Why do I make dances?

 

Why do I make dances? 

For a long time I couldn’t answer this.  I just do.  It’s who I am.  I tried to stop dancing a few times but it is one of the few things in my life that I’ve always gravitated toward without question.   But its important to question it. 

I started dancing for my own pleasure.  To sooth my loneliness and channel my manic energy.  Moving in unison with the other children was a ritual that lifted my spirits.  Working hard to learn new things, challenging my physical memory, working together to solve problems.  At the end of the year there was a performance.  The adrenalin rush that pumped through my veins as I prepared to step before all the people, the dizzy ease I felt once I stood on stage, the palpable exchange of energy I could feel between everyone in the room, performers and watchers, these things sealed my deep commitment to the form.  Everything about it. 

I made dances with the neighborhood kids.  I made dances in the school playground.  I made dances when I was alone.  I made dances in the living room during my parent’s grown-up parties, often to drunken applause. 

As I grew older I studied many forms of live performance,

gathering training and professional experiences that gave me a range of tools to continue expressing myself and took me further into the world of the arts. 

I started making dances to work out my own questions.  My own desires and my own fears. 

I made dances about being alone.   I made dances about discovery: of the world and of one’s self. 

I made a lot of dances that weren’t “about” anything but sprung from my awe of the complexity of human exchanges, a celebration of the absurdity and the sadness of our basic human quests and the awkwardness and beauty in our attempts to connect.

As a performer I discovered humor and reveled in the ways it highlighted the exchange between performer and the audience.  I spent a good amount of time in the training and creation of physical theater and clown work.

I then moved my dances out of the theater to give the audience more agency.  I focused significant energy on creating a world that the audience could literally step into, where the discoveries were theirs to make, sculpting a journey that they could follow and be followed by.

I opened my process to include the voices of the design collaborators at the onset of each project, reaching out to a range of artistic minds as relevant to the project at hand.  Sustained relationships with a pool of collaborators allowed each project to build on the next.  I built up the skills to helm large-scale projects and manage complex investigations (the mathematical love of organizing patterns combined with my dreamy idealistic sense of things)

After several years of focusing on the exchange between audience and performer, between collaborators and dancers, I am wondering what would I make if I returned to a less elaborate process?

With this year of research and discovery I wanted to ask myself:

What would I make if I weren’t collaborating with designers?  

What happens if I stand alone? 

Why do I make dances?  Really truly, why?

What are the questions that I myself am wrestling with and how can I share that with an audience?  How can I make those questions relevant to wider circle?  What is the cultural context that my questions sit within?  How can I play with formal structure to support the weight of personal content? 

And how do the stories of the dancers fit in with my own?

So I don’t have the answers. 

I don’t want to make dances that appear to be statements.

I want to make dances that honor the questions.  But give you a window in.

On Monday night I’ll be sharing my process as it sits thus far.  Flinging the door open to share these discussions with people other than Wendy and the dancers I’ve been working with this year. 

Come join us:
June 18th @ 7pm @ LAB space

Notes from Wendy's April Visit

 

WENDY APRIL VISIT NOTES

(warning this one is long…)

What is a mentorship?  It can take so many forms.  Wendy and I have been trying to take cues from one another and learn how the other is most comfortable working.  What are the expectations of this mentorship and how can we continue to make sure we stay on track. It was essentially a blind date mentorship so there was no telling how it would all shake out.  There have been many discussions along the way about how to define and organize our working relationship.  There have been hurt feelings and un-met expectations.  There have been break-throughs and new ways of seeing things.  Navigating our relationship has not been simple but the project has been overall rewarding and illuminating thus far.

Wendy expressed a desire for me to do the bulk of the initiations for this April visit.  She wanted my desires, questions and inspirations to guide our work sessions.  She wanted me to map out and lead our work for the week. 

Solo process: 

I opened our week discussing the main questions and observations about the process of working alone as well as the main ideas (narrative content and formal concerns) I am wrestling with and investigating in my projects.  

Why Mother why now?

as in...why am I looking at the Mother-child relationship in my process right now...
 

I am a mother. 

My memories of my mother when she was the age that I am now are very strong, potent and continually influential.

My son Simon is almost eight.

When I was eight my Mom came out to me. 

In the same breath she explained that she and my father would be getting a divorce.

She loved Lori the way she had once loved my Father.

My parents had enrolled me in catholic school a few years prior.  We never went to church and we were already considered a pretty weird family, So my mom thought it best if I not tell anyone about her sexual orientation.  So I didn’t.  I felt a little guilty when I made “best friend pacts” to tell all …but my Mom always came first so mum was the word.  But it was tricky for me: I thought her relationship with Lori was beautiful and I wanted so badly to tell everyone I knew.  I didn’t like lying when people asked why my Mom didn’t have a boyfriend. 

My mom’s fear was strong.  In general.  About a lot of things.  And it still is.

When I was eight AIDS was spreading and the general population didn’t understand what it was.

And AIDS was connected to gay.

Fear was strong.

My Mom’s partner was a nurse and they showed me several VHS movies about AIDS; making sure I understood that you can’t catch it through touch and spit.  And they made sure I knew everything there was to know about condoms.  “Guys- I’m 8!!!  Yuck.”  They made jokes about how straight I was and giggled about the guys I would be bringing home.  “Guys – I’m 8!!! Yuck.” 

My Mom and Lori found a community of closeted lesbians in our suburban neighborhood.  Many of them had kids from previous marriages… and they became good friends of mine. 

…when I was 8 years old it was 1980

Ronald Reagan was elected. 

I vividly remember my mother pacing and panting as the results of polls rolled in.

“I can’t fucking believe this.  What is wrong with people?  This man is a moron.

Nichole, the world you live in is about to change for the worse.” 

I wondered what does this mean?  Who is this man?  How could he single handedly ruin the world we knew?  What should I do to prepare?

Is this how Simon feels as we gear up for the election where Mitt Romney “battles” Barack Obama?  Simon is searching for good guys and bad guys – trying to assign the roles. 

The messy details of my parent’s divorce taught me early on that there were no such thing as good guy and bad guy.  There was only difference and complexity.  Sure, there are extreme beliefs and behaviours, but everyone has their reasons and even the most well-intentioned action can hurt others.  I learned this through the example of the relationships in front of me.  The tiny tears against my heart made it stronger bigger full of compassion.  Will Simon absorb this type of information through my words, without living through the struggle?  Is he too protected?  What is he taking in through that little lens of his?

The Memory Map:

In my solo practice I found myself referring to a mental map of my childhood home.  I lived on a street called Midway Avenue between ages 3 and 10, sometimes with my Dad and his girlfriends, sometimes with my Mom and her partners, sometimes with my parents when they were trying to work it out.  As adults came and went I was the most consistent resident. 

I find it interesting that seven years of activity are now condensed into one static picture that I can mentally walk through.  Its interesting to note what remains: for instance the christimas tree sits at the bottom of the steps even though it was only there one month a year.  Its like a time lapse photograph of sorts.  Sometimes length of stay earns a piece of furniture its place, but sometimes a brief flash of activity –if bright enough- burns its way onto the image forever. 

The Poetics of Space:  I started reading The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard and felt an immediate thrill as I read the introduction.  I couldn’t believe how perfectly it supported and illuminated the ways I’d been thinking about space and the significance of one’s memory of their childhood home.  Reading this (I’m still working through it) is deepening and expanding my thinking about this personal material and strengthening my confidence that it can indeed make its way into a work of art that others can relate to. 

Real and Borrowed images.  And the Borrowed images you can’t remove:

The dead guy:  When I was taking a mental tour of my childhood house on Midway avenue, I noticed there was a bloody dead man on the couch.  What??  There has never been a bloody dead person on that couch and I have never seen such a horror with my own eyes.  So why is he here on the couch at Midway avenue?   I realized this image arrived when I saw a play “Iron” in which the mother tells her daughter the details of a murder she committed.  As I listened to the story I was staging the murder in Midway avenue.  I often stage scenes from books or plays there if the author does not assign specific architectural details I just subconsciously stage the action at Midway avenue.  Apparently this body permanently lodged itself on my childhood couch.  As much as a try I cannot erase it from the room.  I’m stuck with this dead body. 

Now as you can imagine, when I relayed this detail to Wendy her eyes widened.  “Well, this metaphor is very strong Nichole, you need to put this stubborn obstacle on the stage with you in some way”

Ok, so what does all this have to do with performance?  Maybe nothing.  Maybe everything.  But its certainly made its way into this creative process…

And, when your own story implicates others, is it okay to tell that story?

*how this relates to my group process is detailed in “Mother and the Architecture of Memory”

photos of may workshop with group

The dance of process

 

Am I investigating process or am I making a dance?  Is this research process leading to a dance accidentally or intentionally? 

Is the dance just there so that I can look at process?  What is process when it’s separate from its product?   Does that even exist?  …Once you have a process you are conjuring something. 

I’ve seen countless dances that are about the making of the dance (and novels about writing novels etc…) Which makes sense.  Making is at the forefront of your mind while you are making especially if your process includes an awareness of the present – of the full picture.  If you are open to what is going on, that becomes a large piece of the work. 

For me the question of making is quite present right now.  But when I am alone in the studio the louder voice is the question of being. Who am I when I am alone?  What is the context?  Who am I in relationship to everything that has come before me?

 

Where this project falls in my life is significant: 

I started my dance company 7 years ago, while pregnant with my son Simon.  I essentially birthed twins: a company and a son.  For anyone who has ever run a non-profit or raised a child you know that both are things you never clock out of.  You live and breathe them.  So my relationship to self changed.  And my time alone evaporated without me realizing it.  The projects I initiated through my company were highly collaborative and included a matrix of performers and designers.  My personal decisions were made in collaboration with my husband as we began rearing this amazing being together.

So here I am seven years into this twin rearing initiating a project for myself that requires that I stand alone: Alone in the studio, alone on stage, alone in front of a group of dancers. 

I’m sitting with myself and noticing the shifts that have occurred under my feet, without me realizing it.  And then certain personal information stirs around in my brain.  Sensations that I didn’t sit still long enough to notice before.  Personal feelings that are connected to details unique to me but rooted in sensations that are universal: feelings are about motherhood and past.  We all come from a mother and we all move forward from a past: I’ve become fascinated by what we carry with us, what we discard, what we bury. (An earlier blog outlines the ways I’m investigating this a bit:  Mother and the Achitecture of Memory)

Why this project and why now?

When writing to fund this research project it seemed like a good way to push me to discover some new things: Seven years into my life as an artistic director of NCDC I wanted to shake things up and try a new way of working.  Or in some ways return to an old way of working and see what it felt like.  Adding Wendy to the process would give me an experienced voice to talk to as I came in contact with the unknown.  Adding Wendy would force me to try new things, to learn from someone outside of my community.      

 

Wendy was essentially a blind date mentor.  And I had no idea if we would get along as people.  I loved her work so it was a risk I felt worth taking.

Where I am in my life and where this project falls is a big part of the project and the process.  It is part of the struggle and the fodder for making the work.  But need it be the content for the work?  I don’t know.  When I wear it as a solo it is a bit terrifying.  When I bring it to the group of dancers I can look at it with more distance – abstract it – let it run and evolve. 

For me art and life are intertwined but that can mean so many things. The energy of the room of collaborators becomes a microcosm of ways humans relate in general and feeds the direction of the work on many levels.  

When alone in a solo my own story rises to the surface.  I want to run with that but I do wonder why would anyone need to know my story?    But at the core of my story lies the basic struggles of humanity.  And this story can lead into a research of the formal structures to carry the story… the formal structures that in a way speak volumes above the details of my days.  

Frankenphrase and whisper down the dancer

I’ve been slowly accumulating a phrase. Well accumulating may be the wrong word because it hasn’t been growing in sequence. Certain movements and moments have been traveling with me since august, determined to remain. Some disappear and resurface. Some things tag along for a while and then drop off for good. Some slowly morph into a new shape

The phrase as a whole is a concise response of sorts, born of my time alone in the studio. At times it is a comfort for me to return to. At other times its a bear I wrestle with. Why are you here? What do you mean? Why don’t you feel the way you did before?

As I spiral off into improvisational exercises, writing assignments and movement tasks, I occasionally check in with my phrase. I bring it new material, gifts for it to reject or absorb.

What am I saying with this phrase? I dare not attempt a summary as its purpose is continually shifting.

Here is a video of the phrase in its current state.

Untitled from Nichole Blog on Vimeo.

(the battery runs out at the end and it cuts off...but the phrase was almost over so its okay...)

I recently used this Franken-phrase as the starting point for a group experiment: I performed it only once for dancer #1 while the others left the room. Her task was to recreate that phrase from memory: to build a repeatable phrase of the same length coming as close to that original phrase as she could come. But instead of simplifying what she could not recall her task was to lie and fabricate the missing details. and to precisely set this new phrase.
Dancer #1 then shows Dancer #2 this new phrase. Only once.
Repeat process for Dancers 3, 4, 5, 6 in a whisper-down-the-lane type process.

In then end we have a 7 fully developed phrases. I am fascinated by: what changes, what persists, what gets dropped immediately and what replaces it. The six phrases sit together like a family portrait of sorts.

Here is a video of the six dancers performing these phrases all together: (they begin in the order in which they saw/created their phrases)

Untitled from Nichole Blog on Vimeo.

Mother and the Architecture of Memory

Notes from workshop #2 with dancers Eun Jung Choi, Jaamil Kosoko, John Luna, Scott McPheeters, Annie Wilsom, Christina Zani

I decided to name this workshop as : Mother and The Architecture of Memory.

I’m trying to find a way to work with and highlight the relationship to memory instead of the memories themselves; To embrace the dialogue between mother and child for instance, not the specific story of each mother and child. Yet the details of each person’s past needs to emerge to support this mission. I’m learning how to include the history of each dancer without weighing too strongly on any one person or event.

I am asking the dancers to trust me with their personal histories. We started with simple details and slowly started digging deeper. I am touched and impressed by their willingness and playfulness.

Embodying Mother
When investigating Mother with the group, I was struck by the visible physical struggle between child and mother as the two attempted to share the same body. As each child attempted to share their body and their mental space with an imagined version of her mother, I was able to identify a vibrant conversation within the body of each performer as they struggled to embody their mother, this person they know so intimately. I realized that I don’t necessarily need to uncover the details of these mothers per se. I am interested in the way their lives interface with the lives of their children. How those children wear that conversation on a daily basis and the ways it lives in their skin.
How “clear” does this experiment need to be? What reads to an unknowing audience? Does a title like Mother give just enough context to frame the performances? These are a few of the questions that arose as I worked with this personal material.

We initially spent some time embracing the archetype of Mother, sliding from image to image, which was a fascinating and chaotic improvisation. At a certain point I asked them to embody their own mother in whatever form that took. Those beings then interacted in a range of ways. Conversations with the dancers and my observations of their improvisations helped me to re-shape the directives and guide the explorations into both potent and playful territory.

Formal exercises. The content of the structure:
We also explored structures that examined the systems at the root of this relationship to the past. These were formal exercises that explored the notion of passing down material, handing down information, and evolution, absorption and the ways we carry something with us. Putting these notions in purely physical terms was really helpful and allowed us to generate material that could augment or sit beside the more emotional, character-driven explorations. The previous blog entry (Blur) outlines one of these experiments.

I am interested in the individual stories of each dancer. But more than that I am interested in their relationship to those stories; how and why they have carried certain details forward with them; and the conversation that occurs between their present and their past when they try to map out (or embody) those details. In organizing these studies into a performance framework I’m faced with choosing the types of memories we display and verbalize as well as the structure we use to convey them.

Through this process I learned that I am primarily interested in examining the tamber of these dancers relationships to their past. I’m curious about the structure of the re-telling; the architecture of the memory.

Here is a video of talking dance structure we are working on. It deals with the "Maps" of space and memory that we carry and accumulate. Again this is something that I was exploring as a solo at first but I enjoy the way it expands with several bodies.

>Video Here< I recently started reading "The Poetics of Space" and its blowing my mind. It relates so pointedly to the various projects that I am working on right now.  

Solo Work – the Mother of the process:
My solo practice births and feeds the group explorations. This February workshop came after several months of my solo practice. The group explorations were directly fed by curiosities and concerns that cropped up in my solo research. Figuring out how to bring these ideas to a group of bodies was a fantastic process.

When I embody my own memories and my own mother in the form of a solo it runs the risk of becoming an indulgent work about me and my life.* I don’t necessarily want to make a dance to simply tell you who I am. Instead I am interested in the ways we relate to our past. (And I am my most handy subject on that matter.) I’m curious about the way every moment is getting absorbed and reassimilated; the way our identity is shaped by those moments and our own decisions about what to keep, what to highlight and what to bury. When I bring these concerns to the group I can more easily step back and sculpt both the content and the form.

 *Here I am addressing a fear. And a challenge. I am simultaneously pursuing a solo with these themes and ideas. To combat my fear of making of a confessional narrative, my challenge is to balance structure with content, to allow the structure to become the content, to reach past my own circle of experience through acknowledgement of the personal as well as the universal, to embrace the mundane and the epic. Wendy Houstoun is coming to Philadelphia in two weeks to work with me. This will be our first time in the studio together since our intensive in London last June. I look forward to talking further with her about her experience as a solo artist now that I have spent a little time digging around in my own solo practice. I greatly admire her approach to making and performing. Her ability to stay rooted in her own personal narrative while commenting on the culture at large is what drew me to her from the start.

I'll leave you with a video of the dancers performing a short section that sits somewhere between formal exploration and emotional narrative.  A short peek into the beautiful dancers moving and sensing.

Ugliness is fear

Ugliness is just fear.
I took a workshop with John Jaspers a few months ago and he referred to Theodor Adorno’s aesthetic theory, by paraphrasing that the experience of ugliness is directly related to fear. And that beauty only exists as a contrast to ugly; as a response. We used this as a foundation for an exercise. The assignment was to address something we are afraid of and manifest “ugly” in relationship to that. Or more pointedly: dig in a sandbox you don’t like to dig in.

For Jasper’s assignment I listed my fears and chose a few to focus on. (listing your fears in a matter of fact fashion is a worthy exercise on its own. I highly recommend it). I focused on my fears instead of the word ugly. This seemed to be the goal of the exercise and I find it easier to locate the things I fear than to concoct an idea of ugly. It made me realize that I rarely use the term ugly. I placed my voice at the center of the exercise. And combined it with an unpunctuated movement state: un-awkward, non humorous, unpunctuated movement. I drew up a quick study in which the vocalizations and the movements did not respond to one another. They stayed on separate tracks. And when I performed it I realized it actually pointed to another set of fears: non-communication, compartmentalization and repression. We all have long lists of fears. Some we can name easily and some we can’t bear to write down, artistic and personal fears that bleed into one another. I appreciated Jasper’s push for us to create a rigorous artistic response as opposed to a simple confession.

I found this conversation and this assignment interesting.
Beauty/Ugliness is a complicated discussion point often at the center of heated debates: how we each define these things and what we do with the information. But fear is personally palpable.

If we think something is ugly – is it just triggering a fear? I can get behind that theory. When we are searching for beauty are we running from our fears? Maybe but that seems a bit cynical.

So digging in the sandbox of your fears – what does that do? I both loathe and love the challenge of doing so. But I sincerely loved watching the short studies that came from each dancer in the workshop. The dancers performances were -in my opinion- quite beautiful. Beautiful because they showed vulnerability and struggle; they were full of questions that hadn’t been worked out and they were so specific to the individual performing them. And these are things I find quite beautiful.


A few weeks later I had a voice lesson with Mike. My husband is a singer and a voice teacher. Every now and then I ask him for a lesson. “The difference between breathing without sound and breathing with sound is simply the decision to do so. The place where we make that decision (to sing or speak) is the same place in the brain that houses all our memories and all our emotions.”
I’ve never asked him how he learned that, what scientist revealed that or what study proved it. It makes perfect sense to me. I want to believe it and I know that information can really help me.

I’ve always put my body forward with abandon, studying methods of opening and releasing, yearning to perform and be seen, to make dances and share them widely. But I’ve never been quick to speak in public. I’ve learned to move through it as a teacher, but I have some blockades to dismantle as a performer. And my singing hang-ups are specific and raw. I know where they come from but it’s not easy to face it. Singing directly into these memories and these tight areas of my voice has been a fascinating process. On the other hand I do sing freely for my son. He is seven now and I’ve been singing him to sleep every night since his birth. He thinks I have a fantastic voice. To him it’s the sound of love. With him it is uncomplicated.