Erik Kaiel - exhaustion and beauty
Erik spoke last today (Friday, 17 April 09). I thought I might write out my notes (and some thoughts) on this presentation simply because it is freshest for me. The notes are not nescessarily that coherent, but intended more as some kind of record of a few of the things that were said.
I think I might have noted before that the basic format for these dialogues is that each of the 12 (11 now - Vava Stefanescu wasn’t able to make it to Utrecht) participants presents a little bit (30 mins) of ‘physical’ practice, followed by 30 minutes of talking about his/her work, and then followed by 1 hr of the entire group discussing ideas, responses.
So, to Erik (who decided to leave the physical practice until the end - which we didn’t get to).
We watched 7 minutes of a ‘site-responsive’ work, involving a lot of duetting/trioing with a ‘contact’ feel; these actions were performed in a roaming manner (in The Hague? or was it Rotterdam?), as if they were taking over the streets (in a micro manner). The audience followed the performers, and there were (of course) many accidental viewers. The work seemed to sit somewhere between contact and parkour, but that’s a little simplistic.
Erik began talking - rapid fire aphorisms, position statements, manifesto-like in their ‘certainty’. He said things like:
“I am busy with raw movement”
“The twin motors of intensity and intention” - virtuosic bodies in public spaces.
He talked of the North American idea of potlatch (I know I know, wikipedia was my first port of call) - what you can give away, as opposed to what you can have.
“ATV - all terrain virtuosity” - worth noting that in other sessions many words have been questioned but in this case (I think in part because of the quite exhilirating rapid fire delivery Erik was using) no one seemed to question this term. Virtuosity comes in many forms (as noted by Gabriella in her presentation earlier in the day).
“Imaginative body as a perpetual manifesto” (I don’t know what this means).
He spoke of the importance of authenticity and integrity … again two words with deeply contested ontologies.
“Choreographers as union organisers”
He said that the audience is “like a dog” in that it can smell the lack of authenticity.
“The body needs to exhaust itself to acheive beauty”. This worrys me (aside from wondering what Erik means by beauty) - what we saw in the video was not of exhausted bodies. I would suggest that exhaustion is a point of breakage, a place in which the need to stop overwhelms the desire to keep going. Cells become denatured. I cannot claim to be an expert, but you might enjoy my account of running a marathon.
“Contemporary dance is first-world liberation theology”
He talked of a need for “sacred literacy”, and that his “contemporary dance is never verbal” (although his works are titled, e.g. “Mecca is a two-way street”). I am probably sounding very cynical. It’s not that, the presentation was very stimulating, and deeply thoughtful, I just felt like we seemed to be lulled into a place where we weren’t critical of the assumptions that I felt were being made about ideas/terminology, etc.
Here are some more of Erik’s aphorisms:
“Good performance throws a wrench into the smooth clockwork of hegemony”.
He talked of anomie - quite an extraordinary sociological phenomenon.
“Dance is the 27th letter of the alphabet”
At this point in the presentation I started to become deeply concerned about this fetishisation or even deification of dance. Or, at the very least, an unequivocal valorisation of a particular (but unstated) kind of dancing. Well, one that certainly didn’t involve language.
Erik mentioned something about it being lucky that dancers are poor … I can’t remember the context, but something to do with being able to look up at ‘society’. But most dancers are not poor! We don’t live on the streets, we rarely struggle to eat, and contemporary dance is, for the most part, an incredibly middle class endeavour.
He talked of preferring “site-responsiveness” versus “site-specificity” as a term.
“Dance takes place out of regular time” … the “many time”
I think I’ll stop this post now … it’s getting too long. More in a bit.
