Steve Reich @ 70 @ BAM @ New York
Resuscitation of the Dying - Life Breath for New York
Steve Reich is hailed as America's greatest living composer.
Throughout the year, major performing arts organizations around the
world are marking his 70^th birthday with special events. Since New
York is the hometown of Reich, like many creative minds of his
generation, BAM Next Wave Festival that presents works of theater,
music, opera, and dance during each fall season, hosted the work of
two "popular" European choreographers, Anna Teresa de Keersmaeker and
Akhram Khan who had created at one point in their career pieces with
or to Reich's music.
New York's cultural organizations love such occasions, celebrations,
commemorations, and revivals of old legends, probably because in order
to thrive, the artistic scene needs such efforts of resuscitation. We
feel like the loving relatives of the about-to-be-deceased in an
emergency room! For example, at the beginning of the season each
September, there is a commemoration of John Cage at Dance Space
Project with readings and music. Recently, there was a celebration of
the re-opening of Judson Church in its actual site after an almost two
year long renovation. Its Monday night programs were moved temporarily
to Dance Theater Workshop during the renovation. I did not attend the
event, but, I've heard from those who did exactly what I was
expecting: Ghosts and spirits of 70s haunting the present in the
absence of anything or anyone to execute a proper burial for them.
Pedagogical Reflections upon Keersmaeker's Phases - Habituality and
Repetition
New York is almost home to Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker, not only
because she attended Tisch School of the Arts in early 80s, but also
because she appears every year either at BAM or at the Joyce Theater
which are the "big name" presenters with "big" money and "big" names
on their boards in NYC.
Surprisingly, or not so surprisingly, Keersmaeker's Fase: Four
Movement to the Music of Steve Reich presented tonight at BAM
corresponds to her years at Tisch. This piece premiered in 1982, upon
her return to Belgium from New York. This work, already a classic,
constitutes the foundational moment of her signature style and the
power of that style - minimal movement phrases unfolding with gradual,
almost unnoticeable variations within seemingly seamless repetitions,
creating a hypnotic, meditative quality, just like Reich's musical
compositions. She doesn't follow up to this earlier aesthetics in her
current work, although music continues to play a significant part in
her productions. Yet, I think the power of her name resides in these
early works.
The four phases of her work are entitled Violin Phase, Piano Phase,
Come Out and Clapping Music. (The corresponding music was composed by
Reich in the 60s). I think, at this moment, it is needless for me to
recite the features of the cool and calculated, minimal but
complicated, rational yet playful, hygienic yet seductive style of her
movement vocabulary and the relations she establishes with lighting,
space and music. There are many articles and books on this. I leave
the analysis of repetition, and the significations opened up by the
failures of exact repetitions, creating endless repetitions with "a"
difference to Derrida fans and Deleuzians.
What I caught myself thinking about this time during witnessing the
unfolding of this piece live for the second time, (excluding many
other times on video), was pedagogical concerns and questions and
challenges of habituating such a movement sequence on different
bodies, maybe also because the piece was danced (along with
Keersmaeker herself) by Tale Dolven, a relatively recent addition to
Keersmaeker's company Rosas. It is also because in my current
teaching, we are discussing "the lived body" and "embodied
intelligence of the world."
In this piece, it looks like, or it feels like (in a kinesthetical
empathy-wise sense), the learning and craftful execution of these
movement sequences within minimal yet calculated variations given a
certain fragment of time need the internalization of these movements
as "second nature." In a way, this is the artistic actualization of
the notion bio-power of Foucault that marks the calculated and
rationalized distribution of bodies within a given time and space
where they internalize motions of order, legibility and predictability
through repeated effort.
From a different yet compatible angle, Merleau Ponty's notion of habit
and bodily intelligence can help us understand how different
vocabularies of motility can be/come "second nature" to us. He writes
in his magnum opus Phenomenology of Perception (1968 [1964]) that our
actions and perceptions are largely habitual. This is the
pre-reflective base of learning - a language, playing the piano,
dancing, etc. Our skillful embodiment makes it possible for us to
react to situations in ways that have previously proved successful,
and which do not require purposive thought. We learn (as in language
games) not through conscious effort and reflection, but, through
repeated embodied efforts. Yet, our habitual mode of being is not
fixed, it is constantly being altered. Habit is therefore more like a
competence, a flexible skill. It is knowledge in the hands, which is
forthcoming only when bodily effort is made, as in the driving of the
car: we don't measure the car's size and compare it to the given space
in order to make a necessary maneuver for parking. The car is absorbed
into our bodily schema. It becomes an area of sensitivity which
extends the scope and active radius of the touch. It is the result of
a practical mastery of technique, not achieved by reflective or
interpretive thought. In the acquisition of habituality, it is our
body that understands. Consciousness is primarily not a matter of "I
think," but of "I can." Action is spontaneous and practical.
I will leave you on this note, and will come back on a different one.
� 2006 Gurur Ertem
No comments:
Post a Comment