The Reaccession of Ted Shawn a Study in Virtual Permanence

The Reaccession of Ted Shawn A Study in Virtual Permanence

Adam H. Weinert

n the spring of 2013, I was invited to represent the modernist choreographer Ted Shawn at the Museum of Modern Art as part of the exhibition 20 Dancers Iof the XXth Century, curated by Boris Charmatz. The exhibit proposed the both radical and rudimentary notion that the main museal space for dance is the human body. In many ways, this is in keeping with how dance has historically been preserved—passing down from generation to generation as an oral and kinesthetic tradition without the benefit of a comprehensive or standardized nota- tion system. With this tradition in mind, I endeavored to become a living archive of Shawn’s work. In determining how to approach this task, particularly in the absence of any living company members or company apparatus, I had to ask both practical and theoretical questions about the archive and dance re-performance.

I chose to reconstruct some of Shawn’s most beloved and iconic dances, includ- ing Four Solos Based on American Folk Music (1931) and Pierrot in the Dead City (1935). To ensure the authenticity of the performances, I reconstructed Shawn’s technique class, trained in the studios he and his dancers built, and studied every form of documentation I could find. All the while I had to ask: Is it even possible to faithfully reproduce these works, which were originally performed outdoors on a farm in the Berkshires, in a white-walled museum in midtown Manhattan? What is the best strategy for revitalizing these historic works? Perhaps it was my dissatisfaction with traditional cenotaphic approaches, or that I was inspired by the inventive conceit behind the exhibition itself, but following the performances at MoMA, I felt compelled to do more. It wasn’t enough for me to retrace Shawn’s footsteps. I wanted to build upon his legacy and extend it into the twenty-first century.

As a result, on May 16, 2014, I launched a digital installation at MoMA, unauthorized by the museum and invisible to the naked eye. With the use of an Augmented Reality (AR)1 platform provided through a residency with Dance-Tech, and video

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00319 by guest on 02 October 2021 filmed by my collaborator Philippe Tremblay-Berberi, I created a permanent installation of my performances at MoMA rendered accessible via mobile technology. Participants are able to view footage of my performances simply by opening an app and training their smartphones or tablet computers to the museum galleries where I performed in October 2013. Shawn made a gift of his works to MoMA in the 1950s, but the museum later gave these materials to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. MoMA’s own policies, however, are such that they do not sell or give away works by living artists, and Shawn was living at the time of his deaccession. By installing my performances of Ted Shawn’s choreography inside the museum walls, I performed an act of reaccession. This flip, made possible by the use of AR and video documentation, trespasses on the museum and re-establishes connections between these art forms parsed out years ago. My hope is that, by doing so, I can ignite a conversation around new modalities for seeing and experiencing choreographic work.

IDEAS THAT TAKE UP SPACE

Ted Shawn, often referred to by his students as “Papa Shawn,” was a leading force of early American modern dance. In 1915, he co-founded The Denishawn School, whose notable pupils include Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and Charles Weidman. He also founded The Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in Massachusetts and the well-known all-male modern dance company Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers. Choreographically, Shawn chose themes which drew from local and international folk traditions and crafted a movement vocabulary that connected with agrarian and other labor practices. He was frustrated with the bourgeois and Eurocentric traditions around ballet, and sought to physically discover a distinctively American movement vocabulary by creating works that celebrated the American laboring class, such as Labor Symphony (1934), Kinetic Molpai (1935), and Dance of the Ages (1938). At the core of his vision as outlined in The American Ballet (1926) is a relationship to the land.2 He wanted his dancers and students to be outdoors, live away from the city, and eat a carefully considered, simple, and nutritious diet. I was inspired by these notions, but uncertain how to encapsulate them within the sterile, corporate, and urban context of MoMA.

Shawn has no company in existence today, so the process of reconstruction brought about unique challenges. I spent weeks studying books, photographs, video, and rumor—it felt at times as if I were dancing with ghosts. The first work I reconstructed, Pierrot in the Dead City, attracted me because the piece itself is about looking back in time, even if what you are looking for never existed in the first place. The music for the solo is based on a score by Erich Korngold, with a libretto that loosely translates as “My longing, my dreaming, reach into the past,” a description that also fits well with my relationship to Ted Shawn and His

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00319 by guest on 02 October 2021 Top: Adam H. Weinert performing 4 Solos Based on American Folk Music on the Jacob’s Pillow Inside/Out Stage, 2014. Photo © Hanna Minsky. Middle: Adam H. Weinert performing 4 Solos Based on American Folk Music at the Museum of Modern Art, 2013. Photo © Philippe Tremblay-Berberi. Bottom: Adam H. Weinert farming and dancing at the Sylvester Manor Educational Farm in Shelter Island, NY, 2013. Photo © Philippe Tremblay-Berberi.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00319 by guest on 02 October 2021 Men Dancers. To me, these men working together and providing for one another represent a kind of antiquated homotopia, one that might never have been, but that I keep searching for anyway.

Growing their own food and dancing outdoors, Shawn and his dancers built the festival and grew the repertory. Engaging with the land was an important part of his creative process and physical training regimen. In turn, my research led me to find employment on a farm. I was skeptical when I showed up at the Sylvester Manor Educational Farm in Shelter Island, NY, and my lack of basic knowledge of how food is grown was laughable. (Imagine my shock at discover- ing that tomato plants are grown from seeds found in tomatoes, learning that a “cow-house” is more commonly referred to as a “barn,” and so on), but I soon found the payoff was huge. I commented one day to the field manager that I was surprised at how varied the work was. I’d thought farm work would be very repetitive. He replied that it is repetitive; it just operates on an annual cycle. By the end of the season I found that my perception of time and space—important mediums for dance—had radically changed and that I had achieved a new sense of groundedness in my dancing.

Shawn strove to create work that communicated with everyday people by utilizing the movement of labor in order to engage the laboring classes—at that time, the majority of Americans. Today in the United States, we have a severely diminished laboring class as far as traditional definitions of labor go. More people have jobs that require them to be sedentary and spend their time typing on keyboards and touch-screens. One striking aspect of my initial “live” performances at MoMA was that most people tended to regard the performance through their smartphones as they were recording, sharing, tweeting, or otherwise documenting the work. This suggested to me that smartphones already serve as the interface of choice for most audience members, and it seemed fitting then to utilize this aspect of contemporary culture when remounting the work. The Augmented Reality platform which houses my reconstruction of Shawn’s choreography encourages the public to engage with their smartphones and makes the work intimately and inexhaustibly repeatable.

AR can also be seen as a continuation of Shawn’s creative vector, since he utilized the most advanced technologies available to him in his lifetime. It is compelling that he shunned Labanotation, perhaps at its most popular during that time, in favor of filmic documentation of his choreographies. Additionally, he collaborated with the Thomas Edison Company in 1912 to make Dances of the Ages, one of the first dance films. It was crucial to bear this pioneering spirit in mind when remounting his work. The use of AR in my project creates an atemporal space where reperformance and archival footage co-reside and are infinitely re-viewable.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00319 by guest on 02 October 2021 By pushing into this new “augmented space,” I am able to interject meaning into the architecture of the museum, as many dance artists do through and onto the architecture of their bodies. This process of incorporating from the archive onto my body, and then excorporating from my body to that of MoMA in the form of digital reaccession, calls forth questions about the form and function of the museum, and its ability to present dance.

DANCE IN THE MUSEUM

In recent years, there has been a major influx of dance works initially created for the stage then transposed into museum spaces. Two prominent recent examples, the 2011–12 Danser Sa Vie exhibit at Le Centre Pompidou and the 2013 20 Dancers of the XXth Century exhibit at The Museum of Modern Art, go as far as to present over a century of dance history within the museum galleries. In my experiences performing at MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and elsewhere, I experienced the extreme differences and complications that arise in presenting dance works in museum spaces. The choreographer cedes control over time, light, attention, and temperature in this context, and the work that results is often radically changed. The apparatus that supports performance work, long taken for granted in theatrical settings, becomes a site of conflict in this new arena. Transient and performative gestures cannot be exhibited in the museum’s conventional approach of displaying discrete objects, so tensions often arise as a result.

One of the first notable complications of this transplant results from differing grammars of crediting in the museal and theatrical traditions. At Danser Sa Vie, I was pleased to view footage of my colleague Holley Farmer performing a work by Merce Cunningham. But on the plaque next to it, the work is credited to Charles Atlas, the filmmaker. If you read closer, you can find that the choreography was created by Cunningham, but nowhere does it mention Farmer’s name. This failure of crediting performs an erasure of a vital component of the work, especially as it relates to the purposes of the exhibition. After completing my tour, I was surprised to see that the work of seminal choreographers such as José Limon, Alvin Ailey, and Ted Shawn were not included. While I understand that these men may not have had as much to say to the visual art community as some of their colleagues (Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, both included in the exhibition, collaborated with well-known visual artists on scenic design), they created some of the most commonly disseminated dance techniques, and there- fore had a profound influence on dance today. Through a dance-historical lens, it is hard to know how to talk about Martha Graham, Trisha Brown, or William Forsythe, all included in the exhibition, without introducing Ruth St. Denis, Ted Shawn or José Limon.3

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00319 by guest on 02 October 2021 Boris Charmatz faced similar difficulties when determining how to properly con- textualize the 20 Dancers exhibit. 20 Dancers was first performed atLa Musee De La Danse in Reines, France. What made for a successful installation in Reines—a space with a long history of presenting dance, a predominately dance audience, and no art on the walls—led to inadequate framing at MoMA, an institution made famous for its visual art collection, with heavy tourism, and world-class artworks already in the galleries. Museumgoers asked me many times over the three days of performance who I was and what I was doing because that information was not available in the museum. Some seemed unconvinced that my actions were sanctioned by the museum at all.

After two days of performances, Charmatz proposed that each dancer announce what he or she was performing before, after, and/or during their performance as a solution to the problem of crediting. This proved untenable for several reasons. Some felt uncomfortable with the practice of locution generally as it falls outside of a traditional dance practice; others thought it antithetical to the kind of work they were presenting; and a few felt that this performative grammar borrows too heavily from a tradition established by the artist Tino Seghal. Despite our objec- tions, the fact remained that if we didn’t tell the public who we were and what we were doing, there was no other way for them to acquire that information. This curatorial dilemma is indicative of a generally cavalier attitude towards dance history which seems to characterize the viewpoint of the visual art museum. Unfortunately, this perspective largely goes uncontested. One performer, Richard Move, included in the exhibit to embody Martha Graham, questioned whether or not the proposal of the exhibit was doing justice to the works we were presenting. In a conversation with the curators, he commented, “Without a frame, we can’t compete with the art on the walls: we’re just dancing around.”

As theorist and choreographer Liz Lerman has pointed out, an additional cost of the lack of proper framing is the loss of impact of the work on its intended audience.4 A good example of this can be found in the contribution of Shelley Senter to 20 Dancers. Yvonne Rainer was invited to perform her seminal work Trio A as part of the exhibition, but the artist refused. Senter, a former dancer in Rainer’s company, elected to perform the work anyway, citing her own author- ity over the material as an interpretive artist. Rainer attended the exhibit and sat just a few feet away from Senter as she executed Trio A without her consent. It was a momentous occasion to those in the know. One felt as if the walls of the museum should be quaking. Yet to the museumgoer, the spectacle of one woman executing movement which may or may not be recognizable as dance, with another woman sitting nearby on the floor, barely registers as significant in itself. If the museum aims to present dance as art, it must be able to make its

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00319 by guest on 02 October 2021 Ted Shawn performing Four Dances Based on American Folk Music, 1931. Photo: Charlotte Rudolph. Courtesy Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival Archives.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00319 by guest on 02 October 2021 actions and their ramifications meaningful to its audience. There was a failure to do so in this case. Who condoned this act of accession, and are the author’s wishes irrelevant in this context? If every body is an archive, is each equally valid? 20 Dancers revealed these questions, but the exhibition neither addressed them nor facilitated discussion around them.

Performances in museum galleries are site-specific in that they lie outside dance’s conventional homes. In most theatres, due to the architecture of the stage and its position relative to the seating, a choreographer manages essentially the same perspective from each viewer to stage. This effect can often be supplemented by a set or the use of lights and multimedia. In site-specific work, however, the problem of perspective is constant and this demands a very different relationship to the public. Lerman saw this as a choreographic challenge but also noted its potential to empower a more autonomous audience. With my project, I complete this transfer of power by literally placing the performance in the hands of the viewer, to be accessed and activated at their discretion.

TOWARD AN INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE

If the museum has an eye to become a presenter of dance, it must also strive to become its steward. This imperative proves especially difficult with live performance, a particularly fragile art form that resists documentation and that the museum was not initially designed to preserve. My experiences performing in the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and others have almost inevitably resulted in physical injury, and the works presented are often radically changed. Performances are for longer durations than normal, rehearsals take place at night after the galleries are closed, and temperatures are mandated by the archival specifications of the artwork rather than the physical demands of dancing bodies.

The artist Michael Asher, one of the founders of Institutional Critique, had his own intervention at MoMA dealing with deaccession. In an exhibition in 1998, Asher published a pamphlet listing the thousands of works the museum had deaccessioned since its founding in 1929. By drawing attention to the fluid nature of “permanent collections,” Asher compromises the notion of the museum as an archive and underscores the similarly fluid nature of its assignations of value. Asher’s art takes the form of subtle yet deliberate interventions—additions, sub- tractions, or alterations. It is just this sort of strategy I emulate with The Reacces- sion of Ted Shawn. Following my performances in 20 Dancers, I discovered that Ted Shawn had made a gift of his complete archives and ephemera to MoMA in 1951.5 MoMA subsequently bequeathed these materials to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts in 1965. If Shawn had been considered an artist,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00319 by guest on 02 October 2021 this would not have been allowed, as the rules surrounding deaccession pro- hibit the removal of works by living artists, and Shawn was alive at the time of his deaccession. According to the Collection Management Policy published on MoMA’s website, “Works by living artists should not be sold except to acquire a superior work by the same artist and then with the agreement of the artist, if possible.” Digital technology now enables me to respond to the questions raised by the museum’s decision to deaccess Shawn’s collection and place his work back in the museum where he intended it to be.

By extending the history of Institutional Critique, I aim to engage critically with the museum and transform it. As Lerman pointed out, when performing on a traditional stage, the choreographer can reasonably expect that the audience will remain for the duration of the piece, will be viewing from a certain vantage point, and will have access to information which will help them contextual- ize the work. This has not been the case for dance in museum spaces, but by embracing digital technologies as modern dance has historically done time and again, I hope to find new, and perhaps more accommodating, ways of housing and seeing dance in these spaces.

DIGITAL DANCE

The Reaccession of Ted Shawn not only involves remounting and reperforming Ted Shawn’s choreography at MoMA, but also in filming the performances and installing them in Augmented Reality. Cameras necessitate a particular frame, have an inherent tendency to flatten, and carry the potential to add layers of artifice to the event they are meant to record. They should be understood as pros- thetic devices used to extend one’s range of vision and replace the world with a mediated version of itself. In this capacity, they have had a profound impact on dance, its function and its popularity.

Modern dance and motion pictures emerged in this country at around the same time, and with considerable collaboration. From Muybridge to Loie Fuller and the Lumière Brothers, movement and cinema became useful tools in each others’ success. But while film and video seem to provide an objective and comprehensive view of a dance event, they also can obscure and distort. In the case of the 16mm film I was consulting in my research, the dancer could either travel from left to right or right to left, depending on how you loaded the reel, and no one knows for sure which is correct. These were silent films created using a hand-crank camera, resulting in uneven tempi. The audio was added later to fit the uneven film, so the speed of the crank was then written into the choreography by virtue of its musical accompaniment. I found a video of Barton Mumaw coaching the ballet dancer Richard Cragun on how to perform Pierrot in the Dead City, and

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00319 by guest on 02 October 2021 was able to take his corrections as my own, but this was a close as I got to the horse’s mouth. With such a mediated relationship to the choreography, it was difficult to feel truly connected to it.

The active role of the participant in my project, combined with the use of digital technology, creates an environment where the producer and the consumer might connect with each other directly. This prompted me to supply an opportunity for conversation and production through a website (www.thereaccessionoftedshawn .com) and build upon the installation over time using content generated by participants. With this platform, visitors can add their own videos directly to the installation transforming the museum into a collection of experiences, memories, and other unheard voices. The website also allows viewers to take aspects of the exhibition home in the form of the museum map and view them online. Just as Ted Shawn utilized the most innovative technology available to him at the turn of the last century to both document and inform his choreography, I aim to build upon that plane of composition and create bridges to new technologies today.

A NEW KIND OF RECONSTRUCTION

Today, more than a century after their first collaborations, new potentialities and mandates on interaction between dance and technology have emerged. The ever-present mediation of experience in the digital age opens additional questions and challenges for thinking about time- and site-specificity. Innovation has changed the way that art, both visual and performance-based, is located, experienced, and documented. I endeavor to think about these possibilities not only in terms of dissemination on the internet, but also of alternative approaches to presenting work in communities and spaces outside of the conventional homes of performance. My own process with this project finds parallels in that of dance history, museum studies, and digital culture.

The success of the The Reaccession of Ted Shawn, and its popularity—over 12,000 visitors to date according to mobile analytics, and with published articles by dance writers, technology bloggers, and art critics—demonstrate that this kind of participatory and interactive digital play generates interest across disciplines. The press tended to focus on the subversive, unauthorized aspect of the installation, an angle I invited and perhaps encouraged, but which only represents a part of the conversation I wanted to instigate. I am more interested in creating new places and ways for museums, and those inside of them, to construct meaning.

The Reaccession of Ted Shawn represents an entirely new kind of reconstruction: a strange intersection of live modernist works with contemporary, technology- enabled approaches to audience experience. The museum pieces take shape both

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00319 by guest on 02 October 2021 as embodiments of dance-historical material and as ghosts, dances superimposed on a space no longer inhabited by the dancer, bringing a welcome retort to dance’s interaction with the museum as well as new horizons for the preservation and dissemination of this ephemeral form outside its rarely-accessed archives. If dance can be defined most basically as the movement of bodies through space, the bodies that move in this project are those of the audience. By ostensibly choreographing the part of the viewer, this project creates a dance of its own that generates a new kind of spectator and reimagines traditional modes of production and consumption.

NOTES 1. Augmented reality is a live, direct or indirect, view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented (or supplemented) by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data. It is related to a more general concept called mediated reality, in which a view of reality is modified (possibly even diminished rather than augmented) by a computer. As a result, the technology functions by enhanc- ing one’s current perception of reality. By contrast, virtual reality replaces the real world with a simulated one. 2. Walter Terry, Ted Shawn: The Father of Modern Dance (New York: Dial Press, 1976). 3. Richard Move, interview with the artist, October 19, 2013. 4. Liz Lerman, Hiking the Horizontal: Field Notes from a Choreographer (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011). 5. For more information about the history and scope of the Ted Shawn Collection, see Susan Brady, ed., Performing Arts Resources, Vol. 20: After the Dance: Documents of Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn (New York: Theatre Library Association, 1996).

ADAM H. WEINERT is a choreographer and media artist, born and raised in New York City. He began his training at The School of American Bal- let, and continued on to Vassar College, The Juilliard School, and New York University. He has danced with The Mark Morris Dance Group, Shen Wei Dance Arts, and for six years served as the artistic associate to Jonah Bokaer. Weinert’s films are screened nationally and abroad and his performance works have toured to four continents. He was recently awarded the Léo Bronstein Homage Award from NYU and is currently a visiting artist-in-residence faculty member at Bard College.

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