Rosie Kay's "5 Soldiers" and the War with Verisimilitude

“5 Soldiers”

Rosie Kay Dance Company

Kunsthaus Tacheles

23 April 2011

The audience enters a space which appears remarkably clean and well-funded in distinction to the grafittied exterior and a bathroom with no working soap dispensers (though there was a bottle of dish soap on one of the sinks). Somehow a ,33 liter bottle of beer was still €3, but I think the bartender calculated a generous tip into the price. I chose a seat on the front row for leg room, because it was easiest to get to, and because I’m finding you really can’t be too close to these black-box productions. The seats were plastic and cupped. I noticed at some point I’d slumped so far down in my chair that I must have looked like a kid who didn’t want to be called on in class. I thought of my tight lower back that keeps me from folding far into hamstring stretches, how sitting like this exacerbates my tendency to slump and allows my lower back to remain inflexible.

We entered to see dancers were dressed in army fatigues messing with their gear and engaging in brief flurries of exercises. While watching one of them do sit ups, I thought that this was the beginning of a show. Dance is Pilates-informed; we never do sit-ups, never let our rectal sheathes “pop out,” but instead do slow exercises which build “core muscles” which draw the abdomen instead in. Another did push-ups with widened arms. Again in my experience, dance classes usually involve “triceps pushups” if any at all, where the hands are placed beneath the armpits.

I found myself tempted by a kind of binary I usually eschew (and really hate): dance is graceful, manly men are not. To dress this binary up a bit more, the sensibility required for dance seems to run counter to the desensitivity inculcated for military life: not just stab and kill, but the idea that you would have your soldiers, whom you would apparently want to keep healthy, run for miles in combat boots. The male dancers in 5 Soldiers maintained manly and straight composure throughout the piece. Their grunting and screaming were convincing. They also choreographed  sexual scenarios before the sole female character in order to entice or intimidate her, which I found completely reflective of the homo-philia exercised in locker rooms and bars by patently homophobic, proudly heterosexual men. I mention this in part because I’ve come to loathe watching men who seem very not at home with playing manly men. It’s less the indignation of a black man watching a white man trying to be black than the incredulity of someone of another ethnicity watching the same effort.

The presence of a female soldier was a powerful component in the dynamic. That she was very attractive opened me up on different levels as a spectator. She did boy push-up like a girl: lowering her head a bit to give the sensation of going all the way down to the floor. And it was through watching her that I realized that these weren’t real fatigues, but costumes. The cloth looked thin around her behind, which showed curvature rather than being pressed down by uncomplimentary, one-size fits all dungarees. A standout for me in terms of a masterful handling of an aesthetically volatile subject was an incredibly well engineered night scene. The female dancer powdered all of her visible body, the sweet fragrance slowly wafted towards me, evocative of femininity in general, of every woman I’ve ever wanted or just femininity, the lightness that is everywhere in the room and nowhere to be seen.  The four men approached her like something of a mob (though I remember thinking I wish it were more so, like the three men of the firing squad who’ve morphed into a multi-legged monster in Goya’s “The Executions of the Third of May). There was a great use of comic relief—relief in sense of contrast to bring out certain features (like a bas relief), not just a holiday. This was when one of the soldiers started clowning and showing off for her a bit more. The Goya-monster was dismantled, and had turned into a harmless man-child. However out of this clowning (and clowns are terrifying, as any child knows!) came a new monster, more aggressive, more determined. Rape, even its possibility, is terribly difficult to treat as an artistic subject without treading too close to voyeurism or victimization. For me this scene was a real testament to Kay’s maturity and artistry.

Another memorable aspect of the performance was the younger man’s body language as they were walking on a patrol. He was so anxious to see everything that he didn’t allow himself to blink. His neck was hinged back and locked into position. I know this feeling. The constriction in the chest because I’m taking short quick breaths that don’t descend far down into my lungs, always ready to flinch and tighten. Hearing your own breath, but trying to open your ears because your life depends on your aural sense. Trying to keep cool, but scared shitless.

Sound crescendos, then an explosive flash of light towards the audience. The boy lies on the ground, then goes into spasms. Moaning, as I recall, but not screaming. This hit me on a level that wasn’t so much empathizing, certainly not with the person on stage (whom I didn’t think to be in any pain), though I did feel a modicum of empathy for the Private Ryan character who went down. What it was more effective as was a kind of searing quality. The idea that when people are blown up, they do something much like this. The others gathered around him, put his legs in a sling. Much of that empathy was lost by over efforting in the final scene. He was trying to walk on his stumps and falling, loudly on a stage whose percussive qualities we’d all come to know through the 10 minutes of drill formations in the beginning. He’d fall and land harder than he needed, his hands gnarled, his arms stiff. It was as if he’d lost supporting reflexes, or they’d be slowed, but that doesn’t seem to me to be an effect of losing limbs. I started to feel as if I was being taken for a ride, and the scene seemed to go on longer than it needed. The lights dimmed as he struggled and fell. Someone began clapping loudly, somewhat slowly behind me, before the lights had gone all the way down. It seemed very rude to me, impatient with the piece, and perhaps a bit sarcastic. I imagined a portly man with a moustache, but I think there were only two women in their late 20’s who could have been the culprits. At any rate, the reception in Berlin was cool: they only brought them back out twice. Berlin doesn’t like dance or expression in their post-Expressionistic dance, and this British import committed both sins.

“Alte Liebe” Choreographed by Britta Pudelko and Stephan Müller

“Alte Liebe”

Choreographed by Britta Pudelko and Stephan Müller

Dock 11, Berlin

27 November, 2010

“Alte Liebe and the Bodies that Bear Ballet”

     As I walked into Dock 11, a group of men lie piled atop each other in a circle. A woman enters, stately in her carriage, positively noble in her visage, and carried by feet which deigned not to look at each other and hips which threatened to topple this mesmerizing, aging queen. Her long neck and still willowy arms serve as tokens for her Royal pedigree and schooling. They command, majestically and impotently, that we not look at the wicked spell cast on her aged trunk.

     Like Nijinsky’s Faun, the four dancers—all of them women, all “old”—bear a certain bifurcation. Most often the split is at the navel: the arms are still obedient to the dictates of ballet while the lower halves struggle against his unyielding expectations. But I imagine this reads very differently depending on the spectator’s own history with ballet. My training in ballet is limited, and my capacities even more so, but my own experience with this form compelled to false, however interesting, conclusions about the dancers. To my eye, that is, according to the way my bodily encounters shape my vision, ballet seemed to have begun its suit rather late in some of the women’s lives. The arms seemed to be grafted on a decaying torso. In the one case where a dancer could meet the “big toe resting against the heel” requirements of ballet’s fifth position, it seemed a dissettling vestige to me, a relic, like a saint’s dismembered and encased hand which refuses to age. I think of it as some position of succor more than comfort, like a trauma victim’s safe spot. However another dancer’s atemporal cambré, a slow arch of the back, harkened back, vertebra by vertebra, to a state of wondrous agility. Another dancer’s right femoral head seemed welded into its socket, Her hip was thrust forward because of it, and her feet both constantly turned out.

     At times the lack of an ability to keep up with ballet was played to a humorous effect. For example, one of the dancers left off before attempting a move where one jumps and faces the opposite direction mid-air, called a fouetté. At another point, three of the women turn their tea party discussion to a dancer’s dramatic fall to her staged death. One commented that it was beautifully done. The fallen dancer then discusses how she is going to rise again, and gets up with an unballetic grunt.

        Some, I concluded, were former ballerinas, others not.

    I was, in some sense, mistaken. The program notes, and my Royal Academy of Dance-honed girlfriend, assured me that these were all thoroughly trained ballet dancers who’d spent years performing ballet. No doubt seeing these women as bearing their expertise to their current capacity would lead to a very different experience with this dance (and I hope some of you who will chime in), but I was never consistently convinced that this was the case with everyone. Instead, this narrative conveyed by the top halves of their bodies, the tale of virtuosity and notoriety, seemed to me as farcical as the legion of young men who were fondling and fawning after the women.

     To put it another way, the alte Liebe wasn’t the chorus of young men. Instead, this lover is far more consumptive and contemptuous. It used the women, maimed their bodies, and left hobbling, physically muttering. Their public confessions/insistence of love made seem not only false, but the unconvincing, pathetic ravings of a corporeal dementia. The women profess to be former lovers of ballet, but he does not recognize them. What does ballet do for you? What does ballet do to you? I only scarcely recognized his mark on them.

Jess Curtis/Gravity: "Dances for Non/Fictional Bodies"

Jess Curtis/Gravity

18 November, 2010

Ufer Studios, Berlin

[Regarding two episodes near to the end of the installation piece]

Jess led a slow progression—the pace of an elderly man using a walker—to a toilet bowl on the right side of the stage. I thought that he was going to sit on it, as he is in the promotional photos for the show. Instead he first dipped his head into the toilet and pulled out a cigarette. (Does Jess smoke? Can you smoke in these studios?) He then slowly dove into the toilet, over the walker, until his head was completely submerged. Next, he slowly, and without a gymnast’s grace, extended his legs into the air until he was doing a headstand in toilet. My first concern—a rather persistent one—was that he would snap his neck if he should fall out of the headstand. Next was simply the agony of holding a headstand that long; long enough, in fact, to sing “Light my Fire” in its entirety, even pausing for its lengthy keyboard solo. At first he was flanked by two other performers, but as they left I felt called upon to watch even closer in case I might need to heroically bound down the stairs and support him before he adds one more differently-abled dancer to the cast.

            Another moment of interest came when one of the performers wrote a series of questions on the chalkboard. “Do you feel empathy?” she wrote. “Where in your body do you feel it?” What a wonderful question. Wonderful in that it prepares one to chase red herrings—which is not the worst way to spend one’s days, but the chase leads one into an infrequently explored area. I don’t think I feel empathy in my body in the same way that I feel today’s floorburn on my big toe. It’s not spatially located, but folk sayings such as “feeling my heart skip a beat” or “drop to my stomach” resonate with me.  I guess I’d say I feel what empathy does, but not the feeling of empathy itself. In the same way, the effects of pain—arching the spine, a tightening of the muscles in the shoulder—are distinguishable from the source of the pain. (Then again, would it be pain without this behavior?) When I feel empathy, I feel a draining of fluid behind my pectoral muscles that seems to drip down my ribs. I feel already intervening with the victim, while grounded by a fearful/cowardly sense of self-preservation. So I feel like I’m there and here, heroic and cowardly all at once. 

battleROYAL’s “Soft Landing,” November 5th and 6th, 2010. Dock 11, Berlin.

battleROYAL’s “Soft Landing,” November 5^th and 6^th, 2010. Dock 11, Berlin.

“I laughed. I cried. I shit my pants!”

“Soft Landing” is a piece that’s difficult not to gush about. I don’t know if I’ve seen a more engaging piece. The piece utilized masks, puppets, acrobatics/Luftakrobatik, puns—in short, everything they could have to make for a shallow, contrived, and fluffy piece, but to the opposite effect. The piece was both captivating and freeing. Hint to the reader: if you don’t like oxymorons, you’d better stop here.

I enjoyed the piece I did something I rarely do, and probably shouldn’t do as a researcher on a budget; I saw it twice. At neither point was I front and center as the “blocking” (pun to be clarified later) for piece suggests. On Friday I was sitting far left, and on Saturday on the right, basically in the wings. Both nights I got tickets on the waiting list, but was not called until the end on Saturday due to an oversight at the box. My only familiarity with the piece was based on the advertising on which a mask was prominently featured. I first thought it was Richard Nixon, then ran through a catalog of old/dead, white, male politicians whom I feel especially American not to be able to recognize. The mask enticed me, and Dock 11 was closer to my digs, and the weather was cold and rainy, so “Soft Landing” won the lotto of my evening. We took our seats, and I had some time to eye the room. Red ropes were suspended over the stage, though they seemed too thin to support anyone.

When the piece began (on the first viewing), a pot-bellied character hands another an electric guitar which he eyed curiously. He held it in a way that made me conclude he did not know how to play it: three fingers in a row, not spread into some chord. As he began to pick, it became clear that this person (a dancer?) could clearly also play, somewhat sloppily I thought (though this was likely part of the act). As the musicians played, eventually joined by a keyboardist, I had what I’ll call and “Alistair Macaulay moment,” wherein I was my attention in a dance concert was irrepressibly called to the music such that I could think, and consequently write, of nothing else. Why were they using a synthesized cello? Is it really impossible to find a cellist to play this melody? Luckily for you the ghost of Alistair moved on and I will be able to comment on the rest of the piece.

Fade to black. Raise lights on a suspended body spinning carelessly—or is it unconsciously? or with terror?—fifteen feet over the stage. Its legs lightly curved, perhaps spasmed, also masked. The performer is slowly lowered to the floor and is forced into different positions by the other dancers. All of them are wearing gray outfits which, like the masks, are very evocative because they seem to say nothing. They provoke one to make meaning rather than evoking one. Only in retrospect, when trying to tie on a meaning or tie together a narrative, did notions such as hospital clothing or prison suits come to me. The uniformed performers first placed a rectangular object covered by a brown paper bag next to the person on the ground, and then a bottle (presumably for alcohol) mostly covered by a bag. I’m only now reminded that my resonance with this fact, coming from a place where, unlike Berlin, public consumption of alcohol is not allowed, might have been rather different from other spectators.

Next began the first of what could be termed a solo, but the dependence upon other performers who were belaying placed the dance in a different category. Perhaps a duet or trio with the others, also on stage, who were manipulating the ropes. But what of the ropes themselves, and the carabineers which hold more securely than any partner, the trustworthy, embracing harnesses, and the pulleys which allowed one person to lift another with such ease? Part of the beauty of this piece for me is the qualitative transformation that occurs across mechanical means. Human volition is made actual while it is enhanced and buffered by the pulley system. Men pull ropes. This effort goes into the air, higher than anyone can reach. Muscles are made audible by squeaking pulleys and clanging chocks, then the dancer moves in a manner vastly different from the arms which move only up and down or the tension in the rope. This in itself is very engaging to watch; it calls on my bodiliness in a way which I value as a researcher certainly, but as a spectator as well. There’s an artistry in the seemingly blunt up and down motion of the arms of the supporter. I noticed how closely he must watch the dancer, and I vacillated between thinking that she was moving in reaction to his donation and relinquishing of force and the more likely notion that they were both moving to a pre-established choreography. Exciting performers create this ambiguity, and perhaps it is a sign of mature choreography to allow for it.

This ambiguity was carried into the dancer’s movement. The body was animated to be sure, but it remained difficult to determine whether this came from within or externally. The movements were ostensibly powered and conducted from the heaving of the rope, but this was not an inert body. The dancer must have been making some decisions, however imperceptible, because this was not simply a flopping up and down. At the same time, a certain presence in the arms and head provided hints of life, and, for me, choreographic decisions and an aesthetic. Ironically, the inhuman heaving and dropping of the body marked the dancer as female, or an incredibly flexible male.

Later came a “duet,” unambiguous in the sense that it involved two dancers, but again ambiguous in that the partner did little other than serve as a slightly mobile prop, while the belayors performed the role of the male ballet partner: allowing the female’s movement to be super human while seeming effortless. She trotted up his body, tiptoed on his outstretched arm, balanced on his head (and face!), and rested in his hand, literalizing a number of metaphors reached for to describe the sensation of being in love. During the course of this duet, the female dancer took off her mask (another literalization). This was the most striking moment in the piece for some of my friends. Some felt it was a poor choreographic choice, that this human face tore away the magic of the piece irrevocably. Others thought that the dancer’s being so pretty had a similar effect, destroying the slowly accruing brutality of the piece. Some thought that the piece made recourse to a male-female hierarchy that could have been overcome in the piece. For me, finding the dancer attractive certainly added a dimension to my experience of the piece. The act of taking off a mask in the duet invites some kind of narrative and suggests that one re-read the piece in terms of some kind of love story.

This unmasking effect was very different from my feelings when a male dancer later removes his mask while attempting to fight a crowd. The ropes and belayor enabled him to make enormous leaps across the stage and into the air. At one point he leapt from upstage all the way to the spectators’ feet. I had a strange sensation of having my dreams placed on stage when he performed four or five tours in a row. (I’ve heard several dancers report similar dreams.) But the fact that he was not masked in this gave me not a sense of concern—perhaps because I trusted the support system, but of excitement. I wanted to do it! And I don’t think that I would have had such a desire had he remained masked. I was surprised that the mask had such a dehumanizing effect on me. Certainly I knew that these were people, but the mask produced a distance almost as great as watching a video recording.

It’s worth noting that I—and I think many spectators—often feel tempted to play on the equipment used in a dance even more than talking to the dancers. Although this seems dismissive of the dancers’ efforts and how they engage us as spectators, I think it testifies to just this power of dance. I didn’t want to see how the pulleys work or inspect the strength of the ropes, but to enact in the same bodily behavior that the dancer did. In some sense, we’ve been teased into new possibilities of movement which were outside of our realm of action. (In Merleau-Ponty’s terminology, they are outside of our body schema.) When I was a kid I thought that my new shoes would make me run faster (no wonder since they’re basically advertised as such!); the pulleys offered a similar liberation.

Rectangular wooden blocks were stacked into impossible states of balance. Again, ideally at least, the spectator is caught between two contradictory worlds. Blocks would be off-set in such a way that they seemed they would fall. Suspense (in both the architectural and dramatic sense) was added by placing a performer far from the fulcrum and another dancer beneath the structure and clearly in harm’s way. On the other hand (a hand which, I think, was intended to be hidden from those lucky enough to be sitting front and center), one dancer would nonchalantly provide just enough force to counterbalance the carefully contrived human mobile. The dancers availed themselves of the coffin-like shape of the blocks to a darkly humorous effect. In fact, this gravedigger’s scene provided perhaps the only comic relief in the piece. First, a Thing-like (as in Thing from the Adam’s Family) hand emerges from the coffin offering flowers to the bereaved. Next, at one point a box is rolled so that a dancer, at this point hidden from the spectators, is assumed to be standing on his head. Our attention was momentarily distracted from the inverted, encased dancer by commotion on the other side of the stage. By the time our attention was returned to the erect coffin, I think we were all somewhat surprised that our externally extended proprioception was correct. The coffin was spun around to reveal a dancer standing on his head, his arms folded over his chest in a way to provide him no relief. A third comedic element came as he lifted his head to check out his undertakers at the precise moment they looked away. Their finally dumping him out with a thud onto the floor was likewise chuckle-inducing.

This Lego-block episode provides some food for thought. First is the fact that it provided the most, if not the only, humor of the piece. I think Henri Bergson’s theory of laughter is immensely helpful when considering humor in dance, in particular since it is so oriented to physical humor. A basic premise of his theory is that we find it funny when the spiritual behaves in a material fashion and vice versa. So a graveyard, with its accoutrements of coffins and corpses, is ripe for comedy; everything is already dead, and only needs to be animated. A live dancer falling to the floor like a dead body is also funny. But Bergson also says that empathy kills humor. We don’t laugh for things we feel sorry for. So how can we laugh when a dancer falls? I think this is permissible for a number of reasons, but in short it is due to the fact that we trust he is not really hurt. The blocks also helped me figure out a concept of Merleau-Ponty’s that had previously seemed mystical. In The Phenomenology of Perception he writes that we have an awareness of every facet of an object as being perceived by the other objects in the room. In some sense, I think we were all aware that the dancer in the coffin was inverted because we saw him as such from some other perspective. It helps, in this instance, that two the other “objects” which could also see him were also humans who don’t see in a sense which is only metaphorical or mystical. Perhaps this is just injecting theory into dance rather officiously, but I had the feeling that the gaze and presence of the other two people, who could see where I couldn’t, provided some permanence that my mentally placing the dancer alone couldn’t guarantee.

Although I am trying to stick to a description of my more visceral, immediate experience when watching dance rather than putting together more systematic theories and narratives after the fact, I wanted to share how such an extrapolated narrative can work back in time and change an experience. I fell into a conversation after my second viewing of the piece discussing the meaning of the piece. The use of the covered bottle, return to the original position lying on the ground, and the repetition of movement from the earlier section of the piece created a sense of finality, but also repetition. Someone in the group speculated that the period in-between was all a dream due after drinking oneself to unconsciousness. Or perhaps the nondescript bag was to contain drugs, and this was someone’s last trip on the way into an overdosed oblivion. I started thinking about nursing homes and the elderly. I’ve seen very rough nurses (throwing the dancer on the floor around) as well as very kind ones. I have heard of many people in their final hours trying to fight off nurses who want to medicate them; they’d rather endure the pain and have lucid conversations with their loved ones. Certainly the masks, but also the bland grays and nearly corpse-like movement also made me think of the elderly. From that perspective, the final moment of the piece, where the male and female characters (the only two who’d taken off their masks during the piece), were both spinning, balanced it seems by the same piece of rope. It reminded me of a piece called "On top of the world" I saw at an exhibit where flies were suspended and lined-up in precise rows. But somehow, though it doesn’t lend itself well to words, it evoked in me a notion of death and missed opportunity. That something vibrant is held captive inside, dying before it’s ever emerged into the world.

I began this blog to trace my experience with watching dance, but with the expectation that the ride dance provides is different, above all more visceral, than that provided by any other art. Dance calls attention to the living body in a manner unrivaled by sculpture or even physical theater. Or so I’d like to say. It depends on what one means by dance, and I’m sure one could add a myriad of qualifications, but I’ll stick to my guns. “Soft Landing” provided that all-over body experience that proves that watching dance can be anything but passive or merely cerebral.

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“Ket-Sui/Die Entscheidung,” Ten Pen Chi art labor

“Ket-Sui/Die Entscheidung,” Ten Pen Chi art labor

(http://www.dock11-berlin.de/index.php/cat/1_0/id/p99_15-Jahre-TEN-PEN-Chii-art-labor.html)

16 October 2010

Direction, Concept, and Installation: JoaXhim Manger

Choreography: Yumiko Yoshioka and Team

Dock 11, Berlin

“Not a Hit…but there shoulda been!”

I found out about the show through tanzforum.de. Strangely, there were only two performances listed this evening in Berlin and the surrounding area. I chose this show over “” because, the online material for the latter show made it appear to be more of a film/performance piece than straight up dance, and after being quarantined for the entire week with a cold, I was ready to see some live movement. Tickets were purchased at the door, the Studentermäßigung bringing it from 15€ to 5€. The comparatively high price for a ticket at a performance at Dock 11 led me to a heightened expectation of the quality and notoriety of the choreography and performance.

At the door, we were asked in German and English to turn off our mobile devices, and then invited to sit where we’d like and encouraged to move around during the piece as we saw fit. My curiosity was peaked, especially since seating is a central concern for me as a researcher, but it also creates different spectators. More mobile to be sure, but also engaging with our more human, perhaps less critical eye. (Merleau-Ponty writes that we can use an objective eye—which seems to cover both the “objective” eye of science as well as Sartre’s somewhat neurotic gaze of the other—but that our daily means of seeing other people is one which instantly recognizes them as being like ourselves.[1]) Alas, this piece played primarily front and center, and those who were more creative with their seating arrangements soon regretted the liberty they’d taken and moved toward the “front” of the stage.

The set itself was remarkable (and the image of it on the website contributed to my coming to the performance). The stage was a platform about three feet in height, covered with Astroturf (if that is the correct name for the faux-grass used on miniature golf courses), populated by round objects and bored through with holes approximately two feet in diameter. In the center hung a long pole with an end shaped like a putter, apparently composed of foam tubing covered by tape. A sound engineer (later shown to be a DJ) stood behind his deck in the back right corner.

The piece began with a single hand slowly rising out from one of the holes. The first tacit question was thus answered: are the dancers already under the stage, or will they enter from off-stage? Although at first I took the hand as something of an androgynous aesthetic object, I soon gendered the arm as male based on the rather defined triceps as the upper arm. Another arm emerged, and I noticed that it was also a right hand, and thus belonging to a different person (although using opposite hands would have suspended this judgment and widened my expectation of what lurked beneath these two holes into something monstrous…think of Luke, Hans, Leah, and Chewy in the intergalactic compost bin). As feet emerged from the holes, something akin to racial determination emerged: I concluded that these were the appendages of the same persons by noticing first the conformity of the parts of the slightly darker-hued performer, and then applied this same matching technique to the dancer whose arm first emerged. This section of entering the stage by parts continued until at least portion of each of the dancers was visible. After the arms and legs, pelvises covered by flesh-colored cloth slowly materialized, prompting my final question, “will the dancers be topless or not?” This question was put to bed by a gargantuan nipple.

To be perhaps overly neat, the first few minutes posed and answered at least four questions. Are the dancers under the stage? (yes) What sex is this person? (male in the first instance) Do the extremities emerging from different holes belong to the same person? (no, provisionally answered via skin pigmentation) Will there be female nudity? (yes)

(While at least the last of these three questions would be summoned before academic tribunals under charges of sexism, racism, and male-gaze-ism,[2] this blog is something of an investment in honesty. I don’t find the questions or even answers particularly harmful in themselves. Additionally, such readings might be helpful for choreographers to bear in mind.)
All of the dancers eventually emerged. Based on the name of the company and the central photos, I had in mind that this was a company based in Asia. When the dancers disinterred themselves it became clear that this was not an Asian company peopled by virtuosic teens and twenty-somethings. All of the men had their heads shaved or clipped very close, and their hairlines suggested they were no longer in their early twenties. (I’m annoyingly aware of my attention being drawn to this fact since own hairline began its strategic retreat long ago, aging me in a way that my visage alone wouldn’t.) No doubt in part due to the fact that, at 34, I can be called an "old" dancer, I prefer seeing dancers with some experience (in the studio, on the stage, and in life). Unfortunately he ineluctable charm of the piece—or my willing submersion in the slowly stirring world of the earlier section of the piece—was disrupted as the dancers started to snake across the stage. While the bodily aptitude of some was evident in how they sloughed out of their holes, the premonition based on the awkwardness of others’ emersions was not to be ignored. Some of the performers looked wooden compared to the careful, serpentine undulations of others. This performativity continued into their interactions with the turf-covered balls. Some interacted with them awkwardly, but without conveying the sense that this was indeed some primal encounter.

Rather than walking the reader through the piece, I would like to center upon a few themes and moments relevant to the purpose of this blog. The first is when the dancers were all grouped upstage in a kind of techno-trance. They incorporated the swimming brontosaurus like hand gestures with their club-inspired movement, which was very effective for me. Having centered my attention at the beginning of the piece upon the watery hand and its supple wrist, I had a new appreciation for its exquisite movement, and how the body strains—not in vain—for this fluidity. This visual orgy was disrupted doubly by the first swinging of the gigantic putter, which is where my interest in the piece puttered out. The dancer aiming the pendulum-putter at the ravers maneuvered it with a theatrical—well, balletic—affectation that seemed from a universe distant from the primordial world we’d inhabited up to this point. The ravers all successfully, then predictably, evaded the foam-padded pendulum, which was recovered and swung again with an effort decipherable even in the cheap seats at an opera house.

Unfortunately, we weren’t in an opera house. I was able to suspend my disbelief for the Safety First® golf club, but I simply couldn’t with the emoting. Throughout the remainder of the piece, the performers made greatly efforted evasions of obviously non-threatening objects and opponents. I kept thinking of the movie, Staged Beauty. I had watched the previous night, where the female-playing male actor Ned Kyneston is criticized for willfully submitting Desdemona to her death for the sake of beauty, and not even putting up a fight. In the same sense, I wanted to see more of a fight, at least some actual interaction between the dancers. In a post-Bausch world, you can’t pull punches, and you can’t swoon either. (The Bausch comparison is perhaps unfair, but the elevated stage of Astroturf certainly does evoke her Sacre.) And nearly fifty years after the advent of Contact Improvisation, I can’t take a dancer seriously who can’t engage with another dancer. Instead Entscheidung is a dance about human relations without humans physically interacting.

Yet my hesitation about just how familiar some of these dancers were with their nooks and crannies did make one moment quite thrilling. During one episode, a dancer holding a putter took calibrated swings at arms, legs, and heads which ducked back into their holes evade his highly emotive chops (he stopped before he would have hit them anyway). The disgruntled golfer then stomped around the stage wielding a golf club in each hand, and their whiffing through the air quite visibly shook up the spectators. Two audience members left directly after this point, and I wonder if they shared my distrust in the putter-gone-postal. Although I couldn’t distinguish all of the dancers (there were six), some of them did not have my trust as being in control of their bodies. Was this guy swinging clubs a few feet from my face one of them? This is obviously snobbish, but the dance stage sets a high bar for movement; I don’t think it has to be virtuosic or even “dancey,” but my expectation is that it’s thoroughly intended.

The floor itself provided me with the only encounters with pain in the piece. I winced inwardly watching one dancer slide across the Astroturf, be surmised that it must not be painful based not upon the lack of any grimace on her face, but because this was a repeat performance and she had neither padding nor scars on her knees. Some of the spectators shouted in shock as the putting iron slammed against the ground after “narrowly” missing the arms, legs, and heads of the semi-subterranean dancers. The dancers also navigated between these holes without once stumbling. In fact, if it were the choreographer’s desire to pull the spectators into the piece more, some acknowledgment of this potential danger could be made readable.  The stage captivated me as something of a mysterious entity. Dancers emerged from, I assume, grands plies, but the movement was so uniform that it appeared as if they were raised by elevators. It also seemed magnanimous to occupy a space associated with more modest scenery (and budgets).

After quietly sitting through a piece of whatever length, this is the time for the house to…what? Emote? Respond? Evaluate? Laud? Condemn? Vocally and corporally exercise? When the time for applause came, I felt immediately bifurcated into a displeased person and a supportive person. I like to think of myself as a supportive viewer, as someone who generally enjoys dance, but in retrospect I was put off by the piece. I’d been rather bored for at least half an hour, but I felt somehow irked and indignant. I couldn’t believe—and was for whatever reason offended—that a choreographer would coach dancers toward such kitchy interactions. Shall I applaud or not? We’ll chalk it up to my southern hospitality that I clapped. This was no doubt aided by the fact that one of the dancers looked right at me, and I was struck with humanity. That, as a dancer, it’s pretty seldom that you get to be in a piece you can stand behind, and not just dance in. Ariel also brought up a good point: sometimes choreographers have to set a piece just to get it out of their systems, because it won’t let you pass until it’s been acknowledged and worked through.

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[1]  “Positing the other does not reduce me to the status of an object in his field, nor does my perception of the other reduce him to the status of an object in mine ” (Phenomenology of Perception, p. 405). Objectification only happens with an “inhuman look ” (414).

[2] On gazes, male and otherwise, check out the following website:

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/gaze/gaze09.html

Most of the material here is based out of film studies, which is far ahead of dance studies in considering the different sorts of gazes we employ when perceiving others.

"Pandora 88" by Fabrik Company

  “Pandora 88,” choreographed and performed by Wolfgang Hoffmann and Sven Till of Fabrik Company. (Oct. 10, 2010, 16:00 at Fabrik Potsdam) 

I’d bought the tickets online and was pleased that my not having printed out a copy wasn’t a problem at the box office (actually a worker behind a table). There was some confusion over the seating, since the rows started at zero, not one, and the person sitting in one of our seats didn’t want to move. This irritation was sitting with me for part of the performance, like when I feel guilty residue within me even if I’m not thinking of what I feel guilty for, or even if it takes some effort to recall it. I can’t say that it distracted from my viewing, or added anything at the time, though the theme of hell being other people had crept off the stage and into the house even before the lights were dimmed.

This was a particularly audible audience, filled with children who frequently laughed at the dancers’ interactions. I imagine the children’s liberty allowed for the adults to do the same. Being a matinee, the mood was perhaps a little less stiff, though I wonder if the presence of children didn’t greatly enhance the palate of responses and interpretations. Conceivably others in the audience were less appreciative of the number of children, but I reserved my annoyance for the couple next to me carrying on not commentary, but irrelevant conversation periodically throughout the piece. That is, at least, until Ariel and I broke the fourth (or is it fifth?) wall: she shushed, and I sat myself up noticeably (and with a bit more oomph than I’d meant to) and, I’ll admit, glared.

The box was an entity all its own. One of the dancers gestured to it (actually before acknowledging the humans in the sound and lighting box), and it made perfect sense to do so. It morphed into a kind of blue screen for a music video, a closet, a science-fiction pod, a room in a fun house or hall of mirrors, a padded room, a prison cell, and a coffin. This was due in part to how the dancers used it as one might use a tool or piece of furniture, but the box also morphed to accommodate the sinews of the narrative. It was difficult to resist running up to it after the piece was over. Indeed, I had more of a desire to probe and consult it than the dancers, wondering how it did certain things, what it was composed of, how it came to be there.

At one point one of the performers ran repeatedly into a corner of the box. Many in the audience laughed at this. I thought that he was receiving most of the impact with his shoulders, not with his head, as it appeared, so it didn’t appear to be particularly painful to me. Also, the box reverberated slightly with most movement, so I was conditioned to effects seeming larger than their causes. I didn’t find the episode particularly funny. I did notice a strange empathy for the box, wondering whether it would be able endure under these two men’s pressing and slamming against it. (Thinking horse of in Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev which so often caused more of an effect on viewers than the depictions of human death.) Ariel thought that he was hitting it with his head, but that he was probably used to it after doing it for so long. Dancers are supposed to be tough anyway.

There were times I wanted the piece to end. Not because of exhaustion or dislike, but it seemed to me that it had come to its place to stop. One that is prominent is that, after fighting for a while, the two seemed to have reached an unhappy compromise, where one would support himself by the walls, floating above the other who was crumpled below as if in space or prison bunk beds. I thought it was time to stop. I was afraid of a happy ending or trite moral being placed atop my dark piece. But the finale surpassed my choreographic imagination. The couple used the same arc-like shapes of their hands, which had earlier featured in a game where they surrounded and captured each other, to hoist one of the dancers onto the other’s shoulders, where he could then climb out. I had a moment of…I guess it was fear, that the one who’d been lifted would simply forget the other, or maliciously leave him there. Perhaps there would be a long pulling up which may or may not be successful. (In the “Hide and Seek” vignette, one of the characters “submerged” himself and was pulled out, which began (I believe) the charades games.) Again, my possible endings were not fulfilled, thankfully. The liberated one did reach down, but the other turned away. There was a gaze outward by the dancer on top. I told Ariel afterward that I thought it was slightly heroic for my taste (which was what I was afraid it would be), but she thought it was rather blank. This could be an instance of my feared prognosis projecting onto a rather blank canvass (like the Kuleshov effect). I found the ending very moving, though I’m not exactly sure why. I remembered hearing of a play, perhaps I read it, of East Germans building a tunnel to escape, yet one of those who did so stayed behind, preferring life in the Soviet Germany. I also thought of Sartre’s dictum, “Hell is other people,” and that the way to get out of hell might not be a change of locale, but getting rid of the other. On the train ride back, I was talking to Ariel about how much I used to journal and write poetry, that I was more morose then, but that something seems missing now. I don’t think I necessarily connected my reaction with that feeling, but perhaps there was the wish for solitude to be myself. A significantly different conclusion to life than my studies and daily living bear out.

The overwhelming (both in number and conspicuousness) presence of the children was clarified as three of them rushed onto stage as soon as the bows were completed, greeting and holding hands with, presumably, their fathers. The freedom to laugh at the partnering is not accountable only in terms of Bergson’s mechanical-versus-autonomous movement theory. The kids were laughing at their dads.