Archive for dance studies
January 27, 2008 at 8:12 pm · Filed under dance, TONY, competition, michel foucault, dance studies, dance culture, thoinot arbeau, dance tv, breakdancing, romeo+juliet, dance/USA
Two titans, two teams, one battle…this is DANCE WAR!
The trailer to ABC’s new gladiator spectacular tells us that “talk is cheap.” So to settle their rivalry “Dancing with the Stars” judges Bruno Tonioli and Carrie Ann Inaba “put their money where there mouth is” and battle two armies of dancers against each other. The casualties of this conflict are not the titans but the unfortunate dancers America decides to vote off each week.
Dance makes for good wars and wars make for good entertainment. As vulgar as all this sounds it is important that we try to develop the thinking around this little cultural treasure. We love a good battle dance. Is it not the battle between the Montagues and Capulets that becomes the centerpiece of Romeo and Juliet. See Kristin’s video on battle training here. Indeed Dance of the Knights, Prokofiev’s score for the battle scene in Act I, Scene 2 of Romeo and Juliet, becomes the sonic theme for the whole ballet.
We have looked at the close relationship between the making a military body and making a dancer before. In our discussions of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and Arbeau’s dance manual we have seen the science of choreography as a general problem to be employed for developing military maneuvers and dance maneuvers alike.
In politics, business and the culture at large war is arguably the eminent form or discourse. It makes sense then that contemporary dance should investigate this form a bit more deeply. Though the work is valuble I am not talking about making dances about conflict, such as David Dorfman’s Underground or William Forsythe’s Three Atmospheric Studies. Rather I am looking at dances that are themselves conflicts such as the battle format in breakdancing. If we were to look at professional wrestling as a performance practice it too would fall into this category.
Perhaps we should have performances in which two dance companies compete against each other and the audience, voting on their cell phones, determines which gets to keep the box office. I would definitely go see that show. It will be exciting to explore the dance war as a valuble performance outlet to be experimented with.
Recent Posts by tony schultz
September 16, 2007 at 10:37 am · Filed under dance, friends, lifestyle, london, KATE, graham, contemporary, dance teacher, scottish ballet, dance studies, glasgow, the place, contemporary dance, martha graham dance company, summer intensive
I’m looking out of my window and trying to get some work done on a rainy Sunday morning. It’s really wet out there and the leaves on the trees across the street are starting to change colour and fall. This has been a rather sunless summer - not just here in Glasgow but my old friends in London have been complaining about it too. (We British DO talk about the weather, it’s not just a great big cliche…)
I find it very hard to believe we are nearing the end of September already. This has been the busiest summer of my life, and unfortunately it’s been almost all about work and not about dancing or anything else. However, it’s been good in the sense that I have learned a lot, especially since I have been working alone and for myself - both for my PhD and in doing some advertising consulting to pay the bills.
But it’s not all been about work and rain, oh no. At the beginning of August I went to London for a week, ostensibly to do some research but actually so I could hang around with some of my friends and do some of the summer intensive at the Place. The intensive was great. I did Graham Technique with Kim Jones from the Martha Graham Company - this was amazing. I was so happy to be doing the class again because it’s my favourite contemporary technique to do and yet it’s really hard to get a proper Graham class where I live. (Actually in London it wasn’t all that easy.) It made me sad that I wasn’t able to do more than just a week of class in the summer - because there’s no way I can ever be the dancer I want to be, because of money, time constraints, location, etc, etc. In Glasgow I can do a couple of good classes each week, and they are good, but they are not enough. But this is the way that people who love dance but aren’t full-time dancers live - we just have to make the most of what we’ve got. It’s hard to pop in and out of something like Graham, because during a week’s intensive it draws you in, like a life philosophy, and when it stops you feel bereft.
The other course I took was contact improvisation, which in the end I loved. I say ‘in the end’ because it was the first time I had ever done it, and to be honest for the first two or three days I felt completely lost and out of my depth. Not because it was technically difficult, because it’s not, but because it’s so much about trust and letting go. I had to let go of lots of preconceptions about things. For example, we were practicing lifts and I was scared that i would be too heavy, but our teacher said to remember that we are not as heavy as we think, and it’s much more about timing and trust. Having said that, I found it really hard to lift people who were shorter than me because the centre of their weight seemed to be so much lower down than mine. Over the course of the week I grew less scared about dancing with other people and by the end I was in love with it. I was also covered in bruises, because I did get dropped and fall down rather a lot. Unfortunately there’s nowhere I can do contact improvisation here, there used to be but it was discontinued because there weren’t enough people. Oh well.
The thing that I noticed when I was on the Intensive was how much better my alignment is and how much more movement I have in my back and my hips. This is because since May I have been taking weekly gyrotonics sessions with Penny Withers. Penny was trained at the Royal Ballet School and had a career with the Scottish Ballet, where she now runs the young associates training programme. Penny is a great teacher and I have learned so much from her.
Later on in August I went with some of my friends to a place in the woods which I love near Dumfries, in the south-west of Scotland. There we stayed in a reconstructed iron-age roundhouse, which had a thatched roof and a fire in the middle. There’s also an outdoor hot tub and sauna! The iron age people knew how to live. The fire was good because it rained all weekend and we were soaked, so at night we sat around the fire and dried off, drank rather a lot of wine and played games. It was really fun.
I’m now really excited because a) this week my favourite Glasgow contemporary class starts again (which is Graham/Cunningham style) and b) I am going to Greece for a week this coming Saturday.
Stand by for tales of sunshine and the seaside.
Recent Posts by kate bordwell
May 7, 2007 at 7:00 pm · Filed under choreographers, students, choreographer, modern dance, choreography, dance studies, contemporary dance, MIKI, stephen pier, suny purchase, edwaard liang, tally beatty
Posted by Miki Orihara
I went to see SUNY Purchase’s “MFA Spring 2007 Dance Concert” on Friday night.
It was interesting to see two chinese students’ work. One student is from Beijing and the other is from Taiwan. Two different cities, and you could see the difference between them somehow.
There were 6 dance pieces in this concert. 3 BFA program students works, and three solos by
Stephen Pier, Edwaard Liang and Tally Beatty.
“Triagon” choreographed by Stephen Pier, music by Elliot Carter was nice, physical solo. Dancer walks on to the stage, walk around with heel pounding, then Carter’s music with just percussion comes in. Pounding sound and music match, then whole movement starts. Use of shifting the weight, off balance is effective with this music. In the middle, there is a slow section in which the dancer stretches her body then clings to sitting position, like yawing of the body. Then back to the wild drumming, with physical movement and in the end, she goes off with a little suprise.
“Underneath it all…” choreographed by Edwaard Liang, music by Arvo Pärt. This dance was more like mixture between Kylian and Ek. Movement and costume and use of music reminded me of Ek’s “Wet Woman”( this is a work Ek created for Sylvie Guillem).
“Mourner’s Bench” choreographed by Tally Beatty, with a spiritual sung by Dalm Gileab. This work, as other master choreographer’s work are interesting. They all made very similar dance in the same time era. Male solo on bench with graham/horton technique like Ailey’s “I wanna be ready” gives you the idea of hardship of human beings. It was a very nice solo.
It is nice to see BFA and MFA students together in one concert.
Recent Posts by miki orihara
May 4, 2007 at 2:19 pm · Filed under books, TONY, education, performance, community, reading group, andre lepecki, dance studies, pedagogy
| | Posted by Tony Schultz
This week Maia Jordaan, a choreographer and graduate student from South Africa, found our reading group and injected a healthy dose of enthusiasm, intellect, and curiosity into the conversation. Yet another amazing person I have met through the internet. She seemed to have found us through Swan Lake Samba Girl.
Thanks Tonya and greetings Maia!
Maia is studying in the department of Contemporary Performance at Rhodes University. Her master’s thesis uses elements of Lepecki’s theoretical framework to analyze contemporary South African dance. Read what she has to say. Her comment on the original reading group post is provides great ideas and resources. The SARMA database is a great online resource for dance studies and criticism. Since Exhausting Dance deals with so many ideas Lepecki has developed in other writings it can be helpful to read some of his related work on the SARMA database. Maia points us toward http://www.sarma.be/text.asp?id=869 called: “Undoing the fantasy of the (dancing) subject: ‘Still acts’ in Jérôme Bel’s The Last Performance” and encourages us to follow the links.
The difficulty, or best part (depending on how you look at it), is that grappling with this scholarship forces you to do research in all the related scholarship. So as we might get lost in following the links of a web page we can also get lost in Lepecki’s references and footnotes.
Luckily we have a smart team and collectively have the intellectual resources to tackle this project. I found another rabbit hole that some might find helpful. The reading list for Lepecki’s course on Movement Theory can be downloaded here. You many of these texts referenced throughout Exhausting Dance. I read Randy Martin’s Critical Moves and Mark Franko’s The Work of Dance in order to get a better handle on what Lepecki is communicating.
It will be exciting to carve out this conversation and we should feel lucky to have found our friend Maia. I would love if Maia could join The Winger and we could collaborate in framing this discourse.
So please Kristin, pretty please, can we keep her? 
Maia suggested collecting online video links to works by the artists discussed in Exhausting Dance. This is a great idea and am looking forward to see what folks dig up.
Maia has also added a number of comments that relate to identifying some important questions and ideas. Lets add them to our laundry list of useful ideas.
1. dance=movement (John Martin)
2. modernity=movement (Sloterdijk)
kinetic excess of modern industrial capitalism
kinetic excess of modern political mobilization
3. dance=politics (Randy Martin)
dance is inherently political in its mobilization of bodies
4. the book title
what is ‘performance’?
what is ‘dance’?
how does the term ‘exhaustion’ play?
what is ‘the politics of movement’
how do all of these link?
Recent Posts by tony schultz
