DCDanceBlog

John and I went to see Pilobolus the other night. it was great! surprisingly great. i’d seen them last in 2003 at the american dance festival in NC and they weren’t good at all, i’d felt. seemed like they’d become gimmicky, frozen, w/o anything dynamic going on in their movement or ideas. i’ve seen a fair amount of pilobolus–they used to perform pretty regularly at ADF and since i’m from that area, they became sort a mainstay to the region, at least in the summers. i remember seeing one of their performances years ago when i was first trying to figure out what modern dance is about and what it’s good for. the piece i saw took me to another world, a trippy place with completely different rules, and i remember loving that, the possibilities and the openness. it sort of provided me with an example of what dance ideally could do.

anyway, so this performance on wednesday night was great. not so much in the trippy otherwordly way, but just as great entertainment. they did 5 pieces and honestly, 4 were excellent. one piece showed an undersea world made up of bizarre creatures that was totally beautiful and charming–not really abstract in the sense i was talking about above, but still amazing to watch and fully entertaining, in the best sense. i won’t go into each piece but they were all pretty satisfying, esp the last one which was kind of like pure energy on stage. and energy is always very satisfying to watch, at least for me.

but john asked me if other modern dancers look down at pilobolus, or if they don’t consider it fully “dance” and i had to say yes, probably so. it’s dance, but not at all in the typical sense, and in a way it can seem a bit cheesy or gimmicky. it’s still great–saying that doesn’t take away from it being amazing–but it’s probably not for the discerning dance snob. most of it isn’t abstract and tasteful in the typical sense, and there’s a fair amount of cultivated sexiness on the part of the women dancers that you don’t typically see in modern dance. and also no lifting of men by women, or women by women, pretty much only men lifting women, which is kinda dull, now that i think about it.

but it was still great and the place (the warner theatre) was packed, which was terrific to see.

john is getting super curious about modern dance and it’s amazing. and i’m certainly learning something! he took a 3-part course on the history of modern dance at the kennedy center, and came back telling me about ruth st denis and ted shawn, and another night came to me raving about merce cunningham! which was so cool b/c i’m not the hugest fan of merce (as john now calls him) and yet i realize i don’t actually know a damn thing about him. what john loved about his stuff, esp one piece whose title he doesn’t know, is how it’s like watching life on mars, or crazy people–creatures from some other world. which is what i’d loved about that pilobolus piece i’d seen at adf years ago, that sense of possibilty, of being able to go beyond our normal, practical, hard limits, the everyday life that binds us to “reality”. if that makes sense. it’s such a cool thing and i can 100% see why john would be attracted to it.

but the class didn’t go beyond cunningham, which is a shame b/c in my mind there’s a lot more out there going on that john didn’t get a sense of. and yet i don’t really know enough myself to say exactly what it is. lotta pointed out the judson church movement, how that’s been perhaps the biggest change in modern dance in the past few decades…and so i must now learn more about it.

The DCDanceBlog is written by Amanda Abrams and Lotta Lundgren. We’re both living in DC, dancing and doing dance-related things (for example, Amanda runs the Improv Fest and Lotta dances with The Playground and is a contributor to the Swedish dance magazine “Danstidningen”).

So, we want this blog to be a place for discussions on all things dance-related. The black and white good-dance/bad-dance type reviews that certain papers tend to print does not do contemporary dance justice most of the time. In fact, it was a review in The Post of a Dance Place concert, “The Dragons Project: Powerplay” by Stephen Clapp and Laura Schandelmeier, that made us crave a forum where we could talk about dance in a different way. The review was not nuanced enough to do the work justice, we felt, and we realized there was no place in this city where more subtle, and maybe more experimental, ideas about dance could be aired.

We are also collaborators on choreography and improvisation projects, and this blog allows us to discuss some of the issues that arise during our rehearsals, and to ponder some of the conflicts we encounter while trying to figure out what we’re doing.
doing.

Anyone who wants to post something here is super welcome to do so and should email us.

Lastly, it’s worth mentioning that one of us (not saying who) is not from this country, and therefore has a slightly more Europeanized English than she wish (wishes?). In fact, another reason this blog came to life was because she felt a need to practice her writing in English, which isn’t one of her favourite things to do. She welcomes suggestions and corrections when crazy things happen in her writing.

So, welcome! Hope you enjoy.

This is so cool!!! i’m finally posting live to the blog. before this lotta has been doing it for me–i’d write something and send it to her to post. now it’s all me.

small pleasures.

so i am having a mellow evening, in particular hoping to sort out some of my feelings about the improv fest, thank people for being involved, etc. i’m still not sure what i feel about the festival. i pretty much ran myself into the ground during the days before and the first couple of days of the festival, so i was a zombie by saturday and didn’t quite get as much out of it as i probably could’ve. but here are some thoughts and impressions:

one thing i really enjoyed was erika schonemann and roxann morgan’s set of pieces down at the WWII and WWI monuments, and the reflecting pool. i really felt like they worked, which in a way surprised me b/c i knew that they didn’t rehearse beforehand. but the dancers all looked good, and the mixing with all of the tourists–who, unlike DC locals, actually stopped to watch–was very successful. i wondered what it would’ve been like with twice as many dancers and all of them dressed in white from head to toe, but it was pretty satisfying as it was. it’s interesting b/c my initial hope in promoting site specific work for the festival was that people would create dances on normal, pedestrian places (like the metro or an average street), but it was great to see that the monuments really do work very well for that kind of art too.

i also really liked ilana silverstein and roxann morgan’s piece at the sculpture garden cafe. they were both in orange and moved with such a regular and deliberate pace, staying in contact most of the time–it was very lovely and inspiring.

i was in the ATM piece that lotta referred to earlier. it was fun and definitely a GREAT location, something worth working with again. but one thing it made me aware of was the general need that a lot of improv has for more structure. i think most people feel that improv means no planning, no structure, no rehearsal, but as someone recently pointed out to me, if you don’t have choreography and composition, you basically have nothing at all if you don’t add any structure. and nothing at all isn’t always so attractive to look at. i think next year i’m going to try even harder to get artists to do more planning and more rehearsing. i just think it can make a huge difference. and even though improv is improv, there are still a lot of layers to it. first there’s just being comfortable improvising, then there’s exploring the boundaries you can push alone, and then there’s improvising w/ others–which i find remarkably difficult sometimes!

me and lotta did our piece downtown, by the way, and i think we both realized that we spent more time working on the choreographed sections and less on the improvised parts, alone and together. i think we both felt great about the performances, but i know i’d like to work on my improvisation so that it doesn’t all run together, so that different sections have different styles and maybe so that we interact more w/ each other.

boy, lots to say, about the festival, about site-specific work–which i want to keep seriously studying–and about dance in DC. but i’ll save some for tomorrow.

Here’s a link to a video of me and Amanda performing “Management Dances” on K street during the Improv Fest. The camera work, editing and upload to YouTude is made by Maida Withers. Let us know what you think.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcQSV3mymGI

Update:
There are two more video clips (filmed and uploaded by John Lanou) from this performance up on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0NaDuxi4lI

and

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0fyKpMGZMk

Thanks John!

Citibank’s ATM westibule on Conn Ave and 18th turned out to be an extraordinary spot on Saturday at 11pm. Inside of the westibule a group of dancers, lead by Rob Bettman, performed an improv that both attracted and chased away passersby. “wtf’ and “i hope they had a lot to drink” were comments flying through the air.
To observe both the dance and people’s reactions were quite a trip. The fact that a bunch of reactions occured in the first place and that people who didn’t expect to catch a bit of modern dance on their way from Five to Dragonfly (two dc nightclubs) stopped by to pull out their cells to take photos, is a great achievement in itself.

It was also interesting to see a few classically trained dancers participate in the improv fest, even if there was a bit of a collision between the Forsythy type of movements and the contact stuff happening.
For me personally though, the most trippy thing was the fact that the ATM machine told me, litterally, while taking out cash, that “This is no ordinary ATM”.