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

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

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

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

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

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