DCDanceBlog

a company that i dance with is working on a piece about catholicism, and i’ve found some of the ideas have worked their way into my non-dance life. during the week, i meditate almost every day in a catholic church near my office, and since our group started working on this piece, i’ve noticed patterns i never saw before.

i avoid the hours when the church is full and a priest is talking. when i’m there, it’s cool and dim and quiet. but there is movement. it’s small and subtle, but there’s a regularity to it.

there are the tourists wandering in, walking towards the altar in their sneakers, clutching bags of souveniers, then walking out again.

and there are the homeless guys. sometimes they’re outside asking for change, sometimes inside sleeping on the pews, and sometimes roving around up and down the aisles, going in and out of various doors.

one day last week i was in the church before noon, the first time i’d done that in a long time, and it took me awhile to realize that people were lined up on the right side of the pews. they were ordinary business people, big-shouldered guys in suits who looked like they belonged in politics, clean and colorless women in business casual outfits. they were there for confession, i realized, and after disappearing around a corner for a few minutes, they’d reemerge, faces passive as ever, and walk over to another part of the church to pray on their own.

there are some regulars. there’s a grey haired guy who comes fairly often; he sits so relaxedly in the pew, his left arm stretched out along the top of the bench, that he could be at a football game. stays for hours.

and there’s a mysterious woman all in black who’s there almost every day. her hair is almost white and she wears it in a bun, but she’s quite lovely and is probably younger than she initially seems. red lipstick, black shawl, often a fan in her hand. she roves the aisles, up and down, walking slowly and patiently, stopping at her station at the far right corner of the pews, then walking again. and she has this weird noise she makes with her mouth, kind of like a constant rolling of her r’s that goes on and on. i think it must be a devotional compulsion that she makes herself do. she’s the spiritual caretaker of the place, i feel.

and behind it all are the cleaners, always moving, always there. they’re the backstory, the drums behind the soloists. they’re two latino guys who must work on a rotating cleaning schedule. some days they’re vacuuming the carpet, other days organizing and dusting the pews, other days waxing the floor up front or cleaning the front doors. one guy is thinner and a bit nervous looking, with lines around his mouth; the other is heavier and a bit hunched. neither one seems the least bit spiritual, at least while working, and i always wonder what they think about toiling in such a beautiful church every day.

i’ve just begun saying hi to the thinner guy, and i like that. and i sometimes say hello to the woman in black, though she creeps me out a little. but i generally avoid looking at anyone else. it’s great–anywhere else, i’d probably feel bad about not looking in people’s eyes and somehow connecting with them. but in the church, i feel, we’re all there for personal reasons, not to connect. being in the church is my time, my space. 

Who has an up-to-date, informative, clean website with contact info?  Just had some trouble when I set out to look based on my criteria.

 I’m inspired by doug’s comment to find some good dance website examples out there, DC and beyond..

someone said to me yesterday, “the best art is personal.”

i love that idea, but realize it’s somewhat controversial. another friend and i have had long debates over that basic issue–whether we are ourselves when we dance, or just bodies; whether dance is or can be or should be therapy. she doesn’t think good art necessarily has anything to do with what’s happening deep inside ourselves.

i read a book by twyla tharp some time ago and she felt art should not be personal–that it is the universal themes that have been touched upon over and over in history that make the best subjects for art. and so her dances refer to greek myths, the bible–archtypal stories and ideas that have deep meaning for our society.

and yet it seems to me that the more personal art is, the more compelling and passionate it can be. and the more unique and true, whatever that means. the subject doesn’t have to be therapeutic–my relationship with my mother, my anger over x or y–but what we bring to it should be as unique and authentic to how we see the world as possible.

oh no!!! i just deleted a bunch of comments while trying to clean up the spam on this site!!! i thought i was being very careful to make sure that didn’t happen…

i’m so so sorry to those of you whose comments i deleted. i feel terrible.

obviously we need a real–non-manual–spam filter for this site.

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.

This weekend, Amanda, Lotta and I will be performing in My ocean is never blue as part of Metro DC Dances at Carter Barron Ampitheatre. The piece changes depending on the venue and where we are in the process - even if you have already seen it in a gallery or at Dance Place, come check it out in its latest form!

The Details:
*Metro DC Dances
August 11 at 7:30pm at Carter Barron Amphitheatre

Presented by Dance/MetroDC as part of the Metro DC Dance Awards in cooperation with Rock Creek Park/National Park Service

Performances by 2006 Metro DC Dance Award winners:
CityDance Ensemble
Daniel Burkholder/The Playground **My ocean is never blue”**
Maida Withers Dance Construction Company
Tappers With Attitude Youth Ensemble
VTDance/Vincent E. Thomas
Free!

lotta and i met with doug fox last week. he’s the founder and main contributor of the great dance blog, which has a broader dance focus than this one. he told us about his plans to expand his blog; they are amazing and ambitious and you can read about them in his post on the topic on his blog.

basically, he wants to expand his blog so that it becomes a platform for many dance blogs, a portal where one can go to find all kind of information about dance. there might be temporary blogs that chronicle short-term projects; longer-term ones that are small and few people would otherwise hear about; fundraising blogs; video blogs; etc! and he’d sell advertising to companies affiliated with dance in order to make it worth his time and effort.

i’m very impressed, for many reasons. first, it strikes me as an amazing business opportunity that will also benefit modern dance. here is an art form that has a small number of very passionate devotees who generally know little about business and are very disparate. separately, little gets communicated to the general public. together, however, and with the assistance of someone who does have some business savvy, there’s a chance to make some noise, convey some ideas.

it’s also fortuitous that one of the few advantages of dance, from a business perspective, is that it looks good in pictures and on camera. you tube, hello?

i’m also a bit jealous of doug. i’ve seen some of the ideas he’s pursued on his blog–video interviews with the head of nyc’s dance theater workshop, for example, and discussions about recent exhibits featuring dance–and they’re very cool and creative. to be able to follow one’s curiousity full time and write about whatever seems interesting at the time strikes me as pretty great.

one last thing of note: i got the impression from doug that people in nyc have been more hospitable than dc folks to his ideas about expanding and being revolutionary. not too surprising, i know, but still interesting. i guess new york will always be new york, filled with innovators who are interested in pushing boundaries. in comparison, dc will always be a provincial town. still, it made me kind of sad.

What dance had changed things for me the most?

I said

DV8 Physical Theatre
Pina Baush Tanztheater Wuppertal
Cullberg Ballet
Rosas
Nederlands Dans Theater

What would you have said?

Wim Vandekeybus & Ultima Vez (who I didn’t say because I forgot).

————

shit, i totally forgot my hero Jonathan Burrows. I saw him a lot when I was the most “shapable” in 98-2000

michaelangelo antonioni, another giant of the film world, died on the same day as ingmar bergman this week. i freely admit that i haven’t seen any of his films either. but i was struck, again, by the articles i read about him and by the ideas that moved him to create work. his new york times obituary said that his “tormented central vision” was that “people had become emotionally unglued from one another.”

i’m also struck by the fact that these filmmakers’ philosophies have made an impression on me. i’ve read short bios of other artists and their central visions haven’t necessarily brought me to deeper thinking about why one makes art. i think, however, that filmmaking and dancemaking have a lot in common, and that they share some central tenets that are not necessarily present in visual art or music. both filmmaking and dancemaking, of course, are visual arts, but they’re also almost always (in the case of film) or always (in the case of dance) performed by people. i think, therefore, they both lend themselves very well to being about people, about how we interact or don’t, are alienated or close, etc. yes, one can dance the wind, or shapes, or nothingness, but i think it’s hard for observers to avoid feeling like the piece is about how people experience the wind, shapes, or nothingness.

maybe this is all obvious or boringly theoretical. but i’ve been having an ongoing debate with a friend about what role “being human” can or must play in dance (and especially improvisation), whether we can simply be empty bodies as we dance, or must always be humans (a small but key difference). i’m not saying i have the final answer. but i do think that each art form has its niche, concepts it is best at conveying. writing about homelessness is easy; playing violin about it is a lot harder. similarly, music about sadness can be amazing, while writing about it may miss the central element that makes it feel real. what is the niche for dance, and must it include humans?