I think American History can be told through 1) food and 2) vernacular dance. American history is the history of Black Dance as it becomes pop culture on repeat.
Murder Ballad (1938) Poor Dog Group
"I'll cut your throat and drink your blood like wine/ because I want you know he's a man of mine."
The American Dance Canon vs The Jazz Dance Canon
“Canons are the conditions of institutions and the effect of institutions. Canons secure institutions as institutions secure canons...When I bring this up, I heard stories of how undergraduates have told their teachers that whole semester of Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer changed their lives. I do not doubt these stories, but we have to do a quality/quantity shift if we are going to canonize the new entries. The undergraduates will have their lives changed perhaps by a sense of the diversity of the new canon.” -- Gayatri Spivak
Growing up in suburban Boston in the 90's, my main access to hip-hop was music videos. My other encounters came in trips into Boston to take Hip-Hop at dance hubs like Dance Complex. My world travelled academic parents, in a model of 'concerted cultivation' supported my interest in vernacular dance forms that lit me up. Commerical hip-hop was only beginning to take hold in franchises or privately owned studios. In the 90's, Millennium, Los Angeles' center of commercial hip-hop training, was a baby. Now, in 2015 so many dancers grow up in contact with some kind of African American form, some mutation, derivation, or incarnation of "hip hop dance," thanks to the pop culture ubiquity of commercial hip-hop.
Attempting to teach a dance-for-other-majors-looking-for-credits course on Vernacular Jazz at Cal Arts this past spring, compounded by an interview with tap maestra Michelle Dorrance, I've been thinking about how and if academic institutions of dance can work harder to reveal the artistry and technical prowess of African diaspora forms, and if -- arguably -- the the role of legitimizing force compels a responsibility.
What would be different if dancers and dance makers had a more profound knowledge of popular black forms than the mass media markets that both commodify and spread hip hop?
I asked Dorrance for her take on the impact of the modern American canon (i.e., the ancestors of the Denishawn legacy, from Graham down) that has left tap, African, and hip-hop as nothing more than special interests in academia. Is this part of the larger problem of racial stereotyping in America? What kind of privilege and subjugation are at work here? Michelle Dorrance has extensive experience bringing tap to prestigious dance institutions in America. Institutions that, as both her and I see it, designate certain dances as entertainment (not fit for the canon, or fit for the Other canon) while others are classified as high art; this means that the most ‘popular’ dance forms in America since 1900, all African American vernacular forms, are understudied and this undervalued. There’s Cakewalk, Soft Shoe, 20’s Charleston, Black Bottom, 30’s Shag, 40’s Lindy Hop and Swing, (my personal pocket) 50’s Balboa, Jitterbug, 60’s Soul, 70’s Disco -- yes, disco started as a black form, 80’s Breakdancing, Locking, Popping, 90’s Miami Bass, New Orleans Bounce, Baltimore club, DC’s GoGo, etc. If we confuse vernacular dance with its appropriation for commercial use as only a form of entertainment, we are demeaning the monumental impact that Black dances have made over the last century. In dealing with what academia might also term ‘folk’ dance, we stumble into questions about dance as entertainment, meaning as distraction from life, versus dance as art, as a focusing beam, and the liminal space between.
In conversation, Dorrance draws easily on her historical knowledge. She has been embodying and presenting the history of tap since she was a child performing for a non-profit that brought tap into schools in the South. Dorrance, North Carolinian-turned-New Yorker, champions the dance form she sees as an African American tradition. She cites the masters she learned from and the masters her masters learned from, tracing her tap ancestry back to their vernacular roots in colonial Black dance. Dorrance seemed accustomed to defending her authenticity and legitimacy as white person working in a black form, standing up for her work and her deep commitment to percussive dance.
“Once you are entrenched in a multiracial community of people, linked to everyone in that community, you have a relationship, and a responsibility to the history and roots of your form. Even if your ancestors aren’t the same skin color, they are still the ancestors of your form. We all have to be responsible for that legacy. We are also trapped in that legacy because we are so reverent about it. In Europe people can experiment. There is a ton of technical innovation happening here in the United States. There is maybe more conceptual innovation happening in Europe."
Dorrance believes that in terms of refined technical approach, tap is on par with ballet. “Tap and ballet, as far as the cannon of these forms, are by far the most refined. Tap is incredibly refined and has no relation to these other forms.” In the same breath, she also highlights tap as a uniquely American (art) form. “Tap dance is both an original American street form, a folk dance, but became innovated by master stylists and master dances. A sophisticated technique was developed.” Dorrance makes a distinction between technical refinement and crystallization. Central to understanding tap as a relative of Jazz, is that it, too, relies on innovation and improvisation. “African dance is more embodied into dance programs (than tap), in part because people codified it. People can’t find a safe place to put tap dance. You can put African dance into ethnic dance and folk dance. And some people will respect it as an art form, although you don’t hear that very often. Hip hop at this point is considered street dance and not an art form. It is considered entertainment.”
I asked her, “If we don’t understand how complex the African diaspora traditions are, does that reinforce the notion that the ideas of non-white people as simplistic Others? Dorrance is diplomatic but honest: “People study Limon, and Cunningham, and Graham – that’s one person’s technique. Talk about indulgence. A lot of modern dance is created inside the academic world.” While unwilling to say if or how the canon reinforces hierarchical models reflecting our society-at-large, she takes a clear stand on the side of music, suggesting a broader, more pluralistic perspective: “I think it’s sad there’s not more interdisciplinary learning with music and movement. A lot of modern and contemporary post-modern choreographers create movement without music. A lot of that happened with Fluxus or Judson Church. They were deconstructing everything. I get it. But if we are studying the larger canon of movement, movement in general, its origins, it has a relationship to music.”
When I try to teach a break down of Jazz dance history, I often come up against Jack Cole. Cole is considered the “Father of Jazz Dance” or the “inventor” of jazz for the stage. You know what this looks like. Cole choreographed every iconic dance sequence for Hollywood’s leading ladies, when Astaire or Kelly wasn’t in the picture. It is a combination of Denishawn training, interest in North Indian dance, and the jazz nightlife vernacular he learned by osmosis. Ailey borrowed his port de bras, Fosse copied his hip isolations, Robbins was his student. Cole was so broadly influential, we can hardly discern his influence. I want to distinguish between Cole the “inventor” and Coles the “discoverer.” Fred Astaire learned to tap from John Bubbles, born John William Sublett, a vaudevillian who caught the eye of George Gershwin. Bubbles is the steward of rhythm tap that married vernacular jazz dance styles with the cleaner tap styles of Bill Robinson aka Bojangles. (For those unfamiliar with the tap form, a simplified way of understanding Bubble’s contribution is that he is credited with the heel drop, a critical part of the earth bound syncopation of Charleston and early jazz dance styles.) I want to supercede the conventional perception of jazz dance as pertaining only to the vocabulary popularized by musicals. This is by and large the general understanding of Jazz dance. But these works represent a narrow slice of jazz dance, and this slice has historically been a site of confusion among entertainment, artistry, invention, appropriation, and commodification. Robbins, Fosse, Gene Kelley, all these choreographers incorporated some elements of Jazz into their personal aesthetics intended for commercial stage and screen. The knowledge they drew on, now referred to as vernacular jazz to distinguish it from the commodified forms of dance, represents a vast form of movement deeply ingrained in America’s heritage.
Before the internet, there was TV, before TV, there was radio, and before radio, there was vaudeville. As ubiquitous a part of pop culture in America as Netflix is today, vaudeville was at its peak in the 1890s, when jazz dance first diffused into America’s urban centers. Vaudeville shows developed nationally popular memes, to use today’s terminology. Like the best of YouTube, vaudeville could be anything from absurd animals tricks, to feats of strength and virtuosity, to satirical performances. The Charleston was in full force in roaring twenties. Lindy Hop emerged in the late thirties, reaching the height of its popularity in the 1940’s -- comparable to today’s fixation and diffusion of commercial hip hop. However, the writing of seminal jazz anthologies, and the academic acceptance of jazz studies were institutionalized after be-bop, the moment when the music removed itself from a mutual existence with dance. Academically, this is an interesting chicken/egg question. Did jazz music become more academically acceptable by shedding its dancing side? How did separating movement and music affect jazz studies? Was extracting movement (and embodied femininity) part of legitimizing Jazz studies? Amiri Baraka’s narrative of jazz history talks lyrics and music but leaves out dance all together. More recently, Todd Goia’s history of jazz starts with Congo Square, where West African rhythms were embodied in a mix of dance culture.
There is a difference between Outside Art, and a dominant cultural form that is continually forced into a secondary position against the canon of Modern dance, because it is associated with popular culture. African American forms become associated with, almost synonymous with, popular culture because of the appropriating and commercializing hands of the Entertainment Industrial Complex taking from the sites of creation: the vaudeville cabaret, the juke joint, the drag ball, the street corner, all sites of resistance and satire against dominating structural forces of racism, sexism and homophobia.
Lily Kind 2015
A haiku...
A haiku seemed like/ as good a way as any/ to tell you that I
(haiku by Catesby Taliaferro)
For me, the theater proscenium is not a neutral space for dance.
First attempt to make this dance, at Cal Arts Open House 2015. On Vimeo Here. (Audio not great.)
At the moment, I am more interested in people than I am dancing. I am mesmerized by people dancing, when the person themself* is not hidden. This is what draws me to forms of 'folk' dance both as dancer and as enthnographer. As ethnographer, I cringe at the transplanting of vernacular modalities into western performance structures. It often cancels the human part of the the practice that is most compelling. So here I am, researching modes of human performative transparency and, thereby, the generosity of the dancer as a subject of visual and kinesthetic perception. I find I am more interested in watching folks perform karaoke at a bar than watch most proscenium performances. I can watch karaoke with intrigue for a long time. (RIP Mulligans, the local establishment.)
I think there are some exquisite choreographers and dance makers who reveal the human on stage, presenting the human dancer as an extra-human version of human. Ohad Naharin’s work on Batsheva, and the corresponding method of training, Gaga, is the current working (and trendy) example. I think Naharin’s work is also deeply motivated by sensuality. The contact point of flirtation, sensation, presence, vulnerability, and force. I think I am interested in the other side of that spectrum, humans at their most obvious and genuine. The opposite of cool? The humans I am most in love with are those unafraid to dance like goofballs in public. I have no idea how to put that lack of fear on stage. This work is part of that research. Coming up again and again in this research is also the beautiful black whole of friendship. And in this case, overtly feminine.
This piece, I am realizing, feels somewhat assaulting to the audience, inside a collection of more conventional uses of the proscenium-set-up-as-black-box-theater, which has become a status quo, or norm, in our institutions of dance education. Normal, I believe, is always a construct, a technology of diffused power. The most powerful kind of control is the kind you don’t know is happening to you. So, while I did not set out to make this piece as a direct dialogue with most of the other works it is being premiered with, I am learning there is a dissonance when folding this work inside other work that assumes the black box proscenium. And, in most cases, I feel, the dancer is being presented as an object, rather than performing the subject. This last idea, I am still unravelling.
I spent five plus years in Baltimore’s DIY art scene. I went to a lot of shows that, to be frank, sucked in terms of craftsmanship but were a wild art experience, even if embarrassing or assaulting. Baltimore is a place of the untamed spillage of art cries. To me, craftsmanship is the ability to make something memorable and delicious out of any ingredients, no matter their quality. Choreographic craftsmanship is an (underestimated) professional skill. Music video, musical, theater production. This is valuable. The art part is, for me, in the vision. A vision is the object of sight, something seen by the mind. The ability and manner of seeing or perceiving something that does not yet exist.
I was recently telling another choreographer that I think the good stuff happens when the two become the same. Baltimore’s limited dance scene, is a micro version of the larger national terrain (?): there are either craftsmen of movement and stage or humans compelled to bring a vision to life, who lack much craft at all. I think though, I am learning, when it comes to human movement, I would rather watch the sometimes embarrassing art vomit rather than the satisfiably forgettable craftsmanship. I don’t feel this way about many other forms, so this makes me question my preference.
Also, the cultural status of internet seems to me to parallel the height of Vaudeville in America at the turn of the last century, 1890-1910. The short attention span, and a channel of satire, appropriate, commentary, anonymous freedom, physical humor, virtuosity, and the mundane. So I have been thinking about that too. If I must create in a proscenium, I prefer the messy holler-back world of Vaudeville, than the lingering mimicry of the ballet court's class structure (unless, of course, it's a ballet in an opera house).
Also, my Shakespeare & American Lit professor in high school always reminded us, angsty ambitious teens, "Comedy is harder to pull off than tragedy." A decade(+) later, I am still driven by his words.
*I am attempting to use the gender neutral pronoun, not the grammatically incorrect plural.
Co-Equity Imaginations
At times, I have felt bashful about my father's high brow academic posts. This was dumb. My pops is the Founder of Consensus Building Institute (CBI), Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Vice-Chair for Instruction at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. His belief in and actions towards social change beyond the horizon runs deep. My bashfulness was because I was confusing the the class privileges I enjoy as a result of the fruits of his labor, with the broad-minded and engaged research and practice he has pioneered for the last 40 years. I have a unique opportunity as the art-making daughter of an urban planning expert. Driving home from the airport on my last visit to New England, my pops and I got to talking, as we do, about Baltimore, urban development, economics, and art making.
I think that for artists, the non-profit status quo continues negative cycles of artist dependency and in-sustainability. I would rather call it what is is, and have a rich benefactor. I am also wary of how Baltimore City understands the role of artists as promotional mechanism. But hey, what could be more transparent than pairing "Promotion & The Arts" in the same city office title? It makes perfect sense as a solution to the recurring paradox of valuing Artin a neo-liberal industrial capitalist world.
He turned our conversation into a post on one of his websites.
"Nobody wants to think of themselves as the reason that someone else gets to make a lot of money. What usually happens is that a developer makes a deal with the city, gets the required approvals (while admittedly taking the necessary financial risks), finds the investment capital they need and then announces to the arts community that there will be some opportunities they might appreciate. When a dance company or a community arts center (future gallery?) wants to design the space being offered, they are usually told that the deal has already been made and that the specs are locked in. When artists ask whether there are low interest loans available to buy what is otherwise being offered only as rental space, they are told that the deal with the city requires that the housing units or the commercial space not be sold (meaning that they want the continued return to capital). In other words, by the time the arts community is notified it is too late to alter the design of the space and no longer possible for the artists involved to become equity (or sweat equity) partners.
Here's an alternative model..."
That time my angry letter to the editor was published
In 2013, I wrote a letter to the Baltimore City Paper. Baynard Woods, from the paper, went on to engage in more dance coverage in 2014. Now, if only there were more resources for dancers in Baltimore and us/they/we wouldn't have to move away in order to survive in industrial capitalist world and still make new dances.
But when we are all cyborgs and can download new knees and ankles with our iphone upgrade, finding studio space will be a lot easier.
"Seriously. for the third year in a row you've neglected to both acknowledge obvious growth in dance in our city and neglected any kind of investigative research into the absences, obstacles, and challenges that have limited dance in our city for the past decade. Here are some ideas: Mobtown Balllroom in Pigtown: the Renaissance and history of social jazz dance forms in Baltimore City. Remember the Royale? Well, at least twice a week hundreds of people from across the Eastern Seaboard are swarming on a renovated church in Pigtown. Go the Paradox and see what there is to be seen. Talk to club DJs. DIY music and dance in Baltimore right now, they are linked. You are already covering the bands and artists beginning to sink their teeth into dance collaborations.
Don't know how to write about dance? Do some research. From Jill Johnston, the feminist Lester Bangs of dance, to Sally Banes, one of the first to pen to paper on the history of b-boying, there are excellent models available for how to write about dance in a way that excites a non-dance audience. Any of these topics would be better served by a journalist's grasp of the sociological complexities involving race/gender/class/structural violence, so often covered by the City Paper, than by an extensive appreciation for Balanchine's oeuvre. Though Balanchine's oeuvre is pretty fucking bad ass too. Move past the cliches and stereotypes of dance as pink frills and sequins, and dig into the art form that has historically been at the front line of embodying and addressing change, transition, and the most relevant social issues of any community.
Look, dance is a subjugated art form. And that's a complicated history a few writers at a weekly publication may not be able to change. As dancers, we know that. However, I hope that in the future, City Paper can join the ranks of the strong and sweaty to be part of the solution, not the problem.
(City Paper, Letter to the Editor, September 2014)
Watching Dance
The text below is designed to help an eager but low-confidence dance audiences in Baltimore get the most out of their dance going.First printed on the reverse of the ButterKnife program, 3/14/14, revised 3/21/14.
In the fall of 2013, I wrote an pretty pissed off letter to the Editor to the Baltimore City Paper for lack of coverage of dance in their annual Best of Baltimore rankings, which carry a strong impact in a small arts community. Baynard Woods, the Editor of the CP, replied to me personally, and made solid steps towards more dance coverage in the months that followed, despite the small paper was bought by a larger conglomerate and half the staff getting fired (#interns). This included Baynard's review of Effervescent's main work at the time, Butterknife.
1) WHAT ARE THE RULES OR THE CULTURE OF THE PERFORMANCE SPACE YOU’RE IN?
For example, what are the rules of a sidewalk?
Walk straight. Skateboarding & rollerblading maybe allowed? Depending, the rule about
eye contact change, as do the pace of your stride and proximity to other pedestrians.
What are the rules here? How do you know? What kind of power did the dance-maker(s)
have in designing and implementing those rules?
2) WHAT CHOICES HAVE BEEN MADE IN THE PERFORMANCE SPACE?
Someone chose, was forced to, or allowed, to put X, Y, and Z on stage.
Does the set on stage vaguely or clearly remind you of something: in life, in dreams, or in
fantasy? Are things you see on stage continuous or juxtaposed?
3) WHAT DO YOU NOTICE IN THE CHOREOGRAPHY, THE COMPOSITION, AND THE DANCERS?
Volume: What size are the movements? Is it subtle or exaggerated? If there was a
volume knob, how high would it be?
Tone: What is the tone of the movement? If the dancer was speaking, what tone of voice
would she be using? Is it formal or colloquial? Full of slang? Do the performers on stage
speak to each other, or the audience, in the same tone?
Articulation: How precisely are different movements articulated? Is it slurred or
precise? Is there an accent?
Visual Rhythm: Where are the bodies on the stage relative to each other? What kind of
landscapes do you see? What visual patterns do you see?
Physical Rhythm: If the movements were sounds or words, how long are the pauses,
rests, or negative spaces between movements? How does the physical rhythm relate to
the score, the silence, or the music?
Gravity: How do the dancer’s relate to gravity? Are there other invisible forces in the
room? What directions of forces do you see? Direct? Indirect? Soft? Strong?
Actions: Ask a toddler to describe a dance, and they will rattle off un-self-conscious
verbs: falling, swimming, flying, swirling, striking, sliding, slicing, touching, running, etc.
Have you seen this movement before? Felt it before? You may not know what certain
signs or shape ‘mean’ (and likely, they have no literal meaning), but your body knows
what different kind of actions feel like, to do yourself, or to have done for you.
4) WHAT’S DIFFERENT IN THE ROOM NOW FROM WHEN YOU ENTERED?
What’s different in you? In
others? The dancers? What changes or shifts do you sense, in your bones, flesh, and skin?
Thanks. Hope that helps. Enjoy the show.
The Writing Analogy: Etgar Keret
I was recently asked to write about a contemporary artist in another discipline that inspires me. Here’s where that went:
ETGAR KERET: The Writing Analogy
Etgar Keret is an Israeli short story writer. Since the 90’s he has become the face of contemporary Israeli fiction. His stories have been translated from Hebrew into over two dozen languages. I have read, cover to cover, over and over, every story within his two most recent publications “Girl on the Fridge” (2008) and “Suddenly, A Knock at the Door”(2008). His stories are lean. His diction is familiar. His stories start with an incident and end with how we feel about it, without telling the reader what to feel. His fiction gives us a dose of what we need in our non-fiction life. As my kind of short story does, his stories communicate incommunicable emotions. His characters live lives we recognize, have habits we know, but they do and say on the page what we cannot (legally) or would not (emotionally), do and say in person.
These are the kinds of dances I want to make.
For example: let’s talk spaghetti — the special familiar feel and smell of a million worms of spaghetti just out of a boiling pot.
There’s an creative non-fiction memoir type dance about an individual’s memory of spaghetti, the spaghetti moment serves as a metaphor for some seemingly universal stuff. There is short spoken word section, and an original score using ancient Italian folk singing. There is a moving duet with one dancer eating spaghetti and another dancer moving around the eating dancer. Maybe there’s a table and a chair. Maybe there is contact and a lift and table-chair acrobatics. The dance is well crafted and performed. The audience is moved by the aesthetic and emotional impact of its beauty in tandem with the subconsciously digested metaphor. “We, and the grains” it is called, grammatically idiosyncratic. I do not want to make that dance.
There is a dance that is an essay of the socio-political connotations of pasta. There is dry pasta everywhere. The audience walked through it to get to their seats. The dry pasta makes amazing sounds. Amazing. Maybe it’s mic’ed and the sounds of dry pasta and empty pasta boxes are captured and live looped on stage. The dancers wear light colored costumes to make visible the projections of the real-time live-captured footage of themselves, spliced with found footage of fields of grain and pasta commercials, projection-mapped to appear only on their bodies as they slide and gesture around, slightly on and off of unison, in parallel lines, parallel lines, parallel lines: the pasta makes a million parallel lines before it breaks. Spaghetti; This Is A Dance About Pasta. I do not want to make this dance.
There is a dance of the pasta. A solo, with a dancer, let’s make it a dude, and he’s basically naked, and he has such a hip haircut, and he is showering in cooked pasta, that is slowly dribbling from an unseen source in the ceiling. He is fully immersed in the feeling of the pasta on his skin, mushing under his feet. The audience is aroused and self conscious. I – Am – Pasta. I do not want to make this dance.
Today, I want to make dances like Etgar Keret makes stories. Taking the nouns and verbs of life, and following them to the incommunicable familiar. I used to be interested in making non-fiction dances. But from Keret I have learned that fiction, good fiction — athletic and imaginative, like a good dance — can give us more. I read and I write because of my faith in words. For my faith in everything that has no words, I make dances.