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PURE RESEARCH (VANCOUVER) DRAFT JUNE 19 LINK Dance • Gail Lotenberg, Artistic Director with • Cara Siu, Senior Creative Collaborator, and • Deanna Peters, Dancer

D.D. Kugler, Dramaturge, Simon Fraser University Brian Quirt, Dramaturge, Nightswimming Rachel Steinman, Intern Dramaturge, Nightswimming

And the following participants on: SATURDAY, JUNE 9, 10:00-­‐4:00 • Ruth McINTOSH, professional actor Students: • MARCELA CACERES • ARYO KHAKPOUR • KAYLIN METCHIE • CHU-­‐LYNNE NG • JENNI REMPEL (Saturday only) • SHANNON WONG (Saturday only)

MONDAY, JUNE 11, 10:00-­‐5:00 • Brenda Morrison, Director of the Centre for Restorative Justice • Robert Seto, Restorative Justice practitioner

TUESDAY, JUNE 12, 10:00-­‐5:00 • Brenda Morrison • Robert Seto Students: • MARCELA CACERES • ARYO KHAKPOUR • KAYLIN METCHIE • CHU-­‐LYNNE NG • JUNE FUKUMURA (Tuesday only) • MINAH LEE (Tuesday only) • STEFFI MUNSHAW (Tuesday only) • CONOR WYLIE (Tuesday only)

BACKGROUND LINK Dance is an organization that emphasizes cross-­‐disciplinary dialogues as a means to create dance. Since 2006, the company has collaborated with scientists, legal scholars, restorative justice advocates, and the public (through the critically-­‐acclaimed Breakfast Dance) to make performances within a dialogical context. The goal of these projects is inherently political—to take ideas generated by people outside the world of dance, and to expand and translate these ideas into a more universal language, the language of the body. Collaborators in all previous

projects contributed meaningfully to the research we conducted to make those pieces.

However, when I brought LINK Dance into Nightswimming’s Pure Research this month, I made sure we arrived with the intent to uncover new ways to highlight dialogical process. Our goal was to discover ways to make dialogues more pronounced in the theatrical context of future work.

METHODS To reveal the dialogues more overtly in the context of a dance—this was my underlying objective. To achieve this goal, I wanted to inform myself more deeply about how to incorporate verbal language into the movement-­‐based vocabulary of a dance production. I needed to understand what would allow language and movement to sit comfortably together and in a way that gave equal authority to both. I needed to experiment with ways to invent a frame for the dialogues; frames in which the movement remained core as a means of speaking the main content of the piece, but didn’t bump up against the spoken dialogical elements. My overriding desire was to see if I could find ways to shine a light on the content of our dialogues rather than bury them within the research phase, hidden from the audience and known only to the creators.

After much discussion with Brian Quirt and D.D. Kugler prior to the actual days in studio, I entered Pure Research with the following question: How many spoken word and dance scores could I reveal to myself that allowed words and dance to sit in a comfortable juxtaposition to one another. I wanted the scores to be: a) innovative (or attempt to be at least) in the sense that they would illuminate the collaborator’s thinking on a subject while not relying solely on spoken language, b) action-­‐oriented, in that they called on action implicitly, and c) familiar, where familiarity could breed an effective relationship with the audience.

FINDINGS What I discovered over the course of the three days we spent investigating these questions and experimenting with forms that I brought into the room, was that at a core level, I was really researching how to re-­‐compose the context of performance multiple times throughout the duration of a single performance. Why? Because the dialogical process requires a sense that at some point everyone in the room is both witness and witnessed. To embed that principle within a performative context requires that who or what is being watched can shift on a dime.

In the work LINK Dance has been doing with the Restorative Justice community, which offered the underpinnings for this research, the dialogical process happens mainly in a Circle format. Circles involve use of a Talking Piece and when someone is holding that talking piece, they are the only person speaking and all other eyes are on them. The talking piece is passed around a circle, and in Pure Research we relied heavily on this format to launch into our experimentation. What we determined is that this protocol can be understood as an invitation to empower the storyteller to take full focus. By implication, by using this protocol, we had an organizing principle that inherently directed the attention of an audience from one moment and location to the next in a piece.

We also had this device in place to build the arc and transformation of theatrical narrative in our studies. It became clear by the end of our third day that who has the talking piece is important but being sure that there is a sense that it had been spread relatively equally among the group is also quite important, We didn’t really experiment with this final point because it was a culminating discovery that requires more attention. Yet, it is worth reporting for my own reflections, that the talking piece is a procedure but though procedural it does not whitewash the emotion on the room. Conversely, by giving people uncontested time to speak,

emotions swell quite high and the dramatic arc of a Restorative Justice Circle may offer a fabulous shape for the arc of a theatrical production.

What accompanies the talking piece in circles is a lot of spoken language. But in Pure Research we were experimenting with ways to devise using the talking piece to allow the room and the players in the room to speak through less verbal forms and primarily to use the talking piece to allow the context of the viewing experience to shift rapidly from the audience as witness to the audience as witnessed, or to redirect focus suddenly from all eyes on one pre-­‐ determined performer to reorienting that focus to a large extemporaneously composed ensemble. These shifts were one of the main discoveries of our experimentation. And spoken word scores were required to make them work. They were needed to make the shifts go somewhere in an elegant manner rather than long-­‐winded explanatory instructions.

So back to the experimentation with spoken word scores…. What we learned was that they reinforced the talking piece, sometimes leading and sometimes following, but they served as transitional devices that not only shifted the circumstances theatrically, but also the very nature of who would be watched and where in the performance environment these players could be watched.

Some of the Word Scores that I am excited about from our research are as follows: 1. Musical Chairs In any Circle, there is a facilitator who helps give direction to the process. In our circle, I always played the role as the facilitator. I would send the talking piece around the circle and one time when it came back to me, I suddenly said, “who ever wants to play Musical Chairs please move their chair to the center of the circle.”

Musical Chairs offered a familiar invitation, which many people accepted, meaning they volunteered to play. The game called action to itself, and allowed the focus point in the room to shift on a dime. We watched people moving with musical accompaniment, which was entertaining in itself. There was no problem if too many people volunteered to play because I could keep widdling the group down till it reached the size required for the show to move on. That could mean anything. It could mean that the people in the center became our focus for a new section of the show. But that is not the only option; it could also be that I get a certain number of chairs into the middle of the room and then ask the people who caused that ring of chairs to take shape, now to please take a seat on the outer ring, so that a composed sequence of dance could move into that focus area. The point is that the Musical Chairs device shifted the environment and theatrical focus for a new section to unfold.

2. In the same style of spoken word scores being used as transitional element, we discovered “Simon Says” and “Red Light Green Light” are also games that have the ability to direct the audience or players to action with simple directions that many will immediately find familiar. It is worth adding here that “Simon Says” had a more sinister layer of meaning or subversion for our work. The game itself is inherently manipulative because the caller can get the players to do things that were right by instinct but not right according to the rules of the game (just by covertly leaving out the words “Simon Says”). This disconnect between impulse and rules mirrored aspects of the punitive justice system where for instance, your instinct to give something back that may have been looted during a riot, is not able to be enacted because it becomes incriminating evidence against that person. The impulse to right wrongs will make you a loser in the game of criminal justice.

3. Another exciting discovery we made about all of these games was that they could be used on multiple levels to bridge the relationship between dialogue and movement.

They can be used as transitions but also for participation; they could also be used as a form for creating choreographed dances. They could be as recognizable or as unrecognizable as the director wants. But the common thread of the game being used in different ways and different context offers resonances and layers that will ripple through the work.

4. “Red Light Green Light” was first used as a performance devise in our explorations. The way I would describe it from my perspective as the caller in the game, was that as an audience I was constantly being surprised by how many fabulous ways the performers recreated the space behind me every time I turned around to say “Red Light Green Light 1, 2, 3”.

I had the idea after our Pure Research was over that I could have asked the viewers who were on my side of the game (meaning the rest of the audience), to turn away with me on each round so that when they looked back, like me they too could have been surprised by the creative variances the performers offered each round of the game. But then what if, once only two of the performers were officially “still in” the game, what if I had turned my back suddenly on the audience and said “Red Light Green Light 1, 2, 3”? The audience is now in a position to act. Add to this the notion that I could have prepared the performers who had been “out” earlier in the game to be ready with a task of working the audience towards a group goal of making themselves into a given formation. Over a few repetitions, after some of the surprise of them being in the actors’ role had dissipated, the performers could have assisted the audience to shape themselves into the formation of a standard audience.

Now suddenly the performance shifts, who is acting has shifted and when we are done, the room has shifted into a new compositional form. It has turned into a relatively organized space for composing a dance in a typical fourth-­‐wall arrangement. I seek this type of flexibility in my relationship with the audience. It allows the context of the room to alter repeatedly and with it, for the focus of who is witness and who is witnessed to continually shift. It will be an added challenge and a delight, if I can also make the talking piece continually appear in the right place. So that after an unexpected shift occurs, the audience sees the talking piece appear in just the right place and time so that when we settle into our new configuration and focal point in the performance, the talking piece seems to have followed the action, or perhaps even led the action.

5. Another finding of a score that worked well was a Square Dance. The idea came to me one day outside the studio because it was a spoken word score that drew movement naturally towards itself, and when I proposed it to people inside the studio, it was funny how provocative a proposal it was. Using a traditional form like this one (that has so many connotations connected to it), to reveal a new form, elicited a great deal of conversation.

The Square Dance as a traditional form proved to be a rich format for our experimentation because it could be a fun participatory installation piece. In that scenario, when there is enough time to teach the group who gathered for the event, all the calls and the accompanying movements, the participation option is offers gratifying outcomes because it is a dance inherently built to lead to a successful outcome.

In a more rigorous performance environment where the flow of the performance could be too significantly halted by the learning process for the dance, the Square Dance explorations offered a different medium as the performance material itself with very subversive possibilities. What we did when we created the Square Dance is we made a very simple dance based on standard calls: i.e. Swing your partner, Right

hand star, Grapevine. Once composed and learned, we altered the language of the caller. The altered language gave different texture to the enactment of each movement.

An example was “Greet your Corner”, versus “Confront your Corner Eye to Eye”, or “Face off your Partner” rather than “bow to your Partner”. With the shifting narrative through the enactment of the Square Dance you could tell a story poetically, imagistically; with minimal words that can be embodied in the form of the dance. It could actually take the worst level of conflict in a show through to resolution if done very well.

Another nice thing about the Square Dance is that the trained dancers, the moving actors and the Restorative Justice volunteers in the room did the movement with almost equal prowess in terms of their embodied reaction to the calls. Square Dances are inherently democratic in that it is the community that makes the form work, not any one mover in the group. As a choreographed section for performance, it allows the collaborators in a cross-­‐disciplinary production to perform with trained dancers in a way that gives authority to no one. In fact the larger size of the ensemble created by the community that formed around the collaboration, is the thing that allows the form to be enacted and therefore to be successful.

One final thought about that issue of making the Square Dance look good and whether it can include participants that have not yet learned the dance, meaning could it include volunteers who ended up in the focal point of a show without having pre-­‐ rehearsed the piece? Yes. Because a Square Dance is often done in partners, the ones who know the dance could be in equal number to those who are uninitiated, which means if the ones who know it push and pull on their partners enough, they can make the Square Dance work. Also, if the dance is repeated a few times, it will end up looking strong because it is the very nature of the Square Dance that participants learn the form quickly. In sum, 4 dancers could make 8 dancers look pretty good, quite quickly even in high-­‐stakes situation.

Aside from the games and the spoken word scores that were familiar, we did play with other forms that were more inventive. One was having a speaker speak quietly near a partner whose task was to move. The arrangement created a situation that the interpretation through the body of a dancer was the audience’s only access to the words being delivered by a speaker.

Those words eventually got louder so that the audience can access the words through their original medium of spoken language but then the necessity of the dancer came into question.

We tried a number of things to take the relationship to a satisfying culmination. One was to have the dancer become the first author once the auditory level of the speaker reached a threshold level; then the dancers role remained essential. Another solution was to understand the relationship theatrically between the speaker and the mover so the dependence between them would have a new direction to follow towards conclusion once the auditory level increased. This series of experiments has some rich possibilities.

One other score that offered great possibilities especially in an installation situation was using a few repeating phrases of dance that are choreographed solos, duets, and/or trios. Have these dance cycle through a pattern, while simultaneously having speakers volunteer to speak.

The order can come through a circle process or any other procedure. What was interesting was that when the volunteer speakers were speaking they had a time maximum that was equivalent to the duration of each phrase of movement. Seeing the same movement phrases in an alternating pattern of sorts, accompanied by random and varied spoken texts was very interesting because it offered so many unplanned points of connection between words and

movement. We learned that it was most effective when we had the speakers speak in ways that limited them from being the focal point, by having them turn around to face away from the audience. It could be interesting to have them stand behind the audience or on the outside of the circle of chairs. These are further experiments that could be conducted.

one experience I found compelling that is NOT mentioned: cara/deanna quietly talking and working out their choreographic score upstage of robert, brenda, and gail in chairs downstage talking about restorative justice... I liked seeing the process of both talking and movement being worked out... additionally, when gail moved upstage to give cara/deanna notes, then returned to robert/brenda and shifted the rj conversation... that gave another layer to the process, a sense someone guiding/shaping the process... anyway, that was interesting to me, perhaps not to gail...

For every discovery there are many unanswered questions. But I will finish this report here by simply expressing my gratitude to Nightswimming and to Simon Fraser University for allowing me to dive into some of my inquiries and into many of my fears. I am thankful for the chance to answer some questions through rigorous investigation rather than through intuition, which often leads back, over and over again to the same solutions.