Archive for discipline
November 18, 2008 at 3:41 am · Filed under dance, dancers, dancing, mercecunningham, dacners, choreography, discipline, miki orihara, MIKI, martha graham, energy
Well since last entry( July22) I went to teach at Atlanta Ballet School’s summer camp, Chicago Dancer Festival( MGDC danced “Cave of the Heart” in August( this was a beautiful festival!!!) I went to Metropolitan Museum in NY, visited my husband’s father in Laramie, Wyoming, saw “Democracy in America: national campaign” at the Armory, saw “A tale of Two Cities”, tour to Greece, saw “Burn This” at the Juilliard School Acting division. and more.
I had a lot…I will try to put pictures later.
And now we are getting ready for Beijin tour (11/24-12/1) Nothing worst that having birthday on the airplane…
I was thinking about for a new entry but had hard time downloading pictures, I don’t know why but this made me away from writing. Today, I saw Benny’s entry and I really like the idea of introducing your fellow dancers , and also David’s wonderful entry from Russia, Veronica’s beautiful young dancers…
so I thought I will try again. Not pictures this time but some thought about “dance” .
I have been thinking about why I dance, why I like dance… and these are some thoughts…
I like dance:
*that thraws challenges us to think about. ( Thinking about early 1920-1940’s. It was nesseccary. I don’t like to watach somebody’s satisfaction dance, I hope you understand what I mean )
*that gives energy. ( without energy, dance becomes dead movement)
*that makes you quetions ( To make us to think about who we are and what are we doing, and why we dance and waht for)
*that gives opinions.( to make us think and search our own ideas/opinions)
*that makes you wanting to dance. ( this is simply making us to want to dance)
*that is pure physical.( I love physical challenge. especially like MG,Merce’s work)
*that is “theater”.(even it is abstract, there is a story or theme and it is a total theater)
*that is very musical.( I love music, so dancing with music is must for me)
I like dancers:
*who search ( who you are as person —who you are in the work )
*who think ( some time too much thinking is not good but not thinking at all is not good)
*who watch other dancers dance ( you can learn a lot from it. And you can steal it from the best! too. as some masters quotes)
*who are honest about their being.( not pretending who you are and what you know. if you do, it will show anyway )
*who are sincere towards technique and works and what you do.( without technique, where can you go? Release movement works if you have some stable thing to brake from. For the works, I keep thinking works of Masters who passed away, how can we preserve their works. Their choreogrphies are like script for Play. Like Shakespear, actors have scripts and their interpretation may varied but words are same. How do you know or how do you find the intension of their works. Can we do that in dance? This is my biggest questions…I know this is a HUGE questions. )
*who are not selfish.( Unless you are dancing solos all the time, you are with other dancers. There are a lot of give and take in dance. Also selfishness really stinks on stage. Even you are dancing solos all the time, you don’t need to be selfish. )
*who are “real” not “fake” ( You have to fake it if you don’t have a good base, and that means you have to have a good training.But in the end, you can not really fake it…)
*who enjoy dancing.( See somebody having good time makes me simply happy)
*who are discipline and a hard worker.( I believe you have to be very discipline and wanting to become a dancer. even you have a nice body to dance, you have to work hard.Sylvie Guillem said it in her documentary too. Sometimes I see dancers who have beautiful body but no passion, those dancers dance are not interested in to watch…MG has a quote for this. I will find it and put it on later)
I am sure I have more to say but for now, this is just a thought that came up on my head now.
If you have some more, I would love to hear what you think about it…
and I will (try to) start my interview with my fellow dancers in MGDC… soon.
Recent Posts by miki orihara
January 23, 2008 at 4:36 pm · Filed under dance, guest, TONY, dance technology, interactive, research, sarah lawrence college, students, education, dance teacher, performance, project, choreography, discipline, pedagogy, process, learning, intelligence, fun, dance criticism, dance lesson, social network, improvisation, Julie Cruse, VICKI, choreobot
For the last meeting of my class last semester, 12-21-07, I had Julie Cruse of Ohio State’s EMMA Lab as a guest to share her research in developing Chorebot VICKI. VICKI stands for Virtual Improvisational Choreographer / Kinetic Instructor. She a virtual automaton who guides a dancer through a structured improvisation using randomly generated verbal cues. Upon initializing VICKI she describes her purpose.
She says:
Choreobot is designed to challenge a dancer’s movement skills, and asks the dancer to draw upon advanced improvisational interpretation. I am programmed to make dances using theme and variation as prescribed by my creator. I use textbook dance methods, but - I am unpredictable. The dancer will demonstrate as I begin my next new dance.
Read more of Julie’s description of the technology HERE at the project website.
Before the lecture demonstration Julie and I had to rebuild modules of the assembly so that we could get VICKI to talk off Intel-based Macs. Retooling software under time constraints can be terribly stressful but I am glad to report we patched things up in time for the class. Julie’s lecture/demonstration was wonderful. She took some time to explain her impetus for building the machine and gave the students a tour of VICKI’s inner workings. Next Julie fired up the choreobot and demonstrated how she danced under VICKI’s instruction. Next she invited the students to try. Watching the student’s improvisation was exciting.
The system forces the dancer to think on their toes and make quick decisions. With time I could see a dancer becoming expert at navigating in this environment. Julie has clearly taken the time to do this. For her it was the first time she was able to observe other people dancing inside her system. By the end of the class everyone was incredibly energized and immersed in conversation regarding future research using choreobot VICKI. Julie has left us with a copy of VICKI and has encouraged us to continue experimenting with and mutating the system.
Matt Gough has taken a good deal of time developing an analysis of this work. In particular Matt takes issue with the description of the work as an “artificial intelligence” simply seeing it as an automated version of Cunningham’s method of chance procedures. Julie has documented the critical discourse HERE.
I met Julie inside Sector 9 of the blogosphere. There she has made bold gestures regarding dance-technology as a field. Like Matt Gough, she has voiced discontent over the current state of dance-tech.
She writes:
When I hear dance and tech, I think - it better not be ANOTHER interactive audio/video environment. It better not be ANOTHER…
…dance contextualized by projected videos
…dancer controlled by robotics or sensors improvisation in real time that composes the score
…motion capture in real time translated to animated projections
…wearable technologies that do something with sound or video
…animated avatars in second life real time “telematic” improvising
I find such pugilistic remarks invigorating and am excited to see what trouble Julie stirs up in the future.
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
October 8, 2007 at 1:05 pm · Filed under dance, artists, books, training, teaching, TONY, dance technology, sarah lawrence college, blog, education, michel foucault, discipline, pedagogy, thoinot arbeau, orchesographie
This fall I am back at Sarah Lawrence College teaching Dance and Technology. All of my students are smart, engaged and still unsure whether I am really crazy, or just pretending. We have set-up our own class blog where we discuss readings and communicate about building dance machines. The blog is appropriately located at http://dancemachines.blogspot.com. Come over for a visit. Other folks seem to be taking interest. Matt Gough wrote an incredibly encouraging post you can see here.
For readings we have started out with sections from Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Here is a part of that conversation.
Locating dance within Foucault’s framework of docility is both difficult and provocative. In attempting to pin dance to this trellis it becomes apparent that dance is slippery and cannot be easily categorized. It is clear however that discipline and dance are deeply entangled. Natasha spots this in the body of the soldier.
These men of the 17th-late 18th centuries were molded into figures with upright postures, programmed steps and structured attitudes; compare to ballet, especially, where all of these are instructed from an early age. Even the goals are similar - achieving honour and respect (of movement), grace, alertness, agility and strength. The quote on pg. 136: “A body that is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved”, is applicable to any dance class or performance, even improvisational. We are constantly subjecting our bodies to our aspirations and limitations, using the body and our knowledge to further its abilities for the task at hand, transforming it (whether in attitude or structure) to execute movements and improving it for the short-term goals and the long-term benefits.
Foucault opens his section on docile bodies with a reading of Montgommery’s 1636 military manual La Milice francaise. It’s description of the dancerly pikeman, who ‘will have have to march in step in order to have as much grace and gravity as possible’ resonates with Thoinot Arbeau’s dance manual Orchesographie. Written less than 50 years earlier, it had illustrated the strong linkages between choreography in the court and on the battlefield.
Thinking that making a dancer is just another instance of creating a docile subject (be it a soldier, factory worker, school child, or mental patient) can be uncomfortable to say the least. Janet points out how subtle power mechanisms can operate to form the subject.
For example the idea of coercion - that the power structure is being so fully and well imposed because of the fact that it’s being slipped in the back door, so to speak. “Small acts of cunning endowed with a great power of diffusion, subtle arrangements, apparently innocent, but profoundly suspicious,” (p. 139). It’s not being beaten into people, it’s “proper” execution is being rewarded. It is being made convenient. I think that these ideas have a very great relationship to the more “open” versions of modern and contemporary dance technique. Even when we are not working from highly stylized and codified techniques, we are still being instructed by a teacher, being ordered into levels, being auditioned for placement and so on. Therefore if we are properly disciplined in WHATEVER is the “proper” kind of “technique” (even if that is merely a general body awareness?), we are being subject to a certain power structure based on WHO decided what is “proper”.
We are inside a discipline machine with all of the spatial and temporal markers Foucault describes. This class demonstrates that. A component of the dance {1,2}/3 or graduate study in the department of dance at Sarah Lawrence College. The class is physically located in a distinct place within a time table. The time and space within the class is also divided and in doing so controls the physical activities of the participant bodies. Some stand, some sit, some on the floor, some on chairs, some speak, some erase, some write and some read. We move inside the computer for a spell. Then there is time and space designated for dancing. Our bodies and activities are seem well placed within space, time and the structure of the academy.
But, Sarah Rosner pushes back with a contrarian maneuver.
I think the thing that hit me most about the idea of discipline via the control of movements is how much i DIDN’T feel like it applied to my experience of dance.
And Sarah Richison voices related discontent, but finds in it a contradiction.
say you revolt. are no longer docile. escape from prison. you find some way to do some other dance. so you move off and do your own thing and someone follows you. someone wants to do your dance. are you then the new discipline? yes. you have manipulated their body, right.
For those of you who were looking for straight answers I fear that we have none. Instead we are left with a set of contradictions and a general understanding that dance is slippery, at times obedient and located, at other times disobedient and dislocated. Here are one, two, three, four dances, two made inside the institution and two made outside. Dissect them with regards to this contradiction between dance’s discipline and disruption.
Recent Posts by tony schultz
April 2, 2007 at 12:23 am · Filed under dance, rehearsal, TONY, science, research, education, politics, sara rudner, michel foucault, choreography, discipline
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| Posted by Tony Schultz
Last week Sara Rudner invited me to sit-in on a rehearsal for Dancing-on-View: Preview/Hindsight. Rehearsal is such a rich environment. Watching everyone focused and communicating, physically and verbally, in a well lit studio is different than watching a performance. It involves problem solving and systematic thinking in much the same way that a scientist works in the laboratory. Rehearsal is a research and development practice. This makes perfect sense as dance, I believe, is a form of science.
I watched the rehearsal to with Sara’s son, Eli. He is a computer scientist, physicist, martial artist and just about to graduate from college. For the first half of the rehearsal Eli and I spoke about programming languages, computer vision, and augmented reality, mostly techie stuff. Then our conversation began to drift, as if directed by the moving bodies in front of us.
The topic turned to from electronic to more abstract technologies, namely techniques for imposing discipline over the body and how they relate to dance. I invoked the name of Michel Foucault. In his book Discipline and Punish, he systematically describes the modern emergence of these technologies of power over the body. His treatment includes a historical and critical presentation of what I will call choreographies of power. This includes: military choreography (marching and weapon manipulation), pedagogical choreography (unison seating of students on command etc), incarceral choreography (strict control of prisoner in time and space by strict schedule and segmentation in cells) and productive choreography (examination and encouragement of physical efficiency in productive labor).
Though Foucault never refers to dance explicitly, or choreography, it seems that his philosophy of power and the body is intimately connected to ideas about dance. Dance is a discipline and choreography requires a technique of power over the body. Indeed technique is what gives the dancer power over their own body. In this way the dancer is always simultaneously bound and set free by their technique. Is this a fundamental contradiction?
Watching the rehearsal from this particular theoretical perspective made Eli and I giggle since it brought, by analogy, comparison between Sara and the associated power personas of the drill sergeant, school master, prison warden and factory manager. I always have this vision of the old-school ballet mistresses who would walk around with a cane and use it to illicit disciplined limb work. Though she did shush Eli and I at one point in our conversation, Sara is definitely not one of the above mentioned whip-cracking dance masters. She is, in fact, one of the most kind and generous people I have had the pleasure of knowing. She is also very interested in critiques of power and ways of disrupting its formations. Sara knows that dance is about power.
This line of thinking clearly needs more development. In my next post I will try to describe the work I observed at the rehearsal and relate it to ideas from physical theory. I have started seeing many similarities between dance and physics, the two pure forms of physical science.
Recent Posts by tony schultz
