In the program for BLEED I have stated that I will post these author’s notes on the blog as a place where people may leave their thoughts about the work or the process. Please also read Jenn Joy’s wonderful recent blog post, Requiem Ascending.  Above we have one of Paula Court’s amazing photos of the work.

BLEED is the culminating work of a two-year project during which I constructed three other pieces, Secret Mary, poem and Sister, all from very different source material and each with an entirely different cast. I then collapsed these into this fourth work simultaneously remembering and forgetting the previous dances. All eleven of the magical performers from the other works are here yet the movement material is gone. Ghosts of the other dances resonate through the new work and shape its form but they are subterranean and exert their pressure on this new construction from the caves of memory.

The ephemeral — overly romanticized in dance history in my opinion — is an actual tool for me and is integral to my process. In this expanded version of a concept that has always been central for me, erasure is a form of construction. Each image or section of a dance is absent in the next, but its essence remains to color the forthcoming events. I craft these wafts of memory into my choreography privileging them over the recapitulation of dance movements. Because inference, essence, quality, reference and affect seem to be some of the purveyors of meaning in dance, I long ago ceded any desire for the expression of specific ideas to the ambiguous contours and endless associative pathways of the choreographic mind.

This work is sparked by my immersion in the poetics of dance and the information I have gleaned from 30 years of wrestling with its indeterminate qualities. My experience with crafting dances has been a journey away from the exigencies of definition or resolution that might be useful in the construction of “cogency”. I have moved decidedly towards abstraction and its potential to mirror consciousness. Contradictory impulses coexist in these temporal constellations. A search for singularity of meaning gives way to a complex weave of disparate elements. I work with a willfully convoluted palette where recognizable imagery and the anomalous enjoy equal value. I am not looking to shape hidden stories into dance but rather to understand how the sequencing of events accrues meaning in choreography. The viewer joins me in the definitions of the parts but I must provide a structural frame that allows for this and perhaps promotes the dislodging of memories in the viewer in order that they might comingle with the images of the dance. People’s projections are braided with my construction to finalize the work.

I am conflicted about author’s notes, so forgive me this indulgence. I am just attempting to help the viewer come on board with what might feel like an enigmatic project. The intense complexity of living on earth right now finds a good friend in dance. Spending some time with an information system that does not hope to deliver messages but rather acts as a container for multiple individual responses, might prove to be an antidote to the polarizing dogma that holds our world in its grip.

Thank you for coming to see our work and the work of others engaged in dance, this fragile, yet powerful form. I would love to hear from you. You can go to our process blog where I will repost these notes and where you can leave your own thoughts – http://bleedtereoconnor.org/

Mary Read in Secret Mary

Jenn Joy: Hello from the still glittering Brooklyn snow. I have been reading my notes from the last rehearsal of poem and Secret Mary in that vacuous hall as piles of supplies for Sandy moved in and out of the adjacent sanctuary and thinking back to the performances.

Secret Mary feels to me so much like a series of shifting landscapes. The dancers establish perimeters through their initial spacing and then amplify the boundaries as they side step, spatially demarcating the choreographic terrain, but then as I watch it seems that the topography is also embodied as if the dancers play with level—standing, bending over, lifting, carrying, lying down—as so many shifting altitudes within the piece. Does landscape or topography enter into your thinking about the composition?

Tere O’Connor: I think dance is an act of traversing expanses of thought. Through moving, internal landscapes unfurl and register as trajectories in space. As a director, I am aware of shifting landscapes and suggested architectures that the human body references. My perspective on choreography reveals an organic dialogue with poetic space—an ongoing slide show of invisible architectural blueprints—shifting, growing, shrinking in hallucinatory ways around the inhabitants of the stage space. I attempt to order this multitude of shifting spaces to create kinetic reactions in the viewer. This is accomplished by directing the gaze of the performers and their intention. I design the differentiation of their reach, alternately aiming their extremities to draw large lines in the space or refer to a use of the arms that evokes manual labor or gesticulation. There are many other subtle tools of construction to draw the eye to spatial differentiation, manipulating the viewer’s eye to see the human figure now in an inferred domesticated space and now contending with the monolithic proportions of the theater and so on. A subterranean drama is created that exerts pressure on the dance yet it is difficult to trace and acts as a second kinetic layer parallel to the dynamics of the movement itself, modulating in and out of harmony with it. There is also a relationship to modernist applications of the stage space that informs my work. Since most of that work is in dialogue with the rectilinear, diagonals and lines and circles are willfully incorporated as generic ground zeros from which I launch into more anomalous spatial forays.

Jenn: How do you describe the quality of the movement in this work? Against the crystalline language within poem, Secret Mary evokes a different kind of physicality—one that feels more individuated, more specific to the performers, more questioning in its relation to traces of gender and sexuality. How would you describe this physicality? How much comes from the dancers or from your direction? And here I remember commenting at the first interrogation and devynn countering to say that this is not the way their dancing/movement looks…

Tere: This is a big question so I will provide some tidbits that may get us closer to an answer.

The physicality of Secret Mary comes in large part from the dancers as they contributed much to the movement creation. They have a lot of training, but also a strong sense of self-awareness that allows their pre-trained bodies to recalibrate the more “sophisticated,” acquired embodiments they have mastered. The background tension between their impulses and mine is a tacit force in the work, but we meet on harmonious terrain as well. We did a lot of improvisation as a way of thinking together and in the process there was a breeching of boundaries, creating an atmosphere of multiplying choices. Improvisation plays a role both in the development of the material and in the structuring of the work. Sometimes they improvise and I extract movement and shape it further as a way of bleeding more information from the material. I would place a new focus on the improvisation or they would and we continued to work that way to “thicken” the material. In the finished work there are a number of places where they are fully improvising.

Somewhat different from poem where I select a narrower movement realm, a larger spectrum of styles and movement individuation are incorporated into Secret Mary. There is no lexicon for the work that restricts its elements yet in the final edit I am making decisions that shape the work and these come from a different part of the mind than that used to design poem. I restrict the movement realm for some works, and others are more open. This is not a statement of any sort, just an aspect of fluidity from work to work. I am not looking to land on a single modality. It is characteristic of my work to incorporate many different styles of dance with their attendant histories, as divergent as they may be. It was wonderful for me to be able to stripe the work with the ballet training of Ryan and Tess’s deep commitment to improvisation and everything in-between. But really the discussion isn’t about the styles used at all. I am thinking more about the tensile structure of a dance and its qualitative modulations over the arc of a work. The surface of a dance is simply material for the internal motor of a work to render itself visible on. The style of movement matters only to a degree.

The movement spectrum in all my work is a polyglot experience, where continual hybrid manifestations in the form of diverse movement clusters are placed in close proximity or blended into each other with no effort made to define their relationship. Their coexistence promotes syncretic systems of meaning production. It is not about erasing the singularity of the components but framing them in relation to each other. This is a method I use both for making the works and structuring them.

The people in my work are not always “being human” nor do I perceive them exclusively that way. They shift from being people to dancers to ideas to qualities to graphic elements to absences to potentialities to characters to themselves and on and on. The intentions of the work and of its inhabitants are in a state of constant shift throughout its temporal unraveling.

I have been dealing with gender in my work since the day I started. I don’t want to engage with it as a topical element; it is a background condition. I have always wanted to live in a place where fluid gender and androgyny were a given. I prefer to create an androgynous atmosphere where the performers shift from masculinity to femininity without question and more importantly without any political proclamation. There is a deep, almost childish desire to be past this issue in my work. Many people who see this combo of poem and Secret Mary remark on the androgyny which makes me happy but isn’t something that is so prominent for me. It is partially that I am a lucky enough to have these cool young people offer their expansive selves to my work.

Jenn: How do you imagine the work of the gaze or vision within this piece? What happens when the dancers become voyeurs within the piece, even momentarily?

Tere: I think the word “gaze” causes an explosion of misunderstandings, so I will speak to how it exists in this work. One of the more important elements I am trying to learn about in constructing dances is how to harness the viewers’ internal dialogues with the work. Each audience member is processing at a different rate. Some are trawling along with the work and others are frozen at junctures they still need to take in. The dancers’ stopping and watching the others is a prompt to the viewer. “You are in this experience doing what I am doing right now.” It is the dancer as audience member creating a transitional space that makes the viewer’s mind visible on stage.

I also have a great love for the anonymous “supernumeraries” of life; all the people you don’t deal with at the airport or in any crowd who are just there. The easy disregard that we have for those people and for their full stories somehow enhances the “protagonist” stature of those engaged in action. The audience plays that role as they are not revealing their histories but witnessing ours…for now.

Jenn: I have an almost illegible note that says “impossible vision” which I think refers to the impossibility of seeing everything that is happening at once. Can you speak about the dense synchronicity or simultaneity within the work? Does this piece have any specific counter-points/references/influences of particular films?

Tere: I think the dense synchronicity that you mention is born of the “everything” aesthetic that I have worked with from early on. It also comes from the idea of the audience as editor. I am placing them in an expanded role urging them to make selections and to take note that they are already creating identifications and references without my understated request. Being subtly forced into choosing what one sees can bring into consciousness the fact that they are already making selections. I don’t work with causalities, yet a free-flowing, abstract choreographic sensibility moves us through many consonances and dissonances. I can’t separate out thematic information and I don’t want to, so the choreography is a network of possible relationships between the elements inside a work. Unlike practitioners of the aforementioned modernist aesthetic I don’t search for thematic presences to make abstractions of. The audience may or may not look for a singular through-line or theme but that is part of the porousness of this form and one of my beloved ideas about dance. One of the root metaphors I am engaging with in the creation of choreographies is the relationship of the force of human control and the involuntary effects of nature upon us. When things align or are in agreement for a moment we notice them because we see them as more valuable. Like when you are driving in a car and you wait for a tree you see down the road to line up with a pole further away. It is so fulfilling and momentary when it hits and so sad to lose. It feels like you and nature coming together but it is really just the car moving forward.

Jenn: What is the value of illumination in the work? And here the secrets of Mary hidden in so many illuminated manuscripts feels not only like a bad pun on my part, but also a way to ask about the varying textures of light within the work. How do you think about light in relation to illumination/vision/knowledge production with the piece? Tess’s opening solo feels quite spectacular with the strobe-effect but then the lighting becomes subtle, minimal, as a backdrop for the idiosyncratic gestures and pairings.

Tere: In this instance lighting is a manifestation of architectural ideas. Since Secret Mary is simultaneously a piece about experimentation and a paean to the early stages of making, I wanted the theatrical realm to be one of spare theatrics. Upon arrival at the rehearsal space that we made the piece in, generously provided through a space grant from the Lower Manhattan Cultural CounciI, I was shocked to find a long rectangular floor wedged into an office space. I felt that initial impact must ring through this whole experience. I wanted the rectangle to be invisibly present as all architectural imprints are in dance. In fact, they are dancing on an invisible replica of the rectangle in the performance overlaid onto the stage itself. The light hits, revealing the rectangle on the floor for a second and fades slowly when the dancers splat themselves upon the floor. They only leave the imagined rectangle once when they walk over to the side and stand in the blue light. This shape will ring out all the way into the set design for Bleed.

At the beginning of the piece there is a “lighting storm.” I was playing with an idea of the annunciation trying with theatrics to bring that forth and hopefully mitigate the inevitable religious connotations associated with the name Mary. One film (to answer your previous question) that was stuck in a crevice of my mind and became dislodged here, is the thrilling Je Vous Salue Marie by Jean-Luc Godard which is a revisiting of the immaculate conception featuring a young girl, Mary, who works in a gas station with her dad. In a certain way inspiration is an immaculate conception. So I wanted there to be a moment of hyperbolic heavenly creation to begin, where the lights are very present and then recede to general stage light except for a couple of moments. Lighting pushes us towards the obvious only to leave us without that for the remainder. I have returned to a place where I want dance to be the protagonist of the work and movement to be the generator of everything.

Jenn: And what of the silence? Of the emphasis on breath and sounds of the dancing itself?

Tere: The dual-purpose of braiding process and product in this project, equates stages of making with the character of each piece. Secret Mary was the first dance created for this project and is of course very precious for us. It is imbued with threshold moments, from the inchoate instinctual beginnings of making to the blind first stabs at shaping and asserting “knowledge” onto the material. The dance places the audience inside the terse atmosphere that characterizes the beginning stages of making something. It is an undecorated space created to evoke the hard-edged plainness of beginning and to create an aesthetic from that.

Jenn: Can you speak about your work as mentor and teacher within this particular work or as it connects to your choreographic practice?

Tere: My work as a teacher and mentor is present in this work as one of the most fulfilling aspects of my life. Over my career I have had phenomenal dancers associate themselves with my work and at all levels there is a constant elliptical transference of influence culled from the experience of moving together. The earliest memory of this and the first time I took note of the weight of this in dance was at the start of my 13 year dancing relationship with Nancy Coenen who remains a great friend. She was someone who I so admired in college. I tried do dance like her. When she said she would be in my work I was thrilled. She and I danced in my first duet Boy, Boy, Giant, Baby in 1985. It was the first work I made after school that wasn’t a solo for myself. She embodied a kind of self-deprecating royalty—a female Pere Ubu ricocheting between real emotional discovery and cartoon exaggeration. She was a brilliant mover. I would teach her the movement and then she would “Nancy” it in super subtle ways and we spent our rehearsal in this pendulum. We created a really nuanced embodied vocabulary for a moment, together, never really stating it but daily passing it back and forth until its authorship was indistinguishable. Ever since that moment I have looked for that in the dancers who grace my work with their presences and I have found it in abundance. Ryan and devynn and Mary and Tess are the next in a line of special beings I have been surrounded by. They are all very clear artists who are committed to investigation as a given in their work. Like all the generous artists I work with they are open to something occurring without knowing what it will be like. This blending of influences is so subtle and intimate. It is an agreement to be with each other in ways that stand outside cultural norms, in the U.S. at least. It is an iteration of the same process by which a viewer breeches my choreography with their projections and hopefully finds a quietly receptive network.

Teaching started out as a way of making money but quickly evolved into a necessary engine for my making. It is a way of staying connected to younger generations of makers. I lead students through a morass of contradictory realities that must find a poetic restructuring through investigation. I feel obligated to ask the same complex questions of myself that I present to students and mentees . Even more importantly I must withstand the ground shaking challenges they launch that strafe my certitude. I have had interactions with thousands of students over the years. Whether it is one of my dancers or a student who took a one week long workshop, their pronouncements and physical answers float in my mind forming an important part of the constellation of elements that comprise my dance making. Once I read an essay by a retired gay porn star who wrote that all the men he slept with were with him in every subsequent experience. They provided an erotic anchor for the amplification of sexual experience. Not blessed with this level of sexual good fortune I will content myself with parallel experience in the making of dances.

Jenn: A final question, perversely perhaps, I wanted to ask about the initiating prompt last… what did you see during the very first run after the dancers were instructed to make the work?

Tere: I always start working by moving. I don’t start with an idea. I don’t translate ideas into dance. I dance to engage a parallel discussion with the world of ideas and ultimately to unearth an umbrella of meaning that will serve as the container for a given work. This prompt was an extrapolation of that premise.

On the first day I said to the dancers “Ok lets run the piece which is 35 minutes long.” They improvised a work and attempted to dissect its make-up, to extract information. The process was an exercise in reading dance and immersing ourselves in a sensibility that favored choreographic systems. After many days of talking we began to build a new work out of the embers of those discussions. We did not try to replicate the first version they danced. We started rebuilding with ideas unearthed by dancing.

The Hudson Movement

In 1981 I had a beautiful boyfriend from Italy named Enzo Cosimi. He loved me very much and I him.  He was studying in New York for two years at the Cunningham studio when we met.  Together we learned about dance and sex and art and film. We were both in the early stages of becoming choreographers and found support in each other for our individualist natures.  For the next decade I lived for part of each year with him in Rome.  One day as we were transferring from one bus to another at Piazza Argentina in the elegantly chaotic center of Rome I said to him, “I don’t think Judson is so important for me.”  The aforementioned love appeared to drain from his face as though he’d been hit with a tranquilizer dart. I realized in that moment that I was treading in dangerous waters and I thought it best to keep those thoughts to myself for a time.  So I tried to shut up for years as I watched Judson come in and out of focus, its mutable definitions appropriated by artists and producers and many dance critics as a catch phrase for  “alternative” dance.  The enormous surge of Judson in the last ten years, perhaps due in part to Baryshnikov’s Past Forward experiment on the White Oak Dance project, in addition to many other factors had me asking – are we still here? Have we not assimilated this information?

Back in the early 80’s, as we traversed the lengths of Soho where galleries resided at that point, Enzo and I were both dazzled by- and critical of – the mega-paintings of Julian Schnabel, Enzo Cucchi, Robert Longo, Frank Stella, Elizabeth Murray, Susan Rothenberg, Jennifer Bartlett and so many others.  Molissa Fenley, Dana Reitz, Trisha Brown, Laura Dean and Lucinda Childs were offering movement based choreographic visions on BAM stages.  The burgeoning “East village scene” in art, dance and performance was breaking conventions. In addition there were the ballet companies of New York City.  City Center presented the larger modern companies such as Cunningham, Lubovitch, Ailey, Taylor, Tharp and others. Mark Morris was in his beginning stages.  Patty Astor’s FUN Gallery had already had a huge affect on the art world boldly facilitating the way for rap artists and graffiti artists to join “high culture.” In Europe people like Jean Claude Galotta, Dominique Baguet, Karine Saporta, Jan Fabre, Ann Terese DeKeersmaker and numerous others were part of an amazing moment of change forging a new European dance.  Unfettering themselves from the influence of American modernists they created unprecedented works produced with funding and government support that Americans could never imagine.  They defined a creative territory that was theirs alone. All of this was about to collide with the AIDS epidemic and its subsequent activism which ignited the field.  Most importantly, this was also a moment that occurred well before globalization had created a necessary wash over all pre-existing stances and the Europe/America binary was up for serious questioning. The art I was seeing then was moving in divergent pathways.  Some of it reflected the Judson aesthetic but much didn’t. In fact many of the dance folks were reclaiming virtuosity and spectacle.  Trisha Brown was on a migration from DIY conceptualism to ethereal movement based explorations. Herself a Judson participant, she evolved away from its tenets, blending some of its relevant correctives and revolutionary zeal into her vision, but not heralding that. This woefully undocumented, but amazingly complex moment in dance was where I started to choreograph.

At that point for me, Judson offered an ideological myopia that seemed to be at odds with my nascent choreographic research which told me repeatedly that choreography eschews singularity of meaning by its very nature.   My work in dance didn’t seem to move towards a platform for delivering my own politics to the world but rather towards the creation of a container that could assess relationships between ideologies.  My work had a lot of ballet in it at that point because I had just come from Purchase where we received a heavy dose of New York City Ballet based training.  I felt politically distant from ballet and angry at it, yet it had been such a big part of my embodied experience that I needed to work away from it through process as opposed to just chopping it off.  I liked having it and other elements as obstacles to my individuality.   Was I to cleanse my work of anything that wasn’t born of my own ethics and didn’t behave as I wished?  Must I represent the dismantling of power structures by announcing my position on the surface of my dance or can I include it in the substrata of my work as a homeopathic element?

Now don’t get me wrong.  I have great respect for the artists of Judson.  They changed our minds and created an important moment in history.  But it is a ”moment in history.”  Art forms go through transitions and the momentary manifesto, often a motor for change, should not be confused with a point of arrival.  I have changed my work drastically over the years and in earlier times felt somewhat convinced that the new mode I’d found was “it”.  But after awhile these adamancies were smoothed out and became components layered into the whole spectrum of considerations that comprise my work.  They found relativity in the network of elements I use instead of vying for primacy there. I think it is like this with artistic movements as well.  They are necessarily born of revolutionary stances but where they end up is personalized and diffused throughout the work of many artists over time.  These moments need to be absorbed for them to have done their duty.  Of course someone had to introduce pedestrian movement, anti-spectacle, and anti-institutional concepts into the art form. It is part of a natural growth pattern already documented in other art forms and in the political weather of the sixties.   As ideas that augment the potential of choreographic thought these are welcomed additions.  As militant statements against the status quo they have become enervated for me.

Reinterpreted outside the original artists’ intention, Judson can be mistaken as the purveyor of great restriction not unlike the institutionalized classicism they pushed against.  Particularly inane is the expression of “no” as a basis for an aesthetic. Although I imagine it to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek, Yvonne Rainer’s “no manifesto” which I also found to be bratty and youthful, was particularly disruptive for me at the point when I was faced with an ocean of information as a young artist.  I loved, and still love, works that are born of various, conflicted political realms both stated and inferred.  I am particularly drawn to works that reside in integrated zones where the ethics are not shot from a canon at you by the author but where you are responsible for finding your own.  I am more interested in work that locates its aesthetic over time and doesn’t brandish the artist’s belief system as its sole purpose.  Work that searches to place its proclamations into destabilizing dialogue with a larger view of consciousness draws me in.  An internalized Judson is useful as a balancing device that looks askance at historical influences in one’s own work – to temper these and to clarify them, not necessarily to annihilate them.

Sadly the “no manifesto” still seems to be the bellwether for artists who place themselves at the vanguard via the suggestion that the excising of “old” elements defines their contemporary status.  All that came before is irrelevant and to be trashed.   I recently read a quote by Tino Seghall in The Guardian: “For me, politically, to sit people down, shut them up and ask them to look in one direction, somehow doesn’t belong to our times.”   I have never seen his work and I have heard wonderful things about it, but for me this kind of statement is what belongs to another time.   Finding the political content of one’s work by placing oneself in a contentious relationship with history is a banality for me.  Especially because these proclamations often include a historical amnesia and an insular scope arguing issues that would be quickly diffused if viewed through a lens including all history and peoples. There are many usages in art practices- not just one. A relationship to history is a much more variegated affair and its complexity finds fertile territory in dance.  The pronouncement by artists of “a new way” that they have located and that you need to find is the true anachronism.  I am aware of all the potential political points of view available on earth and do not require artists to point them out.  Is it really the realm of our work to position ourselves in a place of certitude creating encampments of politics from which we proselytize?  Or is this perhaps a saleable posture embodied unconsciously by artists and congratulated by presenters and curators? Many of the provocations in art of recent years have been accompanied by some of the most simplistic and unambiguous politics.  Perhaps this simplification is due to the fact that provocation has become a commodity and a capitulation to the market.  Marketable objects are not enhanced by convolution or uncertainty. What really seeps through some of these expressions of self-anointed contemporariness is a longstanding anxiety around the entire project of dance and a need for it to deliver definition.

In their efforts the Judson artists necessarily moved away from Merce Cunningham but in so doing discarded the enormity of his vision. His work extended way beyond his chosen style and the technical dancing employed, which is purportedly one aspect of what they had a gripe with.  In fact the look of his work was just a kind of spray used to bring into evidence the complex, irresolvable knots that drive human psychology and experience.  He created for me the incredibly liberating nexus of irreconcilability from which I still ideate my works.  I remember the end of a Cunningham piece, which I believe was a “Minevent”, at the Joyce Theater in 2006.  As often in his works, the curtain came down as the dancers were still moving and the lights were still on. The way in which this was simultaneously an expression of his taste and an obstacle to its full manifestation struck me. It was a climax deadening, unspectacular ending, implying that you the viewer will finish the dance as you survey it in your memory.  It suggested that this is not a place of dogma, but a place of expanded vision -inclusive and horizontal.  I am so much more interested in the ambiguous and unknown quantities that find themselves at home in the choreographic mind. I am excited by the work of artists whose singularity of vision is arrived at by how many contradictions find their way into its assemblage and the diversity of readings it can sustain.

Cunningham was definitely my biggest influence in dance and his work offered differing advice over the years. Validating a range of practices from the aleatory to the hyper-designed, his presence aided my understanding of what to look for in my work.  I used to stay at Westbeth in the summers during college and I remember thinking – “He’s up there.“  Because his studio was in Westbeth on the west side of Manhattan, right next to the river and blocks from the Judson Church, I used to think of starting another movement of his followers called the Hudson Movement.  Its manifesto would be: Continue in any way you wish, stay awake and question your own and any other certitudes.  You are contemporary because you are here and processing the world right now so don’t worry about that.

Tere O’Connor is choreographer and professor who splits his time between New York C and The University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.

Tere explains the project below.

This project is an expanded manifestation of the ways I have always worked. I don’t start with any strong thematic ideas. I begin from day one to make material as a way of thinking and sensing ideas. I develop material from multiple unrelated sources down divergent pathways as a way of entering the realm of consciousness where nothing aspires to order. I then bring these ideas/materials together by placing them in close temporal proximity. A splintering journey begins through this assemblage. Eventually, a decidedly choreographic alchemy commences and alters the singular attributes of each element as they begin to act upon each other. Abstraction becomes a distinct idea becomes a musical reverie becomes an emotional circuitry becomes a clear idea becomes nothing…but becomes is the important word.  Finally, through the entanglement of these disparate elements I shape a new construction in shared imaginative space. I am replicating this process in this new project by creating different works and then merging them into a final iteration.

Over the next two years, I will make three distinct dances with totally different casts and points of departure and then collapse these into each other to create a fourth dance. I have identified and separated out three strains of my thinking as catalysts for each work. These elements, always entwined in my dances will then be remixed into the fourth work.

Dance 1: Mentorship, relationship, improvisation
Dance 2: Artifice, formalism, complexity
Dance 3: Sameness and otherness

 Dance 1   I have taught and mentored many emerging artists. Drawing on the impact of the relationships I have had with students and artists I have mentored over the last 30 years, this dance focuses on how these interactions have shifted my thinking. The effects of these myriad relationships have become deeply integrated into my making.  Dance 1 was constructed as a collaborative process with the performers Mary Read, Devynn Emory, Tess Dworman and Ryan Kelly using improvisational techniques. I include the individual nature of each dancer —both fictionalized by me and actualized by them—allowing them to be the primary material for the work. The generational difference is both exhilarating and rife with inevitable distances. The piece plays with redefinitions of authorship by giving the performer’s choreographic agency, making on-the-spot decisions that shift my own and alter the work each night.  These people are all very clear, wonderful artists and they understand where their artistic affinities reside. They all create their own work and come from very different backgrounds. Dance 1 was performed as a work-in-progress at the River to River festival in NYC in July 2012 and as part of the Anti-Establishment show at the Center for Curatorial studies at Bard College,

 Dance 2     This work is based on my unwavering affinities with more formal, crafted,artifice-oriented elements of dance making. Although eschewed by many choreographers at this moment, I don’t feel these aspects have even begun to be exploited as the truly transcendent components of dance that they are.  I am working with a different group of amazing performers whose extraordinary abilities internally transform the fixity of the choreography into a fluid vehicle for  individual expressions. They are Natalie Green, Michael Ingle, Heather Olson, Silas Riener, Natalie Green and Oisin Monaghan.  I will re-embrace design and incorporate the technically driven body back into my work in addition to the range of embodiments I normally explore. In some ways this piece hearkens back to my earlier work. Please see the process notes area to hear more.  Dance 2 will be performed together with Dance 1 at New York Live Arts Nov 27 – Dec 1 at 7:30pm, Nov 30 at 10pm http://newyorklivearts.org/event/2-new-works

Dance 3     In this work I will be looking at sameness and difference in co-existence. I am very pleased to create a duet for the amazing Cynthia Oliver and David Thomson. They are two longtime friends and colleagues with whom I share a common community and at the same time diverse racial, professional and stylistic experiences.  Just as Dance 1 and Dance 2 reveal sameness inside of difference this dance will braid these two ideas together. I will create this dance in May-June of 2013 and it will have its premiere at the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois in Urbana where I am a professor, as is the esteemed Dr. Oliver.

Dance 4   Will be a final iteration of this series as the first three works become material for the fourth. They may be completely altered or reiterated or, or, or…     The work will be presented in New York City in late fall of 2013 at a theater TBA.

http://bleedtereoconnor.org/?p=305 

I hope this site will help dispel some of the unknowns around how dances progress from ideation to embodiment with some specific applications of daily practice and scientific research methods applied to poetics. I really welcome requests for clarification. I am not a writer and can get muddled but between us perhaps we can come to some understandings. I also hope other artists might share processes that do or do not align with mine. And, people who don’t identify as artists might be able to look at and share the nature of any creative act they are engaged in as a lens for us all.

So do respond. I will be posting through January 2014.

As mentioned earlier, in Dance 2, I am immersing myself in the formalism, artifice and complexity that have naturally occurred in my work over the years (and that I love.)  I have quickly arrived at the structuring moment for this dance.  My structures are usually very capricious. Paradoxically, for this to register, I feel I need to reign in their free-associative fluidity, something I hold dear. I know that sounds contradictory and I wonder if other makers of dances or any other time-based forms, feel that kind of contradiction. (I’d love to hear about it.) This contrast between freedom and control is visible in the art community right now through the present obsession with dance in gallery and museum settings, raising questions around time as shaped by the author or by the viewer. A pressure between the durational and the calculated is being meted out in these different types of venues and their particular functions. This distinction of author or viewer has always been an internal tension shaping the structures in my work. Viewers create themes in a dance that I am not in control of so how can I structure that? They might remember or linger on moments that I see as transitory. They might feel that some element deserves development that I haven’t even identified as an element.

After my second dance Learning Sentences in 1984, I abandoned the idea that someone could “read my message.” I began to toil away at making structural networks that might subvert rationalist time frames, no matter what the subject. I wanted to understand choreographic structure as a temporal terrain where content is destabilized as it is sucked into sinkholes of rhythm or crescendo or dynamic shift or any other sort of time tool that deemphasizes definition.

Certain elements have been born in this rehearsal period so far: complexity to the point of convolution, episodic striations and design hallucinations. These elements are pushing my structural considerations.

One aspect of dance that I feel is accidentally borrowed from theater or novels and exerts great pressure on a choreographer is the idea that “scenes” are being enacted and building towards something. In my experience I have been deeply changed by the formidable power which dance possesses to disarm the denotative. It suggests that I need to find ways to allow for sections or episodes to be perceived in striation, like layers of the earth or like transparencies, one over the other, constructing a product that has its own presence, revealing traces of each layer even as it erases them with its newness. Creating these transparent memory striations is a desire that isn’t always reachable but it nonetheless creates an active friction against the primacy of “narrative” sequencing in the construction of time in a dance.

Due to the nature of generating movement material, “sections” get created that are seemingly autonomous but are really just a consequence of the process; a register of one day.  I have to shuffle these around, expand them and make relationships between all the materials created to find out how they interact. As I am doing this, I see new relationships and begin to work on connections and dissonances between the sections.

This moment generates many things.  It helps me edit for duration.  It helps me see how a movement area that had great import inside of a “section” does not endure in an overview of the work AND how the same structure of realization I had about it could occur for a viewer depending on how I reveal its parts in the chronology of the final work. This concept of braided chronologies is important for me; the chronology of making braided with the chronology of the final structure. Sometimes when placing highly contrasted sections next to each other, I make more material that blends them and often the blended material becomes something more potent than both.

Right now I am doing all of these, and a new element, a kind of design hallucination is evolving. I am very interested in design on earth; what human beings create and how a certain artisanal level of activity, perhaps devoid of explicit message nonetheless reveals tacit statements from the soul. I am allowing for moments that look like they are working towards meaning construction to be overwhelmed by a storm of byzantine choreographic calligraphy. It feels like the work itself acts as a being and begins to daydream and obsess over one element, losing track. The piece becomes a giant baby who misses the teaching moment in a game with its mother because it becomes entranced by the ceiling fan sensing that it is a better register of the present.

In this dance, like some of my earliest work there are very abstract moments where movement takes the foreground, softly insisting to be read on its own terms.  On the other end are little vignettes or groupings that suggest something about community or ritual.  They seem to suggest an “event” or something about the future of this work that will be significant. I think they gain this prophetic attribute out of an internalized value system that places legible content in a higher place than kinesthetic reading: landing on one of the vignettes MUST have more meaning than dancing because it moves towards identification. I try hard to create a balance of these realms, attempting to place the viewer in a limbo between naming and rumination. But I want to take it beyond a binary discussion so by structuring mosaics or layers instead of linear pathways I may be able to circumvent the polarity.

My work becomes difficult when areas that I have stubbornly rejected show up again. I feel attracted to these storied moments sometimes and I want to stay super conscious about what is leading to my structural decisions. Am I secretly sharing some story and its attendant emotional world, one that only I know?  Or do I believe in the expansive nature of dance which can include story in the larger machinery of knowing. The older I get the more I find that meditation on the questions that arise through process can truly foster action. It is so easy and cliché to say that dance is more about questions than answers, but it has been true and functional and dare I say, spiritual in my practice.  An important distinction is how deeply one goes into the questions and how they turn into process catalysts. The questions aren’t looking to be answered. It is more that they act like answers without ever arriving at the categorical.

I imagine some of this needs answers for you reader or further explanation – so ask away. I am also truly interested in hearing how others look at structure.