“I think that, maybe unlike a lot of other improvisational people, I’m very visually oriented and very interested in presentation.”
from Kent De Spain’s thesis quoting one of the dancers in his study
Copy
“What you copy and how you copy it shape your reputation as a dancer.” – C. V. Hill.
Futility of Life
‘Heidegger, Agamben, and Arendt as well are afraid that human life might be reduced to mere organic being, unredeemed from what Arendt calls the “essential futility” of life.’
from “The Origin of the Work of Art in Material Practice” by Henry Staten.
training and reflection
Training enables the dancer to be fully bodily engaged in a reflex and able to reflect on it simultaneously. In other words, unifying the body/mind, or rather not unifying as that implies a split, but existing as a whole.
Merely
In several journal articles that I have read, I sense the white male privilege and how it seeps through, even when the article is written by a well educated female, who hopefully has enough education to get beyond or out from under (pun not intended) the white male privilege.
In “Foucault’s Turn from Phenomenology: Implications for Dance Studies, Sally Ness writes “Dance, or any embodied movement oriented practice, is not what Foucault studied.” It is good to use thoughts and models from different disciplines to interrogate and problematize one’s own practice. But then later in the conclusion, Ness writes – The field [dance studies] has acquired its fair share of cross-disciplinary prestige that any alignment with Foucault’s work inevitably carries. So only by quoting a dead white guy who knew little to nothing about dance can the embodied(female!??!) practice of dance enter the theoretical (male?!?!) world of intellectual discourse.
In an article about Merleau-Ponty and Laban, by Maureen Connolly and Anna Lathrop, Connolly is described as having a “commitment to phenomenology and movement education that is unashamedly (emphasis mine) bodily based.”
Why does she need to bring shame into it? Is she ashamed of her body? Does Alvin Noë have to write that he is unashamedly cerebral? No, because he is of the power structure, white, male, and cerebral. I feel that by connecting shame to being body based, Connolly is still operating under a value system that devalues the body and favors the mind.
In Playing with Performance: The Element of the Game in Experimental Dance and Theater by Karen Clemente, she quotes Michael Kirby about post-modern dance – “…Dance is not used to convey messages or make statements. The dancers are merely themselves.”
Oh, how I hate that word merely. Yes, it can mean purely,without admixture. But it has the word mere in it, which for me has a negative connotation, a mere child. That the dancers in Kirby’s quote are no better than their bodies. That without a code, to bring Barthes into, the subject is dis-intellectualized, all we have is the body and therefore, not of much value. I doubt Kirby or Clemente would say that they disvalue the body, but I think there is a vestigial bias, left over from Descartes or wherever. Similar to how people who improvise and value it as a means of art creation say just improvise or that improvisation is not a piece. That there is technical dance and then there’s CI. Which makes me think of CI dancers in Germany who don’t call themselves dancers because they haven’t gotten a certification in dance. Which then leads to CI being even more marginalized in their own minds and end up even more noodly and less rigorous/less technical.
We are all suffering under biases that we have not consciously accepted or created. Sometimes, though, it seems like there are intellectual/critical theory tropes that people invoke because that is what we are supposed to do. I remember a thread on Facebook about a performance by Isabel Schad at Counterpulse last year. In it she is naked and there is a sound score with a male voice. Everyone was up in arms because the male/voice/intellect was controlling the female/body, or so they thought.
“How could Isabel and her collaborator make such piece?!? Don’t they know how that piece is read?”
The groovy liberals of the SF dance scene, I thought, would value the female/body equally, if not more, than the word/mind. And that they would not think that there are multiple readings and intentions. Isabel and her collaborator weren’t thinking about gender when making the piece. But maybe they, too, are unaware of what vestigial cognitive biases remain.
Motion and Emotion
A movement-deficient understanding of emotion is an impoverished understanding of emotion – Maxine Sheets-Johnstone. pg 214 of The Corporeal Turn
Knowing
3D Binary
Where is your #dance located? Applicable to body, space, time and…
Berlin CI Jams: A Personal Reflection from 2013
Berlin CI Jams: A Personal Reflection
originally posted here in CQ in the Summer/Fall issue from 2013
by Andrew Wass
I have had an ongoing love/hate relationship with the jams in BERLIN, GERMANY, probably mostly due to my issues with CI. When I first got here I was really down on the jams. I felt that people didn’t know how to transition between levels, i.e., do a lift and then continue to the floor; that improvising was more of a theatrical sort than a physical sort; that no one was focused, everyone was chatting; that there was too much influence of Tango and other social dance forms.
Since being in a master’s program in Berlin for the past 1.5 years (Solo/Dance/Authorship at the Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum für Tanz [HZT]), I think I understand why the CI here in Berlin has the flavor that it does. Dance is in service to theatre. Totally abstract physicality is still somewhat new here. I have encountered the attitude here that pure physicality is not enough, so the theatrical creeps into the dance: the dance of the subject vs. the dance of the object; a dance of chemistry vs. a dance of physics. But maybe that is human nature—that all new tools eventually get pulled back to the human condition. How many millennia on and we are still writing love songs?
After teaching CI for five weeks to the BA students at my school, I had some realizations about the form and what I was trying to convey. As they weren’t the most physical group, they had some difficulty with a more physical approach to CI—that is, taking weight during body surfing, meeting the ground. Because of this, I started to focus more on the improvisation, the “What are we improvising when we do Contact Improvisation” question. Contact as adjective and improvisation as noun. Going away from the vocabulary (choreography/pathways) of contact and more in the direction of what I think Danny Lepkoff talks about.
Since that realization, I have been having a better time at the jams. My duet experiences are not what I enjoy (I prefer the duet style of the California Bay Area/West Coast-lots of negative space between the bodies, full weight, level changes, more bone/muscle than skin, continuation of contact through multiple levels, “forceful” manipulations of partner(s), use of hands, possibilities of staccato and flow), so I have been focusing more on the duet of me and the whole jam. Contact between self and other. When others are having a theatrical/subjective/chemical experience, I can still have a dance/objective/physical experience.
I still think the jams are too theatrical, with not enough ensemble awareness and too much duet social-dance influence. But I have learned how to negotiate this for a more satisfying experience.
The rooms are also either too small or too full, so full extension of body and flying through space are rarely possible.
Thank you for listening.
How to Read Body Art
How is the observer intended to interpret the atemporal durational corporeal installative performance of an apple core tattooed to the left temple of a white male? Does the left side of the head indicate the leftward (cognitive) political leanings of the individual? The apple core representing the ingestion of sustenance that reveals the means of regeneration. Or is it indicative of Eve, an Illustration of the fault and acceptance of said fault of the fairer sex? What is the observer supposed to do if left up to her or his own devices?