Making Art?

This is an old passage I found in a journal that describes precisely my feelings at present:

Making Art? April 3, 2010

Does my art need to tell a story?  Evoke an emotion?  Can it just be movement to music?  Can art just be a pretty picture?  In my art/dance I want to travel to a new world, my world... does that mean everything has to be different?  How do I show what I see or how I feel?

Creative pressure can make you freeze.

Maybe this is the suffering artist: You can go days without inspiration, your mind is in a barren desert and you carelessly count the tumbleweeds as you wait for a drop of water.  But when the water comes it isn't rain but a tidal wave of millions of un-thought thoughts that come so suddenly, so quickly, you miss them all together.  When the waves subside you find yourself waiting in that very same desert.  You are left wondering if you are even an artist at all.  At once everything seemed so important, so pressing and imminent, and suddenly... Nothing.

The Spirit of the Classical Dance.

For my Dance History class, I was asked to read an article entitled "The Spirit of the Classical Dance" by Andre Levinson.  Though it was written in the early 1900s a lot of what was said resounded deeply with my present feelings about dance.  I have been searching for these words since I began my training in dance am I am excited to have finally come across them.  Firstly, I want to share a few lines that mirror my thoughts:

• "And thus it is that when a dancer rises on her points, she breaks away from the exigencies of everyday life, and enters into an enchanted country- that she may thereby lose herself in the ideal."
• "To discipline the body to this ideal function, to make a dancer of a graceful child, it is necessary to begin by dehumanizing him, or rather by overcoming the habits of ordinary life."
• "The accomplished dancer is an artificial being, an instrument of precision and he is forced to undergo rigorous daily exercise to avoid lapsing into his original purely human state."
• "...the ideal is the result of a disinterested will for perfection, and unquenchable thirst to surpass himself."
• "You may ask whether  I am suggesting that the dancer is a machine?  But most certainly!- a machine for manufacturing beauty- if it is any way possible to conceive a machine that in itself is a living, breathing thing, susceptible of the most exquisite emotions."

Before I continue, I would encourage the reader to reconsider his or her definition of "dehumanizing" and "unhuman."  I argue, as is my interpretation, that Levinson is not insisting that dancers are robot slaves bound to their art, but instead humans that are greater than the typical person in their physical accomplishments and scopes for creating beauty.

As a dancer, I have at one point felt a connection with each of the above statements.  From my youth onward, I have always believed my life as a dancer to be separate and perhaps greater than my "normal" or "typical" life.  Living in a studio and on stage were both in and of themselves worlds separate from ones in which my peers were living.  I could imagine this feeling would be replicated by any of my friends as passionate and dedicated to their craft as I was to mine.  When I would get home from school, I would immediately go to dance.  When I was at school, I was thinking of dance and the world that my fellow dancers and I had created.  Whether this world was healthy or prosperous is a debate for a different time, but during those moments when I envisioned dancing I felt more alive and more present in my own body than I did sitting at my ordinary laminated school desk.  My drive to surpass myself is what did and does drive me to continue practicing the art of dance.  There is within my soul, as Levinson states, an "unquenchable thirst to surpass [myself]."  This thirst, this desire, gets me out of bed and to my class when it is cold and I am tired; it is the very thing that motivates me.

I have never considered, until this article, the marvel and the wondrous effects of the "turnout" and what it has taken to train my body to accomplish it.  I would consider myself to have an adequate turnout, but this turnout is so integrated into my body that it has taken considerable training and force to get my legs to return to a parallel state as is desired during the practice of yoga.  The positions of dance have become a part of who I am, so much so that I am identified as a dancer by passerby due to my stance and posture.  Because it is such a large and integral part of my self, I have over looked the incredible benefits that it has afforded my movement.  Turnout allows legs to reach new extensions and to beat in jumps.  It has taken years of training to avoid "lapsing into [my] original purely human state."  I am not insisting that I am a sort of cocky super-human dancer, but instead that my practice in dance has allowed my body to explore new "unhuman" states.

This article instantly made me consider something I had discussed in an earlier dance history class where we spent considerable time learning about the post-modern marvels that are the members of the Judson Theater group.  One member left Grahm's company to live in San Fransisco and eventually contribute to the group discussed that the reason she left was because she desired to feel human again.  Grahm responded that her company and others like hers were composed of dancers, not humans.  While I do not argue that the desire to feel like a human dancer is an invalid choice, I have personally never been interested in being human.  Identity, especially to a growing child, is given a special emphasis in society.  I always relished in saying that I was a dancer and I recall during the time that I stopped dancing as much as I previously had, I experienced a loss of identity.  To me, being a dancer was sometime entirely different from being a human.  While I explored human emotions and capabilities, dance was, as previously mentioned, a world of its own.  There is no place where I feel more alive than when I am on stage.  In this moment I disagree with Levinson; I am never a human until I am a dancer.  Perhaps my training has been "dehumanizing" but I feel true life for a few fleeting moments when I am on stage.

My experience at UCSD has been a positive one and I have loved learning about many new aspects of dance.  I have been exposed to a world of dance different than the one I am accustomed to, and for that I am grateful.  However, in such a modern-minded university, there is little emphasis on the art of performance that I loved so much as a young dancer.  This article was a beautiful reminder of all that I love about being a dancer and about the passion that I feel while I am on stage.  While it is a wonderful thing to be able to dance, this process, for me, is fulfilled while I am entering the "enchanted country" that is the theatre.  I hope that this post has allowed entry into my way of thought regarding dance.

A Master Class with Feldenkrais Somatic Methods

"The Feldenkrais Method is a form of somatic education that uses gentle movement and directed attention to improve movement and enhance human functioning. Through this Method, you can increase your ease and range of motion, improve your flexibility and coordination, and rediscover your innate capacity for graceful, efficient movement. These improvements will often generalize to enhance functioning in other aspects of your life." - Feldenkrais Website

Today I had a master class taught by a woman Ami who is training in the Feldenkrais Method and I thought it would be interesting to share my experience and observations.  I have only briefly been exposed to the ideas of Feldenkrais but I find them interesting even at their most basic level.  The idea behind Feldenkrais is to do as much as possible by using as little effort as possible by using the ideas of visualization, a deep understanding of one's own body, and exposure to ways of more effective movement.  Testimonials from people of all ages who have undergone Feldenkrais sessions are astounding if not unbelievable at times; it can help anyone from a young and fit athlete who is striving to excellence to an elderly person suffering from chronic pain.  In the instance of dance, both the visualization and effective movement techniques save one's body from injury and exhaustion.

One of the most interesting concepts is using the Feldenkrais technique in movement.  The idea of "core-distal" movement, or the idea that our limbs and head are connected to and extend from our center like a starfish, has helped me visualize and feel my center more accurately.  Understanding how our bodies are connected through tissues, joints, and bones makes movement more efficient.  For example, the pathway from standing to sitting can occur in many ways.  If we think of our pelvis simply dropping to the floor instead of using our thighs and squatting into a sit we are moving more efficiently.  The energy it takes to drop is more efficient than the body making a diagonal downwards.  

For a dancer trained in classical ballet and jazz, it has been a humbling experience to feel my body move in "simpler" ways by ridding of old movement habits and revealing a new range of moving.  While effective, the class I had today was exhausting.  My hips and legs used entirely new muscles as we worked our movement through visualizing our sit and pubic bones.  By continuously releasing the tension from my leg muscles, I found a deeper plie, or bend, and therefore a greater, more stable balance.  The most interesting thing Ami told us today was to think of our balance as a state of suspension instead of a stop or freeze where our muscles tighten and squeeze to hold a position.  Instead she encouraged us to envision an endless movement where we were constantly stabilized due to our deep plie and bodily alignment.   For the first time ever, I found I was confident in a position derived from a movement that originally felt chaotic; I found my center of balance without tensing my abdominal muscles, (in fact we didn't use our abs at all!)

Though brief, my experience with Feldenkrais has been refreshing and enlightening and I encourage all to look into the benefits and practices of the method.

"Find your true weakness and surrender to it. Therein lies the path to genius. Most people spend their lives using their strengths to overcome or cover up their weaknesses. Those few who use their strengths to incorporate their weaknesses, who don't divide themselves, those people are very rare. In any generation there are a few and they lead their generation."
- Moshe Feldenkrais

The Art and Adventure of Improv Dance

"I mean the idea that we have to be taught to dance is one of the minor insanities of this culture, I think. I think you might have to learn technique and you might have to learn to notice that you improvise and then at a certain point it's your responsibility both for the result but also for the process that gets you that result."
-Steve Paxton

This blog was written after my first improv performance as part of UCSD's WinterWorks 2010 Performance directed by Patricia Rincon. The piece was titled "Between May and Be" by Liam Clancey and was inspired by the post-modern dancer Steve Paxton's signature piece "Flat."

Improv Show #1

I have just gotten off stage from our first audience viewed structured improv; this performance has lead me to believe that I came to be a part of Liam's piece because I needed to learn, I needed to discover the process that could help me answer "how to let go." Each performance, or dance, or practice, was never the same. We started our process with a myriad of structure that consisted of walking in circles. I hated walking in circles. I would get bored and start singing to myself or even concoct a story or two. This idea of a structure sustains me, though, it stabilizes me in my everyday life. As a child, I loved rules. Rules allowed for a system of merit, judgement, and order. I understood the importance of law as a necessity from an extremely early age. In our piece, however, I found that having structure prevented me from doing anything. I would try to find my place in our pattern only to discover that I was lost. The rules that I once loved started to turn against me, I could no longer find stability that usually comforted me. As our ten weeks progressed, we started to strip away the structure- ten circle patterns became 6 which then became 2 and then finally only half. As the layers came off, I oddly started to make some sense of what we were doing. Initially, we started our understanding of the dance by asking a book of questions: how can you practice something that has no finite answer, or even a direction? do we need to do something in particular? how can we make a dance by not doing anything or doing something? if doing something is too much and doing nothing is too little, but only sometimes, how do we judge? However, we found no answer or solace in asking these questions and far less in the lack of answers. Time progressed and the questions lessened because we started to take an interest in the present. Our new focus became less about what we were supposed to do. Instead, we concentrated on what we were doing at every moment in time and allowing ourselves to be freed by what once seemed like an overwhelming plethora of choices. The significance in what we were doing immediately grew. Every option opened millions of doors but we as performers had the power to choose what door we entered; thus, we ruled our present. In this constant exploration, I truly realized and relished in this freedom from lack of constraint. Tonight, I was empowered on stage. I exerted control, but was also susceptible to the never ending stimuli and infinite environment. Tonight, I found freedom, and I also found part of myself. I fought through what I once wished to give up and found connections to others and the environment that I never knew existed. In my experience I found trust, the power of vulnerability, the limitations of rules, the sometimes murky result of clarification and specificity, confidence, fear, the imminent results of choice, and, at the risk of sounding tacky, myself. I found an experience that has defined my quarter and, begrudgingly yet humbly, my view on dance. I realized that I do not have to give up on my preferences to be a part of something different, and that practicing the art of letting go will help me detect future limitations that may prohibit my creative spirit. My journey, which continues after the performance on stage, has been shaped by ten other wonderful dancers/artists/explorers. It has truly been an honor to work with Christine, Paul, Johnny, Sharon, Lauren, Brooks, Marcos, Ilenia, Calvin, and Liam and to venture into the complex and terrifying art of improv. Thank you for an experience I almost didn't allow myself to take and one that I will never forget.