Author Archive: Jody Sperling

While I was in Lagos, someone asked me what is the difference between “modern dance” and “jazz.” Generally, the dancers I met in Nigeria (see “Trip to Lagos, Part I”) had very little exposure to modern dance and were curious, what exactly is this thing. I really thought long and hard about how best to define something which can mean so many different things to so many different people. And I still don’t have a pithy answer.

I don’t think you can grasp the differences between the genres without understanding their historical trajectories. My initial answer was that Jazz is a style of dancing. It’s African-American in origin and has a certain range of movements. It’s usually performed to certain kinds of music (jazz, pop, rock, musical theater, etc.). And, while it can take diverse forms and has evolved over the past century, it has a recognizable character.

Modern dance, I said, is a broader category (although I’m not sure I still agree with that). I tried to give a nutshell of American modern dance history. I sketched out the “family tree” of modern dance, jotting down on a piece of paper a bunch of names: Loie Fuller (my muse), Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, Denishawn, Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Jose Limon, Alvin Ailey, Paul Taylor, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Judson, etc.. Ok, boiling it down to pop quiz points: Graham – “contraction & release”; Humphrey-Limon – “fall & recovery”; Cunningham/Cage – “chance procedure”.

But all these names and bullet points were pretty meaningless to someone without an historical context. While the term “modern dance” can be understood as applying to distinct techniques arising in 20th century, today it can refer to almost any form of movement, any technique. What it implies is an ethos of experimentation and a concert orientation (as opposed to other, more “popular” forms of presentation).

The history of modern dance is one of continual innovation and rejection of what came before. So naturally that accounts for some of the difficulty in classifying it. And yet, for all the supposed generational innovation, there is also much tradition preserved in the array of modern techniques practiced today. I think this sense of heritage is important to the form, perhaps as much so as its perpetual renewal.

Any definition is reductive, but you have to try to explain things. The myriad dance forms that exist today often have separate origins with trajectories that may overlap, converge or diverge as time and fashions pass.

Appropriately a week after visiting Lagos I found myself in Virginia on a program tribute to the three muses of early modern dance (Fuller, Duncan & St. Denis). More on that in the next post!

I just got back from Lagos, Nigeria where I had a residency to teach and perform at the Society of Performing Arts in Nigeria (SPAN). During my stay, I taught two master classes at the studio, worked with four SPAN dancers on flag dancing and performed a solo at the Lebanese Women’s Society gala.

SPAN was founded by Sarah Boulos who is a passionate dance fan and advocate for the arts. Right now the physical complex consists of two small dance studios occupying the former offices of a real estate developer. But Sarah has ambitious plans to expand the center into a complex including an amphitheater, studios, classrooms, dormitories, a cafeteria, gardens and a library. The students take classes in hip-hop, Latin, contemporary (African) dance, jazz and ballet (Russian style, with a former Vaganova Academy teacher). They have little or no exposure to “modern” dance. It’s a special experience to teach people who are so eager to learn what you have to offer and who have no pre-conception about what you’re going to do.

My master classes incorporated the use of fabric, derived from my Loie Fuller-style work. The concept behind the fabric work is about tuning into energetic forces. Simply by standing, you displace air. When you move, you cause rippling currents to emanate from your body. A silk scarf can make these swirling vortices visible. By seeing and becoming aware of such forces, you can begin to control the impact you have in the space, literally. The dancers took to the fabric immediately and improvised with fluid invention. Slim, a tall lanky fellow, moved in an especially captivating way with his scarf, drawing on his training in capoeira.

Above are some photos from the classes. More thoughts to follow.

I’m re-reading Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of the Great American Cities. This should be required reading for city-dwellers. Written in 1961, the book is partly an attack against a certain kind of city planning (espoused by Robert Moses et al) that was devastating the urban landscape. But mostly it’s a celebration of urban living. Here’s a wonderful passage about the city’s “intricate ballet”:

“[The city's] order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance–not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.” (Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of the Great American Cities, New York, 1961; p.50)

Preparing for our 10th-anniversary season (Feb 19-21 at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center), has put me in a retrospective frame of mind. Of course I’m excited about the program’s two premieres, but I’m also psyched about revisiting some older rep. I decided to interweave two dances–the trio A Leg Up (2007) and my solo Cheap (1999)–which, although made years apart, were both inspired by early films of variety dancers. It’s been fun splicing together alternating scenes and revamping my decade-old tricks. We’re also bringing back condensed versions of Ghosts and Bang for the Buck, both from 2008. But alas, we can’t bring back everything. My favorite saying about dance (courtesy of the late Richard Bull) is: “Here today, gone today.” Our dances may be gone, but fortunately we’ve got a lot of nice souvenirs. Here are a few from the digital scrapbook, 1999-2009.

Example of "Joyous Movement" in Labanotation

As a choreographer, the number one question I get asked is: “How do you write down a dance?” It’s surprising to me how often this comes up. In itself, the question reveals a a literary way of thinking about choreography, as something that can be written. It’s also akin to the question my actor-friend is frequently subject to: “How do you remember your lines?” While there are notational systems for dance (eg. Labanotation), they are extremely complex and too cumbersome for “everyday” use. Labanotation certainly has uses, mainly as a tool for those recording and reconstructing master-works (visit the Dance Notation Bureau), but this is not how choreographers generally “write” their dances.

When you say “write” a dance, does it mean: 1) How do I make choreography up? 2) How I teach choreography to dancers? or 3) How do I document choreography for posterity? I hear all of these things.

my notes on aerial choreography

The way I start to make a dance is to build “vocabulary,” i.e. steps or movements. (See  Vocabulary Test post) For example, for “Ghosts” some recurring moves are 1/2 Umbrella, Disc, Pac-Man, Herding, Dervish, etc.. Naming the moves help us both to clarify the shape of the action and to remember it later. Sometimes I have fun making a movement cheat-sheet, matching names with my squiggly drawings. The second phase of choreography is creating movement sequences that correspond to a structure, whether musical, conceptual or narrative. Sometimes I’ll write down the sequences, but very often I do not.

Whatever notes I have in my purple-and-orange book serve only to jog my memory, but would be completely meaningless to anyone else, except maybe the original cast. My scribblings are not “writing” and do not express the choreography, even if they help me indicate it. When it comes down to it, fundamentally, dancing is NOT writing. It is, like an oral tradition, passed down body to body. Choreography is often generated communally. My dancers contribute to “vocabulary building” — you could say we are developing a common “language,” but that is perhaps a linguistically-biased way of thinking.

Choreography resides in the dancers’ bodies. And it lives there, exerting influence via muscle memory, for years after the original performance. For this reason, reviving a work with the original cast can be surprisingly quick — an entirely different experience from mounting the same work on new bodies. It’s in teaching a new generation the “vocabulary” that you realize all the things you didn’t “write” down. All the nuances of expression, idiosyncrasies have to be learned from scratch, re-invented, not just remembered.

So how do you record all these nuances? With video, of course. So that is probably the easiest and truest answer to this choreographer’s FAQ. Video. Duh!

more to come on this topic . . .

Just wanted to share these photos from rehearsal earlier today. I love the contrast between the angelic Rachel Salzman (aerialist) and the gritty SLAM space. David Gonsier took the photos which came out great, despite poor lighting.

I’m working on a new piece that takes my Loie-style explorations into the air. This is possible courtesy a grant from the “Emerging Artist Commissioning Program” at the Streb Lab for Action Mechanics (aka SLAM). It’s quite an experience to rehearse at SLAM. The space is open to the community and at any given time there could three simultaneous activities on the two enormous trusses and the flying-trapeze rig. During our first rehearsal, “Obama girl” was shooting a video of Elizabeth Streb and company. While we were testing out harnesses, we tried not to attract the attention of the film crew. If the chaos is not distracting, it’s stimulating (and inspiring) to catch glimpses of flying bodies on trapeze, aerial silks, lyre, straps, you name it.

It’s taken a while to devise a costume and rigging system for this project. One issue is how to keep the wires and the costume from interfering with each other. Aaron Verdery, Streb’s rigger, helped us set up a pulley system so I can manually raise and lower aerialist Rachel Salzman. Now that we’ve got the mechanics in place, it’s time to figure out the dance! The first step is to develop the vocabulary. Here’s a few clips–early in the process–that show some Loie-esque aerial moves. More to come!

Paris Opera Ballet rehearses Nureyev's Nutcracker in "La Danse"

Having read in the NYT that Frederick Wiseman’s “La Danse” was one of the “finest dance films ever made,” I was set up for disappointment. What the movie has to offer is a sequence of beautifully-shot scenes of Paris Opera Ballet dancers rehearsing repertory. It gives you, literally, a top-to-bottom view of the Paris Opera Ballet, showing a rooftop bee-keeper and fish swimming in flooded underground passages. You get glimpses of people serving food in the cafeteria, seamstresses sewing ornaments on tutus, a janitor mopping the theater. The intention, no doubt, is to make you feel like you are there. The film certainly conjures up a sense of place but, unfortunately, it lacks coherence and narrative thrust.

Read the rest of this entry »

Recently I’ve experienced the transformative power of make-up from a dual perspective. On my journey to India in October, I saw a demonstration of Kathakali, a ritual dance-theater from the state of Kerala. Kathakali performers typically apply their make-up in front of the audience before the drama begins. Tourists, myself among them, get to watch (and take pictures) as the actors perform the preparation ritual. Painting their faces with brightly colored dyes, they assume the guises of characters from the dance-drama. The effect is is one of total transformation. The actor is unrecognizable in his mythic persona. The dance itself involves exaggerated facial expressions, executed with rhythmic precision. The elaborate make-up is integral to the characterization and also enhances the perception of the expressive movements.

A couple of weeks later, I found myself in Montreal as the subject of an Art Nouveau makeover. My own elaborate hairdo and make-up were for a video shoot arranged by Moment Factory, a multi-media installation company based in that city. The idea was to make video projections of me dancing “a La Loie” which will be included as part of the Fête des lumières in Lyon, France this coming December. The projections will be large-scale, so the organizers wanted to make the face and overall effect quite dramatic. Loie herself embodied the spirit of Art Nouveau, so the makeover was period-appropriate. As inspiration, the office wall where I was being “done” was adorned with images of Nouveau-style women: trailing locks of hair adorned, seemingly spontaneously, with garlands of flowers. After three hours in the hands of make-up artist Laurie Deraps, I had abundant hair-extensions, false eyelashes, faux flowers and pearls artfully arranged in around my hair and face. Looking in the mirror, I saw myself transformed into a fantasy from another century.

In October, we performed in front of our biggest audience ever — 65,000 live spectators and a television audience estimated in the hundreds of millions. For real!

I was invited along with seven Time Lapse Dancers to participate in the opening ceremonies of the Champions League T20 international cricket tournament in Bangalore, India. We were just one of the acts which included appearances by the singers Chaka Kahn, Shaggy and Jamelia, as well as (among others) the daredevil-kung-fu Shaolin monks,  four male acrobats, about hundred Indian youths forming lotus flower formations, a laser light show and fireworks.

So what does it feel like to perform for so many people? Certainly I had nerves before hand, but once we were out there I felt strangely calm and alone. Because the arena is so vast–over 100 meters in diameter–I was far away from the fans. And, as I stood on a small platform apart from the rest of the company, I was literally in my own isolated sphere. This was violated only by the over-eager camera man whose head collided with my sticks several times during the spinning sequences.

Once our first number was over, we had the fun of watching the rest of the show from the arena. The finale, which we never rehearsed with the actual music, was an improvised free-for-all with the entire ensemble. Such a glorious moment, whirling under fireworks as the crowd roared, enjoying the spectacle and anticipating the game to come.