Archive for ASHLEY
May 22, 2008 at 5:38 pm · Filed under dance, TONY, Ashley Byler, ASHLEY, dtw, peformance
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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
Recent Posts by tony schultz
October 22, 2007 at 12:47 pm · Filed under studio, architecture, technology, TONY, science, theatre, space, dance technology, visible, stage, video cube, sarah lawrence college, you, politics, set design, performance, school, michel foucault, discipline, dance house, design, audience, intermission, ASHLEY, performance space, theory, art installation, THE ( INTER ) MISSION, social network
Over the past few weeks of my Dance and Technology class at Sarah Lawrence College, the students and I have been programing, dissecting and repurposing surveillance systems to develop mediated performance outlets/environments. To aid and inform our strategies in this project we have been thinking and reading about panopticism.
What is panopticism anyway? wiki wiki
Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a theoretical architecture imagined in the 1780’s, is illustrated above. The name literally means the “all-seeing place.” He describes it as a multi-purpose architecture whose design principles are applicable to constructing factory, school, prison, hospital or asylum. A multi-story ring of individual cells surround a central watchtower; every cell is visible from the watchtower while the watcher remains invisible.
The viewer can see everything while remaining invisible.
This panoptic prison named Presidio Modelo, built under the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado in Cuba, once held the one and only Fidel Castro. It is now a national monument.
Foucault uses the Panopticon to analyze the new ways in which power is exercised in the modern world and the role surveillance technologies play in creating a disciplined/docile body. He describes Bentham’s architecture as a kind of multi-staged performance space.
The unverifiable possibility that a subject is being observed at any time is the essential mechanism by which the machine operates. Visibility, as Meghan noted in class, makes one take responsibility for their own subjection.
He who is subjected to the field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play simultaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. Discipline and Punish 202
What does this have to do with performance? Everything…
Foucault describes the stacks of cells; “They are like so many small cages, so many small theaters, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible.”
In one way the panopticon is like a super-theater, a nesting of many stages.
However Foucault stresses that surveillance architectures are exactly the reverse of those of theater. He writes, “We are much less Greeks than we believe. We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine.” Survellence allows one to see many while theater and spectacle is based on many seeing one
Compare the structure of the Panopticon to that of the Globe Theater.
Different yet the same. Definitely involved in a complex tangle.
This assembly can be used as a dance technology. On April 28th and 29th 2007 Martha Williams directed and performed in a dance installation entitled Stacked, converting an out of business clothing store into a surveillance menagerie. Each dancer took residence in one of nine changing rooms which they themed and designed the interiors of. Camera feeds from each cell were composed and projected in the central room so that all of the dances could be seen at once.
Turning the panopticon back into a performance space constitutes a double reversal.
With this in mind, take another look at the dance-cube I prototyped last fall. In this staging the cameras are on the perimeter of the studio so that the gaze is directed from the outside in (as in theater) rather than from the inside out.
Though still, looking at this dance I am reminded of the cells of the panopticon.
“They are like so many small cages, so many small theaters, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible.”
Could we characterize the structure of the internet as panoptic? Here is a great essay that explores that question.
This very space is haunted by panoptic geometries. Have a look at the contributor list in the sidebar, look at all those little faces, “perfectly individualized” subjects you can see all at once and may click on to reveal “so many small theaters.”
The design of social networking and internet dating sites, showing all your friends faces in an array, seduces us with a kind of panoptic fantasy, being able to see many at once. This is where things become slightly more complicated. Just like the panopticon embeds tiny theaters in an array, these social technologies embed so many small panopticons in a matrix of connectivity. Each cell is now its own theater and watchtower.
All these ideas should not creep us out. Rather, they should inform our thinking about performance and visibility and the way technology provides new venues for artistic expression. It is an open problem. In my estimation projects like Martha William’s Stacked, my dance-cube, or The(Inter)Mission are all part of a project to reverse-the-panopticon. While flirting with aspects of surveillance and making the subject hyper-visible, they enhance communication rather than simply separate us into little boxes.
So next time you feel like you are under surveillance consider it an opportunity to put on a show.
Recent Posts by tony schultz
July 15, 2007 at 3:06 am · Filed under dance, tv, competition, tony schultz, sara rudner, choreography, ASHLEY, alaska, solipsism
Posted by Ashley Byler
So, I was just reading Tony’s post on Lepecki’s Exhausting Dance and I’m thinking… what am I doing in the studio alone? I’ll tell you what i’m doing. i am trying to round up people to tell me what to do, so i am not just in there alone (or there telling others what to do).
But, no one wants to make me their subject, so far. I have been delighted with the email responses (one was a complete script of spoken word and movement direction, one a call to dialogue on desired dance moments described as “utopias”, one was a plea to reinvent Michael Jackson’s scarecrow in “Ease on Down…” from The Wiz with greater integrity to the concept of boneless walking), but there has been a real reluctance from the various artists I have implored here in Alaska to enter the studio and just make something (too many ghosts?).
They are all artists of differing media and ages and maybe the perceived exclusivity of dance as medium is keeping them from going for it… maybe they’re just busy! but, conversation around the idea has been pretty great.
My friend Ray suggested I go to a specific spot where the “humpies” (aka hump backed salmon) will be “running” (aka swimming upstream) here and film myself imitating the movement, then respond to that projected video in live performance. Another friend, Hilary,has an undulating tidal idea and Craig “King” Koch demonstrated a Norwegian net dipping gesture that could grow into something.
In general, it seems like people want to have complete ideas before they are willing to commit to setting something… SO, I have mostly just been working off of my solipsistic self in the studio. making the things that seem to come naturally, responding to the movement i’ve seen recently, like.. So You Think You Can Dance (the hit Fox network dance competition show that those of us familiar with Miss Dance Masters of America competitions find all too familiar).
Montages of externally rotated arms reaching out, long fan kicks the pause in precarious, hip lifting balances, triple turns. while i am usually less engaged with the content of these dances, i am generally taken with the range of physical approaches among the dancers (hip hop artists, ball room dancers and those studio mutts like myself that are hard to define- “contemporary”?). the spectacle is probably most worth noting. this is what a lot of united statesians are calling “dance” right now. this show is both reflecting and shaping an experience of “dance” that is already more common/ prevalent to contemporary usa culture than any social form. i’d be quite solipsistic to ignore it… i’ve been trying to identify my own style favorites in capsule size portions- a little soft shoe adoration, space hold adoration, green jumpsuit adoration, an homage to the way my elbows lock into my waist. anyway, i think this tv show is another way of scripting/ writing dance and creating subjects of aspiring “dancers”.
p.s.- i’m not totally positive about the definition Tony Schultz is working with on “subjectivity”. here is my personal, subject definition- subjectivity is the effect of some constructed ruling set of forces/ norms/ ideals to which i am a humble servant. a servitude, perhaps? So if choreography IS a subjectivity maker (as Tony quotes Lepecki), the choreograher takes responsibility for identifying and either supporting, adhering to or subverting the components of that entity. for instance, Sara Rudner was working in the studio a bit more than a month ago on a basic phrase of weight shifting and, having identified the Western penchant for legs high in the air and quick gestures of the leg (as in ballet beats), asked the dancers to throw in an improvised fast and high leg gesture on certain beats. That is one way of working this idea of subjectivity… am i mangling this word? help me out.
So i am recording my mini macdances on my maccamera. what about that writing? why don’t i just post the macvideos rather than these macwords? i’ll tell you why, i don’t know why. but i will show and tell you how the long-distance (email) written choreography goes.
Here is a picture of me and my oldest nephew, Sean. once i get everyone i love to record themselves to make things, we will start a solipsistic tribe!
Also. if you are curious about what goes on with de arts in Ketchikan, click this word.
June 25, 2007 at 6:55 pm · Filed under dance, welcome, TONY, sarah lawrence college, wingers, ASHLEY, a o movement collective, alaska, stormy
Hello readers!
We’d like to introduce a new and intriguing member of The Winger family, Ms. Ashley Byler.
(Above, her Winger avatar, Stormy. Below, pictured with her composer/friend Softi.)
Ashley comes to us by way of Winger contributor Tony Schultz who taught her and collaborated with her in his Dance and Technology class at Sarah Lawrence College.
She has a BA in music and psychology, and a MFA in dance from Sarah Lawrence College. Ashley has created many original works in the past and is currently developing a new work with The A.O. Movement Collective, based out of D.C. and will travel to Ketchikan, Alaska soon to continue making work.
Welcome Ashley!
Recent Posts by kristin sloan
November 8, 2006 at 8:27 pm · Filed under TONY, sarah lawrence, dance technology, Ashley Byler, computer graphics, opengl, stage, video cube, ASHLEY
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| Posted by Tony Schultz
This is the latest experiment in my Dance and Technology class at Sarah Lawrence College. We networked 4 computers to record synchronously and set them along the cardinal points of my favorite studio, the “Small Studio”. Each student recorded a solo. Next we reconstructed the 4 views using OpenGL video planes and effectively rebuilt the structure of the studio with the dancer’s image projected on the walls. Students are now writing scores to choreograph cinematic movement around their virtual architecture.
In class discussion, this project has raised so many questions about dancing, viewing and the staging of the two. I think back to Kate’s post on seeing Merce Cunningham’s ‘Ocean’ at the Roundhouse in Camden.
She wrote, “Ocean was performed on a round stage. Arriving at the Roundhouse felt like going to the circus. The audience sat all the way around the stage, and the 150-piece conductorless orchestra sat behind the audience all around the amphitheatre. It was very odd.”
The physical structure of a stage changes the the way the dancing is seen and performed by the way it shapes the surface between spaces of performer and viewer. In the same way, cameras and the reconstruction of their images mediate the relationship between performer and viewer. Visible Cities demonstrated that mediating the interaction between dancer and viewer through architecture involves the assembly of both real and virtual structures.
I hope to develop this technology and line of thinking more in the future. Let me know what you think.
Recent Posts by tony schultz
