About
Bennington College
Plan Essay
2015
Dance as Spirituality
“Dance” leaves my mouth before my lips close around it. The word escapes in a dart around my tongue soft on ribbed palette, sssss through scalloped teeth. Each time I make the word I also make the thing.
A Dance:
It begins (and takes the form of my mouth, alert and prepared to respond).
It moves (hang on to a scooping tongue! let go in slick abandon and careen inside that track of teeth, exhale and soften to a pool, gather, unspool and gust slender forward into the open space).
It Ends (mouth closed).
When it’s truly over, though, my lips are still parted. I notice because I have to close them myself and I’m struck, it’s already gone. So it’s not over. Just gone, not inside my mouth, not mine anymore. I made the sound, but then I felt it pass through my lips and I know that in some small way it is somewhere (proba- bly still close to me) dancing with the other escaped words released by other mouths. I’m left with a trace of what it felt like.
Where does it go? Rather, where does dance happen to begin with? What is it? I know the thing that is “dance” is not a pirouette nor the waltzing seesaw of autumn leaves from sky to ground. When I say the word I only feel it take the form of my mouth and respond to the choreography of my jaw and sinews before it exits through my open lips. It eludes the snap of my jaw like it eludes the assignment of a fixed identity to sound. When I send other words out to capture that elusive “dance”, I fill its sails with wind and it floats further from me.
I have spent most of my time at Bennington chasing the meaning of the word dance not understanding the source of my confusion. It is only now, follow- ing 21 years of intimacy with dance—a relationship fraught with discovery, joy, and heartbreak in equal measure— in my sixth term of college; that I am able to see something about what this thing might be to me because I have stopped trying to pin it down, contain it, know it, and do it.
I sustained injuries as a student in 2012 and took time to nurture my body and recalibrate my sense of self as a mover with challenges and changed physical abilities. I grieved. In my grief I stayed close to the anger that was grief’s partner; anger contex- tualized by a fundamental belief that dance, tender and reliable guide, would never reject a loyal disciple because some part of their body had changed since that first ballet class, since committing those first unconscious vows. In that way, perhaps dance is my spirituality. I am a dancer, I insisted through my grieving. But I wrestled with a tension around my diminished abilities. It tugged at me because I un- derstood dance as a genre of medium; an academic and artistic field, concept, practice, lifestyle, philos- ophy, lens, language, form of cultural currency. In other words, I looked to the structures in place that presented dance and, to my eyes, defined it. I think dance can be the things listed but none dwell in the heart or comprise the essence of it.
I am inspired by dance and empowered by movement because a new dynamic understanding of the word has fundamentally altered my relationship to it. I can make a thing but I don’t believe I can make a dance— not directly. Dance is the entity that lifts up out of what I make. Once it lifts it doesn’t belong to me or anyone else and it moves according to the physical laws of the world it inhabits. That is the kinetic identity of dance. A dance is its own being, informed by but ultimately separate from the inten- tions and character of its maker. It is a creature, very much alive, capable of making moves of its own in whatever invisible place it resides. Dance traverses a landscape with its own version of gravity. I don’t know the place by name but when we meet it enters me and it never leaves. It presses into the deepest part of me where the clay is thick and damp.
The moment of a dance’s contact illuminates a landscape that is now my own, visible to versions of my eyes with which I can’t see except for in that place. It carves into my earth, forever changing my pathways for flowing wind and water. It creates new shadows. The dance changes me by sculpting my internal landscape, drawing my attention to a new location in myself and perhaps to a ridge that dips into a valley carved by a dance experienced and cat- alogued at some other time. Where does the dance live in the moment between those perceived loca- tions? Because I experience that terrain in me (as me), I can imagine how it might feel in (as) someone else. How does the dance cope with the strain on its structure across the landscapes of distant tenants? Dance as an object experienced and internalized by a group of people, then, acts like a kind of glue that holds together its own container. Dance moves us in relationship to it, organizing observers in relationship to one another and ourselves in a dynamic form par- ticular to the unique dance experienced. It doesn’t strain because it inhabits a space with physical laws that accommodate structures unviable to architects. It is our task to strain, dancers most of all.
Dancers stir and bellow dust across a structure’s in- visible planes by living inside it for a moment; tracing with our organs and spines the soft and hard edg- es of a particular form. All works of art—all things experienced—are imprinted in observers. But in a dance, time becomes physical and the crouching wretchedness of a question reclines in the open for a moment. In a dance there is no paint; no materi- al, tool, or prothesis, no technology to separate the dancer from the structure; the question. The dancer is its unmediated conduit in kinetic realization.
An observing audience connects to the dancer, to an- other human, and all experience the question bloom to bear an answer that feels like another question, planted in the landscape of the moment, felt before asked. The audience becomes a complex body of complicit conduits for the dance. The chatter of sepa- ration that often typifies human consciousness calms in the quiet when observer connects with performer; human-to-human (dancer-to-dancer?) I wonder if, in that way, dance is love. If love is the glue that fills the space between participants; at once connecting us with ourselves and facilitating connection with others in that moment of vulnerable awakening.
A question central to my work this term has been about what motivates me to assign “dance” to var- ious musical, architectural, visual, digital, theatrical, sculptural, and otherwise generally non-dance works. I am curious about the essence of those things that seem non-dance, yet feel like dance. The subject of my work at present is founded in that curiosity; about the nature of movement and kinetic relationship be- tween formal elements. What is the object of move- ment? Is movement shaped as much by maker and observer as it is by medium? In this essay, I explore this question in writing, which as a medium both opens and closes doors to insight in its own unique way. Those pathways and obstacles offer important information about the kind of dance that emerges from words constructed in linear relationship to an idea.
In my remaining two terms at Bennington I will continue to study visual art using VA tech- niques and approaches performatively, that is, con- textualized and in conversation with other works that are presented as performance. In Multi-Media Performance this term I have been using video to make dances that can only exist with the space and time-editing offerings of video production, multiply- ing my own body to choreograph an ensemble of selves. I am considering ways to present video for an audience and find myself generating solutions that bring together media technology and tradition- al proscenium framing. I believe my inclination to engage and resolve that tension comes from my classical dance training, adolescence in the age of internet and social media, and participation in con- temporary dance as a young adult, with fundamen- tals grounded in post-modern ideas about dance happening anywhere, with any kind of movement, on and in bodies of all kinds of movers, while har- nessing the available technology of the moment.
I seek a new frame for my work in response to the sprawling landscape of today’s contempo- rary dance field. It is big and the corners and edges can be close or far away depending one’s spatial situation within the container. Rather than relate to the frame by locating myself within it, I seek to orient myself in terms of compression and refor- matting. How can I use my intuited and conscious understanding of this global, historical, multi-facet- ed, spiritual medium—dance— to engage honest- ly and articulately with the world as a 23-year-old content-inundated American dancer-trained artist in the Internet era? A frame that isn’t tradition- al dance, isn’t contemporary dance, maybe is like performance art, but certainly calls technology and the accessibility of the Internet into my contextual framework to illuminate questions about human na- ture, personhood, persona, and relationship. Video, digital arts, and performance will all factor into my work as specific areas of focus within visual arts at Bennington. I move into my senior year with foundations in dance, architecture, and philosophy xxxxxxxxx,GBMRML;DMVAL;KMWE;.