Meditations on Metamorphosizing

The first time I ever saw Mordine & Company Dance Theater perform was a couple years ago at The Ruth Page Center for the Arts. I was relatively new to Chicago and its dance world and I had only performed for a few smaller companies. I was struggling to find myself and to find that company that would help push my dancing to the next level. As I sat in the auditorium and saw Mordine & Company’s “LifeSpeak” I had no idea that a year and a half later I would be one of those dancers on the stage performing that same piece. I had no clue as to how difficult the piece was, or of how hard Shirley would make me work. All I knew sitting in that audience was that I wanted to dance like those dancers on stage.  They were so aware of their bodies and how they worked. They were all unique and not a single one outshined the other. They seemed so honest and I wanted to be just like them. Now that I am part of the company and learning “LifeSpeak” myself, I feel I am nothing like those dancers who I watched before, but I am getting closer to discovering my own voice in each rehearsal. 

The new piece we are creating now is called “All at Once/Acts of Renewal” and deals with many ideas, but the one that resonates with me the most is the idea of transformation. We have been exploring that moment just before you transform, and discovering that it is full of frustration, stress and difficulty. And when finally break through that wall of resistance, you become something else—a new version of yourself that still contains elements from your past.

Throughout this process of working on the new piece Shirley has asked us many times to take movement phrases we have created and transform them. We’ve explored how these phrases are affected by others moving in the space, we’ve pushed the movements to a place outside our comfort zone, and we’ve played with minimizing the movement to get down to the essence of the phrase. Through these exercises I have learned so much about my voice as a dancer, and I feel that I have a much clearer idea of what I want to say and how my body feels portraying those ideas.  But I have also realized that through working with Shirley the past year and a half that she has helped me transform my dancing (and by extension, myself) into a new person.  One that is less wary of venturing beyond predetermined boundaries and is unafraid of new experiences yet to come, but who also contains part of her old self and knows and respects where she came from. There were some difficulties and frustrations before I let myself change, and I am sure there are more ahead of me. However, I’m certain that the process of transformation is what I found to be so inspiring about those Mo & Co dancers that I saw onstage in the past.  And with hard work and willingness to evolve, I hope that in the future I can encourage someone else like those dancers inspired me.

-Stacy DeMorrow, Company Dancer

Mo & Co is Back on the Move!

Woah! An exclamation is the only fitting way I can think of to begin this post. It has been quite awhile since this blog has been updated, and a lot has been going on in Mordine & Company Dance Theater. Without sounding too businesslike, my objectives for this post are: 1.) To inform readers about the goings-on of the company as a whole 2.) To introduce myself and give some insight into a dancer’s perspective on the process.

The biggest shift in the company has been its composition—Shirley is working with an entirely new cast of characters. Have you met the new dancers yet? I suggest you check out our “Company Bios” page to learn about Melissa Pillarella, Katie Jean Dahlaw, Stacy (DeMorrow) Miller, Danielle Gilmore, Mary Kate Sickel, and myself, Simone Baechle.

Since the beginning of October, we’ve been creating material for our April 14 collaboration with Natya Dance Theater. This one-night-only event will take place at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie, and will be performed by a cast of 6 Natya dancers and 6 Mo & Co Dancers. Our December 4 event “Fete Champagne” will give the audience a glimpse of the company’s movement sketches in progress.

The main themes of our collaboration (from my perspective, at least) are: marginality, resistance, and immigration/transmigration. What if you can’t find a place to call home in a new and confusing landscape? How does it feel to be denied a voice, an opportunity, a chance to interact? How do you react to being excluded from the majority? Wisely, Shirley has chosen to have the dancers physically respond to these topics as individuals, rather than try to create some sort of overblown, generalized opus about cultural experiences (as less seasoned choreographers might do). In our discussions as a company, we realized that our myriad backgrounds—as second generation Americans or as children profoundly removed from our immigrant descendants, as women who live near or far from our parents, as bold trailblazers or gentle coax-ers of change—would contribute to a much denser narrative than anything that someone could “set” on us.

I cannot speak to how Shirley’s inspirations for this collaboration may evolve. However, I can shed some light on process as I have come to understand it, and I can share the jumble of thematically relevant ideas that have crossed my consciousness: the young Indian immigrant protagonists in Jhumpa Lahiri’s short stories, a radio story I heard on NPR about a lack of any IDs/government records for many impoverished individuals in the southeast US (this article on voter IDs illustrates a tangential issue), my personal experiences working for a company that was male-dominated, the poetry of Yeats and T.S. Eliot (wasn’t WWI truly the catalyst for the next 100 years of universal cultural turmoil?). These are just a smattering of images that I have begun to draw upon as a movement artist.

I’d like to conclude this blog post with a recollection that is more personal and concrete than the aforementioned jumble. As first 7 or so summers of my life, my parents and I would visit Hopi, Zuni, and Navajo reservations. My family’s trek via minivan from NJ to the southwest seemed to be a meditation on these ancient people’s pre-Columbian journey via landbridge from Eurasia to the Americas. Whereas my parents and I did not have strong ties to our German/Irish heritage, these pilgrimages gave me an invaluable sense of scope about the rich anthropology of our country.

While I don’t remember a lot of details about these trips, I do have a lot of visceral memories of how the warm, dry desert air felt on my skin as a reclined on the minivan’s back seat; how the trees in Bryce Canyon smelled like a heavenly mixture of vanilla, pine, and cedar; and how the earthen pueblos were punctuated with doors of bright turquoise (which is still my favorite color to this day). At one point, my family and I were invited to watch a Hopi homecoming ceremony. One of the dancers, whirling with an otherworldly speed, slowly slowed down and separated herself from the circle. She reverently swayed to the drumbeat as she moved toward me. To my astonishment, she presented me with a corn maiden Kachina doll. The rich movement that I witnessed during this ritual and the generous spirit of these people has been an influencing factor in my decision to become a dancer. I look forward to drawing upon more memories like this as Mo & Co continues its movement exploration.

If you can't wait til April (and why should you?!?), then join us on December 4^th at Fete Champagne for a sneak peek- 5pm at Architectural Artifacts in Ravenswood. Make sure to RSVP to marketing@mordine.org- the event is FREE and features champagne and small bites.

Peace, Love, and Plies,

Simone Baechle

Journal Entry #5 by Bryan Saner

April 13, 2010

Natalia learns Persistence.

There is a dance in I Haven’t Gone There that we have named Persistence. Persistence comments on our attempt to stay the same. Shirley tells the story about the roots of this dance concerning refugee groups that when allowed to return to their homeland attempt to rebuild life as it was before the war. It’s also a comment on our persistent belief that war is necessary. It is also a comment on our current national conservatism; “We will stay this way.” As a culture we desire going back to what we know, back to traditional values or those ways of living that we believe were better. It thinks about how culture breaks down and how it builds. It asks if culture’s deterioration is inevitable.

Persistence is multidimensional. We can also be persistent about accepting or creating change. David, Sean and Dmitri each danced the pulsating rhythm that drives persistence. Those men have amicably left the company but the dance and rhythm of persistence is still in. Now Natalia sets the beat. Its persistent inclusion in the performance illustrates its own point. The dance stays and Natalia compliments the meaning by allowing it to progress and change with creativity. Natalia’s rendition of persistence asks if culture could be remodeled in order to be appropriate for the present moment.

The formal components of persistence are rhythm and repetition. The composition follows a disciplined regimen of pulses and dancing on the beat but it also respects and responds to deviations of the beat. This deviation creates a crack in the wall of tyrannical form. The emotional components of persistence are a mixture of blind obedience to the form and a nonconforming challenge to visionless despair. The critical maverick irregularity tenders hope and confidence.

We value ambiguity in performance and dance. We don’t agree. Some see the incongruities, unanswered questions and tangents as vehicles that take us to places we weren’t expecting to go. They thrill at arriving in the middle of uncharted territory. Others look to theater to provide more clues and clarity and point to a transformative new vision that has yet to be realized. Still others are expecting entertainment and the theater moment to be a creative (or [re]creative) event.

Theater creates space and time for these diverse expectations and cultural differences to be investigated in the spotlight. It’s a place where we can repeat ourselves. To act the known past and possible futures . . . to both embrace tradition and also practice transformative change in the same body

Journal Entry #4 by Bryan Saner

This is the fourth entry in a series of commentaries written by Bryan Saner, the Associate Artistic Director of Mordine & Co. about the rehearsal process for "I Haven't Gone There."


April 5, 2010

There are days when everything seems possible. We accept them with the same gratitude we extent to the days that are impossible.

This is the nature of work. The lesson I learned from the recently departed activist Gene Stolzfus is that when we are doing what we want to do, no matter how passionate or committed we are to the profession or how much we enjoy the work, there are days when it is simply just that. It is work and it is not necessarily enjoyable anymore. There are other days of completion, joy and accomplishment but its best not to attach a value of good or bad to any of it. Shirley described it once to me as a “witness by people who are in practice and daily ritual.” The word witness here is crucial in its gerund form; both to be present actively and to be the watcher.

Anna Normann and Natalia Negron have stepped up from their intern positions into performing positions.
David Gerber, Sean Tomerlin and Dmitri Peskov have come and gone through the company.

Meghann Wilkinson created a duet with David for I Havent Gone There. When david left she taught it to Sean. When Sean left she taught it to Dmitri. When Dmitri left she taught it to Mark Duthu. “Im going to teach a workshop on how to teach this duet.” She said. Mark learned it in 45 minutes. A combination of a good day, a good teacher, a good dancer, time spend with the material, hope that the material finally settles in someone’s body and faith in the slow moving toward and culminating in that one good day and that one body of a good dancer.

Shirley pushes hard against limits. She doesn’t accept them easily. She compounds the moments of rehearsal by demanding that the dancers perform at the same time they are learning/creating the material. The layering of expectations challenges the dancers. They are learning new material, creating new material, remembering the movement in their bodies, remembering the placement of their bodies in time and space relative to angles, physics, gravity, motion and weight, coordinating timing and transitions with the other dancers bodies, engaging three dimensional sensing (seeing and listening with the entire body), going from internal to external, and polishing the movement all at the same time.

She described her work to me as “Making something possible for someone else that they can’t do by themselves.” I see this struggle between Shirley and the dancers often. The dancers are working something out from the inside. Shirley sees their external manifestation. . . the thing their bodies do on the outside. The inside and the outside seldom mirror each other adequately. The creative place is the liminal gap between what the dancers are working on from the inside out and what Shirley is working on from the outside in.

It demands much from everyone. It demands a comfortability with the awkward positions we find our bodies and emotions in and not correcting this awkwardness but going with it to see where it goes, to maintain it, to flow with it, to allow it to become a new species, to mutually become other and more than we were.

Journal Entry #3 by Bryan Saner

This is the third entry in a series of commentaries written by Bryan Saner, the Associate Artistic Director of Mordine & Co. about the rehearsal process for "I Haven't Gone There."



March 29, 2010

Last week I wrote some thoughts about the body. . .

I mentioned the systems that body is composed of and proposed that instead of the dualistic mind/body philosophies we literally begin thinking about our body as being the infinite multiple aggregate systems of experience, , , The body as infinite chapters each reflecting infinite systems.
Today I want to write about the difference between having a body and being a body because the question proposes multiple ways of imagining our interface with our existence/culture/aggregat

e.

My writing and interest in this is not only related to dance and performance, but also to the whole of those interrelated systems that compose the body. In an effort to cultivate a sense of wonder and joy in the discussion, I will add that the intentions of these questions are not to be seen as proving one identification or another as being positive or negative or having more or less value. We find find ontological value in all angles of the question and indeed as performers, don't intend to propose anything but the question. The audience will answer. This is one of the purposes of live performance.

I also want to add that I hope we don't figure this out. Thought and the body it investigates is infinite. The questions and possible discussion they create within the body and the immediate neighborhood around the body are more valuable than the temporary answers we might find, The better our microscopes and telescopes become, the more we prove our infinity. The more answers we conclude, the more questions we will discover. We would retrograde if this process stopped.

In an effort to expand the dualistic nature of the question I will add the related but different questions that thousands have asked before: Is body the self? Is body an object/vessel that contains being? Is it the perceiving machinery that connects us to everything other? Does the other create us? What is us? What is other?

So as a first step to thinking about the body as systems, we return to the question at hand:
Do we have a body or are we a body?
But that's all the time and space I have for today. . .enough for the questions. You can respond. Really, just post a comment. Maybe that's what facebook can offer; our body’s inter(face) with the collected con(text) of these questions, our common experience, our creative practices, what we are eating for breakfast. . .

Journal Entry #2 by Bryan Saner

This is the second entry in a series of commentaries written by Bryan Saner, the Associate Artistic Director of Mordine & Co. about the rehearsal process for "I Haven't Gone There."


March 22, 2010

We talked about satire in rehearsal today.
My Oxford dictionary suggests that the etymology of the word is closely related to satura.

“This general sense appears in the phrase per saturam . . .according to the grammarians this is elliptical for lanx satura ( lit ‘full dish’: lanx dish, satura, fem of satur full, related to satis enough) which is alleged to have been used for a dish containing various kinds of fruit and for food composed of many different ingredients.”

I like the reference to enough. Satire functions as a way of stopping insanity. As if we are saying Enough! Basta! and the legitimate way to do this with our bodies is to mock the thing we are opposing. I like the layers that are developing through multiple ingredients that accumulate in satire. One action tells many stories.


In later definitions The Oxford quotes Goldwater Smith in the Feb. 19, 1880 edition of the Atlantic Monthly :

“There are different kinds of satire: the epicurean, which laughs at mankind. . . the stoical which indignantly lashes mankind, . . the cynical, which hates and despises mankind.”

The Epicureans, Stoics and Cynics in their time (4th and 3rd century BCE) were well respected philosophers, citizens and political groups who provided important structure to Greek culture. We still value these communities although we relegate them to comedians, clowns and angry activists. Maybe dancers and performance artists could be counted in the group. These groups still provide important structure to contemporary culture but the impact is so subtle compared to the power of corporate influence and drones exploding silently and invisibly in other countries.

Our rehearsals of repetition and repetition and again and again, of actions and individual routine, of words and movements that accumulate in our bodies must have some reason for being. How can we spend so many minutes, hours and days on these details that perform in a second? How empowered those seconds are. Our cells are supercharged with the memory of these movements. This is how our habits are programmed into the body until we are a full. This is how we reprogram the body out of its habits when we have had enough.

Journal Entry 1 by Bryan Saner

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.