Author: wasswasswass

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Going to Performances

Last night I went to see Nah Dran XXII at ada. Didn’t know anyone on the program, but it is a theater nearby AND I didn’t know anyone on the program. Off I went at 5 past 8. Took me all of 4 minutes to bike to the theater. And found parking right away.

I enjoyed about half of the performance. Most of it, if I just viewed it as cool moves in time and space with some sounds. But after reading the program about how do people connect and trust and does this character want to leave her spot…blah blah blah de#$!@blah…

Anyways that is not what I am here to talk about. Upon reading the program, I was surprised to see a friend was performing. She had been pulled into the performance a week ago due to an injury of another dancer. I enjoyed that piece. It has a fruitful structure. While she and I chatted after the performance, she asked me why I had come to the performance. Did I know anyone in the show or had I seen any of the other performers’ work. I had not, I replied. A look of what I took as surprise came over her face. Why surprise? That I would go see work of people I don’t know?

Regardless of what was going on in her head…it is important for artists to see work. Yes, we all know this, but I think that we forget it. And I would venture to say that it is more important to go see work by people we don’t know and aren’t friends with. *** Birds of a feather flock together, so your friends probably have similar interests in performance, whether in tool, aesthetic or logic (2 out of 3 at least, another ventured guess). And seeing work by people unknown to you will broaden your horizons.

I have heard several choreographers on different continents and different sub-genres of contemporary dance say that they are tired of going to see work – they don’t like what they see (so has performance been reduced to entertainment?) or they don’t have time to see other work after their rehearsals/performances and seeing their friends performances (see *** above).

In summation – go see work and a lot of it!

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Equal representation before law

States are having financial trouble in all areas. One such area is funding for public defenders. After reading this article about the trouble in Missouri, I started thinking about lawyers and equal representation before the law. Party A and Party B are in a legal dispute. Party A is very wealthy and can afford a top law firm and all the research teams, expert witnesses, and investigative teams that come along with it. Party B is poor and not so well off, think small family farm fighting a developer. I am sure John Grisham has written a book about this.

Due to the financial divide, Party A is essentially getting better representation to the law than Party B. Unfair, no?

What I propose is that both parties put the amount of money they were going to spend on legal fees into a pot and then that amount is divided in half. Each party would then have, in theory, equal representation before the law.

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Taxes for Veterans

Some people argue that American foreign policy is largely governed by the United States insatiable thirst for oil. Please note we invaded Iraq to save them from Saddam, but haven’t given as much of a concerted effort in other troubled locations – Rwanda, Somalia – to name a couple. And in our foreign policy efforts, we send many troops into harm’s way. Then veterans come back home physically and mentally harmed.

What I propose is a 1¢/gallon tax increase on gasoline. The more gas you buy/use the more you pay. And these extra funds go to help veterans. I would like to see the right try to talk down the idea of increased aid for veterans.

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The Three Stages of Creation

There are three stages of conscious creation, though unconsciousness can factor into them.

They are exploration, experimentation, and execution.

I had a good description of the three written down in a notebook during a caffeine fueled frenzy after a Klein technique class at Labor Gras, but, alas, that notebook is AWOL. Here is a link to an earlier posting on the subject from ’08

Their4, I will begin again.

Exploration is the first stage. It is search before the research. It is the hearsal before the rehearsal. It is the discovery of what exists around you, whether you are in the studio or sitting on the subway thinking about your project. It is discovery/invention of what tools you will be using in your project. Also exploration is the rejection of tools. A work of art is more about what it is not than what it is. Granted all types of infinities exist some are just larger than others.

Experimentation is the second stage. Once the tools have been selected/created, their relationships can be investigated. (Uh oh, passive voice) How do the tools interact? Are you using them as tools or have they become logics or aesthetics? Experimentation is also the stage in which you can begin to figure out more in what direction your project will go.

The final stage is execution – when the work is presented before an audience.

I would say that in the choreo/impro spectrum the size of the triangle is larger towards the choreo end and approaches a dot towards the impro end. But choreo could be made as something to experiment with during the execution phase, the logic of that piece then being more improvisational.

All three phases can happen at the same time or separately. In more traditional (choreo’ed) work, there is more linear progression from exploration to experimentation to execution.

Below are two pictographs about this triumvirate. One has the three on a Cartesian co-ordinate system and the other as a simple triangle, which can be mapped on to the co-ordinate system. I find that the co-ordinate system can be a little misleading as it implies a “0” in relation to the three elements, which as I think about it now does make sense, so maybe it is not so confusing. A work of art that has no exploration, no experimentation and no execution would be not. What would something that has an infinite amount of each?

The first pictograph has the term “Sprecta of Deliberation”. I borrowed and expanded the term “Spectrum of Deliberation” from Nina Martin. I expanded it to Spectra” as I believe that there is a greater than one dimensional difference between choreo and impro.


I appreciate any thoughts and feedback on this subject.

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The Rite of Spring

Has anyone ever said, “Oh, The Rite of Spring…that’s been done.”? I doubt it and if they had no one would take them seriously. But seriously…how many times has the Rite of Spring been used by various choreographers.

But when we talk about drinking one’s own urine in a performance…that’s been done. And yes, it has been done. Someone somewhere sometime drank his or her own urine on stage. Maybe it was shocking to the audience, maybe it wasn’t. Maybe the urine drinker wasn’t even going for shock value. Maybe it was a metaphor for the nitrogen cycle on the earth or how everything that can be considered waste is really useful in another way or useful to someone else.

But if the original pee drinking premiere was going for shock value, s/he has not shocked me, as I have not seen the performance. Thinking about urine drinking does take the shock out of it. If in a Mark Morris Dance Company suddenly one dancer urinates in the mouth of another dancer..that would be shocking. If two performers at a venue such as CounterPulse in San Francisco performed a similar act…not as shocking. In either context, the act of drinking urine would be less shocking if the audience knew about it before hand.

Removing the idea of context based on performers, venue, or foreknowledge, the act of urophagia would still shock me. Maybe shock is not the right word…startle…surprise…But as I have never seen urophagia and never performed it myself, I would be starprised (new word, you read it here first!).

– But it’s been done. We, as the collective human consciousness, don’t need to go through that again – to paraphrase and misquote a friend of mine. If this were true, about the collective human consciousness, then as soon as a group of humans have experienced something, the rest of humanity doesn’t need to experience that something.

At what point have enough homo sapiens sapiens experienced “x” so that the rest do not need to endure/enjoy “x”?

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Names

Maybe I have written about this before, maybe not. I do know that I have thought about this a lot. A parking lot full of thoughts, a parking lot at an amusement park full of thoughts. A parking lot at an amusement park next to an outlet mall full of thoughts. Though the amount of thinking doesn’t me that the transmission of these thoughts will be very clear.

Name of dance companies/collectives…More and more groups/people are using the forward slash,”/” after their name with a word or phrase to name their group. Just came across one today – Jesse Hewit/Strong Behavior. From what I have seen/heard about him Strong Behavior is an apt title.

There is also Jess Curtis/Gravity and Nir De Volff/Total Brutal. Smith/Wymore Disappearing Acts also use the forward slash but in between the names of the two artists, not between the names of the artists and their company name. Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods is another example. As in her case and De Volff’s the website is only the company name whereas in the case of Curtis the website is his name followed by the company name and with Hewit the website is his name without the name of the company.

Ultima Vez/ Wim Vandekeybus might be another example. On the ImpulsTanz website, the names are written with the forward slash but on the website no such relationship could be found. This leads me to believe that the use of the forward slash on the ImpulsTanz website was a result of a decision of the Austrian dance festival and not of the Belgian choreographer.

Why use the forward slash? Is the name of the company not enough? Or is the individual better known than the company? Or is this a return to the modern, i.e. glorification of the individual? First there were “royal” dance companies, then something like the Ballet Russe, not named after an individual but no longer tied to a monarch. Then came something like the Denishawn, named after the two artistic directors, Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn (great uncle of Wallace Shawn…just kidding). Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Mark Morris Dance Company, Trisha Brown Dance Company, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, etc..

Then came the format that added the dancers in the title – Sasha Waltz & Guests, Scott Wells and Dancers. This format somewhat puts the dancers and the choreographer on an even level, but still the dancers remain anonymous.

Then there came the random word/phrase format entering the post-modern, removing the hierarchy completely as choreographer/creator and performers are not indicated – Pilobolus, Goat Island, Lower Left.

Granted there is not a definite time line when one name format is used and another is no longer used. All formats exist now and companies are continually named in a varieties of formats. One company based in Seattle went from the post-modern format to the modern one – Phffft became Khambatta Dance Company. Why the change, I cannot say. Maybe the choreographer decided to go more “mainstream” with the name. Look at the names of the best funded companies in the United States.

So as asked above, is the use of the slash combining the choreographer’s name and the company title a return to the modern?

How about something like – The Andrew Wass Dance Company and Dancers Project Dance Theatre/Non Fiction?

P.S.
Why is the word “dance” in so many dance company names? How many bands have the word rock or music or band or hip hop or rap in their names?

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Styles of Dance

Jazz dance has Fosse, Simonson ( the only two I know of) and I sure many more styles

Modern has Horton, Graham, Limon.

Ballet has Vaganova, Cecchetti, Russian, Danish, English styles, to just name a few.

Yoga has Vipassana, Hatha, Jivamukti, Svaroopa, Ashtanga, Bikram and…

Say Jazz, modern, ballet, or yoga and most people will have some idea of what you are talking about. Might not be exactly what you mean, but in the ballparl

Contact Improvisation, as of know, has one name. Yes, there are regional styles – West Coast, East Coast, European. But as CI is so young compared to the other movement modalities mentioned (how old is Yoga?!?), it has not been around long enough to change and become codified.

Eventually Contact Improvisation will become codified and that is just as good as it is bad. Codification can lead to clarity, but also to ossification. Codification can then also let practitioners of the form reject was has come before and discover new ground within a form. If CI does not expand and grow (some people might see this as becoming something else and the death of the form) it will stagnate.

I look forward to how many styles and flavors of CI there will be in another 38 years.

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Investing in an Improvisation

Language is a powerful tool. And as with all tools, it is empowering and limiting at the same time. After teaching at Dance Ranch Marfa BERLIN and performing as part of the performance marathon at Ponderosa, I have been thinking about the word “invest”.

What does it mean to invest in an improvisation? To invest in material? Other terms for a similar idea are “t0 mine that vein” of material. Again the idea of “going in” is present. The idea of “going in” in relation to an improvisation is telling. Why do we need to go in, to invest in material to create and develop material? It shows an idea that to create and develop material we need to shut out and remove ourselves from outside stimuli. I can’t think of a more limited place in terms of external stimuli than a mine. Why would we want to work/improvise/create from a place of limited awareness and options?

The idea of “investing in material” leads spatial static work. Going in…into a black hole that sucks you in. Somewhat dramatic of an image…

And if the rest of the ensemble is there to take care of the space, the composition while you and partner(s) invest in material, that leads to even further imbalance between the investors and the ensemble. The investors implode and the ensemble waits for them to resurface.

Take the word “invest”. INvest. How about OUTvest? How would we outvest in material during an improvisation?

Why can’t our awarenesses go outwards when we are mining material in an improvisation? Why isn’t the spatial care taking of the ensemble the mother lode to be mined?

Some other nascent thoughts-

using the Four Winds in CI to explore spatial awareness.
mining the space metaphor relating to Cloud City in Star Wars

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3 Types of Movies

There are four types of movies-

1. I’ll watch the preview of it.
2. I’ll watch the movie on a plane.
3. I’ll rent the movie.
4. I’ll actually go to the theater and see it.