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.

Bashing out these possible structures starts to reveal what the connective tissue between the diverse parts of a work might be. But from where do we get that information? How do we read the dance to find what its poetics are made of?  Things connect by shape or tone or intention or rhythm or inference or numerology or persona or reference or any of a multitude of qualities. I used to look for a single answer but it has been my experience that these must all be considered. They are what I call categories of difference for myself, all the disparate ideas that begin to show up and live inside of one work. These elements will be entangled in the final structure, woven together so a viewer can actively, if not consciously, shift from one potential reading to another as opposed to looking for the author’s view. This is the main attraction I have for choreography.  Working on it never seems to bring me to the definitive. If I try to push towards any “overall” concept it won’t work.  By constantly shifting structure, and regrouping the different parts I activate articulations that I could not find in any other way.  The big, old word recontextualization really is important for me. It is an action I am engaged in constantly. It is what happens to words in poetry when they find themselves imbricated in new constructions and it is similar with movement material.   It is the route to the transcendent complexity that defines the choreographic practice for me.

Something similar to this is repeated daily for me in the process of making a dance. What I make on a given day might be created solely to point my mind in a certain direction, with no further need for it as material. The material excites me and I remember it that evening with great satisfaction, drugged into thinking it is valuable. But it is transitional.

As is perhaps clear in earlier posts, I was very excited by what was going on, but when I returned after 4 days away, I felt like there was nothing there. No matter how long I have been working, something in me still looks for permanence in the shaping of material, but each time it is executed afresh, the performers are in different places and it is no longer the same. The dancers were engaging with the same excellence as last week, yet I had time to expand the work in my imagination and unfortunately, that rendered the actual material a listless flow of blunt, inarticulate magma. Does that sound negative?

It’s not. It is an inherent drama of this form, where the division between the imagined and the actual give shape to a work. The repetition of this process at the beginning of each dance launches a critical mind that leads me closer to seeing and valuing what is emerging, rather than placing too much importance on the material that marks that journey.  This initial roller coaster ride generates the specific relationship in each dance between the visual information of a work and its temporal detachment. The physical material cannot offer signification because it is controlled by the intentions of time moving forward and erased by every next moment.  The material is a container where shifting ideas, internal lives, viewer expectations and projections converge.  It is hard to manage.

28 August 2012       Today I started the second piece in this series with a new configuration of dancers.  (Since both works are presently untitled , I will call this Dance 2 and the other from the summer Dance 1)  Once again, as has been my good fortune for many years, I have a room full of amazing dancers and I start.  They are: Michael Ingle, Oisín Monaghan, Heather Olson, Silas Reiner, and Natalie Green.  This work focuses on the more calculated aspects in my work and my penchant for formalism, artifice, crystalline structure and the natural application of various dance idioms. In recent years, I have been in a very hands-off observational mode, trying to witness the works into being.  I was attempting not to use my taste to drive my decision-making and to observe what was being shaped by my actions. I have been very interested in the machinery of criticality that the contemporary art scene has set into motion, looking at hierarchies, perceived injustices, formulas and the political underpinnings of artistic impulse and it is thrilling for me. However I want to look for a new balance. This phenomenon in art has become too closely related to marketability for my comfort and I need to find my way back to a more blended, less myopic,  range of artistic practices.  Looking back, I can see that it had quieted some of my most natural impulses and I would like to reintroduce those back into my work. During this period I began to question formalism in my work and have been working inside a spectrum ranging from the improvisational to  fixed material.  These research pathways that one takes require time and  are very important. It takes time for them to move from being cerebral exercise to embodied potentialities.  After the last years of questioning,  I still have an impulse to create unapologetically formal, complex structures.  Even though it has only been three days of work so far, it feels like a critical eye I may have developed in the last years is transitioning into a new method for making.    I have been bashing out movement.  The dancers may be slightly in pain as I have unleashed a little torrent of STEPS!!!!!  Of course one of the thrills is watching these amazing people take this in instantly and you can see them negotiating it right away.  It has been so long since I have worked this way as I have incorporated much material developed by the dancers in recent works.  Some dances are like this and some dances are more shared in the making.  An intriguing contrast is being created between Dance 1 and Dance 2 and it will be interesting to see how it continues. It is not only the differences that are interesting, but also, how certain things find there way in no matter what the catalyst.

29 August 2012       I remember and understand choreography in shards and detached moments and that is also how I construct the works. By placing the shards in constantly shifting structural arrangements, the potential for multi-directional editing is fostered.   By this I mean that the standard editing tools of cutting and adding material, are augmented by a technique of assimilation.  By blending one area of movement into another and allowing for  “erosion” and “cross-pollination”  a third area is born. This inescapably time-based editing concept is embedded in the choreographic effort.  One must wait for the syncretistic bleed to occur.  It reminds me of  dabbing in painting, where the brain and the hand go looking for something in an agreed upon rumination. They may see something and bring it into focus for a moment but allow it to merge with its background as further applications of paint bring new associations and relationships. Yet all these moments are ghosted in the final product. So far I have made a number of choreographic shards: two trios, four duets, two solos.  Then I made some “oceanic’ material,  by which I mean dancing that doesn’t consider its contours as much as its internal engine and its inclusion in the landscape of the dance.  I then set these two modes into relief, testing them out in relation to each other.

30 August 2012    All of the performers in Dance 2 naturally modulate the interface between the constraints of the material and the degrees of “self “ they allow to blend in.  My first seven years of dance making involved research into unison in dance. I made about four dances in a row using almost exclusively unison movement.  Partially I was trying to wrest it from its modernist usages and look at it as a much loved, yet overused default setting in dance that had gone unquestioned.   The common role of the choreographer as generator of all actions taken by the group has elisions with the oppressive power structures of language, religion, government.  Rather than reject these and create radical forms I have chosen to highlight the complexity of these power differentials. The process of being engaged with this in a dance­ is where the political critique lies–both for myself and for the  performers who offer their interpretations. It is not a message; it is an embodied metaphor for an ongoing condition of the human spirit.  The individual can only be expressed in regards to the whole of society and its power constructs.   This unison research immersion was the beginning of my understanding of dance as a method for deriving meaning from something as opposed to applying meaning to it.  I needed to question unison through the actual process of making.

Today I talked about how I would like to foster a deeper practice for becoming more conscious of making decisions inside the performance of the movement­; how the performers will live in the material of the work from moment to moment.  Do they like it or not?  Is it natural or foreign to their bodies? Does it include their history in its referential world? Is it difficult to do? Does it suggest anything about virtuosity that may be at odds with how they feel or not.  For example if I dip into a generic area of dance for some choreographic reason they are free to approach that with an attendant attitude of their own. In a certain way they reenact an audience perspective. Given the impossibility of specific understandings in a movement-based dance, I must incorporate a multitude of various readings into the process of making the work. So I want the dancers to remain in a present state of internal commentary with each performance, even as they perform memorized movement that they learned a long time ago.  This process creates very textured and diverse performances from each person as they move through this shared environment of someone else’s devising.