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CoCo Loupe
Current Issues
Professor: BeBe Miller
February 23, 2005

communicating with and practicing self/dance

Where they begin and end, one has no idea: the self, the dance and the combination of the two. They intermingle, define one another and are dependent upon one another for their borders, contents and evolutions. Practicing movement over and over again, listening to it and waiting for it to tell the self where the both of them should go translates to more than just moving about in an arbitrary state of postponement. The self gets practiced right along with the ever-changing dance. All of the elements, gender, race, spirituality, dreams, fears, habits, sexuality, physicality, life, memory, perceptions, and imagination get reinforced, recontextualized and rearranged until the mind breaks through to the body and vice versa and change rolls out. It is a two-way street of information. The self imposes its desires on the dance. The dance then stands independently with its own identity that then speaks back to the self, the maker, and the generator. Thus the roles of persuasion and influence become intertwined and inextricably linked.

As an example, there is a desire in a certain dancemaker to practice new movement ideas repeatedly in order to truly examine their basic qualities. This dancemaker wants to listen to the dance and let it move her limbs around but she realizes that within this structure her desire is to really spend time with herself and to move her self around. She wants to examine every moment within her body, environment and philosophical positioning. Is it because she feels like she doesn’t know herself and is searching for information or solutions, or is it because she knows herself enough to know that if she practices her self often enough in the lonely privacy that dancemaking provides, eventually change will occur? That could be what she wants. A new self and a new dance, not completely new but freshly inspired and/or at least thoroughly considered. Susan Rethorst, in her "Dailiness" article states:

Dailiness requires a simultaneous tuning in to time and the absence of time. One has to know and not know, prefer and not prefer, empty oneself and acknowledge one’s fullness, be passive and charged. It has to happen to you and from you. It has to be too fast for you to take in and done in baby steps….one leaking into the other (Rethorst).

This is a crossroads not always made apparent to the dancemaker through various forms of education and training. One is taught in many cases that they must drive always, make always, push always, create, mold, and build constantly. It is a fearful and adventurous time when one realizes that to surrender, yield, be quiet and listen is quite possibly the next step toward growth and/or paring down.

Inasmuch as repeated visits to a certain movement idea open that movement up to more choices and pathways, repeated recognition of the self through motion and personal gesture opens the self to more opportunities for awareness and reflective acknowledgement. In fact, the following inquiry could be pondered. If one is listening for cues from an unmade dance about where it should go, what it should say, how it should look and act, it could be posited that one is actually listening for cues from one’s self or oneself and the interpreter/filter/mediator is the evolving dance. Maybe the dancemaker is hearing about his/herself from his/herself and the information is filtered through the movement. Where to go, what to say, how to look and act are answered through the dancing. The dance is a physical manifestation of the dancemaker’s conversation with his/herself. It is physicalized communication that had previously only existed between the mind and muscles of the dancemaker. The body is enacting the conversation. Erich Harth, in his book The Creative Loop, explains this creative feedback when he writes the following:

It is instructive to examine the procedure employed in some of the creative arts. An artist may have an idea for a painting but he may not immediately go to the canvas. Instead, he often begins with a series of sketches. But why sketch? Why is it necessary to externalize the idea conceived in the brain, and then have the brain examine it? For a composer the keyboard is a sketchpad. In every creative act we observe this bootstrap process in which nascent ideas are externalized and then taken in again by the brain to be reexamined and modified in a creative loop (Harth, 75).

 

It is possible in this brief discussion to consider that the dance is the "creative loop." (Harth, 75). It is caught, framed and structured in a physical form and eventually a presentation of some sort. Whatever exists in the neural passages between the brain, the self and the body, or the loop is made evident by the dancemaker in his/her choreography.

What is most interesting about this premise is that the conversation, the loop is different everyday for every dancemaker, and in the real-time embodiment of the loop, the dancemaker can choose to override or exchange certain chunks of the information contained in the loop. This may be why it is so hard to explain or articulate what happens in the creative process of building, hearing, seeing, listening to, ignoring, structuring, supporting, cradling, and trashing dance pieces. Again, Susan Rethorst states the following in her article, "Dailiness:"

The reason to make one decision versus another is also the pleasure in the work, is also the interesting in the work is also the mind of the work, is also the play of the work. The goals of the artist are all contained in that moment by moment ongoingness which occupies the reason, intellect, curiosity, hunger, patience, regard. It is a sober regard, not led first and foremost by adrenaline and endorphins , but every bit as much of the body and about the body. But on what do you base your decisions; how are led by that stranger, the unmade dance, regarding with curiosity and modesty where the dance will go, as how a child will grow , a show any experience will unfold? (Rethorst).

On one hand, the process feels like a natural stream of consciousness of the self that flows in and out without much effort and on the other hand, it feels like a constant flux of taking inventory, adjusting value systems and arbitrarily deciding what gets choreographed and what does not. All the while the dialogue is continuing and the art and the self are simultaneously being made.

At first glance, the politics of this idea seem highly personal and introspective. However, the more one studies and lives with their own "creative loop" the more they contemplate and understand their placement in a larger context. The "creative loop" (Harth, 75) for instance isn’t just an esoteric, daydreamy, creative masturbation. It includes the dancemaker considering mundane issues like what they want to have for dinner as well as deep seated questions of morality, social consciousness, ethical behavior and/or aesthetic theorizing all while exploring physical expression. These issues get filtered into the dance and thus reflect the dancemaker’s personal extrapolations and opinions about the world in which they exist. Here, a passage about improvisation from Ann Cooper Albright’s article "Researching Bodies: The Politics and Poetics of Corporeality" resonates in a related tone:

Improvisation can lead us out of our habitual responses by opening up alternative experiences, encouraging dancers to explore new possibilities and desires not only physically, but critically too. Why not let our improvisational practice, as well as the physicalities that experimental dance cultivates, lead us into an engagement with the world instead of away from it? (Albright).

There is something to be said for this secret treasure of information that gets passed down from dancemaker to performer to dancemaker to performer to teacher to mentor. It may not be marketable, and dance may not be appreciated because of its inability to reach the masses but one thing is for sure, investigation will never stop because all artists function on something akin to a creative loop. Until those internal processes cease to happen, the creation of the art and the self continues. The questions and conversation that exist internally between the choreographer and their body and the bodies of dancers and the movement they perform constantly get released out into the open and become applicable to the world at large. This happens regardless of whether or not anyone is there to witness the act or the product. These could be considered idealistic thoughts, but in the face of such adversity in the field at large it is comforting to know that art lives and evolves as long as artists breathe and do the loop.

Works Cited

Albright, Ann Cooper. "Researching Bodies: The Politics and Poetics of Corporeality." Class Handout, Current Issues. The Ohio State University. Winter 2005.

Harth, Erich. The Creative Loop: How the Brain Makes a Mind. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company. 1993.

Rethorst, Susan. "Dailiness." Class Handout, Current Issues. The Ohio State University. Winter 2005.