Tag: Meg Stuart

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Stuart at Pool at Dock 11

scribbled in my notebook during the screening of Sulphur’s Edge –

“A high budget purely aesthetic creation well produced but very shallow that attempts to create meaning through covered faces and awkward embraces. like the aesthetic of grunge w/o the angst”

issues of bitterness aside, I really questioned the value of Stuart’s film. It was beautiful. The locations in the Azores are dramatic and other worldly. The performers oscillate between beautiful, strange, awkward, and ugly. The costumes are eye-catching and fun. But it all seemed more like a surface-level exercise of bringing these elements together, and not even to see what could be created beyond them, the whole being greater than the sum of the parts kind of thing. The film seemed more like an exercise of budget and access that artistic inquiry. Like the dance aphorism says – don’t confused the size of a budget with the value of the project.

This response, though, must be couched in the feelings of regret and loss I had that crept up during the pre-show talk given by Peter Pleyer. He talked about the 5 month process of working with a group of dancers in Lisbon, then a week in the Azores, and Stuart’s new book, that has pictures of the screened films, and info about her other works. Wonderful stuff.

And as these thoughts washed over me, I thought to myself, that I will not likely have a group of dancers to work with for 5 months. That I do not have a fundus of costumes to access, and a videographer with a drone, and a video editor to work with to create an hour long film. The roll of the dice in the past, the choices I have made, the choices that others have made for me, all have led to this and these situations, these levels of access.

Makes me think of two things, of Cathy Park Hong, of how other people than the artist decide if what they make is good. And of Duchamp’s Coefficient, the idea that the art work is the dialogue between the phenomenon and the observer/consumer. Could the scene in the film in the muddy lake be interpreted as an homage to refugees struggling across the Mediterranean? an piece about access and dying and struggling to survive? Sure why not, it could easily be interpreted as such.

Or is the point of Stuart’s film simple to be an exercise in aesthetics, to chart new territory for the rest of us to observe, digest, and react to, a taste-maker, for the rest of us?

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Violet

 There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know.

There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know.

But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don’t know.

– Donald Rumsfeld

 I am curious what unknown Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods is venturing into with Violet that I saw at HAU 2 on October 30, 2013.  The program states that “Stuart once again ventures into the unknown.”  I would agree that she “has banished the socio-emotional issues that have coloured her previous pieces in order too concentrate on the kinetic and the abstract.”(from the program)  The other pieces I have seen by her, Replacement and Do Animals Cry, dealt a lot with social and emotional issues as far as I could tell.

Is Violet a venture into the unknown in terms of logic, tool, or aesthetic?  To concentrate on the kinetic and the abstract is not venturing into the unknown.  That realm of inquiry has been and continues to be heavily investigated.  Maybe the unknown refers to not knowing the results of a predetermined process.  As someone who also makes performance work, I am curious to know what the known knowns and the known unknowns are in this piece.  In other words, what was set(predetermined) and what was not(determined in the moment).  I am guessing that the upstage line of five dancers was known; that they would undergo solo states work was known; that the diagonal of  dancers from downstage right to upstage center stage was known; that the V shape of dancers was known; that the rolling clump of bodies was known.

I do not have an issue with elements, phrases, locations, etc. being predetermined in a piece.  But if the first sentence in the explicative text in the program talks about venturing into the unknown, I want that unknown to be defined.  Are the kinespheric processes unknown?  Are the spatial configurations that will arise unknown?  Is the sound unknown?  Or are they using known processes to discover something unknown.

However the piece is constructed and whatever the choreographer’s intentions may be, I appreciated the events on stage as they gave me a framework upon which I could lay some of my own questions about performance.  Simply put, I would say that Violet is a quintet of “balls to the wall” solos that are attempting to walk the fine line between ignoring the group and composing spatially with the group.  Watching the performance through that lens, I could think about my work with Lower Left.  The Ensemble Thinking work, as spatially clarifying and enlightening as it is, sometimes robs the dancer of a wild solo body.  The outward focus on the group’s spatial relationships can stultify the individual’s expression.  Violet, as I viewed it, is an inspirational, though not completely successful, step in the direction of co-mingling the wild low-brained body with a conscious and refined spatial awareness.  I say unsuccessful because several times I saw dancer’s “drop out” of their solo body work and shift their location to complete a line or angle in space.  Another point (and this might be a bit nit-picky) but the dancers used their right arms much more than their left arms to initiate and investigate movement.

The music by Brendan Dougherty does “produce a dense wall”.  At its loudest, which is a good chunk of the time, the music I found overwhelmed the dance.  Volume, in my opinion, is sometimes used for instant gravitas.  The dancers’ movement became insignificant beneath the weight of the sound.  At one point, a dancer screamed.  I couldn’t hear her through all the racket.  I could merely see the indication of a scream, a grimacing visage.  Quite an image if you want to use a social-emotional lens, even stronger if you add the lenses of race and gender – a white male making so much noise the scream of a small Asian female cannot be heard.  But we are in the kinetic and abstract so forget that interpretation.  Despite the volume, I enjoyed the music.

The large brown wall in the back looked like it was tacked on.  It was quite large but not large enough to envelope the theater/stage space and create a “space” within.  From where I was sitting I could not see enough of a reflection in it to give me another perspective on the events on stage.  The brown wall did, though, reflect the visible light spectrum nicely.  Everyone likes a rainbow.

In explaining the title Violet, Stuart says that “Violet is the last colour in the spectrum, before ultraviolet, before the unknown, before the imperceptible.”  Violet maybe the last color in the visible light spectrum right before ultraviolet.  But it is not before the unknown.  After ultraviolet rays are x-rays, gamma rays, and finally cosmic rays.  Granted everything after the violet is imperceptible to the human eye and therefore, in a sense, imperceptible.  Though we can sense prolonged exposure to ultraviolet rays after the fact – sunburn.  But is she saying that something known but not perceptible with our five senses is actually unknown.  Is the body the ultimate arbiter of known and unknown?  If so, then why have the loud music and the brown wall?  Let’s enjoy sweaty, spinal, rolling, screaming, walking, falling, running, shaking, flinging bodies for their own sake.

She is right, though.  Violet is a great name for a rock band.  Too bad these guys got it.
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Gender in Dance

It has been said many times.

“oh, it’s a man dance.”

2 guys on stage, it’s a man dance. Why, when the dance consists of all women (and 99% of dances made consist of all women), we do not say “Oh, it’s a woman dance”?

Well, precisely because 99% of dances made consist of all women. Therefore a dance, by default, is a woman dance. So when a dance has all men or even a slight majority of men, it becomes a “man dance”.

Heard this just the other day. In a group of what I thought were contemporary post whatever artists. But I guess not. They are still stuck on gender, on viewing a dance through the lens of gender. Dancers aren’t bodies, creating shapes in space/time in relation to other, but men and women creating shapes in space/time. Have we not progressed beyond Martha Graham?

Or have the tools just changed but the story is still the same?

PS

Graham = Bausch = Stuart