#dancecovid

Sardines Shawl - Charcoal on paper, Movement studies in our disciplines nature, Drawing I made in April 2020.

‘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.

...I chose to draw sardines and not, starlings as I had first foreseen.

Starlings live on the edge and move by sight, in formations which are still a mystery. The mathematical models are beautiful as well as intriguing; yet scientists do not know why starlings move in cloudy Murmurations.

Sardines! We love playing sardines- but schools of fish move in relationship to their neighbours, in order to maximize foraging, safety for predators and speed of movement. This image is how they move when predators attack them –minus the predators I didn’t draw them in- It required time, discipline, and observation to create the piece. We ll never be able to move like these orderly bastards. Ballet dancers we are not, we haven’t been taught. Then I realized researching further, that schools of fish do not learn to move this way, they evolved. Is there any chance for us? How long does evolution take?

 ‘Dirty Dancing’, 1987- I am showing my age, I know...

Are you familiar with Dirty Dancing? Showy Peacock spiders dance as part of their mating rituals, romantic scorpions waltz, with the overly excited occasional spiking of the female by the venom of his male counterpart. Praying Mantis, also dance to mate, but often end up devouring the males as a result of it…fun fact- 60 per cent of the male praying Mantis is dinner.

Stick and leaf insect also dance, but it is still a mystery as to what purpose.

Cuttlefish, birds of paradise, bung beetles, also dance for courting it appears. But some can adjust their rhythm and dance without reproduction being the objective.

Our honey-loving bees communicate with dance, with complex moves in lines and figures of ‘8’, where they give each other directions with the ‘Waggle dance’- an advanced form of touch communication.

Some argue that plants and algae dance too, albeit this is still debatable and depending on what it is that we define as dance- 

‘We read that non-human animals ‘dance’; however, their ritualized movements are programmed action sequences. They do not voluntarily express or withhold emotions and ideas distances in time and space from immediate stimuli as do humans in dance.’

Megan N. Ramos, Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy, Volume 13, 2018 - Issue 1.

Dance does have a well-established sexual connection to the elemental impulses of the perpetuation of a species. And the theory that humankind danced to transcend language barriers and heighten rituals to connect to nature, fellow human beings, and an idea of ‘a creator’ do primarily sound reasonable, especially on the basis of mimicking the natural world.

But what is harder to agree on is whether dance, as a language, can be scientifically dissected and stripped  of human emotion, expression, or thought.

From ballet as a child, to jazz dance to tango to Berlin’s Berghain and Ibiza’s Heart- I for one, certainly dance like I am possessed...

Photograph by Jake Davies, Steel Yard Fox and Badge party, London, 2019.

But WHY did people dance, and do today?

1          They want to have fun and relax?- dance as a vehicle solely for leisure and entertainment?

2          They dance because of biological, organismic or instinctive needs of some kind –the dance as

precursor to spoken language perhaps?

3          They dance because they want to express themselves- that dance as a symbolic activity divorced from real life

4          they dance because they feel sexy or sad, or something- the dance as a prime repository of emotion?

5          They dance because a good, or evil, spirit has possessed them, the dance as a neurotic, hysterical or quasi religious manifestation,

6          They dance to show off or to relieve their over-burdened feelings- dancing as catharsis or the governor on a steam- value theory of human emotion

Crick, Malcolm. Explorations in language and meaning: towards a semantic anthropology. London: Malaby Press, 1976 – P5-6

In reality, it can be either of these or a combination, in no particular order, or to other meand- as we see when looking into Contemporary Choreographers such as Merce Cunnighmam, who used as means to experiment.

 From popular dances in bars and streets among strangers or families and festivals, dance appeared in a more refined shape in courts, who then shaped and cut a much more structured and some would argue refined form of dance, with ballet.

Rudolf Nureyev dances with Rosella Hightower during a dress rehearsal at the B.B.C. television studios in London in 1962. (Photo credit should AFP/AFP/Getty Images)

The Kings of Europe funded classical music, fine art, and ballet into their present form, but one that remains even today exclusively for those who can afford them, both in practice and as an attending audience.

Ballet’ s rigor did not allow for individual input. It is the A-Z of dance and even in its the education, preaches implacable linear precision to perfection.

'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.