Choreography:
That which has a higher degree of reproducibilty a larger percentage of the time.
Improvisation:
That which has a lower degree of reproducibility a smaller percentage of the time.
Is Tango Ruining Contact?
Are Tango and other forms of social dance ruining Contact Improvisation? Ruining might be a strong word. How about changing it in a direction I do not like? Expanding maybe? No, I think that I will stick with ruining. And I will explain why. From my small exposure to the CI world, I see the form being “ruined” by social dance forms. Ruined, I say because their influences are not expanding the range of the form but changing the bulk of how it is practiced.
At the jams in Berlin (granted this is a small slice of the CI pie), I see more and more codification of CI. I see person X and know what five moves he will do with a woman. And this person is also practitioner of Tango. I see person Y and know what 5 moves she will do and end up on person Z’s shoulder.
I am not saying that we shouldn’t have habits. Habits are fun. They are enjoyable and give us a benchmark of how we are progressing. They show us how “good” we have become at something. But is that the goal? Is the goal to know how good we are at something? Is the goal of CI to practice moves that we know and have an enjoyable experience? Is CI a product or a process?
I would say that for more and more people it is becoming a product. This might have been what Danny Lepkoff was talking about at Freiburg this year. CI has basically become another social dance form with set moves and gender roles. People go to the jams to engage in a certain movement style and do certain moves, basically a milonga with baggy pants and a less structured frame than the tango.
And as more and more people engage in social dance forms, they bring however un/consciously the values from those other forms into CI and expanding CI. Just as someone who studies Karate or Judo will bring values from those physical practices into CI. Or Alexander techique. Or opera singing or Feldenkrais. All of which people are un/consciously bringing values from those practices into CI. And I hope those values are always brought into CI. This problem, that I see(and I might be the only one) could be a result of not knowing enough about tango. I might need to expand the side of the G.U.T. triangle between logic and tool of tango. Hmm…
Anyways, I just worry that people are reducing CI to a set of movements, basically to small snippets of choreo that they then improvise with.
The Three Points of Contact Improvisation
Where is your center?
Where do you contact the floor?
Where do you contact your partner(s)?
What is the distance between the floor and your center?
What is the distance between the floor and where you contact your partner(s)?
What is the distance between your center and where you contact you partner(s)?
How do you use one point to affect the others?
What is the size of each these points?
What is the size of the triangle?
Ephemeral Art
(Written in 2005, recently found when looking for something else.)
How long do you gaze at a tangible art piece?
How long do you look at art?
Dance is not ephemeral if looked at in relation to a larger scale than it is usually viewed. When people watch a dance they spend more time watching it than they usually spend looking at a painting or sculpture in a museum. But the dance can be considered ephemeral if what is important are the details of it. Those fleeting movements/moments, but the structure of the piece will hopefully throughout the piece and that will be at least 5 minutes, much longer than most people spend looking at the Mona Lisa or a Picasso.
Those paintings are just as ephemeral unless you own it or live in the same city as the painting. But then do you measure ephemerality(?) in in terms of a work’s self or in relation to the viewer. Yes, the dance comes and goes, but so do the viewers. And a painting does not go, only the viewer. But what is a sculpture if not viewed? Nothing. it is merely the possibility of something to be viewed. But any dance piece, once conceptualized and rehearsed(known) becomes the possibility of something to be viewed.
Dance is considered to be ephemeral because the reason for most dances existences, the minute details of the choreography, are ephemeral, they do not last past the duration of the viewing. But what could last for the duration of the viewing and beyond is the conceptual construct of the piece, of the performance elements. The more definite they are, the more definite the zusammenhang, the more tangible the performance.
To summarize – All arts are equally ephemeral. It depends upon how long the viewer is looking at them.
Flow and the Evolution of Contact
Have you ever watched Magnesium? It is probably on Youtube. The seminal performance that gave us contact improvisation. If you watch it and then watch a contact jam at a festival or a weekly jam somewhere in the world, you will probably not see the connection. One is a performance with an audience and one involves performing and there are people watching but not an audience in the traditional sense. The theme of where performance has devolved to in the CI community I will not touch right now.
What I want to ramble about now is flow. The early examples of CI that I have seen on video where rather flowless – bodies bumping into each other falling, flailing, hitting the ground loudly. See contemporary contact, flow, continual contact, and ease are much more apparent. Flow and ease are constant themes of discussions, classes and workshops.
But the Tool does not have to determine the Logic.
Flow has become so paramount because it is as far as you can get from the beginnings of CI. The pendulum has swung to the flow end. And many people like it there. Flow, flow, flow, flow, flow, flow, flow, flow, flow, flow, is the name of the sensual touch junkie game. Go to a jam and get your flow on. Though on Wednesdays at K77 in Berlin that is impossible and no one seems to mind. Maybe that jam is closer to the original idea of CI.
But really, who wants to stay with the original idea of anything? Cooking…certainly not. Housing…certainly not. Living in a cave cooking rabbits over open flame?!?
Ideas evolve and improve. The need for flow grew out of a need for sustainability and easy. Bashing one’s self about as they did in Magnesium hurts, is tiring and grows old artistically quickly. So the other end of the kinetic spectrum has developed over the past 38 years. But in that last sentence, there is an inherent problem.
CI should not be viewed as having a kinetic spectrum – flow at one end and bashing at the other. The frantic energy of Magnesium can exist but with a softer body state. Or a slow tempo with a very held body state. Something I try to open people’s eyes/minds/bodies to when I teach the 4 Winds into Contact.
What I am worried about in relation to CI is that is stuck in the flow world. That flow is the Paragon of CI. And that is why so CI is hard for so many people to watch. It is the same tempo and tension the whole time. No Sturm und Drang. That and most people training in it have no performance training. Well, they might perform at contact festivals, but (uh oh) that doesn’t count.
So go out there do contact. Flow and don’t flow. Find all the flavors in between and around and amongst.
The Absence of Sequential Thought
Above is a picture of the structure of the last piece from The Absence of Sequential Thought. The piece, All Structure/No Content was constructed by arbitrarily combining one or more of the 6 performance elements – Costume, Pathway, Lighting (here listed as video), Sound, Movement (here listed as Kinesphere), and Set.
Sentimental Pussyfooting
Here is the text from the program of Sentimental Pussyfooting, Non Fiction’s ground-breaking performance from 2009 –
Sentimental Pussyfooting – a study in plagiarism
How does an idea become part of the public artistic palette? Can an idea be used
without being seen as a reference?
How does an idea become part of the public artistic palette? Can an idea be used
without being seen as a reference?
performed by Kelly Dalrymple, Sonshereé Giles, Sean Seward, Adam Venker, Andrew Wass.
directed by Andrew Wass
Counterpulse Theater San Francisco
Feb 29th and March 1st 2008
Imagine if all of dance consisted of a performer wearing a video projector?
Or done in 4:33 of silence? Or was 5 dancers on a diagonal line?
The way I see it dance, or most dance, has the same structure – lights go on, music and movement start and they all end together. It’s essentially the same skeleton every time. Whether it’s San Francisco Ballet or Robert Moses, the skeleton is the same. Just the meat
around the bones has changed. The costumes are different, the music is different, the
performers are different etc. But still essentially the same piece.
In this show, I am using works by Trisha Brown, John Cage, Jess Curtis, Paul Taylor,
and Yoko Ono as points of departure. Some pieces will be fairly straightforward recreations
of the structures. Other pieces are using a structure or an element from a piece to examine
or express something different from the original intention. The title of the show and all but
one title of the pieces are taken from sentences in an Iris Murdoch novel.
One of the structures used in this show comes from a piece by Trisha Brown,
called Homemade. In it she performs with a reel to reel projector attached to her back.
The video projected is of someone doing the same choreography, of faces, hands and feet.
The structure of Homemade is redone pretty faithfully. A woman is dancing with a video
projector on her back, projecting the same choreography that she is doing live. It is the same
structure/skeleton but all the variables/meat are different: the performer is different, the
costume is different, the video projector and video are different etc. So is it the same piece?
If Moses’ and San Francisco Ballet’s pieces are different, then Brown’s piece and mine
are different. The costumes are different. The people executing the movements are different.
The choreographies and videos are different. The skeleton in both cases remains the same, yet
people are more likely to say that I am repeating Brown’s piece because it is a different
enough of a skeleton from the basic dance skeleton.
No one says to ODC or Paul Taylor –
“Oh lights, movement, and music…that is So and So’s piece” Why not? Because that skeleton
is from time immemorial. And most dance I see is just repeating the same skeleton over and
over again. And dance is so rich because we keep investigating the same skeleton over and
over again. Where would dance be if people stopped making dances to music because that
had already been done?
By keeping certain structures identified with and tied to certain artists, we limit
our collective artistic investigation. By being sentimental, by saying “Oh, we can’t do that
because that is So and So’s piece”, we cut ourselves off from so many possibilities.
We need to stop pussyfooting around and appropriate/steal/use/riff on/reject performance
history. Every piece in this show that I am relating to I consider a door that was opened when
the pieces were originally made, a door for us to walk through. Those artists pointed us in new directions. It is up to us to continue in those directions and continue their investigations and
create our own skeletons/structures.
Truth in Advertising Titles
Below are the two sets of titles I created for our latest performance, Truth in Advertising. Please see the previous blog post for more information about why each piece had two titles.
1. 20 Discrete Events
2. Person with Object and Pop Song
3. Choreography Created by 6, Performed by 2
choreo by Shelley Senter, Nina Martin, Margaret Paek, Rebecca Bryant, Kelly Dalrymple-Wass, Andrew Wass
4. Contact Improvisation Duet
5. Man Grunting
6. Improvised Trio
7. Scored Contact Improvisation Duet with Sound Score
***************************************************
1. A Useful Fiction – Free will and self determination do exist. We all can choose to act but the circumstances may change before we are ready. Can we adapt to and survive in these new conditions?
2. Still/Life – love, absence, longing.
3. Homage to Elsewhere – What is memory? Is it located in the brain or the body? Can we use the experience and existence of another to trigger memories of my own?
4. Adept At Any Altitude – What is rehearsal? Do two people engaging in an improvised performance modality need to rehearse specifically with each other for a performance or are their years of practicing the form with other people their rehearsal process?
5. Distillation – This piece is a distillation of the collective human experience of cruelty – cruelty that we experience from the direct or inadvertent action of others and cruelty that we consciously or unconsciously inflict upon others.
6. Trigger Conditions – It is hot and bright in the theater lights on the empty stage. Three dancers move and gesticulate through space, time and existences. In this piece the performers grapple with the tension between theater and the spectacle of the contemporary world. It is an investigation: How do we live, how do we breath, how do we reach each other in this post capitalist period?
7. A2Zed/Nexus – Every word/action/idea is at the same time the end of a series and the beginning of new series. Whether or not these two progressions will be related or make sense can only be determined if and when the next word/action/idea is created.
Truth in Advertising Program notes
What is the function of a title? A sign to tell the people who read the program what the performance is about? Or a lens through which the audience should view the performance, creating an event that is something different than is what is happening on stage? Neither function we find satisfactory.
If the function of a title is to tell the audience what is happening, then it leaves no room for the audience to participate, for them to create the performance within themselves initiated by what is presented on stage. On the other hand, if the artist uses the title as a lens, then s/he runs the risk of being too vague, leaving all the work of creating the performance up to the audience’s imagination and perception. And if that is the case, then the audience could just as well stay home and imagine their own performance.
“Truth in Advertising” presents 7 pieces each with two titles – one a sign and one a lens.
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.