The Infinite Community (quantity vs. quality)
January 22, 2008
I chose dance because it is a communal art form. I have been privileged to be a part of the New York Dance community for the past seven years, and have spent shorter periods of time in many others. Each one had its own distinctive flavor, methods, and points of view. Without fail, immersing myself in a new situation resulted in exciting and unexpected syntheses of philosophy. In fact nothing has taught me more about the value of the transitory than moving between these different artistic spheres. Every person we have the opportunity to collaborate with can shift our belief system just a bit. So, if we are constantly engaging with new people, our process can become malleable, dynamic and evolving.
So then, what about this new online community? It is exponentially larger than any other, and free from all geographic constraints. Awesome!
And yet, now, I sometimes struggle to find the freedom to focus. Social multi-tasking has become the norm. At any given moment I’m holding the threads of many different conversations, held via e mail, text, phone, facebook message, flickr photo feeds… at what point does the quality of these interactions start to suffer?
In Rehearsal…
January 11, 2008
A Moving Target
January 10, 2008
(picking up my train of thought from this post )
The only way to “find balance” is to accept that it is transitory and free yourself from the desire to hold it. Buddhism as physical practice.
Going one step further: The only way to “create meaning” is to accept that it is transitory and free yourself from the desire to create it. Buddhism as artistic practice.
I do not intend to say that I am uninterested in content or in communicating specific ideas within my work. In fact, the opposite is true. It is a priority for me that my audience experiences my work as having a strong sense of intention and symbolism. What I recognize, however, is that this meaning is fluid. I wake up each morning with a different point of view. I walk onstage with a different body. My audience is a different collection of individuals each with a different point of view and a different body. So how can I expect “meaning” to have a static presence amidst all of this flow?
The creation of meaningful performance, then, is a lot like balancing. One must allow the situation to unfold in the moment, leaving space for re-adjustment in order to hit a moving target. Choreography itself, however, is a constant. I will perform the same actions each time I go onstage. Thus, “what I am doing” becomes the static container for the dynamic and potentially eloquent content of “how I am doing it.”
While it is important to have a sound and carefully considered container in which to pour myself, the fluid exploration of performance quality is my current interest.
People with interesting things to say, that are somewhat related to this topic:
more later…?
Jacques Tati “Jour de Fete”
January 8, 2008
This past sunday I attended a screening of Jacques Tati’s first film, “Jour de Fete“. It was one of the more heartwarming artistic experiences I’ve had in a while. The content of the film is pure lighthearted slapstick: a bumbling, drunken mail carrier in a small town sees a hilariously exaggerated filmstrip about the American Post and attempts to inject his own route with similar speed and “heroics.”
What made this film so extraordinary was the absolute precision of its execution. Visual jokes were interwoven with a wonderfully delicate sense of composition. All the classic choreographic tools of theme, variation, motif, spacial transposition… were used masterfully. It was no wonder the screening was part of the Dance on Camera Festival at Lincoln Center….
Tati also used sound in really interesting ways. There is very little dialogue of note in the film, but background noise (including dialogue overheard from an offscreen movie) makes a number of surprising appearances.
One other interesting note about the film: It was intended to be the first french color feature. Color processing was so new, however, that Tati shot with two cameras, one color, one black and white, just to be safe. Smart guy, because it turned out the color film couldn’t be processed, and Tati ended up releasing the black and white version. It wasn’t until after his death that his daughter was able to find a lab able to process the color film. This new color version is the one which I saw screened… and it is the one Tati had originally envisioned.
Unfortunately “Jour de Fete” isn’t available on DVD in the US. Three of his other movies including “Play Time” (the one I plan to see next) are available on Net Flix. Definitely check him out.
In the mean time, here are two clips of “Jour de Fete” that I found on youtube:
Tenuous Points
January 5, 2008
I am obsessed with balance.
Or, more specifically, I am obsessed with the struggle to maintain overall physical equilibrium and how, in order to do so, one must embrace a thousand micro-imbalances.
In order to stand on releve (the ball of your foot), especially on one leg, for any length of time, you’ve got to release the idea of “finding your balance”. As soon as you find that still point, it moves a little to left. So, balance feels like it is always an instant ahead of where you are. Tiny adjustments in the body’s architecture compensate for these shifts like the joints on a suspension bridge. A vertebra might compress a bit on the right, or the left shoulder might lift a hair.
In a state of balance the body is vibrating with movement, and its all of the most unaffected, uncontrollable, absolutely honest kind… because that’s how the body reacts when its given an all consuming task.
This is why, in my own choreography, I often find myself in the most precariously cantilevered positions. As a performer, you cannot “fake” a balance, and you cannot “perfect” one either. You can’t fake it because if you fall over, well, that’s obviously not a balance. You can’t perfect it, because as I stated before, equilibrium is really a state of constantly shifting imbalances and asymmetries. Since the two qualities which most interest me in dance are honesty and effort, then balancing seems to be a great place to begin. At those most tenuous points, I have no choice but to simply exist.
Reach vs. Outreach
January 3, 2008
Matthew Gough discusses the difference on his blog.
An Unfolded Place
January 2, 2008
This is a video of my new solo-in-progress “An Unfolded Place.” It’s from a showing at the Cunningham Studios on Dec. 16th.
What I know so far: I’ve created this goofy, cowgirl-esque character and I’m trying to set her loose in a kind of barren, wind-swept space. There is a sense of memory, or passage of time. As a performer it feels as though I have been dropped into a strange abandoned town and am left to try and shake hands with ghosts.
I’m not entirely done with the middle yet.
Dance Theater Workshop and Social Networking
January 1, 2008
The New York Times ran this article about Dance on the Web yesterday. I’m glad to hear that institutions like DTW are thinking in terms of online networking. The idea of making the membership directory interactive is exciting. Yay for new infrastructure! The primary role that DTW has played in my artistic life so far has been that of a real-life social hub… but that is generally limited to performance nights or occasional workshops, this is much broader.
Further, I like the idea of an online network tied to a physical place… maybe my mind just isn’t expanded sufficiently, but something about the disembodied vastness of myspace or facebook makes it harder for me to translate virtual “contact” into real-life physical activity. That transition is essential if these tools are going to be used to facilitate the creation of live performance.
Ideally, though, I’m not sure that a tightly curated theater space, is the ideal location for a network to be tied to. The theater itself provides extremely limited opportunities to present work… the essential end point of this dancemaking dialogue. I’m wondering if an expanded Studio Showing program is in order… perhaps choreographers could be blogging and posting videos of their process, and other members can vote to request a showing of the work? Half-baked idea at this point…. I’ll think about it some more and get back to you.
