waltz notes

I’m listening over and over again to the recording I finally received from the record archive, trying to figure out where the dance steps go in the music, and how to find the musical markers the dancers so need to help them find their place in the dance. The template of the notation score meshes nicely with the recording in a way no other track of this ‘Faust Waltz’ has, and solves some problems that I was having with putting this dance together. But it creates new ones. This dance, a movement-choir waltz by Albrecht Knust, seems to have a really simplistic relationship to the music. The dancers move exactly in accordance with rhythmic changes. This generally should make the puzzle of the score easier to solve. However, the dance notation score is riddled with repeats. Repeats within repeats too, and lots of second and third endings for repeated sections; and all in a form of proto-notation which looks just different enough from the modern to make my head spin. But when I put the dance with the music, there is a whole vague middle section that doesn’t mesh as clearly.

Incidentally, it is the section that focuses most on formation changes; the steps the dancers do are way less important than where they do them as they travel through the space, forming spirals, giant spinning pinwheels that expand and contract, squares, little circles, and y-shapes. This section is the most important to me as far as why movement choirs were special, and different from dances for the stage, not only because of their social and cultural position, but at the choreographic level. This will allow me to talk about how it may have felt to be inside the dances.

The dance is bracketed at beginning and end by more complicated dance steps, in place. Apparently these are what I have lots of practice reading in notation; these are the types of things Laban notation adapted to make readable, and that common practice in dance notation focuses on today. But the group movements are foreign. It is the difference between focusing on dance at the level of the individual body and dance at the level of the group.

The real thoughts I wanted to jot down today though, were about my process with this vague section of the score. The process of aligning and realigning movement and music phrases was getting me nowhere. I realized I am right inside of a border space of dance notation and reconstruction practice. This dance is ephemeral, and it is gone. I have this trace, the score, to work with. This is how it has always been. As I approach the dance, I put my finger on something. I figure out a step, or a musical connection and the dance seems present again. Then, one of these holes appears, and the dance has slipped through my fingers again. The original dance has left the building.

The other day, one of the dancers suggested that in the places where there are holes, the throngs we are inviting to do this score with us should do a disco pose, or something like it. She was really on to something. I realized that since I’ve committed to bringing this dance forward with live bodies, they must have some group consensus about what it is that they are doing, at times down to the musical measure. The dance must make some kind of sense for them in space and time.

I could research more, dig into Knust’s multi-volume, three-language Dictionary of Kinetography Laban as well as other things in the archives to try to decode more of the symbols I still don’t get. I could spend my time, geek out, and dig deeper. But I have been digging for several years now. Isn’t that due diligence? Now I have these dancers, standing in front of me, ready for anything. And really, if I continue digging, I will find infinite places where there is no there, there – where the “original” again slips through my fingers.

This is, of course, one of my axes to grind; how lost past performances are is seriously contested territory for many in my field. They are very lost, people. And who tells the story of history affects what is said. Here is such a lovely opening, where I can get between the sure presence offered by the score and the confusion created by the score. What seems to be a finite dance, which can be determined down to the second, now seems to have infinite holes. To get the chance to create infinite spaces inside apparently tiny holes. . . this is what reconstruction feels like to me.

Until rehearsal starts today, I will be standing in some of these holes. I will patch them with disco steps, or something else. Often, reconstructors find the most believable looking patch they can, so that you can’t tell the hole has been patched. All I am thinking is that it would be fun to use very colorful patches. Patches that aren’t put together very well, that might fall off, that look garish, or embarrassing, or that look fun, or are inviting, drawing attention to themselves, and their function as patches. Or perhaps I could do a little of both, so that no one is sure what is going on.

One criticism against this is approach is that I’m short-circuiting the research process out of laziness. Some will argue that I’m smokescreening; they will say that I am using theory to cover my own failure to be thorough. Well, if they want to know the exact repeat structure of this “Walzer”, be my guest.  The score is in the online collection of the Centre National de la Danse . Plus we have it here at Ohio State. I will share my research path with you. I am tired from my looking right now, and I want to do some making. I am looking for the answers to my questions, which is really the only thing anyone can do.