And more grad school joy

So not only is there the intellectual stimulation of being in grad school (I’m gettin’ me sum book larnin!), as exemplified by Bill’s visit today, there’s also the dancing side of things (a false dichotomy there between book larnin and dancing, but anyway…)  As in, I really think I’m getting a little better at this thing.  There are the incremental things, and then there have been two Moments.  Just like Bill’s visit is in itself enough to make it worth my time to have gone to grad school, likewise with these two Moments.

The first was last quarter in Abby Yager’s modern class (she danced with Trisha Brown.  Kinda nifty, don’t you think…)  It was just a moment of standing, which sounds so anti-climactic, but it wasn’t!  If you want details, let me know–I’ll give them in nauseating quantity–but suffice to say, it is a goal/hope of mine to have a moment of clarity like that again in my life.  If I’ve done it once, that means I’m capable of it, and I might be able to do it again, right?

The second was today in 8:45AM ballet.  (Yes, that’s right, 8:45AM ballet.  And I chose to take this class–it’s not required.  And I think that ballet before noon should be illegal.  Anyone smell a whiff of masochism?)  I’ve been taking class on pointe, because I like to be a spaz, which tends to make my pirouettes into a seeming petit allegro, as I hop my way out of them…  And even worse, this combination asked for an en dehors turn finishing by extending the working leg into arabesque as the standing leg plie-d.  Not my specialty.  But I would swear that what happened was I did two pirouettes, came to my final facing, stopped turning to balance on pointe for a moment, then smoothly rolled down into arabesque.  Now I know that physics says that’s not quite what happened, but it sure felt like it–and I have witnesses, too!

So two spectacular dance moments, Bill, and all my wonderful classes too.  Yes, grad school has been worth it.  But now, back to working on the midterm for the Postmodernism class.  Ack!

Let me pause and wipe the drool off my face…

And why would I need to dry my chin?  Just the minor matter of sitting in the same room with William Forsythe and listening to him talk for 90 minutes…  He’s amazing, articulate, engaging, a genius, and I am reduced to grabbing a towel and saying “wow”–would that I could come up with a response as articulate and engaging, but no, it’s drool and “wow.”

Since I don’t have great stuff to say, how ’bout what he said?  He talked about the lack of dance readership–not reading about dance, but looking at a dance itself and reading its structure and narrative–having some understanding of its dialogue.  The lack of this is a problem for the future vitality and survival of the field–when his now defunct Ballet Frankfurt was being reviewed by the powers that be as to its future existence, he said that “no one came to our defense because no one knew what to defend.”  Further, that “if we are the only experts, we are not doing ourselves a favor.”

So he is working on projects to make structural elements legible, material that people can look at and see the relationships, linkages, through-lines, and so on that occur.  You can learn a bit more about it here.  As part of this structural exposition, he also made the case for the classicism of his work.  It may look wild and chaotic and unrelated to classical ballet and classicism at first, but it is built on classicism, carrying those principles into a new evolution.  He got up and gave a demonstration of this process–it took a few seconds to do, would take pages to try to explain, but it was beautifully clear, showing how he builds upon classical ballet’s concepts of geometry and interrelations of the body by taking those concepts and continuing them in a “if this, then what” sort of process.  Take my word for it, it was a wonderful and convincing demonstration.

And as for the act of performing: “You want to give people the gift of your attention–I don’t want to see Arthur Rubenstein sit don at the piano and not pay attention…I ask of my dancers that they give everything they know about the art at that moment.”  Amongst all the demands of the world, it is so easy to lose the moment, not pay attention, give less than what one can do–his talk was a wonderful reminder of our real aims.

Rant, Rave, and Pity Party (not necessarily in that order)

A new day, a new quarter–after Winter quarter’s character-building experience (and I needed so much more character…) I am on to a fun and not-as-crazy Spring quarter. If only it were Spring quarter in Seattle–here’s the lovely University of Washington campus during spring:

But alas, I’m in Columbus, OH (moment of silence while I fondly remember my UW days…)

Ok, the pity party is over: one of the fun things about this quarter is continuing Labanotation, and the geek-frissons of delight the class gives me. We are centering the class around learning the Parsons Etude from the American Dance Legacy Institute. The Etude is a medley of his choreography and typical movement phrases that he put together into a 4-minute piece. It seemed like a good idea to work on when watching it on videotape, but it turns out that it’s kind of hard too–tricky how that works.

Anyway, it’s one of several pieces available from ADLI that come in a package of video, music, notation, performance rights and so on for $100 or less. I can’t give ADLI enough praise for making accessible the work of choreographers like Jose Limon and Donald McKayle–no huge fee, no special permissions needed, just buy the package and start dancing! A lot of people talk plaintively about the need to preserve dance’s past, and bemoan the lack of historical knowledge on the part of today’s dance students–but ADLI is actually doing something about it. I wish there were more efforts like this in the dance world, but we tend to be such control freaks that the idea of letting choreography go out into the wide world without supervision tends to freak us out. At least it’s a start! Through ADLI, dance students are getting first-hand experience of wonderful works and choreographers, and even if they aren’t performing the pieces like professional dancers would, the sky hasn’t fallen… Dare I suggest that more choreographers/holders-of-a-choreographer’s-copyright take this example as impetus to get over their own preciousness and just get their work out there?!

(But meanwhile I am grumpy about having to hold that balance for counts 4-5-6. Mean ol’ David Parsons!)

Things I’ve written in school, part 3

Ok, this is it for the moment. Another paper from Karen Eliot’s history class. It has a bibliography AND footnotes–I’m in grad school folks!

(I’d love to hear comments on any of these papers–and feel free to post up fabulous inspiring writings!)

Paul Taylor’s Esplanade: Illuminatory Locomotion[1]

The history of dance during the 20^th century in America is a fascinating story of questioning and experimentation. Early in the century, pioneers such as Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham questioned the supposed artificialness of ballet, and experimented with creating new ways of moving, in the process establishing the field of modern dance. As the century progressed, so did this process of questioning and experimentation, within ballet and modern dance both. But while the field’s practitioners might differ from their predecessors in methods, aesthetic values, movement vocabulary, and so on, successive generations of artists did not essentially differ from each other in their base worldview. That dance movement was another sort of movement, elevated beyond the movements of everyday life even if sometimes echoing them, was an unquestioned assumption.

Until the 1960’s.

Things I’ve written in school, part B

This is a paper I wrote this quarter for Karen Eliot’s 20th Century Dance History class, another great course (but part of what made it a nutty quarter!)  A quick thank you to her and my peer reviewers for their feedback!

(And this paper is complete with scholarly references and stuff–I’m really in school!  The bibliography is at the end.  Which is a better place than in the middle, I guess.)

Mirthful Martha

            There are people known for being light-hearted and funny, always good for a laugh.  Martha Graham was not one of them. 

Things I’ve written in school, part I

I’ve decided to be brave and post some things that I’ve written over the last two quarters. I’d also like to invite you to post (or send to me to post) things you have written that you like, or things you have read that you think should be shared.

That’s right folks, we’re dancers and we read and think… Shocking!

This first paper I’m posting was written last quarter for Candace Feck’s wonderful Dance Criticism and Aesthetics class.

Absence:

Or, Why I am Dancing

The absence of a thing can be more striking than its presence. The emptiness left behind takes on form; reveals in sharper definition what had been there; shows the web of relations, assumptions, desires, which are noisy in their silence.

What dedication–or something…

So I made it through classes in this crazy 24-credit quarter of mine, I am now diligently working away at final papers and projects (well, not quite at the moment), gleefully anticipating the end of the quarter, all the while wondering “why me?!”  You see, Columbus is having a magnificent snowstorm, with piled up drifts of several feet of beautiful fluffy white snow, the likes of which I never experienced growing up in Seattle.  All I want to do is bundle up and go outside to flop into drifts and make snow angels, and get snowflakes on my nose and eyelashes, and turn my cheeks rosy, and come inside to warm up with hot chocolate, and then go out and do it all over again!

But back to my paper on Dance for a City: Fifty Years of the New York City Ballet–it’s a marvelous book with amazing photographs, check it out!

My New York debut…

So amidst the craziness that is this quarter, some little part of my brain is remembering that I will be performing in NYC on March 14th for the first (and perhaps only) time.  This is part of the amazing Anna Sokolow Steps of Silence experience.  Sadly, we are just doing an excerpted version of the piece, as the event–Hunter College’s Sharing the Legacy Festival–has a ten-minute limit.  If you must see the whole piece, we’ll be performing it in Columbus in the May Dance Downtown performances.

And what brought this subject to mind now, you ask?  Good question–last night I dreamed that the airlines lost my luggage and I was stuck trying to get ready right before curtain without any stage makeup, hair supplies, etc.  At least it wasn’t the dream where I don’t know any of the steps…

Too much of a good thing?

By tonight, I will have seen 4 different dance performances in 4 nights.  It’s an embarrassment of riches to be sure, and is pretty representative of this quarter: I am loving everything I am involved in, and also wish it would all just stop so I could get off the ride and breathe for a while…  It seems that everything I am doing is wonderfully thought-provoking, but there is no time to process the thoughts from one thing before another set of thoughts is presenting itself, demanding attention.  They trip over each other, get tangled, wake me up in the middle of the night, distract me when I’m trying to learn a combination in dance class and have me continually saying “that reminds me of x–now where did I read about x?”  It’s chaos up in my head!!!

And this is the part where I point out that it’s my own fault for deciding to take 24 credits, and why am I surprised to have so much going on…

Which is all my long way of getting around to say that there have been some amazing experiences that I meant to blog about, but I have been amazingly busy, and  then I freeze up whenever I try to choose one from among the many mention-worthy happenings.  But in random order, here are a few hints of what’s going on:

Lorry May coaching us in Anna Sokolow’s Steps of Silence.

Guest artist Amy Raymond’s ballet class.

I was actually able to explain phenomenology to someone.

Musings on what I might do for my MFA project.

Discoveries in Abby Yager’s modern class.

I like Labanotation!

It might be illegal that I’m not doing homework right now.

Going from confusion to understanding in the weight studies class.

Performances I’ve seen.

So at some point, I may come along and flesh out items on the list–or write on any of the 20 new things that have happened–until then, any suggestions for staying sane?  (Just kidding–I know it’s way too late for that!)

Back from winter break…

So the blog is back from winter break, and as for myself, this will be the masochistic quarter.  I’m taking a lot of classes, too many really, but I’m excited about them.  They are a good mix of stuff I enjoy doing, and stuff I want to push my boundaries in.

One of the classes that I think is going to be more fun than I anticipated is Labanotation.  It’s required for my degree, I’d want to take it anyway to have some familiarity with it, but after our first session today, I’m irrationally excited about it.  I think it will be a major nerd-out class for me, drawing the little symbols and asking “what if you change that situation to this situation?” all the way.  We did a little exercise today with just the couple of tools we had learned, and I was washed over by a rush of glorious satisfaction at manipulating the symbols and getting it to come out right.  (Kind of like math–and in fact, the teacher said that people with a math background tend to do well with Labanotation.)  If only the class required a graphing calculator and a pocket protector, my life would be complete…

Hey, if I can’t wallow in my nerdy side during school, when can I?