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AN INTERVIEW WITH DD DORVILLIER
By Katrin Roschangar & the corpus gang
What are
the tasks of a Dance Web Coach?
DD Dorvillier: Trajal Harrell and I are preparing for a
hard-fun-work-loving summer. I see our most important tasks as skills –
openness, quick response, using all our knowledge, spontaneity, sharing,
directing, cleaning up, and defining rules that will undoubtedly need to be
broken, amongst other things.
You're
meeting Dance Webbers in the framework of what formats?
DD Dorvillier:
We have three days of introduction time during which we have
plans for some ambitious project development in small groups. We will have
lectures and talks open to the public at large, periodic group meetings
(specially designed salons) for Dance Webbers only, during the festival, and a
three-day reconnaissance at the end of the festival. I am giving a Skinner
Releasing Technique workshop and Trajal and I are co-teaching a coaching
project during the festival, to which some of them will attend. I am also
presenting my work, which includes many possibilities for Dance Webber
interaction. We also have a blog through which we have been communicating and
discussing with Webbers about the intro days and our project idea. I meet and
bump into this year's Dance Webbers all over the place, wherever I go to teach,
or perform, and it is at once very personal and exciting between us.
What are
your special points of interest in it?
DD Dorvillier:
Trajal and I are developing an introductory structure to
serve as a motor for cultural, political, and aesthetic exchange and debate
among the Webbers that's centered around the notion of public service. It's
called Public Service Project. Through small simultaneous working groups
Webbers will have a chance to independently discuss, develop, and organize a
"Public Service Project." This project should be in the order, then, of
something that defines itself "for a public" and as a "service" and as a
"project." In working groups they will be confronted with defining who is the
public being addressed and what exactly they consider a service. A
collaborative project should materialize and be manifested immediately, but
could also be developed during the course of the festival and/or accomplished
remotely, in another place, at another time.
The idea is to generate discussion, as well as hands on
experience dealing with issues of production, aesthetics, purpose, social
relations, etc. These social/public gestures deal intrinsically in and with
performance and art making, and that is why we like the idea.
What would
you like to bring across to the dancers as a danceWeb coach?
DD Dorvillier:
That they should work hard, be curious, and have fun doing
this, and that nothing is ever only possible in only one way.
We go for an environment where the desires and appetites of
the participants are stimulated in such a way that it leads them to their own
motivations, to find and develop strong and affirmative ways of doing for
themselves. I'm interested in supporting autonomy, exchange of ideas and
self-education from the point of view of intelligent and willful individuals
with their own self-defined ethics that function within the dynamic of this
huge group of 70 dancers from all over the world.
How do you
see the difference between technique, training and practice in relation to your
artistic work?
DD Dorvillier:
When I go running I have a goal of 20 minutes, which I
generally attempt to go beyond, unless I went to a show too late at night, or
had to work until 3 am on a deadline. This is a meditation practice for me.
Then I stretch and think about how I'm going to go about the day. This is
training. Technique is how I talk to people. All of them relate to my work but
my work doesn't necessarily rely on these to exist.
We are working in dance
within a field that holds drastically different requirements for each work.
Sometimes a work requires a specific skill, so we have to do a lot of pushups
or releves or moving from the fluid, or what have you ... Then we are working in
something that requires very precise rhythmic articulations ... so we develop
this ... We are also makers, so our physical states inform what we do and vice
versa. I have a personal ideal for my own body that is based mostly on vanity
(I want to be slim and fit, have good skin, live long) and pleasure (I feel
alive when I use my body in extremes from gentle to violent), and finally a
practical desire to be able to do as much as possible of what is required of me
by the people I work with and by me. Movement practice is the way I can
discover and put to test certain physical principles.
This is the perspective I bring with me when I teach. We
should look for knowledge about the functioning of the body and mind, as we are
our body and mind, and all its functions, senses, reactions, and constructions.
We should build what we want to build out of ourselves and work towards physical
and intellectual precision.
How do you
see the relation between the aims of mediation (movement and body concepts,
techniques) and artistic, performative inventions in the current models of
contemporary dance mediation (workshops)? Which aspects do you think are most
important?
DD Dorvillier:
I stress that body techniques and artistic invention are
interrelated, but not contingent upon one another. When we are making dance
we're making art. Art is artificial, made up. The bodybuilding practices and
strategies that surround dance making are also constructions. It's possible to
witness performance, during the production of knowledge, within the studio
classroom. Learning and performance could be simultaneous.
What were
the most important thing(s) your teacher(s) communicated to you?
DD Dorvillier:
Air compression and breath control. No failure. The love is
in the work; the work is in the love.
In moments
of doubt, where do you turn to?
DD Dorvillier:
Doubt is a signal. I try to make the objects of doubts
concrete by turning them into questions. A doubt is a suspicion, an
unarticulated uncertainty, a not being convinced about something, the discovery
of a lack of belief or a hole in that belief. In general I can't rely on
believing, because it means I accept something blindly and without contest or
proof. Doubt is a nasty predicament and in my experience a question of mental
lapse and/or fatigue.
Yet even if I know all these things about doubt, I do
experience doubt from time to time. I try then to become more precise about the
outcomes I am expecting from the situation that is the container for the doubt.
Again, I try to replace the vagueness of doubt with a concrete question that is
demanding an answer. If I doubt a decision I have made then I have to examine
how and why I made the choice in the past, and compare it to what I know in the
present. Perhaps I discover that I made a mistake in a certain decision, so
this serves to help me become more precise, as I find ways to change
directions, adjust to my choices, or change my mind. That is what I understand
as work.
When my mind is seriously misfiring and I'm stuck in doubt,
then I go running, do the dishes, make tea, and call my mother.
What do
you consider to be the difference between European and American contemporary
dance today?
DD Dorvillier:
This is a hypothetical question. I resist making general
formal comparisons along cultural lines. I don't see the purpose of
perpetuating generalities for the sake of an argument about dominance, because
when I look at the general working conditions for artists in Europe, even if
art resources are currently being threatened by bad politics of idiot
politicians, they are much better off (dominant) in the Old Country.
Europe's cultural and financial resources are still strong
enough to give young artists a sense that it's possible to be an artist in
society. The access to international works, people, and information, is also
easier and there is a facility of traveling (distances and money) between
countries, so you can meet artists and see works from different communities a
bit more readily. America lacks resources and there is a pervasively low sense
of self-esteem in artists due to feeling socially irrelevant or invisible.
There is a stagnancy of information, and difficult and limited contact with
dance production in the rest of the world (not only Europe). The context for
art history and the diffusion of contemporary thought and theory as it relates
to the performing arts is easier to access in the European art production
machine in general. America, not its artists, is handicapped by a crippling
allergy to intellectualism, throughout the very institutions (theaters, press,
universities) that support and diffuse the work of contemporary artists. The
main institutions for the diffusion of what would be American avant-garde
function, despite good intentions, often on the level of justifying work
through its legibility, practical value, and relevance to an ambiguous sense of
duty to a vaguely defined heterogeneous society. America is a very tough place
for live arts that seek to illuminate unknowns, or propose new ways of thinking
and doing, but still, people are doing it.
(July 6, 2008)
DD Dorvillier at the website of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts
The website of danceWeb with information about Trajal Harrell.
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