INTERNAL COLLOQUIUM 1

die Angewandte

Zentrum Fokus Forschung

November 29, 2022

TECHNIQUE CONCERNS:

Ballet Practice Against the Western Archive

PRESENTATION GUIDE

Short Exercise

Reflection

Little Autobiography

Address Research Topic & Question

Project Abstract

Questions 

EXERCISE

Invite everyone in attendance at the internal colloquium, “the participants”, to stand and join me in a short exercise:

• stand with legs apart, about one and a half of your feet distance apart (referring to 2nd position in ballet terminology)

• I describe a focus, where to put weight down through specific points in the feet (big toe joint, baby toe joint, and heel).

• I invited the participants to find equal pressure through all six of these points equally down into the floor

• let your arms drop to your sides and make some bounces

• I invite everyone to “slouch”, letting all their weight drop down into the floor “like you are 300 years old”

• from this place I invite the participants to press down into the floor into the points across the foot, side to side (across the metatarsals), and front to back (from ball of foot to floor)

• from there I instruct to go up from the top of their heads making space between their bones “without lifting their low ribs”

end exercise

REFLECTION

I invite the participants to think about the experience they just had with their bodies and offer two prompts to guide their reflection if they like, otherwise just to take time for their own reflection about any aspect.

Some guiding questions 

1. How did you pay attention to others as you worked with your own body? 

or

1. How was your imagination of what your body was doing or feeling intermingling with your imagination of others’ experiences in the room or screen?

BROAD QUESTION

How should we* continue to study western systems, styles and techniques?

* I planned to say this, but I didn’t: “we” refers to institutions where techniques are taught that have historically been composed of majority white students, in professional or pre-professional, market-driven or academic, educational settings, but also less visible settings. 

A jump.

My knowledge of ballet technique is intimately felt. I began when I was four years old and practiced intensively until I was injured at 18 years old, at which point I admitted to myself that the commercial aspect, and perfectionist tendency, impaired my capacity to think freely. I wanted to imagine infinite possibilities to express beauty through my body and its movement, and connect with people in ways that didn’t represent heterosexuality. and it felt like the culture where ballet was happening was not interested in that. I left for a short time.

Some years later, like when I was four, I crawled back into the studio. 

Ever since I returned, ballet technique has supported me in my work as a contemporary dancer and performer. 

…as a maker.

…and as a teacher.

I learned to teach ballet through a teacher I started assisting who hosts a class that she calls, “Ballet for Contemporary Dancers” in New York City and abroad. The teacher’s name is Janet Panetta and like me she trained at an elite ballet institution in New York City and got sick of the proscriptions and prohibitions regarding what the dancers might do with their bodies and lives. Assisting her for ten years, I have been working with her ideas and expanding them, now as a teacher for a “contemporary dance” departments. In the past seven years I have been teaching at The New School University, Stockholm University of the Arts, Zurich University of the Arts, and University of the Arts Berlin where I was a guest lecturer for four years and sustained my teaching practice through the pandemic. 

In university settings I have been able to reflect on classical technique with students and teachers interested in choreography as an ever-expanding notion.

COMPLEXITY

Teaching, artistic expression, and theory are enmeshed for me. Through the interrelationship I seek a balance of experimentation and rigor. A world view. 

In much of the work I have done inside the frame of contemporary dance, ballet has been a pretense to talk about a state of affairs that exceeds commercial performance and specialised physical culture. I have observed ballet as a dynamic conversation starter and have used the technique, both theoretically and in practice, as a portal to enter broader debates about the ways in which Eurocentric tendencies are perpetuated through oral history as well as the archive. 

There is a wealth of scholarship that attests to the lives, experiences and stories minimized by the machine of capitalism. 

Here are two quotes from Adedola Akinleye that I like because they draw our attention to the ways in which ballet exists in proximity to the economic and political machinery of capitalism. 

“Emerging at the time of European colonial expansion that began in the fifteenth century… ballet rides the inheritance of colonialism and cultural hierarchy. Ballet was born into this European social-economic exercise… This legacy informs the current Western understanding of the art world and is perpetuated in the way ballet is referenced, classified and represented. (2)”

— Adedola Akinleye

“As an artform, ballet absorbed the richness of the cultures into which it was introduced. However, imperialist sponsors have repeatedly used the artform to further colonial aesthetics. Such heteronormative, classed narratives of the notion of ballet can pervasively drown out the spectrum of human sensibilities that dance can so ably exemplify, but the working class, non-White, Queer constituents who have loved and danced ballet steps have legacies of their own that prevail - albeit often as part of ‘underground’, invisibilized cultural histories and communities. (3)
”

— Adedola Akinleye Akinleye, Adesola. Ed. (Re:) Claiming Ballet. Intellect Books, 2021.

RESEARCH QUESTION

What is at stake teaching ballet in the wake* of mass exclusion?

* ‘in the wake’ references Christina Sharpe’s inspirational book, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016) 

CONCERN

From my perspective, “classical” techniques produce clear forms of rigor for artists to use in skill-building workshops or daily practices, however, the ways in which knowledge of classical techniques is transferred risks reifying (i.e. strengthening) attitudes and sentiments of the imperialist and colonial contexts from which they were established. 

Referring back to Christina Sharpe’s concept “the wake”, I offer a quote from her text that also contains a quote of Saidiya Hartman:

“The “autobiographical example,” says Saidiya Hartman, “is not a personal story that folds onto itself; it’s not about navel gazing, it’s really about trying to look at historical and social process and one’s own formation as a window onto social and historical processes, as an example of them”. Like Hartman I include the personal here, “to tell a story capable of engaging and countering the violence of abstraction (Hartman 2008, 7) (8).
”

— Christine Sharpe Sharpe, C.E. (2016) In the wake: On blackness and being. Durham: Duke University Press.

SITUATED PERSPECTIVE

As a technique teacher, the ethics of my teaching are entangled with my experience working with and against hierarchical power structures. Bodily training in social and natural environments, as well as the creative curiosities and desires I inhabit co-create my intuition as a choreographer, performer, and teacher. 

I want to make it clear that in most cases, when I instruct how to do something I also do it physically, performing a manual labor which catapults me into relation to time forward and back. the temporality of the moment to moment dialogue I have with my body, joins the network of embodied memories of the instructions I have received, which amount to complex somatic aesthetic phenomena, at many time at odds with what is expected. In teaching and using technique, the manners and measures of “appropriate behavior” of the places where I learned them are illuminated; the feelings those techniques I generate bring forward link to the communities with whom I have endured these repetitions of coordinated rhythms and movements. Also the haunting of those who were not there. Thos who were excluded. Or maybe one day there, the next day not. 

Technique is isolating and, simultaneously, embodying techniques helps me connect in non-verbal economies, in groups where exchanges in silence, through chance encounters, build environments of mutuality and joy.  

These joyful, intuitive aspects are highlighted when I craft and facilitate technical exercises, or otherwise use the knowledge as a score when I perform for a public. 

The fact that neoliberalism requires exclusions to thrive as a global economic model is highlighted for those in contemporary art settings and institutions in Europe and elsewhere. 

APPROACH

Social Epistemology

Evaluation of the social dimensions of knowledge or information.

ABSTRACT

Classical ballet is highlighted as an historical practice through which to consider epistemic change in arts institutions and beyond. The project aims to produce a manual of ballet technique, allowing a practitioner's life-long experience of embodying the form to act as a lens on contemporary practice as it pertains to historical practices. The situated perspective, somatically and culturally constituted, interacts with philosophical perspectives on somatic realities and disciplinarity. The project considers how aesthetic ideologies and pedagogy become improvisational narrators in the unfinished story of the ways people learn to dance, including ballet.

FOR WHOM DOES THIS RESEARCH MATTER?

The obvious answer for me is that contemporary dancers and performers are interested in encountering systems that offer unique ways of learning about their bodies and what they can do. To quote Ben Spatz, who follows a long line of philosophical inquiry, from Spinoza to Deleuze, “We do not yet know what a body can do” (Spatz).

Clarifying this important question changes the language and expression of the research. It also, quite possibly, determines the form and aesthetic of the complex of art that comes alongside, with, and through the discursive elements. 

FOR WHOM DOES THIS RESEARCH MATTER?

What is one word or notion you had while experiencing this presentation? 

Be it a point of entry that gets to the heart of an idea you thought of in the last fifteen minutes, or a concept you find relevant to my project as you see it. 

An image to my research

Putting an image to my research. Looking into my archive of images. Figurative images of myself, scenes from performance, street photography, nature, previously made collages. I select an image of a still from a video, a film I made called Isotropic dreams where the camera captures the scene through the peephole of a door enclosing a dance studio. I am facing the mirror, the image does not show my face. My legs are together, not in a ballet pose, but more in a doll-like standing pose with legs straight, feet together, heels on the floor, arms down and palms touching the mirror. I take the image into photoshop. I’m looking to bring representation of a body into relation to a field or landscape with a certain order, but not too much clarity. I start outlining blocks of the architecture and manipulating the colors and saturation. Through this process, the circular image through the peephole starts to reveal the geometries within. Highlighting these areas, I defamiliarize myself with my own work. What else is here that was not here before? What has been her all along that I needed more time to understand?

I woke up today reading a newspaper article about an image Andy Warhols used of Prince for I think Interview Magazine. There is a new lawsuit at the supreme court in the United States brought by the photographer of the image of Prince (not Warhol), who is suing the Warhol foundation because the image was supposed to only be used for one magazine cover and in the end Warhol made fifteen different copies and distributed the image to other venues. Prince is dead. Warhol is Dead. The photographer is alive and deserves to be compensated in my opinion.

I reflect on another image I desire to bring in as a representation of my research. This one is a still of another video (I see this now as a procedure). This video is also taken through a portal, a children’s toy telescope that doubles the image. The video is a 1960s black and white recording of a Balanchine ballet, Raymonda Variations. I do not know the ballet dancers name, or which precise variation she was doing (the ballet is structured with over a dozen short solos that vary in length but generally are very fast and exciting to watch because the dancer is almost chasing the speed of the music. I have already some some manipulation to this photo, which is a double of the dancer in a short romantic tutu, with both arms overhead mid-curtsy.

I hesitate with this image on two fronts. They are both very clear red flags that tell me no, this does not represent YOUR work. One reason is that this is a historical ballet, a choreography by a widely celebrated white male choreographer and my project is not strictly about centering iconic, white dancers doing things with their bodies that are widely regarded as beautiful. The thought is “too classical” (even though Balanchine’s work is not always regarded as classical). The other red flag links up to the Supreme Court case. I’m actually not sure of the copyright laws, even though this is an analogue digital photograph taken of a video that is also blurred by the doubling technique through the kids telescope, and further colorized from black and white into a softly colored photo.

Leaving these concerns aside, there are clear overlaps in these images, there aesthetic, and why I gravitate to them as representations of my artistic research. There is a way of looking at things of the past with the desire to retrace lines, itself a process of slowing down the looking and drawing over. I do not think it is about underwriting. Am I interested in historicizing these images by changing them into a new, unseen/distributed image/process? I think it is the process that I am interested in people seeing. There is the fact that we see an image that is somehow familiar—a white body with a classical ballet aesthetic in see-through tights—and also that the figure is unfamiliar too. I sense I am interested in negotiate with this image of the past. What’s there that wasn’t there before? Why can’t I discard it? Why am I bringing it back if not to reify these classical ballet aesthetics? I have no answer at this moment but I want to acknowledge that I have some instincts and that I apply procedures to the selection of aspects, glimpses, perspectives on the past.

Procedure:

stylized filming>>obscured image

still image>>aesthetic transformation

new image>>thinking

consideration>>…

this is where I get stuck. I cannot justify the process because I do not know what my aim is. This is a problem I am trying to figure out and I’m glad the simple task to present an image that represents my research has triggered this dilemma in my whole work bringing movement into stillness as a temporary place that then deserves its own process of liberation back into movement.