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  • 2020-01-20 13-03

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    Nick Bonadies
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    © All Rights Reserved
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    4 views4 pages

    2020-01-20 13-03

    Uploaded by

    Nick Bonadies

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
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    of 4
    PETRA KurPERS (2005) Vi DISABILITY ¢ CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANLE : BODIES on EDoe Cuntac) Hind a strange, twisted shape. This is an instruction Sonsherée Gilles gives Out at an Axis Dance workshop. I repeat: find a strange and twisted shape. We are in a workshop on physically integrated dance Practice, that Is, dance practice open to people with different forms of embodiment, including disability. The specific theme of this evening's workshop Is Shape, the shape our bodies can make. We have thrown ourselves into asymmetrical ones, have made the smallest one possible, pushed all air out. We have made shapes that take up lots of space, have moved from one into another without hesitation, created shapes that are full of edges like frozen sculptures, and some that are rippling and flowing like water across our limbs. But at this instruction I perk up, Find 2 strange. twisted shape. My body-car-mind, usually easily obedient to dance instructions, a wrench into my movement works. What does it mean to put ‘twisted’ and ‘strange’ together in a physically accessible dance class? On the ground around me are plenty of people who live in twisted bodies, to whom the twist is not strange, but a deeply familiar way of experiencing their bodies’ everyday frontality, location, or elevation while standing or sitting. My own body has a lot of symmetry, but the instruction suddenly makes me aware of my hunched shoulders, a certain lack of muscle tone from extended wheelchair use that I try to combat by extensive dancework, but that is ‘not the same as the muscle tone and comportment I experienced when 1 was predominately a walking person. look around myself. Behind me is my life partner, Neil Marcus. He is not dancing with us, but merely observing, since he just added a new and still metal-stapled scar on his abdomen from a recent fall. He is dystonic, a condition similar to strong cerebral palsy, and I can see his foot reaching out into space, elegantly folded over like a ballet dancer in pointe. Neil is crunching and rustling right now: he’s taking the to the observer, including the many photographers who have fallen in love with him over the years and have created a catalogue of images of his highly photogenic everyday life? The plastic bag rustle adds to the soundscape of moving bodies, hands breaking falls on the floor with a ideas, values and concerns that surround us. This environment is the space of this book.! As in a class of dance fundamentals, this book throws shapes, and orients itself in space. The chapters here move from ‘one shape to the other, and pay attention to the desires and instructions that initiate movement. At times, the chapters arrest, and contemplate what is going on. Like I orient myself, my bodily posture, in the dance class by paying attention to the dancers around me, I write this book by orienting myself in relation to different, sometimes surprising discipli- nary discourses, to theoretical framings both close to my argument and far away, and to the different shapes that critical writing can take. 1 look the other way. Across the studio from me my eyes meet the ‘eyes of a woman I haven't danced with before. Some of us in this Axis workshop are old hands at this, and have done a number of workshops. ‘Some of us are here less to learn about Axis methods, and more for the their individual strangeness. There 1s so much less explanation neces- sary. There Is no ‘special status,’ barely disguised stares, or the enthu- siastic ‘oh, let me dance with the chair’ attitude we often experience in workshops in which non-disabled dancers dominate. Others in the room are just happy to not be in the limelight with their differences: they might have been told that they can’t dance (in a normate-focused class),? that they aren’t beautiful, not right, or that they could hurt themselves. Axis workshops and other physically Integrated dance environments are havens for many of us, places where we can be free to explore who we are. Maybe the ‘twisted and strange’ instruction twisted me out of that place of freedom, for a brief moment, and into the external, normate-informed eyes upon mine and other bodies. In her eyes tells me that she has also just been jarred out of her move- metricalizing effects are currently accented by her injury. Twisted but unstrange could be very much the embodied vocabulary, of, to use phenomenological terms, the body-schema of this woman. But 1 am projecting desires and knowledges onto this woman, and it is only my ‘own mind I have access to: in the end, I have to come back to my own sensation, my own dance. ANIEL ZLEECH -WILKINSIM (2016 IPREEMING MMANNERISTS ¢ THE PERFORMANCE potice’ (Sewn a SLIDE 7 McCormick c Let’s look at the kinds of things critics say about performers. Gramophone magazine is good for this, because it encapsulates beliefs about proper performance over almost 100 years. SLIDES ‘Mannerism’ proves to be a key accusation in Gramophone. And it’s used to denounce anything a performer does that a reviewer finds unfamiliar and unwelcome. The most admired performers do what's expected but simply more vividly than anyone else. Thus Alfred Brendel, Angela Hewitt, Rattle, Abbado, Gullini, Hilary Hahn, Cecilla Bartoll, and so on come out consistently well. People like Schwarzkopf, Fischer-Dieskau, Kennedy, Bernstein are more problematic. And Gould of course. We can get a richer sense of what mannerism means, as a reaction to difference, by looking at some of the words that are used together with it. SLIDE 9 Complaints about mannerism often introduced by accusing the performer of: 2- Lurching into m— collapses into ~ harden into ~ solidify into 1 — trystalize into ~ shade into 2~ give way to 2 spill over into 2 ‘eroded into — laps/ing into S egenerate/ing into 3resortingto— sto0ps to 2— crosses to2~ pushed over the border into 1 morphed into 2~ eroded into, Aso: resort to, have recourse to, And Descending into m parade. now of course the players re not shadinginto or descending into anything: theyre not becoming more ‘mannered’ as the performance goes on. On the contrary, this is all about the crities’ accumulating impression, ‘about their changing attention, their responses as they begin to notice features of a performers personal styl, It’s the performer who gets the blame because anything. contributed by the performer conflicts with their belief that agency arse le with the composer alone So anything that noticeable, whatever itis, must by

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