MR Festival 2008: music and dance by Gelsey Bell

by Gelsey Bell
MR Festival Spring 2008: Somewhere Out There

Tuesday, June 3rd was, for me, an extended meditation on the
relationship between music and dance.

In Nancy Garcia’s workshop I’m wondering who could be singing this
song… the participants were given a momentary peak into Garcia’s
process of creating pieces. We experimented with two scores of Pauline
Oliveros – Sound Meditation and Old Sound, New Sound, Borrowed Sound
Blue, for voices – and a movement exercise of re-experiencing space in
terms of imaginary containers to be traveled through. In the last
section of the workshop, Garcia took the movements and vocalizations
we had created in experimentation and melded together a more coherent
group piece. One thing that seemed to strike some of the participants
in the closing conversation was the separation between experiences of
vocalization and listening and experiences of dancing even after
Garcia had pieced things together. With only four hours, we didn’t
have time to put the two together in single acts, something Garcia
seemed to imply one must do sparingly and carefully.

However there must be a connection between listening to someone sing
the chorus to Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah over and over again and
watching someone crawl through the narrow path of an imaginary
ventilation shaft (two examples of sound and movement from the
workshop). And the link that my thoughts keep returning to is space.
There is no question that making music requires movement the same as
dance: millimeter subtleties of fingers, shoulders, and wrists, the
blurring and focusing of the eyes, the circulation of breath and the
parting of lips. But also, just as dance is seen in/through/as space,
sound vibrations are heard and felt in/through/as the space of their
performance and reception.

The union of dancer and musician was acutely felt later that night at
the event of Dance and Music. The music of Brian Eubanks sounded the
walls and bright hollow of the performance space, beautifully
intertwining with what would, in most situations, be considered ‘bad’
acoustics punctured by noisy basement machinery. Dancer Jessica Ray
was not simply moving through the space of the room but also moving
through the sound, creating a coupling effect of moving with the space
as well as with the sound.

This type of coupling of sound, space, and movement was stunningly
exhibited in the performance of Newton Armstrong on labtop, Nate
Wooley on trumpet, and Jennifer Mesch on, for lack of a better term,
door. To explain, there is an inconspicuous door in the Judson
Memorial Church Gym on the wall across from the entrance and to the
right. From this door Mesch literally opened the piece with a dive
towards the gym floor that had previously been utilized by the other
performers as a stage. Mesch however stuck to the door and the
doorframe, exploring its architecture with her body as Armstrong and
Wooley, unseen to most of the audience, sounded the small and curved
space of the stairs and hallway the door concealed. It did not seem as
if the dance was being lead by the music, or vice versa, but rather
that all three performers were held together by their common place of
expression and the uncanny proscenium doorframe which marked inside
and outside, bleed and silence.

The continuation of distinction between musician and dancer does not,
however, answer the participants of Garcia’s workshop question about
the union of sound and movement within the isolated body of the
performer. Throughout many of the performances that I attended at this
festival there were instances of dancers vocalizing but almost always
as two separate sections of the performance, isolating the two acts
from each other. One instance which broke this trend was the ‘drunken’
descent of two dancers in Faye Driscoll’s piece at the festival’s
closing party. Negotiating the stairs from the Judson balcony with
concentrated physical abandon (highly controlled non-control) and
ringing laughter, the performers cut through the audience’s
unsuspecting chit-chat and enveloped the resonant space as they moved
into it with thumping and sliding of their legs and feet and the
cackle of laughter.

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