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February 2007
Another Birthday
Wow! What a birthday season this has been!
As time passes, I cringe more at the ritual of acknowledging my birthday. This year, I had hoped to keep a low profile and, maybe, avoid the uncomfortable-ness of all that particular kind of attention. But it was not to be and I am glad.
My birthday fell on the second day of the company’s shooting an international print campaign for Puma fashion. The concept was to place dancers in high-energy situations amidst explosions of color pigments while wearing Puma’s shoes and clothes and carrying bags. I arrived at the shoot at lunchtime and was alerted that they would be trying a pyrotechnical test, which we were welcome to watch. As I stood there with my fingers over my ears, there was a flash, an explosion of pigments framed by a suspended heart in the photographic space. I’m always a little slow in such setups, so it was only when everybody started singing “Happy Birthday,” that I realized what was happening. And a happy birthday it was. The dancers, old and new, looking beautiful and putting out 150%, being appreciated by the photographer and the rest of the staff.
That evening, sharing a meal at one of our favorite Japanese restaurants with a former chair of the board and a present board member I was asked by one of the two, “What are you thinking right now?” I took this to mean, “What are you working on?”
The 25th Anniversary Season calls for a new evening length work. It’s not a big clear idea like Blind Date or a pièce d’occasion that catches fire like Another Evening: I Bow Down nor even an intense, site specific commission like Chapel/Chapter, but at this time it is simply a huge capacity I feel that is longing to be articulated and filled. What I do have as a seed is a curious puppet play written by the great short story writer, Jane Bowles, in the 1940’s called The Quarreling Pair. Like everything else in this curiosity, the cast is small: two; the space is small: a space divided down its middle creating what the playwright calls “two rooms,” one for the bigger, slightly more bossy Harriet and the other for her phlegmatic and introverted sister, Rhoda. The action is attenuated, a conversation that explodes into violence at one point in which we learn more about their differences: world views - Harriet is a pragmatist, orderly and self-contented; Rhoda is tired, depressed, unable to succor the sick or even to think about their dead. She is so tired and sad. Rhoda declares she has a large heart and Harriet, nonplussed, insists she has a small one, “Like Papa’s was.” Each puppet sings a song, eerie and introspective. One gets punched - the other gets pushed. The ever-mysterious glass of milk that drives the action is spilt and they make up as someone admits they are glad the day is over and they are nervously exhausted.
What?!!!
What am I thinking?
I have been involved with this story in different ways since 1992 or 93. I remember dividing my then group into couples and allowing them each to tackle the play as they saw fit. I have the image of the giant Larry Goldhuber and petite Heidi Latsky bound across their middle with an elastic thera-band. When Larry and Heidi left the company to pursue a duet company, they created a wry, engaging duet titled It’s Not What You Think. I assumed that that piece was the result of that day when the two of them wrestled with their physicality, their difference and Jane Bowles’s slyly diffident text.
So why is it back again? Maybe it’s a remnant of the opposition work we did in reflecting the 2004 election in Blind Date. There, name-calling and taking sides were important metaphors. Perhaps it’s me trying once again to understand my ever-growing feeling of being somehow or other hermetic in attitude and understanding of a world that threatens to place me in a little room, like Harriet or Rhoda, with my artwork, my personality, the means I employ to shout over the barrier, the barricade, “the line in the sand.”
Jane Bowles’s play is so attenuated, so bizarrely humorous and plain-faced that it should lend itself to various treatments. It should be able to be a miniature about relationships, story telling and child’s play and other treatments that could be more “maximalist” with big groups facing off, with the humble queer songs as introspective soliloquies or triumphal anthems.
Right now, I am feeling supported, loved and loving towards persons, ideas and even institutions. This bifurcated, oppositional world that Jane Bowles describes here is a provocation to me. How to hold this nugget of a literary invention to the light to be examined as one would an intimate thing like a poem, or a piece of jewelry, or a well-crafted tool, and yet be able to explode it, make incisions in its surface that can be propped open, penetrated, rearranged? That’s what I am thinking, or I should say, feeling.
Hopefully, in a year, there will be a work and this work will be offered to presenters and audiences around the world. Would that it should have had the charm and color of a popular theater work such as Spring Awakening that I choreographed. Something that could have audiences leave the theater with a fragment of song in their heads or some affecting bit of staging or ribald humor that will stay with them for days. Whatever it is, can it stand on its own two feet? Can people see themselves in it? Can it help me and the dancers and, yes, our administration and board even to stretch, be more bold and clear in our mission?
How will it be understood around the world? I have included here a communication we received from Bob Yesselman of Dance/NYC, concerning a session presented by the Dance Working Group, a consortium of dance organizations just prior to the official opening of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters conference (APAP) on Friday, January 19, 2007. It’s dangerous for an artist just beginning a new work to think too much about the world that will receive it. But then again, it’s not unreasonable to do so.
Please read the article and, perhaps it will make clearer the difficulty of answering my friend’s question the other night over our accidental birthday dinner.
Bill T. Jones
On Friday, January 19th, just prior to the official opening of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters conference (APAP), I attended a session presented by the Dance Working Group, a consortium of dance organizations, among them Dance/USA, that each year present a forum for ideas looking at big picture issues in dance.
Each year, the Dance Working Group chooses a topic both relevant to what's going on now in dance, and provocative in the ideas put forth. This year was no exception. The topic was How American Dance is Viewed by the Rest of the World and provocative was an understatement. The session was moderated by Carolelinda Dickey, principal consultant of Performing Arts Strategies, working in international exchange (a former member of the NYC dance community and former presenter) and facilitated by Andrea Snyder, Executive Director of Dance/USA. The four speakers were:
• Cees de Bever: Director of Performing Arts, Consulate General of the Netherlands
• Jennifer Barry: Director of Dance Down Under (Australia) and a producer of dance
• Mark Staub: Director of Dance for the Canada Council
• Mayumi Nagatosi: Director of AN Creative (Japan) and a producer of dance
I must stress that each speaker spoke about perceptions abroad and each was quick to acknowledge they were speaking in generalities. I will try very hard not to editorialize. Here's what they had to say:
Cees de Bever (Netherlands)
* Production values of American dance are very low which places our work at a competitive disadvantage in the market place. Cees was very quick to point out that he was very aware of the financial conditions under which we operate in the U.S.
* American dancers are not as well-trained or strong as they once were.
* While many countries financially support native companies to tour abroad; there was very little reciprocity for American companies.
* Since so few American companies are touring abroad, there is very little knowledge of the vast diversity of American dance.
* We are not helped by the current political image of America abroad.
Cees had some recommendations:
* Take a hard look at which American companies are really suitable for export.
* Study international exchange programs closely and adapt to American reality.
* Find the money to bring international presenters to the U.S. to build relationships just as many countries bring American presenters to see their work.
Jennifer Barry (Australia)
* There seems to be a huge focus on the body in American work and promotional materials (she mentioned having received hundreds of postcards from American companies prior to APAP and that every single one was a body image) as opposed to dance in Australia which is much more concerned with concept.
* American dance does not display a cohesive integration of design, lighting and music (production values again).
* Australians tend to resist American-style hype and "showbiz."
* There is much less reverence for the American "masters" - they are perceived as old-fashioned.
* There is a sense that American dance is overly concerned with "pretty" work as opposed to the character-drive, narrative work now popular abroad.
* Australia's subsidy system allows artists the freedom to make less commercially-driven work.
* There is the sense that American dance lacks humor and is very "earnest" with a preoccupation with, in her words, "the pure essence of dance."
Mark Staub (Canada)
* Many in Canada associate American dance as being of a very specific time (the 60's and 70's) and place (NYC).
* Dancers in Canada know the "masters," and many of them have studied with them, but have very little knowledge of what else is happening in American dance.
Mayumi Nagatosi (Japan)
* There is a sense in Japan that American dance's time is over and that in the last 15 years European dance has become more important.
* The current generation of Japanese choreographers have been influenced by European artists, not American.
* American dance is perceived, in her words, as "old-fashioned" and "boring."
I came away from the session with what seemed to be two major themes. First, the lack of production values in current American work coming, I think, from two sources - our chronic lack of money (if we can get a work to a stage in street clothes we consider ourselves lucky) and, as the Australian speaker mentioned, our focus on the body alone in space and our concern with the "essence" of dance. Let me be clear, I attach no value judgments to either of these viewpoints - that's what makes soccer matches. Secondly, that American work is perceived as old-fashioned and still beholding to our great pioneers and masters. Again, it seems to me, money is partly the culprit. We have so little export of current American dance nowadays that this perception is, in part, understandable. I also found it interesting to note that two of the speakers and many members of the audience also mentioned that they had all come to the U.S. (NYC in particular) for study and training.
It was quite a morning.
As always, I welcome your comments. Please don't hesitate to email me with your comments or questions.
-Bob Yesselman
-- Bill T. Jones (Monday, February 19, 2007)
