Writing My Dancing Life

And Your Meaning...

2011-09-12T08:52:00.001-07:00

“But while the dancing was high quality, it was difficult to discern much meaning out of the piece.”

Is it reasonable for a dance critic to make a statement like this? In my view, writing in the era before Judson, let alone Cunningham, perhaps yes. But the assumption that likely underlies the statement−that dance is supposed to “mean” something that the choreographer presents in a way you can parse and give language to−is off-base today.

The piece in question is John Jasperse’s Canyon. After reading the full review of which this one statement is a part, I penned the following:

“I can’t tell you why I trusted choreographer John Jasperse when he placed the audience on air mattresses supine to look up at dancers doing risky weight-sharing partnering directly over us in Prone (2005). Likewise the “meaning” of Canyon, like so many messages that arise in dreams, I accept as a given without needing to know precisely what it is. Audiences and critics looking at dance today are invited to stay open for signals, to allow layers of imagery to build in our memory like so much visual poetry. That challenge evokes the excitement of a worthy mystery, a whodunit one hasn’t yet unraveled, but may well. And however it works out, the pleasure of dwelling in the rich world of signals can be, in itself, plenty.”

Jasperse is wonderfully articulate on this issue in a recent profile.

And then, wanting to share some of the meaning I gleaned in the work, I did something I haven’t ever done before in the seven years I’ve been writing about dance in Philadelphia: sent the newspaper an unsolicited review of something that a reviewer already covered. To be clear, I don’t think the work is without areas that need tightening or clarifying. But in 200 words what seemed most vital was to offer a way IN. My review wasn’t used, so here it is:

Canyon. John Jasperse’s newest work vacillates between the time when dancers, full-bodied and capable, make their bold marks on space, and the time when they stop. Its six fine dancers leap, swirl and whoosh across the stage in satisfying waves of changing groupings, or crash and dive, later giving way to times when their bodies are less ready for deployment. They crumple, they sag, or pensively await further instructions. The implied cycles – rehearse and rest, exert and surrender to exhaustion– are reminiscent of the arc of a dancer’s day, or life. In Canyon intimacy, doubt, camaraderie, and tenderness have their place too. And then, what are the messages coming from a deep interior or a faraway power that cause the dancers to pause, looking to the distance, or listening internally?

Jasperse often messes with conventions of staging and here turns the white dance floor askew in the curtainless cavern of the space. Tony Orrico’s design includes a white cube on wheels, creaky and scuttling, that decorates the floor, or walls, with zig-zags of fluorescent green tape, like the trail of a modernist snail.

Along with surges in light, Hahn Rowe’s magisterial score evokes a grand, sometimes thunderous existential question mark. And then it’s back to simple scratchings and settled tones. So it goes. The big moments and the small ones. The grand dance and the inexorable move toward stillness.

FIN

A Fair for Merce

2011-08-30T06:26:00.000-07:00

Great artists generate devoted communities. On line waiting for the elevators to Lincoln Center's Rose Theater in July, former dancers with the Cunningham Company were overheard comparing notes on who and what they’d seen earlier in the day - so and so from one era, that one from a later time.

Rather than casting many glances back, my experience of the evening segment of the day-long Merce Fair was about looking and hearing anew. Perhaps knowing that there will be no more Cunningham choreography, one is automatically drawn deeper into what there is, and that opens the mind.

It was on film that I first heard Merce explain his understanding of how music, dance and decor functioned for him in contemporary performance. As with a streetscape where one witnesses a bird in flight while hearing the scream of a firetruck, the elements cohere through their simultaneity and our processing. Whatever we make of the interrelationship is what we make of it. So it was ideal to have the music associated with Merce’s work performed in the Allen Theater with a massive window wall gazing out on a vibrant slice of Central Park South.

And the revelations in that music! As a very young dancer I was put off by these male composers’ scratching and unlovely sonic contributions from the pit. Here, it became fascinating to hear one distinct sound at a time played on a succession of percussion instruments in Cage’s “One,”and spellbinding to try to parse Alvin Luciers’ score for piano and hovering theramin-like doppelganger. And magic - a man at a computer whooshing his hands mysteriously behind a laptop’s screen to produce whorling, dense and dramatic flights of sounds.

My sometime perception of “coldness” in the work was utterly dispelled in Duets and Squaregame, the dances offered by the company. How interesting that Robert Swinston, the company's Director of Choreography, chose to revisit works from one narrow band of time - late 1970’s and 1980 - that are structurally exquisite, and with less seeming randomness than many.

Squaregame takes place on a demarcated white square, dancers temporarily deposited at its far corners, watching in formal groups, then joining in unison ventures.

Rashaun Mitchell, at the work’s beginning and end displays a perplexingly deep sensuality. How can it be? While Merce’s clarity and exactitude are there in spades, so are a fleshy fluidity and thoughtfulness. Cunningham himself seemed to dance with the curiosity of someone to whom the dance was happening, as though he were the subject on which the experiment of this dance were being conducted. Mitchell dances as though the movement were his voice; his wobbly knees or big reaches, without any artifice or extraneous additions, conveying a physical vulnerability or spatial interest.

I’ve heard people say that Mitchell can “channel” Merce. What I see is the channeling of Merce’s authority, and one-pointedness. But how the movement sits on his more substantial frame is different altogether - more rounded, more tender.

Duets plays a trick of continuity. With its cascade of pairings performing distinct tasks, one all hyperdrive lockstep dashes, another a duet without touching, we wonder which of the many pairs might be carrying a through line. But the center continually shifts, as though a spotlight is scanning for the heart of the matter. All the pairs are the heart as we see at the end, when in a stunningly dense minute of finale, every duet mobilizes, pauses for a settled moment, before the density kicks back in and the lights switch out.

That black out ending, used in both works, serves as a reminder that a flow can be turned off, like a faucet. It’s turned off when our proverbial glass is quite satisfyingly full, but just before any hint of overflow.

Earlier, the Fair had animated multiple contiguous spaces with diverse events.The group of attendees learning Field Dances threw themselves into their task, delighted with the open-endedness, through Merce’s structure, of making their own choices. A girl - not more than 8 - flitted among the big folks, tipping sideways facing them, placing hands on their shoulders.

Passersby happened on the floating Mylar Warhol pillows, tossing them back skyward..

The Archive represented a carefully winnowed selection from a vast collection of books, papers and photographs. Handsome hanging panels with photos and text offered both a crash course in Merce and collaborators ,and new information for those already familiar.

The film illustrating the process of creating the “Dancer 1 2 3” drawings was screened alongside the drawings themselves. With Merce revisiting a Cagean concept twenty years after Cage himself worked with it, what’s fascinating is to see how he interacts with the dancers - how he offers refining instructions, how his seeing the results generates something new on the spot.

At the Merce Fair, we were given the fitting option of choreographing our own event, wandering in and out of film screenings, or music performances, or learning a dance, or reading, looking, conversing with friends, until finally enjoying a come-together moment watching the culminating performance. It was a party Merce would have thoroughly enjoyed.

For a series of photos, visit here.

Messages from Meredith

2011-03-21T10:57:00.001-07:00

In 1975 I had been under the spell of Judith Dunn and Steve Paxton, both former Cunningham dancers and Judson Church pioneers, for four years. At Bennington College it was their ethos that held sway. Dance was performed as task, as an everyday kind of activity that involved investigation and rigor but certainly not emotional “expression.” Judith Dunn exhorted me to wipe that grin, or whatever, off my face, saying “let your body say it instead.” And, when confronted with potential sexual rumblings and arousal in the newly birthed form of contact improvisation, Paxton exhorted dancers not to play the “gland game.”

Then along came Meredith Monk. For a week of workshops, Monk had us embody our most disgusting habits, sink deep into sensation with exercises from Alexander technique, and, strange for dancers at that time, make sound. These activities confused me. How could the worlds of formalist post-modernism and fleshy, tender hearted and unabashed expression co-exist? Like a koan, that question has dogged me since.

Another week of workshops and performances some thirty six years later at Bryn Mawr College has provided, if not a complete answer, a chance to sit again with the deeper questions raised by Meredith Monk’s work, and to speak with her about them.
Her evolution as an artist has involved a refinement and a rich flowering more than any shifts of course. The fusion of elements – voice, film, movement, into striking stage pictures and ultimately moving theater is unchanged. Today she collaborates more, handing over the authority for pieces of the production to a visual artist for instance – Ann Hamilton. Her musical palette has broadened with complex instrumentations. But the purity, the depth, and the power of what she does has only grown with time and water under the bridge.

Today Monk is a Buddhist. Although in 1975 she had not yet found a formal practice or teacher, her starting place – one of compassionate regard for human beings and their experience, both painful and delightful, is in line with the Buddhist stance. People without any spiritual allegiance can recognize something fundamentally sane in her position as a performer. Although she herself features, it is never about her. Rather, she has always understood how to position herself as an everywoman, with an approach to physicality that reduces action to its simplest skeletons. She becomes like an animation of herself, effectively communicating that the work is about US.

Although ‘dance’ was the rubric that Monk was often categorized under, her approach to it was never in line with those who practiced movement for its own sake, conveying its own meaning. Rather, movement for Monk is what animates her onstage personalities, be they the quirky ladies of “Education of the Girlchild,” or the elegant celebrants of “Songs of Ascension.” Movement is life, and a body in motion is one conveying a story about how it is to be alive on this deeply troubled but spectacular and potentially benevolent earth.

MoMA's Space, Pioneered

2011-02-05T06:49:00.000-08:00

photo Ruby Washington for the NYTimes

When Frank Gehry purchased an old power station in 1970’s Soho, he was eager to see it populated with dancing. The long narrow space was brought to life in the fog-drenched premiere of Trisha Brown’s Opal Loop. Examples of similar synergies of architecture and dancing abound. But topping the list in my book is the recent animation of the Museum of Modern Art’s five story atrium with early works by Brown, another in the long list of her Company’s terrific 40th anniversary events.

Trisha Brown’s work with 10’ sticks and pedestrian rulegames, as well as her very refined explorations of movement designed to ‘hit’ designated points on a cube, could not be better suited to the soaring space. Works like Sticks, Scallops and Locus revel in the play of shifting angles and formations as dancers conform to or slither around imagined or actual boundaries. These dances are architectural from the get go.

Tasks are transparent: ‘balance a stick at a perfect 45 degree angle while sliding from a stand to supine.’ ‘Trace arcs around the perimeter of the space while moving shoulder to shoulder with other dancers who might chose arcs of unpredictable sizes.’
And then, in the interpretations of the onlookers next to me– ‘move within the confines of a square taped on the ground.’ Locus, if seen as fulfilling only this intention, is only partially understood. Is it important that the audience knows that Diane Madden’s every move is in relation to 27 points on her cube? That she takes four passes through, hitting the same sequence of points each time? And that a lot of the movement is the result of layering together two or more contradictory imperatives, making for curious internal ripples and wild splays? However you see it, Madden’s delivery of Locus is silky and clear, like pure water.

Changing into bright red clothing, she is the one who initiates the ‘telephone’ game of largely upper body action that is Roof Piece Relayered. In the five story atrium, 10 dancers play a game easy enough for us to trace, but one we can never see fully, as they are placed on every side, in windows and ledges at every level. One dances in a long notched opening set in an otherwise pristine white wall with a delicate white Calder mobile sailing just behind. One dances on a catwalk so high in the air, we see from underneath.

The audience member has the wondrous opportunity of framing each view for herself. This task is simple when standing in the atrium. But as soon as you decide to venture onto higher or lower levels, the choices and views take on much greater complexity.

To reach the openings into the atrium, you pass great artworks, and look through them at the dance. The dancers—red, sculptural—assert an exhilarating parity with Cornell, Rothko and Duchamp. They are art works up close, with viewers coming right to the edges of their marked off ‘stage’ spaces. Unlike the interior of the Guggenheim Museum where all of the space is always in view, the Modern’s punched out windows and balconies allow you to see partially into the big opening; then you pass through ‘closed’ spaces before the view opens out again. The effect here is of watching the performance by encircling it, and of a building that functions as a lens for performance. When passing between one opening and another, the knowledge of a performance going on, but hidden, is tantalizing. The sense of space in relation to dance explodes outward.

Recalling Brown’s predeliction for returning to rework great ideas, it’s not unlike what we experience when, in Forêt Foray (1990), Brown sets a marching band to circling the outside of the building in which the performance takes place. A dance of the mind.

Learning from Line Up

2011-01-05T13:05:00.000-08:00

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe. Asked to consider which Trisha Brown choreography would be most suitable to teach the students at Franklin & Marshall College,* I weighed the options. Locus, the dance created within a cube that gives the performer options to cut and splice material as she sees fit, dances on that distinctly Brownian edge of immense precision coupled with great freedom. But Locus takes either a long time or a lot of intensive practice to get the movement ‘into your bones’ enough to be able to play at performance level. Glacial Decoy, that glorious torrent of a dance, is a whopping challenge for even the most advanced dancers. As a learning exercise it’s great for a college group, but again, getting to performance level would take more than three intensive weekends. Line Up, made of short dances related to the architecture of the body in relation to other bodies and to space, seemed an ideal fit. Adaptable in its number of performers (groups can switch between its discrete sections when only five performers are needed), and with some very simple-to-learn parts, it’s also a setting for its central complex jewel, the demanding 'Solo Olos,' with three phrases done forward and in retrograde, and dancers bumped in and out of unison by a ‘caller’. On the whole Line Up seemed a challenging, but do-able project. What I did not realize ahead of time was how fully the aesthetic and ethos of the time Line Up was made needs to be understood and embraced by the dancers to perform it convincingly.

Just standing. Paraphrasing Martha Graham, it takes a year to learn to run, five years to learn to walk and ten years to learn to stand. Being simple is among the hardest things to do.
The improvisations based on the instruction “line up” that are the glue binding Line Up were originally set through a process of “building.” Trisha’s group at the time was all-female and included several dancers whose allegiance was to somatic practice – Alexander technique, body-mind centering, Elaine Summers’ and Andre Bernard’s teaching. For them, standing, not to mention the other pedestrian action at the heart of Line Up was a practice with nuance and interest. The simpler the movement, the more the dancer could be aware of the mechanics of the body, the feeling of it, and the unfolding sculptural form they contributed to.

Students today may not have encountered an approach that encourages them to do less and feel more. They might feel bereft without recourse to drama or particular movement patterns – the high leg, the repeating turn - or without filigree, ornament, or ‘personal expression’ as they usually think of it. Line Up teaches that being stripped down is actually hard but plenty revealing. That how you are is as important as what you do. That there’s interest in subtlety – gradations of timing, angle, and energetic quality. Drama comes with the movement or stillness of the eyes, with the little games that arise between dancers and are just as quickly abandoned. In Trisha’s parlance: “Do it and get off it.”

The Time It Takes. Beginning to study the piece again after 28 years, it interested me to see how patient Trisha was in developing the material over the course of the piece. The culture has sped up in the interim. Line Up starts off with a real-time task that takes whatever time it takes. In ‘Sticks’, dancers enter with 10’ wooden poles and lie supine along one line, joining their sticks at the tips. They slide themselves out from under their sticks, each making a full circle by coming up and over her stick, to return to lying supine, all the while attempting to keep sticks joined. The dancers use spoken commands to keep tuning their connections. Like most of Line Up, the simplicity of the action belies how complex and uncompromising it is to do.

At the beginning of our process the nine F&M dancers needed to get a feel for the climate Line Up grew out of. It was a dance for all women, simply and uniformly clad, strong and smart but reflecting the non-heroic performer ethos of its time. Its virtuosity was brainy rather than flashy; its tongue-in-cheek wit a fresh breeze.

We improvised with pedestrian material. We experienced ‘release’ practices. We spoke about the Rainer ‘No Manifesto’. We looked at photographs. But the most effective way for the F&M students to understand how to ‘do less’ with clarity and confidence was to watch the original cast on video. In their stripped down language of walking, standing, running, and lying down, ‘expressiveness’ came in little bursts of energy, in choices to complement or contrast, or to touch.

Details .Within Line Up’s stripped down palette, details are crucial. With Trisha Brown’s material, no matter which piece, a student will often think she’s ‘got it’ when what she has is a rough approximation. The level of attention to detail —exact placement, timing, energetic quality, and interrelationship — is exponentially more exact than is often asked of students. This is what makes or breaks the performance. Distances of a few inches difference determine whether an image coalesces or looks like mush. Knowing that this dancer fires her movement a hair before you do, that the relative angles of your arms should be like this, that the space between you is exactly this much, and that each Rube Goldbergian chain of events has a very particular sequence is crucial to the organized chaos that suffuses many of Line Up’s sections.

In a process that extended from the blazing colors of fall through the first nip of winter, the F&M dancers homed in on their own invigorating interpretation of Line Up. They drilled the phrases of ‘Solo Olos’. They counted out the complex pattern of ‘Figure Eight.’ They found their sultry siren selves for ‘Spanish Dance.’ They ran and reran the ‘line up’ sections, negotiating with each other about moments of connection and group formations.
In the end, I witnessed their Line Up as a vehicle goading each dancer to uncover her own confident, clear and strong performing self. The dance delivers up the dancer: full blown, as a woman of intelligence at work and play. And it reveals the brilliance of what we often take for granted – simple relationships and architectures. That it spins out into baroque complexity with 'Solo Olos' is its crowning glory. ###

*Dr. Lynn M. Brooks, Chair of Dance, and Pamela S. Vail, Assistant Professor, extended this invitation. Pam successfully wrote the NEA Masterpiece grant that made the reconstruction possible.

With many thanks to the eight current and former F&M students who took part in the Line Up project—Triana Brown, Emily Grossner, Emily Herchenroether, Tori Lawrence, Jaclyn Malat, Allison Massof, Alexandria Ross, Michaila Stevens—and to Pamela Vail as performer and rehearsal director.

So Inclined

2011-01-05T10:34:00.000-08:00

photo: Andrea Mohin/New York Times

Since 1975 I have seen each piece Trisha Brown made. (I danced in seven, including Homemade, the solo with the 16mm projector strapped on the dancer’s back.) But of the works that came before, until last fall’s Whitney Museum reconstructions, most existed for many of us only as black and white photo images: Steve Paxton with long hair and headband, bounding eagerly, suspended by wires and perpendicular to the Whitney’s wall; Sylvia Whitman leaning serenely away from her partner, held by a simple contraption of plywood and rope.

Unifying these works was the investigation of the physics at play in the area between vertical and horizontal. A body can lean just so far before it begins to fall. Trisha’s exploration played on that tipping point repeatedly, finding just how far one could stretch out on an impossible incline before surrendering to gravity, or, using various kinds of apparatus, creating the illusion of an ordinary action while in an extraordinary posture. In the early experiments we saw at the Whitney, moments of falling were postponed through ingenious means of counterbalancing. In duos when one partner leaned a bit too far out, equilibrium faltered. Seeing the dancers negotiate the tipping point, repeatedly restoring their formation, was much of the pleasure.

These experiments turning the body every which way in relation to gravity, initially with the support of ropes or other dancers, were crucial to developing Brown’s signature movement style. After fully investigating gradations of suspended ‘off-balance,’ she was ready to take away the supports and deal with the consequences, leading to her channeling the momentum of falling into surrendered ease, updraft and flight.

The physical practice that made this movement possible was to lengthen the body between feet and head rather than crumpling in the direction of gravity’s pull. This lengthening leant extra force to whatever movement followed a fall.

Like so many of the themes she investigated early on, Trisha has cycled back repeatedly to variations on suspension and the 90-degrees-to-the-wall relationship. In Set and Reset (1985), Diane Madden ‘walked’ on the wall supported by fellow dances. In the next work, Lateral Pass, the dancers bounded into the air, supported by bungee cords. Later, every bit of related investigation was folded into the miraculous aerial work in Orfée (2000) where the figure of Musica is suspended by wires drawing her upward and side to side in a musically nuanced series of tumbles, swoops and walks on air.

The early works shown at the Whitney elevate the pedestrian, spinning it into high art. Walking on The Wall recalls looking out a city window to figures on a sidewalk below. Their action is stretched and distorted through a semi-slow motion time warp. The action reverses too, winding and rewinding the figures, bringing them close enough to link arms, and to assist each-other when passing or navigating the room’s corner. In charcoal gray clothing, on a plain white wall, these figures’ slowed down ambulation makes us wonder at the beauty of something so seemingly ordinary, yet anything but.

Early Trisha, Caught

2010-10-05T07:40:00.000-07:00

On Madison Avenue walking past luxe handbags and antiques in perfect window displays you don’t expect to see videos of a renegade movement artist. But next to the Whitney Museum last weekend a passerby could get snagged before two store windows with wide-screen monitors showing early works by choreographer Trisha Brown.* It happened that way to me. I was snagged and then deeply moved, seeing the wildness and brilliance of the early Trisha.

Adventurous and visionary are words too tame to describe what she did and who she was then. Of course there's been an entire and tremendous oeuvre since. But here you see her planting a flag as a post-modern herald. Clad in clear red against a backdrop of muted Soho rooftops, she spooled out improvised gestures, many of them just skewed from ones with particular meanings and building in whimsical ways from one gesture to the next. Her pointing finger swooped around to locate a target which dissolved somewhere off to her side, her hands conducted a dialogue of curlicues. This invented semaphore got passed as a game of ‘telephone’ across the roofs from one dancer to another. It marked the airspace as artists’ playground and, along with other contemporaneous forays, forever transformed ideas about what a ‘dance’ might be.

In the next store window was Jonathan Demme’s 1986 video of Trisha performing Accumulation with Talking Plus Water Motor, shot in her studio with boxes of set pieces (ready for tour?) and her dancers accumulating gradually on the periphery to watch raptly. In her eyes is the wild exhilaration of a creature dared to move to the edge of its physical and mental limits. She mobilizes each neuron, synapse and muscle memory to accomplish her personal quadrafecta – splicing two stories, and two dances randomly and remembering end and beginning points for each to make a seamless, if bumpy ride of synergistic non-sequitors. The one dance, Water Motor, buffeting her body with surprise turbulences that ripple out into her flung arms and corkscrewing turns. The other, Standing Accumulation, gradually builds a long phrase with measured calm, one repeating action at a time.

This is the Trisha I recall watching at every performance with devotion and wonder. She looks as though there is nothing on the planet that could be more right for her to do, more delicious, or more exciting. And that is what she shared with us—her delirious pleasure in investigating physicality. In particular, she delved into what the body might do when the momentum of falling is harnessed in updraughts, careenings through space, and pliant, internal readjustments that blossom out into detailed articulations of every body part. In this solo she had found a challenge equal to her level of skill (which was off the charts) and went for it like a famished fighter. Demme captured her relish for all time. Seeing it I realize that I love this person in a way I never loved anyone before or since: as my dancing heroine, as the sun in my dancing solar system.

* Trisha Brown: Early Works 1966-1979 by Babette Mangolte, Jonathan Demme, Klaus Kertess, et al. DVD Published by: ARTPIX Notebooks

Too Much Art?

2010-07-20T04:33:00.000-07:00

At an orientation for dance artists and presenters seeking Dance Advance funding, DA’s director Bill Bissell said that a recent study found our area to have an “oversupply of art with an under demand for it.” I hear that as a call to action. Here are my questions:

What are the effective ways of helping audiences become more excited about concert dance?

How do you develop dance literacy?

What can we do about art being seen as an elitist luxury?

Within the field some kinds of dance are ‘easy read’ while others require more investment. What are strategies to help audiences want to delve in to more challenging work?

Best Of...

2010-07-16T04:51:00.000-07:00

[Otto Ramstad in a still from "Moving Image: Minnesota," video by Olive Bieringa]

When a critic's "Best of" list departs significantly from my own, I'm inspired to go public with a list of Philly dance events that most excited me in 2009-2010. Here it is, in no particular order. The list leaves out plenty of worthy, interesting artists whom I might have missed or whose work was, in my estimation, not quite as strong this time around.

At the CEC, a triple-threat show featured Anna Drozdowski’s choral village made up of "Our Town" types in pedestrian actions and patterns. Like each Drozdowski work I've seen, it oozed off-kilter charm. Sharing the program, Zornitsa Stoyanova used hand-held lamps to cast artful shadows and illuminate single parts of herself in an inventive trio. And Jenn McGinn’s piece showcased her brother, James McGinn, a wondrously articulate dancer, tracing and retracing his Cecchetti-inspired steps (their mother taught the Cecchetti method of ballet training). It had the ineffable quality I associate with work that’s really going somewhere: a diving in deep to its “itness” as Andrew Simonet/Tere O’Connor would say. Both McGinns are definitely artists to watch.

More, the product of Headlong Dance Theater’s investigations with Tere O’Connor stretched this Philly favorite into new terrain. See my notes on it here.

In Only Sleeping Subcircle partnered with great physical actor Geoff Sobell, taking big leaps in their work fusing projected video and live performance.I wrote about it and about Pennsylvania Ballet dancing one of William Forsythe's most celebrated works here.

Forsythe's In the Middle Somewhat Elevated is a dance that PA Ballet could do every season if I were calling the shots. The dancers are pushed out to the edges of their range of motion and stamina in this fierce, dark and swift gush of ballet steps turned sideways.

I wasn’t planning to see the Ballet’s Romeo and Juliet again this round, but wanted to experience the “audio description” they occasionally provide for visually impaired people. It’s a wonderful idea but has a ways to go before it captures the vividness of the spectacle. The performing by Julie Diana, though, was utterly stirring. Best acting in a ballet onstage in Philly.

Thanks to Dance Celebration, Fraulein Maria by Doug Elkins came to town. Humor in dance is tricky (it’s easy to get schlocky or to pander). But Elkins, remaking the Sound of Music, hit it just right. Glee!

Lucy Guerin Inc. performed Corridor at Bryn Mawr College and likewise astonished with spectacularly able dancers and rugged, ominous material. I wrote about that too (and, full disclosure: I curate that Performing Arts Series).

Another out-of-town favorite was Otto Ramstad on one of the programs in Philadelphia Dance Projects' Local History Project. Ramstad seemed to be using his highly sensitized body to tune into frequencies imperceptible to us, acting like a guide to other realms.

Camille A. Brown’s New Second Line in the International Association of Blacks in Dance showcase, set to New Orleans marching band music, was full of clever sass. Also in a showcase, this time the excellent smorgasbord put together by DanceUSA/Philadelphia, Rennie Harris Puremovement put the ladies front and center in Harris' new work set to Nina Simone’s smoky voice.

Nrityagram at Montgomery County Community College may have demonstrated the finest (East) Indian dance I have ever seen. The group lives and works in a “dance village,” regarding art as a spiritual practice, and it shows.

Also, Jumatatu Poe’s show at Performance Garage was full of precise but full throttle contact. Merian Soto presented yet more hypnotic permutations of her Branch Dances. Meg Foley at Susan Hess was engaged with intriguing explorations. Gabrielle Revlock can do anything, including hula hooping, and I’ll be riveted.(Disclosure: both Foley and Revlock have worked with me). Philadanco’s dancers dance their hearts out utterly. And…

Open the Windows!

2010-07-14T05:35:00.002-07:00

I’m really excited to read Tere O’Connor’s “blook” (blog +book). In the first installment he delves into a bunch of ideas that could blow people’s ways of thinking about dance-making wide open.

Start with this: "I no longer create my works in adherence to a good/bad paradigm. I have become very interested in seeing what the dances can become through a process of witnessing as opposed to employing choreographic technique of any sort.” The evolving dance is midwived rather than “crafted.” Repeatedly he writes about managing a cloud of unwieldy material, not linked in apparent ways, and remaining open to the frameworks that emerge. These come to him after hitting a dead end with initial ideas and suggest a much larger context for the work.

Miracles. Art magic.

Having seen so much dance at the American Dance Festival that followed the old paradigm: tell a story in a linear way, keep it punchy and display virtuosity, reading Tere is like opening the windows wide and looking out on lush space.

Slicing and Dicing the Famous Fungus

2010-07-12T06:56:00.000-07:00

(uncredited photo of Pilobolus from Carolina Performing Arts site)

On the first day of the Critic’s Conference at the American Dance Festival I confessed that in the past I wouldn’t see Pilobolus even if you paid me. At Bennington College in the early 70's I saw the original Pils in a demo that was intriguing - the group's DNA was well in place and they were running on youthful excitement and invention. As they've gone along, the crowd-pleasing, go-for-laughs obviousness of the work became a turn-off for me in the same way that I don't choose to put on easy listening tracks.

Seeing them this July at ADF and coming from a place of such low expectations, the group’s show in the humongous new Durham Performing Arts Center was a surprise - more appealing than I anticipated.

I loved the interaction of Art Spiegelman's comics with live characters in the new Hapless Hooligan in "Still Moving." I enjoyed the circumscribed movement terrains in two of the pieces - one all sailing lifts, often in slow mo (Gnomen), and another all jittery electroshock tremors with hip hop (Megawatt). They sure know how to put on a show.

We wrote about it in little bits. Tedd Bale put us through a series of exercises, taking two minutes to write in each of four styles:

Descriptive: A rocking chair center stage and plucky down-home melodies set a southern mountain feel. Innocuous exchanges in a bubbling cast leave little imprint.

Emotive: The changes of scale in shadow play – hunkering man grows huge by moving toward light source – elicit a childlike fascination. But the violence causes this viewer to recoil – it’s crass stuff, and far from nursery rhymes.

Normative: Nearly forty years on, the group, begun by four Dartmouth undergrads then unschooled in the niceties of dance, is now immensely popular, capitalizing on its most successful formulas to keep’em coming.

Performative: Here’s the Pilobolus recipe – take strong young men and women, get them devising ways to lift, climb over and grapple with each other in multiple group permutations. Change speeds, stories and soundtracks. Go for the gags.

Of course the audience stood up and cheered.

In a morning session later on, John Jasperse brought up a question regarding the effect all this has on the audience’s ability to look at more challenging dance. Some say that pleasing the crowd with an easily accessible group creates more potential dance-goers, but John’s feeling is that if your sense of what dance is is defined by Pilobolus, you are not going to enjoy his work. He feels that the presenters’ strategy of bringing in the Pils because they are so popular just reinforces a situation where audiences want spoon feeding rather than a deeper engagement.

What do you think?

Final Voyage for the Critic's Institute

2010-07-10T07:11:00.000-07:00

Photo by ADF/Sara D. Davis, 2008

Take 14 dance critics and one eminent critic/leader, seat them around a table for hours each day speaking with guests including dance writing’s best practitioners plus presenters, artists, new media mavens and managers, send them out to see and cover a mix of popular mainstream and well-established contemporary dance within a major festival, continue for three weeks (with one day off) and at the end what do you have? Journalists ready to resume their berths at newspapers and web platforms all across the country to report on dance in a more effective, eloquent and possibly experimental way.

The National Endowment for the Arts deserves kudos for having the wisdom to fund this convening of critics over the last nine years. Officially named the NEA Institute for Dance Criticism at the American Dance Festival, this was the first of what are now several separate Arts Criticism Institutes for different art forms.

Within the dance ecosystem good-quality written commentary is crucial. Critics inform audiences about what they may experience watching different kinds of dance: why it matters, what they might take away and what the context for it is. They bring audiences to the work. They create a record in a form that’s evanescent, writing history. And for funders and presenters, their accounts become a way of identifying new artists to produce and endorsing ones worthy of support.

I was a participant in the Institute for Dance Criticism’s final voyage, just ended. It is not slated to receive any funding in next year’s cycle and so faces extinction. This is a shame. People doing terrific work like Claudia LaRocco at the New York Times and Theodore Bale in Houston have been past participants. While critics convene in weekend conferences, in no way do those replace the intensive input offered at the Institute. Suzanne Carbonneau who has been its leader for nine years cultivates not only writing chops, but also attitudes that engender supporting the field as a whole, maintaining allegiance to the reader while remaining respectful of artists and open to all forms.

Thank you National Endowment for the Arts for the great experience I had. I’ll better serve Philadelphia artists and audiences through what I’ve learned. I’m just sorry that a continuing stream of other writers and their communities will not enjoy those same benefits.

A Beautiful Beast

2010-05-26T08:42:00.000-07:00

photo copyright Jordi Bover

Steve Paxton is a dancer I've been watching over the course of nearly forty years. When I told him that my children are grown enough that they now go up to Vermont on their own (that’s where he lives and where we met as teacher and student) he said that time just telescoped, decades down to a moment. Watching Paxton perform his new solo The Beast at Baryshnikov Arts Center, time telescopes too. I visualize the kinetic lusciousness of earlier Paxton incarnations, but here he shows us the dancing’s skeleton. Rather than nostalgia there’s joy in this fruition of his dancing life. The distillation of his focus and the stripping away of connective actions makes for the sparest presentation of one human body’s range of motion and properties of balance. Paxton presents his own body as a locus for inquiry, as he always has. His investigation has become increasingly detailed, exquisite. Without the spongy bounce and space-eating flow of his earlier incarnations, he is pure facet, pure torque, pure stacked bones and stretched sinew.

Merce taught us to look at movement without asking for its implied narrative. And the Raineresque performative straightforwardness of the Judson era finds its apogee in Steve whose weathered face is that of a deadpan everyman. Why then do we have the sense that there’s a scenario here, teasing us by laying just beyond our comprehension? The Beast has a sound score that’s hard to place – is it electronic, made to sound like birds? Water droplets? There’s a percussive rushing quality to it and it rises and ebbs, just as the light, a shifting pool now oblong, now a rough round, moves without provocation. Paxton seems to be lodged in this place, a dark nowhere. Atmospheric, mysterious, this visual and aural setting make a habitat for The Beast. And just who is that?

Paxton’s bio states right off that he lives on a farm. Watching him dance is not unlike watching someone scythe a field, or build a wall. Action is in service of something, and delivered without flourish or emphasis. He seems engaged with questions: ‘What is this? What happens if I shift balance by curving the spine laterally? What happens if I cross one foot over the other, standing? Or tip my head back as far as it goes?’ The action produced by that last inquiry, looking upward, is often associated with a kind of aspiration. Here it’s not that, or anything you could nail. And although that action recurs frequently, as does a full torqueing twist of head against pelvis, or a thrust through the hands, they never reveal any further reason for being. They just are. ‘Testing the Apparatus’ is the shorthand that comes to mind.

In 1986 Paxton began performing his Goldberg Variations to both of Glenn Gould’s recordings of Bach’s masterwork, the first made at the promising outset of Gould’s career, the second after a life in music, more settled and measured, and just months before his early death. The metaphor of the maturation of the artist over time was deeply moving. Paxton’s face in the second half of Goldberg was smeared with wet clay which, over the course of the work, dried and contracted, creating a crinkly premonition of older age. Today his face looks like the one he projected twenty some years ago. And I believe that the dancer he is now is the one he was imagining in Goldberg. And how essentialized and brilliant that dancer has become, like a diamond.

Tasting "Excellence"

2010-05-08T06:54:00.001-07:00

[Photo: "Only Sleeping" by Subcircle and Geoff Sobelle]

A recent meeting at The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage posed the question “what kinds of formats provide and encourage evaluative critical feedback that promotes excellence?” It’s obvious that most everything you see can be developed further in a variety of ways. Sometimes a choreographer has a blind spot, sometimes not enough time, or both. And sometimes excellence will elude even the most thorough worker. There’s a mysterious component too: the ineffable brilliance factor, impossible to manufacture.

How thrilling then to see a dance work, or even big hunks of a dance work, that are beautifully considered, clearly the product of prodigious intelligence, and breathtakingly executed. Two such experiences in one week leave this viewer delighted, relieved, as though drenched with rain in a dry time.

Pennsylvania Ballet demonstrates itself alternately as being top drawer or nearer second string. In mounting William Forsythe’s “In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated,” the Ballet has taken on a work that crackles with brilliance throughout and pushes the dancers to unimagined heights. Forsythe plays between the pedestrian and the meta-virtuosic. Shambling entrances or casual shifts in space are ‘breathers’ that just whet the appetite for more of his whippet swift distortions of traditional ballet line. Formations recall the studio dynamic of ‘in-betweens’ – a line far upstage with each dancer in a different resting pose, a cluster to the side that forms and reforms before the “hit it” moment. And when they do hit it, the action is perilous: partnering with leans at precipitous angles and thrown weight. This was Forsythe before his work strayed too far from the ballet lexicon so every stretch away from the familiar is illuminating, delightful. And the dancers, thoroughbreds that they are, lap up the challenge. I have never seen principals like Zachary Hench, Riolama Lorenzo, Julie Diana, Amy Aldrich move so big, so fast, and so wild. It goes so far beyond even the most virtuosic turns I have witnessed at PA Ballet in the past that I’m left dazed, an adulating fan.

On quite another end of the dance spectrum, Niki and Jorge Cousineau, known collectively as Subcircle, in collaboration with Geoff Sobelle, have mounted an exhilarating synthesis of projected video with dance, text and original music - “Only Sleeping.” This is one of those works where a long history of collaboration and time to chew on multiple possibilities before settling on finalized images have resulted in moments of exquisite complexity. You read intelligence from the get-go. Sobelle appears on video only, a Magritte-like everyman, a counterpart to Niki Cousineau’s everywoman/mother (we learn on audio). Mike Kiley’s music has a rock sensibility and uses a wall of voices for intensely cinematic moments.

In a set resembling a living room with two doorways, a window, and an expanse of wall serving as a large projection surface, “Only Sleeping” relates a tale of parallel worlds, a fantasy of being swept from one’s life into that of another. The lightly sketched story line is given a sense of place through video imagery of hallways, empty rooms, and an expanse of ocean. It mines earlier works by Subcircle (“Somewhere Close to Now” above all) with a live performer in perplexing circumstances involving changes of scale and orientation.

The piece has knock-out transitions that shift nearly imperceptibly from the offhand and conversational to the theatrical (like Forsythe’s switches from preparation to full out execution). The interrelationships of multiple projected video images are orchestral in their density. Layered over time they conform to or thwart expectation, as when after seeing a door open multiple times to reveal Sobelle behind it in some quasi-pedestrian but indescribable activity, the door finally opens to reveal another door and another and another, ad infinitum. “Only Sleeping” is like that, opening out to new ground, who knows precisely where.

Recent Writing

2010-03-12T05:30:00.000-08:00

Please note, the Inquirer articles are no longer available online. Please contact me if you are interested in reading them.

A spate of recent articles and essays:
On the Dance With Camera show at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Philly - http://www.philly.com/inquirer/magazine/79879367.html
Observations about the recent International Association of Blacks in Dance conference and performances - http://www.philly.com/inquirer/magazine/82034482.html
A review of Fraulein Maria - http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/arts/70213087.html
And a piece on the Dance Advance archive where I had great latitude and mused about performance and travel in Asia - http://www.pcah.us/m/dance/six-reflections-six-snapshots.pdf

A Letter to the New York Times

2010-01-06T05:51:00.000-08:00

To the Editors,

If dance is the “art with no history” as Alastair Macaulay states, fair and broad-minded reporting of it, which IS in effect its history, is all the more crucial. In Mr. Macaulay’s assessment of the last decade in dance (Choreographic Climate Change, 12/31), he dismissed the downtown modern and post-modern segment of the field as “too large for anyone to keep complete track of it.” Dance’s cutting edge is no more unwieldy than that of any other artistic field; this statement reads as lack of personal interest.

While the Times’ senior critic has considerable knowledge and skill, he’s missing the curiosity required for comprehensive reporting on dance. Biases become a problem. How can he limn the 1980’s without mention of Trisha Brown whose innovations in physical language and choreographic devices permanently changed the face of contemporary dance? While Mr. Macaulay’s stated preference for ‘joy’ in dance is understandable, deep investigation and the continuing evolution of the art form merit acknowledgement.

Sincerely yours,

Lisa Kraus

Macaulay's article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/arts/dance/03choreography.html

Contemplating the Cambodians...

2009-11-21T08:24:00.000-08:00

I took part in “By Gesture By Word” – workshops and presentations on Cambodian Dance with members of the Khmer Arts Ensemble, sponsored by Dance Advance. Here are some reflections:

1 Dancing has the power to lift you out of misery. In daily practice Chamreoun Yin worked adjacent to me as we learned the “giant” role, one of the primary archetypes from Cambodian dance. He had never worked on this role before. He first danced classical Cambodian dance thirty years before in a refugee camp, at the time when his entire country had been subjected to extreme violence and destruction. You could see on his face that doing this dancing was a refuge – a space of equanimity, of serenity, of joy. The power of inhabiting these slow-moving, spatially contained and gesturally detailed forms is, by its nature, one of growing more centered and uplifted and connected to the divine.

2 You can see what is in someone’s mind. I was fascinated to read on the faces of Sophiline Cheam Shapiro, her sister Charya Burt and the two younger dancers from Khmer Arts a quality that is transmitted to the collective: each of them projects an image of extreme dignity, restraint, and (what I read as) fundamental goodness. The half-smile seen on the gigantic faces of the Buddhas at Bayon is on their faces. Their eyes are steady, confident, receptive, awake. None of this appears pasted on, but instead seems to emanate from entering a particular a state of mind, a collectively understood experience. This may be engendered through initially assuming the form, but in time it comes to be a much deeper expression, where practicing the dances seems to shift one’s mind.

3 Small can be more powerful than big. As giants we had some large actions – brandishing our swords, declaring an intent to catch our enemy. But we also had many subtle shifts in the torso, ripples moving from the ribcage to head or from the wrist through to the head. This was even more prevalent in the women’s role: certain actions were so small as to be nearly invisible, vibrations almost, like a beat of hummingbirds’ wings. I love this quality of “resting” on one spot as a very tiny movement animates the body and space.

4 There is a space in between holding fast to tradition and throwing away the past to focus solely on the “new.” Many artists are looking for a way to effectively balance respect for and conservation of what has gone before with an openness to new influences and innovations. Questions about how to practice traditional arts in a contemporary way are paramount for many of the traditional artists who took part in this workshop. And for those of us coming out of the experimental wing of our field, the question is how to effectively embrace, build on and bring along the knowledge and strategies of what has gone before.

5 As an older dancer, it’s completely appropriate to be judicious while putting my body in situations that could result in injury. Being somewhat more delicate and more prone to injury than when I was younger, I am “conservative” regarding how I want to use and train my body. This feels completely correct. Stretches designed to actually alter the shape of the body (like ones to create a hyper-extended elbow) felt awful and I chose not to do them.

6 Devotion to lineage is at the heart of Cambodian dance study. My study as a Buddhist emphasizes this as well. I could feel in my fellow participants a kind of settling into the spiritual aspects of this dance practice, with this one idea as an entry-point.

7 Providing simple frameworks for responses to arise can be more effective than more carefully crafted “assignments” or forums. Our group was asked simply to present some of our work and examine how the contact with the Cambodian dancing is relevant to it. The range of responses was stunning, reflecting a deep connection and thoughtful contemplation. I was very impressed with what practicing and hearing about the forms brought to each of us.

8 Cultures that emphasize the individual are more likely to celebrate the lone-wolf auteur. Cultures that prize the life of the group and community are more likely to hold to tradition. “Conservative,” in the sense of preserving what from the past is of value, is not a dirty word. When we abandon conservation because we so prize the innovators, the named artists who are stars rather than the anonymous ones whose work preserves and builds on what has gone before, what have we lost? Is our sense of societal disconnect and tendency toward isolation bound up with this? This question has nagged at me since visiting Bali in '85. On returning to the U.S. I remember writing a grant application complaining of our collective "cultural bankruptcy." That's one application that certainly didn't get funded!

Honoring Mama Kariamu

2009-11-19T03:16:00.000-08:00

photo by Joseph V. Labolito/Temple University

How often does a concert end on a note of such unbridled joy that audience members head out into the night singing? Kariamu & Company: Traditions’ concerts at Temple University celebrating 40 years of Umfundalai technique ended in just this way, with a shared ecstasy and sense of affirmation more reminiscent of a community gathering than a concert in a proscenium theater.

Dr. Kariamu Welsh (Mama Kariamu), head of the Dance Department at Temple, makes dances, but I experienced them in this concert more as vessels into which her dancers pour every drop of their passion and personal power. They address tragedies of diaspora and challenges of urban life with humor, urgency, unity and dignity.

Works from across the years were interspersed with moving testimonies by students who became teachers themselves. C. Kemal Nance, Kariamu’s student from the time he was 8 years old, is today a doctoral candidate and a powerhouse mover. Each of the older dancers who demonstrated their moves was a knockout, having applied her teaching over the long haul.

Honoring the life’s work of those who develop techniques, foster the development of dancers, and provide them with fulfilling performing opportunities doesn’t happen nearly enough. Mama Kariamu, whose Umfundalai technique amalgamates aspects of dance languages from all over Africa, richly deserves this tribute.

Lucy Guerin Inc. in "Corridor"

2009-09-30T04:02:00.000-07:00

I am hooked on Lucy Guerin’s Corridor. It’s a slow burn; with the company at Bryn Mawr College where I curate the Performing Arts Series, I saw the show five times over the course of two days and will be sustained on it for months.

What is it that’s gotten so under my skin? The dancing is the best I can recall in ages. Like a family of singers with distinct voices but whose DNA makes their tones blend beautifully, most of the three men and three women trained at Australia’s Victorian College of the Arts, which reliably turns out great dancers. They are fleet, flexible, brazen movers who are neither blank nor overly emotive. I could watch them forever.

Corridor’s scenes sweep up and down the expanse of an eighty-foot swath of marley flooring, building a tone at once humorous and terrifying. The show emerges stealthily out of the two parallel rows of audience facing each other as seated dancers answer their cell phones and begin milling about and chatting, some shushed by audience members confused by this hazy beginning. What ensues is a slew of variations on responding to inputs and commands, with seemingly less and less ability to fulfill anything completely. At one point the malaise manifests in a “sickness” duet with actions of retching, flinching, and groaning woven rhythmically into a tour-de-force essay on all-too-familiar suffering.

Sections are handsomely crafted, with any piece of the whole having its own ebb and flow, twists and turns. The sickness duet sputters and restarts and ends, surprisingly, as a quintet with all, doggy-style, looking up to Byron Perry as he segues into a new solo. Still, the whole does not easily cohere, and is no easy-read. As the setting shifts completely in the piece’s last quarter to a dark and ominous world of lab coats and lights from a rolling octopus-like structure trained on intimate encounters, the sense of puzzling out the meaning of the overall picture feels adult– complex and not easily contained.

Mirrored panels onstage and moving light boxes shuttled behind the audience let dancing be seen behind layers of shiny, smoky obscuration. As dancers and panels move up and down the long, narrow playing space each audience member has moments of watching at extremely close range, and other times of seeing as though down a very long hallway, observing different elements stacked.

Guerin’s physical language has absorbed everything from the classical to the released to the studied gesture. The dancers can create flow and connection between their movements but astonish most with intricately spliced action: footwork moves to tiny hand gesture, to big flailing fall, to bounding leap. In the case of Perry, whose marathon solo is framed by checking himself out in the mirrors on either end of the space, this quick cutting reaches a virtuosic zenith.
His utterances are halfway mumbled, or shouted, his focus turns on a dime. He is the modern multi-tasker, the one navigating too many inputs, impulses and possibilities. Life marches on around him in the guise of four dancers shuttling back and forth with technique class skips and leaps, now backward, now arcing. Perry hurls himself through space, as though on a continuously shifting precipice, and the quick change dynamics and broken snippets of commentary make him seem slightly mad.

In fact, they all begin to seem half-mad, part of a world gone crazy. Is it their constricted space? The effort and speed of trying to keep up? The continual inputs from MP3 players, being told what to do by the wielder of the microphone or blaring speakers, the subliminal messaging – all that “stim”?

Corridor is unsettling, not least because it ends on an ambiguous note of violence, with the soundscape mounting into a whirling machine-driven storm. Finally it all cuts out; the plug is pulled. In Thomas Great Hall the vast, dark space where we are left reverberates with afterimages of distress, with no easy fix.

I felt surprisingly tender toward these people portraying contemporary malaise, trying their best, coupling elegantly, fervently or manically, sailing through space with fine-tuned precision or shuttling through phrases of rhythmic non-sequitors: pop, you’re here, oops, sliding off there, and wow what about this thing? Movement mirrors mind. Guerin’s got it nailed.

The love of dance is life-long and getting a fix like Corridor comes not so often. I treasure the intelligence, dedication and gifts that make such moments in the theater possible. The poor artist is rich indeed.

Across the Great Divide

2009-09-20T07:26:00.000-07:00

I wish I’d eavesdropped more after the A.W.A.R.D. show finale. Passing a parked van with disappointed dancers returning home (not sure which group they were from), I overheard “All they did was….” And then I filled in the blank to form a picture through their eyes of Nichole Canuso’s winning contact duet. “All they did was” roll around, pull and push each other, find lifts and perches, look out with quizzical perplexity. What they didn’t do was power leaps, or turns, or high legs. Or high drama, or unison, or big full out expression to thumping music.

The A.W.A.R.D. show concluded as it began, with audience and dancers divided into camps depending on personal allegiance and dance orientation. I wish I could say it expanded people’s ideas about what dance is and can be. Having been at just two of the four nights, I can’t fully say. But my impression is that once all the butts were in the seats, this captive audience could have used more skillful ways to get thinking outside their respective boxes. On Wednesday, the lady behind me commented on Gabrielle Revlock’s arch and extremely virtuosic hula hoop marathon: “She’s just hula hooping, that’s not dance.” It seems to me that by pitting different styles against each other and not offering dialogue illuminating what’s there to be appreciated, the audience gets left exactly where it started. The choreographers did speak about their individual aims in the preliminaries. But these kinds of descriptions are frequently far removed from what’s actually onstage and don’t necessarily help a watcher know how to “read” a dance.

On TV, talent contests involve judges talking about why what they see is or isn’t strong. And that helps a viewer understand what to look for. Here the judges voted behind closed doors and were all of one stripe – NY “downtown.” Bigwigs, sure. But were they capable of fairly judging “show” dance or contemporary tap?

I was distressed that a process that was supposed to uncover the best young choreographers in Philly ended up with a finale that from a choreographic point of view was exceedingly weak. As a Philadelphia-based dance artist, I was embarrassed that our community should be represented by work that seemed so unworldly – caught in a time warp, and, at its worst, unschooled in effective composition.

Maybe I’m wrong in thinking that I appreciate dance that’s well done, no matter the style. Maybe dance has its inflexible territorial equivalent of red states and blue states, evangelical right versus liberal left. Would it help to agree on substantive criteria that would allow us to “fairly” assess merits across wide gulfs? Potential, Originality, Execution and Merit, the rubric suggested at the A.W.A.R.D. show, seems insufficient. Would rolling up the sleeves to look more deeply just drive audience away? It’s a delicate, ahem, dance. And how much of looking is going to be subjective and alchemical no matter what?

If the aims of the A.W.A.R.D. show are to develop an audience for dance, the most helpful gesture in that direction came from Lois Welk, head of DanceUSA/Philadelphia who offered to pay for the ticket of anyone in the finale audience who goes to see a dance group they haven’t seen before within the next 30 days. Now that’s a tantalizing goad to seeing, and hopefully appreciating, more dance!

Defining Dance: A Letter to the Broad Street Review

2009-09-17T04:46:00.000-07:00

To the Editor:
Jim Rutter’s critique of “more.” in the Broad Street Review (“Is it Art- or Just Movement?”) evokes the tired question “Is it dance?”. Whatever Rutter’s response to Headlong Dance Theater’s newest work, I suggest that he and every critic in Philadelphia catch up to what was a groundbreaking revelation in the 1960’s at New York’s Judson Church: Dance can be all-encompassing and does not need to be fashioned of traditionally virtuosic movement. Pieces that forever changed the field include Trisha Brown’s “Man Walking Down the Side of Building” which was, literally, that, or “Roof Piece” in which semaphore-like gestures were passed, as in the game ‘telephone,’ over the rooftops of then-developing Soho. Neither of these might have been recognizable as “dance” in their day, but both have come to be seen unequivocally as dance, and as representing the commendable artistic adventurousness of an era. Must we keep going backward? Critics are responsible for speaking from a context of knowing their field, and their field of today, not that of a half-century back.
Sincerely,
Lisa Kraus

Notes on Headlong Dance Theater’s "more."

2009-09-11T06:49:00.000-07:00

September 2009 in the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival http://www.livearts-fringe.org/details.cfm?id=7077

Usually on first viewing I form a composite sense of a dance’s elements in the same way that we all perceive movement while watching films - our brains link what are actually still shots. "more." initially defies this kind of synthesis. Its nature is of fracturing and fragmentation. Its six dancers do not interact so much as co-exist, demonstrating, at times for each other, at times for the space itself, their personal movement statement of the moment, then settling back into a generalized passivity – a state of waiting, watching, slightly irritated togetherness. All acts dissipate like waves in an ocean.

"more." is dark, something no other Headlong piece I’ve seen could truly be called. Christina Zani, her left leg in a big brace and often seated in a wheelchair, embodies physical dissolution. At the piece’s emotional center, she enthusiastically marks out for the five others a dance she envisions, but they slip back into their default position, poised on a four-seater turquoise couch in their living room set. Zani’s dance never happens. She is left alone, wheelchair-bound, facing the audience. The subtle play of responses passing over her face is wondrous - I see despondency and the kind of “bucking up” self-talk our society favors. Her story is of the fragility of the body, and isolation, and contrasts with Nichole Canuso’s repeating far-upstage displays of balletic virtuosity. Nice, in a chilling way.

Zani later receives a healing treatment onstage and the space is transformed into a verdant oasis with the addition of leafed-out saplings. Maybe things aren’t so bad after all…

Most of "more."’s movement is spasmodic . Occurring in snippets rather than arcs, movements are nearly all small, repetitive, and gestural, like enlarged tics with interruptions and responses. With an exception or two, no one dances “together” in more. Instead, unisons performed in close proximity or spread apart have the effect of underscoring the movement and calling attention to the space and its composition of seated figures, furniture, and upright dancers. Decisions are formalist and transparent- how do moments arise and transform and cut off? How does a phrase replicate itself at different times in different configurations?

Three of "more."’s players are nearly faceless. Nicole Cousineau in particular recedes, seeming to create a character whose modus operandi is vanishing . At one moment she stands up after having been concealed for some time behind an overstuffed armchair. It resembles a moment of seeing someone who had been previously “invisible,” suggesting a forbearing housewife or mother (“oh, don’t worry about me…”).

Headlong has often seemed less drawn to using movement as a medium for its intrinsic qualities than for its versatility as a vehicle for communicating about other concepts and states. The dancing in "more." sometimes appears like chatter: something to occupy its players, like random statements blurted out into an infinite ether. But "more." delves more deeply into the nature of its movement than any Headlong piece to date, with a movement palette that’s exploratory, thoughtful and of a piece. It unspools in a way that continually reveals the minds of its makers, and the myriad decisions comprising the whole. "more." could benefit from being pushed further structurally to reveal a logic for its myriad short movement bursts that now seem underdeveloped.

"more." is not warm and fuzzy. It’s not cute. But it has a tender regard for some of its characters – Devynn Emory begins and ends the show as an androgynous, human-animal spirit. She is given a whole new environment at the end - perhaps it’s the place of her dreams. This marks a moment of generosity in the piece, and isn’t saccharine, being tempered by the trivialization of a cheering throng.

Dance addresses the ineffable. One of Headlong ’s members said to me after the show that "more." is the first of the group’s dances where what it’s saying can’t be captured in language. I agree. While an unsettling viewing experience, I find it an exhilarating leap in the company’s artistic adventure. And, I wonder whether it might be one of those very few shows that yields its fruits slowly, being puzzling on initial viewing and later coming to mean a great deal, or even representing a turning point in theatrical convention.

[Disclaimer: I have worked closely with several of the performers and directors of "more." and cannot claim impartiality or absence of conflict of interest.]

(End of) Summer News Letter

2009-08-29T08:05:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

I hope the summer found you with time to unwind and enjoy! Here’s my news:

In May I attended the Dublin Dance Festival where I saw some of the very intelligent mixture of text/video/movement that is coming out of Europe and Australia. Lucy Guerin Inc. who will open our next Bryn Mawr season was a knockout, and Rachid Ouramdane from France was able to use two sorts of literary voices so effectively in relating about his Algerian father’s fighting in Vietnam that it was deeply moving. I posted excerpts from my report for Dance Advance (which, along with the DDF’s sponsors and the Pennsylvania Presenters Travel Fund, subsidized the trip) on my Writing My Dancing Life weblog.

A side pleasure was getting to see Francis Bacon’s painting studio and an installation by Yinka Shonibare who now has a retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum. And how Dublin has blossomed in the 20 years since I was last there! We also spent a day in Rotterdam for the Operadagen Festival and Danny Yung’s “Tears of Barren Hill,” a masterwork in the stripping –down-to essences vein.

In June I was part of a Dance Advance-sponsored visual arts/ performing arts trip to Ohio and St. Louis with highlights including a William Forsythe installation. Read excerpts from my report here.

Regarding work-in-progress on “Red Thread” (opening March 2010), Meg Foley and I conducted ongoing research during the spring and have some intricate bits that now resonate with what we saw from Eva Karczag and Vicky Shick at our Swarthmore showing in April. In August, Eva, Vicky and I met up in Arnhem, the Netherlands for a work intensive at the ArtEz Dansacademie. We posted to our weblog with a daily rehearsal log so you can read all about it! And Gabrielle Revlock and Michele Tantoco have agreed to join the project. I’m thrilled with this cast!

“Red Thread,” being inspired by patchwork and women’s quilting circles, has challenged me to reconnect with that craft. At Karme Choling in Vermont, I initiated a sewing circle for all who wanted to work with a needle during the week of Family Camp. We had about thrity takers!

Auspiciously, during a tour of Amish country in July, we wandered into the quilt studio of Hannah Stoltzfoos of Smoketown who was very open to talking about her quilt-making. She seems to do a thriving business and had some lovely examples to show. It felt like talking across the centuries - one woman who lives without electricity or combustion engines speaking with another who uses the internet continually and is on the move in a Mazda. Where do we meet? In the love of pattern, color, and stitching…

On the writing front, Dr. Donna Jo Napoli, Chair of Linguistics at Swarthmore, and I just completed our paper on “Parameters of Language and Dance.” I have been invited to write on Twitter for the Live Arts/Fringe Festival, a new frontier for me. And as a final bit of good news, the Leeway Foundation just announced their next round of Art and Change Grants and “Red Thread” is among the grantees!

All good wishes,
Lisa

P.S. With the news of Merce Cunningham’s death at 90, here’s a deep bow to him as a pivotal pioneer and teacher.

smaller and smaller

2009-08-08T04:31:00.000-07:00

I've signed on to be one of the writers on TwitterFest through Live Arts. As time goes on the number of words a dance writer can use sure has shrunk! The Village Voice used to print 1,000 word reviews. Standard now in the Inquirer is 400 words, 200 during Live Arts. On Twitter we'll be writing 140 characters at a time: single thoughts, but writing four or more of them on a given day. Ninja writers, cutting away anything extra! Ready for the challenge.

Twenty Questions

2009-07-27T11:22:00.001-07:00

from a Dance/Visual Art Exchange: Ohio, Missouri 6/2009*
What correspondence is there between dramaturgy and curation?
What are strategies of composition in the visual arts that can apply to performance?
What hallmarks distinguish effective work? What do “Big People” do (this refers to a Meredith Monk film we viewed pre-trip re: conceptual outrageousness)?
How do we provide liminal space – a decompression chamber to enter art-making mind (of not knowing, waiting, finding)?
How do we foster art as “everyday practice” (Ann Hamilton), a “practice of questions”?
How does revealing the underlying systems and concepts of an artwork through accompanying text or narration serve or detract in perceiving the work? What are optimal ways of presenting contextual information to the viewers of a work?
What is the museum’s role in cultivating artistic literacy in children and adults? How do they do it? What is a dance equivalent?
How does ”reading meaning” remain a fluid activity, not a “spoiler”?
How can criticism foster awareness and excellence?
What are liminal /interdisciplinary works (i.e. Forsythe “choreographing” viewers)? How do artists learn to make them?
How does the museum become a crucible for meaningful interactions with art for all socio-economic groups?
How does the experience of architectural space allow a viewer to attend more deeply to their perceptions of art works?
How can the making of a work slip between the collective and the individual (the choir and the soloist)?
How does an artist find the right question to function as the center of a particular developmental process?
How can arts presenting organizations effectively combine missions of showing worthy art and being agents of civic and social change?
How does the curator/artist “friendship” when cultivated over a longer timeframe result in more interesting or successful projects?
How does the act of listening become the material of the work (Hamilton)?
How do you make a conversation public?
How does the question of a work connect you to some community; how do you become a local artist?
Is it possible to reside in a space of open-mindedness, pre-thought, before a “for and against” mentality clouds the ability to see?
*Sponsored by Dance Advance, a band of twelve dance and visual artists, video makers, composers, curators and arts advocates visited the Columbus Museum of Art, Wexner Center, and Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center in Ohio, and the Contemporary Art Museum, Pulitzer Foundation, and Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Art at Washington University in St. Louis. We spoke with directors and curators at several of these institutions gaining a sense of their methods and how they are thinking about their respective communities. The group was catalyzed into conversation by Mary Jane Jacobs as lead thinker.

News from Dublin and Rotterdam

2009-07-24T07:40:00.000-07:00

Speaking with the Irish about their country always includes discussion of economic health or woes. On our first Dublin day I visited Kilmainham Gaol where starving youngsters who had stolen a loaf of bread during the potato famine and political prisoners were incarcerated. The quality of despondency represented by the jail gave a window in to the dramatic work presented later by one Irish company, Junk Ensemble. Compared to the coal-smoke dulled Dublin I knew in the 1980‘s the city looks uplifted and vigorous now. But cabbies and everyone else will tell you the Celtic Tiger has been brought to its knees. Still, some institutions we saw seem to have remained well-endowed.

Service organization Dance Ireland runs a sleek facility called Dance House with multiple spacious studios, and computer and library access. They sponsored two programs of showcases for Irish artists within the Dublin Dance Festival. These shows begged the question whether fine facilities help in cultivating excellent work. Notable exceptions were works by Jean Butler, a championship Irish step dancer who is now investigating contemporary forms in an extremely vulnerable and compelling way, and Liz Roche whose sophisticated duet took partnering into a fresh terrain of obstruction and stillness.

The Dance House counterpart in Cork, Firkin Crane, seems to be limping along, under-endowed and with staff stretched thin in multiple capacities. In these times with our budgets at Bryn Mawr (and all other institutions with which I am allied) being cut, I certainly empathized with these valiant arts workers.

The Dublin Dance Festival made a great choice in engaging Laurie Uprichard, formerly director of the Danspace Project in New York, as director. The Festival is energized, with artists of high caliber and high levels of attendance, all of it animating the Temple Bar section of Dublin.

Artists whose work was featured in the Festival included Lucy Guerin from Australia whose work “Structure and Sadness” (pictured here) I had viewed multiple times on DVD but never live. Bryn Mawr will be presenting Guerin this September so it was helpful for me to see how much more visceral and detailed her work is in person. Rachid Ouramdane’s piece “Loin” was the most revelatory for me for its intelligence in the weaving of text using two distinct voices - one poetic, one reportorial - plus video displayed on oddly shaped projection surfaces, and radical movement states. Both Ouramdane’s and Guerin’s work is at a level of refinement in their unity of visual elements and choreography that we simply don’t see in the US; this has got to be in part the result of sufficient budgets and development time.

Wendy Houston is a seasoned British performer whose solo performance “Happy Hour” took place in a bar and used clever displacements of language relative to the actual event we were witnessing. Jose Navas’s solo “Miniatures” depended a little too heavily on its performer’s virtuosity and charisma and offered too little in terms of conscious shaping. Ioana Popovoci composed a curious and somewhat static play based on “Animal Farm” with small objects – absurdist, and charming to me in its obsessiveness.

The most controversial work seemed to be David Zambrano’s “Soul Project,” a display of ordinary folks in a vast hall doing their fanciest party dance moves in carnivalesque costumes. It sat at the border between participatory and captive viewing in a maddening way and lead to conversations about how the choreographer’s framing of the audience’s paradigm for viewing makes all the difference. It seemed that Zambrano had not thought all that thoroughly about it.

Our final day in Rotterdam was focused on Danny Yung’s “Tears of Barren Hill.” Since seeing this work on video in Hong Kong, I have held Yung in the highest esteem. He brings the classical form of Peking Opera into the most contemporary of settings and sets up resonance between a host of thematic and performative elements. “Barren Hill” was featured within Operadagen Rotterdam 2009, an impressive festival dedicated to alternative opera that is seeking ways to generate a new audience for the form. The festival’s programming, hospitality, graphics coordination, and press conference/public kick-off all seemed inventively conceived in that inimitably Dutch adventurous way.

The work “Tears of Barren Hill,” is at every turn exquisite and restrained. Artistically I am moved by Yung’s undressing and stripping away, seeking the barest essentials of his forms. Trained initially as an architect, it is as though he finds his way down to bone and marrow.

Thanks for sponsorship to the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage through Dance Advance, the Dublin Dance Festival, and the Pennsylvania Presenters Travel Fund.

Chatting with my Congressman

2009-07-21T12:33:00.000-07:00

I posted this to the Philadelphia Dance Listserv on 7/15. It's relevant even if you don't live in Pennsylvania, being about how to work our representative democracy.

Dear Dance Colleagues,

Yesterday at the State Capitol following the thunderous rally in support of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts (threatened now with elimination) I went to visit my legislative representatives. At the office of Mike Gerber (Montgomery County) I had a chat with his assistant, and then, surprisingly, a long one with him!

The take away is that YOUR INDIVIDUAL CONTACT WITH YOUR LEGISLATORS MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE! There is no substitute for a significant number of individuals approaching our lawmakers one by one through mail, email or phone. For all issues under consideration Gerber’s assistant keeps a tally of calls, emails and letters. Gerber reads only a small sampling. WHAT’S CRUCIAL ARE THE NUMBERS.

By yesterday, Gerber had received a total of fewer than 40 phone calls, emails and letters in the current round of proposed elimination of state arts funding. He said that if he had high numbers of communications from concerned citizens he could go to the Republican Senator from our district who, along with most in his party, is intent on draconian cuts and say “What about these constituents of ours? Can you afford to ignore them?” If more of us go on record as being willing to pay a little more in taxes to pay for the things that make ours a humane and civilized society, a saner budget stands a chance. If we don’t, the reps take that to mean we will not stomach any new taxes, and funding for PCA and many other vital services will be lost.

PA is the only state considering complete elimination of its arts council. PLEASE write and call your own state senator and representative TODAY and tell them that you consider supporting the arts an essential part of government and that you are willing to pay a little more to make that possible. (You can locate contact info for your district at http://www.legis.state.pa.us/)

Thank you!

Lisa Kraus

2009-04-20T11:09:00.000-07:00

Meeting Monkeys and Dancing with Goddesses

in Cambodia and Hong Kong

The seamlessly organized Dance Advance professional development trip I was fortunate to participate in this February provided the opportunity to experience the way dance tradition is maintained in a country that has lost many of its foremost practitioners through political violence and upheaval, and to pose questions about the relationship of artistic preservation to experimentation. We considered the work of three veteran artists and saw the work of several younger up-and–coming ones. For the Philadelphia artists, sharing our own practice with the dancers of the Khmer Ensemble enabled us to see each other’s defining qualities and preoccupations. It was exhilarating personally to reconnect with “sacred” dance from this part of the world and to witness dance in a Buddhist context, something that as a long-time Buddhist practitioner I had never done.

Our first encounter with Cambodia was through the lens of Angkor Wat, the famed temple complex that is one of the man-made wonders of the world. Toni Shapiro Phim, a native Philadelphian who now resides in Pnom Penh, oriented us there, highlighting the significance of the form of the apsara - the heavenly dancer - rendered by the hundreds on the temple walls. The Cambodian legend of the origin of dance is that as gods and demons held a tug-of-war with a Naga (a powerful serpent), they churned a milky sea which spawned thousands of exquisite dancing goddesses, or apsaras. These became the model for earthly dancers whose role was to be an intercessor between heaven and earth. Dancers in Cambodia were always linked to the king and his court, and were later used as emblems of power by succeeding governments.

Sacred Tradition - In the same way that dance was initially transmitted through divine agents, so a lineage continues through dancers who trained and danced at court. These dancers are utterly faithful to teaching what they themselves remember and have collectively been able to piece together with the few other artists who remain alive (about 90% of artists perished under the Khmer Rouge).

Included in the readings we were given to prepare for the trip were pieces by Sophiline Cheam Shapiro which also address the Cambodian dancer’s ideal of being possessed while dancing, being taken over by former teachers in a way that makes the dancing transcendent. This idea resonates with my own frequent cycling back through all my influences (as seen in my performance and video “50 Moves” and current work “Red Thread”).

Shapiro also wrote at length, and spoke in our presence, about the challenges politically of setting up shop where there is still a monarchy and hidebound bureaucracy. As she is married to an American and spent considerable time in California developing a school she enjoys distinct advantages - raising money for the Khmer Academy and Ensemble in the US while paying out at far lower Cambodian rates. Shapiro and her family are able to live in a family-owned compound with a theater across the road built by Shapiro’s uncle, a former minister of culture. This they use for both training and performances. Thus we saw a Southeast Asian variant on how to make dance economically workable.

The recollection of US’s involvement in this part of the world forms a haunting backdrop for such a visit. While there I read Loung Ung’s “First They Killed My Father,” an account of one child’s experience under the Khmer Rouge. Although the Cambodian genocide was not a direct result of US intervention, it is on a continuum with the immense suffering and barbarism connected with the Vietnam War.

My visceral response on first seeing the Khmer Ensemble dancers, especially knowing that their practice of this dancing rises from the ashes of a collective nightmare, was to melt, to weep. It is sublime, knowing, and serene. The detail and demeanor in each dancer is exquisite. I was reminded also of the deep connection I felt to Indonesian dance following visits to Java and Bali and subsequent study of Javanese court dance over 20 years ago. This trip seemed a coming full circle; an opportunity to recall what I consider precious.

Shapiro is extending beyond the traditional posture, dynamics, roles and costuming of Cambodian dance. She encounters resistance for making what we might consider subtle alterations. She is concerned with questions of preservation vs. experimentation, questioning how best to ensure the ongoing health of classical Cambodian dance which is her basis. I am meanwhile engaged with a form that is commonly pre-occupied with the new, always seeking another kind of stimulation, another look, another departure.

Hong Kong, Kinetic City - Never having visited Hong Kong before, I was enraptured by its multileveled curvilinear roadways and combination of soaring towers and low-to-the-ground urban bustle. We were able again to contrast the old and the new, the colonial city with the up-to-the-minute metropolis, and to encounter many versions of “hybrid” dance. Witnessing the work of Ea Sola, who has achieved significant international stature, and hearing her expound her ideas in a teatime get-together seemed a largely intellectual exercise compared to the highly emotional response the Cambodians engendered. I was also surprised that I wasn’t especially grabbed by the explorations by young Asian choreographers on the Asia-Pacific Dance Platform during the Festival. Perhaps this was because their forms seemed heavily impacted by Western ideas about structure and material but didn’t have much edge or clarity or fullness of development.

A true Renaissance artist, Danny Yung met with us and showed tapes of work old and new. Here I felt the brilliance of an artist committed to mining the essential in his materials and discovering resonance in elements from disparate sources. I was deeply impressed by his approach to melding Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Peking Opera gestures. This made stunning theater, outwardly simple, but infinitely refined. I look forward to learning much more about this artist and plan to attend a performance of the work that so impressed me in Rotterdam this coming May.

The trip highlighted how each artist whose work we viewed is the product of their own particular cultural context. It was always interesting to note which aspects of the work seemed part of the practitioner’s home culture and which were influences from the west, more or less skillfully integrated. Sharing the experience with Philadelphia colleagues Kun-Yang Lin, Amand Miller

and Tobin Rothlein brought clarity regarding our own foundations, evolution, and differences.

Open Form

2009-03-13T08:26:00.000-07:00

Joao da Silva, a former EDDC colleague who runs the Dance Unlimited program at the ArtEz Dansacademie in Arnhem, the Netherlands, put out a query: how do we think about "Open Form Composition" (a practise central to their study). What follows is my response:

“Open Form Composition” probably means very specific things to the practitioners who use the term to describe their work. Not being one of that group, I surmise that it concerns a way of composing where there is openness to create within the performance itself, by choosing placements and timings and ways of rendering materials. In a related way, I’ve been on a long-term quest to find an alchemically “right place” on the continuum of set to improvised performance.

Early on, Judith Dunn, a former Cunningham dancer and wife of Robert Dunn, told me that my set choreography was far less compelling to her than my improvisation. And she was right. The immediacy and invention available when the discovery was happening on the spot were far more scintillating than the more staid choices in my fully planned forms.

Four decades later, I am still puzzling out the degree to which I want to know, and want my dancers to know, what will happen in performance. My preferred space on the continuum of completely set to completely open work is probably around the midpoint, with sufficient skeleton and materials to make a one-of-a-kind but reliably structured and rich performance.

I recently revived the dance Interactive Random Access (1990) in which the audience has a “menu” of music and dance selections as well as qualities from which to choose. This solo, first made for an intimate fundraiser, was performed in a Hall for 350 people, with the audience miked so that their verbal “commands” could be heard and immediately responded to. For me, the play in that dance – the instantaneous layering of disparate elements – is a major challenge of receptivity and awareness. Much is known (actual movement phrases, texts, improvisational scores) but the totality is always created by the audience moment by moment. Impatience yields a channel-surfing feel. Waiting and enriching or contrasting what’s already present yields surprising depth and twists and turns.

This is satisfying theater – transparent, interactive. Similarly, watching Trisha Brown perform her “Accumulation With Talking Plus Watermotor” many times on tour, where she spliced between two different stories and two different dances, somehow holding the reins on all of them and bringing them to a satisfying conclusion, was inspiring that way.

While I am invested in structure and method the ultimate question is still whether or not the piece “works.” And the way I define that now is whether it fulfills itself; whatever it contains and in whatever form - is it whole?

Winter News

2009-02-03T07:24:00.000-08:00

Photo: Naomi Ramirez

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

I hope the first month of this New Year and its big changes have brought you joy! Here’s my wintertime news:

November 2008 saw the revival of Desert Island (1986) at Judson Memorial Church. It was a pleasure to dance in this TBDSalon alongside recent and current members of the Trisha Brown Dance Company. I’ll reprise Desert Island on the Swarthmore College Faculty Concert, Feb. 14 at 8pm, this time with live feed overhead video.

Eva Karczag and Vicky Shick were back in Philadelphia in December for a second period of work on Red Thread, our collaboration inspired by women’s quilting circles. We each began to take more initiative as individual ‘authors’ of the work. This residency completed the phase of work supported by my 2008 Independence Foundation and Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships. Research continues now in rehearsals with Meg Foley, developing “stitching” and “stories and spaces” and ways of supporting in improvisation. The whole piece will contain disparate elements like multi-colored scraps in a quilt which form a cohesive pattern when assembled all together.

On April 5 we all invite you to “Windows on the Work,” the first open in-progress showing of Red Thread, at Swarthmore College in the Lang Performing Arts Center, Troy dance studio, 4 pm. Also showing will be Cynthia Lee and Lenny Seidman.

On other fronts, I’m keeping my hand in as a writer with pieces for Dance Magazine on the new Martha Clarke piece for Jeanne Ruddy, for the Philadelphia Inquirer on PA Ballet and Ballet Boyz, and for the Dance Advance archive on the pioneering black ballerina and ballet mistress Delores Browne. I’m putting together what should be an exceptional next season for the Bryn Mawr College Performing Arts Series to open the newly renovated Goodhart Hall. On February 13 we look forward to presenting Ballet X and Miro Dance Theater in alternative spaces including renowned architect Louis Kahn’s Erdman Hall. And there’s a late-February Dance Advance professional development trip planned to Cambodia and Hong Kong. I can’t wait; I look forward to it as a way to continue contemplating the connections of dance and spirituality.

Please share your news! With all best wishes,
Lisa

Fall News

2008-10-22T05:13:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

I hope you are thriving in these eventful times. Here’s my fall news:

I’m reviving Desert Island, a solo that was the centerpiece of the Grand Tour (1986). On November 14 and 15, I’ll perform it in the Trisha Brown Dance Company Salon at the Judson Church in New York. The solo plays out on a carpet/island; it’s a psychological score, and fascinating 22 years later to see how differently I respond to that scenario. Also amusing how “Lost” and “Survivor” color the image…

Red Thread, the new project with Vicky Shick and Eva Karczag inspired by women’s quilting circles and our own long working association, will reconvene in December after our first two-week intensive at Swarthmore College last July. This segment of work will be supported by my 2008 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Choreographers’ Fellowship. We will be showing in-progress segments at Swarthmore in spring '09. Right now, Vicky is in Budapest where she is developing a project to be seen at Danspace in NY. In August my family visited Eva in Arnhem, the Netherlands, where we used to live. I was pleased to see the new directions in leadership and new building of Arnhem’s ArtEz Dansacademie and Dance Unlimited. There is the very appealing possibility of further exchange in the future...myabe with this project. Back in Philadelphia, I am continuing the work on Red Thread, inviting the excellent Meg Foley into the studio for research. You can check our periodically updated blog posts at redthread08.blogspot.com .

Usually I don’t write about my presenting activities in these updates, but I am proud to have been interviewed in the Chronicle of Higher Education regarding the innovative programming for the Bryn Mawr College Performing Arts Series. The first dance presentation will be Kate Watson-Wallace’s CAR on 10/24 and 25 followed by BalletX and Miro Dance Theater on Feb. 13.
Regarding teaching, this fall I’m continuing to work with MFA and BFA students at Temple University on choreography and am mentoring at Swarthmore.

With all this, writing has taken a back seat. I reviewed three shows for the Philadelphia Inquirer during the 2008 Live Arts Festival and will be covering several performances over the course of this season. Assignments for the Dance Advance website and the Congress of Research on Dance, and a paper with Swarthmore linguistics professor Dr. Donna Jo Napoli are all simmering pots on this writer’s stove.

Lastly, I am pleased to be participating in Artists U , a wonderful strategic planning program for artists developed by Andrew Simonet of Headlong Dance Theater in concert with Creative Capital. Through participating I hope to become more effective at all I do, with more clarity and appropriate support.

All best wishes for a glorious fall,
Lisa

Lisa Kraus, Dance Artist
2008 Choreography Fellow - Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and Independence Foundation
Associate in Performance, Dance - Swarthmore College
Adjunct Faculty - Temple University
Coordinator, Performing Arts Series - Bryn Mawr College
Dance Critic - Dance Magazine, Philadelphia Inquirer
http://www.redthread08.blogspot.com/
http://www.writingmydancinglife2@blogspot.com

Luscious Live Arts/Fringe

2008-09-11T13:13:00.000-07:00

When I went to Bali, entire villages would turn out for a late night's performance. The atmosphere was zingy, charged with high spirits and virtuosity. In Philadelphia, the first two weeks each September when the Live Arts/Fringe Festivals are on full tilt feel just like that. Our whole village of dance artists and dance watchers comes out to share work and thoughts on what they're seeing. The infusion of fine artistry from out-of-towners provides stick-to-the-ribs inspiration for the coming season.

We are lucky to be in this city that supports such a blast of dance activity. We are lucky that the presenters, funders, artists and audience all align to make it possible. It's one of the city's greatest strengths and I, along with many, am enormously grateful.

Merian Soto’s One Year Wissahickon Park Project

2008-07-30T14:54:00.000-07:00

The Wissahickon Creek in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park is where my family comes for walks in all seasons, dog in tow. I have images of my then-six year old fording the creek, arms raised overhead for balance as the current buffeted him and sun glinted through massive foliage. We have caught falling golden leaves, and tramped over the covered bridge, passed joggers and mountain bikers and the occasional horse and rider. How enticing then to see this place anew through the lens of performances by Merian Soto, a series of performances that is, inhabiting the park through the course of a year. Of the sixteen performances in four locales, I chose to come to one performance each season in a different locale each time.

Like one of the parks grand trees, Soto herself is wizened now, from her years of creating and performing semi-improvisational scores, springing from dances from her Puerto Rican heritage and her coming of age in the 70’s and 80’s when contact improvisation and release work were the crucial languages to master. She is seasoned now; unafraid of risk, even the risk of going s-l-o-w.

Speed is what shifts most on entering the park. Ordinarily, in the kind of life where too many events and obligations are crammed into too little time, the park is a refuge for timelessness. Native Americans dubbed it the Wissahickon which means Yellow Creek or Catfish Creek and I can easily picture them still. Mills used to dot the banks, and a main thoroughfare, Forbidden Drive, was so named because it was decided in the 1920’s never to let cars drive along it.

November 2007
The first Sunday morning that I made my way to the One Year Wisshickon Park Project was in late fall. The rusty brown of fallen leaves contrasted with dark upright tree trunks. Strong as trees themselves, dancers were fanned out on and nearby a stretch of path far enough away from each other to each be in their own sphere but close enough to be linked visually. You could stand at one high point and see them sprinkled through the landscape – one by a small pond, one on a bridge and one sometimes hidden behind a tree. Five altogether, with caps and mittens and coats.

The shift of speed from the watchers who amble through, pausing for a time, then walking in a hushed, but still pedestrian way, contrasts again with the dancers who are in a super sensitized slow mode. This is how to place a human in this landscape and not have them be dwarfed I think – let their energy spread and pool by settling.

Layers of speed are multiplied – there’s the slow geological time of the evolving landscape, the faster time of the seasons’ progression, the stately, planted stretchings and balances and shapes of the dancers, the hushed, ordinary walk of the spectators and then the speediest layer - dogs galumphing through and mountain bikers whooshing along.

It’s this way all the time I think – everyone is on their own trajectory, some faster, some slower, all set to vanish eventually and make way for more, just as the trees eventually fall, and my little children fording the stream are now grown into tall teenagers, soon to be adults themselves. Other children will ford the stream too, and more leaves will fall next year. Soto’s silent meditation invites all these thoughts, anchoring us in this place to consider its meaning, and to be refreshed by remembering our own actual place.

January 2008
The snow I remember from childhood was frequent and welcome, and the chill sufficient to freeze skating ponds for months at a time. Though Philadelphia is just a couple of hours drive from where I lived then, global warming has eased winter; days of blinding snow on sun are too few. So finding the five dancers of the One Year Wissahickon Park Project stretched along a tree line in a wide snow-covered meadow was heart-quickeningly joyful. Knowing I would be watching a 45-minute performance meant “taking up residence” in this part of the park I’d never before seen.

There was the same “downshift” on first encounter. The figures barely move. It’s easy to do a quick glance and think one has it, the lay of the land, the way the dancers are evenly interspersed with trees, the way they use branches, some wonderfully crooked, as support for tips off balance or stretches that seem to extend infinitely. The glacial pace of their transformations forces the viewer to disconnect from whatever momentum they blew in with, to settle.

Time being our most precious resource, how powerful to craft a dance that gives it back to us. Soto frames this meadow with her dance. We see the movement of trees, the entrance and exit of dogs, the radiance of winter sky through the simple mechanism of staying put and being attentive.

Choosing vantage points becomes playful – do I want to see the line of dancers stacked up on each other from the side, or spread along dotting the space from the “front”? I hang my head low, stretching my back and remember that looking from upside down used to be a frequent childhood game. Seen that way, the dancers hang from the sky, miraculously attached, not falling.

Toshi Makihara’s incidental percussive sound score in a similar frequency to “natural” sounds weaves almost indistinguishably with them. It likely provides cues; this installment of OYWPP looks to have more coordinated actions shared between the dancers. At one point they all commit their weight heavily to their branches, at another they stand fully on two feet. The ending is a slow trek away from the tree line, an expedition to new ground that ends as just an indication of a new direction.

One part of Dreams, Akira Kurosawa’s 1990 film, portrayed a team of mountainclimbers caught in a blizzard. The screen was awash in white, with men bundled against deadly cold. These dancers, in hats and gloves and toasty clothing had little to struggle against – entropy, aging, gravity perhaps. But they reminded me of the prodigious powers and beauty of nature. And the deep delight of a clear wintry day.

April 2008
Although it’s near April’s end, Sunday brought a chill. This time the dancers of the One Year Wissahickon Park Project were stretched from Forbidden Drive, the main thoroughfare through this northern section of Fairmount Park, down toward and across the Creek. Merian Soto was smack in the middle of the road, an invitation to unwitting passers-by to stop and look. She moved at a glacial pace compared to the horses (with black cowboys in chaps on them!), dogs, packs of riders on mountainbikes that passed. This performance of the Project inserted itself more obtrusively into the life of the park than the others I’ve seen, but for passersby it was still take-it-or-leave-it, some staying to take it in, others moving bemusedly past.

Noemi Segarra and Olive Prince were below the main drive in an arc on the wide expanse of the stones that edges the Creek. A cluster of small children played on the stones by the water’s edge for the duration with their mothers who watched, rapt.

My mother, visiting for the weekend, took one look at Neomi’s big backward arch with deeply folded legs and said “You’ve got to have knees for that!”

I explained to her that usually there were five performers plus Toshi Makahara making music. For the longest time we could only see three. Their clothing - brown with touches of green – melded almost completely with the surround. No wonder we nearly missed Shavonn Norris on the other side of the creek - her brown skin and hair and brown clothing rendered her nearly invisible. We never did spot Jumatatu Poe who had secreted himself somewhere among the bushes.

I come to these Sunday morning events full of inner chatter only to have it drain away like air seeping out of a balloon. I settle to watch, to listen, to feel wind and the slight touch of chill. Dancers move slowly, time moves slowly, the Creek rushes past. Shapes in the dancers’ bodies are stretched out to the max, full of energetic attention. Torques, twists, bends, morph from one to the next with the same simplicity as a plant moving toward light, it’s just the next way one needs to go.

The more I see this work outdoors, the more I experience it as a platform for viewing and contemplation. I thought about my elderly mother whose step walking down a slope is if-y as contrasted with those little 2 and 3 year olds bursting with life and adventurousness. The Creek has continued to flow past settlements and industry (there used to be many mills along it), past generations of Native Americans and later Europeans. Soto celebrates place, and the slow pace of evolution.

My mother noted the correspondence to T’ai Chi in some of the moves. Soto responded that the work is something she feels she has discovered, that moving in nature in this way is something she is tapping in to rather than “creating.”

June 2008
Hot. It’s the first time I’ve seen the dancers without their jackets and gloves. Noemi Segarra, on the far side of the creek, wears Kelly green – a top and leggings with bare midriff. The others lean more to softer greens and browns. Jumatatu Poe in his camouflage pants and brown skin and partially hidden by tree branches melds so much with the surround that I don’t pick him out for some time.

June is active at Livezey waterfall with the rushing sound of water, leafed-out trees tossed by wind, sun throwing sparkles across the Creek surface, ducks floating downstream. Just as air molecules move faster in the heat, summer picks up the pace around the Creek. Rather than the five slow-moving dancers being animators of a tranquil scene, they are stable anchors in the vividly alive landscape.

Watching from Forbidden Drive I can simultaneously take in the dancers below and Merian Soto, who, in the middle of the path, is like a someone with an old-fashioned sandwich board ushering us in to see the wares on offer. Soto looks planted, receptive, as though she might have been on that same spot for many years already. Later, descending the stone steps to place myself right at water’s edge, I slip my feet down along the rocks to rest with water lapping up to my ankles. Toshi Makahara, just above me on a wide rock, seems to bring more power to his sound than I recall. Rather than an occasional soft bell or percussive thud or rattle, he opts for stronger clangs, more piercing strikes.

I wonder again how much of the forty five minute sequence involves concrete instructions for the dancers. Each holds a strong branch and tests their weight on it, “hanging”. Is there a progression toward deeper more perilous hanging off their stout branches? This incarnation of the Project doesn’t seem to involve displacement or development that I can perceive.

The usual relationship to performance in a proscenium space involves a basic separation of audience (in seats) and performers (on stage). In the One Year Wissahickon Park Project audience and performers share a vast space: our park and by inference, our planet. Each time watching my attention has been brought to thoughts on the nature of time, the vastness and beauty of nature, and our place in it. This is dance alluding to the big questions gently, as contemplation rather than diatribe. How mature. How generous.

Even on Sundays my to-do list may loom and getting out the door can involve a rush. Arriving in the park and settling in to observe means automatically down-shifting several notches. The dancers who have participated in the Project have told me that the “meditation” of the movement is powerful; Soto has said that she wants to give the practice away, to have a wider circle of people experience it. In a world that leans increasingly toward the virtual, increasingly unravelling our connection to the environment, the One Year Wissahickon Park Project has been a tonic.

It takes being on the planet for a bunch of rotations before an artist would conceive of something with the scale and depth of the OYWPP. While there’s always an appetite for what’s youthful and fresh in dance, I am deeply sustained by the vision and choices some of dance’s elders, Soto among them.

One Year Wissahickon Park Project
Performers: Shavonn Norris, Jumatatu Poe, Olive Prince, Noemi Segarra, Merian Soto
Musician: Toshi Makihara