Archives for June 2010

It is intriguing that for the past four seasons, the Ethnic Dance Festival has had more than one artistic director on staff. Choosing from a wide variety of talented artists and performers, both CK Ladzepo and Carlos Carvajal are tasked with the difficult job of streamlining up to 50 audition finalists representing a multitude of countries: Spain, India, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, China, Portugal, Bulgaria, to name a few. With only 34-36 spots in the season line-up, it’s no wonder it takes two to curate four weekends of top-notch dance. Carvajal was eager to share his program letter, which will appear in the EDF’s program, and what follows is a candid portrait of his job as an artistic director and his thoughts on this year’s show.

How long have you been on staff for the EDF?
I have been involved with the EDF from its very beginning more than 30 years ago. I have also attended most of the auditions and have been a panelist and advisor as well.

What’s your “day job”?
My “day job” is being a dance maker and teacher. I have been a choreographer and involved in dance productions in the Bay Area for most of my adult life, having worked with the SF Ballet, SF Opera, Oakland Ballet, Peninsula Ballet Theatre and internationally in Europe and South America.

What is the hardest part being an artistic director?
What is difficult is not including all [of the auditionees] because of program limitations. There have been so many exceptional performers and performances during the history of this unique event that it is difficult to single one out.

Name three reasons to come to this year’s festival.
1. See the best and most interesting and varied programs of international dance that there is.
2. Enjoy the high quality of costuming and music we have to offer.
3. Leave the show with a higher understanding, and curiosity of the various folk forms, and an interest to see more of such a treasure, which abounds in our area.

Will you be in the audience during the Festival?
I have attended all of the shows. I wouldn’t miss one ever! That is where I can purely enjoy the spectacle with no concerns about anything.

After the final performance, what’s in your planner?
After the Festival I will take a short vacation, continue to teach my classes, and later prepare for another season of presenting my Nutcracker ballet for Christmas. My youngest daughter, Celina, is also being married in October; I’ll be very busy between that and preparing for the Nut. Otherwise, I’ll be enjoying life in my garden with my chickens, my dear friends, and various other creatures and plant life. Will also be working on home improvements, which is ongoing.
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This year, there was a bumper crop of new auditionees for the Festival indicating that the new dancers and choreographers are encouraged to show their work to the discerning eye of our panelists and directors. By this great turnout, our local ethnic communities are showing their support and respect for what has been accomplished by the Festival and acknowledged by the superb reviews we have achieved most recently from our local press as well as from New York. Inclusion in the festival is a very important part of a company’s and soloist’s accomplishments and credentials. The Isadora Duncan Awards Committee have taken notice and have nominated Festival participants and groups for awards.

At first I was rightfully overjoyed when told that there was an increase of 30% over the last year’s auditions, but then I felt truly sad that we would be obliged to include only a quarter of all of the fine artists in the festival programs and that so many fine performances would not be available to the EDF audiences. Since I first joined as co-artistic director four seasons ago, we have expanded our season to four weeks, which have been very successful; a goal is to see the season expand to six weeks.

There are new forms which have been accepted by the festival as well as choreographies based upon the fusion of several styles. Hip Hop and “Bollywood” being two of those which cause controversy and good healthy discussions as to what our festival should include as a genuine “ethnic” form. So often labeling a dance as “fusion” serves as a grab bag and excuse for throwing disparate elements into a choreography. However, there are genuine valid fusions, which are accepted and presented in the festival, and it is to be expected that the purists among us will dispute the validity of such work. The panelists are always faced with such choices and the questions of cultural validity and ethnic roots are never ignored.

What is unique about the EDF is that all of our international participants are exclusively from this very region, the farthest coming from Sacramento and San Jose. Most world dance festivals invite dance groups from other countries to participate. Here in the Bay Area, we have accomplished and respected masters who have settled and who have been producing an admirable 3rd generation of “home grown” expertly trained and knowledgeable dancers. Speaking to the excellence of their teachers, it is the children who will be featured leading off this year’s 32nd EDF including the youngest soloist ever.

Working with co director, CK Ladzepo and the excellent staff of the EDF is always a joy and challenge, particularly enhanced by the fact that none of us fear the unknown and thereby are able to make the best decisions for continuously improving the quality and impact of our programs.

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This article appeared in the June 2010 issue of In Dance.

When first I moved to The States years ago, my artistic mission/intention was to introduce Indonesian dance to Americans and to preserve the Indonesian arts. However, over this time, I changed my perspective on the action of preserving. I found that Americans who have studied Indonesian dance tend to be even more conservative than Indonesians. For example, they study, choreograph/work, and perform only the classical repertoires, while in Indonesia there are many artists who have already crossed the boundaries between the classical and contemporary works. One of the ironies here is that many who insist they want only classical or traditional cannot tell the difference between what is contemporary and what is not.

Much work from the classical or traditional Indonesian dance repertoire has themes drawn from Hindu epic mythology, such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata, and myths or legends more local to various areas of Indonesia. While I strongly believe that the these stories and narrative structures have great value, I have felt a tension between remaining in this framework and being able to address themes that are not traditionally in these texts. On the one hand, remaining within this context has great appeal; I know these stories and love them. These are the myths that I grew up with and the dances I learned were contextualized within their framework. But even within the context of Indonesian culture these stories have lost some of their currency. The invasion of television and movies has started to change the cultural references that people have. With the exception of artistic or academic communities, the mainstream population in urban centers have started to forget these narrative structures or stories. Charlie’s Angels has replaced Srikandi, and the Terminator has replaced Gatotkaca. Now that the audience is not familiar with these texts it is more difficult to create a performance that plays off their existing structures, or incorporates new themes. It is not a given that the audience will understand the embedded context. What is most frustrating is that many of the narratives contain great relevance for some issues today. For instance, in the Ramayana, Kumbakarna, the brother of the king, Rahwana, agonizes over whether to support his brother in a war he thinks is unjust; parallels can be drawn to the way many Americans in the United States have agonized over the politics of various wars, most recently in Iraq, but wanted to support those fighting the wars. Nevertheless, for some themes that have emerged in my work, a directly correlating theme was not to be found in these texts.

On the third hand (I realize the formulation here is “On the one hand…on the other hand.” But in many cultures there are gods and goddesses with 4 or 6 or 8 or more arms, representing to my thinking the many possibilities that we consider.), from my point of view there are objectionable features in many of the traditional texts. For instance, the feudal structure is depicted as being beneficial to those at the bottom of it. In another example, the patriarchal gender structure is taken for granted. Of course, this does not de-legitimate the texts, but calls into question how they should be used. Does one neglect Hamlet because of the feudal setting, or feel compelled to rewrite it in a different context without the disagreeable social structures? For me, the precise and expressive Indonesian dance technique that has grown out of a rich and specific cultural history, which includes themes that may not carry as much currency as they once did, should not yet be abandoned; I don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

In late 1970s, early 1980s wayang golek, a Sundanese traditional wooden puppet performance from West Java was almost lost to its audience. The people preferred to see a movie or watch TV instead of attending a puppet performance. During one such performance Abah Sunarya, a famous puppet master or dalang, overheard an audience member say that he would rather sleep than watch the boring performance. Indeed, a slang expression developed to describe someone who was sleepy was lalajo wayang, or watching wayang. As a result he endeavored to teach his sons, Ade and Asep, to become famous and creative dalangs that would bring back the peoples’ interest in wayang. According to legend, Abah Sunarya performed a ritual and then blew into the mouth of Ade to give him the story making ability, and then blew on the hands of Asep, to give him the dexterity to make puppets with these new special effects. Ade Sunarya became a dalang with a strong story telling creativity that touched on everyday life, and Asep Sunarya created wooden puppets with special effects (projectile vomiting, heads flying off, dancing ability). Their efforts have revived the popularity of wayang golek and made his art more interesting to contemporary audiences.

All this is to say that I come from a culture in which traditionally the arts play a role in peoples’ everyday lives, and most people actively participate in some artistic endeavor even if they are not professionals. Due to industrialization, urbanization, and increasing influence from the West through TV and music, my culture has changed and with it the central place of the arts. I believe that while much can be gained from classical Indonesian dance, art must change and grow with the society, shaping it, while also being shaped by it.

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Sri will be performing in this year’s San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival, Weekend 3, June 19-20.

This article appeared in the June 2010 issue of In Dance.

Going on tour is like a dream come true, or so I thought when I’ve imagined the splendor of the road countless times. When it actually happens it is another story altogether. For fairness sake, I must admit that much of my tour this Fall with Bow & Sparrow was a wonderfully fulfilling endeavor. Some of it, however, left me feeling like a CIA torture victim.

It all began with an ambitious goal spurred into reality by a looming birthday milestone for my co-Artistic Director of Bow & Sparrow, Alayna Stroud. We decided that we wanted to create a new evening-length show and then tour it around the country for six weeks. We actually accomplished this goal, which amazes me still.

After opening the show, NeverAfter, in San Francisco with our cast of five performers—including myself and Alayna—we flew to Salt Lake for our first tour date. In Salt Lake we had the funny-in-hindsight-nightmare-at-the-moment experience of having an electrical fire at our venue shortly before our arrival. This resulted in a complete power loss for our week there. Long story short, it was cold and I learned a lot about power generators and extension cords. Luckily this problem didn’t dampen our audience attendance and we had three successful shows.

From Salt Lake we all piled into a tiny RV. We also loaded our set, costumes and six weeks of luggage. Then we struck off for Winston-Salem, North Carolina. We had three days to get there and we made it in 56-hours by driving in shifts around the clock. In Winston-Salem we had a warm welcome: the venue shared some famous Southern hospitality, we got great press coverage, and the shows were well attended. What a relief that Winston-Salem was relatively stress free, because if it had been difficult our next stop would have totally broken my fortitude. We were New York bound, and although we anticipated stress, we got more than we bargained for.

We timed our entrance into New York so that it would be late at night and we could avoid the press of traffic in our difficult to maneuver RV. We were thwarted immediately, apparently you can’t go through the Holland Tunnel, or the Lincoln Tunnel in an RV. We tried both. Then we drove all the way uptown to the Washington Bridge, and all the way back down to Brooklyn.

Everyone scattered to the apartments of various friends we were staying with, and planned to meet at the venue in two days for load-in. Friday morning rolled around and we converged on Monkey Town. We met at noon, we had 4 hours to load-in, then we were doing two shows at the small dinner theater for two seatings of dinner, then we were to load out the same night.

The day was bad right from the start. The company arrived with hangovers of various severities. Everyone but me was about 20 minutes late, but it didn’t matter because we waited for another 30 minutes for the owner to show up and let us in. Alayna courteously introduced us as Bow & Sparrow from San Francisco. In lieu of a traditional greeting, the owner of Monkey Town, Cliff, hissed scathingly, “Your presales suck!” as he brushed past us and went straight up to his office without another word. Well hello to you too! Thanks for showing us around. We’ll just make ourselves comfortable.

We found our way through a small dining room into a back dining room/theater in the round. We immediately noticed some things that were different from what was described to us. First off the actual performance space was smaller, second there were fewer seats—which made our presales look just great to me—and third, there were no dressing rooms. We began to adjust and problem-solve. We made everything more compact, cut pieces that simply would not work, and got permission to use one of the unisex bathrooms as a dressing room. The bathroom was a stretch for five people but we were trying to keep a good attitude.

The positivity was about to get more difficult. Enter Jon, a friend of Alayna’s who lives in Brooklyn. He is a talented musician and composer. He had “helped” us book this warm and friendly venue, because it is apparently a hipster cool spot, and was also going to play music for our two short intermissions. Well the joke was on us, because since his invitation to join us he had decided that instead of just playing music, he wanted to premiere a mulit-media play about love in the afterlife. It was 20 minutes long and had its own cast of six actors. Oh and, it would be cool if they shared the five by five “dressing room” too, right?

But we shouldn’t worry because Jon had also gone to the trouble of booking a separate musical act to play for the intermissions. This musical act, a blond subway performer who sang to a recorded medley of horrible pop-music and would have been a real hit at a high school talent show, had also gone to the trouble of booking two break-dancers. It would be cool if they used the dressing room too, right? Oh, and I know that you wanted short intermissions for diners to get up and use the bathroom and get drinks, but these medleys are choreographed so we can’t make them shorter.

As the load-in and tech went on it became apparent that our supporting acts were incredibly demanding. It also became pretty obvious that, although we were booked for hour and a half shows, so that people could eat at reasonable times, we were looking at about two and a half hours of material. Alayna and I put our heads together and began to edit, because although this was our gig and we had promoted it, the other acts that we didn’t really even want to begin with were refusing to make theirs shorter.

We got through the load-in and went to grab dinner before rushing back to Monkey Town to get ready for the first show. When we got to our “dressing room” it was so crammed with the junk of the fourteen people who were sharing it, that it was almost impossible to open the door. If we squeezed, and one person sat on the toilet, we could fit three people inside. However, starting at 6pm sharp the bathroom soundtrack turned on and the real torture began. I suppose it is some clever hipster thing designed to make patrons feel slightly uncomfortable for the 45 seconds they need to rush in and out of the harshly lit, tiny chamber. But we soon found that the blaringly loud recordings of first, a Rodney Dangerfield stand-up act, and then a detailed medical description of various urinary problems from bed-wetting to infection of the urethra, was much closer to what it must have been like at Abu Ghraib then anything I’ve experienced in my life.

I had heard that some torture techniques included blaring heavy metal music non-stop into prisoners’ cells. Now, as I tried to center myself after an awful day and brace myself for what I was anticipating to be an awful showcase, I felt very empathetic for people who had been forced to endure the torture of loud obnoxious sounds.

The show began with the afterlife play. It went over-time. When we entered the space I was pleased to see that at least every seat was full. We did a great job, then broke into the first intermission with blondie and friends. They were really bad. It hurt my soul both to hear her high off-key voice and to look around at the audience and realize that everyone thought that she was part of us. She killed fifteen minutes, of her allotted seven. I was quite distraught during the next section of the show. The next intermission was equally bad. The audience was getting restless. There was no clear break for them to get up and move around. Bow & Sparrow valiantly finished up the show, I think on a high note, but who could tell in a room full of people who were to cool to have fun in the first place, and had they been subjected to the kind of performance that makes you want to gouge your eyes out. And this was our New York debut!

Our sections stayed in our time limit but the show ended by the time the second show was supposed to be beginning. The quick turn around the restaurant staff had to pull off did not warm our relations with the management.

The second show of the night was sold-out as well. Take that Cliff, you big hipster jerk. However it started on an even tenser note thanks to the joint scolding that Alayna and I laid on Jon. Jon, in an effort to take some sort of action, immediately and vigorously cried. He then finally and reluctantly agreed to tighten his piece. We also moved our subway diva to the end of the show.

The second time around we made sure to clearly announce that she was separate from us, which while maybe a trifle petty, made me feel way better. We also cut her material in half. She gave us ultra attitude about it, but whatever, if we were in New York it was our turn to be big jerks like everyone else right? And while we were on a roll, we went to the bartender and told her to turn off the torturous bathroom soundtrack or suffer the consequences. I don’t know why we didn’t think to demand that right off the bat, but it was like a magic cure for most of our edginess.

We started late but didn’t end as far overtime as the first show. It was still too long and the audience still got kind of bored. People left during the musical medley at the end, and I certainly couldn’t blame them, I wanted to leave too. We finally finished, had to give the bartenders grief about skimping on our agreed upon allotment of drinks tickets and loaded out. Everything was back in the RV by 3am. All in all, it was a pretty terrible fifteen-hour day. When we went inside to settle up, Cliff had dodged us. He left us some cash, lower than what was in our contract for the number of people we had at the shows. His audience count was lower than ours, and was quite blatantly dishonest. It was the cherry on top.

We still had two venues to go, one in New York and one in Michigan, then a very long drive home. Everything else went pretty beautifully in comparison and we had plenty of time to reflect on the experience. It’s funny because I think that what I learned was to be less trusting and less nice. I realized that dance has an abusive relationship with me. All my life I have strived to treat people as I’d like to be treated and I think that San Francisco has kept me soft and kind. The support and camaraderie that exists in the Bay Area dance community didn’t prepare me very well for being hard-nosed and making sure that my company’s needs were met. So I guess the best thing about Monkey Town was that it forced me find my spine.

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This article appeared in the June 2010 issue of In Dance.

I joke with dancer friends about it all the time. Inevitably we face the pervasive question. You know what it is, it haunts you at parties, lurks behind the wine glasses at art openings, the beer cups at music shows. It follows you on dates and foils you while writing resumes.

“Oh, you dance? So, what kind of dance do you do?” Dammit.

“Um.” I scrunch my nose or grin thinly, and look up toward the ceiling as if Trisha Brown or Gertrude Stein might magically float down and bestow the right words to express contemporary art as dance training on me. I consider the options. Who am I talking to and where am I? How familiar might they be with various forms of dance? How familiar might they be with art, as a general subject? Is the person at all drunk and/or leery-eyed?

I might answer with a tentative “modern?” But I cringe a little inside because I know the polite-blank look they give betrays that they know next to nothing about modern dance. And, that “modern dance,” as a great, big, giant, catch-all category could mean vastly different things. Maybe as I try to describe training with Sara Shelton Mann they picture the Alvin Ailey show they once saw. Modern dance in its traditional Martha Graham or Merce Cunningham-like sense (though this reference does not usually help) does not describe what I do very well, either. By mid-college I successfully, unwittingly, turned into some sort of varied post-modern dancer: one who studies any assortment of techniques from Butoh to Qi Kung, ballet to Body-Mind Centering, anatomy, Capoeira, Pilates, yoga, etc. (This mix academically known as “bricolage” or “eclectic” or “pastiche” are terms which usually require unpacking). Plus release technique classes (“What’s release technique?” “Uhh…”) that may incorporate work from any of these practices, while working with various forms of experiential physiology, and attempting to utilize the laws of physics/biomechanics in order to facilitate throwing oneself around the room with apparent wild abandon. (Take a deep breath, I am still attempting to explain my training background.) While backgrounded in European dance-theater and improvisational performance. (European dance-theater? Experiential-pasta-bricko-facilitate? That definitely gets the glazed-eye with my sister’s co-workers). And then contact improv, that’s a thing…

So, what artistic tenets do I have to base myself in? How do I explain myself? Do I dare attempt a definition of contemporary dance? How do we, as trained dancers of any genre, explain ourselves to a general, untrained audience? Can we explain ourselves as dance artists without marooning our art form?

To make matters worse, as a contemporary dancer, the aesthetic rests on something historically fluctuating: a shifting core of values that seem to refine themselves according to the latest tradition upended. Whatever you learned as a student, redefine as a working artist. In “modern” dance we appreciate narrative, then non-narrative. Then narrative deconstructed. Narrative mixed with self-reflexive analysis. General abstract human landscapes, narrative rising out of the body’s architecture. Yet the thing about dancing, about movement, I cannot pin down in such descriptions. Even if I practiced a classical form of dance, one with an ingrained set of thousands-of-years-old values and aesthetics, I still could not explain what it is, what it feels like, to engage with dance as an artistic medium.

Or, could I? Can other people? What does it feel like to practice a dance form thousands-of-years-old? I begin to question other dancers. What kind of dance do you do? How would you explain it? How do people respond? Do you feel understood when you explain? I talk to contemporary dancers I rehearse and/or train with. I ask a stripper I meet at a tea house. My mom who does Scottish Country dance. I begin to schedule interviews, talk to a professional bellydancer, a professional dancer/graduate student in dance from Iran and Tajikstan. To these and others I begin reiterating the questions to which I’ve been rendered speechless. My subjects relate a diverse world of dance comprehension, levels of understanding running low and high. Some feel understood sometimes, but not others. Others feel the glimmer of interest, but not the radiance of true understanding. Many have their form confused for another, or confused for a version that seems tacky or phony. Some feel like it might not be worth it to attempt an explanation at all. Our listener’s responses range from appreciative to apathetic, mixed with vague confusion or excited enthusiasm. What is the world of that dance like? Often, regardless of our listener’s interest, the idea of what that dance is like as a practice, as a performance, as a sensory world of its own, cannot be imparted through conversation. Across the board a similar response begins to ring.

“You just need to do it. You just need to see it.”

Speaking to the experiential quality of dance, direct experience becomes the end point to which such conversations lead. The more direct, the better. By more direct, I mean the closer to one’s own experience. The sense of movement in one’s own body, own memories. A tingling in the fingertips, a sense of entry to the material. The more recognizable to one’s own particular soul the movement is, the more legible that dance becomes.

I feel this recognition when I see the show of a familiar choreographer. When I train with a certain choreographer, I study their movement (look at it, feel it in my own body), internalize their aesthetic values, learn their process when constructing a dance. I learn what to look for in their shows, how to comprehend the intention behind their artistic voice. In seeing a performance of someone whose work I have studied, the movements of the choreography come alive in me as I see them performed. The emotional and physical memories built up, from having literally done it, create a magnified level of understanding in me, an embodied engagement with the work. Comprehension becomes dependent on my body, itself. How to explain the details of what I feel in this physically-captivated state? I am not only seeing performance, I am eating and breathing and living it, as when I am dancing myself. Can I explain what it’s like to understand the dynamics of the abstract in a literal, verbal language? When the audience comes from disparate artistic backgrounds, can dance artists expect to transmit their own sensory world to their audiences, without first defining its precepts?

Transparent artistic intent in dance remains so elusive that many incorporate ephemerality straight into their aesthetic. Consider Merce Cunningham, his descendants, and chance art. “The audience will make meaning out of it as they will,” being the method of explanation. But I am interested in accessing the choreographers’ meaning, or at least their frame of reference. I’m interested in initiating the people I know to these frames of choreographic reference. If one needs to be trained to see what the choreographer sees, how do the untrained gain access? Do audience members gain access to dance as a poetic form without initiation into dance vocabulary or history? In this loophole, enigmatic artistic intent hovers on the brink of failed outreach. Those lost might be just who we attempt to explain ourselves to while at parties, openings, shows…

In the end, I can identify myself to other people familiar with a specific dance community. (“Oh, you take Kathleen’s class? Ok.”) But to almost anyone else I have two options: 1) remain enigmatic or 2) remain vague and incomprehensible.

I am tired of being incomprehensible. But my artistic leaning does not involve enigmatic forbearance, as posh as that might make me. I desire understanding, from dancers, from friends, from the greater arts and philosophical communities at large. After all this investigating, I still rely mainly on the answer “I don’t know how to describe it. Modern? Experimental?” when attempting to explain “What kind of dance do I do.” I’m interested in the aesthetics of kinesthetic dynamics, I sometimes tell people. Or even launch into my best history and explanation of modern and postmodern dance, at rare times. None of it exactly satisfies. I still receive the questioningly-raised eyebrows I’ve come to expect. What is that dance really like?

You just have to do it. You just have to see it.

While dancing song or words we begin to live them; we begin to understand what one sings or what one says; we begin to live the verbal or musical emotions.
—Raymond Duncan, 1914, La Danse et la Gymnastique.

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This article appeared in the June 2010 issue of In Dance.