#coviddance

'Dance is a form of physical activity, which is sustain-able because it is "fun.'

Patricia T. Alpert, Home Health Care Management & Practice.

 (Jitterbugging in Harlem 1939, Museum of the City of New York, anonymous)

Considering my 'fun' requirement records for any work I undertake, It might be hard to believe I didn't write that quote, but I, of course, entirety agree with it. I am nonetheless aware that some folk hate dancing and do not have the coordination or motor skills it requires, nor the wild spirit. But who said you needed to dance well to enjoy it? My sister and I- I know, she is in my every tale- sing down the road at the top of our lungs, getting all sorts of looks from strangers - intentionally badly. Not dance in this case, but a similar example that might explain the value enjoyment of any practice or activity has for me. 

 You choose a well-known song, and you hit the last note of a sentence a semitone up or down- the results are hysterically funny and horrifically awful. My favourite horror street song performance is to 'Love is in the air, with a Gypsy Flamenco air for added terribleness. Mostly makes people smile and us roar with laughter.

 Back to dance.

 When it comes to why I chose dance as a tangential project, I think I decided it intuitively- ha!

 I have had experience in both dance and theatre, and when you perform you learn that everything you do affects your partner(s), the entire group of people you are on stage with, but also, it affects the audience. They, in turn, affect you and your performance. 

 Since my previous project was focused on collective equilibrium- balance- trust, and connection, this felt like something I should pursue, especially in the light of the current limitations on our movement due to lockdown pandemics.

 The first thing I noticed was the 2 metres marks on the floor in supermarkets, then the way we move when we are confronted with the 'other' in a public space. We then start moving like boxers in a ring, measuring each other up, trying to anticipate the movement of the other, to avoid contact. You slow down; you watch, you 'listen' intently. And you have to trust that the other person will move 'with you', or respond. It's a negotiation of space suspended between tension, and trust. 

 We are forced to acknowledge the 'other' like we never have before, as well as the extent to which we are in fact connected, in immediacy as well as long-distance both. So questions of density arose, and of how many people are allowed in proximity, on how we can and have started moving with greater discipline, towards a common objective (in dance, the choreography)- in this case, the survival of the species. So I wondered what would this new form of movement be under Covid, this dance we are dancing, and whether indeed movement or dance would offer us the tools we need to regain and relearn a form of collective balance.

How have we gone from dancing in the streets on Sunday together, twisting and twirling in ballrooms, howling and doing the wild rumpus under the moonlight, to dancing alone mostly in sweaty clubs, feeling not much of the steps but yes the energy of all those dancing also alone? Is there a case for us being able to dance with individual expression but on a broader collective compass?

  WHAT IS DANCE?

 The health benefits of dance are well documented. Dance is a form of exercise that benefits your body but also your mind; it improves memory; it helps the brain form new interconnections and to work faster.

 It increases flexibility, balance, spatial awareness, and the health of your heart, as well as allowing for creativity, and individual expression.

 As a therapy, it is used against Alzheimer's and dementia, to reduce stress and anxiety, but also to combat loneliness and depression when practised in a social environment. Improvising allows you to move in ways that you are not familiar with and in doing so it breaks usual patterns and olds behaviour (Stuart James Waters, Laban Contemporary Dance Teacher for CAT- in conversation with myself and Florence Leon- 2nd April 2020).

 WHY?

The anthropology of human movement is relatively young, dance anthropology or dance ethnology was not established as a solid field of research within anthropological studies till the 1960s-1970s.

 It appears that dance is one of those things that makes us human- dance is present in all known cultures and each one of them has some form of traditional dance that they feel represents them. 

 Chilean traditional dance is called 'Cueca'- based on the courting dances of a hen and a cockerel- not my favourite and one I had to learn at school and perform for Independence Day reluctantly. Our Argentinian neighbours got instead- life IS unfair- to represent their flamaboyantness with the passionate, beautiful irresistible impossible to learn Tango as their cultural icon. 

 The French, on the other hand, waltzed a lot, at least in my memory, somehow entangled with Leonard Cohen's eighties this waltz this waltz this waltz singing - I am not sure my dancing in the streets for Liberation is correct. That, is not traditional French folk dancing like Morris dancing is to us in the UK.

 I chose to draw waltz because it s dizzying nature and I am a romantic after all. It was my personal favourite tempo when I did dance Tango too- but it is a shared European dance with ballroom credentials, a Viennese invention - apparament. 

 It is that dance- just like biscuits- is a form of ethnographic record, and that it somehow embodies the culture it comes from? But that it can transcend borders, class systems, that it is contagious and dangerous even?

 The difficulty with a history of dance is that we don't know what first men danced to, or what steps did they rock in Greece. I have the feeling that Egyptians did not know much about The Bangles.

 'It is possible to conjecture that the cave dweller may have pretended to be an animal, when he danced at the dawn of the world, the dances of the primitive man are generally mimetic. He has not learnt to express himself in any other way'.

 Crick, Malcolm. Explorations in language and meaning: towards a semantic anthropology. London: Malaby Press, 1976 - P9

'Dance, dance, or else we are lost' PINA BAUSCH

(W. Wenders )

Pina Bausch's work followed the trend, pushing dance into finding and reaching through the common humanity and the traits and narratives that make us be, and feel. Her German expressionist vocabulary added brutal theatrical narratives that made her work more permeable-  audiences could follow stories that they could feel represented and could connect with, emotionally.

Her work also resonates in that she asked her dancers to respond to one of her ideas or thoughts separately, which she then reviewed and worked including into the larger choreographed piece, in thus establishing a collaborative, inclusive form of dance practice.

‘Continuum’ - Own artwork- charcoal and conte carre on card.

Whilst in some ways contemporary dance moved towards a universal form that distanced itself from the place it had been framed into and focused on the traits of our common humanity, it also evolved to a global more abstract language in the work of Merce Cunnigham and John Cage. Their work also experimented and incorporated chance when devising choreography, using coins and dice even, to decide what would happen next.

Even though dance had become means to explore and express new ideas and evolved into a system with its own vast vocabulary in both collective and individual form, it remained exclusive and impermeable- except for street dancing, carnivals, and some social art movements in America that included trivial domestic motion as means to democratize dance.

But dance also remains a mirror of the society and the times too-  there are some many faces to dance-  and not unlike music, it lives in the streets and close to social and racial changes in society-  Jazz comes to mind. 

One could argue that dance was still moving towards an impenetrable art form for most of a population engaging also in search of their own identity, encouraged to break away and be different by neo-capitalist tendencies in the West. 

Have we not gone too far into the individualist tendencies now we dance mostly in sweaty clubs, often even with our eyes closed? It might be that dance is not only means of expression but considering the demands and impositions we now have due to the COVID pandemic, it might offer us some tools to use what has been learned and taught by contemporary dance more widely. But also, reinstate perhaps simple, fun practices of dance which require collaboration, negotiation, listening and moving together with practice and trust. Not without space for individual expression- we are not fish after and do not live in a totalitarian regime (yet). 

Should we all Strictly Come Dancing? Maybe not in that TV, I am not a television person- we decided with my son to give ours away about ten years ago.

(One could argue that other forms of exercise also have that discipline and teach teamwork, and they wouldn't be wrong. But this undecidable is dance.)

This is all theoretical, of course. But while living in my lonely fishbowl thinking and floating around like Isadora, I can re imagine the world a better place if we do, dance.

I approached two performers with my previous piece on 'Distance Dance'. I had at that point not done any of the research for my presentation for my Masters Studio Module- but I intuitively asked the dancers to follow what I now know to be Pina's model. (Someone has always thought what you have thought before you think it. )

The two performers were a classical dancer, and a physical theatre performer trained in Le Coq Style familiar with Laban's principles whom I first saw use choreonotation- I didn't make up the word this time -  at nineteen years old- my younger sister and usual partner in crime.

She firstly inspired this piece by sending filming in fast motion to an arts 'whatsap' group  - whatsap has played a vital role in my research and during COVID-where we all respond to each other's art pieces. The next inspiration was unconscious, and in the shape of the Dancing Clown music box, I wrote a piece about on my online zoom writing session, and a present from my grandfather when I was eight.

And so I asked both dancers to respond to the ideas, gestures and feelings from Covid- 19 in two individual sections. The third section was to be constructed by collaboration by both a synchronized piece made by both their reactions to the other's first part.

It was so much harder than I could have imagined. It made me realize that if this is hard for us, it is ten trillion times worse for people whose work is always collaborative, dancers, actors, musicians- you have my utter respect and understanding of the limitations this inflicts not only in your movements but in your capacity to create work.

Synchrony is a challenge when you cannot hear the other's breath, feel and anticipate they impulses before they move, see what their next movement will be before it is.

The music didn't help. I chose 'Autumn' a remix by Max Richter of Vivaldi's Four seasons as this feels to me as enforced autumn when we all hear the birds singing spring. My incapacity to count as a dyslexic beast didn't help me, nor them- so I had to translate counting into musical phrases that they could hear. The filming and making of the third part was a technological miracle in that I had to negotiate the screens on a computer being horizontal, while the mobile phones filming for the piece were in vertical. Hello Zoom, you are the best next thing we have to share space.

https://open.spotify.com/track/65WvqwvSRc7z1627c5f5nC?si=bjQg7K7wQeS2UTuyrcvDnw

The result was an experiment of expression and collaborative design in movement which is imperfect, but that tested the capacity and will to collaborate even beyond space restrictions.

Not pencil on paper, two boxes still with trapped dancers smiling and scared of one another. It is possible…if you are as stubborn as one has to be to get any art pieces done.

'She is coming, the dancer of the future: the free spirit, who will inhabit the body of new women; more glorious than any woman that has yet been; more beautiful than all women in past centuries: The highest intelligence in the freest body."-The dancer of the future manifesto, Isadora Duncan 1909.

My recollection is, as a child, of 'The Dancer of the Wind' was one of a white renaissance like clothed women that didn't seem at all like a rebel to me- it is all relative to the times. It turns out rebels are troublesome- to draw even. Especially with a cold head that feels like a sea sponge- but while working on this brief, she spent days in my head, floating, asking to be given some pencilled attention. My mum told me as a kid, a trillion times, not to wear a scarf when cycling or else I would end up like Isadora- She tragically died strangled cycling with her scarf.  

Isadora Duncan was the first woman to decide to break away from the dance convention, move how she thought she ought to move, not adhere to social protocols of what a woman was meant to be and she decided not to wear a corset in public which was naturally a huge scandal. She changed dance forever in search of individual expression and a new identity for women.

'Duncan, placed emphasis on "evolutionary" dance motion, insisting that each movement was born from the one that preceded it, that each movement gave rise to the next, and so on in organic succession. Her dancing defined the force of progress, change, abstraction and liberation. In France, as elsewhere, Duncan delighted her audience.'

Daly, Ann, Done into dance : Isadora Duncan in America (Wesleyan ed.). Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2002.

Duncan's ideas ignited and were soon tested in the courts of Russian Ballet with productions such as 'the Rite of Spring' that much shocked the audiences but were welcomed. As an audience, you know what you will see with ballet- mostly- not so in contemporary dance. It was new.

The three most notable schools since the revolution she started-in my humble opinion- I look into briefly.

Firstly and the one we have the luxury to have in London is the one my son spent four years attending.

Laban Contemporary Dance Conservatoire is still teaching the ideas of its founder Rudolph Laban, an Austrian- Hungary dancer-choreographer and dance theoretician whose first school was founded in Munich in the nineteen-thirties.

The Nazi regime and their physical ideas of perfection saw dance as a potential means for political propaganda, so they engaged Laban as Director of Dance and offered him the opening ceremony for the Olympic games. The piece was scrapped after the last dress rehearsal and Laban fled to England- the radical proposals were not in line, and the art form was deemed dangerous and provocative. Laban focused his work in observation of the industrial machinery and movements in factories during the efforts to support of WWII against Hitler.

  His pieces become a political commentary of the time he lived through and included ideas of system collaboration and industrialization.

Laban studied architecture in Paris initially, so his work included ideas of the body as 'living architecture' and concepts of geometry and space in movement. He created choreology, the discipline of dance analysis. He invented a system of dance notation, Labanotation or Kinetography Laban, which recorded movement and choreographic phrases by way of intricate symbols. Laban develops community dance and sets out to reform the role of dance education, emphasizing his belief that dance should be made available to everyone.

 He was also the innovator beyond the first change in hierarchy, were dance precedes music for the first time.

 1926–28 piece Green Clowns, an anti-industrialist work that addressed the fear many artists in Weimar Germany had of burgeoning technologies.

Martha Graham was another female rebel and feminist that redrew the face of dance, yet somehow- became the cultural icon of what America was in the sixties. She was the first dancer to perform in the white house in Her dance, choreography and established technique is also still taught today- My mum did Graham technique with who back then must have been the only gay in tow- dancers somehow were 'allowed' to be gay, acceptably gay dancer and a stigma my son did not feel comfortable with. He wouldn't tell any of his friends at school that he danced, or else he would presumably be deemed gay by his rugby playing playmates. He kept it a secret even from his closest friends.

Gjon Mili, Stroboscopic image of Ethel Butles from the Martha Graham dance group.

Graham wanted dance to be less an entertainment than an art form that addresses our common human traits.

While researching this piece, I realized that Graham was Batsheva's first director in 1965, a dance company I much admire for their capacity to move as one.

Her work was based on the tension between "Contraction and Release" a principle she based on breath and breathing, and promoted female empowerment back in a day when most choreographers were male, most directors were male, and most company owners were also male. Gender politics is a recurrent them in her work, echoing the rise of feminists in other fields like painter Georgia O'Keefe and writer Gertrude Stein.

Her political commentaries did not limit to feminism. 'American Document' was a direct response to Nazi ideology and the excess of "fascist orality" described by Alice Yaeger Kaplan from technological developments and cultural dependency on the radio.

The Graham technique is based on weight, gravity and her notable contraction and release method. "This ancient awareness (contract and release) of the physicality of movement dependent upon the breath and the anatomical changes in the body due to the breathing process was based on her early training in Eastern dance forms in the Denishawn Company".

Horosko, Marian. Martha Graham: The Evolution of Her Dance Theory and Training. University Press of Florida, 2002.

The moon is hugely pregnant out there, radiant, like pregnant women so often are.

So radiant that I can’t sleep. It s not the chaotic state of disarray and trickling feeling of being entirely disempowered, but the moon, which reassuringly returns, lockdown or not, at fault for my persistent insomnia.

Walking up my little hidden woods at the rear of my even more unseen home I though of the rabbit on the moon. He s trapped out there, unlike us, forever.

I felt sorry for him. But then again, may be it is by choice and love of all things moon that he is there, by choice, not trapped, not lonely, he is the moon's baby in the womb and is floating upside down in eternal embryonic waters waiting to be born every night.

My cat is even more sticky and kissy than usual and April is getting a touch too warm for furry feline limpets. He wants to be ON TOP OF ME, be my scarf, adoringly asphyxiating.

While I write this he s giving me reproachful looks as if he knows i m criticizing him in type.

Cats know everything.

Dog face in the other hands seems truly sad over our apparent lack of social bottom smelling escapades. I m trying to engage with him more and give him more treats and tricks but he's bored.

Me? I have two good days, one bad, closely connected to sleep. Meditation, training, eating, baking, mapping the daily slow movement of snails. Did you know snails have between 15 to twenty thousand teeth in their mouths? I didn’t.The sluggish slowness of days. My Ariadne, as I call my course tutor trying to guide us through the marshes of our minds, told me to try to go ‘slow’ after the whole home threatening eviction plus loss of two jobs in one month and panicking pandemic plus actual world pandemic post Barcelona trip happened.

So- snails are slow.

Bach apparently loved them and wrote a fair section of his music based on snails and other garden creatures- he was a loving and enthusiastic gardener, apparently.

The task of finding a tangential on my collective equilibrium project for fair and just futures- in other words, an apprentice to Calder’s aspirational mobile- made me think of the movement of the piece.

Not only how to document the trajectory and motion- long exposure photograph or Muybrige like motion perhaps?

But also, how to annotate it. Like music or dance, all the parts move simultaneously but following different trajectories, fixed in a larger space.

The only specific requirement beside the objective of collaborative balance for my model is:

Space.

A central empty void is needed to hang a mobile. Tall and wide enough for the fragile structure to move, pivot, swivel and balance, fixed yet flexible, suspended.

Space.

The only requirement to survive the Covid 19 outbreak.  

Space.

The new movement we are having to learn is giving way on narrow lanes. Listening and carefully watching, responding and also - trust.

You trust that they will move, they trust that you will, we all move apart.

I thought of fish schools moving away yet keeping the perfect distance and density.

So we dance and move like sardines all packed up, in new ways to ensure survival of the specie and non death.

I started thinking about traditional dance and mimicking the natural world, in direct analogies such as Black swans flying in V formations at perfectly synchronised ballet- Matthew bourne introduces an interesting and radical gender reverse in his production to perfectly stilted ballerinas walking in long stilt like doll legs. In unison.

But ballet is only for the exclusive few, a performance that one observes and experiences vicariously, like theatre often is too, cinema, television.

All these are clearly divided spaces- at least in traditional productions- where the audience is not participatory.

So what was dance and what is dance and what could this new Covid dance be like?

Before I delve into notation and movement language- another turn of the maze and one I came straight to first and I’ m now ignoring- from exponentials and mathematical notations to the figure of eight.

Dance was originally means of expression from when? Tribal dances? They still have a common beat and were performed perhaps in order to communicate with the gods, beating drums and feet and hearts in one song.

Collective rather than individual?

Must research and learn more.

But then, after looking into the figure of eight problem and waltz, and realising the huge amounts of people that used to meet up and dance TOGETHER, like one body- not only in the rich salons of Vienna for the debutantes parties, but in the streets, at parties, asking the belle for a dance- it dawned on me that dance was even at a popular level an activity which connected strangers but that asked them to move TOGETHER. To listen to one another, to lead, to follow, to feel, to trust. But also, to improvise.

And seeing that we don’t know what tomorrow’s world will look like, we should probably get used to improvising.

(Mathew Bourne’s Swan Lake - I confess it did make me cry)

To dance in partnership or in groups you have to know the steps, and trust.

And try not to step on your partners toes, ideally.

Keep your balance. A mutual balance.

Improvisation work in contemporary dance is a good example.

But all ballroom dances require a dialogue of hands legs and hips- especially if you are Latin. Of all these, the hardest I found to learn was tango.

You have to connect and respond to the movements of the leading partner- generally male as tango could be seen as chauvinistic dance in that it is the men that lead.

In the other hand, I was grateful to respond. Women done always have to have the harder job- unless, you are in Brighton and your lesbian married couples are also dancing Tango, learning the lead.

The steps are difficult. Feeling them, responding in perfect timing and elegantly and with the ferociousness required, a true accomplishment of humane coordination of limbs, hearts and brains. Then hope for creativity, later, much later. 

Just thinking about it exhausts me but it was a lot of fun once you could feel and not think and just swirl around a room full of people that never collided or tired.

My tango career fell short due to a my Achilles heel, an injury that has recently interrelated returned. How timely. May be I should not even think ‘dance’. My dancing days are far from over, but are carefully counted courtesy of having been a wild tree climbing horse riding down mountain rolling monkey that has thoroughly trashed one' s body. The only other tribe I know of that hurt themselves to the extent I have, are skateboarders.Now that s another interesting group of folk- skateboarders and the city. Mitha please don’t forget to return my book.

I am loosing my thread. It must be because it is two twenty two in the morning.

Two twenty three.

One two three for five six seven eight.

Sometimes it s one two three four.

In waltz, or a waltz in tango (also a possibility just to add to the complexity of the matter) one two three one two three dresses swiiiishing round and round the room.

The footage of people waltzing in the streets in London for the coronation of the Queen are mind blowing. It s an ocean in movement, hypnotized I watch it over and over again like a child.

When did we stop meeting in the square on Sundays to dance with our neighbours?

(Robert Capa- Women dancing in the streets of Moscow 1947. Sixty percent of men that left to battle didn’t make it back home)

When we go dancing these days- and even at my age I do and won’t miss an opportunity- we go to a club, a sweaty party where we throw ourselves around but dance in our minds and our bodies- mostly, alone. 

With the exception of Latin vibes and then, it changes.

I m then back dancing with my sister- not in my mother's house dancing with my grandmother and all the family too for New Year’s Eve like we used to- but dancing with my blood, like we have since we were small.

I know she ll always catch me and throw me and that I can do the same without having to think. Practiced, life practice. 

Dancing in London for the Queen’s Coronation. We used to  practice listening and trusting each other on the dance floor in huge numbers. Should this perhaps be re introduced as part of wider education- where is the dance curricula?