Viewing/Trying On Improvisation Technologies

After an hour trying Forsythe’s improvisation technologies on my body, I felt much better.  I had articulated my joints in ways that are not my habit. I’m quite surprised at how therapeutic it felt.  With my exposure to Bartenieff Fundamentals and release technique I think of anything that reduces “tension” as therapeutic.  This was not loose, floppy, tension-relieving movement; it was actually quite effortful.  Maybe I was releasing things I’m used to holding while binding things I’m accustomed to letting flow.

This reminds me of my rave days and of the look of breakdancing – finding lines and volumes in space and articulating them, shape being the priority, and virtuosity being about increasing the rate of shifting between lines, points and shapes while maintaining clarity and rigor, and also in having multiple things happening in different body centers at once.   The space that I went to is familiar from those long nights of dance parties in the 90’s.  The question arises for me, how does the evolution of breaking and raving movement relate to that of Forsythe’s work?  Are they similar by circumstance, or was he inspired by breakdancing? Or, do they look similar because they relate in different ways to the same lineage?  If so, what lineage?  I would like to know.  Some associations that come to mind are German Expressionist dance, the abstract movement, modernist architecture, deconstruction, and techno and electro music and its relationship to breaking.  

I get great information from non-dancers.  A friend has described improvisational dance he’s seen in performance as having a value for looking disoriented.  I agree; sometimes it seems the disorientation has been codified, and is therefore not authentic, but just a mode that people resort to.  I don’t see all improvisation in performance this way – maybe just some of the less compelling performances.  These technologies seem like a useful tool for avoiding the  pat disoriented look.  While working with the technologies I experienced having a heightened perception, rather than confusion about what my body was doing each moment.  As layers were added I found myself slipping more easily between this acute awareness and disorientation; switching very quickly between the two, or riding a continuum.  The ideas are heady, but it seems like a goal is to try to get your brain into your joints and do the computations there, in the moment.

Melanie Bales mentioned in LMA class this week that, in her opinion, Forsythe’s work prioritizes Body (in the LMA sense) as a framework rather than Space or Effort.  Several of us who had been doing these readings piped up, “no, Space! It’s about Space!” –because that’s the thing the readings seems to bring up.  But Mel claimed that although Forsythe talks a lot about space, but is really working with a Body sensibility.  The jury’s still out for me; I don’t know enough about LMA or William Forsythe yet to say what I think.  I can say that if I were to prioritize LMA categories with this movement, effort would certainly be last, because the effort seems most to service whatever he has the body doing, or the body doing with the space.  At the body level, I am more articulate and intelligent as a whole after spending an hour or so dancing with this.  Each joint seems to have been explored fully.

Within the “reorganization” section, I enjoyed the part about reorientation of the room.  It reminded me of one of my favorite systems for framing movement, the crosses of axes in the Laban system.  I have always loved working with these for the way they parse the movement.  The crosses allow you to look at the movement in relationship to the body, to gravity, to the room you’re in, to the spine, to the “stance” which is a more specific idea of front.  Then you can change the cross you’re working on as you move, which is what dancers do all the time for themselves.

Symbols for Crosses of Axes from Labanotation

In attempting to accurately record or recover specific movements through notation these crosses are slow and cumbersome and only used when you have to.  Here in these technologies I see that Forsythe has come up with a methodology for applying the same concepts to the body and playing with them in the moment.  I find it so extremely satisfying and fun.  Some other concepts he uses that I’m familiar with from Laban are the space hold and spot hold.

space hold and spot hold

It would be fun to think of symbols for some of his other modes.  Perhaps I could create a symbol for the forms of compression and fragmentation? Or one that is like space and spot hold but shows avoiding a spot or sliding along a line?

There’s a clarity to this methodology that reminds me of working with the Laban system.  I feel at home with it, in the talk of the forms traced by moving distal body parts, of the difference between folding or contracting a limb, or rotating versus twisting a form.  It’s a kind of play that delights me.

Something that spoke to me at a gut level was “dropping points”.  It created the appearance of submission to gravity, as if the structure of the body was slowly submitting chunk by chunk.  I got the impression of this stunted thing, crippled giant, and the look of it spoke to me at a subconscious level.   During these dropping actions I loved sounds of thunking, smacking, and slapping of body parts onto the floor.  These sonic accents made clear the line being extruded, or the point or curve that was being dropped.

The dropping of points and curves was all the more compelling when Forsythe demonstrated (and I subsequently tried) emphasizing the back space.  I grew up on presentational dance, within a proscenium framework, and learned to dance like a paper doll–colorful on the front, with nothing on the back.  To me, what is behind intimidates me, like a dark landscape I’m nervous about exploring.  The actions of submitting, softening, receding and descending resonate with me on a deep level.  I loved his closing statement of this section: “. . . and I think if you practice that regularly that the coordination will begin to spread itself over the whole kinesphere.  And you’ll have more fun.”

That sense of serious play impressed me about the entire set of clips.  I got the impression that William Forsythe approaches movement the way a three-year-old plays with a thing he’s curious about.  There’s a purity of intent to learn everything possible about the thing, while staying in a mode of lightness that can only be described as play.