April 25, 2007

Reflections on "The Nothing Festival" at DTW

Last Saturday I attended "The Nothing Festival" at Dance Theater Workshop in New York. I saw the evening performances by four choreographers and attended an afternoon discussion led by the festival's curator Tere O’Connor.

I enjoyed the panel discussion but, overall, I didn't find the performances very interesting. In the reviews I link to below, there's a lot of praise for Dean Moss' work. So I'm going to follow-up with Eva Yaa Asantewaa and Apollinaire Scherr to try to understand what I missed.

In this post I would like to address Tere O'Connor's disdain for and anger that is directed toward both dance critics and dance funding organizations. It appears that his contempt for these two pillars of the "dance establishment" is a big part of his motivation for organizing The Nothing Festival.

Before exploring this topic, I'd first like to direct you to links about "The Nothing Festival":

- Eva Yaa Asantewaa's review, "Much ado about...something" in her new InfiniteBody blog

- On Apollinaire Scherr's Foot in Mouth blog, there are a number of posts and comments about The Nothing Festival - including from me and Tonya Plank with whom I saw discussion and performance:

** GO: Dean Moss at the Nothing Festival, plus thoughts on "nothing"

** Readers respond to thoughts on the Nothing Festival

** Doug Fox: Skip the Funders--and go direct to the Internet

** Tonya Plank: More reflections on the Nothing Festival

- New York Times review, "Choreographing From Scratch With No Recipe," by Roslyn Sulcas

- Gia Kourlas interview with O'Connor in Time Out New York - "Much ado about nothing: Tere O’Connor skims the fat off the creative process in his new festival"

The Inspiration for "The Nothing Festival"

O'Connor believes that the requirements of funding organizations are diametrically opposed to the creative-process that inspires dance making. In the Kourlas interview in Time Out New York, he says:

One thing that’s always been difficult for me, and that I think has had an effect on the entire form, is grant-writing and talking about my work in a narrative way in advance. But it’s always requested. For people who are able, early on, to elucidate the thematic information of their work, there’s almost a value system that says, “That’s better.” It’s more fundable. My complete interest is in using choreography as an abstract documentation form: You choreograph in the moment you’re in, ideas adhere to a dance and it becomes something, but you locate it through the process of choreographing. So the artists I’ve chosen [for "The Nothing Festival"] seem like people who work in that vein or whose work isn’t about representation or re-representation.

O'Connor is also annoyed by dance critics. At the very beginning of the panel discussion Saturday afternoon, O'Connor referred to Roslyn Sulcas' New York Times review as "myopic" and thought the article with unnecessarily dismissive of the festival. Sulcas wrote that "the four pieces were amateurish and sketchy."

Presumably Mr. O’Connor wanted to free these choreographers from habitual constraints, but the result was mostly a self-indulgent free-for-all that replaced the disciplined shaping of raw material with self-expression. That is not choreography; it’s just acting out.

I believe that O'Connor's criticism of dance writers is completely unwarranted. Dance writers, contrary to his wishes, have every right to use a word, a phrase or an entire review to blast a dance piece if they choose to. That is actually the job of a critic - to say if they like a piece or don't like a piece.

But I sympathize much more with O'Connor's frustrations with the funding process. It simply does not make sense for some choreographers and dancers to submit detailed funding proposals about work that has not yet been created. And for choreographers with a more abstract, less narrative approach, writing a storyline for a future work can crosses into the land of absurdity. If meaning derives from the movement itself, how can you use words to impose meaning on movement when that's not how you create dance?

Rethinking the Dance Eco-System

It's fine for choreographers and dancers to express their frustrations toward our "capitalist" economic system as they did during the panel discussion, but it would be more valuable to discuss how dance-makers can work within our existing economic structures to pursue the creative avenues they wish to explore.

If funding organizations require narrative where none exists or descriptions of works that have yet to be imagined, then what other economic models can dancers pursue to finance their dance works? This is what I wrote in a comment to Apollinaire Scherr:

Why does everybody assume there are no alternatives to financing new dance works besides seeking the blessing of funders? If funders impose too many burdensome requirements on choreographers and dancers, I say, forget the funders!

The Internet offers some wonderful tools for seeking small donations from large numbers of people. Through viral marketing, fundraising badges, innovative uses of online videos and other tools and software applications, I'm very confident that many dancers can bypass the burdensome process of writing grant applications and reach out to online dance enthusiasts. There's no longer any reason for dance people to compromise their approach to the creative process in order to package their work in ways that funders deem appropriate.

I may have overstated my point a little. But I think it's time that choreographers and dancers start exploring new Internet models for financing upcoming projects. While at the same time, it's important to continue working with funding organizations to explore new approaches to seeking financial support. For example, are funding organizations open to supporting projects because of the specific approach taken to the creative process as opposed to requiring a specific narrative framework?

And in terms of dance criticism and writing, I don't see any benefit to viewing dance writers in antagonistic terms. Dance writers play an important role in educating the general public about dancers and dance performances. But in terms of looking forward, there are some important ways that dance companies can help dance writers be more successful and reach larger audiences.

I've written extensively about how dance writers can embrace the Internet in new ways by incorporating video footage into their reviews in order to give readers a better understanding of specific dance pieces and dance in general. I believe that choreographers and dancers should provide video footage of their dances to writers so that dance critics can begin to explore these new online journalistic possibilities. This multimedia dance coverage will reach more people than ever before, which will build new and larger audiences for dance.

At the same time, dance writers need to be given complete freedom to use online video clips in the ways they deem most appropriate without any limitation on how they go about covering and critiquing dance performances.

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