Death. Dance. Doing. New work under way.

New creation has begun. Still finding the title. Its about the small stuff, like life and death.

When Performance Shatters Me Originally published in Stance on Dance, February 23, 2015 Please visit Stance on Dance for original posting and many other great essays about dance.

When Performance Shatters Me

Originally published in Stance on Dance, February 23, 2015

Please visit Stance on Dance for original posting and many other great essays about dance. 

BY CHRISTIAN BURNS

Standing in a lightless arena-sized room (the blackness representing everything I don’t know) holding a flashlight that illuminates a cone of modest visibility (representing my current world view), I wander about. Without warning – KABOOM!!!#&*@!! – a performance shatters me – my flashlight is suddenly bigger – and a tiny bit of that black void is pushed back revealing new details and vantage points. This is how those rare moments feel when a performance shakes me from the familiarity of everything I thought I understood, gifting me with a new set of eyes, a rejuvenated heart and a humbled sense perspective.

Change that instant should be accompanied with a warning label: “Symptoms may include nausea, lightheadedness, headaches, stomach cramps, sleeplessness, vomiting, diarrhea and dry mouth.” Sometimes I’ve felt immediate giddiness, once I wept silently, and on occasion I felt the disorienting combination of having been punched in the stomach while cuddling in a post-coital haze of joy, all at once. That deep-seeded relief of having seen the thing I hadn’t realized existed but intuitively longed for; it’s a rare and precious occurrence.

Here are four important experiences that shattered me:

1)            1995 – The first time I saw Sankai Juku (or any butoh) perform In a Space of Perpetual Motion. Within the production was a section titled Between the Shores, performed by director Ushio Amagatsu, who danced a solo that made a single pass from stage right to stage left, and took him about 15 minutes to complete. At some point during this dance I realized I had been crying. Every shred of understanding I had about time was thrown on its head.

2)            1997 – William Forsythe and the Frankfurt Ballet. After six months of training, researching and playing with Forsythe and his company, I’ve never been the same since. He was my first real artistic hero. He verified that I could improvise and utilize ballet, that the two forms are not so much opposites as they are complementary strategies for the singular pursuit of conveying poetic meaning through the body and movement.

3)            1999 – Kirstie Simson. The first time I saw her perform was in duet with Chris Aiken in Minneapolis. I had never in my life seen the possibilities for performance, risk, freedom, power, communication and wonderment I saw through her that night. It was as though I witnessed a new form of human species – it was electrifying, terrifying, exhilarating and evoked a humility that rendered movement as a new language.

4)            2005 – Remy Charlip. Watching him perform at a fundraiser in his honor, I witnessed evidence that dance can be masterful throughout a long life. I was watching a calligraphy master render sixty years of practice in each stroke and shift of weight. This became a model for me to visualize the goal of achieving a full life in dance. Equipped with this newfound inspiration, I knew I was going to be in this for the long haul – not for success, but for the contribution to the form itself. I can’t wait to be that 78-year-old some kid sees and then relays, “I saw the craziest performance last night with this really old man who was totally…”

Three layers

Three layers from Sonorous Figures

(poverty, vibrations and the clown)

1) Poverty (his conditions)

2) Vibrations (his heart)

3) Clown (his cover)

steps & urinals

From 2008

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

Their presence makes me aware of a creator.  I don't want to be thinking about who made it - starring at a choreographer on stage under the spot-light flapping their arms hollering 'look at me! no me! look at me!! aren't i clever?!?"  I don't want to see choreography.

I was having dinner last night with an internationally recognized choreographer who above all else wanted to FEEL closeness with the performers, rather than thinking about the craft of step-smithing.

Now, 2014

For some reason I think of Duchamp's Fountain, 1917. 

"Whether Mr Mutt made the fountain with his own hands or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object." The Blind Man, Vol. 2, 1917, p. 5

Duchamp

Solo Performance #73 Joe Goode Annex SF, CA CONCEPT SERIES

Dance as a practical philosophically.  

Actively asking: Who am I? What am I? Am I my body? Am I in my body? Where am I within my body? Where is this dance coming from? What am I following? 

Memory, Culture, Taste, Aesthetics, Ambition, Discrimination, Hope, Aspiration, Desire... Desire from what? Desire for what? Is this for you? Is this for me? Is this about us? Is this really happening together? Does any of it matter? What matters? 

I want to be with you. 

I want to give it all away for free. 

I want to see how far we can go.

I want you to join me at the marrow of the moment expression occurs. That is why I dance, with you, we hold each other's end of the tin-can-on-a-string, a tether for us, with the muse.

Preparations and Considerations for Performance: The Check-list

Intention Channel:

Reflections on why I am dancing

What I want out of it

Who it is for

Its reason to be

Body Channel:

Extended axis

Tipping axis

Keeping weight in play

Being formed by the music

Forming the music

Motion follow-through and re-direction

Staying in the moment in the real-time process of re-forming

Temporal Channel:

Isolating the event of change

Moment of moving into motion

Moment of moving into stillness

Keeping time in play and changing

Rhythmic re-organizing

Thought Channel:

Access to choreographic signifiers

Access to musical signifiers

Access to visual art signifiers

Access to current topics/interests/issues

Composing Channel:

Facing in play

Direction of focus/gaze to audience or not 

Radial space in play

Proximal space in play

Spherical space in play

Linear space in play

Being formed by the space

Actively conjuring the space

Repetition and Patterning

Tendu

Part III from Notes on Solo Improvisation

*More Performance Considerations

Working with a sense of play. Acting with a directness of intention.

Two scenarios come to mind: 1. A documentary film whose subject is itself asking what it is as it’s being made – discovery and presentation occurring in the same moment. 2. A skydiver jumps out of a plane, then must construct their own parachute with the materials at hand – a ‘no going back’ commitment to finding a solution and a safe landing.

The tensions arising from contradictory desires between the dancer and the dance all mix up in the soup of Past – Future – Then – Now – What Might be – What Hopefully Will Be – What Was – What Will – What Is – Is Now – Is Now...

Creation is unruly and wants what it wants. An impulse a choice a decision doesn’t know what it is until its emerged. This is the improviser’s psychological challenge; over riding the ‘need to know an outcome’ before we commit to the action, when in fact there never is a ‘right choice outcome’, a choice that works is an action that’s committed to. The completeness of ones decisions, absent of any hesitation or doubt defines the decisions effectiveness. The doing of the thing trumps the thing itself.

Basic performance ingredients: a human doing / a human noticing / a location they share / a beginning and an end.

Part II from Notes on Solo Improvisation

*Actions & Imprints

Given enough time, I inevitably return to the subject matter of Abstract Expressionism and its inherent connection to body, movement, improvisation and motion’s elusive ability to be documented. Action painting (Abstract Expressionism) becomes a function for choreographic thought. Specifically, with regards to Time, the means through which we perceive our actions in the present and the ways we can revisit those moments of action in the past through documentation. Jackson Pollock in particular opened up a new way of seeing the body in motion, a preserved performance of unconscious decision-making, gestural movement and rhythm. Dance is ephemeral. It asks of us to remain in-the-moment with it – that’s the true gift of live performance - but how we document choreographic information after the fact is elusive. Video and written notation are key tools for remembering dance, but rarely does the feeling of dance and its direct force of physicality and sensual play translate through video documentation or Labanotation. Painting does this much better.

My mind wanders to images of fossilized footprints, a hand print left on a cave wall, the foundation of an ancient dwelling peering up through soil, human artifacts whose physical materials cover the spectrum from stone to wood to the new ephemera of digital media.

The painters accumulated brush strokes, dabs, jabs, pouring, scraping, slapping, piling, cutting, and smearing of paint on a surface, becomes a type of imprint or cast that acts as the document of that persons thoughts and body for that period of time, much the way fossil records do. The painting captures; position and location to the surface, anatomic regions of gestural movement and timing, the type and size of tool used to transfer the paint onto its surface, whether they were left or right handed, emotion, pressure, friction and weight applied the surface, or pulled away from it, how much time occurred between marks, the change of color or medium, questions thoughts and interests all suspended at the surface in fields of hardened liquid pigment. A Body gesture’s entire arch of motion is captured from initiation to follow-through (a brush loaded with new paint leaves a more prominent mark and then thins out as is it leaving more of its content on the surface). We can see when concentration is sharp or wanes, we can see the shape of thoughts as they emerge and fade in the pendulum between conscious and unconscious decisions. As visible as physical gesture, we can see where the beginning of one idea emerges and how it resolves naturally or is intersected and re-directed in mid-gesture by a new counterpointed trajectory. The painting holds a history of choices and is the record of its own creation, a tactile documentation - ‘liquid thought’ as James Elkin mentions in his book What Painting Is.

Dance is ‘motion thought.’

This is the first of several postings reporting from within my performance practice. 

What: 8x8x8 curated by Randee Paufve

Where: The Uptown, Oakland, CA

When: January 21, 2014 8:30pm

What I created:

Christian Burns - Solo Improvisation

Duration – 7 min.

Music/Sound – Keith Jarrett (one track from recording Carnegie Hall)

Variables – No props, non-costume (tee shirt & pants, bare feet), wood floor inside of a rock music venue

Introduction/thematic initiation: I shared a story about how my father introduced me to abstract art, in particular a Robert Motherwell painting which I saw many times in my hometown local Art Museum at Smith College. At the age of nine, on one occassion he taught me how to look at a work closely and with as many views of detail possible, and simply describe what I noticed – this cleared up the 'what does it mean' question that can stump people when feeling intimidated by abstraction. Observe carefully, be open to noticing physical or metaphoric connections and describe back - there the meaning will be.  I dedicated the evenings piece to my dad.

*My program statement:

my painting is direct. i usually paint on the floor. i feel more at home, more at ease in a big area. having the canvas on the floor i feel nearer more a part of the painting. this way i can walk around it work from all four sides and be in the painting. a method of painting is a natural growth out of a need. i want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them. when i am painting i have a general notion as to what i am about. i can control the flow of the paint, there is not accident just as there is no beginning or no end. sometimes i loose a painting. but i have no fear of changes, of destroying the image, because the painting has a life of its own i try to let it live.

-Jackson Pollack 1951 (an edited list of text from Hans Namuth film)

This statement captures how I approach the act-of-dance. This improvisation is neither accidental or random, it is a practiced explanation of who and what I am about, right now.

*Performance Goals/Intentions/Aspirations:

Hi-def clarity of the moment movement initiation occurs. Hi-def clarity of when movements complete. Increasing ability to maintain continuity of ‘being in the moment’ while figuring out and assessing next choices to make – especially when lost or in a gap. No gaps while thinking - no gaps of concentration or lapses of confidence.  Everything, every moment must be ‘in the dance’.

Compositionally, emphasizing the shaping of time through physical exertion. Wanting to be total and complete with each individual beat of time (for this one, not prioritizing spatial/graphic composition - focus was on time & timing), creating a pressure and friction based pallet through which to enact visceral textures and complexly layered phrase-work. Approaching the dance as making a painting – the act of painting, of moving paint, of scraping paint, of dragging and dabbing, throwing, erasing, rubbing, molding paint on a surface. Visceral - attempting through body-surface with floor-surface,  intuitive decisions and mindful recognition of those choices, to conjure a constellation of outcomes that may capture a sense of direct interaction, meaning, music and structure. The more real the act of painting can become for me the more impact the experience may become for the audience.

Next posts will include: *preparation, *artistic considerations, *direct report from inside the dance, *compositional notes. 

Process for creating a work Part II

From an interview with dancer and dance writer Emmaly Weiderholt for her recently launched new blog Stance on Dance.

EW: How do you determine when to set movement versus when to improvise?

CB: Firstly I will be faced with very mundane practical/logistic constraints; how much time is available and how experienced are the dancers. The more time and experience equals the more possibility for improvisation. An improvisational approach takes up many hours of a process because the dancer has to not just learn new vocabulary, but a whole new way of thinking and thinking as a composer. Ultimately the dancer who is being trained to improvise is really being trained to choreograph as well. If I know I have a very short amount of time to make a piece, I will likely come in with a lot of set material and make a traditionally constructed piece of choreography.

Secondly, I always look to find new challenges in the way I make things and do things, therefore every other piece I make usually has a different proportion of set versa open movement.

For me improvising offers the greatest challenge; how can I make a dance that has no steps? (I know its a paradox but it really is how I feel about it.) Its is the most difficult dance form to do well, and its therefore for me, the most dangerous. Its also the closest thing you can get to to diminishing the gap between the real-life-self and the art-self. There is nothing more satisfying than to see the moments in a piece where true synergy is happening with the dancers in the moment and knowing my own finger prints are not in it. Its just the performers pure experience that finds form through movement.

I often dont want to see my own movement on others, it feels like looking at a distorted reflection of myself in the mirror. I want to see people as they actually are. I want to be inspired, and to see a dance emerge out of the unknown is an amazing thing to witness. When I look at work, I am not looking so much at the formal vocabulary as I am the pulse of the piece. Also as I get older, I feel less and less interested in 'pushing the limits' of set choreography and more and more interested in illuminating this quality of human connection. I strive to drive towards an energy and a pulse, I think I make dances much more similar to an abstract painter or maybe sound designer. The 'beginning, middle and end' thing is tough for me.

Lastly its a philosophical issue; I need to know that people are acting freely with a sense of self-determination. Not the illusion of it, or the representation of it, but actually it. I cant really explain yet why that is so powerfully important to me, but its my primary requirement. (It goes without saying that I have endless appreciation and admiration for anybody who takes on making or performing set material, as I have done that a fare amount of my own career and know its joys first hand.)

I still from time to time make pieces that are completely set and get great satisfaction from it, so its not as though I am speaking in fundamentalist terms regarding improvisation. I don’t have a political agenda around it, but I have big lingering philosophical questions having to do with the nature of being alive, and how we choose to express the mystery of what it means to be alive. I think its very scary to face the fact that there is so little we really have control of, and instead of focusing on forcing external control onto an art work, improvisation allows me to practice a self-control that comes from a different intention. Improvisation reminds us that the one thing we all have complete command over is our own actions, that through experience the dancer becomes clearer, more defined, articulate, complex and unbridled. So to me improvisation is an issue of living in a certain way. 

Process for creating a work Part I

From an interview with dancer and dance writer Emmaly Weiderholt for her recently launched new blog Stance on Dance

EW: What is your process like when you create work, particularly when you create an improvised piece? 

CB: When I create a piece through improvisation I generally have a sense of what I want to learn from the work. I always start with questions about topics that are important to me and determine how improvising might illuminate those topics. Sometimes I will start with a question that has no literal answer, but comes from a philosophical location. For example my last work asked, “What does gratitude look like?” I never intended to portray gratitude in a literal way; I wanted to pursue an expression of the energy of gratitude. For this work the dancing became tinted by this inquiry. When I feel clear I am going to pursue an improvised work I begin a training program based on some of those initial questions. The training becomes the ‘practice’ and the practice trains the mind and the body to align. The hope is to refine an ability to observe (physical/emotional, immediate surroundings, imagination) and then respond to those observations. Only through observation can the performer orient themself within the situation and begin to make choices. In this sense improvisation reflects real-life (we perceive what is happening and we respond accordingly) and the practice becomes the choreography. I refer to the literal translation of the word choreography of ‘dance writing’ – the performer has to author, edit and enact their dancing spontaneously.

There exists a popular assumption that rehearsing an improvised piece is an oxymoron. Since improvisation suggests spontaneous expression, the question is argued, ‘Wouldn’t spontaneity cease to exist if it were rehearsed?’ Everything we know about how to think or behave we have learned and therefore rehearsed. Improvisation is not about creating something that didn’t previously exist; it’s about a way of expressing ideas. To make a parallel, I could say it’s due to my thirty-eight years of practicing the English language that I am able to spontaneously form complex concepts into language out of thoughts or physical perceptions. I can express spontaneously while utilizing my experience from rehearsing how to read and write English. This might sound like a cliché, but the truth of the matter is that we are in a state of spontaneous expression every waking moment of our lives. So to me, creating with improvisation is very natural.

This process of making an improvised piece takes an enormous amount of patience and persistence. You have to keep practicing and developing how to become a more and more effective choreographer, editor and dancer all in one package. The improvised process can be very challenging because it requires one to confront a lot of barriers within oneself. But that’s what it’s about. That’s precisely what can be so beautiful about it, as well as dangerous. You create the language, context, intention and even aspirations of the piece and then have to sit back and let the dancers (or yourself) find their way through. To see a dance actually occur in front of your eyes, knowing that they are creating it on a tissue of support, is a powerful thing to see.

new dance TODAY dance new

seeing the messenger

Technique - virtuosity / application / costume

Medium - delivery method / container

Creator - messenger / vessel

Content - the experience

Concept - the thought

Execution - the body


The connection between the artist – the messenger, and the execution of their physical experience, dictates their work, their mind, their thought process, their everything. The work itself, a disembodied object, the artifact, acts as the concentrate from a string of moments expressed through physical action, to become thought/feeling made tangible.

Do we want to understand the object of the art or do we want to understand the person behind the object of art. When does the expression of a creative act, in and of itself, become the topic/subject matter of the work, in and of itself?

More simply put – does the object of artwork, or the deliverer of the work resonate more, and if so in what ways? For me, this question has a torn answer, as somebody who completely loathes the cultural obsession of personality over content; I reject the notion that the artist as personality is remotely relevant. However, I do believe the artist as facilitator of the work – deliverer of the work, is in fact utterly more important. I feel the act of expression is, in and of itself, the work. We/humanity/artists are the work. We are artwork. Our physical effort to capture and give form to our thoughts and our fleeting perceptions is the base level of the creative act.

Seen through the lens of an improviser, one does not execute finality, but one practices how to execute decision. Many choices will inevitably be the wrong choice within the context of a certain flow structure, but it is within the delivery of the choice that holds the subject matter of the choice. I am not looking to appreciate the deliberation of choices but the activation of choices. How one behaves not how one thinks.

I want to see the mark of the person. I want to see emotion. We are emotion. I want to see thought as action. I am not interested in seeing science as art. I am not interested in a logical rational art. I am interested in a messy, convoluted, questing, uneven, uncertain or clear expression. I want to see the act of creation, not the polished idea made manifest by technical virtuosity framed by months of deliberation. I don’t want to dominate the output of the work by my minds will. I want to see the work act as the record, the tablet that the word is written upon. I want to see work that is, in and of itself, the record of the messengers experience.

selfmap list

( Mobius Strip, Gilles Jobin)

Selfmap List 2006

Maps as a guide to the self
Maps as a guide to the property of the self
The self as a property object as a location
The self as a location as a landscape
The self as a landscape to be studied and measured
The self as a landscape to be walked and traveled
The self as a landscape of boundaries and markers
The self as boundary’s to be marked for transportation
The self as a road system and curbs to walk
The self as freeway covered in tar
Our selves our freeways we drive on and on and on

Marrow and Dancing, 2005

At night I climb into your skin and

Rest

I breath

your bones

marrow and dancing

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”.