Contact Improv Workshop for all levels
master classes with Olivier Besson and special guests
Washington, DC
Let’s kick off 2010 with a day of dancing!

Announcing the Capital Contact Workshop on Martin Luther King Day, Monday January 18, 2010. We are hosting a day of classes and jams in our nation’s capital. All abilities and levels welcome!

What: Contact Improv Workshop

When: January 18, 2009 from 10am to 6pm

Where: Liz Lerman Dance Exchange
7117 Maple Avenue
Takoma Park, Maryland 20912

Cost: $45 early registration, $55 after January 10, 2009

Schedule:
9:30AM – Registration
10AM – Morning Class
1-2:30PM – Lunch/Break
2:30PM – Afternoon Class
5:30 PM – Closing Circle

*Both classes will lead into a jam.

To register:
Send a check payable to Improv Arts, Inc. with “CI WKSP” written in the memo to:
Ilana Silverstein
1103 6th St. NW
Washington, DC 20001

Or pay with a credit card through paypal by clicking here

Teacher Bio: Olivier Besson is an improvisational movement artist who hails from France and is based in Boston. In the period from 1980 until the mid 90’s, Olivier studied Contact Improvisation with Robin Feld, Nancy Stark Smith, Lisa Nelson and Andrew Harwood, and Improvisation / Real Time composition with Daniel Lepkoff and Julyen Hamilton. During that time, he also practiced and performed Bugaku (Court dance from Japan) with Arawana Hayashi. Olivier’s work has been presented in the U.S. at Dance Theatre Workshop (NYC), New York Improvisation festival, Walker Art Centre (Minneapolis), Boston Dance Umbrella, Florida Dance Festival, Dance Place (Washington DC), The Boston Conservatory, Radford University (Virginia). Internationally, he has performed at the National Institute of the Arts (Taipei, Taiwan), Die Pratze (Tokyo), Art of Movement Festival (Yaroslav, Russia), Micadanses (Paris) and with Compagnie Vertige (Nice, France). Olivier is currently on faculty at The Boston Conservatory (dance division).

I love end-of-year lists! Couldn’t resist making my own. Here were some of my very favorite art events or experiences of 2009. What were yours?

if you see something, say something. Painting by Gregory Ferrand. Print available at gferrand.com

–Gregory Ferrand’s solo show at Hillyer Art Space in DC. Nearly nine months later and I still can’t get Greg’s images out of my head. This is exceedingly rare for me and my memory. Remembering them right now is actually making me want to see them again.

–La Danse, the Paris Opera Ballet documentary by Frederick Wiseman. Mmmm, I’d like to see this again too. Long, silent shots of hallways. Lots of fun administrative details. And lots of gorgeous dancing.

–Last Meadow, Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People. I only got to see a showing of the work in development at Texas Woman’s University, but damn…. Michelle Boule gave a completely astounding performance and the whole thing left me aching.

–New York City Ballet at the Kennedy Center. Dances at a Gathering (Robbins) and the Stravinsky Violin Concerto (Balanchine) just breathtaking. Favorite bits were the phenomenally sensitive live music accompaniment and Megan Fairchild (in apricot), who danced as if she’d just consumed 8 cups of coffee before bursting on stage.

–I can’t find the clip online, but I think the dance scene at the end of Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox is one of my favorite moments of the year. The animals are celebrating their victory in an immense grocery store and dancing up a storm.

–Many of my other favorite moments happened in non-performance settings. I witnessed an audition that was as moving as anything I saw on a stage this year. A rehearsal for Lily Sloan and Bethany Nelson’s Complex Environments. A teacher demonstrating a particular movement. Maybe in 2010 I’ll try to capture more of these moments on the blog. We expect to see reviews of performances; I’m still trying to figure out a little bit how to get at these wispier things.

–Jose Zamora’s CholoRock, presented at Texas Woman’s University, gave out this pulsating energy that I can still taste. His choreography is absolutely rooted in Texas, but not that stereotypical Texas that leaps to mind if you’ve never been there. Jose’s Texas has butoh Lloronas (the weeping woman of Mexican folklore), masked androgynes, mohawked punks doing cameos to Tejano music. (Technically this was presented in late November of 2008, but my memory lumped it into 2009 and I’m going to keep it there.)

–One of the most memorable nights of 2009 was an event held in Richmond, InLight. An unbelievably successful collaboration of a gallery and a city. 26 artists had work displayed in storefronts, or building walls, or parking lots. Just this piece alone would have been pretty fantastic due to the caliber of work. But then there were wearable art parades! And little kids carrying DIY lanterns! And impromptu drum circles and fried fish! And all of the street lamps downtown had been turned off so as to better see the art! So rare to see really good art and really fantastic community-building and civic joy at the same time. Definitely going back next year.

–Universes at Dance Place (DC). Spoken word? Music? Theater? I still can’t figure out exactly what this four-person troupe was, but I know it was a highlight of the year. Fierce, political, and smart as hell. Honestly felt guilty for not insisting that everyone I knew come with me to the performance. That’s how good it was.

–Kelly Bond’s solo Splitting the Difference at the Fall Fringe Festival in DC. I just keep picturing lasers going from my eyeballs to whatever part of Kelly she was calling attention to. There was no drifting, no stray thoughts, every iota of energy being pulled to a pinpoint.

–Read and adored Janice Ross’s biography of Anna Halprin. So helpful in getting a perspective on a broad swath of West Coast dance. Fantastically well-done with writing so engaging that I felt I experienced the dances. Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance came out in paperback this year; get yourself a copy!

–Familiarity only bred increasing pleasure with the Washington Project for the Arts’ Options 09 show, at Conner Contemporary Art.

confluence of events
November 26, 2009
by Kathleen Mattingly

Seeing the solo Splitting the Difference created and performed by Kelly Bond during the same weekend that I saw the GWU Fall Danceworks concert and the Michael Jackson film “This is it,” leads me to think about the body and its representations.

At one end of the extreme, there is Michael Jackson’s concert, a spectacle that challenged the Beijing Olympics in its technological theatrics. No one I have met has disagreed when I say Jackson was a brilliant artist, a singer and dancer who changed the course of dance history. But the most interesting parts of the film This Is It may never have been seen had Jackson lived to perform the tour: they are the moments when he was making music, creating movement, choreographing a tempo. These parts would have been overwhelmed by the extravaganza of special effects the tour had planned. They dwarfed subtlety. Seeing Jackson up close is like looking at two different bodies: the strange reconfiguration of his face juxtaposed with the stunning fluidity and precision of his dancing, which stayed constant over the decades as his physical features were manipulated. Had the tour happened, the concerts would have been explosions of glitz, flash and pyrotechnics; the film offers a more human and nuanced glimpse of an artist.

Do dance students today prefer glitz over subtlety? Since I started teaching at GWU in January I have seen two DanceWorks concerts and I detect a pattern. Students’ work is characterized by choreographed patterns and shapes performed with music, then a guest artist piece explores the more experimental, less “dancey” ideas. During last weekend’s concert a student sitting behind me began texting as the dancers in the guest artist’s work were standing still. When I asked if she could refrain until the end of the piece she looked at me puzzled, as if to say “but the performers aren’t moving.”

To ask a person to observe a body on stage that is not attempting some super-human pose seems beyond the realm of possibility. Even the student choreographers seem uninterested in dance unless it occurs with music, expresses an emotion, or tells a story. Is there a way to interest college-aged audiences and choreographers in alternative ideas about dance? is it intelligent to have the guest artists (predominantly affiliated with Movement Research in NYC and based in NYC) come to DC to work with a handful of students and perform a piece that baffles and discourages 90% of the DanceWorks audience? Is there another way to frame these pieces or introduce them to the audience rather than discourage the people who do not understand what is happening?

Of course there are many ways to program a dance concert. Splitting the Difference – an aptly titled piece – inserts itself here as the deepest exploration of the performative body that I have seen. Kelly Bond is an American artist who spent seven months of 2008 working in France at Mathilde Monnier’s choreographic center where she collaborated with artists like Xavier Le Roy and theorists like Bojana Cvejic. These are the people who are pushing the definitions of contemporary performance today (they are both based in Europe; Le Roy appeared at the NYC Performa festival in 2007).

What Kelly Bond does in this solo is to discourage the audience’s typical expectations: there are no stunning movement phrases; there is no music or special lighting; she does not wear anything out of the ordinary. But what she does is extraordinary.

Bond became interested in the idea of Hans Bellmer: “The body is like a sentence that invites us to reimagine it, so that its real meaning becomes clear through an endless series of anagrams.” Anagrams are usually associated with rearranged words, and there is a rule that every letter must be used, with exactly the same number of occurrences as in the anagrammed word or phrase: “Jim Morrison” is “Mr. Mojo Risin.”

In Splitting the Difference Bond begins by standing in front of an audience, asking if we – the audience – can see her, the lights illuminate audience and performer equally, then she stretches her mouth with her hands so that her all her teeth are visible. She looks at each audience member in the eye, holding her lips in what looks like an unbearably uncomfortable position. The solo continues from there, approximately ten snapshots – poses or gestures or stories she tells us – which are unconnected, but each is linked through our perception of her in time, which creates memory. At one moment she flaps her shirt so that her air blows away from her face; in another moment she descends at a snail’s pace into the splits; at another moment her back faces the audience, her shirt is lifted over her shoulders, and her scapula slowly emerge like ice blocks out of the arctic ocean. The experience of watching the solo is both jarring and insightful: it is as revealing about how we see her body, our body, and our thresholds for the unexpected as it is about Bond’s creative path through her own created and manipulated self. When are we intrigued? When are we repulsed? Why?

In many ways she extends the experiments begun by Yvonne Rainer in the 1960s who performed Trio A as an investigation of not seducing the audience, not allowing their expectation to be fulfilled. Here it is visible how Rainer set out to make a solo that embodied the pedestrian, phenomenological experience of mundane activity:

And similar to the artists of the Judson collective, Bond, based in DC, searches for ways to engage a community of similar free thinkers in the arts. In France there were weekly gatherings at Montpelier in the choreographic center where artists could share and discuss work for 90 minutes per artist. DC has no similar incubator for artists, and Bond says she is not sure if people in DC are engaged in the body and presentation on a deeply analytic level like she is. I wonder when and how the universities and artists within a shared community can come together – collaboratively – to nurture one another’s growth.

On Sunday, another article about ballet by dance critic Sarah Kaufman in The Washington Post makes me think it will be a long time before the DC media takes an interest in the avant-garde the way the Judson collective had Jill Johnston and Deborah Jowitt at The Village Voice.

Although Bond remains hopeful that a scene of like-minded thinkers and artists will come together in DC, she already has plans to show her new project in 2010 at Movement Research in NYC and offers to perform Splitting the Difference in Europe. I wonder if anyone in the audience will be texting…

Today we have a post from guest blogger Alison Friedman, responding to Sarah Kaufman’s review in the Washington Post of the University of Maryland performance of Margaret Jenkins Dance Company and the Guangdong Modern Dance Company. Here’s a link to the original review. I’d love to use this site as a place for multiple reviews of the same work, or responding to reviews published in other forums, or other bits of writing that might contribute to the life cycle of a dance. Get in touch if you have something on your mind!

Margaret Jenkins Dance Company and Guangdong Modern Dance Company, photo: Lin Xiaoyi

Sarah Kaufman’s review of the performance “Other Suns” (‘Suns’ revolves around hopes for a changing China, Oct. 31 2009), a co-production between San Fransisco-based Margaret Jenkins Dance Company and China’s Guangdong Modern Dance Company, revealed a shallow understanding of Chinese culture and an irresponsible lack of research into its burgeoning modern dance world. While her criticisms of the piece were valid, she made an inappropriate leap in her generalizations about how Chinese culture and society as a whole were reflected in those failures.

I agree with Kaufman’s criticism of the Guangdong Modern Dance Company (GMDC) section of the trilogy, that it lacked emotional commitment and consisted mostly of pretty movement by nice technicians. However, what led Kaufman to assume that these flaws are indicative of anything except flaws in those six dancers on that one night? She blames Chinese society for the dancers’ lack of expression, quipping “Expressiveness isn’t easy in a society where individual freedoms are still dodgy.”

The performers’ lack of depth in fact results not from China’s Great Oppressive Society — a simplistic cliché that essentialist articles like Kaufman’s only help to promote — but from the same immaturity found in young dancers in any country. The six GMDC dancers on the Clarice Smith Center stage last week are some of the company’s youngest. Due to the project’s limited budget, the full company was not able to participate in the US tour. Half of the company, in fact the more mature and experienced dancers, are currently performing other GMDC repertoire in Europe and Taiwan. This past July I watched the GMDC section of “Other Suns” performed with the full company in the annual Guangdong Modern Dance Festival in China. That performance of this same piece contained an admirably deep level of commitment and energy, in contrast to the version I saw in Maryland. If Kaufman had read the dancers’ bios in the program, she would have seen that most of the six dancers had joined GMDC only in the last two years. Most of Margaret Jenkins’ dancers, on the other hand, are older and have many more years experience working with different choreographers as well as with each other. If Kaufman’s goal was to write a more encompassing article about the larger topic of modern dance in China, she could have researched footage, easily available on YouTube, of other GMDC works like “Upon Calligraphy” or works by other modern dance companies in China like the Beijing Modern Dance Company. She would have found performances of profound expressiveness and emotional depth by performers like Ma Kang, Xing Liang, Tao Ye, and others.

The rigors of dance training often produce technical masters who are emotionally vacant, but this phenomenon is not unique to China. Young western dancers can be equally uninteresting to watch as they show off flashy technique before they have gained the depth of expression found in mature performers. GMDC choreographer Liu Qi, who has been with the company for over a decade, exhibited this artistic maturity in the final section of the trilogy. A moving duet she performed with one of the Jenkins dancers to me epitomized the connections and trust these artists from different countries were searching for through this project. Had GMDC’s “A-team” been on stage at the University of Maryland and not on tour in Germany or Taiwan, we would have seen more of these moments from the Chinese side of the co-production.

Kaufman asserts that the performance made her consider “the challenges of teasing capitalist narcissism out of a culture of collectivism,” and that this was somehow a prerequisite for better modern dance in China. Not only does this draw a fallacious connection between one dance performance and all of Chinese culture, it also reveals an inaccurate understanding of modern China. Since the establishment of the one-child policy and with rising affluence in larger cities, China in fact is now experiencing what some academics call the “Little Emperor” phenomenon. When asked their goal in life, most young Chinese professionals from this “spoiled” generation will tell you point blank: “To make money.” China today is a culture of capitalist narcissists. This is not what was lacking on stage in October. Capitalist narcissism does not make good modern dance; experience and maturity do. Kaufman’s unsubstantiated analysis does a disservice to both dance criticism and American understanding of contemporary China.

Canadian Space Agency astronaut Robert Thirsk (left), NASA astronauts Jeffrey Williams and Nicole Stott; along with Russian cosmonaut Maxim Suraev, all Expedition 21 flight engineers, share a meal at the galley in the Zvezda Service Module of the ISS. Photo taken October 12, 20

I thought about her question when I came across this interview of astronaut Nicole Stott by science fiction writer Bruce Sterling for the magazine Dwell. It’s one of the best interviews I’ve read in a long time, with both parties fully engaged and committed to the task. Plenty of things I had never thought to wonder about, like what does the International Space Station smell like?, and what kind of plugs do they use up there? But most fascinating to me were her reflections on her corporeal reactions to outer space. Check out these teasers and then go read the interview. And then tell me what site-specific work you would make at the International Space Station.

“As I’m floating in front of my computer right now, basically just holding myself with one foot behind a foot restraint, the way your body just naturally floats up and down is very similar to the roll of gentle waves on a ship. Interesting because it’s your body in zero gravity that’s giving you the sensation; it’s not anything that the space station is doing.”

“In addition to the way our bodies adapt, there are also interesting reactions to the way our bodies interact with the zero-g environment that we can feel if we pay attention. One of the most interesting to me is that while I’m still and floating I can feel the reaction, or maybe better described as a motion through my body, from something as slight as my heart beat. My heart beats and I can actually feel like the space station is moving around me because of it, when in fact it’s really my whole body gently moving in response to it and not the station motion at all.”

Wow, right?!

I recently met local dancer and teacher Barbara Bernstein, who introduced me to Cuban rueda. Check out the video for a little taste of rueda. Who doesn’t want to imagine they’re in Cuba in the middle of winter? To try out some Cuban Salsa action for yourself, check out the classes at danceintime.com. Coupon for a free first class can be found on the website. (Faithful readers will know WtI likes bargains almost as much as snacks.) More videos on the website too. No partner necessary! Here are a couple of regular drop-in classes, one in Baltimore and one in Fairfax. Vamos pues.

CUBAN SALSA DROP-IN CLASS SCHEDULE:

1. Saturdays from 11:30 AM to 2:00 PM at Crown Dance Studio; 2820 Dorr Ave.; Fairfax, VA 22031. Close to the Dunn Loring metro. From Route 495 (Washington Beltway), take the exit for 50 West & get onto Gallows Rd. (VA-650 N) towards Merrifield. Trun left onto Lee Highway (US 29). Then turn right onto Hilltop Rd, then right onto Dorr Ave. There’s a big (free) parking lot. $10/class.

2. Sundays from 5 PM to 7:00 PM at the new Dickeysville Mill Studio; 4900 Wetheredsville Rd. Building #2; Baltimore MD 21207. From I-695 (Baltimore Beltway), get onto I-70 E; then merge onto MD-122/Security Blvd. Next turn right at N Forest Park Ave, then right onto Wetheredsville Rd. Go over the metal bridge on the left to get to 4900 Wetheredsville Rd. $10/class.

It’s rare that I feel my attention focused and manipulated so precisely as it was on Saturday afternoon during Kelly Bond’s performance of Splitting the Difference during the Fall Fringe festival. Laser-like precision was involved in this one-woman work as Bond compelled her viewers to observe her tongue, her thighs, her teeth. It wasn’t as simple as this suggests. While specific body parts were highlighted at times, there were also moments where attention was brought to a whole pose, or to the relationship of hair to shirt to breath.

The entire performance was simultaneously riveting and uncomfortable. I was embarrassed to find myself unable to stop a small fit of awkward giggling as Bond made eye contact during a particularly acute segment involving mouth stretching. Any performance that can provoke an uncontrollable visceral physical reaction is going to have my admiration.

The beginning of the fantastically weird piece is going to be reverberating in my body for a long while; Bond entered the stage and inquired in her normal voice, “can everyone see me if I stand here?” before almost instantly launching into the awkward mouth stretching bit. The juxtaposition of the everyday with the extraordinary was jarring and set the stage for more small shocks to the conscious. There were definitely alien bodies involved, especially during a section focused on the tongue, which was unbelievably strange. I felt as if a small, fleshy creature had taken up residence inside of Bond’s body and kept trying to force its way out, via her mouth. It was a tongue that did not look like a tongue. Bond’s shoulder blades became continents that slowly drifted across her back, as her thighs converted into rivers as they were isolated and left to freely ripple for several minutes.

Bond left her audience with a haunting ending as well: a simple jump, as if she were jumping rope but without the rope, repeated. Then the lights went out and we were left only with the sound of her sneakers hitting the stage, for a perfectly long time. The question from the beginning was repeated, “can everyone see me if I stand here?”, but this time in the dark.

Later that night I inadvertently hit the side of my head on a chair, with force. A large purple bruise arose between my eye and my eyebrow. It felt oddly complementary to the performance as I imagined alternative narratives for the bruise. Like, I had been in a ferocious moshpit at a secret show, or I had been in a fight with an uncooperative foe. Splitting the Difference, along with my injury, made me think about how physical narratives shape how we are and how we feel. How our stories become embedded in our bodies. And the various alien bodies inside all of us, whether we acknowledge them or not.

I live in DC, where there are lots of university libraries, lots of public libraries, and the lovely Library of Congress. You would think that finding back issues of Contact Quarterly would be a cinch. Contact Quarterly bills itself as a “journal of dance, improvisation, performance, and contemporary movement arts” and “is the longest living, independent, artist-made, not-for-profit, reader-supported magazine devoted to the dancer’s voice.” Doesn’t that sound like a good way to spend a fall afternoon? But sadly, any back issues that exist in my city are kept under lock and key, not available to the general public without bureaucratic hoop-jumping. (The scene at the George Washington University library included me begging, pleading, and trying every possible connection I could think of to get past the library gatekeeper, all to no avail.)

So imagine my delight when it turns out that from right now until January 31, you can get back issues of CQ for $1! I stocked up on a few and have been finding gems from the past left and right. If you’ve never read Contact Quarterly before, here’s a perfect chance to get your hands on a few. If you’re already a subscriber, maybe your collection has a few holes in it. And if you’re not a subscriber… why not think about supporting some independent dance media? Who knows, maybe you need some Chinese kneepads while you’re at it!

Puppeteer Tom Lee with Mike Disfarmer

There was so much to marvel at. The lighting design a true tour de force from Tyler Micoleau; I didn’t know light could be manipulated so delicately on a stage. The original music by Dan Moses Schreier with violins, banjo, and accordian all used to amazing affect. The narration by Dan Hurlin, done in perfect cantankerosity. And so I found that I could absorb the production on Thursday night at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center on several different levels.

I could be engaged only in the sheer technical ingenuity of the production. At times I found myself floating along like a small child might, content to grasp the story and the mood from the evocative music alone. At other times I got lost in tiny details and would wonder at it for several seconds before moving on to the next tiny, perfect moment, such as how Disfarmer gently tucks his hand in between his legs while nestling into bed, as if to comfort himself. Sometimes I had to remind myself that the puppeteers were not supposed to be the main point of focus. Maybe it’s just my over-infatuation with the human body, but the image of a puppeteer standing aloof from the group, his silhouette against a blue background, leaning slightly away from the group but taut and ready to assist as needed…. it was as compelling as anything that the puppet did.

But I wasn’t involved with every cell in my body until Disfarmer started shrinking. The photographer continued to go about his day-to-day, but getting smaller each time, which proved to be an ingeniously open and ambiguous device. I read it as a disability narrative, as Disfarmer kept compensating and adjusting as his life became increasingly difficult to navigate. But he was no less alive, no less human. Or he could have been simply aging, or becoming circumscribed by his own madness, or choosing an ever-more-complete isolation.

The end was no less ambiguous. I was watching keenly the whole time, expecting death for Disfarmer and curious to see what it was going to look like. Eyes peeled. And yet somehow, I missed it. He climbed up into the cloth drape of his camera and then he was gone. I know I missed other bits as well, but I’m glad to have had a glimpse into the life of tornado foundling Mike Disfarmer, and to have witnessed the affection and tenderness flowing into him from his expert puppeteers.
]]> http://wideningthei.wordpress.com/2009/11/07/402/feed/ 0 wideningthei Puppeteer Tom Lee with Mike Disfarmer http://wideningthei.wordpress.com/2009/11/01/november-picks/ http://wideningthei.wordpress.com/2009/11/01/november-picks/#comments Mon, 02 Nov 2009 01:05:31 +0000 wideningthei http://wideningthei.wordpress.com/?p=393 ]]>

It’s November already, eek!! Here are some Widening the I picks for the upcoming weeks.

The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at University of Maryland is presenting Dan Hurlin’s bunraku puppet performance piece that focuses on the life of American photographer and hermit Mike Disfarmer. The always-astute Claudia LaRocco had this praise for the work: “Dan Hurlin’s puppet-theater meditation on the remarkable portrait photographer Mike Disfarmer was one of the most satisfying shows I’ve seen in a long time, and one of the best commentaries on the slow, maddening drip of artistic creation I can remember seeing.” So you have banjo music, puppetry, and a solid endorsement from Claudia. Sounds like a sure-fire ticket. Buy yourself one or two here.

If you weren’t able to make it up to Philadelphia to see local talent Kelly Bond earlier this fall, now is your chance to catch her in DC. Fall Fringe November features three favorite former Fringe performers doing their thing to keep the Fringe alive all year long. Kelly will be doing six performances so there’s bound to be at least one that fits your schedule. Mississippi color guard mixes with European avant-garde. See what comes out of the mixture.

Aysha Upchurch and her Life, Rhythm, Move Project come to Dance Place on November 7 and 8. Dance Place says, “Retrofuturistic is a play on time travel and science fiction, all while examining the theme of ‘men are from Mars and women are from Venus.’ It is has all the fun, entertaining appeal of hip hop dance, but also raises some questions about what we are doing to our planet, environmentally and socially.” Their performance at the DC Metro Dance Awards looked pretty tight, and a whole evening of the group should be a treat. Plus it’s at Dance Place, where the positive community vibe could keep you warm all winter long.