DCDanceBlog

[this was spurred as a response in the previous posting by lotta. i’m making it an entry of its own because it describes something i relished about the festival which i’ve been meaning to write.]

i wish i was able to stay for your and amanda’s piece, lotta! from all reports it was quite fine. also, it fit with something that i saw happening at the festival, and want to describe. ilana highlights it in her reply:

> an expensive ticket or be in a classy theater. It works when
> passers by are engaged, and not feeling like they are not
> part of the inside joke. It sounds like that was the case
> last saturday. That rules!

this was my favorite thing about the festival, among many things i enjoyed.

when tony and ilana were doing tony’s Traveler piece, and tony ventured into the audience’ space, i so many times saw people responding with generosity and obvious enjoyment. that situation - being singled out on the street by a very strange character, with everyone watching - could have provoked defensiveness. perhaps it was the self-selection of the people who stuck around, but i think it was also tony and ilana’s shaping of the performance, and particularly his manner in approaching people - he’s such a distinctly friendly person, and that apparently conveys even through even the white mask.

i was even more suprised by my responses to kathryn williamson’s Fall Girl.

the surprise was partly in betrayal of my expectations. i was afraid that the manipulativeness of appearing to fall accidentally in busy crosswalks, as a “social experiment”, would come through at some level, and wind up alienating people. it was certainly invasive, in a sly way. and yet what i saw, perched off to the side, was surprisingly touching.

first and foremost, i saw sudden bridges appear where there were none before. almost completely unconnected individuals and small groups were disrupted for a moment on their solitary paths to reach out and attend to another stranger. people wandered off chatting with one another, lively and talking with strangers if only for a moment. someone stopped and reach into her purse for her stash of clean wipes, to help clean kathryn’s abrasians. i saw momentary glitches in the constant, unremitting flow of people through the crosswalks, in what felt like a momentary respite from alienation.

what’s more, i was surprised to see more similarity to conventional performances than i’d expect.

it’s not uncommon in dance performances to see dancers doing things that seem at the edge of people’s abilities - a bit of risk. how much of the audience interest is in the perverse fascination of the indy-500 racetrack’s “danger of an accident”? in essence theater/drama often involves showing people in situations at their emotional edge. even without the prospect of some injury, drama is an opportunity to get out of the everyday drone built around avoiding of change and risk. (i think that’s a more significant factor than the perverse fascination.) manipulation is often a part of any performance. whether or not the artist stops short of genuine opening, and settles for the cheap spectacle, might make the difference for me between and icky feeling of being manipulated or feeling a good connection with them and what they’re showing. all of these things hold in the same way for kathryn’s performance.

fooling myself or not, what i saw in the intersections was people stepping outside of their solitary paths and connecting with strangers - with the fall girl and with other passersby. people seemed to be getting something out of their and one another’s responses. i had the exquisite experience, perched in-the-know and above the crowd (on the stone rim around the metro center escalator), to see a repeated, seemingly choreographed disruption of the crosswalk’s flow, one that gave a brief relief from the ordinary isolation that seems hard to avoid in daily life. whatever the motives, manipulated or not, i was as touched in ways that i am by some of the most constructive conventional performances i’ve seen.

at many of the performances on friday, saturday, and sunday, i had an overarching sense of bridges being built, however evanescent, rather than walls. certainly the wonderful conditions had something to do with that - weather and hospitality of the neighborhood - not to mention my own relief at having the thing come off well. i think it was not just my projection, however. this is the thing i’m yearning to describe.

an artist has the upper hand when investing the effort to make a public performance. ilana alluded to being on the inside or outside of a joke.  my feeling is that, by making the space a part of the piece and vice versa, the artist connects with the place, and can provide bridges for the audience to connect within that.  that addresses a hunger i have for public places - reducing isolation.  that’s what i enjoyed so much.

(about the car racing analogy, i can’t resist paraphrasing a gag from an old tank macnamara strip, said by an advertising-shill character: “we asked our demographic how long they would watch grown men drive very fast in circles. the average response was ‘about two minutes’. we then asked how long if there was the chance of a serious accident. the response changed to ‘as long as it takes.’”)

i’ve been meaning to post something here for a long time. something i realized at the wild meadows improv workshop is a good place to start, and the request a few days ago for some details about the event has got me mobilized.

the wild meadows dance workshop varies, but (i gather) usually involves a primary focus on movement improvisation, including but not limited to contact improvisation. take a look at the site for this years framing. i attended one other time, two years ago, where all the participants were responsible for leading classes/activities, making it more of a lab. the environment and situation is luscious. i enjoyed both workshops, thoroughly.

in the midst of this workshop i pondered the fact that i’m a dance dabbler getting a chance to dive in fully with intent, skilled people.

there i was, meandering (or leaping, or rolling) into a red-tape delineated box, or walking around the far pole to come back and greet the “audience” (my fellow participants) and then Do One Thing, or whatever structure - all to try to correspond somehow with what we, as a group, were doing at that moment. at times i had zero clue what was going on. but then, sometimes things seemed to really click.

again and again, i was with a bunch of reflexively rule-averse people, all looking for ways to follow rules so we could do something interesting with them - making or breaking them - together. and there were more than a few moments where it felt beautiful.

whether it was moments of intense gratitude that both i and my unappointed partners chose to stick with whatever we were doing long enough to converge and notice that we were in a dance together whose rules we only came to create and follow in that moment, and would not remember or be able to articulate moments after it eventually changed, but it was delicious while it was happening,

or noticing the myriad opportunities that a spindly bush in the woods offers to savor - lovely natural composition, or silliness of engaging with it by entangling myself, or heartfelt dedication to the careful grooming of it, while all entangled, that i had set for myself to do,

or moments where my attention was so much on questions and choices that i forgot my normal rules and moved in new ways, winding up in solos or ensembles that felt substantial, intriguing, maybe even graceful…

we did improv scores and movement practice and awareness exercises, concentrated on the tension between/presentation/performance and inwards/internal/interior appetites, talked sometimes too much and sometimes just enough - surprisingly, i did wind up feeling clearer about what it is we were doing, without actually defining it. doing stuff that felt beautiful not just as an internal experience, but potentially as seen from outside of its doing.

the thing that struck me, as a dabbler, is that this is a wonderfully human-scale way to disseminate art.

i would rather be spending my time and money to explore these realms, with people who have devoted themselves to diving in and bringing back some beauties, than just buying some art to hang on my walls, or watching a movie. not that those other things are bad - i like them, too - but there isn’t enough of this thing. i feel like i really got a chance to grapple with artistic choices, my own and others, how those choices interact, basically exploring stuff that works, sometimes getting to be part of something that works (or goes awry:-) beautifully.

i guess it’s not so easy to make this happen well - but i would like to see more of a critical mass for these kinds of participatory explorations (just i as i wish for contact improv jams), so it would be more tenable for those interested in championing it. maybe articulating it clearly - as a dabbler or as a producer or as a creator - will help that happen.

i mentioned my appreciation of this particular form of art practice to a few of the instructors, as the occasion arose, and am glad for the opportunity to stoke this fire, here. anyway, i hope that this also conveys some of the flavor of the event, subjective as it may be.