For the record: Program Notes

So really breaking the rules of long blog posts, here are all the program notes from It's about time
Starting with

A Note about notes

Program notes are tricky things. At Dancemakers we’re trying to share our thoughts and feelings about our work and to start dialogue. We also think there needs to more writing about contemporary dance and that while tricky, program notes have something to offer to the experience of attending dance performance.

But a few other thoughts on notes: First of all, you don’t have to read them. You especially don’t need to read them before the show. You can – we work hard to make sure they don’t give away anything – but you don’t have to in order to “get” anything. Also, they are not definitive. They are our thoughts at this point in time. The ideas, questions and emotions that are evoked you have while watching the performance are equally valid.

And finally, we want your notes too. Please send them to jacob@dancemakers.org or michael@dancemakers.org – Thanks, Jacob Zimmer.

The rest after the jump



Artistic Director’s Notes – Michael Trent

We do three things at Dancemakers and the Centre for Creation. We make and present contemporary dance performance. We develop artists. And we develop a relationship with publics. When deciding what specific projects to do, we measure proposals against a trio of values: contemporaneity, cross-disciplinarity and collaboration.

Although we think about these values every day, it’s the third one, collaboration, which has taken up a lot of our focus this year.

“Collaboration” is one of those 21st century terms that is used a lot, just as “actualization of the individual” was in the 70s and “acceptance of the other” in the 90s. But saying these things and actually doing them are quite different things. And the latter is much harder than one thinks.
As we diligently work it out in the studio, the office and with our colleagues, neighbours and audiences, our attempts at collaboration call upon us to have an enormous generosity of spirit, an openness to hearing things that are sometimes difficult and as Anne Bogart says, the need to hold on tightly and let go loosely.

Real collaboration takes time. It demands an enormous amount of trust in order to succeed. And trust can’t be demanded, it must be earned. And that takes time, too.
I wrote at the beginning of the year that I insist on surrounding myself with people who inspire me because, simply, it makes the work better. I can now safely add that inspiring people make the collaborative process better, too.

So thanks to the smart and curious dancers for their patience and goodwill. And to Jacob and Bonnie for forcing me to be clearer and calmer every day. To Richard and Caitlin and the board for supporting the creative efforts with insight, care and boundless energy. A special thanks to Philip Sung for his many years of leadership as board chair.

And finally to the group of individuals who answered the call to contribute to the creation of tonight’s show by recording a minute, and to our 60 for $60 sponsors who have also contributed to our collaborative conversation. We extend to all of them our deepest thanks.


Choreographer’s note – Michael Trent

Following a showing of the work last week, a colleague asked me why time was so important to me. Important enough for me to make a dance about it. Important enough for me to take all the time and energy to make something for the public.

It was a good and fair question.

For most of my adult life, I have been trying to reconcile two sides of myself, the empirical scientist and the perceptive artist. At one point I had aspirations of becoming a doctor but realized that smelly things trigger a pretty nasty gag reflex in me and that I wasn’t driven enough to make it through medical school. This impulse meant, though, that my university training was mostly predicated on the scientific method and its insistence on pointing to an inscrutable truth. Dance making for me is nothing like this. There is no single truth I am trying to reach because, in most matters that count, I don’t think there is one. In this process of making art, I find myself in a constant state of destabilization, of disequilibrium in the face of uncertainty. And it is a wonderful place to be because it allows me to have a conversation that is dynamic, open and fluid.

For many years now, I have been concerned with what I see as a common cultural imperative towards the most banal (least threatening?) answers to our collective questions. We want them to be expressed as either yes or no. Or see them as either black or white. A binary world-view, if you like, of how we operate socially and morally.

I think it’s more complex than that.

To frame it differently, it is about the relationship between the absolute (or fixed) and the perceived (or fluid). I seem to be suspicious of the absolute: it says that things cannot be both right and wrong, black and white, yes and no. I think most things are. And I am quite glad about that.

The next thing to figure out was a way or a frame in which to make a performance about this. ‘Time’ seemed to be a good place to start because it is something we share in common and think of as being pretty absolute. We quickly found not only that the definition of a second has changed considerably over time (most recently updated in 1997 in France) but that our perception of time has enormous latitude. So time is not this or that but a little bit of both at the same time.

So by working on how we perceive and experience time, on how it works and works on us, on what happens when it contracts, expands or stays the same, I am addressing my discomfort with absolutism.

And like most good questions, others follow. Like: Why do we do what we do? What is the value of the arts and how do we address issues of meaning, relevance and impact? All of these from a simple question about why the subject matter meant so much to me.

A critic recently commented that my work grew from a place of ‘thematic intellectualism’ and I took it as a complement. They also said I was a curious fellow, which I also take as a complement.

But I mention this because in addition to all the rigour (intellectual, physical, social) we apply to our work, what matters most is the experience we create for you. We have spent a lot of time considering the viewer. Because without you, without a relationship with a public, we are working in a void and that doesn’t seem worth the time.

And for me, time matters.
Thank you for sharing some of yours with us.

If you have any comments or questions, I’d love to talk about it.
michael@dancemakers.org

Composer’s note – Josh Thorpe

Gertrude Stein said, “the whole business of living [is] to go on so they will not know that time is passing, that is why they get drunk that is why they like to go to war….” How we treat time is bound up in ethics, aesthetics, psychology, everything. As far as we know, time is required for activity, sense perception, consciousness. Actually, scientists figure there is a full half-second delay between stimulus and consciousness. In any case, time is quite a mystery.

It seemed like if we were going to make a piece about time, I didn’t want to make music that would try to demonstrate time’s measurement or to represent different psychological registers of time. I didn’t want to attempt to elucidate, neither to romanticize time’s mystery; time will always be confusing.

So I proposed a very literal approach. The music for this piece is a collection of sixty field recordings, and a short piece performed live on guitars, harmonicas, and drums. Dancemakers and I asked sixty people to each make a recording about a minute long. We asked recordists to find a situation rather than to author one (aware, of course, that some people would cheat just a bit) and to treat this approximate minute as “time out” to listen, an excuse for a break. We asked recordists not to measure the minute but to guess it. The reason for this was partly out of interest in what the subjective, sensed minute might be, but more important, as a way to soften the minute – to introduce irregularity for the listener and openness for the recordists.

Field recordings are lovely things. Acoustic information is very useful in everyday life; it tells us a lot about our position in space-time, it warns us of danger, it allows us to achieve goals, to make better use of our time. A field recording presented for the sake of listening doesn’t have much use, so it becomes an object for perceptual or aesthetic attention. This is quite another way of spending time.

I like that these recordings are not only involved in the time frame of a minute and an hour, but also in the time frame of months. We collected the recordings from November to February, a temporarily forgotten past most of us don’t yet think of as history.

The short composition I’ve written is also very straight ahead. I have used the bare-bones of music: attack and decay, repetition and difference, simultaneity (and its impossibility), and passages from A to B and back again. It’s written so almost anyone could play it, and with a flexible approach to duration. I’m very pleased with how the musicians have treated it.


Dramaturge’s note – Jacob Zimmer

Time is everywhere of course – there are endless discussions about how to manage it, of its nature, of our relationship to it. There is the practical time that marches on, thought of as an arrow in one direction, absolute and the same for all of us. It is what we measure with clocks and calendars.

There is also a time that is relative – that you feel differently then I do, that changes if I’m having a good time or waiting. When we lose time or it drags, there becomes a gap between our perception and the measurements we use.

We sometimes want to slow down or speed up time, to move backwards instead of forwards. To shift time.

Art has often had an element of this time shifting – paintings, books, sound recordings and most certainly film and photography all contain strong elements of time shifting.

In live performance it is trickier. We might be doing an old dance, singing a standard or telling a well-known story, but we are doing it now. No matter what we do, there is at least one beginning, middle and end. The audience arrives, the performance happens, the audience leaves.
So, given that, how does performance address this question of reconciling perception to the measurement of time?

Arguably dance is in a very special position to address these questions. Focused on the body in time and in relationship to other bodies, we can see our capacity to change time. We can see the physical, emotional and social impacts that changing time can make.

And what does this problem, in dance, say about our daily lives? It is, after all, a problem that is most acute in the real time of the day to day:
Whether things happen at the same time, how long they take – the pressure to get it done, the endurance to take the time it takes.

These are negotiations and agreements between individuals, their desires and time. And the desires and time of others. In the day to day it is hard to slow down to see this clearly, we are too involved in it ourselves, too busy trying to keep up. The treat, the importance of performance then might be as a space where we, watching, can witness, reflect on and feel these negotiations as they occur – a process rare and vital.