Multiplicity, Embodiment and the Contemporary Dancer

Moving Identities

J. Roche

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137429858
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

This book explores the co-creative practice of contemporary dancers solely from the point of view of the dancer. It reveals multiple dancing perspectives, drawn from interviews, current writing and evocative accounts from inside the choreographic process, illuminating the myriad ways that dancers contribute to the production of dance culture.

1

Introduction: Dancing Multiplicities

What are we seeing when we watch a dancer dance? Is it the accurate unfolding of the choreographer’s oeuvre or is it the dancer’s interpretation of the idea? From where does the movement form emerge, the choreographer’s body or the dancer’s body or both? What gives the movement its specific identity or brings about the differences that we see between one dancer and the next?

When describing the dancer in abstraction, we imagine a moving body encapsulating a high level of physical virtuosity, discipline and control; a body shaped through strict training ideologies, displaying movement versatility and physical prowess. However, in this current historical moment, the role of dancer is embodied in many different ways throughout the broad vista of professional contemporary dance practice.¹ The wide range of activities that is encapsulated by the term dancer in the twenty-first century is mirrored in the myriad creative methodologies utilised by choreographers to generate movement. Depending on the choreographic process they engage in, dancers could be considered to be choreographic instruments or the choreographer’s canvas; or on the other end of the scale, as French choreographer Boris Charmatz describes, the ‘substance of the process itself’ (Ploebst 2001: 178). Dance writer, André Lepecki (2006: 54) explains that within the framework of Jacques Derrida’s² concept of the ‘theological stage’, dancers’ expressivity is muted. In this context, he presents an extreme view of a dancer as ‘nothing more than a faithful executor of the designs of the absent, remote, perhaps dead, yet haunting power of the master’s will’ (Lepecki 2006: 54).

The entrance of dance into academia together with demands from the globalised performing arts marketplace creates the conditions for categorising dance-making into styles and genres. In academia, categorisation allows scholars to analyse and discuss choreographic trends and in the marketplace it allows dance programmers and artists to promote and sell dance works. This leads to the promotion of choreographers as signature³ artists, coupled with the tendency to ignore the significance of dancers in the creation process. Ramsay Burt (2004: 30), in recognising dancers’ omission from writings on dance, explains how dance analysis ‘too often […] means the analysis of a disembodied ideal essence conventionally called “choreography” – rather than an analysis of the performance of that choreography by sometimes troubling and disturbingly material dancing bodies’.

Indeed, the subjective experience of dancers as they engage with the choreographic process is rarely expressed within current dance discourses. Generally, the choreography in abstraction is prioritised as the site of meaning above the materiality of dancers who embody and realise the work. Therefore, choreographic works possess an aura of engaging with dance history and the formation of a dance legacy which contemporary dancers and their singular interpretations seldom do. For example, Alexandra Carter (1998: 53) commented on the difficulty of accessing any writings by dancers ‘especially on their experiences of performance’, when compiling The Routledge Dance Studies Reader. From another perspective, American dance critic, Marcia Siegel (1981: xiv) justified the exclusion of dancers’ contributions to the legacy of twentieth-century dance in her publication Shapes of Change because, ‘choreography must be able to outlast dancers in order for us to have a history’.

The categorisation of dance-making, performing and the growing body of dance discourse within academia foregrounds a fundamentally inherent problem in dance and its relationship to archival knowledge. Diana Taylor (2003: 20) explains that ‘archival memory succeeds in separating the source of “knowledge” from the knower – in time and/or space’, which contrasts with how ‘people participate in the production and reproduction’ of the repertoire, by ‘being part of the transmission’. Siegel acknowledges this in her prioritisation of tangible, archival facts over the more elusive, enfleshed knowing of the repertoire. Dance suffers due to its ephemeral nature; it does not leave a written document behind, but can only enter the archive through video documentation or dance notation. This has a political consequence, according to Taylor (2003: 25), as ‘language and writing has come to stand for meaning itself’. This means that artists, whose practice is embedded in knowledge outside of linguistic or literary codes, are easily excluded from the discursive arenas that determine broader developments in their field.

Dancers embody a living repertoire of movement but the archive, as text, video or photograph, exists independently of their bodies and is shaped by and connects with other signifying forces. They are no longer called upon to represent the dance piece once it enters the archive, rendering their material presence insignificant in comparison to the more important artistic or political statements proposed by the choreographer through the choreography. Through Taylor’s (2003: 25) definition above, the embodied insights of dancers do not have any ‘claims on meaning’. As outlined above, there are few sources to draw from when researching dancers’ perspectives on the choreographic process. The limited range of literature indicates that, traditionally, the role has been perceived as creatively passive within the dance-making process. In spite of increasing creative involvement by dancers in the production of choreography and the increasing acknowledgement of this by the field of dance studies, first-person accounts of the creative practice of dancers remains a peripheral area within dance research.

In order to provide some context for the emergence of the independent contemporary dancer of today, the following passages outline how the roles of choreographer and dancer have shifted throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. Although the peripheral positioning of dancers’ voices may seem congruent with the status of choreographers as creative minds of the dance work, the primacy of choreographers in dance production is a relatively recent phenomenon. By the early twentieth century in ballet, Lynn Garafola (1989: 195) explains, the choreographer was little more than a ballet master attached to an opera house who ‘performed a host of other functions as well – dancing, teaching, coaching, rehearsing and administration’. Dancers performing around the turn of the twentieth century, such as the Russian stars Tamara Karsavina, Vaslav Nijinsky and Anna Pavlova, had enormous fame and box office power. Garafola (1989: 196) situates the emergence of choreographers as artists within Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes (1909–29) wherein Mikhail Fokine developed as a freelance choreographer in his own right, considered equal to other independent artists such as composers, painters and poets. Subsequently, other Diaghilev choreographers followed Fokine, leading to the commodification of choreographers and choreographic works. Diaghilev shaped choreographers from his ranks of established star dancers and thus, he integrated the marketable worth of the performer’s persona and talent into the creative identity of the dance-maker (Garafola 1989: 198). Garafola (1989: 198) explains that, prior to this development in the role of choreographer, style in ballet was associated with particular methods formed within a training system or school; representing an institutional stamp rather than individual expression. This was altered radically by Nijinsky’s L’Après-midi d’un Faun and Le Sacre du Printemps, whereby the imagination of the choreographer produced ‘the total vision of these works, a vision that determined not only their theme, structure and floor pattern, but also elements such as technique, body posture, and presentation traditionally belonging to a school’ (Garafola 1989: 198).

In modern dance, which emerged during the same time period in North America, primarily through Isadora Duncan, Loie Fuller, Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, and in Europe through artists such as Rudolf Laban and Mary Wigman, dancer-choreographers were prevalent. Pioneering artists such as Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey formed dance companies through which they performed their choreographies. They developed movement techniques that supported the choreographic works and which reflected the concerns of their own epoch (Brown, Mindlin and Woodford 1997: 44). The subsequent generation produced dancer/choreographers such as Merce Cunningham, Erik Hawkins and Paul Taylor, who also developed idiosyncratic choreographic styles. Many of the training systems aligned to these styles entered the canon of modern dance and still circulate in dance training institutions today. It should be noted that these modern dance companies did not originate through institutional thinking but usually grew around a signature choreographer at the helm. Sally Gardner (2007a) writes of the artisanal nature of early modern dance, which often involved a group of artists who were personally invested in the creation of a new movement style. As companies developed and expanded in size, an inevitable hierarchy was established that in many cases set the choreographer at the apex of a large performing and training institution.

Sally Banes (1993: 10), writing about the Judson era in 1960s New York, explains how one of the significant dance artists of this time, Steve Paxton (1939–), believed that ‘the history of modern dance had been tainted by cults of personality, and he searched for ways of stripping any trace of the artist’s hand from his own work’.⁴ This position follows from Merce Cunningham’s destabilisation of authorial intention in his choreography through his use of chance operations in creative decision-making.⁵ At the White Space Conference at the University of Limerick in 2000, I attended an interview with Paxton on his work as a postmodern dancer/choreographer. He corrected the interviewer by saying that rather than being postmodern, he thought of himself as ‘post-Cunningham’, attesting to the latter’s influence on the Judson artists (and perhaps his discomfort with the postmodern label).

Cunningham was indeed seminal in his influence on dance worldwide, through challenging many of the embedded conventions within modern dance and proposing innovative methods of constructing choreography. He presented the dance, music, set and lighting as distinct elements that coexisted (at times randomly) within the performance space. Foster (1986: 169) explains that Cunningham freed choreography from the relationship to musical accompaniment and ‘expressive subject’, which allowed him to explore a range of choreographic possibilities. This included using chance structures to make choreographic choices, thereby subverting his position as author of the work. Dancers in this work cultivate a relationship to embodiment focused on enhancing movement options and embracing changeability rather than developing overt expressive qualities (Huschka 2011: 180). Cunningham’s creative experiments significantly influenced future generations of choreographers and were expanded upon through the experimentation of choreographers of the Judson era (Foster 1986) who further unhooked the dancing body from canonical dance vocabularies, representation and expressionism, to present ‘the body as a thing that senses, moves and responds’ (Albright 1997: 20). Banes (1987: 49) describes this as a proposition for dance to move beyond the perfection of technique and expression to become ‘the presentation of objects in themselves’.

Experiments in dance in the 1960s in North America influenced and continue to influence many developments worldwide. As a dance curator working in Montréal, Canada in the 1990s, Dena Davida (1992)⁶ explained the international reach of these developments:

Sparked also by intensified intercontinental exchange with American choreographers, a wave of European new free dance choreographers challenged the predominance of the classical danse d’école and the weighty tradition of opera house ballet. A ‘new dance’ movement was soon manifest in France, Britain, and Holland during the seventies; permeated Canada, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Spain and Italy and much of Western Europe in the eighties; and currently claims disciples in India, Australia, Scandinavia, Portugal and parts of Central and South America and Eastern Europe; and in the nineties has been carried into parts of Africa and Indonesia.

Also writing from first-hand experience, British choreographer and academic Emilyn Claid (2006) describes the emergence of New Dance in Britain in the 1970s. A collective of dance artists known as X6, named after the warehouse that was their base, emerged at this time. Their work reflected many of the prevalent issues uncovered through the feminist movement and radicalism of the 1970s. X6 contradicted notions of the pleasing, disciplined female body as exemplified by classical ballet, through a project which involved ‘re-claiming the realities of mortality and reproduction from the transcendent desires of patriarchal spectatorship’ (Claid 2006: 71). During this period, British dance artists re-evaluated codified dance styles and incorporated into dance the perspectives of somatic techniques, such as Body-Mind Centring and the Alexander Technique as well as martial arts forms such as Aikido and Tai Chi. Throughout this time, Release Technique, which was introduced to the UK by North American dancers, in particular Mary Fulkerson, became widely used as an approach that prepared the body for a greater number of movement possibilities.

Through Release Technique, Fulkerson combined her knowledge of anatomy gained through study with Barbara Clark, a student of Mabel Todd (1880–1956) who developed Ideokinesis⁷ (Jordan 1992: 52). Jordan explains Fulkerson’s use of imagery as a fundamental aspect of Release Technique: ‘in release work’s anatomical aspect, images are used to structure the manner in which bones balance or articulate in movement: images of lines, bridges and bowl shapes in the body, of paths of action-flow, all designed to release the body into easy efficient alignment and action’ (Jordan 1992: 52). Release Technique is still widely used by dancers and dance students today and does not employ a specific movement vocabulary, but rather requires the dancer to employ an attitude of introspection and sensitivity towards the body’s physiological structures. It has become an umbrella term, which encapsulates the idiosyncratic training methods that many dancers use to develop their skills and prepare their bodies for dancing.

Diana Theodores (1996: 1–3) describes the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s as a golden age in New York dance, outlining the prolific range of approaches in a widening field, which included ‘the chaste and virtuoso metaphysics of Cunningham’ and ‘the heroic pedestrianism of the Judson Movement’ alongside George Balanchine, Paul Taylor, Martha Graham and Twyla Tharp. However, in the 1990s the landscape transformed dramatically, according to New York-based dancer Veronica Dittman (2008), as the modern dance economy broke down due to significant changes in dance funding.⁸ Dittman (2008: 23) explains that this impacted on the working practices of choreographers, even those who were very well established, and furthermore altered considerably the employment opportunities for dancers:

There are barely ten modern dance companies in the city of New York that offer their dancers forty-eight weeks of work with a salary you can live on and health insurance […] below that very narrow top tier, dancers are all working for more than one choreographer and/or holding down outside jobs to fill in the gaps financially.

This shift in employment practices underscores the shape of the current climate, in which choreographers continue to develop idiosyncratic ways of moving outside institutional structures. Thus the freelance independent choreographer has become a staple of the dance milieu. Not attached to an institution or school, many choreographers now operate outside a fixed company structure to produce discrete projects for which new casts of performers are assembled and this is a global phenomenon. Contemporary dance projects are often instigated through commissions from companies, performance venues or festivals as well as through funding from public bodies. Choreographers working outside a company system may develop stable working relationships with specific dancers for a number of years. However, as Dittman (2008) charted above, it continues to be necessary for many dancers to seek employment on various projects with different choreographers throughout any given year. As choreographers may only employ dancers for discrete projects for short periods of months or weeks, dancers may work with several choreographers, often simultaneously, throughout their career. Aided by the growth of an infrastructure for dance in Western economies, which took place within schools, festivals, dance spaces/venues, producers and resource agencies, employment as a freelance or ‘independent’ dancer is now a viable career. This type of dancer nomadically traverses between different creative environments to work with different choreographers. In the UK, for example, major advocacy work has been carried out by organisations such as Dance UK and Independent Dance⁹ on behalf of independent dance artists.

A significant development in recent years is the ‘dance house’, which is often situated in a capital city or major economic centre and provides a central hub of activity for contemporary dance. Due to the support offered through these organisations, dancers and choreographers are likely to situate themselves in proximity to these centres in order to avail of these infrastructures in developing their careers.¹⁰ For example, the European Dance House Network (EDN) draws together twenty-two European dance houses from fifteen countries in projects such as Modul-Dance, which supports the work of emerging dance artists to develop and perform their choreography throughout Europe through residencies and co-productions. Funded through the European Union, this project endeavours to address the challenges that independent dance artists face outside of institutional environ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Dancing Multiplicities
• 2 Descending into Stillness: Rosemary Butcher
• 3 Veils within Veils: John Jasperse
• 4 The Shape Remains: Jodi Melnick
• 5 From Singular to Multiple: Liz Roche
• 6 Corporeal Traces and Moving Identities
• 7 Further Iterations and Final Reflections
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index