Archives for March 2014

Embodied Politics: Dance, Protest and Identities
Stacey Prickett
Published by Dance Books, 2013

IN THE LAST DECADES, we have begun to feel a seismic shift in western understanding of the body from that of a machine with drives as predictable as the laws of motion to the body as an ever- emergent organism inseparable from and in ceaseless and dynamic conversation with the world around it. For generations dance has been in the vanguard of this transformation as it pursued complex ideas of corporeality, embodied consciousness and communication, often in concert with philosophy and psychology.

Embodiment, for instance, was one of the vital ideas in the postmodern experiments of such choreographers as Anna Halprin, Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton. It was a vital part of the experiments in consciousness and physical expression that took place at Dartington Hall, when the members of Jooss company practiced meditation under the trees of the Devon estate. Earlier still, Isadora Duncan searched for and built a counterforce to the growing idea in the late 19th and early 20th century of the industrialized body through her use of breath and flow in structured improvisation.

Embodied Politics: Dance, Protest and Identities, sounds like it might feed from this same stream, but author Stacey Prickett, a Principal Lecturer at Roehampton University in England and former Bay Area resident, is foremost interested in the body as the launch pad of protest and dances as “weapons” or “tools” of social and economic struggle. In her extensively researched study, dance content and its context dominate; how the body shaped those politics is largely implied.

As Prickett makes clear in her introduction, embodiment can mean everything from concretizing the abstract, expressing an act in an organization, uniting, or incorporating something into something else. She starts with tangibles, which mirror her interest in Marxist or neo-Marxist politics physicalized through dance. There is something refreshing in her focus on dance as a tool in political struggle, which she takes up with the determination of an early 20th century Wobbly. But anyone picking up the book hoping for a philosophical discourse about the communicative possibilities of the 21st century dancing body will be disappointed. The theme of her study is not the politics of embodiment per se or the shifts in embodied meaning and identity from era to era, but the forgotten or as yet unanalyzed dance of pageants, marches and abandoned sites that has militated against the status quo, whether in affiliation with leftist parties or in unaffiliated protest against global capitalism, injustice and oppression. To that end she has undertaken a limited but detailed investigation of political grassroots dance in New York, San Francisco and England across the 20th and into the 21st century.

It is the sort of history some have lamented is too seldom written—thick with data about the valiant efforts by little-known choreographers—in this case, artists out to show, to protest, to celebrate the plight of the downtrodden. The difficulty of such an approach is that the trees can overtake the forest, and the reader can get lost in myriad and sometimes tangential details. The chapters often read like long articles rather than pieces of a larger argument, and within the chapters the facts can overrun thematic points articulated in the introduction: that alternative or marginal dance exists in taut relation to the status quo and power; that the protesting body as a rebellious social body can alter the perception of the possible; that larger narratives are embedded in many of these dances; and that participatory dances that are fueled by a collective ethos can give rise to personal transformation. These organizing ideas are often subsumed by waves of particulars, making it hard in the absence of those conceptual containers to organize the information into more meaningful wholes.

In the tradition of scholars like Mark Franko and Linda Tomko who have studied political dance in the early 20th century, Prickett opens by shining light on little-known Edith Segal, a New York Communist Party-affiliated dancer who launched the Red Dancers. Here the author offers a highly detailed account of Segal’s history, some of which she was able to get through interviews with the activist. Segal, who came up through the Henry Street Settlement and Neighborhood Playhouse, stuck close to Communist Party pageants, workers’ clubs, leftist summer camps and impromptu performances rather than to the emerging modern dance scene. She was, in the end, redder than most.

More fascinating than Segal’s own exploits to me, however, is Prickett’s depiction of the cross-pollination that went on, how widely someone like Segal traveled, and the shared influences of artists and activists across continents. She studied with “socialist actor and theatre director Senda Koreya,” the brother of the Michio Ito, visited Russia where she grappled with the resurrection of imperial-style ballet at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow after the revolution. She also lived, worked and agitated in Detroit as a “field organizer” for the New Dance Group where, for $5 a week, she choreographed dances like Anti-war cycle: Industrialism, war, Fraternization for 18 dancers at the Dance Festival for the Cause of Peace. Whether she was directing the Ukranian American Pioneer Dance Group or the Freheit Jubilee pageant, Segal was a die-hard Communist who borrowed from avant-garde theater to blur the lines between protest and art to express her radical politics.

Prickett’s final chapter presents the South Asian dance advances in London, including the 2012 opening ceremony spectacle for the British summer Olympic Games that presented a performance by Akram Khan and 50-plus dancers. Detailing the powerful role of South Asian arts in community centers and the codification of non-western dance in the schools, Prickett conveys with some of the same verve as she brings to her portrait of the Bay Area a grassroots scene thriving, morphing, and reflecting the larger cultural changes of the country.

Her liveliest and most acutely shaped chapter is the one devoted to the Bay Area. This is not merely bias raising its head, though I was overjoyed to discover a scholar finally giving local artists the broad attention they deserve. It’s that nowhere else in the volume does Prickett zero in on particular companies and artists and vividly describe and contextualize work as she does here. With access to video documentation, emails with artists, interviews and direct involvement, Prickett makes Bay Area activist dance especially juicy; its link to larger issues of place, identity and injustice striking and clear. What’s more, some of you will find you and your work discussed or trip over fragments of your own thoughts.

The title of the chapter is “Politics, Dance and the Persona: Redefining Performance in the San Francisco Bay Area” and pays homage to Peters Wright, the Bennington summer sessions at Mills College, Gloria Unti’s work with marginalized youth and Ruth Beckford in the community centers in the East Bay. Although she misstates that Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainer et al “travelled west” to dance with Halprin—Brown, Rainer, Robert Morris and Simone Forti were already on this coast, though soon to leave—Prickett captures the spirit of early troupes like Welland-Lathrop, Mangrove, the Moving Men and, more generally, the ferment from the 70s on which both drew upon and inspired a climate of political activism and visionary quest.

She examines some of Margaret Jenkins’ political threads and defines Jenkins’ role as the force that professionalized the scene, although I would argue that Jenkins created a magnet for dance that then generated new activity at new heights. Included was the dance of Joe Goode, who left the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company to start his own dance/theater troupe and contend with gender, identity, the status quo and AIDS. She pays lovely tribute to Joanna Haigood’s efforts to reclaim history, space and meaning through her site-specific work. She also gives Contraband, Keith Hennessey, Krissy Keefer and the Dance Brigade, and dance space per se, attention that is much-deserved.

Prickett’s study is only a beginning. She acknowledges that she has just touched upon the subject of the Bay Area, that artists are left out or merely mentioned. Frank Shawl and Victor Anderson’s pivotal role in the East Bay (Shawl/Anderson) is never mentioned, nor Lucas Hoving’s Performance Group, where he kept his radical past alive in Songs to Chile and other works. But Prickett has opened the path. Now other writers and scholars can further her examination of the body politics of grassroots dance here and elsewhere, and delve not only into the content and the context of political embodiment but its deep physical rhetoric and its role at each juncture of our history.

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This article appeared in the March 2014 issue of In Dance.

“Dance is not a way of depicting, but a way of thinking”1 —Tere O’Connor

I recently took a dance composition workshop with New York artist Jeanine Durning that really made me think—about thinking itself. Language is one form of thought, notes Durning, and another is bodily action, both of which reveal how we organize things. Over the course of a week, our process was to observe the structures of our thoughts in motion while not knowing where they would lead. Through practice periods of continuous moving, speaking and writing, we took notice not of what we hoped to say and do, but instead what we were actually saying and doing, before we had a chance to plan things out. Durning’s own practice answers the question, “If dance is unique, what is unique about it?” by asking dancers to begin before they are “ready” and remain in this nonstop process of activity, which, for her, are the minimum requirements to get started in the studio. From here, a rigorous practice of exercising our agency as movers by naming our expectations, clarifying what we were working on, and refining how we worked on it ensued. Durning sees choreography as the temporal organization of practice, performance and ongoing discovery of what it is we are working on—three elements that are not sequential but rather sit in a horizontal relation. In this way, our thinking is brought into conscious awareness.2

This experience began to clarify for me the notion of “choreographic thinking,” something I have been mulling over for a while. Appearing in various iterations in the contemporary dance world in workshops and texts by Tere O’Connor, William Forsythe, Erin Manning and Susan Rethorst, among others— not all those mentioned use this phrase—the notion stands as a voiced resistance to the misconception that dance needs ideas before choreography is realized, that thought precedes motion and that movement serves to express meaning. Instead, many align thinking itself with the process of moving, albeit in ways other than the dominant rational mode of cause and effect.

Choreographic thinking indicates the ways ideas arise in multiplicity during the process of moving. From this perspective, movement is the movement of thought not requiring something outside to motivate it—particularly not the planned execution of a singular concept, which closes down options.

Dancers are not the only ones who know that thought is integral to moving, perceiving, composing and performing. While privileging linguistic discourse over dance itself creates an undesirable hierarchy, keeping dance knowledge in the realm of the nonverbal also hinders the field by forming a closed system of those in the know. As Deborah Hay continues to advocate in her own texts and workshops, dancers must also write; it is imperative to our survival and to advancing the field. So how can we begin to articulate the thought processes that happen when making things, and how might these articulations open new ways of viewing, speaking and writing alongside dance practice and performance? With this desire, the April 3 Dance Discourse Project tackles the topic of choreographic thinking, looking at its various permutations and asking what benefit it offers to the field of dance. If our purpose as artists, scholars and activists is to remain in question—finding new ways of creating, relating, and ultimately living—then choreography might serve not to define our work so much as unground what we think we know so as to think and experiment in new ways. Below are some perspectives I have culled together; further reading can be found at counterpulse.org and dancersgroup.org on their respective Dance Discourse Project page.

Choreographer Susan Rethorst observes that, “Making is a form of thought itself, done with the body’s mind.”3 In A Choreographic Mind, she gives the example of crossing a busy street. If we translated the moves needed to get us across into the rational structure of language, it would be too late. Instead, there is a somatic intelligence that acts much quicker than the “cognitive, analytical, linguistic faculty that normally goes by the name of thought.” When asked to stand up and make something on the spot dancers often respond that they need to think about it first, but Rethorst’s discussion of movement games reveals that bodies understand direct, efficient connections that do not require preparation or linguistic translation. However, the choreographic mind is not mere instinct. To work with it, Rethorst has found talking necessary to the daily labor of her studio practice. While earlier in her career she subscribed to intuitive, nonverbal approaches to making dances, speaking has brought awareness to the assumptions she operates with so that she can actually work with them. While letting her body intelligence lead, language accompanies the process, bringing into further consciousness what she already knows, and what the dance itself knows and communicates to her. If mind is a way of functioning, then for Rethorst the “choreographic mind” is a specific heightening of the body’s mind through attention to and the articulation of relations, space, place, empathy and affect.

William Forsythe’s perspective is somewhat different. He refers to choreography as the realm of ideas, which he suggests can be detached from the body and exist as separate entities from which potentials for and organizations of action reside. His notion of the “choreographic object” sheds some light on how this might be approached. These objects are the prompts for choreographic thinking, and the way that choreography always rewrites itself anew. As he puts it, “Choreography’s manifold incarnations […] do not insist on a single path to form-of-thought and persist in the hope of being without enduring.”4 Choreography for Forsythe is a proposition to an event that elicits action and an environment of change. Its mechanism is to “resist and reform previous conceptions of its definition” so that positions of certainty are disrupted. Far from a singular path, “choreography elicits action upon action: an environment of grammatical rule[s] governed by exception, the contradiction of absolute proof visibly in agreement with the demonstration of its own failure.” Here, choreographic prompts serve to open the multiplicity of options available to bodies when moving without a singular trajectory to their solution. They “persist in the hope of being without enduring.”

Scholar Erin Manning, who works with Forsythe’s concepts, notes, “Choreographic thinking is the activation, in the moving, of a movement of thought. It expresses itself not in language per se but as the pulses across embodiments and rhythms, the durations and spatializations that create a ‘contrapuntal composition of complex relationships, patterns and trends.’”5 She further poses that such concepts be taken not just outside the body as Forsythe suggests, but into social and political realms as well. In Always More Than One, she cautions that for Forsythe, “choreography and dancing are two distinct and very different practices,” and choreography does not begin and end with the body. Manning calls her own embodied understanding of the “what else” of choreographic thought “incipient action,” or “preacceleration” that moves the relation of what is already underway but has not yet happened.6 Manning describes this phenomena across relations of minds and bodies as a “bodying-with” that activates “spacetimes of composition,” which she discusses eloquently in the example of tango, but could also be applied to contact improvisation or just moving with others. The dancer senses and is moved not by the directive of the step or the other but by the interval itself—the spaces of possibility between bodies.

“Affect,” a somewhat popular term at present, is a way to name what “arises in the midst of in-between-ness: in the capacities to act and be acted upon.”7 Here it becomes evident how dance and philosophy intersect as two disciplines of open-ended and visceral questioning, and it is not by coincidence that affect is the term Rethorst uses throughout her own text. But I’d like to return to thinking as perhaps a way to articulate this sense. As philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari write, “To think is to experiment, but experimentation is always that which is in the process of coming about—the new, remarkable, and interesting that replace the appearance of truth and are more demanding than it is. […] History is not experimentation, it is only the set of almost negative conditions that make possible the experimentation of something that escapes history.”8 Here, while steps and actions may be repeated, they only serve as twhe means for escaping their own choreographic boundaries. Perhaps the “choreographic thinking” exercised by moving alongside these artists and philosophers reveals the coming into form of structures already present and operational, just not yet within our conscious awareness. As we move and they present themselves, something different can also unfold. Choreographic thinking might then be what is both practiced and yet to come.

Dance Discourse Project #18: Choreographic Thinking
Thu, Apr 3, 7:30pm, Free, CounterPULSE
dancersgroup.org/presents/ddp

Footnotes: 1. Tere O’Connor and Gia Kourlas, “Much Ado About Nothing,” TONY, 12 April 2007.
2. Jeanine Durning, Movement Research Melt Works
hop, Gibney Dance, New York, 13 January 2014.
3. Susan Rethorst, A Choreographic Mind (2012).
4. William Forsythe, Choreographic Objects, http://synchronousobjects.osu. edu/media/inside.php?p=essay
5. Erin Manning, Always More Than One (2013).
6. Manning, “Incipient Action: The Dance of the Not-Yet,” in Relationscapes (2009).
7. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, ed., The Affect Theory Reader (2010).
8. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (1991)

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This article appeared in the March 2014 issue of In Dance.

MOVEMENT EXCHANGE is a San Francisco based non-profit that organizes service-focused dance exchanges to Panama with the objective of using dance and dance education as a tool for creating sustainable social change, both in the countries where the exchanges occur, and here at home.

This, I am a little bit ashamed to say, does not fit my mental model of what a dancer does. Even after knowing dancers who lived every kind of life imaginable under the mantle of “dancer,” as a dance enthusiast, my go-to mental model of a dancer is still of a tightly- wound bundle of energy, hurtling across a sprung floor with equal parts, grace and passion. Sometime this is as a singular being, sometime in unison, but always as a performer, and if not a performer, then as a teacher to performers. I needed to find out more about the model being developed by Movement Exchange, so I spoke with founder Anna Pasternak, whose own personal development as a dancer led to the formation of Movement Exchange.

Anna grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and attended San Francisco’s School of the Arts, where she was active in the dance program. Like many young dancers, when she left for college, dancing as a regular practice was put on hold. Because Anna went to high-octane academic atmosphere of Harvard, that hold was somewhat more pronounced. “At Harvard you spend all your time in the library. I majored in Anthropology which was my way to get to travel a lot and do a lot of research on dance. But I didn’t have much time to pursue dance,” she tells me. “I missed dance, but I found that the parts I missed were not the performance aspects, but the community. A lot of what Movement Exchange turned into was looking for that missing piece.”

Two years after graduation, Anna was employed by a non- profit in Panama, working in indigenous communities. Needing dance to be part her life, she began teaching dance to young people in orphanages and realized “that my relationship to dance was no longer based around the desire to perform, but around creating a community around dance.” “It was seeing how the kids transformed and changed. Dance really is a connector. I knew there were lots of dancers who had this same urge, but didn’t have an outlet for it.”

Anna went looking for the dancer’s version of Doctors without Borders, and when she didn’t find it, “I went out on a whim and created it.” Movement Exchange began “without really knowing what the components would be [except for these three things]…It would be about giving back, it would be sustainable, with local dance teachers being paid to teach year-round—this wouldn’t be a program of one-hit wonders…and it would be about dancers making a difference not only in Panama, but in their own communities when they returned.”

Because she already had the connections, Anna organized the first exchange to Panama in 2010 with 13 dancers from all around the United States between the ages of 17 and 50. They were people like her. People who believe dance is a lens to learn about the cultural fabric of another country, and can also be a tool for community engagement and meaningful social change.

Anna and those 13 “dance diplomats” spent eight days working with over 100 orphans and at-risk youth who, prior to this experience, “had never had dance education, or much arts education of any kind, or contact with foreigners, or experience with this kind of instruction.” The dancers taught whatever dance forms they practiced, “whether that’s ballet or belly dancing, hip hop, tap or salsa. Whatever their strength, that is what they teach to the children.”

The process was the point, yet the dance diplomats and their students needed a space to publicly celebrate and conclude this first part of the process. “I knocked on the door of the US Embassy and asked them for support and they agreed to pay for the rental of the National Theater of Panama.” Anna recognized that US Embassy has their own agenda, but that “the people there were sincerely passionate about making a difference in the lives of at-risk youth, as well as increasing cross-cultural understanding.” The idea of dance diplomacy carried some weight.

After eight days of work, 100 kids performed on the stage of the National Theater in front of a packed audience of 500 people. According to Anna, the impact was significant in the surrounding community for many reasons, not least of which was that “it was a free performance so it was attended by people who live in the neighborhood who don’t normally have access to their own theater because they can’t afford it.”

By the time the kids went on stage, the show had grown to include guests. The University of Panama’s dance company along with local dance companies performed and the dance diplomats choreographed their own piece. The children performed, and then watched the performances of the other companies.

For the kids, Anna saw two main benefits: “they got to perform and feel that sense of self-worth that they did something valuable and people came to the theater to see them…but they also sat in the wings watching these dance companies perform and were part of this dance community behind the scenes.”

Despite being physically and mentally exhausted after the first exchange, Anna knew it had to happen again. “It solidified my desire to build a movement behind this, because no one is doing this. No one is creating this avenue for dancers to give back in this constant, sustainable way.”

A key turning point in the growth of Movement Exchange came when Anna met up with fellow dancer Mei-Ling Murray back in San Francisco. Mei-Ling also grew up in the Bay Area and was a “classic bun-head” from the age of 6. A fervent student of ballet throughout her youth, she majored in Dance at the University of Arizona. While in school she studied abroad in Ghana where her understanding of what being a dancer means was transformed.

For Mei-Ling, dance “changed from performance art to cultural language. I was able to identify with so many amazing people in Ghana because of my dance background— it was like this colloquial invitation. So after college I had subsequent travels, and without even thinking about it, the method I took to immersing myself in a culture was to ask, ‘I’m a dancer, where are the other dancers? Let’s hang out!”

Despite attending a “wonderful dance program that was training me to become a really good dancer,” Mei-Ling felt somewhat disappointed on her return from Ghana because “there was nothing in that education about getting involved with community, about doing some outreach. Every single hour was spent on physical and technical training.”

With Mei-Ling’s aide, the program’s three components, which were the only things Anna was certain about at the beginning, have become the pillars Movement Exchange has been built on: Service, Sustainability and Exchange/Education. In the program, a dancer (and it can be any dancer, of any skill level) signs up for an exchange to become a dance diplomat and teach dance to orphans and at-risk youth in Panama as well as explore Panamanian culture. The fees dance diplomats pay for the exchange covers living expenses for the eight days they spend in country, but also pays for local instructors to continue teaching dance to the youth after the exchange has ended, so the dance instruction continues year round. For Dance Diplomats the exchange ends, but the concept of dance as an effective vehicle for creating social change is something they carry with them when they return to the United States.

Mei-Ling describes it as “empowerment on all fronts. The people who participate are empowered because they experience another country through the lens of dance. The children are empowered because they received the dance training, and they receive the connection and love and acknowledgement. The local instructors who Movement Exchange supports are empowered to use their skills to benefit their communities. And all components circle around to support each other.”

Although Movement Exchange holds regular open calls to organize exchanges with anyone who wants to attend, their biggest success, and the one they believe will be key to helping them scale up the model they’ve piloted in Panama, is the formation of Movement Exchange clubs on university campuses. Indiana University and the University of Utah both have very active chapters of Movement Exchange. Anna explains to me that “the model is to find amazing leaders in colleges and high schools and creating groups that change people’s relationship to dance, especially people who are going to become dancers after college. This is a way to remain engaged with dance… beyond going to your weekly modern/ ballet/jazz class.”

The experience with Movement Exchange may be the catalyst that changes their relationship to dance, but for Anna, “whether or not they continue with dance is less the point than whether or not the seed has been planted to be [a] life-long volunteer and civically engaged person.”

Movement Exchange forms the passion for service and dance with their dance diplomats while they are abroad so they continue that service here. “When they return we try to put them in touch with fantastic groups doing work here in the States to see if there’s a way they can help through dance.” One example Anna gives me is how Indiana University’s Movement Exchange club holds weekly dance classes for local chapters of the Boys and Girls Club and Girls Inc.

In the future Movement Exchange is planning to organize exchanges to India, and possibly Brazil, as well as continuing exchanges with their partners in Panama. Anna hopes to build a curriculum through this process, on cross-cultural exchange through dance. They are also going through the process of becoming a sustainable organization with the various logistical and administrative improvements, and most importantly, securing funding for the work to continue.

“Our focus has been making the program take off, excelling the program, expanding it,” Mei-ling tells me, “and now we have to focus a little bit on the operations side-by-side with the expansion.” Anna and Mei-Ling have been building a leadership team, making presentations to potential funders and will begin an Indiegogo campaign in March.

Towards the end of the conversation, I returned to my question of what it means to be a dancer, and said something to the effect that what they are doing is contrary to an image of dancers as a performing artist. Mei-ling disagrees with me, “What we’re doing isn’t in defense. We aren’t saying what performing artists do isn’t valuable, because it is immensely valuable. This is something different. Perhaps it’s because we’re from the Bay Area and had a socially conscious upbringing.”

Anna agrees, adding, “the question is how do you make the world a better place? If you’re a dancer, this is one way of doing that.”

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This article appeared in the March 2014 issue of In Dance.

THIS PAST DECEMBER I was selected as one of seven American choreographers to engage in a cultural exchange in China, a program of ZiRu Productions and Dancers’ Group—with financial support from the U.S. State Department and its Embassy in Beijing. The mission of the exchange is to build greater cross-cultural understanding and cooperation through dance education at universities in China. I proposed to teach Liquid Flow, a movement philosophy, improvisational technique class and compositional workshop that I have developed at Stanford University over the past 8 years.

First stop—Beijing Normal University (BNU)—an urban campus indistinguishable from its surroundings, located about an hour from the center of the city by cab. There are 200 universities in Beijing, all of them self-contained villages with eateries, mini-grocers and mobile phone stores, including a florist, and a good one, I was told.

The first thing I noticed about BNU is that people didn’t really pay me any mind, which surprised me. Having travelled quite a lot all over the world and having been stared at by people who haven’t seen too many Black folks, I had girded myself up for the curious onlooker. Nope. Students, all stripes, old and young, were shoulder to the wheel, hungry for an education, rushing by me on their rusty bikes, with nary a glance. Education in China is revered. It’s a god. Even dancers I met from the rural parts of China had heard of Stanford University.

The dancers at Beijing Normal were beautifully trained, although the focus of the school is to train dance educators. These dancers were not only wonderful movers and quick studies but they all possessed a very fluid dance style. I should have expected it.

Liquid Flow was born out of my desire to combine contemporary dance training with what I had learned from a little known but great teacher of T’ai Chi, Chi Kung and a rarely taught martial art style called Chinese Water Boxing. Exposure to these forms really changed my approach to dance. I found that the use of imagery, and the exploration and application of flow— physical, psychological, cognitive—to formal dance styles, as well as to vernacular movement in everyday life, not only interested me, but also dancers from different styles and traditions, athletes and scientists, designers and poets, beginners to advanced.

Through my own research and student interest in the concepts of flow, I have also applied concepts from thermodynamics, design thinking, cellular movement and wave theory to frame the continuum from pedestrian dancing to classroom dancing, to the stage. This approach to dance has led me to a career-long study and appreciation of the ‘thing beneath the thing,’ the fundamental and structural elements of dance. All dance. Unlike more Western styles of dance, and specifically jumping techniques that are seen in ballet, I want to know for example, how the Massai jump so high without hardly bending their knees? What is a plie?? Why plie?? How do we use gravity and weight sensing in various dance styles?

Despite my plans to share Liquid Flow with the students in China, the message I got from my translator, Mayu, (as relayed to her by the administration) was that they wanted steps, lots of them, the latest and greatest contemporary dance steps from the West. Please teacher.

I went to my hotel room that night and I worked on several hot combinations and I got up the next day and did not show any. I knew that I must give what I came to give: my technique using improvisational prompts, compositional strategies and ways of looking, doing, being that comprised Liquid Flow. I wanted to challenge the formidable technique they already had, to deepen their physicality and give them tools to look at dance training as a system of thought. Liquid Flow was in fact a way of thinking in addition to physical training. And most importantly, I was there to open their imaginations and to help them discover the unique dancer inside and outside of a dance context.

During the first class I noticed a tall, elegant, young-looking dancer, curiously delicate and impossibly long limbed. After class she approached me and introduced herself as a lecturer and dance scholar at the one of the most famous universities in China, Peking University. Her name was Jiajia Tong; Jiajia’s name holds multiple meanings; beauty, fortune and goodness. She extended her hospitality to me and insisted that I see where she studied and now taught. The architecture of Peking University (PKU) looked every bit like a mini Forbidden City and in fact was once an imperial palace. It is a refined campus, with a lake for ice-skating when it freezes over in the winter, a fancy hotel, a florist with daily flowers worthy of a wedding, a great restaurant, posh bar and renowned professional schools. Unlike the lively, crowded BNU, PKU on the Garden of Yan was hushed, surrounded by gates and a guard with white gloves. And right in the heart of Peking University, was the newly built Stanford Center.

After I met Jiajia, a different sort of cultural exchange began. From the start we finished each other’s sentences. We commiserated over the seeming invisible standing of dance in our respective universities, and we bonded over the fact that we had both had attended the universities that we taught in. On a personal level, she also had a doting but absent father who treated her like an eldest son instead of an only daughter. We both resisted being pigeon holed. Both of us are attracted to interdisciplinarity. We both see dance in a larger cultural context and we share a love of the theoretical, the poetic and syncretic, all in equal measure. We were like twins from across the world. Even her mother reminded me of my mother. Both of them are very social, in charge, supportive but living more than a little vicariously, through their daughters’ dance careers.

On a bracing cold day Jaijia took me to the Temple of Heaven. As we strolled arm in arm (something you see women do—taking your arm at the elbow), she pointed out common scenes of the locals: calligraphers copying sacred texts with a book in one hand, wielding a long handled brush dipped in water with the other; old men playing traditional instruments; groups of old women laughing.

She took me to the Zoo. That’s what they called this shopping area (for Chinese consumption only). We were met by The Grandmas to show us the best places. Oh, and you must have a guide. The Grandmas (that’s what Jiajia calls them), are the ladies her mother hangs out with to do daily morning exercise at Behei Park, for gossiping, for bargaining as sport at the Zoo.

I had heard about The Grandmas before I came to China from Caroline Chen who is writing her dissertation at UC Berkeley on the phenomena of these ‘dance clubs.’ They dance all over Beijing—under bridges, in temple parks, down alleyways, on patches of asphalt. They combine folkloric dances drawn from different regions in China with dance moves they find on YouTube, which then gets remixed as a routine and performed to some good ole Michael Jackson or accompanied by their own instruments. Imagine rounding a corner and witnessing 20 elderly women dancing up a storm at 10 o’clock at night. I asked Jiajia if it was dangerous for them to be out like that. And she laughed. I guess not.

Wherever we went, Jiajia related how the philosophy of Liquid Flow could be applied to traditional Chinese culture. I was incredulous. I was moved. I was grateful for these cultural translations. She led me through the Forbidden City, which seemed to be never ending. It was so strange to be able to look into the wedding suite of a royal. You stand behind a low barrier and you almost fall into that faded world. It’s easy to dream. You can hear the music.

Jiajia reminded me how the emperor was never allowed to leave the palace. “This rock garden would have been the great outdoors for the imperial family. See the holes in the rocks. We believe that these rocks are living entities. The openings allow the flow of energy around and through them.”

Next Stop: Tianjing University on a fast train 30 minutes from Beijing. After I taught my master class, they arranged for me to witness the rehearsal of two of their ethnic dance pieces. The first dance they performed from the Han Dynasty floored me. Twelve women with lilting heads and sidelong expressions with arms like scarves, swimming through the air, their feet drumming a hypnotic pattern… on drums placed around the floor. Almost at the climax of the polyrhythms, they start to sing. Good lord. I began to cry it was so astounding. The chair of the Dance Department—one of the foremost scholars of ethnic, folk and cultural dances in China—nodded at me. This was her life work.

China reportedly has 2,000 ethnic and folk dances. National, ethnic and cultural dance is required curriculum in dance departments across China. Thinking back to when I first came to BNU where they were asking for steps, as most dancers anywhere in the world would desire, I gained an essential insight. The Chinese have more content, more steps, than they know what to do with. Some dances are athletic and gymnastic, some use musical instruments or swords, fabrics, props. There are so many different types of dance and as many shoes. Going to the dance shoe store is like shopping at Nordstrom. There are dances that use masks or those that have codified facial expressions like the Han Dynasty dance. There are endless variations and possibilities. Just thinking about that makes me want to travel around China and dream of choreographies.

As to their desire to learn the western contemporary styles of dance, I wondered what could bring them more into the western contemporary milieu? The mindset of breaking, remixing and recombining. Compositional strategies from Liquid Flow. Liquid mind. What if they began to interpolate their folk dances in the same way that Nijinsky or Balanchine did? What if they looked at the way that African-American youth create new social dances through remixing of West African dance steps and what-have-you and have included quotations of that movement through African- American dances across generations?

Chinese dancers could do worse than to adopt the strategies of The Grandmas. They are not even considered dancers by the formal dance community. In fact, there are persistent complaints in the city about their use of boom boxes—noise pollution—since their studios are all outdoors.

I took a risk when I didn’t teach big dance phrases. Would Liquid Flow work as a pedagogical approach in a distinctly different cultural context with well-trained dancers in an insular dance world? Instead, I brought the same fundamental exercises that I use in Liquid Flow classes at Stanford and with my performance troupe, Chocolate Heads.

One example of a series of exercises in class is that I have students lie on the floor on their backs and then onto their sides and stomach: to enact swimming on the floor to energize the core body and activate the limbs from their center to the edge of their kinesphere. When they stand up, I ask them to swim on one leg in all directions like a standing starfish. Change legs. For the second part of the exercise, I ask them to imagine themselves as a flower, a specific flower. In 12 counts, they grow from the floor up onto a single leg (the stem) not to be executed like a de?velope?, but as a unique flower pulling up from the ground through their innards and out through the fingertips, blooming into space. Follow that by decaying into the floor with just as much sustainment and articulation. Bloom and decay right and left sides. Sometimes I ask the onlookers to guess the flower they made. You would be surprised how often people guess the image.

What the students achieve is one of the hardest things to do in dance: to stand on one leg and extend your limbs in a coordinated fashion. This exercise makes it possible for everyone to construct a flower—beginners to advanced students—with integrity and beauty. Like magic, they have created themselves in space. This is just one example of Liquid imaging and sensating to put dancers at the helm of their dance creation. My mission is to continue to innovate improvisational techniques as tools to articulate the human instrument for unique expression. My pedagogical approach to technique is to make it as open, easy, accessible, joyous and non-threatening as possible – to bring out each persons own innate creative urges/impulses and instinctual knowledge. I seek to create a surprise, a gift, a roundabout way to enter and make a dance. My colleague, choreographer and horse-dancer JoAnna Mendl Shaw used to invoke a particular kind of non-thinking and even non-dancing framework to bring dance out of dancers. I am developing my own Liquid Flow methodology to do the same.

After four days of teaching I saw the BNU students drawing from these elemental exercises to create complex movement vocabulary and choreography with a creative force that would have been difficult to illustrate solely on my own body.

One of last day at BNU, one very shy dancer thanked me and in broken English said. “Since the time I was a little girl I have been told, do this, don’t do that. You should do this. You shouldn’t do that.

For the first time in my life, I feel like I know what to do from the inside. Xiexie—thank you teacher.”

And what more could any teacher want?

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This article appeared in the March 2014 issue of In Dance.

CAN WRITTEN DECLARATIONS adequately express dance? The response: depends on the writer and the reader. Words on a page might be more definitive than movement on stage, yet the former can be misinterpreted as well, in an attempt to reveal the many meanings of a dance. I imagine that the best of dance prose hopes to imbue the reader with perspective to better appreciate the multifaceted scenarios of the moving form.

Assuredly, writing about dance is an opportunity to discover the ways in which choreographers think, translate, refresh and explore an ever-evolving spectrum of ideas rendered physical— with their limitless interpretations.

Creating a dance often starts with words crafted for a grant proposal that describe the seeds of inspiration. This language might explain a new collaboration, a re-staging of a classic work, or a concept that looks to move forward what is a dance. Often, grant proposals are written well before one steps into the studio, which can make the writer/artist nervous, wondering if he/she will still want to make the work in the future.

It’s science that thought impacts future actions, and words, as representatives of those thoughts, are no less potent. Perhaps this is why artists can be reluctant to
state their intent, wanting to safeguard their imaginative impulses, to keep the artistic dreams pure. Yet, the art of crafting a work is formed by practice, laboring deeply and intimately with the chosen form. Anyone who has had the good fortune to make art understands the inherent waves of trial and error and discovery attached to the process. Countless hours spent in a studio will assuredly provide plenty of movement material to consider and, yet, maybe a fraction of that information, the actual steps, the score, will make it to the finished piece.

As you can tell, I’ve challenged myself to consider how the written word impacts dance. While it is both a simple and yet complex concept, the theme emerges within the articles featured this month, that inform on a variety of aesthetics, milestones, new projects and even a book review.

For 40 years, Margaret Jenkins has imbedded the written word masterfully in her dance works. I think she would be the first to admit how blessed she is to work with an incredible array of artists that contribute to her intricate dances. Other than movement, language always seems to make a stellar appearance in Jenkins’ work, and her long-time collaborator, poet Michael Palmer, repeatedly introduces an earthy richness to many of her classics, like my favorite, First Figure. Rachel Howard speaks with Jenkins to reveal how her past is making an appearance within her latest work, Time Bones.

The wonderful part about laying the foundation for a new dance work or project or both, is that the journey—from idea, to the studio, to placing the work in front of an audience—will be formidable, and provide the frame to describe what worked or didn’t and what was discovered that one could never have imagined. This is the information that returns to the page, illuminating a final report to a funder or entering a journal for future reflection and introspection, or provide the launch for a next endeavor.

Dances often end with words that describe what was observed—from critics and the ever-present postings that occur with social media. It’s simplistic, yet important to state, that this writing has power. It can impact and even shape a career. The motivations of writing about dance and seeking the truth to illuminate non-verbal moments are many, and will always be debated as to who holds the truth. Most of the artists I know would assert that they want an audience to have multiple interpretations of their work.

March is filled with hundreds of opportunities to write about dance; make incandescent words that inspire and illuminate.

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This article appeared in the March 2014 issue of In Dance.

Once upon a time, there lived a brave warrior, heir to the throne of Manipur. The King of Manipur raised his heir to be a fearless warrior, a skilled politician and a wise ruler. The people of the kingdom came to love the courageous and kind heir to the throne. Word of the warrior’s prowess traveled far and wide, reaching even the ears of the valiant Arjuna. Intrigued, he set across India to find the legendary royal champion.

But this warrior had one weakness: she was not beautiful. Or so she thought.

One day this warrior, Citrangada, came knocking at my door in the form of a sweet faced, world renowned tabla player with a rascally laugh and a dark eyed stunning ghatam player, aka Abhijit Banerjee and Somnath Roy.

Abhijitji and Somnathji were working on a staging of poet/ writer Rabindranath Tagore’s Chitrangada (pronounced Chee-tra- NGA-da and spelled Citrangada in Indonesian). They brought a tempting collaboration to my husband, Dewa Berata and myself and we decided to bring Citrangada to Gamelan Sekar Jaya, where we are in residence until 2015. South Berkeley seemed as good a place as any for a piece about a woman warrior. Her story fascinated me, a powerful warrior, heir to the throne, confident as all get up, beloved by her people, who nevertheless falls apart when confronted with her own assumptions of beauty.

When Citrangada saw Arjuna, like so many women, her heart was all a flutter. She was horrified to realize how unladylike she was and was quite convinced Arjuna could never find her attractive. Having fallen madly in love with Arjuna, Citrangada beseeches the goddess of love to make her beautiful. The wise goddess advises her against the idea but finally relents. Citrangada gives up her life to make herself beautiful in Arjuna’s eyes, or as it turns out, in her own eyes…

YEARS AGO, when I began the process of creating dance, it didn’t come instinctively to me. Trained in the strict traditions of Balinese and Javanese dance, and steeped in the exquisitely complex structures of gamelan music from infancy, raised in a Japanese Indonesian American family that is equal parts tough and love, the idea of freely creating things, trusting my instincts, knowing where to find inspiration was infinitely more daunting than memorizing a 20 minute traditional piece and performing in front of thousands of people.

I was fortunate that years ago, when I first began to create choreography, an internationally renowned composer, I Made Arnawa (pronounced I Mad-ey Ar-na-wa), was my first creative partner. His gentle manner allowed me to confide my feelings of inadequacy. Step one: admit reservations to self and collaborator.

Pak Arnawa’s formula for creative work, it turns out, is deceivingly simple.

-Meditate regularly to create peace in the mind. Nothing fancy, not a retreat, no incense needed (though a useful tool if available), no special meditation cushion. Just sit and breathe. Easier said than done.
-Take one day a week and be with nature. Practice receiving things gently, not always pushing forward to ‘achieve’ something. Sometimes inspiration is but a whisper in a dream, a silent flock of birds leaving footprints in the sky. It took some practice to be quiet enough to hear the sound of an idea.
-Experiment experiment experiment. This was a hard one. Trusting the body and mind to move outside that which already existed. My own mind and body were at a loss when asked ‘What happens next?’

It turns out, it isn’t just three bullet points, and I lean on people all the time. But I always go back to Pak Arnawa’s advice: breathe, allow nature to nurture you, experiment.

The beautiful and loving dancers in Sekar Jaya dance every new move, no matter how ‘weird,’ with the fullest of their spirit, firing up the full potential of the imagination. Their smiles are another lesson for me: when feeling vulnerable, work first with people you love and who love you. There’s nothing like those first moments of development when an idea is just being born. One harsh word will send the whole thing into retreat. One smile is the sun, the earth and the rain…

AT THIS VERY MOMENT, Dewa, the artists of Sekar Jaya and I are in the incredible process of finding Citrangada. Abhijit and Somnath are listening giving input from their homes in India via email, dropbox and facebook.

I can see Citrangada in my mind now. Three months before she will appear on stage, she’s beginning to take form. She’s emerging through the complexity of Balinese interlocking gamelan, songs in Bengali and the movement of the human body. Our artists are their own warriors, tireless, graceful spirits. They are proof that the arts can soar across boundaries of ethnicity, race, politics and economics.

Freeing up the spirit and mind to absorb the beauty around me then capturing it back into someone else’s body is one way the arts have connected me to those around me. When I am hoping that a flash of inspiration will come through, it appears on someone else’s body, in someone else’s face and eyes, and I realize – inspiration has arrived.

Citrangada’s story is not a happy ending. It is a powerful ending. With the help of Arjuna and the goddess of love, she realizes it is her true warrior spirit that is divine and beautiful. There is still the problem of already having traded in the warrior Citra for a Cover Girl Citra. She’s lost her true strength.

I won’t tell you how the story ends because you have to read Rabindranath Tagore, the Mahabharata or see the performance yourself, but I can still share the lesson I’ve learned from her:

Sometimes in this crazy life we need others to help us not only find what is inside us, but to see why it is inside of us. Citrangada has reminded me that the answers to many questions come quietly and can only be heard when the mind isn’t packed with digital chaos. She’s reminded me of how deeply connected I am to my fellow artists. She’s reminded me that questions of beauty (Straighten? Curl? Bleach? Dye? Lighten? Tan? Toned? Voluptuous? Longer eyelashes or thicker?) and power (President? Chief Justice? Lead musician in a Balinese gamelan?) have been here for two thousand years.

Citrangada figured it out. Surely we can too.

Sometimes just before I wake up in the morning, I can hear her rustling around in my dreams. I think she’s here now, and I hope she’s here to stay.

Gamelan Sekar Jaya, under the direction of Emiko and Bapak I Dewa Putu Berata will be presented by Dancers’ Group and World Arts West in the Rotunda Series at SF City Hall on March 7th. Citrangada will premiere at ODC Theater on April 4 and 5. A performance with a simple meditation guided via Skype to Bali with Pak Arnawa will be at the Asian Art Museum on April 6, and Sekar Jaya’s first performance with the SF Symphony will be at Davies Symphony Hall June 12-15. After that? To Bali to give thanks for 35 amazing years of Gamelan Sekar Jaya. gsj.org

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This article appeared in the March 2014 issue of In Dance.