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Animation was something I had to learn to
embody. As a musician in a dancer's body, (I'd studied
violin seriously for nine years before dropping it for
dance), making shapes on the pulse beat or moving within a
carefully orchestrated choreography came easily but wasn't
enough to animate the stage with a truly vital presence.
Despite my reliability in rehearsal or on stage when it came
to finding the dancers' place in the music, Martha Graham
would scold me, "Peter, you are dancing with the music, not
empowered by it and dominating it. You are getting lost in
the music. Too conscientious, too loyal to the music..."
...so little time to be born to the moment...
As a choreographer in a dancer's body, (dancing my own
dances), I had to drop the thinking about, calculating, or
projecting ahead in order to bring the movement to life, to
animate the material, to annihilate the separation of dancer
from the dance. I wondered what a certain critic meant when
she would identify me as an "intelligent" dancer in reviews
of works by Martha or myself. Somehow it wasn't so
flattering--this idea of a dancer visibly pondering the
movement, one step removed from the action. Or was dance to
be a passionately "studied" engagement, a "commentary upon",
an intellectual pursuit with feeling?
So the idea of pre-ordained choreography,--whether plotted
and dictated by some cryptic system of notation, or by a
visualization of the musical score recorded in the mind's
eye to then impose upon my dancers at the next
rehearsal--gradually lost its appeal over the years. I
released my grip on controlling the process and gained in
confidence, discovering the joys of spontaneously creating
movement "within the moment", as a partner to the music (if
indeed I was even working with a score) vs. its mimic, its
parrot, its devoted slave. Blessed with dancers who could
quickly pick up movement as it came tumbling out of my
twitching body, I could step back and enjoy the sequencing
and overlaying of danced voices, of the movement upon the
music, of sympathetic universes sharing an essential force.
Most important, I watched the space come alive with
unexpected textures, densities and forces,--unstudied, not
ponderous, not even "intelligent", rather, effortless,
mirroring my vision of a world in a state of exquisite chaos
and grace. I was free to animate the space. After 26 years,
my body spins out the stuff without noticeable lag-time
between the impulse and the image. I no longer labor over
the material, plot elaborate diagrams and prepare phrases to
"teach" verbatim to my obedient dancers. At last, the
animator inhabits the dancer's body...just as the body
begins to show its first signs of wearing down, i.e. middle
age.
Jason Marchant asks me to act as faculty advisor for his
Life Forms project. I think of my first dance idol, Merce
Cunningham, master animator of post-modern dance. While
Merce may no longer be master of his own animated body, he
has become the master puppeteer of his young dancers and of
the computerized figure via Life Forms,-- a sorcerer of the
electronic screen. I am asked to sponsor my students in an
effort that expresses a kind of regression for me,--from
hard-won ease of instant movement image production
in-studio, in-body, to calculated imaging of an artificial
body, out of body, while sitting at the computer. I ask
myself: Is this my fate? My students' fate? Do I prepare for
my own afterlife-as-image entombed on disc? It's all so
Egyptian!: hieroglyphs in suspension... And how important is
it for my students to first inhabit their bodies as the
instantaneous source of all impulse and image,--to LEARN TO
DANCE--before sitting for hours in front of a computer
screen manipulating figures on a grid, imaging movement
mutations which they then set on their cast of willing
subjects who imitate these double-jointed, cut-out doll
images in some 3-D space-age ballet?
But let's suspend judgement for a moment to consider the
possibilities...
Life Forms figures: 1: mobile trellises upon which to grow a
variety of hybrid species 2: catalysts to encourage
mutations which arise in the interaction of animated figure
with live dancer, remaining open to the variables arising
from interpretation or adaptation of animated figure by the
dancers 3: a means to electronically preserve and send
choreographic information, make it accessible, free,
communal, cumulative, station-to-station,
stage-to-stage.
And why burden the process of choreography with either the
aging body's limitations or the clumsiness and inexperience
of a fledgling choreographer's first tentative stabs at
making movement in the studio space, if precious space is
even available? So diminish the lag between the impulse as
it fires the image in the mind's eye and its manifestation
as it is printed onto the screen. Forsake the real body for
the virtual body in order to realize the hyperreal body and
its potential as a composite of the imagination's fancy and
its eventual reading by the virtuosic dancer. A new breed of
dancer arises along with the new breed of movement composer,
making for a novel, collaborative operatic form: arias by
Life Forms morpher divas danced with mind-bending facility,
speed, boneless elasticity and divine distortion...like
Merce's dancers, his particular strain of brainy animal
taken to new and varied extremes...
Where has this flight of fancy led me? Perhaps I see a new
breed (Argh. Echoes of Isadora's frightening prophecy, "I
See America Dancing"...) of student, firing away those motor
impulses via computer and recognizing the need to stumble
away from the keyboard into the studio space to explore his
or her own body's potential to actually do the stuff! Hey,
what a way to learn to move, side-stepping an imposed
technique, method, or stylistic orientation! But then what
of the knowledge gleaned by our forbears, those maverick
moderns forging the phrase, plying the space, mining body
and soul in their New York studios to invent the art form
called Modern Dance, or by the new body artist/scientists,
the mind-body folks, the ideokinesis researchers, release
technique or contact improv holy rollers, the neos and the
new wavers and the post-post ragers? What of the real stuff
of the body, of weight and soul, of gravity and grace?
No problem. The technology only feeds the tradition,
promoting further invention, movement variation and another
mirror on the inventor. The process mirrors the thoughts,
feelings, esthetics, and images of the processor--whether
on-screen or on stage--while extending the learning loop.
What is thought by the choreographer is seen in the mind's
eye is imprinted on the screen is learned by the dancer is
remembered is experienced is performed for the viewer, and
is in turn experienced by the viewer while it is remembered
is imprinted is seen is thought, entering into an
interfacing stream of perception and experience with the
next inundation of imagery, leading us--dancer and audience
alike--repeatedly and inevitably back through the body. The
body is the transmitter and resonator. It contains all. No
more the need to demarcate exclusive territories. The Life
Forms screen makes that all too obvious, that it is only one
piece of THE ACTION, one more site along the route of
transmission. The body, with both its inbuilt and accessory
technologies, remains the ultimate tool...to the future. To
the "now".
...so little time to be born to the moment....
I suppose some of my future students will take to the
computer as I once did to the violin; they will learn to
tune the instrument, practice it hour upon hour in isolation
facing a series of notated signals, perform on it, and make
music for other bodies to interpret and appreciate. Some
will set aside such an extension or appendage of the body in
order to get up and dance, as I did,--compelled to engage
directly with their bodies-as-animators, experiencing
simultaneously the mind and muscle as instantaneous
projectors and mirrors or screens upon which the unfolding
imagery is printed and performed. They will learn that the
impulse-as-image springs as easily from the muscle as from
the brain, feeding both and annihilating the lag between the
visceral and the visual. Some will learn to revel in both
choreographic technologies-- whether on-screen computer
progams or in-studio live action --as mutual means to
discovering movement with seamless intelligence, grace and
an understanding of the body's infinite potential for
permutation and expression. They will learn with time and
countless efforts that there is a wisdom in the dancing body
which will not be betrayed by any technique or technology;
rather, that wisdom, (sometimes very personal and
idiosyncratic in style, sometimes more broadly accessible
and universal), will be revealed and enhanced by those
techniques and technologies which, in the end, serve the
living, dancing figure in real space and time.
And their students, in turn, will explore new "takes" on
technologies and new loopings back to the body, transforming
both in a slow spiral through changing times and generations
of choreographers.
My plea to future students: teach your teachers well.
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