Dansens Hus

conveniently located behind our very hip hotel the Scandic Vulkan and next to the fabulous Mathallen Market.

Mathallen Market

We are located in the once industrial Grunerlakke neighborhood which has been marvelously reworked as the home of arts design and all things hip and green. Amazing what can be done in a wealthy country with a great sense of design. Glossy steel and glass buildings weave in and out of restored warehouses, some decorated with fabulous wall art and graffiti.

Oslo wall art

The city feels small — like a series of connect neighborhoods. So far no skyscrapers have been sighted allowing the scale to feel friendly. Downtown is all lit up for the holidays with building facades sparkling and the Christmas Market is in full swing–a modest affair featuring typical Nordic items.

Oslo Christmas Market

Its kind of fun to see the winter gear everyone is sporting although the temperature is a mild 39 degrees today.  In the market every kind of knitted, fleece and leather garment is for sale.

So far the Akerselva River is my favorite place for strolling. It winds north to south through our neighborhood and seems a well worn pathway for the many parents with strollers. Lots of babies here all bundles up in their fancy carriages!

Akerselva River

With only 6+ hours of daylight at this time of year one has plenty of chance to enjoy the night lights but the boats trips to the fjords are sadly not running. This is a place i would revisit in the summer. There are so much natural beauty to explore. Flying in I was amazed by the integrity of the landscape–just miles and miles of thickly forested, mountainous terrain with tall Nordic conifers and roads winding through but no houses at all.

Tomorrow begins the dance watching marathon and thus I will be introduced to a whole new dance aesthetic and community.  The festival has set up a variety of venues where we can munch, meet and greet. They are very organized which we all appreciate.

A fun take on self-portraiture. Featuring Deborah Goff at BDF in 2011. Photo by Arthur Fink.

1. How does photography affect/influence/reiterate the story of dance Still photographs help us see the poses, the postures, the juxtapositions, and the patterns that are part of any dance.  While video lets us see the movement again and again, the fleeting moments of dance are represented as just that — fleeting moments.  In a still photograph I can hold those moments.  Indeed, many dance photographs hold iconic moments, which might otherwise be deeply buried in a moving picture story.

By giving us easy access to some of those special moments, dance photographs can help photographers learn about, understand, and remember aspects of dance that can inspire new ideas and new moments.

2. What can a photographer learn from working with and/or witnessing a dancer? I’ve learned lessons about mental and spiritual agility, about reverence, compassion, and sustainability, about balance, weight, and form, about intention and opportunity, and about so much more.  By intensely watching any creative artist, I can learn about creativity, surprise, about something that shouldn’t be called “failure” but is about things not working the way we wanted or expected.  And as I watch great teachers in the dance studio, I’ve learned about how to teach essence, without having the details of a particular practice crowd out what’s really most important.

3. What can a dancer learn from working with and/or witnessing a photographer? I practice watching dance beyond the details of each movement, typically as I search for what images to photograph.  This is a way of testing and translating my understanding of a particular dance piece.  And I believe that dancers and choreographers can learn and benefit from the same practice.  Those who have taken my workshops on, “Seeing dance like a photographer” confirm that this is true.

4. Why do you photograph the Bates Dance Festival? What makes BDF so special to you? Laura Faure, director of the Bates Dance Festival, has clearly established BDF as, “An international community of choreographers, dancers, educators, and students learning, creating, and performing together”. Along side the often competitive dance world, BDF is a cooperative endeavor.  That’s nourishing for me, as I’m at BDF to learn as much as anybody. And, while dancers are glad to see my images, they are not expecting or hoping that I’ll showcase their artistry or virtuosity in the competitive dance world.

I certainly learn from every class, rehearsal, or choreographic session that I witness.  But I learn at least as much by living, eating, playing with the dance community here.  That aspect of sharing our lives in a creative community is much of what makes BDF so special for me.

5. How does/can dance photography benefit our society? Dance matters, and I celebrate, and seek to add some coherent visibility, to the dance that is all around us here at BDF.  If my photographs simply say, “Look at this . . . this dance step or pose or move”, and people do look, I do believe the world can become a better place.  Dance teaches us all that our very weight that holds us down can be the force that sets us free to move.  And, in that metaphor of finding ways to move together — not always in unison, but always in deep respect — we can build a better world.

6. Any other pressing items? I’m sad to see dance photography being forgotten as an art form or expressive medium, as incredibly high quality video equipment is becoming so common, and as video becomes an important part of every dance department curriculum.  I’d like to see both forms of image recording celebrated, and well used.

I’m interested in seeing still images become not just a way to document dance, but an integral part of more dance itself.  That’s the subject for another whole dialogue . . . that I’d love to inspire or create.

This post was written by Ashley Yergens. Ashley is the BDF Social Media Intern for the 2014 summer.

Temperament in form—(depression/mania/rebellion/anger) influences on sense of time and impulse of movement

Deconstruct and reconstruct components of dance in order to highlight and create appreciation for less visible elements

Simultaneous Minimalist and Extremist physicalities

Divulging the many virtuosic elements of the dance

I’m interested in the statement and perspective in chosen form/how ideas are presented

My aesthetic choices in creating a dance are closely related to punk and hip hop musical aesthetics at their points of origin in that they are a re-evaluation of form–>the end product being a reflection of cultural sensibilities/outlooks/goals

What happens when we break things down to examine their parts equally? Put everything on the surface

An obsession with what is being constructed in a space and an awareness of what is out of our control

An overarching theme of intrinsic value of: moving/dancing/working(psychological/emotional/physical)

How many of these things can be layered into a single moment in time/movement/phrase/event?

The DNA of form

Decomposition composed

Inspiration from forms within subcultural movements that have a clearly identifiable style/image that has been absorbed into mainstream society; attempting to bring function to the surface instead of just image

]]> https://www.batesdancefestival.org/bridgmanpacker-dance-at-bdf/ Fri, 02 Aug 2013 13:45:40 +0000 http://bdfblog.org/?p=1058 Tuesday brought multiple encounters with Bridgman|Packer Dance both on the stage of Schaeffer Theater and with their students in the dining hall. This company comprised of Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer is a longtime friend of the festival. Back in 2007 BDF co-commissioned a new work from the company, Memory Bank. Their most recent work, Voyeur will be performed this weekend at the festival, along with Under the Skin.

During the Show & Tell on Tuesday night, Art and Myrna showed a few clips of their work that illustrate how their use of technology has grown over time. Bridgman|Packer Dance’s relationship to technology and video started in 2000 when they began experimenting with an overhead projector to cast shadows on a red scrim in Carried Away. This lead them to think more about how the 3D body can interact or become a 2D projection. The obvious next step for them was working in video.

Always with wit and humor these two have created a vast number of works that integrate recorded video, live video feed, unique set design and luscious partner dancing. Their unique relationship to video work is born out of their use of physical partnering. Unlike other video work I’ve seen, the projections are treated as another partner in the dance. In Double Expose, recorded video and live video are projected simultaneously onto a mattress, allowing the dancers on stage to appear as if they in the same bed as the projections. The precision of the dancer’s placement in space makes these cleaver “encounters” that much more amusing.

However, Art and Myrna are not just here to perform. They are teaching two classes during their time here: a Modern Repertory class and Performance and Live Video. Tuesday during lunch we were surprised with a performance around the tables of the Commons from their modern repertory class. Music blared through a boom box in the back of the room and dancers appeared barefoot and in sneakers to perform some acrobatic partnering work.

Bridgman and Packer’s modern repertory class surprised us with a performance in the Commons.

You can get your tickets to see Bridgman|Packer Dance’s performances on Friday and Saturday at 7:30pm through the Bates Dance Festival website and learn more about the company through their website.

-Posted by Caroline Barna. Caroline is BDF’s Social Media Intern for the 2013 summer.

Below are a few photos from the 4th of July. After a full day of classes, everyone walked downtown to watch our local fireworks display right over the falls in Auburn. And of course many wore their most stylish red, white and blue!

-Posted by Caroline Barna. Caroline is BDF’s Social Media Intern for the 2013 summer.

I relished my position as “Emerging Choreographer” at Bates this year. Not only was I given the time and space I needed to create a wealth of seed material for my next project, but also I was able to take classes from the prestigious faculty as a student of dance, and dance teaching, as well as being a choreographer analyzing movement invention. The open social dynamic of the festival allowed me to know my colleagues as people and then to watch how those personalities translated their desires into movement expressions, pedagogical approaches and performative personas.

Nancy Stark Smith’s Contact Improvisation class was a powerful thread though the intensive for me. Nancy’s approach to facilitating CI taught me a lot about the simultaneity of individual responsibility and communal responsibility. In CI the pressure that is presented can be met or abandoned, but either way, strong, direct choices lead to clear communication. The form encourages practitioners to look out for their own safety, but also to take risks in trusting others. I feel that so many forms of dance are served by this approach. We have to trust our teachers, and walk though the doors they reveal, in order to have new experiences. At the same time, as dancers we must pay attention to the ever-shifting limitations of our bodies and know when to shift our approach.

Techniques were originally created to facilitate the communication of meaning and/or identity. I loved being able to take so many different classes in close proximity because it highlighted the fact that the diverse array of techniques utilized in contemporary dance carry our human spirit though many different channels. These movement styles communicate our individual personalities and cultural inheritances and at the same time, expose our very similar bodily experiences, the material/consciousness that makes us all both fragile and strong.

I was honored to participate in, and fascinated by, the Different Voices program. The works on the program were simultaneously aesthetically diverse and connected by strong themes of gender and power. Many of them were the result of vast ideas condensed into essential gems.

Many of us used external gender signifiers as embodiments of power, while Mamela, myself and Onye all engaged in traditional transvestism, Kettly and Nellie also used drag. Their duet “Correspondences” played with the signifiers of femininity as weapons. It is fascinating to me that Mamela and I, who literally live on opposite sides of the earth (South Africa and Seattle) would both make work that utilizes the male/power signifier of a suit to contextualize our movement vocabularies. While this symbol apparently has enough universality to translate across the world, as women in the suits we both embodied a liminal, androgynous zone that is infinitely varied in its personal and cultural appreciation/understanding. While for many, this indefinable place between binary gender representations is a threat; to others it is the answer to hundreds of years of division and injustice. Internationally, women in a contemporary man’s world are clearly interested in cracking the façade that “masculine” and “feminine” are definable or valid divisions between human beings. The space between is infinitely varied and essential.

Returning to the Left coast I feel that our various communities are a single dance community.  Within this community we are responsible for making our individual expressions as varied and different as our personalities are. It is through the diversity of our specific, genuine expressions that we become a strong, global community, not in spite of it.

What an honor to be a part of the 2011 Bates community in its support and pursuit of what is simultaneously new, ancient, diverse, connected, and true.
Thanks you to all who were a part of this experience.

Catherine Cabeen

Some of these questions are quite formal; As a solo artist who often gets obsessed with minutia, I am curious about how to create phrases that travel through space, and how to effectively interweave larger groups of people.

Alone, in the afternoons, I have been investigating locomotion. I am also thrilled to be working with nine fantastic Bates dancers who are generously willing to push themselves, and my understanding of my work, late into the evenings as we intertwine, compress and collide with the phrase material. The first week was extremely productive, however, as I looked back over the rehearsal videos I heard Bill T Jones voice in my head, re-asking a question he asked me long ago, “What is the funk that informs your formality?”

While I was excited about the formal beauty of what the dancers and I had created, the content that inspired the phrase material had dissolved into spatial patterns and shapes.

While I am a student of the post-modern generation and know that every audience member creates their own experience of the work, and that, “mere” spatial relationships carry content of their own, I am also a student of the modernist school which supports the idea that I as a choreographer have something specific to say and I believe dance can be an effective tool in that focused communication. Much of my career has been spent balancing on this fence; a desire to facilitate agency in dancers and dance audiences on the one hand, and 18 years (and counting) of Graham training, with all the hierarchy that implies, on the other.

This week I find myself pressing hard into the structures I created, trying to squeeze out the meaning that is inherent in the form. I have found in many cases that the meaning I am seeking isn’t there, but in the search I am able to see how the structures could be modified to more intentionally convey my research. Sometimes it is as simple a thing as changing facings, other sections however are being completely scrapped so that the funk/content/questions, can have more space to breath. With this breath comes the possibility of finding new structures, and I find myself captivated by the form that is inherent in the meaning.

Having the opportunity to dig into process is a luxury that itches. These waves of questioning, making containers, breathing, cracking, and dissolving into new questions are as delicious to ride as they are confounding. When I get tangled in my mind however, another mantra I hold dear from BTJ is, “The answer is in the doing.” I am so grateful for this opportunity to do and question, and do and question and do, and question some more.
-Catherine Cabeen