Serious Play, Curious Investigation
Posted: April 14, 2009 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: accad, dance, improvisation technologies, laban dance notation, Laban Movement Analysis, Monster Partitur, physical practice, score, Scott DeLahunta Leave a comment »
The Forsythe workshop at Ohio State constitutes one of the deepest, broadest, and most pleasurable arcs of learning in my life so far. It was unique in its holistic combination of theory and practice. I found that the readings, viewings, discussions, and symposium fed my studio practice, which then informed further thoughts, writings and discussions about this work.
William Forsythe’s ideas and technique left their mark on my body, my conception of the study of dance technique, my approach to creative inquiry, and my perception of time.
At a young age I came to be interested in dismantling the structures that seemed to keep dance separate from the questioning in my heart. I have so identified with deconstruction as a reason and mode for making, and so stripped away at dance while trying to make dances, that it began to seem better not to make anything at all. In part, this pattern is what drew me to step outside of the making process and identify myself as a Labanotator rather than a creator. Something that irks me about the world of Labanotation is the sense notators sometimes convey of having secret knowledge that other dancers don’t, or can’t have. Perhaps I have been irritated by this because it is a strategy I’ve been using to help me hide from my disappointment with dance.
Engaging with the work of William Forsythe, with its beauty in the contrast of extreme complexity and deconstruction has given me a new sense of permission to build and make. Rather than throwing the dance baby out with the bathwater, Forsythe takes what is useful to him and regenerates, fragments, and regenerates again in a beautiful sort of alchemy. Though I admire Forsythe’s choreographic structures, and love the way his technique feels on my skin, I don’t want to make what he has made. Instead I want to imitate his posture of questioning and curiosity. At the heart, this workshop has inspired me to seek earnestly what my questions are starting now. I would like to continue to deconstruct dance when I need to, but also to not be afraid of building new and complex structures. I would like to learn to say, “I don’t know what dance is,” but not to give up on my body and its rich knowledge. I would like to build structures in symbol, movement, new media, or all three at once, and through these structures to continually engage in serious, playful investigation.
Movement Choirs and Wii
Posted: December 10, 2008 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: accad, hacking, Movement Choirs, Reconstruction, Wii 1 Comment »I’m hoping to reconstruct a Laban movement choir from the Labanotation Score, but I envision a serious problem with finding sixty or eighty people interested this. in embodying a group that moves as one, yet has complex interrelationships. To examine what was happening in those movement choirs, it would be best to recreate on some level the communities out of which the choruses evolved.
How on earth could I drum up eighty or more amateur movers interested in this, and willing to learn to read basic Labanotation? I could bribe college students with free pizza, but that certainly wouldn’t help to flesh out the ideologically instructive, expressive nature the choirs had for their eager participants.
I’m theorizing that dance choirs were the mass expression of the 1930′s German zeitgeist, with its emphasis on healthy-body, life-reform culture–and that our mass bodily expression for today could be found in the rabid individualism of the Wii.
Rabid Individualists
I was at the Columbus Arts festival this summer when I saw a demo of the Wii, with eight stations arranged arranged around two central pillars. The full body movements were striking in the context of a crowd, but most eye-catching was the awareness of the movers; It was completely different than someone dancing in public, in that the awareness was on the relationship between their proprioception and the feedback they were getting from the interface.
Viewed as a mover of masses of bodies, the Wii, like movement choirs or Socialist dance fests, begins to look by turns diabolical and inspiring. The bodies are in their individual spaces, but with a little imagination I can envision the people using Wii right now as a matrix made up of bodies not fully aware of the ways in which they’re being used. In light of a critical view of mediated culture it is appropriate to examine the values and aesthetics at the source of the movement generated by a Wii.
I’d like to reconstruct Laban’s Titan virtually using multiple movers on Wii interfaces. I’ve got some hacking to learn. . .
Why Dance Matters, II (Or, a sailor, dancer, attorney and musician went to a dance performance. . .)
Posted: November 16, 2008 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: accad, motion capture Leave a comment »Tonight I went to see “We Will Be Going on Now” at ACCAD.
In my group, there was an installation artist/composer, an attorney-in-training, and a cyclist/carpenter/sailor. Afterwards, the sailor’s impression was of not having enough information to evaluate what he saw. ”It would be different if there was anything written,” he said, that it would help him to understand what the choreographers meant by all that.
I understand this feeling. I get it when I read poetry. But, my friend, there’s a reason this work exists apart from written text. It can be understood on many levels. Watching human bodies in motion (or architectural models rendered directly from digitally captured human motion, as it was in this case) can elicit a physical response. In my (infrequent) readings of poetry, I can’t place the poem in it’s literary context, lacking experience, but even as a beginner I can respond to the rhythms, patterns, sounds, and images. I imagine, the more poetry I read, the richer my experience would become, but I trust that the form itself has integrity.
So I can understand why my friend may never go back to see dance again. When I’m stuck in the middle of some poem, sometimes I really wish I could wave a magic wand and make it a linear narrative that I can just ingest whole. But dance is special in it’s silence. (“Use your bodies, not your mouths” I tell my tiny little dance students.) Verbal language is incessant and voracious, trying to claim all meaning as its own. Dancing, seeing dance, is a special chance to be quiet for a moment and see what your body or another’s has to tell you. So there you go, Norman.
Postcard from the show I attended tonight
Now, in addition the artist/composer pointed out a nice inroad for a law student. We had been talking about performance and conceptual art; she was quite skeptical. ”It might help for you to think about each work as an individual case,” he said. He drew this parallel, about how an individual law case only makes sense in relationship to the way the law has been worked out through other cases. In approaching conceptual art from the outside, it might be helpful to see each work as an individual case, and then play with decoding meaning by tracking what it’s saying in response to the whole. I would assume attorneys do this by reading a heck of a lot of law. I know when I hear an attorney geeking out about law it all sounds like gibberish.
My hackles get a little bit raised when people assume dance should be digestible, graceful, easy-to-read, just because it’s dance.
