Notes from Thinking Out Loud #2 - Monday, October 19, 2009
Here are our notes from the last TOL! Dancemakers has been very busy lately and we have been discussing new articles for next TOL, which falls on December 1st. We will post them soon - but for now, see below:
“What is the Contemporary?” – Giorgio Agamben
“How Modern Is Modernism? The Relevance of Reconstruction”
- André Lepecki
“Reconstructing Dance: Taking an Active Interest in the Legacy of Dance” - a short essay from the Goethe-Institute website
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“What Is Contemporary?”
What connections to The Act of Study (TOL’s first article by Paulo Freire) arose while reading this article?
- Being Agamben’s “contemporary” is like being what Freire calls a subject (an ideal learner). It is not static but a process.
Using Freire’s concept of a flash idea, what flashed while reading “What Is Contemporary?”
- I thought about how I’ve come to where I am and how I can use others’ work as a filtration system to learn about where I am and what is contemporary to me. For instance I prefer contemporary work but it’s lineage is not forgotten. It’s like a line of evolution that you can cut into. Peggy Baker is an example of this: I’m not a fan of her work but I’m a fan of her student’s work.
- if I prefer the contemporary, why would I want to read the “pre _____” if there is a “post _____”,? For instance, why learn about modernism if we are post-modern?
Thoughts on the article’s form:
- Elitist or academic
- Poetic and hard to grasp.
- Inspiring but daunting – if I do what he is asking of me I can’t do things like buy my groceries
- “Contemporary” as an idealism
- A higher call to action – like a manifesto to become more “contemporary” (by Agamben’s definition)
So what is meant by “contemporary”?:
- Is he saying that contemporary-ness is not about “nowness” but more so a state of being?
- Being contemporary is knowing what to look back on
- Breaking down the word as “con” = (connotation) against, “temp” = time – “contemporary” meaning against time? Does this create a paradox of being contemporary as being both intimate and impersonal simultaneously
- OR “con” = “with” (the Latin preposition), “temp” = time – “contemporary” meaning with time
- Indescribable – the metaphor of never being able to describe the ground beneath your foot, until you move your foot
How is the complex term “contemporary” appropriated by popular culture?
- “contemporary” dance section of So You Think You Can Dance
- School of Contemporary Arts
In relation to Agamben’s lightness/darkness reference:
- Lightness/darkness as the good/bad: perhaps it is actually the darkness that is more graspable because we are all able to feel the darkness within ourselves.
- Perhaps what he meant by light and dark is not infused with value but instead a different system of interpreting our experiences
- Lightness/Darkness as what is illuminated and what is less illuminated: understood through Jacques Ranciere quote: “A political act gives audience to a voice that isn’t usually heard” – to be contemporary is to find what isn’t illuminated
- metaphor of an actor on a stage with lights shining in their eyes and sometimes you need to shield your eyes from the light in order to see
Lost in translation:
I wonder what is the essential quality that one is trying to bring forth in a recreation and how does it translate. For instance, perhaps the aesthetic of femininity is interpreted differently in 1960 than in 1990 by dancer, creator, audience, etc. Also, what was radical and meaningful once may not have the same political resonance today. Do presenters get stuck wanting to preserve it’s “radical” quality? However it can be interesting to see something that was political once.
Who is Giorgio Agamben? What is the context of this article?
- He was giving a one-year seminar – the inaugural talk in post-grad seminar and this article was his introduction. He decided to publish it.
- When looking at Italian source, someone found out that Italians were critical about fact that it was published.
What is the relationship between “contemporary” and “modern”?
- Important and enjoyable to just stop and consider what these terms mean
- What is the difference between modern and contemporary dance? Perhaps “modern dance” is a style of dance that dates, roughly, from the 1920’s – 1960’s – starting with Martha Graham, Mary Wigman and ending with Merce Cunningham (still clean lines, formations, etc)
- People have tried to call post-modern “contemporary” so that it is not located in a particular time
- If “modern” is associated with an epoch – roughly the first half of the 20th century - style of dance (modern dance) or style of art (modern art) then maybe contemporary is an attempt to not become affiliated with a particular style
- There was a time that we thought that “modernism” was over and we called it “post-modern” but as time passes we have more perspective and realize that “post-modern” is actually another stage of “modernism”. Is it possible to create a word whose meaning will constantly alongside us and not freeze in time? For instance “modern” once meant “new” and now it is an old style.
- Is “contemporary dance” becoming frozen in time as the name of a style or codification that is defined by works starting at the end of Merce Cunningham until now?
How does what is believed to be “cultural” or “traditional” dance fit into this question of contemporariness?
- Cultural dances as being frozen in time. When in the continual evolution of flamenco is the form frozen as flamenco? Is it possible for flamenco to be contemporary if it is a continual process and subjective?
- Contemporary folk dance = hip hop? Hip-hop as dance of the folk.
Soyouthinkyoudontfolkdance.com
- Has Graham has become traditional dance? It’s moved from being tacit to being explicit. Graham became codified, notated and explicit – whereas the contemporary is the tacit
- Japanese Noh theatre – a style of theatre that is passed down generationally in which the movements are fixed and unchanging and this is what is prized – it is hoped that it does not automatically become more contemporary when done today. Is it possible that this is perfect replication and that this is not contemporary or is it necessarily contemporary because it is danced by today’s dancers? Is there change that we just cannot detect?
-
“How Modern Is Modernism? The Relevance of Reconstruction.”
and
“Reconstructing Dance: Taking an Active Interest in the Legacy of Dance”
and
“Reconstructing Dance: Taking an Active Interest in the Legacy of Dance”
-
On archive and recreation:
- My work has always been about archive and recreation, but most of us always decide to change it. When people were recreating Baroque they didn’t have the visual technology to see the original piece and needed to interpret words into dance. Even though we do have that visual technology now to recreate a piece much more accurately we are choosing to take creative liberty with recreations.
- On one hand it is exciting that we have the technology to archive work. On the other hand if we archive everything, works are at the danger of losing it’s ephemerality
Is it enough to take a body (that is contemporary) and impose historical choreography on it – can this be contemporary? Is this interesting?
Deborah Hay
- made solo pieces to give away.
http://www.deborahhay.com/
William Forsythe
http://www.theforsythecompany.com/
- produced instructional videos.
- What happens when you get so detailed with the DVD instructions technically, that it’s not useful anymore to capturing whatever is that invisible element?
Trio A
- a loose choreography intended for appropriation and use – but finally a 5th generation seemed too distant for the creator - Yvonne Rainer.
Is there a dance word equivalent to the theatre term “adaptation”?
- Is there a difference between adaptation and reconstruction – how do you know the difference, is it important to know?
- Reconstruction is rare in dance
- Maybe it depends on the intention of the “recreator”.
- Does doing reconstruction allow us to look for differences between now and then?
- What is a “remount”? Is it about time? Is something a “remount” when it hasn’t been a long time since the original premiered? Is it about authority? Does a repeated piece become a “remount” when it is done by the same authority of the original – like the same dance company?
- Is there a difference in the dance world to the theatre world in finding a term to define that unchanging quality of a piece when it is performed by different companies or different performers in a different time?
Repeating works can create a canon.
- When we repeat a piece often it’s because it is part of a canon or it may become included in the canon. Is canonifying a problem?
- What sort of canon are we creating in Canada?
Why does (what is known as) the Canadian contemporary dance community (at large) shy away from visiting older works?
- Could it be a decision influenced by the economic climate of dance (funding)?
- There seems to be a quest for the new in dance – but what does that mean?
- Dance seems like the only art form where we really don’t have a constant engagement with the old (read old books, listen to old music, see old movies, etc)
- Unwillingness to revisit old work as devaluing role of artist
- Maybe there is a crisis of choreographer as author. Graham authored things. In recreating her piece how does the whole process of transmission change, as the question of who the author is blurs
- Is it important to learn the roots of what you study in dance?
- It seems backwards that we are not trying harder to learn what we have evolved from.
Why is there a hierarchy of ‘newest’ most ‘innovative’ or ‘unique’.
- Why is there such an imperative towards the new? Disturbing.
- Why are we so determined to do new – especially since it can never really be the same anyway?
When is a concept or a person’s legacy frozen?
- Is Graham defined by her work from the 40’s or from the 90's? We need to keep in mind that she changes. Also, how do we understand Graham’s work in context of her time?
- In a proper reconstruction do I need to make major changes to situate it not, the way it was then?
The Wooster Group, from NYC, had a show that addressed the complexity of trying to reproduce a work
http://www.thewoostergroup.org/
- Poor Theatre was a piece where actors “re-created” in real time, on stage, a video of the original peice
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