The Dramaturgical Process: An Exploration of Motion and Emotion

Abstract

Throughout the semester there have been certain activities, readings, ¹ and films that have particularly piqued my interest in choosing a “topic” or starting point for my dramaturgical process. I began to pull from these points of interest as a way to focus my research.

One of the readings that first captured my interest was an article from The Vision of Modern Dance on Alwin Nikolais and his approach to dance and choreography. As an American choreographer Alwin Nikolais’ innovative work not only helped push the boundaries of modern dance in the United States but also in Europe. In 1978, Nikolais was invited to form the Centre Nationals de Dance Contemporaire in Angers, France by the French National Ministry of Culture. As a result, Nikolais trained many French dancers and choreographers that would carry on the legacy of his work and continue to shape and expand the definition of modern dance, particularly in Europe. Nikolais’ philosophy on allowing the emotion of a piece to come from the movement and not for movement to be stimulated by emotion interested me because of the challenge that it poses to a choreographer. It also plays into my preferred method of choreography which is to come up with movement before I decide what my work is “abo!

ut.” This idea is something that I have decided to maintain in my creative process. Although it will not necessarily come into play until the creative phase of my research process in France, it is an idea that I would like to have in my mind while carrying out preliminary research both in and out of the studio.

I also found Marvin Carlson’s book Performance: A Critical Introduction, helpful as a starting point in my research. In a chapter that discussed the emergence of different types of performance art, I was particularly drawn to a subsection called “Body Art” which described a type of early performance art that was primarily focused on physical operations of the body:

Almost any sort of physical activity was explored by the body artists of the 1970’s. Some…simply offered examples of “real-time activity” –walking, sleeping, eating and drinking, cooking—presented straightforwardly or with a distinctly playful edge. ²

Reading this passage made me think about how everything we do on a daily basis can, to some extent, be considered a type of performance. Thinking about this idea made me question how I could take everyday movements use them as material in a dance.

Another portion of the class that I found particularly interesting was an improvisation I did using plastic bags on my feet. This exercise was one that grew out of our study of object theater in which we studied what one might think of as typical props, particularly on stages in France and Europe as a whole, namely marionettes and puppets. However, in this unit we also began to think a bit more abstractly about how objects we use on a daily basis, or “found objects” might serve as stimuli for generating movement. Initially I thought it would be interesting to focus on plastic bags and the sounds that they make when manipulated. As I continued to turn the idea over, however, I decided to broaden the scope of my research to consider also how plastic bags can be used as an extension of my body’s movement, much in the way that Nikolais’ early choreography used costume and objects to extend the body in choreography.

Having this idea in mind and seeing the video of works by cirque nouveau³ companies in France, created an entirely new direction for me in my dramaturgical process. What I found most interesting in the montages of different cirque nouveau performances were the aerial artists, particularly the trapeze and tissue artists. Watching the video I was completely in awe of the strength required to perform on aerial apparatuses. From there I connected the idea of holding on to the apparatus or another person who was in turn holding on to the trapeze or tissue, to my thinking about plastic bags and the fact that their most obvious or common use is to hold things.

Having developed a metaphor that could connect my interests in plastic bags and aerial performance I began to research others ways to connect aerial performance, particularly as it is practiced in France and Europe to my interest in plastic bags and bags as a cultural phenomenon more generally. In the end I hope to synthesize my interests in movement and object manipulation with the thematic aspect of my piece and in a dramaturgical process that touches on the idea of holding things, holding onto things, and, reciprocally, how something (an object like a bag or a trapeze) can hold a person or another object. After completing my research I think that these ideas and props will lend themselves to a choreographic expression of particular emotions through movement yet without creating movements from an emotion.

Description of Research Process

At the beginning of my research process I had a very specific goal in mind. I intended to try to incorporate aerial work with emotional exploration through movement, trying to capture specific emotions in a movement without creating movements based on emotions. In these explorations I somehow wanted to incorporate the idea of working with plastic bags initially developed during our in-class improvisation exercise. However, over the last month and a half, my research process has taken me through many different phases. As a whole, my process can be organized into three stages, or four, including this written reflection on my process thus far: the first stage involved watching film clips of choreographed works including dance, dance for film, and cirque nouveau; the second stage was comprised mostly of reading texts about performance; finally a third stage of my process involved a series of short-duration improvisations that took place in various environments. While I did improvisations in the dance studio, I also danced outside and in a space where I feel comfortable and entirely free to be myself: my dorm room. These three stages of my research process have steered me to a slightly different direction than I initially had in mind and has opened up more options in terms of how I will continue to research in Paris.

As I began looking at videos of works by Philippe Decouflé and clips from Hors les Murs that incorporated aerial or acrobatic elements into their performance,⁴ and after watching excerpts from performances and films by Decouflé ⁵ I did an automatic writing on each one in an effort to really get myself thinking about dance from the French perspective⁶. Watching these videos was also helpful in doing a series of initial improvisations in which I pushed myself to move more outside of my comfort zone. Over the past year as I have choreographed more works I have come to realize that I do in fact have a very identifiable style and aesthetic preferences and so in beginning to develop movement phrases for my final piece I did not want to be stuck moving the way I typically move. I wanted to challenge myself so that when I went into the studio I was not too limited in my movement vocabulary.

After I watched excerpts from different types of aerial performance, particularly in cirque nouveau and did my automatic writings on what I had just seen, I went back through my journal and tried to pinpoint what it was about aerial work that interested me so much. I realized that what I was drawn to was the support and sense of connection that the artists seem to feel with their apparatuses and to the other artists they were working with. While initially I wanted to try to incorporate aerial performance into my own final piece, pinpointing my exact interest helped me draw a connection to a quotation I had read in a book on Nikolais’ technique. In a section on “realism to abstraction” I came across a quotation which reads: “the other meaning of abstraction: to abstract the essence or essentials from a realistic or literal object or state of being and retranslate those principles back to the abstract language of space-time-shape-motion.”⁷ In a way, my challenge in translat!

ing aerial movement to the floor can be seen as a form of abstraction.

After focusing on watching performance examples, I spent time reading and rereading some of the materials I had collected. Still, one of the things I found most interesting was the article about Nikolais and the book on the Nikolais/Louis technique. There were a few quotations that I found particularly helpful, especially for the third part of my independent study research when I finally began moving and doing improvisations: >Think of a prop as something that will texture and extend the shape of the body…Do not handle objects as unrelated props. They become a part of you, an extension of your body…Decentralization: place your center into the newly created entity…project into it and through it. Bring it to life. ⁸ I did an automatic writing type of exercise on these three quotations which involved a sort of associative writing process in which I wrote one reflection on the excerpt, read what I had just written, and then commented on my own reflection and continued this process for eight minutes. From that point forward, this became one of the exercises I used to process text that captured my attention. Although I did not use the actual text that I wrote as a stimulus for movement in what I will call my third stage of research, I did keep these ideas in mind while improvising. While I was working more in this reading stage of my research, I found that reading articles about performance and performance studies were not actually helping to stimulate creative ideas but instead seemed to make me sensor my ideas more than usual, fearing that I was not being creative enough. While I was coming to this conclusion about my reading, I happened to be reading some poetry by E.E. Cummings for anot!

her class that helped me begin to think creatively again. There was one particular poem which really struck me for a number of reasons:

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady I swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says
we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph

And death I think is no parenthesis⁹

As an English major I am constantly negotiating the realms of concreteness and abstraction (an idea that I first became more aware of in reading about Nikolais philosophy). To me this poem is all about abstraction. And not only is it about abstraction, it also touches on ideas of connection and relationships that I am interested in exploring through movement.

With all of this in mind, I started doing a series of improvisations using props including several using plastic bags as well as a few with bungee cords¹⁰. With the two different types of props I explored what type of movement I tended to produce when incorporating them into my improvisation and what type of emotional quality they produced. I found that when working with the bungee cords, I tended toward movement that capitalized on the oppositional pull that I was able to get from the cords. When working with the bags, I generated movement that was more free flowing and circular. Although I am still not entirely sure what props I want to use for my final project I am open to using either depending on what emotional quality I decide that I want to capture.

Toward the end of my research process I began working on a final project for my composition II class. In the past when I have choreographed, I started with movement and from that movement determined what the piece was “about” or what the emotional quality or tone was. However, this time I took the opportunity to explore an emotion with my movement, against the grain of my own intuition and Nikolais’ philosophy. I took an automatic writing that I did earlier in the semester and boiled the piece down to one idea: connections. While the other parts of my research dealt more with the prop and movement aspect, for this exploration, I focused on the emotion behind the movement I was creating. Although it is a short piece and by no means complete, I worked simply on creating an emotional experience through the movement that I chose to use. When I say this, I do not mean that I wanted the movement to read as being of a particular emotional quality like happy or sad. What I really wa!

nted was for the movement to convey an emotional connection between the dancers on stage, while allowing the audience to determine for themselves what emotional quality it evoked for the audience.

In my study, I created a lot of the movement based on the “theme” of my writing. The automatic writing exercise that I initially began working with was loosely about my family, particularly my mother and father and the connections that I have with each of them. Using this I chose to generalize the idea and expand it to think about all of the different typed of connections that I have with people that are meaningful to me. I also came up with certain words to use as stimuli from which my dancers could generate movement and then use their movement to create phrases. Part of my desire to work this way came from a description of Pina Bausch’s creative process described in Ciane Fernandes’ book on the Wuppertal Dance Theater. In a section titled “The Creative process: (Dis)Assemling Characters and Scenes,” Fernandes described how in the first rehearsal of one of Bausch’s projects she began by telling her dancers to write a sentence which they would later have to communicate to th!

eir peers through gesture. In a later rehearsal Bausch asked her dancers how they cried and their response was to be in gestural form¹¹. While I did not use the exact same techniques, I did use a parred down version that I thought was more suited for my dancers. Although my piece titled Support Plead Disconnect is still a work in progress, this particular exercise was extremely useful in helping me to begin to generate movement phrases that I might want to come back to when using props, to see how the use of a plastic bag or a bungee cord wrapped around my body might alter the movement and possibly even the emotional quality that it carries¹². As I continue my movement exploration and generation I think it will be and interesting and insightful to experiment with some of Pina Bausch’s methods with a group of dancers.

Conclusion

As a whole, my research has helped me focus on how I want to use my props and “found objects.” I was initially wedded to the idea of incorporating elements of aerial performance into my final performance and while I have not ruled the possibility out altogether, I have redirected my attention toward translating the ideas about aerial performance that captured my attention to the ground. In addition, while I was initially solely focused on the plastic bags as my props, improvising with the bungee cords that I had found in the costume shop led me to think about working with multiple props and highlighting the differences in movement and emotional quality that different props elicit. My improvs have also started me thinking about using a set piece as a prop of sorts. I was so enthralled with the bungee cord idea that I am now considering creating a spider web-like contraption out of bungee cords that would be a stationary piece of scenery, yet something I could move with or on !

at the same time.

While in Paris I am extremely interested in doing a bit of anthropological “fieldwork” by people watching. In my movement research I realized that the most interesting movements are not the biggest, showiest tricks. Sometimes, what seems “prettiest” or most satisfying are the small gestural movements that actually contain a great deal of meaning. Just by watching a conversation or any other interaction between people in public will be a great place to find movement indicating emotion without being overtly showy or literal, especially when taken out of the context of the performance of everyday life and placed in the context of a theatrical performance¹³.

Visiting the Centre National de Costume de Scène in Moulin is another part of my “fieldwork” in Paris that I am looking forward to capitalizing on. Although it is not necessarily something that I have focused much attention on during this phase of my research process, I think that visiting the costume collection there will be useful in helping me to start thinking about all of the elements of my performance. I also think that it might serve more directly as a stimulus for costuming ideas. For instance, it might be interesting to look at some more traditional designs created for dance and think about how I might take a somewhat traditional costume piece like a tutu and recreate it using a nontraditional material: plastic bags.

In the coming phases of my research I am most interested in continuing to experiment with different found objects to elicit different movement vocabulary and qualities that will help me pursue the emotion through movement idea that I am so interested in. As my direction has shifted a bit during my process, my focus has sharpened and helped me to think about my entire performance, rather than just thinking about “dancing.”