I've been talking about this for a while. It's time to stop talking and start acting.
The thing I miss most about having finished my MFA program (other than the 1 stop shopping for dancers, space, tech, etc. and the semester long "set" schedule) is the feedback. At Sarah Lawrence, every Tuesday night has "showings." This is similar to many programs. (I understand there are other places that do this every Friday for three hours. Talk about dedication - WOW!) In the particular SLC iteration, every other week you show whatever it is that you're working on, it is videotaped, and then you ask a question to guide feedback from your peers. A day or two later you meet with two faculty members for additional feedback which may or may not also be related to your "question."
There seems to be no reason for this feedback loop to end except for the fact that people are no longer gathered in one place.
AHA! But we have online networking tools! My networking tool of choice is Facebook. So I created a group there. No one has joined yet, but we'll see. I'm hoping it takes off.
I think my system has several perks compared to the University system. First, you can (at least theoretically) have access to many more minds than at any particular college at any particular time. Now, granted, more is not necessarily better, and the flip side of this perk is that if too many people respond it may become overwhelming. But I like the idea that someone whose professional work I respect might just choose to comment on the new work that I'm making. As well as my former classmates and peers. As well as perhaps someone who is working in a completely different vein and who has a completely different audience. It's not confined to a particular place, time, and/or group of people.
Also, I remember thinking in school that it seemed difficult to be on the every other week system. Sometimes I wasn't ready for feedback two weeks later. Sometimes I was ready the next week. The actual time frame was determined by the needs of the system and "fairness" not by my artistic needs. With a facebook group I can post whenever I want. Not for six months, or every day. My posting (and hopefully therefore my feedback) is on my timetable.
Of course there are drawbacks. Many of the people who are potentially looking at this work will never see it live. Not everyone comes from the same system of feedback language use. Since we're not sitting in a room together, I may never get feedback from anyone. The video quality may not do justice to the live performance. People may get too busy. Someone may decide they don't like my work before it's "finished" and therefore write it off.
But any system has its flaws, and not getting feedback doesn't help, either.
So join me on facebook! Let's globalize and revolutionize the way dances are made!
Showing posts with label performance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label performance. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Dance Review: Phó Malpica: The Last White Elephant
I already had some ideas about what I was getting myself into when I showed up to see Phó Malpica: The Last White Elephant at La Tee Da Alley earlier this evening. I had read the description posted on Phó Malpica’s website (http://phomalpica.blogspot.com), and I’ve known Angela Christina Lopez for some time now (full disclosure: we went to the New York Summer School of Dance together in 2002). Not that any of that quite prepared me for the experience of seeing - nay, witnessing - the event itself.
If I have one complaint about the performance, it would be regarding the program notes (also on the website). These notes give me a window into Angela’s process. While interesting and even illuminating as a fellow choreographer, as an audience member I found them to be something of a distraction - limiting, perhaps. They didn’t -couldn’t - do justice to the complexities of the work, its multifarious images and implications. Part of the great beauty of Phó Malpica is that through its ambiguity, by shuffling and re-shuffling specificity and confusion, I experience one of the great mysteries or paradoxes of life: that the specific can be universal, and that the universal is made up in fact of many specifics.
I envy Angela’s bravery as a performer. It takes guts to let so little speak for so much. The opening stillness lasts a long time. When she finally moves, it is to snake her torso side to side, at first imperceptibly, but eventually with a commanding power achieved by pairing sinuous, smooth sequentiality with the visible muscular effort of her naked back. This undulation eventually torques and twists Angela’s body toward the audience, revealing tusks and a gauze covered face supplementing a costume otherwise consisting of half a wedding dress and veil. Her trajectory in space consists of a slow and deliberate progression from “upstage” to “downstage.”
Other salient movement images include a shaking claw of a hand, a precarious balance assisted by the lightest touch against the brick wall of next door, a bound foot tentatively lifted, and the continuous arching, twisting spine and head. When Angela lifts an arm in what appears as an elephant’s trunk, I cringe. My concern is that this well crafted performance will suddenly veer off its carefully trod line between abstract and representational, diving headfirst into the literal. My concern is unfounded. Trunk-like images continue to appear briefly and occasionally, but the effect is of an echo or gesture toward elephant trunk rather than a literal representation thereof.
Most of the performance includes video projection. The space is long and narrow, and the video hits everything everywhere: both walls, white curtain, performer. It is difficult to determine what the video images are. Based on foreknowledge of the source material, I presume the yellowish tubular somethings are elephant tusks, though they could easily be bananas from where I stand. The first image I see with any clarity is an old snapshot of a young man. Though I see him clearly, I must imagine that it is a trophy photo of him and the elephant he poached. As the dance moves forward in space, the projected images suddenly hit Angela’s skirt just so, and I see everything: piles upon piles of tusks. At this distance she returns to her backward facing. I see a duet between performer and her enlarged shadow self.
Bending forward, rear toward us, Angela removes her headdress. She moves past the upstage projector, effectively breaking the fourth wall and invading what has hitherto been my “safe distance.” Her painted white face is deathly. Images of terminal illness invade my thoughts, lending to comparisons between our species’ lack of respect for nature and our own impending doom. The movement has grown in size and intensity, but maintains an elastic, sinewy quality that lends itself to building tension but not its release. At its most aggressive the movement is a single stomp or fingernails dragged across the brick (adding to the anxious electronica).
I don’t like seeing Angela retreat upstage, perhaps because I sense it means resignation to the state of things, perhaps because I know it means the end. I’m struck by noticing that the largest single gesture in space is her lifted leg as she mounts a half-wall in exit, leaving as swiftly and silently as she came. I am left with the majesty of a narrow alleyway in Allentown and the memory of how she filled it. I am grateful for that.
If I have one complaint about the performance, it would be regarding the program notes (also on the website). These notes give me a window into Angela’s process. While interesting and even illuminating as a fellow choreographer, as an audience member I found them to be something of a distraction - limiting, perhaps. They didn’t -couldn’t - do justice to the complexities of the work, its multifarious images and implications. Part of the great beauty of Phó Malpica is that through its ambiguity, by shuffling and re-shuffling specificity and confusion, I experience one of the great mysteries or paradoxes of life: that the specific can be universal, and that the universal is made up in fact of many specifics.
I envy Angela’s bravery as a performer. It takes guts to let so little speak for so much. The opening stillness lasts a long time. When she finally moves, it is to snake her torso side to side, at first imperceptibly, but eventually with a commanding power achieved by pairing sinuous, smooth sequentiality with the visible muscular effort of her naked back. This undulation eventually torques and twists Angela’s body toward the audience, revealing tusks and a gauze covered face supplementing a costume otherwise consisting of half a wedding dress and veil. Her trajectory in space consists of a slow and deliberate progression from “upstage” to “downstage.”
Other salient movement images include a shaking claw of a hand, a precarious balance assisted by the lightest touch against the brick wall of next door, a bound foot tentatively lifted, and the continuous arching, twisting spine and head. When Angela lifts an arm in what appears as an elephant’s trunk, I cringe. My concern is that this well crafted performance will suddenly veer off its carefully trod line between abstract and representational, diving headfirst into the literal. My concern is unfounded. Trunk-like images continue to appear briefly and occasionally, but the effect is of an echo or gesture toward elephant trunk rather than a literal representation thereof.
Most of the performance includes video projection. The space is long and narrow, and the video hits everything everywhere: both walls, white curtain, performer. It is difficult to determine what the video images are. Based on foreknowledge of the source material, I presume the yellowish tubular somethings are elephant tusks, though they could easily be bananas from where I stand. The first image I see with any clarity is an old snapshot of a young man. Though I see him clearly, I must imagine that it is a trophy photo of him and the elephant he poached. As the dance moves forward in space, the projected images suddenly hit Angela’s skirt just so, and I see everything: piles upon piles of tusks. At this distance she returns to her backward facing. I see a duet between performer and her enlarged shadow self.
Bending forward, rear toward us, Angela removes her headdress. She moves past the upstage projector, effectively breaking the fourth wall and invading what has hitherto been my “safe distance.” Her painted white face is deathly. Images of terminal illness invade my thoughts, lending to comparisons between our species’ lack of respect for nature and our own impending doom. The movement has grown in size and intensity, but maintains an elastic, sinewy quality that lends itself to building tension but not its release. At its most aggressive the movement is a single stomp or fingernails dragged across the brick (adding to the anxious electronica).
I don’t like seeing Angela retreat upstage, perhaps because I sense it means resignation to the state of things, perhaps because I know it means the end. I’m struck by noticing that the largest single gesture in space is her lifted leg as she mounts a half-wall in exit, leaving as swiftly and silently as she came. I am left with the majesty of a narrow alleyway in Allentown and the memory of how she filled it. I am grateful for that.
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