Three Remarks about the Semi-finals of the Keir Choreographic Award 2018
by Bojana Cvejić
In the American dream, a dance competition stages the victory of a newbie who wins the hearts and minds of a hard-nosed jury proving that a lack of pedigree and training is no obstacle for the emergence of true talent: Flashdance! In reality, choreographers sneer at contests and showcases as the necessary evil of situations in which one must seek out the opportunity to produce and distribute one’s work. One reason why competitions are rare in the Western world of theater dance today is because competitiveness is everywhere. Applying for subsidy, or pitching one’s work to a programmer, or merely schmoozing with an art crowd in a festival, a choreographer, especially if they are a young person, is performing theirself or their ability to create a worthwhile work, or to just arouse qualified interest.
A theorist and dramaturg, coming from Europe to review the semi- finalists’ works for the Keir Choreographic Award, enjoys the benefit of a different standpoint. A newbie to the context of Australian dance, I relish the occasion to see a panoply of short performances selected by an international jury. As no representative sample of an art scene can ever be made in all fairness, my views are confined to such selection of eight twenty-minute long choreographies, constrained by a limited amount of rehearsals. The first consideration goes to how the candidates approached the constraints of the format, which attitude toward this competition in choreography colours their deed. Placing oneself in their shoes, I am wondering: who took seriously the opportunity to win the means for producing a performance they wouldn’t be able to make otherwise? Who accepted the contest as a call to use all their cards, but how different is then their access to aesthetic resources available for a twenty-minute piece? Who cannot but ironically comment and subvert the ordeal of judgment and to what effect does their provocation aim? Lastly, who is able to brush ressentiment aside and take the occasion for what it also is, namely, take the chance to use some budget and some time to make a brief sketch, a mid-length draft or proposition for a more substantial full-length performance? As I present and discuss eight choreographies under a few topics of heading, it will hopefully become clear which choreographers took which stance. !
Politics of representation
The world is teeming with intractable conflicts, and we are witnessing a justified revival of identity politics with unwearied keenness even in dance, or shall we say, rather especially in dance. Four women in their twenties, dressed in sports training gear, engage in a series of games: fighting in a duel with two bodies separated at distance, answering a quizz-like questionnaire about pioneers and inventors (among other things), or performing physical and cognitive tasks in an ever shorter time-frame. They tell us many things we (should) know – from Marie Curie being the first woman with multiple Nobel prize awards for her pioneering work in physics to the more obscure meaning of the word “yoni” – or things that we (should) dream of coming true in near future, – that in 2028 patriarchy will die, in 2036 sexual harassment becomes an extinct practice and in 2040 gender difference enters continuum. The games are framed by abrupt shifts of montage, where light and, especially music help dancers energetically switch from one number to another. Two disparate pieces of music act like refrains: the melismatic monophony of Hildegard of Bingen’s Canticles of Ecstasy and Princess Nokia’s gangsta-rap-like girl- power song (“Kitana”). A self-made visionary theologian (because as a woman she wasn’t allowed to study the ancient disciplines of trivium and quadrivium), a composer, and a kind of sorceress of alternative healing practices, Hildegard is claimed both by feminism and New Age spiritualism today.
The American rapper of Afro-Puerto Rican and Taíno descent is a queer voice that says: “Ain’t got no hair on my tongue, ... my words are the reasons that I’ll never use guns, I just wanna have fun and to live without fear, I put the ground to the ear and claimed that this was my year.” Everything is overdetermined in this work, screaming the symbolism of first-degree feminist meanings. When a dancer is making a circle around the arm and then the waist of another dancer, or when one is kicking through circles of arms as targets to pierce or penetrate, I am reminded of circlusion, the opposite of penetration. After all, this choreography is titled Yoni, which in Sanscrit means “womb, uterus, vagina, vulva, abode, or source” but appears as an icon of female genitalia representing the goddess Shakti in Hinduism. Is feminism an unfinished business to such an extent that we must engage a TV-like schoolish pedagogy of spreading mainstream general knowledge? It reminds me painfully of this year’s conference organized by Vatican: “Women matter.” How to distinguish a work about feminism from a work that is feminist? Is Lang’s choreography unwittingly feminist when she directs the dancers to overperform multi-tasking and energetic montage just like mothers who are also hard-working in their jobs? These are some questions I was left with.
In the program note of Bhenji Ra’s Wetness, the artist addresses us in a self-proclaiming way: “she is slippery, she is hard to catch, lost from your sight she’s saying ‘you can’t have me.’” After a loud musical introduction in a red (turning pink) space, Bhenji Ra herself walks in. The act of a curtain-raiser or a stage appearance like in a vogue ball or in Almodovarian trans-shows I saw in Madrid, is composed in a virtuoso stammering and staggering poses, gestures and voice. Stuttering syllables phrase up into questions to the audience: “Can you see? You better can you see me? Can you make it can you take can you hold it can you hold me down? Because I’m wet, I’m slipping I’m dripping... .” The queer resistance to self-identity contradicts the gendered manner of this transwoman dressed in a grotesque doll-like costume in the shape of heart. She sits in a man’s lap and asks him to unbutton her costume. She is assisted in putting red high-heel boots on. Her glamour is unmistakably female, as we know it from cross-dressing acts and voguing, and there is not much more meaning to this act than the allure of her lush presence. !
A Caltex Spectrum was a more opaque piece for my eyes. Oil of Caltex (=California Texas Oil Company) is the copula between images of explosions projected in a framed videoclip on the backwall and a motorbike that features as a prominent prop for three dancers. The atmosphere is post-apocalyptic as in Mad Max. Two young women and a young man in sharp (futurist?) black attire are at first an invisible presence revealed thanks to flickering lamps in their mouths. When the light comes up, they are mostly moving on a diagonal, in dancing a chorus line frontally unisono. As in a music videoclip, their movements mix street-dancing and hip-hop and R&B choruses (think of Beyoncé) through which an uncertain story is told. A portrait of a culture of a generation? The choreographer Amrita Hepi is of Bungjulung and Ngapuhi origin, and in this piece she is committed, in Hepi’s words, to “an embodied exploration of cultural corporeality, navigating a complex entanglement of the theatre's social function, a motorbike and its ensuing somatic assumptions.”
After a bit of research, I thought I figured out the ominous metonymy of the motorbike. A case of murder around the purported theft of a motorbike in 2016 was judged in favor of the white man who chased a young indigeneous boy into death, and this injustice elicited a protest of the indigeneous community. Was the reference obvious to the Australian audience? I had to search for it as I wasn’t satisfied with the phallic staging of this object. Words like “too much” and “fuck” break out in a fuming drift. The spectrum of affects, from boisterous eroticism to intense rage, got me thinking of whom these figures represent on stage. Is it the indigeneous youth that suffers from persistant colonization or is it, admittedly, a much more minor problem of the culture of MTV videoclips that has colonized imagination? I couldn’t help thinking how the popular is nowadays tinted with a commercial celebrity glitz that prepackages idioms of expression, even when this idiom is sought out to represent the oppressed. !
I continued to ponder the politics of representation while watching Lilian Steiner’s Memoir for Rivers and the Dictator. In the beginning, aesthetic and formalist concerns seem to guide a virtuoso dance accompanied with experimental electro-acoustic music with a rather serious tone of inquiry. Lilian’s dancing is elegant in combining classical dance movements with combat gestures hinting at martial arts, gentle curving lines with a repeatedly collapsing body. The texture of the dance vocabulary is dense, yet her marching with the body directed frontally and in diagonals draws a clean square in the space. She is joined by a trumpetist, dressed in the same silver uniform, who extinguishes her dance by picking up and dropping her body. Until then, their expression is abstract, coordinated geometrically, so the rotating movement of the man playing his trumpet is also choreographed. Then two circles of light surround two microphones, the dancer in the foreground and the musician behind her. A salvo of words pours at the audience, as if a dictator is delivering a political speech in an agitated tone. However, its form is poetry and only some lines my ears could capture, like these: “the water is rising,” “the earth is chanting the fall of the sun,” “the heat is rising,” “the golden cry of reincarnation is arriving,” “brothers and sisters, we gather in a house and we don’t pray instead we sleep and eat and love our dear,” and so on. If there is one, the poetic message is concealed or vague, a universal outcry of general sorrow, while some bits of a complex mosaic are crystallised against the overal tone of personal conviction about a somatically felt crisis. I am watching a woman speaking on behalf of the undefined plural of brothers and sisters. Is it for the whole of humankind?!
To participate or not to participate, is that the question?
While Bhenji Ra flirted with the audience, two other pieces explicitly engaged with the social dimension of spectatorship in theater. The performance-makers’ duo, Branch Nebula, employed the audience for the whole show. This was communicated in the very beginning by the following message: “Branch Nebula invites you to help create Stop-Go tonight. In recognition of your contribution, we will share the $30,000 prize money with you when we win. More details later.” Spectators were first asked to leave one shoe in the grid on the stage and then to follow a script of timed actions with a time code. Actions included mooing like cow or sheep and clapping as in applause or in a rhythm, standing up and down in your chair, playing the ring tone of your mobile phone, snapping fingers, going down onto the stage to lie down, dance or jump there, and throwing the shoes about. At a certain moment, the spectators were asked to repeat the same instructions each one of them got in their paper script, but this time condensed in two minutes only. The image of people kept busy by performing silly actions felt superfluous. The feeling of a mild provocation was confirmed when the people of Branch Nebula picked a few shoes to shred them into pieces. These weren’t, of course, the shoes of the audience, but the fake gesture achieved the effect of titillating spectators. As one of the few who didn’t follow the script but remained a spectator in the conventional sense, I observed how everyone gave in to a test of compliance for a cheap reward of contributing to a hurly- burly of theater participation. Stop-Go ended with the sign: “To claim your share of the $30,000 prize money, please like Branch Nebula’s FB page and then private message and quote the code word ‘shred.’ We will inform you or your share, and will pay when we receive your tax invoice.” Cynicism often makes a parasitic usage of a speech act. To wield the power of declaring something like the above, Branch Nebula fall back on the contract of theater that separates them further from the real. Lastly, the audience worked for nothing, a much ado about nothing, merely to fill in the time of the artists’ performance slot. !
In Luke George’s Public Action a more subtle confrontation with the audience is at play. Five dancers, one by one, come to lie between two rows of chairs. The first one seems to hug a chair (which a spectator must leave as a consequence) in order to bring this object down. Then four other bodies stack together in an assemblage that attempts to roll down the slanting auditorium. The sheer physical action forces the spectators out of their seats. People move for various reasons, either to protect themselves or to see better the motion up on the top rows from downstage. The audience is asked of nothing, adaptation and negotiation with one another is a necessary reflex, but the situation also spawns curiosity. The dancers making up a physical obstacle with objects, causing spectators to come onto stage (without explicitly luring them there), prolongs the awkard moment, as the clump doesn’t move at the speed of recognizable intention. Hence, the long lapse of rolling is stopped when the dancers stand up and move onto the stage to a pop song. Its refrain is self-referential: “I got to be unstoppable.” Five bodies dressed in casual clothes continue to move like a dancing huddle on stage, their movements also casual, loud and cheerful. If they happened to bump or rub against you, like it happened to me, you could feel the dynamic of a moshing crowd. I kept thinking, why is it that the sophisticated physical tarrying with the audience must end in a denouement of a self-indulgent juvenile fantasy- dance? !
Towards an oblique and surreptitious imaginary
In what looks like a television of a film set, full of film lamps, cameras and monitors playing back the image that the cameras are taking, three performers are bringing additional props. Enters a young man wearing only a T-shirt while his lower body and genitalia appear naked, a young woman in a tiny dress dangling on her body, and another woman (the choreographer herself Nina Biluš Abaffy) who shudders when she realizes upon her eyes meeting the audience’s gaze that she too is naked. The three figures are bringing many loose objects, heads of decapitated busts, and a plastic mannequin whose limbs must be assembled. They pose in front of the camera and dance with the mannequin. A reproduction of a painting with illusionistic ceiling perspective (from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel?) is punched out of its frame. More of such seemingly clandestine and useless actions are strung along. At one point, Nina is looking at the camera, and her image is projected on a screen whose monitor is fitted into the frame. A hand of the man grabs her head from behind the frame. She exclaims in a discovering voice while staring at the camera: “You are the one who sees me. I have now seen the one who sees me.” A punky atmosphere of misperforming, with indifference to the beginning and the end of the piece as well as the audience is instilled. The words in the program note are for once helpful, as they conceptualize a phantasmatic fiction: “This piece is about the brutal dance marathons of the great depression, where contestants danced continuously for up to 7 months and audiences could come and go 24 hours a day to watch – an early form of reality TV. Unemployed people entered the competition because they were given food but had to keep dancing while they ate it. They were only allowed to sleep for 10 minutes at a time, so many went crazy, committed suicide or died of exhaustion.” Towards the end, Nina the director shouts: “Now is the time! Yes, yes! Thirty seconds!” The other two are showing a ballet sequence, a tribute to dancing? Nothing happens for real, but is more akin to a dadaist show like Erik Satie’s and Francis Picabia’s Relâche, a paroxysm of absurdity. In all that, the performers remain so unburdened with the task of presenting a good piece, and equally intriguing in their withdrawn presence.!
A comparable sense of enigma caught my attention while watching Melanie Lane’s Personal Effigies. In this solo, the dancer appears in a black outfit, her face gently covered with gold, while a cellist constructs a drone of repeated tones on top of which he ex-temporizes an ornamental modal melody. The music is constant as is the dance, setting up a tone of a ritual. The woman is mouthing words that we don’t understand with an expressive face. Three transformations follow. At first, she is swiftly jumping through a lexicon of heterogeneous postures, movements, idioms and bodies, few iconic images are discernible. At the second level, the woman appends a mirror to her body such that it distorts the image of it. She manipulates the mirror so as to make for her body two pairs of legs or three arms, or she props it up with an extension that can make her look like flying off ground or headless. Having taken her black clothes off, she stays in a semitransparent unitard in the color of white-pinkish flesh, and covers her hands with large star-like protruding shells. This prompts the third stage of disguising in which the dancer puts on a sumptuous costume, a golden skirt and a jacket, and covers her face with an archetypal mask. With the masked face and long hair, shrinking in a posture of widespread legs, she appears as a sorceress of sorts. The meaning of the Etruscan word prosopon, at the etymological root of “person” surfaces here: the one who holds the mask over her face. In ancient, totemistic societies, persons were comprised of masks of ancestors, amuleths and other objects that gave them multiple names and roles to play in a theatrical conception of tribal life. !
All the transformations in Personal Effigies happen through ongoing dance movement, which doesn’t only disguise the performer into a character, but also makes her movement shape the space choreographically. In retrospect, this piece, which is paradoxically a solo, relied most of all on choreographic thinking and tools. When I say choreography, I include it in an expanded sense. However, this broadening still rests upon the capacity of having ideas and posing problems within and through a body in movement, without a topic being communicated through theatrical metaphors. The sense of a choreographic idea or problem intrinsically arises from within its own making and its own invention or expression, and not by adapting a form to express a concern, a story, a self-identity. In the end, the Keir competition is for a choreographic award.
Last but not least, I would like to briefly comment a pervasive characteristic of almost all performances I saw in these semi-finals. It pertains to the aesthetics of the theater apparatus the eight choreographies unfold. According to this apparatus, a performance must make ample use of lights including contrasts; it should include loud music, either pop or contemporary experimental, and striking, possibly also rich costumes that distinguish performers from the rest. While in some cases, such choices are justified, as they are in the function of the expression of the concern the work is preoccupied in, in others they seem to act as a default arrangement, in which colors, sounds and volumes of all things expressed are fighting to capture our senses. In difference to the Western Euro- American tradition of contemporary dance, opulence and ostentation are preferable to stark minimalist economy of style. The show must be a spectacle, regardless of its size. Is it obedience to an imperative for grabbing the attention of the public? I cannot tell. However, such an aesthetic sometimes shifts emphasis from bare bodily movement to what cloaks movement.
“This, of course, is no flaw, only a matter of priority about what to perform or choreograph !”
BOJANA CVEJIC is a performance theorist and performance maker based in Brussels. She studied musicology and holds a PhD in philosophy. Her latest books are Choreographing Problems: Expressive Concepts in Contemporary Dance and Performance, A Choreographer's Score: Drumming and Rain with A.T. De Keersmaeker, and Public Sphere by Performance, co-authored with Ana Vujanovic. Cvejic teaches at various dance and performance schools and is co-founding member of TkH editorial collective. She has been the jury member of European Cultural Foundation Princess Margriet Award and Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart.
Bojana Cvejic was a 2018 Dancehouse Public Program guest.
