Dancer Walks Away Unscathed: Or, How to Survive a Dance

What does it mean to demolish a dance? What arises in the aftermath? What becomes of a dancer who engages in such activity? These questions are increasingly prevalent in contemporary dance practices, in both the U.S. and Europe. A dancer’s claim to power over the stage space for something other than entertainment has been a theme in a number of recent experimental projects. Miguel Gutierrez’s Age and Beauty Part I (2014) ends with the dancers retaining occupation of the stage while the audience is asked to leave. Sarah Michelson’s earlier Devotion (2011) presents a dancer’s relentless dedication to the ongoing taskmaster of choreographed movement as an expression of rigorous training. Movement Research’s bi-annual MELT workshops in New York and Hope Mohr’s recent Bridge Project Rewriting Dance in San Francisco are programs that highlight a dancer’s thinking-while-moving as dance takes form. Recent writings such as the Dancer as Agent collection (developed out of a 2013 conference in Stockholm), Susan Rethorst’s A Choreographic Mind (2012), and scholarly texts that pose choreography as both a social force and a way to undermine its control, such as those by André Lepecki, Andrew Hewitt, and the late Randy Martin, all support a similar sentiment. Together, these activities indicate that a shift in the relation between dancer and dance is underway.

Simply stated, this changed perspective relocates choreographic thinking, choice, and action away from the authorial eye of an outside choreographer and instead toward a dancer within a movement scenario. With this shift, a dancer acts in relation to but is not subservient to the dance. Dance does not hold ultimate power over a dancer whose movements render it a success. Dances—or more specifically their choreographic directives—can then be considered less as stable entities than propositions for rewriting through movement. While clearly live performance differs each time, the slippage between the choreographed score and its embodied manifestation is increasingly where a different understanding of dance unfolds. Now audiences must learn how to see it. Dance’s demotion from fixed central object poses additional concerns for preservation and legacy as well. Today, Merce Cunningham’s and Trisha Brown’s dances act more productively as pedagogic innovations than as stage objects, while Nancy Stark Smith’s contact improvisation Underscore and Deborah Hay’s many word-based dance scores each demand of performers modes of presence rather than repeatable bodily forms for their manifestation. In these examples, dance preservation relies more on acts of transmission between bodies than on safeguarding an entity or stable structure.

Two recent projects in San Francisco further elucidated these concerns: Leyya Tawil’s Destroy//, presented in the grand atrium at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Christy Funsch’s weekend of Susan Rethorst’s project wrecking at the Joe Goode Annex. These two events dismantled works already on shaky ground in that each were in a process toward solidification they had not yet reached. Occurring only weeks apart in spring 2015, they together reinforced several questions: What makes a dance cohere and come into form? Need it take form for a dancer to engage it? What remains in the aftermath of its destruction?

PERFORMING DESTROY//

The forty-five minute performance of Tawil’s Destroy// at Yerba Buena occurred on the narrow cement corridor of the center’s grand atrium. The audience was seated on high stools on one long side, and also positioned to look down from the floor above. Two musicians sat at one short end of the area. Nineteen dancers dressed in shoes and fancy black trash wear (sequins, sleek and silky fabrics) walked slowly, fell and rose from the floor repeatedly, and ran and slid, turning with abandon while avoiding other bodies in the same chaotic process. The work concluded when all dancers reached the long window-filled wall facing the audience. As each body sat breathing heavily and regaining composure—what Tawil refers to as “recalibration”—the dancers sat in the aftermath and knowledge that the dance had been destroyed.

I was a dancer in this piece, which...