The Integrity of Anonymity

This is a series of excerpts from an essay that questions the role of external recognition in our understanding of identity, and explores the importance of doing unrecognized work for the common good. It situates identity and environment as interdependent, re-framing the unseen labor of being one of many, not as an affront to who we are, but as an essential aspect of our self and our power. It seeks to inspire and support us as we allow our diverse identities to breath into the space of shared experience and to celebrate the integrity of anonymity.

As a teacher and artist I feel a void in our culture when it comes to celebrating the huge amount of work that must often be done anonymously as part of a political movement, scientific inquiry, or institutional advancement. In order to align our society and education systems with environmental sustainability and human rights, many individuals must work together toward goals, which may have nothing to do with personal recognition. Social media however, has turned daily life into a popularity contest of sorts, amplifying the fear that we might cease to exist if we are not seen. For many people, this has reversed of the cause and effect relationship of action to recognition. Public recognition is increasingly a primary motivator for generous actions, rather than a result of them.

The current presidential primaries reflect our culture’s obsession with celebrity and delight in the entertainment value of baseless, shocking claims made by overstuffed egos.  At the same time they are revealing that there are pockets of the American people who see very clearly that our political, economic, education, and criminal justice systems have become corrupt. These people are mobilizing behind a candidate who speaks almost entirely about transforming American systems for and through “we” rather than “me.” The realization that change in our governing systems might be possible is gaining inspiring momentum, but its basis in the collective good is so revolutionary to our egocentric American culture, that the mass media is still in shock. Many Americans are casting votes for candidates who embody status quo selfishness as a reflection of their own fear of equality.

Living in a hierarchical society, we are conditioned to perceive the misfortunes of others as “good” for us. Through his, her, or their loss, we are given the opportunity to look down at someone, giving us the false sensation that we have somehow risen.

Numerous studies have shown that greed does not lead to happiness. Greed, selfishness, and our desire to be acknowledged as “special,” are powerful motivators that separate us from our environments and convince us that the only consequences of our actions that matter are the ones that we can acknowledge as personally beneficial. Our culture does a fantastic job pitting the oppressed against one another so that we will be so distracted by our own disputes that we will continue to look the other way, as we are all taken advantage of.

The Occupy Movement, Black Lives Matter, and the 4^th wave of feminism are all political movements that are charged by particular events and individual stories, but which represent the interests and experiences of large groups of people. Social movements have historically consisted of masses fueled and organized by outspoken and articulate leaders, but as the times change so do our ideas about participation and recognition. The integration of media into almost every aspect of our daily lives, and the resulting un-curated access we have to the construction of celebrity culture via digital followings, has dual functions. Social and mass media both simplify and accelerate the mobilization of large groups of people, and at the same time they can feed the hungry ghost of the ego that often times wants to be recognized as an actor more than it wants to act. 

Current breakthroughs in the field of cognitive science however, stand in direct opposition to the idea that we are individual agents who must see others loose in order for us to win. The emerging field of Four E Cognitive Science investigates our self-realization, not through our isolated identities, but through our engagement with the world around us. It also points out that every one of our actions impacts our immediate and extended environments.  The definition of mind and self articulated by Four E Cognitive Science supports us as we seek to break down the outdated notion that we are protected, by the walls we construct to divide us.

Artists always seem to be one step ahead of scientists. Visual artist Carrie Mae Weems began a lecture in 2015 by saying that she was inspired by the simultaneous truth of two opposing facts. On the one hand, we are living on a tiny planet in the middle of a vast ever-expanding universe. On the other, we leave traces of our DNA on everything we touch and these traces of our presence can remain in our environment for thousands of years. The first observation points to our undeniable anonymity in the eyes of universal forces. The other suggests that our every action affects the world around us, and that through these actions our individual identities are manifest and consequential. Both observations are true.

In his February 3, 2016 lecture entitled, Embodying the Extended Mind, Al Kaszniak, referenced the work of contemporary cognitive scientist and philosopher Even Thompson and the late neuroscientist Francisco Varela, who have reconceived the notion of “mind.” These figures are using Western scientific methods to prove what Eastern philosophy has claimed for thousands of years; the mind is not a computational device that is manifest in our brain alone, but a process that arises from the interaction between living organisms and their environments. Drawing on Thompson’s work in Four E Cognitive Science, Kaszniak describes mind as, “embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended" and adds to these four E's that the mind is also, "evanescent.” This articulation of mind-as-one-with-experience has helped me tremendously to understand how illusory individual identity is. It does not deny that each of us has a perspective, but it situates all of us as both in process, and interconnected. It suggests that our world, communities, and cultures are in themselves, recognition of our action. For me, the acknowledgement that my actions have an impact on the world soothes the desire for further recognition. Both Carrie Mae Weems assertion of contrasting dynamics our human condition, and this articulation of the mind/self as an inter-subjective process, can help us to reconsider our individual connection to the common good.

The embodied mind refers to the 2-way neurological streets that connect our physical bodies to our brains and breaks up one of the oldest hierarchies we have been conditioned into, that which separates the mind and body. “Mind” refers not to the workings of the brain in isolation, but to the interaction between the brain and the rest of the body.

Embedded mind refers to the depths of cultural conditioning. Despite our efforts to think for ourselves, we are always making judgments in relation to the web of ethical and aesthetic priorities that are woven all around us though our societies. Whether we agree with or rebel against the status quo, our minds are shaped by the cultural contexts in which we live. Our actions re-enforce cultural conditioning and we become subject to what we assert, or as visual artist Jenny Holzer states in her 1978-87 Truisms, “You are a victim of the rules you live by.”

Enacted mind refers to the interconnectivity of action and consciousness. Through action, we become aware of our environments and ourselves. Numerous studies have shown that not only does our physical and mental development depend on dynamic sensory stimuli, but also, movement throughout our lifetime is what makes us aware of our physical being. While we are in motion, the ways in which our choices resonate with or fracture our environments, feeds back to us. This feedback reinforces or inspires change in our minds and actions. At the same time, each choice that we make affects the environment and society we inhabit. “The path is laid in the walking of it,” Kaszniak asserts. Similarly, choreographer Bill T. Jones once counseled me, “The answer is in the doing.”

Extended mind is an articulation of our desire to outsource certain aspects of our thinking to external devices. Whether we are talking about Google searches on a smart phone, the use of pen and paper to catch a “to-do list,” books that hold histories, or artworks that communicate cultural ideals, humans have long “extended” our minds through technologies. As our integration with technology steadily increases it becomes increasingly important that we do not becomes slaves to technology, but rather embrace and fully utilize it as part of our extended mind in a process of collaboratively co-creating reality.

Kaszniak deftly connects this evanescent definition of mind to Zen practices that support our embodied understanding of the mind as a process, not a thing. Key to this process is the interactivity between our mind and body, personal and cultural histories, changes in our environments, and the countless causes and affects of our actions. This articulation of integration between an “in-process” individual and their environment, in turn this reveals that our society is also in constant motion, which illuminates the potential for change.

Seeing my “self” as a process that is co-creating reality with my environment and community is a perspective that I find immensely empowering. Similar to the dichotomy presented by Carrie Mae Weems, it suggests that while my perspective is of consequence, it is also a product of collaboration. “I” am making choices that are constantly informed by and informing my environment. Hence, “self” improvement, and community improvement are one.

Perhaps I find the idea of co-creating reality so empowering because I have recently transitioned from the life of a full-time performer to that of a full-time professor. As an artist I am primarily interested in communicating ideas, and as a teacher I am overwhelmingly dedicated to communicating ideas, so in many ways, this is really just a change in venue for the same, on-going work. However, as you may well imagine, the shift in lifestyle is rather dramatic.

My life as a teacher is decidedly less glamorous than that of my still performing peers. The daily relationship to identity construction and recognition seeking has been replaced by a daily rhythm of service. I thought I would miss the spotlight, but instead I find that I am increasingly drawn to the freedom, power, and integrity of anonymity.

As a dancer, one of the things I loved most about performing was that I was part of something larger than myself. Though I was acutely aware of the strain in my own legs, heart, lungs, and focus, I was also aware that I was only one part of a moving painting, an experience being shared with fellow performers, audiences, technical crews, funders, presenters, arts administrators, etc. I have always loved working in community with others. At the same time, I would be lying if I were to suggest that I, as a dancer, did not consistently desire recognition for my tiny piece of the performance puzzle. It is part of a dancer’s job to aspire to be luminous, and most of us choose to perform because we want to be recognized for that momentary glow, which is supported by a lifetime of work. We want to be part of a successful production, but also to have the choreographer choose us for the featured solo, to have critics mention our name as one of the shows’ many attributes, and many of us eventually leave performance companies to start our own, so that our own voice and name can be found in bigger type and bolder font.

In stark contrast, there is no spotlight on a teacher (that is unless the teacher’s goal is to harness devotees instead of actually teach). One who is dedicated to education as a form of growth and development can hope to be admired and respected by one’s students and colleagues, but as a conduit for knowledge, you can be assured that to the students you work with, your voice will be one of many, co-creating the students’ paths.

One of the dance techniques I teach is the Martha Graham technique. Graham (1894-1991) is undeniably one of the most important choreographers of the 20^th century. She created over 180 ballets in her lifetime and revolutionized American culture’s ideas about dance as an art form, gender and costume design, and the relationship between abstraction and narrative in theater. She created an angular and aggressive movement technique in collaboration with the dancers with whom she worked, in order to facilitate the performance of her repertory. Graham technique is based in precise movement practices such as the contraction and release of the torso, the use of spirals and rotation to connect the limbs of the body to the core, and assertive shifts of weight that allow a dancer to cover immense amounts of space in a single stride. These principles are still useful today in relation to contemporary choreography. Unfortunately however the technique is more often taught as a form of idol worship, than as a series of principles. Graham’s notorious ego would have it no other way. She worked in collaboration, but demanded sole recognition for her successes. As a result, instead of being celebrated for its enduring underlying principles, Graham’s legacy is quickly being reduced to a series of “Martha said…” quotes.

As a part of this legacy I am beginning to notice, that teaching through a singular historic figure or even through a cannon that was established through a historic (which in America means racist and misogynistic) filter, only serves to guide students towards imitation and reverence, not towards the critical and creative thinking needed to inspire a generation to move forward with their lives as agents of change in a troubled world.

The confusion between the teacher and teachings is not isolated to the performing art world. There are teachers in all subjects who use their positions of power over students to boost their own egos. The style I aspire to when I teach is inspired by my study of Ashtanga Yoga and Zen Buddhism, wherein the guru or teacher can take almost any form of embodiment or experience in order to be a conduit that can open a student’s eyes to certain truths. However, even in the long-standing schools of the supposedly spiritually uplifting Yoga and Zen practices, egomaniacal teachers often prey on the inexperience and devotion of their students.

Just because something is common and/or wide spread however, does not make it right. Teaching anything in order to establish or maintain power over others is at best a waste, and at worst an abuse, of education systems. In his 1916 book, Democracy and Education, philosopher John Dewey states, “Each generation is inclined to educate its young so as to get along in the present world instead of with a view to the proper end of education: the promotion of the best possible realization of humanity as humanity.”

By teaching students to revere an individual teacher, we keep our lesson plans locked in the past. They honor what has happened, rather than what could happen. I share Dewey’s opinion that the proper end of education is not to prepare students to enter the workforce and maintain the status quo, but it is instead to empower and inspire students to change the world, and to create new roles for themselves within it. Through education, we, students and teachers, create reality together. My perspective colors my delivery of information, as does the generation, ability, race, gender, class, and curiosity of the students with whom I work. However, I seek to engage the classroom as a collaborative space. One in which I lead by example, letting my identity and anonymity dance an intimate duet.

Dewey also asserts, “The conception of education as a social process and function has no definite meaning until we define the kind of society we have in mind.” This brings us back to the political concerns that opened this essay. If we are seeking to build a society of individuals who prioritize power over others as opposed to power with others, then teaching students to imitate from a celebrity pedestal will create the kind of followers that society calls for. If instead we define the “best possible realization of humanity” as one in which, community, human rights, and environmental sustainability are respected, then we need to think about how individual teachers can become channels for teachings that are much more consequential than any one artist, intellect, or cannon. In this way perhaps we can develop educational models that celebrate the embodied, embedded, enacted, extended and evanescent mind.

It’s one thing to say, we should all love each other. It is entirely another thing to work tirelessly towards a society in which equality manifests. How many of us are interested in that work, which makes the world a more just place, rather than the work that attempts to put our name in lights, leaving others in shadows? Can we begin to frame, and understand, identity and anonymity, not as mutually exclusive states, but as simultaneously possible? Can we anchor our identity in our works, as opposed to our titles? Can we, as a culture, find ways to celebrate the integrity of anonymity, so that enough individuals recognize their interdependence in time to create the ground swell needed for a political revolution in the upcoming election?

I believe that the answer to this lies in the cooperative efforts of students and teachers, educators and presenters, performers and audiences, creators and consumers, scientists and religious leaders. For in fact our identities are embedded in one another. Whether we are conscious of it or not; we are all co-creating reality. To honor this interconnectivity and work for the common good is to celebrate our embedded identities and allow the integrity of anonymity to amplify the power of our actions.

Abbreviated Works Cited

-Dewey, John. Democracy and Education. New York: MacMillan, 1916. 96-97.

-Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 2000.

-Goldberg, Michelle. The Goddess Pose: The Audacious Life of Indra Devi, the Woman Who Helped Bring Yoga to the West. New York: Penguin, 2015.

-Juhan, Deane.  Job’s Body. Barrytown: Station Hill, 2003. 21-55, 185-202.

-Lehrer, Jonah. How We Decide. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.

-Lehrer, Jonah. Proust Was a Neuroscientist. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007.

-Shlain, Leonard. Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light. New York: Morrow, 1991.

-Thompson, Evan. Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.

-Van Der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score; Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Penguin Group, 2014. 223-227. 

-Varela, Francisco. Ethical Know-How: Action, Wisdom, and Cognition. Standford: Standford University Press. 1999.

-Weems, Carrie Mae. "Constructing History: An Artist Explores the Context of Her Work." Lecture, The Jack and Lewis Rudin Distinguished Visiting Scholars Program, Marymount Manhattan College, New York, October 28, 2015.

Excavation Site: Martha Graham USA

It was an honor and a strange pleasure to be a part of Michael Kliën’s Excavation Site: Martha Graham USA, on January 16, 2016.

Photo:Brigid Pierce

Kliën’s “social choreography” seeks to dismantle dominant notions of productivity and representation in dance, replacing these agendas with relatively open scores, which reveal the actual choreography of social interactions that are colored by historic and present contexts.

When I was told that Graham, PS122, and the New Museum were collaborating via Kliën’s vision, I knew I wanted to be involved. I grew up in a New York that was still strictly divided between “uptown” and “downtown” dance. Though my own career has bridged many aesthetics, and the geography of the New York dance scene has shifted, the division between for-profit and experimental dance is still rarely broken. Hence I was intrigued to see what would come of a group of dancers tied together via an outrageously formal and performative movement technique, diving together into an experimental space of the unknown.

The project utilized the entire 11^th floor of Westbeth, which will always in my mind be the Cunningham Studios, not the Graham studios. The space was transformed into a kind of salon through the ingenuity of dramaturge Steve Valk so that the audience could engage in a brief philosophical and historic Graham intensive before venturing into the main studio. This beautiful studio was draped in heavy black curtains, closing it into a black box that was immersed in a surround sound electronic score.  In response to Graham’s assertion that, “where a dancer places her feet is holy ground,” the audience was asked to take off their shoes before entering this space. In the studio the audience encountered 20 past, present, and future members of the Graham legacy, who were involved in their own, collective excavation.

Kliën’s prompts for our excavation were simple, yet at the same time baffling. The entire project reminded me of a Zen koan. Something designed to short circuit one’s brain, so that we might catch a glimpse of what lies beneath the mind-as-director of our constructed selves and rehearsed interactions. My understanding of the instructions was to act, observe, ponder, and take note of the sediment that remains. Through these four tasks we were to excavate how action becomes dance, how observation enables attunement with one’s environment, to allow pondering to shift into evoking spirits, ancestors, or gods, and through them to sanctify the sediment. We were to stay engaged with one another, but not communicate in codes (language is a code, a wink is a code…). There were also underlying rules, “do not have ideas, do not be creative, do not perform, do not judge, do not perform touch, do not improvise, do not resolve, do not worry, be shameless.”

It is fascinating to ask such a performative company to “not perform,” to act, observe, and be, but to not try, do, accomplish, resolve… Wasn’t it Martha who said, “anything but indifference…”

For me it was the evoking of ancestors that allowed me to make sense of my task. Graham dancers know how to channel. It was/is part of Martha’s technique to allow the blood memory of human experience to speak through your body, as both a mere, and an exulted, vessel. We were in a space and a community that are rich with ancestry.  Through the four-hour experience I found myself engaged in an amazing conversation between the present moment and a loaded past, being danced.

In her essay, The Female Dancer and the Male Gaze, Susan Manning refers to Dempster’s assertion that, “social and political values are not simply placed or grafted onto a neutral body-object like so many old or new cloths.  On the contrary ideologies are systematically deposited and constructed on an anatomical plane, i.e. in the neuro-musculature of the dancer’s body.” (Manning 156)

In my experience, classical techniques are similarly grafted into the facial container of a dancer’s body. Graham’s interest in spirals, contraction/release, and shift of weight, are movement experiences that become lenses for a Graham trained dancer, through which to perceive, contemplate, and respond to the world. The technique isn’t “in” our bodies. Rather, this specific kinesthetic intelligence, no matter how we deconstruct, rearrange, or rebel against it, “is” our body. The body of a dancer is a multi-faceted process, always unfolding and redeveloping itself in relation to what needs to be honored, what needs to be dismantled, what needs to be said. We can build new aesthetics out of deepening how we consider our training, but we can’t drop it. The body remembers. (Rothschild 38)

Those of us from the Graham tradition, who started Excavation together, share this embodied knowledge. It has a variable aesthetic and ethical value, depending on whom you ask. For the consumer of traditional western theater, Graham technique carries a high aesthetic value. Most of us from the Graham tradition believe sincerely in our work because the profound emotional truths embodied by Graham’s movement vocabulary have resonated with our own lives. Through these dances we have been assured that we are not alone in the intensity of our pain and our ecstasy.  

At the same time, to a connoisseur of contemporary art, this aesthetic is often seen as a site of farce and ridicule, a vocabulary that has been bankrupt by commodification, and which is now best used ironically. Viewed in this way, those of us from the Graham tradition also share embodied knowledge of a community that reeks of a disregard for the potential ethical value of art. In relation to social hierarchies and gender binaries, Graham’s theater is decidedly old fashioned. As a modern artist, Graham’s concerns were aesthetic, not ethical, but we cannot help but to look at the work now through contemporary eyes, filtered by postmodernism and an awareness of body politics, which tie aesthetic evaluation to ethical considerations. (Merrill Viii)

The intersection of aesthetics and ethics in classical dance is a fascinating subject to me, because I have inhabited communities that are suspicious of modernism’s hierarchies, as often as I have inhabited communities that are based in them.

Most of my dance life I feel like a spy. I don’t really drink the kool-aid in either camp. 

Photo: Martha Graham Dance Company

I’ve often been told in improvisation jams that my pointed toes and straightened knees show that I am not being “honest” to myself about how I really want to move, that I am not moving “naturally.” (Someone who either has not undergone classical training, or someone for whom the training never reached the level where the discipline transformed into ecstasy usually launches this critique.) But in this Excavation I was calling the ancestors from this space and community, surrounded by other humans whose vessels have been similarly sculpted to fall into classical alignment. Deep within ourselves, is a love of the intersection between the body and sacred geometry, and an unrelenting faith that dances can align us with spiritual forces through technical precision.

After laying on the studio floor for nearly 30 minutes, opening my senses to the energy in the space, the first thing I felt compelled to do was a series of Cunningham tendus with the full torso involved in many opposing directions. Throughout the Excavation I would find myself on relevé,  balanced on one foot, and being drawn into the constellation of bodies I observed in the space, my own body channeling the lines of that living architecture.

For the audience I imagine there was a strange aesthetic disconnect between the informality of the whole and the precision of the individual disciplined bodies. However, when I would start to hear the voices in my head saying that I was surely doing too much, that the aesthetics embodied by my “uptown” physicality are “wrong” for this sort of experimental performance practice… That my embodied “old school” aesthetics represent tyranny and ignorance, I could let myself drop that shame and observe myself in a precarious balance, being stretched into physical lines that cut through the space.  It was an incredible luxury of permission.

As my body was pulled into various forms, it was also pulled into various people. Some of them were in the room in bodies; others came through movement and touch. At one point I knew Dudley Williams was with me, as I was pulled into a coccyx balance that lasted for many, many breaths. A spiral that started from Graham’s pelvis broke into a Laura Dean spin that continued until I felt that it would surely be easier to keep turning forever than to stop. The diagonals of the space kept pulling me, as I fell into the energetic etchings of numerous dancers who have gone “across the floor” in that room. Eye contact and physical contact with friends and strangers allowed for equal parts fascination, connection, and disinterest. Non-attachment fueled dignity in both greetings and departures, but the infinite possibilities in a room of experienced humans are also tinted with risk.

Channeling in a community of Graham dancers can be dangerous business.  At times, the ricochet from heartbreak to ecstasy in the air was enough to give me spiritual whiplash. Graham was always battling demons, and they came too.

There were many times when I tried to walk away, only to find myself on a circular path, back where I had begun, facing the same challenges. There were times when the open channel of my body pierced my heart with insatiable longing for something I cannot name. At one point I found myself dancing with Abdiel Cedric Jacobson, but it was no gentle pas de duex. It was a dance in which I was genuinely working hard to survive. From the depths of his excavation, he had brought the Minotaur and it came for me, pushing me up against all of my supposed limitations of strength and age. I do not know Abdiel well, but in this moment of being danced we were intimate conspirators and servants to momentum, grasping for each other in a dynamic, asymmetrical equilibrium.

Graham’s universe upholds old-fashioned binary ideas about gender. This is the main ethical dispute I have with her theater. As powerful as she is as a woman artist, her choreography maintains the “asymmetrical equilibrium of patriarchy” that Ann Daly articulates in Classical Ballet: A Discourse of Difference (Daly 116). My own life, and choreography, pushes against these gender roles constantly, but in the Excavation I found myself placing my foot on a man’s back in a gesture of power-over, only to find myself melting into him and being lifted. A strange permission; to indulge in a dance that is not my own, to be danced by history, to be taken, lifted… and left. Endings without resolution send us again into the ricochet of ecstasy to heartbreak that is this legacy.

Danger makes us present. Perhaps this is why Graham insisted in terrifying her dancers, and so many Graham teachers continue this legacy of the pedagogy of fear. In our mediated age though, one does not need to yell, ridicule, or hit in order to intimidate. Eye contact alone is enough to send a fellow human into the void of the present moment; the realization of personal, ethical, responsibility. Here we are.

During the Excavation I fell into eyes that I have looked into through tears and laughter, toil and success. The next moment I would find myself drowning in the deep pools of eyes of someone I had never met. It was all an invitation into the infinite, breath taking possibilities of actually being together without judgment, or agenda.

The intimacy is terrifying.

When was the last time you spent four waking hours without looking at your phone?

Across the room I see Carrie Ellmore-Tallitsch and Kim Jones frozen, forehead-to-forehead. They are dancers of my generation, women I have known through triumph and transition. Their gesture radiates love. I feel it tap into a newly blossoming space in me. One that is learning that the more one loves, the more love one has to give. I hear my mother’s voice, “It is the most radical thing we can do in our culture: to cast our heart net as wide as possible.” I am pulled into a new dance in which the sediment of all our digging leads to gratitude for what we share through time and space, without language and without shame. We who know each other, and we who are strangers, all caught up in this dance between stillness and momentum. The love is there. Even through the history of drama and power plays, it is ours to invite.

I hear the long curtain that divides the studio space from the entryway, opening. People begin to speak. Judgments are the first things they articulate. Reactions are the second. I long for the un-coded, judgment-free space/time that has just concluded, but time is money in NYC and someone else has the studio. We have to get out.  There is no closure, no resolution. The void of possibility spills from the art space into the street. Some people drop it, others drink it, I gone on into several sleepless nights before I am able to stop trying to make sense of it.

To act, observe, ponder, and take note of the sediment that remains. To excavate how action becomes dance, how observation enables attunement with one’s environment, to evoke spirits, ancestors, or gods, and through them to sanctify our interactions.  What of this is still possible? Does any of it actually require an audience? As I dance into the next chapter of my life I will remember; “Do not worry, be shameless.”

Photo: Lauren Neuman

Daly, Ann. “Classical Ballet: A Discourse of Difference.” Meaning in Motion New Cultural Studies of Dance. Ed. Jane C Desmond. Durham: Duke University Press. 1997. 111-120.

Manning, Susan. “The Female Dancer and the Male Gaze.” Meaning in Motion New Cultural Studies of Dance. Ed. Jane C Desmond. Durham: Duke University Press. 1997. 153-166.

Merrill, Robert. “Introduction.” Ethics/Aesthetics Post-Modern Positions. Ed Robert Merrill. Washinton DC: Maisonneuve Press. 1988. Vii-xiii.

Rothschild, Babette. The Body Remembers, The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment. New York: W.W.Norton & Company. 2000

http://www.danceviewtimes.com/2016/01/digging-through-history-for-nowmichael-kliëns-excavation-site-martha-graham-usamartha-graham-studioscoil-2016-f.html

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/01/18/arts/dance/review-in-excavation-site-martha-graham-usa-a-bond-is-shared.html?_r=0&referer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F

http://stagebuddy.com/reviews/review-excavation-site-martha-graham-u-s-coil-2016 

…Funny, my fear was always that I was doing too much, yet these critics seem to feel that not enough happened… another infinite void; the space between artist and critic…

An introduction... or re-introduction!

In the interest of continuing to create context for both my work, this is how I introduced myself and Hyphen at the recent Maine International Conference on the Arts:

My name is Catherine Cabeen.  I am the Artistic Director of Hyphen, an interdisciplinary performance company that celebrates the dancing body as a fluid intersection for ideas.  I founded Hyphen in 2009 in Seattle as Catherine Cabeen and Company and changed the name recently in order to give the company a title that emulates is connective nature.  Hyphen has engaged 28 interdisciplinary artists in the creation of over 30 new performance works since 2009.

I am trained in the Martha Graham technique and I have a deep love for the theatrical grandeur of early modernist work.  However, I spent the bulk of my professional career dancing in the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, where I developed a love of honesty and transparency in performance.  My own work dances on the lines between these two polarizing aesthetics, celebrating both the kinesthetic virtuosity of the well trained dancing body and the politics inherent in using the body as a medium for expression.  My work often plays with gender representation because drag performances so eloquently reveal the grand performativity of everyday life.

I am in the midst of creating a trilogy of evening-length works that celebrate Nouveau réalisme (New realism) a post World War II, European, visual art movement, in which artists focused on new ways of perceiving and depicting reality as time, space, and action, rather than as a cluster of objects.  While in graduate school at the University of Washington, I became fascinated by this shift in the visual art world away from the tangible and towards the experiential.  As an artist who has always worked in the ephemeral form of dance, at first I found myself rolling my eyes at this supposed “eureka” moment.  Dancers and musicians have been celebrating experiential art forms for thousands of years.  But as I read the New Realist Manifesto and other articles by critic Pierre Restany that situate this artistic mission, I realized that this moment of confluence between the visual and performing arts actually provides a rich conglomeration of perspectives and language that supports my own articulation of just what it is we do as modern dancers.

It’s no secret that contemporary dance is the least funded and most commonly misunderstood of the arts.  The ever-increasing disembodiment of contemporary life has begun to fracture the former power of metakinesis; where audiences were once able to feel within their own bodies a resonance with what they saw on stage, they are often now so disconnected from their own bodies as to not recognize the movements they see before them as abstractions of a unifying human experience.  By borrowing from the new realists a renewed enthusiasm for the sensations of space, time, and change. I hope that my work will enliven dance for new audiences.

Into the Void, the first work in this series, premiered in 2011.  The work engaged 14 interdisciplinary collaborators in creating an abstract biographical work about Yves Klein, a French Visual Artist, who led the New Realist Art Movement in the 1960s. Into the Void was commissioned by On the Boards, a theater in Seattle, and the full work can be seen through On the Boards Television, OtB’s on-line performing arts archive, and Into the Void can also be purchased on iTunes via TenduTV.  

Into the Void was followed by Fire!  a second commission from On the Boards, in 2013.  Fire! was inspired by Niki de Saint Phalle, the only female artist in the New Realist movement.  This work engaged 13 interdisciplinary collaborators as it brought to life Saint Phalle's monumental Tarot Garden.  

Hyphen is now working on MetaKinetic, the third segment in this trilogy, which is inspired by the kinetic sculptures of Jean Tinguely.  MetaKinetic is so far being supported by On the Boards in Seattle and the Flynn Theater in Burlington and is scheduled to premier in 2016.

At the same time Hyphen continues to tour its ever-evolving repertory program.  The repertory program is extremely versatile in order to fit within a large range of venues and budgets.  The evening of diverse dance works can range from being a solo show, performed by myself, to an evening of duets and trios, to being a large scale production with five dancers and two live musicians.   All versions of the repertory program feature interdisciplinary collaborations between dance, music, writing, lighting and fashion design, and visual art. This variable programing makes performances possible in all kinds of spaces that have a range of technical capacities.  Always when I tour I am happy to teach associated classes, as are my collaborators. 

Hyphen recently performed a large scale version of its repertory program at Middlebury College.  We will next perform a more intimate iteration of the program at the Flynn Space in Burlington VT in the Fall of 2014, and we are looking for presenting partners to share iterations of that work throughout the region.  If any of you are interested in large scale productions I would also love to have conversations about additional presenting partners for MetaKinetic.

On behalf of all of the artists here I would like to thank the Maine International Conference on the Arts for giving us this opportunity to dialogue about our work, and our faith in art as an essential component of a human life well lived.

Thank you.

Embodied Education

I’m currently wrapping up teaching spring semester at Middlebury College.  As a freelance choreographer and dancer who is blessed right now to hold a temporary academic position, my mind frequently ricochets between the fortune of my temporary financial stability and the oppression of working for a private school that exemplifies the problematic American capitalist education system. 

Though I could easily dedicate this blog to the anger that arises in me from witnessing privilege, cloaked as education, I will instead focus it on what I learned this year from the subject matter I engaged in with my students.  For though the system is deeply flawed, individual students, conversations, and colleagues, continuously rose above the party line this spring and reminded me that education is on-going for all of us.

When the semester started I thought I was teaching 2 classes that would have little cross over; Anatomy/Kinesiology, and a course I designed called Ethics/Aesthetics/Body.  (I also taught advanced technique, choreographed a solo on a Sr  Dance Major, advised two Sr thesis projects, performed my own solo work locally and internationally, danced as a guest artist with Richard Move, and choreographed a few scenes for a film… but those experiences are for other blogs)

These two classes, one on how we feel, articulate, and move the gross matter of our bodies, and one on how we perceive, judge and value ourselves and each other, seemed highly oppositional when I made the syllabi.  The ethics course is deeply rooted in my graduate research into gender representation, which is a field that looks at everything one does as evidence of gender expression, but decidedly does not engage biology in the discussion.  Anatomy/Kinesiology is designed to explore the opposite, not what we do with our raced/gendered/(dis)abled bodies, but what we are; energy organized into mass, saturated with sensation, separated into muscles, bones, connective tissue, and systems with fancy names.

But as the semester wore on I noticed that while the readings and discussions may have been based in different disciplines, the point of the teaching was the same.  I kept coming back to one thing; what do you see or experience so regularly that it is invisible to you?  

In Anatomy/Kinesiology I found that many students had never considered their bodies except for on occasions when they were injured.  Most of them had no concept of the beauty and complexity of the physical systems they utilize everyday to get from bed to class.  All of us develop physical habits that simplify our mind/body connection. These habits can be extremely helpful or extremely detrimental to our well being, but unless we know what we are doing (from slouching, to always standing with our weight on our left leg, to grinding our teeth) and that there are other options, we cannot determine the number of choices we are denying ourselves.  It is impossible to see the value of our body’s intelligence when we are entirely attached to the way we have patterned our selves through repetition. 

Repetition is also what transforms our various gender performances into our sense of self.  Repetition of the practice of confidence or victimization creates our personality and our concept of our role in the world.  Culture’s repetitions in the form of mass-media-marketing-strategies, capitalist government systems that support a particular family structure, and the on-going struggle for equal wages for equal work among different classes, genders, nationalities and races of people, create assumptions for all of us within a system of, “the way things are.”  Unconsciously, we fit ourselves into these systems and pattern ourselves in line with, or against their standards.  In this value-laden conception of self, we again cannot determine the value of our heart’s intelligence, and/or our attachments to the way we have patterned our selves through both conscious and unconscious repetition, until we can see that our habits are actually choices. 

Frequently in my years of teaching dance related subjects, I have found that the best of what I have to offer the students I work with comes from my 18-year (and counting) study of vinyasa yoga.  This semester proved to be no exception, in fact Hinduism, Buddhism and Yoga even have a single word for this shockingly interdisciplinary habitual body/mind; Samskara. 

Samskara defines physical and mental patterning as not only the product of this lifetime, but a response to the accumulation of multiple lifetimes of habit building.  Whether or not you believe in reincarnation, the habits of multiple lifetimes are surely what create the cultural/social traditions that enmesh, condition and define us.  Samskara explains how the habits of consciousness we develop in this lifetime, which manifest as our physical posture, intertwine with cultural, raced, gendered, classed memory causing our bodies and minds to be subjected to infinitely more unconscious instructions than conscious ones.

Whether we are talking about tucking our pelvis under as a weakness in our lower back and strain on our hip flexors, or a conditioned response to being told that our butt is too big to be in a certain kind of dance class, we are talking about a detrimental physical/mental habit that the practitioner needs to become aware of, before they can respond to it in a healthy way.  If the realization of pelvic miss-alignment comes through a conversation about the relationship between the curved sacrum and pelvis or an articulation of the lingering Western European dominance in popular dance and marketing aesthetics, it doesn’t really matter.  What the student needs to do is to pause their habitual reactions to what they are experiencing long enough to actually feel their own pelvis.  Where is it right now?

“Why am I doing what I am doing?” is an excellent question, but useless, unless one first knows what they are doing and that, more often than not, it is a choice.

One cannot make a change unless one knows where one is to begin with.  That requires listening, feeling, and not holding on so tightly to what you think you know that you cannot see that, "you are a victim of the rules you live by." (Jenny Holzer). 

Our embodied experience is contextual and always in motion.  The body's inescapability as our main sensory means of experiencing the world we live in, and its constant state of change, can teach us that mental constructs such as Right/Wrong, Good/Bad, Beautiful/Ugly are also contextual concepts. 

It is interesting to teach in a liberal arts institution.  There are a lot of ideas bouncing around.  But in terms of giving the students an opportunity to actually learn something, I am increasingly grateful that I teach an embodied discipline... mostly so that I don't need to justify teaching meditation.   All this liberal arts education is pretty useless with out enough space in it for students to occasionally pause and witness the journey they are on. It is through this understanding, that we are all changing constantly, and that all of life is a process, that students will be able to manifest their own power to contribute to/conduct that flow. 

Hyphen

I've been called a great many things.  Labels help us to define our experiences, and at the same time they limit our growth. Names and Labels reek of our human desire to hold fast to our understanding of something, in a world that is in constant motion. 

I founded Catherine Cabeen and Company (CCC) in 2009, to explore how interdisciplinary research and collaboration can be used to build new movement vocabularies.   

In the last four years CCC has engaged 30 interdisciplinary artists and created over 22 collaborative works. 

Catherine Cabeen in Fire!
photo by Phill Cabeen

But as my base shifts from the west to east coast and the collaborations I engage in reorient their dynamics, I find that "Catherine Cabeen and Company" is not a name that supports the integration of dance and ideas that I am after.  

So, CCC is now becoming Hyphen.

The mission is the same, and hopefully this name will help us to move forward as an entity based in connection.  

Hyphen, as what we need to "co-exist," or make a "well-thought-out-plan." 

Catherine Cabeen - Hyphen is starting a new relationship with New York Live Arts as an Associate Artist and is held under their 501c3 Umbrella.
http://newyorklivearts.org/artist/catherinecabeen