Art of Teaching
This Sunday I went to a lecture demonstration given at the Guggenheim as part of their Works & Process series. The Art of Teaching: Participation & Perception consisted of a talk by Damien Woetzel, principal in New York City Ballet 89-08, and Proffesor of Government and Rhodes scholar, Michael Sandel.
I found the whole affair highly problematic. This is a good thing. It means I was engaged and the performance was an authentic experiment in process. The piano accompaniment by Cameron Grant and the dancing by Tiler Peck, Joaquin De Luz and Robert Fairchild were not only beautiful but also incredibly intimate in the small Peter B. Lewis Theater.
The presentation started with Damien who opened with the question to the audience. What is performance? He spoke about a “ladder of engagement” for the viewer. He then introduced Tiler Peck who danced the opening of Balanchine’s famed Serenade. Afterwards Damien “taught” the opening choreography to the audience who then “danced” it with music. There was not enough room for the audience to do the arms so the exercise, for me, was a bit forced and uncomfortable but I am always one for traumatizing audiences. I did appreciate the attempted accention of the “ladder of engagement.” My mind also grumbled when Damien described turning the feet out into first position as “becoming a dancer.” Pardon my French but ballet is not the only dance on the block.
Certainly this is a separate issue, though the performances by Tiler Peck and Joaquin De Luz (of various openings from Robbins ballets) made a good case for ballet being “the dance.” Maybe first position is the best way to become a dancer. If that’s how these two did then they have a strong arguement. While the dancing was all beautiful I found the lines of thought offered by Damien to be difficult to incorporate into what I was seeing in the bodies. Granted, he teaches the great ballets and I do not so I would expect our interests to be quite different. Perhaps I wanted to watch the dancing without intellectualizing it. Very unlike me.
After a short video introducing Michael Sandel, he emerged to give his talk. It was good in that it again, like Damien’s call for our participation, transgressed the comfort zone of the audience. It too made me rather agitated. In an attempt to probe our ideas about “justice and equality” Sandel went straight to the hot button issue. What do you think about record bonuses immediately following the largest transfer of debt from private to public the world has ever seen? (Not his words exactly.) What do we think about 50% tax on bonuses for investment bankers?
Everyone certainly had an opinion. Some thought the tax should be more, others like Stuart Cohen thought society might collapse if investment banking “talent” be forced to take up their proffesion in another field. I wonder? As a physicist I know Wall St drains many of our PhD’s to work on options pricing and algorithmic trading schemes over the development of new physics and technology. A burping gentleman behind me kept muttering, “it’s the market stupid, it’s not justice, it just is.” A woman in back framed it as a public relations issue and thought it dangerous, with regards to civil unrest, if people percieved the wealth inequity to be as high as it is. Finally a woman in front explained that following the objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand the fully unregulated free market, and the distribution of wealth which it generated, was the just one by definition. Rand, of course, was the fountainhead of much neoliberal market philosophy that shaped the aggresive deregulation schemes during Greenspan’s reign at the federal reserve.
Clearly I have an opinion too.
Sandel then showed the wealth disparities between, the average public school teacher and David Letterman, and Chief Justice Roberts and Judge Judy. After showing each income disparity he’d ask, “is this just?” In the end he tried to draw a connection between the wealth disparities between celebrities and public servants and the gap between regular working shmoes and the financial oligopoly. The big error I see in his logic is that though David Letterman maybe overpaid while public school teachers are underpaid, David Letterman is not hurting anybody. David Letterman does not get rich by selling to pension funds financial products that are set to self destruct and then betting BIG that they explode. Big invesment banks enrich themselves this way. This is vampirism. David Letterman, on the other hand, gets our attention because he is funny. He then sells that attention. Letterman has no victims.
In the end Sandel and Woetzel sat down together and discussed the similarities and differences in their seperate discursive modes. It was Sandel’s contention that the classroom, or public speaking forum, was much better suited for creating meaningful participation by the audience. Though I don’t agree I can understand his thinking and that is enough for me. Congratulations to the Guggenheim for presenting this kind of work. I would never have thought I would be in the midst of New York’s most well bred, read and cultured discussing banking in a spirited and physical context. Bravo to that. Also cheers to Damien Woetzel who continues to put dance where it does not belong. Which is exactly where I believe it belongs.
Baron Ambrosia
I am ready to speak of another secret project. Today in the New York Times (dining section) there is a three page feature (complete with interactive map) by Melena Ryzik on the Bronx’s very own Baron Ambrosia. The Baron Ambrosia is a guerrilla film maker, performance artist and self-professed “quaffer of culinary consciousness.” This is a must read for anyone interested in the most cutting edge, most contemporaneous and most dangerous performance and media culture the city has to offer.
Baron (aka Justin Fornal) writes, directs and stars in the Bronx food show Bronx Flavor. Check out the Roti Express episode to see some amazing Trinidadian food inspired dancing. Baron came to guest teach in my class this spring. That was a blast. You will certainly hear more about Baronism in the future. Enjoy
The Black Cherokee Project
Its been a while since I have written. Have been working on projects underground and coming to appreciate the value of a secret. Here is one I am ready to reveal.
Many of you may already know about my interaction with famed unknown nyc performance artist Otis Houston Jr aka Black Cherokee. A record of our correspondence through the winger is archived here. Last I wrote Otis was posting advertising for the winger uptown and I was trying to figure out a way to archive his work. Soon I realized that the Black Cherokee project was not something Otis or I could not do alone. We need help from the people. So this weekend Otis and I setup a social network for this purpose. Everything is there: poetry, short writings, papers, music, photographs, video, documentation from magazines and newspapers, Otis and also you!
All the responses I got from these little blog posts indicated that Otis’ work is meaningful to many people and fills their hearts with joy. Also because of the space-time vortex Otis inhabits viewers can only see the work for a few seconds as they pass on their commute, maybe enough time to wave and snap a picture. In order to fill out the whole story, in order to see the entire performance, the people (as Otis calls us), have to communicate with each other.
Hey Otis!
Hey Otis!
I have been seeing your “Google ME” signs since the beginning of the summer and am real happy I can help make the winger a place where the people can find out more about you share their own stories about you. The chickens make this sign next to the gas station on 125th my favorite. Hello to all the people in the cars who followed the sign. I looked at your myspace page. The pictures are great. This one really shows what you are about: living in peace and being healthy.
Artists depend on others to chronicle their work. The 2003 times article by Alan Feuer is a good start but nowhere near a complete story. My posts arent bad either but there needs to be more. I think people need to know more about how rich your life is before they can really understand what you got to say. Lots of folks think you are crazy or homeless. People should see your paintings and hear your music and read your poetry. If you could share the view from your terrace or inside your art studio the people would really know and want to help support your work.
I think we should create something together with images, music, video, books, wisdom, technology and people. We should continue to use the internet and signs to communicate to each other and with the people. It was great to meet with you on tuesday thanks for giving me a call on my birthday. Let me know next time you are putting up an installation so we can artifact it. I am in the neighborhood.
Tony
I dont know what you know and you don’t know what I do but together we got a whole lot of know.
Otis Houston Jr.
The Gay Science
Photo by Erin Baiano for The New York Times
The rest of this week, Dance Theater Workshop continues its two week showing of Dance by Neil Greenberg. Closing out the spring season are two pieces, the 2006 Quartet with Three Gay Men and premiere of Really Queer Dance with Harps. The work has been well reviewed in the Times and TONY among others. Artforum published an interview with Greenberg and the DTW website has some great images and a clip from Quartet.
Opening night last Wednesday included a post-show talk with the DTW’s artistic director Carla Peterson, Neil Greenberg and the co-creators of the work. Performers: Colin Stilwell, Antonio Ramos, Luke Miller, Ellen Barnaby, Nicholas Duran, Christine Elmo, Paige Martin and the adorably disruptive Johnni Durango. Musicians: Shelley Burgon, Kristen Theriault and (composer) Zeena Parkins. Lighting designer Michael Stiller.
The talk, as most of the writing on the dance, focused on process. Over the past sixteen years Neil has been creating work through a process of taping improvisations, analyzing and remixing the movement, and attempting to reconstitute the captured/curated material “verbatim.” These pieces represent a development in his process as Neil, for the first time, is recording the movement of all of his dancers to generate the primordial vocabulary from which he fashions the final pieces. Neil and I have a common interest in remixing the dance graph.
The titles are curious as they intentionally provoke questions the asking of which only lead to more questions. As Sulcas points out in the Times, the dances have “an evenness of tone that can sometimes lead the mind to wander.” Perhaps this free space is given by Greenberg to interrogate the questions.
In Quartet with Three Gay Men the initial question is “who?” In a dance with four men, three of which are announced gay, who is the odd man out? And there is no easy answer. Immediately our reflexes fire with additional questions, “why can’t I identify the straight dancer?”, “how does one identify a straight dancer?” and “why does it matter?” Much like pulling loose thread on a garment, this train of thought unstitches itself, disrupting its own chain of signification. The question is brought into question.
Really Queer Dance with Harps presents its own matrix of questions, the first of which is, “what is queer dance?” Throughout the dance Neil teases us with seemingly stable landmarks for identifying this category. We might recognize flowers behind the ear, limp wristed bounding and and languid excursions into the hip as “queer”. But as this movement plays on both male and female bodies and intertwines with brisk, stiff wristed hetero-normative gestures the boundary terms begin to blur.
For Neil, queer dance is anti-censorship. “Dance is such a censored event for men,” Gia quotes Neil “We think of it as both an effeminate activity and a queer activity and, first of all, so what? Why would either of those things be bad?” If dance is, as Neil writes, “a space for living with the question of the body” and “for attending to the information living in the body” then what knowledge is the hetero-norm hiding? Inquiring minds want to know; I want to know.
Interrogating the question “what is queer dance?” elicits more questions/instabilities. Isnt all dance a little queer? What is it in dance, what is the ingredient that is queer? If dance is, according to the popular conception, a queer activity what is it that makes it so?
We owe something to Neil Greenberg for developing work that plays this beautifully while unasking so many important questions. Performances run tonight through Saturday.
Science!
This weekend brought the World Science Festival to New York. From Thursday through Sunday science came into focus through various lectures and performances throughout the city. On Friday night I went to see Armitage Gone! Dance present The Elegant Universe as part of The Guggenheim Museum’s Works & Process series. This new dance work by Karole Armitage was inspired by theoretical physicist Brian Greene’s book The Elegant Universe about string theory.
The work consisted of three different chapters, each based on a piece physics. First relativity, then quantum mechanics and last string theory. According to the Armitage website, this triptych is meant to “unveil the central drama of current theoretical physics” namely the incommensurability of the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics, and the promise of “string theory, which resolves the conflict and revolutionizes our understanding of the universe.” Each chapter was itself split into sections the title of which was projected through the dark on a large sheet of paper held by two dancers. I enjoyed this as a theatric pedagogical device. My favorite section was Quantum Foam.
The dancing was much bigger than the stage space. Armitage has beautiful dancers all of whom are great to watch and the Guggenheim stage is terribly small. This made it especially wonderful when the dancing came off the stage and into the aisles. I always enjoy watching dancers close up especially when they its large fast movement and you know there is a possibility you might get clipped in the head. Hey, I like danger.
Blending physics and dance is also risky. If they are not thoroughly mixed, the combination of these two ingredients can create an excess convective heat. Framing the dance work, theoretically and chronologically, was talk by Karole Armitage and physicist Jim Gates director of the Center for String and Particle Theory at the University of Maryland in College Park.
I wish Jim and Karole had spent more time trying to bridge the gap to have a conversation with each other rather than trying to teach the audience about either physics or dance. Opening up any line between the arts and sciences is valuable so I will try not to be to critical. Perhaps if they spoke about something as basic as symmetry they might have been able to have a more enlightening exchange. As it stood their conversation didn’t seem very productive for each other or the audience.
It is not that often you open up a dialogue between these two fields so I had high hopes. Physical theory and dance composition certainly have things in common regarding operations in time and space. Thanks to the Guggenheim for hosting the dance and talk. The performance of music by Lukas Ligeti held its own amidst all the high legs and high minds. The whole event and reception were enjoyable.
I hope events which help connect dance to other fields continue to be developed and sponsored.
We are the Champions of Dance
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Tonight I am going to see Ashley Byler’s Champions of Dance: Make Millions! at Dance Theater Workshop. Since last fall Ashley has been in creative residency at DTW as part of their STUDIO SERIES. The residency consists of a 100 studio hours culminating in a final showing.
Tickets for tonight and tomorrow are sold out though I have one extra ticket if someone would like to accompany me this evening. dance_plan at yahoo dot com. The showing starts at DTW’s rehearsal studio at 7:30. Act now, this dance is a hot commodity.
I have had the ongoing pleasure of visiting rehearsals during the process of making this dance. I have learned much from these visits about directing dancers and the elusive art of how one actually makes a dance. This is something that confuses me to no end and to which the Bylerian science provides many answers.
The Science
- Start with dancers. Caitlin Koch, Jeremy Pheifer, Sarah A. O. Rosner, Elizabeth Schafer, Lynne Schlesinger-Rudeman and Enrico Wey. These are your subjects. Love them and rule them.
- Understand that a dance consists of real human beings. Step back motion capture, we cannot extract the dance from the dancer. This is a social science. Cultivate interactions between subjects.
- Communicate by any means necessary. Use sound. Stron Softi. Use video. Give descriptions or rules for improvisatory trials. As in cybernetics, communication is control so be expressive to your subjects.
- Curate, harvest and distill movements and qualities. Take what you like and burn the rest. Be the master of your dance. You are caesar so fill out every cranny in your aesthetic universe.
- Make their organs move. This means being funny and sexy. Dont be afraid to show a little skin or body hair (respectively).
I cant wait for tonight when everybody turns up and the dancers turn on. I have lots of favorite parts in this dance and I don’t care if thats oxymoronic. Caity’s solo, Lynne’s monologue and when Sarah goons on Jeremy are tops. Other jewels are when Enrico gets kicked in the stomach and when Elizabeth lifts her leg.
You too may be a champion of dance if you act now for the only ticket left on the entire planet.
dance_plan at yahoo dot com
Player Participate
This is a live dance composition interface that we built in my Dance & Technology class at Sarah Lawrence College. You could also call it a video game. It uses the Wii controller to compose both dancer and viewer movement in a virtual space. This is an extended version of last years Dance Graph.
Gondry’s film and installation at Deitch Projects, Be Kind Rewind, presents a refreshing view of culture, putting value on process and participation over product and profit. Making computer games out of ourselves, our movement vocabularies and the environments we inhabit, follows this same philosophy.
“I don’t intend nor have the pretension to teach how to make films. Quite the contrary. I intend to prove that people can enjoy their time without being part of the commercial system and serving it. Ultimately, I am hoping to create a network of creativity and communication that is guaranteed to be free and independent from any commercial institution.”-Michel Gondry
Force Fields
Last month I wrote a guest post on Matt Gough’s blog quodlibet titled math skills. It addressed the question of what fundamentals of physics and mathematics should be included in the dance technology curriculum.
Since dance-tech is in its infancy and still forming as a field this is an open question. This issue is not simply about inserting math and science into an arts curriculum but more so about how these two worlds partner. The action is reciprocal, math and science inform the dance and dance-tech provides new ways of knowing math and physics.
Force is one of the central landmarks of physics pedagogy. Gravity is Newton’s force.
And to use the force you must learn the force.
Simulation is a great way to learn about forces.
So is dancing.
Laurel Is Dancing
I wanted to give an update on our friend Laurel Dugan. It has been a big year. In September Laurel married Luis de Robles Tentindo and is now Laurel Tentindo. They are a great couple. Luis is a former Doug Elkins dancer and currently doing great work in providing new media design for various dance and performance companies. See here. He is also developing experimental puppet work as a member of the Puppet Lab at St. Ann’s Warehouse.
This fall Laurel also began dancing for Trisha Brown. Thats a big deal! Anytime a dedicated dancer finds good work I get a feeling of victory. Laurel is also teaching a dance workshop beginiing this week in Skinner Release Technique. The course description reads as folows.
SRT is the pioneering approach to dancing that has evolved from the simple principle that when we are releasing tension and habitual holding patterns we can move more freely, powerfully and articulately. In Releasing, spontaneous movement evoked by guided poetic imagery, music, and sound enables a creative exploration of technical principles such as multi-direction alignment, suppleness, suspension, economy and autonomy. In the practice of Releasing, engaging the imagination and involving the whole self integrates technical growth and creative process. Experienced dancers and beginners are welcome to participate in this three-day SRT introductory workshop.
The classes are this week at the Trisha Brown studios Feb 11, 13, 15 Mon, Wed, Fri, 10:00-12:00 p. m. and $20 per class. The studios are located at 625 W.55th St., between 11th and 12th Avenue, on the 2nd floor.
Hope to see you there! I will definitely keep you updating on any performances Luis or Laurel are having.
