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Performance as Practice
The performance practice for Whizz is "What if every cell in the body has the potential to distinguish loyalty and disinterestedness (in the loyalty), at once?" Most dancers have an intimate knowledge of loyalty in their relationship to the dance being performed. But the choreography of Whizz is structured to undermine attachment to that kind of loyalty. This is where disinterestedness enters the picture. "What if disinterestedness repositions the frame so that the dancer's loyalty is to the moment rather than to the dancing?" In this way, both loyalty and disinterestedness should govern the performance of Whizz.
I recently devised a baby, button, and stick analogy to help conceptualize how my performance practices work. Imagine observing a baby who is strong enough to sit up. Baby picks up a button and almost immediately the button finds its way to Baby's mouth. Baby either spits it out, chokes on the button, or swallows it. What we see is spontaneous, visceral, and predictable. Baby and the button symbolize "being" in the moment. When the button is put in the mouth it disappears from sight and becomes an invisible part of Baby. We see Baby.
The Zen approach to life tells us that "being" in the moment is not necessarily a great thing however it is all there is. Performance as a practice suggests to me that there can be more to the moment than just "being" in it.
Imagine now that Baby picks up a little brown stick. Baby moves it erratically through the air. There is no clue to the path or movement of the stick. Baby touches, pokes, bites, frames, waves, points, or drops the stick. The stick can always be picked up again. Options abound. Baby and the stick symbolize an extension of the self - territory gained, pliable, and visible. The observer notices a greater totality to the world of Baby, beyond its "being."
The nature of my performance practice is analogous to the baby's handling of a stick, but in its place I hold a linear thought, postulated as a self-perpetuating question. Within this construct, the self extends through that linear thought with the purpose of noticing possible worlds beyond the physical choreography of a dance. The question stimulates the body's curiosity and responsiveness. The dancer is thus decentralized and continuously repositioned in relation to time, space, and other.
I feel instant gratification when guided by a practice while performing choreography. This feeling reflects the psychology of the American consumer tradition. I am rewarded with an immediate sense of self-renewal, cohesion, accretion, and good conduct. I am reassured by the rules prescribed by the choreographer that includes my power to direct the flow of time. Like the consumer in a market, I am aware of my limits: how much pressure can I apply to that direction without irrevocably damaging the whole process? The limitations are the hot spot of perceptual activity, where the fieriest experimentation can be practiced.
I was invited to choreograph a dance, Whizz, for Mikhail Baryshnikov and the six-member White Oak Dance Project. I also choreographed Single Duet for Misha and myself. The opportunity to work with such sophisticated, versatile, and intelligent dancers was an exceptional privilege. I toured with them for six weeks in the Fall, 2000, guest teaching, talking to the public, and dancing with Misha in Single Duet. I also watched nearly every performance of Whizz and copied notes to give the company members afterwards. My observations were primarily directed to how they were performing the practice for Whizz, and not how they were doing the movements. Their practice determined their perceptual field, and from my perspective it was the most interesting element to observe on stage. The purpose of my feedback was ultimately to show how the inclusion of a performance practice could help loosen the tyranny of the myth of the dancer as a single coherent being - a basic element in dance training in the west. The effects of this idea can best be observed in the photographs in New York's Dance Magazine, where images of erectile dancers follow one another, page after page. My vision of the dancer, through the intervention of performance as a practice, is as a conscious flow of multiple perceptual occurrences unfolding continuously.
I contrasted Whizz with Lucinda Child's Concerto, another dance in the PastForward repertory. I had watched the company perform Concerto for six weeks, from the wings or from the house. I can still hear myself thinking, "Why am I so fascinated?" What follows are some of the notes I recently sent to the dancers.
The five strongest elements of Concerto are:
1. a tightly designed choreographic grid that punctuates its formal rigor;
2. its appeal to our desire to turn musical sensibility into a visual analogue-in this case, the power of Henryk Gorecki's ferociously driven Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings that sets the dancers in motion;
3. the choreographic balance between a strong visual geometry and the assertiveness of its persistence in motion;
4. its choreographed physicality expressing a classical, transcendent model rooted in traditional dance training;
5. and its ability to share with the audience a sense of clearly established tasks leading to the accomplishment of definite goals-through its dramatic display of speed, repetition and endurance.
By contrast, the five strongest elements of Whizz are:
1. a structure that erases causality;
2 . the independence of the dancer's physicality from the electronic music score, Alvin Lucier's Clockers;
3. an instantaneous and collaborative interplay of time and space that is the primary force in determining any given performance of Whizz, rather than the three dimensional body's preeminence in the choreographic design;
4. the dancer's spontaneously determined response to the moment, which suspends the viewer's attention and brings a sense of vulnerability to the performance;
5. and, a feeling of unity which is not modeled on any narrative, or visual cohesiveness and thus resists interpretation.
Concerto's complex and subtle template requires a sense of mastery (and loyalty) and thus a precise execution of its movements is needed for its' implied narrative to unfold. Whizz's progression is unforeseeable and the dancer is not the embodiment of a pre-existing design, but rather the author of a multiplicity of instances within the choreographic structure. Consequently each dancer's ability to manifest this, suggests his or her own music, alongside the electronic score.
My work can be traced in the questions it poses and the answers it rejects. What if performer and audience could learn to distinguish milliseconds of movement? Would that help us to realize the past and the future in the present? Would that then provide a more substantial role for the performer and the audience in the experience of dance? And, what if there are no answers to turn into history?
Note: I wish to thank Rino Pizzi for his editorial help.
A version of this article will appear in Dance Theatre Journal, Volume 17 Number 2 www.dancetheatrejournal.co.uk
[_writings and notes]