Performance Aggression

L - R: Emma Lipp, Elie Charpentier, Robert Burns, Theo Holdt, Sara Mapelli, Kelly Rauer.
Ideas have been slowly gathering since November for a new performance/video/sound work. A session last week allowed me to try out some ideas for using recorded prompts as a score, with vocal performers listening and responding to prepared parts. Research will continue on how best to utilize this tool, which I think must recognize its mechanical, isolating aspects.
My inspirations for this piece have circled around the connections between children's stories and horror cinema, and ideas about violent imagery. Some of these concerns were starting to emerge in Bandage A Knife - certainly the relationship between cinema and performance, issues of cinematic violence and the division of style and content. Linda's playful sensibilities tempered my darkness in a way that was right for that project. Now, working on my own, I find myself increasingly drawn to the gothic... I'm wanting to make a piece which is overtly, even relentlessly dark. Much of this feeling is based on a forgetting of various "pop culture" sources - remembering things only as I want to see them, diverting things, or actively perverting them. And, like Catherine Sullivan, curious about the symptoms these artifacts reveal (and those revealed in my own process). At this point, I'm following many tangents which lead to various avenues of research: Suspiria to Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to the Brothers Grimm to Grimm's law of linguistic drift, etc. But not the actuality of any of these single things. Each of them could easily be a dead end, one fully explored by other artists and other works. It's something else...

I'm interested in writing and posting more about this work in progress. I want to explore and reveal the conceptual substructure of this work as it develops. At the same time, I want to be careful about allowing ideas their unexpressed ambiguity. In the past, I've been fairly private about sources and materials, thinking that they would distract from the work itself. Now I'm realizing that even "stupid" details might help to invite people into the work. On the one hand, I'm thinking of, for example, the "post-breakup solitary Wisconsin winter cabin" narrative that is constantly told around Bon Iver's album. It's a story that is united with the materials, mood and character of the resulting music, but it's a sentimental story - an overlay. I'm interested in a narrative which might itself be generative material, a narrative that is definitely unsentimental.
An area I need to research more is the question of "distancing". One of things that fascinates me about some horror films is where they remain undeveloped and flat. They are not interested in the depth of inner space, but rather the use of sensations, and a material manipulation to create effects. The wonderful Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel mentions her appreciation of this aspect of horror films and, like her, I'm interested in work which allows the experiencer to sometimes think "I am watching this." To simultaneously observe the operation of affects, and to feel effects. I'm not sure where this might overlap with Brecht's ideas.
I want to strip the surface of the work, minimize the materials, concentrate the use of insistence and repetition, extend the span of attention, focus on physical rather than pathetic effects. I'm interested in making work that might be angry, even forcefully so, but somehow without alienating or insulting the audience. The aggression of horror films is often on the surface - I want to drive it inward, create an implosion.
I've been thinking about an aggression which is not (or not only) one of content but of form. For example, a piece like Morton Feldman's "For Stephan Wolpe" which is absolutely beautiful as a surface - soft and open, composed of delicate textures - but on a formal level is so aggressively open, unresolved and unsentimental. It rejects many of the assumptions about musical form, but does so with elegant materials. This paradox and the music's utter sincerity are (among other things) what makes the piece great.

Growth of the Author

One of the things that draws me increasingly to performance-oriented work is the complexity of authorship. I do enjoy the isolated, private give-and-take of the studio experience, but collaboration tends to be more fun, more unpredictable and more unstable. And the result is more than can be contained by any one brain - a sharing and dispersal of responsibility.
A piece like Bandage A Knife (which runs for 5 more nights!) explores so many variations of authorship, it becomes quite difficult to determine a point of origin. Some moments, such as the trio of Anne, Kaj and Rebecca with mirror, flashlight and mirror came directly out of my notebook sketches and my scripted monologue, but were developed through improvisation with Linda and are brought to life in performance through Rebecca's intonation and Kaj's elaborate and absurd facial translations.

Some moments, such as the dialogue between Kaj (below the plywood) and Linda (standing on top) were developed through improvisation, but injected with my dialogue (which is itself an interpretation and extraction of the filmic source material). Other moments were written in a back-and-forth manner between Linda and myself, with much laughter. Laughter was used as an evaluative tool throughout.

A moment such as Rebecca with projected hand gestures and a percussive score depends heavily on my studio-based video and sound composition, carefully constructed (though again, the video was assembled from an editing of Linda's improvised gestures). Rebecca's hands-behind-back trajectory within that video/sound moment was then developed from my broad suggestions which asked for her interpretation.

I am thankful for Linda Austin's willingness to allow me to develop my own directorial ideas within the safety of her studio. And it was fascinating to observe the wide variety of methodologies which make up her own choreographic practice. These ranged from predetermined and taught movement, to suggestions for improvisation ("imagine your eyes are a camera"), to a kind of aleatoric mirroring ("catch my gestures as I improvise and assemble them into your own phrase") to free-form improvisation by the dancers, videotaped and then painstakingly relearned from the tape, among others. These elements then meet discussion, suggestion and editing from the directors and the group.

What makes this issue of authorship even more complicated is the way a distinct voice shines through such an enfolded and complex development. (A standard example being that of John Cage - if he's so interested in subverting the authorial ego to allow indeterminacy, why do his pieces always sound like his?) For this reason, it's understandable that Lisa Radon would mis-attribute moments from this piece in her thoughtful review. Linda's quirky movement and choreographic preoccupations with bodily awkwardness are suffused throughout the piece - and influenced me too. This raises the open question of how the dancers subsume their own bodies within the director's aesthetic, and to what degree they are "allowed" or willing to insert their own movement idiosyncracies. The meeting point is diffuse, complex and, to me, deeply interesting.

Within cinema - another highly collaborative form - it is somewhat understood how the cinematographer, sound designer and others operate within a directorial vision. What would Ingmar Bergman be without Sven Nykvist? I'm sure that each director and each film explores these relationships in variously shaded ways, but we at least know how to think about such structures.
Modern dance/performance work, on the other hand, seems to rely much more broadly on what Catherine Sullivan calls "unique methodologies". It seems that the author's role in this kind of work becomes one of providing frameworks for improvisation, contexts for material, strategies for assembly and, of course, a guiding voice and a kind of generalized "veto power". Authorship gathers, disperses and re-gathers within the unique methodology of a director, as each participant gives him or herself to the collective creative process.

photos by Michael Degutis

Neighborhood Notes

Eve Connell was kind enough to come to a rehearsal and interview me and Linda Austin about Bandage A Knife for the website Neighborhood Notes. It's a good peek into our creative and collaborative process one month before opening night.

Fall Arts Preview

Article on Bandage a Knife
Here.
IMAGE: Christine Taylor

new CD!

Flock & Tumble is out now from Sonoris (France)! This music was mostly the result of my scoring of Linda Austin's dance piece, Circus Me Around, which ran November 2007. For that production, the sound was dispersed on a roughly cross-shaped four-channel system, across three separate but simultaneous performance areas in a large warehouse. This album marks a major shift in my compositional style (at least to my ears), emphasizing a more song-like structure, a more obvious inclusion of the voice as material, and a finer degree of attention to micro-structures.
Confusingly, this is not the sound for my own performance piece of November 2008 titled Flock & Tumble (I'm still looking for a label for that material, which will be called Furl.)
The beautiful cover image is by Harrison Higgs.

I'm now a few months into twice-weekly rehearsals with Linda Austin, building material for our movement/sound/video performance, along with the dancers Anne Furfey, Rebecca Harrison, Kajanne Pepper and Lucy Yim. This is the first time I've started a dance/sound collaboration from the very beginning and it's been fascinating to observe processes for constructing. Linda uses a number of methods for improvising, gathering and remembering sequences, utilizing a combination of technical means (video-taping and re-watching) along with individual and group memory. It's been a tangible luxury to develop all the components of the piece simultaneously and interdependently.

I've been recognizing the importance, in various creative ventures, of just "getting something out there". I've never been one to plan something and then attempt to match reality with that already complete mental conception. The movement towards action begins with an impulse, an image, a dynamic, etc. This impulse is the trigger for improvisation which places something before our senses - a thing which can be examined, revised, tweaked and adjusted. Within performance practice, there's the interesting opportunity to incorporating the filters of each participant. For example, Linda might perform an improvisation, instructing the dancers to "catch" movements and to assemble them into a phrase. We watch each of these phrases as solos and as a quartet, begin working with the quartet, making changes in timing and moving towards ever finer adjustments. Within an hour, we have several minutes of new material to expand, shelve or discard...
I'm interested in producing video material in a similar way, through group improvisation and play - within situational contexts rather than strictly movement-based concerns. Working with a set of materials and methods, unpredictable things may happen, and I can videotape continuously. Combing through this stockpile of material, I can select images or sequences which have strength, and refine the procedures for another session of taping.

Since I've been painting again, these procedures for "getting things out there" seem not so different from approaching a blank canvas, making a gesture, observing, reacting, making another gesture, obscuring, erasing. I suppose it's all very old-fashioned. This approach has its dangers for me as well, largely the problem of becoming attached to material just because it has been externalized, diminishing the possibility of change. There is an addictive freshness to the blank canvas, the equal possibility of all options. The rupture of the first mark which immediately begins to close off or determine future gestures.
As I was yielding the brush yesterday, I was listening to an interview on NPR about O.C.D. behavior, a disorder which makes extreme this fear of the determining consequences of action. A man who was literally paralyzed by the fear of "something bad" which might happen as a result of his actions. But of course, even non-action is an action... Putting material into the world requires a certain fearlessness, combined with clear observation and a willingness to change at any point.

Flock & Tumble - Screens and bodies

A large performance event, Flock & Tumble is scheduled for the first weekend in November at AudioCinema (226 Se Madison St in Portland). A large, empty warehouse, 12 sound-makers (performers), 4 channels of pre-recorded sound, 4 video projections of the dancers Linda Austin, Wooly Mammoth and others, with clothes by Diana Lang. At this point, I am working with 5 sections - an opening "tumble", three "flock" sections ("Flock", "Swarm" and "Torus") and a closing "tumble". Loosely speaking, (that is, as far as I know) a tumble consists of actions which are passed sequentially from one performer to another, while the flocks use rules of behavior taken from animals (birds, insects and fish) to create clusters of activity. The dancers perform only in screenal space - projected onto the walls.

What does it mean to dance on a screen? Why are the dancers in this piece separated from the activities in “real time”? Perhaps simply to create this space for “unreal time”. I have been interested in the possibility of simultaneous frames which “open up” the edges of actual space into alternate ones. With the emphasis on the plural. These are not spaces to lose the sense of the body (as in the typical cinematic experience of "suspension of disbelief” - though these videos will clearly draw on filmic inspirations. I have been noticing the movement of bodies in films which exist on (or across) the edges of “realism” - the carefully choreographed actions in Bresson’s prime output. The way sitting down, turning the head, placing a hand on a bench can be both completely normal and totally stylized. He achieved this hyper-awareness by filming many, many takes of the same seemingly unimportant movement. On the 40th take, the actor finally reaches an appropriate level of automatism. “Don’t we complete most of our actions in a kind of automatism?” he asks.

Another very different film has informed my thoughts - a Japanese yakuza flick called “Branded to Kill” which takes the stylized choreography of genre-specific conventions - the gunfight, the chase scene, the violent death - and twists them into dance. Falling back into a spinning office chair, the wounded man spins around not once but three times, calling attention to the falseness of the entire construct. Calling attention to the beauty of pure movement which fights against the story while furthering it. There’s something about this fighting and flowing which can exist together. Maybe we can call it “Suspension of belief”...

Bodies will be multiplied by four, though not mirrored. Staggered flashes. Where does the individual movement exist in this multiplicity? How does the body contribute to the larger pattern? How does the repetition of movement create sequential pattern? These are questions I leave to the dancers, as authorities on the subject. Perhaps it can spark a conversation. I would like that.

Music has been underway since December, though I have to imagine much of the final result. In combining live activity with recorded sound, I want these elements to coexist, sharing space. I imagine voice to be a primary tool of the performers, while the recorded compositions are "instrumental" for now (concrete and electronic sounds).