this whole dance thing

yea. this whole dance thing.

why dance?

I just had a discussion with my friend Claris, who is one of those people who come up to me after a dance performance and say, "I got nothing meaningful from the performance." yea. Frustrating right, dancers/choreographers? yea. what is it? why is it that i can feel so powerfully and substantially that you can't? Aren't we all humans? what is this truth in movements and in moving the human body that i believe in? the truth. Bill T Jones talked about it. Meredith Monk talked about it. the truth.

ar. maybe i am just having a depressing day. didn't go to work. didn't go to class. didn't do nothing. just sat and thought, about this whole dance thing.

Gestural VS "Dancey"

Gestural=human

"dancey"= non-human/definition of space through angles, lines, spirals, etc. through the human body?

My last two rehearsal (and first two as well) with David Hurwith and his selected group of women were challenging. The movement-based rehearsals are so far improvisational work that follows a set of guidelines from him. We've been working with the definition and range, I think, of gestural movements, and with finding the place where gestural and "dancey" are not so separate, where they both exist in a way that defines each other in the dancer's body and in space. That place reminds me of Faye's work, in which "dance" movements have something that triggers an impulsive human response, movements that look like "we can all do it" and "true, we all do it." Often when dancers improvise, we forget that not only were we dancers, but also humans. We forget that on top of all the techniques and "moves" that we've been trained in, we can also do other movements that we do "naturally" every day as living humans. Dance by definition might have been "movements that define space in a geometrical sense" rather than movements that are mundane. However, the collective effort of modern choreographers in the last few years to deconstruct that definition is obvious. Each choreographer is looking for that "place" where gestural meets "dancey," of course "dancey" as defined by the work in the last decade. Where is that place where dance movements can provoke a more direct, approachable, impulsive human response in more audience of different kinds and how do we get there?

Juddertone Performance a success!

Big Ape has just finished another successful performance as part of the Juddertone Performance Series at Boston University Dance Theater. The concert was an exceptionally long one and the audience has been incredibly patient for the duration and also general quality of the work in the concert....Thank you everyone who came out to see the show!

This piece is quite different comparing to Big Ape's other repertory work in the way that it doesn't have an obvious drive as the piece progresses. It maintains a specific pace throughout and at times almost hints a termination of momentum or energy, but then it picks up and keeps going...in a cycle. The work was made in pieces and usually you would imagine sections start to interweave and have meanings being done one after another. But "Away" kind of maintains that "sectionalism" in a way, pieces held close to each other only because of some inevitability of the bigger structure. I am still making sense of the work. It almost feels like it should just crumble and complete fall apart and be "disposed" at the end, somehow. How do you dispose a piece?

I was getting on the T to get back to my temporary "home" in Boston and had a rather inspiring conversation with one of the audience members about what is "modern dance." haha, of course right? what is modern dance, then, and now, and how's it changing, how's it dying. Maybe we can wrap all that has happened since the 20s until now and call it modern dance, and call what is yet to come something else? So many dance works have shifted to something close to our concepts of "experimental theater." But that seems to me only a way to escape thinking about what is the kind of work that we don't consider dance now? Why? Can we categorize them in more specific and informed ways than one large "easy-to-go" category of experimental theater? of course, i think modern dance pieces still need to be movement-based to be called dance. Theatricality is one of the ways to say what you wanna say, but i do think only if the movement itself makes a statement that a piece can be a dance. It seems to me so interesting that each audience member has a "line" through which they judge/ or categorize whether a piece is "dance" or not.