The below Journal entry is the first in a series of commentaries written by Mordine and Co.'s Associate Artistic Director, Bryan Saner during the rehearsal process of "I Haven't Gone There."
March 21, 2010
We begin and end with the body.
Shirley invited me to work with her as the associate artistic director for the creation of the performance I haven't gone there. I will be contributing weekly essays here on facebook as a journal for this process.
Shirley and I inevitably spend time at each meeting talking about the news and the culture we live in and then an equal amount of time trying to make this dance relevant to that world. Yesterday she asked me “Is it too much to ask for dance to be meaningful or care about the human experience?”
I was thinking about the Romantic and Modern aesthetic that I sometimes feel current dance and theater is frozen in.
Théophile Gautier (1811-1872), the renowned 19th C. dance critic and champion of l’art pour l’art wrote:
“. . .there is nothing of the actual, nothing of the real; one is in an enchanted world.
The word is sung, the steps are pirouettes . . . an evening at the Opera rests you from real life
and consoles you for the number of frightful bourgeois in overcoats you are obliged to see
during the day.”
The 20th C. modern dancer Harald Kreutzberg (1902-1968) said
"I dance to express myself. I dance for my heart, blood, imagination. . .I do not believe
that dancing should tell a story or have a meaning; nor do I feel that a dancer must draw upon
his experiences to express fully dances of great joy or great sorrow. .."
The words of these old men bore me and Im concerned that we still have these expectations of dance and theater. Or, Im concerned that dance and theater produces this kind of work by default without thinking of alternative forms or intentions.
What is the point of simplifying the theatrical experience by filtering away the world outside ourselves and presenting our own ego? Do we really go to the theater to escape our time and place? How is it even possible for the living human body to perform or witness dance and theater and not have a thought that is relative to our mutual lifestyle outside the theater?
Shirley and I WANT to make theater that responds to the actual real phenomenon of this time and place and our body's interface with it.
Shirley talked about these dances as practices for the future; as rehearsals for entering unforeseen, unpredictable, sometimes incomprehensible encounters and experiences that we will be living. This preparation by our bodies for our future is exciting in relationship to dance and theater.
We’ve had some discussions about the body and its experience of time and space. I will talk about this more in future posts, but today I want to propose a challenge to the the dualistic problem of reconciling mind and body. This simplistic discussion, like any discussion that only has two sides, will only produce limited knowledge and experience. Because of its exclusive nature, dualistic thinking will be ignorant of larger more complex, and richer contexts. There are multiple types of knowledge and all of it is perceived and comprehended by the body. We are capable of so much more. We have evolved into creatures that are capable of appreciating and needing much more complex specific experiences.
Body is not separate from mind of course, but it is also not separate from environment, diet, gender, culture, physics, economics, language, violence, politics, technology, love, spirit, philosophy, memory and the rest of the infinite list of events and phenomena that occur. The human body is ready and able to connect with the infinite perceived system of events in time and space.
When we begin to realize that body is one part of a system, we will be able to make appropriate responses to the systems which in turn affect our body and for the purpose of this essay, will have a bearing on the kind of theater we will be making. We want to make dances that embrace this complexity.
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