AJOHNNY

Oof. It’s probably been a solid six months (if not more) before I could watch Stacy Grossfield’s Sugar doesn’t live here in one sitting. Getting used to ‘slow dance’ (cf. ‘slow food,’ only get rid of the bougie factor) has been an equally slow process and it’s still in the works. What’s cool, though, is reaching those checkpoints where I can feel myself getting better at something — the mental muscles I’ve flexed for so long are finally able to withstand sustained stress.

Calling this piece a watershed moment in my dance-watching experience might be a lil too dramatic, but in an uncanny and cool way it lights up a ton of points that have been in my view recently. In wondering how the flourishing dance/visart relationship has affected work that tends more strongly toward the former (works favoring the latter seem to be getting the lion’s share of the attention, which makes sense considering how much gravitational pull the visarts world has), and in thinking about the possibilities of dance that effaces the matter-of-fact identity of the performer, I’ve itched to see more dance that breaks common formal considerations open to make room for more ‘visual’ considerations. I’m still trying to figure out what that means, but for starters I’ll note that this piece doesn’t privilege the idea of a ‘stage’ as a singular unit. Spatially, each figure inhabits a separate realm: the women in blue bodysuits, by turns erotic and horrific; the woman caught in a super-long toilet; the brooding villain straight out of a Limón piece (haha, that Zorro mask); the woman and her lover-in-a-bear-suit, who trade melodramatic whispers in a background act that constantly risks lapsing into bad performance art, or at least parodying it.

But what’s more compelling is how they all take these realms with them wherever they go. Limón Guy, for instance, commits to his tilts and frenetic high jumps all the way, and is always accompanied by wistful modernist chamber music even when he crosses some other figure’s path. Eventually the worlds collide, but only after they’ve claimed the space for themselves. And it’s here that the more overtly ‘visarts’ elements of the piece begin to make sense — that is, the jagged plywood archway that sits right in the middle of the space. Insert some thought about the dialectical relationship between dance and visarts that’s all the rage now. Suffice to say for now, though, that everything ‘comes together’ when they all start crawling through the doorway, or when the bear/girl performance-art couple get in an argument that culminates with a loud “Oh, come off it!”.

I think I value the satisfaction of getting through the piece more than I enjoyed the piece itself, but if nothing else I appreciate the way it dips into so many currently-pressing concerns. And it continues! As I said when writing about Meg Foley’s latest piece, I’m really excited by choreographers who prefer to define dance by putting it face-to-face with what it ‘isn’t.’ With its insistent (and largely ornamental?) treatment of visual art and theater in league with dance, Sugar is among the first steps of what looks like a promising body of work.

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tl;dr: Meg Foley (and Monty Python)

the whole time in the meanwhile from Meg Foley on Vimeo.

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More often than not, Monthy Python sketches seem to run out of steam about two-thirds of the way through. This has to be at least partially deliberate. An average episode of Saturday Night Live always declines steadily in quality from the beginning to Weekend Update, and rapidly from there to the end. And Mad TV apparently gave up trying altogether when I started watching it in middle school. Monty Python’s Flying Circus’ lapses, though, happen in cycles—that is, sketches may fall off but each one starts anew with its own energy. Consider, too, that absurd and frustrating situations are the group’s bread and butter, as they are in their (no-)cheese shop sketch. Together, these features suggest that “getting lost” or “dwindling away” are intentional features of Monty Python’s brand of comedy (or anti-comedy, if you’re into that).

The cheese shop sketch gets old quickly. Once you catch on, the joke lose its fizz after two minutes and won’t recover it for the remaining three. What makes this sketch work for me, though, is not the ridiculous premise or the slightly annoying shaggy dog ending: it’s (surprise!) the music and dancing. It gives the scene a grating momentum, and when it’s pulled into the dialogue it becomes a nice cool splash amid the dry humming back-and-forth.

When they interact, text and dance are often at odds with one another. How the contest plays out in a case like Singin’ in the Rain (about which I drafted a post but haven’t revisited in a while) is fundamentally different from what’s going on here. In the Monty Python sketch, there’s so little dancing that it can’t really be said to be in a substantial relationship with the other elements. But that’s actually why I find the dance so compelling—not because it hijacks another, more dominant system of meaning as it does in “Moses Supposes,” for example, but because it’s like a quietly-whirring motor grinding its gears even as the larger machine stars to peter out. All I need to know is that it’s happening, and that split attention keeps me on edge.

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Stephen Colbert is surprisingly nimble.

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This is Greatest Hits, the “all Maroon-5 ballet” senior dance thesis I presented last weekend. It comes five years after this much shorter, much more humorous (maybe?), very different beast of a piece I made in high school. I’m actually surprised that there’s still a soft spot in my heart for something I made so long ago, when I was still so inexperienced, when my dancing was still decaf-weak, and when I was preoccupied with such a different mode of expression.

A little after the junior-year concert, I asked my parents what they thought about Neighborhood Watch. “It was fine,” my mom said. “I mean, it was funny, but I didn’t like that you all smiled so much.” I didn’t understand what the problem was, but she didn’t feel like elaborating. A few days later a well-meaning (I think — I hope) teacher told me that she appreciated the piece’s caustic wit. Which was news to me? “The way you played with minstrelsy…it was so incisive.” I don’t know what planet I was on back then but it was only a few months ago that I remembered the comment and finally understood what she was getting at.

Neg(oti)ating humor is always a challenge for me. It’s seductive and so pleasurable to work with, but I’ve learned that it can be a formal crutch — I find it so easy to make it do the work that any other, more nuanced sort of investigation can produce, and with so little effort. But having more or less lost the creative struggle of separating dancer from dance (at least for now, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing) has made me realize that yes, whether I like it or not, cultural and social histories are always converging on the point that is Me. No matter how hard I try, I cannot shake the fact that black people have long mugged their way to a shallow sort of acceptance. Humor has been our bread and butter. That’s why I’m always empowered by the thought of Miles Davis playing shows with his back to his audience. He was an anti-entertainer. It’s a deliberately cold gesture, but he deflected attention in a powerful and necessary way. The only way he was able to carve out a space for respectful, engaged spectatorship was by busting it open on his own.

Circumstances are much easier for me than they were for him, though. On some level I need not be so resistant to appeasing my audience, but I think the problem still persists in some way. How to hold humor at arm’s length, and how to keep it close? I tried to take some steps in that difficult direction here. Maybe it worked. I feel like it did.

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Taking stock after presenting my dance thesis this weekend, I’m having a little freak-out that every would-be artist probably has at the end of a cozy four years in college: there’s, like, no money out there. Which is not an entirely accurate thing to say — there’s plenty of funding floating around, you just have to go out and find it. I’m floored by how easy it was to get a rug and a microphone and even lighting for my little project, and I fully realize that things like this usually don’t happen for artists my age if they’re out in the Real World making work. That’s one reason dance has started to accumulate the stuff of its surroundings: “pedestrian” clothing, found sounds, sneakers. If a dance has props it’s either something that’s already in the studio or some trinket that’s been lugged out of the choreographer’s apartment. Lighting design often goes as far as flipping whatever switch is on the wall.

Recently there’s been considerable talk about arts funding and its effects on aesthetics. Culturebot has been running a series of pieces that got its first rumblings in articles like this, which examines the tension between artistic haves, have-nots, and the work they produce. “We cannot continue placing the expectation on artists to simply make do with what they have while blithely choosing not to interrogate the structures that have been built with the general intent of supporting them and their work,” Jeremy Barker says. “I spent many years in Seattle, Washington, covering the arts there, and I’ve seen how the punk rock/DIY ethos is so painfully limiting. It’s not resistance, it’s capitulation. And it leads to artistic stagnation.” His point isn’t that everyone needs to chase funding in order to succeed, only that it’s totally valid for an artist to want more than what he has — and to make his work demand more, for the sake of improving the system in which he works.

In meeting young artists and hearing about their interests, I often hear something like a refrain: “Yeah, I’m not really into the whole careerist thing.” I get that a lot of people are totally fine with making art as a recreational activity, and that’s cool. But if someone who has serious (and possibly professional) aspirations, I’m not sure what to think. Is your intention to make work that somehow dodges the system responsible for swallowing and castrating everything in its path (if so, good luck with that)? Do you plan to spend most of your time making work while pursuing odd jobs to keep the lights on?

I think most young artists realize that the dream of being an artist for a living is kind of oxymoronic, and at least implicitly understand that art’s long history as an economically privileged, leisurely activity persists today. Personally I’m unsure how I feel about the prospect of economic instability — it sounds like a sellout thing to say but I don’t care because after all who’s still really into the idea of “selling out”? #punkforever — but feel that making the sort of work I’d like to make either requires a lot of time to be successful. And because I prefer the slow process to the pick-up piece you might do with friends in a couple of weeks, I realize that funding is an important piece of making that machine run. Even as I remind myself that taking the ethical course of action is something I ought to do because I’m convicted about its truth (and not because it’s the “cool” or “less shameful” thing to do), I’m not willing to give up on the fact that more “involved” work is often heavily funded or otherwise supported by presenters. Which I suppose is something a lot of artists don’t have to worry about…I can see writers getting huffy about The System because there’s not much capital involved at the grassroots level, which just isn’t the case for dance. tl:dr, I don’t get all the resentment toward pursuing funding from established sources. Yes, it may be the case that one’s values might be compromised when interacting with institutions interested in preserving their own interests, but that’s how all human relationships work (even if that shouldn’t necessarily be the case)? And I get the feeling that a good number of the people making the anti-careerist argument aren’t nearly as “fringe” as they think they are?

Has anyone done any compelling writing on this subject?

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Let’s petition Thom Yorke to follow his real dreams and become a contemporary dancer.

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This is an actual email that someone just sent out to my res-college listserv. In the past couple of weeks a few people have blasted everyone on the listserv to track down a shirt or a blanket that “went missing” from one of the laundry rooms. Any other person would assume that they just misplaced these items, but at Princeton the only possible explanation for missing clothes is Theft!. The People have had enough, though. Someone is actually trying to petition student government to install video cameras in every laundry room — and to drag Public Safety (basically a group of guys with badges who sometimes ‘patrol’ campus on Segways) into the whole mess.

I mean, this is pretty typical for Princeton. Not the starting-petitions-to-prevent-laundry-theft thing, but, like, the assumption that I am not and would not be at fault until a crushing load of evidence proves otherwise. My freshman year marked the first time I heard the word “counterintuitive,” and for the following three years it was a pretty common refrain. “I couldn’t work that coffee machine, it was counterintuitive.” “Last night’s homework seemed messed up to me, it was counterintuitive.” Quite telling, the expectation that new challenges and encounters should yield themselves so easily to one’s “intuition.” No one wants to be wrong — and no one imagines that they build their houses on sand, so to speak — but at what point do confidence and intellectual surety become arrogance?

This is actually something we talked about in dance yesterday. In many other disciplines — and to some extent dance as well — it’s pretty easy to hedge your bets by hiding behind your core strengths. Of course as time passes this only becomes easier and even necessary, as independent work drives you to burrow deep into something you think you can do extremely well. That’s fine. Even if the idea of general requirements atrophies in the process, there’s nothing wrong with cultivating personal interests. But it becomes too easy to project an image of “having-it-all-togetherness.” It affects how people talk in class, and to one another on the sidewalk (when they actually talk on the sidewalk). It is an ever-present anxiety!

That’s why dance is a welcome change of pace in my academic schedule. For starters, students aren’t allowed to self-select classes unless they’re complete beginners — in which case, they take the introductory course. Since each fall course is dedicated to learning a specific work to be performed in a spring-semester concert, choreographers and repetiteurs (hahaha that’s not what they’re officially called but it’s the most appropriate word) audition everyone who wants to perform. And while capability plays an important role in determining who’s chosen for which piece, professors make a point of putting students in a wide variety of pieces. If you stay with the department for multiple years you are bound to do something that makes you feel awkward or uncomfortable or otherwise inadequate. That means that technique classes and rehearsals will be a constant struggle. And while I can pad my academic schedule with classes I’m pretty sure I’ll do well in, I can’t really save myself in a dance class — where all of my inabilities and imperfections are on full view for everyone to see and learn from. So much of the instruction in a dance class is little more than correcting mistakes, and using those mistake to teach others. You can’t fake your way through a dance class. Success requires you to be completely honest with your shortcomings. You’ll be hard pressed to find that in most seminar rooms.

I love a lot of things about this school, but sometimes I wish there were more reasons for people to be more honest with one another and, most importantly, themselves. Of course it sucks to admit but I’ve found that I learn so much more when I’m vulnerable or at a total loss. Learning to doubt myself is actually one of the most valuable skills I’ve learned in my time here. After all, Public Safety is not going to rush to my aid if I make a mistake in the real world. Should I have to wait and learn that the hard way?

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newyorker:

Sasha Frere-Jones weighs in on Baauer and the “Harlem Shake” phenomenon sweeping the web: It “is not a dance craze but, rather, an Internet-language craze, a replication based on imitating the syntax of a particular video. With other dance crazes, you could use whatever music you liked and twerk or do the dougie, but you did have to get those dances roughly right to be part of the phenomenon.” Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/VVaRwp

Hmm. I know Sasha Frere-Jones is a music critic, and (like most people) probably knows next to nothing about dance, but just because “the syntax of a particular video” is this trend’s defining characteristic doesn’t mean it’s not a form of dance. Its (a) reliance on a common editing technique and (b) general lack of choreographic consistency (I mean, that’s not entirely true, but let’s go with it) may dissuade him from calling it a dance, but that dismissal relies on a very narrow notion of what dance is. Even the Dougie comparison is not completely accurate because, like the Bernie, the threshold of “acceptable” movement is extremely low. All you have to do is “Put your arms out front [and] lean side to side”! The Dougie and the Harlem Shake are similar in that they’ve both established what a contemporary choreographer might call a score: they don’t require any specific moves, but anyone who decides to follow a rough set of guidelines is doing the dance.

Sure, most “dance crazes” aren’t really interested in questions of form, so I can understand SFJ’s denial of the term. But we might do well to take the label as it is (because, after all, no single person decided to deem this or any other dance-related fad worthy of it), not least because popular notions of dance could stand to be expanded. As I explained in this post, the Harlem Shake — and its companion, the Get Down — have probably done more legwork for dance-for-camera / “alternative choreographic techniques” than most dance artists have. As much as I dislike this trend, we shouldn’t overshadow its constructive aspects.

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∞ Feb 22nd, 2013 at 10:58 pm via newyorker / Comments
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tl,dr: In Whicn I Work Through My Feelings about the Harlem Shake

When I saw a Harlem Shake video for the first time, I unfairly compared it to the Bernie. There was so much flailing going on that it seemed like a natural point of comparison. Some friends pointed out that all flailing is not created equal, and pointed to the fact that the dances are not at all trying to do the same thing. All of that is true, but it didn’t change the fact that I get more and more frustrated with the concept every time I watch a new video. So, of course, I had to work through the feeling (because I can only enjoy things by thoroughly killing them). The videos are entertaining enough, I think — so why don’t I like the idea?

» Is it because there are so many different versions of it? This was my first thought, but that doesn’t hold for long. One of the best parts of listening to classical music, or pop song covers (when they’re not being ironic), or watching ballet variations, is the pleasure of sussing out small differences. But I only feel that pleasure when a performer has made marked or deliberate interpretive choices. So, like, this version is probably my favorite because it’s unlike most others on a few levels: formally, it makes its own breathing room and doesn’t hold to the deadpan > freak out pattern; it uses a few extra seconds of the song; and everyone is wearing a bizarre costume the entire time. (If DizastaMusic is to be believed, this is “The Original Harlem Shake Video.” I’m tempted to believe him because repetition and reproduction have a way of refining things, and compared to most Harlem Shake videos this one is pretty unrefined — for all of the reasons that make it special.)

There is no real difference between the so-called “Harlem Shake” and the Bernie, save one of rigor. When done as such, the latter is more fun to do and more entertaining to watch.

bernie > harlem shake

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