encyclopaedia of ways to wiggle

i heard someone on stairs during the interval say "they all look like little frogs"

we were next to a row-full of dancer-students, who were like the kids from avant-garde fame!! they whooped and hollered when tiny little old merce came on for his many curtains calls, which was nice (he is badly crippled w.arthritis)

(this is only the fourth or fifth time i ever went to the barbican btw) (b4 u start)

In effect, modern dance isn't audience-driven--it's inner-driven, which is why it's difficult to watch sometimes. The odd thing, to me, is that as time has passed, many modern dance techniques have become just as rigidly-defined as ballet, ballroom, etc. So, as audience members, we no longer get as much of the immediacy of emotion--as much of the "Wow! I can really feel that rage/grief/joy they're expressing" reaction. Which is a shame, and kind of defeats the purpose of it, in my opinon.

Incidentally, Mark S., did you know that Merce C. used to make choreographic decisions by flipping a coin? (Heads, he wiggles this way; tails, he wiggles that way...)

Anyway, I think the starting step is to go and watch a lot of these things, just like you do with movies and music, etc. and then you starting reading abt it too and eventually you could get into it but for that to happen you need to see whether there's something in it in the first place.

This is the greatest review of any dance ever. Thank you.

well, prob since I just don't see anything in it but since he's asked the q. but he did find something to like...anyway, carry on.

i. yes the fabulous human body, but actually the bodies we are looking at are very much all of a type, somewhat (but surely not entirely) determined by the requirements of the craft: viz slim, androgynous, shiny, recessive mannequins
ii. yes the fabulous human body, but the range of movements on offer seems to have been cut down only to those which are NOT used in other body-directed disciplines (sport, battle, non-modern dancing, mime, everyday life) (they even run on and off-stage in a "modern dancers' only" kind of way
iii. i wz talking to dr vick after, who works a lot with children, and we were thinking about how we wd have responded if some section of what we'd just watched had been a little performance made up by kids earlier in the day and put on for us: answers included, A. they would not have sustained the range (there would have been a lot more crapness and repetition, amd clumsiness would have alternated with grace); B. they would have broadcast their own emotional feelings OR the feelings they wanted us to feel/respond to, ie grins, frowns of concentration, pleased-with-self smirks, kid-style acting etc etc (cf "recessive mannequins" above: *one* red-head woman dancer had an expression which kind of contained a smile for one passage, but that was it => their own feelings, the "dance of their face" ew ew, was kept totally locked in all the time); C. Complete inability to suppress a sense of personality of movement (idea expanded in iv.)
iv. OK I have a friend in Physical Theatre, who used to be in DV8. She is tall and imposing, and terrifyingly fit. She doesn't call what she does "dance" — which i guess is to the point — but in nothing that I've seen her in is there a sense she's masking her "self" from the watcher. She may well be playing a role, but you would always immediately know it was HER playing that role. And OK, she's pretty physically unmistakeable, but what i mean is, someone maybe more of the bodytype of the merce cunningham ppl, if tackling the kind of thing Liz does, would come across as SOMEONE. Not merely an interchangeable type. With Liz, the self is one of the limbs/features being used: perhaps to call up stuff which is unlike her — the way actors do obv — but nevertheless particular to her.

OK with iv I can see why you might *sometimes* want free yrself from this dimension of performance (Brechtian alienation effect? i know nothing abt Brecht), but I don't understand what the theory of its total removal is. I can sort of make an analogy w. eg AMM's resistance to pre-formed musical material being imported into improv, but I can also see how the analogy fails (AMM logic wd bar ballet moves and jazzdance, yes, but not laughing...) (tho there *is* a "what do singers do in improv" question, haha phil minton oh dear...)

I said the Blake's Seven thing to Dr Vick and she larfed and stopped and said: "But what's sad here is that they (ie MC-people) totally wouldn't know what you meant, or even what Blake's Seven is." Is that true or fair?

Also: "Dance is an Artform for Girls"?? OK, I realise this is totally as stupid as "Rock/Jazz/Improv is an Artform for Boys" — but what is being said by such a claim? And does it tie in with anything I am banging on about?

(ps more-than-usually obscure mark s pet hate: when adverts require a "child's drawing of a house" or similar and hire a commercial artist to fake it => WE CAN ALL TELL!! Select a child (at random if nec), get THEM to draw a house and pay them the artist's fee please!!)

we were next to a row-full of dancer-students
It took me a while to realise just how limited the audience usually was at these things - once I cottoned on it felt like such a closed world: I came to suspect that only about 20% of a small-event audience was composed of people who weren't actively *involved* in the admin/practice/learning/teaching of modern dance, and half of that 20% were EX-types etc

(One of the best things I saw wasn't dance itself - one company's performance at The Place involved a 'live' rendition of Ligeti's 'Poeme Symphonique' - 100 difftempo metronomes placed on the stage one by one as the backing quite a sight and sound. This section ended with one ROWR dancer standing there in her underwear doing some geometric routine whilst babbling in french - difficult to think of ART when confronted with that ROWR)

haha Modern Dance = Tarkovsky audience's answer to Lap Dancing haha

I would think there isn't a big leap from Cage's music to what I presume Cunningham does in dance (I've never seen him, alas). Are you able to not demand expressiveness in the performance of Cage's music? Why is it harder to accept in dance?

Is Twyla Tharp modern or jazz? She's probably more of the jazz end I guess.

As I said on the ballet/child abuse thread, I'm not a huge fan, but I've enjoyed some of it.

The main thing I got out of it was a real revulsion to cultural-tourist middlebrow which two of the pieces consisted of: "Here are dances set to music of styles: Celtic, Portugese, and Latin". Yesyes there is "Latin" music which exemplifies a continent you stupid dick. They all speak Latin on the continent too. Far worse was the Russian Peasant whatever dancing which was like a cross between a rogers & hart musical number and Disney's Small World right down to grotesque painted on faces. The Portugese piece was actually okay though, coz the music was spectacular and totally overwhelmed the dancing, which if I tried I could read as a humbled in the presence of god deliberateness instead of just naff choreography.

There was a good piece with Tom Waits music that was very directly telegraphing and capturing the theatricality of the music, but in a modern dance style. The part for Big In Japan could have come straight from an update of West Side Story or cet. and God's Away On Business was tremendously powerful.

The best thing I've ever seen to help me "get" dance was Centerstage which actually captures the lives of dancers and motives of choreographers (the less obscure ones) quite well while pulling the usual teen-flik trix. I think of this now coz the highlight of the evening was an intesnsely personal piece from a first-time choreographer with a practiced company, and it was just spectacular clockwork elegance, the partnering and switches and everything just v. systemically powerful and perfectly in tune with the music.

The one thing I think is that it is necessary to read dance as the aestheticization of ways in which we already wiggle day-to-day -- that formalizing them still leaves them in reference to our own bodies and gestural signifiers should probably find a deep root in our own ways of interpreting body language et. cet, re-imagining ourselves as the dancers firing mirror neurons and feeling their motion as ours.

Or somesuch.

from Anything Can Happen, an article on Encounter Merce from Stanford Magazine:

Dance lecturer Diane Frank, a former instructor with Cunningham’s studio in New York, is teaching an intermediate/advanced class in Cunningham-based technique. “The students rehearse without music and learn to put movements together that don’t usually follow one another,” Frank says.

FACT-CHECK GOLD:
"Most successful of these was Rafael Bonachela's Amox, a slippery, Sapphic duet for Oxana Panchenko and Amy Hollingsworth, barely distinguishable one from the other in gym knickers and vests which, in the course of their rubber-limbed convulsions, kept threatening to ruck up over their breasts. I'm sure this was deliberate."

haha in the interview i'm proofing the choreographer is all, oh ppl tht it wz about two women having sex, but NO WAY d00d, the thought never entered my head

ha, whenever I make fun of modern dance I do that convulsion thing