Unearthing Rigor in the Saint Mary’s College Summer MFA Concert
By Sarah JG Chenoweth
When I was asked to write about Coalesce, this summer’s Saint Mary’s MFA in Dance Cohort 2 concert, the notion of rigor was suggested as an angle from which to respond to the works. These questions came along with the suggestion: What does rigor look like? How can we keep promoting rigor within an MFA program? How does a dance review support and inspire rigor within the choreographic process?
Thinking them fabulous questions, I agreed to take on the topic. But, writing about how rigor showed up in Coalesce has been a much harder thing to wrangle than I expected. Because, by seeing a piece only once, it seems arguably impossible to know the amount of rigor with which a choreographer has tackled the making of a dance. If rigor is about being relentlessly thorough, then it seems we are talking about effort, not product, right? If so, rigor is relegated to the process. So, for the pieces in this concert, how could I know how deeply a choreographer actually engaged with their making? What and how profound are the questions that drove them in rehearsal? How scrupulous was the choreographer with the answers she/he found? Did she make the first thing that came to mind, or dig meticulously deeper and wider with each possible choice? And, does that cover “rigor?" How determined was the attempt to reach outside her/his boundaries? One artist’s norms will lie a different stage than another’s, so that a piece that seems unfinished to me could have come out of a comprehensive process more rigorous than the choreographer’s last. How would I know?
BUT rigorous doesn’t only mean being arduous and grueling. It also means being precise and clear. These are pretty observable characteristics. And they allow us to ask, how “thorough” is the piece itself? How does it present as exactly what it should be? To be able to frame these works in rigor, I decided that a rigorous composition will feel both complex and complete, and…new. New. Oof. More shaky ground… I do believe a one-time viewer can have a veritable sense of the complexity and completeness, or cohesion in a dance. Newness, though, is intensely problematic, because it is necessarily based on my specific experience and viewing history. Another audience member may have never seen something that I have seen in countless dances, and vice versa. Therefore, it seems a faulty measure. However, I couldn’t leave it out. Because, again, graduate school is where we go to rigorously question our personal and collective conventions. I sincerely hope graduate work to have some sense of novelty or individual perspective. It is the very time to do sometime atypical, to take on something really “out there” and exploratory, without concern for ticket sales and professional or public acceptance. It's the place to do the hard work of confronting our patterns, in service of ever more expanded, more re-searched versions of our art. It is anything but the time to crank-out our own, or the world's, status quo.
Complexity, completeness and newness. These identifying features guided my assessment of the rigor in the works of Coalesce. All dances have purpose and place, as they are. Yet, in the service of rigor, I will offer some questions, hopefully difficult ones, pertinent to one or more of these three features. Maybe they’re questions that haven’t yet been asked. Maybe they already have, and they need more investigation, which seems one of the main purposes of graduate degrees. Isn’t graduate school supposed to be hard? Isn’t it supposed to upend our preconceived estimations of the world and our selves in it? I once heard graduate programs described as the place we go to realize we don't know anything. Advanced degrees, as a function of academia, are the very locale in which to regard both dance making and the act of dancing itself as processes of research. This is where we search, and re-search. We don’t have to know the answers; it’s our dedication to asking the questions that defines our work. In this way, graduate school is like an intense improvisation: “…it is a willingness to explore the realm of possibility, not in order to find the correct solution, but simply find out (Ann Cooper Albright, Taken by Surprise).” So, if my questions don’t get applied to these particular pieces, maybe they will hold some benefit for future projects. In general, I hope they help the rigorous pursuit of finding out.
I’ll start with Michael Lupacchino's If These Walls Could… which presented a well-defined narrative. A young woman, reminisces her dance career, as she says goodbye to it. As it opens, a ballet barre and mirror are set down stage left on an otherwise empty stage. The barre has a “for sale” sign on it. The woman enters with a dance bag and sets it down next to the barre. She notices and caresses the props, and gazes off into space. She smiles and looks toward center from her position down stage. She enters the center to dance with a small ensemble of other dancers. The piece drifts through a series of her memories. We know that they are memories because of her wistful expression, and because of how the space is defined - the space of the present is down stage left with the props, and the space of the past is center with the dancers. Each section takes on a different tone in costume and action. One is balletic, in skirts and leotards. Another is contemporary, in black bike shorts and white tanks. Another depicts a musical theatre sort of battle between dancers. It seems the memories signify various training she’s undergone or experiences she’s had with people in her dancing past – some are soft and delightfully traditional, while others are brash and hit hard with punctuated rhythms and interactions. Each recollection is signified further by varying musical styles: pop, classical, funk. We don’t need to know the details to grasp their worth to the lead character. For her they are each profound and seem to have shaped her. Ultimately, she releases them and walks away from the barre, seeming to have said her final good-byes.
The work rendered a complete picture of her nostalgia. However, much of the movement material, while performed marvelously, feels compositionally superficial. The movements in the memory space of If These Walls Could… were the standard leggy tricks, and pyramid formations in competition style dance. And again, while they are impressive and sometimes satisfying, a piece made up of pre-programmed movements loses the personal touch that I believe the choreographer was trying to impart. If we are only repeating exact lines and movements from a prescribed industry, how are we being personal or meticulous in movement creation? I wonder, why use such exteriorly focused movement in a piece of such obviously internal substance? How can the choreographer intersperse this existing movement and staging to include a movement vocabulary all his own? Can he strip his dances of anything he’s ever seen before? Of anything we’ve ever seen before? How might this change how we see the story?
Signalings, choreographed by Raul Galvan, created a backdrop from a different century. Four men, wearing harem pants and displaying bare, bulging chests, stand like statues upstage. They each arc in a slightly varied pose. They move independently for a while, writhing and twisting softly in their set place. A bright red cyc frames them, and ancient, chant-like music accompanies them. It is a Romanesque scene. The bodies take turns soloing. And I say bodies, because we see them as such. While they each have slightly different, special tricks, the piece doesn’t reveal them as people, but highlights them as movers. Their solos include grand exhibitions of virtuosity – massive leaps, flying barrel turns, break dance style maneuvers and balances. Physique trumps emotion in this piece. The dancers never touch, contributing to their impression as spectacle versus relational. They also remain onstage the whole time, anchoring the space in such a way that gives the entire piece a feel of sturdiness and stature. After their solos, the dancers come together down stage center to maneuver in a rotating circle. Now in full unison, the dancers round each other with grand, bouncing pliés and more sweeping barrel turns. Ending the piece, they separate again, returning to a slightly twisted, majestic pose.
Intent beyond entertainment and presentation of strength is unclear, but the image is generous. The choices are convincing and beautifully performed, but I wonder what the choreographer is trying to say with the piece. Or, is there a statement at all? I also ask how the choreographer can complexify the textures on stage by integrating mid-range dancing. The dancers are mostly still and posing, or executing hugely powerful movement. Is there a middle amplitude that will serve his intentions? Additionally, can the dancing take risks by introducing partnering to all of this enormous movement? How would that generate a more specific style?
We come to another well-conceived concept with Joy Thiesen's Generations. In this piece, a pre-teen dancer, maybe twelve, enters. In a light blue ballet skirt and leotard, she performs a sweet solo, combining traditional ballet material with soothing gestures, indicative of a child playfully writing her name in the air. Her expression is pleasant and we perceive her to be savoring the experience of her youth. She is still forming her technique, but soft and charmingly skilled in her work. She exits stage right, as another dancer enters stage left. This dancer is an adult, middle-aged. She wears a matured version of the costume, the same indigo blue, with a womanly sash at the neckline. She gazes in the direction of the young dancer, smiling toward her. She too dances a blend of ballet vocabulary and wandering arm movements. At one point she kneels and mimics the same air-writing from the young girl’s section. Her execution of the ballet movement matches her adulthood. More grounded in her feet, her lines are clearer and firmer, etched more deeply and gracefully in her body. Finally, a third dancer appears. She is aged, maybe 70, and also wearing a light blue leotard and skirt. She begins in a chair with a soft port de bras series. Eventually she rises and crosses the stage, with recognizable ballet adagio steps. She takes her time, more gentle and cautious than the other two, though obviously trained. Here too we see the movement marked with time, her body less lithe but her dancing simple and accurate. All three finish the piece on stage together, commencing a reprise of their solos, side by side. They don’t interact much, regarding each other only subtly, with spatial awareness and a tender smile here and there. It culminates with the middle-aged dancer smiling at each one of them, centered and whole heartedly delighted by the arrangement.
It’s unusual to see such varied generations in a single piece. It’s a respectable and captivating choice. Culturally, we still expect dance performers to be young and exceedingly agile. Instead, with this piece we see the beauty and value in both youthful suppleness and seasoned sureness. It could be interpreted that the women represent the same person, in three different stages of life. Or, it could be that the ballet itself is the constant – showing up differently in three different bodies. Either way, I ask, what else? While the story is sweet and clear, it’s progression is easily absorbed. The comment seems obvious – appreciating beauty and skill at every age. How can you interrupt my expectation in the piece? Also, it is interesting to think about the supposition of originality in “non-contemporary” ballet movement, a style that is so prescribed. The choreographer in this case has the help of mixed bodies and has blended her own gestures with the established ballet steps. In these ways, she’s created a work that does feel personal. Yet, I wonder, does including multiple generations necessitate dancing about age?
Vermillion Vento, choreographed by Stephanie Emmanuela Engel, exhibits a very vibrant and photographic scene. The whole length of downstage is lined with branches of green leaves. The cyc is colorful and mutable. A man in olden garb dances stage left with a basket placed in front of him. These components cooperate to suggest a folk tale will unfold. The man’s movements are exaggerated – he knocks his fists together, stomps firmly and with knees tucked high up into his hips, all the while encircling the basket. He seems to activate the space with magic, commanding the waiting energies onstage and energies beyond it. Ultimately, he curves over the basket and summons a woman’s spirit. She enters upstage in a long red dress, fitted on top and loose and flowing from the bodice down. To R&B music, they dance together but separately, from and in two different worlds. Some of the dance occurs over the basket, and he even pours the contents out around her – more leaves. As more female spirits come in, the conjurer exits, leaving them to their revelry. The women are all dressed exactly the same and dancing to infuse and orbit the space. Four of them encircle the basket at one point, each taking a leaf and dancing with it in hand. More women join from offstage, saturating the stage with swirling red. The dance, partly modern inspired, partly afro inspired, goes on for a long while. Much of it is in unison, and with the beat of the music. The cyc has changed to a luminous green. In the end, as the women make a long diagonal line through the space, the man returns. Weaving through the line, he takes a special moment to give each a leaf. They reach toward him, and we hear sounds from the forest. The entire cast performs a final, grandly swooping and driving scene as the lights settle.
It’s a mysterious tale to me, and therefore I am intrigued. It’s comprehensive in design, staging, and danced material. The piece is packed with symbolism. One can cull rich metaphor in the leaves, the red, the green, the man, the basket, the woman, the multitude of women. Passion is clearly significant, denoted by red, the soulful music, and some of the undulatory movements. The rest of the symbols’ significance, however, remains unclear. Though I know the leaves are supposed to mean something, I am not sure what. Did the man create the women and the leaf signifies their connection to him? Or, do they come from the forest? Are the women plant spirits? If so, what does that mean? What does their existence or their dancing tell us about the plants, the man, or our own actions? What is the consequence of their dancing? How do they affect the man? Unlike other allegories, I could not glean a lesson or explanation of the world that the dance offers. I wonder if the big dance section, which makes up the bulk of the piece, could increase in complexity and deliver some of these insights. As it stands, I lose the story and the symbolism in that section. How can the big dancing continue to be in direct service of the narrative and/or the imagery that is so boldly set up at the beginning?
Sometimes a simple mission can provide extremely compound results. Such is the case in Desiree, choreographed by Zaquia Mahler Salinas. The work shows a film of a dancer in a black tunic contained in a concrete pit. She is bound by a stick that is tied between both of her upper arms. She begins in the corner, pressed up against the hardness. After struggling there for a bit, she moves around the center of the room. She does what she can without the help of her arms. She twists and sweeps, developés her legs out in parallel to thrust across the concrete, and lunges deeply to drop to both knees on the floor. The film editing revamps her corporeality – flickering, slowing her down, coming close-up to her neck and thighs, cutting and repeating. The film closes with her on the ground, gazing up, palms and inner arms turned to the sky.
The dancer then enters our theatre space, stage left. She wears a white tunic. Redeemed somehow? She throws the stick across the stage and moves in flesh in front of us. I expected the movement to free her. I expected the loss of the constraint of film, room and stick to loosen her spirit and strengthen her presence. However, she resumes a sort of anguished dancing – thrashing and tossing herself about the stage. She is freed up from her actual limitation, but seems still controlled by something. She tosses herself around the stage and repeats whopping, taxing movement to the extreme, to the point of her ultimate destruction. The lighting is bare and stripped of emphasis, contrasting the abundant editing in the film. Yet, she seems even further gnarled. She is anything but grounded. The forceful dancing amplifies until she literally dances herself out. She slaps herself and grunts and falls flat. She stumbles up again with her last bit of energy to lash through her material one final time. The sounds of bumps and “ugh’s” come out of her not because she’s trying to make them, but because of the effort she’s expending. She moans with tire. And then she is beaten.
If truly committed to, as this was, this simple task to crescendo provides an impressively rigorous framework. What makes it “new” is that no one else can do it this way. The dancer is Desiree. How she fatigues is all her own – her body folds and exhausts like no one else’s. The piece takes only her just this amount of time, force and damage, making it unrepeatable. The juxtaposition of pixel to flesh offers a full range of feeling for the viewer. Our experience traverses the imagined to the lived. I wonder, though, how the fragmented version of Desiree in the video is different from the one we experience on stage. Is it the point that the “real” Desiree is having the same pyscho-physical experience, even without the constraint of the room and the stick? She still pleads and still falters. While the concept is valiant and the dancing potent, how can the trajectory from bound, to free, to ultimate demise be more informative?
Sarah Billings Wheeler's What moves you, moves me presented a simple score - cause and effect, manipulation and response, as the title aptly suggests. The piece was well rehearsed, the movement precise and fully expressed. One dancer begins, with a watery gestural phrase, in a pool of light. Two others join her. The dancers trade moments in other small light pools peppered throughout the stage. At one point, two push one into a wide circle of light. She moves as the others frame her, just barely visible in the dark beside her. And then they switch, each dancer having at least one moment in lit pool. There is a clear and singular movement vocabulary and clear and purposeful staging. Drop swings and floaty arabesques meet quirky and animalistic movement. The three push each other around, sometimes meet up in unison and sometimes combating one another. There is an air of resistance and strain, as the dancers vie for space and struggle both in and out of the light. It ends with a nod to the calm beginning, with the same dancer moving her arms like liquid now upstage and having endured this bumpy exchange.
The whole piece is in silence, which I very much appreciate. It contributes to the distinctive environment the piece creates. We can easily hear skin squeak on the floor, tired breath, and stomping feet. The costumes are uniquely designed – part dress, part shirt, leggings underneath, bright colors. They looked custom made, almost circus-like. They help create this idiosyncratic world as well. Only toward the end does the entire stage take on light. Accordingly, the lighting further defines the piece, the relationships between the dancers, and domain in which they exist. I don’t, however, notice a shift in the action with a shift in the lighting. Are they related? What else can the lighting reveal or conceal? The lighting is almost a 4th character in the work. How can it be involved in the game? Finally, could the conceptual construction itself complicate? What about a bookended piece serves the progression of the relationships?
Posing an inquiry directly with its title, Kaveri Seth's Here in the distant now primes us for a conjectural work. We ponder, how is the now distant? The work opens with a dancer holding a suitcase. The sound score presents the hustle and bustle of an airport. She is either coming or going, we aren’t sure. Two more dancers appear. All three wear dresses, and they curve and bend, stop and point, gesture to the space and to one another. Some of the hand gestures and shapes are recognizably from classical Indian dance. Throughout the piece I come to perceive one of them as a mother and the other two as siblings, sisters. This is in part because she wears the dot between her eyebrows that marks the maturation of an elder in Indian culture. Secondly, it is because of the danced relationship that develops: she seems responsible for their eventual physical connection. Sometimes the women dance in unison, fully aware of one another and sometimes they separate to their own realms, in mind and movement. They run and spin and trade places. More gestures and smiles and spins. Text fills the sound space. The voice speaks of destiny: that it never rests. It states, eternally together, somehow we disconnect. We hear sounds of the ocean and string instruments. The dancers stop smiling, and the movement becomes first staccato and then slows in motion. They are almost floating. “There is no gap to bridge, no time for looking into the eyes.” The elder pulls them back together and they dance in unison once more, circling, partnering, falling into one another and helping each other stand. It closes with an embrace, and a final return to the opening image – a young girl, coming or going, standing with her suitcase.
The piece takes a single moment and expands it into a day-dream, or a proposal that there is infinitely much to experience in a single interaction. Dance becomes the vehicle for stretching the reality out. And the text supports the theoretical possibility that even in an embrace, there may be deep chasms between us; and that even in physical distance, we may be acutely linked. Here in the distant now takes us into the metaphysical space, speculating about the truth of our experience. It’s made intricate by the blend of west coast modern movement and classical Indian dance, creating appealing transitions between steps and striking permutation of the body. I wonder, what does this blend mean for the characters? How can the movement itself contribute to our understanding of their experience and our comprehension of time distorted? How can the imagined space be even further abstracted? How can the lighting, production, and staging all warp in such a way that completes the impression of time out of time?
Distortions, choreographed by Kevin Paul Hockenberry, begins with two female dancers, tall and strong. They wear leotards and pointe shoes. The music surrounding them is intensely driving and full of orchestration. The lighting is low, glowing just a bit of heavy yellow. They don’t spend much time up on their toe box, but use the pointe to emphasize their ability to bend and buckle with control, lunging, stretching, and pressing with the toe. The scene and the movement style is markedly contemporary ballet – not trysting about, but coiling through the extreme limits of ballet shapes, sometimes using one another for support or resistance. A male joins them. He wears socks, shorts and a tank top, fitting with contemporary ballet aesthetic. The women leave him to writhe and torment. He grabs his face, wipes his brow and holds his chest. Amongst his impassioned display is some traditional ballet movement, executed professionally. He is extra sinewy, braiding his body against itself with flowing discernment. At one point, he curves forward and rises to crown himself with his hands. After a quick withdraw and some intricate petite allegro, he grabs something in his fists and reels back to cover his face again. One of the women reenters, seemingly to comfort him. They dance, one in front of the other, mirroring each other’s movement. He lifts her and catches her blind fall back into him. Consoling and holding one another, he falls to ground. The other female returns to briefly hover and gesture above him. The lights go out.
The emotions can distort; the body can distort. We see both, and the concept is palpable. But, I can’t help but feel that the ending is incomplete. It closes abruptly, just after reintroducing one of the women. What is her role in the end? Why is she necessary at all? Does the piece need both women? I wonder how the two women are related to the man and his anguish. Where does their connection to him come from? Further, the skill level of the dancers is unmistakable. They are powerhouses in this dance style. However, if we strip away the professional quality of the dancing, does the composition still hold up the piece? What is the thread that ties the sections together?
Byb Chanel Bibene's Nkisi Nkondi – Part II is consummate, and one-of-a-kind in form, production and concept. An ancient, west-central African ritual, mobilized live in the contemporary body and contemporary moment, the piece exists beyond the verbal. It feels almost violating for me to distill it to the world of the worded. In it, people become gods, and gods resemble human form. The stage and we are transported to a liminal space at the threshold of the real and the supernatural. Costume, set, dancing, vocalizations and live music combine to create a strong and unified whole, packed with both historic and modern meaning. It is truly for undergoing, not for reading about. It is animate research.
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Sarah JG Chenoweth holds an MFA in Dance Performance from the University of Iowa and a BA in English Education from Illinois State University. She is a co-founder of the Mid to West Collective (midtowestdance.org). Sarah teaches dance to all ages and performs with multiple San Francisco Bay Area companies. She writes about improvisation and new dance works.