Theater is that in which the form and the content are different entities.
In dance, the form and the content are the same entity.
Some thoughts on Tanz Plattform 2012 in Dresden
A couple weeks ago I was fortunate to go to Tanz Plattform 2012 in Dresden. Tanz Plattform is an event that happens every two years. It is like APAP in New York. But as I have never been to APAP, I can’t be sure. The event in Dresden was primarily for curators from festivals around Europe to see work of the who’s who of German dance. Not sure why the who’s who needs an event like this, but that is another discussion.
I was able to go because my school organized a trip. €50 got me a round-trip train ticket, a hostel room and breakfast for four nights and tickets to ten shows. Not a bad deal. Yeah, socialism!
Of the performances happening in five theater in two different location, I was able to see (in no particular order) For Faces by Anonia Behr, Horizon(s) by Laurent Chétoune; N.N.N.N by William Forsythe; Abdrücke by Anna Konjtzky; Berlin Elsewhere by Constanza Macras; Cover Up by Mamaza; Dance For Nothing by Eszter Salamon; Revolver Besorgen by Helena Waldmann; Métamorphoses by Sasha Waltz; and Baader – Choreographie einer Radikalisierung by Christoph Winkler.
Of those performances I would categorize Abdrücke, Berlin Elsewhere, Cover Up, Revolver Besorger, and Baader as theater. Horizon(s), N.N.N.N., Métamorphoses, Dance for Nothing, and For Faces as dance. These categorizations are based upon the rubric that theater is dealing with, referencing or talking about ideas or events that are not present on stage and/or trying to convey an emotional state. Granted this is not a binary, but more of a spectrum.
But definitions of theater vs. dance are not what I want to write about right now. Again, another lengthy discussion.
What I want to write about is several sentences in the programs about these specific performances or work by one of choreographers in general:
1. “Dance is no longer representation.” – Laurent Chétouane
2. “Chétouane makes reference to classical dance forms and formulas and dares to come out from the corner by demonstrating how dance beyond style – the dance of the future – might look” – Katja Schneider
3. “Forsythe embarks on a search for a quality of movement that is increasingly oriented towards the dancers’ own self awareness and reciprocal observing of one another, generating an intense presence in the space.” – Gerald Siegmund
4. “Movement without reason(s) makes the audience nervous….a clear, deep and melodious voice, sharing philosophical introspections, while the source steadily changes positions – we try to follow it all. Yet, it is too much to process all at once, form and content at the same time.” – Katja Werner
5. “Helena Waldmann… the Berlin-based choreographer…knows that a work is only successful when it is able to conjure up the world of illusion.” Andrea Kachelreiß, Stuttgarter Nachrichten
I am not sure how to respond to the first sentence by Chétouane. Dance hasn’t been representation for decades. Did he not get the Judson/Trio A/Merce/Brown memo? He is described as “a French director working with texts and movement” so maybe he is not informed about what dance has happened before he started making dances.
This seems to me a common issue in the post/non disciplinary times – people from one genre getting excited about a new tool, logic or aesthetic that is old hat for another genre. Maybe because Chétouane is a director, which I am taking to mean he comes from the world of theater, the world of illusion and allusion, the idea that something on stage could be no longer representational is a new and exciting one.
The second sentence, by Katja Scheider, I also think is a joke. Dance beyond style?!?! Dance of the future?!? Are you kidding me? What I saw was pretty straight-up, par for the course movement for this day and age. Does Katja mean that the dance of the future looks just as it does now? Are we already in the future or is she saying that there is no future for dance because it will look exactly the same as it does now? There is nothing nothing new in the world…is that it?
The references to “classical dance forms and formulas” that I saw the grid, flocking, and mirroring. Maybe not classical ballet formulas, if that is what Katja Schneider meant by classical, but classical post modern dance tools. At least for grid and flocking. Mirroring is more of an Improv 101 exercise, so maybe classical in that sense. But maybe that is what my training affords me – seeing the grid, flocking, and mirroring. If I am to look at the piece as a whole, and this is the second time I have seen the piece, I could say that the piece is an arc of dance history from ballet to post modern spatial scores to badly executed contact improvisation. Maybe that is the director’s point, that the end of the future(as this piece is about the future of dance) of dance is bad contact improvisation. Well, if that is the point of the piece, then it’s brilliant. Sheer brilliance. Ha!
Gerald Siegmund’s description of Forsythe’s new creative invesigations is interesting and eloquent. Hmm…sounds an awful lot like…what is that word, umm, it was just on the tip of my tongue, what is it…oh, yeah…IMPROVISATION! Why is that word such a dirty word? I guess a single word wouldn’t be as poetic as an eloquent phrase. I guess a rose by any other name doesn’t smell as sweet.
Categories and labels aside, I have another question. What was Forsythe’s work before this new eloquent line of inquiry? Did his work before not use “the dancers’ own self awareness and reciprocal observing of one another”? Were his dancers unconscious of their own movements and and unaware of each other? Did they not know where their limbs were in space? Did they not know who else was on stage and who on stage could see them? Were his dancers mindless zombies doing their master’s bidding?
On what planet does “movement without reason(s)” make the audience nervous? Maybe Katja Werner is from the same planet that Chétouane is from, the Planet of Representation, where Judson never happened. I thought that the crowd at Tanz Plattform Deutschland 2012 in Dresden would be ok with abstract movement. Guess not. But they seemed to love N.N.N.N., which was pretty abstract. Granted the dancers looked at their hands as they moved them, creating a subject by objectifying their hands, and made cute sounds as they moved. Maybe the looking at the vocalizing created enough “reason” so that the audience was not nervous. They could see enough representation in the presentation of relationship between hand and eye and movement and sound, therefore they did not get nervous.
On the Planet of Representation form and content are two different things. Performances have content and that content is different than the form. This leads me to another definition of theater and of dance. Theater is that which the form and the content are different entities. In dance the form and the content are the same entity. In the piece Dance for Nothing by Salamon, I think that Werner is referring to the spoken text as the content and the “movement without reason(s)” as the form. This separation is further evidence of the supremacy of theater over dance in Germany. Tanztheater, Tanztheater, Tanztheater, TanzTHEATER. Tanz is merely the adjective to the noun, theater.
I would postulate that the reasons Werner writes that the form(movement) and content(text) is “too much to process all at once” are that she is not a native speaker of English and she is trying to link the movements to the text in more than a spatial and temporal way. From the beginning of the piece I did not try to connect the movement to the sounds. I let both of them wash over me. Even though I am a native speaker of English, I would guess that the text by John Cage is not that complicated. The vocabulary and the topic are not that esoteric to require a super advanced command of the English language. Most people at the festival in Dresden had very good English.
Or maybe I was a bad audience member and did not listen closely enough to the text, did not get every word and would fail a test on what John Cage via Eszter Salamon said. Maybe I should have strained harder to understand which movements meant Kansas, paragraph, and mind. Maybe I should have asked why Salamon extended her fists and touched them together. Did that movement section represent a connection of the working class in Kansas to the proletariat of Hungary? Hmm…what would Derrida say about the fact that the performer wore sneakers? Oh my gosh, so many signs and signifiers, so many layers…how do I interpret it all? What does it represent?!?!
And the final quote – “to conjure up the world of illusion”. Once again, theater, theater, theater. Yet the author of this work is referred to as a choreographer. There is a fabulously trained ballet dancer prancing about pretending to be a crazy woman who has a “thirst for discovery” and is in “the depths of madness”, so I guess it’s theater because the piece is about something other than what is happening on stage. But the creator is a choreographer and not a dancer.
Kachelrieß writes that Waldmann’s work is a “godsend for the theater.” Does she mean theater in the open sense of the word, as in stuff that happens in the theater? Or does she mean theater as in not dance? If she means theater, then this piece is a vague and wan representation of an illusion wrapped in presentation of madness and the “dignity a person needs to remain human.” But if this piece is dance, then it is well danced dance piece of a limited and unimaginative palette.
I do not know what my overall thesis for this posting is. Maybe that dance in Germany is more theater than dance.
Tanztheater.
I prefer my dance with a little less theater and a lot more dance.
3 of the Roses Framing Statement
Repetition as a theme for investigation presented itself to me during the Erasmus Intensive. Kirsi Monni, head of the Helsinki program, during her presentation said that there is no repetition in Trio A. At the end of her talk I said that there is a lot of repetition in Trio A and showed several examples. Maybe I was being pedantic. One man’s pedanticalness is another man’s accuracy. Yes, Trio A could be said to have no repetition as there are no long sections of movement that repeat, but if the time frame that one uses to examine all of the choreography of Trio A is short, several instances of repetition do appear. The arm swings in the beginning, the toe taps, the ear flaps. These repetitions are just within the kinesphere of the performer. If we look at other performance elements we see a lot of repetition. The performer is always the same person. The costume never changes. The performer repeatedly does not look at the audience. One of the performance instructions for Trio A is to keep the same speed throughout the piece – if you start slow, stay slow; start fast, stay fast. In other words, repeat the velocity. Keeping vocally silent is another form of repetition in Trio A. How many ways of repeating exist in Trio A? How many ways of repeating exist in any choreography or performance?
One hallmark of contemporary dance could be said to be the continual search for the new. The new way to move, the new sounds, the new taboo to break, the new way to engage the audience, to frustrate, to excite, or aggravate them.
I am sure that we have all heard “Oh, that’s been done” in relation to a performance. But if that, whatever that is, has been done, then Gertrude Stein is wrong. A rose is not a rose. But if a rose is a rose is a rose does mean that there is no such thing as repetition because the context is changing then nothing has ever been done before and we can stop worrying about newness. Or maybe something similar has been done. And for some folks that similarity is too close for comfort. Enough change has not been instilled into the second rose to be different enough to be something new.
The human body can sense a 1% drop in water levels triggering a thirst response. Maybe in art there is a similar response. The change from one rose to the next needs to be greater than 1% to be registered. Or maybe 10%. I read once that humans can detect temperature change in a space only after the initial temperature drops 10%. How to measure this percentage necessary between roses I do not know.
Taking a very wide “zoom lens of attention” to performance in general, we could say that 90+% of performance is a repetition of something else. We sit here, performers there and we watch. Humans on one side of a box watching humans on the other side of the box. Zoom in and change the lights, change the framing statement, change the performers etc. and each piece is wildly different.
Emperor Penguins, the ones that stand with eggs on their feet all winter while their mates eat and then switch roles. To me they all look alike. I can’t tell them apart. They are just repetitions of each other. But penguins can certainly tell each other apart. Maybe if I took more time, trained my eye and zoomed my lens of attention in, I could see beyond the repetition and see the variety. Maybe Stein should have said a penguin is a penguin is a penguin is a penguin…
Coming back to my research. Some of you saw the piece I presented during the Erasmus presentation – a repetition of a spiral initiated by my right foot. Using that initiation repeatedly and by changing the physical context around that repetition I was able to craft my trajectory through space. The physical context I changed by altering where on my body(hands, pelvis, shoulders, quads etc) I increased or decreased pressure into the floor; how large or small I made the angle between my legs; how tight or open I made the spiral by varying when in the spiral my upper body followed the initiation of my lower body. All these elements within the repetition led to change.
Recently, I have been more interested in repetition within the body’s kinesphere than in repetitive actions that relate to the space or repetitive actions that are used to create a physical remainder. Examples of those kinds of work are Bruce Nauman’s Square Dance or Richard Long’s A Line Made by Walking (1967). One of the second years repeated Nauman’s Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square in December. If traveling through space does happen during my kinespheric repetition, that is fine, but not the goal. One ah ha! moment I had about physical repetition and looking back on it now, seems quite obvious, is the relationship to time. Repetition of an action is not time dependent. The repetitions can happen rapidly and evenly spaced in time or the time between actions could be quite long and the action happen only twice.
I have also been investigating repetition in relation to words by using Context Free Grammar language generators to create texts. From what I understand they generate a type of Mad Libs that are then filled with vocabularies of a certain genre. One such generator for physics I came across is snarxiv and is described as “a random high-energy theory paper generator incorporating all the latest trends, entropic reasoning, and exciting moduli spaces.” Another text generator I came across, is The Postmodernism Generator.
Could I create a sensible piece of writing using “senseless” repetition? I selected chunks of text from the Postmodernism Generator at random, hitting refresh to generate more texts and created a “Frankenstein” text. With a little word substitution here and some rewriting there, I tried to breathe life into this text. I repeated words throughout the text hoping that their repetition would create enough of a through-line to create meaning. While I do not think that if looked at with a wide zoom lens the Frankenstein text I created has meaning, there are some interesting nuggets in it. It is possible that the whole text is coherent and I do not have the ability to understand it.
These nuggets, if they already existed in the texts of Lacan, Eco, Lyotard, or Derrida, are now available to me without their original context, thus allowing me to craft my own meaning out of them. The original context is not interfering with my perception of them.
In my attempts at repetition I invariably created change. This change, to draw a geographic metaphor, can be catastrophic or gradual. Gradual change in geology is just as it sounds, gradual. The Himalayan mountains grow about 5 mm a year. For us 5mm is nothing but for a bacterium that 5mm might as well be the Himalayas. The opposite view of gradual change or gradualism is catastrophism – sudden, huge events that radically altered the face of the earth, creating mountains and valleys in moments. From a human perspective, the recent events in Fukushima, Japan were huge and devastating. For the Earth, a mere hiccup.
A similar idea in evolutionary biology is phyletic gradualism(slow, gradual but continuous change) versus punctuated equilibrium (rapid change with longer moments of stability). An example of rapid change in evolution in species is the Cambrian explosion. This “rapid” change lasted 70-80 million years. An incomprehensible time frame for humans, but only 2% of the age of the Earth.
The change created by my repetitions can be viewed as gradual or catastrophic. While holding a static pose, I might fall slowly due to my hands and feet sliding out from under me because of increased perspiration. I might have fallen abruptly due to muscle fatigue. The distal and proximal initiations might have changed abruptly or evolved slowly.
Two artists whose work resonates with me are Sol LeWitt and Agnes Martin, artists whose work involves a lot of repetition. I first encountered LeWitt’s work several years ago when Kelly suggested that I look at a piece of his called Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes. When I looked at it I saw something very similar to a sculptural project I was working on. I was trying to figure out all the possible variations of the minimum number of lines needed to indicate a cube. I was working at the time with 16 gauge two inch square steel tubing. The pictures I saw of LeWitt’s piece were just what I had been drawing. I first saw Martin’s work at the Dia:Beacon in Beacon, NY in 2006.
In reading about them I came across some words about and by LeWitt and Martin. I will share just a few here with you. I find that these words are a distillation of how I tend to look at or make work. Jannis Kounellis said of LeWitt “His fundamental square, I believe, has as its target the iconographic excesses…” Agnes Martin in her poem The Untroubled Mind writes – “…this is a return to classicism/Classicism is not about people/and this work is not about the world…Classicists are people that look out with their back to the world…it’s as unsubjective as possible…The classic is cool/a classical period/it is cool because it is impersonal/the detached and impersonal”
The works I presented to you I consider to be works in progress. I do not have a definite answer why. I feel that I know what tools or processes I have created – the physical scores, the texts – and am confident that they can take me some where. I just do not know where yet. Each of these tools has as its generative source a form repetition – the first, repetition of thought; the second, repetition of intention; the third, repetition of process. What I do know is that I am interested in repetition as a means to target iconographic excesses and to create work that is not about the world, trying to make something as unsubjective as possible and through the repetition wash away past experience.
To repeat Lisa repeating Ric repeating Deborah Hay –
What I am really trying to do is just be here in my body, in this costume, doing this movement and not have what you think this movement is from your past experience interfere with your seeing now.
*************
click here to see 3 of the Roses, my final presentation for the second semester of my MA SODA program.
Performance Nutrition
What humanity needs to ingest to survive evolves very slowly. As our ancestors before us, we are still eating proteins, sugars, fats, vitamins, antioxidants, etc to survive. Humanity’s needs in the arts evolve slowly, too. Witness the fact that Greek tragedies and Shakespeare’s plays are still produced. Song of love and loss are recorded still. Instead of using harps, musicians now use laptops and keyboards.
What evolves faster in terms of performance ingestion is the tools used to create the fodder for consumption. New ways of moving, making sound, lighting the performance space, modes of covering and leaving the performing form uncovered evolve faster than what is done with those tools.
Inevitably these new tools are used to in performances that return to the basic needs of the audience. After a deplorably short time, the exploration of the new tools is dropped and their use is co-opted by the need to explore the human condition, to create theater.
In other words, the tools and aesthetics change, but we come back to the same logics again and again and again.
Just as the nutritive needs of human will basically remain static so, too, will the performative needs of humanity. It, therefore, behooves us to investigate the tools themselves and not their use in relation to humanity and the human condition. Only in this way can we expect the arts to evolve
Meaning
The search for the meaning of what is happening on stage is the act of demeaning what is happening on stage.
A bunch of blind spiders creeping around
Having a diverse cohort has its advantages and disadvantages. An advantage is that people from different backgrounds can see my work in a new light from a different perspective and offer me feedback from that perspective. A disadvantage is that they do not know as much as I do about my tools/genre, as I know little about theirs.
By having such surface knowledge about their media, I am not able to push them more in their direction. Yes, I can offer “lay” opinions in their work and shift their progress(maybe) but if we all are continually helping shift each other, will we be able to get anywhere or will we just cover the same ground erratically?
A bunch of blind spiders creeping around the same dusty shoe box? Milling about getting nowhere…
Does this continual redirection prevent us from progressing forward in relation to ourselves not just in relation to the opinion of an outsider?
S.O.D.A Assessment 101 Feedback
Below are the feedback discussion points I received from my performance of The Range of Acceptable Outcomes as part of my MA dance studies. The text for the piece is here and the framing statement for the piece is here. I added the numbers for clarity when referring to those specific points.
I am confused by points 5, 6, and 7. I thought a “sense of assuredness, certainty, demonstration of expertise”(point 5) was a good thing in a performer, especially one that is doing a performance lecture.
I also do not understand how “control…of material prohibits interaction”. The piece, though a lecture, was also a performance. Interaction in the proscenium format is inherently limited. This could, though, refer to mental interaction. But then again, I refer to the lecture aspect of this piece. The point is to disseminate information is a clear(ish) manner that people can think about during or after the event of dissemination. Maybe I was so engaging that my performance inhibited all thought. I wish that were the case. With that skill I would take over the world!
And point 7 – “too few moments of fragility” Why would I want fragility in a performance lecture? It is not an emotional event, it is a lecture.
As those three points were on the list of discussion points and from my reading, negative, I assume that those were part of the reason I did not get a perfect score. Maybe if I had written a better framing statement, I would have received a better grade. But as those points refer to the performance aspect not to the relationship with the framing statement.
Also point 11 – the piece lost “momentum” and stayed in the “same frame of reference”. I admit that my performing lost steam. A question of craft, that. But, as I understand the “frame of reference” that I was referring to – a lecture – always stays in the same frame. People sit behind a table, a desk and speak with the same tone and energy for the whole lecture. Every lecture I have seen so far during the S.O.D.A. program has been in the same energy and tone. Maybe the lecturers did not lose momentum, but they stayed in the same register.
Maybe with this, too, I should have been more explicit in my framing statement.
ahh, the learning curve…
Andrew Wass
Grade: 2.5 Very Good
Assessment 101 Feedback Discussion Points:
1- Appreciated humor and mental ability (word plays/associations)
-2 Are you aware of historical precedence of the ‘style’ of performance – the rhythmically structured
talking? Is this an attempt at “Leading audience indirectly?”
3- What is your context of investigation of zero point?
4- Categorization of parts brings attention to what is not there – experience of own choices not
evident
5- Sense of assuredness, certainty, demonstration of expertise makes presentation not easily
accessible (as audience we feel tricked, or that there was riddle we were meant to solve..)
6- Too much control in manipulation of material prohibits interaction
7- Too few moments of fragility
8- Improvisation vs choreography – in what way is this important?
9- Need to go into more ludic quality of text to enter into profound relation with these issues
10- Art is assertion of form – formal takes over – Form doesn’t support gathered matters of concern
11- Performance loses momentum, stays in same register (no cracks) stays in same frame of reference
12- Need to sharpen own perceptive tools with how improvisation can be developed
13- Freedom and constraint – the relation of these two need to be more thoroughly investigate
14- Some clear questions presented in framing statement –for example: “how much audience needs to
know to enjoy the work?” “individual parts don’t last but whole remains in memory”
Examiners: Prof. Rhys Martin, Prof. Kattrin Deufert, Litó Walkey
A pessimistic view?
Art is a creation of the creator’s limitations.
The port de bras and the coolest new lift you just learned in contact class have just as much to with contact improvisation as the fist bump. All three can be done while in contact and while improvising.
All three events are small bit of choreography that can be done inside the larger frame of contact improvisation.
Choreo, Memory, and Impro
The more closely linked an event is to memory, the more choreographed it is. The less connected to memory, the more improvised it is.