I am swept away. You are not supposed to be “swept” away. I keep thinking about the references to Bruno Latour’s “intermediary” and ”mediator.” Perhaps I am a mediating intermediary? I go back to my first Sunday night in October in Beijing at the Beijing Dance Academy anniversary performance at one the national “Military” Theatres. The red flag, covering the stage, with its brilliant glowing five stars, one large [...]]]> Final blog
Swept Away

I am swept away. You are not supposed to be “swept” away. I keep thinking about the references to Bruno Latour’s “intermediary” and ”mediator.” Perhaps I am a mediating intermediary? I go back to my first Sunday night in October in Beijing at the Beijing Dance Academy anniversary performance at one the national “Military” Theatres. The red flag, covering the stage, with its brilliant glowing five stars, one large representing the communist party and four smaller stars radiating on an arch from the larger one. Those brilliant four stars are supposedly the different kinds of people (or classes), as written by Mao Tse Tung: the working class, the peasantry, the urban petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie. I was so moved. I was so caught in my own history of this history, wanting so much to say that I dreamed of coming here for so long because of the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, Mao’s Red Book, Beijing Opera, the erhu, this red flag, and those revolutionary dance operas created by Jiang Qing. She had taken the ballet, folk dance, Beijing Opera, martial arts, classical Chinese dance, and folklore of the revolution to make this outrageous mixture into a ”teaching” dance drama for propaganda. Did she know she made a brilliant fusion of modern, postmodern, and avant-garde with melodramatic and pop sensibilities? How right on. It still works: I am swept away. (Stumbling, that afternoon of my first Sunday I felt that surge of the famous Beijing wind and dust storms. full of dust. I become a kite in the hutong and I am blinded. It takes a lot of time to get to places here when you are blown away and swept along.)

I am swept away by the power of Chinese dance, or of Chinese to use dance or dance dance to communicate kinaesthetic resonance that has a very specific aim. I still find it hard to understand the dance and the dancers without doing more research on the last two decades in China and Beijing. I have to do that, to understand the contemporary transformation in this powerhouse, the Beijing Dance Academy. I remember those stars on the flag: the large one and the smaller stars, radiating out from that central force, not unlike how the Beijing Dance Academy works: “star” power (and I do not mean soloist or fame or Hollywood stardom). What stays with me beyond all the choreographic changes, inflections, transformations … is this sense of power that dance has in China. What is this power about? Who does it serve? What does it have to do with the new/old China? I am sure there are many answers and more questions. There is something about the centralization of dance education for the dance stages, which will stage these dances and dance dramas that can and will “move” the audiences beyond and outside their daily lives. I will take that further in my essay for the Danscross book. It was remarkable how much the Chinese choreographers’ works “moved” (swept away?) the audiences and by contrast: how the ”foreign” choreographers’ works made the audience carefully watch and consider…I was told by one young dancer friend that perhaps I could not understand how much “feeling” meant to the Chinese. I know I must avoid ALL essentializing and of course I am swept away, but I also have to reflect and question this power “across” Danscross. I am an intermediatrix.

In Hongse niangzi jun (The Red Detachment of Women)

I went to this revolutionary opera ballet by myself in a 3000 plus seat Beijing theatre that was packed and sold-out. Everyone in the 2nd balcony seats was leaning forward toward the stage to the effect that I thought the balcony my very tip into the orchestra area. For this work, they had a full orchestra and chorus, and dance ensemble of thirty-five to sixty-five members. It was one of the most “power-full” performances I have ever seen. It was not about technique, but power in devices fueled by overwhelming beliefs and passion for those beliefs. You do not have to believe me, but when the Red Detachment of Women strut, leap, and swagger (with big rifles) down stage on the long diagonal for their first full out stage appearance, the whole audience came to their feet. And the soloist, especially when she is striving and writhing during her scenes of capture, liberation, and revolution, dances everyone’s heartache: Surge. Hearts beating. Wow factor. Dance Power. More later, more and more.

‘I suspect I’m the only one of the panelists today who, rather than preparing for what we in the West might colloquially call his five minute song and dance, was [...]]]> Below is a slightly doctored version of my summarising contribution to Danscross, delivered at a day-long conference following the two public performances of the eight finished pieces. Again, as in my previous review entry, I’m given myself permission to retrospectively comment on my own text [in square brackets].

‘I suspect I’m the only one of the panelists today who, rather than preparing for what we in the West might colloquially call his five minute song and dance, was instead having a foot massage until 2am. But I maintain that an experience like that could, and in this context, possibly enlarge my understanding of the dance I’ve seen in Danscrsss and elsewhere during what is my first visit to China. [The foot massage was an amazingly relaxing, highly choreographed and completely clothed experience. Three young women worked on my two female companions and me as we lay in a dim, paneled room in lounge chairs eating strange-to-us sweets and channel-hopping, eventually settling on a beautifully shot and wonderfully manipulative black and white Chinese film about rural children rebelling against an oppressive military regime. The massage was quick but thorough, and so well calibrated in terms of the masseuses’ co-ordinated timing and depth of touch from feet to fingertips. I won’t forget the film or, more to the point, the massage.]

I’m not an academic. I write about dance, theatre and the arts for the mainstream press and specialist magazines and websites. I feed on cultural experiences like this one. It’s been a great privilege to be an observer and guest here, gathering impressions, having – I trust – insights, making some perhaps incorrect assumptions, finding meaning and basically absorbing everything I can both in and out of this organisation. [That is, BDA.]
I think I learn more about dance seeing it in the place where it was created – and here it was being created in front of me. Liao bu qi! [This was an attempt to impress my listeners with my new-found but extensive knowledge of Mandarin. I’m being ironic. ‘Liao bu qi’ means, or so I was told, amazing or extraordinary. Apologies if I’ve written the sounds in incorrect phonetic English.] This privileged [obviously a key word for me vis a vis Beijing/Danscross] kind of situation informs all of my perceptions. Right now those perceptions are fully charged. I feel filled up, a little drained but intoxicated and hugely, deeply curious.

I arrived halfway through Phase V. How could I catch up? Be quiet. Look. Listen. Don’t impinge or interrogate — I’m not the choreographers’ dramaturg or confidante. And so I danced around the work, on its periphery. I saw fragments and quick sketches, caught some shapes, guessed at form and aspiration. I saw struggle and play. I wrote down ‘everything,’ silently dialoguing with the process in my notebook and occasionally, gently grabbing bits of information from Jonathan and Caroline during breakfast at the hotel. Doing this, I made my own spider’s web of connections in the studio.

What is just as important for me is finding those connections in the wider world outside the studio. I see the movement of Beijing’s citizens strolling or practicing t’ai chi in Zizhuyuan or Jingsan parks. I look at a calligraphy exhibition in the grounds of the Forbidden City and see some of the writing in the air that the six male dancers — ‘Jonny and Caroline’s boys’ — are doing in Beijing Man. I go to the National Library – I joined the National Library in my first full day here: liao bu qi! – and see people studying or slumped over computers and tables. Are they dreaming? I think the dances I saw being created – Beijing Man and Zhao Tiechun’s Ghost Money – are a kind of dreaming too. From the tallest point in Jingshan I gaze at the snow-dusted rooftops of the Forbidden City, hazy in the smog of Beijing, and I see the dream of those two dances hovering above those rooftops.

So I’ve been dreaming while wide-awake in Beijing.

The audience is dreaming too. Or maybe in China they’re chatting, or reading and texting messages on their mobiles, as can be done in the modern world. [But why would you want to? Boredom? A too-full life? Odd…] In these dances I see the present but also the past, and a glimpse of eternity. This last comment applies especially to Ghost Money, in which Tiechun’s onstage family inhabits a world between earth and heaven. For me it’s a view of China. [And one that I’d certainly never had before.] Last night’s foot massage is another, equally valuable view of China. I’m not sure yet what it’s taught me about dance, or dance in China, but it was a highly and subtly choreographed physical experience. [Sorry about the repetition.] My colleagues and I also enjoyed watching on television a channel advertising Magic Underwear Show Time. This was a kind of dance, too, about support for the breasts. [My attempt at off-the-wall humour might’ve fallen dead at the feet of most ofthe audience, but I couldn’t resist it. As far as I can gather Magic Underwear Show Time, bless its commercial little heart, is all about extolling the life-changing virtues of a certain brand of brassiere. Needless to say, and especially in a foot massage context, it held us fascinated and had us in stitches – a winning combination.]

I suppose the big phrase I’d use for my research process in a very process-oriented project is ‘subjective contextualisation.’ How cultural connections affect change. [Or something like that. Here the attempt was to give my words an academic spin, or some intellectual weight. Maybe I should’ve said ‘quasi-‘ or ‘pseudo-academic,’ which is not to invalidate my thoughts and views but, rather, is an acknowledgement that I don’t know how to talk that talk.]

Like watching – or dreaming – any dance, my investment in Danscross and Beijing – and its investment in me – has deeply aroused my emotions, stimulated my brain and senses, and changed me in ways I expect I will know better only after I go away tomorrow and, ideally, when I return to China. Xie xie. [That’s Mandarin for thank you, and as good a way as any to bring my contribution to the Danscross blog to a close.]

‘At their best the pieces devised [...]]]> I make my living primarily as a critic, although it’s not a label with which I’m particularly comfortable. In any case, after I returned to London the magazine Dance Europe accepted my proposal to write about the Danscross performances, both of which took place at Beijing’s swank Poly Theatre. What follows are excerpts from that review, occasionally sprinkled with [in square brackets] my retrospective commentary.

‘At their best the pieces devised for Danscross functioned like short stories, all of which were expressed in the language of the body. And that meant specifically Chinese bodies.
[This notion of each body containing the rhythms of the societies and cultures in which it exists continues to be of interest. I’d love to go back to China, see more of the country and spend more time simply watching how people move and interact…] The BDA Dance Company is a highly capable, attractive entity well versed in Chinese classical styles… It appears that the group adapted well to the rigours of contemporary dance offered by the foreign choreographers. By the same token, the Western dance-makers had to accustom themselves to a different system of circumstances and disciplines than they might have previously known. [The learning process on both sides was understandably immense and complex, and therefore not always easy. Again, what a privilege to witness some of those struggles – and the joyous breakthroughs.]

And the result? Not unexpectedly, perhaps, a mixed bag of dances that ran a gamut from Western abstraction to Chinese emotionalism. It was my good fortune that the two pieces I, in fly-on-the-wall fashion, watched being made in the studio turned out to be among the strongest on the bill. Set to the percolating rhythms of the American electronica duo Matmos, Jonathan Lunn’s Beijing Man is a male sextet cleverly combining an almost calligraphic gestural filigree with quick-witted athletic vigour. It was quirky, sexy and fun but delivered with a seriousness of purpose that deftly balanced its more playful qualities. In complete contrast, Zhao Tiechun’s Ghost Money was a moving, beautifully expressive contemplation of earth and heaven, or life and death, built round a four-person family unit clad in vaguely peasant garb. According to those in the know the choreographer was stretching himself here, redefining his knowledge and use of a twisty but limited folk style juxtaposed against Mozart’s Kyrie (Andante Moderato). It’s undeniably big music, but he had the measure of it. [I’d gladly watch these two pieces again, particularly if I could do so out of their Beijing context. I’ve long maintained that seeing dance in the country it was made can be a hugely different experience from seeing it abroad.]

The programme opened with Shobana Jeyasingh’s Detritus, a bold attempt to capitalise on the hybrid nature of the BDA dancers’ training. Sharpness and speed are the watchwords of Jeyasingh’s style. The piece’s admirably unsettling drive was, however, undermined by a score (credited to Andy Cowton and Ryoji Ikeda) played at ear-splitting volume. Kerry Nicholls’ Cleave was similarly fast and frenetic and, as such, a suitable exemplar of the shaking world theme. Nicholls works closely with UK choreographer Wayne McGregor, and it shows. That’s not a bad thing, and probably quite welcome in the context of both the BDA and Chinese dance generally. Cleave showed plenty of craft and kinetic complexity but, from this Westerner’s perspective, it was written in an overly familiar vocabulary. [I’ve never met up with Kerry to discuss her time in Beijing. As for Shobana, I know she had her bumpy moments there. Before the end of 2009 we agreed to get together for a post-mortem, but it’s yet to happen. Some day, maybe soon…]

Temperamentally I felt much closer to John Utans’ Water Mark, a liquid piece of structured improvisation musically bookended by a version of the American standard Stormy Weather and Tim Buckley’s vibrant Song to the Siren. Marked by a fine sense of stillness and an undertow of romantic melancholy, this was one of the evening’s most poetic and elusive dances and, in all likelihood, no less of a challenge for the dancers than Jeyasingh’s and Nicholls’ more aggressive work-outs. [It’s unavoidable that you have the strongest feelings for the work you saw being made in front of you. Alright, I only saw John’s work after it was finished, but only just. My response to that run-through – immediate, tactful yet honest and heart-felt – might’ve helped shape or shade the way it was subsequently interpreted. If so, I take no credit for this. If anything it’s a humbling reminder of what a sensitive state artists are in when they’re creating work, and how that needs to be respected. But how they deserve to be told the truth of what you think and feel, whether the work is fresh out of the oven or older than the proverbial hills. That, I guess, is one of the main functions of the critic/dance writer.]

The dances by the other Chinese choreographers was, unsurprisingly, quite distinct from their foreign counterparts and of likewise variable effect. Zhao Ming’s Trust or not took swine flu as the topical inspiration for a fairly obvious study in group dynamics with, in its favour, a hopeful ending. Zhang Yunfeng’s starting point for The brightest light in the darkest night was Liu Yan, a BDA dancer injured during the final preparations for the 2008 Olympics and now a wheelchair-user. Set on two levels, this heart-on-sleeve dance was her first time onstage since her accident. An exquisite, long-armed presence in a red ballgown, she occupied a high platform stage right. Until the closing tableau, her three male co-stars danced with expansive sensitivity below her. That leaves the programme’s oddest entry. Cued to an adaptation of a Bach cello suite, Wang Mei’s What a golden autumn featured five dancers in rabbit costumes. The choreographer has been described as the Chinese Pina Bausch. I can’t comment on the comparison. I only know that her unhappy, floor-based bunnies constituted the least successful and yet perhaps most original piece in Danscross. [Those goofy rabbit outfits! And don’t ask me why, but I happen to like rabbit references. But in this case was Wang Mei practicing some weird form of artistic self-sabotage or what? I watched a studio version of her dance, up close rather than long-distance as was the case at the Poly Theatre, and sans the bunny garb. It was a memorably affecting piece. Now I wonder what will happen to it. The same could be said of the other Danscross pieces. For one possible answer, read on…]

What next? It seems that some, if not all, of these dances may be presented in the UK next year. [That is, 2010.] Ideally the project’s next phase would happen there, too, with British dancers on tap for UK and Chinese choreographers. But as a model for cross-cultural exchange, Danscross could probably work anywhere in the world.’ [Here’s to the future…]

1) What changes did [...]]]> I am in need of feedback on methods and ways of considering what happens in transnational creative exchanges: while there are many books, articles, and even dances on this process of transit and transmission between bodies of different “cultural and political practices: I am curious what Danscross choreographers, researchers, dancers, and administrators found (during or after) as the points of ”transformation” (focusing here about the space between not in opposition to):

1) What changes did you notice in what the dancers or choreographers or researchers did, directly related to the circumstances of being in Beijing, with Beijing-based dancers, trained at the Beijing Dance Academy? No matter how small and specific or broad and general: what caused a known pattern to shift, transfer, disengage, remain silent, empty out, or burst, self-destruct, or disappear?

2) Because “change” can be very difficult to know or write about except in retrospect, what was new or unprecedented or unusual in your dancing or dance making or observation process that was (again) directly related to these place/time circumstances of Danscross? In this case, could you describe what that was and what were the circumstances surrounding that moment?

3) While the larger and cumbersome “differences” of dance cultures may seem obvious to some of you, I think it may be still helpful to hear some of these. What were some of the first, most impressive, and continuing differences in this transnational encounter?

After viewing and viewing and viewing the Chinese and the UK, Hong Kong, and Other choreographic works in performance:

What is the deep sweeping emotionalism in the Chinese works? What does it do? How does it work? What does it produce? What is the abstraction of emotion through forms and stylization in the Other [...]]]> Wild show.
Nov. 6
Big questions I want to ask during the next two discussion and forum times:

After viewing and viewing and viewing the Chinese and the UK, Hong Kong, and Other choreographic works in performance:

What is the deep sweeping emotionalism in the Chinese works? What does it do? How does it work? What does it produce?
What is the abstraction of emotion through forms and stylization in the Other works? How does this process work? What does it do to ”meaning”?
Can we talk about the power and politics of emotions?
Can we talk about the power of abstraction?

How is dance “used” in these works?
How is dance “employed” in our different culture/nations?

How do you choose and shape the dance with your music, objects, lights, set?
How are we speaking and making meaning through every element of these dances in performance?

I feel that everyone needs to do homework on each other’s histories. Both of the individual and their “culture” and ”nation.” We do not create separated from our local space. We do not create separately from our given circumstances of daily life.

There is so much I do not understand.
Danscross crosses.

On one level this blog is like writing into some masturbatory void, but I’m aware that I am [...]]]> There’s a real heating up of the Danscross project as the collective energies of those who are involved and in Beijing focus on the public performances as opposed to the process. But these performances are also a part of the process. Will the enormous contradictions in Chinese culture be evident in the eight works to be premiered this weekend?

On one level this blog is like writing into some masturbatory void, but I’m aware that I am likely to get caught doing it.

Jonathan spoke at breakfast about how exposed he felt in what was sometimes a fully documented working environment, what with observers in the studio with him and Carolyn and the dancers plus on certain days a photographer or film-maker as well. Amusing, although maybe not at the time: apparently he muttered something along the lines of ’What the hell should I do now?’ and it was duly translated to the dancers as ’He’s undecided what to do next.’ Does process become performance when it’s under such close scrutiny?

My friend, the Beijing-based dance scholar and critic Jiang Dong [who's written a book called Contemporary Chinese Dance which to my shame I've yet to read, but which is available in English] has said that Wang Mei, whom he holds in high esteem [and whom I've yet to meet], isn’t the least bit interested in a career. She’s professor of the choreography department of BDA. and yes, she enjoys it when the public sees her dances. But that’s not why she’s doing it. If no one sees the work it’s okay. She’s really a philosopher, he says. Does this mean process is where it’s at for her?

Danscross has been three years in the making, which is how long it’s been since BDA and ResCen began thinking and talking about the project. The doing of it — the actual making of dances — began less than six months ago. hence the heightened expectations this week. I’m reminding myself of this timeline while thinking about the rules of the game for the choreographers. It’s about numbers: no more than six dancers in a piece lasting ten minutes maximum and made in just eleven days.

Results of Phase 4: on Saturday afternoon there was a sharing at BDA of Jonathan’s and Tiechun’s dances. The latter’s Ghost Money came first. Witnessing the creative struggle of any group of artists to get things right in the studio is a kind of investment, especially if you’re privileged enough to be able to do it over the course of a few days. Maybe that’s why I felt so glad for — and even proud of — Tiechun’s four dancers at the sharing almost in a lump-in-throat kind of way. I was moved by them — and by ‘Jonny’s boys’ too — because they’d really pulled their act together. The two pieces are vastly different in outlook and execution and yet they share a wit, by which I mean an intelligence, that stems as much from each cast’s commitment as their respective choreographic concepts. My Chinese colleague Pan Li was quite right when she remarked that each dance creates its own cohesive world. The high-flown sense of purpose of Tiechun’s piece, set to Mozart, is offset by something quite human. [More on this later.] Jonathan’s Beijing Man, meanwhile, is both serious and, in its own quirky way, sorta sexy. The six men in it are dazzlers. It’s fun — and something more — to watch them sway and float, leap and ’sleep.’

At the sharing Jonathan spoke about being ‘very drawn to the idea of making a piece with men only as the basis for a world that already wasn’t complete.’ His take on the notion of a shaking world is about ‘looking at the instability that comes from the shifting of alliances and people.’ This was possible, he said, largely because of ’the shared trust, connection and feeling’ of dancers whose working relationship he views as exceptionally harmonious. With them, he added, ‘I found I was in one way on very stable ground.’ Not being around during the first week of Phase 4 meant that I missed him/them using poetry from the Tang and Song dynasties, along with contemporary Chinese verse, to find movement. But it was this process, often a part of Jonathan’s practice, that enabled ‘the individual personalities and idiosyncrasies of the dancers to come out.’

Dancer Wang Zihan said that one of the strongest parts about working with Jonathan was the feeling that ‘in creating work there should be no restrictions or limits.’ It’s ironic that this arose out of creative circumstances that were in some ways highly restrictive, at least in their outer casing; it’s what each choreographer and cast have put inside of the dances that constitutes the differences between them. He continued: ‘In China we limit ourselves to a certain style or period. In this situation we were asked to forget about the time period or the meaning of a poem. This gave us more space for imagination and more options for physical expression.’ Fellow dancer Wang Lei added that he knew Western choreographers ‘like to use games to get and build up material,’ but in this case said games can be used in the future ‘when we have the opportunity to choreograph.’ Note that there’s been no time to enquire how such choreographic opportunities  might practically materialize, nor just what that choreography might be.

For his part, Tiechun began by saying how ‘in China we don’t have this practice of having created a piece you have to explain it afterwards.  A lot of times, working with dance, the minute you try to put it into words something’s lost in translation.’ ‘ Could this have been for him one of the 18 levels of hell that he was telling lighting designer Charles Balfour about? He was honest and good-humoured about having no ideas for three or four months. ‘In the past when I created a piece i always had a kind of preparation,’ he explained. ‘This time, no. That kind of approach will give the dance a lack of definition, but this lack of clarity becomes an essential part of the piece.’ Addressing his dancers, he admitted that ‘I didn’t pick you guys because you all majored in folk dance. It’s just that you were the one left over!’ He tried working from their improvisations, but apparently this didn’t prove to be particularly fruitful. What he hit upon, eventually, was shaping them into a family unit in which two of the dancers are ‘not really dogs, but they take on the essence of dogs. In every family there’s always these small lives crawling about. But if this was a family, there needed to be some kinds of twists and contradictions between these people.’ Out of this Tiechun somehow hit upon the idea of using money to signal a transition to another world, ‘a symbol all Chinese people are familiar with. It’s money that works in the worlds of the dead and the living; It connects the two.’ The dance is not about rebirth or reincarnation, he said, but more to do with the meaning of those two worlds juxtaposed against what happens between the actual people or even within an individual. While thematically all of this might sound heavy, on the physical side Ghost Money could hardly have been simpler. A lot of movement was derived from a Chinese folk dance called  jiao zhou yang ge. Tiechun himself called it limited, citing twisting as its major element. ‘The entire piece comes out of this twisting action, and out of the dancers themselves.’

After stating her belief that Tiechun was ‘totally going away from what he’s done before,’ Liu Xiaozhen deemed it ‘a new way of performing Chinese folk or ethnic dance, and of passing down culture and tradition.’ The dancer Huang Dongmei echoed this, speaking of how she and the others were able to ’open up and try things never possible before’ by ‘reaching out and trying to grab onto certain elements about just what is Chinese for us?’ She’d asked Tiechun if his dance was a tragedy or a comedy, but ‘he wasn’t sure. He said it’s sometimes one and then the other.’ As for personal rewards, she believes that working on Ghost Money has strengthened her ‘ability to think and reflect as I’m dancing and creating a dance work.’

I asked if the choreographers could comment on each other’s dances. ‘Talking about someone else’s work is even harder than talking about your own. All i can say is there is a feeling here. Jonathan did an excellent job of deeply accessing material in the dancers’ minds and hearts as well as their physicality. I see elements of Beijing and China in it, maybe, but just an impression. It’s not specific. And if it were an imitation, it would be wrong. You can see the process in the finished work. It’s a product of the way it was created.’

As for  Tiechun, Jonathan said his piece contained ‘a refreshing clarity and purity. There’s a strong sense of a connected group of people, and something from another time.’ The beauty of the dance, he added, was never merely decorative but instead had a carved quality. The work reminded Carolyn of paintings, and also of something ‘not of this world, but making a connection between our past and out future. Maybe that’s the feeling between life and death.’

It was compliments all round then. Ringmaster Bannerman, aka Professor Ban, took the opportunity to sum up the project from his perspective:  ’In the process of research the unknown becomes familiar, but the opposite is also true — things that we think are familiar to us suddenly become unknown.’

It’s more than half a week since the sharing. For me here and now the greatest unknown is still China itself — the people, the place and the dance that is happening both in the studio and all over on the streets of Beijing.

The BDA Dance Company, as ringmaster Chris Bannerman put it to me the other day, is kind of the Chinese equivalent to NDT2. I wonder how the dancers perceive themselves, their place in the national (and, why not, global) culture, their sense of achievement and what potential they feel they collectively embody. My colleague Katherine has [...]]]> Random thoughts and observations, or else I may never feel caught up with myself here:

The BDA Dance Company, as ringmaster Chris Bannerman put it to me the other day, is kind of the Chinese equivalent to NDT2. I wonder how the dancers perceive themselves, their place in the national (and, why not, global) culture, their sense of achievement and what potential they feel they collectively embody. My colleague Katherine has been pursuing some of these issues. More on that in a bit.

Apparently Tiechun is going to use fans to blow paper money around the auditorium when his dance is finally shown to the public. Maybe I got the means of transport wrong, but there will be flying bills. Fake, I presume. Even so, it could start a riot…

The British-based designer Charles Balfour, who will be lighting five of the eight Danscross pieces, has been talking about hell and death with Tiechun. Edifyingly, no doubt, on both sides. I asked Jonathan Lunn is he believed in the concept of hell (no) and if he did, what would his idea of it be? Being stuck eternally on a rugby field in a freezing November rain, he replied. My own playful notion of hell dates back to my schooldays too. I was about age 12 when my older brother and I used a home-made ouija board to contact Marilyn Monroe in our kitchen. She spelled out that she was in hell, and that the devil called all his minions there jazz babies. It would seem that some do indeed like it hot.

Fragments from the interview I sat in on that Katherine was conducting with Tiechun’s quartet. How learning Westerner’s choreography has ‘overthrown some of the things that we think are correct.’ This from sweet, round-faced Huang Dongmei, who also spoke of Chinese movement as typically being ‘more introverted. During this process we’ve had to overhaul ourselves mentally and physically.’ Wu Shuai, whom I see as the class clown, hilarious and endearing, evinced surprising philosophical depth when he spoke of Western versus Asian dance. The first he described as ’several different brooks from many directions going into a big lake,’ whereas the latter stems from one source ‘that pushes the river a long way. It can go on forever, and it activates our imagination.’ Put another way, Western dance moves ‘from the impossible to the possible’ while the route of Chinese dance is the opposite ‘because it has no end to it.’ This notion of eternity intrigues me; it’s the opposite of a quick fix. Also interesting is how the dancers generally question or certainly regard as unfamiliar the whole idea of choreographic personality or, by extension, the individual voice. As Chris Bannerman (or Bannerman Chris; when in Beijing…) reminded me at breakfast this morning, in Asian countries the surname tends to be voiced first. The implication is that identity is about an us before it’s about a me.

I’d like to learn more about Chinese dance drama. I think. What am I talking about? Of course I’d like to know more. I only qualifed this graph’s opening statement after having tonight witnessed what I was told was an example of dance drama staged in the BDA experimental theatre. In this period piece, supposedly based on a well-known and possibly classical story, three main characters were supplemented by a small squadron of identically clad extras of both sexes. The latter were exceptionally well-drilled, their bold, machinated and frankly rather basic moves cued to a score that seemed a melange of blockbuster film music. One of the two male leads strode around in a black robe being commanding and mean to a young woman in pink and a long, thin man in a blue jumper and loose white trousers. The latter pair were plainly some kind of couple. And to what spurious lengths they suffered. (How to say sturm und drang in Mandarin?) Alas, I failed to engage with either part of this duo. The young man was especially and tediously, off-puttingly and frantically pathetic. When the soldierly extras began mincing around him (note, without dropping their aura of implied threat) I thought, Great, could this be a whole new genre? Let’s call it bombastic camp. Dreadful is how I’d describe it, and yet there was still some discipline to admire in this arduously bold dance. Who knows, I may be misreading a masterpiece, and I haven’t got a clue who was responsible for it. Such ignorance could be the price paid for making a spontaneous decision to see something just because I happened to be in the vicinity when it got mentioned, and I went along for the ride. It was bumpy, yeah, but I like to think it’s my tendency to try to actively respond to new and/or unexpected experiences. As Wu Shuai and other dancers remarked today, an open mind is where the new China is at.

I’m not quite clear about why the dancers balked at going barefoot. I see now [...]]]> Fascinating and fun to watch Avatara Ayuso prepare to bring Shobana Jeyasingh’s dance — made at the very start of Danscross — back up to speed yesterday. It’s a sextet featuring, with one exception, dancers I have enjoyed watching this week in freshly-made pieces. Avatara is a wonderful teacher, in command yet relaxed. And she’s learning Mandarin!

I’m not quite clear about why the dancers balked at going barefoot. I see now that it’s probably not because they had no idea it would be required of them when performing the piece, but rather that they weren’t necessarily prepared for a barefoot warm-up on this particular night. I guess I’ve never thought much about footwear in Chinese dance, but bare feet is definitely not the norm. Tonight I dropped by the BDA’s experimental theatre where a string of solos and ensemble pieces in what I am guessing is a dance-drama style were being shown to a smallish group of mainly older people who were marking things on clipboards. I wonder what this evaluation was for. Anyway, the first and quite tall boy wore a costume made up mainly of bits of fake fur and hide. He had on baggy-legged, tight-at-the-waist trousers, and his chest was mostly bare. Despite the faux naturelle look (including glitter lashes!) he was incongruously shod in what looked like black and yellow trainers. Go figure.

Avatara’s class was a challenge to do and a pleasure to watch. The focus was the kind of grounded weight exchange associated with contact improvisation, which is a far cry from what these dancers are used to. She started with a three-person taffy pull where the body in the middle is being stretched from either end. By the end of the two-hour session she’d shifted from testing, toning and training to summoning key elements of Jeyasingh’s work back up from inside the dancers’ bodies. Other moves included leaping backwards and up into your partner’s grasp, or slanting down fast, sharp and back to back, almost like a tree that’s been felled. Although I don’t think I heard her say the word, most of this was about the trust that comes from really working together. Attention was also drawn to the direction of each dancer’s gaze (up tends to expand how the movement is read by an audience) and, even more crucially, to the openness of the chest. ‘From the heart,’ Avatara instructed, ‘like in life.’ She demonstrated what she meant and wanted to see; how almost every move seems to originate in or push out from the chest, so that nothing looks or feels held back. And yet it all must be very controlled, strong, focused, with taut stomachs and some kind of intention. It’s up to each dancer to decide what that last is, but intention there must be. It’s what drives Jeyasingh’s dance, however abstract it might appear.

Dancing to and beside music. At some point, I have to deal with the music going on here. Jonathan listened to his ipod while watching the work as we moved through last week. He was sorting and feeling out what was going to work best. I think it was Friday or Saturday when he played three music selections to the same movement sequence and asked [...]]]> Oct. 26 2009 Music sound gesture

Dancing to and beside music.
At some point, I have to deal with the music going on here.
Jonathan listened to his ipod while watching the work as we moved through last week. He was sorting and feeling out what was going to work best. I think it was Friday or Saturday when he played three music selections to the same movement sequence and asked the dancers how they felt and to hear the sound next to the image/kinaesthetic materiality. Two pieces did entirely different things: one a Bach fugue and the other electronic by a new music group out of San Francisco, (will get the name, sorry). Well two things happened, both worked but differently, and one of the Danscross works already has a Bach work on it. BUT, the fugue was spectacular with the movement because it charged the emotional side that the dancers have not really played with directly. See below

I THINK WE NEED TO STOP FACING THE MIRROR. In order to get out of the frontal gaze, the dancers need to be placed elsewhere to get the dance out of dance-hood or the proscenium stare.

Ok, so the Bach fugue channeled the emotional links from tender to silly but I think Jonathan also felt it could mask what else was going on and thus: the electronic work is now in place. As Jonathan also suggested, sometimes the music can run outside the dance and I was thinking how it streams and sometimes pushes the movement in interesting ways, but not forcefully. That is a problem though; the music does not create any kind of sound/body tension that can make a work really rich and provocative. The music seems to stand directly beside the dance.

Aside: the electronic choice can also make the dancers work very hard on an expressive encounter with each other and wherever
My last VOTE: This work grew out of these small moments of physical encounters with words/letters/sounds from poems and a play. It does not matter to me if those texts have been chewed and bitten and danced alive, but there were ecstatic moments that just no longer happen because the dancer does not speak the words… It was really wonderful when a sound/syllable/tone would hit the air and echo with the gesture. I would love even a whispered section or even one dancer doing that word/phase dance. It opened up the dancers’ vulnerability too because it is not something they do all the time. They are such brilliant dancers that sometimes they can sit back, away from their dancing and not tune in the way they did when the words made them be present.

Enough. I know the poly-stage is large but I have seen Pina Bausch send a dancer onto an opera sized stage and whisper making the entire theatre lean forward and reach for those syllables.
The encounter in language and gesture here is charged and nuanced because I remember the poems, the play texts, the choices made…

Tiechun
I walk in and the dancers have costumes on: I was concerned because this work needs costumes but I do not think they should look like Chinese Folk Dance costumes. They have big linen pants dyed so that the brown starts very dark and fades into the off-white.

I keep thinking of the things that are HUGE in Beijing: the Forbidden City, Tiananmen square, the new buildings like the National Performing Arts center (it’s a HUGE like a drop of water on the surface of the earth. Perhaps China wants to be BIG now, what does that mean?

Twists, like the Chung Guo Jie that is the woven/braided knot that is used in Chinese knotted hangings. Tiechun used every twist today: In one group encounter they hold hands and knit and unknot their bodies. Tiechun directed a powerful suggestion: lift through the weaving when you start, the chest should press forward up and over and then the limbs take over the ”twisted” distortion as he called it today. Keep the legs together, the knees in, tighter, concentrate, flow within that pretzel.

Back to those costumes and music
Tiechun is creating a world, the pants, the tops of with their layers of tucked and pleated off-white cloth, on the front of the shirts that are cut on diagonal necklines for the women. This makes them “Han” if they have that kind diagonal flap to close the shirt. Each dancer’s patterned folds are different. While the cloth and tops give me a sense of ”folk,” I am told that they do not feel that way to the dancers. They do add to the strangeness of this work.

A long ribbon of twisting bodies, a hurdle of twists, like a human “Bird Nest, ” the flinging flying stomping twists, followed by. …Those WONDERFUL FLOATING WHITE COINS made out of paper. These are the reappearance of the funeral practice like the early parade: These are the coins that are tossed somehow. Tiechun adds these small triangles of red silk that float like brilliant flames with the white coins over the dancers’ dancing.

Like the Mozart Mass in C Minor, the clothe and the changes in the shapes of gestures with sleeves and billowing pants wrench the work out of its simpler space into a public one.
There is that word again: Public. Dance making made public, an incredible way to challenge all of us.
Like Tiechun asking his dancers to let their breath and movement “coincide”.

What ever I hear or ask is filtered through different people. Even when they say that “primary source material” (like face to face encounter) is what a researcher wants to get, that this is the raw material of research, but really “in translation” means a kind of change has happened to the source material: it is already transformed. Thus research is [...]]]> October 21, 2009
yunlu and couples

What ever I hear or ask is filtered through different people. Even when they say that “primary source material” (like face to face encounter) is what a researcher wants to get, that this is the raw material of research, but really “in translation” means a kind of change has happened to the source material: it is already transformed. Thus research is creative and dynamic, not the ”truth.” Alive.

I keep wondering when Tiechun will name his “work.” The walk with the male dancer lifting the feet of the female as she glides forward, down stage in the hip swing, body twisting away from the center/ Emily, a walk from a Chinese minority

I would like to talk to each dancer about their ideas about this project from the beginning until now in its 4th phase. What does the theme of the world “shaking” mean to them now? How has this changed?
I would like to have an open discussion about the theme with the dancers, researchers. And guest choreographers. I will also ask the choreographers about any preparation they did and how they may be adapting their normal methods to this particular task. I need to see earlier works by the choreographers to see what their work has been like at least in the last few years.

Today I will make lists. Some very famous authors (Sei Shônagon) made themselves famous for their lists.

Tiechun’s room and ”making strange”
Perhaps surreal is not the word but absurd, like Beckett’s characters, we seem to be a strange family caught in its own tiny world. Is this ” shaking” like those little globe worlds used for souvenirs where you shake and ”snowflakes” flurry about this miniature fake world?
Two dancers work two wait
Tiechun wants the yunlu: the patterns in the movement, the rhythmic patterns, the deep structures, the rhythmic structures.
In this walk by Guo Jiao from the folk dance, what began as a distinctive walk almost parade-like appearance has become a walk with Yuan Jia lifting her feet one by one in her rhythm? He must be crouched on the ground to do this. Now she is literally walking on air in the hands of all the dancers, she walks upright across the stage with the hands of the dancers holding her up, until she falls backwards into Wu Shai’s arms.

Tiechun works on the two “children” Wu Shuai and Huang Dong Mei in their rocking and now whirling dervish dance. They must: stare forward with out blinking. They must get faster and faster, they practice many many times. They spin out they fall they laugh they spin they work with their heads to one side arms over head, spinning: bend straight bend straight bend straight, Tiechun calls and claps and makes them spin over and over and over again. But it works. The voice of the soloist in the Mozart Mass in C Minor begins her most sweet sad song with Guo Jiao’s raised walk downstage, and the doll-like rocking figures in the background. Figures in a landscape. Many phrases of the mother and father figure repeat but with slight variations, her fall and jump into his arms, crouching on his knee, again and fall, again and fall forward, again. This is a precarious world.

Jonathan and Carolyn’s room
Have they talked over the theme with the dancers? With themselves? Can we talk or maybe not. I am not sure silence works. I am not sure dancers only want to dance and not talk about their work. I do not think that brilliance disappears if you share ideas about your work.

I sit on the bench across the front mirrors so the 6 men are always looking directly at us to adjust their movements, posture, look etc. I feel invisible and like I am an obstruction.
Has the world disappeared outside of Beijing?
Jonathan puts the 6 into 3 couples to play the male and female roles in a play from the early 20th century by another Chinese playwright. It is a fractured love scene, with only tension and small talk between the characters. I love the small movements that come from an emotion that is lost but leaves traces. I will get an English copy of the play and scene. It seems to be about two people who no longer hear or know each other. Instructions from Jonathan: in contrast to other exercises and tasks think of the physical language as an emotional or ”charged” language. In his critiques: when you do not use the words while moving (to one couple who does not) it is a cop out, using the words gives the movements a different power, without the words, it becomes just a dance. They are asked to lean into the words, push response, and sometimes to wait, hold back, let the movement moment arrive. Wonderful moments where their bodies seem to have different meanings: from I am tired, leave me alone, hands to face, pushing legs between legs, rolling over and off each other. No one is violent with their actions, but something is masked. One dancer clasps his partner around the neck, and Jonathan asks for that moment to be more front, more twisted. The dancers laugh. Is it laughter away from the strangle hold?
One dancer traces the entire body outline of his partner: is this map of the person? Is this the boundaries that he must stay within? Is this the shape of a dead body on the pavement anywhere in a shaking world.

I am reminded of Pina Bausch’s different shoulder stands and parades making humans strange and strange humans.

Watch the process as it unfolds here with:

Choreographers – Jonathan Lunn, Carolyn Choa, and Zhao Tiechun Documentors – Katherine Mezur, Pan Li and Liu Xiaozhen and dancers of the BDA Company

Translator: Xu Rui.

Interviewer: Emilyn (transcribed September 2nd)

Xu Rui’s presence as the translator was integral to the interview process. However, I have edited the text to reflect a direct dialogue between Wang Mei and myself.

Emilyn: I am fascinated in your process and I would like to know more about your work. I would like to ask about your concerns in this piece. Perhaps [...]]]> Interview with Wang Mei August 7th

Translator: Xu Rui.

Interviewer: Emilyn (transcribed September 2nd)

Xu Rui’s presence as the translator was integral to the interview process. However, I have edited the text to reflect a direct dialogue between Wang Mei and myself.

Emilyn: I am fascinated in your process and I would like to know more about your work. I would like to ask about your concerns in this piece. Perhaps we could start with the wider context of your work?

Wang Mei: What I am concerned with most is my current personal feeling, about life, the reality of living — people.

Rather than the codified dance?

Yes.

Does that thread through all your work?

Yes. I would like to say I do not like dancing at all. (We laugh).

Yes I can appreciate that. We have choreographers in the UK who are concerned to find the real pedestrian body in the performance rather than the codified body…

So, what about this piece? What are your particular concerns for this piece?

Concerning this piece, there should be two layers, one is about myself, my own feelings about life and reality. Another layer is about the theme of The Shaking World, the theme of this project. About this theme –we have quite a lot of international communication and exchange. Many Chinese artists, when they have the chance to exchange with foreign culture, they have a kind of feeling they are not as good as the foreign artists. This is to do with cultural difference, and Chinese artists are not very confident. I think this is not good, that before you begin to do something you feel you are not as good as foreign artists.

I imagine this has gone on for a long time, this sense of hierarchy. Have you felt it here during this two weeks?

It is not a question about right or wrong, it is nothing personal, it is the history. We have this feeling, passed down. For example, During the Qing Dynasty, China was very strong and everybody would learn Chinese.  Now we have a strong influence from the Western world and we speak English. It is like a standard and we pay attention to the Western ways.

Yes, I see it on the subway here, there are little TV screens, portraying Western faces, and the worst of American advertising, and I want to say, no, no, don’t go there, don’t go there! In a project like this, I would like see how we can begin to unravel this unevenness — I am not sure if that is happening?

I was in France several years ago for the international competition and the foreign artists I met were very kind. Facing them I never felt uneven or unequal. That is why I think it is not the foreign people’s problem but a problem of ourselves, how we look at our tradition. As a consequence, sometimes Chinese artists will focus on our own tradition a lot,  so people can see it is Chinese, what is really Chinese. I do not think that is right thing to do. That is why I decided not to do Chinese dance in this project, but to focus on my own ideas.

As I observe the work next door and the work in here, I notice a big difference. If I was to compare the pieces I would say that Kerry’s movement cuts the space while your movement absorbs the space. It is not that one is better or worse, just different. So I am curious about the idea of emptiness rather than fullness in your work. I am wondering if that is part of your process?

I think the issue of space is the biggest issue for a choreographer. You mentioned fullness and emptiness, this is very important. If you have the right quality you will have the big space, but if you do not have the quality you have just a small space.

I am reminded here how every small movement is magnified because it is given time and space… Is there anything more you would like to say about the piece?

The original idea comes from a little event in my teaching last year. I was teaching the graduate class majoring in modern dance. And we were going to make a full length ballet together, all the students of this class. Then the students had a discussion to decide whether they wanted to do this or not. But only a few students wanted to do this, so the four dancers you see in this piece are the students who said yes. They have graduated now. I really wanted to put my personal feelings into this piece, the relationships between people. There is something not serious but playful about it. The starting point was an ancient Chinese poem that is hard to translate. A feeling that in the middle of your life, after a lot of experiences of life, you have a kind of understanding. You want to say something but you cant say it in words. I chose this subtle feeling about life as a starting point.

I am picking up on you telling me that only 4 dancers wanted to do this piece — so where is your place in Beijing as an artist?  Is your work supported? Or do all the dancers want to do technical spectacle? Is there support in Beijing for your work?

It is nothing about the piece itself. It is a personal understanding about life or art. My life or my world is different from yours, but I cant require you to follow me.

But the performance by Yabin last night was very different. So I am wondering how your work is placed in Beijing? The language is different.

Oh yea.  There is a big problem about the attitude. China is changing very fast, Beijing city is changing every day. You go to some area, say the eastern area, and you go there the next day and it is changed. In this very fast rhythm of life, people are rushing, they don’t want to stop, they don’t want to concentrate on something.

So in your work you are slowing down. How do you want the performers to perform, what is you concern with performing presence?

Of course there are a lot of details and requirements about the technique and the movement. Yet there is a basic concept about the performing and presentation. I ask each dancer to be ‘human’ not a ‘dancer’. Because there are dance performers who create a big distance between the audience and the performers and I want to close that gap, to be human. 

Thankyou.

The last three days of this period (days 10 — 12) were filled with intense activity as choreographers and dancers honed their works [...]]]> I am picking up the narrative of these postings as the clock robbed Emilyn of the chance to maintain the daily contributions in the final days of this phase of Danscross. I am happy to say that she will fill in the gaps in coming weeks and complete this remarkably rich commentary on the phase three process.

The last three days of this period (days 10 — 12) were filled with intense activity as choreographers and dancers honed their works and made final alterations and adjustments. Simultaneously more people were drawn into the studios: Emilyn Claid and Qing Qing were joined by academics Naomi Inata from Japan and Luo Bin from the China National Academy of Arts Research; and lighting designer Charles Balfour arrived from London to work with Chinese designers Ren Dongshen and Shui Wendong. The introduction of these new spectators brought the performance moment palpably closer.

Another interesting element to be added come from material gathered by Emilyn and Naomi who interviewed both dancers and choreographers, so enabling more voices to join this record of the creative processes. These subsequent additions will alter a blog which has focused on the immediate and spontaneous, and perhaps this part of the process will exhibit a change in register — a kind of reflective blogging.

Days 10 and 11

In the midst of the bustle and the preparations for the production the concentration in both studios deepened noticeably. The energy of the dancers became more consistently focused and the longer passages of material both demanded and allowed longer periods of attention to be sustained and enhanced. Academics and designers have commented on the fact that the works and the working methods are virtually polar opposites as the sweeping phrases of Kerry Nicholls’ work are in stark contrast to the minimal sparseness of Wang Mei; and the panoramic scope of Kerry’s attention and energy is contrasted by the pinpoint focus of Wang Mei.

But nonetheless I am struck by the remarkable similarities in the works and processes: both choreographers demand an unusually high level of concentration from the performers and a commitment to being completely present in rehearsal; both have very clear structural concerns and work carefully to hone the structural elements; both are concerned with finding movement languages which challenge the performers albeit presenting very different challenges; both works are present a kind of balance — Kerry finding unity and collective identity within a world of individuality, and Wang Mei finding moments of individuality to balance the strong collective presence. While it might be said that such aspects of the choreographic process are always present, they are more explicitly present, more clearly identified by these choreographers than is the norm.

These points were noted in the discussion which took place on Day 12 as part of the sharing, of the two works. The comments from academics, choreographers and dancers acknowledged the challenges that the works presented, and also repeated a point made in other creative periods of Danscross: that the presence of academics and dance studios is new at the Beijing Dance Academy and the experience is proving fruitful and thought-provoking. It is seen by many of the Chinese academics as fieldwork, which raises interesting issues/tensions about the nature of the ’field’ and its relation to the normal ‘habitus’ of the academics.

‘Believing is seeing’ or the context makes the meaning — or not

I had my own thought-provoking moment from one comment from Luo Bin, the Director of the Dance Department at the Chinese National Academy of Art Research. He commented that the dancers had difficulty in achieving the clarity of detail in Kerry’s work. This was at odds with my perceptions of the work, which puzzled me and that led me to speculate how this disparity might arise and on what he might be seeing.

My first thought was that Kerry’s movement vocabulary may not be familiar to him and as he was only in attendance for the last three days, his eye had not become attuned to the movement. This is not meant in a superficial way — rather it is an acknowledgement that our visual experiences lead to specific interpretations of the world and form a key part of our habitus, that familiar context or world that we reconstruct each day, but which may form a veil which impedes our vision of the new or disrupting.

This reminded me of times in the past when I have experienced a shift in perception that allowed me to enter into a new visual language, complete with vocabulary, syntax and structural form (it is always difficult to avoid the literary metaphor!). On one occasion in India when observing Kathak classes and performances over a period of weeks, I felt almost a physical sensation during one performance, as if the dancer, and dance form, virtually literally came into focus for me and suddenly I could comprehend what I was seeing.

It seems obvious that a process of visual acculturation needs to take place, but what is fascinating about this is that the eye seems unable to physically, mechanically capture the data and a level of confusion arises that cannot be dispelled. This is probably not the case, rather it may be the brain’s inability to process the information — to locate it within a context and make sense of it. The shock of the new means that there is no context in which to view the work — that the act of comprehension (literally taking together) eludes us and so no sense can be made.

This is supported by some findings in science disciplines (eg the University College London scientist Professor Zhaoping) that believing is seeing — that the context forms our perception of visual events. The implication of this is that when the context is unfamiliar, we are inhibited from forming a coherent perception.

In this case and in my Kathak experience, it was not that the context determined what I believed I saw, but simply that I could not make sense of (believe) what I was seeing. While this may be discomforting when viewing an established dance form, in my experience it also plays a more enticing part in watching new dance works, as they often present a number of possible avenues of development, and even display an aesthetic of ambiguity. In these cases the initial visual ‘confusion’ can  be savored as part of the appreciation of a dance coming into being and crystalising before us.

Point of view — translating from the studio to the stage

In this case, I also wondered about the problem of Luo Bin’s field of vision as he was in a dance studio viewing at close proximity material which is designed to be seen in a theatre from a much greater distance. The issue of ’point of view’ influencing the opinion (or, point of view!) of the viewer reminded me that the choreographer is utilising a professional expertise that allows them to transpose the dance material onto an imaginary stage, even while viewing it in a studio, making decisions about the material and structure that only make sense when seen in the proper performance context.

The challenge for viewers in making this translation was made greater by the use of de-centralised space and the complexities of the timing, with events occurring simultaneously in a torrent of movement, sometimes at opposite sides of the studio, interspersed with wonderfully constructed, but seemingly spontaneous moments of synchronicity. It seemed to me that it would be physically impossible for the viewer to take in the full range of this visual information, as so much lay outside an individual field of vision in the studio. In this setting the viewer must accumulate repeated viewings in order to construct not only a familiarity with the movement, but also a ’map’ of the dance so that the totality can be assembled.

Identifying the disparity in Luo Bin’s visual perception and mine is an integral part of this initiative of course, and I welcome the opportunities for further dialogue that phase four and the performances and conference will bring. I may find that my speculations are misconceived, but already the experience of this debate has stimulated thought and reflection, and led me to analyse my own past experiences of the unfamiliar and how it becomes familiar. And the ’believing is seeing’ point is also entirely relevant to me — my familiarity might be a barrier to my ability to perceive what is before me.

Binocular vision

My intention is to apply a kind of ’binocular vision’ to this task. One eye uses my knowledge and experience of the disciplines of dance and dance making to observe, noting any points of interest without making judgements; simultaneously, the other eye is given the task of simply observing, using my human perceptual apparatus to be present and open to whatever might occur. In this way I hope to avoid seeing only what I wish to see, or simply reinforcing my previously held understandings and beliefs. Is this possible? I can’t be sure, but the attempt seems important. How to watch, see and observe will no doubt feature again during Danscross, and may the debate flow freely.

Zhaoping L, Jingling L (2008) Filling-In and Suppression of Visual Perception from Context: A Bayesian Account of Perceptual Biases by Contextual Influences. PLoS Comput Biol 4(2): e14. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.0040014

I am writing this from Tokyo where ResCen is undertaking research into community arts practice (this term is not always used in Japan). Yesterday at Setagaya Public Theatre, arguably a unique institution in Japan, with an impressive range of work and a very string reputation, we observed a visual arts/theatre workshop for children aged 6 to 10 and my thoughts turned again to the impact that community arts practices have had more widely. The use of devising processes particularly and the focus on process, although in this case, there is a product to be shared, both at the end of each day and at the end of the series of workshops.

But the focus on the experience of the participants and the process of addressing a particular set of external factors seems intrinsic to both this community work with school children, and the professional context at the BDA. This is dangerous territory of course, as it is all too easy to ascribe the creative act to the realm of childish play and to diminish the expert practitioner status of all those involved, but especially the performers — although there is no denying the expert practitioner status of those leading the Setagaya workshops, they are very skilled indeed.

These are topics for another day, but the proximity of the experiences of the BDA and now the Setagaya Public Theatre has thrown up more food for thought, and more thinking, digesting and processing is required.
–
Prof Chris Bannerman
Head of ResCen, Centre for Research into Creation in the Performing Arts

I enter as a discussion is in process about how far to drop their heads as they sit on the floor.

…Time passes, I am watching them all lying on their backs. They are now discussing exactly how Wang mei wants them to initiate arching their necks so that their eyes can look back behind. A very slight movement, imperceptible at first, [...]]]>
Wang mei rehearsal video

I enter as a discussion is in process about how far to drop their heads as they sit on the floor.

…Time passes, I am watching them all lying on their backs. They are now discussing exactly how Wang mei wants them to initiate arching their necks so that their eyes can look back behind. A very slight movement, imperceptible at first, grows out of nothing. They expand the very start of the gesture as their hair slides on the floor. Does it begin with the movement of the eyes, or the shift in the neck? Nothing becomes something.  Something small becomes magnified.

Today I interviewed Wang Mei. Hopefully it can be loaded onto the blog site.  It was informative. However by the time my questions/comments were translated, and Wang mei had responded, and then her words translated back to me, I was left feeling that the response seemed to have moved away from the question to a new place, which took the dialogue in another direction and opened up other questions.  Dare I say it – we seemed to be playing Chinese whispers!

I will see about transcribing the interview or uploading it in iTunes format.

A crucial point I remember – Wang mei is not interested in technical codified dancing, she is interested in working with dancers as people, to explore human-ness, human gesture, rather than dance technique.

I spent the morning writing up yesterday’s process.

Afternoon

Kerry is talking to the dancers -

 — You know the sextet, the lifting phrase altogether?  Well good news, it is scrapped.

Kerry sets new line material, as a possible ending and echoing the earlier line material. Three A dancers and three B dancers. A’s are in unison, B’s are in unison. Kerry teaches two phrases [...]]]> day 8 beginning

I spent the morning writing up yesterday’s process.

Afternoon

Kerry is talking to the dancers -

 — You know the sextet, the lifting phrase altogether?  Well good news, it is scrapped.

Kerry sets new line material, as a possible ending and echoing the earlier line material. Three A dancers and three B dancers. A’s are in unison, B’s are in unison. Kerry teaches two phrases of 8. This is gestural with arms, elbows and hands featuring. She then works another phrase of 8, new duet material, still in the line. She works fast, without hesitation, phrases constructed before the rehearsal began.  There is no break in the rhythm of her delivery of material.  She continues for the 4^th phrase of 8, with a reworking of each dancer’s solo, which they perform together in the line, before walking upstage for 4 counts to end.

It is all in the preparation! To reach the ending within the time available, the preparations need to be thoroughly considered, which I imagine Kerry does before entering the studio. To prepare, Kerry will need to unweave from the final image, back to the first figure, in order to choreograph forward to the final image. E.g. Everybody turns and walks 4 steps upstage with her/his right leg first, which means each preceding solo needs to end with the right leg free, which affects how each solo begins, and how each solo begins depends on each dancer’s placing in the new line material, so this spacing needs to be considered before the line material is choreographed in order that the follow on material can unfold from there. And of course before any of this can happen, Kerry has decided on how many beats and phrases of 8 she requires, so that the final image will meet the end of the music.

At the end of the day I see a run of the last section of the piece.   Bother – the music ends before the material. Somewhere there is an overspill.  Kerry unravels, tightening up a few moments to see if the material will fit.  It does, tight. No gaps, no letting go, no moments of rupture or empty time. No time to breathe out.

I notice as the dancers get tired, their movements tighten, become small and tense, losing grounded-ness, breath and risk. Their gestures hit the space with short punches, rather than extend and thrust into an expanse of space.  When they are tired they work on the surface of their bodies. What they need to do is work deeper as they get tired, finding an economic use of energy that expands from inside out rather than outwards in.

Charlie Balfour has arrived (lighting designer). Just in time to see the first full run today, with 80% energy.

Then another run, 100% energy. No talking on the sides, stay focused for the dancers working in the space.  When it gets fast you need to look at each other, take time to approach each other.  You are a company of 6, not 6 soloists.

The piece is nearly there. A few gaps, a few spacing questions and then the cleaning begins!

wang mei rocking day 7

Wang mei has decided  to perform in the work, so now there are 5 performers.

I watch a run of a small section, to music. Dancers are sitting on the floor facing front, swaying slightly, forward and back.  I am caught by the concentration, the stillness within the movement, a contained attention to detail, the ability to be empty and full simultaneously.  The minute changes in gesture, for instance one [...]]]>

wang mei rocking day 7

Wang mei has decided  to perform in the work, so now there are 5 performers.

I watch a run of a small section, to music. Dancers are sitting on the floor facing front, swaying slightly, forward and back.  I am caught by the concentration, the stillness within the movement, a contained attention to detail, the ability to be empty and full simultaneously.  The minute changes in gesture, for instance one dancer’s change of direction, or an extended rocking that takes a dancer onto his back, becomes magnified, almost a shock.  I am pulled in.

The run through lasts maybe 1 minute.  Then they gather round the video recording, to watch this short section several times, discussing details, shifts in the material.  The attention to detail is astonishing. I am looking at the micro made macro.  I am reminded of that movie about the life of ants, when a blade of grass becomes a tree, and we are looking into a tiny world enlarged.

I sense a collective working together, although Wang mei has the final decisions, different dancers step out to direct material and all the creative discussions and changes are discussed as a group.

I gather that they discussing real and empty.

I am fascinated watching the group work out the subtle differences in a single gesture.  Lifting themselves on their hands, legs straight out in front, they rock sideways in rhythm. The difference between a sharp rocking movement and a swinging rocking movement is discussed at length. The swinging rocking movement is required. They watch each other to perfect this.

Later – after the marathon next door, I come in and slow down.

Five bodies are sitting, facing the mirror, knee tapping and sliding backwards on the floor.

Qier explains to me a little of Wang mei’s working process. For Wang mei, when one dancer is communicating with another, this is reality. If you are working alone you are empty. I interpret this as a play between bein in the world relationally and focusing inwards when alone. Wang mei seeks a co-operation between everybody. Every movement must be comfortable for each person; if one person is uncomfortable then the movement will be changed. Each dancer has a different movement, yet they work together in unison, so each person can see the other do his/her movement. They are working with an inside awareness as well as the outside image, to come into together differently in unison.

I need a deeper understanding of her methods. I arrange to interview Wang mei tomorrow at 5pm.

marathon trio: working it out day 7

Kerry has listed the methods she uses when teaching and transferring knowledge of her movement language to students and dancers.  This also represents the qualities that are important to her. I attach an image here.

Task (new material):

Insertion into the quartet.

All four dancers working together.

Day 6 Pulling together

Wayne’s blog comment reminds me to write what I respect and learn from Kerry as she works. Her tireless driving energy and rhythmic [...]]]> Video clips:

Day 6 Pulling together

Wayne’s blog comment reminds me to write what I respect and learn from Kerry as she works. Her tireless driving energy and rhythmic pace is an inspiration, as is her thorough preparation of material, her ability to demonstrate and translate the language onto the dancers bodies, her patience and her ability to cut the crap and get on with it.  Yet there is something else very special that I learn to do with how Kerry relates in the studio. She has the ability to surrender to the creative process. I don’t mean a ‘giving up’, but a generosity, a giving of self to the dance that emerges, a giving of self to the relational dialogue. What I mean by this is that the work is not about her, rather the translation of material between them. She leaves her ego elsewhere to be inside the process with the dancers. Her body acts as a conduit, through which the material passes, from its history with Random, through Kerry to the dancers. There is humility here and a lack of self-consciousness. At the same time she directs with authority and drive, there is no room for doubt in the studio. I learn a lot from this quality of delivery: her play between drive and surrender.

(Yes, doubt can be a creative tool as it open up the gaps, but not here, not in a two-week process with a piece to make).

Saturday. We begin at 11am with a warm up class. Five dancers all on time!

Small group, talk the plan for the day:

This is every thing we have done so far. (Kerry shows the dancers her hand written list of numbered items, each one crossed off). There are some things we will be able to forget but I want to see them today and then I can tell you if we can throw them away. We have 25 things, 2 or 3 we can’t do because Wu weifeng is injured. Without him we have 21 and I want to see them with clarity and precision.

Kerry leads a short 2-hour rehearsal, going through all the material so far. After each fragment she cleans up some details before moving on. She demonstrates the material when necessary, indicating where she wants the stops, changes in quality, space directions, unison moments, breaks in the material and emphasizing specific gestures that have got lost. Here are the fragments:

Phrase 1

Phrase 2

I am thinking about plie here, eyes are to the audience, drop out. Sharp elbow.

Phrase 3

Knee clasp with double pirouette. What did we say yesterday about this, travel, moving, I am moving, remember crab, crab?  I am thinking about my ear… Lets try again everybody.

Wang lei solo

Walking in from upstage, shake, and stop. Ooze, pin, scythe, flick.

Men feet phrase.

Knee, up, screw heel, fouette, thigh lift, knee, limp sideways, slide, cut through, skidder. Wu shuai ends the phrase by falling into ‘splits’. Don’t do that Wu shuai or I will put it in! Laughter follows.

Men & women, feet and arms. (Track 2.29)

Can I see the arms on their own please?

Its not small, its about reaching away from you, something is happening here as well, this is sharp, then remember the tortoise, heavy.

Kerry attends to the details of the hands and wrists.

Wu shuai and Wu weifeng duet — can’t do today.

Kerry’s unison duet

Begins with fingers pointing to shoulders and roll down through spine. Includes the partner work, tortoise head movement, head to partner’s stomach, split leg drags, women lifted parallel to floor.

Sun rui solo

Points and lines duets

Do you remember your points and lines solos? Well you don’t need to, you can forget forever. We have the duets with that material.

Duet with Wang lei and Wu weifeng. Cannot do today.

Sun rui and Zhao zhibou duet

Zhibou solo

She is working well, the lines are more defined and clear, she is gathering strength, she seems more weighted.

Yabin solo

Men floor material

Exquisite, sharp, sorting out timing – with laughter.  Playful teasing relationships between Kerry and the men.

Sextet (water) – can’t do without Wu weifeng.

Stopping duets

Kerry wants them close together in space, four bodies of complex material. She sorts out timing, so lifts come together, unison shapes, and canon after the stop.

Sun rui & Wu weifeng. Duet (not today)

The line coming forward.

Wu shuai solo:

I love you Wu shuai! (‘I love you too’ he responds – they tease).

Very clean, very nice.

Visualisation solos

Kerry runs all the material in a constructed order, which is split into two sections.

She then runs the material again, running sections 1 and 2 together.

The piece is beginning to take shape. The weaving and linking from solos to duets and trios and quartets is well paced and Kerry’s meticulous attention to timing has paid off as one fragment slips and overlaps into another.

A good week’s work. How do you feel? Tired. I am very happy at the end of week one.

Tomorrow you sleep, eat chocolate, sleep. Any body want to say anything to me?

Thank you guys.

day 5 duets

day 5 Wu Shuai

day 5 wang lei 2

Working the Gaps

Kerry looks like she might be riding a slight panic (with positive energy of course). There are 4 dancers in the space. Wu Weifong is injured and will not be back till Monday. Zhao zhibou is [...]]]>
day 5 wang lei solo

day 5 duets

day 5 Wu Shuai

day 5 wang lei 2

Working the Gaps

Kerry looks like she might be riding a slight panic (with positive energy of course). There are 4 dancers in the space. Wu Weifong is injured and will not be back till Monday. Zhao zhibou is off this morning, and Sun rui will be off this afternoon but zhibou will be back.  Kerry asks the dancers if they will all be there next week. Reassured, she accepts that today and tomorrow will be without full cast. She needs all 6 dancers to work the sextet, the trios and the legs/arms line. As yet, she has had only one day with all 6 dancers present.

She shows me her rehearsal notes, she has structured most of the material now on paper, with the sound score. Now her structure needs to be worked in the space, which is tricky when dancers are not present.  There is no time for re-thinking, the dice is thrown, and there can be no wondering or wandering into the gaps that have appeared. Kerry needs the dancers here, present and full in the space.

She begins rehearsal working with the men’s floor phrase, begun yesterday. Wu shuei, Wang lei, Sun rui.  Cleaning the details, counts, spacing.

I watch the solo for Sun rui.

…Slide through, deliciously pointed foot, shove hip, look, turn, arabesque, perfect, deep on supporting leg, spin, arms over the head, drop hands, stagger, stagger, hands on bum, travel, drop head, leg up, clap hands around knee, slide hand down sternum, hands to ribs, hands to bum, extending those legs, those violently beautiful extensions, slicing in the air. Exquisite, a tall sinewy swan, sharp swift and linear.

I watch the solo for Wu shuei.

…Reach arm back, step forward, parallel rise, stop, drop, jump, thrust hips, circle, smooth, catch, throw arms down, straight legs jump, snake through, pull out, sharp arms down, smooth ripple of back.  Small, tough, cheeky, direct hits and fluid as a butterfly!

Kerry begins to structure material. Wu Shuei’s solo links into the men’s feet phrase. Kerry sorts the spacing, fronts, diagonals, facings, corners. Concentration on the legs.

A gap appears — 4 counts need filling before the repeat of the leg phrase. Kerry pauses, her body hesitates, opening up the gap for a new something that has not yet been figured. She searches for a movement that travels, she knows where she needs to be, how many counts. What will be the movement that emerges? Hold that moment unfixed, just for a moment — then she is off, the movement appears and fills the space — two runs and a skidder — and the gap is filled.

We are in positive space, punctuating points in space, on the beat, movement happens on 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 & 5 & 6 & 7 & 8 – even the stops are sharply accentuated. Gestures cut rather than absorbing the space.

And then there is dancers’ remarkable ability to remember material!  We tend to take this for granted, for it is assimilated into daily training from an early age. Memory of movement is a fine skill.

Have some lunch gentlemen.

Afternoon.

Studio 703 Wang mei

I have gathered information. The piece is based on a poem. I am given 4 translations. Here is the first (translated by Lin Yutang):

In my young days,

I had tasted only gladness.

But loved to mount the top floor,

But loved to mount the top floor,

To write a song pretending sadness.

And now I’ve tasted sorrow’s flavors, bitter and sour,

And can’t find a word,

And can’t find a word,

But merely say, “What a golden autumn hour!”

The composer is Bach with an overlaying score treated by a Chinese composer names Fan ZongWei.

As expected, the company is sitting on the floor, discussing the fine details of moving forward on their bums. Who moves first, how they move, on what count, the quality of the move, the extent of each lean forward — are discussed through collective wrangling. The timing of the movements reminds me of musical counterpoint.

Wang mei often steps into the piece and one of the dancers takes over the direction.  Her energy matches the dancers, no more, no less. Yet she clearly has the final say. The work looks inwards to its internal functioning, its group rhythms, rhythms composed of 4 parts, 4 layers. Each dancer’s part brings a different counterpoint to the whole, a 4 part score. The question is – how are they reaching decisions – as it seems to take a very long time!  Wang mei seems passionately absorbed in the problematic details of space and time.

I return to studio 702.

Kerry is working with Wang yabin. Here are some of Kerry’s words, caught as she directs.

… Yea, so from here, quite like to see the hands, hands go, hands drop, can this be bigger, exactly, carry on, judder, hit emilyn, travel, carry on, small, small, small, big.  Exactly and carry on. Ah, so could I have this with this shoulder, big, big, exactly, just make sure, stop it, then go, then shoulder, yea, and then yabin, you can do this one on 4, nice, two arms legs in, good yabin, where does your solo finish? Urr, so literally from here I want you to go…  do you need a minute to think?

Yabin does the solo again, this time I try to catch what I see – writing as I watch.

…Still, eyes, mouth smiles, step, leg round, arm air swift, sway, shunt out sideways, criss cross, hand on floor, curve, split legs, turn, swan lake wrists, elbows in, hug self, circle arms, throw above head, head snake, foot up, cramp, elbow, heel, lunge, hips turn, spin, twist arms around, fingers judder, ripple back, whoa, fall to floor, circle hips, tiger walk, skidder on feet, shoulder circle small, small baby, fetus, lengthen out, hips smash, hands flipped, draw along the floor, skidder round on one hand, lie back, shoulder twist, turn, kneel, skim along floor,  stomach tense, head lifted, snake whisper with hair…

We go downstairs to the BDA office, to look at Random videos, to give context to Kerry’s work.

Kerry discusses the rehearsal process and checks out how the dancers are remembering the material and assimilating it into their bodies. She is used to seeing dancers working all the time. These dancers rest while not working and then get up and do the material pretty well remembered. So how do you remember?

Dancers: In middle school this is most important in the training.

Tomorrow is Saturday, we will start at 11am. I want you there with energy, focus, for three hours. I want you there with bright eyes and energy. Good plan?

Dancers happy to begin later tomorrow!

(I am aware that I am not asking questions of the work as I said I would do on day 1.  I am not asking questions of relational aesthetics, ecological practice, devising processes, cultural difference, language translation, and choreographic practice. Nor am I asking questions of the dancers’ relationship with Kerry, how knowledge is transferred, the mirror techniques, the affects and attunements of the process. Nor am I making [...]]]>
day 4 sun rui

(I am aware that I am not asking questions of the work as I said I would do on day 1.  I am not asking questions of relational aesthetics, ecological practice, devising processes, cultural difference, language translation, and choreographic practice. Nor am I asking questions of the dancers’ relationship with Kerry, how knowledge is transferred, the mirror techniques, the affects and attunements of the process. Nor am I making parallels with theories and philosophies that emerge from the work.  The immediate is too present! I am simply writing what happens in the studio – for now).

Weifou is not here, he is in hospital, with an old back injury.  5 dancers again. Plans are scuppered for this morning.

Kerry begins with Zhao zhibou and Wu shuei, working with the obstruction duet; cleaning, finding stops, extending lines, sorting phrasing, making, breaking. Kerry pulls out moments, signposting points that consequently have a shared consciousness.  With her interventions, she enters into the duet, creates fissures, and cracks in the material. These moments become points of shared awareness, beginnings and ends of phrases, places from which to start, pick up and continue.  Shared ownership.

What began as an obstruction, an interruption to the material, has become a movement. The cut becomes a space, the space becomes a movement.

Kerry works on a new solo for Sun rui, testing their relational contact through the sharing of the material. His long thin legs go up and up.

Men — back to the leg/arm phrase. — with a new front, facing the windows.  Ladies  — facing the back of the space.  Men once through without arms, then ladies join, all do the leg phrase with arms.

Kerry is beginning to layer the material in the space, bodies in space and time.

Afternoon session.

2pm start. But no one is ready. Two dancers are asleep and no one else is here.  2.20 the dancers have arrived but no one has warmed up.  Kerry decides to talk with them, even thought there is no interpreter.

I am getting a little unhappy, this may be a cultural thing, but in UK if class begins at 9.40am then dancers are in the space warmed up and ready to go. Here, you are asleep. If I say rehearsal begins at 2pm, I mean 2pm… I need you with me.

Kerry gets the message across positively and respectfully, yet clearly. She needs the dancers to be with her for the length of the rehearsal.  The dancers tell us that this two weeks is summer holiday time, and they are coming in especially to do the project. Perhaps this contextual information helps to explain their attitude.

I can feel Kerry’s frustration in my body. I know that feeling of expecting to work with dancers and finding them low, tired, with sleepy energy – how difficult it is to lift their energy – I feel myself dropping and with that goes confidence. The relational contact breaks down. I see it happening here with Kerry. Her talk with them helps to catch that feeling early.  She is so ready, so ‘up’, speeding, moving three paces ahead, punching the air, driving the beat, hauling the dancers along with her. If they drag behind it is five times more exhausting for her to keep going at this pace. (Many questions here of ways of devising/directing).

Kerry is crafting, structuring material. The dancers are spaced in a flat horizontal line, coming forward, men in unison, and women in unison. Adding new material as she goes. The line travels down front, with sharp cutting movements, one gesture for each beat, each gesture thrusts in a new direction.   Nothing is smooth; all is fractured; yet the shards create a whole. The solo material coming forward in the line breaks into duet material.

The dancers copy the material beautifully, immediately after Kerry demonstrates. Yet retaining this image in their bodies appears to be more of a challenge. The tendency is to lose not only the shape of the gesture, which inevitably includes a multiplicity of specific directions in space, but also the ability to shift between movements with clarity. Wang lei and Wang yabin have this ability. On the other dancers the material can look mushy, lacking articulation and precision, details are compromised.  If the dancers work a little slower they find the clarity. Working at Kerry’s speed is a new experience for them.  (Again questions here of devising methodologies).

I go next door.

Wang mei is on her stomach demonstrating how the legs scissor and slide. Yes, they are still on the floor, working slowly. Wang mei has a blister on her elbow. I am not surprised!  She is waiting for a plaster.

I leave and go back next door.

Contrast – POW! Kerry is asking the dancers to do the next run full out, so she can see if her answers work. Kerry is going even faster, pumping out her counts. The dancers are straining, staggering, but they are with her.

So, what is the intention here, working fast with movement in a complexity of directions?

This seems to be becoming a challenge of power and endurance — can the performers keep up?  Will Kerry give a break in the marathon?

This is a challenge of technical skill, will power and stamina for the dancers.  Is that the core of the work?

We are inside the engine of a technical dance language, (we are inside the racer that is Wayne McGregor!). And what history do these dancers have of Wayne’s work. Do they know the context in which they are working?   There is a myth that if dancers are not working full out when Wayne enters the studio, he might decide to get on with something else. (A myth, but there is something here about  the need for dancers and choreographer to meet and match creative energy). Kerry carries  this legacy. She has to – she has a piece to make. Yet she does not want to set up a hierarchy of power and fear.  Testing testing. Driving on (edited august 3rd).

Would it be useful for the dancers to learn more of the context, to watch some DVDs of Wayne’s work for instance?

Scaffolding is being erected on the windows outside. Men are walking on single planks and poles, constructing the platforms, 8 floors up, without harnesses attached. Another test of endurance?

Men, do you remember this phrase? Kerry goes through one of the phrases she taught them.

Task: Work a version of that phrase on the floor.

Task for the women:

Take the letters: C L E A V E

Take 6 body parts: left side of the ribcage, sternum, hip, shoulder blade, foot and ear.

Take each letter and each body part and find a movement to describe it on the floor.

Write on the floor as if writing in the sand.

The 6 movements should flow.

How Kerry relates to the dancers influences the material that is made. Her fighting energy brings the attack and drive into the work. Translation of language is not just about the content, or the ‘what’, but the ‘how’, the quality of the translation, the style of contact and transference.

The men play as children, making a compelling piercing phrase.  How can this child like creative enthusiasm be contained? Will the articulation be retained tomorrow? Explosive energy comes in waves, it is unsteady, unpredictable, dazzling. When it is not there we have fuzzy, mushy, unarticulated scratchy, fiddly, sloppy dancing. I am not sure these young dancers know how to sustain and contain energy.

Kerry works with Wang lei for another 15 minutes, extending his solo.

This is perfect, this quality is perfect, this is just what I want.

I agree.

I go next door to Wang mei.

Although continuing to work on the floor the dancers have changed position in space. They are sitting up, facing the window, in a vertical line upstage. They continue to work with the movements of babies, and the contradictions between pedestrian released gestures, precise timing and exact unison, which gives the work a quality of taut simplicity.

They work on the moment of change between the horizontal line and the vertical line, who goes where, and who moves first, to achieve the shift in two beats, 7,8. There is much laughter and discussion, as they try to accomplish this task. It is achieved by using less effort, going there directly without wasting energy.

I am caught up again by the difference.

For Wang mei less is more, movements are stripped to a bare minimalism, requiring concentration on details of placement and timing with a centered stillness and core strength.

For Kerry, energy is pounding outwards, attack is outward, stamina and technical brilliance are always required, in a survival of the fittest.

Wang mei has until November to make the piece.

Kerry has two weeks.

Exhaustion!

Summary. After a very creative and energized day yesterday, everybody is tired — the dancers are exhausted. So the day does not produce so much material. Even so, what does emerge is ample for a day working at this level of complexity.  The day focuses on the relationships between the dancers and Kerry, a playing out of power dynamics, who has control of time [...]]]>
day 3 working it out!

Exhaustion!

Summary. After a very creative and energized day yesterday, everybody is tired — the dancers are exhausted. So the day does not produce so much material. Even so, what does emerge is ample for a day working at this level of complexity.  The day focuses on the relationships between the dancers and Kerry, a playing out of power dynamics, who has control of time and how.  There is good rapport; laughter and generosity circulate between them.

I walk into Kerry’s rehearsal near the end of the morning. A Zoë Keating track is playing. Dancers are working on duets.

The task:

Make obstruction duets. Using ‘elbow phrase 1’ from day 1, dancer A attempts to complete the phrase. Dancer B interrupts, intervenes, attempts to stop dancer A from performing the phrase. Roles can change. Compose this material. The terms stop, obstruct, prevent, encourage the quality required – fragmented, broken, jagged, complex yet playful and relational.

The music Kerry is using as texture during her process include: John Adams, Max Richter, Zoë Keating, Deru, together with Wayne’s Random sound tracks.

Kerry does not look happy. We chat. She is very tired from lack of sleep. The dancers also. They arrived this morning unable to move, exhausted. It took over an hour to get them with her.  So she is rethinking her plans for today, in order to allow dancers to rest.  The duet task this morning allows the dancers to talk with each other and this is giving them energy.

Early break for lunch.

Noticing one’s own process as a choreographer and how that affects the dancers — this is part of the relational process for creative contact.  There is no ‘them’ and ‘us’, we are all in this together and how we meet each other requires respect, awareness, enquiry and presence.

Afternoon

Kerry discusses starting points for this afternoon. She shows me a folder with 22 transparencies, 22 diagram drawings of a city. You are the City, Observations, Organisation and Transformation of Urban Settings, (Petra Kampf 2004). Each transparency represents another interpretation. The 22 diagrams are divided into four categories: ‘Cosmological Ground, Legislative agencies; current, Flows and Forces; Nodes, Loops and Connections’ (p.11).

‘Cities are an everyday invention. They are informed and imagined by many people at a time…. Cities are an open stage for complimentary and conflicting encounters, and allow for multiple identities to emerge and evaporate. They are backdrops for dreams and desires, a platform for departures and arrivals. … Cities are impermanent – they are in a constant state of transformation, in which unpredictable changes keep their structural organisation shifting from one state to another’… Cities need to be viewed as transitional entities in which their local is to be found in the idea of moving points, animated by different forces that interact with the urban construct’ (Kampf 2004 p.2).

For Kerry, this notion of the city is the quality she is looking for in the work. For me, the notion of complementary and conflicting parallels the discussion we are having with the dancers on linearity and fragmentation.

She is also playing with a title: ‘Cleave’, suggesting a contradiction between piercing/ cutting and adhering/being faithful.

Kerry explains the transparences to the dancers.

We are looking at one transparency today. Lets take this one.

Working as 6 people, choose one journey; follow any of the lines of movement in the transparency.  But work together.

Without much debate the dancers agree on the line they wish to take.

How are you going to represent those jagged lines?

Where is your audience?

The task:

Work as if you are one person.

There must always be two people in the air being lifted.

When one person comes down another person comes up.

Lifts can be quick, but as soon as one comes down another goes up.

All 6 of you have to working, so join together.

If you are not lifting you are working to change places.

You will find yourselves laughing; I want you to take it seriously, not to miss the possibilities.

Every person needs to be in the air twice.

It should have a watery kind of feeling and it needs momentum.

You can work with flow, impulse — show me Chinese flow.

You are one animal, you move together.

Working as a sextet the dancers begin to work the task – and yes, much laughing begins the process.  Kerry is close by, engaged, anticipating. They begin to get more serious, talking, constructing, and resolving clumsy potential.  I wonder if they have had any contact improvisation?  Possibly not! They construct the lifts looking in the mirror. They play, create, and fall, thump. I am interested to notice how they relate, who is in, who is out, who has the power, who makes decisions. Without understanding what they are saying, they appear equally involved, working things out together.

I wonder about improvisation rather than construction. Yet, in a sense, constructing in this way is new for them. Usually they work with harmony and flow they are very skilled at that. So this awkward sticky playful design is creative conflict – the flow can be added later.

I leave Kerry to go next door to Wang mei.

I come back as Wang lei is performing his solo.  He is dynamic, strong, dark, dramatic, makes bullet points. He is fluid yet weighted, into the ground, sultry.

Kerry works with Wu shuai on his solo material. Kerry crafts, shifting directions, dynamics, changing arms, placing of feet, elaborating the material, directions in space and deciding on eye focus. In contrast to Wang lei, Wu shuai is a light dancer, particular, petite with delicate finesse.

Today Kerry has added two more nuggets to the repertory of material.

14. Obstruction duets.

15. Water sextet (based on the architectural transparency).

Kerry talks through plan for tomorrow.

She is thinking — no new material, but dancers teach each other material, a giving of gifts, teaching and learning, which will bring greater ownership of material.

Giving the movement away brings closer ownership.

Kerry is on the edge of beginning to structure and craft the material. The music is giving her suggestions as to the order of material.

Wang mei works at the Academy as a teacher and choreographer. Her background is ballet and Chinese folk dance. She is working with Liu mengchen, Ma linzhi, Chen maoyuan, and Shao junting. These dancers have been working together with Wang mei for a while and the material that they are working on was [...]]]> Studio 703.

Wang mei works at the Academy as a teacher and choreographer. Her background is ballet and Chinese folk dance. She is working with Liu mengchen, Ma linzhi, Chen maoyuan, and Shao junting. These dancers have been working together with Wang mei for a while and the material that they are working on was made previously.

As I walk in to the studio I see four dancers sitting on the floor, tapping the backs of their knees rhythmically on the floor, and then bouncing along the floor on their bums using their arms. Fast taps, then a drawn out lift of the bum, shifting in space, then drop.

Wang mei is looking at detail, spending time with timing. It seems important exactly how many bum bounces it takes before the hands move, the placing of the hands on the floor needs to be precise, who looks at who when and how, needs to be specific. Dancers watch each other and learn from each other.

Music begins. Bach (treated in some way, I will find out details tomorrow). Wang mei stops, starts, stops, starts, seeking the precision in timing that she requires.

Movements are repetitive and require unison of time and space – a challenge when movements are simple.

The interpreter tells me they are playing a game, like children, ‘natural and relaxed’. Yes.

Wang mei is now asking the dancers to keep their feet still, legs straight, and only the bums move in space, so that they move into a circle on the floor, their feet acting as a axle centre.

Now the dancers are squatting on their heels, bouncing in rhythm in rhythm, moving along the floor by twisting the feet and then shifting weight, with hands on the floor. Wang mei demonstrates the detail of how the foot twists. She does this without words. Liu mengchen copies, but is not exact. The dancers take time to observe the detail and assimilate it. Where to place the hands, how many bounces before the hands move forward, which foot moves first – these details are carefully resolved. The dancers try many different variations of a bouncing squat walk, playing with different rhythms of feet, moving forwards, backwards and circling – like a tongue twister, the hands and feet quickly become tangled. They experiment with folk dance steps while squatting! Wang mei works seriously with occasional long bouts of laughter.

Within a short while of watching I become aware of the differences between styles of working. (First impressions obviously).

Wang mei is working with simple repetitive movement and focusing on structures, choreographing shapes in time and space.

Kerry is constructing a complex movement language on the dancers bodies, where the focus on structure has not yet begun.

Wang mei is working closely with the music and the timing and placing of the movement.

Kerry plays music throughout the day to add energy, background atmosphere and attack to the movement tasks. Movement is not fitted to sound.

Wang mei stops the sound immediately she sees something that does not fit. She does not go on until is it correct.

Kerry is not working on perfecting movement to sound, as she does not yet know who will be performing the movement.

Wang mei is working on the complexity of timing with simple movements.

Kerry is working on the complexity of movement with simple timing.

Watching Wang mei work I observe a contained stillness and clarity, an attention to minimal gestural simplicity, no frills, no fuss, no explosive exaggeration or distortion. She is quiet while she thinks about the next movement, goes inwards to focus on herself. The dancers are left on their own to play with the squatting gestures, like a gathering of young playful frogs, trying out their tricks.

Kerry never leaves the dancers alone, even when they are working on tasks; she is in there with them. She arrives prepared with loads of material, holds the energy high all day, talks energetically to her dancers, rarely letting them rest, she is always facing outwards towards the dancers, never inwards to herself, the high speed rhythm of the day rarely breaks, she drives on persistently.

Today Wang mei’s dancers are always sitting down.

Kerry’s dancers are not allowed to sit down!

Wang mei is working slowly, exploding a moment of time into an hour, where less is more.

Kerry works fast, where three hours can become one minute of material and more is less.

These are my day 2 observations, without judgment or criticism. Both studios feel focused, alive, creative and concentrated, with strong relational contact between dancers and choreographers.

I leave Wang mei and the dancers in studio 703 as they continue to resolve details of timing, when to accentuate a movement on which beat in which phrase of music.

Day 2

A day for Merce.

So – the dancers are sore in the ‘right’ places, inner thighs, abdominals, lower back and their necks. This is to be expected, and indicates to Kerry that they are working intelligently with the language, as the tension is not held externally, in their thighs or upper backs.

The style is more familiar [...]]]> Video clip: day 2 Wang lei & Wang yabin

Day 2

A day for Merce.

So – the dancers are sore in the ‘right’ places, inner thighs, abdominals, lower back and their necks. This is to be expected, and indicates to Kerry that they are working intelligently with the language, as the tension is not held externally, in their thighs or upper backs.

The style is more familiar to the dancers in class this morning; they execute the size of the material with more confidence. They retain the corrections from yesterday, only needing a gently reminder, so Kerry is able to build from there.

Kerry begins rehearsal with a task:

She teaches a phrase primarily for the legs, followed by a phrase primarily for arm gestures and torso. The task for each dancer is to put the arms and legs phrases together in his/her own way.

The leg phrase travels through space, sharp scissor like cuts and shifts of weight, low lunges contrasting high releve turns. Set to phrases of ‘8’.

Kerry’s persists with speed, driving the dancers onwards, keeping a fast rhythmic attack in the learning that keeps the dancers engaged. She demonstrates and talks – particularly calling out the counts as she demonstrates the movements:

Hip 5, knee 6, push7, heel 8… lunge 1.

Hidden in the leg phrase is a sideways triplet.

Did you see that Emilyn – that is for Merce!

Lets try it up to speed, with music…

The dancers do the phrase. Kerry corrects them:

This is all fine, then here — we need this to be very sharp and precise. This is good here and good here… but here I need you to go lower, stay longer here, and this should feel like a fall. Here, you have just got to move… this leg needs more energy, I didn’t see the energy of that heel, so push that first… these are really sharp, this has resistance, then it drops, it is a different feeling… this is all about this leg, not this leg… I am not interested in jumping, I am interested in long… (She darts across the space). Here I use my stomach and my knee – oh, it is hard work. This is lower, higher, a definite drop, one turn only, break, let me see the heel, then it opens, now you go up, break.

Mandi, Can you ask them if they are ok with the counts?

After the correction dancers do the material again, attempting to incorporate changes although the material. This is a challenge as the speed does not let up.

If by next Tuesday, it is still too fast, I will change it.

Kerry begins the arm phrase.

Arm stretches out to side, comes round to front, other arm comes up and through, quick shoot up above head, open arms out, explosive, throw it away, bring arm closer across body, fingers tickling, twist body with arm, shoulder lifts, two fingers pointing, plant them over head to other side, use focus as well to plant them, shoulder height…

I am going under my armpit, left hand 3,4. Picking up the arm, 5,6.  Right arm comes through sharp, break in elbows 7, 8. This is like taking off a jacket. This is like a tortoise.  This is like boxing – I love that.

The metaphors translated, bring instant recognition and laughter with the dancers.

Now the dancers take over, creating material that brings arms and legs together. They work as a duet and a trio (Sun rui is away today).  Kerry stressed that she doesn’t want to see legs and then arms, but legs and arms working together throughout.

Kerry created these two separate phrases outside the studio. She did not make one phrase and then separate arms from legs. This way there is more chance of the material not making sense, encouraging a discontinuity as the dancers make their own dis/connections.

There is a paradox here – Kerry wants the dancers to work their whole bodies at once, yet not making sense — a non-sensical wholeness.

Dancers are happier with being more weird today!

Afternoon.

Studio is alive, music playing, dancers chatting and warming up, changing T-shirts, Kerry working out a new phrase on her own, observers keenly watching. There is alive-ness and creative openness.

The afternoon begins with some exercises from class as a warm up. This is the 2^nd day and the dancers have assimilated the exercises into their mind bodies, memory and body becoming one.

Kerry revises the phrases from yesterday -

She shouts above the music as dancers move — whoop, whey, sharp, reach, travel, yes, stop, and go, go… good, lovely, I like it!

New task: the dancers are asked to use inversion to create new solos with the leg/arm phrases. Turn your bodies inside out and upside down: Legs become arms, pelvis becomes head, head become the back and arms become legs. Solve the task in your own way; you can work on the floor. You work on your own. There is no right or wrong answer.

Material is composed and shown in two duets and a solo.  An astoundingly beautiful depth of focused material emerges, fully embodied and assimilated. With the switch from arms to legs, the dancers are often upside down, standing on their arms, working from the floor into the air with distortion, wrangling articulation, twisting torso from legs, arms from shoulders, punching striking, stripping the space.  Different qualities are emerging.

Kerry begins to choreograph two duets, giving material, hard and sharp and without pause…

At this point I go next door to observe Wang mei’s process.

I come back into Kerry’s work in studio 702 at the end of the day.

I missed a task, which was:

Lie on the floor and visualize the duets we have just made. Visualize both parts, imagine both parts. (3 minutes). Now stand up and show me your version of the duet – stay inside your visualization. Fix that visualization.

We are going to recap everything for 20 minutes, and then you can go home. The dancers are exhausted, but they are with Kerry. She holds them with her positive high energy, determination and no nonsense approach to the work.

We have 13 pieces. Recap.

1. Elbow phrase 1
2. Arm hip phrase 2
3. Point and line solos
4. Sun rui and Zhao zhibo conversation duet.
5. Wu weifeng and Wang lei conversation duet.
6. My leg phrase in isolation
7. My gesture phrase in isolation.
8. Coordination phrase put together, trio and duet.
9. Ladies Inversion duet.
10. Men’s inversion duet.
11. Wang lei inversion solo.
12. Unison duets.
13. Visualization solos

Kerry sees each piece twice, working on a few details – they are knackered!

Debrief at the end of the day.

Thank you lets talk.

Your concentration in the task exercises was brilliant today. Yesterday was good but I can see the difference today. Did you feel the difference?

More productive today!

Do you feel you have worked your brain and your body?

More in the body.

For me there was more honesty today in attempting to do the task.

Any differences from yesterday in what you feel?

The way you approach your work feels more familiar.

How does your body feel? Other than tired.

I give speed because I think you can do it. I don’t give it because I want you to sink; I give it because I want you to do fly. I trust you; I will keep pushing because I believe in you.

Don’t push too much!

Are there any new differences?

The use of weight, the power, the attack to start. Our training before, in Chinese classical dance, is about lines of movement, following the patterns, following the lines. While your work interrupts the line with points.

What are you saying about the point and line?

The discussion that follows unpacks the difference between the linearity of classical forms and fragmentation of linearity in contemporary dance forms today. In classical Chinese dance there are no attack points, only smooth phrasing. Kerry’s work goes directly from point to point without climactic phrasing. Suspension itself is another point. Rather than a pull back breath of longing in order to go forward, there is simply the necessity for suspension for making the point. (I can get academic about this when I have time!) For now, it is exciting that the dancers are experiencing in their bodies these differences between convention and displacement. The theory is in the practice.

As I observe the material, I think again of Cunningham and see movements derived from his vocabulary embedded in Kerry’s work. I am thinking how a movement travels, like an epidemic, catches hold, is adopted, fostered, manipulated, transferred, handled, engineered, sold, borrowed, stolen, discovered by a thousand different choreographers and still manages to slip away to find a new inauguration elsewhere. And there is a Goat Island quote to insert here via Bergson & Deleuze –  but I don’t have time to find it, I must get going on day 3.

A diamond in the heart.

Summary: a rich, full and fast day. Kerry introduces her movement language, through class exercises, taught phrases and task based methodologies. The movement language and style of working is challenging and new for the dancers. The day was positive and energised, with the different qualities of [...]]]>

Day 1

A diamond in the heart.

Summary: a rich, full and fast day. Kerry introduces her movement language, through class exercises, taught phrases and task based methodologies. The movement language and style of working is challenging and new for the dancers. The day was positive and energised, with the different qualities of the dancers becoming evident.  I am including the notes of the first day  (below) as they begin to indicate the source of a depth of knowledge, history and cultural difference that is within the movement and the transference/translation of  movement between bodies. The notes include fragments of Kerry’s spoken words (in italics), descriptions of what happened, descriptions of process, issues of translation and some emerging questions.

Notes:

Beginning in the studio

An atmosphere of curiosity, with introductions, people meeting in small groups in studio 702 – one of many identical dance studios in the building. This is a large square space, with a wall of mirrors, no different to any other dance studio the world over. We do not really notice the site, it is familiar, neutral within the context of dance training..

Kerry is excited, energized, going fast. She talks with Mandi, the interpreter, discussing how they might work together.

I can go fast, if you don’t understand, please stop me.

A group of 6 dancers, sit together on the floor, stretching legs and backs.

Eyes are eager, waiting, looking at Kerry.  Kerry introduces herself and identifies each dancer by name.

Lets make a start.

The dancers immediately stand up, spread out facing the mirrors, with equal space between each body – the universally understood protocol for the beginning of a contemporary dance class.

Kerry demonstrates and talks simultaneously.

Stretch up, arms overhead, curve down, hang down, weight of the head pulls you to floor. Just hang there. Take big breath in, exhale, push back onto heels. Breathe, slowly rolling up the length of spine working.

A familiar beginning to a Limon based class. Kerry works for Wayne McGregor at Random Dance Company. She is here in Beijing as choreographer and in her role as Co-Director of Creative Learning, which also promotes Wayne’s work through her manipulation of his methodologies. The phrases and tasks she constructs are her own composition, yet drawn from Wayne’s style and movement language.

Falling to the side, arm comes up above head, hand flat, arm stretches in front of body, back arches away from arm… Bring arms come up like an eagle.

Plie, slow, four to stretch, using arms to help us up.

As Kerry demonstrates the dancers pick up the exercise through seeing and copying, a learning from outside to in, not through the words that are spoken. Kerry turns to ask Mandi to interpret ‘eagle’. The difference is immediate, the dancers fully embody that particular movement on hearing the word, the metaphor.

Mandi and Kerry now find a way to work together. Mandi stays right inside the action and translates as Kerry speaks.

What is ‘suspension’ in Chinese?  We need the feeling of suspension a lot in this work.

This is discussed, and again there is an ‘aha’ moment, as the shared term brings deeper understanding.

Here is my hug, here my arms are really expansive, here is my fall, throw this arm over the top and my spine reaches over.  My body is trying to stay leaning forward, like superman, I land onto my left, right, low on the floor – lovely.  In my parallel, push this leg, cut underneath, then just walk 7,8. Mandi do you know ‘rebound’ in Chinese? No OK – so don’t lose momentum. Suspend, suspend, same thing here, then fall.  Good lovely.

I watch a dancer as his leg goes up effortlessly high to the side. He hardly notices his own hyper extended leg. High legs are currency amongst these dancers, a necessity for a successful career. Yet, there seems to be little awareness of the extension.  Perhaps because these dances were trained so young to achieve this extension, through a regime of stretching, that it is difficult now for the dancers to consciously own their extensions. I wonder if that they have dissociated from the pain, therefore dissociated from conscious placing and effort.  The same leg finds it hard to take a normal step forward. Two contradictory qualities are at play, the hyper articulated and the pedestrian.

… 5,6,7,8, ear, ear, arm behind, don’t forget low, high,  I am in curve, arch curve, like a tiger, my arms come with m… I should still be here on releve, step back on 4… my arms take me, in the air on 5, we run we run back, right leg, left, right, close.  Suspend and fall, Attitude retire, my arms go swimming, my arms push the space away, step, bring foot to ankle… then we do left side.

I see you do arms and legs and not the spine.  I am interested in what the back is doing –

The short but strenuous class allows dancers to meet Kerry, the atmosphere is eased through the familiar universal structure.

Kerry notices how the dancers are exhausted. Then remembers that this is new material for them, new ways of moving, new uses of the body – of course they are exhausted.

Kerry talks to the dancers about the work. We sit in a small circle on the floor.

For me, the work has got to have attack.

For two weeks, you may get tired, because the energy is like this (punches her fists in the air), but you are fantastic dancers and I want to show you off…

You have to meet me and be alert when we come in the studio.

For me ugly is good.  I don’t want you to look in the mirror and making a pretty shape, it is more a sensation, more about the feeling than what it looks like. A lot of my language is distorted, and so quite extreme.  Your bodies are trained, and I want to see how far we can take them.  You may get sore in the lower back.  So stretch when you can. I will sometimes give material, a lot of the time I give tasks for you to find the answers. This is interesting for me as well, as a choreographer, you can push me in another direction as well.  So I feel it is a sharing of ideas rather than me leading.  We are a company, I am in the company and I am learning from you as well.  When I set a task and you are solving it, how you solve it is important to me, the process of how you get to the answer is sometimes more interesting than the answer. Remember! Till I say, this one is in the bin, remember everything. Wayne always says his dancers are his computer software, so you are my memory. I am going to be pushing your brains as well as your bodies. This will feel weird, but go with it.

Kerry teaches the dancers her 1st phrase.

She takes a deep lunge to the side, elbow jutting forward, arm at right angles. She circles her elbow outwards. Her chest moves against the circle, arching back, avoiding the arm. Now she has got two elbows jutting forward, circling without dropping…

You are a little bit polite and small, make it big, scary, I want it scary.

Her elbows break again like wings behind her back, she suspends, throws her arms forward, falls, her body curves over, her arms come down fast, then head, sharp sharp. Broken birds. She shunts, hips through, body pulled back distorted, all weight on the back foot.

Do you have a lighthouse in China, by the sea with a light shining all the way round? Mandi looks puzzled. Probably not.  So this movement is broken at the hip, back straight, eyes looking, focus all round as you turn.

She transfers two phrases onto the dancers bodies, called part 1 & part 2.

I observe the process of learning, picking up the material, connecting mind and body,  watching as the dancers try to keep their weight low, co-ordinate arms and legs in different directions, use their backs, remember complex sequences – all this seems new to the dancers,  breaking habitual patterns of movement.  As the material is performed faster and faster there is no chance for them to hold onto conventional aesthetics.

Kerry’s words as are often metaphorical in describing the movement.  What is being translated is not what she does but what she says. The dancers pick up the shape of the movement from watching. The quality of the movement they learn from the translations of the language, from one metaphor to another.

The dancers do not know what Kerry is saying while she is moving, so she is being observed from 6 different perspectives. Kerry might be speaking about what her arm is doing, but the rest of her body is also moving. So the dancers, who do not understand what she is saying, might be focusing on something else that catches their eye.

Does dance transfer solely through the body?

Do words allow a deeper understanding in the body?

Is copying movement enough?

Movements are unpredictable, always catching a surprise, playing with dynamics, texture, speed, drop, turn, curve, circle, jump, arc, smooth, low, effort, hard, soft, sticky, silky, long, dragged, punctuated, staccato, one gesture at a time, with very fast changes.  This is contemporary dance post Forsythe – fragmented, non hierarchical, continuous,  multiple directions, movement that defies conventions of beauty, yet creates the beauty of distortion in its place.

Lets do: 1^st group part one, part two, go away, 2^nd group: part one, part two, go away, 1^st group, part one, part two, go away, 2^nd group, part one part two – lunch!

The work is in the task of learning and translating the surface of movement into a deeper place in the body. The work is in about becoming familiar or comfortable with the material. With so much extreme effort, I notice chaos, and I feel empty of centre, like a shell.  The idea is to move so fast that the body is intuitively caught up in the movement, not perfecting or understanding at this stage. At this stage Kerry wants to jump their bodies out of complacency, out of smooth risk-less perfection. For her, working at speed is vital.

Afternoon:

Kerry introduces a task-based methodology for creating material.

Today’s task evolved from Laban’s shape and effort, to Forsythe, to Wayne McGregor to Kerry Nicholls.

For now, lets call it ‘The point solo’.

Kerry instructs the dancers:

• List 1 – 10 on a sheet of paper.
• Think of a body part to write at the side of each of these numbers. Try to choose small parts of the body, e.g. not the whole arm.  You need to know where on your body are the parts you have chosen! Ear – elbow, back of the knee.
• At the bottom of the page write your mobile phone number. Take the ‘1’ off.  You should have ten digits.
• Bring your paper into the space. Imagine yourself in a cube. Number the corners and spaces of the box. One to ten.
• Use your mobile number to navigate your way round the cube. Match your mobile numbers to the body parts and create 10 movements in the sequence of your mobile phone number.  Strange and weird is good.

The dancers create solo phrases.

This requires concentration, detail, and precision, thinking into movement.  Focus goes to the different body parts in juxtaposition with each other. When awareness is with one body articulation, intelligence is moving in other directions. No part of the body is sleeping. This requires direct attention and precise memory to a multiplicity of directions.

Next task –

Make duets with your solos, you are in the same cube together. Stay really close. Work through the material without crashing.  I want it look like a conversation. Be aware of what the other person is doing, give attention to each other, and weave with each other without losing individual precision.

The dancers are tending to look in the mirror rather than relate to each other. They tend to make it look ‘right’ as a duet, rather than going for the discomfort and strangeness.  There is a desire for confluence rather than conflict.

Keep going, the task is never done.

5 interventions are inserted into the duet.

• Look for a question and an answer.  One person asks a question in movement, and the other person answers, then carry on.
• Look for a moment of stillness. Both of you are completely still, then either leave together or one goes and the other follows.
• Find two points of touch.
• Find two points of dependent touch or lifts – when one of you really needs the other.
• Use each other to travel to take you somewhere else in space.

Try to be investigative, keep going back to work it again.

I don’t want to see anyone sitting down; I want you up and in full energy all the time. You need to be up and creating without stop for 10 minutes, in a place of presence.

Kerry works closely on one duet, she looks at the material, pausing the dancers when she wishes to intervene. Adding, editing, creating the conversation, changing the timing, playing with dynamic, altering speed, looking for moments of contact, moments of risk, points of stillness, sharp stops, looking for changes in height, weight, sharpening, making rhythm, sorting eye focus, looking where and when, filling moments of dullness. She is directing and crafting the material. The dancers giggle, the energy high, there are accidental bumps and punches of knees and elbows. Kerry is inside their material as they dance, detailing exactness.

What are you looking for Kerry?

Looking for things that attract me, the extreme of physicality.

By bringing in a detail of my style, I can see how to get in and out of that moment. The detail tells me if I need the movement that follows. If it is too organic, I give them something to change that direction, diverts the pathway.

We have a debriefing process at the end of the day.

How do you feel?

Many things are new.

What is new?

The style and energy.

This is a good new style for everybody.

After two weeks with me it will feel like home.

We discover that the dancers have known each other for 10 years at the Academy.

Three dancers worked with Shobana.  One worked with John Utans.

Three trained in Chinese classical dance, three in Chinese folk dance. None have had ballet as a first training.

What is the main difference between Chinese dance and this work?

Chinese dance is soft and circular. There are not the angular, sharp straight lines of this work. Chinese dance is like a ball of energy in the heart.

While this work is more like a jagged diamond in the heart.

Video clip:  day 1 Wey fong & Wang lei

So – I enter a liminal space that begins at the airport, when everything I am doing ceases to be and everything I am about to do has not begun. The moment of traveling. The moment of being in between places that is simultaneously a moment of here and now. There is nowhere else to be although I am in no place.

I am upgraded to business class – yea! Upgraded liminality – sublime!

Where to start from … and I have tried to start three times and changed my mind each time! I finally decide to start with a question about the context in which John (Utans) and I find ourselves in this project. We both work at the HKAPA (Hong Kong Academy [...]]]> Things contextual and cultural

Where to start from … and I have tried to start three times and changed my mind each time! I finally decide to start with a question about the context in which John (Utans) and I find ourselves in this project. We both work at the HKAPA (Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts), and thus work in what is very much a Chinese environment – but one which has a fascinating inter-cultural mix (and ‘inter-cultural’ used here in a broad sense). The APA is – a BFO!* – in HK which is part of China; at the same time, however, it stands (politically) apart from China. But the APA also has a strong western influence that comes through in various ways: leadership at the top, for instance, is (and has been for most of its 25 years) in the hands of non-Chinese; certainly that applies to Deans of Schools – currently 3 of the 5 are from the west, and one of the other two has strong connections with the UK. This inevitably affects/influences what is done and how it’s is done. In the School of Dance more specifically, each of its five Deans (starting with Carl Wolz) has been/is from the west – initially from the USA, and more latterly from Australia (although I bring some UK experience to the job). Many of the teaching staff, however, are Chinese, either local Hong Kongers, or from Mainland China, with one from Taiwan: we are roughly 50:50 in respect of east/west mix. By contrast our student population stands at 97% Chinese – this includes those from Hong Kong (the vast majority: we have only about 26 students who are non-local (including one from the Ukraine!), the number capped by the government at 20% of the Academy’s total undergraduate population of 750), from Mainland China, from Malaysia and from Singapore. So working intensively with young Chinese dance artists in a creative, artistic environment is nothing new for either of us. That said however, there are distinct differences between students from the Mainland and those from Hong Kong, differences that are due largely to the education and social conditions that prevail/have prevailed in each.

The School also has a mixed dance culture in that we have students majoring in Ballet, in Chinese Dance, or in Contemporary Dance. At the same time, we have gone a long way to break down the walls between the three streams, to the point where Ballet students have Contemporary Dance technique classes and vice-versa, and Chinese Dance students are able to choose either Ballet or Contemporary Dance. Importantly each semester we have what we call a ‘cross-stream’ work for performance – a work (contemporary) where the dancers are from all three streams. (John has choreographed three of these.) So: intercultural in more ways than one!

Given the context, I am constantly aware of being an ‘outsider’, and so constantly aware of cultural differences, and being sensitive to these differences (although I don’t always succeed!). Some of this awareness is possibly heightened by my own background as an immigrant child – the one with a funny name, who had dark rye bread sandwiches for lunch, and whose parents would insist on talking to her in a funny language! (This at a time in Australia when immigrants, no matter where they were from, where labelled ‘wogs’.)

* BFO stands for Blinding Flash of the Obvious – a term used by one of the lecturers at the Management Development Programme I attended at Harvard; and a term that has stayed with me. Its meaning is self-evident (or – in the context of the below – is it??)

Musings on language

It’s often been said that dance needs no words – it’s a universal language that crosses all [cultural] boundaries. I have never been convinced! Language of the more specific kind certainly matters when you are choreographing – to get your ideas across, to go into the detail, of explaining the inspiration/deeper meaningfuls behind what you’re doing. Some things remain difficult to articulate in your own language, let alone in someone else’s!

If I had any reservations, then they have been put to rest by the experience of this past week. Language, and the detail of the communication, is quite crucial. Let me just illustrate with a couple of examples of things that have happened ….

Take for instance, translation ….

John has/we have an excellent translator in – firstly – Emily Wilcox. She is an American doctoral candidate who has spent considerable time in China over the past 6 or so years, some of that time spent in intensive learning of the language (and so the culture as a whole: no way can you access the culture other than superficially without being able to use the language to communicate with people – and to communicate on more than a superficial level). So Emily is fluent in Chinese, and the same time has a good understanding/sense of movement/ dance (including observation): she’s able to give fluent instruction/ explanation …… But at times she also appears to expand on what John is saying – I say ‘appears’ as I don’t have any understanding of Chinese (beyond ‘hello’, ‘goodbye’, ‘yes’ and ‘no’, and the odd other word or two!), so have no real clue, other than the observation that she speaks for a good more time that John (a man of relatively few words). There are also times when she and the dancers engage in discussion that is [obviously] outside what John has said; and times when John gives some instruction to a dancer – who then asks questions/ for clarification – which are answered without reference to John. This may be simply connecting to what he’s said before – or it may not be. His humour, too, is possibly not translatable – at times a bit edgy, with a bit of a bite to it (and, some might say, very Australian!).

Our second translator – Annie – is Chinese/local, doing a masters at UCLA Riverside (if I remember correctly): while her English is good, she is not a native speaker, and in this particular context, appears not to be totally at ease with her role.

The dancers have a range of English capability – if they have more, they are reluctant to use/show it, although there is some evidence of one or two being able to do a little more as time goes on. Y however has a reasonable facility, and at times acts as translator. She is quick to ‘cotton on’ to what John wants, and this leads me to ponder …….the need for a dancer to be able to access the more subtle aesthetic and creative nuances that are part and parcel of a choreographer’s ‘tools of the trade’ (and thus an integral part of the creative process?). Choreographers work through the body/its movement (another BFO!), but they also rely heavily on imagery, on putting the practice/process into a context, on drawing on aesthetic principles – all of which have language implications. John also throws in the odd phrase in Cantonese – but this tends to confuse rather than help things (mainly because it’s so different from Mandarin/ Putongua). He also makes various ‘throw-away’ lines/ comments that are probably not translatable – even were they understood! (So for instance: “… trying something altogether different – because it’s Saturday”.)

So, then, the question of what gets lost in translation – and more to the point perhaps, what is comprehended in the first place.

The problem of language is less overt (in respect of the creative process) in the other group where the choreographer – Liu Ning, who is assistant to designated choreographer Zhang Ming – and dancers both speak the same language. But of course, I have little access to what is going on there because I rely on translation – and some of the time there is no-one to translate as Annie is often translating for John while Emily is attending class. So what I glean about the process comes from my observations – so even more subjective than normal, and inevitably superficial. I confess that at times it can be difficult to stay fully engaged as a result – even though there are always things of interest to pick up on.

One of my great frustrations – and one I’m sure shared by other expatriates – is the lack of Chinese, and thus the limitation on getting into deep discussion about whatever with the majority of my Beijing colleagues – and the dancers. This inevitably means that I remain the ‘outsider’, with all that that entails (the intention to learn more Putongua being one!)

Another example
I was invited to present a session on my area of expertise last night – mainly to the staff and students of the Academic Studies Department. After discussion with the Xu Rui, I decided on Choreological Studies as the topic – what it is, the choreological framework, and the notion of dance as a performative event.The presentation – together with the slides that were shown – was translated by Emily. This meant the inevitable stretching out time-wise, and given the specificity of the some of the language, how much was /was not understood.

In some ways it reflected some of what was happening in the studio: my train of thought could not be as fluent as it would were the presentation not translated … I had to be conscious of simplifying my words – although I did not want to simplify them too much: so needed to strike the right balance. Essentially it was a process of negotiating my way through, rather than being able to freely present (simply an observation and not a criticism!).

There were then questions from the floor: for most part they were translated … and so were my answers … However I think this went reasonably well – the questions were not so particularly choreologically oriented, so were perhaps less ‘problematic’ in respect translation. But again it brought home to me some of the issues inherent in language and translation, and in words – their use and their meaning.

Phrases and such (John’s)

Try not to use the mirror
As if! It was fascinating to see in both groups just how tied to the mirror the dancers were. Nothing unusual however: BFO: dancers and mirrors are inseparable! Choreographer Liu Ning for instance was exploring ways and means through contact improvisation techniques: initially at least, the dancers were never able to take their eyes away from the mirror, and focus on working ‘internally’ with another dancer.

[… the task] becomes more complicated …. but more fun ….

A little bit like a conversation ….

…. but all this could change …

In a way you shouldn’t listen to the beat …. I don’t like it when it becomes very on the beat ….
Given that moving to the beat is inherent in most forms of dance, then not moving to it is a challenge! So often while the dancers began moving independently of the beat, they all to soon went into 1-2-3-4 (or whatever) mode.

Looking really Chinese ….
Whatever that might mean: must remember to ask John.

OK la …beautiful ….
And so it was. The dancers in both groups are beautiful movers – each with his/her own special characteristics. As John says – you could simply watch them time on end. I find Chinese Dance especially fascinating to watch – and especially its contrast with ballet and contemporary dance (or is it its integration of some of the key principles of each of these western forms with its own??).

For the moment

Anita