ORAL HISTORIES: A TRADITIONAL CHOREOGRAPHIC APPROACH TO AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL THEMES

NANCY GREYEYES

A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF FINE ARTS

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APRIL 2012

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A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies of York University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF FINE ARTS

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Permission has been granted to the LIBRARY OF YORK UNIVERSITY to lend or sell copies of this thesis, to the NATIONAL LIBRARY OF CANADA to microfilm this thesis and to lend or sell copies of the film, and to UNIVERSITY MICROFILMS to publish an abstract of this thesis.

The author reserves other publication rights, and neither the thesis nor extensive extracts from it may be printed or otherwise reproduced without the author's written permission. Abstract:

This extended essay explores MFA thesis research by Nancy Greyeyes, titled

"Oral Histories: A Traditional Choreographic Approach to Autobiographical Themes." It discusses the underpinnings of the author's choreography, and how personal experience infuses and mitigates her creative process. Further to the choreographic research, the essay investigates the extent to which dance can be a vehicle to express intimate, multi- layered realities of personal history. Explaining how her choreography adheres more closely to structures of traditionalism than to post-modern dance, the choreographer defines how music and narrative become the means by which an audience connects with her work. Use of autobiographical themes by three women artists (Kahlo, Sexton,

Pada) is discussed; the choreographer also examines postdramatic theatre traits in a self-produced work. The creative processes of her three thesis choreographies are described in depth: a solo, Carriage; a self-produced work Miss(ing) Julie; and Valley of

Coal, a sextet, for the proscenium stage.

iv This thesis is dedicated to my daughters Eva and Lilia.

v Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my supervisor, Carol Anderson, for the numerous meetings and discussions we had together on this extended essay and her generous support throughout the entire thesis process. Many thanks to the MFA faculty, especially Darcey

Callison, Holly Small, William Mackwood, and my supervisor Carol for continually challenging me to find deeper meaning in the work. Thank you also to my designers

Peter McKinnon, William Mackwood, and James McKernan for offering their rich talent to my work.

I am especially thankful to the dancers who greatly contributed to my research. The cast of Miss(ing) Julie: Alyssa Stevens, dance artist with Ballet Jorgen Canada, and the York

Dance Ensemble students, Yvon Allard, Justine Comfort, Tracy Day, Jill Eisener,

Anastasia Feigin, Cristina Greiner, Alison Keery, Nikolaos Markakis, and Megan

Windeler brought endless energy and a fierce commitment to the work that proved not only to be creatively rewarding but immensely fun.

I could not have hoped for better dancers than the artists that comprised my cast of

Valley of Coal. Michael Caldwell, Louis Laberge-Cote, Luke Garwood, Ana Groppler,

Michael Sean Marye, and Daniel McArthur contributed their immense skill, unique talents, and maturity to our process, which inspired and motivated me to create the work that I had always envisioned.

Most of all, I would like to thank my husband and dramaturg, Michael Greyeyes, for the countless hours he spent listening to me speak and formulate ideas for this thesis.

vi TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract iv Dedication v Acknowledgements vi Table of Contents vii

Chapter One: Introduction 1

Chapter Two: Methodology 3 "Traditional" versus "Post-modern" 3 Music Visualization 8 Narrative 12 Artists and Personal Experience 14 Postdramatic Theatre Traits 20

Chapter Three: Creative Process 24 Carriage 24 Miss(ing) Julie 31 Valley of Coal 37

Chapter Four: Research Outcomes 47

Chapter Five: Conclusion 50

Bibliography 51

Appendices 53 Appendix A: Images 53 Appendix B: Program Notes 61 Appendix C: Performance Text 68 Chapter One: Introduction

Entering the MFA in Contemporary Choreography and Dance Dramaturgy at York

University, the desire to choreograph autobiographical work drove my research. As a

choreographer who develops work in a traditional manner, I was curious: to what extent can dance act as a vehicle to express the intimate and multi-layered realities of one's

own history? My initial ideas developed as three thesis projects, an "I Am" solo, a self-

produced work, and choreography created for the proscenium stage, that were rich with

stories to explore through dance.

Reliance on music and narrative, the backbone of my creative process, led me to

discoveries about oral histories that I wished to convey through the abstract language of

dance. I realized my approach to choreography, while not viewed as current or

fashionable, comes naturally to me as a result of my training and professional dance

career; I am a classicist working within a post-modern paradigm. A choreographic

methodology that emerged from and was informed by classical ballet was organic to me

because it has been the working model for my entire professional career.

Although auto-ethnography is often sourced in the creative process of post-modern

dance, my research was unique in that I was applying autobiographical material, using a

modern choreographic method, framed by the language of classicism. To be specific, I

choreographed to music on my own body and transferred those very precise movements

and counts to the dancers. The music was central to the choreography and was equally

as important to the dance as was the movement itself. Post-modern choreography

usually privileges a more open methodology, based in improvisation and chance

procedures. Questions related to this research resonated through all three processes.

1 Was there a place for autobiographical themes in a traditional approach to choreography? How did personal experience change this traditional way of working, and what did it reveal? How did this auto-ethnographic approach infuse and mitigate the process? Further questions that drove my research asked - what were the limitations to working in this manner, and what did I glean about my own process and the merits of classicism through the development of these autobiographical dances? How might my understanding of the term "traditional" change and evolve through my work?

This thesis essay begins with a discussion of "traditional" versus "post-modern" approaches to choreography. I examine my use of music visualization and narrative as tools to connect an audience to my work. To broaden the context of my research, I consider painter Frida Kahlo, poet Anne Sexton, and choreographer Lata Pada, who use autobiographical themes as a means to create in their mediums, and discuss similarities my work has with these women artists. In addition, three postdramatic theatre traits,

"irruption of the real", "musicalization", and "simultaneity", used in the creation of my self- produced work, are examined. Also included are accounts of creative processes for each of the three choreographic works created for my studio-based research. The first work, entitled Carriage, is a deeply personal solo danced by myself. The second,

Miss(ing) Julie, explores alternative uses of space with student dancers. This work emerged from my recollections of working as a dancer at the Alberta Ballet in the late nineteen eighties. My final creative process, Valley of Coal, is based on the oral histories of my grandparents, and performed by professional dancers for the proscenium stage.

The final section of this essay focuses on outcomes and conclusions of my choreographic research.

2 Chapter Two: Methodology

"Traditional" versus "Post-modern"

This discussion is not meant to trace the history of modern and post-modern dance, but to categorize through an examination of music and content why I consider my choreographic work to rest in the camp of modern—rather than post-modern—dance. By modern I am referring to the canon of work produced by the seminal modern dance choreographers: Doris Humphrey, Martha Graham, Jose Limon, Agnes de Mille, and

Paul Taylor, whose work relied upon traditional mechanisms of musicality and narrative.

These choreographers worked in forms similar to their classical counterparts Roland

Petit, Birgit Cullberg, Frederick Ashton and George Balanchine. For example, they all choreographed individual sections that comprised a larger whole and there was often a rising action with a denouement. In a traditional methodology, the musical score and/or the narrative are privileged and often initiate the choreography.

Post-modern choreographers of the early nineteen sixties broke away from modern dance because they felt that it had become "more remote from the masses than ballet"

(Banes xvi). Dance writer Michael Kirby used the term "post-modern" for the first time in print in 1975 (Banes xiv). Kirby stated, "Post-modern dance rejects musicality, meaning, characterization, mood, and atmosphere; it uses costume, lighting, and objects in purely functional ways" (qtd. in Banes xiv). This describes what Sally Banes refers to as

"analytic post-modern dance", which developed through the late nineteen fifties and sixties and reached its zenith in the 1970s. Analytic post-modern dance rejected , theatrical meaning.

3 The dances by the early post-modern choreographers were not cool analyses of forms but urgent reconsiderations of the medium. The nature, history, and function of dance as well as its structures were the subjects of the post-modern inquiry. A spirit of permissiveness and playful rebellion prevailed, foreshadowing the political and cultural upheavals of the late sixties. The younger generation of choreographers showed in their dances that they departed not only from classical modern dance with its myths, heroes, and psychological metaphors, but also from the elegance of ballet and even from post-modern dance's closest influences. ... [T]he first eight years saw an initial bursting of forms and definitions, and several major themes of post-modern dance were set forth: references to history; new uses of time, space, and the body; problems of defining dance. (Banes xvii)

Traditional modern dance often embraced the literary canon, as Martha Graham did with

Clytemnestra and Jose Limon with The Moor's Pavane, a distilled adaptation of Othello.

That is not to say analytic post-modern dance was devoid of meaning, "[ijssues of the body and its powerful social meanings were approached head on. The body itself became the subject of the dance, rather than serving as an instrument for expressive metaphors" (Banes, xxiii). This idea was fed by Yvonne Rainer's infamous "No

Manifesto" written in 1965:

NO to spectacle no to virtuosity no to transformations and magic and make- believe no to the glamour and transcendency of the star image no to the heroic no to the anti-heroic no to trash imagery no to involvement of performer or spectator no to style no to camp no to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer no to eccentricity no to moving or being moved. (Banes 43)

It was, as Banes states, "a heroism of the ordinary" (xxii). Another strand that developed

in the 1970s, metaphoric post-modern dance, included the work of choreographers such

as Meredith Monk, Anna Halprin, and Kenneth King (Banes xxiii). Metaphoric post­

modern dance used theatrical elements: lighting, music, character, props, etc. (Banes,

xxiii). These dances, nonetheless, differed in that they drew upon

4 ... post-modern processes and techniques. The key post-modern choreographic technique is radical juxtaposition. But also, these dances often use ordinary movements and objects; they propose new relationships between performer and spectator; articulate new experiences of space, time, and the body; incorporate language and film; employ structures of stillness and repetition. (Banes xxiii)

In the 1980s post-modern dance had shifted away from its early roots and started to re-incorporate meaning and narrative content, in addition to a renewed relationship of dance and musicality. Choreographers such as Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane began using autobiographical material to create dances with political meaning.

The narrative, whose death seemed a certainty in the sixties and seventies, has been reborn in the eighties. Yet this development is not simply a return to older values or even techniques, for the new narrative finds exposition in ways that take into account the entire history of the post-modern choreographers' deliberate dismantling of literary devices. (Banes xxix-xxx)

Furthermore, the political rationale for examining autobiographical material reflected societal concerns and biases. Banes states,

One outgrowth of the revival of the narrative is an emphasis on the genre of autobiography, a result, perhaps, of the synthesis of new narrative concerns with the personal, intimate mode of performance that emerged in the work of Grand Union [the seminal improvisational group from the nineteen seventies] and other early post-modern choreographers, as boundaries between performer and spectator, art and life were challenged. The public display of the personal was partly a political gesture in the style of the New Left, and thus it is not surprising that several of the choreographers who work in the genre of autobiography often work in the arena of political dance as well: [Johanna] Boyce, [Tim] Miller, [Bill T.] Jones and [Arnie] Zane, [Wendy] Perron, [John] Bernd, Ishmael Houston- Jones and Fred Holland, among others. They use the intimate revelation of personal details as occasions to meditate on larger issues: war, racism, sexual politics. But even where their dances remain specifically private, that very act of confessional revelation seems [author's emphasis] to take on political meaning, (xxx)

5 It is important to clarify that in my process and finished work I am not seeking a political end through personal means. Narrative, musicality, and emotion often imply an inevitable political agenda, but that is not my motivation. Personal subject matter, for example, Valley of Coal, may be viewed as, and some may insist it is, inherently political; however, my intention in using autobiographical material is simply a mechanism to illuminate emotional truth. The world of emotion occurs in my work on an intuitive and intimate scale. I am interested in the aesthetic value of dance. For me, dance is apolitical and unapologetically aesthetically driven. If I was interested in making overt political statements, I would choose to march or occupy or any of the other actions available to citizens. I do not make dance for and about that realm. And if people choose to see my work as political, then that is their choice and not my intent. This very fact separates me entirely from the motivations of the post-modern choreographers, whose work engaged the political.

In the eighties, dance and music had become intertwined once more. This departs radically from analytic post-modern dance in which most dances occurred in silence.

Banes states,

...the recent rise of MTV shows a general cultural fascination with visualizing music through dance. But, more generally, the association of new dance with music—often, the very closest correspondence, "dancing to the music"—signals a radical shift in the history of twentieth-century avant-garde dance, which until the eighties had been systematically separating itself from music. The new musicality is more closely related to social dance practice than to the development of modern dance in the twentieth century. Where Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis made their dances visualizations of symphonic music, Mary Wigman, a generation later, preferred to use simple percussion; Cunningham makes dances that do not correspond structurally to the music at all (except by accident); ... Meredith Monk's "operas," Laura Dean's Collaborations with Steve Reich ... and Twyla Tharp's use of Afro-American social dance style were early examples of the new fusion of music and dance. (Banes xxxiii)

6 A choreographer who exemplified the fusion of music and dance, American artist

Mark Morris rose to prominence in the nineteen eighties. It should be noted, however, that his musicality was related to modern dance as opposed to the social dance to which

Banes refers. Morris' choreography straddled both modern and post-modern dance.

Joan Acocella, in the book Fifty Contemporary Choreographers, writes,

...[Morris'] work unites what were, before him, two divergent trends. One is the traditional modern dance, with its weightiness, its musicality, and its liberal humanism. The other is the postmodern sensibility - with its insistent irony, its self-conscious historicism, and its political emphasis.... (Bremser 164)

In examining the elements that describe Morris' choreographic work, the differences between the modern and post-modern worlds become clearer, as do the distinctions I make in describing my own work.

Post-modern dance continues to evolve without a centralized movement, academies, or manifestos to guide choreographers. Eclecticism is the only rule. Banes states,

...the post-modernists reject a hierarchical position of authority for the most part. Their break with tradition carries with it the explicit notion that there need be no more academies; that rules are not sacrosanct but can be either useful or unnecessary. If it is a new establishment, post­ modern dance is so pluralistic that it inaugurates a new type of establishment: one that tolerates invention and welcomes change. (19)

Currently there is a trend to move back to the beginnings of the movement with performers learning solos from post-modern choreographers of the sixties. For example,

Christopher House, artistic director of Toronto Dance Theatre, has performed two solos

7 adapted for him by Deborah Hay, a member of the Judson Dance Theatre, the collective who birthed post-modern dance in the early nineteen sixties. These solos, News and At

Once, were taught to House at the Solo Performance Commissioning Project. In addition, Hay was commissioned to choreograph a new work, Up Until Now, for Toronto

Dance Theatre that premiered in 2009. Another expression of post-modernism is

Dancemakers' artistic director Michael Trent's premiere of Show in 2011. His avant- garde choreography had no narrative arc, no sense of character, and the music, a collage of various sounds, had no understandable relationship to the movement. Instead of meaning, the dancers' bodies were the subject of the dance as they stared at the audience, leaving the spectators to wonder - who was watching whom?

My own sense of creating dance was shaped by performing in masterworks by

George Balanchine, American dance pioneers Jose Limon and Agnes de Mille,

European choreographers Roland Petit and Birgit Cullberg, and working with noted choreographers such as American modernists Eliot Feld and Donald McKayle. These experiences permeate my view of how to construct, rehearse and perform a choreographic work. This traditional approach is methodical and precise, and at its core relies on a deep sense of musicality.

Music Visualization

I do not view post-modern work as unmusical; there is simply a very different relationship and level of importance for the choreographer and the music in a traditional approach. I view choreography that is structurally related to the musical score and has movement vocabulary that references the music precisely as traditional. As a classical and contemporary ballet dancer, this is familiar ground to me. This is different than the

8 post-modern model of choreographing movement, which places music to the movement at a later time, if at all. Another technique used by post-modern choreographers is to create movement to one score then switch to another for performance, or even choreograph without regard to the music whatsoever. Typically I enjoy work on an aesthetic level more when there is an apparent connection to the music. Dance makers

George Balanchine, Mark Morris, along with Feld, all choreographers who have inspired me, have this connection in their work. This relationship with music is at the heart of where my choreographic process becomes modern as opposed to post-modern. While creating choreography within a climate that esteems post-modern dance methodologies,

I have often questioned the rejection of music visualization. Mindy Aloff writes in Dance

Anecdotes,

The term 'music visualization' sometimes rudely referred to as 'Mickey- Mousing the music,' is not a compliment to a choreographer these days: it suggests that the dance really has no creative independence from its score—that it does no more than translate its score into living bodies. (63)

Such attitudes have prompted me to research the value, if any, of music visualization.

Stravinsky once commented that Balanchine's choreography to his music was like

"hearing the music with one's eyes" (qtd. in Maynard 44). Music visualization played an essential role in Balanchine's multifaceted approach to musicality. Stravinsky, referring to Movements for Piano and Orchestra, said, "The choreography emphasizes relationships of which I had hardly been aware, ... and the performance was like a tour of a building for which I had drawn the plans but never explored the result" (qtd. in

Maynard 52). Balanchine used the technique of music visualization at strategic moments within Stravinsky's scores to accent both the dance and the music. This technique was realized in their most important collaborations: Apollo (1928) and Agon (1957), which

9 resulted in the creation of two of the most important ballets in the dance canon of the twentieth century.

Stephanie Jordan points out in Moving Music: Dialogues with Music in Twentieth

Century Ballet that Balanchine's use of music visualization occurred as a result of dialogues with scores that were highly sophisticated (123). Balanchine's goal was not to simply mirror the music, as was the sole objective of modern dance pioneer Ruth St.

Denis, the founder of the dance company Denishawn, along with her husband Ted

Shawn. St. Denis trained some of the most influential modern dance artists of the twentieth century including Martha Graham, Charles Weidman, and Doris Humphrey.

While conducting a music visualization experiment, St. Denis states:

... in order faithfully to visualize a symphony, the same multiple values in movement must be received by the eye as tonal values are by the ear, and the dancers, in orchestrated embodiment, must parallel the instruments of the symphony orchestra. ...To listen patiently to the symphony, selecting and comprehending the themes, and after that the various groups and solo parts into a logical and beautiful identification with the separate instruments, proved a gigantic task. (Aloff 64-65)

Ruth St. Denis used music visualizations (and may have inspired the term) (Aloff 64) as a means to an end without commitment to any other musical techniques. Balanchine, however, used multiple techniques to choreograph to Stravinsky's complex scores. He used the pulse of the music, counterpoint, breath timing, as well as music visualization.

These are all techniques that the post-modern dance world uses and accepts, all but one—music visualization. Why has this particular sense of musicality been problematized in the post-modern choreographic scene? Choreography cannot survive on music visualization alone, but should its use be avoided?

10 When contemporary choreographers, such as Mark Morris, use Balanchine's examples of musicality, they are criticized specifically on the account of music visualization. Morris is famous for his rigorous examination of his musical scores and this knowledge is then transferred to his dancers, who can all sing the entire score from start to finish. In Grand Duo, Morris is quick to defend his choice of music visualization when

"accused" of it as he remarked in a recent interview, "Like that's a crime or something"

(Mozart Dances). Morris takes great pleasure in matching movement to music, and we as an audience enjoy watching it along with the many other layers of musicality, just as in Balanchine's work.

When I danced in Mr. Feld's company from 1990-1993, each dance used music visualization. I particularly remember Feld's Contra Pose with its score by C.P.E. Bach and how absolutely effective the ending was because of music visualization. Three groups of dancers drop in unison to the floor (an earlier motif developed in the dance) each group dropping on its own note during the last three notes of the dance.

Interestingly, due in part to music visualization, this ballet was one of the most obvious crowd pleasers in his repertoire.

Music visualization engages the viewer and deepens the connection of the dance for the audience member. It makes dance accessible in an art form that, at times, can be inaccessible to the average spectator or even the astute theatre observer. As Aloff pointed out, having one's work labeled as music visualization is not considered a compliment to a choreographer in today's climate. However, I believe it is a lifeline between movement and music, a tangible moment for the audience to grasp and hold.

11 Narrative

The dances choreographed for my thesis use narrative. These narratives are derived from personal experience and oral histories. Along with issues of tradition and post-modernism, there has been a long-standing controversy as to whether or not there is any room for narrative in dance. Judith Mackrell, dance critic for The Independent, said,

For at least two centuries, choreographers and critics have been debating whether or not dance is capable of creating interesting fictions about the real world; whether it ranks as one of the serious dramatic arts or whether it just slots somewhere between music and decoration. Back in the mid-19th century, the suspicion that dance couldn't carry a sophisticated storyline was voiced by one of the most notorious balletomanes, Theophile Gautier, who thought that 'the literature of legs' was 'little adapted to rendering metaphysical themes'. This century, George Balanchine noted dance's limited dramatic scope with the sally that 'there are no mothers-in-law in ballet'. And Merce Cunningham took the argument to its limits by insisting that dance is purely 'an activity in space and time'. (Mackrell)

Once again, it is through the engagement with narrative, as with my approach to music, that I am searching for a path to connect a dance piece to its audience. These stories inform the movement in specific ways and allow spectators a visceral, concrete way into what Gautier described as the literature of the legs.

In discussing narrative, it is important to define the term in the choreographic context. Narrative may be construed as plot or story, but neither of these describes it effectively in terms of my process as a dance artist. For me, narrative exists in the interplay between visual images and gestures that become expressive once translated into dance movement. The narrative, therefore, is an amalgamation of meaning (sourced from images in my research and my emotional response to them) and the movement vocabulary that is informed by it. Meaning and movement have become intertwined and

12 inseparable. Together these narrative moments are connected episodically and in relation to the music to form a larger arc of "story." The narrative becomes a vehicle to express the emotional content of the situation and the characters who inhabit that world.

Because my thesis work draws upon my personal history, I was deeply connected to the characters and their emotional journeys that I was translating into dance. For example, images of my grandmother sewing or preparing food, taking off my pointe shoes for the last time, or holding a baby in my arms would all, once intertwined with movement, form phrases that are more akin to poetry than prose. Often these phrases of linked movement would become abstracted, changing the original image or gesture. My choreography improved, for example, when I moved the narrative for Carriage from linear to a more oblique style of storytelling, but the emotional narrative arc of the work— in this case, loss—remained apparent.

Contemporary audiences, I believe, want to understand and relate to a dance piece, and narrative, as I have defined it, can provide this. Mackrell states:

...there have also been those who believe that dance not only can, but should explore the workings of human minds and hearts. Martha Graham, Kenneth MacMillan and Lloyd Newson have all committed their work to the world beyond the studio, making the body dance in new and even shocking ways in their determination to strip the art form of its dramatic innocence. Incest, sexual politics, greed - their subject matter has moved way beyond the fairy tale simplicities of the old ballet scenarios. (Mackrell)

It is through my personal stories that I want to capture the workings of the human mind and heart, but first and foremost the heart. Narrative becomes another lifeline for an audience to connect with my work.

13 Artists and Personal Experience

Three artists I greatly admire have also mined personal experience as a source for their art form. The famous Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, American confessional poet

Anne Sexton, and Canadian choreographer/dancer Lata Pada have all used deeply personal events in their lives as catalysts for work. Although the artists constructed work in different mediums, each conveyed personal anguish, which in turn led to the creation of remarkable art. I was struck by the similarities of my own experiences to those of these artists pertaining to subject matter, feelings of isolation, and stages of recovery while creating Carriage, a dance work about personal loss.

Pain is a subject that can be extremely difficult to express. In the introduction of

Frida Kahlo's diary, Carlos Fuentes states,

In her great work on the body in pain, Elaine Scarry lucidly notes that the pain of others is but a transitory fact in our own consciousness. Is pain something you cannot share? Even more, is pain something that can be said at all? It is undescribable, writes Virginia Woolfe. You can know the thoughts of Hamlet, but you cannot truly describe a headache. For pain destroys language. (12)

However, Kahlo effectively expressed pain through the visual language of painting.

Kahlo's life was surrounded by anguish. As a child, she was plagued by polio. At eighteen, she nearly died in a bus accident when it collided with a train, and she was bedridden for months during her recovery. Kahlo also experienced a life-long, volatile relationship with Mexican painter Diego Rivera and suffered a miscarriage in 1932. Days after the miscarriage, she first created a drawing and then a painting, Henry Ford

Hospital, referring to the hospital in Detroit where she experienced her trauma. Kahlo painted herself nude lying on a hospital bed in a pool of blood with six red umbilical cords running from her swollen belly to six objects. These objects: a snail, a fetus, a torso on a pedestal, bones of a pelvis, an orchid, and hospital machinery surround the bed. Elena Poniatowska writes in the book Frida Kahlo: 1907.2007,

What strikes me most powerfully in the painting is the square machine to one side of the bed. ... [F]or me the machine evokes all those pieces of metal that are put in our bodies, the nails, the pacemakers, the plates, the prosthesis for hip and pelvis operations, the screws, the alien bodies fitted into our insides, the mechanisms that are foreign to us: all the immense hospital machinery, the metal of the operating room that repels and frightens us. (134)

Similarly, the harsh imagery of surgical machinery also entered my piece Carriage. My encounter with recurrent pregnancy loss caused multiple surgeries to extract the fetus.

In the last section of my dance, while lying on the floor on my back, I turned upstage and opened my legs. While placing my arms in between my legs, I grabbed both of the outsides of my thighs with my hands and quickly fluttered my legs (see Appendix A pg.

53). The intention of this movement was gleaned from the multiple surgeries I had endured and my loathing of all of the foreign surgical instruments that were repeatedly placed inside of me.

It is in her risk of exposing her interior emotional state that people connected to the work and empathized with the wounded Frida. Ankori writes,

Kahlo depicted her body as an external presence perceived by the outside world and identified as a specific person, but also as a subjective, internally "sensed" entity. Thus her "body" is simultaneously an aspect of her "objective" physical Self and one of the vehicles of her "subjective" experiencing Self. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, one of her favorite writers, for Kahlo the body was "at once surface and symbol." (10)

15 With Carriage, I also hoped to achieve a simultaneous objective physical Self as the dancer being viewed in the dance, as well as a subjective experiencing Self, experiencing the recurrent pregnancy loss.

Another artist who drew upon her own suffering was celebrated poet Anne Sexton.

As a confessional poet, Sexton's work was fueled by her attempted suicides, mental illness, and obsession with death. Ralph J. Mills speaks of the personal nature of

Sexton's poetry in the book Anne Sexton: Telling the Tale:

The poems...read like the pages of an autobiography in verse which expose her without defense, ... The private experience that Mrs. Sexton holds up so courageously to frank, imaginative scrutiny falls outside her possession once the poem has been written: that experience is transformed into a public one, that is to say, one capable of illuminating the lives of each of us. (124)

My dances transformed from private experiences and oral histories into publicly shared experiences when placed on the stage. There is a letting go inherent in the process of work constructed from autobiographical themes, and I found this letting go difficult at first. Eventually, as the performances drew closer, the dances took on a life of their own separate from myself and the intensity of their personal nature lessened as the dance created its own meaning for each audience member.

In the book Sexton: Selected Criticism, Sexton explained her use of poetry as a means to remember different periods in her life. She states, "I have this great need somehow to keep that time of my life, that feeling. I want to imprison it in a poem, to keep it. It's almost in a way like keeping a scrapbook to make life mean something as it goes by, to rescue it from chaos..." (Sexton 38). I related deeply to this sense of wanting to imprison a period of my life in a dance. It facilitates a clearer understanding of the experience and preserves it; one always knows it is there to be unwrapped and remembered each time it is danced.

Sexton began writing during her hospitalization after a nervous breakdown. She explains in an interview with Barbara Kevles, "My doctor encouraged me to write more.

'Don't kill yourself,' he said. 'Your poems might mean something to someone else someday.' That gave me a feeling of purpose" (McClatchy 4). It is this sense that others will connect with your work on an emotional level that drives my work as well. I find inspiration in Sexton's courage to expose her thoughts openly and honestly through poetry. Ultimately Sexton succumbed to her preoccupation with death and took her own life. Greg Johnson writes, "What remains for us, after her death, is to admire her spirit in facing that experience, to rejoice in her momentary triumphs and to recognize, in the poems themselves, her ultimate survival (187).

For choreographer and dancer Lata Pada, survival, at one point in her life, seemed like an impossibility. The tragic events of a seemingly ordinary day forever changed the life of the Bharatanatyam dancer/choreographer and founder of Sampradaya Dance

Creations. On June 23, 1985, Pada's husband and two teenage daughters boarded a flight from Toronto to Bombay. Air India Flight 182 exploded in mid-flight over the Atlantic

Ocean off the coast of Ireland. A suspected terrorist bomb placed in a suitcase aboard the flight caused the explosion. All 329 passengers died. Sixteen years later Pada created her landmark autobiographical work Revealed by Fire based on the traumatic loss of her family and her personal journey to reclaim her life.

In a Canadian Theatre Review article titled Repeated by Fire: From the Personal to the Universal, Pada writes about an artist's path toward recovery. I was struck by the

17 similarities of our experiences while creating a dance work about an intensely personal journey. For example, we both discovered an inner strength through loss, spiritual growth, and also sought ways to make our work move beyond the personal experience to a dance that speaks of loss universally. Although Pada's circumstances in losing her entire family in a terrorist attack were far more emotionally devastating than my recurrent losses in attempting to create a family, similarities in our emotional journeys remain.

The period in my life in which I experienced recurrent pregnancy loss became a time of intense, albeit difficult, growth. It was only later that I came to an understanding that, "the path to wisdom begins with a broken heart" (Pada 47). During the years I was experiencing grief over my miscarriages, I began asking questions about how I thought, the choices I made each day, and how those choices affected my overall life. I began to recognize patterns in myself that, if addressed, would improve my life. For example, altering negative thoughts to positive ones and taking time to remove stress in my life through flow yoga and meditation. Inner growth began to occur, almost undetectable at first. Pada writes about how growth can result from darkness:

I was reminded of a nineteenth-century minister, Henry Jackson Van Dyke, who wrote, 'in some realms of nature, shadows and darknesses are the places of greatest growth. The beautiful Indian corn never grows more rapidly than in the darkness. The sun withers and curls the leaves, but once a cloud hides the sun, they quickly unfold, the shadows provide a service that the sunlight cannot'. (47)

It was in shadows of loss and grieving that I became aware of my resilient spirit. The road to motherhood took an emotional toll on me, but through the process I had gained new skills to overcome adversity. I was reminded during my performances of Carriage, as I danced in the dead leaves that were part of my set design, that each separate leaf

18 represented my strength and persistence to persevere even when only a flicker of hope remained. The dancer appeared to be recklessly moving the leaves out of the way, but it was actually the woman urgently trying to root herself in a strength she barely recognized (see Appendix A pg. 54).

Transforming a personal experience into art can only be effective if that intimate experience can be recognized in a broader context so that it speaks to all audience members. Revealed by Fire forced Pada to confront her identity as a woman, wife, and mother. She stripped away layers of "self and discovered that the creative process exposed many hidden questions (Pada 48). Some of the questions she asked herself were, "If I lose my husband, am I still a wife? If I lose my children, am I still a mother?

Who am I?" (Pada 48). As I read this I realized that I had confronted my own set of hidden questions involving my identity as a woman, wife, and mother. Was I a mother if only for the briefest of moments? Did I ultimately choose my career over motherhood because I continued to dance into my thirties and if I had retired earlier I would not have had any issues becoming a mother? Would I still be viewed as a good wife if I couldn't have children? Why did my body keep failing me when I had relied on it my entire life as a dancer to do exactly what I needed it to do on demand? It is here, through these questions, that I had moved my piece from the personal to the universal. Pada writes, "I did not question the need for this work; I was terrified how to tell it. I laboured over how I could make the personal universal" (49). I too was terrified as to how to tell such a personal story. My first attempt was choreographically off the mark, as I explain in detail later in this essay when examining my creative process for Carriage. However, through the process I discovered that importance was not in the details of the story but in its emotional landscape. Only then did I begin to translate my own personal experience into a broader sense of loss that most audience members could relate to and understand. My story had made the leap outside the walls of my own experience.

Postdramatic Theatre Traits

After reading Hans-Thies Lehmann's seminal work Postdramatic Theatre, I was inspired to apply several of the ideas explained in the book to my self-produced thesis project Miss(ing) Julie. In postdramatic theatre, the theatre artist shifts away from the importance of dramatic text and instead focuses upon many postdramatic stylistic traits including: parataxis, play with the density of signs, plethora, musicalization, simultaneity, visual dramaturgy, warmth and coldness, physicality, irruption of the real, concrete theatre, and event/situation (Lehman 86-106). Although I write later in depth about the creative process of Miss(ing) Julie, my writing here will focus on three characteristic traits of postdramatic theatre that I included in my self-produced work: irruption of the real, musicalization, and simultaneity.

In traditional theatre, the audience understands that there is a set of rules in place that separate the theatrical frame from its environment. There is, as Lehmann states, a

"fictive cosmos" or a "diegetic universe" (99). The performance is operating in a made up reality. This world, however, can be disrupted with the postdramatic sign of irruption of the real as Lehmann explains,

The postdramatic theatre is the first to turn the level of the real explicitly into a 'co-player'... The irruption of the real becomes an object not just of reflection (as in Romanticism) but of the theatrical design itself. ...In Fabre's The Power of Theatrical Madness the houselights come on in the middle of the performance after an especially exhausting action by the performers... Out of breath, the actors take a smoking break while looking at the audience. It remains uncertain whether their unhealthy activity is 'really' necessary or staged. (100)

20 In Miss(ing) Julie, the ballerina finishes the dance with her fiance and sits on the floor slowly taking out the hairpins from her hair. She places one in her mouth as she adjusts the others in her bun. She eventually takes the pin from her mouth and neatly places it back in her hair, irrupting the real. Is this activity really necessary? The mundane rearranging of hairpins then becomes a partner with other traditional elements of the theatrical design. Lehmann writes:

... ever since the Impressionists offered banal meadows instead of grand subjects and Van Gogh featured simple chairs, it has been evident that the trivial, the reduction to the greatest simplicity, can be an essential prerequisite of the intensification of new modes of perception. (101)

Another example of irruption of the real in Miss(ing) Julie occurs when the "Nancy" character takes off the Walkman and hands it to an audience member at the beginning of the piece. Also, this intrusion is repeated at the end of the dance when the "Nancy" character gives a spectator the knife used in the prior scene to kill the Miss Julie character. The unwitting spectator must interact with the dancer in these real moments.

The dancer firmly acknowledges the audience member, shattering the "fictive cosmos" created in the dance.

Another postdramatic theatre trait that I explored in Miss(ing) Julie was musicalization. Lehmann quotes Eleni Varopoulou on this subject in Postdramatic

Theatre, "for the actor, as much as for the director, music has become an independent structure of theatre. This is not a matter of the evident role of music and of music theatre, but rather of a more profound idea of theatre as music" (qtd. in Lehmann 91).

The corps dancers, staged in ancestral portraits, (the ancestor characters were used in

21 the ballet Miss Julie, choreographed by Birgit Cullberg, and I staged them in portrait-like groupings) begin whispering derogatory comments towards Miss Julie as the piece builds to her suicide. Originally I intended to record these whispers in Swedish, but decided that the dancers whispering the comments live, in English, would be more eerily effective. It is here that theatre became music. I asked the dancers to deconstruct the five phrases from the given text, for example, using repetition of one word or several words, or drawing out the sound of the beginning of a word in a phrase. From this idea, developed from the noted American theatre director Anne Bogart's Vocal Viewpoints,

"an independent auditory semiotics emerges" (Lehmann 91). The dancers' text as score carries the piece to its climax. The whispering continued to increase in volume, but at the precise moment that the knife was thrust into Miss Julie the ancestors fall silent.

"Through the different auditory peculiarities the enunciation of the text thus becomes the source of an independent musicality" (Varopoulou, qtd. in Lehmann 91).

As with irruption of the real and musicalization, simultaneity is also an important technique used in postdramatic theatre. With simultaneity it is impossible for the spectator to take in the amount of information being delivered all at once. Lehmann writes:

The compensatory function of drama, to supplement the chaos of reality with structural order, finds itself inverted; the spectator's desire for orientation turns out to be disavowed. If the principle of the one dramatic action is abandoned, this is done in the name of the attempt to create events in which there remains a sphere of choice and decision for the spectators; they decide which of the simultaneously presented events they want to engage with but at the same time feel the frustration of realizing the exclusive and limiting character of this freedom. The procedure distinguishes itself from mere chaos in that it opens up chances for the recipient to process the simultaneous by means of their own selection and structuring. (88)

22 Simultaneity was effectively used in the "Master and Servant" and "Girls Just Wanna

Have Fun" sections of Miss(ing) Julie. The dance work uses a reversed perspective wherein the audience is seated on stage, in the upstage section, looking out to the permanent audience seating. In the "Master and Servant" section of Miss(ing) Julie, the principal dancer is introduced as the Miss Julie character for the first time in the dance.

She is given her riding crop and tutu and her fiance enters the stage where they dance together. The eight corps dancers begin their dance simultaneously in the background using the seats of the theatre as their set. The corps bounce and stand on top of the seats performing equestrian style movements. As the corps "ride" their seats and Miss

Julie viciously torments her fiance with her riding crop, the audience is forced to decide which dance they watch.

In "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun", the use of simultaneity is also employed, as three layers of choreography were presented to the audience. The first was the principal dancer, the "Nancy" character, watching her memory unfold in front of her as she sat in the centre front row along with other audience members. The second layer was the trio danced on the stage by three women. The third layer involved the dancers moving in the seats of the set. The spectators were required to view all three layers simultaneously.

For example, it is rare to see a ballerina in a practice tutu sit in an area specifically designated for the audience. If an audience member wanted to focus on this unique situation, the other choreography would be lost to them. The abundance of choreographic layers heightens the audience's awareness, and liberates them to a wide array of choice as to how to view the dance.

23 Chapter Three: Creative Process

Carriage

As I entered the studio to begin the creative process for my first thesis project, I brought with me many memories from my history with recurrent miscarriage. This became the subject material for my "I Am" solo titled Carriage. For music, I chose singer and songwriter Alanis Morrissette's composition, Not As We for its highly emotional lyrics and melancholy tone. I intended the solo to have multiple sections, and Not As We would be the final dance. Yet the thought of simply walking into the studio with the music to begin choreographing an emotionally intense piece was daunting. It is always difficult for me to begin a new piece, but I wanted this dance to convey all of the complex emotions that surrounded this subject, and that was overwhelming. The emotions on my journey to motherhood included excitement, anxiety, depression, anger, and even self- loathing. But how could I convey all of those realities in one dance? I needed to seek inspiration beyond the music. Looking to my past, I found a poem I had written in 2001 about my recurrent miscarriages. Immediately the second half of the poem suggested an image from which I could begin:

Sleeping, curled, safe in your nest,

days add strength,

night breath,

tiny toes and fingers,

a beating heart...

laid to rest,

never have I felt more alone.

24 Through a pulsing gesture made with my own toes and fingers, I physicalized this beating heart. Using this gesture with my fingers and toes and alternating between the two gave me the first movement, and I continued to use this particular gesture as a recurring theme throughout this last dance. Once the poem had helped initiate the opening material, I then relied on a very traditional approach to choreography: I played the music and choreographed directly to it using the song's rhythm, accents, and musical phrases.

The period of my life explored in this work was a very dark and isolating time, and I wanted to capture this through the movement. In order to continue to find such imagery,

I experimented with weighted movement. For example, dragging myself across the floor on my knees with a heavy pulse that propelled me from one knee to the next, use of a weighted plie in which the upper body collapsed into the plie deepening it further, and jumps that landed heavily, all created appropriate emotional weight and fragmentation.

This dance vocabulary was intended to suggest fate pressing down upon me, leaving me to feel that no matter what I did my pregnancies would always end in failure.

As well, I explored the idea of grasping, because when faced by issues of pregnancy, or fertility, a woman will try many things to rectify the problem; acupuncture, yoga, meditation, herbs, vitamins, drugs, hormones, the list is as varied as the women who seek solutions. As I made my way through the list of remedies, my repeated disappointments led me to feel as if I was only grasping at air. I wove this idea of fruitless searching into my choreography: I extended my arms out in a scooping motion to the side, and quickly brought them back towards my body. This was a gesture of grasping and evoked my desperation in the search for a solution.

25 Before I started to choreograph I knew that I wanted a white cloth to be suspended

above me for the entire dance until the final moments of the piece when it would be

dropped, picked up, and cradled. Initially the cloth was to represent my womb, and I

even considered projecting images of a fetal ultrasound onto it. Very early into the

process I decided this idea seemed too literal, so the cloth was re-envisioned as a

metaphor for the child I could not carry to term. This child was being held above me,

beyond my reach. In the final moments of the piece, the cloth would drop to the floor for

me to discover and become the baby I had so desperately sought.

Once I had finished the Not as We section, meticulously choreographed to the

music, I started on the opening of the piece. I set the entire dance in a women's clinic

with the intention of adding the background sounds of a waiting room, with a simple

hospital gown as my costume. Structurally, I needed this section to contrast with the

later, darker emotions of the piece, by having it explore the joy and excitement of

-anticipated motherhood. Intending this section to be light in mood, perhaps even

comedic, I explored a physical theatre approach to convey that story; this meant a foray

into territory relatively unfamiliar to me where acting, clown-inspired mime, and spoken

text took precedence over the choreography.

The narrative I wanted to convey required that I take the audience through a

detailed, chronological journey of my failed pregnancies. I began in the earliest stages of

pregnancy, imagining myself with a large end-of-term belly by placing a pillow

underneath my hospital gown, as I waited in a sterile doctor's office. This section allowed

me a few minutes of levity in an otherwise bleak piece. I used spoken text to announce

where I was in my journey, for example, "Day forty-two: 381 heartbeats," "Day fifty-

26 seven: 2,116,008 heartbeats." I then created a balletic dance about the fragile life growing inside of me. The movement was light and lifted, as opposed to the heavily weighted movement in the Not As We segment, but I choreographed "breaks" in the dance, foreshadowing the darkness about to descend upon me. These breaks manifested in the form of a hand sliding down my leg without control, a weighted stumble as I prepared for a turn, and an arm that shook while my other arm reached out to hold it and stop it from shaking. At the end of this section I staged a representation of my first miscarriage. Grasping my hospital gown in fear, I stated, "Day seventy-nine ... no heartbeat," before falling to the ground. I crawled toward the pillow (from the doctor's clinic), clutching it, as a source of comfort. By using dialogue, I wanted the audience to understand my own sense of failure. Juxtaposing my loss against the seeming abundance of others' happiness that surrounded me, I wrote and staged a short scene, in which I conversed with an obviously pregnant acquaintance, moments after learning I had miscarried. Feigning happiness, I wished her the best and slowly returned to the pillow and, in anger, beat it against the floor repeatedly. This anger turned to grief and led me into the already choreographed Not As We section.

This first version of my piece was roughly twenty minutes in length and was unsuccessful on a number of levels. Even before my first showing of Carriage for faculty

I knew the work needed to be changed. I was dancing/acting for the first fifteen minutes with essentially no sound (the ambient waiting room sounds were yet to be added). The piece felt too long and its length, coupled with how I had joined the different scenes, failed to create empathy for my character and my journey. In addition, I had moved away from my strength as a dancer and into areas of performance where I was relatively inexperienced.

27 At this point I made a radical decision to throw away nearly all of the material I had created and start again. On consideration I realized that the ultimate piece could not have been created without generating the choreography of those problematic twenty minutes. From this early material I began to distill my dance. Most important was my decision to incorporate a dance that I had choreographed the previous year for

Professor Holly Small's choreography class entitled Half-Life. This dance was created when I did not have the full use of my right leg because I had ruptured my Achilles tendon, only five months prior. Because I could not walk without a severe limp, I created a solo on a white table that evoked the image of a broken bird unable to fly. My arms and legs quivered, while my legs entwined around one another as I unsuccessfully tried to take flight. In the original version of Carriage, during the balletic middle section, one of the "breaks" that foreshadowed the miscarriages was a right arm that shook while my left arm lowered it to stop the shaking. This was reminiscent of Half-Life as Small noted, after viewing one of my rehearsals. Small remarked that she saw my Half-Life broken bird character in my first version of Carriage and suggested I try to integrate it into my solo. I decided Half-Life, in its entirety, would become the opening of a new, distilled version of Carriage. There were already important connections between the two dances, for example, the character from Half-Life could easily be a woman broken and torn apart from repeated pregnancy losses. On another level, she could be viewed as the actual fetus trying desperately to survive, only to live for a short time before its inevitable death, or a combination of two characters: both struggling mother and fetus (see Appendix A pg. 55).

My entire perspective of the dance changed in the moment I decided to begin with

Half-Life. I needed to distill Carriage to the essence of its emotional landscape: a woman captured in a liminal moment, a transitional state from ballet dancer to mother, and the emotional journey between those two identities. Because I had originally choreographed

Half-Life with a set that consisted of a large white table with autumn leaves placed underneath it, my decision to keep this setting choreographically altered the entire course of the dance. Also, with the addition of the table and leaves, the scenography was strengthened. The table and leaves placed upstage right balanced the cloth hanging slightly off centre. The piece now had a fully realized set.

As my emotional journey came fully into focus, the narrative also became clearer, the personal chronology now evident and truthful. Half-Life signified my final years as a professional dancer—a woman performing on the stage (the table), and then leaving it behind to pursue motherhood. A tutu at waist level on a thin wire stand was placed downstage of the table. The transitional section after Half-Life began as I took the tutu off the stand and buried it under the leaves, a further symbol of leaving my dance career behind. Additionally, the autumn leaves—dead and dry—stood as a metaphor for my many miscarriages.

With an evocative opening, choreographed to The Chairman's Waltz, composed by

John Williams, I knew I needed to change the music for the final dance. I stripped away the spoken text, and abandoned the linearity of my original dance, reducing it to an abstract embodiment of the struggle and emotional turmoil I had gone through during those dark years. I compared this new process to that of a writer who takes a novella and turns it into a poem. Instinctively, I knew that the work of minimalist composer Philip

Glass might provide an answer because of its emotional timbre. Researching his

29 Metamorphosis series, I found Metamorphosis 3 ideally suited to the piece because the music provided an emotional quality to which I felt a deep response.

Changing the music moved me away from a traditional approach to choreography in that I had an entire dance set to music without counts. Each time I danced the piece it was slightly different, but landmarks in the music guided me through it. This spontaneous new relationship with the music added freshness to the work that kept me present and in the moment of performance.

As I looked at a video recording of this reworked version of Carriage, I recognized that a problem remained, but I could not identify what it was exactly. To my eye, the dance simply looked flat. I asked my dramaturg, Michael Greyeyes, to look at the recording and tell me his thoughts about why I had this intuitive sense that something was lacking in the work. This, like my decision to use Half-Life, was again another break­ through moment for the piece. After looking at the recording, Greyeyes suggested I turn to the set to provide an answer. Why did everything look as pristine in the end as it had in the beginning? This life experience was messy and yet nothing had changed with my set. Had I even interacted with it, apart from the opening and the cradling of the cloth at the very end? Re-investigating my set as an intrinsic part of the dance allowed new choreographic ideas to flow. I restaged the choreography once again in order to interact more fully with the set. I was reminded of how I blamed myself for choosing my career over having children at a younger time period in my life. The set provided a perfect opportunity to examine those feelings and this anger. After I jumped onto the table, I stood on it making a sharp staccato movement with my arms, an obvious statement about my feelings of resentment and anger toward my decision to remain a performer

30 those few extra years. This anger continued as I returned to the floor and pushed the table on a steep angle upstage revealing the leaves underneath it. I furiously kicked the leaves with my feet and knelt down in them, unearthing the tutu I had buried earlier, another target for my anger. I threw it upstage, away from me, scattering the leaves across the stage. I then continued to dance in the leaves, in the death they represented, finally fleeing to the other side of the stage where I explored movement that expressed my feeling of being caught in an insidious cycle of loss that I could not break: rolling onto the ground violently, quickly getting up and jumping repeatedly, while landing with my upper body curled over. After this frenzied and angered choreography the cloth dropped.

My movements halted as I turned to watch the cloth fall to the ground: the denouement of the piece. I walked to the cloth and knelt by it. I gathered up the cloth and prepared to bury it in the leaves, just as I had done with the tutu, only then realizing that I was holding a baby. The final image of my dance, beyond the disbelief that I was actually holding my own child, was one of utter joy as I looked into the face of my newborn baby swaddled in the cloth. As the lights faded to darkness, the audience was left listening to the sound of a heartbeat, insistent and strong.

Miss(ing) Julie

Early in my dance career, I danced with the Alberta Ballet from 1988-1990, a small company with twenty members based in Edmonton. The creative process for my self- produced choreography Miss(ing) Julie was developed through my memories of dancing for the Alberta Ballet, and more specifically the staging of esteemed Swedish choreographer Birgit Cullberg's ballet Miss Julie (see Appendix A pg. 56). Although I used several postdramatic theatre traits to help develop the work, as noted previously,

31 the piece was based on my subjective experiences of the time I spent rehearsing and performing this ballet, as opposed to staging a postdramatic version of the actual ballet.

My work was an exploration of the youthful and carefree world I was living in, and I incorporated the music I associated with that time period in my personal life. The use of the McLean Studio at York University allowed me to easily adapt a reversed audience perspective (see Appendix A pg. 57). Instead of having the spectators sit in the permanent seats of the theatre itself, I placed them in chairs that were arranged against the upstage wall of the studio. This reversed viewpoint positioned the audience to see this dance from the perspective of another dancer in the space. It also forced the audience to see the space as a theatre and not a metaphor for the endless ideas that theatres are used to express. The piece then became meta-theatrical in that it was about dancers dancing in a theatre. The dancers moved in and out of the permanent audience seats, now the dancers' set.

Very early on in the process I realized that the vast ideas and numerous characters

I had imagined for the piece needed to be pared down. Discussions with my dramaturg helped me to realize what I essentially wanted to say through the piece and allowed me to trim the work to a manageable (and affordable) size. My creative process became centered around the idea that I had to walk away from a career that I loved, but I would always be able to look back at the memories from that experience.

The song Bookends, composed by Simon and Garfunkel, was the music I chose for the opening and closing of the piece. The music starts in darkness and as the lights come up the "Nancy" character, danced by Alyssa Stevens, looks back at her younger self in a classical pose. I imagined this scene to be reminiscent of looking back at an old

32 photograph. This stirred "Nancy's" memory and she soon discovers a Walkman nearby.

She places the headphones on and begins to hear American Girl by Tom Petty. The song American Girl inspired me to choreograph a solo for Stevens, relying heavily on classical ballet technique, namely petit and grand allegro movement and a repeating series of turns. For the refrain in the song, I used classical ballet positions counterpointed with contemporary movement because I wanted to state this was a ballerina who had a modern dance background. The imagery of flight motivated this section. I was fleeing from a small town in Pennsylvania, excited to see where this new adventure in Canada would take me. Originally, I had Stevens dance this solo with the audience as front. It wasn't until after I showed this section to my supervisor, Carol

Anderson, that I changed its direction and intent. Anderson was left wondering where exactly this character was dancing. To give the character a place in which to dance I brought out the other dancers in the piece to watch her solo. I reversed the direction of the solo now having it face upstage, away from the audience and towards the other dancers, as if it was her first day in the ballet company. The other nine dancers stretched and watched to see how the "new girl" would rank in the company. Glances and whispers amongst the dancers told a narrative of the hierarchical and highly competitive nature of a ballet company. It is in this dance that "Nancy" earns her place as the top ballerina and the coveted role of Miss Julie.

I always felt something was missing in the transition from the American Girl solo to the Master and Servant section, sung by Depeche Mode, where we first encounter Miss

Julie. A sound design idea helped immensely with this transition. I incorporated the sound of a horse galloping and neighing, which set up the scene with Miss Julie as she is dressed in her tutu and given her riding crop. In Cullberg's ballet Miss Julie, the fiance is made to jump at a designated height by Miss Julie with her riding crop, striking him with it until he finally turns on her and storms out.

At this point in the dance, irruption of the real became a useful tool to transition

Stevens from the Miss Julie character back to the "Nancy" character. As "Nancy" rearranges her hairpins, she tries to remember steps from long ago, memories not easily recaptured. Her memories, embodied by the corps, enter the dance floor and she sits with the audience, and watches them unfold in front of her. I chose the extremely popular eighties song Girls Just Wanna Have Fun by Cyndi Lauper, but the version I used was the much slower paced Greg Laswell interpretation, which was a necessity for the pacing of the overall work. I choreographed a trio for three female dancers, Tracy

Day, Alison Keery, and Megan Windeler. It took several attempts to try to find the right fit choreographically for the dancers. Again, through discussions with Greyeyes insisting that I state exactly what I was trying to communicate through this particular dance, I discovered a deeper idea about the section. I realized that each of the three women had been in a relationship, at different times, with the same man that had all ended negatively and now they were there to support each other as the man moved on to others in the company. A male dancer, danced by Nicolaos Markakis, watched the female dancers from the set, above them and at a distance. The female trio directed their forceful movements at him allowing the intent of the dance to be clearly identifiable.

The sound of a servant's bell starts the next dance, moving the audience back into the world of Miss Julie and her servants. I wanted this dance to be reminiscent of the barn scene from the ballet Miss Julie. In the ballet, the servants are having a party in the barn on midsummer's eve and Miss Julie enters uninvited with the intention to dance

34 seductively with Jean, her butler. As the organ from George Michael's song Faith begins, the servants start to move in slow motion. Miss Julie leaves her tutu on the floor upstage and begins to dance, her attention on the male dancer (Markakis) playing Jean. I staged the servants in a large circle around Miss Julie, watching her closely. Miss Julie begins to dance with Jean. For this section, I choreographed ballroom style movement for Jean and Miss Julie, in addition to classical ballet partnering. As in Cullberg's ballet, Jean begins to react to Miss Julie's flirtation and they quickly turn to the servants who have witnessed their interaction and the section ends with the characters frozen in their last pose. "Nancy" comes out of the tableaux while the other dancers remain motionless.

She looks at the picture before her, but realizes that her memory is slightly incorrect.

She wanders back into the group making subtle adjustments to the dancers' positions.

The next section of the dance involves "Nancy" sitting in the front row of the set, icing her Achilles tendon as she watches the other company members dance. The corps dancers exit except for Keery. The reversed perspective permits the audience to see the action of the dancers waiting in the wings for their next entrance. Keery, a youthful understudy, repeats "Nancy's" movement vocabulary from the Faith section, but in bare feet at a slower tempo, creating a very different choreography. When the corps dancers re-enter they travel up and over the seats where Stevens is sitting. The music Sweet

Dreams by the Eurythmics set the ideal tone for this section. I wanted to convey the incestuous nature of a ballet company and how sexual partners could change quite rapidly amongst its company members. At first, I had everyone dance the same choreography at the same time and the movement looked clinical and robotic. I threw out all of the material I had set and started over again. To choreograph each individual couple with their own specific movement took a large amount of rehearsal time; however, the effect was what I had hoped to achieve, as the dance was a wash of limbs vibrating with sexual energy. This dance takes place behind Stevens and she smiles as if remembering this particular past. This section culminates with the entire group of dancers lifting Stevens up in the air over the seats in a mosh pit-like carry over to stage right. She is placed on the floor as one dancer hands her a knife.

With the presentation of the knife, the audience returns to the world of Miss Julie.

The dancers, in sharp, angular, staccato movements, travel to three different groupings reminiscent of ancestral portraits as Miss Julie, in stillness, stares at the knife. Miss Julie begins to dance in the same jagged and fractured manner as the corps, except on pointe, while the now motionless ancestors watch her movements only with their eyes.

Miss Julie repeatedly tries to stab herself with the knife, but is unable to summon the courage to do so. The music in this section, from the original Cullberg ballet, recorded from a 1989 Alberta Ballet videotape, sounded like a music box. In cleaning up the sound, the music became even more bizarre as some of the notes were dropped. This new digitized version of the music enhanced the strange reality of the scene. Miss Julie, urged by the derogatory whispers of the ancestors behind her, finally commits suicide.

Originally, I had the corps dancers exit slowly, one beat after Miss Julie's death.

However, Anderson pointed out to me that because of this staging I had created two endings to my piece. To avoid this, I had the dancers exit obtrusively and remain in the wings as the Miss Julie character slowly becomes still, thus disputing in dramatic terms the supposed finality of this first, unintentional ending. Stevens stands up as "Nancy" and hands the knife to an audience member.

36 "Nancy" moves to the centre of the floor and faces the empty seats of the set away from the audience. The choreography I created here resembles the many hours I spent alone working on pirouettes or refining specific movements from a ballet, perfecting them through countless repetitions. One by one, the dancers in the wings slowly leave.

Stevens stops and turns to the audience and pans across their faces. The audience represents the many audiences over the course of a career and there is a moment of reciprocal thanks, one from the ballerina to the audience for being there those many years and one from the audience to the ballerina for the many performances she has given. As Simon and Garfunkel's Bookends plays, Stevens dances and her last movement re-creates the pose that her younger self had assumed at the beginning of the dance. She sits down on one of the seats on the set and takes off her pointe shoes, placing them on the floor. In the silence, Stevens walks to the exit door and turns back to take in one last look at the empty studio. She turns off the light and walks out the door as the audience is left in darkness.

Valley of Coal

Coal mining is a part of my history and culture. It is in my very blood. Both of my grandfathers worked in the coalmines of Pennsylvania in the first half of the twentieth century. In choosing to create Valley of Coal as my final thesis project, I brought to light the oral histories of my grandparents, now spoken through the language of dance.

My paternal grandparents, Josef and Rose Latoszewski came together from Poland in search of the "American Dream". Josef found work in the coalmines of Pennsylvania and Rose worked as a housewife and mother. My paternal grandparents had two sons and although they were poor, they found comfort in their family and friends and their

37 Catholic faith. Their days were extremely long and filled with brutally hard work. I remember my mother once commenting that she never had met anyone as hard working as Rose. One particular story about my grandmother Rose has remained vivid in my memory. My father, at two years of age, had become quite ill with pneumonia. While

Rose was carrying a bag of groceries home one day she looked into the front window of her own home. In it she saw a vision of herself looking out of the window dressed from head to toe in black, with a black mourning veil. Rose, in seeing this image, immediately assumed this was a premonition about my two-year-old father because he had been so ill at that time. Shortly after this premonition, however, my grandfather Josef was killed in a mine collapse. The coal mining company returned him to my grandmother by simply placing his body on her porch.

My maternal grandfather, Alex Kormas, also found work in the coalmines of

Northeastern Pennsylvania. Alex was born in Russia and at the age of twelve was placed by his parents on a ship headed to America. They believed he would have success at finding a better life in America than he could possibly have in Russia. Being so young, and not knowing any English when he arrived in America, when Alex was asked if he knew how to mine coal he answered in the affirmative (he answered yes to whatever they asked him even though he did not understand what he was agreeing to) and spent the rest of his life working under the ground of Pennsylvania's Wyoming

Valley mining coal. My mother explained how my grandmother, Wladyslava Kormas,

(everyone called her Lotte) had to continually sew patches on my grandfather's work pants; soon those patches had patches from the constant work he did crawling on his knees in the mine. My mother recounted how Lotte prepared a bath for Alex every night when he returned from work. My grandmother would heat pots of water on the coal stove and fill the tub that was placed in the middle of the kitchen floor. The clean water would turn instantly black from the coal dust that covered my grandfather's body.

Armed with these oral histories, I entered the studio to begin choreographing Valley of Coal. I was also inspired by a passage from Thomas King in his book The Truth about

Stories. He asks the question; what makes his stories special or unusual? He answers this by stating:

Absolutely nothing. Matter of fact, the only people who have any interest in either of these stories are my brother and me. I tell the stories not to play on your sympathies but to suggest how stories can control our lives, for there is a part of me that has never been able to move past these stories, a part of me that will be chained to these stories as long as I live. (King 9)

I will always be chained to my family history. This ethnography guides my piece, its choreography, the different sections I chose to create and their order, and its overall tone. This personal material, unlike my other two thesis projects that were also forged by personal stories, bears the burden of telling these oral histories with a profound care and respect for my forebears: I have taken on the role of culture bearer for my family. A first step towards honouring this responsibility was to tour The Lackawanna Coal Mine in

Northeast Pennsylvania's Wyoming Valley.

I went on the tour by myself so that I would have absolutely no distractions. After I got my ticket, I was told to make sure I took a jacket down in the mine because it was quite cold, only fifty-three degrees, three hundred feet below the surface. I took a seat in the very front of the mine car and as we began our descent into "Slope #190" I could not keep my eyes from welling up with tears knowing that, for my grandfathers, this journey occurred daily. They often entered the mine in the darkness of the early morning, and

39 after long hours of work, re-emerged in the dark of night. Our descent to "the foot" of this anthracite coalmine, originally opened in 1860, took about four minutes. It was dark, cold, and damp and I was overcome by a sense of claustrophobia from the low ceilings and the knowledge that we were deep inside the earth.

The tour let me experience the sights and sounds of a coal mine. At one point, the guide extinguished all the light. It created a darkness so complete that I was unable to see my own hand in front of my face. There were sounds of rushing air, as ventilation in the mine was critical, and water occasionally dripped right on the top of my head.

The tour lasted for an hour and at the end I was relieved to be ascending from the earth. Imagining mining as a way of life was very depressing. The tour provided me with a new perspective on coal miners, and I was humbled to know that my grandparents endured this reality to provide their children with an education to make their lives better.

Upon completion of the tour, everyone was provided with a "miner's certificate". At the very bottom of the certificate is the quote, "Theirs was the glory. Ours is the heritage to cherish and hold." These words instilled a further sense of responsibility to tell my grandparents' stories with a truth that honours their memories.

By amalgamating the stories of both my paternal and maternal grandparents into a single pair, I created the narrative of my piece. When I ventured into the studio with my dancers, Michael Caldwell, Louis Laberge-Cote, Luke Garwood, Ana Groppler, Michael

Sean Marye and Daniel McArthur, the two fundamental elements that steered my choreography were the narrative and the music I had chosen, the backbone of my creative process. Using miner's headlamps as part of the costume design and integrating the lamps into the choreography (turning them on and off and where the light

40 from the lamps would be projected) created a more compelling scenography. My search for verisimilitude in the visual design strengthened the narrative. I began with the last section of the piece. In Valley of Coal, I needed this last section to tell the story of grief, as the miners confronted the loss of their friend and also to represent their sheer exhaustion from the years of working as coal miners. I envisioned the entire piece, choreographed for one female and five male dancers, covering the time span of one day in the life of my grandparents. The opening occurs in the early morning as the miners are walking over the hills to work. The second movement portrays their work in the mines. During lunch, (the third section of the piece), they unite in song to illustrate their close friendship. Afterwards, there is a dance about my maternal grandfather leaving

Russia as a young boy, followed by the mine collapse that killed my paternal grandfather, constituting the fourth section. At the end of the workday, my grandmother prepares a bath for my grandfather as the fifth section of the piece. The final section depicts the latter part of the evening, when the men gather together in grief.

I had a clear vision of what steps I wanted to use in this final section and how I would coordinate them with the score. I choreographed the men kneeling and crawling as well as "stepping" from one knee to the other. This heavy knee work formed the basis of this dance, representing several ideas: the continuous work in the mines on their knees, the Catholic faith where one kneels in prayer, and the miners' inability to stand due to their emotional and physical exhaustion. I juxtaposed these heavy steps with lighter and more lifted balletic steps, for example, a leg raised and suspended to the side with arms opened wide and palms lifted upward, or an arm reaching to the sky as the other hand caresses that arm while arching backwards. Reaching motions comment on the worker's spirituality. At first, when searching for music to use in this section, I was listening to Catholic hymns. However, the music I selected, Hard Times Come Again No

More, composed by Stephen Foster, was secular, but had a hymn-like quality.

When I viewed the dance later, in conjunction with the other sections, however, I wondered why the dancers were moving so quickly and dancing so precisely on the music. Each time I viewed the ending it felt wrong. With the death of one of their friends,

everything had changed and this needed to be reflected in the choreography. The unison and even spacing that was effective in other sections had no place in this last dance and the speed of their movement did not speak of grief. I threw the entire section

away and choreographed a deconstructed version for all four dancers. At first, the

dancers improvised movements and fragments from the original version. Gradually, I

shaped the section into patterns and steps that I preferred and had the men, one at a

time, throughout the dance, turn their headlamps off, so that darkness slowly

encompassed them. When I viewed this version in the McLean Studio I was concerned

that it would not translate to the proscenium stage because of the distance from stage to

audience. Also, my dramaturg felt I had lost the emotional thread I had developed

throughout the piece by not having the dancers connected to the music. I went back to

the studio once again with McArthur and created a dance of mourning for him that was

tied to the music. With the staging of this new dance, I had created a strong diagonal as

explained in The Intimate Act of Choreography,

The famous diagonal from upstage right to downstage left is so often used because it makes the most powerful visual and psychological impact. Why is this so? It moves the audience's eye from left to right, the pathway universally followed by human beings in visual scanning (even in cultures who read from right to left). (Blom and Chaplin 52)

42 The end of the dance moves three of the dancers (McArthur, Caldwell, and Garwood) with their lamps turned off in poses across the downstage section of the stage, one kneeling and two standing. Marye, the fourth dancer, standing upstage centre, slowly pans across the three other men with his headlamp. Marye covers his light with his hand, causing the light to bounce back across his face, just before he shuts his lamp off.

In silhouette, we see Marye lower his arm to his side. As the music comes to an end, there is a slow fade to black, leaving the men frozen in time.

The longest section, the second movement, was my next choreographic challenge.

Originally my intention was to choreograph this section to the music The Poet Acts, composed by Philip Glass, and then remove the music and replace it with recorded text about miners' experiences working in the coalmines. However, I immediately became attached to the music because of its emotional timbre. I decided to layer the text over the music. Knowing there were multiple layers of information being given to the audience in this section (music, text, and movement), I crafted the dance using traditional balletic staging, with the five male dancers working as a corps and moving in unison. This helped convey the idea of the repetitive work the men performed day after day in the mines. The steps involved rocking side-to-side and slowly melting down to one knee only to rise up again. Also, the choreography produced lifting, trudging, and swiping movement, as if the dancers were carving out the earth with their bare hands. Ultimately, the layered text over the music was too didactic. The use of the music alone suited the section beautifully.

In all of the feedback sessions with the MFA faculty, a recurrent suggestion was to make the second movement "grittier." I was also particularly inspired by Small's

43 comment about exploring the space above the men in the mine. In order to achieve a grittier look and explore upward space I let go of the complete unison for the corps of men. I kept the choreography for their lower bodies in unison, and let the men decide how they would use their arms and upper bodies based on the previously set choreography. My decision to place many of the movements that were originally on the men's feet onto their knees impacted the section significantly (see Appendix A pg. 58). I also re-choreographed a repeating box step that was performed with their bodies upright. The new choreography placed the men's entire upper bodies at a ninety-degree angle to the floor and the men lifted their right hand to the ceiling. These major changes to the section created a much more effortful and brutally constricting feel to this dance.

From the earliest stages of creation, I knew the song Sixteen Tons had to be incorporated into the score. The song is upbeat, with a sobering undercurrent as expressed in the following lyrics: "St. Peter don't you call me cause I can't go, I sold my soul to the company store." Miners were not paid in cash, but in script—credit vouchers that could only be used to buy goods at the mining company's store. This system made it impossible for miners to build savings, and they became forever indebted to the mining company. This section was critical to the piece because of the serious overall tone of the dance, as it provided a lighter moment that the work desperately needed.

Even as I began choreographing this section, I felt as if it belonged in a different dance. The movement seemed too current, almost Broadway-based. Throwing out everything I choreographed, I started over. A major shift in the piece occurred when I decided to have the dancers themselves sing the song. This change created a stronger sense that the men were trusted co-workers and close friends. The new direction in the

44 choreography, however, was not as successful. The movement was designed to be comedic, but it was unconvincing. I re-choreographed the section again, but continued to have the men sing. The final adjustment for this section was to stage the action on the edge of the apron as "the lunch" area. This was effective for many reasons. As my dancers are not trained singers, the projection of the song became less difficult because of the dancers' close proximity to the audience. Also, in this naturalistic scene, the audience could engage more with the dancers. Spectators could see the performers' sweat from their hard work in the coalmine and view small details, for example, the sandwiches they ate as their lunch or the coal dust on their faces (see Appendix A pg.

59). This enabled the audience to see the men as real people. Similar to Carriage, less was more for this section. By literally bringing the song forward, this section became about the song. The dance needed to be secondary. As the song culminates with Marye slowly singing the last part of the refrain alone, the mood shifts dramatically, from jocularity to a sobering reality.

The amalgamation of both my maternal and paternal grandfather's stories became the root source for the fourth section. Knowing my maternal grandfather came to

America at a very young age to pursue a better life, I explored Russian folkloric movement. I introduced this scene with a sound design that consisted of three people speaking in Russian. There was a mature male and female voice and that of a young boy. The scene depicted what I imagined could have been the final conversation before my young grandfather walked onto the ship headed to America. Even though the conversation is in Russian, there are enough clues in the dialogue, along with the sound of lapping water and a ship's horn, to understand this was a memory about a young immigrant leaving his parents. In this male solo, danced by renowned contemporary dancer Laberge-Cote, I juxtaposed folk steps with contemporary-based movement. The dance is a narrative about my grandfather's idea of being Russian, exploring his loss of childhood, parents and culture. The scene culminates with the death of my paternal grandfather in a mine collapse. Heavy black drapes fall on Laberge-Cote from the ceiling. During the descent of the last drape there is a blackout and the audience is left sitting in darkness as an intensely loud sound of crashing rock fills their ears.

The female solo that follows, created on emerging dance artist Ana Groppler, developed from images of household chores my grandmothers performed. I incorporated the literal filling of the bathtub with water (see Appendix A pg. 60), but other work images were evoked. While Groppler is on the floor she wipes the ground with her hands to indicate washing the floor. At another point, she flexes her hands up to the ceiling while keeping her forearms on the floor and quickly moves her arms back and forth repeatedly, a movement reminiscent of using a rolling pin. Also, while holding her dress out in front of her body, she moves her arms in a large circle and shifts her weight from one leg to the other as if she is stirring a large pot. Other subtle movements included

Groppler slowly drying her hands on the front of her dress and wiping the bottom of her tired foot. In the final section of this dance, she sees a premonition of herself clothed fully in black through the window. I incorporated this image from my family's oral history since it had made such a vivid impression on me. This vision startles her, but she returns to her work. As she continues to fill the bathtub, she hears a knock at the door at the time when her husband should be coming home from work. She knows her husband would never knock, and with the intuition of a wife about to become a widow she understands her husband is dead. She drops the basin into the bathtub and stares straight ahead, unable to move. Chapter Four: Research Outcomes

Personal experience can be many things: memory, a fragment of conversation, an aroma, or historical fact. My MFA choreographic research has led me to a deeper understanding of what it means to make a dance about personal experience. I consider

"the personal" in dance to be very specifically the emotional imprints of an autobiographical event captured in movement. Regardless of whether events are joyful or traumatic, human emotions can resonate strongly through dance. It is because of this that dance is an ideal vehicle to express the complexities of one's own history.

Auto-ethnography infused my work from its very beginnings, flooding me with an array of vivid imagery to the point that I had more ideas than I could possibly translate into these short works. There was a curatorial function in how I chose what to include, which required me to produce movement that served only the narrative's ultimate purpose: to have an emotional effect upon the audience. Throughout the entire creative process, I recognized that an aesthetic hierarchy was in place, which prevented me from being "precious" with my choreography. The hierarchy demanded that I cut material I had spent weeks working on if it ultimately did not convey the necessary emotion the pieces required.

A traditional approach to choreography lends itself to literal expression much more easily than a post-modern approach. With Carriage, I broke from an Aristotelian arc to an oblique narrative that explored atmospheric mood rather than specific details. I abandoned spoken language that contextualized the choreography's abstracted movement and moved away from the literal to the implied. I was forced to re-examine the merits of post-modern processes. After Carriage I was very careful not to fall into the

47 dangers of being literal for my remaining works. It was during the transformation of

Carriage that I realized my understanding of the term "traditional" had not changed, but what had shifted was my view of myself as a choreographer.

There are limitations to working within a traditional framework. One's freedom to explore certain impulses in the creative process can only be taken so far because the narrative demands constant attention. In Miss(ing) Julie I wanted to explore more post­ modern elements within the piece but ultimately moved back to my traditional base. In the process of ordering and condensing all of my ideas, I developed a traditional narrative arc for both stories. I could have made much more use of postdramatic traits, but a more traditional approach was warranted because of the narrative's sheer complexity. I concluded that in committing to tell a clear narrative one needs to stay within a conservative approach otherwise the meaning will become obtuse.

Another drawback to working within a traditional approach is creating work that looks too ordered and organized. Valley of Coal was my most traditional piece. Yet I was able to step back from the work after I choreographed it and acknowledge where this methodology did not serve it. In the few places where the piece seemed over-structured,

I was able to loosen the reins of the ordered choreography slightly and organize the dance vocabulary in a more oblique fashion. The movement was still musical and the narrative transparent, but it was no longer burdened by its organization. The choreography moved towards post-modernism when necessary, but its fundamental makeup remained traditional. Classicism, with its inherent structure, had shown its value.

The most important factor in my research was the translation of emotion to the audience. I took the images produced from oral histories, along with the overarching

48 narrative, into the studio with me. Through the creative process, the images are placed within the abstract language of dance. During the creation of the dance the images become implied, but the original emotional message is retained. The sum of the dance's parts should create a whole that is literal (linked images that tell a story), but because of the abstract language I was writing in, the whole became abstracted, yet the emotional imprint of the story was not lost in translation. The audience, while watching the dance, reconstitutes the meaning of the images for themselves, and in so doing becomes connected to the dance, making possible the emotional transference that was a foundational aim of my research.

49 Chapter Five: Conclusion

As I have watched dance over the years, I have realized the importance of emotion.

It has always fueled me as a dancer and drawn me in as a spectator, yet a great deal of contemporary dance seems to distance itself from emotion. For example, Wayne

McGregor, resident choreographer for the Royal Ballet, and one of today's most highly esteemed choreographers, creates work from a highly analytical and scientific base.

McGregor states, "If you think about it, we are all made of mechanisms and neurones

[sic] and codes and stuff. Human hardware and software. That's more fundamental to dance than characters and stories, isn't it?" (McGregor). I blatantly disagree. People and their stories are fundamental to dance. I remember a story Eliot Feld once relayed to us while in rehearsal. He spoke about scientists that had created a computer to play the best chess player in the world. The chess master continually defeated the computer until one day the computer won. The scientists, who had been cheering their invention, became morose, asking "what have we done?" By creating a machine that was smarter than humans, they assumed they had made us obsolete. One scientist saw things differently. He claimed they were missing the point. He said, "It doesn't matter that machines are smarter. That was never our strength. What makes us unique is that we can feel emotion." Stories, characters, and a traditional sense of musicality are old fashioned in today's post-modern climate, but for me they are how I connect to a richer storytelling tradition. As deconstruction and fragmentation are pushed to their limits there is great potential for a backlash to occur from an overabundance of work that is emotionally arid. Audiences need music and stories to live vicariously through our work.

This is exactly why I make dances and why tradition must remain part of my process, to remind us of our ability to feel, to find a literature of the legs rich with emotion. Bibliography

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Ankori, Gannit. Imaging Her Selves: Frida Kahlo's Poetics of Identity and Fragmentation. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002.

Banes, Sally. Terpsichore In Sneakers. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987.

Blackwood, Michael. Seven Post-Modern Choreographers. New York: Insight Media, 2009. DVD

Blom, Lynn Anne, and L. Tarin Chaplin. The Intimate Act of Choreography. Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 1982.

Bodner, John. Anthracite People: Families, Unions, and Work, 1900-1940. Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1983.

Bremser, Martha, ed. Fifty Contemporary Choreographers. London: Routledge, 1999.

Colburn, Steven E., ed. Anne Sexton: Telling the Tale. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1988.

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Grimberg, Salomon. Frida Khalo: Song of Herself. New York: Merrell, 2008.

Jordan, Stephanie. Moving Music: Dialogues with Music in Twentieth-Century Ballet. London: Dance, 2000.

—. Music Dances: Balanchine Choreographs Stravinsky. New York: George Balanchine Foundation, 2010. DVD

Kahlo, Frida. Frida Kahlo: 1907.2007. Mexico: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 2008.

—. Henry Ford Hospital. Collection Museo Dolores Olmedo Patino, Mexico City. Frida Kahlo 1907.2007. Mexico: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 2008. 133.

—. The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995.

King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Toronto: House of Anansi Press Inc, 2003.

51 Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Trans. Karen Jurs-Murphy. Postdramatic Theatre. London: Routledge, 2006.

Mackrell, Judith. "Dance/ She wants to tell you a story: Narrative force or empty gesture? Judith Mackrell talks to Siobhan Davies about the 'literature of legs'" The Independent. 13 Oct. 1993. Web. 27 Jan. 2012.

Maynard, Olga. Balanchine and Stravinsky. New York: Dance Magazine, 1972.

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Poliniak, Louis. When Coal was King: Mining Pennsylvania's Anthracite in Picture and Story. Lancaster, PA: Applied Arts Publishers, 1970.

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Strindburg, August. Miss Julie. 1888. Print.

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Wolensky, Robert P., Nicole H. Wolensky, and Kenneth C. Wolensky. Voices of the Knox Mine Disaster: Stories, Remembrances, and Reflections on the Anthracite Coal Industry's Last Major Catastrophe January 22, 1959. Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1999.

Wright, Jack. "Music of Coal: Mining Songs from the Appalachian Coalfields." Lonesome Records and Publishing BMI, 2007. Liner Notes. CD.

52 Appendix A: Images

The following images are from my three thesis works: Carriage, Miss(ing) Julie, and Valley of Coal. These images reference each piece through a combination of production photographs, publicity flyers, and auto-ethnographic sources. Nancy Latoszewski, my maiden name, is used as my stage name.

Carriage

Dancer: Nancy Latoszewski

Photographer: David Hou

53 Carriage

Dancer: Nancy Latoszewski

Photographer: David Hou

54 Carriage

Dancer: Nancy Latoszewski

Photographer: David Hou Miss(ing) Julie

Dancers: Daniel McLaren and Nancy Latoszewski in Birgit Cullberg's Miss Julie

(Alberta Ballet 1989/1990 Season)

Photographer: Unknown

56 Miss(ing) Julie

Dancer: Alyssa Stevens

If if S.rV if If it

f f rws , jr

A new choreographic work by Nancy Latoszewski

Featurkig guest artists from the York Dance Ensemble and Balletjorgen Canada.

McLean Performance Studio Accolade East Bldg./ 2ai Floor ^ York University * 4700 Keele St, Toronto, ON

November 29,h, 7:30 pm November 30lh, 7:30 & 8:30 pm

Limited Seating/ PWYC $ 5 suggested ^Photograph featuring Alyssa Steve

Photographer: Michael Greyeyes

57 Valley of Coal

Dancer: Louis Laberge-Cote (2nd Movement)

Photographer: Jamie Day Fleck

58 Valley of Coal

Dancers: Daniel McAurthur, Michael Sean Marye, Louis Laberge-Cote (3rd Movement)

Photographer: Jamie Day Fleck

59 Valley of Coal

Dancer: Ana Groppler (5th Movement)

Photographer: Jamie Day Fleck

60 Carriage is the first of three thesis projects in which I explore the personal and examine what it reveals, while creatingchoreography in a traditional approach. When I began to choreograph Carriage, I was determined to tell a specific and detailed narrative. Through this process, however, I discovered that sometimes it is in the letting go of initial Ideas that a work Is discovered. CARRIAGE After my original Carriage piece was choreographed, I stepped back and realized I needed to find its root essenoe—a distillation of the work, somewhat like taking a novella and transforming it into a poem. The import was no longer This piece is dedicated to Wynter in the details of my story, but in the emotional landscape surrounding this liminal moment in my life. 1 took the long road to this pieoe, but in the end I arrived at this place—this moment, and not unlike my own experience that I am drawing upon, the longer road is always more challenging, but when you finally arrive the view is often sweeter. Choreographer/Performer: Nancy Latoszewski

Lighting Designer: William Maokwood Nervousness and excitement, the smell of Woolite Music Composed By: John Williams Chairman's Waltz, Philip Glass from my freshly laundered tights, Metamorphosis 3 my amazement at the fact that I had permission SoundScape, Costume and Set: Nancy Latoszewski to wear more make-up than all five of my older sisters, Dramaturg: Michael Greyeyes and the immense blackness as I looked out into the audience MFA Supervisors: Carol Anderson / Darcey Calllson thinking I could spot my Mom. These are some of the memories that oome Thank You: I would like to thank Darcey Calllson, Carol Anderson, flooding baok to me as I remember William Maokwood, and Holly Small for their generous contributions to my first experience as a nine year old this work. I would also like to thank my team of doctors and therapists performing on stage (especially Ginette Hamel,'Vlodek Kluczynski, Jen Bladon, as a card (the Seven of Hearts) in and Vickl Hawkins) for assisting me in my long recovery from a Wilkes-Barre Ballet School's production of devastating injury, which required that I relearn not only Alice in Wonderland. how to walk again but finally to dance once more. Lastly, X would like My nervousness turned to relief to thank my husband and dramaturg, Michael Greyeyes, as I exited the stage in the blackout, not only for his skill as a dramaturg, but for his unflagging support only to realize which has allowed me to continue in this program, I was on the wrong side of the stage even when I thought it impossible. for my next entrance I As my terror grew, I made a mad dash for the other side of the stage in total darkness. Thankfully, I scurried into the wings just before the lights came back up. I knew at that moment there was nothing else in the world I would want to do with niy life - what could be more exciting than this? Nancy Latoszewski Miss(ing) Julie November 29-30, 2011 Program Cover

a new ehoreoaja.phic work by Nancy Lstoszewsfci

62 Xracie Burgess (Stage Manager) Recent credits include lighting design for The Provok'd Wife (TheatregYork), management for from thine eyes (Signal Theatre), and lighting design for FRESH Dance performances and Bordeaux directed by Alex Kentris at the Toronto Fringe (July 2011). Tracie also acted as production manager and j 1 volunteer coordinator for Scenofess 2011, part of the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space, in the Czech Republic.

Choreographer's Notes Michael Greyeyes (Dramaturge) is a choreographer, director, and educator. His Not long ago, I started reconnecting, through directing credits include the opera, Facebook, with friends that I had made in the Alberta Pimooteewin (The Journey) for Soundstreams Ballet during the nineteen eighties. It was amazing Canada, Almighty Voice and his Wife for to be reminded of things that I hadn't even thought Native Earth Performing Arts and The River, of in over two decades. Hilarious stories and for Nakai Theatre. Prior to his work as a photographs, both outrageous and dazzling, forever director and choreographer, Michael danced immortalizing us in our early prime, came flooding with The National Ballet of Canada and was into my inbox. I was struck at how some of these soloist for Feld Ballets/NX. In 2011, he memories were blurred and had become distorted or, in produced and directed from thine eyes, which some cases, X was left with no hint of recollection; premiered at the Enwave Theatre in Toronto. yet others remained crystal clear, as if it was He is an Associate Professor in the yesterday. Some drifted in and out of my mind with department of Theatre at York. no particular beginning or end, disjointed and fragmented, while others seemed to have a very © particular narrative arc. My strongest memories of Special thanks to my cast and crew, Carol this time surround my role as "Miss Julie" in Birgit Anderson, Holly Small (artistic director of cullberg's ballet adaptation of August Strindberg's The York Dance Ensemble), Darcey Callison, play of the same title, while these memories form the William Mackwood, Paul Holland, Victor basis of this dance and are derived from my life, Waiters, James McKernan, York Dance Ensemble, both on and off the stage, I reversed the audience's it Jorgen, Brooklyn Doran, George Greyeyes, perspective in order for the viewer to have a & Eva Greyeyes, York university & FA stronger sense of a dancer's point of view. As I mance Facilities delved into these memories I was reminded of my naivete, thinking that X had forever to dance. The choreographing of this piece created within me a nostalgia for a period in my life that seemed—t,ohave Please join Signal and the cast and passed all too quickly... forever came fast. crew of Miss(ing) Julie at the bsinthe Pub, located on the York niversity campus, after the opening night performance to celebrate this, the 2nd part of my overall thesis work. O (A CD (A Nancy Latoszewski 3 (Choreographer) danced with Feld 3 5' Ballets/NY, The Cleveland/ San SS. Jose Ballet, the Alberta Ballet c. and the Wilkes-Barre Ballet (D c Theatre and'is an award winner at York the prestigious New 73 International Ballet Competition. Q> CD Nancy has performed principal roles in Eliot Feld's A Footstep (D of Air, The Jig Is Up, and Bloom's Wake, Agnes de Mille's 0) Rodeo, The Moor's Pavarie by Jose Lim6n, Roland Petit's Carmen, M and Serenade and Donizetti Variations by George Balanchine. at She danced the Sugar Plum Fairy and Maria in The Nutcracker, Synopsis of Birgit Cuilberg's 3 and the title role in Birgit Cuilberg's Miss Julie, among many a. Adaptation of Miss Juiie others. Nancy has taught throughout her career, set ballets, w and was rehearsal director for a number of companies. Miss Julie, written in 1888 by August Strindberg, deals with Alyssa Stevens (Nancy/ Miss Julie) was born in Vancouver and class, lust, and power. The youn trained at the Flora Pigeau Dance Academy and The Vancouver Goh woman of the title, wanting to Ballet Academy. Alyssa's training also included summers at escape an existence cramped by Boston Ballet and the Banff Centre social mores and oppressive attempts to find her a fianc§, In 2007, Alyssa won The Most Outstanding dances at the servants' annual Contemporary Dancer Award in the Semi- isummer party, where she is Finals of the Youth American Grand Prix fewn to a senior servant, a Competition. With Ballet Jorgen Canada ptman named Jean. Over the she has performed the small step-sister [arse of the play, Miss Julie and in Bengt Jbrgen's Cinderella, lead an battle for control, which Czardas in Coppelia, lead, flower in The Sings back and forth between them Nutcracker, and one of the principle roles in Malgorzata Nowacka's Icaraus. Alyssa is now in her fourth season with l''nOKKN.Jl!U£ Ballet Jorgen Canada.

Peter McKinnon (Lighting Designer) worked for more than two decades as a lighting designer, principally for dance and opera. In dance, he has lit the ballets of John Cranko, Brian MacDonald, William Forsythe, Sir Anthony Tudor, Reid Anderson and John Butler, and contemporary Bennathan, David Carle, James Kudelka, Paul Taylor, Judy Jarvis and many others. He has really' enjoyed returning to the studio with the dancers and is delighted at this opportunity to be back in the saddle again.

ON COo

Costume Design by Trio: Tracy Day, Alison Nancy Latoszewski Keery, Megan Windeler

Memories/ Dancers/ Servants/ Ancestors: Dramaturge; Michael Greyeyes Yvon Allard Justine Comfort Sound_j^chnician. Amanda Tracy Day Ciccoritti" Jill Eisener ^ Anastasia Feigin Dirk Ave Cristina Greiner Alison Keery fSHasLDegian: Michael Greyeyes 6 Uikolaos Markakis Nancy Latoszewski yyes & Megan Windeler r squei VALLEY OF COAL

Choreographer: Nancy Latoszewskl Interpreters: Coal Miners: Michael Caldwell, Louis Laberge-Cote, Luke Garwood, Michael Sean Marye, Daniel McArthur Josef/Alex: Louis Laberge-Cote Rose/Lotte: AnaGroppler Woman in Black: Tracy Day Coal Mining Bosses: Miles Gosse, Nikolaos Markakls Lighting Designer: Peter McKinnon Technical Director: James McKernan Music: Old Home Medleyby Stephen Foster, The Poet Acts by Philip Glass, Sixteen Tonsby Merle Travis, BiaJyoh Roz (anonymous), Stasiek (anonymous), Hard Times Come Again No More by Stephen Poster Costumes Designed by: Nancy Latoszewskl Costume Assistant: Trade Burgess Set Designed by: Nancy Latoszewskl and James McKernan Props Designed by: Nancy Latoszewski Set constructed by: James McKernan Sound Designed by: Nancy Latoszewski Dramaturg: Michael Greyeyes MPA Supervisors: Carol Anderson, Darcey Callison I would like to thank all of my dancers for their keen commitment to this project as well as my designers Peter McKinnon and James McKernan. Special thanks to William Mackwood, Carol Anderson, Darcey Callison, Holly Small, Trade Burgess, Bengt Jorgen and Ballet Jorgen Canada, Katya Kuznetsova, Zhenya Cerneacov, Elena Gariaeva, Anton Gariaeva, Gleb Garlaeva, Katrina Avrutov, Eric Armstrong, David Smukler, Tom Bradshaw, Chris Karczmar, John Herron Sr., John Herron Jr., York University and the MFA program. I would also like to thank my Mom, Josephine Latoszewski, Bucky Bowden, and Lee Perlis for sharing their memories that contributed greatly to this piece. I would especially like to thank my family, Michael, Eva, and Lilia Greyeyes for their endless support of my work. *s (Q3 £ 3 >5 3 z ^ a o CDW OQ) 0)"U a. M

My creative

research of Sfort: included visits

ON •"-J Appendix C: Performance Text

Valley of Coal Prologue

I recorded select phrases from the full text to create an introduction to the piece that had multiple layers.

Text for Valley of Coal compiled and edited by Nancy Greyeyes based on Anthracite People: Families, Unions, and Work, 1900-1940 and Voices of the Knox Mine Disaster: Stories, Remembrances, and Reflections on the Anthracite Coal Industry's Last Major Catastrophe January 22, 1959.

"I worked in the mines my whole life. My father worked in the mines, my uncles, my brothers too We were Polish, but we worked with the Irish, Italians, Lithuanians, Russians, Slovaks, and the Welsh. We all worked like dogs, but the Welsh, they had it easier because they had experience from working in mines before they came here."

"I was one of the lucky ones that survived Knox. The Knox mine was right under the Susquehanna River, and we were robbing the pillars, mining beyond the 'stop lines'. When the roof gave way, it sounded like Niagara Falls. We sprinted up the slope, but twelve men weren't so lucky—they drowned like trapped rats. Work crews toiled round the clock for 3 days to plug the hole. They tossed whole boxcars, boulders, dirt and rock into the whirlpool to stop that river from filling the mine below. They didn't think the river would cave in. They were living in a fool's paradise, even making plans to do more mining in that area. Greed caused us to lose some good men that day."

"I said, 'I'll never go in the mine and get sick like my father." My four uncles—that's my father's brothers—died with black lung. My dad died with it. I said, 'I'll never go in there.' When I got married—well—what was left? And then I had children. I wasn't going to go away from here. I had to go in and make a living. There was no other way out."

"I was a union official, a committee man. I was one guy, stuck with the men. And I had hell-holes to work in. If I'd had listened to the coal company and done what they wanted me to do, I'd have been the boss in the coal company and taken care of. But I wouldn't. They wanted you to see that the men loaded more coal for the same wages. And I wouldn't go along with it. We had a contract to live up to—the contract that they agreed on—yardage, the price of a full coal car. The minute

68 they wouldn't pay, I was after them. They even offered me to go to school to become a mine foreman, that I'd be taken care of, but I refused."

"The mine bosses play favorites. They can give you better places to work, easier jobs. Every place in the mine is not alike. In some places you have to work harder than in others to produce coal. A boss can get money if he does you a favor. It's hard to prove, but all the men know about it. You meet a boss at the bar and make sure he gets his free drinks. Lots of them do that."

"In all my years spent working in the mines, I've seen men killed on every side of me, others had their legs, and arms, and backs broken... yet, I have been spared."

"We loaded a lot of dynamite into those walls. Every time it exploded the air filled with coal dust and little slivers of sharp, glass-like pieces of coal filled the sacs of our lungs."

"There were all kinds of mine disasters: collapsing roofs, gas explosions, cave-ins, fires, floods. There was a mine fire in Plymouth and the mine only had one opening. No one could get out. After that all mines had to have two openings."

"We used mules to pull the coal out of the mines. The coal companies placed less value on a coal miner than on a mule. If a mine cave-in was reported, the first thing the mine officials asked was, 'How's the mule?' If a mule was killed, they had to pay for a new one, but us coal miners—we could easily be replaced."

"I started working in the mines as a breaker boy when I was nine years old. We sat on wooden chairs over the chutes with conveyor belts of rushing coal picking out the slate. My fingers were so cut up from the rock they would bleed and we couldn't wear gloves because we could grip the coal better without them. I learned quick from the other boys that if you urinated on your hands they healed much faster."

69 Transition into Male Solo (Recorded in Russian)

Written by Nancy Greyeyes

Mother: Josef, it is time... Josef: But I don't want to go, I want to stay here with you Mama. Mother: My dear boy, you are a good son, so loving. You have always listened well. We just want what is best for you. You can find a better life in America. Father: It is time to go now Josef. The ship will be leaving soon. You must be strong. Go and make us proud. Josef: Yes Papa.

Miss(ing) Julie Performance Text Written by Nancy Greyeyes

All text was whispered live. Following are the instructions I gave to the cast concerning the text: Feel free to jumble the order of the text, repeat phrases and or specific words of the text, for example: "You bring dishonour and shame to our household. Dishonour, dishonour, shame, dishonour and shame to our household." Phrases: "You have blackened our family name."

"Why have you done this?"

"You bring dishonour and shame to our household."

"You are a disgrace to all of us."

"This is a stain that can only be cleansed by death."