DCDanceBlog

Are you like me? Have you sat in the audience at dance concerts and wished you could be much closer to the performers? Have you had to restrain yourself not go up to them afterwards, just to be able to see what you’ve observed from a distance up close? As if you wanted to try to touch with your own hands the magic you’ve just experienced during the performance.

If you are like me, this Friday is your chance to consume a dance performance in a space smaller than your living room. At Transformer Gallery (by Whole Foods on P between 14th and 15th) at 7pm, dance artists Daniel Burkholder, Ginger Wagg, Christine Stone Martin and Ilana Silverstein will perform a modified version of the work “My Ocean Is Never Blue”. It’s going to be a unique performance for many reasons, one of them being the closeness to the performers, and to be frank, I don’t think you wanna miss it.

Myself, I’ll be thousands of miles away from P street on Friday -Hortlax, in the North of Sweden, to be more precise- to bury my grand mother. But I will interogate Ilana about the details of it when I get back and hopefully see some video clips (Daniel, is someone filming this? Would be great to YouTube it. (Did I just make a verb out of YouTube? About time.))

But, so yeah, if you’re in DC on Friday night, check it out. There’s a big chance it’ll be one of the hottest contemporary dance performances taking place in DC his year. For sure, it’ll have the lowest ratio of square feet per performer/audience. That in itself is a must see.

this review in the new york times made me cry. honestly. it was this passage in particular:

In what must be one of the saddest romantic duets ever choreographed, two exhausted people who once loved each other remember how it felt and why, with fleeting, yielding tenderness. Finally Stefano murmurs a closing litany of homages to remembered sex, to trust and to voids, and to “loss, loneliness, absence and longing, and no longing at all.”

i’m not sure what it was, but i do know that i’d be pretty happy to have created a phrase that reads like that.

1. They study Merce in med school.  From an orthopoedics class at Stanford:http://move.stanford.edu/projects/index.html The Essence of Merce Cunningham:  The Essence of Merce Cunningham:   The Essence of Merce Cunningham:    

The Essence of Merce Cunningham:     

2. And a cool article creating a defintion of the Merce technique via electronic Merce Movement analyzer.

Stanford Report, March 16, 2005

Dancing with data adds to the show Class crunches numbers to analyze whether Merce Cunningham’s choreography should be viewed as ‘biomechanical rebellion’      BY ROSANNE SPECTOR L.A. Cicero Jonah Bokaer, a dancer from the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, was adorned with sensors that allowed a computer to record the motions that he performed with Stanford senior Jessica Goldman. The test subject danced wearing only blue shorts and the 50 silver balls the size of marbles that stuck to his skin, mapping out his physique.      “I know what I think my body is doing. But is it really doing that? I don’t really know, but I’d like to,” he said during a break in the afternoon session at the Motion and Gait Analysis Laboratory at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. A member of the Merce Cunningham modern dance company, Jonah Bokaer said he couldn’t wait to see the results—a digital record of his skeleton’s behavior as it undulates, spins and leaps. He wasn’t the only one. His March 7 session provided the final data set for one of four student projects in an unusual Stanford class, Anatomy of Movement. The class, in its second year, takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the production of human movement. “We’re looking upside down, inside out, at the human body,” said course director Amy Ladd, MD, professor of orthopedic surgery. “It’s not the way any single discipline would frame the study of movement.” Ladd added, “Each project reflects an integration of disciplines spanning the humanities and sciences to portray human movement.” The exercise was part of an extensive series of interdisciplinary art projects that were tied to Cunningham’s performances on campus last week. While movement is something humans do constantly without thinking, the members of this class are giving it a lot of thought: By analyzing movement from both scientific and aesthetic perspectives, they are trying to gain a deeper appreciation of why people move their muscles and bones in a particular fashion. The students evaluate golf swings, create a moving hand model, develop a standardized test for arm function and, in this particularly compelling example, probe the essence of a legendary choreographer’s mode of expression. With direction from faculty, the three undergraduates responsible for the Merce Cunningham assignment set out to reveal and quantify what they believed to be the essence of Cunningham’s approach to dance. Since the choreographer has no codified set of principles for his work, the course’s faculty, including Stanford dance teacher Diane Frank, who trained with Cunningham and taught for eight years in his studio, proposed a few themselves. The central tenet they arrived at is “Biomechanical rebellion”—movements that require dancers to produce positions not generally achieved by the human body. Next they boiled the dance style down to measurable elements. A Cunningham dancer is expected to: Move the torso as if it were a limb, not just a support for the arms and legs Make frequent and unexpected changes in direction Have an extraordinary sense of balance.From there the students picked up the ball. They devised the study and, with help from the motion analysis lab’s engineer Erin Butler, analyzed the data. They decided to compare the characteristics of Cunningham’s dance and ballet. At the core of the project was the data collected in the motion analysis lab.Eight cameras in that lab tracked the motion of the silvery balls on their test subjects: Cunningham dancers Frank and Bokaer and course director Ladd, who also happens to be a trained ballet dancer.”We thought that the study needed a comparison, and analyzing someone in pointe shoes would be a good contrast,” said Ladd, who has studied ballet for years. “So I reluctantly agreed.”The cameras sent the data to a computer, operated by Butler. The output includes motion capture of dancers as well as quantitative information.Why bother going to all this trouble to demonstrate something that seems obvious to anyone who has seen Merce Cunningham’s “biomechanically rebellious” dance? “When you actually quantify something artistic, even if it seems obvious, you often learn something,” said Ladd, when asked before the final class presentation last week. “You often think you know how things work, but until you quantify it you don’t know for sure.” Eadweard Muybridge’s 1878 stop-action photos of a trotting horse exemplify this—proving that for a moment the horse is suspended above the ground. When student Joyce Pan took her first look at the dancers’ data her heart sank. “It looked like we had disproved all of our hypotheses,” she said. On second look, she realized she had misread the data. In fact, their predictions had all come true, save for a few glitches due to data intake problems. Projects like this, mixing science with art, are challenging to conceptualize, said Ladd. “We’re looking for projects that merge science and art. No one really knows how to do this well yet. It’s a difficult mix. It calls for a philosophical paradigm shift for people who have been trained to think in one realm or the other.” The students’ contributions serve as a springboard for future projects, said Ladd. As for the three students who did the Cuningham project, all were changed by the experience. Pan, a computer science major with ballet and martial arts training, has gained an appreciation of modern dance, she said—a ballet snob no more. Jessica Goldman, an English major and a classically trained dancer, has decided to add a minor in a scientific field. And Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour Jr., a computer science major with no prior exposure to dance, is planning to create a dance-based computer game.

So, I was at a dance workshop in NYC last weekend (eventhough I don’t dance and can never hope to) and during the post-performance roundtable I said something about one of the presenting choreographer’s work, noting enthusiastically that it “introduced movements derivative of Merce.” I knew this was somewhat of a faux-pas (nobody wants to hear that their work is derivative, especially of such a household name) but I decided not to censor myself. I meant it as a compliment, of course, given my worship of ole’ Merce, but the moderator of the discussion broke in and said, “well, everything is derivative of Merce.”

Below is an email exchange I had later with the choreographer:

CHOREOGRAPHER: I had a conversation last night about dance/art, and there was an echo of a comment spoken by the post-show moderator, in that everything is derivative at this point, as there has been so much that has gone before that we know about, and the human body can only move in so many ways (unless, of course the specific mutations which allow for more range of movement in this or that joint).
ME: Yeah, I’ve had that “everything is derivative” conversation regarding music, and I think it’s kind of a pointless debate. Of course everything is derivative if you reduce it back far enough. For instance, I could say that Radiohead is derivative of bird song because they both involve the same notes. Modern dance is largely derivative of ballet too in many ways, if you break down much of the movement. To say something is derivative, in my mind then, is only practical if you can draw an immediately indentifiable connection between two styles/techniques/whatever. I.e., Brahms is derivative of Beethoven, while KISS is “derivative” of Beethoven only if you strip it down to its bare elements — both use Western major/minor scales, harmony, etc. So I don’t think the moderator’s point was really relevant to my comment about your dance being derivative of Merce, because I did see an instant similarity, whereas she was just adding “of course it is, because so is everything nowadays.” Two different things.

END email exchange. . .

I also take issue with the idea that “all is derivative because so much has already been done”. This reminds me of something Steven Jay Gould said in trying to answer the question of why there aren’t any modern day Beethovens. He said that perhaps Beethoven’s work maxed out the available supply of notes and combinations so that there was nothing more for future geniuses to create. Everything had already been done. After all there are only 12 notes and a handful of harmonies to work with (until you spill over into atonal music which gets messy) and the rhythms constructed out of these notes are constrained by that which is discernible. This nonsense perfectly illustrates why biologists should stick to biology; actually, had Gould used a bit of math he would have realized how nearly infinite the number of musical combinations is, and how there should never be a cap on new expressions of genius in music. I think his point merely betrays his lack of expertise, and thus the relative inaccessibility of the new “genius” music that is produced every day in underground, submarket arenas.

The same point applies to dance, yet with more force. While western music is, in fact, confined to 12 notes, dance is confined to an almost limitless number of “notes”. True, there are only as many notes as one’s joints can accomodate, but that is alot of notes! Even if there is a theoretical limit upon the number of “notes” the human body can produce, I imagine it will be a very long time until choreographers have reached that limit. New “words” are entered into the dance vocabulary every day, and there is no reason to think that dance is at an invention-impasse for lack of raw materials.

John Lanou

i went to contact on thurs night at the dance exchange. it was great because we had a number of new people there, always nice. one woman in particular really interested me. at first i felt like she didn’t seem too familiar with contact, and that may have been true, but after watching her even for a little while, i began to see that she was clearly an excellent dancer. it was just so apparent in how she held herself, placed her feet, kept her head and neck and shoulders free. but most of all her center was clearly incredibly strong, so that where and how she gave her weight always came across very clearly. and even more important, her whole body moved as an integrated unit rather than as separate parts–shoulders, hips, etc. i’m embarassed to say that while i’ve heard of that concept–the whole body being integrated–i really didn’t get it till then. of course i didn’t see her move individually, and maybe it isn’t as apparent in regular dance–maybe that type of thing is clearer with contact.

it was very cool and impressive and i instantly started feeling intimidated. i suddenly saw how i don’t move like that, how my shoulders often are at odds w/ the rest of my body, and how i often translate “flow” and “release” as floppiness and lack of a strong center. but it’s all information, and good to have. as they say, identifying the problem is the first (and often the biggest) step towards changing it!

i was at least glad to realize, after later talking w/ her, that she’s one of the better known dancers in DC–this is what she does, and has been doing, for forever, probably. and she was also incredibly friendly, which was so great and such a bonus.

speaking of contact, next month is the spring east coast jam, at claymont court in west virginia. it’s great fun, with tons of dancing, great nature, and amazing vegetarian food. plus terrific people and an extremely relaxed atmosphere. i can’t recommend it enough!

and I came across this (not from browsing YouTube! which I never do these days…but from a site about all things eighties) and it made me so screwed up that I couldn’t do much for the rest of the night. The memories. Sitting in front of the TV, recording each episode on a lousy VCR, playing the dance scenes in slow mo, trying to do the movements with my back towards the screen and looking over my shoulder to see the steps. Having these flashbacks brought in turn back other memories…like the color of the wallpaper we used to have in the living room, what I used to do and think about in that age, all my Hello Kitty stuff… It’s dangerous! All these clips that haven’t been easily within reach until now, via YouTube. It can take you back to times you might not want to (or have the emotional capacity) to visit during your 15 minutes lunch break. It’s also of course an amazing source if you do want to go back in time. It’s all in there.

i want to respond to rob’s post, but first i think i will write quickly about my good choreography experience yesterday. i was hoping to create a phrase for a friend, but didn’t have a ton of time and wasn’t quite sure how it would come out. so i decided to essentially take lotta’s approach from last december–to just put together movements, add one to the next without seriously trying to edit or consider composition. i did think about which step might best follow its previous one, but not very seriously–this was really just an exercise to create something. and what i found was that stringing together movements was surprisingly easy, and satisfying! and to be honest, i like what i did. it’s not amazing, and there are probably so many ways it could be better, but i still like the choreography and the clarity i see in it.

which leads me to think that i really should do that more often. about 10 years ago, i had a practice of writing a poem every day. i never edited the poems–this was simply an exercise to practice writing, to get used to trying to capture the moment. sort of like improv. and i really feel that it made me a better writer, a better poet. so spending time just putting together movement w/o overthinking it, w/o giving into the perfectionist instinct, would probably be a great thing for me.

i still am trying to figure out my creative process. because although i like what i created yesterday, i didn’t walk in w/ an intention. what would the process be like if i was actively aiming for a certain idea or tone? i think it’d be a lot harder. when i improvise, in contrast, it’s very easy to work with a certain concept or color, but much harder to be clear, to keep track of what i’m doing, and to consciously make changes. it’s almost like working with different sides of my brain.

i’d like to know more about others’ creative processes. 

All expression is contextual
By Robert Bettmann
5/9/05

All expression is contextual.
All expression occurs on at least two levels: the direct and the metaphorical.
The words we say and write, the clothes we wear, the glances we steal, the love we make, and the love we don’t. And, the art we make.
As artists we learn to make choices. This is called “learning a technique.” Be it someone else’s technique or our own. The thing is, every form of expression has in it the root of prior expression. This is why I say that all expression is contextual. No matter what type of recluse or rebel one is, still, one harbors the images and relationships, the techniques of expression, that one has experienced earlier in life. And though one might consciously reject every manner of connection to those experiences – that in itself leaves one with the context of not expressing in those ways that one has seen/experienced/felt, and therefore frames the art to an even higher degree.
All expression is contextual. Technique gives you choices about which context one wants to reference.

i just read an article about matthew bourne, the englishman who created a hugely popular gay version of swan lake, as well as the new edward scissorshands show and a bunch of other pieces, in the new yorker and then in the ny times today.
what interests me about him isn’t particularly his work itself, but the fact that he does what he’s interested in and has dismissed certain trends would otherwise have dictated a particular style. what i mean is that it seems that he encountered modern dance tradition and attitudes, and eventually bucked them in order to do what he was most interested in. the new yorker writes it here:

He went to the Laban Centre in London to study modern dance. “This was in 1982, when in England modern dance was a young field, and puritanically ‘contemporary.’ Dances, as the Laban faculty saw it, should have no stories, and they didn’t really need music, either. A dance should be a ‘movement study,’ an exploration of structure. Bourne respected this aesthetic: ‘I wanted to emulate that. I did try and do that.’ But it didn’t really work, becuase it wasn’t what he really wanted to do. He wanted to tell stories.”

i am attracted to this quote b/c i think it does capture a lot of the authoritarianism that can exist in modern dance, esp in various esteemed institutions–rules and more rules. what attracts me to modern dance is the possibility of doing what you really want to do, potentially breaking all the rules in order to somehow create something more transcendent, richer, wilder. i know matthew bourne is very commercial and perhaps i wouldn’t enjoy his work, but i respect hugely that he bucked the system to do what he really was interested in–and telling stories is definitely not fashionable in the modern dance world, at least in my opinion–and wound up doing it really well.

the article also describes his creative process. apparently he first lays out the structure of the show. then, together w/ some cast members, spends time gathering ideas for the piece (ie, watching swans in the park, for swan lake) and improvising off of those ideas. then he conducts rehearsals with the whole company, giving particular members a broad outline of the characters they are to play as well as some movement ideas, and asking them to flesh out the personalities and movements of those characters. and then he picks and chooses, refining and clarifying and adapting. and that’s, essentially, the show.

A friend who works as a dancer in Holland asked me about the projects I’m involved in here in DC. She asked what I felt is most different between dancing here and there. I said that all the dancers that I’ve met here are much more health conscious.

She laughed thinking I ironically joked about unhealthy American food habits. I wasn’t joking at all. I explained that whereas the breaks at the Rotterdam Dansacademie consisted of 90% of the dancers and teachers running out for a quick smoke, the dancers here dig out little organic snacks from their backpacks to share with the group. She said that the only thing that could possibly make her quit smoking would be to feel like she’s the only one giving in to such a destructive habit. I said that’s pretty much the only reason I don’t run out to smoke during breaks anymore. She said she wanted to move here. I said she should.

I’ve been thinking about that it seems like that the dance community here in the US is much more linked to other communities like body awareness folks, yoga people, Feldenkreis practitioners, etc. And I think that generates an overall more Whole Foodsy dance community. The dance scene in Northern Europe is much more separate from these fields. But maybe this is special for DC? I wouldn’t know since DC is my only experience.

However, the switch from Marlboro Lights to little crackers and spicy pumpkin seeds is pleasant and very good for my lungs.

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This article (which is from ‘04, but still..) and starts like this:

“HOW DID YOU START YOUR DAY? With a couple of cigarettes and a soda? It’s a cliche by now, but in spite of many well-publicized Surgeon General warnings, it’s still a typical dancer’s breakfast.”

might me more relevant to dancers in Holland than here. It nevertheless talks about the fact that still, globally, so many dancers smoke.