I’ve been turning around in my mind the thought that I am surrounded by people who are making dances, thinking about making dances, and know what it feels like to make dances, but that I don’t have that knowledge. I hid away my series on my experiences as a dance musician and as a dancer so that these pieces can be refined out of the public eye. My public is a bit too avid and a bit too involved in making dances. I have some experience with doing dances, but I’ve never made one. It is not inconceivable that I could, in fact, do it, but it is not my calling. I’ve been thinking about calling, too, since music making now seems almost peripheral to my interior life. It is fun to make music, but at present I’m passionate about these writing projects. Whatever. What I am called upon to write about at the moment is what it feels like to watch a dance. (Or an evening of them.)

My remarks are intended to be casual, and as always, personal. It’s not rigorous critical writing. Concerning the pieces I hid about the dance training from the musicians point of view, I’ve been cautioned about naming names. But when a dancer walks out onto the stage in a public venue, I’d say the kitty cat is out of the bag. 

The concert I’m talking about is taking place this week (February 2-4th, 2012) at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts in Urbana, Illinois. The presenting group is the University of Illinois Department of Dance, my employer.

I attended last night’s so-called ‘invited dress rehearsal,’ which is as it sounds, a  full dress rehearsal to which a small audience is invited to view the concert ahead of the general public. I watched from the house, therefore, in the center about 10 rows back. It’s closer than I usually prefer, but I wanted to be in the midst for a change. 

I was early enough that I got a chance to devour the program notes in their entirety before the start. In these programs, the artists offer their bios in brief and also, if they prefer, some remarks about the work. These I call ‘artists statements.’ The writing of them is carefully practiced by most artists, and they can be quite informative and revelatory. They put one in a frame of mind, with a frame of reference concerning the artist’s intentions regarding the piece. If you read the statement, you are looking at the dance with something in mind already.

The first piece up was Jennifer Monson’s ‘there there,’ from her ongoing series BIRDBRAIN. The project involves following migrations over the distances (vast) that they traverse, and then developing dance material in the field along with other activities. (Lectures, demonstrations, etc.) All of this is in the program notes along with a link to the website. You can probably also just Google it. The stage was exposed for this work. The legs were out and the cyc and scrim were flown. For the non-theater speakers out there, that means that the curtains (legs) that usually mask from the audience goings on in the backstage area were not present. The cyclorama, if it is used, provides both a backdrop for light and sometimes projections, and also masks the area reserved for storage and cross overs from the audience. No cyc. (Flown means it was hauled aloft on its baton via the counterweight system into the ‘fly gallery.’) Instead, we saw a pile of boxes, derelict audio equipment, and other effluvia, as well as the fenced storage areas backstage. Two worklights were aimed out at the audience, more or less into my eyes. These dimmed with the house lights. When the light came back up, the dancers were present in simple costumes of pale gray or light blue. The costumes varied from cast member to cast member. We got right away that these were birds. They strutted and preened and moved about in their ‘built’ but random seeming environment. Since we could see into the wings, we saw them both offstage and on. Occasionally (twice, actually, at different ends of the piece), the dancers made a bird call “bawk.” When this happened, the dancer looked directly at the audience. The soundscape was very present and intense. It was being created live by the composer, Jeff Kolar, but he was not visible. The sonic spectrum was the full range, and the texture was event rich, but un-metered. (No pulse, no chords, just sound.) Things happened with these birds. Nothing happened that was narrative. No bird died during the watching of this dance.

This was followed by Rebecca Nettl’s choreography to a bunch of Jaques Brel songs. Becky is a master choreographer at the height of her game. She knows how to get at the heart of a piece of music without imitating it, she knows how to use the music in every conceivable way, and she knows how to use the whole stage, keep the blocking and spacing speaking out and expressing her rich aesthetic and intent. Her intent, as expressed in the program was not to create a ‘narrative’ but to express her relationship to the Brel pieces. It was a ménage a trois. The three dancers, which included a marvelous ballroom duo and a forthright, competent contemporary mover, seemed to be wrestling with issues of the heart. They flew to each other, and flew apart. They beat their heads and breasts, they bent over backwards to resolve their aches. Their interactions were elaborate and tender. The program notes said that you didn’t need to understand the texts to get the dance. I watched, but my mind kept drifting to the music from the dances. I admit that I am not a fan of Jaques Brel, nor the French Chanson, though I’ve heard much Piaf, and own some of the records. I’ll even go so far as to say I’m not big fan of French music in general, except for perhaps Berlioz. Anybody who knows me knows that I’m into the sublime horror and divine ugly of German music, ancient and modern. So listening to a lot of French was, for me, distracting. Remember, I’m talking about what it feels like to watch a dance. My personal feelings alone  are fully accessible to me. I’m not interested in what I’m supposed to think, only what I do in fact think. The sound of the Brel was odd. As the concert went on, it became obvious that the sound in the theater was exquisite. The sound guys went all out to do it up brown. Brel is a bit of a historical item. The sonics were certainly high fidelity, but there was a certain slap back it seemed to me. If I heard it this way in my near deafness, I can only wonder what it really sounded like to a good set of ears. The last piece really got into the French brain, music wise. I kept trying to tune Jacques out. But he kept singing something like ‘dit pas’ over and over and over. A very hooky refrain. Dit pas. Dit pas. I’m not a french speaker, despite lessons in High School and a trip to France. (I was with a German.) So. “Dit pas.” What is that? Speak not? Don’t speak? Don’t talk? Don’t say? (You don’t say? Who was it? He didn’t say.) I couldn’t, in the end, completely watch the dancing (in all of its beauty, both in execution and design) because I couldn’t get the drivel in my head to shut up about ‘dit pas.’ Perhaps I could get the video of this piece and watch it in silence. My failures here are entirely my fault. If she choreographed “Wie Bist Du,  Meine Konigin?” (How are you, my Queen?)  I’m sure I’d be awash with tears. The lighting of the Nettle was fab. The red on the cyc during one of the numbers, red tinged all around, and also the dramatic spot on the floor; great work, lighting team!

Next was Linda Lehovec’s genius piece. (“Full Throttle.”) Get this: the lights keep coming up and going down. (We got our legs and cyc back for Becky, and they’re still back. The dancers (huge cast) are covering the stage area in various postures, only one or two move. Black. Lights up. Same. Black. Light up. A little different, but similar. Black. It happens just enough that you get a bit lulled. (I got a bit lulled.) Lights up. Milling around of big cast on stage. Lulled… Then BOOM, the music comes on full blast with a drop four beat. Really nice and loud. I’m at a loss to trace this narrative from memory, but despite the full tilt amplification, and the insistent beat, the dance and the dancers held it up even higher. The thread was never lost. It got down, at the end, to the whole cast doing counterpoint. All of a sudden, seemingly, it came together in a unison and they did an arm gesture that was clear and all together. I adored it. 

After intermission, we got down to Sahar Azimi’s piece for a fabulous cast of Dance at Illinois’ young artists. The artist’s statement in the program declared the intention to explore the usual combinations that ‘manipulate audiences,’ and Sahar specifically mentions love duet, unison, and contact. His intention is to drain the emotion out of them, to offer them in a flat, antiseptic way. He asks, “is it possible?” He seems to think it is, but seems to acknowledge the risk.

Of course, the music poured some of the emotion back in: Elvis, “Three Days/Charles in the Park,” and a bit by Didi Erez. I found it interesting that with the emotion drained, that is to say, blank faces, stylized gestures, and clean dancing as much as humanly possible, the fact of the technique was front and center. It seemed to be all about musicality, perhaps as a result of ‘cleaning it up.’ Can I express it? Is it possible? The emoting is often seen as bendings and twistings of the body and limbs, and as lingerings and leanings against and through the music’s pulse. Cleaning it up meant hyper-intentionality about all of this. That made the dance’s relationship to the pulse of the music a very clean cut and clear thing. It made the individuality of the dancers a fine point: you could see any hint of personal variation. Humans are human. For me, this became the subtext. That is the ‘ghost,’ in this particular machine, Sahar Azimi’s dance.

Lastly, but certainly not leastly was Renée Wadliegh’s ‘like this.’ Weighing in at about 40 minutes or so, and ending with an ongoing cast party on the stage with apparent bubbly, this was a hyper-real rant about liking/not liking, and it furthermore invited audience participation. Renée did not provide an artist’s statement. For a while, she was sitting behind me cattycornerd. I turned back around to her and expressed my appreciation (not entirely facetious) that she had let me have my own blank mind going into her piece. As an after thought, it seemed another voice at the party, the wall flower, the one saying nothing. The work was/felt like some kind of a party. I’ve been to parties like that, where there were meltdowns, fur covered chairs, an awards ceremony, simultaneous acceptance speeches, all of this and so much more. Mania. Yelling over loud music. Alrighty then. I might have attended one, but I’ve never seen the like as a member of a dance concert audience. Dancers with mikes out on the apron asking us (the audience) if they should continue. Did we “like” it?  Facebook, come to life. Made into a dance. Wow. Speechless in Rantucky. If there was a piece that could get me back down to the theater, it would be that one. I want to see if anybody in the audience has the moxie to object to it going on. It could happen. Audiences are funny that way sometimes. The woman sitting next me must have been a ‘plant,’ a person put there to be ‘the audience member.’ She said something odd about “Nutcracker.” After the house lights came up, but with the dancers having champagne (or something) ‘on set,’ I spoke to that woman. I said, “the party, the dance, it might go on all night.”

I must say, by way of wrap up, that this is a very high caliber concert. I hope you can get in to see it. It really got me thinking. It compelled me to break, in public, my silence on things dancerly. Maybe you’ll get such a bang out of it too.