Today, like every other day, we wake up empty. . .

. . . and frightened.  Don’t open the door to the study

and begin reading.  Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

–Rumi, “Soul, Heart, and Body One Morning” The Book of Love. Trans: Coleman Barks.  San Francisco: Harper, 2003.

The Pocket Reader

Here’s the cover of the little pamphlet I wrapped my impossible and illogical scores into.  I think the design of the cover is still awkward.  But it is a start.  Laban scores for dance inside. . . to follow.

illogical and impossible scores

A page from the score of Brian Ferneyhough's fourth String Quartet

Brian Ferneyhough addressed the limitations of traditional music notation and its impact on music theory. He wrote dense music scores that were difficult or impossible to perform, bringing the performer into a state of heightened tension beyond what is usually asked of a traditional music performer.

In On Sonic Art, Trevor Wishart credits Ferneyhough with finding a meeting place between rationalized theoretical music and what he calls “musical gesture”

These music scores are a point of reference for me in my current project.  I am working with what movements can and cannot be described by Laban notation, and exploring the states I have access to as a dancer when trying to solve a logically or physically impossible dance scores.

Other points of reference at present include Butoh, with its intense use of imagery to create a “state of crisis” (a phrase borrowed from Michael) in the body.  I am exploring the way a specific, intricate set of criteria for where the body will go and when might bring a performer to a fruitful state of crisis.

I am inspired by choreographer Meg Stuart’s use of “states” as opposed to “steps”.  Laban notation scores movement according to position of body parts in space and time, without mention of quality.  How can I work with this criteria of space in a deliberately confounding or illogical way, in order to produce a condition which is generative?

 

 

About Dance Studies, From the Dark Side

I have to admit I am slightly suspicious about the push in dance studies to proclaim the territory of knowledge specific to dance.  How is this not just a way to justify dance as an academic specialization, thereby proclaiming the need for more Departments of Dance, more Administrators of Dance, and more lines of funding for Dance?  I am questioning whether this push to demarcate dance serves knowledge –or power structures.

I am really crossing over to the dark side today.

Asking this question has the effect of shooting my own self in the foot.  As a scholar in dance, I am supposed to want funding to justify academic activity in dance.  Plus I would like to have money for groceries.  I would like to have a job.  The practical side of me says, yes, you need to be clear about what dance does and what dance knows so that someone will pay you to work in, and write about, dance.

Another side says, “what is it all for?” This side of me would rather exit stage left and grow my own radishes while dancing naked in the moonlight in my garden than to participate in this circling of the wagons.

I should give some context–several events have brought me to this state.  First of all, I am taking a Ph.D. level class at the moment.  It is the most idea-heavy dance class I have taken thus far and has involved discussion of extensive readings on the history of analysis of movement.  I’ve never been one to argue that we need to just stop thinking about what it means and just dance, but this class is threatening to push me over the edge.  I am suddenly remembering my experience with the  Forsythe Symposium last year – that of being overwhelmed with conceptual thinking, feeling unable to keep up and synthesize, and starved for sensory experience and information, which feels so much more real to me personally.

There is also the fact that I personally miss performing, and creative activity in general.  I have whined enough about this and will leave it at that for now, and add that this is getting better.  I’ve got some things in the cooker.

Then there was something Norah Zuniga-Shaw mentioned in her presentation of Synchronous Objects to my PhD class the other day.  She told an anecdote of a presentation of her research to a group of musicologists, whose initial reaction was to wonder why the dancers in “One Flat Thing Reproduced” were not dancing to the music.  To me, this, and other exposure I have to the field of musicology, causes me to think of that field as a closed, antiquated, self-referential academic dinosaur.  Is this really the direction that dance wants to go?

I also had a talk this morning with someone who attended the discussion at the Wexner last night between painter Luc Tuymans and curator TJ Clark.  The discussion apparently turned to the idea of painting as a site of knowledge in itself.  From the sounds of it Clark credited Tuymans with reinvigorating painting after the postmodern breakdown of the form.  I am fine with the idea of using and reusing a form for the layers of information it can then convey.  I do not hold with any evolutionary ideas that say we must always push to the next form, new forms, and thus discard painting.  But something about the story makes me wonder if these two had other motivations to justify painting as a valid and living art form?

I am suspicious of the academic need to maintain existing forms for the sake of power structures.  I would rather see dance as a tradition die off than to have it be preserved in formaldehyde.

In my flair for the dramatic, I may be setting up an unecessary dialectic again.  Is it really vitality and creativity vs. academic specificity, or can I reframe this as a both/and situation?

Proust was a Neuroscientist

I’ve been doing a lot of reading.  Because I think of myself as some kind of creative artist, I think while reading about my aesthetic values and what I’d like to create.  I think about the themes and ideas presented in the books and then try to imagine performances that will “express” them.  Then I usually decide these ideas are uninspired and discard them.  I find this process to be depressing and unproductive.  Why not begin making things by making instead of starting with an idea I’ve read and then translating into performance?

Jonah Lehrer’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist helped me to come up with this question about my practice.  As I’ve mentioned many times in this blog, I don’t actually do a lot of creating in dance or performance anymore.  I write some, and analyze dances, and do coursework, and did a little reconstruction, but I think there has to be more with my involvement in dance.

So while reading this book, I found myself interested in the idea that writers, chefs, and composers could all know things about reality that are kinds of knowledge we usually credit to science.  I thought “yes” and then, since dance is my medium “I should make a dance about dancers knowing things without needing hard science to prove it” –and then I thought “BLAH!”   No one needs me to make a dance like that.  It’s been said quite nicely with words here in Lehrer’s book.  What’s more I suspect the characters profiled in this book are so inspiring because they deeply explored what they were drawn to, rather than writing or composing to illustrate the latest philosophical idea.

I need to develop a practice that helps me make things from a different, less “propositional” (to use Johnson’s terminology) place.   This takes time, and a sense of risk.  I have known this, in a sense for too long without pursuing it.  It is time to make things or get off the pot!  Maybe it will help if I stop whining about how busy grad school and parenthood and work are and just go into the studio, or out into the yard, or the woods or pick up the video camera, and make something.

Does it seem like I’m eschewing rigorous thought and research in the creative process?  I feel a little that I am, and I’d hate to do that.  It is good to study structures of ideas and organize and synthesize them.  I have found thematic footholds in the work of Rudolf Laban this year like I never before, because I read and read and read, and thought about his theories, and compared them to other theories.

I just think I’ve swung a bit far in that direction lately.  I have spent so much time sitting, reading, typing, that I have shut down whole parts of my body.  Muscles have begun to atrophy.  I don’t know the state of my sacrum at all times anymore.  This is sad to me.  I’d like to get back on the horse, try to make things, and continue to be a scholar.  Look for more posts when I fall off the other side.

Embodied Meaning and Freedom in Dance Class

I’m wrapping up my first quick round of teaching for the summer.  Friere’s Pedagogy of the Opressed, Johnson’s Meaning of the Body, and Dixon-Gottschild’s Black Dancing Body are sinking in, challenging the way I see my students and myself.

Friere posited that the student-as-object model is oppressive and that true learning, and freedom, happen in relationship.  After reading Friere, I was primed to think about Johnson’s embodied meaning in terms of the classroom.  In Johnson’s view, babies make sense of their world holistically, beginning with their experiences, which are wrapped up in the experiences of their caregivers.  Babies begin by experiencing themselves, their caregivers, and their environment as one, and then slowly differentiate.  Furthermore, humans are all “big babies”; our perception of experience still arises holistically.

Friere’s ideas about learning and Johnson’s about perception are related; Friere proposes deconstruction of the the subject/object relationship, and Johnson declares that the subject-acting-on-object model of meaning-making is secondary to that which arises viscerally.  These arguments support a class structure that is relational, egalitarian, and open-ended.

On July 3 I blogged this quote and some notes from Dixon-Gottschild’s Black Dancing Body:

“Figuratively speaking, dancers as a group are a subjugated “race” – destabilized as a matter of course, as a prerequisite inherent to the field.” –Brenda Dixon Gottschild, The Black Dancing Body. p. 10-11

This, plus the entire description of a dance class . . . hit very close to home for me.  I spent ten of my formative years engaging in serious dance training that fits her description . . .  I have chosen not to walk away from this tradition, but I feel squeamish about demanding the same “destabilization” from my own students that my teachers asked of me.  And yet, I want the training I offer to “work”, and often so do my students.

In the beginning jazz and modern dance classes I just finished teaching, I pretty much followed the traditions I’ve inherited, ones much like those described by Dixon-Gottschild.  I stood in the front of the room.  Wherever I was standing became the front.  I performed movement for my students which they were expected to imitate and perform for me.  I then scrutinized their performance and gave specific critical feedback on their performances to help them imitate me more closely.  No one talked; even when I asked questions they were generally treated as rhetorical.

I am aware that the way I teach right now structures a classroom where students are very much passive objects to be acted on by me, the active subject.  The model I currently follow is very effective in creating the ability to do certain movements in certain personality and physical types – those who are kinesthetic, visual learners, and are passive enough to submit to whatever the teacher says to do, and who have cooperative bodies.  It is a very defined outcome available to a small number of people.  I love western dance techniques, and believe this training does work in a sense, but maybe the outcomes and beneficiaries are too limited.  Dance can be meaningful in many ways to many different people.

It’s one thing to want to change the way a thing is done in your culture, and quite another to actually change it.  There is a good amount of risk involved.  (I notice the same thing in the way I parent.  My philosophy tells me to do things differently than my parents did, but in the moment of truth, I often send my own experience forward, because it is known.)

Still, as I pile on the ten-week sessions of technique classes, with different students each time, I can’t help but feel a little sad for the way I hardly know them,  and I just deliver these skills to them.  Many don’t even learn much of those for one reason or another.  I need to redefine a classroom that works, and the relationship between me and the students.  There is so much possibility for what could happen.  I’d like to experience a dance class in which people relate to each other first and students feel they have a voice.  I’d like to help students experience what I have in terms of discovery that arises out of their own embodied experience.  I’d like for humor and laughter to have a part in the process without feeling that I, as the teacher have to entertain and tell jokes.

I’m not sure what I’ll do differently this next round of classes, how I’ll think differently of my students.  I’m afraid of the arguments that can be levelled against teaching-as-an-experiment in freedom.  Classes may seem unplanned, indefinite.  Students may hate the class or resent that they’re asked to be active when they have already been conditioned to be passive.  We are after all in a culture of oppression.  They may stare at me sullenly.  Nothing might happen.

(In some sense, isn’t that always the fear?  In everything?  That if I don’t do it, it won’t happen? Ha ha.)

Mark Johnson’s “The Meaning of the Body”

I just finally read this big, long book.  Mark Johnson’s ‘theory of embodied meaning’ confirmed my experience of art and argued against unhelpful dichotomies between body and mind, feeling and thought, emotion and reason.  Without calling it that, I already ascribed to the embodied theory of meaning, which is why I am so attracted to dance.  Mark Johnson’s arguments in support of this theory come from philosophy, developmental psychology and neuroscience.

A watershed point in my own history with embodied meaning in art was experiencing the Clyfford Still room at the Albright Knox in Buffalo.  These paintings have their own room because that was one of the stipulations of the artist; that they would never be shown alongside the work of other artists, and never be bought or sold.  I had developed a relationship with other abstract impressionist painting there over the course of my childhood through trips with the Brownies, school or family, but maybe because they have their own room I had missed the Still paintings until one day when I was there alone, and about seventeen.  (Perhaps, in the Alva Noe sense, I only noticed this room at this stage in my development because it was then that I was able to see it)

The paintings are massive with jagged shapes streaking through them from top to bottom or corner.  They felt so craggy, so much like my teen-angstful inner landscape.  I was impressed that Still resisted the interpretation of his work, and felt that I understood his intention.  I felt I used these paintings well by sitting in front of them and noticing them, and noticing myself and the flow of my thoughts with them.  I returned there often and sat with them.  I thought about that they were important to me at a gut level, and would not have been so if they had a determinate, defined meaning, such as “this painting is about the loss of my mother because of war”.

Previously, I described this experience in terms of feelings, delimiting it to the subjective and taking away some of its power and importance to me.  Reflecting on the experience in light of Johnson’s theories, however, I would describe it as an experience of embodied knowledge.  The paintings are ripe with meaning.  They have massive weight, which feels like the importance of a thing.  They reference minerals, the slow passage of time, which, for a teenager, is also about deferral of gratification.   They are about conflict, and tension, and permanance, and glacial flow.

This way of talking about an art experience may be very elementary for visual artists or philosophers, and might come as no surprise to dance insiders, but it is new, and freeing for me.  I came to these painting with little specialized knowledge of painting and its history.  All I had was a history of contact with abstract paintings and the knowledge that the artist resisted interpretation and commercialization.  I was relatively unschooled, and yet I found I could access knowledge in these paintings.  This is very encouraging to me, positioned as I am in the small, specialized world of post-postmodern dance.

My deep discouragement with this moment in dance is that it seems to have gone in the direction of only speaking to one’s peers, and also maybe your mom, who comes to shows out of love.  On the other hand, there are the forms of dance that convey determinate meaning through movement, and come across as trite or impotent.  But reading about the embodied theory of meaning reminded me of dance’s best capability, which is to speak to the knowledge of the gut, which does not need an MFA to know things.

Practice of Place

Time to dust off this ‘cobweblog’ by creating updates of everything it would have been good to write about as it  happened, had there been time to do so.  Summer has suprized me by turning out to be nearly as busy as the rest of the school year. Again, I’m thinking about how I might do the good work of my life without keeping such a frantic schedule.

A “practice of place” was something that started as part of my to-do list but ended up being a great antidote for this feeling of busy-ness.  The task was to spend some regular and repeated time in a familiar place, experience what changed about my perception of that place, and then create a physical trace of my experience.  I chose my very small backyard.  Each day I would sit outside for a time.  I then went inside and made a 30-second sketch about whatever jumped out at me from that experience.

I was quite fed by this practice, because on the most basic level, it was a consistent practice of not-doing-anything-else; it was time to just notice things.  I seemed to really need to stop to notice things, and maybe had not realized how quickly I constantly move, how constantly I am checking email, twitter, and the cell.

Another thing I noticed was the way the small (15 x15) yard got richer and deeper for me as each day’s experience built on the last.  I began to choose different places to sit or stand, and to find an entirely different world from that perspective.  It is a rather plain yard with a tall fence, having the feeling of an outdoor room.  But the more days I sat  out there, the more small features, like a knothole in the fence  or a strange hole in the ground, became whole worlds to me.

I have found (and blogged extensively) about the busy-ness issue: that what with teaching and coursework and home life I never seem to do indpendent creative work of any kind, which seems unfortunate for someone pursuing an MFA.  This little practice was quite helpful to me in terms of doing some small creative thing.  My observation is that as sleep begets more sleep, creative activity begets more creative activity.  And also, that creative activity, at least for me, requires rest and attention.  The little sketches I made (this idea was inspired by workshops with Nik Haffner) became reasons to explore movement.  Some of the movement became little videodances.  I also made a DVD that allows the user to click around my yard to see what I saw this week.   I’m observing, happily that this place practice created a small wave of creative activity.

Photo Shoot with Nick Fancher

http://www.flickr.com/photos/shutterthink

Notes on High Tech Soul

High Tech Soul: The Creation of Techno Music on Vimeo on Vimeo

via High Tech Soul: The Creation of Techno Music on Vimeo.

jotting some quickie notes after watching this:

I’m inspired that the innovators of techno created a new form that suited their place, resources, and desires.  The form is deeply connected to detroit and the  stories of its innovators.  Connection to place  inspires me, wherever I find it.  I also love thrift – the use of what one has available, such as empty warehouses and images of technology and urban decay.

Some of those interviewed felt validated when techno became a worldwide phenomenon.   Others fought to keep techno small, underground and connected to black culture.  The film seemed to convey simultaneous loss and triumph about the recognition of detroit techno.

(Disclaimer: skepticism about the commercialism in art comes easy to art students who have grown up white and privileged.)

I feel like going out and creating something.  Watching this film made me want to make things.  I to create whatever it is that allows me to feel moments of vitality and power, using whatever resources are already around me here in Columbus, Ohio.