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Curation & Collaboration in American Post-Judson Dance

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Curation & Collaboration in American Post-Judson Dance Colby College Digital Commons @ Colby Honors Theses Student Research 2015 Co-Authorship in Action: Curation & Collaboration in American post-Judson Dance Sara Gibbons Colby College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/honorstheses Part of the Dance Commons Colby College theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed or downloaded from this site for the purposes of research and scholarship. Reproduction or distribution for commercial purposes is prohibited without written permission of the author. Recommended Citation Gibbons, Sara, "Co-Authorship in Action: Curation & Collaboration in American post-Judson Dance" (2015). Honors Theses. Paper 771. https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/honorstheses/771 This Honors Thesis (Open Access) is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Research at Digital Commons @ Colby. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Colby. CO-AUTHORSHIP IN ACTION: CURATION & COLLABORATION IN AMERICAN POST-JUDSON DANCE Sara Gibbons Honors Thesis in Theater and Dance Annie Kloppenberg May 15th, 2015 2 Table of Contents List of Illustrations………………………………………………………………………3 Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………….4 Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………..5 Chapter 1………………………………………………………………………………..12 An Introduction to the Instability of Authorship Chapter 2………………………………………………………………………………..21 Early Modern Dance, Judson Dance Theater, and the Evolution of Collaboration Chapter 3………………………………………………………………………………..33 Post- Judson Artists: Creation is Collaboration Chapter 4………………………………………………………………………………..43 Authorship in Action Chapter 5………………………………………………………………………………..55 The Choreographer-Curator Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………67 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………….75 3 Illustrations Figures 1. Martha Graham 24 2. How to Pass, Kick, Fall, and Run 27 3. Yvonne Rainer: Terrain 30 4. Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Ravel: Landscape or Portrait? 34 5. Heidi Henderson 36 6. Xan Burley and Alex Springer 38 7. Way In 41 8. Into the Frame of Us A 46 9. Into the Frame of Us B 48 10. Into the Frame: Charlie, Kathryn, Chandler 51 11. Into the Frame of Us: Emilie 53 4 Acknowledgments I would like to thank the Theater and Dance department for its support throughout this yearlong endeavor, as well as Heidi Henderson, Silas Riener, David Dorfman, Jenna Riegel, Xan Burley, Alex Springer, Kellie Lynch, and Kate Enright for their insights and for taking the time to speak with me. I would also like to thank Todd Coulter for his thoughtful and generous feedback. Finally, I would like to thank Annie Kloppenberg; it has been a privilege to work with her on this project. Her unparalleled guidance and tireless editing have pushed me to become a better critical thinker, writer, and artist. 5 Introduction Dance and America maintain a complicated relationship. Contemporary dance audiences could be described as esoteric and minimal, yet as Jan Van Dyke reminds us “Dance classes for little girls are considered part of growing up in many American families.”1 As a form, it intrigues people, as evidenced by the popularity of television shows such as So You Think You Can Dance and Dance Moms, but concert dance is by no means widely followed, accepted, or understood. Historically, according to Jo Butterworth and Liesbeth Wildshut, dance has been neglected for countless reasons: its ephemerality and transience, low social status, nominal documentation, and lack of cannon and literature, to name a few.2 Postmodern dance maintains an even more inferior position. This essay aims to illuminate and champion concert dance through an investigation into a sliver of American postmodern dance, which I term post-Judson dance, in an attempt to better understand, define, and assert dance in academe, art, and culture. In this essay, I examine the use and benefits of collaboration in today’s dance devising processes and the influences that constructed collaboration as a choreographic working method. Ultimately, I argue that today’s choreographers are curators. Contemporary choreographers arrange and highlight the artistry of their collaborators by supporting and crafting individuality. They maintain rehearsal environments in which dancer identities can reveal themselves through collective action– environments where diversity and multiplicity flourish. Dancers are expected to be individuals, make bold choices, and offer an artistic point of view and choreographic curators step in to sift through and sculpt that material in ways that align with the larger trajectory of the work. These two groups come together to explore 1 Jan Van Dyke, “Gender and Success in the American Dance World,” Women’s Studies International Forum 19(5): 1. 2 Jo Butterworth and Liesbeth Wildschut, trans., Contemporary Choreography: A Critical Reader (New York: Routledge: 2009), 4. 6 the range of aesthetic perspectives, skills, and abilities available to them. Through historical, theoretical, contemporary, and practice-based evidence, this essay argues that through choreographer and performer participation, leading to the transformation of content, style, structure, and discovery, choreographers harvest an expansive collection of information that they use to make the most fully explored, articulate, and compelling creative work. Historical Influences Scholars Ramsay Burt, Sally Banes, and many others regard The Judson Dance Theater as the birthplace of postmodern dance. Judson artists rejected drama, spectacle, and artifice, engaging with chance and the unremarkable, focusing on “the clarity and directness of movement as unembellished activity, and the dancer’s actual weight and physicality.”3 In the 1960s, Judsonites redefined what was allowed in dance performance. Most important for this argument, the Judson Dance Theater laid the foundation for today’s collaborative working model, emphasizing unified action and fostering the beginnings of a dance community in which individuality became a core value. Judson work was a reaction to the egocentric choreographic value systems of early modern artists such as Martha Graham. Modern choreographers worked against the limitations of ballet and developed new techniques to create a unique voice, emphasizing more humanistic qualities.4 Artists including Graham, and earlier Isadora Duncan, Loie Fuller, and Josephine Baker, among innovative others, created individual techniques yet were united by the desire to investigate human expression, liberation, and “…a recognition of femininity.”5 Working against societal events such as the Great Depression and later the perceived threat of Communism and 3 Jan Van Dyke, “Gender and Success in the American Dance World,” 3. 4 Nora Ambrosio, Learning About Dance: And Introduction to Dance as An Art Form and Entertainment (Iowa: Kendall/Hunt Publishing, 1994), 64. 5 Philippe Noisette, talk about contemporary dance (Paris: Flammarion, 2011), 28. 7 Socialism, modern choreographers sought to create work by asserting their artistic voices by means of lone-authorial creation. At the core of both modern and postmodern dance traditions is the choreographer – some might call them the author. This essay aims to uncover the uncertain, undefined edges of authorship in postmodern dance. Contemporary questions of authorship are usually framed through poststructuralist claims about the death of the author. Writers like Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Alexander Nehamas complicated traditional notions of the author, recasting it as a function of discourse that serves as a "means of classification"6 that is "regulated by the culture in which it circulates."7 Throughout this essay, I will investigate notions of authorship and how they relate and become complicated in reference to collaborative, co- authored dance making processes and finished works. Classifications Before moving forward, I want to clarify and define some terms I will be using throughout this essay. The first is the concept of choreography. As you will see, choreography is a concept with multiple understandings that have changed radically throughout history. However, in its most basic form, choreography is making dances.8 In their anthology, Contemporary Choreography: A Critical Reader, editors Butterworth and Wildshut make the argument that choreography is context dependent – that choreographic constructs are explored in relation to the unique environments in which they are employed. 9 I keep in mind Butterworth 6 Michel Foucault, "What Is an Author?" in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 123. 7 Roland Barthes, "Death of the Author," in Image, Music, Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill, 1977), 140. 8 Jo Butterworth and Liesbeth Wildshut, Contemporary Choreography: A Critical Reader (New York: Routledge, 2009), 1. 9 Ibid. 8 and Wildshut’s assertion and refer to choreography (or the act of choreographing) as a process of experientially and critically examining, researching, and assembling movement and ideas, which are dictated by and dependent on societal climates in which the choreography is made. I also adopt the term “devising” when referring to dance making or choreographic processes. Dance devising comes from the theatrical understanding of devising or devised theater. Devised theater, like choreography, has multiple definitions that are constantly in flux. However, devising is widely understood as interactivity in the process of making, usually original,
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