Archive for TONY
June 18, 2008 at 5:23 pm · Filed under dance, TONY, dance theater workshop, Neil Greenberg, queer dance
“La Gaya Scienza,” of that union of singer, knight, and free spirit…
Ecce Homo
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.
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June 4, 2008 at 2:31 am · Filed under culture, TONY, politics, Barack Obama
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June 1, 2008 at 8:42 pm · Filed under dance, TONY, physics, guggenheim, works & process, Karole Armitage, Brian Greene, world science festival, Jim Gates
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.
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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
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April 8, 2008 at 11:35 am · Filed under dance, TONY, dance graph, dance technology, sarah lawrence college, video game, aesthetics, Cavin Moore, Michel Gondry, Meghan McCoy
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
moves: Cavin Moore
photo: Meghan McCoy
music: Real Nice by Should Have Thought of That
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March 29, 2008 at 4:20 am · Filed under studio, media, video, teaching, TONY, dance and technology, science, space, physics, apples, computer graphics, opengl, education, performance, school, pedagogy, astronomy, learning, hermes, arts, double feature, animation
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.
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