Course blog #19 [Sara] Esplanade sets the stage for modern dance

Paul Taylor claims that his inspiration for writing Esplanade came from watching a young girl run to catch a bus on a beautiful day. According to the dramaturgical notes archived by the Paul Taylor Dance Company, much like his contemporaries in the visual art world such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were using found objects to create art, Taylor was using “found movements” and quotidian gesture to re-create American dance.

An esplanade is a large outdoor place for walking and indeed Taylor’s choreography is pedestrian in the sense that it refuses the formal, prescribed gestures of classical dance while still capturing the exuberant poetry-in-motion of the everyday joys of being out and about in the air. I was particularly struck by the irreverence of the movement in contrast to the motivic structure of Johann Sebastian Bach's Concerto in D minor for Two Violins. At first, I was unable to see the expansion or repetition of a dance idea that might coalesce with the music, but in continuing to watch, I began to pick out the lovely return time and again of the solo women—I’m thinking the first, dynamic entrance by the lone female figure, and the delightful image of the small girl bouncing—leaping—bounding? over the line of prostrate dancers. 

From Research IUBloomington: "IU Dance Theatre celebrates 85th Anniversary" 22 Oct 2012.

This playful image finally forced me out of a losing game in trying to match the relationships between the dancers to the contrapuntal relationship between the two violins and instead see the choreography coalescing so beautifully with the music, rhythmically or “aesthetically” independent and yet intertwining, each made richer and more beautiful in their juxtaposition.

A little research at home turned up a lovely intertextuality between this piece and George Balanchine’s ConcertoBarocco, a ballet made on students at the School of American Ballet in 1941 that also used Bach’s Double Concerto. Here, though, Balanchine is using pairs of dancers to evoke the violins and there is much more consonance between the dance form and the music. I don’t feel as enlivened watching this piece as I did Taylor’s, but my experience of it enriched the IU Dance performance project for me—I’m struck that at an anniversary performance in which only four selections were made that Taylor’s playful exploration of the everyday perhaps finds more resonance with contemporary audiences. I do not suggest that there is a one to one comparison between the pieces nor than Balanchine’s work even entered the conversation in a showcase highlighting modern dance forms; however, in light of our recent conversations about certain universal reactions to the particular shapes of human bodies, I’m struck anew by Taylor’s intervention in the world of dance c. 1975. By eschewing narrative and formal abstraction for embodied exuberance and the aesthetic of the everyday, it was Taylor’s work that created a space for the subsequent pieces we witnessed. There is no beauty much less propriety in the tumble on the mattress without first witnessing the beauty in the walk for the bus. As a retrospective, I was happy to begin with Taylor and ponder the journey from formalism to expression, youth to age, public to private. It let in some necessary air, and the light of a beautiful day.

Course Blog #19 (Justin): Using the Bodymind

In dance and physical theatre, a spectator is often reminded that the body is the only guaranteed tool of a performer – costumes, props, and set pieces may inform the performance, but only the living body is inseparable from the individual artist. Yet, simultaneously, dance and physical theatre can call the performer’s ownership of the body into question. This notion came to my attention during the performance of Black Watch as the ‘soldiers’ performed the training/disciplining of their individual bodies, their most basic possessions, so as to become a seamlessly working unit – ultimately, their bodies were no longer their own, but belonged to each other and to the state. 

The performances of “Esplanade” and “Nascimento Novo” at IU Dance Theatre’s Celebration Gala evoked this same idea. Throughout, I envisioned the internal challenge for the dancers: “This is my run, yet it is your run. This is my jump, yet it’s yours as well. This is my arm extension, yet it is our [the whole group’s] same extension.” The individual is erased, as each member works to embody the same steps and to mirror the rest of the group. This was most evident in “Esplanade” as pairs, trios, and the entire group were challenged to crawl, skip, run or leap in unison. Likewise, moments of differentiated movements called body ownership into question, as they were typified by the sharing of weight and absolute trust in another’s physical strength. “It is my head-first leap, but your ‘catch’ that keeps me whole.”

We have been discussing kinesthetic empathy and the connection between critical and emotional intellects as they relate to spectators. How can a viewer’s thoughts and feelings be attended to simultaneously? The answer may lie in the dancers’ ability to simultaneously perform their own physical movements yet have an external focus that allows for a faultless connection to another or group. Such simultaneous attention to external stimuli and internal response may be attributed to use of what critics have termed the ‘bodymind,’ a tool that Phillip Zarrilli has discussed concerning the purposeful training of actors. He states, “Working toward mastery of embodied forms, when combined with the ability to fix and focus both the gaze and the mind, frees the practitioner from ‘consciousness about,’ allowing the person instead to enter into a state of ‘concentratedness’” (194). Is the ‘bodymind’ a performance muscle that can be trained by the scholar as well? If so, one can achieve ‘concentratedness’ through willed practice: frequent conscious performance spectatorship where marrying external stimuli and internal focus becomes habit.

Zarrilli, Phillip. “What Does it Mean to ‘Become the Character?’: Power, Presence, and Transcendence in Asian In-Body Disciplines of Practice.” Means of Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre and Ritual. Eds. Richard Schechner and Willa Appel. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.

Dance review (Andrea)

There were two types of dance performances at the Gala last Sunday—those that were based in a narrative and those that were not (or were less so). Throughout our discussions about dance, I've been thinking about the role that narrative plays in my understanding and appreciation of art, and whether meaning can exist without it. I’d like to use those questions to frame my review of the Gala, in which Rite of Summer and Straight Duet relied on some kind of direct narrative and Esplanade and Nascimento Novo did not.

The program notes for Rite of Summer tell us that the dance is playing with references to the ballets Rite of Spring and Giselle. Even without these notes, though, I read the dance as a narrative because of the props, costumes, and interactions between dancers. The twitching movements of the dancers and their facial expressions indicated a struggle between opposing forces. Much of the pleasure or enjoyment of watching was about puzzling out the story and the characters. The narrative in Straight Duet was much more obvious, and the pleasure in the dance came more from seeing impressive athletic feats and simultaneously seeing the parts of the story that they conveyed.

In the non-narrative dances, I noticed myself responding more physically to the performance. Through most of Esplanade and Nascimento, my enjoyment came from the physicality of the dancers as they moved and the joy that they seemed to have in their own movement. They were often smiling as they ran or jumped or spun onstage, and I felt my face become more lifted as well, raising my eyebrows and lips slightly. I kept finding that my leg muscles, especially my calves, were slightly flexed as I watched, and when the music had a strong beat, I tapped my toes in my shoes. At their best moments, these dances conveyed a kind of exuberance in movement that I somehow experienced with them. I’m not sure that I can completely remove narrative from my understanding and appreciation of dance, but the chief enjoyment I took from Esplanade and Nascimento came from a different, more obscure, source.

Blog 19, IU Dance Theatre's 85th Anniversary Gala

Never having seen live modern dance before, I was unsure of what to expect from Sunday’s Gala. Actually, sitting in the cavernous, ribbed auditorium, I rather expected plankton to emerge when the curtain lifted (this perhaps reflects on my self-awareness as a consuming observer). The pink, orange, and tan costumes and initial sprightliness of Paul Taylor’s “Esplanade” didn’t undermine this expectation.

I was particularly affected by the juxtaposition of joy and misery throughout the evening’s performances. For example, the opening was joyous: happy bodies frolicking across and around the stage in what appeared to be an updated quadrille. The second movement was a sudden change – an exploration of destructive isolation. The dancers reached, but their inability to actually touch each other was painful to watch. The dancers emphasized their shoulder blades and collapsed their cores, dragging themselves to center stage where they revolved in a starving, circling herd.  The final two movements, featuring ecstatic leaps and flirtation, were each shaded by this indelible image of suffering.

The misery returned in full force in the next piece, William Evans’ “Rite of Summer.” I tried not to impose a narrative on the piece, but the use of a prop (a flower-girl’s basket of petals) and symbolic costuming appealed too much to the latent lit scholar in me; I ended up reading Evans’ work as one in which the performers wracked their bodies against a female-enforced patriarchy. The titular reference to a rite was evident in the shortened wedding dresses of the bride figures. Their gestural attempts to coerce and impose conformity on the female dancer in the simpler dress were intentionally redundant/stuplimitous: a big, circular gesture reminiscent of stirring a vat followed by a flattened, raised hand as though they were looking in vanity mirrors. The Rousseau figure’s eventual triumph – her rejection of the brides – was evident in the contrast between her previously jerky, seizing movement and her graceful, dismissive exit stage left, leaving the brides to twitch on the floor. The final two pieces continued this pendular swing from joy to misery, leaving me with aftershock mood swings on the drive home.