Spoilt for Choice

This piece I wrote for DANZ magazine re: a trip to Europe last year. Photos by Francisco Rodrigues, taken at a workshop led by yours truly at Dans Centrum Jette in Brussels 2005 “How does New Zealand dance compare to dance in Europe?” It is a question I was asked not long after I arrived back after a recent work and research period in Brussels and Amsterdam. And it is a question that is impossible to talk about with any degree of accuracy because European dance is far too diverse to oversimplify with generalizations like “European dance” for example. What I am prepared to say is that dancers in Europe have access to a large array of technical approaches from gifted, accomplished, and influential teachers In Brussels (where Claire O’Neill is well respected as a teacher and performer) on any given weekday there are professional dance classes in two or three studios in different areas of the city. Company classes are also accessible to a lesser degree. The teachers are often choreographers drawing on a very broad knowledge base to create their own hybrid practice which in turn is what they offer professionals. The atmosphere in class was consistently friendly and supportive. At one studio there was a volunteer whose job it was to simply welcome you at the door. The range of abilities, skills and backgrounds of the freelance professionals are so diverse that it sabotages any narrow notions of what a good dancer is. It seems acceptable to be who you are, working on whatever it is you want to work on. Walking into any freelance class you are likely to encounter trained dancers at student, semi professional and professional level with technical influences too extensive to list. Also you find circus acrobats, martial artists, breakers, contact improvisers, and people with relatively little training who have somehow found work with choreographers (men relatively common in this category). There is a constant and extensive choice of workshops available. A few things I saw were: acrobatics and floor work for dancers, ballet adaptively geared for contemporary dancers, the usual physical theater and voice workshops and a workshop devoted entirely to learning the air track (a break move). I attended a four day workshop in Amsterdam in improvisation and composition taught by two different members of Magpie Dance Music Company on each consecutive day. There is extensive history in this group. Each member has their own artistic concerns and are very strong individuals. But onstage and off they work together like a cross between a punk band and a close knit family. As I was invited to perform with them I got to experience that directly. I got to sneak in a ‘rehearsal’ and share ideas on the practice of composition with another accomplished Amsterdam based improviser Lily Kiara at the School of New Dance. Lily is a disciple of Julyen Hamilton whose work I studied in 2003 in Spain. In Brussels I attended a contact improvisation workshop with Frey Faust whose system of movement organization called “The “Axis Syllabus” not only helped me sort out a chronic knee condition but also taught contact improvisation in easily understandable biomechanical principles as opposed to the more mystical language of image based approaches I’ve encountered. At a jam at the PARTS school I found myself being caught off guard simply because people I didn’t know smiled at me as I entered the room and I wasn’t used to that. Every person I worked with that evening was a highly competent dancer and capable improviser. David Zambrano, a veteran improviser and a teacher in high demand all over Europe, taught a week of classes at a special price of five euro per class (when he runs a workshop there is a higher price tag) Approximately forty to forty five dancer’s attended everyday and the guy on the door whose job it was to welcome you also got to stop excess dancers from coming in. David’s technique is called ‘Flying Low’, works on getting in and out of the floor efficiently at high speed, and has been in development since before Catherine Chappell encountered it in the nineties An essential idea that I gleaned from all this is the idea that technique is treated as a servant of the required task. By this I mean that the aim is to achieve efficiency of function rather than being focused on a look. In working in this way the dancer was not a victim to the aesthetic of dance. A lot of practitioners are working this way. I was surprised at the common usage of improvisation in a class setting. It was used as an exercise to achieve specific technical aims and to facilitate different enquiries. This meant that there were sections of class that were tightly choreographed exercises and sections where guided improvisation was used to appropriate a specific outcome. The net result was that the dancer worked on developing a body consciousness that was intelligent, sophisticated, articulate and responsive. Of the performances I saw I observed that hybridization and references to the past were prevalent in every single work. Influences from the eras of romanticism, modernism, late modernism, post modernism, and whatever phase we are in now were all on display. Minimalism, athleticism, complexity, simplicity, physical theatre, abstraction, multi media, fashion, design & performance improvisation were all made use of in different ways. Hybridized vocabularies of cultural dance, popular dance, martial arts, somatic practices, character based movement and different contemporary dance techniques meant that anything was put with anything. And voice was used, often extensively in almost every work. Contemporary dance appears to be a significant blip on the broader cultural radar in Europe. The art form is both relatively visible in the media and prolific in output. Dance and its practitioners interact with popular culture in a range of media. From artist initiated spaces and squats, to project based networks, to fulltime companies there is an abundance of practitioners and works. And they have a public that are both relatively dance literate and very willing to meet what it is that dance demands of them.