The dancing

The dancing, shouldn’t be about the dancing person. When it is, and in most cases it is, then it’s only about this. About that specific person and their dancing.

For the dancing to be able to step out of that narrow place, it has to transcend the carrier. It must avoid falling into the personal and strive to position itself in a space where it is no longer tied to ‘this person doing this dancing’. No, that doesn’t mean ‘’abstract’. There isn’t such a thing as abstract dance, as there’s nothing more concrete than people, and dancing IS people.

In other words, the best dancing, is an act of channeling - presence, attention and consciousness, rather than (my) story-telling.

Also, what the dancing needs, is not to be looked at, or seen, or even understood. What it needs, is that the people watching it, believe it.

From scale, to Core Values

Like any other system of organization, choreography is scale related.

A model of choreographic organization, which works perfectly well with three dancers, won’t necessarily work as good, with ten dancers. There’s a need to constantly re-examine the choreographic model, the system, the tasks, the rules, the process etc, in relation to the scale, as in, the size of the group carrying out the choreography.

If you play one on one basketball, you do not play it in the same way you’d play three on three, or five on five, even though it is essentially the same game.

Some aspects though, are a fix. They do not really change when the scale changes. These are a sort of core values, which are clearly identifiable over time and attempts. Figuring these, is figuring out what one’s core values are in general.

Currency/Rules/Systems

The currency of choreography, is people.

Hence, the need to decide upon which type of system to put in place, in order to manage it. The currency. The people.

What I’ve found works best, are systems who prioritize rules over rulers. That has to do with moral, ethical and practical reasons, which unsurprisingly, work hand in hand.

If one manages to put in place a grid of rules which are coherent, agreed upon, practical, moral, ethical and realistic, the system that emerges, becomes the sum of the people self governing themselves within it. The choreography then, is simply a physical visualization of that same system.

People don’t need rulers, they need rules they agree on and have a say in. Rulers strive for centralized power and control, which are intrinsically related to the use of violence under different forms. Rules on the other hand, can serve as a shield against the use of violence. The role of the leader then, is to come up with rules that actually work to the best interest of everyone involved, to be attentive in case the set of rules needs updating or adjustment, and then, to stay the hell out of everyone’s way.

What it is, by way of what it’s not


Choreography is not dance

  • Dancing is not choreography

  • A person running after a ball, isn’t a football game

  • A turning wheel, isn’t a car

  • Wings are not an airplane

  • They’re also not a bird

  • A tomato, isn’t sauce

  • Tomato sauce, is not a pizza

  • A Pizza, is not a restaurant

  • A cucumber, isn’t a salad

  • Words are not a poem

  • Bricks are not a building

  • Brick walls, are not architecture

  • Sound, isn’t music

  • Color is not a painting

  • A line is not a drawing

  • Money, isn’t the economy

  • Leafs are not a tree

  • A tree is not the forest

  • Water is not the ocean

  • A person dancing, is not choreography.

Choreography is a system, it organizes things, people, movements, ideas, actions and sometimes, dancing.

Please, stop calling the dancing, the movement researches, the improv practices, the dance techniques and all the rest of it, choreography.

Nature boy

At its best, a choreographic work, engages the senses and the mind in the same way nature does.

Watching a choreographed dance work, should feel like being in the middle of the ocean. Or inside a forest. Or on the top of a mountain. It should have similar properties and as a consequence, allow for a similar sensorial, emotional, spiritual and physical experience.

That being said, it should avoid being ‘effect based’ and strive to have an inner structural logic. The effects, in whichever way we might perceive them, that are produced by natural phenomenas, are always an unintentional byproduct.

Many choreographic works, tend to produce a nature-like visual effect intentionally. It might look the same, but it’s as far as possible from what a natural phenomena is actually.

The road that should be taken, is the long one. The research, is about how to create kinetic structural events, that as a byproduct, produce an effect, which in its essence, is un intentional.

OMG It’s alive!!!

  • The short version

The problem with most dance works is, they are made with the intention to be seen only once.

What a dance work actually needs, is to be created as something that will be watched and experienced repeatedly and over time by its audience, regardless of the fact this won’t happen.

.

  • The long version

Watching a choreographic work once, is not like watching a movie once, or reading a book once. It’s not even like listening to a recorded piece of music one time.

It’s more like meeting a person you don’t know, a single time.

Most choreographic works are seen once, and that one meeting, is the basis for how they’re perceived. The entire system that produces and presents dance works, is configured around that notion.

The book, the movie, the recorded music, won’t change over time. The artifact they are, is a fixed object. The viewer, reader, listener changes, yes, their perception changes with time passing and experiences accumulated. The movie won’t be seen in exactly the same way the second time around. Nor the book will be read in the same way on a third reading.

A piece of music for sure isn’t heard in the same way the first time one listens to it and the 1000 time, although the recording itself did not change. There’s a whole process of studying a musical piece, that requires multiple listenings and time spent with the work. Choreographic works requiers quite the same type of studying music does (And there are multiple reasons why we can listen to the same music thousands of times over a life time, but there’s almost no chance we would read the same book or watch the same movie more than a few times).

But there’s a whole other level to dance pieces, which renders this need to see them again and again even more acute.

Choreographic works are made with people. People ARE the choreography happening. Choreography as an artistic form, exists only through the physical presence of living human beings. There’s no way to record a dance piece. Hence, engaging with a live choreographic work is engaging with people. Thus, it is similar to the type of relationship we might have with another living person.

For whatever reason (probably the one in the short version), most choreographic dance works are made like a movie, or a novel, with the logic of a fixed object at their core. They are created with the aim of producing an unchanging, finished thing (while ignoring the fact they simply can not be that). They are made to be seen once.

As a result, one meeting with them, is usually more than enough (one meeting with almost all choreographic works, is usually one meeting too many).

In order to truly see, understand and benefit from a (real) choreographic work, one needs to form a relationship with it over time. Engage with it on multiple occasions, in different contexts and with a state of mind which resembles the type of relationship one would develop with another person.

The knowledge and content contained in a choreographic work, is constantly evolving, changing and growing. It is people, context, space and time related. The experience of it, what it feels like, what it knows, what it conveys, constantly changes. From one day to another, in different palaces and along the years it’s being performed.

This happens of course because it is people who are the choreographic thing, and people change, but also, it’s the choreographic thing itself, which in a weird way (probably as a result of the fact it is some sort of a sum of shared consciousnesses), goes through constant change and evolution.

In that sense, most choreographic works, have been truly seen, by very few people. Which, in turn, is the explanation to why this art form, more than any other, suffers from such poor readership and understanding. Why most of what is created and presented, is of such poor quality, barely scratching the surface of the choreographic potential.

If choreographic works would be studied and engaged with in the same way pieces of music are, the landscape of the art form as we know it, would be radically different.

Choreography, like music, cannot be a representative act. It’s too much the actual thing happening, for it to be able to be ABOUT something, since it IS already a thing. In the same way a person cannot be about something, since it is already a thing, it is a person. And the only way to get to know the thing that a person is, is to engage with them regularly and over time.

No other art form is a living THING to that extent. No other art form can be engaged with and experienced exclusively while it is physically happening (music was the only art form with the same specificity, but that has obviously changed radically with the introduction of the recording. Music, being the most abstract of all art forms, actually gained from the ability to be totally dematerialized. it somehow makes perfect sense we now consume music almost exclusively in its recorded form.

Not only you can not dematerialize the dancing body and the choreographed thing, you can’t even experience them, beyond a very shallow level, if you don’t spend time with them physically and regularly while they happen.

Music (after the introduction of the recording) and dance, so similar on so many aspects, are at opposite ends completely on this one.

This is also why dance and choreography, are a form of resistance against the current move towards the digital virtual worlds of alternate realities and artificial inteligence and consciousness.

Now that we are able to even make babies, without anyone actually making love, Dance and choreography might be the last untouched territories in the near future, where a concrete human experience is taking place.

Choreography

Choreography making is more about choosing what to use and figuring out how to use it, than it is about creating stuff to be used. There are no bad movements, there’s only poor use of them.

Improvisation

Improvisational tools, practices and methods, are a frequent go to approach when it comes to contemporary dance and choreography. Similarly to musical practices, they tend to explore the ability to produce coherent and meaningful content, outside from the habitual compositional traditions with their tendency to set, fix and produce a detailed pre practiced score, preceding the moment of execution.

Most improvisational outputs, add up to nothing more than a sort of blah blah blah. Many times, these are separate layers of blah blah blah, one on on top of the other, producing one big blah blah blah structure.

The use of improvisational content, requires a clear balance between two primordial aspects of any kinetic structure, the Fix and the Flow.

When musicians improvise, be it in the old tradition of western classical music, eastern music, jazz and so on, they do so within a clearly established, practiced and recognized framework. Rhythmically, harmonically, melodically etc. They are actually framed by concrete points of reference, which allows them to manufacture a flow of improvisational content that is well measured, coherent and in direct dialogue with a multitude of aspects that are in themselves, fixed, recognizable and agreed upon. These aspects are bound to a specific tradition, a well defined musical style and a shared knowledge of the context in which the improvised content is being generated.

Contemporary dance has always been eager to free itself from the shackles of western classical, neoclassical and modern dance, with their set and rigid choreographic scores. Improvisation as a method to produce dancing content in real time, as well as choreographic structures, has been a frequent manner in which contemporary dance makers have tried to answer this question.

The problem, more often than not, lies in the fact that there is usually too little, and in most cases non, fixed elements to be able to sustain, support and give meaning to the improvisational flow.

In other words, the lack of a clearly established, practiced and recognized choreographic framework, renders the improvised content into nothing more than white noise. Movements as blah blah blah. A sort of self therapy. Nothing that can be interesting to look at, contemplate or engage with..

The incorporation of improvisational content into a choreographic context, requires immense clarity, as well as pre established knowledge and mastery of the choreographic thing. Both by the choreographer and the dancers.

The spaces where improvisational thinking and doing can flourish, are opened only when the choreographic environment serves as solid banks to the improvisational river flowing between them. There can’t be a meaningful flow of improvised content, being, action and information, without a pre established and well structured choreographic context and a deep understanding of the thing taking place by everyone involved.

That being said, a choreography that do not contain a multitude of improvisational layers, spaces, aspects etc, is a dead choreography. The two go hand in hand. They not only balance each other, they literally create one another while giving life and meaning to each other.

How it looks

You can’t decide how it will look. The dancing. The choreography.  The work.

You can only decide to follow the thing happening while it’s happening. Then you get to discover how it looks. If you know how it will look before you made it, don’t make it.

You can spot a work in which the maker knew beforehand how it’s gonna look a mile away. It stinks ‘end result’ rather than smell process. That’s product design, not art.

Life and Death

“So what were you imagining when you decided to make that piece?” Is probably the one question I get asked the most.

You don’t imagine art. You do it.

A choreographic work is something which takes shape, matures and reveals itself slowly. You have to wait and see what it becomes. The only thing that is under your control, is moving with clarity. Staying attentive and observant. Reacting to what the work asks of you. Creating a space which facilitates growth, evolution and coming into full being.

And then, letting it die.

Choreographic works are a living organism. They die eventually. They stop being. Keeping choreographic works alive after they died, is like mechanically keeping a person alive after brain death.

‘Dance experts’, love dead choreographic works. They call it - repertoire. Repertoire, is good for business. And politics.

It’s subjective

Art is usually considered as subjective. There’s nothing further than the truth.

What is subjective, is the experience and perception of it by different people at different places and times. The truth about what a work of art is though, isn’t.

It is permanently objective.

It has nothing to do with opinion, taste or preference. It is the thing it is, regardles of how it is seen. Only the perception of the art work is subjective, the work itself, what it actually IS, is objective, separate and detached from its external perception.

Stories

Dancing shouldn’t be an act of shoving your own story down everyone’s throats, but rather an attempt to produce clarity through doing, which allows whom ever engages with it to experience their own story.

Dancing which is forcefully interpretative, deprives the viewers from having their own experience, rendering them passive and irrelevant.

Good dancing is more a white page, than it is an already written story.

Conflict

Choreographing, when practiced as an art form, requiers constant management of the inherent conflict, which lies between the scientific and the religious. Or maybe, it is actualy about the reconciliation of these two.

Why don’t I say what I’m about to do

I always try to share as little as possible with the dancers about what we’re going to do, before we actually start working.

I do the same with myself somehow, I don’t follow through or try to clarify most of my preliminary ideas about optional strategies and processes, as they appear in my head. It’s not that I don’t have all kind of ideas crossing my mind, I do, I just don’t really go too deep into them. I notice them, I might write down a short note just so I don’t forget it, but at the same time, I also push it aside quite fast and forget about it.

What I’ve learned over time is, that once we actually start working, I will very fast be flooded with completely new ideas coming straight up from the thing happening in the studio. Most of them, I couldn’t have predicted or anticipated. In order to be able to stay receptive and available to follow the better ones, I need an open space. One that hasn’t been cluttered with existing ideas, a declared road map or a possible destination. I need to have a certain lightness in decision making, one that doesn’t have to push against an already declared plan. That doesn’t have to announce a change of course from the one presented, before we actually engage with the process .

I need both the dancers and myself, to be in a state of mind, which is un burdened with pre existing ideas about the thing we’re making, so we can freely navigate the process with lightness, curiosity and a mind free from the weight of trying to imagine the end result.

There’s nothing more boring and un creative, than knowing how exactly what you’re making will turn out.

Anarchy

If I look at my work from an anthropological angle, as in, a process of thinking about and actively examining questions such as: Authority, optional models for groups organisation, governance modalities, political and social structures, economic models, resources management and so on,  the way I would define it then, would be something along these lines:

A commitment, through a choreographic practice, to the idea that it can be possible to have a society based on principles of self organization,  voluntary association and mutual aid.

Which, in some ways, is the short and simple definition of Anarchy as a social model.

Damage Control

The most damaging thing that happened to art and artists, was turning art works into commodity like products, and the artistic process into a payed job. Add to this the complexity that comes with public funding of some of the art forms, and what you get is a dysfunctional system who renders being an artist and art making, an extremely challenging endeavor.

Artists shifted from a shaman like role, high priesthood, oracles, prophets, mediators of spiritual content etc, into business entrepreneurs, producing products to be marketed and sold. The core essence of what art is and why societies, communities and individuals need it, has mutated through that transition in irreparable manners. It has taken artists and their work, hostages of a system which negates and cancel the specific context needed for art making to make sense, to do its thing, to be of value. And in the process, it has created a reality where the vast majority of what is considered art and those considered artist, have almost nothing to do with either.

One of the most harmful aspects of this shift, manifests clearly through the gradual emergence of what is best defined as ‘gatekeepers. The concept in which art and artists need to be curated, mediated, let in, selected, approved and so on, by specific people, which are not artists and who act as gatekeepers, is anti art. The presence of those ‘middlemen’, is a direct result of turning artworks into products. Naturally, the drive, interest, agendas and overall vision of the gatekeepers, has to do mostly with things which are foreign to the Art they are managing, thus creating a constant friction between what art is and needs, and how the art world is being managed. These gatekeepers, are carefully chosen by the system, who makes sure their primary allegiance is to the system who appointed them, rather than art, artists, and the public. The result is that most artists who are let in and pushed up, are services providers, rather than free art makers who are more often than not, labeled as trouble makers, crazy and so on.

In a way, it’s a reproduction of the general current political systems, in which politicians serve first a foremost, the interests of corporations, central banks and other unelected power groups, over those of the citizens they’re supposed to serve.

Artists and their art, exist best when they have direct access to their audience. When sharing the work, is part of the work. When the audience is an active player in choosing and engaging with art and artists.

The current art world is structured like the fast food industry. What we need, is less MacDonalds, and more chef owned restaurants. Less supermarkets chains, and more local farmers markets.

Art is nourishment. It needs to be seen, structured and treated as such.

Random thoughts

  • The Fourth Wall

The concept of the Fourth wall, together with the drawing surface (wall, paper, canvas etc) and the organisation of sound as music, are probably some of the most important inventions of humanity. Up there with the wheel.

Canceling the fourth wall, is the laziest performative strategy. Coming up with ways to reach the audience and share the work with them, whiteout penetrating their space, is one of the most challenging and rewarding aspects of performance work.

  • Maniérisme

The emergence of Maniérisme, is a great way to detect lack of artistic content.

Maniérisme (which in most cases is unaware of itself), places style above all other components of the art work, thus signaling there’s no need to bother looking any deeper, beyond the appearance of the thing. That’s why great artists keep shape shifting freely between styles, never bound to one way of addressing the artistic question, without loosing the clarity and coherence of their process. They place the question of style at the lowest possible position in the hierarchy of artistic elements to be managed and addressed. From the outside it may look as if they keep changing the way in which they work, but that is false. What they do, is simply concentrate on the core questions of art making, unbothered by which style emerges as a consequence (Picasso)

Performance wise, the opposite of maniérisme, is presence.

  • Presence

    Presence, in the context of dance, has to do with clarity of action. Clarity of action, is the result of accuracy of intention, which is mainly the result of an understanding of the dancing thing and the choreographic context in which it takes place.

  • Ego

The relentless demand of ego to have its needs satisfied, is the main enemy of art and artists. It will make them accept, be part of, and do almost anything and nothing, as long as their ego was fed. What you crave, is rarely what you need.

  • Freedom

Artistic freedom isn’t to be found within a thing which declare itself free. Chaos isn’t freedom. Randomness isn’t freedom. Poor structure and craftsmanship aren’t freedom. Freedom isn’t a starting point nor something that can be granted. Artistic Freedom is reached through knowledge and understanding of the artistic thing. Freedom requires clarity of vision, an insight into the thing one is engaged with and the acceptance to embrace responsibility.

  • Looking

If dancers do no LOOK at each other while they do the dancing, they do not exist. No matter the strategy behind the ‘not looking’ (as in classical dance when the dance is set meticulously on the music, thus freeing the dancers to ‘be together’ through relating to the music alone, or in some performatives styles when rolling your eyes in a transe like mode, looking inwards etc), it always results in acute lack of presence, poor decision making and a tunnel vision, separating the dancers from the whole and limiting their perception and understanding of the choreographic thing.

The main reason why choreographers adopt and impose the ‘not looking’ mode on their dancers, is as old as humanity. It’s called - devide and conquer.

  • What it say it is / What it actually is.

The gap that sometimes exists between what a thing say and declare it is, how it describes and explain itself, and what it actually IS, is sometimes so big, it becomes a black hole. Swallowing and negating the ability or need to address it.

If X is bad and Y is good (yes that’s personal and relative and subjective) there’s more authenticity to be found in a thing that claims it’s X and delivers X, than in something which declares it’s Y and behaves as an X.

Authenticity is important.

  • Mass

A live performance, any live performance, leaves a certain mass on the performance space once it’s over. If you take the time to try and notice it, you’ll see it. Some performances leave a grain of sand, other a pebble, some a small rock and rare few, a solid mass which fills the entire space where the performance took place. Performances create an energetic residue which can be clearly observed and felt once they are over.

  • Musicality

All you need to know about a dance work, can be found in its treatment of musicality. All of its musicalities. The dancing musicality, the one of the overall choreography, the work’s timeline musicality, the dramaturgical musicality, that of the lights, the musicality of the sound/music timeline etc.

Musicality to dance is what character is to a person. It’s what taste is to food. What meaning is to words.

  • Art

    A thing is either Art, or it’s not. It can be bad art, unfinished, unsolved, immature art, or it can be good, great, genius art. But there’s a clear line separating the things which are art, and those who aren’t. Most art, is more a form of exercise in the use of artistic tools, than it is actual art.

  • Old fashioned

Artistic things feel old fashioned, not as a consequence of adopting old styles, but rather because of the lack of originality by their creator.

Art knows no time. The source for all art works since the dawn of time is the same one. No one discovers or invents new sources. What artists do, is to reconsider the strategies for taping into the source. Most artists, copy or recycle existing strategies, and therefore, produce work that lacks originality and feels old and recycled. That’s why a work of art can be thousands of years old, and still feel relevant, fresh and contemporary. What makes a work feel old, isn’t its chronological age, but the fact it’s based on the copying of artistic strategies, rather than the presence of an original one.

The ability to come up with original strategies (which doesn’t even mean new, but rather something that bares traces of uniqueness and authenticity) in order to connect with art’s source, is called talent.

  • Talent

There is no art without talent. Talent can’t be gained or learned. Talent is a form of sorcery, granted at birth.

Art without talent is the saddest thing.

Truth/Beauty/Love

In a world plunged deeply in the muddy waters of deceit, ugliness and fear, what we desperately need is truth, beauty and love.

What can be choreographed

Anything that is ‘happening’, can be choreographed.

Any type of dance, any situational event, any interaction, anything that moves, anything that is action based, every form of conscious ‘doing’ (and in some cases, even different types of unconscious, inanimate, artificial doing), any text and every form of talking can be choreographed. Sound can be choreographed too, it’s called music.

Choreography is the practice of organizing things which move (through time and space).

This sets choreography apart from the thing being choreographed. They are not the same thing, since they are produced and managed by different processes and tools.

That’s why dance, regardless of the genre, style, method etc, isn’t choreography. It can be choreographed, but it’s not choreography.

Just like running, even thought it’s the main activity happening while playing football, isn’t the game of football. And although one has to practice running if they wish to play football, running has eventually very little to do with football playing, the thing.

Most works defined as choreographies, are actually dances. Choreography as a practice, a craft, a field of knowledge and an art form, is absent in varied degrees, or is present in extremely simplistic forms (usually driven by the toxic type of authority which can only produce imitation and conformity), from the work of most ‘choreographers’.

What choreography offers, is deep insight into systems. It allows the reproduction and study of that which is all around us, both in the natural world, and in that of human beings (as in, social, political, economical systems and so on). It lets us engage artistically with the essence of systems of organisation, which is where the core of its revealing powers lie and through that, it serve as the doorway for spiritual experience and growth.