Tag: improvisation

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Seven Thirty in Tights

Seven Thirty In Tights
April 28th 2013 at Sophiensaele
“Picture the ballroom dance of the future.  Imagine this dance and its consequences are the result of an intense physical dialogue between dancers – an interaction of distinct group decisions in which all react to the impulses of the others and have to find answers in a split second.  Now imagine this dance was a political practice.” – from the program
I saw another piece by Frédéric Gies several years ago and I had the same problem with this one as I did that one.  He adds too many other elements to the stage space that the physical actions lose value or I can’t tell what he values about them.  The last performance had explicitly stated BMC exercises paired with music by Madonna and a large rug like object hanging from the ceiling upstage.  I don’t have or remember the program notes from that piece, so I can’t say what Gies’ goal was in juxtaposing those elements together.
With this piece, he wants us to picture the ballroom dance of the future.  The dance we see is a group tuning score about decision making and reacting to others, i.e. improvising.  By asking us to view a type of event that is very much of the present (group improvisation) as the ballroom dance of the future, is he saying that in the future scored group improvisation will be a rigid codified form of dance.  Looking at another form of group decision making and reacting, the contact improvisation jam, we are well on our way.  Contact Improvisation is all but a codified social dance with defined movements and roles.  But Gies and company were not engaging in contact improvisation, at least not in the normative sense of contact improvisation.  But as they were improvising and coming in and out of contact, the performers in Seven Thirty In Tights could be viewed as engaging in contact improvisation.  After all who determines the tools used in a performance – the doers or the viewers?!!?
For me this piece suffered from a flat ontology.  All elements had equal value.  The physicality didn’t change that much through out the 60 minute plus.  The dancers came in and out of manual contact, dancing alone or facing each other.  There was some change in tempo, initiated mostly by the female all dressed in red.  Well, maybe the elements didn’t have equal value, but I felt that there was so much sensorial noise generated by all the non-dance considerations of the piece, that I couldn’t help but be preoccupied by wondering about the reasons for those elements, thus lowering for the valorization of the corporeal elements.  I tried to enjoy the physical actions of the performers (and there were some well trained people performing whom I have enjoyed watching in other performances) but I couldn’t get past the neon lights, the costumes, the tape on the floor, and the program notes.
The physical practice in the piece was not of the future, so maybe the tights, the lights and the tape indicating the 4th wall are elements from the future.  But colored fluorescent tubes (a possible Flavin reference?), non-proscenium stage spaces and tights are also not of the future.  So is it then the combination of group real time spontaneous composition with the, lighting, costuming, and staging that create the ballroom dance of the future?  Or is it up to us, the viewers who have read the program to picture the dance of the future, inspired by the elements presented? (Representation, once again rears its ugly head!)
Another element of the program statement that lowered the valorization of the corporeal elements of the performance was the directive to imagine the dance as a political practice.  I felt that in order to do that more fully and in the direction that the choreographer intended I should have attended the lecture by Sylvie Tissot that took the day before I attended the performance.  Was this piece a political practice because it was more improvised than choreographed?  Was this piece a political practice because the individuals were able to make their own decisions within a larger set of considerations?  Political because tax dollars are supporting the work?  Who determines the politics – the doers or the viewers?
In summation – I did see some dancing I enjoyed[*], solo body and group, but the staging and sartorial choices were too aesthetically noisy overwhelming the dancing itself.  The program notes were too generic and could be applied to any dance, performance, or sporting event for than matter.  Maybe instead of generic, I should say open.  But for me the program notes/framing/contextualization were way too open.  Isn’t part of the artist’s job to focus our attention?

[*]When the group rotated through space along the perimeter of the performance space delineating the boundary between audience and performers.
When the group came to a long diagonal…Doris Humphrey is right!  
When in a long line the dancers changed location within the line.

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Compare and Contrast

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pqhks1Q41g]
and
[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/62056892 w=560&h=315]

granted, it could be said that we are looking at apples and oranges as one performance has audience on three sides, live music, and video.  But I would say that these two performances are more alike than they are different.  I am most interested in the spacing, placing, and pacing of the kinespheres and how they differ in the two pieces.

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A defintion

Improvisation: bodies manifesting and dissolving dynamic temporal-spatial structures according to aesthetic and physical potentialities and proclivities in a planar arena.

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Personnel vs. Content

I was just at the Texas Dance Improvisation Festival this past weekend.  Thoroughly enjoyed myself.

Sitting in on a class taught by a friend and fellow Lower Lefter, Leslie Scates, I listened to the discussion at the end of class.  One of the participants brought up the question of personnel vs. idea during the exercise of Number Score.

Usually, during Number Score, the content happening in the work/performance space changes when the personnel/dancers change.

This need not be.

How to train Number Score to focus on shifting personnel but maintaining the content?

Does Number Score inadvertently simultaneously train Jump Cuts?

How to train Number Score and not drop material?

Maybe beforehand determine what the material/content will be…

must investigate (though, I have always had trouble with Number Score.  Not that I think it is a pointless exercise.  I see its value, but I have (almost) never enjoyed it)

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Choreo vs. Impro

Choreography is knowing the other’s response to your actions.

Improvisation is not knowing the other’s response to your actions

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TanzNacht Berlin 2012

TanzNacht Berlin 2012
Insignificant Others
(Learning To Look Sideways)
An Kaler
What I read in the program: Together separately. Separately together.  How can one perceive and analyse a collectively experienced, present moment?  Three performers share a moment on stage.  They go through a series of positions that let them become the bearers of ambiguous, almost static yet variable images.  Connections develop between them which cause the moment to gently but clearly shift and their relationships to constantly charge and discharge.  Through a series of interrupted yet connected sequences and situations a space is created in which performer and spectator share the potentiality of what comes next.
What I saw: a generic contemporary dance.  They started standing in silence.  They shifted slowly as the computer generated music with cracks, whistles and pops grew louder and louder.
Another reason I say generic is the type of movement.  Though quite articulate and adept at it, the dancers didn’t offer much in terms of kinespheric originality as they stayed with the elbow initiated limp wrist movement that is quite fashionable.
Spatially, the dancers tended to be upstage and face away from the audience.  Quite a lot of time was spent far stage left in the unlit section of the performance space.  Was this a somatic spatial response to the audience or intentionally done to contrast the two moments when the three dancers were center stage?
One thing I like to watch when I watch ice-skating is when the skaters fall.  Not out of a desire for schadenfreude, but I like to see how they react to an unscripted moment. I am guessing that Insignificant Othersis improvised or scored with landmarks and therefore mostly unscripted.  A moment that I perceived as very unscripted was when one of the dancers, mid thrash, bonked against one of the lighting supports.  Two other very unscripted moments involved two dancers almost colliding.  Did these near collisions happen because the dancers were so involved in their own processes that they became unaware of the others on stage?  Maybe this is the insignificant others bit. Ahh…and the (learning to look sideways) is that they aren’t directly relating to each other, but mostly responding to each other’s movement as opposed to other Viewpoints.  But then they do take similar shapes when standing in front of the hanging rectangles.
Compositionally this piece was coherent.  The movement ebbed and flowed.  The music got louder, quieter, and came in occasional bursts.  The lighting shifted and repeated.  There were three dancers and three rectangles.  So in that sense the piece held together.
But what didn’t work for me was the use of space by the dancers.  I didn’t see a compositional choice (except in the two times of stillness center stage) but nerves and adrenaline causing the dancers to shrink back and away from the audience.  Also, the piece was too long.  Maybe I am too American and my sitzfleisch is not so developed.  But I think it is more that I am a dancer.  After seeing people flailing about articulately for 20 minutes, my mirror neurons are full and I want to get up and join in.
Some notes –
“How can one perceive and analyse a collectively experienced, present moment?” – Is this a rhetorical question?  How about Viewpoints, Laban, amount of sweat, sound, sight, video, photography, Ensemble Thinking, touch, pressure und so weiter?
“…which performer and spectator share the potentiality of what comes next.” – a fancy way of saying the piece is improvised
“They go through a series of positions that let them become the bearers of ambiguous, almost static yet variable images.  Connections develop between them which cause the moment to gently but clearly shift and their relationships to constantly charge and discharge.” – Another reason I say that this piece is “of the genus”.  Can’t this be said about almost any piece?  Especially the ambiguous part?
***********************
Propositon(s)
Laurent Chétouane
What I read in the program: The French director Laurent Chétouane has developed a unique language for dance.  The six choreographies, developed over the course of the last few years, speak for themselves.  Each new encounter with a dancer challenged and enriched the vocabulary of the work.  For the TANZNACHT BERLIN 2012, five of the seven dancers who worked with Chétouane during this period lend their bodies to this language and give insights into their understanding and interpretation of the collaborative works, the shared ideas and the time they spent during rehearsals.
What I saw: Six dancers, not five. One Idea of line or semi circle giving focus to a solo.  I remember one multilevel tableau instead of a line giving focus.  Mostly the solos began and the ensemble would recognize that and create a Hot Spot for the solo. (Some might recognize the Ensemble Thinking vocabulary I am using.)  Every dancer in the group had a solo before dancers went for another solo.  The two dancers in purple had the most solos and the male dancer with long hair in green had, sadly, the fewest.  Maybe he’s the new guy. 
Also saw an odd mandibular action, mostly with the two dancers in purple.  Everyone had their mouths open, and some occasionally moved their mandibles.  Several times the soloists would break out in a funny grin, causing a tittering in the audience.  These smiles were reminiscent of smiles I have seen during group faculty improvisations at festivals when everyone knows it’s headed downhill.  Maybe this use of smiles was a distillation of that phenomenon and commentary on improvisations headed south.
What kept this piece from being generic was that it stuck with the same score for the entire time and kept running through the permutations of soloist and ensemble.  Group improvisations frequently churn through so many scores, ideas, and movement themes (I have been in many of those!) and it was nice to see one that stuck to its guns, or gun, as the case maybe.  But if they were going to stick with one score, they could have been a bit more adventurous in their investigation of it and expression with it.
This piece, too, was coherent – people running through the permutations of a score.  No rabbits popping out of hats, or balloons appearing from pockets or other such non-sequitur surprises.  Though, the mandible jiggle, like the three rectangles in Kaler’s piece, why?
A note – the last soloist before they repeated at one point had her left leg out to the side and rotated it to an arabesque as she rotated right.  A beautiful moment!

**********

My issue with both pieces, was not so much the performances themselves, but how they were framed.  The descriptions could fit most any piece out there.  Kaler’s was “ambiguous”, dealing with the “present moment” and “what comes next”.  Chétoune’s was about collaboration, sharing ideas, and time spent rehearsing.

If the framing doesn’t elucidate how these pieces are more than just iterations of our current genre of dance, then the pieces do not become anything more than an aesthetic experience.  Either you like it or you don’t.  Maybe that is what the creators are after – contemporary dance as entertainment.

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Somatic – Compositional

Now – Future
Need – Want
Have to React – Want to React
Body – Space
Kinesphere – Spatial
Sensing Self –Sensing Space
Reaction to Self – Reaction to Other
For Self – For Other
Solo – Group
Self – Other
I – We
Compensating – Creating
Reacting to Change – Creating Change
Following – Leading
Habitual – Non-habitual
Unconscious – Conscious
Automatic – Forced
Exothermic – Endothermic
Anatomical – Cerebral
Poetic – Formulaic
Inner – Outer
Process – Product
Observational – Generative
Subject – Object
Instinctual – Cognitive
Fast – Slow
Evolving – Abrupt


a list of binaries generated during my third semester of my MA SODA at the HZT in Berlin