Clarice Smith Center, University of Maryland Fall 2005
Bebe Miller
Blog #1
Clarice Smith Center, University of Maryland
Photo by Jim Wood
Hello. It’s a pleasure to introduce myself along with introducing Landing/Place, the work that I’ve made with my company and collaborators. As a choreographer, it’s rare to have the chance to invite you, the audience, into the inspiration and process behind a work, so this is a real pleasure. By this point in the process – nearing the point where I’ll have to actually stop making in order to share the work – looking back seems much more orderly than the way forward seemed to be at the start. Landing/Place has been a three-year effort with a core group of dance, sound and visual artists, all stemming from an odd feeling of being lost inside of Place. Well, not actually lost, let’s say unfamiliar, or out of rhythm, or out of step with a foreign logic that surrounds you. Travel carries that sense of things with it, of being inside of someone’s familiar ways, a manner of sensing that’s somehow different than your own. Landing/Place concerns this impact of the unfamiliar against the everyday: picture any collision of images that tells you you're not at home. [This photo from Asmara, Eritrea carries that sense of a foreign matter-of-fact-ness, and is the image that set this whole work in motion.] It explores sensory, spatial, and cultural dislocation, one’s yearning towards order in the apprehension of difference. And while it’s inspired by my travels in Eritrea, Landing/Place has been created as a portrait of a more common landscape, the daily exchange of multiple ways we imagine ‘Place.’
I traveled to Eritrea in 1999 to teach contemporary dance. When I found that my own sense of choreographic irony (might that be a post-modern vehicle for meaning?) had no place there, I lost my way. I was struck by the directness of people’s gaze, and it wasn’t until I was home that I realized that they looked at me so directly because I didn’t fit in the picture. The lack of irony was because they had no use for it. As artists their job was to teach each other how to be good citizens and neighbors, not just to comment from their own perspective. So where should I start teaching the idea of dance outside of cultural tradition or political propaganda? Could I use my post-modern dance ‘code’ in a new situation? The answer is another story, but the questions led me to question our own codes of culture, of imagining, of art, of order, wondering how to capture the sense of being inside someone’s homeland. This work is the result.
As a choreographer I’m interested in using physicality as a device for locating oneself in our current times. How to listen to the weight of a gesture, how to qualify the space between movers is my constant current of interest, packaged with how we might see ourselves in the world. Our daily dance practice is how we figure out community, in a way, and we rehearse to re-imagine a wider view of ourselves. Our daily task is to take a risk into the unknown, and that unknown extends into what happens between dancers, to the body, to the move, and with the audience. While working on Landing/Place we came up with a lexicon of words and images that seemed to fit our process:
Juxtaposition of time and place
Displacement of time and space
Telescoping views of the situation
Persist (inside someone else’s framing)
Spontaneous unison, like kittens
House
We are ideas talking to other ideas
Alchemy
Magical realism
Fully intent on something that’s not there
Weather
Inner opera
Falling up
Imagine
All told, what seemed most fascinating was that Place is not just a physical landscape, but how and where we place gods & images into our personal narratives.
How to make all this show up:
I thought I might need new tools to shape an unfamiliar vocabulary suited to an unfamiliar sense of Place. Could technology give me the means to see movement in a new way? Alongside my work as a choreographer I also teach at Ohio State University, where I was able to work in the motion capture lab at the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design. While in residence with the company we were able to come up with not only a new vocabulary but digital animations of our movement that brought a new, visual translation of our ideas. Check the future blogs for a look at some of our animations and technology. All told, this work in dance technology has renewed my faith in live performance while it has expanded my options.
In many ways the development of this work mirrors its subject. A beginning, a Place, that becomes the background of another beginning, which sets off a new idea, so that the Beginning is now changed, or forgotten, or misplaced. And the new idea, made in another time, a later Place, goes forward and collides with the first Place, which is seen as new. And so we telescope in, looking for the details, getting lost, finding a new way….
