Bricolage House
11/2
It seems to me that dance can become bound in an aesthetic box, or it can blend aesthetic concerns with internal, sense driven exploration. It can be used as a means for the dancer to overcome mind/body dualism and break established codes. Cynthia Bull (known previously as Cynthia Novack ) believes that there are webs of meaning created through the dance; personal and impersonal, objective and subjective, social and natural.[15] Can I make dance that takes cultural and personal individuality into account while simultaneously acknowledging our shared experiences and languages?11/7I keep thinking about John Martin’s idea, and begin to wonder if the idea of a universal emotional language in dance “denies difference” and has contributed to the justification of colonial ideas and appropriation of cultural identities.[16] When I watch modern dance, sometimes I feel as though I am watching someone who speaks a foreign language. Do others feel this when they watch me dance? Western concert-dance come from a place of undeniable privilege; a very particular sector of culture. My friend Amii said that I have to realize that the dance tradition that I am in (the post-modern dance tradition) is a deeply white tradition, an ethnic folk form, and it is informed by ideas that come out of whiteness and privilege. The values of white middle class-ness are entrenched in the ideas of the form. She reminded me that modern and postmodern dance “is not just this thing that the body does, and not everyone is going to be comfortable with it.”[17] We need to find new ways to make dance and dancing relevant to the needs of the community in order to keep it from reverting to pure spectacle or, worse, disappearing.
11/12
I went to a class today that focused group and solo improvisations, and it was such a relief to step outside choreographic demands and approach dance in a more playful and dynamic way. Improvisation teaches me to release my preconceptions and become fully present to each moment. It sharpens my focus and demands that I make and follow through with decisions. I learn to embrace the unknown. In improvisation, the movement is mine and mine alone. This is a mental and physical challenge, as I need to actively and quickly link the languages of my mind and body. The more that I engage in improvisation, the more that I become bored by technical virtuosity. It’s exciting to watch, but often it seems like little more than spectacle. What if virtuosity had nothing to do with how high a leg could go or how many pirouettes a dancer could execute? What if we refined virtuosity in terms of quickness of response to sensory experience and physical adaptability and sensitivity? Could this kind of virtuosity create a model for a different way of being in the world; a way that revitalizes dance and translates to the larger outside world? All my years of dance training never once addressed this possibility
.11/27
Tonight is Dress Rehearsal. When the lights come on, I feel magic on my skin and power in my muscles. Tonight I will stop thinking- and dance.
Dear Starla-
Here is a journal
where you can write all of
those deep thoughts!
Happy Birthday,
xoxo
-Aubrey
10/4
Aubrey gave me this gorgeous journal for my birthday, and I have decided to use this book to record some of my thoughts and reflections on dancing and choreographing.
10/5
Attendance at our performance tonight was very poor. Sometimes I wonder what we can do to make dance easier to connect with. People love dancing at a party, but watching lengthy or cerebral dance seems to bore people. Our audience is often almost entiely made up of other dancers and artists.
10/13
Today I discovered Genevieve Stebbins, the woman responsible for much of the initial study of Kinesthesia. Stebbins was one of the first to explore the link between pantomime and interior psychic landscapes.[1] She organized the body into different zones (energetic, spiritual, emotional, and vital), and created intricate movement sequences which corresponded specific gestures with inner emotional states. Though Stebbins’ work paved the way for the subsequent emergence of American modern dance, her own work was never performed on stage, but only in ladies’ parlors (considered a more appropriate venue for the Victorian middle and upper class women that she worked with). Stebbins’ pantomimes were created using narrative structures, and her combined exploration of narrative and inner life influenced the subsequent idea of kinesthetic empathy.
The word ‘kinesthesia’ made its first appearance in 188o[2] and was used to describe the phenomena by which we can sense our own bodies in space. The French Scholar Chevalier Louis de Jaucourt is credited with being the first to speculate about this idea of kinesthetic response, describing the fear that the audience feels in their bodies when they watch the performance of a tightrope walker.[3] This notion challenged the pervasive assumption that emotional and physical experiences were separate. Jaucourt’s ideas were eventually developed into our current conception of kinesthetic empathy— the idea that we can experience physically that which we are watching. In the dance world, we often take this idea as doctrine, but how and when exactly do we share other’s physical experiences? Why do some movements/dancers affect us more fully and meaningfully than others? Perhaps kinesthetic empathy is more complex than most of us think.
10/21
The Cartesian mind/body split is at the root of many misperceptions about the body, From the early Western conceptualization of it as a container of sloshing fluids[4] to subsequent understandings of the body as a highly mechanized machine, always directed from and superseded by the mind, it sometimes seems an impossible task to uproot our dualistic conception of the body and reimagine it as an exquisitely sensitive sensing and sentient organism. Can we conceive of an intelligence that is rooted not within the mind but within the body itself? Wilhelm Reich, an Austrian psychoanalyst, believed that the body is the resting place of the unconscious, and the cells themselves contained both knowledge and memory; their own intelligence.[5] When I dance, I return my consciousness to my body. When I dance, it is not my mind that leads my body, but my body that informs my mind (or at least my conscious awareness).[6] David Abrams wrote, “ The sensing body is not a programmed machine, but an active and open form, continually improving its relationship to the world.” Dancers and Choreographers are intimately aware of this relationship. Choreography necessitates a conversation between and an integration of the two (three, four, five?) ways of knowing. If I listen, there is another language under my skin.
You have discovered some kind of notebook or diary. You open it up.
10/24
Out of commission with a twisted ankle today, I watched rehearsal. As I was watching I found myself wondering if there really was such a thing as a universal pan-human dance language. John Martin, a dance critic who developed the modern notion of kinesthetic empathy, believed that there was, and that the spectator shared the physical/emotional experiences of the dancers. He called this phenomenon kinesthetic sympathy, inner mimicry, or metakinesis. Martin championed modern dancers like Martha Graham who danced in a "universal" emotional language which, he argued, superseded the narrative. Post-modern dance later challenged these assumptions by embracing movement that was investigative, non-narrative, and free of emotion. This attempt to return to the essence of movement is encapsulated in Yvonne Rainer’s “No” manifesto:
“No to spectacle.
No to virtuosity.
No to transformations and magic and make-believe.
No to the glamour and transcendency of the star image.
No to the heroic.
No to the anti-heroic.
No to trash imagery.
No to involvement of performer or spectator.
No to style.
No to camp.
No to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer.
No to eccentricity.
No to moving or being moved.”
As a dancer, it is easy to be seduced by narrative, aesthetics, and emotion, but can we really use gestures specific to a culture and time to translate human experience and emotion across boundaries? Can dance still be as captivating without emotion and narrative? Can we return to the exploration of pure movement and attention to the senses and still make dynamic performance work? Both Modern and Post-Modern dance seem to have an unfortunate habit of alienating non-dancers and working class people. Are we sentimentally preserving traditions that inhibit the continued vibrant evolution of dance? How can we make dance that does not bore but engages, investigates, and revitalizes its audience?
Sometimes I am deeply moved by modern dance…other times I’m just bored, or inappropriately amused by movements that seem too ridiculous to be taken seriously. I take care not to voice my opinions, but I know I am not alone. I observe audiences when they come to dance performances. Many of them spend the majority of the time on their phones or other electronic devices. While berating the spectators for their inattention might be the most satisfying response to this phenomena (at least to the performers), I think it is indicative of a larger crisis in the concert dance world. Why are people so bored? It seems to me that our cultural anchors have uprooted and changed too quickly for the world of dance to keep pace, or maybe there are too many of us dancers who still want to believe in the idea of the universal language of dance without taking the time to account for cultural and class specificity.
10/22
The relatively recent discovery of mirror neurons sheds light on the concept of movement universality. Apparently these neurons, which light up in the same areas of the brains of the spectators as those of the performers, are far more active when the spectator is watching an action that he/she has previously performed and/or watched.[7] This seems illuminate the lack of translation that seems to plague much of the dance world, and explain why dancers are often able to “feel” the dance that they are observing more than the average spectator.
10/24
I am exhausted; rehearsed all day today and my body is screaming. I was supposed to go out with friends, but could barely muster the energy to heat up a frozen dinner before crashing. Not looking forward to tomorrow.
10/25
I’m working with a new group of dancers, and I’ve been thinking about the concept of choreography…how its hierarchical structure separates it from other dance forms (which tend to be socially based and improvisational). A choreographer has ultimate creative control and can require other’s bodies to fit into the his or her artistic vision, privileging certain kinds of movement and repressing others. Despite my best intentions, when I choreograph I am creating a product that will be measured and classified in terms of style, speed, technique, and performance situation. I am then the “owner” of the choreography. If we are aware of this power dynamic, we must then ask the question, who is it who gets to create concert-style dance? I’m afraid the answer, as it always has been, is probably predominately white, educated males.[8] The politics of privilege are clearly at work here.
If choreographic opportunities are only available to certain sectors of society, then we are missing vital movement languages. We cannot escape the “located, limited, inescapably partial, and always personally invested nature of human ‘story making’” (and corporeality)[9]. The body (and thus choreography) “bears symbolic value and DEVELOPS alongside of other social forces.” Our physical languages are crucial to the maintenance of inequalities in society.[10]
10/26
Rehearsal today with Clyde: We began a reconstruction of Doris Humphrey’s “Water Dance”. I watched some footage of the original, and wonder if re-staging the work with today’s dancers diminishes it somehow. The training of a dancer today encapsulates modern aesthetic values, creating thin, strong, flexible, and balletic dancing bodies. By contrast, the bodies in Humphrey’s work were soft, full, and connected to the earth. Can these modern bodies adequately embody Humphrey’s work without extensive retraining? Dance, and the way that it makes use of the body, has always reflected the values of its time.[11] . Ballet, for example, comes from a culture that equated posture with morality; an upright posture symbolized moral uprightness[12]. The body of Humphrey’s time is not the same as the body of today, nor is our relationship to it. As we create or reconstruct dance, how can we help but bump into the cultural coding of the body?
10/28
Mary Wigman separated what she called absolute dance from stage dance; defining the former by its lack of narrative or emotional representation.[13] I continually struggle to resolve my fascination with and desire for narrative with a more direct focus on movement itself. Anna Halprin said, “I have found through dance, that when people are moving directly all the superficiality just falls away.”[14] Yet Halprin’s work is not entirely without narrative. Is it possible for narrative to act as a container for movement exploration? Does choreography itself inhibit our ability connect with and react to our own sensual experiences…to respond fully in time and space? Can a well-formed improvisational structure incorporate narrative ideas?
[1] Foster, Susan, Choreographing Empathy, pg. 108
[2] Ibid, pg. 103
[3] Foster, Susan, 'Kinesthetic Empathies and the Politics of Compassion', lecture.
[4] Foster, Susan, Choreographing Empathy, pg. 84
[5] Berman, Morris, The Reenchantment of the World, pg. 176-177
[6]Anna Halprin also writes about these different ways of knowing; writing that when the body informs the mind, your physical impulses guide you and the movements become YOUR movements. KQED Spark interview.
[7] Winnerman, Lea. "The Mind's Mirror." Monitor on Psychology.
[8] Jennings, Luke, 'Sexism in Dance: Where are all the Female Choreographers?',The Guardian
[9]Susan Bordo, quoted by Susan Foster in her lecture, Kinesthetic Empathies and the Politics of Compassion.
[10] Thomas, Helen, The Body, Dance, and Cultural Theory, pg. 117
[11] Foster, Susan Leigh, Choreographing Empathy, pg. 102
[12] Foster, Susan Leigh, Choreographing Empathy
[13] Brown, Jean Morrison, The Vision of Modern Dance
[14] Halprin, Anna, KQED Spark interview.
[15] Spain, Kent De. Landscape of the Now: A Topography of Movement Improvisation, pg. 94
[16] Foster, Susan Leigh, Choreographing Empathy, pg.31
[17] Legendre, Amii, Professor of dance at Bard College, personal interview