Ephemera Builds An Enduring Perspective

A recent coffee date with a friend included extensive conversation about how we came to be the individuals we are today. It struck me how, sometimes, only the briefest of encounters can shape whole facets of our lives. So while I often focus on the many people whose lives have catalyzed shifts in my own, and with whom I have gotten to know personally, there are many who will likely remain strangers to me.

Going to see live performances of any kind, is for me a kind of ephemera which will live on only in how I remember my responses in the moment to the work, the performers, the environs. And yet these experiences did not live/exist discrete from the rest of my life to that point.
I have an idyllic home in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, where I am extremely lucky to live surrounded by original forest land. There is even a small bridge with a panoramic view of the pond that forms one boundary of the property. Most years, I stop on the bridge and take a picture to ponder the contrast of changing seasons and the kaleidoscope of differences that nature provides at any given moment. The pictures freeze a moment in time that will never occur in exactly the same way again, but if I am attentive, that picture might just spark the memory of how the cold air felt trying to crystalize in my nostrils, or how the geese plopping into the water momentarily interrupted the quiet burbling of the stream below the bridge.

Nearby is Jacob’s Pillow, where I selectively go to see dance performances during their summer festival. Most recently, I saw Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui / Eastman perform Larbi’s, Fractus V (2015). I will leave reviewing the work to others, as my purpose for writing here is to comment on how this work prompted me to reflect on my own perspectives about dance, particularly in light of what my time in India might hold for me.

My Fulbright grant is partially based on the fact that I represent a particular knowledge about “American Modern” dance from a professional and aesthetic perspective. As a performer that was not originally trained in the USA, I have often struggled to identify the subtly specific ways my dancing evolved to sustain my career here. Much of my time in the dance field has been to diplomatically promote dance as an Art in the USA, whether it was as a performer with a US company, or as a teacher/coach bringing the dances of Paul Taylor to companies and communities around the world. Over the years, I have come to appreciate that I can see and I can feel a difference in the dances and dancers that have grown up here, but not know how to articulate the differences. Maybe, after thirty-six years, I am too closely involved with dance in the USA to critique objectively? Seeing performances by companies from outside of the US often crystallizes a new perspective on my conundrum, at least for a moment.

I think of professional dance performances as a means of impacting an audience in some way whether discernable or intangible, in the way we might use languages, dialects and accents. While you can certainly parse dance into many genres and sub-sets, there is also the opportunity to view dance from a non-genre specific perspective. However, the ART behind eschewing genres is in engaging an audience with an aesthetic perspective, freeing them to not be bogged down in the “words” (so to speak), but to transcend “language/genre” for an experience that may only last a moment, yet live within you for much longer. This is what I think of as the ephemera of experiences that shape our perspectives and lives.

For me, Cherkaoui’s, Fractus V exemplifies his self-described “translating into a field that is contemporary dance.” I have often argued that Paul Taylor may have chosen to not develop a “technique” for training his dancers, so that he might continue to draw from the essence of vernacular, disciplined or cultural movement that he observed to further the interests and ideas he pursued when creating dances. I am not attempting to compare the resultant work of these men, or even their approaches to crafting dances. However, Fractus V was further evidence for me of contemporary dancers and dancemakers finding original voices drawn from global influences. And I was viscerally moved by Cherkaoui’s ability to present a clear and graphic perspective on humanness, celebration and especially on violence, without becoming gratuitous.


One of the more graphically violent roles I danced, was in Taylor’s, Speaking in Tongues, with Annmaria Mazzini. We are pictured together in this studio shoot by Lois Greenfield.

In a short post-performance discussion, two performers extolled how diligently they practice their singing, and the additional hours of training and repetition that the less familiar “disciplines” require of them. I am gratified that as a performer I have been part of creating works that stretched me beyond movement and content into speech, singing, body percussion and even puppetry. My multidisciplinary days are decades past, but witnessing these performers brought my own experiences into the present, as I marveled at their facile ease in service of their intent.

It is not important to me that audiences for live performances have a personal background in the discipline. Rather, I place importance on the impact that the creative voices and performers have on their audience. Dance has a potential for reaching audiences beyond the literal language of words as the performers embody sound, rhythm and the passing of time for the observer. And as a populist at heart, I appreciate Art that affects the broadest range of experience in its observers, from the “jaded expert who has seen too much” to the “neophyte who stumbled into an opportunity and took a chance.”

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Thanks to Paul Taylor and William J. Fulbright.

Writing Challenges Me...

Looking Behind the Reflection.