Jennifer Monson's "Bird Brain" [Enlarge in New Window]

Dancing Outside the Box
By URSULA EAGLY, for the Creative Capital Channel

"The proscenium stage is passé.  Experimental choreographers are intent on creating dances that evoke a world, not just a showcase of steps within a frame."  Gia Kourlas's July 2003 article in The New York Times got the dance world in a sweat.  Certain artists and presenters felt vindicated, while others felt attacked.  One well-known choreographer was heard to retort, "If the proscenium is passé, then I am passé, and I am not passé!"  But whichever side of the debate you came down on, evidence that choreographers are seeking out new, unconventional venues is easy to come by.

In 2002, fifty-four twelve-story grain silos hosted the acclaimed Picture Red Hook, a piece created by Joanna Haigood for her San Francisco-based company ZACCHO Dance Theater.  The silos are part of an abandoned industrial complex in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook, where Haigood was commissioned to create a dance involving the community.

In Picture Red Hook, ZACCHO dancers glided down the silos with the aid of harnesses and ropes.  Hanging 160 feet above ground, they performed running, diving, and scything movements.  For the physical demands of aerial dancing, the performers draw on both contemporary dance and acrobatic techniques.  Haigood began to develop this hybrid form in 1977, while she was studying at the London School of Contemporary Dance.  At that time, she started to see circuses as a way of escaping the environment of the conservatory.

Haigood's site-specific work is driven by what she describes as "the pure physicality of the moving body within the architectural structures."  Yet architecture is only one of the choreographer's interests.  She also has a deep curiosity about the history of the site she's using, and has been described as a "poet of memory."  For each piece, Haigood spends hours upon hours researching the site's past before she begins developing movement.  For Picture Red Hook, she compiled an oral history of the neighborhood, videotaping interviews with residents about their memories of Red Hook and their hopes for its future.  The footage was then edited and projected onto the silos during the performance.

Another of Haigood's best-known works, Invisible Wings (1998), examined the history of the site of Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival as a mid-19th century sanctuary along the Underground Railroad.  Researching the piece, Haigood found herself at the national archive, sifting through census records for traces of Stephen Carter, a farmer and abolitionist who ran the sanctuary.  "It's mostly older people who conduct genealogical research," she says.  "You sit in these rooms, they're very quiet, and every couple of hours someone will shout 'I found him!'" 

By exploring a place's history and architecture, Haigood aims to "reinvigorate and illuminate" it.  She hopes that audience members will never again look at one of her performance sites in the same way, even if it is a place that they pass every day.  But the viewers are not the only ones whose experiences are transformed by her work.  Haigood must adapt her own creative process to negotiate each location's challenges.  "It's refreshing to think of [choreographic] skills in a new context," she says.  "It revitalizes the process."

Of course, different artists approach site-specific work in different ways.  For New York-based choreographer Jennifer Monson, the site is a tool to experiment with sensation, perception, and movement.  She is currently working on the five-year dance touring project Bird Brain, in which she and her dancers perform in outdoor spaces as they follow the migratory patterns of animals.  The performances are hosted by a wide range of arts and environmental groups, reaching a diverse audience as a result.  No single event marks the project's culmination, keeping it in a state of constant evolution.

Before launching this ambitious multi-year project, Monson had, as she puts it, "made the rounds of the downtown [New York] dance venues."  A 1995 collaboration with composer Zeena Parkins inspired by Debussy's composition La Mer planted the seed that grew into Bird Brain.  Monson was moved by her readings on Debussy's relationship to nature as well as by the evocative score itself.

Since embarking on the project in 2000, Monson's investigative approach to improvisation has become increasingly grounded in fine-tuned perceptual experiences of touch, smell, hearing, and sight.  Each Bird Brain performance begins with a workshop that engages the audience in a series of exercises exploring the senses.  In one workshop, viewers close their eyes and listen to a nearby sound, like their breath.  Then Monson asks them to listen to a noise farther away and to try to calculate the distance between these two sounds.  "How are you able to make this calculation?" Monson asks her audience and then repeats the exercise using sight.  This workshop is a basic tutorial in the type of awareness that Monson and her dancers have been working for years to hone.  As she points out, these magnified sensory skills are similar to those that animals use to navigate during migrations.

Like Haigood, Monson challenges her audiences to re-examine familiar experiences. Monson hopes to encourage her audiences to become more aware of their surroundings so that they can be better stewards for the environment.  "Portuguese fishermen could navigate based on the salinity of the water, which would tell them how close they were to different rivers," she says.  "I believe that we all have this potential if we pay attention."

Equally environmentally conscious, San Francisco-based choreographer Amelia Rudolph creates daring aerial dances for her troupe Project Bandaloop.  The company often performs on stunning mountaintops like Yosemite's El Capitan, which at 3,000 feet is the Earth's largest piece of exposed granite.  "I use the power and beauty of what I do as a lighting rod for attention to and as a celebration of these natural spaces," Rudolph explains.  "I hope to convey the value of natural spaces and the need to protect them."

Rudolph also brings her airborne dances to urban buildings, such as Seattle's Space Needle.  Often coinciding with large outdoor festivals, these inner-city performances draw huge crowds.  For example, Bandaloop performed for 130,000 people over the two days of the Power of Houston event in 1997.  At events like these, the group reaches far more children and first-time art viewers than contemporary dance performances usually attract.  Urban or rural, each structure inspires Rudolph with its unique surfaces and dimensions.  "The site is a springboard for my choreographic imagination," she says.

Since first pairing her rock climbing skills with her choreography in 1991, Rudolph has enjoyed the possibilities of vertical choreography.  "My spatial lexicon is a cube," she says. "I work with spaces like 'downstage right high.'"  Bandaloop dancers use ropes to allow for gravity-defying freedom of movement.  Pushing off the sides of mountains, they can stay in mid-jump for minutes on end, and the company's smallest dancer can hold up its largest.  But dealing with harnesses, ropes, and climbing gear creates challenges, as well.  Says Rudolph, "I am constantly negotiating the balance between the aesthetics of the movement I want to create and the logistics of creating it - as well as the safety, which is paramount."

Rudolph is known to push the envelope with her airborne feats - even fellow aerialist Haigood describes her as a "real daredevil."  While Rudolph is interested in creating a primarily uplifting experience for her audiences, she admits that some viewers' response to her work is based in fear.  "This fight or flight response makes the audience more attentive, and raises sensory perceptions."

Another adrenaline artist is the New York-based choreographer Elizabeth Streb.  A 1997 MacArthur "Genius" Award recipient, Streb is famous for her "popaction" technique, which is a combination of gymnastics and stunt work.  Her dancers throw themselves into walls, drop from trapezes, and dodge swinging cinder blocks.  With each fall, they land face down with a thundering thud on the mat below.  As Rudolph has discovered, such visceral work creates an immediate bond with viewers.  Also, its accessibility attracts a demographically mixed audience.

Streb further democratizes her artwork by bringing it to public spaces.  She points out that admission prices and the theater context create a class system that is not truly public.  Having performed in public since the mid-'70s, Streb has in recent years brought her company to New York's Coney Island and Grand Central Terminal, among other places.

"The proscenium setting is deeply borrowed from a symphonic idiom, in terms of format," she says.  "I don't think it's the best way to watch movement.  I don't think people want to sit in the dark, all facing the same way."  Streb's own presenting format draws instead on the old-fashioned mode of performance in town squares and in inside-outside spaces like Shakespeare's Globe Theatre.  The circus provides another model, getting more viewers closer to the action by seating them in a full circle.

The choreographer currently hosts performances in her Streb Action Invention Lab, which opened in 2003 in a former mustard factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.  A garage-like space with high ceilings, the Action Lab is home to performances, rehearsals, and classes for children and adults.  At performances, viewers in folding chairs munch popcorn, children move about in search of better sight lines, and both performers and audience members share the same lighting.

The Action Lab is a far cry from traditional dance venues, which are typically pristine spaces where food and drink are forbidden.  "In the atmosphere of a garage, we don't have to be so precious about the floors and the walls," Streb says.  As Joanna Haigood, Jennifer Monson, and Amelia Rudolph have taught us, the same can be said of grain silos, nature preserves, and mountaintops.

As a freelance arts writer, Ursula Eagly has contributed to ARTnews, Dance Magazine, Movement Research Performance Journal, and Surface Magazine, among others. She is the former Associate Editor of Arts International's magazine (ai) performance for the planet and currently works at Danspace Project in New York.