TanzNacht Berlin 2012

TanzNacht Berlin 2012

Insignificant Others

(Learning To Look Sideways)

An Kaler

What I read in the program: Together separately. Separately together.  How can one perceive and analyse a collectively experienced, present moment?  Three performers share a moment on stage.  They go through a series of positions that let them become the bearers of ambiguous, almost static yet variable images.  Connections develop between them which cause the moment to gently but clearly shift and their relationships to constantly charge and discharge.  Through a series of interrupted yet connected sequences and situations a space is created in which performer and spectator share the potentiality of what comes next.

What I saw: a generic contemporary dance.  They started standing in silence.  They shifted slowly as the computer generated music with cracks, whistles and pops grew louder and louder.

Another reason I say generic is the type of movement.  Though quite articulate and adept at it, the dancers didn’t offer much in terms of kinespheric originality as they stayed with the elbow initiated limp wrist movement that is quite fashionable.

Spatially, the dancers tended to be upstage and face away from the audience.  Quite a lot of time was spent far stage left in the unlit section of the performance space.  Was this a somatic spatial response to the audience or intentionally done to contrast the two moments when the three dancers were center stage?

One thing I like to watch when I watch ice-skating is when the skaters fall.  Not out of a desire for schadenfreude, but I like to see how they react to an unscripted moment. I am guessing that Insignificant Others is improvised or scored with landmarks and therefore mostly unscripted.  A moment that I perceived as very unscripted was when one of the dancers, mid thrash, bonked against one of the lighting supports.  Two other very unscripted moments involved two dancers almost colliding.  Did these near collisions happen because the dancers were so involved in their own processes that they became unaware of the others on stage?  Maybe this is the insignificant others bit. Ahh…and the (learning to look sideways) is that they aren’t directly relating to each other, but mostly responding to each other’s movement as opposed to other Viewpoints.  But then they do take similar shapes when standing in front of the hanging rectangles.

Compositionally this piece was coherent.  The movement ebbed and flowed.  The music got louder, quieter, and came in occasional bursts.  The lighting shifted and repeated.  There were three dancers and three rectangles.  So in that sense the piece held together.

But what didn’t work for me was the use of space by the dancers.  I didn’t see a compositional choice (except in the two times of stillness center stage) but nerves and adrenaline causing the dancers to shrink back and away from the audience.  Also, the piece was too long.  Maybe I am too American and my sitzfleisch is not so developed.  But I think it is more that I am a dancer.  After seeing people flailing about articulately for 20 minutes, my mirror neurons are full and I want to get up and join in.

Some notes –

“How can one perceive and analyse a collectively experienced, present moment?” – Is this a rhetorical question?  How about Viewpoints, Laban, amount of sweat, sound, sight, video, photography, Ensemble Thinking, touch, pressure und so weiter?

“…which performer and spectator share the potentiality of what comes next.” – a fancy way of saying the piece is improvised

“They go through a series of positions that let them become the bearers of ambiguous, almost static yet variable images.  Connections develop between them which cause the moment to gently but clearly shift and their relationships to constantly charge and discharge.” – Another reason I say that this piece is “of the genus”.  Can’t this be said about almost any piece?  Especially the ambiguous part?

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Propositon(s)

Laurent Chétouane

What I read in the program: The French director Laurent Chétouane has developed a unique language for dance.  The six choreographies, developed over the course of the last few years, speak for themselves.  Each new encounter with a dancer challenged and enriched the vocabulary of the work.  For the TANZNACHT BERLIN 2012, five of the seven dancers who worked with Chétouane during this period lend their bodies to this language and give insights into their understanding and interpretation of the collaborative works, the shared ideas and the time they spent during rehearsals.

What I saw: Six dancers, not five. One Idea of line or semi circle giving focus to a solo.  I remember one multilevel tableau instead of a line giving focus.  Mostly the solos began and the ensemble would recognize that and create a Hot Spot for the solo. (Some might recognize the Ensemble Thinking vocabulary I am using.)  Every dancer in the group had a solo before dancers went for another solo.  The two dancers in purple had the most solos and the male dancer with long hair in green had, sadly, the fewest.  Maybe he’s the new guy. 

Also saw an odd mandibular action, mostly with the two dancers in purple.  Everyone had their mouths open, and some occasionally moved their mandibles.  Several times the soloists would break out in a funny grin, causing a tittering in the audience.  These smiles were reminiscent of smiles I have seen during group faculty improvisations at festivals when everyone knows it’s headed downhill.  Maybe this use of smiles was a distillation of that phenomenon and commentary on improvisations headed south.

What kept this piece from being generic was that it stuck with the same score for the entire time and kept running through the permutations of soloist and ensemble.  Group improvisations frequently churn through so many scores, ideas, and movement themes (I have been in many of those!) and it was nice to see one that stuck to its guns, or gun, as the case maybe.  But if they were going to stick with one score, they could have been a bit more adventurous in their investigation of it and expression with it.

This piece, too, was coherent – people running through the permutations of a score.  No rabbits popping out of hats, or balloons appearing from pockets or other such non-sequitur surprises.  Though, the mandible jiggle, like the three rectangles in Kaler’s piece, why?

A note – the last soloist before they repeated at one point had her left leg out to the side and rotated it to an arabesque as she rotated right.  A beautiful moment!

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My issue with both pieces, was not so much the performances themselves, but how they were framed.  The descriptions could fit most any piece out there.  Kaler’s was “ambiguous”, dealing with the “present moment” and “what comes next”.  Chétoune’s was about collaboration, sharing ideas, and time spent rehearsing.

If the framing doesn’t elucidate how these pieces are more than just iterations of our current genre of dance, then the pieces do not become anything more than an aesthetic experience.  Either you like it or you don’t.  Maybe that is what the creators are after – contemporary dance as entertainment.

Somatic - Compositional

Now – Future

Need – Want

Have to React – Want to React

Body – Space

Kinesphere – Spatial

Sensing Self –Sensing Space

Reaction to Self – Reaction to Other

For Self – For Other

Solo – Group

Self – Other

I – We

Compensating – Creating

Reacting to Change – Creating Change

Following - Leading

Habitual – Non-habitual

Unconscious – Conscious

Automatic – Forced

Exothermic – Endothermic

Anatomical – Cerebral

Poetic – Formulaic

Inner – Outer

Process – Product

Observational – Generative

Subject – Object

Instinctual – Cognitive

Fast - Slow

Evolving – Abrupt

a list of binaries generated during my third semester of my MA SODA at the HZT in Berlin

I.E.P.

Something I wrote on the subway today about improvised performance, especially in relation to my project as part of my third semester studies at SODA - 

Improvised Ensemble Performance intentionally has such a limited palette in relation to props, music, set etc. as each of those elements and the unnamed ones are all ways that we can distract ourselves from our existence.  Think of cell phones, portable music and video sources on planes, trains and automobiles.  We use those forms to pull us away from ourselves, intentionally or not. But consciously using the limited (yet infinite!) palette of shape, space and time, we are drawing our own attention to the barest form of our existence. We will not distract you, the audience, from your experience with sound, set, drama, overt story, magic, the space of appearance etc.  We invite you, maybe challenge you, to experience what is happening before you.

No cracks needed

Who needs cracks or a way in?

3 of the Roses Framing Statement

Repetition as a theme for investigation presented itself to me during the Erasmus Intensive.  Kirsi Monni, head of the Helsinki program, during her presentation said that there is no repetition in Trio A.  At the end of her talk I said that there is a lot of repetition in Trio A and showed several examples.  Maybe I was being pedantic.  One man's pedanticalness is another man's accuracy.  Yes, Trio A could be said to have no repetition as there are no long sections of movement that repeat, but if the time frame that one uses to examine all of the choreography of Trio A is short, several instances of repetition do appear.  The arm swings in the beginning, the toe taps, the ear flaps.  These repetitions are just within the kinesphere of the performer.  If we look at other performance elements we see a lot of repetition.  The performer is always the same person.  The costume never changes.  The performer repeatedly does not look at the audience.  One of the performance instructions for Trio A is to keep the same speed throughout the piece - if you start slow, stay slow; start fast, stay fast.  In other words, repeat the velocity.  Keeping vocally silent is another form of repetition in Trio A.  How many ways of repeating exist in Trio A?  How many ways of repeating exist in any choreography or performance?

One hallmark of contemporary dance could be said to be the continual search for the new.  The new way to move, the new sounds, the new taboo to break, the new way to engage the audience, to frustrate, to excite, or aggravate them.

I am sure that we have all heard "Oh, that's been done" in relation to a performance.  But if that, whatever that is, has been done, then Gertrude Stein is wrong.  A rose is not a rose.  But if a rose is a rose is a rose does mean that there is no such thing as repetition because the context is changing then nothing has ever been done before and we can stop worrying about newness.  Or maybe something similar has been done.  And for some folks that similarity is too close for comfort.  Enough change has not been instilled into the second rose to be different enough to be something new.

The human body can sense a 1% drop in water levels triggering a thirst response.  Maybe in art there is a similar response.  The change from one rose to the next needs to be greater than 1% to be registered.  Or maybe 10%.  I read once that humans can detect temperature change in a space only after the initial temperature drops 10%.  How to measure this percentage necessary between roses I do not know.

Taking a very wide "zoom lens of attention" to performance in general, we could say that 90+% of performance is a repetition of something else.  We sit here, performers there and we watch.  Humans on one side of a box watching humans on the other side of the box.  Zoom in and change the lights, change the framing statement, change the performers etc. and each piece is wildly different.

Emperor Penguins, the ones that stand with eggs on their feet all winter while their mates eat and then switch roles.  To me they all look alike.  I can't tell them apart.  They are just repetitions of each other.  But penguins can certainly tell each other apart.  Maybe if I took more time, trained my eye and zoomed my lens of attention in, I could see beyond the repetition and see the variety.  Maybe Stein should have said a penguin is a penguin is a penguin is a penguin…

Coming back to my research.  Some of you saw the piece I presented during the Erasmus presentation - a repetition of a spiral initiated by my right foot.  Using that initiation repeatedly and by changing the physical context around that repetition I was able to craft my trajectory through space.  The physical context I changed by altering where on my body(hands, pelvis, shoulders, quads etc) I increased or decreased pressure into the floor; how large or small I made the angle between my legs; how tight or open I made the spiral by varying when in the spiral my upper body followed the initiation of my lower body.  All these elements within the repetition led to change.

Recently, I have been more interested in repetition within the body's kinesphere than in repetitive actions that relate to the space or repetitive actions that are used to create a physical remainder.  Examples of those kinds of work are Bruce Nauman's Square Dance or Richard Long's A Line Made by Walking (1967).  One of the second years repeated Nauman's Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square in December.  If traveling through space does happen during my kinespheric repetition, that is fine, but not the goal.  One ah ha! moment I had about physical repetition and looking back on it now, seems quite obvious, is the relationship to time.  Repetition of an action is not time dependent.  The repetitions can happen rapidly and evenly spaced in time or the time between actions could be quite long and the action happen only twice.

I have also been investigating repetition in relation to words by using Context Free Grammar language generators to create texts.  From what I understand they generate a type of Mad Libs that are then filled with vocabularies of a certain genre.  One such generator for physics I came across is snarxiv and is described as "a random high-energy the­ory paper gen­er­a­tor incor­po­rat­ing all the lat­est trends, entropic rea­son­ing, and excit­ing mod­uli spaces."  Another text generator I came across,  is The Postmodernism Generator.

Could I create a sensible piece of writing using "senseless" repetition?  I selected chunks of text from the Postmodernism Generator at random, hitting refresh to generate more texts and created a "Frankenstein" text.  With a little word substitution here and some rewriting there, I tried to breathe life into this text.  I repeated words throughout the text hoping that their repetition would create enough of a through-line to create meaning. While I do not think that if looked at with a wide zoom lens the Frankenstein text I created has meaning, there are some interesting nuggets in it.  It is possible that the whole text is coherent and I do not have the ability to understand it.

These nuggets, if they already existed in the texts of Lacan, Eco, Lyotard, or Derrida, are now available to me without their original context, thus allowing me to craft my own meaning out of them.  The original context is not interfering with my perception of them.

In my attempts at repetition I invariably created change.  This change, to draw a geographic metaphor, can be catastrophic or gradual.  Gradual change in geology is just as it sounds, gradual.  The Himalayan mountains grow about 5 mm a year. For us 5mm is nothing but for a bacterium that 5mm might as well be the Himalayas.  The opposite view of gradual change or gradualism is catastrophism - sudden, huge events that radically altered the face of the earth, creating mountains and valleys in moments.  From a human perspective, the recent events in Fukushima, Japan were huge and devastating.  For the Earth, a mere hiccup.

A similar idea in evolutionary biology is phyletic gradualism(slow, gradual but continuous change) versus punctuated equilibrium (rapid change with longer moments of stability).  An example of rapid change in evolution in species is the Cambrian explosion.  This "rapid" change lasted 70-80 million years.  An incomprehensible time frame for humans, but only 2% of the age of the Earth.

The change created by my repetitions can be viewed as gradual or catastrophic.  While holding a static pose, I might fall slowly due to my hands and feet sliding out from under me because of increased perspiration.  I might have fallen abruptly due to muscle fatigue.  The distal and proximal initiations might have changed abruptly or evolved slowly.

Two artists whose work resonates with me are Sol LeWitt and Agnes Martin, artists whose work involves a lot of repetition.  I first encountered LeWitt's work several years ago when Kelly suggested that I look at a piece of his called Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes.  When I looked at it I saw something very similar to a sculptural project I was working on.  I was trying to figure out all the possible variations of the minimum number of lines needed to indicate a cube.  I was working at the time with 16 gauge two inch square steel tubing.  The pictures I saw of LeWitt's piece were just what I had been drawing.  I first saw Martin's work at the Dia:Beacon in Beacon, NY in 2006.

In reading about them I came across some words about and by LeWitt and Martin.  I will share just a few here with you.  I find that these words are a distillation of how I tend to look at or make work.  Jannis Kounellis said of LeWitt "His fundamental square, I believe, has as its target the iconographic excesses…"  Agnes Martin in her poem The Untroubled Mind writes - "…this is a return to classicism/Classicism is not about people/and this work is not about the world…Classicists are people that look out with their back to the world…it's as unsubjective as possible…The classic is cool/a classical period/it is cool because it is impersonal/the detached and impersonal"

The works I presented to you I consider to be works in progress.  I do not have a definite answer why.  I feel that I know what tools or processes I have created - the physical scores, the texts - and am confident that they can take me some where.  I just do not know where yet.  Each of these tools has as its generative source a form repetition - the first, repetition of thought; the second, repetition of intention; the third, repetition of process.  What I do know is that I am interested in repetition as a means to target iconographic excesses and to create work that is not about the world, trying to make something as unsubjective as possible and through the repetition wash away past experience. 

To repeat Lisa repeating Ric repeating Deborah Hay -

What I am really trying to do is just be here in my body, in this costume, doing this movement and not have what you think this movement is from your past experience interfere with your seeing now.

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click here to see 3 of the Roses, my final presentation for the second semester of my MA SODA program.

Meaning

The search for the meaning of what is happening on stage is the act of demeaning what is happening on stage.

A bunch of blind spiders creeping around

Having a diverse cohort has its advantages and disadvantages. An advantage is that people from different backgrounds can see my work in a new light from a different perspective and offer me feedback from that perspective. A disadvantage is that they do not know as much as I do about my tools/genre, as I know little about theirs.

By having such surface knowledge about their media, I am not able to push them more in their direction. Yes, I can offer "lay" opinions in their work and shift their progress(maybe) but if we all are continually helping shift each other, will we be able to get anywhere or will be just cover the same ground erratically? 

A bunch of blind spiders creeping around the same dusty shoe box?  Milling about getting nowhere...

Does this continual redirection prevent us from progressing forward in relation to ourselves not just in relation to the opinion of an outsider?

Fear the Obvious

Why do we fear the obvious?  I would postulate that the current machine of contemporary performance bans the obvious.  Too banal, this might be too obvious, too simple was a refrain I heard during the Erasmus Intensive. But obviousness is in everything.  And everywhere.  Everything ever performed on stage could be stated to be completely obvious.  Unless you were looking at a life form composed of unknown elements that you have never encountered and you weren't sure you were asleep or you were on shrooms and all you know of reality was short chunks of time and your personality had dissolved and all you knew was that you were not in a vertical position and rings of colored morphing spinning shapes circled around you. This is what the Mayans saw you scream to yourself in your head. I understand everything. It is all so obvious and I love it. I see the leaves and I know that they are leaves and that they are the source of food and breath for the trees.

But then why do we fear the obvious?  Is it because we are not satisfied with what we have now, with the information that our senses give us?  Is our fear of the obvious our desire for God, for a mechanism that operates outside of our understanding and creates something satisfying?  If I understand the operation, if it is obvious and apparent to me does the beauty disappear. If I understand the metabolic pathways that convert sugars to alcohol do I get any less drunk?  If I know that looking at my daughter causes a surge of oxytocin in my body, do I love her any less? No.  I love and embrace the obvious.  I love the obviousness of sweating, curving, spiraling, weighted bodies.  I love unison, I love shit my mind has gone blank and the inspiration for this composition that was improvised in the pattern of typing with thumbs has dried up.  Maybe I should have stayed on the tram and gone with the flow, ride the current and improvise within the composition until it ran out.

The two paragraphs above are the answer to the questions that are below.  The questions are from Boyan Manchev, a philosopher who has been working with us at the HZT.  The short versions of my answers appear after each question.  I read to above paragraphs to my cohorts while walking around the tables that we all were sitting at.

Do you fear that your work is obvious, that the meaning behind it will be too readily apparent? Fear people won't enjoy the obvious

Is fear ever a good thing? Yes for survival, but not for the artistic process/sharing

Are you improvising when composing? Do you formally define patterns of composition? -yes and yes 

What I forgot to write/say is that the unobviousness is in the intention of the person creating the obvious events.  It lies in ourselves when we try to understand that motives of another human being.

S.O.D.A Assessment 101 Feedback

Below are the feedback discussion points I received from my performance of The Range of Acceptable Outcomes as part of my MA dance studies.   The text for the piece is here and the framing statement for the piece is here. I added the numbers for clarity when referring to those specific points.

I am confused by points 5, 6, and 7.  I thought a "sense of assuredness, certainty, demonstration of expertise"(point 5) was a good thing in a performer, especially one that is doing a performance lecture.

I also do not understand how "control...of material prohibits interaction".  The piece, though a lecture, was also a performance.  Interaction in the proscenium format is inherently limited.  This could, though, refer to mental interaction.  But then again, I refer to the lecture aspect of this piece.  The point is to disseminate information is a clear(ish) manner that people can think about during or after the event of dissemination.  Maybe I was so engaging that my performance inhibited all thought.  I wish that were the case.  With that skill I would take over the world!

And point 7 - "too few moments of fragility" Why would I want fragility in a performance lecture?  It is not an emotional event, it is a lecture.

As those three points were on the list of discussion points and from my reading, negative, I assume that those were part of the reason I did not get a perfect score.  Maybe if I had written a better framing statement, I would have received a better grade.  But as those points refer to the performance aspect not to the relationship with the framing statement.

Also point 11 - the piece lost "momentum" and stayed in the "same frame of reference".  I admit that my performing lost steam.  A question of craft, that.  But, as I understand the "frame of reference" that I was referring to - a lecture - always stays in the same frame.  People sit behind a table, a desk and speak with the same tone and energy for the whole lecture.  Every lecture I have seen so far during the S.O.D.A. program has been in the same energy and tone.  Maybe the lecturers did not lose momentum, but they stayed in the same register.

Maybe with this, too, I should have been more explicit in my framing statement.

ahh, the learning curve...


Andrew Wass

Grade: 2.5 Very Good

Assessment 101 Feedback Discussion Points:

1- Appreciated humor and mental ability (word plays/associations)

-2 Are you aware of historical precedence of the 'style' of performance – the rhythmically structured

talking? Is this an attempt at “Leading audience indirectly?”

3- What is your context of investigation of zero point?

4- Categorization of parts brings attention to what is not there – experience of own choices not

evident

5- Sense of assuredness, certainty, demonstration of expertise makes presentation not easily

accessible (as audience we feel tricked, or that there was riddle we were meant to solve..)

6- Too much control in manipulation of material prohibits interaction

7- Too few moments of fragility

8- Improvisation vs choreography – in what way is this important?

9- Need to go into more ludic quality of text to enter into profound relation with these issues

10- Art is assertion of form – formal takes over – Form doesn't support gathered matters of concern

11- Performance loses momentum, stays in same register (no cracks) stays in same frame of reference

12- Need to sharpen own perceptive tools with how improvisation can be developed

13- Freedom and constraint – the relation of these two need to be more thoroughly investigate

14- Some clear questions presented in framing statement –for example: “how much audience needs to

know to enjoy the work?” “individual parts don't last but whole remains in memory”

Examiners: Prof. Rhys Martin, Prof. Kattrin Deufert, Litó Walkey

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The Erasmus Intensive

The Erasmus Intensive

The Erasmus Intensive invervates misuses of sensitive manures taken from unassertive mines. In the ruminative sense the interim suaveness gained by the universe's inmates of this masseur intensive reinvents a misuse of me, a intrusiveness.

What is your reading of this paragraph?

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Assume Perfection

I would guess that every famous painter, dancer, author, i.e., artist was derided as terrible by some authority or the authorities of his or her time when s/he first came on the scene.  "Howl" by Ginsberg was thought to be horrible and people tried to have it banned.  Van Gogh never sold a painting in his lifetime. Elvis was hated by parents for his pelvis. The Rite of Spring caused a riot. 

But now all of those artists are famous, lauded, canonized.  The works haven't changed.  The context changed.

Therefore, all work is worthy of praise and deserves to be canonized.

All that needs to be changed is the context.

Therefore, do whatever the %#!?+ you want and wait for everyone else to catch up.

And assume it's perfect!
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The port de bras and the coolest new lift you just learned in contact class have just as much to with contact improvisation as the fist bump. All three can be done while in contact and while improvising.

All three events are small bit of choreography that can be done inside the larger frame of contact improvisation.

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Framing Statement

Framing Statement
for
The Range of Acceptable Outcomes

I call this piece a performance lecture because I have definite ideas that I want to transmit. I call this piece a lecture performance because I want to inundate the audience with a lot of information, maybe some new ideas and I am not so concerned that people follow and remember every word, but more that the words wash over them, giving them more of a feeling than an idea.

In a more strictly movement oriented dance performance every movement is seen and rarely can the viewers remember or recreate the movements. The constant onslaught of movement in such a performance overwhelms me, not allowing me to digest each individual movement, leaving me with a general sense of the movement quality. The movements in relationship create a feeling, a sense, an experience that stays with the viewer. The individual parts are lost but the whole is understood.

In this piece, The Range of Acceptable Outcomes, I am trying to create a similar experience with the words. Not all of the ideas will be remembered or immediately understood, but hopefully a feeling, a sense, an experience will stay with the viewers.

Using the concepts of the Three Stages of Creation and The Six Performance Elements, I aimed to create an event to question the need to know the process of the creation of a work. How much does an audience need to know to enjoy the work? Does the audience need to know whether or not a piece is set or scored? Does the audience need to know what material the artist is sourcing?

The piece itself was created with a talk about "cracks" that I had with Jeanine last semester in mind. We were talking about one of my showings. For her the piece had no cracks, no way in for the audience. The inundation of information in The Range of Acceptable Outcomes - "facts" about the spectrum of choreography and improvisation, the asides, the stutters, the reference how this piece should be viewed, the quotes of Mary Overlie, Deborah Hay, and A Chorus Line - is an effort to create "cracks". Maybe cracks is the wrong term. Maybe tendrils or rhizomes is more appropriate. Some of the information in the inundation might trigger a thought or a question, leading the viewer down a pathway not directly connected to what is happening on stage. Poetry, if you will.


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Text for The Range of Acceptable Outcomes

Below is the text for my newest piece, The Range of Acceptable Outcomes, a lecture performance.


Please assume what you see here as zero. A zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero zero on a multi-dimensional co-ordinate system.

Let us say this costume is zero, not because it does not exist, but is zero in that we will measure the change in the costume during this performance from this point on. ΔCostume, if you will.

In fact performance can be seen as the measurement of the change, the Δ over time of the six performance elements. The one performance element that will not change in this performance is the performer.

Though that is debatable. I will get sweaty, some skin might rub off, I'll age a bit, though we will all age the same amount so that we can ignore that variable. You as audience might decide to watch something, someone else, authorizing a different performer for your performance.

But anyways, let's assume that everything you see here in this moment is the zero on a multidimensional grid.

Should I stop moving or be quiet?

No, as I will not stop reflecting light rays into your eyes, through the pupil, through the vitreus humor, activating your rods and cones, etc. on to your brain and as I will not stop being present in this spot.

Or yes, stop moving, talking and you close your eyes, cover your ears to create an even more truly empty zero point.

This piece, as I see, it is conceptually choreographed but executed improvisationally. To relate it to the three stages of creation, exploration, experimentation, and execution...

well, let me back up, what do I mean by "it"?

The word it is derived from the Middle and Old English word "hit". Hit is a neuter version of he. The neutral he that I refer to is the performance that I have, am, and will present to, for and with you today.

This piece is not completely improvised because I already know what realms, ideas, genres, and themes I will be presenting and roughly how I will execute those ideas. I will be using the human form, using gesture, movement, and sound to convey those ideas that have been predetermined by time spent exploring, one of the stages of creation.

Side note - it is easy to think that these stages happen in a linear fashion - first explore, then experiment, then execute. And you will be forgiven if that is how you see it.
For all of our talk of contemporary this and post that, we really haven't changed in 5000 years and all still want a refrigerator to keep our beers cold. Whether it's avocado or stainless steel in color, we just want a cold beer.

But let me back up again, as I feel that I would be remiss to not define what I mean by explore, experiment and execute.

Exploration is the search before the research. It is the hearsal before the rehearsal. It is the discovery of what exists around you, whether you are in the studio or sitting on the subway thinking about your project. It is the discovery/invention of what tools you will be using in your project.

Exploration is the, and this maybe more important, the rejection of tools. A work of art is more about what it is not than what it is. Granted all types of infinities exist some are just larger than others.

Experimentation is the second stage. Once the tools have been selected/created, their relationships can be investigated. How do the tools interact? What poetry, if you will, do they create?

The final stage is execution - when the work is presented before an audience. I did use the words second and final indicating a linear relationship to time. That is the more traditional relationship, or more choreographed. The further apart the moments of exploration, experimentation, and execution in time are, the more choreographed the work. The closer in time those moments are, the more improvised the work.

This brings me to the 6 performance elements - Costume, Lighting, Sound, Performer, Set, and Movement.

The lighting is choreographed, set or predetermined. It is this, what you see. I chose this because this piece is not about lighting. Because the decision about what lighting to use and the execution of the lighting are separated along the space/time spectrum, we can call the lighting choreographed. If I were to decide midstream to alter the lights or have someone do so with a lighting board or open and close the curtains, the lighting would be more improvised.

I could have choreographed someone to improvise the lights.

As of now the costuming is choreographed. I am wearing this. You could say that I am trying to represent the traditional contemporary western male caucasian urban outfit with slight preppy undertones.

What happens to the costume during the performance has yet to be seen. In the midst of the execution of the performance, I might decide, consciously or not, conspicuously or not, to explore and experiment with the costuming.

Sound - the sound of my voice and whatever parts of me happen to hit any surfaces with enough force to generate vibrating airwaves. The idea of what kind of sounds to use is choreographed as I have decided to not use saxophone or an iPod or a parrot. What has a greater distance between its execution and experimentation is what I will be saying. Therefore more choreographed.

How I will be saying what I will say will be determined in the moment. The three stages in very close proximity to each other. Therefore more improvised.

This brings me to the performance element of set. No set, unless you count the empty stage we have here as a set.

But, I could create a change of set by changing the location of my performance. Going outside for example, or entering the audience. Maybe entering the storage closet and continuing there. For all intents and purposes the set is set. The execution, exploration, and experimentation stages for set all have a different location along the space/time continuum. Set, interestingly enough, is an anagram of est.

Movement - choreographed as in I can only do what my teachers have taught me. The times of movement exploration, execution and experimentation are different, therefore I consider the movement to be choreographed. I consider, though, the movement in this piece to be improvised within that choreographed frame.

I do not know exactly where I will be, when I will be there, what level I will be at, what body parts will be still, which moving, etc. During the execution of this piece today, now...now is here is harmony, something I do, something I see in an audience member, an observer/participant, though more on the observer end, will probably trigger a question. Will open up an avenue for exploration. I then might begin experimenting with the variables discovered in that exploration.

But as you are witnessing/participating/observing my explorations and experimentations, could we not then say that it is at the same an execution also, collapsing all three stages of creation into a singularity? A singular moment in which what I am doing is what you are seeing, when we are discovering the same thing at the same time. We merge becoming essentially one, but opposite sides of that one singular sensation - improvisation.

Coming back to costume. What ΔCostume have we seen thus far? How are the pants? The shirt? The tie.

Talk about a loaded image.

The inherent meaning. Yes, the inherent meaning. We all carry our inherent meanings around with us for others to read us and how we read others. Biases and stereotypes. Our aesthetic biases.

Two performers on stage (and this relates to the performance variable of performer): two men - discord; many men - war; one male one female - love; two females - a man is bad; many females - war is bad; two females and a man love triangle and he is an ass and one chick's a bitch; two males and one female she is a slut, he is an ass and the other guy can't get it up; two heterosexual couples and a couch - an Arthur Miller play. Three couples and a couch - an American sitcom. Four couples, a large tunnel made of brown sticks, a dog house and a table...

But as you have not seen the process and the time that went into making this piece, you can not for certain say which performance elements fall where when in relation to the stages of creation. Whether or not it was choreographed or improvised. Does it matter?



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The Stage is a Test Tube

Imagine, if you will, a Petrie dish or a test tube. A test tube is a glass tube, closed at one end. Usually the end is rounded and the opposite end has a slight lip around the opening.

In a lab a test tube can be used many times. Many different reagents are added to the test tube; experiments are carried out. Acids and bases, metals. Water is split into hydrogen and oxygen; nylon is created. A vast array of experiments can be carried out in a single test tube.

If the experimenters are good and follow a strict protocol, they clean the test tube out each time after their experiments. This is done so that the reagents and results from the previous experiments do not affect the following experiments.

Yes, the information learned from previous experiments informs how the experimenters view the results of their next experiments. Yes, the previous experiments will affect what experiments are later run. Yes, what experiments run in other test tubes in other labs affects through the knowledge of the experimenters what happens in said test tube. But the experiment itself is not affected by the reagents of the previous experiments.

The empty performance space is a test tube. It is a blank space that can be a place to run experiments. What has happened in the space before, in other test tubes in other labs, does not have to affect what will happen next in the space. What has come before affects what will come next only in the minds of the experimenters - the performers and audience.

As performers, creators, artists, we need to recognize that a blank slate is possible. If we can clean out a test tube, a petrie dish, wipe a chalk board clean, we can also start with a blank(referenceless) performance space.

What do you see?

This has been a question used in the past couple weeks of my MA course at the Uferstudios here in Berlin.

(please note the use of the word here, as I am in Berlin. This attention to detail is similar to the uses of come and go & of take and bring that are too frequently misused. )

For the past couple weeks, we have been doing an exercise of Susan Rethorst's , who maybe got it from Simone Forti. Who knows where it really came from, but I am sure people have consciously arranged objects in space for millennia. Did an exercise once with Mary Overlie in which we arranged white beans. The focus of that exercise was spatial arrangement. The focus of the Forti/Rethorst/Durning is quick decision making. (does it ever seem like so much of dance creation training is helping dancers get over their @#$%?!?)

Anyways, the exercise progressed from objects to people to solos. Each of us worked on something for 30 minutes (the exact time length varied each round). We watched each person writing down what we saw the person do. After everyone had presented, let's not say performed because there is just too much baggage around that word, we read what we had written about each person.

Somethings I wrote - read from notebook, put notebook down, close eyes, open eyes, place downstage heel to arch of other foot...

Something I heard - a heroin addict, deliciously slipping, time expanding...

After the feedbacks, I felt confused. Were we supposed to write what we saw or what what we saw made us think of? For the next couple weeks, we did variations of this exercise with a new visiting artist. The feedback was stated to be of two different kinds - what you saw and then what it made you think of.

Good, I can roll with that. But then when the feedback happened, both kinds were mingled, eventually the what you saw losing a significant share of the airtime to what it made you think of.

Talking in the Ufer Cantine with my cohorts - (paraphrasing not quoting)
"When you see a man and a woman on stage, you don't immediately think love story"
"No, I see a man and woman on stage."

I am baffled as to why in our post-modern contemporary age we would still automatically see love story. Am I supposed to see war automatically when I see two men on stage? No matter what age we say we are in, we all still have the same expectations. Love songs are still written and will always be written. The only difference will be the instruments and the notes.

But back to seeing...It took me a while to understand, but what everybody else mean by "what do you see?" is "what do you think of when you see..." And this is very dangerous territory. Just because you think something does not mean it is there.

Of course when I see stuff, it makes me think of other things. But when I am in a studio and I see someone sitting slumped against the wall, I see someone sitting slumped against the wall. I don't see a heroin addict, or a depressed business man, or swirls of pain an agony. I might think of those situations or scenarios, but I don't see them.

Are we not trying to be clear with our language and context in this MA program?

During the feedback after my showing on Monday, I brought up this issue and not understanding how people were seeing. This lead to a discussion of poetry...hmm not remembering so well, the connection to what I am thinking of...

but here is the thought anyways -

the need for the poetic, the dissatisfaction with what is there is the same need that has given rise to religion. People want mystery, people want there to be stuff going on behind the curtain and then they want to forget about the curtain.

People want to see what they imagine

Don't get me wrong. I want people to imagine whatever they want. But when we say that we are going to write what we see, let's do that. And then when we saw, we are going to write what what we see makes us think of, let's do that.

there was something else I wanted to write but I forget what it was.

And here is quote of a quote to provide some triangulation and provide some sand to build this house on -
'Ulmer affirms that Beuy's objects are "...both what they are and stimulation for the general processes of memory and imagination."'

We should not confuse the two.

What is it?

Flo eminates from the kitchen.
Grub is collated frantically.
Foxy lemmings kite checks.
Worst Oma eliminates four tiny kittens.
Bald Mary stems collegial fraternizing.
The rebar knows kind chicks.
A kangaroo taps foul Tibetan koans.
The wild bran challah collective failed.
We all got tan in Kay's chalet.
The tilted atrium failed the kinetic colloquial festival king's child.


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Critique of piece I saw during the S.O.D.A. audition

In order to relate what I saw without being descriptive I will offer a short list of whats that I saw:
1. a tattoo
2. a cube
3. black tape
4. gestures
5. white tape
6. a hypodermic needle
7. blood

My feedback about the piece would be to simplify. The piece has at least three different pieces in it - Man with Cube, Man with Tape and Man with Needle. He should pick one of them and investigate it more deeply. I would suggest that he keep his manipulation of the tape to a minimum and not rearrange the tape once it is on the wall. Also I would suggest that the black tape movement section occur further downstage facing the audience. The tape is already abstract and geometric and his focal and spatial choices re-enforced that. Maybe it was his intention to replicate the impersonal nature of the tape. But what I saw was more of a coping mechanism than an artistic choice.

Black tape plus movement plus white tape plus the downstage space plus low level movement plus text plus needle plus blood. Eight dimensions in all. Is this piece, then, about the progression towards the multidimensional, the ultra dimensional he said he was seeking? I do not know. I can not say whether or not this piece worked as I do not know what he was trying to achieve. I can say whether or not I liked the piece. I did not. But whether or not I liked it is of little importance. I can say what it made me think of. The use of the cube made me think of Donald Judd. The black tape pictographs on the white wall made me think of Lawrence Wiener and Robert Motherwell. The piercing of the skin made me think of Chris Burden and Marina Abramovic.

Any of these references, though, is at best a stretch and more present in my perception of the performance than in Riccardo’s presentation of the piece. This brings up the question of what does an audience need to know about the work. Do we need to know what the artist knows? Do we need to have the same frame of reference? Do we need those references to get out of the piece what the artist put into the piece? Is it important for the viewers to get what the artist is saying? Or is the artist creating something for us the respond to with our own references?

Despite not liking it, I feel that of the pieces I saw yesterday this piece had the richest vocabulary to be investigated. And I intend on taking his Man with Tape piece and investigating it further.

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Personal Statement for SODA

Below is my personal statement that I wrote in applying to the SODA program here in Berlin.

My interest in the S.O.D.A. program stems from a desire for a more profound connection and dialog with the dance/performance community. I am looking for thoughtful, candid feedback about my work that is more constructive than the often superficial comments traded after a performance. I am also seeking the tools -language, books, other minds - with which to understand and view my own work better. I am hungry for the same level of rigor and feedback in the studio and theater as I got when I was studying biochemistry at U.C., San Diego. Over exposure to acetone will destroy your liver no matter how you contextualize it.
What I am hoping to gain from the S.O.D.A. program is the same kind of discourse I had in the lab. Working individually or in groups, we evaluated and discussed each other's methods and findings. I hope to interact with people of similar interests(performance, dance, presence) from varying backgrounds(age, country, training) in a focused yet open environment. I hope hat they know and have experienced will open my eyes and increase what I know and will experience.
My artistic skills, capabilities and development have been driven by my proclivities. I am drawn to the tool of improvisation because it keeps my mind constantly engaged, constantly sensing and interacting with my environment. Having studied other approaches to improvisation, such as Action Theater and the Viewpoints, I am more drawn to the tool of contact improvisation. I find that it is the clearest model with which to examine performance variables in relation to improvisation. This is not to say that I am only interested in unfettered vague improvisational work. In fact, quite the opposite. My work, though improvised, can be quite restricted. In Any Fool Can Think of Words that Rhyme the three dancers are restricted to moving one joint at a time. In A2Zed/Nexus one point of contact is maintained and returned to as much as possible. Other limitations or choreographies for my work involve the lighting, body tone, or staying still and grunting.
I am also drawn to the tool of improvisation because there is an assumption that improvised work has no point to it or thought behind it. Sadly, most of the work out there professed to be improvised does not have a point other than it is improvised. The artists are so enamored of the process of real-time composing, that they forget that the tool of improvisation can be used to create something other than itself. Anvils can be used to create other things besides anvils. I, therefore, make a point of creating work that has a very definite concept outside of improvisation itself.
Just as I was drawn to study biochemistry to understand how the mechanics of life work, I am drawn to the theater to understand how it works. I am interested in the underlying structures of theater and their relationships. Currently, my specific area of interest is the function of a title. Is a title a sign to tell the audience what the performance is about? Is it a lens through which the audience should view the performance? Neither function I find satisfactory. If a title is to tell an audience what is happening, there is no room for the audience to participate, for them to create an event within themselves initiated by what is on stage. On the other hand, if the artist uses the title as a lens, the artist runs the risk of being too vague, leaving all the work of creating the performance up to the audience's imagination. If the artist is too vague then the audience could just as well stay home and imagine their own performance. Truth in Advertising, my most recent production, arose out of confusion about this function. The concert consists of seven pieces, each with two titles. One title is straight forward, the other title more obtuse. For example one piece is titled Man Grunting and Distillation - This piece is a distillation of the collective human experience of cruelty - cruelty that we experience from direct or inadvertent action of others and cruelty that we consciously or unconsciously inflict upon others. The intention of Truth in Advertising is to lead the audience to question the function of titles.
If art, as Brecht said, is a hammer with which to shape society, I would say that I aspire to be a hammer that shapes the hammer that shapes society. I say this because I make work in response to my environment. Observing the patterns and trends in the work around me inspires me. I aim to create work that leads my peers to question the tools and possibilities they are using in their work. I created Do You See What I See?, a series of performative still-lifes which bombard the audience with biographical information, as a response to all the intensely biographical work I was seeing in the San Francisco Bay Area. I created the sound score for Content with Content from descriptions in a film catalogue. By incessantly telling the audience what the piece is about, the sound score forces the viewers to question what any piece is about. I created Sentimental Pussyfooting: a study in plagiarism because I was tired of hearing "Oh, that's been done." The basic dance formula has been done again and again and no one complains about that. In Sentimental Pussyfooting I used pieces that have been done as points of departure, showing how much more there is left to investigate within ideas that "have been done". Yoko Ono's Cut piece, Paul Taylor's Duet, and John Cage's 4'33" are some of the pieces I used.
By surrounding myself with curious intelligent artists, I hope to gain new insights and avenues of inquiry into the inner workings of dance and performance. The S.O.D.A program will be the hammer that shapes the hammer that shapes the hammer that shapes society.

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