Footnote . Auckland, NZ . Herald Theatre

It was a really challenging space, the Herald Theatre. The rack on the seating was impossible to get a good perspective that was unobtrusive to the dancers and there were no wings even though they pretended that there were. The dancers are proficient, the choreography is excellent to average albeit inconsistently so, and the performance lacking. It's clear that Footnote is a young dance company; a "choreolab" comprised of six core dancers of capable technical ability and beautiful physique. Choreographers from the area are invited to make work on the company for performances on a touring circuit. What Footnote does have is funding.

Supported by the local foundational institutions and private donors throughout their touring territory, it comes as no surprise to me that this young company have the financial backing to put on such mediocre performances. It is not uncommon in the States to have many companies of varying artistic capabilities funded by local arts advocates. One such company is settled in the heart of my hometown. The company employs technically able performers with amazing bodies and on-stage charisma, but the range of their individual artistry leaves me wanting at the end of countless performances that seem to blend into one another as time goes by. Once I've seen then, I wonder if that's all I'll ever get. There is generally no range of sophistication being performed onstage. Where is the artist within the technician? And yet, audiences flock to support them and they are well funded with astounding social, prestigious, and financial backing.

Companies like this have their good sides too. Perhaps some audiences will never see dance in any other form; therefore, the fact that the company has attracted them to see dance however fundamental advocates the art form on some level. The only distress I feel is in how unchanging the administrative arts are in these matters. A companies structure and methods are rarely ever examined if a “formula” for success has been attained, hailed with an expounding “Eureka!”, no doubt. I struggle to understand how some artists with limited vision can be racking in the financial support and others, with more artistic depth and clarity perhaps, are never given the acknowledgement they deserve, let alone a check to make significant work.

That’s the key, isn’t it? Who is deciding what significant dance work looks like?

Clearly no one asked me. Hopefully when I have my own flailing dance company that will no doubt elude funding as well as prestige, I can tackle some of these questions and actually find solutions to them, however unconventional. For it seems that unconventionality is the way I must access the work albeit poorer rather than financially (politically perhaps) enabled.

Choreographic Process

I think it is interesting the way artists think about and articulate their work. With the ever-increasing difficulty in describing "modern" & "post-modern" dance, I'm becoming less and less interested in carbon copy aesthetics and more interested in the depth of work it takes to come to significant dance work. I know, I know, "significant" is up for debate, but whatever it is, I consider it the "stuff" that perpetuates the field rather than the "stuff" that sedates it. Upon request for a lecture I was giving in a Dance Studies course a few weeks ago, one of my own professors, Sarah Gamblin, wrote about her process is creating her work entitled Terrible Angels.

Sarah Gamblin: Terrible Angels

"All I knew before the process began is that I wanted to work in a way that is similar to Bebe Miller's process, which is doing lab/workshops using improvisation and reflection to locate and create a world collaboratively with dancers. I also wanted to work with detailed, complex movement. We began the weekend of Katrina and I was listening to Cocorosie, which has a mournful, strange, hyper feminine and subversive feeling, this made me think of NO and it's cultural history, it's national bad girl status; death, femininity, sexuality, poetry, failure. These images just kept swirling around and I did not try to make narrative sense of any of it, nor did I try to distill anything into one coherent metaphor.

We worked with improvisations that I have been working on for a while. One is called, "docking and permission" or sometimes "pause and undo" or also "pause and permit". Basically you work on feeling your kinesthetic impulses without acting on them. You pause in stillness for a long time and then allow, permit an impulse to move you, but only until you pause again. You try not to let the movement carry you too far, try not to fall back on kinesthetic habits but instead pause and observe what you would do if you could, and then allow the impulse to emerge out of the blackness of not knowing; inviting surprise, incoherence so as to find mystery. This is an improv mode, not a way of setting material. It is a sensibility, always trying to subvert itself.After that we set material from this improv mode but through opposite means- by just repeating movements with a partner, without counting, analysing, singing, editing or correcting, until the movement became learned.

I am an improviser and I tend to privilege presence and the freshness of a moment over formal coherence. The choreographer in me is still trying to figure out how best to dialogue with this part. The improviser in me likes things that unwind, rather than wind-up, as classical aesthetics tend to privilege. I would like to learn how to make this improviser’s sensibility more meaningful to audiences. The feedback at ACDFA taught me how irritating departures from classical formal development can be for viewers. Incomprehension, mild contempt and dismissal seemed to dominate the responses from the adjudicators. In my process I had been trying to create an authentic universe lived in as if for the first time, I did use my own sensibility for form to make coherent this universe but my sense of form is not classical. What is development? Do we just know it when we see it? When someone says, you need to develop that, what is it we are supposed to do? I can see now that it is a matter of asking questions, dealing with feedback. There is no prescription for development, just a process that eventually teaches everyone; choreographer, dancers, audience, what development means in that world being created.
Also collaborated with a wonderful electro-acoustic musician named Dave Gedosh whose ultra strange music completely subverted my privilege of being strange. What I like was how over the top wierd the whole thing became, what I don't like is how jittery and uncomfortable and ultimately inaccessible the world became, witout any pay-off. I think the music was almost too intense for my work, which perhaps did not slap back enough, formally speaking, the musical wierdness.Hope this helps, let me know if you have any other questions.

I also collaborated with a wonderful electro-acoustic musician named Dave Gedosh whose ultra strange music completely subverted my privilege of being strange. What I like was how over the top weird the whole thing became, what I don't like is how jittery and uncomfortable and ultimately inaccessible the world became, without any pay-off. I think the music was almost too intense for my work, which perhaps did not slap back enough, formally speaking, and the musical weirdness.

I'm becoming increasing nervous about finishing up my graduate work. There seems to be too many ideas that don't connect to one another to be deemed my personal 'body of work'. I'm going to have to work on that. I don't want my choreographic work to suffer simply because I'm forced into putting more attention on my professional paper. It's become a challenge to relate all the components that I will be presenting in my final presentation at the end of year 3. The last 2 dance works I've choreographed were, in my mind, successful for various reasons but I don't feel I have a good video representation of the work in order to make a professional-looking demo reel. How do I rectify that? By doing the video work myself? Hiring someone? That may have to happen. It's frustrating to realize that, like everything else in my life, I am required to do everything myself if I want it done right. For someone who values collaborative processes and feels that relationships are the most valuable asset emerging from dance work, it irritates me that I am constantly stuck doing work over again because it was not done well the first time. This is a self-indulgent rant, mind you, and I'm sure I will get over it by tomorrow. I'm just frustrated.

Introduction to My Work

My name is Rachel Bruce. I am a graduate student at Texas Woman’s University in Denton, Texas. I’ve worked as a video producer, photographer, and web and print product designer for the last 7 years as well as a professional performer and choreographer in several small grassroots dance companies in Oklahoma, Texas, and Washington DC and am currently the publicity coordinator for Texas Woman’s University’s Department of Dance. I am in the third year of a 3-year program to earn a Master of Fine Arts in Performance and Choreography at TWU.

I have learned most of what I know out of necessity to carve out a place for myself in dance. I don’t stand out in auditions but I’m a good performer. I have talent for choreography because I absorb ideas and can organize them kinaesthetically first before ever understanding them abstractly or logically. I worked in a corporate job straight out of college as an administrative assistant because I had to eat. It was a position in a creative division of a military contracting firm made up of graphic designers, video producers and communication specialist. I also danced for a company, rehearsing in the evenings and on weekends.

Everything I learned at my corporate job that I had a vested interest in (barring the interest I had in keeping my job) was geared toward supporting the dance company. When we needed a poster to promote our shows, I found a co-worker who craved a creative outlet to volunteer. When we needed marketing, I paid attention to relevant ideas while at work. When we needed a program, I took a class under professional development (paid for by the company) that helped me learn a layout program in order to support the dance company. I got very good at seeing opportunities and making relevant connections to support the dance work I wanted to be doing.

Artistic Statement
I am an artist interested in making relational connections. From the movement in and from our bodies connecting to the movement in and from person to person, these are the movements that form relationships; relationships amongst people, ideas and movement. I am interested in asymmetry as a means of skewing conventionality and perspective. I am interested in developing movement quality as the voice of specific work.

Choreographic Process

I mainly enter the work through emotion and movement quality. Most of the time I am situated somewhere in between controlling and guiding the concept and am concerned with the accomplishing goals and nurturing the dancers rather than making master works. I’ve learned a lot from this approach.

Here are some examples of my work and the process I engaged in to create them:
White After Labor Day

Worked from a piece of music that inspired me. I had a vision of the kind of humor that the music inspired and it was a challenge to develop it. I worked with dancers with a wide range of skill sets so it was sometimes a challenge to generate the type of movement quality I thought the piece needed. I gave set movement phrases and tailor them to the dancers as well as asking them to create movement phrases based on what I had already given them. I thought that by doing this, I would receive feedback on what motifs were the strongest as well as the ones that the cast was kinaesthetically relating to.

dive

“dive” is a multi-media piece using video footage and the flat it was being projected on as another performer. I developed the movement and the structure first with a first draft of the video footage. I realized that I had too many metaphors in the video footage and should distil it down to one. I chose one metaphor – diving/floating – based on the movement vocabulary that had been developed. I originally called this piece “living in the blindspot” because I wanted it to be about making the choice to live wide-awake to not be indifferent. The movement vocabulary was virtuosic and kinetically chaotic while the video performer was floating in a pool not engaging with her environment in the typical way. I realized that the ‘blindspot’ was negativity so I spray-painted negative words like ‘no’, ‘not’, ‘never’ on the flat that the video was going to be projected on. I’d been taking water aerobics for 2 months in the pool where we did the filming and I happen to notice a sign that said ‘No Diving’ on the wall. I saw a connection – the missing piece of my context that would bring my concept alive. I re-worked the footage, re-shot a few segments and made some minor structural changes to support the context including a dive at the end of the video, which proved an effective ending.

Don’t…Away

This is a solo art/dance collaboration project. I listened to the same music that the visual artist was listening to, spent time studying the paintings which were large-scale on sailboat sails and incorporated inspiration from quotes she sent me that were relevant to the concept. I had a kinaesthetic entrance into the piece but not a visual one and that impeded my intuition to some extent. I filmed a 45-minute improvisation based on the movement ideas I was working with that I felt referenced the concept and edited the sequences as they made sense to me visually. Then I put it back in my body for further kinaesthetic reflection. I was editing and moving, editing and moving until, in the interest of time, I abandoned the editing software and finished making my decisions via movement. I never reached a satisfactory ending but had to perform it. After the art reception, my professor confirmed that she too didn’t think it was finished.

distorted clarity

This was a piece that my colleague and friend, Brooke Schlecte, choreographed through concept and improvisation. We were researching dance as grotesque form and had been saturating ourselves with reading about grotesque form and watching hours of video clips cataloguing relevant samples for our history presentation. We talked a few times about concept and what the other was thinking about. Brooke wanted to put two ideas together: eating disorders and writing on her skin with a marker as an addictive activity. I wanted to use contortion and emoting as a movement qualities. As we talked, we began to see how our ideas could fit together. I had some movement motifs and further ideas but had only improvised some in my living room. She had some motifs and a skeletal structure but that was it. We watched each others movement and reflected on each others ideas. We both began to see some possibilities that we then tried and videotaped. We saw more possibilities and made some changes and repeated the cycle 3 times before we were finished. We both felt we had a complete movement and concept idea that resounded with our intention to create a dance in grotesque form for our history presentation.

we all fall down

This is a 4-minute dance film that was part of a larger 24-minute film. I took a concept from a choreographer about ‘adults at play’ and asked a dancer to improvise swinging, hanging and playing on a monkey bar (with no storyboard). I got inspired by what she was doing and filmed the pebble section and the run away, then asked her to roll down the hill. At the end of the last take, while still filming I saw her knees and feet in the frame and asked her to walk back up the hill. She did and then laid down (which I didn’t ask her to do). Like I said this was part of a larger film and we finished the day having gotten, what I thought, was sufficient footage to make a sketch of something. After seeing the footage, I realized that there was a complete idea there and 3 hours of editing later, we all fall down was finished.

Summary

Critical thinking – pose a problem and set out to solve it. Be reflective and have reasons for every choice you make. It’s okay to not always be able to articulate your reasons for your choices, but pay attention and work toward it.

Engagement is an (re)action: engage with the work on as many levels and from as many perspectives as you can.