>cris (& others), can you give a description of what crash dancing is? this
>is all fascinating to me, but i feel underinformed....somehow missed the
>karlien posting cris is responding to, and cant get to the chisenhale dance
>palais and altho i recognize the name carolee schneeman & have seen stills
>of some of her work, dont know abt judson. But what would a few moves in
>the course of one such event come to in words?

Hi David and Matt and Karlien (yes, please do put the discussion up on the
list) and Ric and Randolph and all,

i'm not sure i can amply satisfy your curiosity but'll try.
It's a zig - zag. Going to spray in some direct quotes and some
allusion to (or illusions of) syntactical and so on strategies
that might partake of morsels from equivalence.

Judson dance (this is ludicrously general, practitioners developed
dif(f)fering tendencies and i stress i'm no authority) certainly
concerted a core investigation in presenting movement not 'normally'
considered to be dance 'as dance'. Involvement of 'non-dancers',
those without formal training in the dances  -  that's how i got
'in' in the first place.

i.e. everyday movements or sports movements (Paxton has a workshop piece he
developed based on improvisations leading both towards and away from
but always trying in between to 're-create' sports photos cut out of the
newspapers), children's games, social dancing or work movements.

Applications of 'physical materials'.

Make the jump   -   colloquial speech, specialist vocabularies,
'non-standard' english, noun becomes verb, clear pronoun and 'originator'
is less cogent, two divergent lines are heard (like in the Wooster
Group's extraordinary 'LSD' production, the one containing the 15 minute
version of Miller's complete 'The Crucible'). Syntactical trajectories
tumble in the spin dryer, exquisitely interfering with one another.
Quote and reference to low - high, hackneyed and arcane genres (much
as found in music such as Zorn's hommage to Godard or Mickey Spillane).
Inclusion, collision, doubt, vulnerability, deliberately off-balance
'progression', awkward rules, stupid attempts to transcend physical
limitations. Write it and rite new it under the rot clan gander pit.
Scurrilous flish problem get that bog stampede arson up and hear
a blue hoot spider on ma weather's mop.

Goofy glamours, your question is hard David. I was never at a Judson
gig. Though i can attempt to give some sense of what it translated
to in London and Devon (the festivals at Dartington were crucial
watering holes for the cross-over between the states and here).
At the risk of overdetermining the trivialised -

A man is displaced, standing on a small table, on one leg, wearing
underpants and a tutu, playing irish jigs on a penny whistle as he slowly
shifts the weight on his standing leg and turns. He is lit by a beam
from a hand-held torch. The woman holding the torch shakes the light
as he shakes to turn. With her free hand she is shaving one her
legs, but only from the ankle to the knee. Another woman, further away
is simply struggling to move in various ways whilst holding a full
size wooden door on her head. All the lights go out. Super 8mm Film of
a boy irish step dancing is projected onto the tutu of the 'still
turning' man. A voice. situated in the rafters above the audience, is
reading out loud, recontructed 'manners' from a Victorian etiquette book.
Two women rush into the space wearing american football crash helmets,
they crash into each other at high speed and fall to the ground. They
are the leg shaver and the door-wielder. Getting up extremely slowly,
as if in a bhutto peformance they come upright and then rush around the
room only to come crashing together again. The tut'd man is now wearing
a black suit, and sits on the table, his legs crossed, silently reading
a book. Total time taken approximately one hour.

Of course this resonates with concerns of Fluxus. What it meant in practice
was that simply (simply!) walking across the stage without any
pretense at performing (that old 'act naturally' conundrum  -  very
different from Aristotle's concerns it seems to me?) could form the
basis for a whole piece (Steve Paxton's 'Satisfying Lover'). I've
performed in this piece under Paxton's direction and it's pretty
funny how many people (it uses a number of performers  -  haven't
got the score to hand  -  20 or so) can't resist looking at the
audience or a smirk or an overt or even subtle funny walk and such.
I probably came across as blank and serious and gormless, same
difference.

Anyway, walking, sitting (maybe watching tv as in Velda Settlefields
piece with David Gordon 'Fragments'), queuing, running, lying,
rolling, body surfing and so on all took their place in the dance.
If Fluxus sometimes took 'art' to the street (although it was later
i remember the ICA show entitled 'art into life into art' as getting
to the nub of a lot of this period) then Judon brought street
movements and domestic posture and so on into the experimental performance
space. And it was truly experimental. An environment and audience and
curational approach that encouraged the trying out of ideas.

Of course Trisha Brown developed her everyday, from the rooftop dance
pieces in New York, into the highly aestheticised precision choreography
we know her for today. Fluid interface of what was 'release' fused
with quirky detail that suggested far more alluring social behaviours
than those we are mostly saddled up with. Uses of visualisation
were prevalent in dance long before sport got hold of it. It was
never something i liked much, but some choreographers use
visualisations to affect their dancer's movements. So in those
senses there is a text of the piece, inclusing personal text from
dancer to dancer, the social text of the 'performance space' and
the context of the 'work'. Kind of paratextual and peritextual
equivalences.

Lucinda Childs developed repetitative phrases much along the lines
of so-called 'systems' composers such as Steve Reich and Terry Riley.

Meredith Monk got various singers and writers (including Dick Higgins)
to move in choreographed sections of pieces such as 'Turtle Dreams'.

I keep coming back to Bourdieu's 'habitus' in all of this. You know,
if you're doing Paxton's walking piece,
what about all of one's body's involuntary, acculturated gestures
postures attitudes and on? Here's the dialectic  - between 'habitus'
and the Judson concern with 'letting go' of dance conventions.
There's also a tension with Benjamin's use of the 'flaneur' and
with 'frame' theories as applied to performance by Goffman.

Try actually performing Jackson MacLow's 'The Pronouns' with a
bunch of people. Work it out according to his instructions and
at least some of what i'm on about will raise itself.

'Euro-crash' as i (and many others) term it is a stylised branch
of physical theatre closely related to dance that grew out of
younger choreographers frustration with the kind of work i
invented to describe earlier. Sped and precision of often
difficult and sometimes dangerous physical interactions is
ascendent. Sometimes, as in the case of Vanderkeybus, this is
'task' based  -  i.e. people throwing heavy bricks to each other
across a stage, catching and building something whilst some
earlier construction is dismantled. Often in combination with
other movements phrases, the effect being a little like a
performance art event meeting a motor-cycle display team.
Often bodies are thrown at other bodies, to be caught, or not.
Sometimes, as in the work of DV8 this is framed within a
psycho-sexual analysis of gender roles and relationships.
Their classic example would be 'Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men'
which translated well to tv, about Dennis Nielsen the gay
serial killer.

You have to imagine what it would be like to launch yourself into
the air and onto someone else's shoulders from a couple of metres
away, how that physical impact would 'impact' on the person
you landed on. How that can be treated exhuberantly or as an imposition
or agressively or sexually and so on. 'Euro-crash' is sometimes
exhilerating to watch, in small doses (it can too readily ossify
into attitude and pose), is physically demanding and 'dancers'
often hurt themselves. hmmm

Contact Improvisation is generally its undemonstrative, untheatricalised
springboard. David, have you ever tried Tai Chi? CI uses the space
energised in one's bodies immediate extended environs during Tai Chi
and places another body (sometimes more than one) into that space.
The bodies have some point of contact (this does not, although usually,
necessitates touching) meeting of physical mass  -  weight. Such
locations are the focus of the beginning of the 'dance'. Play at
being drunk with a friend but instead of being out of control explore the
possibilities for mutual controls  -  converse through your bodies.
Some people get turned on by CI and broadly miss the point. CI is no
about sex than massage is. Concentrating on the form of the unfolding
interaction  -  the dialogue  -  is where attention is most usefully
engaged. It's surprising how stiff you can feel your physical responses
to be  -  how stilted and ungiving. It's also surpising how that
begins to loosen under the imapct of giving play. How spatial
orientation wakes up, not into a transcendental but into an enriched
awareness rooted in the bodymind.

it's late, there's more but slowly slowly catchee man ray as is said

love and love
cris













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