Christy Bolingbroke, Executive / Artistic Director of the National Center for Choreography - Akron, hosts this episode focused on the the relationships of choreographic practice and various technologies. Referenced in this episode are works by David Parsons, David Rousseve, Compagnie Kafig, Rennie Harris/Puremovement American Street Dance Theater, and Ragamala Dance Company.
Christy Bolingbroke, Executive / Artistic Director of the National Center for Choreography - Akron, hosts this episode focused on the the relationships of choreographic practice and various technologies. Referenced in this episode are works by David Parsons, David Rousseve, Compagnie Kafig, Rennie Harris/Puremovement American Street Dance Theater, and Ragamala Dance Company.
Jacob’s Pillow Dance Interactive
David Parsons Caught
David Rousseve/REALITY Stardust
[Music begins, composed by J.S. Bach, performed by Jess Meeker]
NORTON OWEN: Welcome to PillowVoices, a production of Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, with content from the Pillow Archives. I’m Norton Owen, the Pillow’s Director of Preservation, and it’s my pleasure to introduce our host for this episode, Christy Bolingbroke. Christy is both Executive and Artistic Director of the National Center for Choreography in Akron, Ohio, known as NCC Akron. And she has served as a speaker at the Pillow in our National Dance Presenters Forum. Here she explores how dance and technology come together in live performance, with examples from more than 30 years of Pillow history.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: In sitting down to write out this podcast in longhand, pen to paper, I pulled out the closest book as a hard writing surface. It’s a gift from a friend for my niece and nephew. My First Classical Music Book and it comes with a CD also known as a compact disc. Remember those? The irony is not lost on me as I ruminate on how quickly technology advances compared to the time and body-based performing arts. I’m writing on a book published just a decade ago and I would be hard-pressed to find the means to play the enclosed piece of technology.
Is dancemaking still an analog practice?What is to be dance’s relationship to this ubiquitous term “technology” if the digital tools - not may become, but likely will become outdated? Does that mean the human body outlasts technology? This podcast may not answer all of these questions, but they are the ones that manifested as the result of my own digging into the Pillow Archives. What I do intend to share and point out is how dancemakers performing on Jacob’s Pillow’s hallowed grounds have incorporated technology to help them convey an idea, tell their story, and sometimes, even push the art form forward.
In 1982, David Parsons created one of his most well-known, signature works, Caught. In 1987, Parsons himself gave the first of innumerable performances of this work at Jacob’s Pillow. In 2014, Gia Kourlas of The New York Times still referred to Caught as Parsons’ greatest choreographic discovery - “He invented a way for a dancer to fly.” It has been performed by many companies all over the world since then so maybe you’ve seen it. A lone dancer on a dark stage. Down spots of light and electronic bursts or synthesized sounds pulse with the figure moving in and out of the light. Less than 10 minutes in length, this solo escalates alongside faster and faster flashes of light with the figure jumping…floating…seemingly levitating. Whenever the lights flash in the darkness, we only see the dancer in the air, never on the ground. The equipment is a remote-controlled strobe light. The technological intervention is putting that remote in the dancer’s hand so they can control the lights themselves. The agency this affords the performer is nothing short of magical. Long before handheld smartphones, the technology is not just a bells and whistles spectacle happening to the performer onstage but a partner with whom they are dancing. Needless to say, that did not set off a trend of strobe-light choreography across the field though, even in Parsons’ own body of work.
In 2023, the Pillow hosted Compagnie Käfig. Their work titled Pixel included a different interplay between live movement and technology. But was it as a true performance partner or just a stage element? You decide. As the dancers move across the stage, projected dots of light appear to rustle like the leaves on the ground outside the theater there in bucolic Massachusetts. Is the technology in response to the dancers or just carefully choreographed and programmed to create such an illusion?
I don’t think the two - projections and dancers - are triggering each other’s respective movement as the illusion tries to imply. It’s just designed to look that way. But what would happen if the technology failed or a dancer missed an entrance. Would we the viewers even notice? Having relied on the technology of the human body and all of its precarity, I have been a part of a production or two where a colleague cannot go on one night. We make quick adjustments, scaling down from eight to seven people. Another dancer steps in for one section because they know it well enough, but yet another section, a trio, may become a duet for the evening. Does the audience know the difference? If a Käfig dancer were to miss a step, does the technology still go on? If the technology doesn’t work for some reason, does the audience miss it?
Also in 2023 Rennie Harris/Puremovement American Street Dance Theater performed Nuttin’ But a Word as part of the “Hip Hop Across the Pillow” Festival. Working inside of hip-hop and concert dance cultures, Rennie Harris has been choreographing within and around multi-media throughout his career. At this point in his trajectory as an artist, he incorporated video as a new form, a kind of repurposed approach to sampling himself in this case as an icon for the genre and the teacher that he is. The live performance was broken up by video interstitials of Harris speaking to the audience. His face fills up almost the entire stretch of the cyc upstage in the all too familiar video-conferencing, Zoom-like environment we know these days. He shares anecdotes and the three laws of Hip-Hop: individuality, creativity, and innovation. So inherent to the culture, of course, artists working in it embody these governing ideas, making them and their work innately progressive. By layering Rennie’s commentary in the work and in this very familiar format, the audience is invited to hear more from the artist directly, firsthand. Here is a clip of Rennie Harris speaking in Nuttin’ But A Word, at the Pillow.
RENNIE HARRIS: There is three laws of Hip-Hop: individuality, creativity, and innovation. Those three laws govern Hip-Hop culture and by design, by definition, those laws are progressive. Right, those three words are progressive. And so, we always have to be progressive in Hip-Hop culture. And so, taking street dance, and by the way, what I call street dance is a slang to me, community dance. And changing how you view it, in my opinion, is progressive.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: In comparison, Ragamala Dance Company also looks backward and forward to share the classical Southeast Asian dance tradition, Bharatanatyam, in these contemporary times. Making their Jacob’s Pillow debut in 2018, Ragamala performed Written in Water. Choreographers Ranee Ramaswamy and Aparna Ramaswamy used video projection as added context but also as a kind of visual embellishment framing the live performers onstage for this 50-minute piece. The opening tableau features a pained glass projection on the upstage right cyc and straight down on the white marley from stage edge to edge. The visual imagery includes a sort of grid presenting the dancers almost like players or tokens on a board game.Throughout the work, different layers of the video projection seem to disappear revealing serpent-like creatures or a shifting landscape.
In 2023, I had the privilege of traveling with Ragamala and got to witness another one of their works, Fires of Varanasi, at least four times in a little more than a year. It was after the third time I asked Aparna and her sister as well as fellow dancer Ashwini Ramaswamy why it seemed like some changes had been made from show to show. Certain quote/unquote favorite parts or memorable moments were somehow different than I remembered previously. They explained that they often are adapting, shifting, exploring within a work while on tour. With both live musicians and dancers, maybe a trio becomes a duet or they wear different saris from city to city. This dynamic decision-making also likely asks more of their technical team who may be calling specific cues off of what they see on stage. All of this human interplay and disruption may somehow instigate or affect the general production technology. Looking back at Written in Water now, I wonder how and where the Ramaswamys found room to play in a large and seemingly fixed landscape.
In both examples, regardless of the dancemaker’s aesthetic point of view, the choreography could still be performed and experienced without the technology. It would be subjective to each individual viewer whether or not they would “miss” the technology as part of the experience.And just like the idea of noticing a dancer is missing, a trio becomes a duet…the audience would have to have seen the work before to make the observation and comparison.
Then, there’s the work of Roussève. A postmodern dance theater maker, his earlier work in the 1990s featured David as a sort of narrator or griot, both dancing and speaking sometimes as commentary and sometimes as a first-person character. In his 2014 return to the Pillow with an evening-length work entitled Stardust, this was the first time he did not make a live appearance as part of a production on-stage. Although he clearly states it is not autobiographical, the absence of his physical performance is somewhat replaced by a character we never get to see but only get to know through text messages projected on the cyc upstage. From the shorthand and intentionally misspelled words, David Roussève and video collaborator Cari Ann *Shim Sham* Henderson cite an everyday technological reference point familiar to most of us and make a character out of its incorporation on stage. In this recording from the 2014 Pillow Talk titled “Creating Stardust,” moderated by Pillow Scholar Philip Szporer, David Roussève lays out both the lead character, Junior’s relationship with technology and how it plays a vital role in the development of this character’s journey.
Philip Szporer:this is actually a very, both painful and dangerous place for this young man. It's, it's not as simple as just texting messages, messages, which is a big part of pieces about as well. You're choosing a really interesting territory, because we think of the utility of, of, you know, texting or internet, as within everybody's grasp. But what you're doing in this particular piece is actually seemingly showing that this is this is not, you can readily access it, but it's going to place you in a place of danger.
David Roussève: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, part of his, the piece started originally began as a conversation about intimacy and technology. And so right at its core, is this conversation about the beauty of, and also the danger of the frustration with, but also the potential mystical possibilities held by technology. And so, he's trying to conduct through his raggedy old broken up iPhone, which, you know, be secondhand, these huge issues about the world. And one of the things that I find, lends his story of poignancy is that he's trying desperately to do that through a vehicle that maybe is not even suitable for those types of conversations. But he's so desperate to have his story heard, that he's texting it to someone who, it's an unassigned number. He doesn't know this person is. And he's trying to talk to himself essentially, and his prayers, through this iPhone that has become his God, which I think the iPhone shows itself to be a false God by the end of the show.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: While that clip provides insight into the choice to add the layer of a character represented by technology to the composition of Stardust. These next two excerpts from that same Pillow Talk, illustrate the process and how choices were made. Here David Rousseve describes working with his video collaborator Cari Ann *Shim Sham* Henderson as a new way of developing the protagonist’s voice and discusses the broader value of their previous experience working on dance films together.
David Roussève: I mean, I think, thematically those issues are because we've moved from a national world into a global world. So, if anything, those issues have become magnified, I created a dance film with Carri Ann *Shim Sham*, who was the video artists for Stardust about an Indonesian woman who was actually in my last piece. And it was actually this same notion of now expanding on a global terrain, of how to find what I'm avoiding the word universal. But I think especially in a global world, that that word maybe is not quite as applicable, but what was what we could all share in Shri’s journey. And so, it feels like those issues just started for me of culture crossing, have now expanded and maybe never been more present. And it is true that if you look then compositionally, there's a weaving and a seamlessness that I'm trying to achieve, because it seems as natural to me to express, to try to exploit what each one of the different disciplines brings to the table. And I have to say movement, which I've never been more infatuated with in my entire life. And its ability to express through metaphor, emotion, and narrative and words and their ability to express narrative in ways that movement can't, possibly shouldn't. As one who’s used to use movement to express narrative. And so now it's the juxtaposition of what they both bring. And then these incredible visual images that Carri Ann came up with, that through their surreal nature are also communicating in a different way. So compositionally, I'm trying to weave together these different genres, elements and forms to become this seamless and fluid whole as well.
It seems really important that Iyoka edited, because Cari Ann *Shim Sham*, shot and edited our latest film Two Seconds After Laughter. And I have to say, I directed that one, and I also directed the film that I made right before that, but Cari Ann crucial as editor and finding the shape of this film. And I learned so much about editing. So much about editing. We had a half hour film that we cut to 16 minutes. Because it's really a matter of do you want the film to screen or not. It's a short film, it's not going to screen if it's a half an hour. And I have to say it's so much easier emotionally to edit when you're looking at this box. And when you have the expertise of Cari Ann, who's known to be just a genius editor. But it translated over to Stardust. As you've probably noticed today in my talking and long winded and I know I'm artistically long winded. And so piggybacking on the creation of this film, I thought, no intermission. I didn't want to ask people to sit down to this very difficult piece for even 90 minutes, much less, it was actually a lot longer than 90 minutes. And I thought you have to find the core of this piece working with my dramaturg and edit it down. And it was painful, painful, painful, but I thought I have to approach this like a filmmaker. What can you lose? And it seemed unfair for the journey of this feast to ask people to sit there any longer, including after it premiered, we took another 8 minutes out. And I think that came from working with Cari Ann, who’s a genius editor.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Inevitably, when bringing various mediums together in live performance, one process affects the others. Like dance, film, or theater, technology can be another performance medium. And in a tech-reliant work like this, should something go wrong, the audience would definitely feel a gap or that something is missing in the performance, even if they had never seen Stardust before. David Roussève and Cari Ann *Shim Sham* have continued to work together specifically on a short 2016 commission for RAWdance’s Double Exposure, where an additional performer or voice is projected as text messages or tweets appearing on the back scrim, again as a featured choreographic tool in a 5-minute duet that becomes a sort of trio, thanks to technology. Beyond spectacle or special effects, I am struck by the incorporation of this technology and the video-collaborator relationship as one so close to how many choreographers work with dancers. It’s a relationship based in trust and giving room for all parties to be excellent at what they do to create an inextricably interwoven outcome. Perhaps this is the unique opportunity and inherent tension between dance and technology – How they might constantly push each other, respond to each other, balance each other. Not just for the sake of doing something new but to continue to find a means to communicate and convey the artist’s idea more clearly or effectively. The downside of this relationship is that like the human body, technology ages as well. To date, technology has challenged the performing arts most in how audiences experience them. In music, we have seen a turntable to an 8-track to a cassette player to a CD player to mp3 players and now streaming applications. In dance, the human body has shouldered most of the evolution of the form on our real-life stages, practicing the art form where the performer makes adaptations and developments obscuring the aging process, amplifying functional mobility, or highlighting a new approach to evolve the effective execution of the steps. Choreographically, we are at an existential inflection point. What is dance in a 21st-century streaming world? With the invention of the handheld video camera and subsequent downsizing of this technology becoming more and more efficient to today’s moment where we hold it in our hand with our smartphones, video recording rehearsals has become more normalized than ever as part of the creative process. What is the next technological tool that will become normalized as part of the creative process whether we the audience can identify its effect on stage or not?
[Music begins, composed and performed by Jess Meeker]
NORTON OWEN: That’s it for this episode of PillowVoices. Thank you for joining us today. On behalf of Jacob’s Pillow, we look forward to sharing more dance with you through the films, essays, and podcasts at Dance Interactive dot Jacob’s Pillow dot org. And of course, through live experiences during our festival and throughout the year. Special thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts for helping launch this podcast series. Please subscribe to PillowVoices wherever you get your podcasts, and visit us again soon, either online or on site.