See video http://bleedtereoconnor.org/?p=310
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.
hi tere
this sort of relates to structure. i’m interested in this blog as a time-trip, which your work always provides for me. There is this chronological structure unfolding for the blog, out of necessity i supposed, arranged in an more architectural pattern on the screen, in relationship and speaking to a history of dancemaking — your own and the collective — towards these dance performance moments in the future, which have some sort of looming, lurking presence inside all of this, and then these snippets of video that are in themselves singular in time, with all the language of yours, speaking to personal process, and jenn’s language and writing, pulling from sources that traverse the realms of stimulation and experience and are often poetic in their nature. that’s just a quick synopsis. and of course, in watching the videos, there are the dancers, and their presence, and their histories, which i do consider when watching, i think from the porousness of the frame (your language), which allows me to consider the material from your interests and my own, and just a very basic reading of “well, what’s actually happening.” all this adding up to say, this structure seems beyond the mathematical. there is a wonderful dominance of the geometric in your work, that for me creates the wonderful paradox between the here and the spiritual/ transcendent. the geometry of the material is “true,” is from a language of numbers that explain our existence on earth and how that’s happening. and the relational aspect of it defies any sense of knowing or known or needing to know. and how the rhythms and repetition of the geometry over time is actually what unfixes it’s meaning, unfixes its marriage to the math, to the “known.”
i’ve been thinking of structure in a more horizontal way. away from that which is constructed. i’m not sure what is on the other side of that. it’s not anti-constructivism (is that a movement?), perhaps it is speaking towards Constructivism, but i wonder what the contemporary version of that is… this blog, this opening of process, de-decntralizing meaning and inviting meaning to be created by the ways in which we ENGAGE with art and process feels like a nod to that. to contemporary Constructivism…
i’ve been thinking of structure through huge spans of time. and looking for frames to hold the minute activity or experience that contextualizes it, appropriates it and places it in this much larger sense of “structure.” i suppose i’m actually working with emergent structures. looking to the body to be a source of structure in itself — to provide the technologies to build structure. to take on the technologies to build structure. perhaps there is a separation between solo work and group work as far as “structure” is concerned. i think this relates to this issue of control. i think i’m coming to understand choreography as simply systems of control… where one places control in the work, to what degree. it is so personal. it is what makes one’s work her work, i think. where we relinquish control, where and when we assert it. that studio series of mine you saw when the musician abandoned the structure i had set up — that was one of the most intense experiences of my life! and to make the choice to assert the structure, the control, in front of an audience — to abandon the social for the structure. whew… it was a moment of the work cracking. to allow him to ignore the fine lines of control i had placed in the work was to loose the work. it was crazy to interface with someone who did not understand that. it was crazy to be forced to examine my own assumptions about how we communicate and agree upon structure, when it’s not an outright choreography. when the structure is just a designated activity in a designated bubble of time. in terms of reigning it in, that you speak of, i think this story is about that. that the smallest assertion of control over activity and time can actually produce a huge architecture and structure, has so much power, and can communicate louder and resonate further than we realize.