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ArtsCross Taipei is coming to an end. The colloquium began this morning; the performances will premiere this evening. Tomorrow night we all start leaving. Of course, in important ways, this weekend is what it has all been about. A crystallizing moment. Almost everyone involved has been working towards these public presentations. Almost everyone. As an academic with the luxury (if that’s what it is) of not needing closure, of seeing no culmination here, I think this can be a risky moment. It’s the point when whatever finally makes it into the public domain stakes a powerful claim over everything that preceded it. Retrospectively, we are invited to see everything that has happened over the last three weeks as leading inevitably to these outcomes. Of course, these are the outcomes of those processes. But if all the foregoing observation and investigation teaches us anything, it’s the high degree of contingency about so much that is now about to be chiselled into stone. This is true for the audience, of course, who have little reason to believe otherwise. And in my experience, it is also true for practitioners, since setting the final material often involves channelling the full range of earlier possibilities into the single act or outcome. In so doing, all previous potentiality is dismissed, erased, or brought to heel. Sometimes, it’s simply not possible to perform well without doing that. Here, though, in the dying hours of the work in all its mess and multiplicity, I’ll reflect a little on the project as a whole. And here may be an apt location, since this blog itself records more – by no means all – of the variety of ArtsCross than ordinarily remains in the public domain once a work stakes its singular right to exist. The other day, I sat and read the blog through. It’s a lot to absorb, and there’s a remarkable diversity of voices, styles and perspectives, even within this limited sample of the wider ArtsCross workforce. One thing that comes across is how multi-faceted the project is. One has the sense that, while it could not have come about without the immense energy and commitment of certain key individuals, no-one really has a grasp on the whole thing. Even at the institutional level, there is such a range of investments and relationships that one suspects it would be very hard to draw a straight line between any one stated goal and its outcome. Not only do alternative and complementary institutional expectations and operating procedures constantly thicken or bifurcate such intentions, but they are all being realised by individuals who themselves have a huge range of attitudes and abilities, and whose own divergent interrelations further knit, knot or strain all the sayings, doings and knowings that need to happen in order to realise the project. Moreover, those ‘sayings, doings and knowings’ are more-than-usually complicated by the breadth of the spectrum of activities that ArtsCross entails. Anyone who has made a dance or organised a conference knows it’s a complex process. To make ten dances and a colloquium internationally intensifies this complexity substantially. Consider any one participants’ experience of a day at ArtsCross: one may be interacting with researchers, artists, administrators, translators. One may move from an improvised or process-based rehearsal to an exacting repetition of clearly defined gestures and phrases; from a monolingual to a multi-lingual environment; from selecting what you want for dinner to debating the diverse meanings of ‘modern’ and ‘modernity’. At a strictly material level, it is this combination of variety and intensity (along with the encroaching exhaustion it entails) that defines ArtsCross. On Tuesday, some of us ‘overseas’ academics spoke with the Beijing academics (through interpreters) about our research interests and methods. The next time we met, Theresa Beattie gave a talk about the UK independent dance sector, and instantly that same group was plunged into an entirely different conversation. It was fascinating to me that, so late in the project, the whole thing could still be turning on a pinhead, scrambling its components in order to take on a different form or face. I began to glimpse the dizzying potential of this intricate arrangement to keep shifting, changing, and to facilitate some genuinely novel relations between ‘sectors’ (to use Theresa’s term) that so often hold themselves at arms-length form each other. This capacity of this project to change over time is also an important feature of its identity. Reading the earliest posts by Donald, who had already clocked off by the time I arrived, is to encounter a process I can see obliquely sustained into my own experiences. Donald writes, for instance, of one dancer standing out at the audition because, “with his compact body and floppy mop of platinum-blond hair [he] looked like a trend-setting Shetland pony.” As it happens, Ming is amongst the most prominent dancers in Avatara’s 14-strong piece. In interview yesterday, she said she found him amongst the most willing to push himself, to take risks, to engage most directly with the material and developing ideas. One wonders now whether it was only Ming’s hair that drew Donald’s attention all those many days-that-seem-like-months ago, or whether, already there was something more about Ming intruding upon his sensibilities, without his recognising it. Maybe Donald knew unawares what Ming was capable of, but put dancerly insistence down to platinum hair out of convenience, ‘reterritorializing’ the dancer’s deterritorializing potentiality upon his most distinguishing feature. Or maybe not. It’s a bit of a hair and solo question: which came first? What is the relation between them? How might one produce or sustain the other – and where does Meng’s musculature, stature, campiness, personality come into this? The reason I have titled this posting ‘The ArtsCross Assemblage’, and not the ‘ArtsCross Network’ is because, whereas networks tend to draw our attention to inter-institutional or inter-personal interactions, assemblages exist at all scales, as well as across and between modes and media. Ming’s hair is an assemblage of chemicals and follicles. Ming is an assemblage. The dance he is in is an assemblage. The dancers, Avatara, me watching and Avatara’s mum sitting quietly in the corner is an assemblage. Avatara talking into a microphone giving instructions to the technicians about exactly how to fly in the legs (theatre curtains that normally create ‘wings’) while her dancers familiarise themselves with the space of the stage: this is an assemblage. Me blogging about it and you reading it…well, you get the picture.  Avatara (left, in dark) and team spacing in the theatre. At centre, Ming. Well, the best intentions don’t always pan out. I meant to write more and look more often at the blogging since I came to Edinburgh on August 10 but the festival has gotten in the way in a huge way. I’ve seen 51 shows or ticketed events in 9 days plus the evening I arrived, with dozens more in the offing. Some of it’s been wonderful, too. One of the more special pieces was a solo King Lear by Wu Hsing-kuo, a masterly dancer who was a member of Cloud Gate. Tonight I saw Princess Bari by the South Korean choreographer Eun-Me Ahn, which was wild and intoxicating fun. But it is 3am now and I can’t say more, especially not if I want at least a bit of sleep. And I do want, as I have a morning concert, an afternoon show, a Peking Opera-style adaptation of Hamlet and then a midnight-till-dawn Brazilian-made telling of Medea all on the docket for tomorrow and spilling into Sunday. Plus a deadline or two to contend with. And so I will sign off with a sigh, wishing everyone there — but especically the choreographers and dancers — a truly splendid weekend. I look forward to eventually seeing the results of all this intensive work, but also hearing about it from those who made it and those who get to see it. Break a leg! I will catch up with all that’s on the blog in due course.  Reproduction of 'The Remaining Mountain' set alongside the rest of Huang's scroll ‘The Remaining Mountain’ is the name given to a section from ‘Dwelling in the Fuchan Mountains,’ an ink landscape painted in 1350 by Huang Gongwang (1269–1354). Apparently, it was separated from the rest of the scroll during the seventeenth century, when the Qing Emperor Wu Hongyu cast it into the fire on his deathbed. The painting was rescued, but the two sections remained apart until this year, when the Zhejiang Provincial Museum lent ‘The Remaining Mountain’ to the National Palace Museum in Taipei, where the remainder of the scroll is kept. The resulting exhibition is called ‘Landscape Reunited’, and a foreigner can only guess at the political significance of this act of cultural restitution. Similarly, one wonders about the different meanings that the ArtsCross project may hold for the participants from China and Taiwan. At the same time, one should be cautious not to allow such symbolism to detract from the work itself – either in the case of Huang’s handscroll, or the dances currently being created. I myself was very struck by this phrase, ‘the remaining mountain’. In English, it can have two quite contrasting meanings: the last mountain standing; or the mountain yet to come. In addition, there’s a gentle tautology to the phrase itself, since if there’s one thing we usually assume about mountains, it’s their durability. Of course, we know they may rise and fall over millennia, that the occasional hill has been razed to meet the needs of developers, or indeed raised to meet the needs of performance artists, as in Zhang Huan’s ‘To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain’ (1995). But by and large, ‘remaining’ is what mountains do. It’s their bread and butter. Now, I’m no Derridean, but it strikes me that in roaming around the remaining mountain, we have entered the territory of what Derrida called the logic of the supplement: an add-on that is thereby foundational, because it defines the original as such. And as I wandered through the rehearsal studios yesterday, I wondered to myself where the remaining mountain was in each of the rooms, what it was to each of the dances. The most literal answer is to be found in Studio 6, whose wonderful views of the mountainous landscape surrounding the TNUA are reflected in some of the wall mirrors. This, in turn, draws attention to the visual field of the studios. Normally neutral, we are used to a visual environment that is at once charged (the studio is a site of intense scrutiny, both of self and others), but constrained. Here, the sky, city, landscape, lights invite themselves in – either presenting themselves with panoramic panache to whoever glances out of the window, or, creeping obliquely across the mirrors as one’s own position shifts and the sun proceeds across the sky.  Mountain view (r) and mirror reflection (l) Publicity material for ‘Landscape Reunited’ describes ‘Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains’ as a ‘landscape of the mind’, which is rendered “in a ‘sketching-ideas’ type of freehand brushwork…The application of the brush is quite calligraphic, at times gentle and serene, while at others free and untrammeled.” We need not resort to clichés about the relationship between dance and calligraphy (thoroughly investigated in any case in ‘Cursive’ by Cloud Gate, whose HQ we visited this morning) to note that this combination is also on display in the rehearsal rooms of TNUA. Different choreographers have different styles, but in all cases, the rehearsals take a ‘sketching-ideas’ approach: the dancers performing against a dramatic backdrop of hills and towns, with the city in the distance: Dancing in the Taipei Mountains. Down in Studio 3, a quirky design feature affords a different kind of ‘Remaining Mountain’ view. Watching Lai Tsui-Shuang work with her dancers to pack ever more gunpowder into her firecracking duet, I overheard the plaintive erhu of Zhang Jianmin’s piece, and realized that a Perspex panel allowed me to see through into his rehearsal, which was being done in full costume. The Perspex is only about a metre wide, so one has a partial view, but turning one’s head through 180?, one is able to block together a fragment of the Chinese dance with the fuller ‘scroll’ of the Taiwanese. This particular combination has its own qualities – the Mongolian grasslands set alongside a bleary tale of modern break-up. But it also threw into relief how we researchers have been experiencing the process. I bought a concertinaed reproduction of ‘Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains’ at the Museum, and have been periodically leafing through. In the Museum itself, one must take in the painting on the move – right to left is the correct direction, but old habits die hard, and I intuitively went left to right. To think of the works as scrolling by, while we ourselves move from room to room, is to recognize the ways they join up for us, and perhaps for us to see continuities where audience members and indeed the choreographers themselves may see differences. To see the works as creating a compelling landscape in this way also draws attention to the ways Huang’s trees, rivers and mountains are here replaced by bodies (which figure only minimally in the scroll). I watched so much dancing yesterday (Cloud Gate trip + run-though of all ten pieces), no doubt the ‘landscape’ of my own mind is crowded with torsos and limbs to an unusual degree. But the ‘remaining mountain’ component also draws our attention to the points of intersection between these dancers. There are countless ways in which the dancers in this project make and break contact with each other. But the other night I was struck by one in particular. Bula had been working quite painstakingly on a solo. Immediately after that, a duet between two men exploded into the space, and it was thrilling. An eye-popping combination of need and rejection, combat and tenderness, masculine posturing and mutual reliance. It’s intricate and the dancers cover the entire space of the stage, dominating it. But the piece crystallizes for me in a relatively simple move: they lean forward, into each other, and one, slightly higher, pushes the other backwards – he slides in his socks, like a sumo wrestler being bulldozed out of the ring. As I watched it, the phrase ‘man mountain’ sprang to mind. Normally, this describes a large man. Here, it took two, and it was on the move. I tried to snap a picture during the run-through. It reminds me that as in dance, so elsewhere, we are all remaining mountains to each other; both supplementary and foundational. Whether we seek or find restitution there is another matter entirely.
What role does teaching and learning play in the dance creative process? Presumably, the dancers are learning something. Perhaps the choreographers are also teaching something. Observing Li Shanshan and Lai Tsui-shaung last week, I imagined that these somethings share a common point of reference, but the methods are substantially different. Li Shanshan, Studio 4, 3:15–4:15, 08.11.2011 The group stops. Shanshan works in close proximity, thumping and clicking, solidifying a tightly constructed section with detailed timing and physical corrections. The quintet executes a rapid series of ever-shifting supports: a boy catches another boy around the legs in a vertical jump-snatch-lift as a girl rolls to the floor, released from an embrace with another boy, as a second girl hops from behind onto his straight back. A moment of breath, the lifted boy slowly opens his arms into a tableau of supplication. Then, BAM: boy down to ground, girl on floor leaps up, second girl hops off. One-two-three and they all shift, rotating like revolving doors into two lines, leaning into one another side-by-side. This section of the composition follows a clear pattern: image, hold, transition, image, hold, transition, image – stillness, sustained, sudden, stillness, sustained, sudden, stillness – a dynamic ten seconds that Shanshan polishes for approximately 10 minutes. Exhorting and demanding, Shanshan works with diligence and care to set cues and clarify order. She is choreographer-cum-captain-cum-cajoler. By design, the dancers take two steps forward and one step back, every movement measured and weighed. It is arduous, technical, slow-going work. The result evinces precision, a powerful display of group coordination and collaboration. Lai Tsui-shuang, Studio 6, 4:30–5:30, 08.11.2011 I walk into Tsui-shuang’s rehearsal where a very different kind of slow-going work is under way. “It’s about the initiation and flow, not the position or step,” the translator tells me, “shifting center of weights [sic]”. Tsui-shuang stands akimbo in loose, pedestrian fashion, mimicking in reduced fashion the head and torso movements enacted by the dancers. The movement looks mad: a woman contracted over, arms sent flinging out from the center, seemingly thrown away, crazy and shaky, but not out of control. Tsui-shuang’s is meticulous, very sure of what she wants, focusing on the intention of the movement. Tsui-shuang speaks and the translator tells me, “send the energy out, more out, don’t hold it in, I want crazy. I want your upper body to go up and lower body to go down with more relationship with the ground.” The dancer listens intently. She does not seem to want to please Tsui-shuang, but instead wanting to dig at the movement herself. It is her solo after all and Tsui-shuang is making the movement idea clear, helping the dancer to realize what inner intention will manifest it better, realize it more completely. Pedagogy of Rehearsal Together these rehearsals reminded me of something that Renata Celichowska, director of the Harkness Dance Center at the 92nd Street Y in NYC and author of the book on the Erick Hawkins Modern Dance Technique, once remarked to me about the pedagogy of rehearsal. To my knowledge, this is a rich, largely untapped area of scholarly investigation in dance. It seems to be a practice that exists at the very heart of performance making as research. One tentative hypothesis suggests that these choreographers ultimately work toward similar goals of expression and communication (and self-discovery?) in movement, but approach it from very different personal processes, diverse methods, and multiple directions. In this example, one distinction might be made between coaching, working on the outer form to create the inner feeling, and facilitating, working on the inner feeling to create the outer form. Coach and facilitator may not be the best terms. I wonder if Paul’s distinction between mediation and intermediation might unpack something here? What other terms? Is ‘pedagogy of rehearsal’ a useful conception? At what point does it begin or end? Aug. 5, 2011 (Friday, Week One) Interviewed by Lin Yatin Alexander Whitley (UK) Q: When you first knew you would be taking part in this, did you have any ideas or expectations of what you would be doing? A: Well, a little. The first email I received told me a little about TNUA and the Beijing Dance Academy being involved; I guess it was exciting just to imagine all the opportunities that would come from it. Even until a week or two ago, there was still a lot I didn’t know about how it would all work and come together as a project, so it’s been very nice to finally be here, to see how everything is coming together, and to engage with all the other choreographers and dancers. Q: It seems from the rehearsals that you and your dancers have been coming together pretty well. Would you like to talk a little about it? A: Unfortunately I’m only here for two weeks due to other commitments in London, but I’ve tried to take advantage of this opportunity to explore ideas that I might not ordinarily do. A lot of my previous choreographic experience has been in the presence of big companies with lots of other priorities, so I haven’t had very many opportunities to work for long, concentrated periods of time with the same group of dancers. In that respect, this opportunity has been really great for me, because it has given me an intense focus I haven’t had before. This week has been my play week: I’ve been trying lots of different things, making as much as I can, but also giving the dancers an opportunity to create material around the ideas I’ve been giving them, so next week we’ll have the task of putting it all together. Q: You were saying that you have been playing with ideas. What kind of tasks or goals have you set for them? A: All of the ideas I’ve been working with are derived from the project’s theme “Uncertain… waiting…” I’ve found this a very useful resource to draw both direct and less direct ideas from, relating not only to the movements but also to the structures organizing the movements. As for the tasks I’ve set out, some of them have been games for them to play: I give them one or two rules to follow, and they play a game, giving me the opportunity to see how a structure could emerge from some simple rules. Or I might give them more specific tasks: in one of the tasks I gave them, they had to imagine an object they really wanted, and then describe it in space with their bodies. Their movements were generated by the idea of the thing they wanted, but I also tried to get them to focus on the thing in space. The idea behind that task was to keep their attention always on something outside of themselves. It’s been interesting to see how they’ve engaged with the ideas, since that was one of the unknowable aspects before coming here: how easy would it be to work with my usual method of setting out tasks and engage with the dancers in the creative process, rather than making all the material myself and getting them to follow? Sometimes it’s taken a few tries for them to understand exactly what the thing is, but some of my ideas are quite complicated, even for Q: What do you expect to achieve from this process? A: I like to think of every piece I make as something new, a chance to try out new ideas. Hopefully this piece will be a reflection of that to some extent: there will be things in this piece that haven’t been in my previous works. Already there are some ideas I’m working with, so the challenge right now is to put it all together. Hopefully, the dancers will be shown in a different light as well: it’s an opportunity for them to show themselves in a way they might not have been seen before. One of the things I’ve found interesting is the best way to work with what their strengths as dancers and my strengths as a choreographer are, finding the middle ground between challenging them enough to do things they haven’t done before, but also not pushing them to far so as to make them feel uncomfortable. I think that’s one of the most important skills for a choreographer, to bring out the best in the dancers, while also putting out a good show. (transcribed by Kevin Wang) Aug. 4, 2011 Interviewed by Lin Yatin Khamlane Halsackda (UK) Q: What do you expect to come out of these three weeks of rehearsals? A: I am very interested to experience the general dance scene in Asia. I’ve been to Bangalore, India this year, and now I’m in Taiwan. My family originally came from Laos, so it’s good to be able to come to Asia, where I came from, to be able to see how the training is, what kind of works are being shown, and to have an opportunity to input my own vision of choreography. Q: Your training has been mainly in Western dance techniques? A: I trained primarily in ballet and contemporary dance, but generally in Europe you need to be quite versatile. I’ve done everything, from pop videos, some more jazz works, to very modern and contemporary works. I’ve also performed in theatre pieces, so versatility is important. Q: Now that you’ve rehearsed a few times with the dancers, can you share with us your experience? A: Yes, it’s been wonderful. I think they’re very hungry to experience something else. They’re very strong students, the ones that I have from TNUA, and it’s been very surprising that they’ve already experienced so much and are capable of doing so much. Q: What do you hope to hope to achieve at the end of the three weeks. A: Apart from an amazing piece of choreography? Well, just to fully experience my time here, to be involved with all the people I meet, to accumulate contacts. In anything like this, to be in a different country and a different city is to grow, to learn new things, and to push myself further. (transcribed by Kevin Wang) Interviews with ArtsCross 2011 Choreographers Aug. 4–5, 2011 at TNUA Transcripts Part II: Three UK choreographers Avatâra Ayuso (UK) Q: What are your expectations of this ArtsCross/DansCross project? A: I think to learn as much as I can from the dancers, from the people here at the university, even the administrators. Q: I know you’ve been working with the dancers for two rehearsals so far. What has your experience been with them in the studio? A: Very good. Considering I have 6 dancers from Taiwan, 1 from Hong Kong and 7 from Mainland China, I can see they have different training – it’s very evident – but they’ve been working very well together. Of course, right now they’re just getting to know each other, but I can see that they want to: they really want to learn, and they want to put themselves in unfamiliar situations, which is very good. That’s the main thing, because when you have the dancers try something, it takes many days and weeks to convince that person; but here they already want to. Right now I haven’t set any material; we’re just doing improvisation and contact. I need to know first what they’re good at, what they are and aren’t comfortable with. Once I know who they are as dancers, then I can go into one direction or another. Tomorrow I will start to set material, but up to now it’s been just getting to know each other. Q: Do you have any specific goals to achieve through this piece? A: Apart from the practice of choreography, not really. But now that I have 14 dancers, I know that I want to work in very complex structures, because in Europe we usually don’t get that many dancers. I’ve already known for two or three years what I want to do with those relationships, but I never got enough dancers to do it. So, choreographically, I’m going to try to work with complex structures and patterns. (Aug. 4, 2011) This clip makes me reflect on the relationship between dance and sensuality or possibly an aesthetic related to sensuality… Aug. 5, 2011 @ TNUA Interviewed by Lin Yatin, Transcribed by Kevin Wang VII. Li Shanshan (Beijing) Q: What do you expect from ArtsCross? A: When the Beijing Dance Academy told me I would be participating in this project, I felt very glad. As a choreographer who’s visiting Taiwan for the very first time, I’ve always wanted to come to Taiwan, not only to work and interact with the dancers here, but also because of its culture and atmosphere. Q: Can you share with us your experiences in working with the dancers these past few days? A: The Taiwanese dancers in my small group stand out in their excellence and dedication. Throughout the rehearsals we have enjoyed a flowing rapport; even during the initial audition process I felt a distinct sense of power in the atmosphere. Rehearsals have never been a problem; there are a few technical aspects which we can easily work through in due time. They have certainly far exceeded my original expectations. Q: The performances will soon take place on the third weekend. What do you wish to achieve by then? A: My piece for this project is a work for five dancers, titled “Home”. It depicts a mental desire for security and belonging. Of course, with all the choreographers involved in this project, I think of myself as much a student learning in this environment as a choreographer, seeing – NOTE: The three choreographers from UK (Avatara Ayuso, Khamlane Halsackda, and Alexander Whitley) were also interviewed during the same two days in English and those transcripts will soon follow. To be continued… Interviewed by Lin Yatin, transcribed by Kevin Wang Aug. 5, 2011 @ TNUA VI. Zhang Xiaomei (Beijing) Q: What do you expect from ArtsCross? A: I’ve known about the mechanics of the ArtsCross project for quite some time. Last time [in 2009] I was just an observant, but I felt that the final performance was profound in meaning. Firstly, our school [Beijing Dance Academy] extended its interactions with other institutions, giving us easier access to how foreign artists work, and some of their more advanced ideas. Secondly, our dancers also expanded their horizons beyond their classical Chinese trainings, and into the ideas of contemporary dance. At that time there was a competition which would run into conflict with ArtsCross, but all of our dancers put their efforts on the ArtsCross presentation instead of the competition. Competitions may serve as a vehicle for future careers, but the professionalism in ArtsCross can be an even stronger catalyst for artistic development. This time, I actively applied for our school to participate in this year’s project, and our school was supportive. Here, I feel I need to adjust from the atmosphere I’m familiar with into a more global environment, and for us (the three choreographers from Beijing) we wish to seek what we can touch and reach with our own accumulated experience. I believe this will be a positive experience for myself, as well as an Q: Can you share with us your experiences in working with your group of selected dancers these past few days? A: I have taught Taiwanese students before, and also seen dancers from Lin Aug. 5, 2011 @ TNUA Interviewed by Yatin V. Zhang Jianmin (Beijing) Q: What do you expect from ArtsCross? A: There are a lot of new or unfamiliar faces here at ArtsCross, so I think this is a great opportunity for interchange and interaction with other choreographers and dancers. For my part, I hope to gain experience through participating in this project, and of course I also head home with a new work under my belt. Q: Can you share with us your experiences in working with the dancers these past few days? A: During rehearsals I need to strike a balance between what marks my own distinctiveness, and a sense of Q: The performances will soon take place on the third weekend. What do you wish to achieve by then? A: I’m confident that we’ll have a very effective presentation. Although we’re short on time, we find something new every day; whenever we run into trouble because of the constant flow of new ideas, I always look forward to the next day, since for some reason we always manage to have an excellent rehearsal then. I believe we’ll have a very successful performance. (Transcript by Kevin Wang.) Aug. 5, 2011 IV. Yu Q: What do you expect from ArtsCross? A: Well, I don’t think I have expectations per se, but I do feel very uncertain and frightened, since this is such a big project. I guess I do expect uncertainty, the uncertainty of meeting new people, the uncertainty arising from not being completely independent from all the factors surrounding the creative process. Q: I know, since we are so short on time, and you’re creating a new work under so many limits. A: Yes, this is a project with strings attached. I’m still adjusting myself, finding how to put it under perspective. I was talking to the dancers today, telling them to have a good time in my dance; but when they come up to me and say, “I had a lot of fun today!” I want to tell them, “But I’m very nervous!” Q: Can you share with us your experiences in working with the dancers these past few days? A: The dancers are simply wonderful. They are very open to new stuff, and I feel extremely lucky to be working with them. I think that for dancers and choreographers alike, when you enter the studio for the first time, you of course have a mix of expectation and trepidation; but they manage to shrug of their nervousness very quickly, and are very open to speaking directly from their hearts, whether through words or through movements in improvisation. My group is a very culturally diverse one, and every one contributes distinctive elements into the piece. I’ve felt very comfortable in this atmosphere, and I’m trying to find ways to let them speak out in the piece, since I think it would be a shame to silence their voices in favor of the work itself. This is not all that easy, and there is quite a lot of pushing and pulling in the process: we just had a 30-minute improv session, and frankly I found it unbelievable that I’m still doing this at this stage! I think it’s hard to strike a balance between finding a good rehearsal strategy, and just lying back and enjoying the process. Q: I’m extremely curious how your piece will turn out in the end! It seems that for you, the process takes precedent over the finished product. A: I feel exactly the same; I’ve been telling myself to think in this way. Of course, you still have the pressure of being one among so many works, but I feel that we’re taking this opportunity to produce something that will be the focus of discussion. I think the colloquium is a great idea, lending much support to the creative process: when such a discussion takes the lead role, you feel a sense of security when creating your work. In each studio we go into, we talk about this sense rather than whether a piece is good or not. Q: I hope you and your dancers will continue to have fun in the following weeks. A: I hope so too. My dancers are all having just a wonderful time! (transcribed by Kevin Wang.) Aug. 5, 2011 (Fri.) @ TNUA Interviewed by Lin Yatin III. Ms. Lai Q: What do you expect from ArtsCross? A: Simply to create and present a complete work in such a short time. Of course it would be impossible to make everything perfect given the time available, but I still hope that I can bring forth something that can stand as a complete, whole work. This is a ArtsCross project, so perhaps in the coming years there will be further interaction with artists from London and Beijing. Q: Can you share with us your experiences in working with the dancers these past few days? A: The Taiwanese dance students have less experience, and as my piece is for two dancers, they need time to fit in with each other. During the past week they have been doing exactly that. Also, because of the height of the male and female dancers, some things will not work, and I will need to look for other solutions. Nevertheless, the Taiwanese dancers are very bright and have a high command of technique; they only need more opportunities to perform. Q: Do you think you will be able to help them with this? A: I’ll try as best as I can. But I think the best way would be to ask them to forget about what they have previously learned! Sometimes what they’ve learned has been ingrained too deeply into their bodies, and because my piece has more of a theatrical element, using the natural body as its starting point, they’ll have trouble doing some of the more natural movements if they use their acquired technique and put too much effort into it. Q: It will be hard: we teach them technique, and then they have to suddenly unlearn it. A: Yes, but I think it won’t be that impossible. I believe performing means emphasizing each individual’s unique qualities; it just takes time. Q: The performances will soon take place on the third weekend. What do you wish to achieve by then? A: Well, I hope that they can express what I aim to express in this dance, and that the audience will like it. Aug. 4, 2011 @ TNUA Interviewer: Lin Yatin II. Bulareyaung Pagarlava (Taipei) Q: What do you expect from ArtsCross? What ideas do you wish to portray in your work? A: Usually, if I learn of a future project when I’m already working with another project on hand, my mind will already begin to anticipate what the coming project might hold. This anticipation both excites and pains me, because it gives me a sense of anxiety, but it is this anxiety which forms the beginning of my creative process. I’m extremely glad to be a part of this project; it is not one to be taken lightly, since we have a Q: So it’s a state of mutual uncertainty? A: Yes, even I have no idea, and of course they know even less. Q: But what you said about the Beijing dancer, do you feel there’s any difference with the Taiwanese dancers? A: I told that particular Beijing dancer that I expect quite a lot from him. He’s loaded with talent, but he hasn’t had the opportunity to put it into use. The Taiwanese kids have much more opportunity, since a lot of choreographers ask them to use their own body to be a part of the creative process. They know a lot about their own bodies, and they tend to express their bodies much more easily. As for the Beijing dancer, Tian Yang, he has a lot of explosive energy and is very active, but right now he’s a bit nervous and his moves are too Chinese in style. Right now I’m telling him to do what he can do, then I have the Taiwanese dancers to break his mold and hand it back to him. He often wants to take it even further, and asks if he can go ahead and break what the Taiwanese dancers have given him. I think this is a very good way of trying things, since this is something I haven’t attempted before. (English Transcript by Kevin Wang) 2011 ArtsCross Choreographers’ Interviews by LIN Yatin Aug. 4–5, 2011 TNUA College of Dance Series of Transcripts of Choreographers Interviewed in Chinese* Part. 1 of 7 Ms. Yao Q: What do you expect from ArtsCross? A: Having been to both London and Beijing, I already have some impression of these two cities, and I look forward to see the Taiwanese dancers perform in the works of the London and Beijing choreographers. As for myself, I most likely will be using techniques I’m familiar with, but in terms of the project itself, I want to see what kind of sparks will be set off by our dancers, who for the most part come from Taiwan and Mainland China [note: as well as Hong Kong and Malaysia], and the choreographers from all these different nationalities, and also how they can connect and interact. But it’s such a short time, and just getting familiar with everyone takes quite a bit of time… Q: I think we can treat this as a A: Yes. I think this is a wonderful project for connecting and interacting, especially since we can see for ourselves what the results have been in the final performance and the forum. Q: You’ll be continuing your previous experimentation with mattresses. How has it been so far? A: Often you can’t attempt to dive in with any sort of set notions; even after the very first day I knew I had to rethink everything I had in mind, not least because I now have a mostly male group instead of females. I will need to rethink everything using their perspective, asking them what they think and what ideas they have. On the first day I went directly into discovering what their physical limits are: they must have no fear of leaping around in the air, and luckily they’re young and don’t have that fear. The second day was spent talking and sharing what they’ve experienced in life, and I like the composition of my group, since some of the dancers have come from backgrounds other than dance. I look forward to what they can achieve this time, even though I’ve already done previous work using mattresses. Since I’ve had to rethink everything this time, this is not a work where I dictate everything that should happen, and because of the limited time, I think this is a good opportunity to push and challenge them to explore. Q: You mentioned the diversity and internationality of our current student body… A: Yes, and I think they are very open to experimentation. After I talked with them yesterday, I found that they don’t have any fear of changing or experimenting; they have a “go for it” attitude, which really helped reduce my own anxiety coming into the project. Also, they are very mature dancers, and I like their thoughts about life and emotions. Q: Do you have any concrete expectations right now? What do you anticipate to bring forward on the third weekend? A: I’m a bit perplexed right now, since we’re only on the third day of the project! Currently I don’t have any idea of how the piece will evolve, since I’ve only just come into contact with these dancers, but I know without a doubt that they will be doing a wonderful job, simply from their (English transcript by Kevin Wang) *Note: These interviews were arranged by TNUA’s Center for Teaching and Learning, and made available here upon request. Thanks to all concerned for a wonderful session just now, the first meeting between the academics from the BDA, TNUA, the UK and the USA. It was a fascinating and deeply rewarding discussion. Below is the brief summary of themes from the previous Friday’s meeting which I addressed at the beginning the session:
Although I haven’t been to Taiwan before, many things appear familiar from Singapore, where I live. There are similarities in the stuff of the places – food, materials, visual environment, humidity – as well as how people move around and interact in them. No doubt I’m missing some significant differences – what historical reason, for instance, lies behind the greater prevalence of mopeds here? – but the similarities also serve to highlight minor variations. Single-trip travelers on Taipei’s MRT use tokens; in Singapore, they buy a $2 stored-value card, and are refunded the difference on arrival at their destination. And ‘minor’ does not mean insignificant. No token, no trip. It’s the difference between staying put, or projecting yourself out into the city. In my own case, the first journey took me miles into and around central Taipei in search of a connector that would link the Ethernet cable to my computer: a round-trip spanning several hours and half the city that would have failed to reach its destination had the final 10cm not been measured out in the precise configurations of an Apple Mac Ethernet to USB adaptor. It is these precise configurations that ease the flow of bodies, ideas and information to, from and around our location. Without them, situations can become massively more effortful or frustrated. And it’s the precision that is important. Your key can be the right size and shape for the lock, but if it’s the wrong key or even a poorly cut copy of the original, you’re not getting in. If your Mandarin tones are slightly off, you may be disappointed, or surprised. So we make efforts to ensure our precise needs will be met. I drew an Ethernet to USB adaptor so I could ask someone where I could get one, so I could show it to the person in the shop if I needed to. A colleague added the name of the place in Chinese so I could show it to someone if I required directions, and I tried to transcribe it into hanyu pinyin so I could read it on a map – before being reminded that it may be spelt differently here. In the Chinese restaurant, I drew a comically bad eggplant for the waitress. It looked like a sausage. Martin drew a better one, but in any case they didn’t have it. After much pantomime, we had a great meal – and half way through, the waitress sweetly brought out a translation of what we were eating. These proliferating scraps – creased and rain-spattered passports granting free passage between minor realms of place or meaning – document the pronounced multi-modality of novel interactions. Gesture, expression, tone of voice, writing, drawing, the back-and-forth of repetition and emendation: such is the repertoire of the newly arrived and their gracious hosts. With the correct combination of tenacity from the former and patience from the latter, most needs can be met eventually. But while the resulting actions and behaviour may tend towards the fuss-free, even habitual, this is not to say that complication and confusion are transcended. ‘[Botany)’ is the word given in our restaurant order translation for ‘broccoli’ (I think). Somehow, it doesn’t feel entirely wrong. The sounds are similar enough, and given how closely we were scrutinising the water spinach (and how assiduously we sought to approximate an aubergine), the term is a salutary reminder of how one tends to treat even (perhaps especially) the food on one’s plate as an object of structured, if speculative, curiosity. Walter Benjamin described his ambulant investigations into Parisian consumer culture as “botanizing on the asphalt.” As a metaphor, the phrase reminds us of our own peculiar peering into the closed and otherwise mundane rooms where dance is daily made. Taken more literally, it reiterates the organic dimensions of our enquiries. On the day I flew here from Japan, I woke up with a cold, which the constant movement between heat, humidity and air-con has entrenched. It’s not debilitating, but I just can’t shake the sniffs, the chesty cough. They are nuggets of phlegmy difference between my body and its environment that pills and potions won’t smooth away. Like the ‘g’ in ‘phlegm’, which is never said, but which I always voice silently when I read or write the word – a mental cough. Yesterday, in Lai Tsui-Shang’s rehearsal, a glorious moment of just such botanized obstinacy. Almost at the end, and two exhausted dancers are trying to get a phrase right. He’s on the floor on his back. She cartwheels over him, her head on his stomach, then as she goes into a crouch, he grasps her waist, and she twists, hauling him into a sitting position. Over and over; they never quite get it right. Previous sequences have been repeated, but this is a real sticking point. 10 minutes, 15 minutes…they are soaked through, but transfigured by the effort. There is no resolution. Eventually, Lai moves on, though it is unclear if she was at any specific point sufficiently satisfied. Rather, it’s the labour of it all that is the effect. Other points of contact in this dance are glancing, or fizz with an electric charge: here, momentarily, the dancers are soldered together by experience; knitted into each other like broken bones re-fusing, before snapping apart again. This is one way in which dance sustains an attention to the knots of experience, intimacy and encounter we otherwise sediment over until they are just like peas at the bottom of a pile of Yao Shu-Fen’s mattresses. Or maybe some [botany). Two dancers in Alex Whitley’s Rehearsal last week, unaware of their similar stance in waiting….a nice image of the project’s theme…
Of all the choreographers in the Artscross project, the longest gap between sessions I’ve been able to witness, has been with Yu Yen-Fang’s work. It was with a real sense of anticipation that I went into the studio yesterday morning. The group were arranged in three rough lines, making jerking, shoving movements, their bodies twisting round as if trying to continue to exert a pressure against an object which was moving and twisting itself, even as it tried to shove them backwards. Yen-Fang was herself leaning against and pushing into one of the male dancers so that he had to work both to carry out his own movement, but also to resist hers. As the section was repeated, she leant against several more of the dancers, and as the repetitions progressed, it became possible to tell those that she had worked with like this already, and those with whom she had not. Those she had worked with made the play of oppositional force apparent in their own body, for example, pushing outwards with their hands, shoulders or torsos, whilst pushing their feet, knees or hips down or backwards in the opposite direction. The dancers who had not yet experienced the actuality of the shove, had a lighter quality of movement, indeed, were it not for the action of gravity, you might almost say that it had a sort of weightlessness. It was like a copy of the original, shorn of something of its dynamic. It reminded me somewhat of computer generated movement, which often captures the precise spatial and dynamic quality of ‘natural’ movement, but leaves out something of this physical force. This comment isn’t intended to be unfair to the dancers, who were working hard on a complex movement, which was waiting to be energized by Yen-Fang’s addition to the process. The matter of how to energise a choreographic process – and indeed, what that energy might be – is one that has been coming back to me again and again across many of the works I’ve engaged with over the last week. Today, watching Zhang Xiaomei’s company prepare and the give a run through, she repeatedly exhorted them to find a sense of energetic engagement with the form. Xiaomei had already prepared the soundscape for the piece before leaving Beijing, and the odd shrieks and cries which rip through it have an affective charge which she tries to get the dancers to pick up. Although there’s no rhythm to count off, they have to mark their movements to these moments in the soundscape, as well as using some of their affective shape and dynamic to vitalise their own. Much of the movement circles in to the dancer’s body in order to explode out, and is cycled back in in return. The same can be said not only for the bodies of the individual performer’s but also for their collective corpus as well. In rehearsal today, Xiaomei described this as a gathering and usage of qi, both from the dancers’ bodies, but also from the natural world, a sense of being activated by movements which begin with, but also somehow outside of, that of your own body. In Zhang Jianmen’s rehearsal on Friday I watched him working with one of the male dancers, demonstrating, not the force he wanted him to move with, but the force he wanted to move him. Standing next to him, he struck the air with both hands, next to the dancer’s chest. It reminds me of something similar I’ve seen in the context of martial arts practice, where master teachers demonstrate their ability to strike the body at a distance by discharging their kinetic force – perhaps qi in this context – into the air. What joins these quite different examples of forces acting on the body – one actual and two subtle – is their co-concern for the manner by which dancers feel through the work beyond the movement of their body per se. None of the choreographers seems satisfied with seeing only the reproduction or refinement of gestures. What’s at stake is a sense of the movement of energies in the world, as well as within the body. The geographer Nigel Thrift has described this as ‘a sense of push in the world’. He is concerned with the means by which immaterial forces – affects – are gathered and distributed on and by bodies, human and non-human, collective and individual. Although affect is a term allied to emotion in English, and is often bound up with its discourse, in Thrift’s deployment of it, it refers to both an action and a feeling of force, albeit one that is immaterial. A useful corollary by which this might be understood, is the weather, which is all around us, and, in the case of Taipei’s current humidity, presses against us, and can be felt, even though it cannot be said to be a ‘thing’ in the strictest sense. To me, it seems important to recognize that there is also a subjective component to this ‘sense of push in the world’. Not every person is as attuned to it as another at any given time, and some may be actively engaged in trying to seek it out. I’ll try to follow something of this thought, albeit in a slightly different direction in my next post. I have been pondering a while about the ready use of the term the ‘other’ in the present context of the gathering of Chinese, Taiwanese and UK-based choreographers as well as academics including the US. My sense is that beyond the institutional curriculum differences of each training institution that is involved here (which are arguably not representative of whole countries), I am looking here at ‘expert practices’ (Susan Melrose), which actually provide ground for something ‘shared’ and ‘common’, precisely on the level of expertise, rather than ‘otherness’. Practitioners from different countries and with different backgrounds meet each day for a number of weeks in the studio, and what is at stake here is their expertise in dancing and choreography-making. My sense is that we should avoid to look at these practitioners in terms of their ‘other’ nationalities, as this is not what comes into play in the studio. What seems to be more relevant in the actual rehearsals is the degree of training that dancers have received, whether they are junior, senior or graduated dancers, whether they have specialised in contemporary dance or Chinese Classical dance, and how much experience they have in performing, indeed how they move, process notes and what individual qualities they offer to the work. On the level of ‘observing’ the collaborations that are taking place here, I feel we need to draw up a new map of our world, which is a map of ‘practices’, rather than a map that delineates national boundaries. In terms of performing arts practice they do not seem very relevant to me now, writing as a (German) tai chi chuan practitioner who is based in London, and who witnesses here in Taipei both Taiwanese and Chinese dancers who are highly trained in classical ballet (amongst other dance forms), make work with Chinese, Taiwanese and UK-based choreographers. August 15 Watching studio process today I find myself again curious about difference — different dancing bodies. I am not interested here to make comparisons between ROC or PRC dancers, so much as to note what I observe in the studios. (And it would be interesting to have UK dancers here too, to throw into the mix). I think this is to do with training rather than cultural difference. For the most part the differences are smoothed over, everybody working together to realise choreographic product – yet some distinctions remain. Let me try and write some aspects of these differences, without categorising, as the genealogies are too mixed and too varied – there is no pure line back to a root anywhere. And I am writing about the dancing, knowing that choreographic style also influences the way dancers move. There are dancers who seem to dance as if surrendering to another power outside of themselves. Their bodies move into hyper extension, their arms and hands fully extend with a flamboyant style, almost to distortion, their legs extend beyond human possibility. And they express. As I wrote earlier about full body/empty body, their bodies are full, their faces are full of feeling. Yet this fullness is also an emptiness as they surrender their real every day bodies to this ‘feeling’. I am not sure what feeling this might be, as emotionally there are many feelings – grief, joy, anger, fear, etc. (Martin knows all about this one). All I know is that these bodies are feeling. I observe the contraction of face muscles, the upward turn of the head, the tension in eyebrows and lips, and I might interpret this an expression of longing, loss and anguish. But I have not heard this spoken. These dancers seem to have an emotional connection to the material, the emotion dictates the movement and the dancers are transported through the emotion into the performance. These dancers tend to focus on identifiable lines and positions as in classical dance. They work with an impulse, a flow of the oppositions of contract and release, which also describes the emotional connection. These dancers find improvisation challenging, as improvisation requires an attention to the here and now of an individual movement language, rather than surrendering to another power. These dancers are most at home in work that explores spiritual themes, ritual, nature – something bigger and more transcendent than the here and now. Dancing seems more serious than living. Then there are dancers who work between extended positions. Perfectly capable of achieving hyper extension and virtuosity, they choose to apply these skills to fast, unpredictable, non fixed movement that’s sole purpose is to be itself. These dancers have an ability to improvise and play in the here and now. They work with fragmentation rather than (only) linearity, they creatively shine individually rather than as a group, they focus on movement as task. Their faces do not express longing, rather a concentrated awareness to the immediacy of their actions in space and time. They exhaust themselves dancing, and this exhaustion is humanly revealed rather than hidden. Living seems more serious than dancing. Many dancers are capable of both of these kinds of dancing, depending on which choreographer they are working with. For most choreographies these different bodies work together, differences are eased out and group harmony is encouraged. For me, there are some choreographic processes where the differences are not reconciled, and these are intriguing. It is in these studios that I long for the dialogue to be opened and the space for difference to be made more transparent. There is no good or bad, better or worse here. Just difference. But the show must go on and there is no time to explore the uncertainties of dancing difference. On Saturday, we had the photo-shooting to get the picture that might represent our choreography in the evening program. I found this as a very difficult task: how can you find the ”right” image that gives a sense of what the concept of your piece is?. Can an image say more than hours of rehearsals, talks, tasks… Well, here I leave you with some of the pictures I took that day, trying to see if I could capture a smell of what some of the choreographers (Yu Yen Fang, Khamlane, Bulareyaung, Li ShanShan, Zhang Jianmin and myself) might want to reflect in their works.
© Avatâra Ayuso Avarata, Studio B402, 6:50–8:50, 08.10.2011 Avarata assumes a commanding, roving presence in rehearsal. When I walk in, she is working intensively on a lifting sequence designed, it seems, to explore the upper reaches of imagination through physical exertion. In fact, the entire time I observe, the upper realm is alive with bodies and movement motifs that go up, up, up into thin air. Two girls lift a boy repeatedly, his feet barely brush the floor. A group of girls work on a task that sets them on the vertical axis reaching, yearning upward, lithe arms flowing skyward on a vertical through-line like bamboo trees in a gentle wind. A group of boys and one girl clamber up and around an obstacle course of ballet barres, twisting, gasping, floating, arching, “never touch the ground,” Avarata exhorts them. The room hums in anticipation. Somehow, it makes me more aware of the ground: Is it a question of gravity? Extremity? Whatever it is, from the beginning, Avarata has upped the ante in her work: more dancers, more rehearsals, more intensity. I see a virtuosic, high wire act that demands character and courage and attention from everyone, especially her. I saw no pattern emerge, but she had hooked me, dangling in the air tonight. A discussion has arisen about the use of the term ‘devising’ and its various possible functions and applications in each of the very different dance-making processes we are witnessing here. I am sharing a (short and slightly modified) section of my previous research as part of my PhD thesis which might be of interest here: The verb ‘to devise’ readily refers to the actions of “planning” or “inventing” and stems originally from the Old French word deviser, derived from the Latin devisare/dividere (to divide, distribute, distinguish). In the Old French the verb ‘to devise’ initially kept its etymological meaning, but through a semantic slip took on the meaning of “to order”, “to organise”. When no longer only applied to material objects but also to events, the verb began to be used in the sense of “planning” or “making a plan or a project” (in French, un devis). It was also assumed into intellectual discourses, in which it was used in the sense of “to organise (a discourse)”. Through another semantic slip in the Old French, deviser took on the meaning of “to meditate”, and then “to imagine”, “to create in the mind”. Finally it was also used in the sense of “to wish for”. Modern French has lost most of the medieval usages of the term, and deviser now means “to converse”, while in Swiss French, interestingly, it means “to reckon”. Evidence derived from contemporary practices would suggest that much of the French medieval usage of the term still prevails in the current English usage. The New Shorter Oxford Dictionary entry for “devise” lists a number of definitions that correspond to its French root – something that strikes me as significant with regard to the application of the term within performance-making, as distinct from the performance genre identified as ‘devised theatre’. The notion of dividing, distributing and distinguishing, as set out above, seems to me to signal actions, in performance-makers, that are patterned, logically consistent, with implications for the ways ‘composition’ is made in performance-making, or likewise ‘choreographic process’ is understood in dance-making. Building on these definitions, I have then used the verb ‘to devise’ as a synonym for the verb ‘to invent’, as Gregory Ulmer understands it in the text entitled Heuretics: The Logic of Invention. It seems to me that the term can be applied to the different processes we are witnessing here in various ways, and it allows us to look at how performance material emerges. With regard to Martin’s thoughts on ‘character’, what interests me here is how ‘invention’ takes place. What ‘roles’ are the dancers given in each process and how does the choreographer’s ‘signature’ (S. Melrose) emerge? Are the dancers asked to provide technical skills for a pre-conceived movement that they should emotionally invest in? In what ways do their personal qualities come into play? Are they asked to ‘invent’ movement sequences? On Saturday night, a group of us academics interrupted our intellectual ruminations to venture out to the popular “Shilin Night Market.” At some point during the evening, after some refreshing Taiwanese beer, Martin interrupted a story he was telling to say, “… you see, because Paul and are aren’t really theater academics in the traditional sense, we’re …” whereupon Paul jumped in and said, “… mathematicians!” It was quite funny, especially in light of our fumbling with the bill at the end of the evening. On the MTR ride back, we discussed the geo-political implications of ArtsCross and the future of BDA-RESCEN-TNUA (or, if you like, PRC-ROC-UK) intercultural relationships. We found daunting the complexity of concerns and issues that have already arisen. We expressed confidence that Chris will continue to interrogate this question – defining and problematizing “intercultural” a bit more – and get back to us soon with a complete solution (Monday or Tuesday will be fine, Chris:-) For some odd and (to me) still inexplicable reason, these two interchanges connected in my mind. I woke up thinking of a recent conversation with an astrophysicist colleague, Greg Laughlin, at University of California, Lick Observatory. He wondered whether I, or anyone, had choreographed the pythagorean three-body problem. Here’s the background. In 1893, the mathematician Meissel from Kiel proposed the general of three bodies, which is quite simply stated: “Three point masses attract each other according to the Newtonian law of gravitation. The masses of the particles are m1=3, m2=4, and m3=5; they are initially located at the apexes of a right triangle with sides 3, 4, and 5, so that the corresponding masses and sides are opposite. The particles are free to move in the plane of the triangle and are at rest initially.” Meissel was of the opinion (in 1893) that these initial conditions will lead to periodic motion. It is not clear how he arrived at this conjecture. In 1913, Carl Burrau, hoping to find a periodic solution, attempted to solve the problem with the aid of a mechanical calculator, but he was unable to determine the outcome. The problem was finally solved in 1967, with the advent of high-speed numerical integration and the technique of “two-body regularization,” by Victor Szebehely and his collaborators. The solution is neither “quasi-periodic” nor periodic, but rather assumes a form known in the technical literature as “elliptic-hyperbolic.” After a great deal of graceful, swooping action, the two heavy bodies form a bound binary pair, while the smaller body is ejected in the opposite direction on a hyperbolic trajectory. Here’s a link to Szebehely’s paper. The figures 1–8 show the progression of the “dance.” It is quite beautiful: a good old-fashioned line drawing of a kinetic floor plan. Without presuming to know the behind-the-scenes choreography composed and still being devised, I appreciate in a new way what ArtsCross has already wrought: if not a complete solution, a generative framing of the artistic-research problem. After all, the most important part of any investigation is the finding of a good question. Which reminds of something Howard Gardner once said to me: “it is always better to interesting and wrong, than to be obvious and right.” Uncertain waiting, indeed. I’m something of an interloper here, as my background is one in the theatre, rather than dance. That said, I’ve worked as a performer in dance contexts, and continue to do so, as well as watching a good deal of it – perhaps more even than works which might more recognizably be the province of a theatre studies academic. Historically, the two arts have not always been quite as bifurcated as they might like to think. The Natyasastra (as Chris reminded me), whilst being ostensibly a treatise on dramatic representation for the Sanskrit theatre of ancient India, contains a good many prescriptions which relate to dance, as well as those relating to the representation of characters and the management and representation of their emotional states. In historical terms a little closer to my own culture, the eighteenth century English actor David Garrick, widely lauded as the finest actor of his time for his ‘natural’ presence and appearance on the stage, greatly admired the French ballet master Jean-George Noverre (the feeling was mutual). Much of Garrick’s reputation for ‘natural’ performance was connected to his ease and variety of movement on the stage. There is a paradox in this perhaps, as the so called ‘naturalistic styles’ of performance (such as the American Method) are now commonly thought of as having little to do with movement at all, relying largely, instead, on ‘internal’ processes. In these, a sustained sort of concentration on facts about a character generates a form of belief in them, which leads to shows of spontaneous expression. It would be wrong, of course to suggest that when such actors are ‘in character’ that they do not move, but it’s a ‘natural’ process, an unavoidable consequence of their sustained focus on imagining the material and sensory facts of their character’s circumstances. What’s natural about it therefore, seems quite the opposite from when Garrick had cork heels made for his shoes (which were usually heavy and wooden) so that he could appear to float across the stage. These are, of course, actorly concerns for character, but it is a word which has begun to appear more and more in my thoughts in the course of this week’s rehearsals. Character is maybe one of those words in English — as I noted of practice earlier on the blog – which is very much defined by its use and context: a keyword. The reason that it keeps coming back to me in the rehearsal rooms I’ve been in over the last few days is that, despite the real, and rather pleasurable difference between the works I’ve watched taking place, whether in the work per se, or in the choreographer’s demands, most seem to me to manifest one or another of the following concerns: 1) for feeling, and 2) for what I would describe as ‘theatricality’. The latter arises variously as a hint of narrative, personality, or emotion arising out of all that movement. The former to the concerns that something ‘real’ should happen, and which have been beautifully blogged about by my colleagues thus far. So what does this have to do with character Character has several meanings in English. It can mean, an aspect of personality, or a stock or typical personality type. It describes the role played by an actor, or the persons they impersonate. But it is not only attributed to persons; events, objects and even atmospheric conditions can also be said, in English to have or to reflect a certain sort of character. What this means, I suppose, is that as well those more straightforwardly objective facts by which they might be described, they have energetic properties which belong to the person or thing said to possess them, but do not wholly encompass them – the personality of the actor is not the same as that of her character, even as she temporarily takes possession of it. Its not a property which actors or events have on a permanent basis; it’s a consequence of the way in which they go about doing things. In various rehearsal studios over the last few days, alongside giving instructions to dancers and showing them moves, I’ve also witnessed choreographers ask for and show dancers different ways of doing them which might extend their function beyond movement per se. I’m finding a degree of theatricality in several of the pieces so far, in which what’s at stake is not pure movement exactly. In Alexander’s piece there are sections at the beginning which index or reflect everyday behaviours. His dancers are quick and supple, and push hard to project their bodies into the lines offered by his own speed and strength. They struggled, however, not to do this, to find at the beginning, a piece of movement that was ‘just as you would do it in everyday life’. Where just doing the movement might be about finding a relationship to it in terms of a dynamic set of qualities – rushing, sinking, gliding etc. – this speaks more of a relationship to experience within the wider world. The ‘world’ of the theatre, argued the phenomenolgist Bruce Wilshire, is nested in the real one. It’s this effort towards the real world or to a nesting within it, which leads to some of the sense of theatricality I’ve mentioned. Li Shanshan has drilled her dancers already in an incredibly tight choreography. As they go through it again and again, as well as refining the technical nuances of the piece, she’s also looking at the manner in which they approach it. Where the comments I noted by Alexander’s were directed to the work of individuals, and their relation to their own performance, Li seems as concerned with the group, and with the energetic quality of their collective, with an affective resonance of their working together. I think of both of these as character. It sits somewhere between your own personality and one which you want to project. It’s sense of yourself in the moment, but one which you equally want to offer as an experience to others. It’s both a property of the immediate theatrical moment, but also one which speaks to the world we occupy beyond the theatre, as well as to the here and now.
August 12th I am attempting to enter inclusively into each studio process, noting my response to what is happening. And from this embodied sensation, to describe what I see. Alexander: The atmosphere in this studio is cool, gentle, English. I feel the space between my shoulders and my neck. Alexander creates space. And he has a double act to play right now. He has to finish his piece by today and also find time to translate his movement quality to the dancers. Falling is key to Alexander’s choreography, falling as a metaphor for uncertainty. As I enter the studio he is exploring a fall with a dancer, falling backwards into a partner’s arms, and then coming back to standing. The dancers partner each other in a fall to recover. Going down to come up. Alexander wants a fall… and then return to standing, not a fall to recover. The recovery is not inevitable. For dancers trained in classical/modern dance, fall and recovery are inseparable. In modern dance students learn a stylised fall that has no connection to letting go, but to an onwards connection to more movement. After all, modern dance is about youthful living – and ongoing fight against the dying of the light – right? To fall is a meeting with uncertainty, with loss, with chaos. And this kind of falling – technically — requires a somatic understanding of letting go … What a paradox for Alexander and this studio process, he has little time left and has to move fast, yet to fall requires a slowing down, a stopping of time. What a challenge! Shanshan: The dancers are grouped together, looking into the far distance. I sense a searching for something more, a longing, anguish and loss. As I watch I feel this in my body. I have walked into the very end moments of a run of the choreography. The next half hour is spent reworking details of timing, hand and footco-ordination, movement dynamics, when to turn energy on or off — the fine tuning of rehearsal process. There is no discussion of feeling, or what to feel. The feedback is technical. Shanshan is precise, exact and sure with her technical feedback. Yet their bodies seem full of feeling, their eyes are full, their hands reach to full stretch, their legs fully extend, they perform a full pause, heavy with feeling. Is it the theme of belonging that fills them with feeling? Is it the sound score? Or is it the performance of the movement language itself? If I move my elbow down sharply I experience a different feeling to when I move my elbow down softly. A feeling emerges with the movement. I am reminded of something I wrote a while ago (2006) about full body/empty body, presence and absence. In choreographic process we can create movement material through fully expressing an emotional connection. It is then possible to empty the body of the emotion, to be left with the movement itself, as an empty shell. In performance we might embody that empty shell of the movement and the feelingre-emerges, without having to emote. Empty body becomes full. Shu-fen: A large space is scattered with mattresses and dancers, talking, falling about, clowning, vying for a laugh, enjoying each other’s interactive performances with the mattresses. Little scenes unfold, improvised meetings between bodies and mattresses. The dancers are wearing what they normally wear to bed – in some cases quite revealing! At one moment mattresses are placed standing up, like walls, one behind the other, with a body sandwiched in between each one. A dancer improvises, climbing up and popping his head over the brow of the mattress, then fainting slowly down again — and the action is so funny. Each dancer plays, joking, finding possible material, appearing above and to the sides of the mattresses and disappearing again. Shu-fenenjoys their play and keeps a firm hand. She knows what she wants. A pleasurable release this is – to laugh. My body relaxes into their joyous games. Xiaomei: What exuberant passionate energy Xiaomei shares with her dancers. She leads them and they follow. I see such open honesty and commitment to her task, to reconstruct, re-enacta shamanistic ritual from Mongolia – a communication between people and god. The shaman, the healer, draws the spirit. And the spirit draws the performers, through the hand held cluster of bells that are passed from dancer to dancer — breathing life into the group, pressing them onwards, driving them forwards. As another kind of empty body, the dancers surrender to allow the spirit of the bells to enter their bodies. This is powerful stuff. I am down on my knees, I am ready to be taken. I am carried away by the power of the group. The sound score is ritualisitic, throbbing with rhythm and gutteral voices, created by Xiaomei. I observe simple ancient spatial patterns, snaking circles and lines, heel first running with bent legs, women bent double at the waist, slapping the backs of their wrists, the men as warriors of yin and yang. I almost lose myself to the spirit of the dance, my body energised with the pulse of the group dynamic, I want to be closer, closer, surrender to the dance – yet I know I have far too much individual ego to perform something like this! Wow! what a range of work and what a tumble of embodied experiences for me. I’d meant to write so much more, but this process has been more consuming than I’d imagined it to be. Today was my last day of scheduled rehearsals – needless to say I’ve arranged some extra time for tomorrow to do some last gasp alterations! What a whirlwind….. I feel like I’ve only just started to understand what this piece, this thing is, and now I have to say goodbye to it. I wonder what’s more confused – it or me? Thankfully, the wonderful Elisabetta is here to make sense of it in my absence! In brief reference to Ted’s comments on emergence (and my first post perhaps) — I’m continually captivated and consumed by the process of making a piece of dance. The tension of thinking and feeling – analysis and intuition – pushes and pulls in different directions and can be at once magical and perplexing! Whatever plan there was at the beginning takes on a whole new life (from which both ugly and beautiful heads emerge!) and our task is then to make sense of what we see before us and somehow reconcile it with, and organize it according to, the original plan/revise the plan/scrap it all together/bash it with a sledgehammer to make it fit the plan! At what point do you let go and let it be what it is? A life unto itself with a meaning beyond (or lacking) the intention you brought to it. This is my uncertainty and it’s what will keep me making dance — always waiting for the answer! Before I sit down to observe the choreographers, dancers, scholars, and other observers, I slowly, somewhat timidly open the door as not to disturb those in the room. I feel like there should be a welcome mat. I Other times I feel like I need to behave as a guest in someone’s living room or kitchen. I feel the choreographers, the hosts, are inviting me to dinner or to come over for an afternoon tea. It’s as if I have the rare glimpse of individuals embarking on the most intimate of daily routine. It’s as if I am peering over the shoulder of someone concocting a feast using a secret recipe or I am in the room while someone dusts family pictures with an accumulating sense of nostalgia. Perhaps I feel like I am an intruder in a house, spying on a family. I embody a tension between the familiar and Yesterday on my first visit of rehearsals I witnessed various modes of creative practice/ In witnessing processes we get a hint of the reasons for decisions that lead to a performance. I am interested in the variances of I am sitting in one rehearsal in which the choreographer speaks only in Mandarin, and, on this occasion, I have no translator available. They work on sections that are clearly being repeated, there is much detail and precision at stake. Dancers try over and over again to get it ‘right’, which suggests an approval on behalf of the choreographer. The dancers’ work has to match the choreographer’s ‘vision’. The more dancers ‘do’, the further their vision seems to develop. It seems that this work can be inexhaustible at times, as the more dancers offer, the further the vision of choreographers seems to develop. More and more detail is being addressed and maybe it will only be the approaching performance date that will make the work be finished. Then the group moves into a new section in which dancers are forming a line, with only the dancer at the very front of the line moving for a certain count of beats, then running off to join the back of the line again. As though it was a queue, dancers take turns in being at the head of the line, moving. For some reason it is strikingly clear to me that the movement is being improvised here. How come? And am I really right in my judgement? I still cannot be certain, nobody has confirmed this. Their movement bears the overall aesthetic of the piece, there is no lack of definition that gives its spontaneous emergence away. I am not sure where my sense for its spontaneity comes from, and only after a few cycles my sense gets confirmed as I can see that each time certain dancers take their turn again, there are differences to what they have done before. But I have to look carefully in order to be able to see this. I am intrigued by the atmosphere that has shifted in the space from the previous But what do these instances of practice entail when we try to strip away those metaphors? And what is taking place here that makes this section so remarkably different to the work of Zhang Jianmin, Studio 7, 3:30–5:30pm, 08.10.2011 I salute our scholarly community! It’s the fourth day of observation and blogging and I have neither seen nor heard peep of the word “empathy.” Yes, really. If the word evokes a certain kind of emotion in you (revulsion, say), then you will be forgiven. I certainly have suffered cognitive fatigue from the recent fad of evoking everything empathetic in dance. Unfortunately for me (and now you, if you decide to read on) empathy enjoys a rich and complicated history in the phenomenological and scientific literatures, so it has long been of particular interest to me. For this post, however, I promise not to resort to discussing the MNS. And if you don’t know what that is I salute you again! What does empathy have to do with dance creation and creative process? Well, everything. Everything that is if you work with living, breathing individuals and not animated figures on a computer. Empathetic response in dance – the feeling in, of, and for movement – is arguably what most differentiates dancing from other skilled physical activities, like sports. Furthermore, the varieties of empathetic response in dance are arguably what distinguish dance from other performing arts. The ArtsCross experience is compelling in this regard and I can’t help but wonder how empathy might motivate and/or play out in particular choreographic situations. The risk of course is that I will over-generalize, trivialize, and simplify something that is rather complex. Check, already did that! Since we’ve been given license on this blog is to be (wildly) speculative, I’ll blunder ahead anyway. No promises, no apologies. (Sorry Chris.) Consider that the source of empathetic experience is fundamentally somatic. The idea of somatic awareness has a rich history in movement practices. Early somatic movement practitioners like Moshe Feldenkrais emphasized learning to “listen and respond to one’s inner experiences, which is one’s felt-level experience” Contemporary somatic practitioners and educators have described this bodily-based sensing of one’s own and another’s somatic experience as somatic empathy. I suggest (tentatively) that those choreographers who begin by asking dancers to devise personal movement responses are in fact privileging the creative source of this kind of “feeling in” movement and, ultimately, value above all else the sort of communication that arises from this site of being. In a biological motor-resonance sense, somatic empathy sets the stage for more sophisticated responses. Consider those dance folks who believe that one of the most important qualities in a dancer is a “feeling for” previously devised choreographed movement, which dancers themselves sometimes describe as “connecting to the choreography.” I think this ability is a kind of mimesis that is more appropriately characterized as mimetic empathy. I’m not talking some simulated, outward mimicry, or aping, but something deeper and more intense. It’s the ability to put oneself imaginatively in the place of another, reproducing in one’s own imagination and physicality the emotional tenor and movement form of another (see Willerslev, 2004, for an account of such an experience in his ethnography of the Yukaghirs, indigenous hunters in Siberia … wow). Choreographers who emphasize the movement signature of a work, as opposed to the steps or structure, seem to be digging at this kind of response. A third source of empathetic experience in dance is kinesthetic. Kinesthetic empathy has gotten a lot of scholarly airtime lately with projects like Watching Dance in the UK, so I won’t go into it here. But it is an interesting thought experiment to consider what motivates a choreographer who emphasizes this kind of “feeling of” the movement: an over-riding concern for audience reaction? I should end here, since my posts seem to go way beyond the average length. Still … I haven’t said anything about what brought up all this cognitive-phenomenological stuff for me. So, if you will indulge me … “I’m trying to bring you back to what I need; otherwise you will be doing what you want and be far, far away from what I need.” [and later] “Try to follow my instructions; otherwise you will be doing it your own way and it will not be my choreography at all.” – Zhang Jianmin, translated by Christopher Zhang Jianmin moves with such quality, such a sensitive muscular tonality, that it is tempting to describe it as melodramatic. When I look closer, however, I see, I feel what he means with his demand to “follow my instructions.” (From a Westerner’s point of view, the question of interpersonal efficaciousness is another matter altogether.) On the way back from swimming yesterday, Martin and I were musing about Jianmin’s approach. In the rehearsal that I observed, he was working hard on a duet, showing the dancers what he wanted. The steps be damned, he seemed to be saying, what he really wanted was for them to evoke “yin yang”: opposition in relation as a complicated almost syncopated timing in the upper body with a direct-indirect spatial intention. Not easy. His demonstration was remarkable and qualitatively different from what the dancers had achieved. The ensuing interaction certainly evoked yin yang in me: I found it troubling and essential, annoying and riveting, inane and miraculous. It may be that Jianmin actively demonstrated so much in this rehearsal – really, full out – in part because he wishes to stimulate a mimetic kind of empathetic response from his Taiwanese dancers. They clearly do not (yet) have Jianmin’s particular (particularly Chinese?) movement signature in their physical or mental repertoire. Or, perhaps what I saw was an artifact of Chinese culture and methodology? Ultimately, my take away after watching Zhang Jianmin for two hours was a powerful feeling from a creative artist working somewhere between poetry and humanity. I once worked with another choreographer like that: Ben Stevenson. Coincidentally, Jianmin and I both danced at Houston Ballet back in the mid- to late 1980s when Ben was the artistic director. Jianmin joined the company the year I left. Talk about intercultural empathetic understanding! I’m still trying to sort out my thoughts and feelings from this rehearsal. Martin? Help me here, SVP. As all the other choreographers, I’m starting to find a coherent choreographic structure. Still I don’t have a title. Here are some of my notes:
If last week felt rushed this week is a crazy scrabble to structure structure structure. In the the 3 hours of evening studio time I’m having to be extra vigilant with my time keeping, decision making and organization of what takes priority for each rehearsal. This is hard for me since I function badly in the evenings. The freedom I had to explore ideas last week is by far less this week, although I am still throwing a couple of knew bits and pieces in because it’s very hard to resist the temptation. It’s a catch 22 situation. The more I look at rehearsal footage the more I see what could be done, and as much as this helps me to find a compilation for structure it also encourages and stimulates more concepts. I am careful that I don’t simply create a backlog of things that I still need to work on just because I want to keep trying out new ideas. Another point that is still important, and I think will remain in being so, is that I continue to push what choreographic material we do have, this can always be clearer and I am expecting that, although the dancers are working extremely hard at retaining in their mind and bodies the information I’ve imparted to them, there is simply not enough time in the days to really concentrate purely on this. Up until today I remain satisfied, things progress steadily and calmly enough, despite the scrabbling (which are more my nerves than anything else). And now that I draw to the end of week 2 I wander if this is the calm before the storm? I won’t ponder too much however, and the timely Thai massage the UK choreographers have booked themselves for tonight will most definitely help! /Khamlane Bulareyaung, Studio 5, 7–9pm, 08.09.2011 If I carried with me an emerging sort of seriousity from Studio 7, it was dispelled immediately upon contact with the Studio 5 floor. No sense of tranquility here. Action, action, action permeated the room. A male dancer spun like a top; another flew through the air; a couple grappled in the mirror; someone in the corner rose and fell, rising and falling; someone else panted loudly on the floor. Where was the choreographer? I see an assistant sitting quietly, operating the music from a laptop. Where … where … scanning … scanning … But wait, that’s him? Bula’s rehearsal is, in some ways, the most remarkable one that I’ve observed thus far. He remains still for long periods of time, watching, making small gestures to indicate “more,” “less,” “not really,” “really?!” He operates the music from a laptop, placed at a right angle to mirrors resting on the studio floor. His expressive face runs the gamut of emotions. When he does rise he does so with an alacrity that astonishes me. Those feet! Those hands! His physical ease and generosity of spirit are self-evident in his smiling face. Were but I a young man again, Bula would surely be my sage! Ode to Bula Bula Buddha He sits. He observes. He stands! He sits again. He waits. On his feet suddenly. No immobile all knowing one he. A princely Siddhartha, perhaps on the periphery of enlightenment, looking for a kernal amidst spinning, lunging, popping, locking, grunting, jumping, sighing, laughing, exhausted, entertaining, pleasing, suffering, self-flagellating, wondering, happy seekers to unearth a visceral seed with which to grow his Bodhi tree. He sits. (We wait.) Alexander, Studio 7, 3:30–5:30pm, 08.09.2011 For the afternoon round of rehearsals, I must have carried with me a contemplative state of body-mind, a residual from an earlier yoga class. I felt serene in Studio 7. The recognizable studio theater multipurpose space – with its black Marley over wood floor, trussed curtains, hanging lights, and racked seating – set the stage for the calm, relaxed, yet deeply focused and deliberative disposition of this alert group. It sounds strange when I write it, but I could smell purpose wafting through the air. Alexander glided around the room. He reminded me of a cat moving languidly, not predatory but always on the lookout. His normal pace is deliberate, each step a measure of the man. His speaking voice is subdued. But, as his dancers must have learned early on, Alexander can spring into action in the space of a heartbeat. In my mind’s eye, I think of him as a dancer’s dancer. With admirable facility, he demonstrates with ease. His assistant Elisabetta stood in silence. She constantly scanned the room with large watchful eyes. The movement vocabulary is recognizably contemporary, employing a range of release, pedestrian, and gestural intentions. It is part technical, conceptual, pure and dramatic movement. I suspect the actions and motifs had been generated by the dancers at least in part. When I arrived, Alexander and Elisabetta were making close study of movement quality, focusing on timing (slow, slow, quick-quick-quick, slow, slow) and a lightly bounded flow effort (contained, not jerky, smooth). It felt feline. It held my attention. In one instance, Alexander and Elisabetta worked for 5 minutes or so with a solo dancer, sorting and sussing out the details. The dancer was seated diagonally on a black chair, legs bent together, knees parallel, feet flat on the floor. Gripping the edge of the chair, he scissored his feet back and forth three or four times, turned, contracted, stood up, sat down. The dancer performed it very fast, rushing through the phrase aggressively without much change in tempo or quality. Elisabetta whispered, “softer,” and Alexander agreed, telling the dancer, “yes, softer and slower.” The dancer did it again only fractionally slower and imperceptibly softer. Alexander, who had been seated in front of the mirrors, transported to the dancer’s side in an instant. “Right,” he peered at the dancer and said gently, “try it softer, less force.” A light seemed to go on in the dancer’s eyes and he tried it again. “Yes, better” Alexander continued, “do one shift of the feet, only one, not many,” he demonstrated, “make it quick and the rest of it slow and soft.” In the span of 30 seconds, this simple and short phrase was transformed into a feeling form with life and breath, a riveting image shaped from featureless clay. Just prior to entering the studio, I had noticed a not insignificant number of people wearing tee-shirts inscribed with the word “Emergence.” A few, maybe three or four, of Alexander’s dancers were wearing them in rehearsal and I couldn’t help but feel the pull of the word. Emergence. (OED) Noun. [1] the process of becoming visible after begin concealed [2] the process of coming into existence or prominence. Origin. mid 17th century (in the sense of ‘unforeseen occurrence’): from medieval Latin emergentia, from Latin emergere ‘bring to light’ (see EMERGE) It occurs to me that much of creative process, whether implicitly or explicitly, uses the premise of emergence as a springboard, as in “emerging choreographers.” Indeed the entire ArtsCross adventure seems to value emergence as a goal in and of itself. Naturally, what one views as a “successful” emergence will depend crucially upon one’s preferred choreographic process, style, approach, and outcome. It is also interesting to consider, in a wildly speculate mode, what emergent forms I found in Studio 7 on Tuesday afternoon. What I witnessed was a multilevel, multistage process of choreographic emergence: a manner through which complex phenomena arose from a collection of relatively simple interactions. From the development of a particular movement signature in short motifs to the construction of phrases, crafted chunks, and sets of entire sequences, Alexander’s brand of emergence might be characterized as a combination of upward emergence and downward causation. It suggests to me a generative bidirectionality or bidirectional causation (or more nuanced mutual complementarity) in creation. In the upward direction, a higher-level phenomenon (for example, his opening scene 1) might stem from a lower system level (for example, an isolated gesture). In the downward direction, the emergence of an “opening scene” feeds back to the isolated gesture itself, amplifying and modifying it, causing lower level changes through a kind of downward cause and effect. And that’s just the movement talking; the levels of systems interactions (human, institutional, cultural, social, aesthetic, ect, ect) in any choreographic creation process takes my breath away. Follow that? Not sure I did. Anyhow, speculation aside, perhaps a more interesting question is, what happens when there’s an absence of emergence? When does emergence morph into emergency? This is not likely a problem in the present case. This team works with an earnestness of purpose and manifest craft that promises to bear fruit. And yet … I wonder what would happen if (and when) emergency rears its dreaded head? So many things can go awry before, during, and after any given theater performance that I’m constantly amazed that anything gets on stage at all. How might the presence of emergency itself produce that particular sort of urgency that – save outright panic – can produce a surprising, even novel, result? Bular sits cross-legged on the ground – still. Surrounding him his dancers move with extreme speed and strength. Bular’s presence is grounding, a still point within a whirl of energy. Bular holds the space, contains the energy around him. I sense that if he were to join the dancers in speed and movement, the energy in the room would become chaotic, clashing, confused, and frantic. Concentration would become tension. Or perhaps, like the door of a birdcage that suddenly opens, within seconds the energy would disperse. Bular provides the still core, the boundary, within which the dancers can bound and rebound. I learn that the dancers have created the movement material – I have yet to hear what the initial tasks or starting points might have been. Today the dancers are working on a floor sequence. Each dancer is concentrating on his/her own phrase, finding individual space in the studio, coming close but not crashing into other dancers. The plan is, after each individual phrase has been created and crafted, to combine the material into duets – without losing the individual complexity of each dancer’s material. (This is also the challenge of Yen Fang’s work today as she begins to bring the individual solo material into group process without losing the separate difference of each solo. And this is a question of practice – how to collaborate to create a community that is a meeting of separate differences, rather than a confluence of sameness. How to create and maintain community with risk, uncertainty and difference, rather than (only) safety, similarity and mutual hugs). Bular’s dancers are superb. Such agility and power, strength and finesse. Staying close to the floor I watch a man swiveling on his hands, spinning, sliding his legs through, folding at hips and knees, bum close to the floor, lifting himself off the ground on his insteps, his pointed feet, crawling, thrusting hips forward, falling back on heels, using his hands to walk, pushing up to head stand, torso sweeping across the ground, giving his legs momentum to fly, flipping his body onto his stomach, arching his back, taking his weight on hands again, shoving his hips backwards, circling his leg in an arc around his body, spinning on pointed feet, squatting, jumping parallel to the ground, catching on hands, rolling backwards, flipping onto his chest, rising on one shoulder.. Such contained strength, such ease to work close to the floor, with extreme speed, fast changes, where nothing is predictable. Power, testosterone and feminine delicacy combined. Flexibility and subtlety, hyperextension and folding, lightness and control, concentration and dedication. It is their responsibility to perfect, with Bular’s feedback and specific likes. He trusts them. They trust him. Occasionally he rises to clarify a move. Mostly, he sits – still — and holds the space. Back to it today, and after some time this morning wondering what it was all about — what it was for, who am I to say such things &c. — I found myself really wondering (a lot) about looking. Most of those wonderings wander too much for any sort of post right now, but they took a few interesting detours through some thoughts about place, rehearsal room floors, feet, air, and finally practice. In his book of the same name, Raymond Williams suggests that Keywords are those which demonstrate the extent to which, even in the same language, a single word can carry several different meanings. Were he alive to attempt a new edition, I suspect that Williams might well include ‘practice’ as it is a widely used, but variously understood word. I suspect, also, that much of what interested Williams about keywords was to do with their being a rather acute example of the vagaries of the English language. Certainly, those other European languages with which i am familiar — French and German — don’t seem to carry quite as much of the multiplicity of these words (although, as I write, the French sens occurs to me as one which does). We are being well served by a group of graduate student translators here, and I hope to ask them in more detail of the extent to which some of these terms translate exactly from English to Mandarin, and if not, what their other cognates or possibilities are. I expect this will have to be outside of the rehearsal room, and it is with something of a sinking feeling, as an Englishman abroad, that I am reminded (again) of just how poor our engagement with other languages is, and how myopic. We need to practice more. Or we would, if I could get round to to thinking about it more specifically… …practice, so the saying goes, makes perfect. Importantly, however, that seems to imply that it, itself, never is. It’s what one does on the way there. It is the way there maybe. ‘Practice’ also implies repeating something, for the sake of getting it right; a process; revisiting an exercise, game or system; an engagement with the latter which is ongoing, rather than a finished version; the distinctions of a personal version of a more general schema of work; a conjoining of the place and undertaking of certain sorts of profession (eg. a doctor’s practice). As I write these down, I realise that I’ve borne witness to most of these today, often simultaneously. Watching Avatara’s rehearsal this evening (a pleasure), as she worked for the better part of 45 minutes on three phrases with the same group of three dancers, she repeatedly demonstrated, or responded ‘something like this’. There was a certain sort of rhythm to the suggestion, an encouragement, and an openness. What was also there was an intriguing sense (unstated) of how they should practice practice. Again and again, over and over, two young women attempted a complicated lift of their male partner. Avatara, weaving in and out, repeatedly showed and said ‘something like this’ without ever quite wholly showing or saying how. As the dancers tried something like it, Avatara saw something else, tried something else, something like this. And this. And this. And so we moved on. To say that she saw something doesn’t seem quite to describe the process however, as she moved continually in, out and around the dancers. She wasn’t just looking at them, imagining something in repose and in response, and Pierre Bourdieu suggested that practice has a ’fuzzy logic’ which is both particular to each situation it arises within, but which is also opaque to their possessors, and which is ‘varying according to the logic of the situation, the almost invariably partial viewpoint which it imposes’ (The Logic of Practice, London: Polity Press, 1990, p.12). Bourdieu’s point is that practice makes sense because it is something like this, a something which makes itself knowable in its own quite particular instance. This is where ‘just seeing’ falls down, because what this something is, is also a feeling, or at least its possibility, that you might somehow realise it in yourself. The above leaves out a lot, admittedly, not least the extent to which performance makers routinely describe their work in proprietary terms of my practice, as if it had arrived de novo and reached (thanks Avatara). Wait a second. Keep waiting. Pause. Pause…Don’t move, Don’t speak, Don’t think. No Questions, No Answers. That’s ‘real’ uncertainty. The ‘Pre’ Space. The dirty, lingering moment prior to a clean form. Stay with it. Float in the air there. Stop, I mean completely stop. Breathe. Close your eyes and engage with the whirls of voices, languages, gestures, breaths within the universe of which you are temporarily inhabiting. What are the intimate secrets of the voices, languages, gestures, breaths? What are the underground layers? What is beyond our tactile and tangible reach? What is NOT being communicated? What is not there for us? What will never be there? What is already gone? What are we trying to avoid? Voids… Where are they and can we find more? More swollen places of nothing and of everything. Stillness, emptiness, the immaterial remnants of all the chaos we encounter daily…. How to harness frustrated fears and keep them nestled within the body to impact us later or never? Value everything and nothing. Stop reflecting. Just stay there. Just be there and nowhere and everywhere. Be moved without moving. No crystals for now. Time passes…keep waiting and wading. Or don’t.
I’m finally coming up through the fug of jet-lag this morning, and having promised myself not to return to old topics, am now, of course, immediately doing so. Something that has struck me over the last day and a bit of watching, thinking and talking, is how often the question of feeling has arisen, either as part of something a choreographer wanted a dancer to do or show (i.e. more of), or of something I wanted to see. There were times, yesterday, watching various groups of dancers, who all seemed to be giving, or investing something in the work, which I’ll call feeling for the moment. I can’t deny my own feeling, that on occasion, something seemed to get in the way. It wasn’t the dance itself exactly, but sometimes i wanted to live — or have the dancers live — with that feeling a little longer, before another flurry of limbs drew my attention elsewhere. Maybe that’s my own bias and background as a theatre person coming through, but I am curious sometimes as to whether there is a tension between an urge or need to move — from A-B, on to the next thing — and a need to find feeling. The debates over this tension are as old as the hills, but watching various performers come to it as individuals or in groups it seems to me to be a discussion still worth; is it? ‘Feeling’ is a useful word to me as I think, as in English, it is a catch-all term, which allows for movement (no pun intended) between affect and exploratory touch. Having heard some of the TNUA and BDA choreographers instructions to their performers translated using this word, I’m curious to know what the Chinese words or terms being used are, and what other cognate ideas they might carry with them. I walk into the studio and Yen Fang is working with three men. Two men are mirroring each other’s movement, in close contact, facing each other but not touching, perceiving each other with all senses. The third man is moving on the ground between them, like a Golam figure seeking attention, twisting and turning, arching and falling. Yen Fang observes closely, talking intimately with them, as they improvise. The women are spread out across the outsides of the space, improvising individually. Yen Fang works with each woman one to one. Each dancer improvises with a particular set of instructions, to embody and embrace Yen Fang’s movement quality. These dancers are fabulous. One woman’s lower back is so expressive, arching and curving from minute to extreme degrees. Her body is fragmented, wrists broken, shoulders tipped, hips distorted, feet turned inwards, dissolving into soft palpitating muscular ripples, moving in multiple spatial pathways, never fixing, always changing, multi fronted, a body fired with intelligent contradictions. She moves towards a certain direction in space but another movement, another direction, has taken over before the first is completed. No action is fully performed before the balance is shifted, no limb is extended to complete a conventionally expected shape, change has already happened. The conventions of formal space are displaced, the dancer works in many dimensions, superbly articulating each micro detail. No mushiness here. The improvisation ends and an intimate dialogue begins between the dancer and Yen Fang, who intermittently, throughout the dialogue, demonstrates with her own body — and she is stunning to watch. (I am aware here that I am talking about ‘dancers’, I do not have the names of the dancers in front of me to equalise the dialogue in written words). Yen Fang is particular in her search for multiplicity. As she observes one dancer improvising, she notices how he moves his torso from side to side, two dimensionally. She works with him to increase the possibility of multi directional movement, twisting, turning, curving, dipping, and tilting. I am reminded here of how we hold our emotions in our bodies – and yes Donald, the body always lies – we all hold parts of our bodies against the fear of letting go to the unknown. So – I watch movement language that fills me with the energy of uncertainty, of not knowing, a potency of possibility. There is no truth here, no final statement. This is not about authenticity. This has nothing to do with seeking truth, real or representation. This is a full-embodied practice of undoing all that. I sense in my body this is about embodying the intelligence of constant change, aliveness in the moment of moving here and now. I am also drawn to the relational practice between Yen Fang and her dancers. She meets them as people, with personalities, with voices; she meets them equally in the space. They are in dialogue; there is an exchange of knowledge. She is not telling them what to do, and they are not waiting to be instructed. Yet both of these are happening. Something is created between them, here is a creative between-ness. Yes I am writing after the event and I can make connections with forms, codes, styles and histories, Forsythe, Jonathan Burrows, European postmodern dance. I can also contemplate how these individual voices will come together as a group. But not when I am in the studio. I am observing process, I am engaged, and I am in the moment. And I want this aliveness to continue. I am wondering about how we might make process as performance – in this context of Artscross. I feel sad that this process must take the shape of product, that this inter-relational, dialogic moment of uncertain knowing must somehow fix itself into a choreographic shape that becomes there and then rather than here and now, where Yen Fang’s presence and dialogue with her dancers is abstracted – to be replaced with a relationship with a fronted, seated, audience. How can this uncertain knowing be maintained through to performance? For here and now, in the studio, is the unique immediacy of performance process. And this is perhaps a place where the dialogue between observer, writer and choreographer might hover. On laboratories, microbes and microdevelopment Yen-Fang, Studio 5, 4–6:30pm, 08.08.2011 “Shall we come back to work,” Yen-Fang asks sweetly but it is not a question. The dancers had been working more or less consistently on solo material for about two hours and were returning from a short break. “When doing your own exploration,” Yen-Fang begins as the dancers sit with her in an intimate circle, “there is something about this space …” Her sweeping gesture, looping up and around the studio, takes the dancers eyes (and mine) swimming up to the rafters into the pools of light cascading down. She continues, “a shared imagination. This particular environment, this same universe, that needs to be acknowledged.” She pauses, perhaps uncertain that she’s made her point. We wait. Her audience is riveted as am I. “Separate investigations,” she nods looking around at the dancers’ faces, “but being in this room is like a big lab.” (Come to think of it, with the white walls and rounded roof, Studio 5 does look a bit like someone bisected a test-tube.) Yen-Fang smiles, “But the same universe. I would like to acknowledge that and invite you to be inspired by what you see or feel here, each other … to jump in no hesitation.” Yen-Fang grins broadly, a beatific countenance. “That was my realization for the past hour,” she murmurs. Everyone is quietly nodding and smiling. It’s hard not to smile when Yen-Fang does. “Okay, back to work.” (Yen-Fang speaks excellent English and Chinese. Fortunately, she has an American dancer in her piece, so one can catch the thoughts expressed in English to him or the larger group, all of whom obviously understand a great deal of English.) In this rehearsal, I glimpsed what seems to be Yen-Fang’s preferred working style at this stage of the creative process. Some work had been set but solos needed to be developed. Prior to the comment about the shared relational space, she observed each individual dancer for up to twenty minutes. She moved around the room to view at different angles, high and low. Then there was discussion, some demonstration, a bit of checking – I did this, you did that – a bit of an explanation or focused consideration or more demonstration, and then a melting away to the periphery to afford the dancer some mental and physical space to continue working. This was repeated all around the room. Yen-Fang assumes a process-oriented, calm and inquisitive demeanor though still retains what one might call a pre-reflective approach. This is generative time, not decision time. Individual moving identities abound (cf. Roche, 2011) and yet Yen-Fang’s keen eye lends a surgeon-like precision to the development of an overall movement signature. Her desire for clarity in motion is juxtaposed by a preference for interplay between direct and indirect spatial intention, a predilection for supple spines and exploration of “back space”: all that juicy room behind one that invites depth but rarely gets its due. It is a surprisingly pleasing aesthetic that Yen-Fang embodies, like a flowing, textured, elegant scarf. She is a remarkably adept mover. Her encounters with each dancer include a series of moments of confusion, experimentation, multiple iterations and sudden understandings. These snapshots, brief moments, made me think of a relatively new approach in psychology that analyzes microdevelopment in human behavior. Microdevelopment is the study of developmental change over short time periods, measured in seconds, minutes, or hours instead of days, months, or years. It is analysis in real time, observing the fine-grained phenomena of a gesture, a nod, a frown. Microdevelopment captures the transitional moment through which one moves from a simple to more complex knowing. And, because the study of creativity is the study of change, any adequate account of a cognitive or creative process must provide credible explanations of the transition from not knowing to maybe knowing to actual knowing. As in life, transitions in creative process function as a kind of connective tissue. Using a microdevelopmental lens, one can see Yen-Fang’s sixty-second, self-described realization as a turning point, a piece of connective tissue holding bone to muscle as the dancers work for authentic movement in relationship to her, others, and the whole ensemble. For me, the lab analogy harkened back to the halcyon days of “movement research” with a contemporary twist. In the 60s-70s, artists like Yvonne Rainer in America (among others) assumed the proverbial white coat and placed the organism under the microscope. Seemingly with the purpose deconstruct, the goal was to know the source, genome if you will, of movement’s biological makeup in order to hypothesize, test, and use it so as to alter it at the genetic level in some way. Something else entirely happened in the 1980s and 90s. Dance experienced a profound shift, unsettling the cool laboratory method and disinterested result. Movement practices, one part artistic and one part political, brought the lab onstage with a power and passion that overwhelmed the rest. In New York and San Francisco, it hit like a massive tsunami. Some called it a mess; others not knowing what to say, simply equivocated, calling it post postmodern; still others called it real-life-get-used-to-it. In America (as I would imagine, elsewhere), the iconoclasts were sometimes treated rather badly, more like microbial infections spreading doubt (rather than creative dis-ease) amongst the staid field of dance, panicking the choreographic population. Happily they did not care much, not enough to stop anyway. Call it what you will, displacing or stimulating, the point was to re-center the aesthetic order of things. No doubt, one can find today the salubrious effects on dance everywhere. Now we’re somewhere quite different: a reactionary time; a middle; a promise? And still the lab remains in some ways more open and available than ever before. Perhaps the lab space itself is waiting, patiently waiting for ’someone’ like Yen-Fang to offer ‘something’ in response to her generation “why”: something about how creative artists today are systems of interacting habitats, influences that need no alteration, just a little food and water and time and attention to reveal themselves.
In the relationship between questions and practice we are not in a linear progression, more of a mobius strip. For me, questions open up the wider field. Key to phenomenological enquiry (description, curiosity, interdependent relational process, embodied here and now experience) is the ability to acknowledge how our immediate interactions are affected by our embodied histories, our innate need to make meaning and to seek interpretation through questioning even as we embrace living in the here and now. Choreographers question on a daily, moment-to-moment basis. Much of the work in the studio is an attempt to resolve, find embodied answers for those ongoing questions. Never finding, or wanting, a single answer, or truth, keeps us, as choreographers/writers/practitioners returning to the studio/page. Living now and questioning living now are partners in a dance of now and then. And there is the Artscross theme of ‘uncertainty’, which colors the open enquiry that has no answers. I am already looking at the work through the pre-determined lens of uncertainty – if that lens is possible. And of course I am opening myself to questions. How do choreographers work with uncertainty in the studio, when they have three weeks to produce a performance? How do choreographers deal with the enormous uncertainty of working with performers they do not know (at least the UK choreographers)? Can they allow themselves to admit to uncertainty in the studio? How do dancers work with the uncertainty of the moment with the choreographer while their bodies carry historical and repeated codes of knowledge? What is my experience of uncertainty that I bring into the studio? Can I stay with, feel and experience uncertainty? How long can I allow myself to embody not knowing? So I set myself a challenge. Yes, phenomenological observation, yes, to enter into the work in the studio to see what arises. And to notice how the predetermined theme of uncertainty is played out in my body and others’ bodies within the studio. Can we catch a moment without fixing it? Perhaps, in a relational dialogic practice… What did I see? Kham’s performers – holding pieces of paper, huddled, absorbed in the act of counting, limbs jerking, quiet concentration, heads down. Yen Fang’s performers — improvising, hip hop fragmented ripples, a sense of something playful, multi directional. Avatara’s group laughs loudly. Her voice, sensual, opens the space: ‘I want strong women of the 21st century – you understand that?’ Yao — four double mattresses in the space. The group is sitting in a circle, talking their dreams. Laughter shared. These moments open time, unfixing, waiting.
Random thoughts on Body Ritual Among the Nacirema: a research note on dance observation and magic in dance. Kham, Studio 5, 7–8pm 08.08.2011 Walk in. Take off shoes. Sit on floor. Open a sheaf of papers. (Something like a notebook.) Appear watchful, studious. Hold papers. Look at papers. Shuffle pages. Bring face close. Closer. Flex feet, extend legs, roll shoulder, look up. Turn. Head around. Look in mirror. Grimace. Scratch scalp. Stand up. Look at papers. Bring face close. Closer. Handle implement. Huddle over page. Make small scrawl. Grimace. (Something like a smile, not quite.) Shuffle feet. Move lips. Kham: [facing dancers, looking at page, speaking softly as if to self] “Good.” [look up, louder to group] “Good!” (pause) [Nod, direct eye contact] “I think again,” [smile] “let’s try it again everybody.” [look down at page, slight pause] “This time, I’ll count more slowly.” 1, 2 1, 2, 3 1, 2, 3 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 1, 2, 3, 4 1, 2, 3 1, 2 1, 2, 3 1, 2 1, 2, 3 1 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 1 1, 2 1, 2, 3 1 1, 2 1, 2 1, 2, 3 1, 2, 3 1 1, 2 1, 2, 3 1, 2, 3 1 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 1, 2 1, 2 In 1956, noted anthropologist, Horace Miner described the Nacirema, a little known tribe living in North America. Published in the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association, American Anthropologist, Miner gives readers a thorough and exciting ethnographic account of the myriad of taboos and ceremonial behaviors that permeate the everyday activities of the members of a magic-ridden society. Focusing on ”attitudes of the body,” he depicts secret rituals that are believed to prevent disease while simultaneously beautifying the body. Through careful analysis and thick description, Miner demonstrates the importance of ceremonial specialists such as the ”holy-mouth-men” and the ”listeners” in directing even the most routine aspects of daily life among the Nacirema. What does all this have to do with Kham’s evening dance rehearsal? I guess you had to be there. But there’s more … >> spoiler alert if you have never read Body Ritual Among the Nacirema, a classic of anthropological literature << … the formal academic way in which Miner writes about the curious practices that this groups performs has the effect of distancing the reader from the fact that the North American group described is actually Americans of the 1950s. (“Nacirema” spelled backward.) At the time, Miner’s piece created an uproar in academic circles because, as some overly sensitive American anthropologists believed, he was essentially criticizing (lampooning, really) their own research and writing practices. They were the Nacirema. Which brings me back to Kham and his studious dancers (and right before that, Chris’ holy-mouth-man appointment, but that’s another story). True, Kham and his assistant and dancers were working on a complex movement and meter problem in a tricky section of the piece. Yes, the dancers were taking, making, and looking at notes. They moved in restricted, patterned ways always with paper in hand, never putting the pages down. I thought, “this is an interesting deconstruction of [insert overwrought conceptual theory here].” Kham held fast to a sheet of paper too. Obviously he was demonstrating the precise way in which — “WHOA, hold on!” I stopped myself short of takeoff on an ill-advised flight of the imagination — I suddenly realized the dancers were simply trying to learn the complicated movement-calculus task that Kham had ingeniously (deviously) given them! Oy. The dancers’ notes were serving an important creative-cognitive purpose: the numerical traces joined together with marked movements were helping to reduce the cognitive load of remembering (at minimum) a) the movements, b) the phrase, c) the counts, d) their individual spacing-place in the phrase and counts, e) the group placing-space in the phrase and counts and f) the arc of the entire movement-phrase-spacing-placing-counting of one section of one part of Kham’s piece. Pure, hot, dance, magic. 5, 6, 7, 8 And the description at the beginning of this posting, you ask? That was me of course, trying to turn my Nacierma self inside out and back around. Now it all makes sense. I think … Oh well, better check with Kham about that. I joined the group of BDA dancers, BDA choreographers, UK choreographers, and others on the voyage to the National Palace Museum, a hot pot dining excursion, and a Taiwanese musical at the National Theater this past Saturday. On that day, as well as this, I realized how much we all can sense truth and imitation of the truth even if we cannot quite always pinpoint or express what these truths or falsities are exactly. For example, at the museum we were brought to a special exhibition of a painting that had been historically broken into 2 parts and was now I don’t know what provoked me to ask whether it was real, my eyes are not trained in traditional Chinese painting; it must have been my intuition prompting me to question this copy of brilliance. Likewise, at the musical, though there was a language barrier, I sensed that the musical lacked a certain depth. I believe many of us left the theatre (early) because we were craving raw passion and more openness from the performers even if it was a musical (sorry!). We couldn’t understand the language, but we could understand the body language, the performance, the presence, and the potential of what wasn’t. Imitation versus Truth. Copying someone versus exposing something honest within. In friday’s rehearsals and in today’s rehearsals, I heard from many choreographers (and heard from many choreographers via the interpreters) a request to their dancers to bear more than just a repetition of what was seen visually and physically direct from the choreographer’s body. Perhaps not just the choreographer’s truths but the dancer’s version of the choreographer’s truth: in fact, an interpretation of what was observed (which still has some level of verity ultimately). I heard requests for responses from the dancers that were not exact replicas (because in this case it would only be that, a fake replica)- but instead, for reactions that encased both the emotional and physical impulses with some level of authenticity from the individual dancer. Whether the movement had been devised inside or outside the studio, it seems most choreographers crave the real thing. None of us can escape or resist the pursuit of authenticity in all its different guises. Sometimes, especially in the context of performance, it’s tempting to imitate or copy something, especially when it is beautiful or aesethetically interesting or attractive to someone, but even in performativity, ain’t nothing like the real thing. Even just a sliver of individual truth in the movement conveys something extremely satisfying for performer, director, and audience member….(in my opinion of course!) Quote of the day: “Stop, Stop….[Pause]….It should be real. Don’t just jump…follow your partner’s energy.” - Clip of the day: Zhang Jianmin
 Taipei from the guest house at the University (TNUA) © Avatâra Ayuso
Temperature: 34°C Humidity: 74% (windy) The phrase of the day: nimen yao cha ma? // would you like some tea? Had you ever had the experience of eating a hot pot? (in mandarin…). Every one seats around the table and, having previously chosen anything they want from a meet/fish/vegie buffet, you just put your choices inside the chilli soup that is inside a hot pot place in the middle of the table. What you have put inside is cooked in about 2 minutes and you just take it back to your plate whenever you want to eat it. By the end pieces of meat, fish, tofu, noodles and many other things that I don’t know what they were, are all being mixed in the soup. It’s seems a simple process to just pick up what you put inside, but most of the times I found myself not finding what I had put inside and taking what the others had put inside. It was very frustrating as I didn’t want to take what they had put into the pot! I felt I was invading What are the implications of all this into the dance studio, more precisely into a rehearsal with 14 dancers from Taiwan, Hong Kong and mainland China. Well, the main one is that I can see they feel very comfortable with the fact that they are a large group; with sharing a space and working together. This sense of community (very rooted in their own culture, from food to politics) is very evident during the rehearsals. Dancers in Europe tend to be more egocentric, in the sense that we want/need/like a constant attention to each of us. We want recognition, and we might feel hurt if that is not given to us during a couple of days. Here (even though I try to do my best to give them personal feedback) I can see they “feel ok” with being on their own. They are obviously very happy when anything is said to them in order to improve certain movement, but I feel they behave more like a team, rather than like individuals within their private space. Eventually this sense of community happens in the European dance troops also, but this is probably just when the dancers have been together for a big while (years of practicing together in the studio). I am just surprised to see that here this feeling of community has happened in such a short time. What I’m trying to work on now, is on pulling out on stage their individuality, to help them to feel free to talk to me and their mates, to express what they think, to even make suggestions when creating movements, to make decisions. |
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