Dance criticism is not thumbs up or thumbs down. What Deborah has done consistently over the years, better than any living writer, is to see and respond to dance. She is one of the most articulate observers of the form and this is her genre of criticism. It takes much more skill to be able to understand a dance than to slam it.

I studied dance criticism with Marcia Siegel who drilled in us the power of observation. To write about a dance, you have to have the ability to conjure it up for the reader. Then you can analyze its form and evaluate its success or failure. The writer’s imperative is, first and foremost, to share the experience of the choreography. If you can hold off the rush to judgment–not an easy thing to do–you might actually discover something unexpected about the work. It’s also possible to develop an appreciation for choreography that rubbed you the wrong way at first.

Having written reviews (for The Voice, ages ago, among other publications) and having taught dance writing workshops, I can say how hard it is to delay passing judgment long enough to open the mind to seeing. Deborah’s sustained generosity of vision is a singular gift. I don’t know how she manages to sit through so many performances without her writing growing dull or her spirit jaded. I certainly don’t have that kind of tolerance.

I’ve been lucky enough to be reviewed by Deborah a few times. The experience was of being seen in print. What I got from her response to my choreography was positive, yes, but not uncritical. I could tell where she felt the work succeeded and where my choreographic vision was not quite fulfilled.

Writing a negative review every now and then does not constitute “balanced” criticism any more than balanced journalism means quoting, say, an advocate for climate change intervention and a climate change denier.

We live in the age opinion, where editorials substitute for reporting and punditry proliferates. In criticism and in journalism, there should be a quest for the TRUTH. Let’s value and respect the truth-seekers, Deborah Jowitt, among them!

Coincidentally, my “take-it-easy” sentence coincided with auditions for a new company member and the beginning of rehearsals for Turbulence. My interpretation of doctor’s orders: ok to to stretch and mobilize gently, but not to strain or overly exert myself. Probably I was not supposed to be lugging my costume-suitcase up subway stairs. I was going to sit back, be a folding-chair choreographer and let my dancers work.

For the auditions, I marked a phrase for my current dancers and they taught it to the newcomers. Gosh, that’s how it should always work. I generally choreograph collaboratively with dancers, but for this process I’ve had to rely on them particularly to generate movement vocabulary. We’ve used many improvisational techniques and focused on specific imagery. The upside of my sitting out, is that the range of movement dynamics my six dancers have invented is much greater than if it had all come out of my own body.

Once I had the go ahead to start dancing again, I had to figure out how to do so in my newly-expanded body.

A pregnant woman at full term has a 50% increase of blood volume. Don’t know what % I’m up to now, but here’s what I can say: inversions are out. I can’t hang over my legs, or pose in downward dog, for more than about 5 seconds, before my head feels like it’s going to explode. Forget about handstands.

All that extra blood means extra work for the heart. And a good chunk of the O2 in the blood going around has to feed the baby. I walk up a flight of stairs and my head is pounding. With the uterus pushing the stomach up into the diaphragm, my lungs don’t have their full capacity. I can workout now, but won’t be running any marathons. So nothing too aerobic, no jumps (with the extra weight couldn’t get much elevation anyway). Getting into and out of the floor, too, require careful consideration — and hands.

On the plus side, being pregnant gets you pumped up on hormones that make your ligaments lax. Even after a month without dancing, I was loosey-goosey and moving fluidly. More importantly, I feel as if a spell of well-being were cast on me, concocted from everyone’s love, good wishes and protective impulses. That spell and, of course my own joy and anticipation, have made me feel like dancing.

Limitations offer freedom. It’s been fun figuring out what my big-bellied body can do now. One thing that feels absolutely amazing is back-bending. Arching the spine and expanding the ribcage makes more room for the baby and for my lungs to fill-up with air (whoopee!).

I’ve also been getting a kick out doing a ballet-barre. If I squeeze my pelvic floor and engage the transverse abs like crazy, I can actually tendue without keeling over. As my belly keeps growing, my balance point changes every day — just keeps it interesting.

The past few weeks I’ve been working on a solo, Not Here Yet, which I’ll perform at my company’s season June 22-25 at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. My challenge is to use the physical resources I still have to express the presence of she-who-has-not-yet-arrived. In much of my work, I’m interested in how dance can capture invisible, ineffable forces. My baby on-the-way has already created quite a happy stir in many people’s lives and it’s this stir that’s making me want to move right now.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We are lucky that Brown kept a journal and was a prolific letter writer throughout her performing career. She recounts every major Cunningham performance and tour, from the birth of the company at Black Mountain College in 1953 until her last appearance in 1972 at the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris. You feel like you were there, hearing about the splintery raked floors, the exhausting travel conditions, the endless rehearsals, the sometimes uproarious sometimes adulatory audience response. But most marvelously told is the experience of what it was like to dance Merce’s works, so many of them, and on so many different stages all over the world.

The narrative begins with Brown and her then-husband composer Earle Brown moving to New York in the early 1950s and being swept up in Cage and Cunningham’s artistic circles. A vivid view of a city’s bygone era emerges, a time of grit, possibility and boundless energy. Brown expresses the most nostalgia for the company’s early touring years when, with Cage at the wheel of a VW microbus, life and art intertwined.  Road trips included jaunts for mushroom picking and  company cook-outs. Cage leaps off these pages as an uncommonly generous, affable, kind man, not without flaws, but fiercely devoted to Cunningham and a tireless promoter of the company.

Added to our picture of Merce, the emotionally elusive, brilliant and prolific choreographer, is Merce-the-dancer who thrived on performing. He didn’t miss a single one of the seventy performances scheduled on the grueling 1964 world tour despite a serious illness and injuries. Brown shows us how he ate up the stage at every opportunity with dramatic intensity. She also suggests that, contrary to the oft-stated notion that Cunningham’s dances didn’t have meaning aside from the movement itself, some of his dances did have stories, even if he never shared these with the dancers.

The book also traces Robert Rauschenberg’s ascension from poverty to celebrity. For a period, Rauschenberg (who was already becoming famous) toured as the company’s scenic designer and stage manager, sweeping floors, composing the lights and building ingenious custom-designed sets from scratch in each new locale. Perhaps the meatiest part of Brown’s book is her description of how the collaboration between Cage/Cunningham and Rauschenberg was torn apart by his runaway success. Brown sheds light on the inter-personal dynamics of these three extraordinary artists without ever resorting to gossip.

If there’s a flaw in the book it’s in exhaustiveness. At 600 pages (according to Brown’s acknowledgments cut down from 900!) this is more chronology than most lay readers would want. However, as a resource for the scholar or Cunningham fan, this is a treasure trove. Personally, I enjoyed every page and finished it with a lump in my throat. Thank you, Carolyn Brown, thank you!

This quote just about sums up my whole “time-lapse” philosophy. I find myself saying this in different ways every day. Aside from this passage, am abs0lutely loving Chance and Circumstance so far!

So why the obsession with paper? “The paperfold is a dynamic artefact, unstable and evolving. It bares the traces of the activity that brings it into being: scores, creases or incisions drawn in the surface of the paper.”(p.9) These words about paper folding clearly relate to dance. Dance generates dynamic spatial trace forms that are fleetingly visible. However “unstable” paper art is, it’s an order of magnitude more concrete than choreography.

A single sheet of paper may be sliced open, folded, curled, wrapped in on itself, tangled, braided or wound, in ways that suggest bodily movement. The plane of the paper abstracts spatial relations, makes them visible. My special niche in dance–working with silk after the style of the great Loie Fuller–does a similar thing. My silk “prosthetic” costuming amplifies every action and exposes its planar dynamics.

All this is pretty heady, but truthfully I’m being guided by instinct and compulsion. It’s so satisfying to be able to make in just few minutes–out of a single sheet of scrap paper–something that is a tangible (if not indelible) marker of gestural action.

I know this relates to the new choreography that is stewing in me now. Cutting the paper multiplies it’s planes so that instead of one “dancer” I have a whole corp de ballet to interweave. In ways I don’t fully understand, this paper exploration is helping me imagine solutions for spatial problems that I will eventually visualize with moving bodies and swirling silk.

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.