for the performers

whose bodies and imaginations

carry this work forward

- Anne Bogart and Tina Landau, Viewpoints

BALLET ON THE BARRICADES

AND HOW TO FORM A MOVEMENT

During my senior year at Hampshire College I wrote, directed, choreographed and performed an original play that incorporated dance, theatre, video and ethnography with an emphasis on multimedia installation, emergent improvisation, and collaborative design.

FOREWORD

As human beings we are always in motion, co-existing with the world around us.

In an attempt to form an epistemology of this movement,

I have sought out,

in my work,

the exposition of our collective hauntings.

On both public and private stages, the art of physical action-taking is directly affected by technological systems that foster inattention through dynamic shifts in the information we receive on a constant basis. Despite these limitations, bodies continue to follow the natural world's geometric tendencies of movement during periods of interdependence.

In my quest to embody these naturally occurring methods of movement, the production of which are rooted in the mathematical systems that govern each and every expansion of the present moment,

I have wandered, searching for fractals.

If kinesthetic energy is an entity which can be neither created nor destroyed, every movement opens onto another flickering window of opportunity, and [in sum]:

I wanted.

I wanted to make.

I wanted to make fractals I could share.

INTRODUCTION

As the world becomes more and more mediatized, art has become increasingly complex--the act of creation has been deeply impacted. Art has been forced to respond to a system of inattention and an over-saturation of information.

I have found that MOVEMENT FORMATION in its postmodern state then, is fueled by this multiplicity of events, which serve to displace the focus of the participant/observer in order to mirror the complex nature of navigating increasingly compact and mediatized spaces.

What was once seemingly random and incongruent no longer phases audience members of today. Our senses are overloaded. Creation now frequently entails the interaction of a multiplicity of events occurring simultaneously. But perhaps the true solution is a simple and minimalist interpretation of our increasingly intersectional identities--intersectional not solely in terms of race, gender and sexuality, but also in regards to experience, migration and sustainability.

Through trial-and-error, I sough to quantify the relationship between individual suffering and a collective affinity either towards, or in opposition to, activist struggle. In an era that is increasingly segregated in terms of public and private, we often forget about the head's connection to the foot.

For over three-hundred years now we Americans have been collectively haunted by the underlying sense of lost spirituality that lies beneath our homes, our monuments, and our memories. I am referring, of course, to the bodily wounds that remain in our national memory, as evidenced by the distribution of history textbooks within which all conceptions of capitalism and industry trickle down into pure mythology.

This lineage of historical censorship is incongruent to the country's current state of affairs, which has laboriously instituted strategic methodologies designed to deny the founding fathers of African-America a piece of history.

The stasis of our current political climate seems to lack the perceptive awareness of the postmodern artist, who nurtures an internal deity of revolt, day in and day out, through the exposition of his sufferings: the wounds of which are able to shine light on the dark places of the time-based internal and external pressures within which we live.

This begs the question:

Have we been robbed of spirituality? And, if so, what remains?

Investigating the validity of the aforementioned claims through my Division III project, 'forming a movement epistemology: the public and private stage(s) of postmodernist art', I came to the conclusion that what remains of the American spirit is the collective desensitization of our bodies' natural inclination towards revolution, resulting from a lack of connectedness to our nation's history. Situating the the Occupy Wall Street movement, the seminal case The National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples (N.A.A.C.P.) VS. the City of Yonkers (1986), and the Interwar Period in France as distinct and categorizable historical moments, my play expanded upon the potential motion that bodies create when they energize their methods of action-taking in unison form.

The following retrospective and literature review is an expression of my efforts to devise a strategic plan for taking action against the delegitimization of our nation's history in a way that resists the overloaded tele-visual experience of the present moment.

OCCUPY WALL STREET

Fall of 2011 was an incendiary moment for our nation. Occupy Wall Street began on September 17^th . I did not immediately know what was going on until months later. Once I did, I began participating during all of my free time, growing ever-more integrated into the movement.

I organized Occupy Hampshire and planned the school's November 17^th Day of Action, a Walk-Out, Speak-Out and Teach-Out carried out by colleges nationwide.

Participating in Occupy Hampshire was kind of my method of staying in school at a time when it had become so difficult to do so knowing that something like Occupy Wall Street was going on internationally. I was so jealous that I couldn't be living there full time right in the middle of the action. So I followed it I followed every single thing every single day. I was taking six classes and auditing a seventh and yet, Occupy Wall Street still became my job.

I started a blog called The Enhampment, a twitter account and Facebook account in addition to bringing together those interested in Occupy from the five colleges.

And I put everything into it. At first organizing with Occupy Hampshire was wonderful because for the first time I saw all of the activist groups on campus in one room. Every group: the International Socialist Organization, the Anarchist Network, environmental groups, Students for Economic Justice... It was just so beautiful and it would have been wonderful it it had been able to continue.

I was the type of person who had always dreamt of this type of social movement occurring but never actually thought it possible. Even my college applications were about the fact that I never thought that my generation could care about anything at all ever again because in my experiences (particularly during high school) I was so aware every day that we were a nation at war, and I just couldn't understand the lack of awareness and anger regarding that.

At the time, I considered apathy and ambivalence to be a hinderance to a potential movement that was actively opposing the continued historiography of the current post-Racial climate of our society which challenged potential alternatives to America's current status as an intentionally segregated superstructure.

PERFORMING IDENTITY

At the time that Occupy Wall Street was beginning, I was enrolled in a class that had a really huge impact on me called “Performing Identity: Race/Gender/Sexuality in Theory and Practice” with Jaclyn Pryor, which I took alongside a lot of people who I would end up collaborating with on future projects.

The class was really special because we would ready critical theory which although I was reading for the first time, it allowed me to put these experiences into my body in a way that was really new to me. So in that way it really exposed me to both performance art and a way to approach complex philosophy.

For the performance ethnography we were assigned as our final project, we were asked to interview people around some topic that had to do with race/gender and/or sexuality and then to transcribe and perform one minute of said interview as that character. Therefore it meant not acting necessarily, but really studying and listening to the particular way, the exact intonation of the character's manner of speech. This practice was rooted in Anna Deveare Smith's Fires in the Mirror which we watched during the course of the semester.¹

I chose Occupy Wall Street as my fieldwork community in the hopes of representing the Occupy Wall Street movement as an ideology that was accessible to people of intersecting identities. Therefore I interviewed Emahunn Raheem Ali Campbell, my father, and some other participants who were completely disinterested in the movement. Emahunn is a Students Against Mass Incarceration Activist from UMass who I met organizing with Occupy Hampshire and whose experiences as an Occupier of color I found to be truly compelling.²

1 Smith is a Performance artist who devised a play called Fires in the Mirror in which she performed multiple characters using a similar tactic, and her idea was that language was essentially everything, that language could BE character, and that if you're really seeking that out then all that you needed to do was really on the language knowing the character would inevitably be embedded in that. This relates to my further participation in Milan Dragicevich's Performance in Detonated Language class at UMass Amherst, which also emphasized the relationship between language, sound, and character.

2 Another way that Performing Identity really influenced the show as that it was the first time that I was really exposed to the writings of Judith Butler. One paper on the phenomenology of gender as a performative act really influenced me, as did her “Bodies and Alliance and the Politics of the Street”, part of which she read at Occupy Wall Street and the full version of which she read on November 17^th, 2011 at UMass Amherst. I was so influenced by the latter, in fact, that I ended up incorporating into the show through the characters of the Ancestors. It was so important to me that we worked really extensively, Sage Lau, Tika Simone and I on ensuring that they were speaking their lines on exactly the same moment. In order to do this we implemented various theatre and movement exercises and practices to really work on timing. In order to indicate the dancers were now portraying the character of the Ancestors, the costume designer crafted a 'MuMu' for them to cover themselves with in the scene right after my long poem.

SPRING

In the spring I was in two shows one of which was UNMUTED by Gillian Cannon which was based on an ethnography of women's prisons' in California and I was also in Kaia Jackson's Div 3 Out of SIlence. both of these developed in acting but also UnMuted age me a structure within which I felt like I could use interviews in my Div 3 and out of silence had a free enough nature to the collaborative aspect of devising and the connection to spirituality that I also felt comfortabl applying to be slotted. So this spring, in the spring, things start getting pretty crappy with Occupy. I went down every break that I could throughout the year and ended up getting pretty integrated into it. I spent all two weeks of Spring Break at Union Square

And this is what inspired the ballerina police force characters. I had one experience in particular, well the whole thing in particular was that they were shutting down the park and that influenced the play as well, this idea of cleaning out a park that wasn't dirty.

And so I applied to be slotted in the Spring and I was totally underqualified.

I did not get a Spring term slot, which meant that I was going to have to do a big project in half the time. But I proposed to write a play about my father because my goal for Division III being someone who really just ideally wants to sing and dance and act professionally, I thought to myself: What could you really do for a year and love?

So my father seemed like the perfect foundation and I believed that my background would be adequate. I had a huge production team. The inspiration of Trisha Brown prompted me to bring together a lot of people from various disciplines which was unusual.

I started working with my production team the Spring for Division III not really knowing how I was going to do it, but knowing what ideas I wanted to work with.

THE CREW

My image of the project was inspired by the collaborative process modeled by Trisha Brown.
We all worked to develop the script, designers, dancers and actors alike. Much like the Judson Dance Theatre, we experimented, worked with what we had, and learned to make radical decisions, together.

NAACP VS. the City of Yonkers

My Division III was originally intended to be an ethnographic dance-theatre event about a segregated America; seeking to contextualize the NAACP VS. the City of Yonkers case as but one microcosm of a centuries-long citizen's revolt against America as an intentionally segregated superstructure.

American cities operated under systems of oppression rooted in North American slavery until a 1954 Supreme Court decision called Brown Vs. Board of Education found segregated educational facilities to be inherently unequal when two parties don't have equal power.

The Civil Rights movement that rose soon-thereafter foresaw the pertinence of the case and sought to enforce it on a national-level. Despite a decades-long quest for social justice on the part of Civil Rights activists worldwide; the city of Yonkers, New York remained chock-full of people of color who held heart-wrenching grievances regarding housing discrimination and segregation within the public school system. The subsequent NAACP Vs. the City of Yonkers decision of 1986 found the city guilty of violating the freshly-amended United States' constitutional standards for racial equality

My father, Leonard Buddington, JR. represented the Yonkers, New York chapter of the NAACP during the aforementioned settlement. As the chapter's President he was also responsible for enforcing its jurisdiction, which meant calling attention to policy brutality while also actively working to desegregate the city’s school district.

As a little girl I’d tag along to NAACP meetings to high schools where he would give speeches about a so-called ‘diaspora’. It was work with the African-American community of Yonkers, New York (many of whom migrated from the segregated South) which fed my desire to believe that it was okay, desirable, and possible to changep things for the better. I was worried that his story would be lost if I didn’t express it, and set out to trace the inextricable link between physical action and the struggle for an actively anti-racist world.

I intended to write a play based on interviews with my father, who was president of the Yonkers, New York chapter of the NAACP during the 1990s. For a time he was also the chapter's attorney, consequently suing the Yonkers Police Department on numerous charges of police brutality while actively working to integrate the Yonkers Central School District (which continues to be heavily segregated to this day).

My father lost his law license right when the recession hit in 2008, at the same time that he was buying a house that he could not afford so that my brothers and I could attend decent schools and escape the enormous resentment he'd been accumulating from the reactionary Yonkers Police Department.

As a former lawyer he qualified for entry-level positions on Wall Street. So he ended up working alongside twenty-two year old recent college graduates for years, simultaneous to the collapse of the financial market. He was tossed, quite literally, between Merill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Chase, Wachovia and Allstate. Months went by where I saw my father around the house every day before thinking to ask him, "Did you lose your job?"

It took years for me to reconcile with the impact that my father's unstable 'occupations' had on our relationship and family environment. That is part of the reason I became increasingly interested in Michele Alexander's articulation of the New Jim Crow and about the ways in which he has been stripped of his agency to profit the police state.

I decided to ground the play's narrative in the history of United States' social movements, by connecting my father's lived experiences to the national economic crisis. It was to begin in Yonkers in the 1990s and end on Wall Street in 2012 with the ultimate goal of representing the Occupy Wall Street movement as a long-overdue consequence of the institutionalized and systematic oppression of the American spirit.

The undertaking of my Division III project was simultaneous with the slow decline of the Occupy Wall Street movement. By December of 2012, a month before my show was slotted to go up, I was plagued by intense feelings of activist burnout.

Q: Explain this - or will it be clarified in the process?

Q: What did you gather/learn/gain from these experiences?

The Paul Robeson Freedom School

My efforts to salvage the Occupy movement impeded my work on my Division III during the summer. I should have been doing more interviewing and transcribing and less organizing, but oftentimes I just got so carried away trying to take on everything and important things suffered.

THE STORM

It was not until late November that I accepted the fact that my show was going to be autobiographical rather than telling my father's story.

Once the situation with the NAACP case fell through, I was forced to come up with a new plan.

I felt like I would never stop reading, and I wasted a lot of time doing things I should not have been focusing on.

I was extremely afraid to share my work. It was especially hard to be confident in a piece of activist theatre when I was no longer even confident in the movement itself.

However when it really came down to it, I buckled down and handed in a script.

In the fall, I was really struggling with the script and not knowing how to go about doing what I wanted to do, so instead I put all of my effort into the production of the show.

I had such a rigid ideology in mind knowing the structure I would be using with Katie Martin that in committee meetings there would be this kind of moment of lapse because my committee would ask me you know what do you need our help with and i just had nothing to say because I was working so hard on my own.

In retrospect, what I really needed was help with structuring the script. I did not realize how unprepared I was. I had never written a play before. Ultimately, drawing from my prior experiences and reading, I decided that the show would be more of an installation than a play.

In the face of the Occupy Wall Street movement's slow decline, my writing process was, for the most part, sporadic.

With the help of the dramaturg and pre-production coordinator, I compiled a series of activist poetry I had written in the past few years and set out to devise a script that was not only “Here's me and here's Occupy Wall Street and here's me as a tiny bit of Occupy” but one that also spoke to the movement within the context of other older movements.

Over time the script developed into two things: (1) the silencing of the Occupy Wall Street movement in the face of my attempt at political organizing and (2) an attempt to display to the audience the power that their bodies possess to participate in the voicing and actualization necessary to enact great change.

I did not anticipate the extent to which fighting to keep the momentum of Occupy Wall Street alive had worn me down, or that acting as teaching assistant for a course on the subject would only further my inability to fully reconcile with the political turbulence of widespread social disruption.

We were at a historical moment when change was possible, and then the impetus was gone. Thus, my greatest experience of loss in this life was not just of a lover and a community, but an ideology.

In this moment of mourning, myself and my art suffered.

Both suffered deeply.

EXTRACTING THE DIFFICULT FROM THE DIFFICULT
THE WRITING PROCESS

ACTIVIST BURN OUT IS REAL

In keeping with the teachings of Mahāyāna traditions, the character of Soma was meant to represent some sort of "Great Vehicle" or vessel through which the audience could experience the action of the performance means of this 'being'.

the Ballerina Police Force were inspired by my interactions with police at Occupy Wall Street both at Liberty Plaza and Union Square. These snarky officers dance in horizontal lines and serve to abstract the Police State's sexual representation through a reversal of traditional masculinity. They sport a Ballerina version of the NYPD uniform; all in blue, with tutus to match [add photos]. the Prima Policina (chief officer) wears red sequined pointe shoes (modeled after Dorothy's ruby red slippers in the Wizard of Oz); which Soma takes after their showdown towards the end of the play.

++ NOTE: Originally, Miriam King was meant to play the Prima Ballerina and we rehearsed several solo sessions together for several weeks. However, after learning that Miriam would not be returning to campus until three days before opening night, I re-wrote her role and choreography to fit the current performative collaborations I was having with another actor, Maddy Gowing and Tika Simone who then split the role. [add footage eventually]

Bartleby, the Scribner was originally intended to be a French male who I met on the street last summer. The man saw my 99% pin and I was so excited to meet his first Occupy Wall Street activist.

++ Diego Iban~ez is a Bolivian-born activist and organizer, who focuses mostly on student and worker immigrant rights. He loves the logistics of direct action and is passionate about movements around the world. He's been in various forms of direct action: from sit-ins in Alabama and Salt Lake City to sleeping in a Manhattan park to hunger striking in front of a church to attacking Bank of America with furniture or marching in the Bronx with radical organizers. With Occupy Wall Street, he has been involved with the immigrant workers justice working group, organizing with the Laundry Workers Center, among other. He hopes to move and organize in Bolivia soon. He has written for Waging Nonviolence. He also loves to write poetry and short story prose.

Rip Van Winkle is an African-American middle-aged woman from the segregated South. She wears a nightgown similar to something the grandparents in the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory would wear. She sleeps during most of the production. Originally based on my step-mom's mother, who is an African-American woman who came to Yonkers, New York from the segregated South; I eventually realized I found writing the character is such a negative light was problematic. So I re-considered the character to be a broader representation of 'the Consumer' and envisioned the characters' watching TV all day as the constant in an experiment of representation and changeability.

The New Jim Crow was originally inspired by Emahunn Raheem Ali Campbell, who I interviewed for the first time while taking a class called “Performing Identity: Race/Gender/Sexuality in Theory and Practice” with Professor Jaclyn Pryor. I interviewed Mr. Campbell for our final project, a performance ethnography in which we were asked to choose a fieldwork community and conduct interviews with a group of subjects in preparation for final performances within which we were asked to transcribe and perform one minute of each person's interview.

The Mad Men were were played by dancers Maddy Gowing (who doubled as the Prima Policina) and Faraday Borg. At first the Mad Men text did not have much interaction with the Rip Van Winkle character, but through conversation and further exploration we worked collaboratively to re-work the scene so that it could be incorporated more into the Rip Van Winkle subtext.

The Ancestors are portrayed by two dancers under a mumu*. The appear in one dance sequence only and speak text from Judith Butler’s Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street, which she read at Occupy Wall Street during 2012. It was my hope that through applying the text from the philosophical paper to dance scores would create visual representations of complex theories in the body, making them easier to understand. This derives from my experiences in Performing Identity with Jaclyn Pryor, which is also where I met Diego Ibanez -- INSERT

ANNE BOGART - VIEWPOINTS

In the weeks before the show's opening we began working in the Main Stage of Emily Dickinson Hall, and were joined by the actors.

The greatest difficultly came from the multiple roles played by dancing and acting ensemble members who were pushed out of their comfort zones.

Although pressed for time, I insisted we go through all eight of Anne Bogart and Tina Landau's Viewpoints before proceeding with the script. This led to an ingrained sense of spatial awareness and created dynamic improvisational tensions in final performances.

Q: How does this fit with your philosophies of collaboration?

According to the authors, "Viewpoints is timeless - a system belonging to the natural principles of movement, time and space. We have simply articulated a set of names for things that already exist, things that we do naturally and have always done, with greater or lesser degrees of consciousness and emphasis. Viewpoints is a philosophy translated into a technique for training performers, building ensemble and creating movement for the stage." (Bogart & Landau, from Chapter 2)

But everyone hated it. Which is why!

As an advanced learning activity, I was going to teach an EPEC course that the cast would be required to take. The class would have covered a wide range of skills I considered to be integral to the production, including but not limited to: authentic movement, contact improvisation, and voice for actors. In order to adequately prepare the cast for the context of the play, the proposed curriculum would have also reviewed the history of black radicalism.

Since I did not have the time to facilitate a full EPEC course with my dancers, I attempted to recreate the meaning of theoretical texts in the bodies of my dancers. I often used philosophical writings as movement scores in an attempt to examine the ways in which related imagery and understanding could emerge from interpretations of sounds and movement.

Q: And what happened?

ITS SUCH AN AMAZING THING, TO WALK AND TO LISTEN

In an active rejection of Anne Bogart's insistent emphasis on timeliness within her directorial philosophy, I lived by my own schedule until recurrent unpreparedness, tardiness and a general lack of communication with my Division III co-chairs cost me the option of incorporating video into my show.

I had become so wrapped up in my own twisted methodological process that the Division III advisory committee that I was collaborating with were no longer my priority. Although the decision to remove video projections from my show was painful, I am grateful for it forced me to find a way to communicate my persnickety artistic vision.

Q: Explain further. How did you do this?

POST-PERFORMANCE RETROSPECTIVE AND END THOUGHTS

The development of my dance-making methodology and subsequent performances of my Division III forming a movement fostered my independence as a director, choreographer, writer and performer. I was incredibly pleased with the result, and also feel so blessed to have embarked upon a newfound experience of leadership and planning that has provided me with both a sense of guidance and creative independence.

Much much more needed in this section.

FOTO

I lost one of my actors who was very crucial to the story under very curious circumstances and therefore re-wrote the role so that his part could be communicated through audio or visual technologies [components]?

I had been really interested in technology as an interpreter and translator. I originally wanted to have a scene and then have it replayed through like a screwed up way of the media as a commentary on the ways that technology interprets what we are doing [our action]. I wondered how technology might translate and mistranslate it.

There were to be two video screens incorporated into the set. One of them would live-stream to Foto, and the other of which would play the art films I was going to create with Mt. Holyoke student Katie Demarse, who attended the MADE-IN-FRANCE program with me.

 VIDEO #1: Candle Twin Towers superimposed over SOMA singing on stage in a dress modeled after the one that Mandy Moore wears in A Walk to Remember; she sings an acapella version of 26-hour day by Jay Brannan. The video takes us to New York City during a blackout on stage..

Although Props Designer Sam Hollier did create these towers out of wax... we were not able to incorporate them into video projection as the script described.

I ended up losing my ability to incorporate video into my show as a result of reccurrent unpreparedness, tardiness and lack of communication with my committee. Oftentimes I became so wrapped up in the process that the other people that I was working with were not my priority. In the future I hope to emphasize timeliness as much as Anne Bogart does in her directorial philosophy.

In the end I was able to incorporate Foto’s audio into the show. Stage manager Rhana Tabrizi and I would go over to his house off-campus and record audio alongside the other characters.

Rather than projecting video during the show, I recorded a poem that Foto wrote on PhotoBooth and played it on loop in the lobby scene before all performances.

I came up with the idea that Soma's running in circles was to represent the 'yellow brick road,' which transported her to Occupy Wall Street and was modeled after the Emerald City. That is why the light turned green and Soma took a balletic position mimicking the Statue of Liberty center stage after her solo.

While I agree that my not having used video in the show made it stronger as a whole, I am motivated on a deeper level to create art in a way that creates win-win situations with others. As persnickity as I have to be with my artistic vision leaves me with a newfound motivation to truly and deeply participate in a grander ensemble, that of the Earth. As the Weakerthans song says, “It’s such an amazing thing: to walk, and to listen.”

During auditions I taught two pre-determined movement phrases built upon postmodernist (my muses?) dance phrasework/material to “contain a degree of both finely detailed gestures and nuanced shifts of weight and focus, and at the other end of the spectrum, large, sweeping, full-bodied motions that cut through, attack, and engulf the space around the performers.” (Martin, 58) .

We cast six dancers. Either the Dramaturg/Pre-production coordinator or Publicist/Stage manager were present during the auditions. I was really nervous when not too many people showed up the first day, but suddenly through word-of-mouth, I had just the amount of dancers that I needed.

After coming up with a base-phrase through stream of consciousness movement invention, we extrapolated upon those concepts until we had several usable dance sequences.

The dancers and I spent the first few rehearsals refining the specific dynamics of each phrase in order to perform each sequence in as perfect unison as possible. This process, which Katie Martin refers to as unison relationship, fosters a connection amongst the movers that helps them to establish a spatial relationship. In Martin’s theorization, what it means to dance in unison is taken a step further by exploring the very essence of what it means to be in a unison relationship with another individual.

Lastly, the dancing section revealed a deep regard for the sensory intelligence of the body. To quote Katie Martin, “I do not believe I would even be able to consider the kinds of working processes described above without a high level of embodied knowledge.

Within Susan Sgorbati’s improvisational practice “the notion of embodiment arises as a process of centering the body into the present moment of attention and sensory perception, attuning oneself to the body’s innate intelligence and felt experiences. Embodiment reinforces the notion that the physical body is also a thinking body, a concept” postmodern dancers of consider a crucial element to their movement experimentations.

Stream-of-consciousnes movement invention, whole body gesturing, embodiment, unison relationships, and action word variation- these are the primary choreographic strategies that built the scope of forming a movement. “I used these strategies to reinforce and reveal in various ways the ten arenas of tension that initially inspired the dance’s conceptual framework of perceptural multiplicity* (BARBA) and complexity of the moving body: (Martin, 72)

Movement 1: Solo

Abiding by Katie Martin’s choreographic philosophy (as articulated in her MFA thesis Impossible Frames) I decided early on in the process of making forming a movement to create a solo that I would perform within the overall composition. I hoped this solo will stem from a more instinctual and unplanned place; one that would relieve some of the stresses of the group rehearsals that were occurring concurrently. I imagined the solo section to allude to Martin; through a series of movement sequences that evoke multi-directional pathways of action within the landscape of the body and alternately carve a spatial matrix throughout the environment. (Martin, 54)

The primary choreographic theme that propelled this solo into being is the notion of stream-of-consciousness movement invention. This strategy emphasizes an improvisational structure based on instinct that would foster the emergence of movement phrasing and gestural dynamism.

Lastly, this solo section will reveal a deep regard for the sensory intelligence of the body. To quote Katie Martin, “I do not believe I would be even able to consider the kinds of working processes described above without a high level of embodied knowledge.”

In this quote Martin refers to the development of embodiment within Susan Sgorbati’s improvisational practice. “As detailed in her Solo Practice, the notion of embodiment arises as a process of centering the body into the present moment of attention and sensory perception, attuning oneself to the body’s innate intelligence and felt experiences. Embodiment reinforces the notion that the physical body is also a thinking body a concept I perceive as integral to any kind of improvisational exploration.” (Martin, 58)

Movement II: Duo

Duo between I. Buddington & Miriam King
Short & focused choreographic process

When I first begin rehearsing with Miriam King, I plan on teaching her two pre-determined movement phrases build around the perceptual spectrum of minutiae/scale. Thus the actions within these movement sequences will contain a degree of both finely detailed gestures and nuanced shifts of weight and focus, and at the other side of the spectrum, large, sweeping, full-bodied motions that cut through, attack, and engulf the space around the performers.” (Martin, 58)

Miriam and I will spend rehearsals refining the specific dynamics of each phrase in order to perform each sequence in as perfect unison as possible. These two phrases will then become the foundation for other choreographic strategies that Katie Martin articulated in her Smith College MFA thesis Impossible Frames. The first of which is the basic idea of unison relationship. To quote Martin, “I chose to work with unison for two reasons: One, I believe it is fairly difficult overall to achieve moements of perfect unison in any kind of movement scenario… I was drawn to the challenge of finding ways to align our diverse dynamic dispositions and ways of understanding and embodying movement information. Two, I perceive the idea of unison as a powerful indicator of connection… I wish to evoke a sense of relationship.” (Martin, 59)

In addition to refining phrase material in perfect unison, we are experimenting with the spectrum of unison form. In other words, we are exploring other modes of what it means to be in a unison relationship.

In the last two rehearsals with Miriam, we will stretch the idea of imperfect unison one step further, working with the theme of action word variation.

If varying the phrase by distilling each movement into an action word creates an interesting degree of counterpoint and dynamic tension, I will use Miriam’s action word sequence of the base phrase to create my own action word sequence, essentially distilling the distillation. Thus, her original action word variation becomes a new series of action words that I use to shape my own sequence. We’ll experiment with how these distillations are organized spatially, finding moments of extreme proximity and distance, and these explorations will be set as the ending moments of the final duet. (Martin, 60-61)

THE DANCES

To warm up we would begin with stretching and sun salutations accompanied by audio of chanting and Kirtan. After that we would always do a ballet warm-up working through barre exercises because (due to my research of William Forsythe) it was imperative that the ballet be essential to the piece and that we always be working strategically to improve our precision and flexibility.

Q: Should there be a link to the dance video? Say more about Katie's methodology.

One of the most amazing things that happened throughout the experience was the creation of the dances.

Video was really important throughout the process, not only because it assisted my communication with sound designer James Glass but also because we ended up using video to teach ourselves dances we had improved. My favorite example of this is the Yuna dance, in which we took our base phrase, and then using Katie Martin's "action word variation", listed different adjectives that described all of the gestures within the phrase. After that we split up into small groups and all came up with different phrases, which we then put together. It was so amazing to see how using a specific structure could create so much gestural dynamism.

It was one of the dancers, Alina Ortiz, who chose to put on Yuna's cover of "Thinking 'Bout You" by Frank Ocean which I ended up using in final performances. The dancers and I worked throughout January to learn not only the Yuna dance from video but also the dance to Beyonce's "End of Time" which was choreographed using a ballet barre as a police barricade (which further inspired the incorporation of a paper mache police barricade into the set).

The police barricade also there because of a protest I was a part of at Union Square last spring break, where two Occupiers were carrying giant paper mache barricades in opposition to the police who were kicking us out of the park.

This gave Forsythe the ability to experiment with balletic choreography in the forthcoming paradigm shift within the postmodern frame. Honoring Forsythe’s ideology Katie Martin writes, “[...] I imagined my body as having infinite centers of gravity and bases of support to launch a particular gesture. I initiated movement not only from the most obvious points of origin, (the limbs, for instance) but also perceived both gestures and centers of gravity originating from such unlikely locations as the tip of my ear, the side of my fifth rib, and the back of my skull. As a result I was able to intersperse moments of surprise, counter-intuitive flow, and oppositional dynamic intention with the longer streams of more instinctual phrase-building.” (Martin, 57)

I created the choreography of forming a movement in a similar manner, following the naturally occurring impulses that arose in my body until “each string of movement phrasing dissolved or transitioned into something new on its own accord [...] in this process, I also allowed myself to digest what occurred by repeating the particular orders of the actions at hand, until it was solidified in my muscle memory before moving on to the next movement exploration.” Additionally I aimed to channel my intentionality through my body’s physicality and energy level on a day-to-day basis. (Martin, 55-56)

I wanted to tap into the physical logic of my own choreographic material, which would allow me to move freely without being too critical of myself. But I also wanted to do the opposite. So I worked to challenge my own dancing habits by reflecting over the way I’ve tended to move during the past few years. Once I had an idea of my usual movement patterns I was given more choices of “how and where in the body I tend initiate, support, and dissolve energy flow.” (Martin, 56)

TRANSCRIPTION OF THE INTERVIEW:

Q: Simply include transcription in literature review; eventually include translation of Q's?

I appreciate the informality of this large table. Your distance, this room. No, it's great to be here it's very nice to be here, thank you.

[...] Yes, I have proposed that dancing and choreography are two different practices. Having done both for many, many, many years I think they're very distinct things to do. They're not, they can have a tremendous amount in common, they have had a tremendous amount in common for as long as we can think, but it is not necessarily an imperative. Or somehow we've accepted it, its received practice, but it apparently works without, let's say, a body demonstrating the idea. So you can have a situation that in some cases is manifested as an object, which causes a discrete set of motions to spontaneously appear and the object when presented with it can induce what I call 'unconscious competence'... It's not my term, actually.

An 'unconscious competence' would be like, not falling over, let's say, or saving yourself from a certain situation or avoiding something. But things your body does automatically but obviously in a capacity that is not too... quotidian. There has to be some, as far as I'm concerned, some unique perspective on the thing, some experience of your body that's slightly different from normal.

What we're presenting is more of a score so 'no where and everywhere at the same time' is a situation, and this is a score that is sheerly or merely, suggestive. It only does so much. There's about 300 pendulums in a room, and the performer sets these in motion if he wishes, or not. But its designed, this particular dance (if you would call it), is designed for the person performing it. So Brock Labrenz was the original performer when I made it in New York. And I've tried to do it in several other occasions with several other dancers and I would say 99% of the time it has failed.

He possesses a very unusual skill set, so he's an extremely talented well-trained dancer from Julliard. He comes from a family, his father of from Harvard, and now he is a film producer and he directs films, he directs actors and he produces films. I mean, he edits films, shoots them himself and works internationally. He also studied astrophysics, he studied acting, I can't remember what else but he did several other things.

But because of this very unique skill set that he is, it really is unique I don't know that many astrophysicists who make films and dance at the same time.

I do think that at present in our work as a company, with my dancers we focus very much on autonomous musical structures now. The music that we use has very little to do with the organization, it is an independent event like film music, I would say in that sense. It colors your perception of the event, but it is not necessarily the beat we're gonna dance to. What we have tried to do because of my idee-fix about counterpoint, is we have really made very serious attempts to find out 'how robust is this idea of a physical counterpoint as opposed to an acoustic counterpoint'? And this provides a lot of interesting research.

My ideas about counterpoint I think are very much linked to an essay that had a very big impression on me in 1984 which was by Barbara Johnson which was called "Nothing Fails Like Success". You can find it on the net. And it is about the substance of deconstruction and in my opinion it describes a... I'm gonna get there... a condition that is, that tries, that imagines a non-absolute condition of language. It says yes but also, either or and neither nor. It allows contradictions to exist together. And for example you say 'counter point', well 'counter point' is a musical event. Well yes, but, could it be that the origins of counterpoint were in the bodies of the musicians? Maybe, I mean obviously, there were people with bodies playing the instruments and writing so is counterpoint something that exists as some kind of platonic idea? Or does it have something to do with the body itself?

And I had a very interesting experience in this piece called One Flat Thing, Reproduced which I've put on the internet. There are certain sections if you sync it up right, it structurally matches, perfectly, note-for-note a Beethovan symphony. Now I had no intentions to do anything to a piece of classical music nor I doubt I will in the near future though tomorrow, I mean tomorrow I'll do it probably because I just said no.

But I was shocked to see that, I said, "Well does that mean that Beethovan was a dancer? Or was Beethovan a choreographer actualy?' Or, just when you thin you've sort of abandoned one sort of structure of cultural... one fragment of cultural heritage or one category of making or organizing or thinking, accidentally shows up in the work, unconsciously, in the time of the structure.

In the time of the structure, and not in the form of the structure, but in its actually time. Pieces. Each little section was dun dun dunned un dun. So that was kind of eye opening and shocking and so I really don't know whats choreographic, what's musical, what's fine arts, what's visual arts, what's dance, I really don't know and actually I don't care. I really don't care. What's more important is the research, methodological research with the people I'm working with.

Actually, the most difficult thing is to - really have no idea. It's very frightening, you have to practice - young people listen to me, I'm old *laughs* You have to practice not knowing, you're gonna have to practice being scared shit as we say in English.

My son said, 'How come you do so well at your business?' I said, ''Cause I'm more scared than anyone. So don't be afraid to be afraid. That's probably your good little self going 'Don't produce merda' *laughs* because that's pretty much what you're concerned with. You want to be in a conversation. You don't want to be isolated from a conversation you want to participate and that's probably why you make work - you're wondering, what could be the answer to the questions that you have and, are they going to come from yourself or are they going to come from others. You don't know and you don't know where the next question will come from.

But allow yourself to not know and that's a very scary thing is to not know, and that means up to the last second - every stage of the work you have to question your own thoughts about the work and say, 'Is what I want a good idea?' and then listen to the people you work with even though you don't like what they're saying you have to go:

WHY.

And don't be frightened by commentaries or reactions that don't align with what you think you want. As they say, 'Be careful what you wish for.' I would say, doubt. doubt. doubt.

Its really a valuable skill to acquire. And if you think you know, hang it up. Give it up, 'cause you don't.

Louis Pasteur said "chance favors the prepared mind." Do your reading, don't sit around smoking and drinking, do that too but also think. But when you're there, don't try to look for your idea. It's not there in the room. Just see the people, and then try to be articulate about what you see. What is an honest description of what's happening, for example. You're in the room, what's an honest and fair description that works on a human level, in other words, that works on the humanity or the civilizing process, let's say that should be happening in the room. You should be coming more and more civilized, you can be as uncivilized as you like but on the other hand you're aware of what you're doing. But being civil is another story, being civil is a form of respect, so how does this respect manifest itself?

Its dialogic. I suggest something and what the dancers hand back and you go, 'Oh! Okay, that's what you think of that idea, oh okay.' Then if you think that then, dot dot dot and they go no no no and I go dot dot dot. So, its alive. It's a conversation. And that same conversation is going to happen with the rest of the world so you have it with yourself, then with people you work with then you put it in front of people and they go Eh and you go Yeah and they go Eh, but its a conversation. Don't expect everyone to go yes and you go yes, it ain't gonna happen.

[...] Yeah I mean philosophy is a good thing to do, I mean music sure but I question now... I like the musicality of the body but I do question now the kind of hierarchy that we've received about music being something we should interpret and our interpretation would be greater, lesser, equal to or less than the quality of the music. That was the a model for many years. That makes sense for him but what is musicality without Balanchine? Let's ask ourselves because he ain't around. So what is the musicality of the dancer? It wasn't necessarily the dancer's musicality you were watching, it was his musicality... He wanted to just do it.

So things have changed and our ideas of musicality have changed. I'm sure he would have adapted if he had seen hip hop or crumping he would have gone like, 'Okay, on the point.' And I think right now it's just a different world than the middle of the 20th century, and lets say from his point when a lot of the paradigms were established in relation to music, this idea of this big single genius thing all of it coming out of one person I just don't think that it really has the same value. I don't think we need to have that kind of model. That doesn't seem to always bring about just and fair being.

So what, could we think -- could we still get coherent ideas and, without needing the idea of this kind of absolute authority? This thing that knows exactly how to do it. I said thing, did you notice? This this, not a peson, and that's thingyness. Like people say, 'Oh you're all idea bah bah bah but the first thing I am is a human being and here's other people in the room and that's the most important thing is let's be civil or civilized with each other.

Keep yourself... indefinite. Don't try to become, it's so easy now I'm a 'William Forsythe.' I'm a thing. By the way, it doesn't take out the garbagee, it doesn't wash the dishes, *laughs* it doesn't get the mail, it doesn't do much, but it does enable me to sit here at a big table with my friends.

[...] But be careful about having an idea about who you are and what you do. So look for a categorial description of yourself within the practice that leaves you the space to move and change and become something else.

EXPLAIN! CLARIFY!

Edie - while I understand your propensity towards segmentation, this retro feels piecemeal and I'm left still wondering what you actually learned - I'm not even clear why you chose specific options or rather how the impact of your choices moved/shaped your process. Perhaps the process itself is a mode of revolution, but what have you learned from this phase of the action? This particular stand? What do you take with you as you continue moving and making art and moving?

When then is the nitrogen in the nitrogen in the ammonia molecule?

Recalling Wittgenstein’s warning: “one shouldn’t speak of things which can’t be spoken about”, we would adopt the ambiguous language of silence. But we prefer instead to propose the alternative according to which at times what can’t be spoken of can be perceived. In that case we could say, practically at random: the nitrogen is on the right. Or, if you wish, the nitrogen is on the left. Or perhaps, why not, on the right and on the left. The nitrogen, then, can be found where you take it when you look for it.

Thus, we’ve arrived at an elusive conclusion. Or if you prefer, a conclusive elusion. Or perhaps, why not, to both. (via Guiseppe Caglioti, The Dynamics of Ambiguity, p. 52)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Eugenio Barba, "The Deep Order Called Turbulence: the Three Faces of Dramaturgy," in The Performance Studies Reader, ed. Henry Hial, 252-265.

Brown, Trisha, Lise Brunel, Babette Mangolte, and Guy Delahaye. Trisha Brown. Paris: Editions Bougé, 1987. Print.

Martin, Katie Marie. Impossible Frames. 2010. Print.

Morgenroth, Joyce. Speaking of Dance: Twelve Contemporary Choreographers on Their Craft. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.

O’Donnell, Phaelon Chelsea. Relativitiet: Choreographing a Place. 2011. Print.

Making Dances [videorecording]: Seven Postmodern Choreographers. Dir. Michael Blackwood. Perf. Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Douglas Dunn, David Gordon, Kenneth King, Meredith Monk, and Sara Rudner. Insight Media, 2007. DVD.

Set and Reset [videorecording] : Version 1 / a Co-production of WGBH New Television Workshop and Trisha Brown Company: Perf. The Trisha Brown Company Performs One of Her Pieces. [New York, NY: Video D Studios], 1985. Videocassette.

Berrett, Dan. "Intellectual Roots of Wall St. Protests Lie in Academe." Intellectual Roots of Wall Street Protest Lie in Academe. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 16 Oct. 2011. Web. 24 Apr. 2013. <http://chronicle.com/article/Intellectual-Roots-of-Wall/129428/>.

Bogart, Anne. "And Then, You Act: Making Art in an Unpredictable World [Paperback]." And Then, You Act: Making Art in an Unpredictable World: Anne Bogart: 9780415411424: Amazon.com: Books. Routledge, 20 Apr. 2007. Web. 24 Apr. 2013. <http://www.amazon.com/And-Then-You-Act-Unpredictable/dp/0415411424>.

For Colored Girls "Dark Phrases" [Pt. 1 of 19]. Dir. Ntozake Shanges. YouTube. YouTube, 06 Nov. 2010. Web. 24 Apr. 2013. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVDFYruqNVQ>.

Colors of Compassion Trailer. Dir. Eloise De Leon. De Leon & De Leon in Association with Chaney, Mikich and Perez, 2012. DVD. Youtube. Youtube, 26 July 2012. Web. 24 Apr. 2013. <http://youtu.be/wpVPH6UwrNM>.

"Colors of Compassion." Colors of Compassion. Eloise De Leon, 2012. Web. 24 Apr. 2013. <http://www.colorsofcompassionmovie.com/index.html>.Colors of Compassion: A Cinematic Retreat (Teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh)

Quinn, Jason. "Heart Sutra in English." Jason Quinn. Bandcamp, 01 Dec. 2011. Web. 24 Apr. 2013. <http://jasonquinn.bandcamp.com/track/heart-sutra-in-english>.

Bonilla-Silva, E. "The Linguistics of Color Blind Racism: How to Talk Nasty about Blacks without Sounding "Racist"" Critical Sociology 28.1-2 (2002): 41-64. Print.

pre-show contents: bridging the public and the private

This introduction to the performance was originally going to focus around the NAACP Vs. the City of Yonkers case.

It was to begin in the lobby outside of the Main Stage theatre. When audience members entered, the space was to be segregated. Cast members would be in the lobby in costumes reminiscent of the segregated 1960s. Ensemble members of color were to perform custodial acts in silence without making eye contact with the outside world, while non-POC characters handled customer service and distributed tickets to incoming audience members.

Next what was to happen was that suddenly, Soma and the Ballerina Police Force would appear frozen against a wall replicating Norman Rockwell's "The Problem We All Live With" as the audience entered the lobby of Emily Dickinson Hall in groups of eight, led by the house manager.

The vision of this painting was meant for the costume designer mostly, and was intended to trigger my internal associations with the painting within the action of the show's performative moment.

The painting, which depicts an African-American girl being led to school by several non-POC cops along a wall dripping with tomato juices from the reactionary population not seeking to integrate the schools of their varying locales.

I related so much with that little girl in the picture, growing up as a middle-class African-American student in all-white schools. Despite my seeming to 'fit in perfectly' there was always something unsaid, always something that I could sense… A grinning through the teeth; the reason I chose to read "The Linguistics of Color Blind Racism: How to Talk Nasty about Blacks without Sounding 'Racist' by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. This article, had time permitted, would have been deeply explored throughout the choreographic and directorial methodology of my production.

In this paper, Bonilla-Silva indicates 'color-blind racism' as being focal to our nation's conception of racial ideology after World War II. Considering this strategic method to be notable for its clumsy apparatus, seemingly postracial attitudes, and indifference, Bonilla-Silva juxtaposes its influence against the current political climate of the USA and posits color blind racism as one of its middlemost centers of influence.

In his study, he summarizes this theorization of 'color blind racism' in the following seminal giveaways: "(1) whites' avoidance of direct racial language, (2) the central rhetorical strategies of 'semantic moves' used by whites to safely express their racial views, (3) the role of projection, (4) the role of diminutives and (5) how incursions into forbidden issues produce almost total incoherence among many whites."

Bonilla-Silva tops off this research by proposing to the academic community further commitment to discovering the rewarding components of color blind racism as something being exacerbated, ideologically, through our ancestral hauntings.

Highly influential in my directorial decision-making was my directorial background in devising ensemble based performance art, which emphasizes the public and private stages(s) and questions the participant/observer roles of performer and audience.

So, although the show's direction would come to change, I left my kept these original ideas as a score regardless.

EXCERPT FROM THE SCRIPT

Bartleby, the Scribner:

(shyly) Would you like a bootleg movie?

SOMA:

Hmm, Yeah actually! Let’s see what you’ve got!

Bartleby, the Scribner is delighted and takes out the contents of the black plastic bag. The first movie is the Wiz, which SOMA immediately puts aside..

SOMA:

I’ll take this and… Brick by Brick also, my Dad’s in it.

This moment refers to a documentary that as produced about the case entitled, “Brick by Brick... a Civil Rights Story”. Earlier in the semester I watched the film and posted Youtube clips from it onto the tumblr I had created to share with the ensemble and production team. Directed by Bill Kavanaugh, “Brick By Brick: A Civil Rights Story is a contemporary American civil rights documentary. It tells the tale of one city, Yonkers, New York and three families caught up in a confrontation that challenges- and ultimately changes – their hometown.” The film examines the lives of the following three Yonkers residents: (1)Adrien: who “lived in the projects downtown, where the city had built a ghetto of 7,000 units of public housing over a forty-year period,” who “wanted a safer home for her family.” (2)Mary and her husband who “worked hard to buy a house in their East Yonkers neighborhood. When the desegregation suit in Yonkers gathered steam, [they] worried about what might happen to their community and to the quiet streets of Lincoln Park.” and (3) Doris “a Hispanic woman with an Italian surname, and her husband Gene, an African-American, would arrive at the realtor's office in Yonkers, they were only shown homes in downtown neighborhoods, not the East Yonkers neighborhoods they were promised on the phone.”

Yonkers Desegregation Debate

Where are the dark places, the unexamined corridors of the soul now? What are we dreaming about at night but do not dare to think about during the day? (Bogart, 16)

In my opinion I see a serious correlation between the views of my choreographic muses such as Trisha Brown, William Forstyhe, Katie Martin, Susan Sgorbati, etc. and the buddhist spiritualities which I have come to follow this past year. **expand and transcribe or insert forsythe ++ write on dynamics of ambiguity.

To create this pre-show in the context of these influences, I began with the intention of creating a 'bank toss' to represent the ways in which I felt my father was tossed from bank to bank during the 2008 financial crisis.

As Jaclyn Pryor would say, "audiences love being rewarded". Therefore I sought throughout the performance to make small gestural references to future bigger sweeping movements.

To begin we went out into the EDH lobby where I assigned the name of a bank to each member of the ensemble. Creating duets with one another that were extremely informed by the lobby as a physical space as well as through improvisation, we developed some phrase material that we would end up keeping in final performances.

I say some of which and not all because after a while I realized that the Bank name calling we had incorporated into the scene (raising our voices and then lowering them, heavily inspired by the Performing Identity class scores I worked with a year prior) and cut the text, focusing the scene onto Bartleby, the Scribner who was no longer a Frenchman but a future OWS activist.

The remainder of the scene was derived from a short story/memoir that I wrote when I was about 16 years old. Much of the dialogue, in terms of the characters that I met and the situations that arose, was referenced later on during the show and sought to reflect the personal relationship amongst Occupy activists that is not always supremely accessible to the general public.

A close friend giving me feedback on the pre-show thoroughly enjoyed this experience and was actuality he one to comment on the fact that it mirrored his experience of isolation from the community within the movement. In a recent conversation regarding their opinion on the show, I learned that they felt the opening scene was the most important for them. Perhaps this has to do with the fact that they interacted with Bartleby, who was selling DVDs (only because of my story): a situation crucial to my desire to integrate the relationship between participant and observer.

During the Spring 2012 semester I was also taking a Contemporary/Modern dance technique class with Katie Martin. Concurrent to my research of Trisha Brown, I independently studied Katie Martin’s work. This included reading her Smith College MFA Thesis Impossible Frames in its entirety, and creating an annotated bibliography of its methodology. Once again I could feel in my gut that these conceptions of dance-making would stay with me through my fourth year at Hampshire.

In preparing this thesis, I dived the final product into eight parts: moment one: Wall Street/Catharsis, moment two: The City/ Articulation, moment three: The Commune/Intention, moment four: Occupation/Attention, moment five: Decolonization/Magnetism, moment six: The Police/Attitude, moment seven: Imagination/Content, and moment eight: Debt/Time.

In the process of creating this choreography, these eight pairs were explored not as ‘either-or’ or dualistic constructs but instead viewed as distinct themes upon which a spectrum of movement possibilites were investigated and fleshed out. (Martin, 53-54)

BALLERINA POLICE FORCE DAY 1 - GRIND

After coming up with a base-phrase through -of-consciousness movement invention, we extrapolated upon those concepts until we had several usable dance sequences.

BALLERINA POLICE FORCE DAY 2 - END OF TIME

Movement 1: Solo

Whole-body gesturing was another key choreographic theme for Martin’s solo in Impossible Frames.

Movement II: Duo

Duo between I. Buddington & Miriam King

Short & focused choreographic process

Another video on the NAACP VS. the City of Yonkers case: brick_by_brick

My grandmother gave me the DVD and I brought it to Hampshire with me inside a cardboard box containing the entire NAACP VS. The City of Yonkers case that my Dad had been hiding in our attic...

Although I didn't end up using the documents in the box, I did incorporate the 'Brick by Brick' idea through the set design, working alongside Sculptor Samuel Hollier and Architecture student Hester Tittman who created a series of LED-lit boxes which were meant to symbolize the city. More so, the boxes were meant to represent a broader idea of 'the structure' or 'the man'. Thus at the beginning they are a skyline, but throughout the show they are changing.

act one: WALL STREET|CATHARSIS

Americans were not yet ready for catharsis.

We have not made the necessary adjustments.

But art can help us do so.

And it is not too late.

- Anne Bogart, - And Then, You Act

the New Jim Crow recites the last page of The Stranger by Camus via Skype; Rip Van Winkle watches an afrosheen commercial at a low volume and puts on a mask to go to sleep.

the New Jim Crow:

(shouting) If I don’t hit this wall, I’m gonna have to hit someone else. I have to release the energy, because I can’t contain it.

---

This line, text from a poem I wrote first year, was meant to stand alone and play alongside the following text in syncopated rhythm.

I completely forgot about incorporating The Stranger into this scene because the way we naturally composed the ensemble's entrance was so specifically catered to Hester and Sam's decision to position the audience in a very complicated stage space - the audiences sat on boxes as well throughout the show. As a result of my desire as written into the script to have the audience as integrated into the stage space as possible.

From the start of this process I have referred to Trisha Brown's quote, "What's in a stage? It's nothing. It's just a black thing sitting there." Throughout the process I wanted to create an installed art gallery situation, in which the audience was allowed to 'take it or leave it.' In other words, I did not intend to create a work of 'theatre' necessarily, but saw the Main Stage as a gallery space within which the ensemble and I could perform alongside this epic poem what Esme Vaandrager would call "movement theatre".

---

Rip Van Winkle:

(waking up from a dream) You know they say the first woman on earth looked like me.

This statement really resonated with me and was meant to represent Rip Van Winkle as an African-American constantly watching television and taking in images of white standards of beauty. The plan at first was to make a collage in the lobby of white models' images cut out from magazines in order to represent the challenges that I faced throughout my life as an "Oreo" -- EXPAND

Soma:

(whispered) If black women were free all people would be free.

This quote stuck with me through my work in Performing Identity: Race/Gender/Sexuality in Theory and Practice and quotes the Combahee River Collective ** [CHECK] who suggest that black women face both racism and sexism and therefore if we focused our attentions on the freeing of the most oppressed identities. (or as Jaclyn Pryor or Judith Butler would say), those who are non-human. I recall Professor Pryor asking Judith Butler on Nov. 17th, 2011 (the same day we organized a huge speak-out/teach-in/ and walk-out with Occupy the 5-colleges and marched all the way to UMass shutting down two banks on the way.)

As I have been writing about extensively it was this class that was really was really special to me and also it was when I was exposed to the Combahee River Collective and the notion that if Black women were free all people would be free and also that the masters tools would never dismantle the master's house. Not only was the small dance studio in itself a really important site of memory for me but also there was just a really serious performance involving keys and a door in that I haven't been able to shake out of my memory. So I definitely wanted to incorporate that text into that show in a way that was seemingly unconventional but really inspired by my work with Esme Vaandrager whose Div 3 Flying Practice I was also in at the time that all of this was going on during the Fall 2011.

the New Jim Crow:

I'm not just trying to get out of here I want to GROW!

This text refers to alternative education and was from something I submitted about my lack of desire to receive grades. But I shifted it around so that it could represent the New Jim Crow's confinement on the inside of the prison industrial complex as an unsustainable system.

I chose to name this character the New Jim Crow for two reasons. One was because I was really inspired by Michele Alexander's talk on her book 'The New Jim Crow' which I saw while I was writing the script during the fall semester. Another reason was because I played a character called "the New Jim Crow Puppet" or "Jimbo, the Puppet" in J.D. Stokely's Spring 2010 Division III. My experiences in this show were life-altering, as Stokely's organization of ensemble warm-ups and activities included mentorships in maskmaking and authentic movement with Hampshire-alums Kaia Jackson and Esmee Vaandrager.

NOTE: Kaia Jackson also did a maskmaking workshop with Nadia and I during December 2011. She was going to do another one with the whole cast but it did not end up happening because unlike the Sexual Liberation of Mammy in which I played a puppet, there was no need for mask making in the production. Most of all I think it was an important experience for Nadia and I, who had never acted before.

the Ballerina Police Force:

(to the New Jim Crow) You're banned!

This line relates to a story I recorded when I was still conducting interviews with my father:

My father is a local umpire in the wealthy Bedford-Pound Ridge community, and my brother is MVP out of 300 players on the team. As a result (and because of their current financial status) they face a lot of overt racism on and off the field.

In the audio my dad talks about how he senses that a lot of the White Wall Street and lawyer types in the town, who are fathers of other kids on the team, know about his activist work in Yonkers and strongly resent him for it.

One day on the field another lawyer guy literally yelled to my father, "You're banned!" My father think it has to do with his being disbarred. Either way, I chose to incorporate this line into the script because of this as well as its connection to the aforementioned paper on Color Blindness.

I chose to have the Ballerina Police Force deliver the line accordingly.

THE CITY/ARTICULATION

The show really begins with a poem that I re-worked to be a conversation between Rip Van Winkle and her son, who I repositioned as being incarcerated after what happened with Foto.

To prepare for the scene Rhana and I went to Foto's house and rehearsed on numerous occasions before recording and sending the audio to James to be chopped up.

During the first weekend of performances, Nadia was mouthing the words to the poem which in retrospective I found out made her slightly uncomfortable. I had asked her to act like she was praying but unfortunately did not take the time to really rehearse it with her, which I should have done considering her nervousness and lack of experience acting on stage.

Considering some of the criticism I've received about the opening scene I think the lack of sentience* of this scene may have started the show on a dislodged note, which I accept although I'm not so sure that I would have wanted.

By the second weekend James was able to split the audio so that Nadia could speak. In a live improvisation (inspired by my work with Jules Beckman on my final solo in the MADE-In-France program), James was stationed on the cat walk the entire performance and used his experience in improvisational electronic sound design to be completely present the entire show, performing each sound clip in direct conversation with the ensemble and with the audience. Not only did he play the music for the entire show but he also overlaid little bits of experiences, which were meant to encourage an atmosphere that was perceptively whole in terms of raising sensations in all five of the senses that might foster a more wholly embodied experience -- EXPAND: S. Sgorbati, 'embodied awareness'.

The recurring reference to time situates it as a conceptual tactic which was utilized by the forefathers of the Industrial Revolution to establish wage slavery and the development of unequal managerial systems. The invention of the time-clock is a subject I discussed at length in a paper for Laurie Nisonff when I took U.S. Labor History my second year at Hampshire.

At the time of my writing I was very against common emphases on time and sought to take charge of my own sequential experiences. The writing style was inspired by two of my muses: Regina Spektor and Charles Bukowski. One song in particular by Regins Spektor, also discusses our increasing plasticity ays a commodified state whose chief food supplier Monstanto forsakes the well-being of our environment for immediate monetary gain.

The opening scene between Rip Van Winkle and the New Jim Crow relates to a motif throughout the show of circling which refers, simply put, to the circle of life while also alluding to the time-clock as a circular instrument of measure. From the start, I intended for the show to start at the beginning. The only difference between the beginning and the end of the show is that at the end of the show, the children are in control of the creation of a new structure for society. This was a nod to the hippie wisdom of Bob Dylan's activist classic "The Times They Are A'Changin'"

NOTE: The Children originally served to represent my younger brothers, never appearing on stage but rather through audio-visual manifestations. Instead, the dancers played the children and the New Jim Crow was portrayed through audio.

FOTO

It became a gift to my brothers.

The show was dedicated to my brothers because I saw it as some sort of declaration for Black men. Some sort of space where they could experience legitimacy and freedom, outside of the constraints of the racialized future that they may inevitably serve.

When Soma defeat the 'Wicked Witch' or 'Prima Policina' of Wall Street, her and Diego are in control of the establishment, which is represented through the boxes being stacked high all atop one another

In the last scene of the show, the 'children' return (the ballerina police force changed back to the childhood outfits they were wearing in the scene with the floating paper airplanes) they begin to play with different forms of creating a new type of structure.

This idea of creating a new structure is expressed when Soma says, “The masters' tools are his language.” This refers not only to the Combahee River Collective's assertion that 'The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House” (which my classmates and I created performances on during Performing Identity: Race/Gender/Sexuality in Theory and Practice.”

TRISHA BROWN

“What is a stage, its just a dark thing sitting there”

- Trisha Brown

I planned on writing a play about an NAACP case but didn’t end up doing that.

Slowly and yet quite naturally, it also turned out into an allusion of that little girl’s (my...) navigation of activism and politics, both literally and as a metaphor, as I’ve traversed these twentieth century social movements searching for hisstory, and in that.. home. *

THE CREW

I struggled for a long time in trying to figure out how to coordinate what I envisioned as working groups within the production team, which were inspired by my experiences community organizing with Occupy Wall Street. I was never really able to articulate it, however, and to this day feel there was some lack of clarity around positions of power. However I did prepare extremely thorough contracts which were very effective in outlining the responsibility of each member of the collaborative team.

*for Jordan; who was originally going to do the projection design. I asked him to sign on because his art was remnicient of Robert Rauschenberg and I was interested in the same collaboration the Trisha Brown implemented in her work. For this reason I also brought on sculptors Sam Hollier, Hester Tittman and Anastasia Galfund as co-set|props and costume designers.

Hester and Sam, co set-props designers

Q: How can the dancer’s interaction with the frame of the Main Stage be visually enhanced by the architectural set?

Bob [Robert Rauschenberg] designed an overhead structure named Elastic Carrier (shiner). The central form is a large rectangular box made of transparent white fabric stretched over an aluminum frame with two slanted internal panels. At either side of the box, a pyramidal form made of identical materials is attached. Four films of black-and-white stock footage — each film edited by Bob — are projected simultaneously on the structure, their images refracting as they pass through the planes of gauze.

Rauschenberg explains his intention for building such structures::

With their large presence on stage “hopefully [they] will diffract and register changing distortions of images in a mix to provide a hovering environment for the dance.’ The images that Rauschenberg projected are quick snippets of environmental material and designs: car tires, gasoline trucks, cows, coiled bed springs, barbed wire, chain-linked fences. The pictures create a collage of sorts, which is replicated in the designs and patterns painted on the translucent costumes the dancers wear. Visually, the set and costumes form a noticeable relationship that displays the dancer’s connection to the larger environment around them. The shared textures and imagery between the set and costumes also creates an aesthetic for the piece that highlight’s Brown’s collage-like arrangement of movement. (Phaelon, 18-19)

VIDEO: https://vimeo.com/40413626

Invited back to Ste. Baume in 1979, she [Trisha Brown] created Glacial Decoy in collaboration with the painter Robert Rauschenberg, whose work was being exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art of Toulon. The arrival of a set in Trisha Brown’s work thus happened in a totally natural manner. It was not a real set, but rather projections of black and white photographs. During it’s second run, in the autumn, in a ‘real’ theater at the Pompidou Center, the dance took on its full dimension and found its raison d’être. Engaged to dance in traditional proscenium theaters, Trisha Brown, for whom the stage is only an anonymous draught, wanted to define the space using Rauschenberg’s mobile images.

A game of visible and invisible, Glacial Decoy plays hide and seek with the spectators’ field of vision, through the photos that interfere with the dances visual impact, the wings where each performer in turn continues to dance in relation to the three other dancers remaining on stage, and finally through the costumes whose transparency reveals the shape of the body. The images give the illusion of a natural environment, an idea to which Rauschenberg returned for Set and Reset, this time projecting some films on pyramidal structures. (Brunel, 12)

- Lise Brunel // May 13, 1987 // translated from French by Ruth Barnes*

FURTHER READING:

Laurie Anderson Trisha Brown and Gordon Matta-Clark Pioneers Of The Downtown Scene New York 1970;; http://www.artlyst.com takes a video tour of Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown and Gordon Matta-Clark’s new exhibition at the Barbican. The three artists led a vibrant Manhattan art community through a period of economic crisis.Pioneers Of The Downtown Scene New York 1970s is the first exhibition to reevaluate this important body of work. The video is narrated by Curator Lydia Yee.The exhibition runs until 22 May 2011. Who are the Artists and where are the Exhibitions everyone’s talking about in London? Check out ArtLyst.com

CONCLUSION

I sought to represent the fact that language is the key to history. This alludes to Mona Seigel's, “History Is the Opposite of Forgetting” which explores the role of history, childhood and memory in the creation of historical narratives of war. It concludes that at least as far as the InterWar period in France goes, the schoolteachers were the creators of history.

One of the basic purifying functions of art is what the Greeks named catharsis. According to Aristotle, catharsis is a purifying and cleansing of the emotions brought about through the evocation of intense fear and pity in an audience. The etymology of the word "catharsis" also suggests, "to shine light in dark places.

[…] Meaningful theater experiences do shine light in dark places of the soul. To engage catharsis it is necessary to be sensitive to where the dark places are to be found at any particular moment. And this demands sensitivity to context. (Bogart, 11)

The act of performing would serve a therapeutic function. (Bogart, 14)

When you put your life into the service of what you value, that action will engender other values and beliefs. Through engagement, things happen. Movement is all. Keep moving and yet slow down simultaneously. In Latin this is known as festina lente, “make haste slowly.” Inside of this paradox, you make a space where growth and art can happen. Within the framework of art and theater you will find a special freedom and the space and time to explore complexities. It does not cost you anything. It costs you your life. (Anna Bogart, page 2 of And Then You Act: Making Art in an Unpredictable World)

I chose this quote in the script because at the time, it really summarized for me my opinion towards movement. In retrospect, I would find that it to be a semi-superiority complexed perspective. Regardless it became a mantra that I carried with me on a daily basis. “Festina Lente, make haste slowly,” inside of this paradox, I planted seeds of artistic growth and art at the same time. Particularly in the theatre, we discover the freedom to truly explore space-time continuum of spending a life-time being timed by a tiny rhythmic reminder pushing you to revolt, on and ever onward, to revolt.

The previously posted essay on Eugenio Barba was one I read on my trip to France. Which also inspired the following annotated bibliography:

Building Upon the Previous Discussion of the Potential Transformative Nature of Mourning & Melancholia

Intro

“I always took for granted that the best art was political and was revolutionary. It doesn’t mean that art has an agenda or a politics to argue; it means the questions being raised were explorations into kinds of anarchy, kinds of change, identifying errors, flaws, vulnerabilites in systems.” – Toni Morrison

“Given the methodological ideology encrypted within Morrison’s quote, it is not surprising that a postmodernist such as Anne Bogart would choose to use it to introduce her book, “And Then, You Act: Making Art in an Unpredictable World.”

Q1: When exactly, do you act?

Q2: What are some strategies (advice)/useful tools this provides to the artist?

The following quote appeared in all drafts of the script for a very specific reason. I knew I was onto something:

“When you put your life into the service of what you value, that action will engender other values and beliefs. Through engagement, things happen. Movement is all. Keep moving and yet slow down simultaneously. In Latin this is known as festina lente, ‘make haste slowly.’ Inside of this paradox*, you make a space where growth and art can happen. Within the framework of art and theatre you will find a special freedom and the space to explore complexities. It does not cost you anything, it costs you your life.” (Bogart, 2)

This quote illustrates not only the depth of Bogart’s directorial methodology, but also connects back to previous chapters on Eugenio Barba and Trisha Brown. Moreover, Bogart’s realization that “the outcome of an artistic process contains the energy of your commitment to it, expresses the traditional postmodern obsession with a process that extracts the difficult from the difficult. In my opinion, this quote also brings up questions of physiscs in the formation of a movement. The passages to follow will seek to connect (natural)laws of the universe (i.e. ‘energy can be neither created or destroyed, but never transferred. We’ll also touch upon susan sgorbati’s emergent improvisation and conclude with the role of accumulation and gravity in the clay figure.** To add: “the Key to Dancing is to Allow yourself to Fall”

So that’s what I do; ** KM

Postmodern dance-makers tend to be heavily influenced by space and the immediate architecture of their prescribed environment. (see: site dance paper?) They use the body’s physiology and natural jointedness to initiate a fractal* of kinesthesic carvings around their bodies.* The gestures they come up with are often recognized as fluid shapes that flow into the next within the architecture of the present moment. Often these dances are mobilized through improvisations and structures, similar to musical scores (J.Cage/Cunningham ref? postmodernity paper!)

I developed forming a movement in the spirit of these dance-theater makers* - elaborate on term and always sought to add quick interjections into my dances that provided an unforeseen dynamic shift much like is articulated in Barba’s *** -- ADD TO LIT REVIEW

My desire to “puncture the fluidity of my natural movement shaping” relates to the teachings of both Martin, Brown, Sgorbati*, Forsythe and Barba**.

Ballet on the Barricades and How-To Form a Movement

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

OUT OF MOVES: A DIVISION III RETROSPECTIVE BY IDALIA ISADORA BUDDINGTON

TRANSCRIPTION OF THE INTERVIEW: