» Continued from pg 6 In Practice: Mary Armentrout Dance Theater's listening creates an opening
Dancers’ Group and the Asian Art Museum present Fog Beast’s The Big Reveal : Thu-Sun, Jul 18-21, Asian Art Museum, SF. dancersgroup.org/onsite or fogbeast.com SARAH CHENOWETH is a dancer, teacher and writer based in Oakland, CA. She currently dances with Andrew Merrell, teaches at Shawl Anderson Dance Center, and writes for Dance Teacher Magazine and DIYdancer . To commit time to The Big Reveal , Fog Beast held a winter retreat in the Southern Cali- fornia desert. Estrella explains the reasons why, sharing that, “the idea of going to the desert was just a seed that seemed right, we poured water on it, and it grew. The harsh conditions of the desert and the kind of stark beauty and peace of the landscape is what drew us. Sharing a house with our company of performers, singing songs, cooking and eating together fed the connective tissue of our ensemble.” Out of this adherence to communion and reflection, The Big Reveal materializes. It is Fog Beast’s first show of this magnitude, having received the Gerbode Dance Compo- sition Award for the production. Dancers’ Group approached Fog Beast about applying for the grant together, and Estrella and Ward are incredibly honored: “After years of self- producing our shows, it feels like a real gift to have the strength and counsel of Danc- ers’ Group producing this work. There is also a sort of privilege that comes with being a grantee of the award. We are afforded time, space and an opportunity to construct a project a few times larger than we have ever done. But with larger aspirations, come larger obstacles… as directors we get to feel and appreciate the responsibility of being decision makers on this scale.” It is on this visionary scale that The Big Reveal invites you to the corporate American feast—to convene, to observe, to participate. What ancestors will escort you there? How will you come to the table?
proscenium. I’m still learning how to make my work live inside or alongside these more rigid institutional spaces like EMPAC, Z Space, or university theaters while disrupting them in the ways I want to.” When I asked Mary what San Francisco audiences may expect from listening that may be different from the original EMPAC per- formance, she immediately reminds me that we’ve already rejected the notion of an “origi- nal”: “There’s a piece called reveries and ele- gies that I did at the Biscuit Factory that I also set up to move. I did it four times in four months—in a little tiny gallery in Temescal [Oakland], at CounterPulse, at the beach, and at Milkbar. That piece didn’t change, I just had to remap it. I was interested to see what the mapping was doing to the piece. Then, because I loved that title so much I wanted it to be the title for the rest of my work until the day I die, I did a different version—same title, same theme, same structure but completely different—in Brighton, in the firehouse at Fort Mason for the San Francisco International Arts Festival, on the Mendocino River, at Lou- isiana State University, and at the University of Roehampton. In a certain way, the EMPAC performance of listening is really a version of reveries because the structure is very similar.” Ok, Mary, but what do you want audi- ences to know in advance about this iteration of listening ?: “How does this strange thing called performance, the two hours of your life spent as an audience, connect to other parts of your life, you, person watching this thing called dance, whatever that is. How does my double-pronged approach help, where on the one hand, your body is going to show up for you more in my work, and what does that mean, and how is that related to the fact that there’s both discontinuity and continu- ity between the theater space and the rest of the world? Where does the art start and stop? Does it happen in your memory? Your sen- sations? These are the major questions that push me. It’s an attempt to make performance
Listening to Mary, the tension between her desire and gratitude for institutional support on the one hand, and her resistance to the norms that undergird that support pulsates and constitutes an ambivalent mode of insti- tutional critique: “I feel I still can’t do what I want to do within the theater model. If I only work in the institutionalized spaces, which all theaters are, my work doesn’t show up. I have to be able to work site-specifically, even and especially within ‘theater’ spaces for my work to show up. I used the Biscuit Factory as my rehearsal space for 8 years before I pre- miered a show there [ the woman invisible to herself in 2010]. I knew you weren’t allowed to do shows at such a space—it’s off the map, it’s not a production facility, there’s no audi- ence coming to the Biscuit Factory. If you do a show in a space like that, you’re putting yourself in a ditch. That’s why we spend the money to do a show at Z Space. That’s how the institutional network works. So you climb the network: you do a show at 848, then you get into Dancers’ Group, then ODC, then Z Space, then you hope to get into Yerba Buena [Center for the Arts]. You have to make smart choices relative to that or else all the money you’ve invested in prior shows doesn’t pay off in letting you lose more money in the bigger space. I’m not kidding! I’m a mid-career art- ist in the Bay Area and so for me to go back- wards and do a show in an unknown space seemed a dangerous career move. The fact that it’s my space only makes it worse.” When I countered that the Milkbar is not an unknown space but itself an institu- tion where people want to show their work, where audiences do come, Mary sighed: “Inside my story, I still feel pretty much not allowed. When Ian came into the mix around 2003, we found ways to empower ourselves, to support our vision of perfor- mance. Our space is fluid and not really such a good space for proscenium production, which is what makes it work for me. It’s an informal rehearsal space with just a whiff of
that examines what it means to live here in this body right now. How does dance approach that experience, the localness of our lived lives, the feel of sitting at Sima’s kitchen table on this day in March? When you take me out of my real life and put me on stage, it’s a no man’s land, a beautiful, tech supported no man’s land, which makes me just want to drag my whole life back into that picture.” All this questioning reminded me of my 2001 San Francisco Bay Guardian “Critic’s Pick.” I wrote, “A newcomer to Mary Armen- trout’s work might conclude that she is, to put it mildly, out there. I can attest to the fact that while Armentrout is out there, she knows what she’s doing.” Over the past 18 years, get- ting to know Mary as an artist, somatic prac- titioner, and friend who basks in the light of not-knowing, I stand by those words today. 1. “At once a site-specific performance meditation and a tech- nology/embodiment puzzle, listening creates an opening asks how we listen and what we hear. Leading in a listening state, from a Victorian storefront through the alleys and parks of ODC’s Mission neighborhood, into and out of the ODC Theater, to end looking out over the rooftops of the city at dusk, listening creates an opening poses the further question of what we do next – once we have started to hear?” From the ODC website. SIMA BELMAR , Ph.D., is a Lecturer in the Depart- ment of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her writing has ap- peared in The Brooklyn Rail , San Francisco Bay Guard- ian , The Oakland Tribune , Dance Magazine , TDR , Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices , Performance Matters , Contemporary Theatre Review , and The Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies . Her writing on living in Naples can be found at undertheneapoli- tanson.blogspot.com. To keep up with Sima’s writing please subscribe to tinyletter.com/simabelmar.
Mary Armentrout Dance Theater and ODC Theater present listening creates an opening : May 12-14, ODC, SF. odc.dance THERE’S MORE SPACE THAN YOU THINK BOOK IT. CREATE.
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in dance MAY 2019
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