Over the past two weeks I have been in residence at Lake Studios Berlin focusing on improvisation in rehearsals and performances, mostly with saxophonist/improviser/composer Ross Feller, the other half of a long collaboration via Double-Edge Dance. Improvisation has been a through-line in my decades long journey as a dance artist while I have also focused on choreographic work. As a performer, I prefer to create instant compositions and as a choreographer, I prefer not to perform and to hone the work to a fine degree while honoring the rigor and spontaneity of live performance. I teach improvisation, composition, and dance ‘technique.’ I write that last word with the memory of being a student long ago in the heydays of SNDO, the School for New Dance Development, when it had its own building on Da Costakade in Amsterdam and amazing guest artists. In the late 80s they refused to call their technique classes technique and instead called them systems. After a year of taking ’systems’ classes, I was well aware that those classes were still dispensing a ‘style’ or a ‘method’ even if it was not totally codified as Cunningham or other modern dance techniques. At that period of SNDO, it was release technique in motion, with a particular indirect focus and appreciated ‘moves.’ There were tiers and assumed ideas of what constituted adept movers just as there are in other spheres of dance. This is fine but deserves to be mentioned as there is still a pervasive construct of what constitutes methods that are freeing with the idea that they are beyond style, whether within technique classes or improvisation classes. Many of us navigate our pathways through dance training via a mix of sound anatomical understanding and somatic approaches so that the baseline of the training is efficiency via healthy alignment and body use. All of these approaches are useful but they are approaches. What I find is that idea of efficiency creeps into value for artistic expression, whether in improvisation or technique classes, workshops or performances.
While as a human and dancer, I embrace efficiency and healthy alignment; I am not so interested in having that as an issue within my artistic work, whether through improvisation or choreography. I am interested in wringing out motion from my body and some of that involves struggle, a very different kind of exhibited effort than Graham but a similar bent towards the drama of conflicts within the body. I may love to be cozy (one of my favorite words in Dutch is gezellig) rolling on the floor with flow in contact improvisation but I am not really interested in being cozy in my work. I do not care to exhibit my abilities within release technique while on stage. Just like all contemporary dance artists, we are making our mixes. The interesting element is the gloss of improvisatory values as a lens and value system when looking at performance or being a personal arbitrator. We are all personal arbitrators, having varied histories and values. However, the conflict I find within the improvisation world is the unexamined assumptions and preferences that bleed into artistic arbitration. Why is dealing with discomfort in performance seen as a spectacle while doing a released spin or cool inversion is seen as an accepted validation of training? Or, why is conceptual work taking such hold in contemporary dance rendering full-out motion passé? Or, why is it not more readily acknowledged that improvisation techniques are, well, techniques, and have their limits and assumptions and preciousness just like some codified techniques?
Early on during my artist residency I met a wonderful Italian actress who, with another woman, invited many improvisers from very different vantage points and talents, to come together to research memory. It was good timing for me given that is the topic, an iceberg of its own, of my new work. I purposely let myself not be impressive with my improvisational ‘skills’ and judgments but to submerge myself in the research without of an instant composition, ‘make it work’ hat. Another particular perfomer took a very different strategy and it was obvious and visible to me. I could see that performer make what I would consider skilled but somewhat generic decisions based on good calls of what the space needed to make the overall composition have merit. It was clear the person had good dance and improvisation ‘chops’ but it was also somewhat oppressive in terms of the stuckness of thinking certain improvisatory approaches, such as one employs (including myself) within instant composition. There is a certain air of superiority that can come into play, which is really interesting within the improvisation field. I have had a few encounters in the last couple of decades that woke me up to the egos and ranking within the improvisation world. There are masters. There are people who dedicate their entire lives to dance improvisation. Anna Halprin would be one who I would consider so full of compassion that there is not a sense of her having one way, only one approach. Many others are also compassionate and amazingly skilled but it is good to remember that, just like in any form, there are assumptions that sometimes do not get examined. For example, many have the idea there should be one approach to improvisation. Viewpoints is wonderful. I feel lucky to have studied with Mary Overlie early on and would love to study with SITI. Contact Improvisation is wonderful. I feel fortunate to have studied with Steve Paxton, Nancy Stark Smith, and Kirstie Simson among others. I studied improvisation with all different flavors, from Nikolais to Authentic Movement and much in between. But I am not trademarked, I do not subscribe to one approach, and I have not only dedicated my entire life to improvisation. What came up with the powerful presence of the Italian actress and her workshop partner was the reality of gathering many artists together and not spouting one method, not putting one method above another, not placing a generic hierarchy on approach, and not using ones skills to breakthrough and impress. That was refreshing. What came up in a recent lovely contact improvisation workshop, is how a slightly varied way of someone else teaching say, surfing, can be, as another workshop participant said, like trying on someone else’s clothes. That new set of clothes was unfamiliar and a bit awkward for me even though it was an idiom in which I usually feel free. That was refreshing too – not to only feel cozy. Even things that I am really ‘good at’ such as resilience and modulated resistance was not like wearing the clothes I wear when I teach that material. For me, such slight discomfort is good as I am not only submerged in assumptions but am somehow am in an awkward zone of unknowing, something I do believe in while letting it go simultaneously.
One question that was posed to a group of us recently involved our individual motivations to dance, our messages, our statements. I, as many, don’t have one of each of these but a layered web of answers and refusals. I dance largely because of an intense non-verbal relationship I had as a child with my sister who was unable to talk or walk. I would watch her, touch her, cuddle with her, and do my best to empathize and intuit. I learned to quietly shut the screen door so as not to upset her upon me stepping outside or, worse yet, heading back to where I lived which was in another state. I dance partially because the echoes of understanding such non-verbal communication deeply with someone I loved so dearly and lost when I was 12 years old, reverberates in my being and demands ways of release. I dance because I enjoy it as well. As a teacher and human, I embrace joy for sure. But as a mover and choreographer, I am actively and constructively churning. Not in some cathartic exorcism, but as ongoing research with topics such as being on the edge of balance, honoring the awkward in movement and performance, mining the body for memories without needing any literal translations, and doing the same with the performers with whom I work.
One performer last night in a shared grouping of improvised solos posited that arms couldn’t hold a memory. Perhaps they can, perhaps they cannot. Memories are volatile, made up, real, shifting, erasable, retrievable and every other construction - within limits and beyond limits. The research I am doing now involves memory and active forgetting. The latter is a skill that is very interesting within improvisation and performance. I teach a score in improvisation classes that is quite simple in structure yet complex in practice. In a large circle we play a kind of telephone game. One has to try and quickly do the movement of the person by them exactly in the circle one by one, taking turns in one chosen direction (clockwise or counter-clockwise). What happens is that there has to be active forgetting so that students do not correct mistakes they've witnessed being made. They've witnessed the first - original and 'correct' version of the movement but they need to forget that enough to do the translated movement as accurately as possible versus correcting the 'mistakes' made. Everyone is trying to be accurate versus creatively altering movement. One needs to actively forget some information in order to be fully present to the most relevant information and be an engaged, responsive self.
Interesting to me is that last night, while seated on a bench as one of the twenty-four performers to improvise what were to be 2-minute solos (many were quite a bit longer last night but no worries), I imagined using my mimicry skills to regurgitate bits of about eighteen of the solos I had seen. I immediately dismissed this as I decided quickly it would not aptly honor the performances I had witnessed. As a witness, I took my role as a type of holder, such as one might be sensitively with Authentic Movement and Jungian practices. Such mimicry, though certainly comic, seemed like a cop out of my role as being a holder, a compassionate witness, and my role as being present in the moment as an improviser. I let go of the idea incredibly quickly. What ended up happening was that a neighboring soloist left his sweatshirt with me. I then used that sweatshirt in my improvisation as it was on my lap and well, there it was. Post-performance two people communicated concern about the sweatshirt. Admittedly, I put part of sleeve in my mouth and was a bit wild. I was far from being wild enough to damage a designer sweatshirt but perhaps my use of the sweatshirt was somehow taboo in the mostly free, but yet not, culture in Berlin. No worries, but interesting. My motivations for being a mover and a dance artist come out in my work and they came out in my improvisatory performances in Berlin the last two weekends, the first two at ada 10 times 6 series at Uferstudios and the latter two at Lake Studios second anniversary Self-portrait series. They are not cozy for the most part. They definitely have sensitivity and are composed in the moment using honed skill sets but they are not comforting. I don’t dance to be comforting somehow and this seems to be something that continually pops up as a concern from the audience. Sometimes it involves people who know my fun-loving humorous side and are surprised by the darker side, the churning of many aspects of myself. Often times it involves people who do not know me at all but are witnessing unknown material, not referencing conceptual art or normative dance and thus steering away from what might be a compass to guide the audience in something they can put a finger on and at least try to define.
A self-portrait. We are so many in one. Not schizophrenic, but we can modulate many aspects of ourselves in ways, bringing out some, and gently tucking in others in the memory folds of our selves. One person that knows me calls me Chödrön Wigman, in reference to the Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön as well as the dance expressionist and choreographer Mary Wigman. Access to the light and dark swan without getting stuck in either but aesthetically being closer to the dark, and in daily life being closer to the light.
The work I will begin to focus on with depth at Lake Studios in June when BOOMERANG’s principal performer Matty Davis joins me in Berlin is a new evening-length creation to be premiered in NYC in March 2016. We will push physical extremes with both sensitivity and rigor. This new work will interrogate the relationship between memory and active forgetting. Within the creation process of the new dance and the emerging duet itself, one of our avenues of research will be how exhaustion can precipitate forgetting, when all that is not necessary must be relinquished. I will continue dipping into my research of ‘what I call ‘awkward grace’ (a blending of idiosyncratic motion with unpredictable timing and making the ‘ugly’ ‘beautiful’), physical necessity, teetering on the edge of control. Davis and I, through these and many other strategies and purposefully impossible challenges, will deal with the ideas and altered realities of memories.
The creation process, starting earnestly in June, will progress in a continuous but modular form, creating movement and text conversations that are purposely interrupted and backtracked. Literary references will come into play, most notably from recent research and writing on memory and forgetting by Lewis Hyde, an internationally known cultural critic and MacArthur Genius Award winner. I have been inspired by Hyde’s latest unpublished manuscript. Personal writing will also factor into the creative process as Davis and I further investigate the links between memory and forgetting. Continued collaboration with playwright Will Arbery, with whom BOOMERANG has worked on three other pieces, will hone the text and dramaturgy of the duet.
BOOMERANG will collaborate as well with Greg Saunier, the drummer in the band Deerhoof, on sound and live music. Saunier met with me after witnessing a performance I choreographed and performed in at Roulette in Fall 2013. We have since been in enthusiastic dialogue. Saunier’s energy and artistry is charged and vibrant, similar to the athletic and sensitized work of BOOMERANG. Video of the emerging work BOOMERANG will create in Berlin will be shared with Saunier, who will respond with video and sound as well. Both his rhythms and his movements will offer important contributions to the creative endeavor. Once BOOMERANG returns to the U.S. we will engage in live studio collaboration with Saunier. Also, definitely in the U.S., and hopefully some in Berlin, I will be replaced as a performer by another performer so that I can be a third eye, what I need as a choreographer.
It has been an interesting ride in Berlin so far. I have such appreciation for Lake Studios Berlin and the community and feel lucky to be there. Much is gurgling up and I am all there processing, fighting, and allowing. Thanks to Lake Studios, in particular Marcela Giesche, and to Ross Feller for encouraging me to keep visiting the stage, rather than only hiding in the studio, and for improvising on stage rather than my only stage work being my choreography sans me as a performer. The latter, I am committed to, happily so, but the former is good to return to for the learning and the depth. Also, thank you to Marlon Barrios Solano. Much gratitude.
Kora Self Portrait of the Moment in 2nd Night of 2nd year anniversary of Lake Studios Berlin from Double-Edge Dance on Vimeo.
Costume by Textile artist Rebecca Cross
