Sunday, October 22, 2006

Theater and Seeing

I have been in residence for the past three weeks with my collaborative The Foundry making a new work titled Imprint. The Santa Fe Art Institute has been our host for this residency and we have basically spent most of our waking hours in the studio working and creating raw material for the future next residency at Ucross Foundation in Spring 2007. The piece should be completed and premiered in May 2007 at ODC Theater in San Francisco.

So, the other day one of my dancers and I went to the Site Santa Fe, one of the main contemporary art centers in the area. Their 6th biannual is showing and is titled ‘Still Points of the Turning World’. So, during the walk through I had many different thoughts and ideas about what I was looking at, what I was feeling, what I liked and didn’t like, what made sense and what didn’t ect… I have been raised by art lover parents and have spent my life within the arts; so being in a place like Site Santa Fe is very familiar and fun. Being that my dad is an artist, it has been part of my earliest memories to hold and smell and engage with art supplies – clay, oil paint and mixing mediums, inks. I loved playing with the mechanically designed drafting tools as little space ships.

What struck me during this Site Santa Fe trip was a feeling I have had from time to time. Its one of those epiphanies that usually hits you just when you need it – when you get a bit tired or lazy to remember how to engage work or the world. It’s the reminder of how to see.

“How can I look at what is actually in front of me?”

The moment during this particular visit hit me while I was in a room with the sculptures of a German artist named Wolfgang Laib. The room had three objects in it. They were staircase forms, life size scale, two positioned parallel to each other with stairs leading up to the high empty wall, and another in the center of the room. That one was diagonally positioned and was a triangular form, stairs leading up to lead down – or visa-versa depending what side you started up. The moment I entered the room I had one of those ‘what is this?’ feelings. They didn’t particularly interest me on the initial impact of walking in, and they didn’t give me the feeling of ‘satisfaction’ I think I was wanting, I was actually about two seconds away from walking through the room. But this is when I had the old epiphany –
‘What Is in front of me?’
‘What Am I looking at’?
‘How do I just look at what is in front of me, and how can I See what I look at?”
This thought is certainly not a profound one in the least (I am sure if I went to college or art school I would have learned this in a formal context) – but given the reality that I feel I have been trained from birth to look for what I want and avoid what I don’t want – ‘to consume’, it is in my opinion worth a mention.
So, “how can we see what is in front of us, without looking for what we want to see in front of us?”
I clearly, at the moment of walking into the room, wanted to encounter a different kind of experience or object or idea. The reality that what I wanted to see ‘something’ specific – had more to do with me than it did the artwork. This notion is potent to me in the context of being a dance maker. As a choreographer and director, I am constantly dealing with the age old issues of how to deliver the performance. In a big theater, in a small theater, a gallery, in a lobby, in a studio, onsite outside of the theater, observing the forth wall or not, observing the audience or not, being real, being artificial, being what ever you think the piece needs – always thinking endlessly about how you share the work with the viewer.
Now, I am very aware about the difference between the natures of live performance as opposed to visual art. There is a very different set of criteria that determines how you engage the work. On the most basic layer, the visual art engagement can happen on the viewer’s time. In the live performance realm the engagement happens on the productions time. These are definitive differences. Not better or worse certainly, but clearly different. There is also the social historical context that separates the engagement process of visual art from the engagement of performative art, which is ‘the theater’. Even the word Theater, sends ripples of mixed messages and loaded meanings. That we have socially appropriated the word ‘theater’ to fit the various layers of our lives explains a lot – theater of romance and love, the operating room theater, theater of war, the theatricality religious pageantry ect… The notion of Theater is at the core of our lives and society – and that ‘theater’ is the space were we engage with some of our most beautiful and horrifying possibilities.
So, within that room of the staircase sculptures I started to realize I wanted something out of it, something I wasn’t getting. And then I realized that I wasn’t in a room for me to ‘get something’ to consume, but to share. Like a code, the form of the object speaks its own language. And in that moment I remembered that it all had very little to do with what ‘I want’. And had very much to do with having a conversation. In that moment I felt the point was obvious. We have to keep trying to engage one another, to enrich one another and help to develop one another.
“How do we engage one another?”
“How can we meet in this space of ideas, and talk in the way that distance and time allows us?”
I suddenly got on with the work of trying to decipher the objects offered by the artist and found I had to look carefully. I noticed for example, that the steps although meticulously constructed had rises of different heights. They were finished with finely painted gilding and in their dark pallet had numerous tones emerging in and out of one another. They were symbols of basic domestic functionality, to transport us up and down in our dwellings but these went nowhere. Just up to a blank wall or back down where you started, getting you nowhere. Was it referring the process of traveling and not the destination, or a comment that we are going nowhere? Or was it exploring the beauty of the most invisible objects that we tread on without thought? Suddenly just as objects they started to look beautiful to me. The more I looked at them and engaged them as they were the more I could see. And the more I could see the more I felt close to them and enjoyed their company their presence. Its an old and almost boring question to ask, “What is the artist saying?” and to hear the response “it doesn’t matter what the artist is saying, let the art speak for itself”. But actually, its true. If you let the work speak for itself, you will have to rely on your own abilities to find a way into the conversation. (This shouldn’t suggest that all art is good, and is actually saying anything at all.) But that space where I engaged the staircase sculptures is the space of the theater where our minds and senses meet.
I think, the big problem with the way people sometimes become alienated by art is more of a societal problem. We aren’t generally encouraged to think abstractly in our society. And yet the great irony is that the most common aspects of our (Americans) lives are actually based on the abstract – Love, God, Death, and Life. Its all abstract, and we are all actually very well versed in the languages of the codes of the unquantifiable, which is the same space where art and performance lives. This is the conversation of the human condition. The theater space of our lives. That’s all really. My life offers something to the table for others to engage in and another person offers what they can. Whether its chatting to the waitress at the diner, or watching the feet angles of the back row of swans of the third act of Swan Lake, or waiting in line at the grocery or feeling the body of contactor roll over my back or figuring out what the stairs are doing leading up to a blank wall or sitting quietly feeling the weather touch my face - its all the same. So for me it comes down to the realization that if I enter into an engagement with an art or performance piece or even the engagement of anybody in my daily routines – if I enter into that engagement with a predetermined criteria of what I want out of it in the end, I will never be able to get anything out of it. I have to work hard at fighting this instinct, as it is this culture that has trained me to do so - consume what I want when I want it, rather than to experience what is right in front of me from a perspective of where I actually am.

Thursday, October 05, 2006

A view out from within motion







I have been interested in trying to understanding how to illustrate the perspective of a view from within movement looking out. How can we see what movement sees? Can we catch a glimpse of the birds eye view from within movement and dance?
This study tries to capture a moment of that sense.
It is often the case that movement within the context of 'The Dance World', is that it is an object that is "over there". You look at the person moving. Its out of your own body. But in reality we as receivers of dance, are also in a constant state of movement. Our eyes move in our head, we shift, we settle, we shift again... we look away, we look back, we are in a state of response/involvement. Dance as an experience has a much more dynamic and fluid engagement. We, as views are as much the movers as the dancers are. It is this relationship that fascinates and bewilders me. How can we start to understand dance as an aspect of perspective, a perspective that illustrates our own participation, rather than simply an object "to look at".
As the camera fixes on the man in the frame it is the person holding the camera that moves away. A brief example of looking out from within a moment of transition or movement. Also, in my opinion, a brief example of the simple beauty of movement. It is always being tracked from outside our bodies as much as it is being recorded from within.
Perhaps dance has something to do with the observance of perspective and participation, rather than a state of passive objectification.