performing... in my mind

This is a fantastic group from Wales. Their work is generally sit-specific, collaborative and improvisational. In this particular durational performance, I was struck by their ability to navigate the barrier of the forth wall and engage the audience, it was in a word "sublime".
I have a lot to learn from this group.

on or off

i have been on a rest finally, after a non-stop year of travel, work and research. while on my break i am starting to feel the absence of my daily practice of dancing. the practice of letting my thinking (skull based) brain to share a communion with the much deeper body based brain.
i have got to get into a groove for myself soon.
below is a posting from another conversation with a couple of friends whom i shared a two month-long daily practice with.
as i currently find myself in a physical limbo, swilling around in my mind wondering how to return to the reality of my body, i thought this entry was an appropriate reflection.



on or off.

i am here in a far off location trying to remember my experience of the daily practice. obviously not the formal framework of it, that has been clearly articulated by j and l. but the rest of it - the physiological dimension. the memory dimension. the body fleshy dimension. the experience of coming clean with the truth of a particular moment or three minutes of moments strung together, our theater and performance.

were we on, within the experience of expressing a period of our lives. at times we succeeded and were real with one another and at times fell short and hid, perhaps just a little behind clever moves. going to the silent place of dance - as known territory, veiled in exploration. and many more times, beautifully articulating the raw state of ‘egg on face’. dont know what to do - AND - am not going to try to pretend i do - BUT - staying with you. the vulnerability can be palpable and then in an instant, complete recognition of the obsurdity of all of it. hysterical laughter. i loved those moments. not knowing and communicating not knowing. but i observed, and experienced, that only by doing that do you really have any control. and then something occures that tickles the soul dimension.

because really, its all over in an instant anyway. like a great photojournalist who can capture that one passing instant on film, we as performers also do the same - we read our environment - and monitor our sensations - and report on our experience, in an instant - many instants in a row until times up. thats it.

having spent years perfecting my acting skills of illustrating being in control (often in white tights or sleek ass shorts as a classical/contemporary dancer), i see i am still a student at living within a certain dimension of my work.

the performer practices saying - I DONT HAVE A CLUE (when they really dont have a clue). but in that admission, is everything. that admission is truth, in most cases, but it is precisely that admission that is culturally denied, especially in presentational dance.

this two month long period of daily practice with j and l, was a form of ‘articulating’ the ‘i dont know’ - and celebrating that.

its weird even to say it that way - “articulating not knowing”.

vaudeville & stepping

I can’t really explain it any better: all I want is to make dances that have no steps.

I think that there is something fundamental in this inquiry. The presence of steps makes me aware of a creator of steps. I am looking at the origin of the material as though the dance maker where upstage under a spot light – in my mind, always keeping me at arms length from the experience of the event.

I was having dinner last night with a friend, a very accomplished dance maker – one of his reflections this year were that he wanted to feel greater connections with the performers within a dance – a human desire to be connected. This is an internationally recognized choreographer, and he, above all, wanted to FEEL a closeness with the performers, rather than the craft of step-smithing.

My experience as a performer currently is that I must acknowledge the audience when I perform. In some way I must do this. I don’t have to literally look at them and wink, but, I energetically must acknowledge that “here we are together in this room”. You are looking at me and I am up here doing things to try to be appreciated by you. But underlying that is an essential requirement to acknowledge one another. That is really what an audience member wants. This is what I imagine what the pre-cinema vaudeville culture delivered – performers connecting in a very raw direct way with people.

[This line of thought in performance, always begins to get close to contradicting everything I believe in - a desire to deliver authenticity in within the performative environment, but within the right context, I at least imagine, that those early vaudeville shows were hysterical and at moments heart breaking.]

I wonder in those early performances, probably in basic spaces placed in neighborhoods for workers, if there was a focus on an investigation of step making, or on making people laugh, or scream or cry or to simply take a trip within the energy of the performers.

SFCD - choice/authorship/illusion

Artistically and philosophically I am uninteresting in being the sole decider of the choreography. I am interested in facilitating to a dancer a developed skill set for which they can learn how to make their own choices for their dancing, to give them the experience of what it feels like to have to take responsibility for their dance, their choices, their actions.

[I also frame this passage with the assumption that the dancer/dance maker is already clear that with this sense of responsibility for make their own choices, that they respond to the responsibility of their audience. I believe there is an underlying assumption, with few exceptions, that a performer is working toward connecting to their audience, to actually have an intention to transmit some kind of information – not to fall prey to egotistical self-indulgence. Part of this exploration is to articulate this space where within the context of communication, in some way, freedom meets responsibility.]

I am not currently interested in giving value to the content of the actions (what one does), but rather, that the action of the choice itself becomes the subject matter. The timing of choices, the placement of choices, the engagement of formal or anarchistic composition, the continuity of the development or subversion an ongoing set of ideas – how the choices moves the ideas along, like in a conversation. This is what I am interested in, in terms of choreographic material. Given that of course, the content of a choice affects an enormous amount onto the dance, but the content is often what is only seen - its context of placement and relating-ness is often deprived of investigation.
We watch the choice making AS choreography. Impulse, judgment, decision and then action - is choreography. And implies much more.

I want to expose my students to the premise that as a dancer (one who creates through the body), they have autonomy and choice. I want this also to be interesting and fun to them. Sometimes this is an issue that comes up late in the dancers development, since when a dancer is younger there is still an emphasis on wanting to be told what to do and to receive affirmation from the one who gave the orders.
This is a huge step from conventional models of dance expression, where the dancers are the ‘fulfiller’ of the choreographic desires of an external source. Choreography by its literal definition is ‘body writing’. The act of dancing suggests this SENSE of self-authorship.
My interest choreographically, is to pass the baton of authorship onto the dancers themselves. It is only when a dancer is given this space to make choices within the dance, that the dance can transcend from the space of the illusion of something real, to something that is real. All choreographers worth a grain of salt are after the same thing – a dance that feels as through its actually happening for the first time, right there in front of you, a human experience occurring.

Why not actually train that way?

My opinion is that the experience of a living dance cannot be duplicated or controlled no matter how skilled at illusion the performer or director may be.

Thinking Motion - teaching notes from San Francisco Conservatory of Dance, summer program 2008

Energy is real.
Energy is language.

“Asking Motion” “Thinking Motion”

How can we re-illuminate the real –ness of energy in dance? How can we recognize physical intention or physical actions with the same level of clarity that we recognize choreographic steps?

(In Dance)
What we see is not so much the physical steps and sequences of steps, as building blocks that exist separate from the body – instead we see the human being as their true selves, in ‘thought motion’. The bodies movements can be seen as residual effects of choice making and intention. The body becomes a medium to the content – similar to how linseed oil carries the raw pigment for a painting.
Rather than objectify dance as something that is outside the human being which must be mastered, we instead witness the state of a human being living within the moments of the dance context. In this sense, dance becomes the record of the human experience. We become the vessels, to and for, our own expression.

(For Performance)
We practice physical and mental skills that enable us to negotiate the variables of an ever shifting circumstance. We work with an expressed intention of articulating our experience that is only relative to our capacity to perceive through our senses. We work with developing our awareness of inner perception, such as being conscious of our ever shifting impulses to move, and practice exercising free will to either respond or not respond to these impulses. We are also working with perceiving the immediate external environment that we choose to perform within, as well as any conceptual -criteria that we deem to work with.
The performer is applying all that is perceived from their life and history, their desires, prejudices, fears, tastes, intentions, aesthetics and abilities - smacked up against the moment of the now. Also, taking into account the responsibility of the performer toward their audience. With a greater range of freedom of expression, comes greater responsibility to be sensitive to the use of that freedom. Remembering always about being a host to your guests – assuming that there is a conscious desire to communicate and not abuse.
If a performer is interested in connecting to their audience, the audience needs to know what the parameters are and what is expected of them. This is basic psychology, if you want somebody to trust you and follow you, you have to make the feel comfortable. This has nothing to do with content, but everything to do with communication. Otherwise you end up with a passive audience feeling bewildered, objectifying the performers in a state of confusion and distrust. Which unfortunately is an all to common experience in dance today.

How do we continue to further this language of communication within the performance environment – human to human in real time and in real space.

unintended performers, toronto international airport, may 24, 2008

there is something fun about watching people in the world
and deciding to observe them in the framework of the performance
context. their personal, subtle movements and actions executed in the
framework of their environments. intricate timings occure, unintended, and
no less beautiful than any crafted piece of choreography. they are
the unintended performers. and i realize we are all unintended performers
for somebody else at some point. as professional performers we work
towards showing our work, being conscious about our delivery - striving for
an authenticity. therefore if we are lucky, our performance
presence is not a lot different than being an unexpected performer
beyond the confines of the theatrical environment.

watching gravity

watching paint dry on a canvas is literally as satisfying as watching
the most intimate transitioning in a dance. i wait for the moments
when the pull of gravity forces the collecting edge of wet paint to
break and small valleys open up and the paint drips down. it is beautiful
to observe where the drip stops. i can only partially estimate how that
will work out based on degrees of solubility and viscosity. in this form, the
dance is making the mark by pushing the paint across the surface, and
then stepping back and watching. i control where the paint starts, but i
cant contol where the paint stops. THAT is what i love to engage in.
i want to have a conversation with the act, not dominance over it.
this is how i see dance making. i make the dance and the dance makes
itself. i assert my intention in the form of a phrase and then i step aside
and see where this phrase wants to settle into.
i practice being the performer and the audience to this process.

mid painting process

painting again after ten years. been drawing consistently but
painting is a new addition again. curious to see how much more
will come this time around. i have done thirty two paintings so
far this year. all created in ann arbor michigan.

Am I my body?

I.
I am my body. What do I become
with every new situation?
I am everything else
other than my body, I am your body too
and the space our bodies share.
The body is relational. I am my body in
reference to what my body
is not. My body is occuring in that moment -
under those circumstances.
I am not my body that I was a moment ago.
I am my body also.

II.
Methinks that in looking at things
spiritual, we are like oysters observing the
sun through the water, and thinking
that thick water the thinnest of air.
Methinks my body is but the lees of my
better being. In fact take my body who
will, take it I say, it is not me.

Herman Melville - Mody Dick

on improvising

Improvisation bridges the space between my physical sense of
self and a physical sense of what my self is not. It is the manafest
dialogue between my edges and the worlds edges, including all people,
living things and objects within the world.
It is a language of my skin. It is a form that emerges
before i know. It is a form of me.

Pollack the movement.
The record of the movement.
The drip is the residue of the action.
The action is the conversation.

Isn’t that what we are always requiring in our
work as dancers, the attempt to crystallize a
moment of the passing stream of living. A
dancer is in the profession of living ones life in front of
people and among people. To me that is the ultimate
function of dance, to help others feel themselves by
means of acting as a surrogate channel for experience.
Our job is to place ourselves within an accessible proximity
to people and attempt to deliver a honest and direct report
of the state of ourselves, in order that we may be able to
allow others to access some range of this state within
themselves.

My mother said the other night that a dancer is a form of
being an exhibitionist, but I think what she really means
is that as a dancer I put myself - as a person in process,
one dance at a time – in front of others to communicate
through the bodies histories and languages. The language
of the body is a shared fluency, if allowed.

Given the fact that we can never not be a body is an incredible
thing. We are body, we are the drips of a Pollack painting every
moment of our lives.

Ucross Foundation 3/07

During March of 2007 my company The Foundry was in residence
at the Ucross Foundation in rural Wyoming creating Imprint.
During this period me, as well as the rest of our collaborators
took the time each day to embark on a daily practice that helped
to inspire and focus and primarily to engage with the extraordinary
landscape and history of the region. In my case, I walked in the
mornings. At a certain point within the walk I would stop, take in
the immediate snapshot of where I was and jot down quick
observations based on the near/distant. From that location I
would then count the steps back to a certain end point, often
not based on returning home, but a specified end point. Something
about measuring a distance of space within the total space of a
journey resonates with me. Spaces within spaces - distances within
distance. Measurable performances within a daily activity. Activity
as performing action, logging the action as performing memory.
This is one of my daily logs of such a walk.

Ucross Foundation, Ucross Wyoming – day 3
3/8/07

7:30am walk

up dirt road into hills across the road.

Step count on return – last portion of walk only:
547 steps – from last portion of dirt road leading to highway
to Ucross population sign posted on highway.

Observations:
*Big puddle – thin ice
*old barn new roof
*barb wire / aged wood
*frozen animal tracks
*air conditioner system mounted on bunker block

keith Jarret on Improvising

Here are a some informative quotes on the process
and sensibility of Improvising by one of the musical masters of
the form. Listening and reading the work of Jarret has inpired and
reaffirmed my own experiences about what it can mean to give
over to an unknown space, in my case through dance, into creation.


Inside out: Thoughts on free playing
by Keith Jarrett
"It really depends on whether a player ‘conceives of
nothing’ as the ‘lack of something’, or pregnant with
‘everything’. Then, further, it depends on what
‘everything’ means to that player. If it means something
limiting, if it scares him his ability as a free player will be
stunted also. We all have a structure to our bodies.
The only limit, it would seem to me, is what the body
cannot do."

"There were at least 3 people involved at a solo concert
(which was always improvised from scratch): the improviser,
the spontaneous composer, and the listener at the keyboard.
The improviser is the easiest to explain (though none in their
right mind would try to). He sits there confident in his ability
to find some musical way from a - b (although he has no idea
what b is). The spontaneous composer is a little harder to
explain, though his position is slightly above the improviser.
He ‘sends down’ material (sorry, it’s the only way I know to
say it) at the spur of the moment whenever the improviser calls
for it. He might have to create out of thin air. His job is harder
because he has to supply substantialcontent on the spur of the
moment, in case the improviser gets stuck or lost or just plain
looses his connection to ‘the zone’. The composer eggs on the
improviser (and visa versa), while the man at the key board -
monitoring the proceedings and trying not to judge too quickly
or intervene, even when he disapproves - attempts to pay attention
to it all, simultaneously (all of this is simultaneous) checking his
vital functions for any abnormalities, making sure he has no finger
or body cramps and than he has drawn a breath recently, etc."

Scattered Words
by Keith Jarrett
"All of these pieces are born of a desire to praise and contemplate
rather than a desire to “make” or “show” or “demonstrate” something
unique. they are, in a certain way, prayers that beauty will be made
acceptable despite fashions, intellect, analysis, progress, technology,
distraction, “burning issues” of the day, the un-hipness of belief or
faith, concert programming, and the unnatural “scene’” of “art”, the
market, lifestyles etc., etc... I am not attempting to be a composer,
I am trying to reveal a state I think is missing in today's world (accept,
perhaps in private): a certain state of surrender."

Casina Setartta, Puglia Italy July 2007 - Improvising for Performance Research Project lead by Kirstie Simson and a group of international dancers

Brussels Performance - Andrew Morrish, Kirstie Simson, Christian Burns

Dance Is Transportation

The body of dance is the body of

Points of body travel through trajectories

The travel mode of movement

Trans – portation

The function of transportation is to achieve the goal of moving from one location to another. The notion that the object of this action is only of a singular body is part of the potential of...

The journey of the hand is the body of a traveler

The body of the head is the body of a traveler

The memory of the knee is the body of a traveler

Each point of the body (down to the smallest measurable component) has a potential for trajectory and transportation. The idea of these individual points of the body, as being individual intelligences, that gather, experience and notate experience, is for me the most interesting and curious aspect of my dance experience these days.

How could you manage to illustrate these individual trajectories, so that the unison of their multiple directive points are seen as a weave of one fabric. Where are they going and what are they serving. Are they aware of what their work is?

Head moves around while elbow dips in counter circles and hips duck and rise. These are obvious and familiar body associations, but how about if it was more deeply drawn from, such as the specific nerve ending at the rim of the fourth vertebrae, and the inner marrow cavity of the upper left femur and the specific tonsil of the right bottom edge of the throat. A single strand of hair or a point under at toenail or line along the right heart ventricle. It can go on and on, every single molecular point of matter has its own sense of transportation, within the confine of a larger body. Not unlike the body of our planet and the minuscule movements of tiny organisms (Us for example) in combination with other organisms and flora/fauna/geology.

five choreographies / one color

moving with drawings

drawings for theater

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.

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.