The choreography of a piece is that which is repeatable between iterations.
Ugffhhpklj
The improvisation of a piece is that which is not repeatable between iterations.
Showing posts with label improvisation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label improvisation. Show all posts
8.17.2013
7.05.2013
Rehearsal Videos
The above are three videos from rehearsals in the Crowley Theater for the third section of Secondary Surface Rendered. We are investigating the use of repetitive movement drawn from the Re/Wire work to examine and magnify the corporeal kinetic connection between drawing and dancing.
5.23.2013
Seven Thirty in Tights
Seven Thirty In Tights
April 28th 2013 at Sophiensaele
“Picture the ballroom
dance of the future. Imagine this dance
and its consequences are the result of an intense physical dialogue between
dancers – an interaction of distinct group decisions in which all react to the
impulses of the others and have to find answers in a split second. Now imagine this dance was a political
practice.” - from the program
I saw another piece by Frédéric Gies several years ago and I
had the same problem with this one as I did that one. He adds too many other elements to the stage
space that the physical actions lose value or I can’t tell what he values about
them. The last performance had
explicitly stated BMC exercises paired with music by Madonna and a large rug
like object hanging from the ceiling upstage.
I don’t have or remember the program notes from that piece, so I can’t
say what Gies’ goal was in juxtaposing those elements together.
With this piece, he wants us to picture the ballroom dance
of the future. The dance we see is a
group tuning score about decision making and reacting to others, i.e.
improvising. By asking us to view a type
of event that is very much of the present (group improvisation) as the ballroom
dance of the future, is he saying that in the future scored group improvisation
will be a rigid codified form of dance.
Looking at another form of group decision making and reacting, the
contact improvisation jam, we are well on our way. Contact Improvisation is all but a codified
social dance with defined movements and roles.
But Gies and company were not engaging in contact improvisation, at
least not in the normative sense of contact improvisation. But as they were improvising and coming in
and out of contact, the performers in Seven
Thirty In Tights could be viewed as engaging in contact improvisation. After all who determines the tools used in a
performance – the doers or the viewers?!!?
For me this piece suffered from a flat ontology. All elements had equal value. The physicality didn’t change that much
through out the 60 minute plus. The
dancers came in and out of manual contact, dancing alone or facing each
other. There was some change in tempo,
initiated mostly by the female all dressed in red. Well, maybe the elements didn’t have equal
value, but I felt that there was so much sensorial noise generated by all the
non-dance considerations of the piece, that I couldn’t help but be preoccupied
by wondering about the reasons for those elements, thus lowering for the
valorization of the corporeal elements.
I tried to enjoy the physical actions of the performers (and there were
some well trained people performing whom I have enjoyed watching in other
performances) but I couldn’t get past the neon lights, the costumes, the tape
on the floor, and the program notes.
The physical practice in the piece was not of the future, so
maybe the tights, the lights and the tape indicating the 4th wall
are elements from the future. But
colored fluorescent tubes (a possible Flavin reference?), non-proscenium stage
spaces and tights are also not of the future.
So is it then the combination of group real time spontaneous composition
with the, lighting, costuming, and staging that create the ballroom dance of
the future? Or is it up to us, the
viewers who have read the program to picture the dance of the future, inspired
by the elements presented? (Representation, once again rears its ugly head!)
Another element of the program statement that lowered the
valorization of the corporeal elements of the performance was the directive to
imagine the dance as a political practice.
I felt that in order to do that more fully and in the direction that the
choreographer intended I should have attended the lecture by Sylvie Tissot that
took the day before I attended the performance.
Was this piece a political practice because it was more improvised than
choreographed? Was this piece a
political practice because the individuals were able to make their own
decisions within a larger set of considerations? Political because tax dollars are supporting
the work? Who determines the politics –
the doers or the viewers?
In summation – I did see some dancing I enjoyed[*],
solo body and group, but the staging and sartorial choices were too
aesthetically noisy overwhelming the dancing itself. The program notes were too generic and could
be applied to any dance, performance, or sporting event for than matter. Maybe instead of generic, I should say open. But for me the program notes/framing/contextualization
were way too open. Isn’t part of the
artist’s job to focus our attention?
[*]
When the group rotated through space along the perimeter of the performance
space delineating the boundary between audience and performers.
When the group came to a long
diagonal…Doris Humphrey is right!
When
in a long line the dancers changed location within the line.
3.22.2013
Compare and Contrast
and
granted, it could be said that we are looking at apples and oranges as one performance has audience on three sides, live music, and video. But I would say that these two performances are more alike than they are different. I am most interested in the spacing, placing, and pacing of the kinespheres and how they differ in the two pieces.
1.22.2013
12.15.2012
A defintion
Improvisation: bodies manifesting and dissolving dynamic temporal-spatial structures according to aesthetic and physical potentialities and proclivities in a planar arena.
11.09.2012
Logic determined beforehand
A piece is choreographed if the logic is determined before the piece begins.
10.08.2012
Personnel vs. Content
I was just at the Texas Dance Improvisation Festival this past weekend. Thoroughly enjoyed myself.
Sitting in on a class taught by a friend and fellow Lower Lefter, Leslie Scates, I listened to the discussion at the end of class. One of the participants brought up the question of personnel vs. idea during the exercise of Number Score.
Usually, during Number Score, the content happening in the work/performance space changes when the personnel/dancers change.
This need not be.
How to train Number Score to focus on shifting personnel but maintaining the content?
Does Number Score inadvertently simultaneously train Jump Cuts?
How to train Number Score and not drop material?
Maybe beforehand determine what the material/content will be...
must investigate (though, I have always had trouble with Number Score. Not that I think it is a pointless exercise. I see its value, but I have (almost) never enjoyed it)
Sitting in on a class taught by a friend and fellow Lower Lefter, Leslie Scates, I listened to the discussion at the end of class. One of the participants brought up the question of personnel vs. idea during the exercise of Number Score.
Usually, during Number Score, the content happening in the work/performance space changes when the personnel/dancers change.
This need not be.
How to train Number Score to focus on shifting personnel but maintaining the content?
Does Number Score inadvertently simultaneously train Jump Cuts?
How to train Number Score and not drop material?
Maybe beforehand determine what the material/content will be...
must investigate (though, I have always had trouble with Number Score. Not that I think it is a pointless exercise. I see its value, but I have (almost) never enjoyed it)
9.01.2012
Choreo vs. Impro
Choreography is knowing the other's response to your actions.
Improvisation is not knowing the other's response to your actions
Improvisation is not knowing the other's response to your actions
8.28.2012
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?
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!
**********
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.
8.10.2012
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
7.30.2012
5.16.2012
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.
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.
3.11.2012
3.07.2012
More Definitions
Theater is that which the form and the content are different entities.
In dance the form and the content are the same entity.
In dance the form and the content are the same entity.
Some thoughts on Tanz Plattform 2012 in Dresden
A couple weeks ago I was fortunate to go to Tanz Plattform 2012 in Dresden. Tanz Plattform is an event that happens every two years. It is like APAP in New York. But as I have never been to APAP, I can't be sure. The event in Dresden was primarily for curators from festivals around Europe to see work of the who's who of German dance. Not sure why the who's who needs an event like this, but that is another discussion.
I was able to go because my school organized a trip. €50 got me a round-trip train ticket, a hostel room and breakfast for four nights and tickets to ten shows. Not a bad deal. Yeah, socialism!
Of the performances happening in five theater in two different location, I was able to see (in no particular order) For Faces by Anonia Behr, Horizon(s) by Laurent Chétoune; N.N.N.N by William Forsythe; Abdrücke by Anna Konjtzky; Berlin Elsewhere by Constanza Macras; Cover Up by Mamaza; Dance For Nothing by Eszter Salamon; Revolver Besorgen by Helena Waldmann; Métamorphoses by Sasha Waltz; and Baader - Choreographie einer Radikalisierung by Christoph Winkler.
Of those performances I would categorize Abdrücke, Berlin Elsewhere, Cover Up, Revolver Besorger, and Baader as theater. Horizon(s), N.N.N.N., Métamorphoses, Dance for Nothing, and For Faces as dance. These categorizations are based upon the rubric that theater is dealing with, referencing or talking about ideas or events that are not present on stage and/or trying to convey an emotional state. Granted this is not a binary, but more of a spectrum.
But definitions of theater vs. dance are not what I want to write about right now. Again, another lengthy discussion.
What I want to write about is several sentences in the programs about these specific performances or work by one of choreographers in general:
1. "Dance is no longer representation." - Laurent Chétouane
2. "Chétouane makes reference to classical dance forms and formulas and dares to come out from the corner by demonstrating how dance beyond style - the dance of the future - might look" - Katja Schneider
3. "Forsythe embarks on a search for a quality of movement that is increasingly oriented towards the dancers' own self awareness and reciprocal observing of one another, generating an intense presence in the space." - Gerald Siegmund
4. "Movement without reason(s) makes the audience nervous....a clear, deep and melodious voice, sharing philosophical introspections, while the source steadily changes positions - we try to follow it all. Yet, it is too much to process all at once, form and content at the same time." - Katja Werner
5. "Helena Waldmann... the Berlin-based choreographer...knows that a work is only successful when it is able to conjure up the world of illusion." Andrea Kachelreiß, Stuttgarter Nachrichten
I am not sure how to respond to the first sentence by Chétouane. Dance hasn't been representation for decades. Did he not get the Judson/Trio A/Merce/Brown memo? He is described as "a French director working with texts and movement" so maybe he is not informed about what dance has happened before he started making dances.
This seems to me a common issue in the post/non disciplinary times - people from one genre getting excited about a new tool, logic or aesthetic that is old hat for another genre. Maybe because Chétouane is a director, which I am taking to mean he comes from the world of theater, the world of illusion and allusion, the idea that something on stage could be no longer representational is a new and exciting one.
The second sentence, by Katja Scheider, I also think is a joke. Dance beyond style?!?! Dance of the future?!? Are you kidding me? What I saw was pretty straight-up, par for the course movement for this day and age. Does Katja mean that the dance of the future looks just as it does now? Are we already in the future or is she saying that there is no future for dance because it will look exactly the same as it does now? There is nothing nothing new in the world...is that it?
The references to "classical dance forms and formulas" that I saw the grid, flocking, and mirroring. Maybe not classical ballet formulas, if that is what Katja Schneider meant by classical, but classical post modern dance tools. At least for grid and flocking. Mirroring is more of an Improv 101 exercise, so maybe classical in that sense. But maybe that is what my training affords me - seeing the grid, flocking, and mirroring. If I am to look at the piece as a whole, and this is the second time I have seen the piece, I could say that the piece is an arc of dance history from ballet to post modern spatial scores to badly executed contact improvisation. Maybe that is the director's point, that the end of the future(as this piece is about the future of dance) of dance is bad contact improvisation. Well, if that is the point of the piece, then it's brilliant. Sheer brilliance. Ha!
Gerald Siegmund's description of Forsythe's new creative invesigations is interesting and eloquent. Hmm...sounds an awful lot like...what is that word, umm, it was just on the tip of my tongue, what is it...oh, yeah...IMPROVISATION! Why is that word such a dirty word? I guess a single word wouldn't be as poetic as an eloquent phrase. I guess a rose by any other name doesn't smell as sweet.
Categories and labels aside, I have another question. What was Forsythe's work before this new eloquent line of inquiry? Did his work before not use "the dancers' own self awareness and reciprocal observing of one another"? Were his dancers unconscious of their own movements and and unaware of each other? Did they not know where their limbs were in space? Did they not know who else was on stage and who on stage could see them? Were his dancers mindless zombies doing their master's bidding?
On what planet does "movement without reason(s)" make the audience nervous? Maybe Katja Werner is from the same planet that Chétouane is from, the Planet of Representation, where Judson never happened. I thought that the crowd at Tanz Plattform Deutschland 2012 in Dresden would be ok with abstract movement. Guess not. But they seemed to love N.N.N.N., which was pretty abstract. Granted the dancers looked at their hands as they moved them, creating a subject by objectifying their hands, and made cute sounds as they moved. Maybe the looking at the vocalizing created enough "reason" so that the audience was not nervous. They could see enough representation in the presentation of relationship between hand and eye and movement and sound, therefore they did not get nervous.
On the Planet of Representation form and content are two different things. Performances have content and that content is different than the form. This leads me to another definition of theater and of dance. Theater is that which the form and the content are different entities. In dance the form and the content are the same entity. In the piece Dance for Nothing by Salamon, I think that Werner is referring to the spoken text as the content and the "movement without reason(s)" as the form. This separation is further evidence of the supremacy of theater over dance in Germany. Tanztheater, Tanztheater, Tanztheater, TanzTHEATER. Tanz is merely the adjective to the noun, theater.
I would postulate that the reasons Werner writes that the form(movement) and content(text) is "too much to process all at once" are that she is not a native speaker of English and she is trying to link the movements to the text in more than a spatial and temporal way. From the beginning of the piece I did not try to connect the movement to the sounds. I let both of them wash over me. Even though I am a native speaker of English, I would guess that the text by John Cage is not that complicated. The vocabulary and the topic are not that esoteric to require a super advanced command of the English language. Most people at the festival in Dresden had very good English.
Or maybe I was a bad audience member and did not listen closely enough to the text, did not get every word and would fail a test on what John Cage via Eszter Salamon said. Maybe I should have strained harder to understand which movements meant Kansas, paragraph, and mind. Maybe I should have asked why Salamon extended her fists and touched them together. Did that movement section represent a connection of the working class in Kansas to the proletariat of Hungary? Hmm...what would Derrida say about the fact that the performer wore sneakers? Oh my gosh, so many signs and signifiers, so many layers...how do I interpret it all? What does it represent?!?!
And the final quote - "to conjure up the world of illusion". Once again, theater, theater, theater. Yet the author of this work is referred to as a choreographer. There is a fabulously trained ballet dancer prancing about pretending to be a crazy woman who has a "thirst for discovery" and is in "the depths of madness", so I guess it's theater because the piece is about something other than what is happening on stage. But the creator is a choreographer and not a dancer.
Kachelrieß writes that Waldmann's work is a "godsend for the theater." Does she mean theater in the open sense of the word, as in stuff that happens in the theater? Or does she mean theater as in not dance? If she means theater, then this piece is a vague and wan representation of an illusion wrapped in presentation of madness and the "dignity a person needs to remain human." But if this piece is dance, then it is well danced dance piece of a limited and unimaginative palette.
I do not know what my overall thesis for this posting is. Maybe that dance in Germany is more theater than dance.
Tanztheater.
I prefer my dance with a little less theater and a lot more dance.
I was able to go because my school organized a trip. €50 got me a round-trip train ticket, a hostel room and breakfast for four nights and tickets to ten shows. Not a bad deal. Yeah, socialism!
Of the performances happening in five theater in two different location, I was able to see (in no particular order) For Faces by Anonia Behr, Horizon(s) by Laurent Chétoune; N.N.N.N by William Forsythe; Abdrücke by Anna Konjtzky; Berlin Elsewhere by Constanza Macras; Cover Up by Mamaza; Dance For Nothing by Eszter Salamon; Revolver Besorgen by Helena Waldmann; Métamorphoses by Sasha Waltz; and Baader - Choreographie einer Radikalisierung by Christoph Winkler.
Of those performances I would categorize Abdrücke, Berlin Elsewhere, Cover Up, Revolver Besorger, and Baader as theater. Horizon(s), N.N.N.N., Métamorphoses, Dance for Nothing, and For Faces as dance. These categorizations are based upon the rubric that theater is dealing with, referencing or talking about ideas or events that are not present on stage and/or trying to convey an emotional state. Granted this is not a binary, but more of a spectrum.
But definitions of theater vs. dance are not what I want to write about right now. Again, another lengthy discussion.
What I want to write about is several sentences in the programs about these specific performances or work by one of choreographers in general:
1. "Dance is no longer representation." - Laurent Chétouane
2. "Chétouane makes reference to classical dance forms and formulas and dares to come out from the corner by demonstrating how dance beyond style - the dance of the future - might look" - Katja Schneider
3. "Forsythe embarks on a search for a quality of movement that is increasingly oriented towards the dancers' own self awareness and reciprocal observing of one another, generating an intense presence in the space." - Gerald Siegmund
4. "Movement without reason(s) makes the audience nervous....a clear, deep and melodious voice, sharing philosophical introspections, while the source steadily changes positions - we try to follow it all. Yet, it is too much to process all at once, form and content at the same time." - Katja Werner
5. "Helena Waldmann... the Berlin-based choreographer...knows that a work is only successful when it is able to conjure up the world of illusion." Andrea Kachelreiß, Stuttgarter Nachrichten
I am not sure how to respond to the first sentence by Chétouane. Dance hasn't been representation for decades. Did he not get the Judson/Trio A/Merce/Brown memo? He is described as "a French director working with texts and movement" so maybe he is not informed about what dance has happened before he started making dances.
This seems to me a common issue in the post/non disciplinary times - people from one genre getting excited about a new tool, logic or aesthetic that is old hat for another genre. Maybe because Chétouane is a director, which I am taking to mean he comes from the world of theater, the world of illusion and allusion, the idea that something on stage could be no longer representational is a new and exciting one.
The second sentence, by Katja Scheider, I also think is a joke. Dance beyond style?!?! Dance of the future?!? Are you kidding me? What I saw was pretty straight-up, par for the course movement for this day and age. Does Katja mean that the dance of the future looks just as it does now? Are we already in the future or is she saying that there is no future for dance because it will look exactly the same as it does now? There is nothing nothing new in the world...is that it?
The references to "classical dance forms and formulas" that I saw the grid, flocking, and mirroring. Maybe not classical ballet formulas, if that is what Katja Schneider meant by classical, but classical post modern dance tools. At least for grid and flocking. Mirroring is more of an Improv 101 exercise, so maybe classical in that sense. But maybe that is what my training affords me - seeing the grid, flocking, and mirroring. If I am to look at the piece as a whole, and this is the second time I have seen the piece, I could say that the piece is an arc of dance history from ballet to post modern spatial scores to badly executed contact improvisation. Maybe that is the director's point, that the end of the future(as this piece is about the future of dance) of dance is bad contact improvisation. Well, if that is the point of the piece, then it's brilliant. Sheer brilliance. Ha!
Gerald Siegmund's description of Forsythe's new creative invesigations is interesting and eloquent. Hmm...sounds an awful lot like...what is that word, umm, it was just on the tip of my tongue, what is it...oh, yeah...IMPROVISATION! Why is that word such a dirty word? I guess a single word wouldn't be as poetic as an eloquent phrase. I guess a rose by any other name doesn't smell as sweet.
Categories and labels aside, I have another question. What was Forsythe's work before this new eloquent line of inquiry? Did his work before not use "the dancers' own self awareness and reciprocal observing of one another"? Were his dancers unconscious of their own movements and and unaware of each other? Did they not know where their limbs were in space? Did they not know who else was on stage and who on stage could see them? Were his dancers mindless zombies doing their master's bidding?
On what planet does "movement without reason(s)" make the audience nervous? Maybe Katja Werner is from the same planet that Chétouane is from, the Planet of Representation, where Judson never happened. I thought that the crowd at Tanz Plattform Deutschland 2012 in Dresden would be ok with abstract movement. Guess not. But they seemed to love N.N.N.N., which was pretty abstract. Granted the dancers looked at their hands as they moved them, creating a subject by objectifying their hands, and made cute sounds as they moved. Maybe the looking at the vocalizing created enough "reason" so that the audience was not nervous. They could see enough representation in the presentation of relationship between hand and eye and movement and sound, therefore they did not get nervous.
On the Planet of Representation form and content are two different things. Performances have content and that content is different than the form. This leads me to another definition of theater and of dance. Theater is that which the form and the content are different entities. In dance the form and the content are the same entity. In the piece Dance for Nothing by Salamon, I think that Werner is referring to the spoken text as the content and the "movement without reason(s)" as the form. This separation is further evidence of the supremacy of theater over dance in Germany. Tanztheater, Tanztheater, Tanztheater, TanzTHEATER. Tanz is merely the adjective to the noun, theater.
I would postulate that the reasons Werner writes that the form(movement) and content(text) is "too much to process all at once" are that she is not a native speaker of English and she is trying to link the movements to the text in more than a spatial and temporal way. From the beginning of the piece I did not try to connect the movement to the sounds. I let both of them wash over me. Even though I am a native speaker of English, I would guess that the text by John Cage is not that complicated. The vocabulary and the topic are not that esoteric to require a super advanced command of the English language. Most people at the festival in Dresden had very good English.
Or maybe I was a bad audience member and did not listen closely enough to the text, did not get every word and would fail a test on what John Cage via Eszter Salamon said. Maybe I should have strained harder to understand which movements meant Kansas, paragraph, and mind. Maybe I should have asked why Salamon extended her fists and touched them together. Did that movement section represent a connection of the working class in Kansas to the proletariat of Hungary? Hmm...what would Derrida say about the fact that the performer wore sneakers? Oh my gosh, so many signs and signifiers, so many layers...how do I interpret it all? What does it represent?!?!
And the final quote - "to conjure up the world of illusion". Once again, theater, theater, theater. Yet the author of this work is referred to as a choreographer. There is a fabulously trained ballet dancer prancing about pretending to be a crazy woman who has a "thirst for discovery" and is in "the depths of madness", so I guess it's theater because the piece is about something other than what is happening on stage. But the creator is a choreographer and not a dancer.
Kachelrieß writes that Waldmann's work is a "godsend for the theater." Does she mean theater in the open sense of the word, as in stuff that happens in the theater? Or does she mean theater as in not dance? If she means theater, then this piece is a vague and wan representation of an illusion wrapped in presentation of madness and the "dignity a person needs to remain human." But if this piece is dance, then it is well danced dance piece of a limited and unimaginative palette.
I do not know what my overall thesis for this posting is. Maybe that dance in Germany is more theater than dance.
Tanztheater.
I prefer my dance with a little less theater and a lot more dance.
3.05.2012
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.
click here to see 3 of the Roses, my final presentation for the second semester of my MA SODA program.
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.
*************
click here to see 3 of the Roses, my final presentation for the second semester of my MA SODA program.
3.04.2012
Performance Nutrition
What humanity needs to ingest to survive evolves very slowly. As our ancestors before us, we are still eating proteins, sugars, fats, vitamins, antioxidants etc to survive. Humanity's needs in the arts evolve slowly, too. Witness the fact that Greek tragedies and Shakespeare's plays are still produced. Song of love and loss are recorded still. Instead of using harps, musicians now use laptops and keyboards.
What evolves faster in terms of performance ingestion is the tools used to create the fodder for consumption. New ways of moving, making sound, lighting the performance space, mode of covering and leaving the performing form uncovered evolve faster than what is done with those tools.
But inevitably these new tools are used to in performances that return to the basic needs of the audience. After a deplorably short time, the exploration of the new tools is dropped and their use is co-opted by the need to explore the human condition, to create theater.
In other words, the tools and aesthetics change, but we come back to the same logics again and again and again.
Just as the nutritive needs of human will basically remain static so too will the performative needs of humanity. It, therefore, behooves us to investigate the tools themselves and not their use in relation to humanity and the human condition. Only in this way can we expect the arts to evolve
What evolves faster in terms of performance ingestion is the tools used to create the fodder for consumption. New ways of moving, making sound, lighting the performance space, mode of covering and leaving the performing form uncovered evolve faster than what is done with those tools.
But inevitably these new tools are used to in performances that return to the basic needs of the audience. After a deplorably short time, the exploration of the new tools is dropped and their use is co-opted by the need to explore the human condition, to create theater.
In other words, the tools and aesthetics change, but we come back to the same logics again and again and again.
Just as the nutritive needs of human will basically remain static so too will the performative needs of humanity. It, therefore, behooves us to investigate the tools themselves and not their use in relation to humanity and the human condition. Only in this way can we expect the arts to evolve
Meaning
The search for the meaning of what is happening on stage is the act of demeaning what is happening on stage.
1.18.2012
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?
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?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)