cypher.myself
My dancing has become so hard to decipher.
And I assume that this is true for a large number of contemporary works. With the move away from modern aesthetics, with storytelling dominating many dance works (with exceptions, of course: most famously Merce Cunningham) the maker-viewer agreement was much clearer: The choreographer would make it her responsibility to communicate clearly. Now, with many dance makers and dancers based in a wide array of body techniques and somatic practices, the viewer can’t rely on the previous, linguistic modes to understand a dance. (Questions like: “What is this dance saying?” “What story is it telling?” “What is its vocabulary, its syntax?” are leading to little productive answers, as far as I am concerned.)
So recently, I have made it my practice to dive into this illegibility some more. I am not excluding gesture from my improvisations, but am trying to have them read as movement, rather than as means to the end of communicating. (And yet still, SOMETHING will be communicated regardless, to anyone watching.) What exactly that something is, I do not care much about at the moment. Arrogant? No. Avoiding artistic responsibility? Maybe.
Trying to find out more. Drop me a note if you have thoughts about this. I’d very much appreciate it.
arihoffmann at
macdotcom
