2019/20 SEASON INVERTIGO DANCE THEATRE: FORMULAE & FAIRY TALES
HANDOUT 3: WHAT IS DANCE THEATRE? What is “dance theater”? Is it Pina Bausch’s raw examinations of everyday life? Is it performance that mixes movement and text? Is it dance that tells a story? Dance Magazine talked with four choreographers who use elements of dance and theater—but whose work escapes easy categorization—about playing with narrative, integrating movement and words, and what “dance theater” means to them. Annie-B Parson: Dance theater, to me personally, means that there’s no hierarchy of materials you can use to make a piece. Movement is not more important; text and narrative aren’t more important. I feel this complete free range as I try to express something, to use a whole variety of theatrical elements, like relationship, cause and effect, clothes, dance, singing, talking, found text, plays, literature—this cornucopia of theatrical possibilities. Having said that, the contradiction is that I think dance is the most important thing. Dance is sacred. So even though everything’s equal, what really needs to be preserved is dance, because it’s the most fundamental element at hand. I don’t know why dance and theater ever separated in the first place. Since the ancient Greeks, they’ve been united. That theater became this thing where people sit on couches and move their mouths—to me it’s insane, so unexpressive. One thing that attracted me to Samuel Pepys [the 17-century English diarist and inspiration for Big Dance Theater’s new work, 17c] is that when he went to the theater, he described the dances. He’s seeing Shakespeare, first- and secondgeneration Shakespeare, and he’s saying, “Well, the play was bad, but the dances were really good.” It didn’t look like theater does now. They danced! Okwui Okpokwasili: I don’t call my work dance theater, but I am borrowing super-liberally from both disciplines. Both have to do with language, embodied language, these multiple utterances that have different forms and shapes that I hope will collide with each other. Generally I start with text. Once I’ve written something, I try to think about particular gestures or if there’s some kind of movement that resonates with what I’ve been writing. In working on my piece Bronx Gothic, I came out with this vibrating gesture, something related to a twerk and a twerk gone wrong and the question of how long can that be sustained. When I move away from written language and go into a space of movement, it’s a very open and yummy space where I just follow my body, but it’s anchored somewhere in this text that I have floating in the back of my mind, a word or an idea. It’s like going into a really wide field, and you don’t know which way you’re going to go. You can stay in one place, but it’s quite spacious.
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