The Brooklyn Rail

Nell Breyer: While dance has always reached audiences beyond the “dance stage,” now that we are all editors, photographers, videographers, and critics in the digital era, are we also all choreographers? Are today’s array of stages and pocket platforms helpful to dance-makers?

Emily Coates: I don’t think we are all editors, photographers, videographers, and critics—and we are definitely not all choreographers. The ease of generating digital content on our phones and computers ignores aesthetic lineages, histories, and the innumerable hours required to develop one’s craft. Dance artists try to align themselves strategically with other industries and disciplines to survive. It doesn’t always turn out well for dance. Something about tugging dance so far afield can break the art form.

Nell: Sydney Skybetter’s recent podcast Dances with Robots runs exactly that experiment! The recent series, produced by Brown University’s Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces (CRCI) valiantly tries to carve out a role for dance artists in the highly engineered and still-not-yet-human field of robotics. The podcast advocates for paying dancers to advise on movement behavior design for robots. Skybetter and his cohosts Ariane Michaud and Kate Gow describe the project’s reason for being as: “a podcast catalyzed by the corporeal risks and expressive opportunities of contemporary technologies.” However several guests point out the challenges in this undertaking. For example, engineer and dancer Dr. Catie Cuan, notes that embodied knowledge lacks a “clear mapping to language” unlike written algorithms, which can be instantly, widely, and freely transmitted across the world. She also argues that “we accept as having real value” the outputs from STEM fields, whereas the dance “product might be more abstract.”¹ While important to support dancers getting salaried jobs and offering their movement expertise with wider swaths of society, will advising on robot design help artists create more compelling dances? And why redirect dancers to improve robots, instead of enlisting robots to help make good dances (see Black Flags [2014] by William Forsythe)?

Emily: I feel disembodied just listening to your description.

Nell: Ha!

Emily: My mind went in a different direction: when dance meets commercial theater. I’m thinking of Illinoise, the dance musical choreographed by Justin Peck that is headed to Broadway. I saw it last summer at Bard with my eight-year-old daughter, who leaned over to me in the first five minutes and whispered, “What is going on?” Exactly, I thought. The choreography did not guide the viewer. The involvement of playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury, who is brilliant, could not save muddy movement. Justin is finding his way by looking to twentieth century masters such as Twyla Tharp and Jerome Robbins, both of whom I danced with. I also saw a bit of stealing from Ohad Naharin: Justin’s ghouls disappeared by dropping off a high wall, which quotes, knowingly or not, from Naharin’s Sadeh21, seen at BAM in 2014. Sadeh21 spoke to the tragic obliteration of life on all sides of an intractably militarized zone. Transposed to Illinoise, awkwardly re-contextualized into a nightmare dream sequence in the American Midwest, all those wall-dropping ghouls looked like they were shopping at a Walmart that forgot to install an escalator. Especially without Gaga, which is the physical language Naharin developed to train his dancers in breathtaking spontaneous action. As Jonathan Burrows has written, every artist steals ideas—but if you steal and it looks like a poor imitation of the other artist, you’ve not successfully stolen.

Nell: GPTs take note.

Emily: I worked with Robbins on his revival West Side Story Suite while I was dancing with New York City Ballet in the 1990s. You do not soon forget Jerome Robbins yelling: “Know who you are! Know who your family is! Where you live! What you ate for breakfast! And look at the goddamn horizon line when you sing there’s a place for us!” But the thing is, his choreography had already established the story. He just needed us to supply the inner intent.

My eight-year-old daughter is savvier than Jesse Green, the New York Times theater critic, who gave Illinoise a rave review. He said it made him cry. Over in the dance section, Gia Kourlas rightfully panned the production. Why is Broadway not listening to the head dance critic of the New York Times? The arts economy ignores dance expertise on so many levels.

I do want the dancers and designers to have the work. The Illinoise producers need Jerome Robbins to rise from the dead and be their show doctor.

Nell: Sometimes, the “dance economy” ignores dance expertise too! Take, for example, the recent massive public performance: Chiroptera—a collaborative, Olympic-scaled project with set/concept by JR, choreography by Damien Jalet, and music by Thomas Bangalter. Twenty-five thousand spectators packed together at the Place de l’Opéra this past November, donning head lamps and flashing iPhones, to watch 153 artists dance while harnessed to scaffolding that towered nearly one hundred feet high, covering Le Palais Garnier.

Performing as part of JR’s Retour à la caverne: Act II, the dancers were held back by harnesses and “locked” into their small steel cubits: a metal cage for each body, recessed into the scaffold. Against this staging, the choreography appeared to turn the dancers into human visual pixels. The costumes, by Chanel, were black-caped backs with white fronted suits that created a screen-like binary function once the dancer turned from front (“on”) to back (“off”). And most of the movements consisted of just that: dancers turning themselves on/off like a human byte, becoming visible or invisible by literally turning around on themselves. The prologue, performed in front of the scaffold by Amandine Albisson, Étoile dancer of the Paris national Opera involved more angular, expansive extensions, and, along with the finale of the dance by the whole ensemble, offered some dynamic range with varied interpretations of level changes and fluidity. However, the choreography as a whole seemed intent on bending each unique body into a giant, unified symmetrical machine that synchronized to produce visual effects or digital messages such as: “LIGHT.”

Emily: “…turned the dancers into human pixels…” Sounds scary.

Nell: The platform presented paradoxes. Live, the performance must have been monumental in scale, and generous in its communal physicality with the gathered audience becoming part of the spectacle. But mediated through Instagram on a handheld iPhone screen, the experience was digital, solitary, and pocket-sized.

The choreography subsumed individual expression. It prioritized a unison that molded the dance to the constraints of a vertical grid and a screen. Compare this sense of restriction with the raw movement and individuality expressed in Trisha Brown’s iconic Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (1970)—designed for a performer who defies gravity by walking, perpendicular down the side of a public façade (clipped into a harness); or in Elizabeth Streb’s One Extraordinary Day—presented at the Olympics-inspired London 2012 Festival. That project included dancers “bungee jump[ing] from the Millennium Bridge”²; Streb herself, aged sixty-two, performing something like Brown’s Man Walking Down… down the curved glass façade of London’s City Hall, and members of her company climbing up and out to “dangle from the colossal London Eye, the 443-foot tall ferris wheel on the bank of the Thames.”³

Emily: To me choreography emanates from the body, and the strongest choreographic imagination, however far afield it may roam, retains a core understanding of our humanness, projected outward into new interfaces and scales. Choreography’s superpower is to connect the human and nonhuman, including that which we create—without leaving our humanity behind. The man who walked down the side of a building in Brown’s piece was a human. I am still very wedded to the embodied expression and live presence of humans. I am unmoved by a pixel.

But having bodies weighs us down too. If a female-presenting ballet choreographer had created Illinoise she would have been critically panned and whisked off the stage—not shipped off to Broadway.

Nell: Depressingly true. That said, the profound impact of female choreographers across digital and analog platforms is hard to overstate. Take, for example, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s recent solo, The Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 performed with unflinching rigor in February at NYU Skirball. The artist’s sixty-three-year-old body dancing continuously for two hours on a bare stage with just Bach, one pianist,⁴ one costume change (for both performers), and minimalist staging/lighting, showcased her commitment to musical structures like counterpoint, variations, canons, and fugues, through an “embodied abstraction” that have made her company Rosas, her nearly forty years of choreography, and her school in Brussels, P.A.R.T.S. (Performing Arts Research and Training Studios), significant influences on the basic mechanics of postmodern dance, dance film, and music video. Despite the palpable physicality and clinical precision of De Keersmaeker’s live virtuosic solo, and the canon of bodily research she incarnates, her impact “at scale,” has been through YouTube. Beyoncé’s music video “Countdown” (2011) which appropriated/plagiarized De Keersmaeker’s work⁵ has 227 million views and counting. De Keersmaeker’s “how-to” tutorial series published the following year: “A Choreographer’s Score”⁶—offering analysis, in conversation with the brilliant theorist Bojana Cvejić, of how De Keersmaeker made specific dances—has tens of thousands of views for several of its video segments. As her choreography and analytical contributions are amplified exponentially online, what happens to the visceral way in which we sense De Keersmaeker’s use of physical force and exactitude?

Emily: I admired De Keersmaeker’s Goldberg solo a great deal. More to say on that—let’s bookmark the topic. Your point about how a robust in-the-flesh choreographic practice can then allow a creator to invade and set the terms of the technological world is a good one. Speaking of bodily force and technology, Joan Jonas’s retrospective at MoMA (on through July 6) is a triumph. There’s power: a woman performing with her video camera over more than fifty years, amassing this wildly imaginative, sprawling body of work. Full disclosure, I’m dancing in her most recent work, To Touch Sound (2024), which she created with her long-time collaborator, marine biologist David Gruber. The medium of video allows Joan, with David’s underwater footage, to create new alliances: between humans and nonhuman species, between those on water and those on land. We need those kinds of radical compositional collisions to shift our vision of cohabitation on planet Earth. It was an honor to learn from Joan, and to learn more about how she creates. Her body, aging, maturing, transforming, is the throughline in her work. Let’s talk about the incredible beauty in aging, in our next dispatch. When we will be even older and even wiser!

1. The Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces (CRCI), “Episode 6 - Dances With Robots IRL: A Conversation With Catie Cuan,” November 6, 2023 in Dances With Robots, presented by CRCI, podcast, 34m14s. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cEU-rXC6FuqcnCWClaco5nULZiku9qud/view?usp=drivesdk.
2. Bryan Abrams, “SXSW 2014: Catherine Gund’s Born to Fly Tracks Elizabeth Streb’s Genius,” March 11, 2014, https://www.motionpictures.org/2014/03/sxsw-2014-catherine-gunds-born-to-fly-tracks-elizabeth-strebs-genius/.
3. Ibid.
4. internationally celebrated pianist, Pavel Kolesnikov, https://pavelkolesnikov.co.uk/.
5. Sarah Kaufman offers a brief art-historical context for Beyoncé plagiarizing De Keersmaeker’s choreography in 2011, citing similar, less well-known practices predating YouTube, such as Michael Jackson appropriating/plagiarizing both the dance and costume from Bob Fosse’s The Little Prince (1974) in his epic music video “Billie Jean” (1983). Sarah Kaufman, “Beyoncé: “Countdown” Video and the Art of Stealing,” Washington Post, November 18, 2011. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/beyonce-countdown-video-and-the-art-of-stealing/2011/11/15/gIQAj0WbYN_story.html.
6. Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Bojana Cvejić, A Choreographer's Score: Fase, Rosas danst Rosas, Elena's Aria, Bartók, (Mercatorfonds and Rosas, 2012) Book + 4 DVDs, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlZulJ0RtAU.