Throughout my time at the Bates Dance Festival, I’ve had the pleasure of facilitating a series of community conversations, as well as two pre-show talks. Artists tend to be most nervous about pre-show talks — they generally don’t want audiences to go in with preconceived notions about how to experience their work. If you happened to attend my talk before Doug Varone’s performance in the Schaeffer Theatre, you might recall I invited you to “bring yourself” to the performance and allow your personal stories to permeate your impressions of the work. In my conversations with Joanna, she was open about the process of creating “What Will We Be Like When We Get There,” but would prefer that we not spend time on what this show is “about.”

Instead, I’ve prepared some remarks about potlucks.

People tend to have strong opinions about potlucks. You either love them or hate them. Personally, I love them – even the ones where you don’t have to sign up for a dish to ensure all the food groups represented. I love potlucks comprised of four lasagnas and a chocolate cake. I love potlucks with a folding table full or unused plastic silverware, five varieties of chips and salsa, 12 cases of cheap beer, and those store-bought sugar cookies with a thick layer of icing.

When I’m invited to a potluck, I always bring deviled eggs – it’s kind of my thing – and no matter how many I make they always disappear before the last guest arrives.

Deviled eggs are a ridiculous appetizer, but also perfect in every way. They’re bite sized, contain an unreasonable helping of mayonnaise, and look much fancier then they actually are. The first few times I made deviled eggs I followed a recipe from the Betty Crocker cookbook, which is the gift every woman in my family receives when she first moves away from home.

Betty’s recipe is not that great, actually; it’s too salty and she definitely does not include enough mayonnaise. Over the years I’ve discovered a few ways to improve on Betty’s recipe, and now, I don’t follow a recipe. From experience, I know the perfect quantities of mayonnaise (read: a lot), salt and pepper, finely diced onion and paprika to add; I know that Dijon, pickles and celery don’t belong anywhere near my deviled eggs. God forbid you suggest using Miracle Whip.

Cooking in this controlled way is a solitary act, but I learned to cook with my Mom. Even as young kids my brother and I would stir ingredients or later learned to chop vegetables or made the side dishes. Some of those meals would have probably turned out better if she’d kicked us out of the kitchen, but working together to prepare a meal for our family was more important to her, and as a result, everything on our family table was delicious, because we’d made it together.

“What Will We Be Like When We Get There,” reminds me a little bit of those imperfect potlucks, and of those family meals prepared with my Mom. One of Joanna’s primary questions surrounding this work is, “How do we inhabit space together?” Four performers representing three genres of art – dance, music and visual art – get into the kitchen together with some shared goals and outcomes, and they don’t have a recipe to follow. Each brings a particular set of priorities into the space, and must spontaneously respond to the others. Continually, they must ask themselves what they’re willing to fight for, and what they’re willing to let go of.

We experience this process of compromise all the time, and not just in the kitchen. With your partner or children, among co-workers and collaborators, and even in the voting booth, we’re continuously faced with the need to pick our battles and prioritize the things that are most important to us. And by letting go of a little bit of control, we can benefit from the input and talents of others.

You might read in your festival brochure that Joanna began this process shortly after the 2016 election, but it’s not about that. Instead of looking for evidence of Donald Trump in the piece, consider how close the lines are between order and chaos, or humor and violence. Why do we laugh when the Three Stooges punch each other in the face? Why does a messy desk inhibit productivity and promote creativity?  Political polarization has simultaneously created vitriolic tirades and gut-busting monologues – reality is sometimes so wholly ridiculous that we can’t help but laugh at ourselves, even as we are continually shocked and appalled.

So “What Will We Be Like When We Get There,” in a way, is an exercise in collaboration, in which each performer must hear and respond to others. In the process, the cast is making something, or building toward a “there.” What, where and then “there” is is less important than who we allow ourselves to become in the process.

In watching it, you might find chaos is actually necessary, and beautiful. You might find it inspires you to challenge your assumptions and expectations about others. You might unveil a desire to engage with others and reach beyond your personal and political echochambers.

And if you invite me to your potluck, you might discover I’ve brought lumpy deviled eggs stuffed with too-big chunks of celery in them and a bit too much paprika. They’ll still be delicious, and they’ll still be gone before the last guest arrives.

Lauren’s Deviled Eggs:

Ingredients

• Hard boiled eggs (as many as you want)
• Real mayonnaise (not Miracle Whip)
• Very finely diced onion (optional)
• Salt (or celery salt) and pepper
• Dried yellow mustard (not French’s)
• Paprika

Instructions

1. Half each hard boiled egg, removing the yolks into a bowl and setting the whites aside on a platter. If you don’t have a deviled egg platter, you can strategically place lettuce or some other garnish around a platter to keep the eggs from toppling over.
2. Using a fork, mash the yolks and add onion, if desired; salt and pepper to taste; and a small pinch of dried mustard. A little goes a long way.
3. Add a big plop of mayonnaise to the bowl and blend with a fork or scrapper. Add enough to create a smooth, creamy consistency, but not so much that the mixture is just basically mayonnaise. Don’t bother getting your mixer dirty to whip the egg mixture unless you really need to impress someone and are making a large quantity of eggs.
4. Transfer the egg mixture to a pastry bag (I often use a plastic baggie and cut a small tip off of the corner instead of using a piping bag), and fill the egg white cups with a nice mound of egg goo.
5. Dust the tops with a dash of paprika. Scallion, bacon or lobster are tolerable garnishes, olives aren’t.

Lida Winfield’s “Imaginary” was presented as part of Bates Dance Festival’s 2019 Performance Series, situating audiences on three sides of Gannett Theater. It was spiraling, it was colorful, it was wild, taking us on a journey animated by six magnificently potent performers, live music, mismatched green high heels, and emerald green tutus. A set covered in fabric reminded me of a structure you would see in a cozy reading nook in the children’s section of Barnes & Noble and transformed into a table, a mountain, and a wardrobe at various times throughout the piece.

Immediately it was like we had been dropped into a carnival for adults. The lights cast purple and green hues on the performers as they began to address the room and the audience through gestures, facial animations, and loping passes on the diagonal, demarcating us from them. I couldn’t see every minute detail, but I could feel it. I could feel the buzz of the room, which lived for the entirety of the piece, supporting its grandeur, eccentricity, and seriousness.

Whimsical absurdity became the through line. Laurel Jenkins was electric, pacing the space with loud and assured steps, sporting a large emerald green trench coat with shoulder pads. With convincing bravado, she launched into a performative monologue repeating, “Step right up, step right up,” as if turning into a game show host listing all the prizes that could be yours. Step right up, step right up.

Winfield and Maree ReMalia embarked on a duet with balloons strapped to their chests, communicating in staccato gestures, facial expressions, and gibberish babbles against fitful bursts of movement. Ellen Smith Ahern treated us to a scoping improvisation, playing with the audience as she traversed caveman-like states and moments of elongated beauty, all the while interspersing deadpan stares at the audience whenever they could no longer stifle their chuckles. Joseph Hall crafted a headdress out of a tutu, prompting musician and performer Matthew Evan Taylor to emerge from the corner while singing opera, prompting an operatic battle between Jenkins, Ahern, Hall and Taylor to break out amidst animal-like running, sliding, and falling on the diagonal. Choices like these, I could have watched forever.

Some of the most salientmoments came in the spaces where the lunacysimmered, allowing audiences to approach this perceived seriousness with the knowledge and memory of the caricatures and characters the performers had so fluidly inhabited just moments before.

This sense first arose when the five performers settled centerstage, eyes closed, carefully shifting through their feet like treading through sand with hands on each other’s shoulders. ReMalia stood at the helm, microphone in hand, saying, “You may or may not imagine…” followed by a statement of truth.

You may or may not imagine. What a way to frame a truth, to think about perception, to think about how our perception is wholly imaginary. Just moments before, we saw Remalia transform into a birdlike animation, wearing a tutu, balloons strapped to her chest. That was her, and this is her. Both are real, one is not imaginary.

From this truth telling, a series of physical tableaus erupted. With each tableau came the spoken frame of “This is.” “This is my childhood bedroom,” one said, as the performers stood, arms outstretched, mouths open wide, creating a cavernous hallway lined with their arms, which now served as branch-like objects.

Between each “This is,” they traversed the space: downstage, upstage, zigzagging in between. It became more staccato, more layered, each performer shouting with both voice and body, much less shape driven. “This is a dog getting hit by a car,” said another, as one by one they descended from the upstage corner, writhing their body like getting hit by lightning as they arrived centerstage. “This is church.” “This is an all-you-can-eat midnight buffet on a cruise ship.”

Eventually they knotted themselves in the corner. The tableaus shifted into solos, patterning and gridding through the space, moving en masse as each performer made their own statement of “This is.” Layered one over the other, it became more solitary, independent. It went on, immediately prompting a mood change:

“This is an ICE detention center.”
“This is the Mueller Report.”
“This is hashtag Me Too.”

It was somber. It held so much weight–partly because of how trivial what they had been doing before seemed, partly because of the mere mentions of the topics at hand. Regardless, it made me wonder about perception on a larger scope. How much of what is happening in our world is solely because of what we imagine, solely because of what we perceive to be true? What if our perceptions created false truths, impeding the potential for another, more inclusive, reality?

This, I believe, is the root of what Winfield was getting at. Everyone has an imaginary lens from which they view things. Everyone has a tendency to believe their “imaginary” as truth.

The imaginary isn’t poetic. This dance wasn’t. It was loud and in your face, but in exactly the way I wanted it to be. There were so many moments I wanted to keep reliving. But each moment, in the context of the piece, lasted for the exact right amount of time. There were morsels of these larger characters, these larger animations of self, these performative indulgences, these magnificent moments of absurdity and righteous silliness, that left me wholly satisfied but not overly full. It left me thinking more cheerfully, more seriously, more wholly about the way we see the world we inhabit and the people we share it with.

The piece ended with a chorus of truths, similar to the monologue of truths recited by ReMalia earlier. Ranging from funny, to serious, back to funny again, we were reminded the importance of not taking ourselves too seriously.

Imagine that.

It was during an in-class showing. She performed a solo inspired by tigers. She sat on the ground with her knees pulled into her chest, and opened her mouth to scream, without making a sound. In that same showing, I performed a solo inspired by social anxiety. I sat on the ground with my knees pulled into my chest, and opened my mouth to scream, without making a sound.

It was a total coincidence.

A few themes overarch the Bates Dance Festival, which director Shoni Currier says asks questions about identity, faith and artistry. Tangentially, several performances and conversations approach the topic of appropriation, creative license and intellectual property. It was probably ridiculous for my classmate to claim a silent scream as “hers,” but there’s a very real question in contemporary dance about “who did it first,” and who gets to claim a series of movements or an aesthetic as his own. As prolific choreographers seek to pass down or protect their legacies, topics like appropriation vs. inspiration and copyright laws intersect with the economy of dance. And how ever small that economy might be relative to other industries, it’s hard to argue that contempt for Beyonce’s gazillions of dollars made while repeatedly plagiarizing modern dance choreographers isn’t somehow motivated by a little bit of jealousy about her financial success.

Consider Netta Yerushalmy’s mammoth-sized “Paramodernities,” a miniseries of biopics (sort of) probing, remixing, deconstructing or reacting to works by six celebrated choreographers: Vaslav Nijinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” Martha Graham’s “Night Journey,” Bob Fosse’s “Sweet Charity,” five dances by Merce Cunningham, George Balanchine’s “Agon” and Alvin Ailey’s “Revelations.”

“Paramodernities” was performed July 27 and 28 in the Schaeffer Theatre.

On her choices of which choreographers made the cut, Yerushalmy says she was looking for distance (as in, dead); name recognition; and a legible, well-documented aesthetic and/or codified technique. Working from fair-use materials and New York Public Library collections, she considered others who are notably absent – Pearl Primus, Mary Wigman, Doris Humphreys, Jose Limon, Paul Taylor and Ruth St. Denis as an incomplete list of examples – settling on these six for the reasons above, and pragmatically, because they had the most comprehensive, publicly available archives.

The question of whether or not Yerushalmy was plagiarizing these artists never really occurred to her – she completely reordered and restructured the steps, mashing parts in a blender and then putting them back together. Devoid of their original context, each episode is performed without music (excepting a jaunty instrumental piece layered into the Cunningham section), set to lectures by a series of academics, all but one of whom participates on stage with the dancers. The dancers are dressed in a variety of sweat suits which only hint at their source material.

Except for Nijinsky – perhaps because, as Yerushalmy said in our community conversation at the Portland Museum of Art, “He’s way dead,” – there are specific keepers of each of these choreographers’ legacies, held by their namesake companies in the case of Ailey and Graham, or by trusts and foundations set up to specifically preserve and police the work. Only one took issue with what Yerushalmy was doing; can you not guess who?

The topic of movement invention and intellectual property is also imbued within Yerushalmy’s choreography and the commentary from each scholar. Modern dance, often credited as an American artform with roots in German Expressionism, is riddled with cultural appropriation – one needn’t go further than Ruth St. Denis’s fascination with Egypt and India to start seeing the problems.

It might be helpful to remember that Ruth Denis was raised on a farm in New Jersey.

Many of Yerushalmy’s episodes acknowledge and explore modern dance’s problematic past, but Bob Fosse gets the brunt of it. This section zooms in on the roots of jazz dance, which largely originated in Africa. Whether he knew what he was doing or not, Fosse appropriated indigenous dances, dressed them in a high-cut leotard and heels, and sold the whole package for a profit.

Here’s the part where it comes back to Beyonce. You almost start to feel bad for Vanilla Ice once you notice how precariously Beyonce toes the line between inspiration and plagiarism. Uproar accompanied the similarities between “Countdown” and works by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, and in the past few days there’s been talk of the unmistakable parallels her new “Spirit” video shares with Petite Noir’s “La Maison Noir: The Gift and The Curse.” But, follow me here, if we just consider “Single Ladies,” which blatantly draws from Fosse’s “Mexican Breakfast,” could one propose that Beyonce was simply reclaiming movement that was, in essence, stolen in the first place?

I don’t know enough about Beyonce to say whether or not that’s giving her too much credit, but it doesn’t feel like too much of a stretch to extend the argument to Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, who’s lineage is in modern dance and questioned above.

One more thing about Beyonce: She’s clearly stated that these striking similarities are about inspiration, and not motivated by a malicious intent to steal people’s stuff. The ethical lines are technically in the hands of copyright courts. Aside: the estate of the guy who wrote “Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer” pays a temporary employee enough cash to live on for a year by hunting down copyright violations between Thanskgiving and Christmas. More often, they’re hashed out in the court of public opinion (read: Facebook).

By the way, Jumatatu M. Poe and Jermone Donte Beacham, who will perform a processional performance called “This is a Formation: Intervention” in Portland Friday and from Lewiston’s Tree Street Youth to the Bates College campus on Saturday, are incidentally involved. This travelling performance is part of an ongoing exploration of J-Sette. J-Sette’s origins are credited to Jackson State University, a sexy, flamboyant style adopted by Jackson State’s female majorette squad. The trend spread across Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the south as more and more drill teams ditched their batons, and J-Sette was soon embraced in gay clubs, predominantly by cisgender gay men. Poe and Beacham take the form out of its original habitats and place it on city streets, performed by people representing a wide range of gender and sexual identities and traveling through historically or pre-dominantly black neighborhoods. Amongst the many imbedded and important threads in this work, Poe and Beacham are also, in a way, reclaiming a form that has permeated pop culture. Indeed, J-Sette has been said to inspire a number of pop icons, including – you guessed it – Beyonce.

MaMa², comprised of Chicago’s Amirah Sackett (“Suga Mama”) and Detroiter Mary Mar (“BGirl Ma-Ma”), offered three short dances injected into more than 90-minutes of goodness by The Reminders, a music duo hailing from Colorado. The husband and wife team – Big Samir and Aja Black – alternate between rap and hip-hop with pinches of funk and soul sprinkled in, while Sackett offered two quintessential examples of her signature style of popping-and-locking. Mar’s solo is a brief, but wide-ranging journey telling the story of her family, who fled the Cambodian genocide to ultimately settle in Michigan, where she was born and became a B-girl.

The second and final performance of this festival kick-off was July 14, with Bates Dance Festival events resuming tonight through August 4 in and around campus.

MaMa²’s work blends old school hip-hop with each woman’s Muslim faith, which produces a rich amalgamation of layers in their performances. But amidst the seriousness of the 2019 Bates Dance Festival’s overarching themes surrounding identity, culture, and the biases and assumptions germane to contemporary dance, they essentially threw a big party to kick off the season, backed by DJ Man-O-Wax fiercely spinning vinyl upstage.

What the back half of the audience soon came to find out, is that this first public event of the Bates Dance Festival (BDF) was, for the other half of the crowd, the end of their time in Lewiston, Maine. The Reminders, MaMa²and DJ Man-O-Wax were the penultimate event for youth enrolled in the Young Dancers Workshop (YDW), a three-week, pre-professional training program taking place each summer in conjunction with the performance season.

This year, the BDF schedule has been reorganized, condensing the presenting series over three weekends to overlap with the Professional Training Program (PTP), a series of intensives for college-aged and professional dancers. Hours before The Reminders hit the stage, YDW participants gave an informal showing for family and friends, and the night before, Sackett and her aforementioned friends led a hip-hop workshop and dance party as part of the festival’s Concerts on the Quad series (relocated, like the first BDF Beer Garden after Friday night’s show, to a covered terrace near the Bates College library due to rain).

The casual, outdoor venue was a wholly more natural atmosphere for such a thing, if you ask me, but that didn’t stop Friday’s guests from grooving to the infectiously joyful noise of The Reminders, who, at intervals, brought YDW dancers and other audience members, including an infant, a toddler and two other adorable kids, up on stage to jam with them.

From our seats, we became part of the show: standing up, shaking our hips, waving hands in the air, swaying, snapping, clapping and reciting words with them – like a rock concert with a bit more direction.

I don’t know why, but when I’m told to stand up and shake my hips, I almost always feel apprehensive. I, like a lot of people, I’m sure, struggle to abandon physical defenses and “let go.” In so doing, my actions probably counterintuitively draw more attention to me than if I were to join in – but an ear-to-ear smile and tiny bobbing of my knees to the beat of the song is enough to get by with, right?

I think people might interpret my hesitation as an unfortunate quality – something to be pitied, even – perhaps related to some level of insecurity, or a crippling lack of awareness or inhibition with my body, or an inability to really embrace what’s unfolding on stage.

That may be true for some, but for me, that’s not it at all.

Many choreographers and dancers talk of their desire to help “normal” people become “embodied,” as if to dance is to exist on some higher plane of kinesthetic awareness, self-knowledge or confidence (for some, it is; for some, it’s not). Artists who create immersive environments which require or encourage participation might view conventional theater spaces as relegating the audience a passive, uninvolved, detached entity, non-essential to the performance itself.

Is it fair to equate the above esoteric thought bubble to a couple of great musicians asking me to wave my hands in the air?

Heck, no. And to be clear, I personally felt safe and totally comfortable during this performance, and had a good time. (Furthermore, The Reminders shifted their approach when a comparatively subdued audience of Lewistonians and incoming PTP participants watching Sunday’s show were very clearly not going to be as exuberant as Friday’s audience).

But participation is something I’ve been thinking about within a larger discussion about audience expectations and consent, and it’s a theme that will arise throughout BDF this season.

The Reminders’ recommendations are tame compared to the demands of choreographers like Faye Driscoll, Yanira Castro or Haja Saranouffi, as three examples. And those choreographers are tame compared to artists who are really pushing participation to the edge.

It becomes even more complicated as festival directors and presenters realize that their audiences may not share the same values as their organizations. At least one, Pamela Tatge at Jacob’s Pillow, has publicly acknowledged this, which raises questions about what you can assume about your audience when you’ve evolved and they haven’t, and how much artists can therefore pressure their audiences into being vulnerable.

This is unfair, I suppose, when stadium tours and sports events aren’t given the same mandate. Maybe they should be. It’s impossible for the person who runs the “kiss cam” at hockey games to know whether they’re zooming in on an actual couple, or if cutting to commercial with a person wolfing down a hot dog at a ball game is how that spectator wants to be represented on TV. I’m not suggesting here that we eliminate or be offended by kiss cams or showing people eating hot dogs, or even inviting audience members on stage. Rather, I think I’m pointing out that permission is a thing, and this is a trickier subject that some artists might think.

As a not-so-serious example, I’ve watched Ohad Naharin’s “Minus 16” about a dozen times, mainly performed by Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. One of those times was last summer in Mexico City at the Danzatlan Festival, where a language barrier contributed to the most memorable viewing to-date. In the famous “Dean Martin” section, when the whole company falls down and leaves a lone audience member standing at center-center, she followed visual cues from her partner and laid down, spread-eagle, with the rest of the dancers.

Now, a more serious example: Watching Gauthier Dance perform the same piece a few months ago at the Harris Theater, one of the volunteers tripped and face-planted, belly flopping on the stage. She was fine (and an amazingly good sport), but there are so many what-ifs that went on in my brain when that happened. What if she’d been hurt? Dance doesn’t have “injury time-outs;” must the show go on if she’d busted her knee or blacked out? What does the process for picking volunteers look like? Could those volunteers be asked ahead of time, before the show? Would that create more inclusivity, allowing people with disabilities, people who’d love to do it with a little mental preparation, or even just the people in the middle of a row, to be considered? Picking “plants” from the audience – like, for example, what happens in Cirque du Soleil’s “O” when they strap an “audience member” to a harness and launch him 125 feet above the stage – would be inherently safer and more controlled in every regard. But it’s also contrived, quashing the beautiful variability and spontaneity that results from audience members (and the performers!) not exactly knowing what will happen – even when you’ve seen it a dozen times.

In an informal showing last week in the Shaeffer Theatre, the audience was given more than one trigger warning about nudity in the second of a trio of works in progress. By contrast, the third piece, during which the performers strongly recommended sitting in a circle on stage (though there was not enough room for everyone), showed what I considered to be images more triggering than naked bodies, and didn’t offer any disclaimers in advance. I’m not sure what the right approach is, but it’s important to consider the optics.

The most negative experience I’ve had at a dance show was within a supposedly inclusive environment. It was a burlesque cabaret which touts platitudes of queer positivity, body positivity and sex positivity, but made very clear that those who couldn’t let go of personal inhibitions toward participation were not welcome. I left at intermission.

Large, institutional dance companies and venues are, in increasing numbers, offering relaxed or sensory-friendly performances, creating an inclusive environment for individuals and families who are not able to, or are uncomfortable with remaining still and quiet in the dark for several hours. The house lights are dimmed, there’s no “shushing” allowed, and people are permitted to move around or go in and out of the theater as needed. Many experimental artists whose work hinges on participation do not seem to be picking up the other side of the issue by accepting that some audience members might need, or simply prefer to sit and watch. This is obviously a generalization; in my city alone, I can immediately offer Dropshift Dance, Zephyr Dance and Khecari as exceptions – three companies who play with audience interaction and almost always take meticulous care of the people in the room.

Art does not exist in a vacuum. Artists should seek to embrace everyone, or at least, manage the audience’s expectations. I don’t do conga lines. I don’t do mosh pits. I don’t want to wave my hands in the air, and I don’t enjoy getting up on stage during someone else’s performance. Nobody has the right to question this or ask why.

But I also love watching others who, with no hesitation, join in, and it doesn’t make me feel awkward to not be one of them. Seeing those YDW dancers oozing with joy, confidence and kinship for each other, dancing in the aisles and on stage as The Reminders’ lyrics drooled with positivity and love, I couldn’t help but stand up, smile and bob my knees to the beat, just a little.

I’m grateful to the Bates Dance Festival for creating spaces – digital and physical – for audience members and others to engage, not only with the work happening on stage but with these broader topics, too. I hope you will join me at one of the remaining Inside Dance events, in addition to all the festival performances, to discuss and digest the artists and subjects presented at BDF.