Well, tonight at 6pm marks my 10th consecutive (and the last) class in five days. I'm tired! Everyday between my two classes we've been running around trying to see a new museum or another area of town. Today we took a much needed break from being tourists. Yesterday's visit to the Leopold museum was enough to sustain us for a day I think. Oh the art there! Schiele, Klimt, Kokoschka, Muehl...these secessionists were intensely talented and just intense period. They didn't shy from using vibrant colors, even with so many haunting images. Schiele's naked self-portrait for instance, features the artist without feet and with red eyes and a red belly button. It's the kind of work that struck me as both inimitable and the kind of painting that even though I thought I was done looking at it, I kept going back to view it again and again, teetering between fascination and fear.
Evie was of course, most interested in her soccer ball, which we played with in the lobby, Jeffrey and I tag teaming with her. Tomorrow, we'll attempt to hit the Schonbrunn palace. I think I remember reading there is also a zoo there, so Evie will be happy.
So yes, a week of heavy dancing after very little dancing has yielded some noticeable changes in my body. Lifting Evie hurts. My feet are banged up. I have bruises on my shoulders from rolling. My legs feel like anvils. I'm trying to feel like "water" when I dance (as one of my teachers, Marta, keeps shouting at us in class) but I'm thinking I look more like a peanut butter sandwich. Perhaps the seven day break will do me good before I go at it again for a two day intensive workshop next weekend.
Being a student here is the best. Being a student PERIOD is the best. I found myself explaining to one of my new Austrian friends, Sabina, that I felt like a big empty container before this trip and that this week has slowly been filling me up again...with new information, new perspectives, new commitments and new promises to myself as an artist. For one, it's time to be serious with a daily movement meditation or practice. Why is it so hard to carve out even 30 minutes everyday for my body? I must insist on it and keep this experience close to me for a long time. I already know that I will leave here inspired, motivated, and hopeful, and after savoring this fullness a bit for myself, I'll be ready to spill it back out to my students in some sort of new, transformed, 'Christina' way. Ultimately, this workshop was well timed for me- I needed this more than I think I ever have needed a new learning environment. Dancing and living in Vienna for three weeks has filled my tank with gas. And then there is seeing work here...
Last night I went to see French choreographer Jérôme Bel's recent work. He collaborated with former Merce Cunningham and Lyon Opera Ballet dancer Cédric Andrieux to create a 75 minute solo, performed by Andrieux. I know what you're thinking: a 75 minute solo? Really? It was beautiful! Andreiux essentially just narrated his life in dance...from sharing his love of the hit TV show FAME when he was 9, to demonstrating the warm up in a Cunningham company class, to performing solos he has danced as an adult by Cunningham and Trisha Brown. He began by introducing himself and reciting his date and place of birth. He is 33, like me. What different lives we have led. At age 16, he entered a conservatory in France where the school's system constantly pitted him in competition against his peers. Grateful to graduate at the age of 20 and leave France for a job dancing in New York City with Jennifer Muller, Andrieux only mentions a fixation with a male dancer in Muller's company as a major factor to help persuade him to take this job. In his performance, we follow many of these seemingly important life details along the way but in Andrieux's performance, they are like insignificant signs one passes on a long road trip and then promptly forgets so as to not miss the valuable road sign we need next. But in these details that pass us by, I wonder what gems are missed. We're following his life's map, traveling from his past to the current moment, where he stands on stage, and he is always navigating. As his passengers, we follow him through vulnerably beautiful, sad, exciting, funny, and unpredictable moments. Yet throughout these different stretches, Andrieux is so matter of fact throughout the work. Despite the bumps and difficult moments that extend throughout his prolific career as a dance student and professional dancer, there are also many celebratory milestones that are shared mundanely. For instance, we learn that Andrieux takes an open class at the Cunningham studio soon after arriving in New York. Merce happens to be observing this class and personally invites Andrieux to an upcoming company audition. Andrieux describes the audition only as "lasting two weeks" and then immediately we are in the throngs of his seven year career with the company. Andrieux begins the work by remarking that he was never naturally talented as a dancer yet the awards he received in school and important jobs he received early in his career might invoke some commentary. However, Andrieux only shares with his audience that he remembers thinking that so many dance successes happened rather quickly for him. Significant milestones such as these are never commented on by Andrieux however. He presents a dance excerpt or a costume change with the same even-tempo delivery as the person who asked for my umbrella at the theatre's coat check. He never makes different inflections in his voice to suggest how he feels (or how we should feel, for that matter) about a significant event in his life.
Along the map of his dance-life journey, we stop at a rehearsal with the Merce Cunningham dance company. I was disappointed to not hear of some tribute to the recently passed Merce Cunningham, or some comments of his experience dancing for Cunningham. But for Andrieux, by taking us directly into the process of learning Merce's choreography generated from a computer program, we see that Andrieux is respectful of Cunningham, even if this reenactment shows Andrieux stumbling through Merce's nearly impossible physical requests. This rehearsal reenactment immediately brings Merce Cunningham back to life, and on stage with Andrieux. We follow their rehearsal together, a Merce Cunningham ghost, feeble bodied in his 80's and seated in the corner, asking Andrieux and his imaginary company members in the space to follow his concocted dance steps as though they are something we would read in a manual to connect a dvd player to a television monitor. This moment in the work is particularly powerful. I realize at once that I am both voyeur, giddy and delighted to be in on this rehearsal moment and yet it feels like a private and sacred event that actually becomes a beautiful and reverent tribute to Cunningham too.
As Andrieux transitions from a rehearsal moment like this one with his soft, almost-whisper like voice to the next place in this performance, he states: "I'm going to dance this for you now" and an excerpt of famous contemporary choreographer's work made for him takes place. Andrieux uses an attached microphone in the piece and as we watch him dance, we hear his breath amplified, or the microphone feedback from his arm swipe the cord attached to him. These moments are magnificent. The performance is not glorified, it is almost just an archive, a way for the body to remember these highlights, and for us to watch him relive them. We watch him dance and it is an opportunity to just observe a skilled dancer executing difficult movement. Certainly it is about Andrieux doing this movement but even more, his unassuming presence, dressed in rehearsal sweats pants, tee shirt and socks allow us to strip away the formalness of what this moment might have been at one point and instead admire the organization of these dances, the artfulness of their accumulated steps, the specificity of the dance's sequences. Ultimately, these dance excerpts allow us to focus on a choreographer's choices like we are using a microscope to see it. And more, we realize how special it is to see his interpretation of another person's choreography.
His pattern is consistent: he performs one beautiful series of movements by Trisha Brown, for instance, until it is finished. Now, after his dancing is complete do we really appreciate the hard work of it all. He takes as much time as he needs to catch his breath or drink some water. He walks upstage a bit, as if to shake off the remnants of this excerpt before he transitions back into storyteller mode. We wait for him to do these sort of things multiple times and it is never indulgent. He does not respond to the audience's applause. He does not add a joke, or a comment about his execution of anything. There is no lighting change to transition us, it is just him, reflecting on what just happened, and us, reflecting on his reflection. Where to next on his map? Andrieux is so even tempered and unassuming in his performance you begin to realize that even if there is a life altering event like a breakup, a death in the family, or an injury in the life of this dancer, it will not enter the performance with a big, dramatic entrance. It will simply pass by, like another road sign.
Bel and Andrieux's work made me think. Telling one's life story in performance, through performance is not a new performance theme by any means yet somehow, in the stripped down storytelling mode of this work, Andrieux's life is utterly human and poignant to anyone. Attending a dance class at Impulstanz the morning following the performance, I could not help but look around the studio crowded with dancers from all over the world and realize that each of us has unique dance stories, impressionable early dance teachers, humiliating moments at auditions or in performance; moments that translate into beautiful, vulnerable material. This collaboration was succesful first because of its simple, no-fail structure. Have a dancer tell his story with words and dance. It will be rich because it will reach all of our senses. We will watch, we will listen, we will viscerally experience it, we will empathize, we will crave certain moments, be jealous or relieved that we did not experience others, and we will leave the theatre in love with the dancing body and all it is capable of expressing. Thank you, Jerome Bel and Cédric Andrieux for reminding us of this.
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