Investigating Technique

Bales, Melanie & Rebecca Nettl-Fiol (eds.)
The Body Eclectic: Evolving Practices in Dance Training
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008

Disclaimer: I firmly believe inquiry into the body to be the most noble of lifetime studies and that the process of learning a physical technique is a brilliant way to get to the heart of your investigations. At first glance, I thought The Body Eclectic: Evolving Practices in Dance Training, edited by Melanie Bales and Rebecca Nettl-Fiol, might be too specific to dance students (even more specific, I assumed it was aimed at university undergrads) to be of value as contextual material for Lincoln Center Institute-style thinkers. But as I delved into the book with my own interests at heart—above disclaimer firmly pinned to my sleeve—all the questions I hear during Lincoln Center Institute (LCI) workshops about the technical requirements of dance, where and how people learn to move the way they do, and the enthusiasm for delving into the philosophy of the body in motion came flooding forward from the text.

The repertory we teach to at LCI is highly varied, in a single year we might go from flamenco (primarily a solo form of world dance) to tango (traditionally a social dance) to Bill T. Jones’s post-modern collaboration with video installation artists. Dance is not just one thing in the context of imaginative teaching and learning through aesthetic education, or even in the field of dance as a whole.

Often, the question participants ask me is “How did you learn to do this kind of dance?” or, “Where can I learn to dance like this?” or even, “What do you call this kind of dancing? In The Body Eclectic, Bales and Nettl-Fiol investigate the practices “that thread through the jumbled collection of experiences that comprise late twentieth- and very early twenty-first century dance training. They wished to know what people were doing, why they were doing it, and how it fit into their view of dance and themselves as artists” (ix). Bales and Nettl-Fiol attack these questions through a series of essays, interviews, and personal statements with choreographers, teachers, dancers, and body workers all currently practicing in the field.

My personal technique background runs like this: very late starter with a will to make my own work from the beginning of my training. Over time, after injuries, a health crisis, the ravages of dancing around free-lance work, and aging, I have evolved a solid commitment to yoga most days, ballet class as often as I can get there, and contact improvisation every blue moon. I find I tailor my training to suit the choreography I am currently exploring. As I read these interviews, I find my eclectic training keeps me in very good company.

At the center of the book I dove right into an extensive interview with my all-time favorite composition teacher, Martha Myers. Nettl-Fiol observes to Meyers that some of the most active dancers in New York don’t take technique classes. “Ballet dancers are still taking daily classes,” Meyers replies, “It’s the modern dancers, partly because they don’t have any well-defined technical standards to fulfill…Each choreographer’s technique is totally different: what David Dorfman is demanding of them, Trish Brown isn’t. There aren’t any absolute standards of performance. What they are asked to do often has no name, it doesn’t have three hundred years of perfection that has to be met. If you look back to [Martha] Graham or Merce [Cunningham] or Trisha [Brown], the really top folks have invented their own techniques” (97-98).

Bales and Nettle-Fiol compare the continuing shift in dance company structure and the training needed to dance in these companies to larger social trends. “The idea of ‘going Hollywood’ in the American business culture refers to the direction from large companies to smaller, less permanent organizations that mobilize around talent, as big Hollywood studios gave way to independent producers and film makers. This idea is reflected in the shift in American modern dance from earlier periods—where companies sought to produce and preserve the repertory of the founder-choreographer through a stable, hierarchical structure much like a ballet company—to today’s more fluid and unstable pick-up company…the entrepreneurial dancer is a counterpart to the independent choreographer” (viii).

In our repertory at LCI, we have examples of both models. Paul Taylor, Martha Graham, Pilobolus, and Cunningham have all been in our rep, giving us an opportunity to see a codified company style or vocabulary in action. On the other hand, we have also seen highly idiosyncratic work from Mark Haim, Sean Curran, and Monica Bill Barnes that demands a whole different style of training and level of versatility from the dancers.

David Dorfman speaks to what he looks for in his dancer’s technique, “…A value that I hold, that things should be maximally idiosyncratic, maximally expressive, and personal…That’s why I choose to begin all classes with some kind of expressive exercises, with improvisation; I feel I’m doing improvisation and composition in a technique class…When I’m teaching I am starting to express certain values: I like to spin, I like to go in and out of the ground, I like to jump. Over the years I keep seeing wonderful people like [long-time company members] Lisa [Race], and Jen [Nugent] who inspire me” (180).

One aspect of working as a choreographer that constantly amazes me is that your medium is other people. The level of collaboration, personal investment, and creativity demanded of dancers during every rehearsal is awe-inspiring. It would be edifying for anyone with an interest in dance, performance, or the art of choreography to read The Body Eclectic and experience this unique point-of-view, an investigation into the how and the why of dance technique that fundamentally shapes the art form. It is one of my favorite investigations.

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