the urgent artist

and why Wendy Perron couldn’t be more wrong

Ever since our premiere of 90 ways to wake from drowning has closed, i’ve been thinking.  As Lillie will tell you, I’m always thinking – mind constantly churning like some mix between a hamster’s wheel, particle orbit, and a blender – but the last few months have been different.  During production week you feel like a crazy person.  You’re constantly balancing the million things you need to get done, making last minute decisions and tweaks, and trying to stumble upon some brand of clarity that will allow you to actually see what you have in front of you before it’s released to the public.  Even before that, in the months leading up to our Joyce SoHo engagement, my thoughts were devoted to the piece, crisis mode style.  How do i solve this piece? What’s the way out? What’s the tweak that will make it all fall into place? But now, now that i find myself in the limbo of not-yet-started-on-the-next-piece, i’m back to thinking (“Thinking“?) in a way that feels much more normal, at least for me.

What have i been thinking about? Well, to start this nice little wormhole of a discussion, thinking.

It started when Shalonda Ingram (friend and associate via DTW and Nursha Project) asked a question in the last minutes of our post-show talkback.  Though I cannot give you her wording exactly,  she asked about the role of technology in our process, and specifically within our generation.  I found the clarity of my answer somewhat surprising, and it’s been on my mind ever since.  “Aside from me having no interest in it, It wouldn’t be possible for me to be creating the type of work that was created thirty years ago.  The way that the minds of our generation function is completely different from how the minds of that generation worked.”

Is this statement true? The danger of a talkback is that you might publicly say something that you don’t mean, or perhaps worse, say something that’s achingly close, but not yet there.  However, the excitement is that you might uncover something, maybe even something big, that you hadn’t put together yet.

Thinking about thinking more and more this week, i find that assessment to be true.  Though i can’t put myself back thirty years and understand what the thought processes were like at that point in time, there are certain aspects of thought in the present climate that we can hypothesize to be true.  I should say, to start, that I realize that no two people may think alike, and that a whole different post.  Let’s start looking at broad gross generalizations.  Let’s think about computers.  Let’s think about the prevalence of the internet, YouTube, facebook, blogs, and more.  Let’s think about one of my favorite subjects – digital natives versus digital immigrants.

I have a clear memory from high school of going to a technique class after i had spent an hour or so online, playing one of those mindless balloon-popping games where you clear the screen by grouping colors together and then popping them.  As i lay on my back with my leg negotiating its turnout, my mind rationalized “group the turnout with the alignment of other parts (both were yellow in my mind) and then pop to clear (ie: adjust into turnout)”.  Disconcerting.  I stopped playing that game.  Another instance: In a dance class at Sarah Lawrence, after spending the morning intaking and cataloging video footage for my thesis, moving through a new movement phrase in class. Bend at waist, turn left, foot pattern ah bah da da da dahhh, aaand release, turn front. file, save as?

Perhaps this is why i’m always a bit reluctant to see new content – books and TV shows in particular: once i’ve internalized something, it is inevitably a part of my process and work.  Not only that, but it has become included in the way that my brain functions.  Now, before we start lamenting that YouTube has killed our attention span and that Facebook has made us socially inept, let me propose that this is not a bad thing.

In fact, it can’t be a bad thing, or even a good thing for that matter, for our generation it just is.

We (perhaps i should say “I”, but I won’t because i do think it’s broader than myself) have developed ways of thinking that are in line with the media we utilize to convey those thoughts, and the subsequent interactions that stem from them.  What do I mean by that? Well, for starters, that when I’m thinking about choreography, I’m imaging the phrase-work like a Final Cut Pro timeline – in terms of  being able to cut and re-position, adjust speed direction of playback, layer clips, adjust tones, etc.  When i’m thinking about structure, I’m often thinking along the lines of a wikipedia system – a living and growing hypertextuall web where things can cross reference, link to source material, and house commentary and insight from multiple users.  This is, of course, not to say that i’m forcing my choreographic methodology into these restrictions – it’s just that my mind functions naturally in this  techno-based mode, and it is the way that my mind has come to understand and create the choreographic process.  It’s not that I (and i suspect, many other makers of art) are choosing to create tech-related work per say; as a generation of digital natives, this is the way that our brains inherently function. To say it differently, it’s not that technology has become the subject, so much as the process.

Surely this digitization of our mind function has many different results stemming off from it, but i’d like to focus on one: multi-user content and interactivity.  For our generation (or, perhaps i should say generations under us, as many of my contingent find themselves on the fence) if it’s not interactive, it’s not relevant.  If it can’t be commented on, tagged, re-posted, remixed, or liked, we lack clarity of what to do with it.  Let me clarify here that i’m not talking about “interactive” in terms of audience participation (which i usually find particularly painful and unsuccessful), I’m talking about a multitude of individuals, each interrelating and networking to form a living organism of ideas, opinions, and interest.  It’s not that “I” is nessescarily turning to “we”, but that “I” has become “I…and he…and she…but they…and then…and then”

Again, inter-connectivity isn’t so much the subject, as the process.

Which is why i find Wendy Perron’s massively outdated article in Dance Magazine, Blogging about the Process of Choreography – ugh!, so deliciously damning and problematic.  Much has already been written in response to her lament (notably, on Dance Theater Workshop’s blog, Culturebot, and trailerpilot – Perron responds here) so I won’t (as i had originally intended to) pick it apart piece by little piece.  Make no mistake: in my mind Perron’s stance could not be more harmful to the dance community, lacking insight, or arrogant. But let’s go a little deeper: I want to focus on one line of her lament, a panicky question that I have heard expressed many times, and find quite interesting.  She writes:

What if you’re in the studio working on a piece, and you’re thinking about what you’re going to say about it in your blog? Wouldn’t that compromise your process?

Now wouldn’t that be something? Thinking about the work outside the work itself? How dreadfully meta.  How…how…postmodern?
Perron’s assertion assumes a few things:

1. the act of Choreography (or any art-making for that matter) is, at it’s core, based on some pre-verbal murkiness
2. this murkiness (“the groping phase” she calls it) needs to be waded through without verbalization from the self or outside eyes, until (at some undefined point) it is then legal to talk about.  In other words, we must first be intuitive, and then we can begin to (in Perron’s words) “justify [our] decisions”

Allow me to pause here.  I do partially agree with what she’s saying – there is a certain amount of the unknown inherent in creative endeavors.  However.  Nothing hurts me (or the dance world) more than the idea that what we’re doing when we’re creating isn’t so much thought and decision making as intuitiveness and untraceable inspiration.  Regardless of how conscious you are at that moment of the reasons for those intuitions, those gut instincts are based on a very finely tuned and developed sense of structure, anatomy, pacing, flow, etc.  And that, my friend, requires a large amount of skillful thought.  It may be subconscious at a level that makes it feel intuitive, but it’s still informed decision making.  Contrary to popular belief, an investigation of what make those choices work will not cause them to crumble or vanish. Furthermore, the idea that any verbalization of process or making public of one’s work at a pre-performance stage for discussion and interaction is justifying the work is nonsense – dangerous and arrogant nonsense.

Though she never comes out and says it, Perron’s assertion is that being conscious, verbal, and/or public about investigating this “groping phase” somehow makes it less.  Less what she never says.  If i employ consciousness in my process, and then make it public is my work less genuine? Less “art”? Less likely to yield profitable or satisfying results? Less “dancey”? Less ephemeral?

So let me return to Perron’s question: “What if you’re in the studio working on a piece, and you’re thinking about what you’re going to say about it in your blog? Wouldn’t that compromise your process?”

Well, not if thinking is your process.

Perron’s delivery makes it seem that young artist with a blog are blogging for All The Wrong Reasons – perhaps seeking approval from outside sources, being prideful, or showy, or as Perron puts it, they hope that it will “bring them a wider audience and/or… make them a better choreographer.”  Here she misses a truly interesting shift in the dance world, perhaps letting her own fear of digital media as it overtakes print blind her to the realization that the way dances are being made, not to mention the very basics of the way our brain’s are functioning, are changing.

Call me too-heady, but as digital native I identify the importance of creating a work as being in dialogue – with your collaborators, performers, and larger meta-questions about form, content, context, etc etc up through the big ones about existence, and morality, and humanity.  Questions like “what is this that i’ve made?” “what is the nature of making work?” “what is the nature of being human?” and “how am i thinking and making these things, and what does it mean?” The purpose of the work is not to showcase answers, but to ask questions.  Whether you arrive at answers is, to me, largely inconsequential.  I prefer work that questions with a ferocity that may never reach a solution, but again that’s just me.  Some people love So You Think You Can Dance, and that’s a show based entirely on a repetition of high-gloss answers.

Moreover, the point of making work is to engage with others.  While most people would point to the performance as the point the the work engages with the public, i find that system hugely economically flawed, and frankly uninteresting.  The process is the real meat, the real richness of art, and while Perron would have you believe that “explaining how you make a dance, the problems you encounter and how you solve them, is not going to help either you as the choreographer or your potential audience” I’ve found otherwise.  Bringing the audience into that discussion and experience is not only an audience engagement opportunity that’s educational for them, it helps you be conscious of your process, strengths, weaknesses, thought patterns, preferences, and more. And when it reaches the point where your readers are interacting – asking questions, challenging your assertions, sharing and re-posting your content – it ceases to be explaining and becomes interacting.

Perron’s article is so blindly out of date and wrought with old-school arrogance towards today’s young audiences and choreographer that I can’t possibly touch on everything that I find to be fundamentally wrong.  However, one thing is clear in my mind: our generation of makers isn’t thinking the same way as makers of 30+ years ago, why should we be expected to make things the same way?

“What if you’re in the studio working on a piece, and you’re thinking about what you’re going to say about it in your blog?“

Yes, what if? I think about how to blog the work (in addition to how to shoot, edit, convey, market, talk about, share, remix, and fund it) at every single moment.  It doesn’t make me uncomfortable or self conscious, and it doesn’t make my work suffer.  Rather, it enriches my work, engages and develops my audiences, and provides my company with a stable economic base that I see to be fundamentally lacking in nearly all of the companies of choreographers of older generations.

“Wouldn’t that compromise your process?“
Wendy, that is my process.

Tags: brain function, choreography, Culturebot, Dance Magazine, dance theater workshop, intuitiveness, process, thought process, trailerpilot, verbalization, Wendy Perron