Thoughts on the similarities between essays and dance

I realized I choreograph kind of like I write essays. Normally, I start off your typical way: thesis, intro, body. However, by the time I get to the end, I have to go back and change the beginning to reflect what I ended up actually talking about because what I planned on writing about never works out the way I think it will. But what I find ridiculous is that even knowing that I'm going to not use what I start with, I have to start with it. It's all very counter-intuitive to me but I've come to accept it. 

Working in rehearsal with Kaya today though, I felt bad because it wasn't me re-doing everything. It was me flip flopping everything and her having to remember/execute the new movement patterns. Despite my wonky brain though, I think it went very well. Having the actual recording altered how I was thinking about it which is why I came in with a new game plan. Luckily I still loved the majority of what we had come up with last week; it was just a question of which section I wanted to put it in and in what order. But I think I set the movement for a poem in the Maternity section and we came up with about 30 more seconds in addition for the beginning so that was exciting. 

Picture from rehearsal, dancer featured: Kaya

Super excited for my second 'first' group rehearsal this Saturday! History section here we come. 

The use of language in Șerban's Medea

I'm still on the subject of language and communication. Andrei Șerban, a Romanian born American theater director, explored "how to communicate the power and passion of the play without the mediating influence of modern language" (102) in his adaption of Medea, a Greek tragedy. 

"Serban's rejection of recognizable language came from a desire to find the emotional core of the drama - something that was not merely hidden under inadequate translations but, he felt, impossible in  a modern language whose relation to the emotions and to the very structure of society had become dulled" (104).

He wanted to understand and emphasize the emotions inspired by the play but felt that much was lost in translation. I definitely empathize with this sentiment. I attempted a translation for my non French speaking collaborators of the excerpts I've chosen. While in some parts I felt as if I got the gist of what they were saying, it was never said in the same way, thereby losing much of its impact. Everything I'm using was written by renowned authors so not only am I probably not translating the literal meaning very well but the style in which it's written is getting lost in the translation. 

I love this quote by him from "The Life of a Sound," an essay on his approach to language:

"Hidden vibrations start to appear, and we begin to understand the text in a way truer than any 'analysis' would have afforded. It is not only the imagination but our entire being which lives through the words. It is a matter of discovering the paradox that the head, the heart, and the voice are not separate but connected to each other...Movement and voice rediscover one another in a common effort...This potential cannot be realized by means of any technique, but rather through the opening of a particular sensibility" (104).

I do think that movement and voice are connected in a way that makes them mutually reflexive (I'm not sure that's a real description but I think it works). If you don't understand the language but can see the movement and hear the tone you're still going to understand something about what is being said, and vice-versa, if you can't see the movement but only hear the words and tone you'll understand something about what images are being evoked.

On another note, audience/performer relations:

"Serban's productions created a vibrant emotional connection and intimacy through the staging, but it never violated the implicit boundary between performer and spectator. It was an attempt in modern times, to recreate the sense of connection with a powerful aesthetic, religious, and civic event that the Greeks might have experienced. The audience implicitly understood its role and responded accordingly" (106). 

I'm very interested in the audience/performer relationship (I think I've mentioned it in early posts) so this quote caught my attention. I think playing with this 'boundary' will be an interesting part of this project because I want to make an impression on my audience but I don't want them to feel overwhelmed to the point where they detach and leave their reactions in the performance space. I think how the language is presented to them will alter this dynamic. I'm looking forward to creating small test groups this semester to experiment with audiences who A) can speak French - no context given, B) can speak French - context given, C) only speak English - no context given, D) only speak English - context given. 

Be on the look out this semester for posters / an email advertising this! 

La traite transatlantique des esclaves en 2 minutes by Vincent Hiribarren

Professor Caradec forwarded me this link. If you read French, it's an article on the transatlantic slave trade published this month (the topic is still relevant!!) in the Libération.

http://libeafrica4.blogs.liberation.fr/2015/09/20/la-traite-transatlantique-des-esclaves-en-2-minutes/

Here's a video that was included. TThis video, created by Andrew Kayn, shows the displacement of over 12 million slaves over 315 years across the Atlantic.

Magic Moments™*

1. Rehearsal this Wednesday was exactly what I needed after last Saturday. Currently, I've reserved my Wednesdays for the solo I'm working on with Kaya but I just wanted to touch bases with everybody who still expressed interest in participating after I sent out an email asking for explicit commitment. It was the first time we've all been in the same room together. A quick discussion on Fig Newtons made me inordinately happy and left  me feeling completely assured that this is going to work. Sometimes you just know a group is going to work together when they're debating the bug content of snack foods. 
2. Then we were able to set about a minute of choreography in like half an hour. It was nice to see the improvisation tasks, discussions we had, and the text all come together pretty seamlessly. Progress!
3. Having a discussion with one of my readers about the section I asked her to read. It was great to engage in a conversation about tone, symbolism and the cohesiveness of the script. It's always nice when someone else expresses interest in a subject you've put a lot of time into thinking about and brings new insights. 
4. Discussing the benefits of collaborating with a potential sound designer / seeing her get excited at the possibilities for this project. 
5. The Registrar telling me that I can get credit for continuing my MAP in the Spring. 

* Shout out to Heidi Howard in Atlanta 

Methods for overcoming the Language Barrier

In an earlier post I discussed the potential difficulties with the language barrier created by my performance for a non-french speaking audience. Celeste gave me several artists who have created work that dealt with this subject. The first was Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui.

Babel (words) - Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Damien Jalet
--> How people from different cultures communicate and overcome the language barrier while                 respecting each other's cultures.
Excerpt: http://www.numeridanse.tv/en/video/361_babel-words 

The dancers interact with each as a group at the start, both by physically touching each other and by actively watching each other's movements. They then break into pairs where they continue similar movements but are face to face. Slowly, they start to break off into individual facings and movements but a continuity remains between all their movements. It should be noted that the 13 performers in this piece are from different countries and dance backgrounds. For me these three changes parallel communication between people who speak different languages. In the beginning they are working together deliberately to understand each other. The inquisitive gazes show how comprehension doesn't happen immediately. When they reach the moment where they're acting as individuals but a common thread can be seen in their movements, it suggests that something deeper than language connects them, their humanity.

For me, their work reinforced the idea that the context, the emotion inspired by the music and the tone of the reader, and the movements themselves will convey something to my audience. They won't leave with zero impressions! (choreographer's worst nightmare :O)

Frustrations of Collaborating and Lessons on Plan B

I've set choreography on people in Salsa before (for those who don't know, I'm one of the leaders of the Latin American Dance Club on campus) and in my final project for Choreography. I feel like those were both very different experiences for me than this project. In Salsa, we're a lot of people's first exposure to Latin dance so we start out as teachers. The goal in choreographing for campus events is to have fun and show off what they've learned. Our choreography is in no way political and often we choreography to music rather than working from a concept. My final for Choreography was very much in the same vein. I was interested in how to integrate various dance styles and it was created to the music I had chosen. En contraste, in this project, the subject and text came first so I'm trying to build relevant movement that enhances the text and can convey the subject. Basically, what I'm trying to say is that I still very new to this process. I became more comfortable with this type of creation this summer but I wasn't the director. Now that I'm in this position I'm trying to figure out how best to organize rehearsals, and what the timeline needs to be and who I want in what. I'm the type of person who, when I'm in a rehearsal, I like it to be organized well and for the person running it to have a plan/direction.

Today was my first group rehearsal of the semester. Everyone who wanted to be a part of the project (well those who are a part of the project and actually in the performance) were set to come. I was excited because it would be the first time everybody who was interested was in the same room together and we could start moving together. There's one section in which I want to have all my dancers participate so I thought it was the perfect chance to really get a good start on it.

Rehearsal started and I had one dancer show up. I knew two weren't feeling well so I had already come to terms with that and had decided that I would just mark their places when needed but I was completely unprepared to work with only one dancer. Quick side note: I'm part of the Dance Ensemble/ACTivate dramaturge team and we had just had a meeting yesterday to discuss the topic for the show: Plan B (see http://danceplanb.blogspot.com/ for further info) so it was on my mind. I found myself in a situation which we've been calling "reactionary Plan B" where your hand is forced. It's not a back-up Plan B which already in place when things go wrong but it's when you have to react in the moment. We're back: To be perfectly honest, I didn't react well. I was totally unprepared to work on a different section and I don't like to think through my choreographic decisions for the first time with other people. I like to take my time by myself where I don't feel pressured and then bring it to other people.

There was potential for it to still be a productive rehearsal because Kaya has a solo that we started on Wednesday but I had been focusing on preparing for this rehearsal so I hadn't refined anything we had worked on. Of course my mind went completely blank for other improv exercises we could use to generate more movement so we did the same phrase activity we had done Wednesday but with a few new words. Personally, I wasn't as committed as I should have been. I was obstinately holding on to my original plan and frustrated that I wasn't getting to play around with the ideas I had brought to the rehearsal. I only kept her for an hour and then tried to work on my own solo. It wasn't unproductive but it wasn't the super inspiring rehearsal I had envisioned either.

I know there's an inherent commitment difference because this project counts as a class for me, I'm getting credit for the time I put in whereas everybody else is volunteering theirs. My hope had been that that would mean that those who had expressed interest were really invested. I really do think this is the case for some and I can't wait to share a space with them.

I think today was a good lesson in learning about myself as a choreographer. Above all else I value people who are committed and open. I'm putting a lot of time into not only into achieving the end goal of a finished performance but into the process of creating itself. I appreciate collaborators who respect my commitment to them and reciprocate.

Performance and Theatricality: The Subject Demystified by Josette Féral and Terese Lyons

To be perfectly honest this article didn't demystify anything for me. It was one of those articles where you can read the same sentence five times and still not be able to explain what exactly it was saying. Never good for the academic ego, but good for the dendrites.

Anyway, here were a few quotes that stuck with me:

"Performance does not aim at a meaning, but rather makes meaning insofar as it works right in those extremely blurred junctures out of which the subject eventually emerges. And performance conscripts this subject both as a constituted subject and as a social subject in order to dislocate and demystify it. (173)

"A problem identical to one presented by the theatre of non-representation: how can we talk about the subject without betraying it? How can we explain it? From descriptions of stagings taking place elsewhere or existing no longer, to the fragmentary, critical discourse of scholars, the theatrical experience is bound always to escape any attempt to give accurate account of it. Faced with this problem, which is fundamental to all spectacles, performance has given itself its own memory." (175)

"Performance can therefore be seen as a machine working with serial signifiers: pieces of bodies...as well as pieces of meaning, representation, and libidinal flows, bits of objects joined together in multipolar concatenations*...And all of this is without narrativity" (178/179). 

* Concatenations: a series of interconnected things or events. 

Translating Performance by Diana Taylor

This article was written in reaction to the Second Annual Encuentro where the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics brought together artists, activists and scholars to talk about how they approached politics through performance. It's focus was on how the word performance couldn't be directly translated which left many people confused as to the exact nature of their work. For any linguists out there, it's a very interesting article, discussing the nuances in meaning between performance and words such as representation, theatricality, etc. I came across it trying to research techniques on how to convey meaning when your audience doesn't speak the language you're using in your performance.

Taylor's view on performance (the author, not myself) : "[p]erformances function as vital acts of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity through reiterated...behavior" (44).

I found the debate on whether by its revelatory nature, performance is a revealer of culture or whether by it's constructed nature, it's artificial to be very interesting.  Taylor argues against the second idea saying that just because "a dance, a ritual, or a political demonstration requires bracketing or framing that differentiates it from other social practices surrounding it does not imply that the performance is not real or true. On the contrary, the idea that performance distills a truer truth than life itself runs from Aristotle, through Shakespeare, and Calderon de la Barca, through Antonin Artaud and Jerzy Grotowski, and into the present." (46) [italics added] I agree when thinking of dance under the umbrella term performance. Because of the abstract nature of dance, the form needs to be constructed but it doesn't make the content any less real.


Quotes:

"As its different uses - scholarly, political, scientific, business-related - rarely engage one another directly, performance also has a history of untranslatability. It has been locked ironically into the disciplinary and geographic boxes it defies, denied the universality and transparency that some claim it promises its objects of analysis. the many points of untranslatability are of course what make the term and the practices theoretically enabling and culturally revealing. While performances may not, as Turner has hoped, give us access and insight into another culture, they certainly tell us a great deal about our desire for efficacy and accesss, not to mention the politics of our interpretations." (47)

I really liked this quote (above) because it alludes to the self-reflexive side of performance. In watching performances from other cultures, maybe it's not what it's revealing to you about their culture so much as what you're realizing about your own through comparison.

"Performance carries the possibility of challenge, even self-challenge, within it." (49)

Parlez-vous français? Non, tant pis pour vous.

All text used in my performance will be in French. I attend college in Iowa where the one language we all have in common is English, not French. Consequently, I've been thinking about the potential language barrier between my performance and my audience.

Dance is abstract. Language is abstract. In black and white, I'm seeing the connection and therefore don't necessarily see it as a problem that some people won't be able to understand exactly what is being said. I'm hoping to evoke certain responses during the performance. It is not as if watching a dance performance that is set to music with no words is meaningless for the audience. And oftentimes, to those who grew up seeing traditional, western dance performances, dance is movement to music.

However, I think the text I'm choosing to use is important and an integral part of the performance, otherwise I wouldn't include it. I want people to know what is being said but I think I'm mainly struggling over the lengths to which I should go to assure this happens. I'll put translations in the program but how many people do you know who read the program cover to cover before the show starts. I never do; I usually assume it'll all be made clear in the performance.

My other thought is that the imposition of a language is part of colonialism. It's hard to watch a performance, a TV show, hear a conversation, listen to a song in another language and draw a complete blank on the subject. I'd be putting the audience (well those who don't speak French) in a position where they are living the reality of having a different language forced on them and having to see what meaning they can grasp contextually. Furthermore, the part of me that's interested in the unspoken contract between audience and artist thinks it would be fascinating to see how the audience responds to this withholding of knowledge and how the performance differed for those who could and couldn't speak French. But, having seen a performance done in a language I don't speak, it can be hard to stay completely present in the moment which isn't something I want my audience to experience.

I'm thinking a pre-show or post-show discussion will be imperative to the performance.

First Rehearsal

I had my first rehearsal of the semester yesterday! In my mind right now, the section that deals with La Maternité (motherhood) is going to be a solo and since only one of my dancers can show up every Wednesday that worked out nicely. I was really thankful that another of my dancers could make it yesterday because I want these first few rehearsals to generate movement. The three of us have pretty different styles which made for a very interesting collaboration.

Employing the time-honored Celeste exercise, I gave my dancers a list of words from the text I'm using and asked them to create a short phrase. We then taped our individual phrases (to Zoe Keating's Escape Artist and Hold On by SBTRKT), taught them to each other briefly and then did an improv where we were allowed to use our individual phrases, moves we remembered from each others, or create new movement if the moment called for it.

The list was as follows:

• La volonté - Willpower
• Le mépris - Contempt, Scorn
• Stériliser - Sterilize  
• Le destin - Destiny 
• L'agression - Aggression 

It feels good to have officially started and be moving on from the concept only phase of things.

Working on the Text!

Accountability versus Empathy

Victoria Mark's "Not About Iraq"

A section of the piece, in which Victoria Mark's in alone on stage, stuck in my mind when I was done watching it. She is moving two fingers on her hand to create certain recognizable images. Some examples include scissors, human legs, and a gun, as seen in the image below.

Her serene and somewhat playful attitude, which led to laughter in the audience, allows for a moment of release during the heaviness of the rest of the performance. However, when she turns her hand into the gun, maintaining her serene expression, she manages to sharply bring the audience back to the serious nature of the subject and evokes the need for their active participation in addressing political issues. This relates to ideas brought up in both the Cecilia Olsson chapter on Protest Ballets in Sweden and comments made by William Forsythe in the New York Times Article by Diane Solway. They all speak to the need to find a balance in making your audience feel accountable versus empathetic.

Chpt. 11 Your Fight Is Our Fight Protest Ballets in Sweden by Cecilia Olisson

"Visualize a heritage and a tradition of politically committed choreographers, that is, choreographers who take a moral stand in order to heighten awareness of injustice and encourage social change." (140)

"Artists were no longer called artists; they were named cultural worker" (144). 
The combination of anthropology and art!

"And within the education system, from elementary to high schools, South African and South American arts and culture were taught to reflect the parts of the world in which Sweden was politically engaged, as well as to counter dangerous commercialism."  (144) 

I really like this idea and in reflecting on the United States involvement around the world, I feel like it's something we could really use. I didn't learn about Iraq or Afghanistan in school except where they were located geographically and what contact between our country and theirs led to conflict. I think learning about another country's culture and their arts is a great way to humanize them and lead people to better understanding which, in my opinion, is a better way to resolve conflict then through military force. The fact that Sweden started teaching these lessons in elementary school means that whole generations grew up with the idea that it is standard to learn about different cultures and more importantly cultures that are different from your own.

Culberg's Rapport (1976) - about the political conflict in Chile at the time 
"The closing moment offers no tangible suggestions as to how to solve the political conflict"

"A delicate balance between accusation, without causing guilt, and empathy, without being patronizing" (148). - how to criticize passivity of audience while at the same time getting them to become engaged in the cause for human rights and equality

Culberg's Soweto - about apartheid in South Africa
"in the program he states that his work is an 'attempt to provide empathetic insight into the blacks' situation,' knowing it to be impossible to really know, belonging to a privileged group spared from living in horror." (149).

As an anthropology student I think empathy is so important because it garners understanding; however, I do think it gets dangerous taking on the role of telling someone else's plight. Good intentions don't always prevent negative consequences. Where's the line in socially engaged performance between  creating/inspiring change without contributing to the problem by speaking for others. This was something I studied this summer in a different research project with Celeste Miller, Halley Freger, Ebony Chukwuu, and Sophiyaa Nayar. (see mapsummer2015.blogspot.com)

I think the inclusion of the Mother Earth character which "convinces [women and men with different histories, yet all experiencing discrimination and oppression] not be victims, to acknowledge their roots and be proud and realize that they themselves can make a difference" (150) is key in giving agency to those they're trying to help.

Take away phrase: Firm individualism within a strong collective