Swingin'

I went swing dancing! Well, sort of - one class and a brief open studio way out on the west side hardly count as a wild and crazy night of being led around the dance floor. But it was a perfectly happy little evening of good old-fashioned social dance. Warm up this way, add steps that way, and next thing you know you're either floating like a cloud around an engaging, loveable partner!, or you're having all your signals crossed by a man who can't count past six. Turns out you don't get much choice sometimes.

All right... so sue me. I have ideological misgivings about surrendering the basic structure of a dance to a man. But in a recent effort I've commissioned myself to, I present to you: the positive! (That's right. The positive.) The positive is that after a long and happy few years of always demanding at least equal share in a dance, it's a little bit freeing to just shuffle my feet and swivel around under the guise of chipper surrender. I had an unbeatable sense of my partner's baffled respect as, provided he could count past six, I made the most of every structural resource on the dance floor.

As I type, I am letting a Taylor Swift song poison my mind about how love works, and I'm wondering (as I imagine many, and wiser, wonderers have) if we created these structures for social interaction just to break them when the time comes, if the Lindy or the East Coast or whatever the heck I was doing to "All Shook Up" are just launch pads to acknowledging what really matters by giving it a boundless free-for-all boogie. Is freedom from structure... transcendent?

(Answer me, Taylor!)

But I digress, and my day job beckons. Happy dancing.

Flash! A mob!

What just happened? Did I just meet up with hundreds (right?) of strangers in LA (aah, city) and bust out Janet Jackson moves in a flash mob? Why, yes. Yes I did. And it looked like this the second time:



Staci Lawrence and Conroe Brooks put their production experience and general enthusiasm (it's infectious) to the test, gaining participants from friends, family, Facebook, Twitter, and Miss Jackson's (if you're nasty) website, then having the whole lot of 'em stepping in time to a medley of the superstar's hits.

Sadly, the much-Twittered Janet appearance overshadowed the "flash" part in Round 2 (hence the aisle). Flash Mobs can be pillow fights, hug-fests... anything; in a manner somewhat typical of LA, this one served consumer culture. But hey, the first round surprised glassy-eyed Grove shoppers into unexpected delight!

What a bizarre experience. "It's really about promoting that viral grassroots side of it," Staci pointed out. And this is true: I am utterly impressed with the range of dancers, from skinny to not-skinny and tall to short, old to young and in between, obviously and sneakily devoted to Jackson. (After learning my intentions to ponder and write, one participant asked me outright: do you like Janet Jackson? I do.) The "let's just do it" attitude of the whirlwind orchestration says quite a bit about embracing spontaneity. (Cheese!) Furthermore, I've never felt so connected to so many people in this weird car-obsessed land of group solitude.

I'm disgruntled that this was, by definition, a promotion (see the tab here). But if a comedian and a singer in the TV-and-movie industry can just say "hey, let's do this" and really do it? Well, then I have no doubt that they'll keep doing this for simpler things - even better than Janet's Number Ones album.

Happy dancing!

It's Happening!

Fact: I dislike extensive program notes. I think they mute the dance. The dance should speak for itself. Down with program notes!

Now that that's out of the way, let me praise every other aspect of "Once More, Again, One," Hana van der Kolk's latest creation at Five Thirty Three. I'd been feeling a little gipped after parades & changes, replays came to REDCAT this week, as if by missing the 1960's I'd missed having my mind blown by the first run of anything.

Wrong!

With or without all the rhetoric in the program notes (which I still refuse to read), "Once More, Again, One" is part is-this-art?, part Warhol happening, and all 2009. I'm not even totally sure when the program began, although it certainly picked up when David Kendall (not the VJ) spun a song out of sounds coming from the four dancers. The performance elements are just super. (Gush!) There are solos, duos, and Lucinda Childs-ish floor patterns, not to mention enough Prince to tide me over 'til next 1999. There's stripping down and zoning out and a creepy a capella Madonna cover! But I'd rather you attend this gem of a show than read what's in it. Heck, skip parades & changes, replays. You'll be learning more about postmodern art if you see it at Five Thirty Three. It's a grungy loft two meaningfully scary blocks away from the terrain of the Downtown Art Walk. Through the former factory windows you can see a "This Is My - OUR - Town" Dodgers billboard with good ol' Villaraigosa beaming. Make what you will of that.

I am a little wary of van der Kolk's Master's Degree. The institution says a lot about dance's recent history. To slug through tuition and academic red tape in order to make warehouse art... If you ask me, it's a paradox. It's undeniably networking-friendly, and preservative to say the least, but seems to counter by its very nature how we stick it to the man. (Can we anymore?)

But hey, I'd have had not a clue of the card-carryin' dancemaker's background if I hadn't asked before the show! So shame on me.

I am thoroughly impressed and relieved to know that my generation can escape sweepstakes and YouTube (awesome though the two may be).

Now please scrap your evening plans, scrap what you learned about what dance should be, and see this performance.

parades & changes, replays (& replays & replays & replays & replays...)

Every so often I see a dance and I feel I've been given the finger. Well, hi! Anna Halprin, mother of the Planetary Dance and the happy holistic practice of movement arts for one's quality of life, you have put me in my place. I'm not particularly impressed with "parades & changes, replays," nor am I inclined to read the laborious program notes explaining the 1964 original of the 2008 recreation. I am inclined to give you, my darling reader, a play by play. Even if you read it, you'll probably be all right seeing it too.

The white noise of crowd uncontrol hums out of the speakers when a kindly man in a suit takes the stage, presumably for the standard off-with-the-cell-phones chide. Instead he conducts, and dancers sneakily seated rise and speak in French and English and who knows what else about... well, anything? Once they reach the stage, what I will call Part I is already off to a wily start. Off with the suits! On with the suits. Off with the suits again! And so on. Next thing you know there's a brown paper waterfall and a celibate orgy center stage, then the back wall opens and off they all glide, clad in wads of the waterfall. End Part I.

Jerome Delatour

In Part II, the lights are brighter and the composed, near-smirk faces are wilier, and everyone is probably more aware of my formalist eyes bugging out in the back row of the theater. (Will I ever be on time to anything?) A brief flash of Stomp later, the stage becomes aisles of 21st-century-junk-kitsch piles. This I'd been anticipating. The dancers mosey and don wacky costumes. They put wacky costumes on each other!

Jerome Delatour

There is not one pirouette, not one leap or gesture that suggests this came from a classroom. (Although, minor gripe, a few moments feel like a college class learning to make improv scores.) Generally the dance is just... there. Production value be damned, since a huge white balloon lit from the inside and a live musical score are about as complex as things get. As two critters wander out of the theater, having gone from suited to naked to suited to naked to dressed in colorful trash, I wish LA had more pedestrian traffic. It's a little bleak to see two such laissez fair art bodies wander out into the street to find... nothing.

Dense Thoughts

A few thoughts with erratic-at-best parenthetical citations:

I'm often asked how dance is preserved, then an hour later finding myself still rattling on about Labanotation. (Think of it, simply, as music notation where bodies become sounds that take up time and space.) Despite the thorough work of this written system - even the basics are meticulous - there is a debate within the dance community as to whether the pen can truly record and convey the dance. This is understandable: live concert dance, as any basic art theorist can shrug and mumble about, is ethereal, ethereal, and ethereal. But the dichotomy between dancers and notators is selfish, and far from self-serving; indeed, it makes for a bleak future at best in written dance preservation.

In Arthur Lubow's "Can Modern Dance Be Preserved?" (New York Times, 5 November 2009) the postmodern dances of the late Merce Cunningham receive especial attention. The old age and ailing health of the renowned choreographer sparked a quick plan to preserve his work - one that seemed counterintuitive at best. Cunningham's famous words suddenly spoke volumes to both the value and the preservational carelessness of his art:

Dance gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.

If this is not carelessness, it is at least occupational hazard. As Lubow points out, Cunningham freed dance from dictatorial music, "charged it inventively with the chaotic overflow and technological buzz of contemporary life" (Lubow). These two steps (so to speak) both set his works apart from the dance canon prior and made it nearly impossibly difficult to recreate without the maker at the helm. One could argue that for all the details of a notation score there are infinitely more nuances in Cunningham dances, works that convert pure feeling into pure presentation.

Further problems arise with the infrastructure of most modern dance companies (inseparable choreographer and company), and with the teaching of dance "primarily from one dancer to another, 'body to body'" (Lubow). The alternative method - one taken by Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, for instance - is to adopt new works into a repertoire, honoring gestalt over byline. (This of course presents its own problem, perhaps another issue entirely: with one choreographer or ten, artistic attitudes may be as nebulous as trends in the arts or as heavy as Martha Graham's heart. [In the case of Cunningham, chance and indeterminacy put an already abstracted process through a kaleidoscope.]) But in a single choreographer's work, for one company or otherwise, there must be a compromise. I am not convinced that preserving teh dance and honoring the dancemaker are mutually exclusive endeavors.

Lubow refers to the common reliance upon videotaping, the notion that it captures movement and presentation, if incompletely. But performances are not exact, and intentionally or not, Dick Caples (witty and wise Lar Lubovitch Dance Company's executive director) articulates exactly how choreographers hinder their own preservation when they fail to engage notators. "'No choreographer I know can do (Labanotation),'" he says, "'They don't trust giving it over to someone and saying "I can't check on you, but I am going to trust you"'" (Lubow).

A risk is already being taken when a choreographer places movement in the proverbial hands - the literal, risky bodies - of dancers. I accept the artistic distrust of a stranger fitting elaborate thoughts into columns, but there is no rule that this notator be a stranger. What if dancers could preserve their own steps? What if learning to dance and notate were the same as learning to speak and write? Without this dual endeavor, dance culture is making itself one of orators and no written language.

The "dance capsules" in the Cunningham trust are progressive, containing everything from choreographer's notes to pictures of stagecraft to videotapes and dancers' advice (Lubow). Leave it to the theorists to decide whether this threatens the fresh choreographic approaches that made work in the first place - now it's the responsibility of the recreator, a legacy left to the able and willing artists who can reinvent Cunningham indefinitely.

It is painful to consider that a life’s work will disappear, but it is also hard to think that it will be diminished by inexact performances, as fuzzy as fourth-generation photocopies. In establishing the trust and endorsing the extinction of the foundation, Cunningham seemed to be creating a structure as intelligent and farsighted as a Cunningham dance. But as any of his dancers will tell you, his steps are fiendishly difficult to carry out.

!!!

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/magazine/08cunningham-t.html?_r=1&th=&emc=th&pagewanted=all

cheating.

I apologize for the basic copy-and-paste (see below) from what'll be on Culture Spot tomorrow. I am very, very tired and took "To Be Straight With You" very much to heart - where I will keep it 'til thoughts thereof become conversational. If you see the performance, please tell me what you think. Good night!

DV8 Physical Theatre

It is an art to express oneself, calibrating instinct with expectations and behavioral parameters.

It is an art to project a sphere of blue and green Earth out of thin air and spin it at a dancer’s fingertips.

It is an art to let an audience forget about “dance” or “performance” and instead submerge it in a vision so thorough, so absolutely clear-sighted that town hall meeting, support group, feature film, and personal journal meld into each other and onto the stage. It is this art that makes DV8 Physical Theatre so much greater than the sum of its parts. At another west coast premiere in Royce Hall, UCLA Live presented the English troupe and its latest work, “To Be Straight With You,” on Friday night.

Every word comes from an interview conducted to create the piece. Sentimentality is left at the door for eighty minutes of movement, stories, facts, meticulous lighting and sound, and costumes as subtle as the DV8 craft itself. What remains is the raw nerve of cultural shame. Part of this is beyond native comprehension: there is a sense of post-colonial guilt, a confused responsibility that belongs uniquely to the English heritage. Men and women must flee to England for refuge from blind atrocities in Nigeria, or from families in India that will not accept homosexuality the way London will.

But “To Be Straight With You” does not make generalities. Instead, facts are acknowledged as the force of so many individuals’ suffering for their sexuality. The 85 countries lit in red beneath a dancer’s hands criminalize, to varying degrees, homosexual relations, and regional prejudices create the private narratives of each vignette. Two women are drawn – literally, by lighting on a scrim – farther and farther from each other as their culture denies them a relationship. An Iraqi doctor relates his devastating story in clinical tones, even as unidentifiable men batter and drag him across the stage. In a passage of the finest staging, classical Indian dancing to pop music helps ease the tragedy of suppression in arranged marriage. One woman revels in her newfound freedom from stringent religion.

Many ask for anonymity outright: their families will find them, or their neighbors will assault them.

For every moment of heart-wrenching fact, there is a moment of physical mastery. The DV8 dancers have precision command over every sinew. Some of the most effective monologues are delivered from bodies seeming possessed, with shaking legs or expressing every single word in an arm, an elbow, a neck. In one awe-striking blink, two men sitting in chairs become two men standing on chairs.

With chairs and scrims and moving sets, the stagecraft in “To Be Straight With You” is integrated so that one might overlook its complexity. Lights find their subject to the thread; sound obeys staging completely. Projection, the bane of graceful tech in dance, seems prepared as its own exhibit. It is a startling complement to what it accompanies. A mobile room becomes DJ booth, living room, or prison cell, and there is a chalkboard on the stage filled with scrawl, the chaos of a world that has thousands of words to describe its own fear of, well, deviation.

The glue of the piece is the tone of Lloyd Newson. When he established DV8 and his artistic directorship in 1986, Newson cast aside the pursuit of abstraction in dance. What results is so closely integrated with its performance and production elements, from monologue to follow spot, that the company truly embodies its “Physical Theatre” moniker. Best of all, there remain the unconventional – or, as with masks, hyperconventional – signatures of the troupe behind “Strange Fish” and “The Cost of Living.” It is direction so well-developed that performance disappears altogether, allowing us to observe our own.

DV8 Physical Theatre will present “To Be Straight With You” again at 8 on Saturday, November 6 in Royce Hall at UCLA. For more information or to order tickets, visit uclalive.org.

Movie?

Does anyone know how to navigate films in LA better than I do? Because I want to see this.

Dance Around Town

(I don't understand why my font changed!)

One embarrassingly long hiatus later, I'm back - and the calendar's exploding! Whoops. So here you have a preview/plug for at least halfway trustworthy dance performances, classes, and events (and a performance art piece or two) coming up around Los Angeles. Sorted by date, this should help satisfy your hankerin' for local AND exotic fare for at least half the month. Tie on your tennies (or your ballet flats or your bare feet) and get across town to...

...Tonight (November 4) at 8:30 - "Dancing on Site and on Camera" brings three award-winning choreographers to chat about their work (the how's, the why's) with Alpert Awards director Irene Borger. The event is at REDCAT and co-presented by Dance Camera West.

...November 5 at 12:00 - Kasey McMahon and Emmeline Chang will be dotting now 'til early 2010 with performance art events. In Century City, Help Your Husband Get Ahead is the first. There's a Facebook event up - RSVP if you're performing, and you'll get the full dig on how to be! Or just find yourself at Avenue of the Stars Office Park around lunch time...

...November 5 at 7:30 & November 8 at 3:00 - At the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, Lineage Dance will perform in the Art & Ideas Festival: ORIGINS. It's the brainchild, if you will, of artistic director Hilary Thomas. For tickets, check out the company site or the Art & Ideas one. To learn more, click here! They're a pretty super charity-driven group with dances worth seeing.

...November 6 & 7 at 8:00 - UCLA Live actually seems to have planned their Dance and Spoken Word series around my interests. DV8 Physical Theater is coming to town! Lloyd Newson, consistent purveyor of what no one will talk about enough, is bringing To Be Straight With You to Royce Hall for its cross-disciplinarily envelope-pushin' west coast premiere. I am actually drooling.

...November 6 from 10:00 AM 'til 5:00 PM - As if the weekend could get any better, DV8 is holding open auditions. (Also at Royce Hall - and really, open. Men, women, whoever. Click here.)

...November 6 & 7 at 8:30 PM, November 8 at 3:00 PM - My beloved bumpkin college made me a big fan of gamelan music. That and Balinese dance make Ramayana: An Indian Epic at REDCAT. I don't know the first thing about the performance ensemble, but it looks promising!

...November 6 & 7 at 8:00 PM, November 8 at 6:00 PM - Who knows...

...November 7, 14, & 21 at 11:00 AM's - Neil Greenberg will be teaching at DANCEbank, that steady sturdy stream of dance classes for all at Farm Lab heading out of downtown. Classes are $12 apiece. And, because I think this map from the Facebook group is just so great:

...November 7 at 7:00 - I love this company's website. I dig their origin. I don't like that (for shame!) I've never actually seen them perform. Maybe I'll make it to this! And then maybe I'll make it to this. I can't vouch for it yet... but I'm excited.

...November 8 at 7:30 - Yvonne Rainer, that glorious dancemaker who changed SO so so much in the art (Wiki her) is getting more well-deserved attention with Part 2 of 8 in "Bodies, Objects, Films: An Yvonne Rainer Retrospective." The Egyptian Theater in Hollywood is showing "Film about a woman who...", which Ms. Rainer made in 1974. Parking's near-free with validation; general admission is $10. Check it out.

...November 11-14 at 8:30 PM - Another glorious dancemaker, Anna Halprin, will actually outlive us all. But slightly separate from her holistic and apparently life-elongating dances, parades and changes was as awe- and grumble-inducing a piece of postmodernism as any when it premiered in 1965. Who knows how it'll look among 21st century art confetti? I don't. I'm curious. Will review, if tickets appear... But beware, social conservatives! Like all good art, it was once banned in the US. Features a cast of modern scene all-stars, in case you're curious.

...November 14, who knows when, who knows where - FLASH MOB JANET JACKSON DANCE. Will update.

...November 15, 6:30 - 9:00 PM - Word to my home crew! Okay... forget I said that. But a kernel of cool cats meets every week at 522 Santa Monica Blvd. in the coast town for a Contact Improv jam. (My first LA dance experience.) Better than that (as if it could be), they have a Be Or Bring a Beginner night every month! I think it's on the 15th this month. Sorry if I'm wrong... But hey, pay $7-or-what-you-can-pay and get play time with a group of considerable skill and variety. And even if there's no official class, folks are there to help you learn. Plus you might luck out and land a Swinger's milkshake date with the whole party! I recommend. In case they ever update their site: here.

Okay. Gotta stop. Too much to do.

Love,

LADB

MIA

Will post again soon! Took a quick break to write about lit instead. Quite an adjustment...