What do I mean when I talk about contemporary dance.

[notes from a body in motion]

There have been many attempts to define contemporaneity when it comes to artistic practices. Speaking within the context of the western world, contemporary dance comes with a clear history. More specifically, the birth of what we call contemporary dance is located in the late 1960’s, when a wave of dance practitioners began to question the then established notions of what dance is and what kind of body can be considered a dancer’s body. Yvonne Reiner’s No Manifesto (first published in 1965 in the  Tulane Drama Review ), has come to represent that fundamental shift in the prevailing understanding of dance: a rejection/questioning of spectacular, virtuosic, narrative, and expressive choreographic approaches, and a cultivation of the understanding that everything can be seen as dance. Expanding even further on these notions, choreographers such as Marten Spangberg, Jerome Bell and Jonathan Burrows took contemporary dance into the Post-Dance era. What is Dance after Dance? For a moment there, contemporary dance had come to mean not dancing. But, beyond the socio-political importance of challenging predisposed ideas of what a dance should be and who is allowed to do it, and dismantling the patriarchal, imperialist and colonial characteristics of what was until then considered the foundation of all dance (Ballet), dancers desire to dance. Bodies, desire to move and to do so in poetry. So we have come full circle to techniques such as Gaga that require and cultivate a lot of virtuosity and even draw movement vocabulary from ballet. Does this mean that what comes after dance is more dance? 

Having presented a chronological review of contemporary dance history and the various names within it, I would like to entertain the idea that contemporary dance is far from being a style, for or philosophy. What if we look at contemporary dance as exactly what it says it is: the dance of the time. Or, more like, dancing with the time. Or, maybe, dancing with the bodies of the time. 

In her essay “always more than one”, philosopher and movement practitioner Erin Manning calls “body” a “misnomer” as, in her words, “nothing so stable and so sure of itself can ever survive the complexity of worlding” (Manning 2013: 14). In other words, the abundant complexity of the world itself that is continually being revealed to our perception is proof that we too (as part of the world) cannot live up to to a self-image of separation and individualism but rather are fundamentally entangled. So much so, Manning speculates, that there simply cannot really be such thing of separation as a “body”. Movement doesn’t have a body, it bodies. (Manning 2013: 14) To perceive the body as a verb rather than a noun offers a fundamental shift of the perception of one’s self. We become leaky and permeable. The separation between the “me” and “the world” simply ceases to exist. Therefore there is nothing more contemporary than the bodies of a time. Bodies being a derivative of the verb “to body”.

I body 

You body 

They body

We body

or, rather

I am bodied

You are bodied

They are bodied

We are bodied 

Mannings’s offering invites for a soft flip to our perception of self. What if everything is movement; what if a body, any-body is a collection of moment of meetings of matter; all matter. What changes when we stop thinking of the world through separate bodies but rather see it as an incredibly complex dance of intra-actions? And what does this mean for dance and, more specifically, contemporary dance?

If everything is movement, if body is a verb, what then does it mean to dance? 

“When movement dances in the dancing, what we experience is a lived extraction from the plane of immanence that is total movement, leaving us in the vibration of what is beyond the predetermined body, in the realm of movement-thinking.” (Manning 2013: 17). In other words, to dance is to align our perception with what here is called “total movement”, so that we are able to access and distil a quality, to think through movement as opposed to thinking from outside of it and, finally, to write poetry. 

Manning talks about “movement-moving”, a movement not of a body, cutting across, always active (even though not always percievable), movement as a state of being of the everything, trans-parent, trans-ient, tarns-disciplinary, trans-mattering, trans-temporal, trans-spacial, trans-everything. 

What is most confusing regarding this notion of movement-moving and, in extension, movement dancing, is my own experience of the dance. In Manning’s descriptions, there is no “I” that is dancing, no-body, the dance dancing, movement-moving, dance-moving, movement-dncing. Yet, I am there in the middle of it, experiencing, relating, emoting, chanelling, decision-making, moving, dancing. 

Can it be then a momentary meeting? My witnessing of a bodying? 

People have been dancing for millennia; we danced for rain, we danced for Gods and Demens, we danced to free ourselves from sin, to celebrate, to seduce, to concur. In an era self-identifying as the Anthropocene, an amalgamation of hyperobjects such as climate change and geopolitics, and an overwhelming sense of disconnection, what do we dance for? Or, more precisely, what does a contemporary way of dancing have to offer? 

— big logical jump?— 

My proposal is that we dance for access to the awareness of interconnectedness and for holding space for the grief that so desperately needs acknowledging, holding and ultimately, loving. To better understand what such a process could be and what would be needed of us in order to go through it, I am facilitating a series of meetings, moving sessions with contemporary bodies. In these meetings, I am looking for a process/practice that supports these bodies in their being bodied.

How does one properly analyse the experience of moving? Especially when the moving in question is improvised, fluid, fundamentally indecisive and deeply personal. What is actually the difference between the contemporary dance I am attempting to describe and simply “noodling around aimlessly”? Can there/should there be a method to the madness?

ybdg_: Children of Modernity

When talking about The Young Boy Dancing Group (ybdg_), the first thing that comes to one’s mind might be the legendary lazers in the butts. Others know them from the time they accidentally set some of their audience members on fire in Berlin. Others, follow them on Instagram. Others are loyal followers also beyond the virtual world. 

Personally, I was infuriated watching them beat up some innocent moss (for absolutely no apparent reason) during their 2023 performance in Biotoopia, after having spent two days in long discussions on how plants are indeed sentient beings and, how, along with the crucial role they play for the health of the ecosystem we inhabit, they also -most probably- feel pain. Whatever your interaction with ybdg_ may have been, one thing it is NOT: forgettable. 

But what lies underneath this collective’s edgy and provocative style? Upon a closer look, and a conversation with founding members Nica and Maria, I come to understand that this work lies at the heart of modernity and is indeed a direct product (one might even call it a response) to the conditions that characterise the contemporary art scene and, in extension, the contemporary world. 

The Origin Story

The story of ybdg_’s beginning might as well remain between rumours and creative story-telling. “Should we tell lies or the truth?” Maria responds when we asked to tell us how it all started. Indeed, there is no need to know how this meeting truly came to be, weather it was through school, at a crazy party or through the performing arts equivalent of grinder; all that matters is that Maria, Nica and Manu came together and discovered a common desire to make work that fancys itself anti-institutional. 

The origin story of ybdg_ is that of three friends “kind of doing a show together.” in Maria’s words, trying out ideas wherever that was possible, facing the challenges of the severe lack of resources in the arts, the impossibility of finding time and space for research, development and rehearsals and at the same time the necessity for artists to survive in a deeply capitalist world. These are the conditions that seem to have shaped ybdg_’s method and, inevitably, style of work. "We started kind of quitting this institutional way of producing work," shares Nica, "We didn't have that luxury,". And this, according to Maria is when it all started taking shape. 

Quick and Dirty: A methodology

It became a matter of figuring out how to make and tour work with close to zero financial (and not only) support. Undoubtably, operating outside the cushion of fancy art institusions poses more than a few challenges, but it also offers a freedom that cannot be found within the traditional boundaries of funded productions. 

Their method is as simple as it can get: 

Every place they go they invite local performers to join (whom they apparently recruit from Instagram).

For every show, there is an excel sheet where they put down ideas, a mix of new and old material, or material directly inspired from other works.

Upon arrival, they meet with the local performers one or two days before the show and together they design the performance. “We kind of figure out who wants to do what, what scenes, so it's very structured improvisation." Maria explains. 

Set up the soundtrack and that’s it. 

Inevitably this process does not lead to polished or well rehearsed material, but this is certainly not what the collective is interested in. Rawness, freshness, failure, and vulnerability in front of the audience is what they describe as “the heart of the work”. 

If you happen to be present in one of ybdg_ shows, you can rest assured that it is as if you’ve been in all of their shows (more or less). And this, it seems, is not at all by accident. 

“We only have one work that we keep on developing”, explaines Maria, “we'd like to call ourselves a bit more like a band or like a punk band. So you kind of play the good hits or sometimes you also don't need to play what the crowd wants, like with the lasers and stuff. Sometimes we don’t”. Reuse and recycle. 

Followership

In a reality predominantly  preceded by perception, image is everything. For ybdg_, Instagram is the perfect platform for playing with self(mis)representation: “If you see our work from Instagram, you might have an impression that we are this hypersexual group. But, when you see the show, it's actually very melancholic and very fragile world that has nothing to do with sexuality.” Instagram comes up a lot in our conversation, as it has become an essential tool for them to booking gigs and being able to make work. So, the crafting of their public image is something that ybdg_ take very seriously. As they say, they are “obsessed with photography” and they make sure to have a photoshoot wherever they go. And even though they claim to be more interested in the somatic side of dance making, their performances and creative method often do resemble the look of an edgy photoshoot.

Contemporarily yours 

Beyond it being a coping mechanism of the characteristic lack of support in the arts, ybdg_’s “quick&dirty” method also responds to the capitalist need to overproduce and overconsume. “Make more and make it fast” is the overal motto of the global north so, why should art production be any different? And to whose expense? Why should artists spend months of unpaid labour in a creative process when we live in a world of fast tech, fast  food, fast fashion and the list goes on? 

Ybdg_ is remarkably contemporary and that’s not because of their so-called post-apocalyptic DIY aesthetic or the skimpy outfits and their impressive number of IG accounts being shut-down due to “extensive nudity” and openned anew. They are contemporary because they make exactly the kind of art that the current world allows: a kind of art that craves vulnerability, accidentally creates vioence and allows us to make more stuff without spending too much time and resources. Sexy and audacious, homogeneously queer and instagramably weird. 

Any other kind of art is either privileged, delusional, or an act of resistance.

72 Days: Performance Analysis

72 Days is the PhD performance of Estonian Music and Theatre Academy doctoral students Tiit Ojasoo and Giacomo Veronesi, directed by Ene-Liis Semper and Tiit Ojasoo with body dramaturgy overseen by Giacomo Veronesi. The cast consists of Liisa Saaremäel, Keithy Kuuspu, Rea Lest and drama school students Alice Siil, Astra Irene Susi, Emili Rohumaa, Hanna Jaanovits, Hele Palumaa, Kristin Prits, Kristina Preimann, Lauren Grinberg. It premiered on February 20, 2022 in the black box of the Estonian Music and Theatre Academy. 

As we step into the blackbox, the performance is already happening: there is a pile of intertwining young female bodies, softly swimming through one-another, almost completely blending into each other at times. Bodies become one tender body of water. The soundscape is that of ambient sounds with races of a calm sea, accompanied by soft lighting and a sense of eternity that is highlighted by the performer’s fluid and patient movement language. It is a highly introverted moment, the presence of the audience is barely acknowledged and seems somewhat unimportant; is this them telling me that they are not here simply for my entertainment? 

The scene is quickly and undramatically resolved when the performers disentangle themselves in a matter-of-fact way and move to the sides of the stage to change clothes and prepare for what comes next: A kaleidoscopic journey in the countless of lives that are being and have been lived in the world. 

Entangled with the story of american journalist Nellie Bly, who in 1889 completed a journey around the world in only 72 days, while all the while describing all she sees in her journey, 72 Days has taken upon the task of breathing life into a collection of photographs that is touching a wide range of humanity (from studio 54 to some of the earliest photographs in history). And here lies the first paradox: A photograph always belongs to an-other space/time. It is the distillation of a moment that no longer exists therefore, there always seems to be a void between picture and spectator, between the time and space the photo was made and the time and space we encounter it. On the other hand, live performance is a medium that separates itself from other artforms due to its “presentness”; performance always takes place in the here and now. So how do the borders of these two worlds (photography and performance) manage to become so gracefully porous? 

It is almost impossible to speak about 72 Days without talking about presence. In fact, it is the refreshing and masterful choreography of presence that allows for the experience of this spectacular merging of photography and performance. Right after the dissolution of the first image, the performers go on to create tableau-vivant after tableau-vivant, conjuring poses and compositions that feel deeply familiar: they are recreating those old photographs, from the time when one would have to pose for several minutes in order for their picture to be taken. What is striking about this scene, besides the precision with which the bodies are positioned, is the way their presence is turned into absence: although we are undoubtedly in the same room and at times, the performers establish immediate eye-contact with the audience, there is a strong sense that there is some sort of invisible wall between their eyes and mine. It is as if the time that is separating the pose and the photograph, the photograph and the witness has materialized into distance in proximity. In fact, throughout the entire performance there are shifts in the quality of the presence: one moment you make a genuine connection and the next you’re worlds apart.

The image that haunted me most of all was that of seven of the performers, happily wiping the floor with a cloth and a big shiny smile. This image is held for a very long time and remains on the stage while four of the performers (who until now had been sitting on the side of the stage watching the tableaux-vivants come to life), enter the stage and concur it with an unquestionable female force. The juxtaposition of the two energies on stage is very strong and it becomes even stronger as the difficulty of maintaining a smile for that long becomes apparent though small involuntary twitches, the sensation of which mysteriously finds its way in my own body as I watch. I feel liberated, constrained, empowered, naked and safe all at once. 

Soon enough, the stage that was once occupied by a sea of bodies is now covered with a sea of things: clothes, shoes, accessories, empty bottles, guns, toys…the modern history of humanity in objects tossed on the floor of the blackbox. The performers are browsing through the items, picking and choosing, constructing a “look” and then inhabiting its image only to then peel it off them and strategically place the items on a big shelf that inhabits the back of the space, as if it is an attempt to somehow taxonomize this journey. The pace is fast and irregular which, along with the constant and intense ambient soundscape distorts our sense of time. Meanwhile, images appear, disappear, coexist, converse or ignore one another and the task of composing any kind of meaning out of these chance encounters is assigned to the audience: the play is what I make of it. As audience, we are trained to search for connections, we crave for meaning, for the gratification of understanding the big picture or narrative. But in the case of this performance, the meaning is constructed individually within each one of us watching. Depending on which images happen to meet my eyes and resonate and which connections I manage to construct, the story is different.

Kaja Kann describes 72 Days as a “two-hour trip where nothing happens.”. Indeed it feels like a journey. A journey through everything, everywhere, all at once, tinged with the sensitivity and fierceness of the eleven female performers. By the time the performance finishes everything (including the performers) is neatly organized on the big shelf at the back. 

Sources:

Performance Information: https://eamt.ee/semperi-ojasoo-veronesi-72-paeva/

Video Documentation of Performance: https://vimeo.com/742143221

72 Days performance review article on Sirp: https://sirp.ee/s1-artiklid/teater/stardipositsioon-loob-reisikirja/  

Photos of the performance made by Tiit Ojasoo