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The Reaccession of Ted Shawn a Study in Virtual Permanence

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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, unauthor- ized 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 © 2016 Performing Arts Journal, Inc. PAJ 113 (2016), pp. 69–79. 69 doi:10.1162/PAJJ _a_00319 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 instal- lation 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 choreog- raphy 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 70 PAJ 113 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. WEINERT / The Reaccession of Ted Shawn 71 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 plat- form 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. 72 PAJ 113 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.
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