ICA Boston: MAKE DANCE SEE 2011 by ICA Boston

MAKE DANCE SEE

T h e I n s tit u t e o f Co n t e m p o r a ry A r t /B o s to n

TABLE OF CONTENTS

01…Foreword by Jill Medvedow 03…Introduction by David Henry 05…Participating Artists by Marcia B. Siegel 07…MAKE DANCE SEE Activities 08…MAKE DANCE SEE Overview by Marcia B. Siegel 17…An Engaged Audience: Survey Analysis by David Henry 21…Choreographing the Future by Marcia B. Siegel

All quotations throughout this document originated in interviews and public conversations during the MAKE DANCE SEE project, unless otherwise noted.

Front and back cover: Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company Body Against Body Photo: Paul Goode

Foreword

Opposite: Bill T. Jones speaks with students from Boston Arts Academy.

MAKE DANCE SEE set out to begin a conversation about dance education. Through a series of workshops, panels, observations, and performances, the Institute of Contemporary Art/ Boston (ICA), with the help of able partners and advisors, attempted to ask some key questions about how choreographers, dancers, and audiences—the people who make, dance, and see—experience dance. As an institution dedicated to contemporary art, we recognize that the best contemporary art is as likely to be seen in our theater as in our galleries. The shifting definitions of art and the boundaries between genres, both clarify the conventions unique to specific disciplines while busting them open. We built our new museum to fiercely embrace the visual and performing arts, and the hybrid art forms and experiments we’re so excited to see. It has become increasingly clear that while artists and art forms command equal respect and resources, the educational and interpretative infrastructure to appreciate them is wildly divergent. Most exhibitions have walls with room for explanatory text, useful quotes by artists, and labels that accompany individual objects. They have publications that provide historical and cultural context, troupes of highly trained docents or tour guides to walk visitors through at their own pace, and according to their level of expertise. Exhibitions also remain on view for extended periods of time, allowing for knowledge and awareness to accumulate. Not so with dance, however. David Henry, the ICA’s intrepid program director, proposed that the ICA tackle this disparity with the museum’s typical combination of bold ambition and modest scale. He did so with his characteristic resoluteness and commitment to equity, artists, and audiences. We have many people to thank for their assistance and support. Richard Colton and Amy Spencer, co-founders and directors of Summer Stages Dance at Concord Academy, brought their collegiality, partnership, and ongoing commitment to dance and dance education. From the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company: artistic director Bill T. Jones, producing director Bob Bursey, and education director Leah Cox brought their

extraordinary talent and commitment to excellence in dance and dance education. Choreographer, performer, and teacher of contemporary dance, Elizabeth Streb never failed to share her powerful vision for dance, change, and education. At the Boston Arts Academy: Linda Nathan, founding headmaster, and Fernadina Chan, founder, artistic dean, and co-chair of the dance department, are working tirelessly to ensure that there will be a new generation of dance artists. Critic Marcia B. Siegel brought decades of experience with dance and dance education, and provided needed context to this publication. Our editor Melissa Hale Woodman helped ensure the readability of this document. My colleagues at the ICA: John Andress, public programs coordinator; Maggie Moore, theater production manager; Sam Betts, assistant production manager; and Ryan Arnett, special events production coordinator, made certain that every artist who performed here could give their best. Monica Garza, director of education; Gabriel Wyrick, associate director of education; Donna Sturtevant, creative services manager; and Kevin Manley, senior designer, brought dancers, choreographers, and adult and teen audiences together so that we could learn from one another about the discipline, history, practice, and power of dance. Last, but certainly not least, we thank the National Endowment for the Arts for supporting this project. Recently, the ICA presented a public conversation with choreographer William Forsythe as part of the programming for our Dance/Draw exhibition. Several times, Forsythe commented on the lack of a vibrant discourse about dance and how the exhibition, public conversation, and publication made a welcome contribution to the field. We hope that MAKE DANCE SEE adds to this effort. Most importantly, we are grateful to all the choreographers and dancers who participated in performances that were the heart and soul of MAKE DANCE SEE. Medvedow, Director Jill Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston

WHEN WE CONSIDERED DANCE EDUCATION, WE OBSERVED THAT IT WAS HEAVILY WEIGHTED TOWARD THE TRAINING OF DANCERS. THE FOCUS WAS ON HOW TO DANCE, NOT HOW TO THINK ABOUT, OR LOOK AT DANCE.

Introduction

MAKE DANCE SEE shines a light on dance education and its three primary constituents: choreographers (make), dancers (dance), and audiences (see). As a museum with a 75-year history of presenting contemporary art, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) has been a champion of art and artists in a variety of disciplines. Like many museums, the ICA provides a wealth of resources to facilitate the viewer’s engagement with works of art. Today’s museumgoers are privy to historical and aesthetic information developed over centuries of scholarship by curators and historians. It is delivered to them with the latest in new technologies and the skills of highly trained educators. Out of a sense of responsibility to the general public, art museums have committed significant resources to make this knowledge accessible. This commitment to education has increased tremendously over the past 30 years—a time when art increasingly pushed experimental, conceptual, and esoteric boundaries. MAKE DANCE SEE grew out of conversations between Richard Colton and Amy Spencer—the artistic directors of Summer Stages at Concord Academy—and myself in the fall of 2009. When we considered dance education, we observed that it was heavily weighted toward the training of dancers. The focus was on how to dance, not how to think about, or look at dance. Where, we wondered, could dance audiences turn to gain an appreciation for this form of art? Who is working to ensure a growing and engaged audience for dance?

MAKE DANCE SEE was designed to address these questions. The program was shaped by early conversations with Bob Bursey and Leah Cox of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company (BTJ/AZ). Choreographer Elizabeth Streb helped refine our questions and activities. Ultimately we programmed a combination of performances, audience workshops, surveys, conversations, and interviews and worked with both dancers and non-dancers to learn about their training, understanding, and appreciation of dance. We decided to bookend our exploration of dance education with two performances: BTJ/AZ’s Body Against Body in February 2011, and performances by a group of six alumni dancers from the company the following summer. BTJ/AZ’s commitment to education made them an appropriate and excellent partner. We chose the Boston Arts Academy, a pilot school in the Boston school system, to host our residency activities. Writer Marcia B. Siegel was commissioned to document MAKE DANCE SEE and contextualize our ongoing questions within the larger history of dance education. It is our hope that MAKE DANCE SEE will provoke conversations among choreographers, dancers, writers, educators, funders, and presenters about dance education today. Together, we must recognize that an informed and engaged audience is critical to the vitality of dance. David Henry, Director of Programs Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston

“I would love to go into the theater and have something happen that would shed light on my predicament, being alive.” —Bill T. Jones

Photo: Stephanie Berger

“We’re creating work that asks questions of the culture, a dialogue that is both visceral and embracing at the same time.”

“The audience should surrender to the piece. My job is to make invitations for that to happen.” —Alexandra Beller

—Arthur Aviles Photo: Robert Maxwell

“I’m trying to make entertainment and maybe it reaches art.”

“The work will save you.” —Seán Curran

—Lawrence Goldhuber

Photo: Harry Pocius

“Black women are the blind spot of modern dance.” —Andrea E. Woods

“I take what people perceive as beauty and shatter the stereotypes.” —Heidi Latsky

Participating Artists

Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane began their partnership in the early 1970s, after the initial phase of experiments that challenged the premises of ballet and modern dance. With backgrounds in a variety of dance and athletic disciplines, they formed the American Dance Asylum with Lois Welk in Binghamton, NY. In the early 1980s, Jones and Zane began performing in New York City, where they founded their dance company in 1982.

Arthur Aviles (1987–1995) joined BTJ/AZ after graduating from Bard College, where he acquired a dance education grounded in Merce Cunningham and postmodern points of view. Soon after beginning independent performance and choreography, he returned to his roots in the Puerto Rican community of the South Bronx, where he now runs the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance—a center for local performing companies—as well as his own group.

Like other artists influenced by postmodern dance, Jones and Zane embraced the democratizing ideas of that period. They were men with complementary talents—Jones was dramatic and intuitive, Zane formal and cerebral—and entirely different physical characteristics. They worked with people of varying physiques and types of dance training. They built choreography from gestures, sports, work activity, and social and popular dance styles. Their dances often grew from a process of improvising on set tasks, movements, and verbal cues. As Jones has written, they “performed casual acts…until they lost their origins and became pure movement.”1 In their duets, they used their training in contact improvisation to incorporate lifting, carrying, and other weight-sensitive activity. This opened up new movement possibilities, and allowed them to perform simple acts of intimacy that were still unacceptable outside the gay community.

Alexandra Beller (1995–2001) began teaching after leaving BTJ/AZ, forming Alexandra Beller/Dances in 2001. She completed an MFA at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, in 2006, and currently performs in film and theater pieces, and choreographs her own work.

Both Jones and Zane choreographed solos for themselves and group works for their company dancers. They co-choreographed Secret Pastures (1984) with music by Peter Gordon, sets by Keith Haring, and costumes by Willi Smith, which led to other large-scale theater pieces. Their work acquired characters and an invented dance style drawn partly from the members of their company. After Zane’s death in 1988, Jones expanded the political concerns that always informed his work, taking on the tensions surrounding AIDS and terminal illness, and examining icons of America’s troubled racial history. The six alumni of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company (BTJ/AZ) who participated in MAKE DANCE SEE reflect the diverse nature of the company. All of them now maintain performing, choreographing, and teaching careers:

Seán Curran (1983–1993) was trained in Irish step dancing, then in modern dance and ballet at New York University (NYU). After ten years with BTJ/AZ he joined the first New York cast of Stomp, then founded his own dance company in 1997. In addition to teaching and choreographing, Curran has staged operas and choreographed for the theater. Lawrence Goldhuber (1985–1995, with later guest appearances) was trained as an actor, and continues to perform. He toured as a duo with Heidi Latski from 1997 to 2004, and currently choreographs for his own company, BigManArts. Heidi Latsky (1987–1993) joined BTJ/AZ after arriving in New York from Canada, where she cut her teeth on disco dancing and Les Ballets Jazz. She choreographed solos for the duo Goldhuber and Latsky, forming her own company in 2001. She started the GIMP project in 2008 as a touring work for trained dancers and disabled persons. Andrea E. Woods (1989–1995) became rehearsal director for BTJ/AZ shortly after she retired from dancing with the company. Now a video artist, performer, and choreographer, she creates contemporary, African American folklore as artistic director of SOULOWORKS/Andrea E. Woods & Dancers. Woods is also a faculty member in the dance program at Duke University. 1

Bill T. Jones, Last Night on Earth, Pantheon Books, 1991. p.139.

Pre-show workshop at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston

MAKE DANCE SEE 2011

ACTIVITIES Pre-Show Workshops All pre-show workshops were taught by Leah Cox, education director of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company (BTJ/AZ). February 1–4:

Classes for dancers at Boston Arts Academy (BAA)

February 1–4:

Classes for non-dancers at BAA

February 4 and 6:

Pre-show workshops for audience members at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA)

Performances February 4–6:

Body Against Body by BTJ/AZ, commissioned by the ICA

July 15–16:

Summer Reunion performances by six choreographers and alumni of BTJ/AZ: Aviles, Beller, Curran, Goldhuber, Latsky, and Wood, presented in partnership with Summer Stages Dance (SSD) at Concord Academy

July 23:

other stories by Alexandra Beller/Dances performs other stories, commissioned by Co Lab: Process and Performance, an ongoing joint project of the ICA and SSD

Conversations and Interactions February 5:

ICA panel discussion with Karole Armitage, Bill T. Jones, Elizabeth Streb, and Janet Wong, moderated by Richard Colton

February 5:

Pre-show conversation with Bill T. Jones and Marcia B. Siegel

July 15–16:

Post-show conversations with Summer Reunion choreographers

MAKE DANCE SEE

OVERVIEW

Pre-Show Workshops MAKE DANCE SEE set out, in part, to explore how to engage audiences in a compelling dance education experience. The assumption that experiencing movement helps an audience to understand better dance performance is an idea shared by many dancers. However, the interface between dance practice and viewing dance isn’t widely explored outside the parameters of dance studios and college dance departments. In February, Leah Cox—a former Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company (BTJ/AZ) dancer, and the company’s current education director—taught several classes at Boston Arts Academy over four days preceding the BTJ/AZ performances of Body Against Body. Cox taught separate classes each day to two groups of students: dance majors, and non-dancers specializing in music or theater. Ultimately, the project extended throughout the school year, as the students studied BTJ/AZ later that year in their humanities class, reinforcing their performance experience. In addition, before two of the performances at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA), Cox invited audience members, with or without dance training, to participate in a movement class on stage. About 25 adults joined each session. Cox hoped the workshop participants from both the high school and the pre-show audience would relate their experience to the ICA performances of Body Against Body. She notes, “The

particular structure of the class and the content explored was developed around an overarching goal, which was to prepare students and audience members to see the performance and understand the concerns of the specific and challenging works that were being performed.” Cox began each class with a brief verbal introduction to the works. Later, she introduced movement exercises that replicated the compositional process of the BTJ/AZ dances, a process originating in the reforms of the postmodern dance period. In one workshop, she asked a class of dance students to choose four poses from picture postcards she’d brought, then to walk and to stop on command in one of their chosen poses. Each stop, when accompanied by making eye contact with someone else, created its own drama. Cox used the same exercises with a group of adult audience members. In another class, after drawing attention to the “raw materials” of postmodern choreography— such as speed, level, direction, and location—she asked the students to use pedestrian movements in fulfilling the postcard assignment. “Take the energy out of it,” she instructed. “Use the shell of the movement, the shape, with no emotion.” Once the participants took the drama out of the movement, they could make their own postmodern “dreamscape” by combining in quartets and moving together for five minutes, stopping in their poses, and choosing when to make eye contact with their partners.

Pre-show workshop at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston

A Dance Educator’s Approach: Leah Cox

Leah Cox teaches at Boston Arts Academy.

Leah Cox traces her teaching approach to her experience participating in the rehearsal process with the Bill T. Jones/ Arnie Zane Dance Company, and to her work with Anne Green Gilbert, a noted Seattle dance educator who uses movement as an avenue to develop cognitive enhancement in children.

a warm-up to activate fundamental patterns of movement—breath, touch, speed, direction, and eye contact—she sets up simple movement tasks that students can develop into dance-like sequences.

At the Boston Arts Academy, Cox asked a group of music and theater The idea in these classes was to avoid majors to begin with pedestrian the complicated and exacting premise movements like walking and running. of a conventional dance technique class. From this basic and deliberately unCox began with movement native to emphatic material, each person found everyone, then, with astute prompting, one movement to repeat, making eye enabled each person to experience how contact with others in the room. With these actions can lead to choreography. judicious intervention, Cox guided them to an understanding of the subtle Cox notes, “Classes for all groups difference between abstract movement included learned as well as improvised and the performance of a relationship. exercises. Depending on the experience level of the group, these exercises were “Most teachers want more control,” either follow along, basic, or highly Cox says. In contrast, her open aptechnical.” proach enables people with different backgrounds to share an experience Cox thinks of her classes as exploratory, and build performative encounters whether for college students, teenagers, together. “I don’t call it improvisation,” or audience members. Beginning with she says. “I call it movement literacy.”

Opposite: Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company Body Against Body Photo: Paul Goode

Performances Body Against Body The performance series began in February 2011, with the world premiere in Boston, a program of “reconstructed and reimagined” early works by Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane. Monkey Run Road (1979) and Blauvelt Mountain (1980), both seen on this program, were part of a trilogy of duets that originally included Valley Cottage (1981). Continuous Replay was also performed, a piece that originated in Arnie Zane’s solo Hand Dance (1977), and expanded into a company work by Jones in 1991. While Jones believes in familiarizing the audience and the dancers with the company’s history, he also acknowledges that change is an unavoidable corollary of bringing back dances that have lapsed from repertory. The most obvious difference lies in performing styles. Contemporary dancers, however well coached in the ordinariness of the 1970s, are trained and even physically sculpted to a different model. Together with associate artistic director Janet Wong, who set the works, he made edits and adjustments to Body Against Body to accommodate today’s audience. Still, many aspects of the postmodern revolution remained: the absence of virtuosic dance movement, the repetition of ordinary-seeming behavior, the dancers’ extended sense of time, and the task-like feeling of phrases that begin and end without dramatic emphasis. In Monkey Run Road, two men push a large box into the space. It becomes both a prop and an obstacle that they have to move from place to place; a cosmic metaphor that takes on many meanings. When the men finish each repositioning task, they engage in a dialogue of conversational moves that sometimes look like sidewalk encounters, and sometimes like seductions.

The dancers in Blauvelt Mountain perform pedestrian and athletic movements that accumulate into longer and longer sequences. Each movement is structured to look different even as it repeats. At the same time, the dancers engage in impromptu word association games. For this revival, a man and a woman were cast in Jones and Zane’s roles, creating a similar physical dynamic with different sexual implications. Minimalism, by its very clarity and simplicity, can expand into varied compositional structures. In Continuous Replay, Zane’s 45 gestures were set on a walking pattern for 11 dancers. Another issue that was important for Jones and Zane—and that continued as a theme for the company—was the body itself; in this case the dancers began naked and gradually added clothes. The success of the partnership between Jones and Zane depended largely on contrast between them as personalities and physical opposites; between laid-back, pedestrian performance and provocative behavior; and between formalism and spontaneity. All were evident in the three revivals. Following up on their own dissimilar presences and the axiomatic egalitarianism of the postmoderns, Jones and Zane made a point of diversity when they founded their company. The early ensemble included a range of physical, racial, and ethnic types. The organically derived movement could be absorbed by all of them in their own ways, and eventually included their own contributions. Besides considering anyone a dancer despite his or her age or unconventional physique, the concept extended to Jones’ later works about people with terminal illness and disabilities.

Seán Curran Company Force of Circumstance Photo: Julieta Cervantes

Summer Reunion and other stories In July 2011, two performances brought together six choreographers who danced with BTJ/AZ for varying periods between 1984 and 2001. The works themselves, and subsequent conversations with the choreographers, confirmed the influence of working with Jones and Zane on their own creative processes. All the pieces in the Summer Reunion program and the new work by Alexandra Beller could be seen as extensions of the early Jones/Zane ventures. They may have been somewhat more explicit and audience-friendly, but they resisted the often facile virtuosity of today’s mainstream. Larry Goldhuber may have been closest to his roots with the company in his excerpt from Trellis. The movement was simple—sitting, skipping, gentle jogging, and the behaviors of watching and being watched—and served to contrast and combine Goldhuber’s bulky body with that of his dance partner, the thin, ballet-trained Roy Fialkow. The sketchy prop of a garden bench and trellis imposed a narrative situation on their seemingly neutral action. Alexandra Beller’s Egg was more specific, referencing Beller’s visible pregnancy. She began with a floor dance in which encumbered by her physical condition, she also had to hold an egg without dropping it. The challenge and the peril increased, as six

domineering characters appeared with more eggs for her to handle, and voices on a sound score bombarded her with the responsibilities of motherhood. Beset by her masters, Beller continued to dance as eggs accumulated on the floor and layer after layer was added to the implicit pleasure, risk, anxiety, and the inexorability of nature. Heidi Latsky’s solos for herself (excerpts from her ongoing work, GIMP) and Jeffrey Freeze (Grace, from 1989) demonstrated the choreographer’s interest in working with physically challenged and disabled persons. Both dances imposed arbitrary limitations. In Grace, a fixed spotlight held the dancer in place while a length of fabric draped around his body and one arm. In GIMP, Latsky confined herself to a tight space and restricted movement. Both dancers performed with high intensity, their movement itself highly expressive and nonliteral. In the early years, Jones and Zane downplayed the use of technically accomplished dance movement. Latsky and several other BTJ/AZ alumni have since recouped this resource, without sacrificing the seriousness of other messages they wish to convey. In two excerpts from Seán Curran’s Aria/Apology, Elizabeth Coker Giron and David Gonsler performed a combination of

Alexandra Beller/Dances other stories Photo: Steven Schreiber

courtly rituals and contemporary dance. On tape, a soprano sang music by Handel, and anonymous voices on a confession hotline reported horrible crimes they committed. The dance itself wasn’t violent, but as so often in Jones’s later work, the audience was left with the ironic impact of malevolence lurking under a civilized surface. Arthur Aviles stressed an openly upbeat view in three small selections. Elysian Fields evoked Jones’s community dances, specifically Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land. Here, 14 dancers simultaneously performed their own variations on material Aviles supplied. The coexistence of different voices represented a modern utopia. In this piece, an excerpt from Aviles’s Things Which Transect Our Vision (1999), he performed his own revival of a dance that is renewed with every performance. Aviles added three Boston-based dancers to his New York group, who learned the work in four rehearsals. A dark film of seemingly naked men making love preceded This Pleasant and Grateful Asylum, in which two men danced a long kiss, drew apart to declare separate identities, then danced into another kiss. And for Homenaje, Aviles recited Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech backwards, while dancing excerpts from his mentors’ works.

The problem of finding one’s own dance persona within an ensemble was implicit in the BTJ/AZ aesthetic. In Kujichagulia To the Max/Self Determination to the Max, Andrea E. Woods danced to a recorded track by the drummer Max Roach. Woods dedicated her performance to Roach and to the recently deceased Boston senior dancer Betty Milhendler, paying tribute to her mentors by quoting movements from three BTJ/AZ dances. She incorporated material associated with two Afro-Cuban orishas as well, but the core of her solo was her personal response to Max Roach’s music. In other stories, Beller offered the idea of structured versus spontaneous choreography writ large. The six members of her company danced in rehearsed duets, solos, and groups with an invited guest dancer, Karl Rogers, who did his own movement phrase. Through an intricate dance-making process, Beller allowed Rogers’s material to be absorbed and transformed in performance by the other dancers. While working as an ensemble, they also retained their own dance identities.

Choreographer Conversations and Interactions A highlight of the BTJ/AZ residency was an afternoon panel discussion among choreographers Bill T. Jones, Elizabeth Streb, and Karole Armitage, with BTJ/AZ associate artistic director Janet Wong. The moderator was dancer-choreographer-teacher Richard Colton, who co-directs Summer Stages Dance at Concord Academy. In revealing the choreographers’ thoughts about their own work and that of their teachers and peers, the discussion brought out extreme ideological differences. It’s not often remarked in how many ways dancing has been redefined in the wake of postmodernism. When asked about finding their “voice” as choreographerdirectors, the panelists talked about how they’d come to realize their lifelong investigative themes. As a member of Merce Cunningham’s company, having spent earlier years as a ballet dancer, Armitage asked herself if it would be possible to combine Cunningham’s aesthetic with ballet, and then inject into the mix a kind of rawness and extreme liberation that she found in rock music. Jones also spoke about his work as a fusion of elements and influences, but when Streb declared she was after more basic answers to the meaning and the content of action—hoping to discover what she feels modern dance has failed to do—Jones replied, “You want to talk about real movement. I want to talk about action in the world.”

This exchange identified them as making three different kinds of work, each with potentially different audiences. Although they might agree that touching an audience deeply was their goal, but Armitage was aiming toward formal dancing with a distinct edginess and daring, while Jones said he wished to invoke the dance experience through the audience’s feelings rather than their “eyes” or their intellectual capabilities. Streb described throwing away the modern dance precedent, its external politics and demographics, and working for some essential, “real” action in time, which she believes has its own content. All three of these artists agreed their work often eludes an audience’s expectations. Armitage wants to push beyond the conventional dance experience, Jones has a politically transformative journey in mind, and Streb sees everyone in the room, including the audience, as an action traveler. The choreographers felt that most audiences today are not prepared for what they deliver. They seemed to feel it was up to them to make work that overturns preconceptions and creates the audience they need. They, in common with most of the other choreographers involved in this project, took a limited view of how they could provide for the audience to help bring about this transformation. The work would be the message.

Shown left to right: Janet Wong, Elizabeth Streb, Karole Armitage, Bill T. Jones, and Richard Colton

In a pre-performance talk the same evening, Jones was asked by dance critic Marcia B. Siegel how much background he thought an audience needed to approach the Body Against Body revivals. Dance is an immediate event, he responded, and has to stand on its own. During the 1970s, he noted, “We thought anything else was cheating.” Descriptive program notes might expose the weakness of the work. He felt that explaining the working process by which a piece was made would be of interest only to dance professionals and “egg heads,” and not to the general audience. “We thought these works should feel like watching clouds,” he said, to be appreciated as passing images in a continual state of change. During a series of interviews in July with the six Summer Reunion choreographers, Larry Goldhuber said that he thought the biggest problem for an audience is fearing that they might not understand the dance, but he feels the best way of overcoming this is for people to go and experience the work. In common with Jones, Goldhuber said, “You have to believe that dance is a powerful communicative art form.” He feels that critics are a major source of educating the audience, but also said, “I side a little more with the idea of being less informed. Maybe the artist and the work are supposed to be elusive and not defined. Maybe that mystery is part of it.” Goldhuber would like to increase audiences for his work, but he feels it’s the presenters’ job to accomplish this.

Alexandra Beller admitted to what was the most complex choreographic process, attributing much of her approach to Jones. She said she thinks of the work as an invitation, and uses a process of inventing, transferring and transforming material. In her pieces, dancers learned movement or worked from other sources— stories from their lives, secret characters, tasks, games, and scenes from plays. Individual dancers developed the material in their own ways and memorized their stories, which they recited mentally while dancing the performance. In other stories, the rehearsed material was interwoven with an improvisational process she calls “The Box.” A guest performer was invited to bring his own material into the piece, while the other dancers chose sections of that material to learn and then improvise on, in alternation with the rehearsed material. Beller said she doesn’t think an audience needs to know this process. She feels it’s all right to share this information, but she doesn’t want it to become the focus of the piece. “It’s my job to make something that’s comprehensible, legible, and that hits you on an emotional, primal level,” she said. “People are used to watching other people and making up stories. I’m not sure any artist can make you have that skill if you’re not interested in it.” When Beller talks about “stories,” she doesn’t mean that the stories the dancers began with are meant to become the stories of the performed piece. other stories could be seen as semi-narrative encounters between the dancers, or simply as movement scenarios.

Bill T. Jones speaks with students from Boston Arts Academy.

Both Arthur Aviles and Seán Curran have relied on their skills as dancers to support their creative work. Undoubtedly, their dynamic personal styles have given them certain name recognition with the public, and won them many awards. But they both admitted that the demands of extra-curricular jobs have taken them away from working with their own companies. Curran’s freelance career is spectacularly diverse, and after a three-year hiatus, he’s regrouped his dancers, planning for a tour to Central Asia in the spring of 2012 as part of a cultural exchange program sponsored by the U.S. State Department. He has joined the dance faculty at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts with a three-quarter-time appointment that will allow him to choreograph and fulfill company commitments. Aviles has declared that he wants to cut back on his dancing in order to spend more time with his company and the expanding activities at the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance. In addition to administering the South Bronx performance space, running the company and doing a small amount of teaching, he produces four festivals a year featuring Bronx dance companies, with each festival centering on a theme: “boogie,” “out,” “Latino” and “badass women.”

Aviles has developed a teaching instrument he calls “Swift/Flow,” emphasizing the connectedness of the upper and lower body, a training he views as a reaction against Jones’s more fragmented “Battle of the Body.” Only recently, Jones told an interviewer, “What we called ‘the body’ was this great, wonderful metaphor for human struggle.”2 Like all the BTJ/AZ alumni, Aviles said he values each individual dancer’s creative contribution, and spoke of giving each dancer a technical basis through which to achieve personal freedom. Andrea E. Woods said she feels teaching is a part of her identity as a dancer, and like Leah Cox, she learned how to teach from Jones’s choreographic process. She explained that she could copy movement and teach others from a very early age, and when she joined the company, Jones would ask her to break down a new combination so that she could teach and rehearse it with the other dancers. This “breakdown” process showed her how to concentrate on parts of the body, and how they flow from one to another. She’s developed a technique that involves teaching movement principles before teaching the phrase, allowing students to enter deeply into the movement. In an interview, she quoted Jones, saying, “We’re going to dig deep and throw it away.” Marcia B. Siegel 2

Interview with Kris Wilton, The Huffington Post, February 24, 2011.

An Engaged Audience After each performance of Body Against Body, we asked audience members to fill out a survey to learn how pre-show activities, the workshops, or conversations affected audience engagement. While by no means conclusive due to the small sample and limited number of performances, the surveys offer some tantalizing clues. About 30% of audience members returned surveys. About 50% of those who took part in either the workshop led by Leah Cox or the conversation between Bill T. Jones and Marcia B. Siegel, returned surveys. The surveys indicated that roughly half the audience had previous dance training.

I Was Completly Absorbed:

Agreed with statement

Attended Workshop

Attended Pre-show Talk

Attended Workshop

8% 0%

6.3 %

83 %

87.5 %

100 %

Attended Nothing

Adults With Previous Dance Training

5.6 %

83.4 %

95 %

100 %

Adults With No Previous Dance Training

Dis-agreed with statement

Attended Pre-show Talk

Attended Nothing

Survey Analysis Absorbed Those who attended a workshop with no previous dance training, reported feeling most engaged. One hundred percent of this group agreed with the statement “I was completely absorbed,” 80 percent of whom strongly agreed. For workshop attendees who did have previous dance training, the number was significantly lower: 87.5 percent agreed, but only 58 percent of this group strongly agreed. Conversation Attendees In contrast, those with dance training that attended a preshow talk, reported feeling most absorbed with the performance. While 83.4 percent (66 percent strongly) of those who attended a pre-show talk and had no dance training agreed with the statement, a whopping 100 percent (72.2 percent strongly) of those with dance training said yes. Without Enrichment Activities Audience members who did not attend dance workshops or preshow talks, agreed with the statement at a rate of 95 percent (58 percent strongly) if they had no dance training, and 83 percent (57 percent strongly) if they did.

Attentive In order to corroborate our findings, we asked the audience to rate their agreement with the complementary statement: “It was hard to pay attention.” Again, most respondents indicated that they were engaged in the performance they saw, and disagreed with this statement. Workshop Attendees Among the workshop attendees, those with no dance training were most assertive in their disagreement. One hundred percent disagreed with the statement (60 percent strongly). Workshop attendees with previous dance training disagreed at a rate of 75 percent (58 percent strongly). Only 12.5 percent of workshop attendees with prior dance training agreed that it was, indeed, hard to pay attention. Conversation Attendees For those who attended a pre-show talk with no previous dance training, 87.4 percent disagreed (57 percent strongly) and 6.3 percent agreed. As with the earlier statement, those with dance training experienced an enhanced level of engagement: 94.5 disagreed (70 percent strongly). Without Enrichment Activities Finally, among audience members who did not partake in any preshow activities, the responses nearly mirrored each other. Eightythree percent of those without dance training disagreed (53 percent strongly). Similarly, 79% of those with dance training disagreed (50 percent strongly).

Note: The full survey results can be found in the appendix of the online version of this document at http://www.icaboston.org/programs/MAKEDANCESEE/

Teen Responses Students from Boston Arts Academy attended the dress rehearsal of Body Against Body, where they viewed the 55-minute duet “Blauvelt Mountain.” These teens divided into three groups: 1) dance students, all of whom participated in pre-show workshops at the school with Leah Cox, 2) nondance students who participated in pre-show workshops with Cox, and 3) non-dance students who did not participate in the pre-show workshops. Results here are equally intriguing and suggest the need for further research. For those who took workshops with Cox, 75 percent (62.5 percent strongly) of the dance students and 71.1 percent (28.8 percent strongly) of the non-dance students agreed that they were completely engaged. Responses to the statement that it was hard to pay attention, however, showed a diminished level of enthusiasm. Fifty-eight and a half percent (35.3 percent strongly) of the dance students disagreed with the statement that it was hard to pay attention, while 51 percent (only 20.4 percent strongly) of the non-dance students disagreed. Just as telling, is the comparison between the non-dance students who took the workshops with Cox, and non-dance students from a humanities class who did not. Seventy-one and one-tenth percent (28.8 percent strongly) of the non-dance students who engaged with Cox agreed that they were completely absorbed, while only 61.6 percent (30.8 percent strongly) of those who did not participate in pre-show workshops, agreed. And of the non-dance students who took the workshops, 51 percent (20.4 percent strongly) disagreed with the statement that it was hard to pay attention, while a smaller number of the humanities students—only 45.8 percent (12.5% strongly)—disagreed.

Summer Reunion Audiences We used a different survey to drill down responses to the alumni performances, given that the pre-show activities were less intensive. The survey, completed by an audience comprised of 56 percent with dance training, yielded compelling results. A majority—54 percent (18.9 percent strongly) of those with dance training, and 64.3 percent (21.4 percent strongly) of those without—said they wished they knew more about modern dance. Further Questions These survey results are just a beginning. However, it is interesting to note that the pre-show talk seemed to be more effective at engaging those with dance training, while the workshop—which was designed for those without dance training—was more effective for that group. Might the conversation between two dance insiders be more understandable to those who have already studied dance? Might learning specific movement exercises connect non-dancers more directly to experiencing a dance performance? Another fascinating discovery was that among audience members who did not attend any enrichment activities, those without dance training expressed a slightly greater level of engagement than those with dance training. I can imagine a number of possible reasons. Are dancers who are kinesthetic by nature, less inclined to sit still for an extended period? Are they more critical of their experience, and is a performance like this more revelatory for those without dance training? Whatever the answers may be, it is clear there is much more to learn about how to engage our audiences. If our research on museum visitors is any indication, further efforts will no doubt reflect the fact that different people respond to different forms of education. David Henry

Alexandra Beller/Dances other stories Photo: Steven Schreiber

Choreographing the Future

Modern dancers are an independent lot. They have always worked in marginal circumstances, developed their teaching talents and crafted ways to survive within the community, bound by their own dance families and audiences. Ascendancy to institutional status or “celebrity-hood” is a recent phenomenon in American modern dance culture, and many dancers don’t aspire to climb that ladder. Whether working on a modest or a high-powered scale, they accept that theirs is an art form with low visibility. Some would like to change this, but certain attitudes, instilled since the beginning of the countercultural revolution, have worked against attracting and holding a wider audience. The following precepts—insisting on self-definition and resisting analysis as inimical to the creative rush, making new work a priority, and throwing away past work, and valuing immediacy above stability— have spurred creativity in dance artists. They have also kept the most interesting work cloistered behind a curtain of indeterminacy. The conviction that dance’s power lies in its immediate presence and its inevitable disappearance was taken very seriously by everyone involved in the postmodern dance revolution. Pushed

to extremes by these choreographers and their acknowledged elder stateman Merce Cunningham, this idea translated into a deep animus toward any form of rationalizing. Bill T. Jones regards Cunningham as a hero. His work, Jones has said, “doesn’t need any exterior explanation. I think he’s very proud and protective of the idea that dance is a domain, a country unto itself. It…is something primary and pure.” At the same time, Jones admitted to “the uncomfortable sense that speaking about my work could historically overshadow the work itself.”3 This insight captures the educator’s dilemma: if dance is essentially selfevident and self-contained, trying to explain it may falsify even the memory of it. The postmodernists put aside historical precedent and historicizing, and debunked the notion of canonical works. Repertory was considered an indulgence in nostalgia and a diversion of creative energy. They discouraged opinion and critical judgment in written accounts. A generation of writers practiced “pure” description, avoided interpretation, and accepted the dictum that “anything can be dance if I say it is.” As the reformers outgrew their anarchic youth however, their dance began to embrace the

Alexandra Beller/Dances egg Photo: Jaye R. Phillips

theatricality and technical skills it had previously rejected. Its messages could no longer be told without recourse to dance movement. New vocabularies were invented and codified. Jones sees his own work as loaded, the opposite of pure. When he injected provocative words into his conversational banter with Arnie Zane in the early duets, politics contended with abstraction. Formalism could “mean” something. Metaphor was unavoidable, but unacknowledged. The dancers’ deliberate reticence about their work became another way of mystifying it. Audiences today expect sophisticated movement and staging, but the information about dance that does reach the public, increasingly controlled by the dancers and dance companies, is often general rather than specific. It doesn’t lead the audience to see what is unique about a given work, even though every choreographer strives for originality. Dance-makers and dance companies possess powerful resources for overcoming the perceived inaccessibility of their work. If new work is an unknown quantity, putting older work in

repertory alongside can give the audience a sense of where the choreographer is going, as well as where he or she has been. Archival films are not just historical curiosities, but dramatic evidence against the assumption that what’s being done right now is better and more compelling than what’s come before. The disclosure of how a dance was made doesn’t necessarily limit the audience’s response. The contribution of critics, academics, and other independent viewers deserves greater emphasis. The chronic disparagement of criticism neglects its potential as a conduit to the public and a springboard into discussion. This symbiosis is not yet fully understood by dancers, their representatives, or by the mainstream press. Professional criticism and scholarship affirms the different ways a work of dance can touch a viewer’s sensibilities. Beyond the promotional play that brings a work or a choreographer into the public eye, it’s the perception and insight of outside observers that give dance legitimacy and a chance at longevity in the wider world of arts and culture. 3

Art Performs Life: Merce Cunningham/Meredith Monk/Bill T. Jones. Walker Art Center,

1998. p.118

Educating the Audience Arts presenters play a significant role in the dance scene, not only providing dancers with performing opportunities, commissions, and residencies, but also by bringing in the audience. Since they’re often housed within bigger institutions devoted to art and performance, presenters can do more than inventing catchier campaigns to sell tickets. Unlike the other arts, dance has no deep tradition of scholarship, publishing, and “appreciation” training. In contrast, the visual art world’s routine interpretive practices include widespread teaching and scholarship, and creating an intellectual grounding for the public reception of new work. During the Body Against Body series at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), an exhibit of Mark Bradford’s artwork was on display in the gallery upstairs. The show was accompanied by wall panels encompassing quotations, curatorial notes, and other information. Docents guided viewers through the show with descriptive talks. A catalogue of the show was readily available. The visual art world’s routine

interpretive practices, including widespread teaching and scholarship, create an intellectual grounding for public reception of new work. In dance, a few monographs and catalogues raisonnés have been published for general consumption, usually by art institutions in connection with dance-related exhibitions or installations,4 but these are only modest gestures toward implanting dance in the public consciousness. Without a sustained infrastructure of independent validation, interpretation, and criticism, dance remains insular and self-referential in the eyes of the public. In offering diverse attractions, a presenter must essentially reinvent the audience for every presentation. We can’t expect the audience for Gallim to jump at the chance to see Nicholas Leichter, but there may be a larger sensibility that covers them both. A more sustained excitement about a whole series or a season of dance could emerge from activities that are only

Students at Boston Arts Academy in workshop led by Leah Cox.

sporadically practiced by presenters: public interchanges with the artists, lectures, and film showings with expert interpreters and movement workshops. Abundant examples of this kind of framing exist in the art and music fields. A Dance/USA study of how organizations reach out to audiences5 made it clear that the question of how to increase an audience and its apparent corollary, and how to enrich the dance experience for an audience that already exists, are separate issues. The study showed that interest in “audience engagement practices” has increased, and that most of these activities are undertaken primarily by presenters or the administrative staff of dance companies. These organizations are working toward a greater openness and connection with their audiences. Dance/USA however, represents dance companies with stable organizational bases, and the “dance field” referred to in the survey constitutes only one sector of a broader world of dance creation and performance.

In addressing both audience development and audience education, it’s evident that the type of dance, venue, ticket price, and other theatergoing choices available, all influence who the audience is. There may not be a single set of solutions. The alumni of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company (BTJ/AZ) share certain values and working assumptions that could be put into play in building their audiences. Other inheritors of the postmodern dance revolution—small groups, independents, and freelancers—might find other ways of getting at the problem. Even among the MAKE DANCE SEE participants, there are different goals and resources that could be committed to outreach. 9 evenings reconsidered: art, theatre, and engineering, 1966 (MIT’s List Visual Arts Center), 2006; and Time is Not Even Space is Not Empty - Eiko and Koma (Walker Art Center), 2011. 5 Survey of Current Audience Engagement Practices. Research Commissioned by Dance/USA, with support from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The James Irvine Foundation. July 2009; and How Dance Audiences Engage: Summary Report from a National Survey of Dance Audiences. Research Commissioned by Dance/USA, with funding support from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The James Irvine Foundation, 2011. 4

Beyond Dancing Bill T. Jones now heads a company with institutional heft. Having merged with Dance Theater Workshop (DTW) in 2010 to form New York Live Arts, BTJ/AZ is now based in the DTW building on 19th Street in Manhattan, where it can conduct administrative work, rehearsals, performances, and classes. Jones himself, having received major cultural recognition, is an articulate spokesman for his own work and the social concerns behind it. He hopes to give a broader dimension to his work by reviving his earlier dances and drawing on critics to substantiate these projects. He recognizes the value of education, and has the vision to frame large training programs, under Leah Cox’s direction, including a degree-granting affiliation with Bard College. Following the modern-dance precedent of Alvin Ailey and Martha Graham, the company-based school seems an effective way to provide training for professionals and laypersons, as well as income for the company. This model also has the potential of drawing new audience members into the orbit of the group’s creative work. Both Mark Morris and Elizabeth Streb have expanded on their success as highly original artists, and have established training centers with a broad population in mind. Morris’s school features traditional classes for adults, children, and teens in modern dance, ballet, popular ethnic styles such as Afro-Haitian dance and belly dancing, and body work such as Pilates, Zumba, and Gyrokinesis. Streb’s Lab for Action Mechanics (SLAM) offers classes for kids and adults that include dance as one element in a workout encompassing acrobatics and circus skills, walking, and body work—all aimed at training for extreme action.

Getting Over the “Art” Bridge Morris and Streb may be at opposite ends of the modern dance spectrum, from a conservative to an experimental approach, but they are both responding to a vast public interest in physical training outside the narrow confines of modern dance and ballet. Americans are much less wary of engaging in physical training than they were 50 years ago, when postmodern dance began. Popular culture is fixated on the body:

fitness, dieting, sexuality, fashion, sports, how to get energized, and how to fall asleep. In high schools and colleges there’s a TVinduced craze for dance drill teams, cheerleading, hip hop, and competition “reality” dancing. Yet there remains a resistance to theatrical dance, a perception, perhaps, that “art” is difficult. Surveys show that a large part of the dance audience has had some studio or social dance experience, and that those with a dance background are better prepared to understand and enjoy a dance performance. However, there are no figures on what percentage of those taking dance classes actually joins an audience for live performances. In a sense, the popularization and diversification of dance is just what the postmodern dancers were hoping for, but how can this enthusiasm be channeled into support for dance performance that’s neither mainstream High Art nor Dancing with the Stars? And how can any individual audience member be helped to understand the specific theatrical experience he or she goes to see? In some public schools, modern dance and ballet are just one aspect of physical training that’s more oriented toward sports and popular culture. Does learning folk dancing, line dancing, hip hop, or ballroom produce a future modern dance or ballet audience? Are college dance students preparing for professional careers or simply engaging in recreational activity? What’s the role of dance in community-based programs of cultural exploration? Postmodern dance has developed an assortment of tools for initiating creative work that everyone can do, and teachers like Leah Cox use them to introduce the choreographic process to students of all levels. Would any of this expand the audience for Larry Goldhuber’s or Karole Armitage’s work? “Audience participation” was a familiar device in the days when postmodern dancers looked like ordinary people, and anyone in the audience could have been a dancer. Today, it remains a successful way of engaging the audience. Elizabeth Streb gets everyone to stand up and do one of her exercises, even when she’s only lecturing. Many artists invite us to join in clapping, vocal call-and-response, and post-performance dancing. Choreographers, from Ohad Naharin to David Dorfman, have given selected audience members a planned role in the stage work

itself. At recent performances of Dorfman’s Prophets of Funk, as reported by dance critic Deborah Jowitt, “While the spectators are entering the theater, some of them accept the invitation to come onstage and learn the steps of a line dance. They’re digging it, and when that phrase appears later in the Prophets of Funk—whether we watched the lesson or participated—we recognize it, and our muscles very subliminally twitch.”6

How does an audience make its way through these complex, content-laden structures, these beguiling designs, spoken words, musical mashups, photographic images, video and virtuosic dancing? Confronted with postmodernism’s “flat-affect” performing style, how does a viewer discern the sincerity, irony, political satire, goofiness, and preaching that underlies a seemingly neutral performance? How does a viewer “read” a physical metaphor?

Cultural awareness begins early in our education. Drawing, music appreciation, and folk dancing used to be elementary school staples, exposing young children to the rudiments of art. Cutbacks in public education funding over recent decades have reduced these opportunities, sometimes relegating them to extracurricular time slots or eliminating them entirely. American mainstream culture is devaluing the arts in general, and in many circumstances it’s also redefining them. Although dancers subscribe with confidence to the idea that dance training will enhance the dance audience, no one really knows if this is so.

Assuming artists want to open this level of their work to an audience, one opportunity exists in program notes. These written introductions can range from the density of William Forsythe’s essays to a line or two about the work’s performing history or intent. Other useful forms of program information that are underutilized include interpretive essays by scholars or critics, photographs with dancer bios, and a discussion of what particular training or performance experience the choreographer found most influential for the work at hand. All this material could be posted online. In fact, rapidly evolving technologies suggest that online information, including film previews and demonstrations, could not only expand the usefulness of the program book but may eventually make it obsolete.

Physical training can foster receptivity to dance performance, but it still doesn’t fully address an audience’s experience in the theater. In a dance event, physical empathy may not be the only point or even the main point. In fact, it’s the gulf between vicarious, pleasurable, physical activity and “meaning” that potential audiences find hard to cross. 6

ArtsJournalBlogs.com, September 1, 2011.

What Do You Mean, “Meaning”? A great deal of contemporary work is multi-layered or uses clashing theatrical media, without attempting aesthetic consistency. In talking with critic Ann Daly about dancing as his mother prayed in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Bill T. Jones described several layers of memory, spirituality, irony, and performance woven through the scene:7 “I was assuming that the audience was smart and that they were able to look at layers and layers and layers, of deconstruction or reconstruction….What anthropological distance did they have to take on in order to be able to hear and see all these layers that I’m talking about? It was a very active thing I demanded.”

Talks, receptions, social media opportunities, email blasts, open rehearsals, onstage discussions, and interviews all seem to give an audience a sense of contact. Little attention is paid to the historical, aesthetic, or political background of the work, or to the complex process of looking at what’s there. In addition to presenting performances, institutions could be cultivating a wider sphere of discussion, through regular salons, courses, forums on dance issues, informed video showings, online discussion sites with YouTube links, and more access to dance company residencies. To attack this problem, all of the interested parties—choreographers and dance companies, presenters, teachers, and writers—could share strategies that have worked, and explore new avenues and attitudes. This takes time and thought, but first it takes more mutual regard among those who want to see it happen. 7 Art Performs Life: Merce Cunningham/Meredith Monk/Bill T. Jones. Walker Art Center, 1998, p. 122–23

Re-Entering the Process

Seeing in Different Ways

For contemporary work created on post-Cunningham models, the process of making the work is of great importance. It would be interesting to ask how audience members think dances are made. It’s likely their notions are quite different from what really happens. In composing work, all the MAKE DANCE SEE artists employ task-oriented movement, structured improvisation, or variations on everyday movement to some degree. Process can be described directly, as Alexandra Beller did in revealing her intricate route to other stories. It can be replicated in abbreviated form, as in the workshops given at Boston Arts Academy and the ICA by Leah Cox. Would the audience get more out of the work if they knew what processes were in play, or is the final result the only thing that matters? If nothing else, a simple demonstration of how these internal structures work could spark the viewer’s interest and demand a more active kind of spectatorship.

Choreographer Liz Lerman gets at an even more basic premise of the postmodern sensibility in her recent memoir.8 Early in her teaching career, she asked a class of high school students to write an essay describing what happened on a particular day at school. Each student came back with a different version of that history. Lerman realized she’d stirred up a lot of confusion, because the students had to confront the idea that there’s no absolute historical truth. She found “liberation in the notion that all of us have our own experience that is truthful and unlike that of any other person,” but she had to acknowledge later that, “not everyone likes free fall.” The audience today no longer takes such an open attitude toward what’s supposed to be “art.” By encouraging a willingness to be surprised and allowing the possibility of multiple responses, presenters and producers could put audiences in a more receptive frame of mind.

A Dance Educator’s Approach: Heidi Latsky Improvisation and process work are common tools in dance composition classes. At Concord Academy in July 2011, Heidi Latsky used four sessions of her one-week workshop in Performing Skills to teach a version of her dance, IF. A showing for invited guests took place on the last day. The 33 students (the piece originally had 15 dancers), worked with a series of improvisational gambits and a rehearsed phrase, set in a prescribed order with cues for change called by Latsky or one of the dancers. For the viewers, the work offered a chance to see how the performers interpreted the instructions in their individual ways, and how the whole group created a collective event. Latsky used a breathing exercise and face massage as a warm-up, which she decided to try with the Concord audience as well. She thought the relaxation technique would help the dancers, and potentially the audience, to worry less about getting into the piece. “People need a hook,” she said. “They need to feel this is a cool thing. They need to feel they’ll get it. I want my audience to get it.”

The things dancers know and experience during a performance aren’t necessarily what the audience sees and experiences. If naming and pigeonholing preempts the audience’s experience— ”programs their behavior and trumps their real responses,” as Elizabeth Streb declared—non-judgmental writing that interprets, describes, and uncovers the working process could enhance that experience. The internal workings and the history behind the dance, however, still aren’t what the viewer witnesses. In fact, in that moment, the spectator brings something unique and unpredictable into the dance. Disinterested critics speak for that viewer. They report one observer’s subjective reactions, connections, recognitions, images, and questions out of a theater full of other reactions. The critic’s truth is no more true than the choreographer’s. The two versions are complementary. Training in the skills of observation and recognizing structure could help viewers see more in a performance, and to make their own connections among what often appear as clashing stimuli. Moreover, greater openness from the artists about their own thinking could encourage an audience to find metaphor without resorting to absolute meaning. Bill T. Jones has spoken about how he used words in the early solos, to disrupt the “mute and transcendent experience” that the audience thought it would receive. He wanted to put the audience at a distance, and then both he and they would work to come back together: “I believe that this is the metaphor for what all human intercourse is really about. Falling apart and fighting back together.”9 Making and seeing dance is more than give and take. It needs a different kind of exchange, a bigger concept of reciprocity, and a more active role for both the audience and the dancer. 8 Liz Lerman, Hiking the Horizontal: Field Notes from a Choreographer (Wesleyan University Press), 2011, pp. 183–184.

9 Art Performs Life: Merce Cunningham/Meredith Monk/Bill T. Jones. Walker Art Center, 1998, p. 123.

Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company Body Against Body Photo: Paul Goode

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MAKE, DANCE, SEE is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.