Choreographies is both autobiography and archive—documenting production through rehearsal and performance photographs, illustrations, scores, process notes, reviews, audience feedback, and interviews with both dancers and choreographers. Covering the author’s practice from 1975 to 2017, the book delves into an important period of change in contemporary British dance—exploring British New Dance, postmodern dance, and experimental dance outside of a canonical US context. A critically engaged reflection that focuses on artistic process over finished product, Choreographies is a much-needed resource in the fields of dance and choreographic art making.
Choreographies is both autobiography and archive—documenting production through rehearsal and performance photographs, illustrations, scores, process notes, reviews, audience feedback, and interviews with both dancers and choreographers. Covering the author’s practice from 1975 to 2017, the book delves into an important period of change in contemporary British dance—exploring British New Dance, postmodern dance, and experimental dance outside of a canonical US context. A critically engaged reflection that focuses on artistic process over finished product, Choreographies is a much-needed resource in the fields of dance and choreographic art making.
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Overview
Choreographies is both autobiography and archive—documenting production through rehearsal and performance photographs, illustrations, scores, process notes, reviews, audience feedback, and interviews with both dancers and choreographers. Covering the author’s practice from 1975 to 2017, the book delves into an important period of change in contemporary British dance—exploring British New Dance, postmodern dance, and experimental dance outside of a canonical US context. A critically engaged reflection that focuses on artistic process over finished product, Choreographies is a much-needed resource in the fields of dance and choreographic art making.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783207664 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Intellect, Limited |
| Publication date: | 09/15/2017 |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.60(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Cheoreographies
Tracing The Materials of an Ephemeral Art Form
By Jacky Lansley
Intellect Ltd
Copyright © 2017 Jacky LansleyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78320-766-4
CHAPTER 1
MINIMAL DANCE
By the 1970s a diverse field of performance art was established across Europe and America, influenced by a minimalist art movement that had been developing since at least the 1950s. Boundaries had been broken between painting, sculpture and performance and for a brief period in the early 1970s, the London School of Contemporary Dance (LSCD) allowed a space for dance to explore and interact with these interdisciplinary influences, primarily through the diverse and radical students who were part of its community at the time. In 1971 I enrolled as a student at LSCD (having performed with the Royal Ballet Company for two years) and became part of this radical community, which included artists such as Sally Potter and Diana Davies. We exchanged skills and learnt from each other, supported by a ground swell of political change and widespread action around societal oppressions such as sexism, racism and homophobia; all of which inspired the material and imagery of our performance work.
As activist students we created many site-specific events and performances in the LSCD building and in external contexts, with collaborators from across all disciplines. Nothing seemed to be off limits if it was useful to the realisation of what we were trying to explore. Any indoor or outdoor public space was a potential performance space; any personal or political theme was legitimate material; any found object, random image or fragment of text was a potential 'script'. We were aware of the postmodern dance-work going on in the USA, and artists such as Meredith Monk (who visited LSCD in 1973 and got a group of us to camp out in a studio for several days), the Judson Group, Merce Cunningham and John Cage inspired us. It is significant, however, that the experimental performance work that we as a group were interested in combined artistic, conceptual and theatrical strategies and skills. The focus on minimalist pedestrian movement in the early work of Yvonne Rainer and others, wasn't our central concern at the time, although conceptually we understood the minimalist aesthetic of task-based dance performance which opposed a narcissistic, virtuosic and dramatic view of performance.
In 1972 several of us joined Strider, an experimental dance company initiated by Richard Alston, which drew on this radical student energy. I worked with Strider for a year, during which time I choreographed The Truth About Me (1973) – using music of the Everly Brothers and Elvis Presley to evoke cultural stereotypes of the 1950s – and Halfway to Paradise (1972), which included performers such as the sculptor Barry Flanagan and the US composer Gordon Mumma who performed alongside other colleagues from The Place. The piece was performed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) as part of a Strider event and this review by the dance critic John Percival reveals the kind of personal and political collage of images, themes and skills that we were exploring:
Strider's next London appearance was 1 December when an expected new piece by Flanagan (described as using light bulbs and restaurant tables) failed to materialise, but the sculptor himself, together with composer Gordon Mumma (an associate of John Cage and Merce Cunningham), appeared as performers in an event by Jacky Lansley, Halfway to Paradise. Together with Banner, Davies, Early and Colette Lafont, they played a group of rockers who burst in on the activities which had begun even before the audience was let into the room. We took our seats as Lansley, in pink tights and leotard, sitting on a small central platform and occasionally turning her head, while Alston, Levett and Potter in drab overalls leant against the walls supporting piles of empty boxes. At the advertised starting time, these three began to move from one spot to another, transporting their piled burdens which were eventually aggregated to form an impossible load.
Prior to studying at LSCD, Diana (Di) Davies had been a student then teacher of art and brought her already considerable experience of interdisciplinary practice to the school. We had collaborated on several projects with other students and with Strider and in the summer of 2013 I met up with Di at her home in Brittany and we revisited some of these early experiences and talked about her relationship with choreography:
Jacky: Di, I have been remembering with great affection some of our early works such as Hundreds and Thousands (1972), which we co-choreographed and devised with Sally Potter and the sculptor Barry Flanagan. The piece was performed at the ICA and the Sonja Henie Centre in Oslo as part of a British Council tour. It involved two men shovelling heaps of sand backwards and forwards across a stage to a tape of the same activity while Sally, you and I wore sporty white clothes and wielded Indian clubs in callisthenic formation and carried each other about the space, accompanied by the conceptual artists' orchestra the Portsmouth Sinfonia interpreting the Sugar Plum Fairy!
Di: Yes, a while back I spotted a commemorative article in Tate Magazine about Barry Flanagan; its author had written that Barry 'had worked with dancers' and seemed to imply that we were passive objects in this piece. I wrote in to explain that we were not anonymous dancers but, as you have described, artistic collaborators ... I never received a reply.
Jacky: We devised the work. Did you ever think of yourself as a choreographer? Where did this practice fit in for you?
Di: I think I lost my way a bit with regard to choreography. I didn't easily identify with it; I didn't feel at ease as a choreographer working within the UK contemporary dance culture of that epoch. Despite receiving an award from the Gulbenkian Foundation for my early work, when I tried to apply for funding from the Arts Council, firstly from the Dance and then the Theatre panels, I was turned down by both on the grounds that my work was 'not dance' and 'not theatre'. I wasn't necessarily discouraged because I had begun to encounter other kinds of performance that were also, at the time, not supported in the UK, but that were nevertheless welcomed at various well-known experimental venues and festivals in mainland Europe. Prior to studying at the LSCD I was a student, then teacher, of art and my initial experience of contemporary art media in its many forms began in Liverpool with Bill and Wendy Harpe's project, the Blackie. So I had already been exposed to alternative dance and performance. When I went to study at the LSCD it appeared to me that some British contemporary dance forms seemed to remain within a sort of classical framework. Important and interesting though these were to the development of the UK dance scene, there were other things 'out there'. At the LSCD I met other students who were also interested in pushing the boundaries. We were avid readers of The Tulane Drama Review and admirers of contemporary dance coming out of the USA at the time. We were influenced by the rare performances that were available to us, for example, Merce Cunningham's use of a 360° performance space; Trisha Brown's use of non-theatre venues; Meredith Monk's re-visioning of narrative in dance performance; to name but a few. Perhaps aspects of the British contemporary dance scene became rather sanitised for me in a way.
Jacky: So you felt that there wasn't an appropriate context for you to continue your work and your exploration with dance?
Di: I don't know – I didn't think it through at the time. There was so much going on. In the mid-1970s when we, as you have already mentioned, participated in the British Council event 'The Best of British' in Oslo we met, along with Barry Flanagan, several other visual and performance artists. That's how we came to work with the Yorkshire-based John Bull Puncture Repair Kit (JBPRK). Our performances of Mick Banks's (JBPRK) scripts – Auk and Fallen Angels (both 1973) – which you, Sally, Dennis Greenwood and I collaborated on – arose from this. Auk drew on cabaret, pornography, religion, seaside holiday activities and polluted birds. In Fallen Angels we were three women at a tea party wearing surrealistically elaborate hats, engaging in a dialogue with an angel in a sack. Quite Beckett-like.
Through JBPRK I met the Welfare State at a festival in Rotterdam. This performance company essentially transformed spaces in which they performed and I was invited to join them. As well as the travelling lifestyle of Welfare State I enjoyed an entirely other form of movement, learning how to wield a pickaxe for example. Although it was often difficult as the only single woman, I enjoyed the work. The core company were mainly visual artists – it was certainly different to Martha Graham!
Jacky: You choreographed a solo piece for me called Dry Dock (1973) when we were at The Place. Can you remember anything about the process?
Di: This 'crisis' I had about choreography; the one-movement-following-another, didn't come easily to me, it didn't make sense to me. I dream about moving; I am an excellent social dancer in a wild and extraordinary way; not in any particular form but I can make up movements at the drop of a hat in that context, it doesn't faze me; but I couldn't connect with what was going on in this other sanitised place! The step–upon–step method ... so I guess I just went and joined Welfare State! I wanted to do quite ugly things; I did not always want to appear linear. I found an ugly movement could be extraordinarily beautiful.
Jacky: I seem to remember with Dry Dock that you were experimenting with gesture and everydayness?
Di: If I have remembered correctly, I used part of Erik Satie's Gymnopédies over which John Darling (JBPRK) had taped the sounds of foghorns. You, poor thing, hardly moved from one spot! There was a huge loneliness in it, 'an atmosphere of desolating emptiness' as John Percival wrote at the time. I remember that I gave you large amounts of rocking on your ankles, almost like Irish dancing. It was extremely sparse and confined as choreography. It can't have been much fun to perform, but you did it so well! There is no record of it – it was all ephemeral – before this age of digital media so much performance work just went into the ether ...
Jacky: It's an interesting question – what is choreography? It's about form, structure, meaning and as we know it's that collision of the visual and performing arts that has produced perhaps the most interesting work. And you were very much part of that.
Di: We were a group and we each brought our different qualities and interests.
Jacky: If someone gave you the resources and asked you to choreograph a work now – what would you do?
Di: I don't think I would want to choreograph now. I don't want to tell people what to do anymore – though I'm aware that this is not the only way of proceeding.
Jacky: So that would be your main concern, that you would have to direct people?
Di: No, it's not as simple as that – but even having to negotiate socially with people in order to make something, I would perhaps find difficult, I really don't know. Perhaps I have grown too selfish after all those years of teaching art in various schools. Now I am making images. It's the experience of the 'possible', of taking an image in any direction according to an inner sensibility and 'need' to express being in the 'now'; it's an experience of freedom tempered by the necessities and suggestions of the making process. This is one of the great and wonderful tensions in art, any art. Perhaps if I were to work on a cooperative effort of some kind ... One of the nice things about working in the Welfare State, and subsequently IOU, was that everyone had their own area, their own bit, which then got strung together as a performance. In IOU we pooled ideas much more. I do miss the generosity of chewing over each other's ideas without any sense of personal threat to the ego. Great! There is a sense of this with some dancers and some choreography. At its best it's more creative and risky.
Jacky: You have recently been involved in recreating a cabaret project that you first created with other artists, writers and musicians in Bradford in 1980, Café Déspard ... It was obviously something that excited and moved you.
Di: The Café Déspard of 1980 was a brief and extremely ad hoc mini-series of cabaret evenings involving artists and musicians and anyone else who wished to commit. Its venue was in the back of a pub. Its performances were packed out and it apparently seems to have reached cult status in some of Bradford's current cultural circles. At the time we made something out of very little. Within a matter of hours, using simple tools and materials, a space and its cohort of performers were transformed into a performance possibility.
In 1975 Di asked me to participate in a Welfare State project on an open-air site in South London. It was a requirement that I worked with objects in some way. I was not confident crafting things with my hands, but I attempted to embody the idea of object with other skills. I came up with a navy-blue industrial boiler suit, which I wore, and a sturdy costume rack which I hung from and improvised around, doing eccentric movements with mysterious pauses and tableaux which I think looked rather abstract and somewhat bleak in that Welfare State context of craft and colour. I remember that I invited some bemused members of the audience into my space to have 'a go' on my costume rack – which contributed some interesting audience participation and attracted the quizzical interest of John Fox, the founder of Welfare State. Di was very supportive; it felt a bit like we were continuing our Dry Dock project but in a different space and context, which was a very valuable experience for me at the time.
LIMITED DANCE COMPANY
In 1974 Sally Potter and I created our project Limited Dance Company (LDC), so called because of its fusion of conceptual minimalist performance with theatrical strategies and skills, including very 'limited' dance. Following is a brief description of an early work Episodes (1973) which we performed over five weeks, using the central stairway and public restaurant of The Place theatre:
A serial piece with recurring elements, and an accumulative visual and sound structure, using as image material archetypes drawn from stages in two women's lives from childhood to old age. The images were developed in relation to the physical properties of the spaces used (e.g. sequences were related mathematically to the number of steps in each flight).
Limited Dance Company used formal systems which emphasised the structural make up of a piece through its use of interconnecting strategies such as repetition, fragmentation and collage. We used terms like proposals, scores and events to describe work that was part of a broad artistic flux happening across visual art and performance. Sally and I worked together as LDC for three years during which time we made work in a huge variety of public spaces, theatres and galleries as part of performance art programmes and alternative dance and theatre festivals in the UK, Europe and the USA. Our work framed and exploited the interesting mix and range of visual, theatrical, choreographic and directorial skills that Sally and I shared, even though we were at the time still in our early twenties.
LIMITED DANCE COMPANY AT EDINBURGH ARTS 74
On leaving the Place, Sally and I were invited to teach workshops and make performances as part of a six-week arts festival throughout Scotland – Edinburgh Arts 74 – coordinated by the Richard Demarco Gallery. Richard Demarco is a unique impresario and was a great champion of our work; he saw the meaning and importance of what we were trying to achieve, even at that early point. We wrote this statement about our proposed work with the Edinburgh Arts 74 participants:
We want to use a form of narrative structure in the sense that perhaps James Joyce would employ it, or as Godard said, 'things with a beginning middle and end but not necessarily in that order'. We want to work in relation to the particular environments in Scotland and to the individual experiences of the participants. A kind of movement image collage structured in the form of a developing serial divided into episodes.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Cheoreographies by Jacky Lansley. Copyright © 2017 Jacky Lansley. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements, ix,Inward, 1,
Chapter 1: Minimal Dance, 5,
Chapter 2: Dance Object, 33,
Chapter 3: Out of Thin Air ..., 47,
Chapter 4: Holding Space, 71,
Chapter 5: View from the Shore, 81,
Chapter 6: Standing Stones, 93,
Chapter 7: Researching Guests, 103,
Chapter 8: Guest Suites, 117,
Chapter 9: Other Voices, 133,
Onward, 151,
Works and Photography Credits, 159,
Bibliography, 169,
Index, 173,