Movin' Easy Dancewear

@Tapestry show Ears Wide Open.  Again Tapestry breaks open the true connection between performer and audience.  The bond is real, like a flamenco club where every person there seizes the moment as if it were a treasure waiting to be captured and opened in the next moment.  There is no waiting or wondering in this audience connection, no time to analyze what is liked and what is perfect.  Performers are real, in a real conversation with each other and they are talking with us the audience.  Emotions are real explorations of territory both understood and unknown.  We all agree to journey together, to feel the swell and the expanse of a mutual improvisation.

Nina dances a response to Deborah’s piece “No Time to Fly” at symposium honoring Deborah Hay’s life achievement. 040810

A glistening orange jester enters reminding of the black and white mime who appeared from we know not where.

The orange dancer takes us into a room with clear parameters, delighting us with nuances and shadings of the path to be studied.  We are pleasantly reminded of the difficult passage we squeezed through as we experienced the black and white mime’s movements the day before.

The orange leg swings with a familiar momentum.  Ahh, we take a sigh of relief to see that swinging friend, a momentum only insinuated by the black and white mime.  It was as if the mime wished only to initiate the gesture and it was our responsibility to complete it.

So I am here mulling over the places the mime took me, human pomp and humility, canyons of grandeur, ancestral tragedy, a delighted commentary on where we are not, and a chronicle of something like the rise and demise of spirituality as  embodied in feeling states.

I immensely appreciate Nina’s personal response and responding in movement.  It is the response I would have wished from her.  I loved that Nina’s dance was asking the question, “What is this? and “Why is it so hard to get?”  I completely concur.

I understand you not Deborah Hay.  When I start to write your name it comes out Hah and then Hey and I wonder if next would be Hee Hee, before I finally type Hay.

Watching you dance, I am totally engaged in I know not what.  I am pulled close, pushed away, taunted to laugh or cry as if it were all the same.  My brain waits on edge for a familiar momentum that will carry my spirit out of my body.  Yet where I am taken is into the depths of my body where I am asked to own up to something, something I probably know but have long ago buried the desire to know.

Instead of the exhilaration of flight that my body yearns for, I am challenged moment by moment.  Instead of simple reminders of the beauty that under girds all life, you insist that I look at a spirit world where life and death are a constant swirl of positives and negatives.

Your refusal to rely on familiar patterns throws me instantly into a glaring stare into myself.  As with any entry into the self, I am uncomfortable.  I must decide to look and go into the next moment or withdraw into unconsciousness or irritation.

Your dancing brings me every moment to “Here.  Here.  Now here.  Here Now.”  And once I have made the choice to join you for that moment, I am hugely and fabulously engaged.  Engaged in my own life, that is my goal after all.

Deborah Hay 040710 No Time to Fly 2010

Paraphrased comments heard on Deborah Hay dance floor from audience who had never seen her before:  She calls me to attention and calls me back over and over.  Her movements are so slow yet so continuous.  She uses so many parts of her body at once.  Something is always underway, leaning toward the next movement.  There is a kind of magic that while one slow movement seems to hold my attention another movement or a whole lot of other movements are building a continuity anticipating the next movement.

I did not want to blink so that I would not miss anything.  Reminded me of staying in this wonderful place in San Francisco with a huge picture window where I would be mesmerized by watching groups of Asian people doing Tai Chi.  I could hardly take time to eat for wanting to keep watching them.

I would ask, why am I so engaged?  She brings me to the attention to the moment, more than that she breaks the moment down for me, taking me moment to moment, she breaks down the jester, demystifies the jester by exposing herself.

See Ballet Austin’s new website http://www.balletaustin.org/danceresources. Beautiful description of dancing from the point of view of the dancer and the choreographer.  Also see my posts at http://www.movineasy.com/blog/category/dance-audience

Being audience for dance is exploring together.  This is especially true for new choreography of any dance style.  The choreographer is exploring and the audience agrees to go there with their dance.  Together the dancer and the audience build a way of communicating.  Both are in the process of sorting and clarifying the emotions, the themes, and the direction of the communication.

Dance audiences are the most courageous because there are often no words, sometimes no story, and usually no musical refrain to grind the message into our souls with repetition.  We are challenged to follow the choreographer where their exploration leads.  Sometimes we must override our desire to be entertained or our wish to be shown an “in our face’ clarity.

Exploration is exploring and that requires a willingness to look deeper into our reactions and into who the choreographer is.  We enter the choreographers world by exploring our emotions, our confusion, our faint wishes and passionate desires.  We explore our busyness and our worst battles.  We are often asked to explore fears, pains, and agonies that we would rather not talk about, let alone see in graphic movement. And sometimes we have to watch as the choreographer avoids the huge hurtful zones that we yearn to be opened and reconciled.

 More often than American audiences would like, we are sometimes thrown into an unending circle of angst without resolution or transformation.  What is often missed by both choreographer and audience is the insight and laughter that comes with stillness and the simplest interactions of two people.

Ballet Austin Promotion Rocks, now the Austin Swizzle team joins them for more high powered heat.   http://www.bizjournals.com/austin/stories/2010/02/22/daily55.html

The dance audience experience is a different animal.  For the exciting dance performance, animal is the right word because the whole pack gets the emotion and joins totally.  A sigh of awe goes through the audience in a quiet moment in a ballet.  The audience stands up yelling after a dance that has shown a new take on a familiar situation.

How is this different from the most engaging sports or gymnastic event?  With dance, there is a range of emotions.  The yells or the sighs at a dance can come from subtle intimate moments that bring a new way of thinking or seeing.  The thrilling exhibition of athletic dancing is more than a task accomplished beautifully; it is the audience participating in a creative expression of clarity and strength of personal character.

I love the thrill of the audience sigh and hush after an intimate movement in a ballet.  Another personal favorite is  when a tap master stands before a Soul to Sole Festival crowd and challenges them to repeat his rhythms with clapping.

It is at these times that the audience comes alive, fully engaging in a very unique way.  The dance audience is eating every morcel of emotion, movement, commitment, passion, and digesting the internal dialog and creativity that becomes their own brilliant take on life outside the theater.

Dance is a consensual art form.  The bees do it when they have something to celebrate or to communicate.  Some bacteria do it when enough of them show up and they all begin to glow in neon colors.  Authentic Movement dancers come together as a group, close their eyes and dance to their hearts content.

When an audience enters the picture, consensual dance shows itself in full force.  Avante Guard dancers agree with their audience that they have free reign to explore and anything goes.  Not anything, of course.

There is mutual consent between dancer and audience on the worlds they are exploring together.  The audience is agreeing to go to the dancer’s world no matter how surprising, disgusting or even boring it might be.

Audience and dancer are on a consensual journey.  They are exploring a world together.  For some they venture into unknown space, for others they are exploring the extremes of a specific form whether it be Ballet, Rumba, or Contemporary.

Dancer and audience then become co-creators as the dancer explores and the audience responds by engaging or going numb.  When the audience can taste every moment like a fine meal they are on the edge of their seats experiencing  anticipation and delight along with the dancers.  It is at these times that the dancer brings all of their energy and imagination to meet the audience attention and excitement.

The level of expertise and prowess that is acceptable is also by mutual consent.  The parents are ecstatic with a different level of skill for their four year old than for a teen youth troupe.  Beginning ballroom dancers are appreciated for their level of skill in the same way a novice bowler would be encouraged at the bowling alley.

For all dancers, they are making a huge commitment just getting on the stage.  As audience we pay the price, we commit our full attention, and we applaud because we are there to build a world with them.

As audience we are consenting to be present during this demanding journey that we all face.  We are committing to join in a world of hope where dancers choose every moment to meet their own determination and passion.  And we the audience are shaping the dancer’s work as our attention turns on or turns off.  Either way is a learning for the performer as long as we consent to stay the course of the journey.

Why do I look to the dancer?  For the brightness of course.  There is no other brighter light than the open hearted dancer.  What is demanded is so great, to go completely with every part of everything, the brain, the imagination, the cells, the hope, everything that adds to a creation of a new world every moment.  And getting there is of course grueling and discouraging and demanding more than is humanly possible.

And there before it all is the open hearted dancer, a bright beacon in those eyes leading any who would choose to follow their movements and believe that a new powerful world is being created each moment of our lives.