Movement Research presents "Body Disrupt" at Abrons

Mat Fraser as The Beast
(with Jonny Dixon and Jess Mabel Jones)
in the 2014 production of
Beauty and the Beast at Abrons Arts Center
(photo: Sheila Burnett)

Below: Julie Atlas Muz as Beauty
(photo: Sin Bozkurt)

Artists with disabilities and artists whose work disrupts normative notions of what constitutes a dancing body will come together in conversation.

 --about Body Disrupt, a Movement Research Studies Project panel

Body Disrupt
--a panel convened and moderated by dance artist Kathy Westwater at Abrons Arts Center for Movement Research--left my head buzzing, not so much with a bunch of questions or final answers but rich points of departure. In that way, I found it satisfying--again, not in the sense of finality or feeling sated but in the sense of deliciousness. Each panelist--Wendy Whelan, Petra Kuppers, Julie Atlas Muz (representing her husband and creative collaborator, Mat Fraser), Marissa Perel, Cathy Weis, and Westwater herself--offered a different history, pathway, insight and flavor. I consider them all guides who lead you to a good place and leave you there with confidence that you're smart enough to push on forward in your own way.

Westwater introduced the event by talking about how her engagement with somatic practices left her at variance with their emphasis on organizing the body. In her dance practice, she said, she was "pursuing a disorganized body, trying to understand what that was."

"Why am I trying to organize my body?" she asked. "I'm an artist. I want to express the body I have." Indeed, she turned to physical "disorganization" as a stimulus for a choreography of exaggerated dis-alignment that, she says, "never stops being interesting to me."

As the panel wrapped up, Westwater revisited this language and reworked it--referencing, instead, "different organizations of bodies."

As a dance writer, I found that revision at once enjoyable and useful. It made me remember a question someone recently posed to me: "What do you look for when you go to see a dance?" My response was perhaps different from what another writer might offer: I go to engage with what's there, whatever it might be, not to look for something predeterminied. In other words, if I expect anything, it's the possibility of something different, and I've signed up for engagement with it. While that's no guarantee that I will get it or like it, it's a protective against simply failing to respect its right to exist.

Westwater and Whelan, it turns out, are old friends from youth. Even so, Whelan's presence on this panel was surprising and proved refreshing. After all, her stellar career, though evolving, has been rooted in classical ballet technique, far from Movement Research's approach to dance. But here's the thing: At age 12, Whelan was diagnosed with scoliosis (curvature and rotation of the spine) and spent months in a chin-to-hip body cast while bravely resuming her rigorous ballet training. Treatment helped, but it did not wipe away her innate sense of difference. At times, the ballerina had to endure fault-finding by members of my profession for the look of her body and her dancing.

Today, Whelan considers her condition a gateway to the truth of herself, beyond picture-perfect ballet conventions, and to the pursuit of more adventurous means of self-expression through the works of contemporary choreographers.

"I strive to be fearless," she says. "I'm never afraid to embarrass myself."

Kuppers--a German-born community performance artist and disability culture activist, now based in Michigan--impressed me with her playful approach to the world as a model of easygoing engagement based in perception and compassion. From Muz--performance and burlesque artist married to an actor with thalidomide-induced Phocomelia--I simply inhaled a renewed affirmation of my femme self and a voracious pleasure in the age-old, radical power of the Outsider. Perel spoke of disabilities and pain hidden from view--"I've been able to look like a dancer"--and, in particular, what dance critics fail to take into account when they encounter her work. A poet, installation artist, choreographer and critic, Perel says she works with forms of art that will give her agency. "I don't really care what they are." Weis, diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in decades ago and facing the loss of her marriage, regained her own agency through turning not only to dance but to stained glass and, especially, to video as an extension of herself, made on equipment that she could handle by herself.

Body Disrupt offered notions of disruption that can instigate not only the work of movement artists but also the work those of us who view, process, document and critique their art. These artists encourage each of us to define and relish in our freedom.

*****

Movement Research Studies Project presents a series of artist-instigated panel discussions, roundtables, performances and/or other formats that engage issues of aesthetics, philosophy and social politics relevant to the dance and performance community.

All Studies Project events are free and open to the public.

UPCOMING:

June 7, 6:30pm
Festival Spring 2016 Studies Project
Curated by Aretha Aoki, Elliott Jenetopulos, Eleanor Smith and Tara Aisha Willis

Gibney Dance Choreographic Center
890 Broadway, 5th Floor, Manhattan
(map/directions)

If you like what you're reading,

subscribe to InfiniteBody!

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Infinitebody

It's open season: "People feel hunted."

Documentary filmmaker Rachel Lyon (left)
at screening of Hate Crimes in the Heartland at Harvard Law School
below: Tulsa, OK memorial for victims of the race riot of May 31, 1921
(Photos from http://www.hatecrimesheartland.com)

"What does it mean to be a Black body out loud?" asked dance artist Edisa Weeks at a recent Movement Research Studies Project forum.

One answer came as choreographer (and forum co-organizer) Whitney V. Hunter (Social Health Performance Club) lay like a crumpled corpse on the floor of a Gibney Dance studio and recalled the complexities of staging a #BlackLivesMatter "body count outline" intervention at Union Square Park when, as he discovered at the last minute, it was Greenmarket day.

In America, it's always Market Day--green or otherwise--and the artist/activist is challenged to complicate the easy, inebriating flow of that narrative. Rachel Lyon's Hate Crimes in the Heartland, screened last night as part of The New School's Creatively Speaking film series, is one film project that interrupts the same-old flow, dredges up history and connects the all-important dots. In April 2012, two white men went on a hunt through Tulsa, Oklahoma suburbs, shooting random Black people, killing three, critically injuring two others. Lyon's film looks beyond the "Good Friday Murders" and their aftermath to the city's post-World War I history of thriving Black businesses, white rage and tragedy.

Dealing with the Good Friday Murders, Lyon at first pelts the viewer with news media images and commentary too rapid to digest. However, her work becomes more effective--and moving--as she examines the story of the prominent, self-contained community of Greenwood ("Black Wall Street") Black people built in the wake of World War I.

On May 31, 1921, Tulsa's struggling whites, resenting Black success, rampaged through Greenwood, destroying 25 city blocks, leaving 300 people dead and 10,000 homeless. The shattered community still bears signs of decimation while white Tulsa rebounded and continues to flourish. Not a single person has ever been charged or faced justice for the genocide of 1921.

Lyon has been touring Hate Crimes in the Heartland around the US in an effort to bring awareness of this atrocity--certainly absent from my high school history books--and create opportunities for discussion of hate crimes, systemic racism, and strategies for empowerment.

Click here to order the film and consider hosting a screening in your home or community venue (discussion guide provided).

Be careful where you sit!

By the time I walked into the studio at Gibney 890 for last evening's Movement Research Studies Project--What is The Role of Class?--there were few chairs to be had, and I am not one for sitting on the floor. I found an unclaimed chair and plopped down with my bulky winter coat, backpack and little bag of grocery shopping.

There was Jodi Melnick to the left of me, John Jasperse and a new friend, Barbara Forbes, to my right. The wondrous Beth Gill rushed up for hellos and a hug, and noted that I had sat with the group that would be talking about the economics of class--not "class" as in social status, but "class" as in where dancers go to explore and hone their craft. Taken aback by this sudden requirement, I looked about to see what the other group topics were, and Jasperse handed me his sheet of notes. Fine, I said, but I'm basically here to listen and learn. Still a bit confused about the evening's game plan, I told Gill and Jasperse I'd probably float around, listening from group to group. Then everything started, and no one had time to correct me.

Gill (and everyone else) didn't realize that the event's other organizers had not invited me to be a panelist. I didn't realize that several small groups of panelists--maybe "discussants" would be a more apt word, given the intended casual format--were arranged along my half of the misshapen circle, invisibly embedded, for the moment, in what would appear to be an ordinary gathering of people.

In other words, I'd landed in a hot seat.

When I finally realized this error, it was too late to move elsewhere. And so, at a livestreamed event, I was seen to be curiously reluctant to open my mouth and contribute remarks along with everyone else arranged around me.

Afterward, people kept coming up to tell me they were disappointed that they hadn't had a chance to hear what I might have to say. In fact, I have just received an email from someone expressing the same disappointment.

Oy!

Okay, I survived.

Far be it from Movement Research to do a panel discussion like anyone else would do a panel discussion. With, like, a clearly, spatially-identified panel.

The main drawback, here, was near-inaudibility in that big studio. Panelists at a far remove from nearly everyone else came to realize the need to turn not to one another in discussion but, as individuals, to face the room and project their voices.

So. A group of panels after all.

Once past this initial awkwardness, the discussions took off in many directions. Must a dancer go to class on a regular basis, or can that dancer's physical practice take other forms? What are the factors--cost chief among them, certainly--that keep dancers from attending class regularly or at all? How is teaching a form of continuous learning for the dance teacher? How do you work with students who come to class solely for physical technique when your interests bend more towards social justice? What is revealed and challenged when a US-based dance artist teaches in another country and culture? How can this community make dance training sustainable for teachers and students? How can teachers take what they know so well and market it beyond the professional dance field, helping to subsidize professional dance classes for more students?

All of these, and more, are valuable questions and ones not easily addressed in less than two hours. The issues raised at What is The Role of Class? call out for further discussion, organizing and action. They call out for commitment.

I woke up this morning, thinking about Janet Panetta's remarks about "hobby dance classes." She said, "That's what we used to call them," and she meant the classes that studios would offer for non-professionals who wanted to exercise to lose weight or just have some fun after the work day. The money from these classes made it possible to keep studios open for the serious students and pros. Now, though, people go to health clubs and yoga studios. They get their Zumba on. The discussion turned, briefly, to the challenge of recapturing that civilian market to keep studios and teachers alive.

I was thinking, You know what? If it were not for so-called "hobby classes," I might not be involved in this community where I've witnessed and written about dance for decades. I came up in a family and at a time when I probably could never have found my way into the field as as professional, but dance classes of all kinds were where I took myself, seriously, to get healed the way others might go to church or visit the local shaman.

So, you can never tell about this "hobby dance class" thing because you can never tell who's out there and what dance really means to them--or could come to mean to them. I think we need to get more curious about this. And we need to take some care with the way we identify and view the outside world and put more interest and effort into the way we communicate with it.

And we need to turn and face outward and project.