First Drop

March 28, 2008

Video Episode One: POW!

Enjoy this first in a series of collaborations between choreographer Jessy Smith and videographer Ren Casey.

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March 27, 2008

POW VS. FONTANAS, a photo montage

SNEAK A PEEK AT THE GIRLY GIRL POW BAND BACKSTAGE

BROOKLYN AND LAURA SING CHOREOKAY WITH OUR LIVE BACKUP DANCERS

THE GIRLS GET DOWN TO THE GROUND CRAZY WITH DEATHMASK!

OUR LESSON LEARNED: YOU'VE GOT TO GET UP TO GET DOWN

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March 24, 2008

What I Want From Purgatory

Here are some things I have been writing in my journal about the piece. Working from filmic inspirations such as Alphaville and The Exterminating Angel, a Twilight Zone episode ("Five Characters in Search of an Exit"; first part is above, other two below) and After Dark by Haruki Murakami, I am imagining the following scenario:

So, how have these people come here?

It is as if they have been absorbed from the flow of time and brought into a paralyzed present. They have been sucked out of their living rooms and workplaces, and now they are held in this wasteland. They have their words, conditioned bodies and expressions, but in this place words have lost their meanings and meanings their words. They cannot name where they are or the state that they are in; they can only iterate and reiterate their vocabulary, and re-experience what it could mean, hoping to stumble upon resonance: true meaning. They are held captive by this static present. Not the kind of present that flicks by effortlessly, making each moment the amalgam of present and future, but they are in a time hold. The present remains terribly cordoned off from what has been and what will be.

The are only two bridges back to processional time. First: their physical vocabulary, a series of gestures that they do not understand the origin of. Their miserable physical uniqueness alludes to a past and a future, but the function of their self, though it will theoretically propel them from this purgatory of inertness, means nothing as of yet. 'Yet' itself seems unachievable. The other bridge is an array of points in the space; these points, tangible beneath their feet, but understated and obscured in significance, indicate the other, and the past. What one is to do to connect one's ingrained history to this space of ennui remains unclear.

Their bodies contain all. Everything is somehow accounted for and has been said through their bodies. They are capable of being birthed, dying, feeling sorrow, joy and terror, loving and hating. But they do not know in what order or why they would do such things. How can this timeless world make the time and placement of these events more than a constant reminder of the dolorous nature of their respective individualities? Are they doomed to become further agents of abstraction, mimicking the arbitrary array of points beneath them? Will they go mad, attaching sorrow and disappointment meaninglessly to the random points, reinforcing the paralyzing present through an unwarranted narrative? Or can they reintegrate themselves into the flow of time, and make this desolate, uncaring space have traction in the story of their lives?

________________________

This is about the stage. This profoundly inert, uninteresting place, with a voyeuristic bias. How do you justify arriving there and being there? And the challenge is to bring something meaningful. To you and for others. How can you avoid showing something more than what has been rehearsed into you (conditioned)? How do you get your shit on stage? I mean, that which composes your life (i.e., your shit) on stage? Being on stage is like being in purgatory. When you come on from stage right, you leave your past, and when you exit stage left you walk into your future. In the middle stands the present of indeterminate length. How do we connect the three and ask them to have validity to one another? And our relations onstage: they too should have traction and be more than touching for the voyeurs. We must consider what we do with our onstage partners.

Lately, I have felt that the product does not excuse the process. It is not okay to ask people to invest themselves in a miserable rehearsal period with the promise of onstage bliss. I want both: a happy, fulfilling process and a truly engaged, vibrant set of performances. They must relate to one another--especially when I am both director and performer.

I cannot say that when I treat my partner like shit onstage, it is not related to my life. It must be somehow woven into the fabric of "everything else". That's not to say that the stage is the same as "everything else" or we should only portray the world in which we aspire to live in, but that what we do onstage is integrated with our past, future, and selves, because it is literally a part of our being. The special things that happen there to have significance to what comes before and after.

Posted by Jacob Peter Kovner at 12:18 PM - Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

March 17, 2008

Two adjacent people (and other problems)

So today is going to be the day that I just talk masturbatorially about my process. The two biggest influences on my process, to date, have been Meg Stuart and William Forsythe. The Forsythe influence lends a deconstructivist approach towards physicality (while keeping the physicality integral), while Meg Stuart's influence enables me to work with human states, emotion and the physicality of therein. I did a workshop with her last summer and found out, to my surprise, that working with emotional states does not all have to be play-acting and make-believe, but once can actually work unpretentiously with the physicality of feeling. That shocked me because I'm American, and we don't do that. That said, I am really glad to have the American attitude that physicality is integral to performance, even if we don't want to call it "dance" outright (or if we do).

The process for this upcoming piece in July has been really interesting. This piece will be a duet for me and my good friend Anna Whaley. In addition to the difficulties of directing one's self (always a challenge), this is also the first time that I've made a duet. While working with Anna, the first challenge I was confronted by was how to work with the pre-suppositions of a man and a woman juxtaposed on the same stage. How does it become more than "boy meets girl" and the ensuing, probably romantic relationship? What is the broader spectrum of interactions between two people? Things that come to mind: inert co-existence, antagonism, symbiosis, platonic love, romantic love, dominance and subjugation, witnessing, etc... Actually, the politics of being together are quite negotiable, but hard to keep from over-simplification with an audience. I guess what I'm trying to go after is an on-stage relationship that is constantly being (re)negotiated.

We have been thinking a lot about time and space. Sounds very "Composition 101," I know. But here's how we've been thinking about space: how can a proscenium stage, which is made to have as few points of interest as possible, be made into a space with history? How can we impose our personal histories onto the space? You'll have to see what our devices are (and so will we, to some extent). In terms of time, we've been thinking about our personal mythologies. How we freeze-frame moments in our life and incorporate them into our identities? How, subsequently, we can renegotiate and re-interpret those moments? How these moments can gain and lose relevance when they are pitted against the mythologies of other people, or be abstracted or reinvigorated by somebody else? This is what we are after.

And then, what happens to our personally mythologies and bring them to a space like a stage, where there is no evidence of anybody having been there before or coming after. Who do we become in the face of the moral, social and physical relativism imposed by a proscenium stage? The stage cannot make us into anything but frontal. It does not condition us, we arrive and leave pre-formed and pre-conditioned.

Here is a quotation from Godard's fantastic film Alphaville:

Time is like a circle, which turns endlessly. The descending arc is the past. The arc that climbs is the future.

Everything has been said provided words do not change their meanings and meanings their words.

It is not obvious that someone who customarily lives in a state of suffering requires a different sort of religion from a person habitually in a state of well-being.

Before us, nothing existed here. No one. We are totally alone here. We are unique, dreadfully unique. The meaning of words and of expressions is no longer grasped. An isolated word, or a detail of a design can be understood but the meaning of the whole escapes.

Here's the trailer for that film:

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March 6, 2008

POW! Delving into the 20's, 50's and 60's

The POW! girly girl band working hard both in the dance and the music studio

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Jillian Hollis, Kiersten Franz and Molly Merkler rehearse to the Shangri-Las

In the dance studio we are playing with the sounds and feels of the 1920's and 50's. For the 20's, we are doing that classic swing thing and throwing just a touch of old school hip-hop in the mix. Choreographically, I'm designing the bodies to create plaids. Costumes will probably accentuate this. I'm thinking fringe with multicolored gloves and tights. I want to see plaid pop out in the space now and again. POW! PLAID!

For the 50's scenario, I'm basically mixing ska with the Shangri-Las sound- both classic 50's, very cool and easy breezy. I'm using circle imagery mixed with lots of percussive isolation. For costumes, I need something that will accentuate the calmness of the circles (flowing fabric perhaps) but will not hide sharp movements. Perplexing...

Katie Atherton on the Harmonica Molly Merkler on the Guitar

On the music side of the board, debuting this Friday at Fontanas, the girly-girl band will perform their first ever song and dance with live instruments! (they also will be doing a little Choreokay, our favorite karaoke songs with live backup dancers)

This was my attempt to see if I can make live music work with the dancing, and Katie and Molly really pulled through! ALRIGHT!!!!! I'm feeling super about their new 1960's inspired number to These Boots are Made for Walkin', where they transform from two meek geeks into raucous riot girls. Let's see what happens when they get in front of an audience... It's our little experiment with being a dance band that actually plays their own music.

You're invited to deathmask's Wonderful CD Release party!

FRIDAY MARCH 7!!

at FONTANA'S

105 Eldridge St. between Broome and Grand

Horny Worms 9pm

POW! girly girl band 10pm

deathmask 1030pm

DJ Dawn all night!

Posted by Jessy Smith at 7:02 PM - Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Wrestle Me Beautiful

I have just started reading Roland Barthes' Mythologies. Call me a Forsythe wannabe if you like, but I think that post-structuralism has a lot of resonance for dancers. I know Forsythe and other choreographers have read and been inspired by Barthes and Derrida, and I really think that the post-structuralists have tapped into issues that are highly pertinent to the field. Barthes writes in his preface, "The starting point of these reflections was usually a feeling of impatience at the sight of 'naturalness' with which newspapers, art and common sense constantly dress up a reality which, even though it is the one we live in, is undoubtedly determined by history." (11)

What we consider to be a 'natural' dance is, as pointed out by others, anything but. Theatrical dancing, although it is one of my favorites, is most certainly a genre determined by the normative history it has acquired throughout the ages. Nature and history, Barthes says, are not to be confused. So where are those pre-conceived notions of naturalness in dance? How is our history represented? Barthes talks about the determining 'petit-bourgeoisie' values that determine the idea of the 'natural' within the medium? How do those manifest?

It seems to me that, far too often, the dancer is still a sylph; dehumanized, and generally subjugated to the ideologies of the cult of the 'body beautiful' or music visualisation. Dance remains transcendental, and thus inaccessible. Barthes writes subsequently about the theatrical value of wrestling: "There is no more a problem of truth in wrestling than in the theatre. In both, what is expected is the intelligible representation of moral situations which are usually private... Wrestling is an immediate pantomime, infinitely more efficient than the dramatic pantomime, for the wrestler's gesture needs no anecdote, no décor, in short no transference in order to appear true." (19) Wrestling's appeal, according to Barthes, lies in the fact that it is a (semi-)composed theatrical act, in which the physicality requires 'no transference' or suspension of disbelief to be engaged with. The sylph, who with her ethereal grace defines that which is beyond mere human physical expression, creates here appeal the opposite way. Through playing the transcendental, mystical card, such dancers (and the choreographers who use them) impose such a huge burden of transference upon both the dancers and the audience. Dance is one of the only fields that has actively cultivated lack of plausibility and elimination of immediacy. Particularly in America, where performance after performance is done in a black box on black Marley with black curtains on either side. The space effectively eliminates history, or any points of history, immediacy or interest. The space gives the audience nothing to grab on to, and the dancer leads the audience even further away. It primes the pump of the transcendentalism and etherealism that dance has come to rely on. The wrestler gives his audience immediacy. Dance, most often, deliberately evades immediacy; virtuosity with a pretense of ease seems to be the epitome of that attempt. If we are going for any sort of verismo, that direction of effort seems to be misguided.

While I don't know what Barthes' would say about black box theatres vs. use of spaces that cultivate histories, I would tend to think that rethinking space and encouraging the décor that Barthes sees as anecdotal, would at least offer the performer, choreographer and audience the opportunity to interact with pressing physical realities; an immediacy of a sort. I think it iss important to realize that when you elect to use a black box, you are choosing the absence of something.

On a slightly different note, I think Barthes expresses what I was trying to say about figure skating, except he does it much much better. He writes, "It is not true that wrestling is a sadistic spectacle: it is only an intelligible spectacle." (20) I think you could probably replace wrestling with figure skating in that sentence.

Let's try it with dance:

"It is not true that [dance] is a sadistic spectacle..."

Oh dear, I've seen some performances lately that have put that much to the test.

"...[dance] is only an intelligible spectacle."

That's just false.

Let's work on that.

And now, some more wrestling:

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. by Annette Lavers. New York: Hill & Wang, 1972.

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March 4, 2008

Video Episode One: About "About-ness"

Videographer Dorian Nuskind-Oder has partnered with Jacob Peter Kovner to present this first of three video episodes detailing Jacob's choreographic process.

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