Reflections on three decades of New York Dance by Elizabeth Zimmer

Below is a retrospective from Polish magazine, Teatr, which features several artists on the Dance Theater Workshop roster:  Ivy Baldwin, Eleanor Bauer, Susan Marshall,  Dean Moss  & Yoon Jin Kim,  David Neumann,  Adrienne Truscott,  Christopher Williams,  Chris Yon,  and  among others.

Still Looking: Reflections on three decades of New York dance.
By Elizabeth Zimmer
Teatre
December 2008

Invited to comment for this special dance issue of THEATR, I checked my files. I found an article I wrote in 1986, for Dance Magazine, about downtown dance. Looking over it, I was struck by how similar the scene is in 2008—and in many significant ways, how different.

For one thing, the article, “After Post-Modernism: Waiting for the End of the World,” is thousands of words long; the magazine today would never commission anything that substantial. For another, in 1986 there were dozens of committed dance writers publishing their work in New York; in 2008 perhaps seven remain, and one of those, Deborah Jowitt, has been cut back to only every other week in the paper whose dance page she used to rule. Newspapers have folded and established critics have been laid off. AIDS claimed several masters. Some of our best writers have turned their attention to books or theater.

To be sure, the Internet has created circumstances where practically all dance fans can anoint themselves critics, but very few of those are paid and almost none are edited, resulting in a miasma of amateur expression.

The American economy was on the verge of crisis in 1986, and it’s in an even deeper hole now. Real estate in Manhattan, for living and for presenting dance, is out of reach of most young artists, who have decamped to Brooklyn and Queens, outer boroughs on the western end of Long Island. Twenty years ago movement artists performed short works in intimate downtown clubs. Now the clubs are gone, and the artists often work in warehouses and lofts in Bushwick, a derelict corner of Brooklyn.

The question of whether New York is still the center of the dance world is always in the air. With two major ballet companies and hundreds of modern troupes, choreographers and studios, the city certainly still has a plurality of dance activity, and an ardent dance audience. But the audience is aging and the performers and choreographers, finding it harder to earn a living and afford a home, have begun to migrate to other cities and to educational settings.

Twenty years ago many choreographers strewed their stages with piles of junk; they’re still doing that. But now the messy spectacles might last an hour or more, might include interludes of ballet variations, and might culminate in a free buffet dinner of roast lamb offered to the audience, as did another situation for dancing, performed in April at the Kitchen by Heather Kravas and Antonija Livingstone and the ensemble they collected, including a trio of security guards (probably the best paid figures on the stage). Strewn across the floor were mattresses, horse manure, a TV monitor displaying a mooing cow, a large bottle of Coca-Cola, an artist drawing caricatures, and Kravas and Livingstone, sometimes half-naked, making aggressive love or executing technically sophisticated ballet steps.

We are looking at a generation of choreographers who have never known a world without cable television. They grew up using personal computers, their aesthetic formed by the quick cuts of MTV and the remote control. Rare is the artist who’ll reel out a straightforward piece of choreography. Among the good ones I’ve seen recently are Chris Yon, Eleanor Bauer, and Andrea Miller.

Yon, an NYU-trained choreographer in his mid-20s whose deadpan style has been called “latterday Buster Keaton,” started out engineering funny, ironic displays of performance art (wielding a vacuum cleaner on a stage in a hotel lobby, or collaborating with young men of his cohort on physicalized plays about their fraught childhoods, standing against a wall and pretending to be troubled adolescents in bed). He recently offered HUGO, which after a bewildering video prologue evolved into a touching duet for Yon’s wife Taryn Griggs and Jeff Larson. Ostensibly a message to the future from the present, it succeeds as a dance statement of a strong relationship, using repetition of a few quick walking phrases contrasted with frozen poses.

Miller thinks of herself as an international citizen: born to a Spanish physician mother in the American west, she graduated from New York’s Juilliard School, danced for two years in Israel with Ohad Naharin’s junior company, and recently formed her own troupe, Gallim Dance, in New York. Her mission, she claims, is to “find juxtapositions of the mind and body that resonate in the soul.” She’s one of few in her generation to talk this way, and her work is perhaps the most “traditional,” composed almost entirely of exhilarating contemporary movement, percussive and deeply emotional, performed to diverse music by highly trained dancers. Her ability to coax dramatic response from her performers exceeds her capacity to structure choreography, but we watch her work with interest.

Bauer, the tallest and youngest of this group, joins Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s Rosas this fall. A large, sturdy woman native to New Mexico, she graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts several years ago, and almost immediately moved to Brussels to study with de Keersmaeker. Her recent New York performance (at a space in Queens called The Chocolate Factory although it was originally a hardware store) included a video installation; a savvy and elegant hour-long trio with talking, At Large, that played with ideas of simplicity and sparkle. A free 125-page book, AT LARGE With Reasonable Doubt, subtitled “a soliloquy En Masse,” distributed to audience members (see her website, www.goodmove.be, for details), collates the responses of 51 dancers from New York and Brussels to a series of very basic, even radical questions about their involvement in the dance world. Her list of interviewees is practically a roll call of essential talents in the contemporary scene. It tellingly includes several of her teachers on both sides of the Atlantic.

The dance community in the States is more “international” now, with large numbers of artists from Europe, Asia and South America living and working among us. Partly this is a function of the cheap American dollar; partly it reflects the fact that many other governments still support their dancers, enabling them to travel and study abroad.

Dean Moss, an African-American native of Tacoma, Washington whose work for some years has explored issues of identity, often collaborates with Asian artists. He’s currently working with Korean choreographer Yoon Jin Kim, on a piece about “Kisaeng, artist-courtesans similar to Japanese Geisha. They had a more open, less mysterious history; they were slaves of the government for 500 years, and they wrote poetry, which means there’s a written record of their lives.” Audience members at every site will be incorporated into this production, scheduled to debut in Seoul and then go to Hong Kong and New York’s Dance Theater Workshop in late February 2009. People who visit his website, www.gametophyte.org, an engage in a dialogue with the director.

In 1986 the United States’ National Endowment for the Arts stopped underwriting the touring of dance to colleges, universities, and outlying communities. Because of this decision, many companies could no longer pay dancers a living wage. The lack of subsidy meant that regions outside New York were rarely if ever exposed to experimental work. Now mid-career artists themselves are moving to these outlying areas, taking jobs in university dance departments. Tere O’Connor, a major downtown force who has inspired a whole generation, works half the year at a university near Chicago. David Dorfman heads the department at Connecticut College. Stephen Koplowitz is Dean of Dance at the California Institute for the Arts. Bebe Miller and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar have jobs, and bases, at Ohio and Florida State universities, respectively. These artists continue to choreograph, but are basically “part-time.” A flock of mid-career choreographers are enrolled in low-residency masters-degree programs, so they can command higher salaries when they’re invited to teach around the nation (and, not incidentally, get free use of college studios and unpaid student dancers to construct new

The model of choreographers running their own companies is becoming increasingly hard to sustain, not least because touring, paying managers and renting space have become impossibly expensive.

The past 20 years have seen the proliferation of cheap video equipment, and rare is the downtown stage not shared between dancers and video projections. There is also more speaking. Many of the seminal artists began in theater and art departments, rather than with dance training. Thus we see a trend toward “theatricalized, emotionalized” dance, in which pregnant phrases and pauses are sprinkled into a movement landscape. Ivy Baldwin’s recent choreography reflects this aesthetic, which can be found in earlier works by Chris Yon, who, after a couple of years of running his own performance space in Brooklyn, is moving with Taryn Griggs to Minneapolis, Minnesota, a city in the middle of the country with lower living costs and a great record of supporting experimental dance.

Though the youngest hotshots are under 30, they have a clear sense of who their mentors are. Almost all would claim Yvonne Rainer and Merce Cunningham. Some 60 years after he started showing his own work, Cunningham, 89 and rocking a wheelchair, is still the master and an inspiration for the young. Any list would have to include, of all people, Russian ballet superstar/TV phenom Mikhail Baryshnikov. He attends many downtown concerts, and when he sees work he likes he commissions choreographers to make new pieces for his troupe, Hell’s Kitchen Dance, and often for himself. His name on a program is guaranteed to fill houses, at home and on tour; his transformation from a ballet danseur noble to an avant-garde performer, producer and patron of the newest, youngest choreographers has been a blessing to the community.

Among the working choreographers whose work I find essential, count David Neumann, who mixes virtuoso dance technique with a healthy dose of street and club culture. A longtime actor whose father, Fred Neumann, is a member of experimental theater troupes Mabou Mines and the Wooster Group, his recent FeedForward is a sharp parody of athletic tropes and television sports coverage. Susan Marshall is a unique artist who exploits the emotional possibilities of the simplest gestures, conjuring theatrical magic with the simplest of props and video.

Adrienne Truscott, a trapeze artist and vaudevillian (one of the Wau-Wau Sisters, a burlesque duet) is just emerging as a choreographer in her own right, and Clarinda Mac Low, a deeply cerebral artist whose idea-driven pieces include massing dancers in jumpsuits at city intersections who then offer to carry pedestrians across the street, makes us sit up and take notice, rethinking the boundaries of dance and by extension all art. Jonah Bokaer, who danced with Merce Cunningham from the time he was 18 until he was 25, resigned recently to tour his own austere choreography, collaborate with Robert Wilson, and work as a presenter. He has gained status as a producer and international impresario, bringing avant-garde work from Europe and presenting it in Brooklyn and elsewhere around town.

Christopher Williams, a maverick who goes his own way, makes stunningly designed dance plays, often incorporating puppets, to pre-14^th-century music, often performed live by experts in the field. Larry Keigwin, 36, thinks his work “borrows pretty freely from old and new, bridging entertainment and art, my interest in cabaret and in contemporary dance….I’m not doing the European theatrical esthetic, but carrying on in an American pop-culture esthetic.”

As long as dance performances can only afford to hold a theater for two or three days, which is the case now for 90 percent of the work shown in New York, the field is condemned to marginality, poverty, and maybe even, as one media critic put it recently, “irrelevance.” But some of these artists are as savvy as they are gifted, and they will figure out a way to cross over and enter the consciousness of a critical mass of viewers. I have to believe that; otherwise it becomes too hard to go on.

Elizabeth Zimmer writes about the arts for magazines and newspapers in New York and Australia, and for websites worldwide. She has studied many forms of dance, and performed in the work of several New York choreographers.