How It Started…

Photo credit: Nathea Lee

I had some urgent questions that had accumulated over more than a decade of projects that delved into collective memory and history: What can performance bring to history? What knowledge and competencies does a performance artist need to develop in order to interpret history and shared memory well? What responsibilities—-and licenses—does a performance artist have when interpreting history?  I could have continued in my meandering way to wrestle solo with these questions, threading them through new and evolving performance projects.  A more attractive approach would be to enlist a group of smart and talented dancers—-dancers of diverse backgrounds, styles, and ages— to engage with me in this exploration.

From my years of involvement with school reform, I had confidence in professional learning communities as a structure for adult learners to hone their professional knowledge and skills.  I was inspired by seeing groups of K-12 teachers organize themselves voluntarily—coming together at the end of grueling school days and on weekends—- to articulate the questions and collectively find and hone strategies for increasing education opportunities and strengthening learning impacts for their students.  Organizational guru Peter Senge explained the idea of professional learning communities as “where people continually expand their capacity to create results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together.” (from The Fifth Discipline)

By the time my proposal for a collective learning community was funded by Dance Advance, my questions sounded somewhat more esoteric:

What are the earmarks of excellence in movement-based art that embodies historical, social and political themes?

What approaches, strategies, and techniques can percussive and improvisatory dancers use most effectively to address historical, social, and political subject matter?

What distinctive qualities of percussive and improvisational dance lend themselves especially to historical, social, and political content?

How can we pursue and use political and social research to shape dance movement?

How do we define intentions for what we want audiences to experience, and how can we recognize and measure the impact of our work on audiences.

I enlisted Leah Stein to be my co-pilot in convening and facilitating the PLC, and together we carefully identified 13 dancer/choreographers and invited them to apply for one of six openings.  Ten people applied—for six openings.  We asked them to respond to two questions: What critical questions in your artistic practice would be served by your participation in this project? What contributions to the group learning process are you prepared to make?

A small sample of their responses is representative of potency and urgency that resided in the group:

“The subject matter [of a current project] is about public/private lives, what happens behind closed doors, assumptions of prostitution, sexuality, and art as voyeurism.  I am conflicted between the interest and the value these themes offer and questioning how contemporary dance looks at these issues; I also suffer from the question of who has the authority to address about these issues (or any social issue) let alone “dance” about them?”

“As an artist who is a Christian, how to maintain the message of Christ and not lose the quality of the dance?”

“Being in process in the act of creation, exploration, for me is a sacrosanct space.  I create for others and myself a safe place to live dangerously, a non-judgmental place where once can be fully expressed….I have an accumulation of experiences that I desire to share.”

“Can artists be the glue to hold the world together? If so, how do American artists thrive when we are [considered] one of the least important factors in our society?”

“Some days it feels as if I have many jobs and no colleagues at all.  It gets lonely… I’m hungry for ways to invigorate all of my artistic practices and would be excited to work with others of different artistic and cultural backgrounds, giving and receiving insight and trying out new things in my body.”

“At this point the foundation for my work is set—now all I need is the work.  I often feel very vulnerable when choreographing and performing my work.  I’m afraid to dig deep because I’ve been suppressing so many things I’m afraid what will come out.  I am hoping that this experience will help me with the creative process.  I am welcoming the opportunity to workshop ideas in a safe open forum.”

The responses touched me with their earnestness, and with their writers’ urgent desire for the time, space, and human context to test their practice with old and new questions and challenges.   They filled me with a heightened sense of responsibility to make the PLC experience meaningful and generative.  I couldn’t choose six from the ten applicants; I committed myself to finding the funds to support the additional members.

We all met for the first time on June 10, 2012.  My notes of the 4-hour gathering:

The session…was inspiring, deeply satisfying, and a harbinger of an exciting year….[P]eople conveyed excitement as well as anxiety about not knowing what was to come.  There was immediately a sense of openness, honesty and generosity.  It was lovely and moving to look around the circle and see the diversity of ethnicity, age, style, body type….” Leah and I introduced “Breaking the…”, our improvisational score inspired by Tommy DeFrantz’s evocative quote: “The break is an unexpected, uncontrollable space where an insistent beat is interrupted by a flash of contradictory rhythmic ideas…it contains both the tie to a ubiquitous rhythmic flow and the potential for anarchy and disruption.”  I repeated the quote as people began to move, framing Leah’s and my duet.  Some people continued to move, some watched from the stands, while some watched from the edge of the stage….When Leah and I ended the duet, JungWoong was quietly perched next to my right knee.  This was followed by an animated discussion about people’s reactions to the preceding 15 minutes—-talk about how the “break” is used in tap and African dance—Adrienne and Robyn demonstrated.  Talk about how the words of the DeFrantz quote resonated for them.  People shared their various comforts or discomforts with using rhythm, and with improvising….Shavon said how the experience spoke to improvisation’s validity as a performance medium.  Viji talked about how distant improvisation is from her traditional dance form—about her defiance of being kept in a traditional box.”

I couldn’t have asked for a more encouraging start to the year.