THIS SPECIAL SECTION ON SPACE IS SPONSORED BY HAIR AND NAILS CONTEMPORARY ART
www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WtnI32uvM4&t=2516s
Benny Olk
When I was sixteen years old and a student at Minnesota Dance Theater, one day just before ballet class, I was told I was needed in rehearsal. I quietly left and went from the sixth floor of the Hennepin Center for the Arts to rehearse La Bayadere in the studio at the end of the hall on the 2nd floor. My ballet teacher called me later that night and scolded me: “Class always comes first.” But I was more worried about the choreography for the upcoming performance. My mom, understanding the interpersonal politics behind the scenes, talked to my teacher and said, “You can’t expect him to bilocate!”
Something I love about dance is that it carries context from somewhere else to the right here, to the dancing moment and then lingers for a little bit longer. Even in the necessary movement between rehearsal studios, or to different performance venues on tour, I project from the before space to this space. The chasm of the proscenium audience where there had once been a mirror. I’m obsessed with this displaced presence, this transposition. The history of choreography is about bilocation, across planes of presence and absence. In his dance manual ‘Orchésographie’ Arbeau needs to invent choreography in order to dance with his departed ‘companions of youth,’ with those no longer there (Lepecki). The empty squares represent le presence du corps of Beauchamp-Feuillet choreographic notation. Merce Cunningham’s LifeForms mapped and recorded the bodies of dancers, rendered into digital beings who model steps for a fleshy body to reinterpret.
try it everybody
so you get the feeling that the head is projecting just like the leg. it reaches, infinitely, out into space
(00:37:32)
In my physical relocation from New York City to Stockholm I long for comfort and home; from taking class as a form of engaging in community to claiming it as the site of my practice. “It’s class. Class is for you,” as Robert Swinston says. Cunningham class was the hub of my freelance dance career in New York, the place where I returned to and felt home among my peers, a place for artistic engagement and social exchange. In my first months after moving to Stockholm, I missed this feeling, and thought it was the class itself I missed. In October 2017, I found a video on the Merce Cunningham Trust’s YouTube channel of Cunningham company class, taught by Merce Cunningham’s assistant Robert Swinston. The video was filmed on July 30, 2009, just days after Merce Cunningham’s death. There in the video were people who since had become my peers, my friends, before we’d met and before the company had closed. There was a melancholy in doing this class apart from them, and a joy as well. Joy in the challenge, the camaraderie I saw, the lighthearted and yet serious approach to doing it, and sadness in my realization that this was over, I was alone, in a studio far from this studio.
bring the top of the leg in
I know you think your foot’s coming in, your foot’s coming in, but think of higher here, in the leg
(00:26:28)
Here, in this city on the periphery of Europe, I have become the Cunningham emissary, at a time and in a place where his work is seen as ironically cool to some and acknowledged as historically significant to most. Separately, but not entirely removed from my artistic practice of repeating this single class, I have been asked to teach Cunningham technique. With permission of the Merce Cunningham Trust to teach this technique, I find myself repeating phrases of Robert’s my own teaching:
reaching the head out, infinitely, into space (00:37:32) or
side and side, five times, and close (00:32:05) or
we wanna do the double beat right? we wanna do the double beat! (00:39:00)
I realized what I’m trying to do in my teaching is to bring the feeling of an entire community, its ethos, to the class I’m working with, through a few classes to transmit my experience. To take what I learned in community, through a multitude, and transmit it through my singular voice. I am glad to have Roberts voice around and with me, but it’s lonely work, made more lonely by my knowledge of what it’s lacking.
repeat and eight
(00:23:44)
It’s been over a year of repeating this single class multiple times a week, on my own. Through a regular repetition of a one-time-event-saved-forever-online, I have developed a strong and complex relationship to the material of the class. I draw upon this embodied knowledge to depart from and return to the class. Over time I have built familiarity with the particular exercises, the specific words of instruction, the music accompanying the dancers, so much so that the class has entered the realm of memory for me.
You make it hard for yourself so I make it a little harder, alright?
(01:20:55)
On my own, I’ve been working now with the class with my eyes closed. This greatly multiplies the physical challenges, but it also allows me to experience the movement as a memory, and gives me access to a different physicality. These portals arise as a result of my devotion to this single class. Specific movements like a tendu in parallel position, a curve of the lower back with the arm extended, the extended fourth position, among others, become a portal to something else. Sometimes I wonder if I’m reinterpreting (bastardizing?) what Cunningham himself said regarding the function of technique in 1951: Not to exhibit, but to transmit the tenderness of the human spirit through the disciplined action of a human body. Within the dance discipline of regularly re-embodying Cunningham technique class, what physicalities which I don’t yet understand can I conjure? Where do these portals lead me to, away, from?
you’re here. you’re gonna go:
(01:11:23)
Recalling and amplifying the ghosts present in film recording and transmission, I have been exploring the spectral remains in the transmission of dancing to dance technique and back, from Merce Cunningham to Robert Swinston to the Merce Cunningham Dance Company members, from film to corporeal to the land of memory then back to the physical enactment of a class. Who has become the dancing master Arbeau, who the melancholic Capriol? What physicalities, images, and senses are reduced, which are amplified, and what is added in these many transmissions?
This is sort of a reduced version of one of the combinations we did with Merce in June. Alright? It’s a reduced version… I mean, in other words, it’s not as uh impossible, alright?
(00:59:53)
Though I’m not dealing with Cunningham’s choreographic legacy directly, my insight into his work is shaped only by his absence. I see my history in this history and I’m practicing within and against it. I experience the melancholic aspects of dancing with those no longer here and now (wherever that here and now occurs). I find fleeting, temporary satisfaction in the embodiment of ballet’s idealized forms transposed onto Cunningham technique’s specific demands.
I enjoy the strange spectral things that arise from this practice: ghosts, portals, other bodies. With my eyes closed, my attention is displaced from image to sensation. It becomes about work. “Not to show off, but to show.” It’s about toil. It’s about devotion.
A space must be maintained or desire ends (Carson). The solution for the bittersweet is the sweetbitter. So my solution was to keep going.
It doesn’t stop. Once you start the movement you go all the way. Follow through.
Alright just one more time
(00:41:56)
Sources
Lepecki, André. “Ghostly.” NBprojects, www.nbprojects.nl/en/texts/ghostly
Cunningham, Merce. “The Function of a Technique for Dance.” The Dance Has Many Faces, by Walter Sorell, Cappella, 1992.
Carson, Anne. Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay. Princeton University Press, 2017.
Merce Cunningham Trust. “CUNNINGHAM TECHNIQUE® COMPANY CLASS 7.30.2009 (Close View).” YouTube, 24 Sept. 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WtnI32uvM4.
Benny Olk is a dancer from Minneapolis, Minnesota and a graduate of NYU, currently pursuing an MA in New Performative Practices at Stockholm University of the Arts. He has worked with choreographers Lucinda Childs and Moriah Evans and has performed in reconstructions of Merce Cunningham’s dances. His interests are in questioning the legacy of modernist dance artists in the contemporary, and the devotion of dancers.
Website: benolk4.wixsite.com/bennyolk
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