Last Tuesday I saw the third installment of the Dinner Party performance at the Warehouse Theater of new or experimental works in progress. It was a long show without intermission and it was hot in the back of the theater but it was nice to see so many people presenting work in this informal setting. I performed at the first Dinner Party and there were many more people there on Tuesday. Clearly this is something that is needed. I am happy to see this and the Mason/Rhynes adult themed Latenight being produced as a series.
In some ways the audience saw a lot of processes like setting up for a piece, starting over when it did not work out quite right, having the performers emerge from the audience. However in term of the actual work we were generally presented with what I call "shiny movement objects" which are like a ship in a bottle. You ask the question, how did they do that, arrive there, et cetera. When I talk about process I am reminded of a football game where you see the whole process of the game not just then end result. When I see dance I want to see more than the ship in the bottle, I want to see how you got the ship in there and why you decided to work that hard in the first place. There have been times in my life that I felt that dance was one of the few places that you could see abstraction so "save the abstract experience" was my motto. I am not so much interested in only seeing abstraction I want to know about a piece as I am watching it. I want to know the choreographer's intention and inspirations. I do not want to just be presented with a shiny movement object without knowing how it was made.
While I was sitting in the feedback session of the Dinner Party I was struck by how many times a choreographer was asked or found themselves describing the process of making their work. I was also struck by the fact that I always wanted to see the processes they were talking about. So many times I said to myself I don't know what is going on, the performers have intention but are not sharing it. The presentation was about where they had arrived and it was frustrating to me because I knew that they came form somewhere. The descriptions of how they created their works were so vivid and inspiring that I wanted them to be central to the work not an aside only to be shared when asked in a feedback session. When I first learned composition in undergrad I was told not to make a story, to be abstract and to let the movement speak for itself. Well now that kind of instruction is outdated and useless. In my 25 years of watching dance, I may have seen almost everything a mover can do with abstraction many times over and now I would like to see some stories.
