Copy, Transform, Combine

Copy, Transform, Combine Anne Bogart n 1979, I was invited to join the faculty of the Experimental Theatre Wing (ETW) at New York University where I remained as an adjunct for seven years. IIn many ways, teaching undergraduates at ETW became my own degreeless graduate school in directing. At first I was unsure of what to teach. Still in my mid-twenties, my creative work up until then had been directing hardscrabble devised inventions, mostly on the streets and rough spaces of downtown New York. Ron Argelander, the founder of ETW who invited me to teach at NYU, encouraged me to engage the students with the kind of work that he had seen me create in the downtown theatre scene. It was at ETW that I met fellow faculty member Mary Overlie, the choreographer and the inventor of what she, in those days, called The Six Viewpoints. We became good friends and we worked together on several productions with our students. We co-directed a site-specific piece entitled Artourist and together we choreographed the dances for my produc- tion of South Pacific. Mary introduced me to her Six Viewpoints and I was galvanized, hooked. The students, empowered by the parameters of Mary’s Viewpoints (Space, Shape, Time, Emotion, Movement, and Story), relished the freedom to create evocative stage moments themselves rather than wait for a leader to tell them what to do. Much of the theatre at that time felt to me staid, literal, and conservative with the exception of some courageous downtown artists and companies, including The Performance Group, Mabou Mines, and Richard Foreman. But the domi- nant means of theatre-making felt patriarchal and hierarchical, an approach that simply did not sit well with me. I yearned for effective ways to collaborate with actors rather than using the role of director as a means of domination and control. Mary’s work directly addressed fundamental issues that I felt were sorely missing from the theatre world. Mary’s own discoveries were influenced by her contact with significant dance- makers of the time. She had studied the techniques of the American pioneers, © 2018 Anne Bogart PAJ 118 (2018), pp. 5–10. 5 doi:10.1162/PAJJ _a_00389 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00389 by guest on 25 September 2021 including Martha Graham, José Limón, and Merce Cunningham. She worked directly with Barbara Dilley and Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, Suzanna Linke, Jean Hamilton, and Beth Goren. She performed with companies as disparate as the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the Judy Padow Dance Company, and perhaps most significantly, the Natural History of the American Dancer, founded by Barbara Dilley. In 1978, she formed her own company, the Mary Overlie Dance Company. She also co-founded Danspace and Movement Research, which became institutions in support of the work of other dancers. The innovations of the Jud- son Church dancers seemed particularly galvanizing for Mary. Their rejection of the more dramatically oriented dances of their predecessors stimulated radical experiments involving structure and space. The task of an artist, much like that of a scientist, is to re-combine or edit existing materials in order to create something new. Ideas are adapted, extended or improved upon based on the needs, circumstances, and limits of the time. Every work of art contains a recognizable reference to another work and this can be traced historically throughout the development of the arts and sciences. Innova- tion, and indeed originality, arises from the act of recombining and editing what has come before. Kirby Ferguson, a New York–based filmmaker who popularized the trope “copy, transform, combine,” proposes that we all build from the same materials, that creativity is not magic and that everything is a remix. Citing examples from the historical development of musical forms, scientific and artistic advances, and technological breakthroughs, he proposes that the formula for innovation is united in a consistent pattern of copying, transforming, and combining. Copy- ing materials, transforming them, and combining them are the same techniques used at any level of creation. Rock and roll, for example, was a result of copying, transforming, and combining the American blues. The typewriter is a transformation modeled upon a piano. “The task of the artist,” Ferguson says, “is simply to apply ordinary tools of thought to existing materials.” The result is nothing short of real innovation. My work with the Viewpoints over the years since I met Mary developed within the context of directing plays, conducting workshops, teaching and, in general, working with hundreds of actors in the heat of creation. The basic principles that I learned from Mary underwent changes in the form of the stages of “copy, transform, combine” and progressed eventually into something other than what she originated. In time and with constant adjustment to what I was absorbing and testing, Mary’s “Space, Shape, Time, Emotion, Movement, and Story” became less relevant to my own work. Eventually, I found it practical and useful in working with actors to differentiate “Spatial Relationship, Shape, Architecture, Kinesthetic 6 PAJ 118 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00389 by guest on 25 September 2021 Response, Repetition, Tempo, Floor Pattern, Duration, and Gesture.” And then, in numerous explorations in the art of speaking, I arrived at the Vocal Viewpoints: “Pitch, Tempo, Silence, Repetition, Timbre, and Silence.” Looking back now, I can clearly see that my own work with the Viewpoints underwent a process of copy, transform, combine. When diverse ideas are combined together, one idea can disrupt another and create new and dramatic results. I was not only influenced by Mary Overlie’s innovations, but also by those of myriad other external inputs that were consistently moving in and out of my sphere of experience. Connecting ideas together and merging multiple, unrelated ideas in new and creative ways require an ability to see the potential for creative leaps. In our current technological climate of cut-and-paste, a hot topic of discussion in all artistic arenas is ownership. A great deal of heat and negotiation is transpir- ing around the legal and ethical consequences of copying other peoples’ words, images, and ideas. Musicians can no longer depend upon record sales to make money, because it is easy for anyone with Internet access to listen to almost any musical recording without paying a penny. Visual artists are adjusting to the fact that viewers seem to photograph their works more than look at them. In the theatre it is now easy to clandestinely video-record performances. Consequently, directors are greatly concerned about their work being imitated in subsequent productions. Generally, it feels good to borrow or copy, but it feels lousy to be copied. Steve Jobs admitted to stealing all of his original Apple innovations, at first saying, “creativity is just connecting things,” but in later decades he spent millions on legal procedures against those who copied or stole from him. “I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this,” he said, referring to the patent lawsuit that Apple filed against cell phone manufacturer HTC. But I would like to propose that copying without the conscious and committed ensuing heat of transformation is the real problem of appropriation. The transformation of one idea or trope into another is actually necessary for cultural, scientific, social, and artistic progress. In a letter to Helen Keller, who had been accused of plagiarism for her short story “The Frost King,” Mark Twain wrote: “All ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources. When a great orator makes a great speech you are listening to ten centuries and ten thousand men—but we call it his speech and really some exceedingly small portion of it is his.” I believe that the quest for originality is vastly overrated and that the creative act does not happen in a vacuum. I also know in my bones that to copy, transform, BOGART / Copy, Transform, Combine 7 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00389 by guest on 25 September 2021 and combine requires not only openness to the substantial influences of the past, but also the consistent heat of curiosity and the stubborn persistence of work. The willingness to learn and an appetite for study, fueled by vigorous and genuine curiosity, can lead to creative innovation. Ideas are everywhere. But it is the act of processing and connecting ideas together that produces the kind of creative leaps that have an impact in the world. In order to copy, transform, and combine successfully, it is necessary to be passionate about the subject, to be open to influence, to apply one’s authentic curiosity, to bring an informed point of view and to experiment with variations. The first step in Kirby Ferguson’s equation, to copy, requires me to be open to disparate influences, to choose those that feel most promising and unfamiliar, and then to study them. Copying is how I learn initially. Rather than sticking with what I already know, I look around and select influences that feel both attractive and novel. Copying is an action wherein I derive new experiences in unfamiliar territory. I gather raw material, absorb, and digest it. The process of copying and imitation is similar to learning a new language and then taking the first steps to put the words into an order, creating new personal meanings. The composers Max Richter and John Adams both recently released two albums in which they plunder, indeed copy, older works in order to reclaim them, reify them for the present moment. Max Richter’s album Recomposed re-imagines Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons.

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