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New
dance creators look outwards, elsewhere
From Africa to India, new technologies to new perspectives: a look at the
Monaco Dance Forum
By
Andrew Princz
Reporting from Monaco for ontheglobe.com
On the streets of the Paris suburbs where hip-hop lives; on the tail-end of a digital shadow in the outskirts of Tel Aviv; in the depths of Southern Africa or on the streets of urban India: these are just some of the inspirational sources of dance creators who attended the Monaco Dance Forum, a unique biannual cultural think-tank which ended last week.
One of the most unique events
on the calendar of dance, the Monaco Dance Forum - which ran between 7 and
16 December - is held in this seaside principality where the glamorous play
with fancy cars and where the streets literaly glitter.
The festival, founded six years ago, gives itself a broad a range and mandate.
Dance companies present cutting-edge works in one venue, while at another
young ballerinas are auditioned for positions, while elsewhere digital artists
show-case their most recent projects in hopes of gaining interest from funding
institutions.
"It appears to be eclectic since it was really designed it to produce
a kind of reflection of where dance is going, and where the artists are
researching," says Dominique Passet, the artistic and managing director
of the Monaco Dance Forum, "We have always had the commitment to show
where dance is going, be it in India, Africa, in Europe or elsewhere."
The creations presented here were like a mirror perched on the edges of the world of dance. The festival presented existent works, but also actively support and nurture new developments and directions in dance. In this unusual, almost unreal, glitzy-clean ocean-front setting ideas fermented and new ways of presenting dance were tested. Contacts were made, and all, at times in the presence of royalty.
Such was the case with the performance of the hip-hop inspired Konnecting Souls by the curiously titled French company, Compagnie FranckIILouise. This creation ended up being a true breath of fresh energy transposed straight from the streets of the banlieu to the stage. The setting here couldn't pass without a touch of irony. The the company brought a mix of urban culture with its score produced by high-tech gadgetry - all in the 19th century gold-gilded ornate Monte Carlo Opera in the presence of one of the co-founders of the festival, Princess Caroline of Monaco.
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The self-dubbed choreographer and composer FranckIILouise revealed a world that swayed between a harsh, aggressive video game culture and the atmosphere of a soft, sweet sounding music box. While the moves were authentically hip-hop - its creator is one of the pioneers of the movement in France - the piece followed a narrative in a rare and successful attempt at the delicate balance of movement, technology and visual poetry.
Konnecting Souls
In Konnecting Souls, the dancers' bodies become musical instruments
with the help of high-tech motion capture technology. With each movement
of the arm or leg, sensors kick off sounds and pitches to magically form
a true to life, complex work of art brought together through sounds, movements,
lights and costumes. Sensors are found on two of the dancers: their elbows,
arms and feet. In the meantime, two others can only flirt with the "connected
souls" in a poetic, soul-searching courtship.
"The work talks about the attitude that we have in leaving our tribes - be it social, cultural or ethnic," says a forty-something FranckIILouise, "How we mix with the other to appropriate their language, or to communicate."
"I knew in my experience with hip-hop that at a certain point you feel enclosed within the codes of that dance. So this narrative is the meeting of one who is connected with the codes, while another is not."
FranckIILouise spent some three years between the dance and the sound studios to develop the technology to produce the show. The precursor to this piece was presented at the Monaco Dance Forum at its last edition, suggesting the longer-term vision of the festival as a practical defacto incubator of new ideas.
The dance of
urban India
At the nearby Théatre des Variétés, a stones throw
from the Mediterranean coast, contemporary Indian performance Purushartha
took us to a far-off urban Indian landscape choreographed by Jayachandran
Palazhy of the Compagnie Attakkalari Centre for Movement Arts.
Originally based in Chennai in the state of Tamil Nadu, India's fourth largest metropolitan city, Palazhy went on to study at the London Contemporary Dance School before returning to Bangalore, the capital of the neighboring state of Karnataka. There, he began to work with Attakkalari in the training of young dancers of this repertory company.
At first glance, the choreography had little to do with common western notions of Indian dance as a narrative of gods and goddesses. It looked more like a staid of contemporary fare, yet appealingly with a cast of very Indian-looking dancers. But the content here was very clearly a reflection urban India, and all that that implies. Although not devoid of the movement, traditions and process of the principals of age-old Indian dance, it was much more. Palazhy is as comfortable taking his inspiration from classical Indian dance as he is from the marshal art of Capoeira, or contemporary dance aesthetic that he was exposed to in Europe.
"Notions about India and the Orient are very static at times," said the choreographer after the company's Monaco performance, "In the same way it is an evolving contemporary language. We don't close our eyes to something, whether it is created in the America of the 1950s or whether it is the Capoeira from Brazil or Angola."
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A meeting place for new ideas in dance and technology at the Monaco Dance Forum was Digital Dance, one of the component parts of the Monaco Dance Forum. This is a rare competition that requires you to come to the table with a half-baked cake, so to say. Some 110 as yet unfinished projects were submitted from 32 countries for choreographies using digital tools, or choreographic installations. Of these, 50 projects from 22 countries were pre-selected to be showcased at the event where artists travelled from far and wide to share their ideas, and vie for the opportunity to realize their project. Solo Siento was one of these, represented in Monaco by Israeli digital artist Shira Miasnik, who lives in Jaffa, a historic port-town adjacent to Tel-Aviv. Shira, who works with dancer Arkadi Zaides, creates with shadows. Their work will combine real-life dance with her live generating animated digital shadows, aimed at adding another layer of interpretation to the choreography. "We are both artists," she says, "I am also designing an interactive program. We have a dialogue between us: he brings his input, and so do I. We react to it, sometimes independently, and sometimes it is a reaction to each other." "This
is a place to meet with people and develop. I hope that I can have
a light for my project, someone can give me input to help me on the
technical or conceptual aspects of the project." |
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"I think that there is a new confidence in India where we do not feel as if we need to be limited or defensive. It is opening up that is influenced just as much from anywhere else."
The set for Purushartha
is a stark contemporary-looking bare stage adorned on both sides with flashing
lights and three live-playing DJ's realized as a collaboration with the
Japanese music director and digital artist Kunihiko Matsuo. You could feel
tensions of the contemporary and the classical, the philosophical and the
practical as three DJ's stand on the left of stage creating the scratchy
sounds. The dance was at times overshadowed by a tapestry of images.
Abysmal ignorance of Europe
"Many in America or in Europe have a very different view of contemporary
Indian dance," said Sunil Kothari, a New Delhi-based dance critic,
and a regular of the festival. "They don't know that contemporary Indian
dance exists not as a shadow of the West, not as an imitation but as an
indigenous contemporary dance."
"India has a great tradition of dance. I do not believe that any other country has eight different types of classical dance forms as we have. People do not know this, and I must say that the ignorance of Europe is abysmal in this respect."
The mission of leading Dutch dance presenter, festival director and producer Jaap van Baasbank of Van Baasbank & Baggerman, goes a long way to reverse that very trend. His firm consistently programs works from around the globe, including yearly special focuses on geographic regions.
Each year he presents Julidans in Amsterdam, a dance festival of specifically non-Dutch works, and has included special focuses on contemporary dance in China and Africa. Next year he will focus on works from India.
"The aim of our festival is to always go out, but it is sometimes difficult because these works are not always to our specific tastes," says van Baasbank, "If we do a segment about Chinese contemporary dance, for instance, it is always a discussion of whether you have to present some of these groups which are not up to the standard. But at the same time, it is what is presented as new dance there."
van Baasbank had similar doubts after watching Purushartha. "On the other hand I see that it is that they are doing. That is what they want to show us, and it is contemporary dance."
It is just this kind of cultural dialogue and questioning of just what new dance is to each player in the community that makes the Monaco Dance Forum unique. It is the closest thing to a cultural think-tank that dance has, after all. It puts a mirror in front of preconceived notions of just what dance is, and can change them.
No geographic
boundaries
The festival also nourishes artists over multiple years, acting as a trampoline
for talent by aiding companies to find their artistic expression from the
far corners of Africa or India. This year's festival alone presented artists
from France, Burkina Faso, Algeria, the United States, Burkina Faso, Canada,
Finland, India, Mozambique, New Caledonia, Spain and Sri Lanka.
The work also played a role in assisting choreographers work with high-tech
gadgetry, helping them discover new ways of expression. Contemporary icons
of new dance were not left out either. One of the most important innovators
of new dance of our era, choreographer Trisha Brown - was presented with
a life-achievement award at the Monaco Dance Forum - and was commissioned
to choreograph a work using high tech sensors.On
the same stage her fellow elder statesperson of American dance, Bill T.
Jones created his own work 22, using the same technology developed
with Herberger College of Fine Arts and Arizona State University.
Brown's
creation, How long does the subject linger on the edge of the volume,
had the feeling of an experimental étude. It did not have the freshness
of Konnecting Souls, likely because she had less time to experiment
with the technology to be able to integrate it into the poetry of the piece.
The result was a feeling of her dance interspersed with a haphazard - albeit
truly beautiful at times - visually pleasing technological outbursts. It
was as if the technology did not seem to need the dance, and vice versa
- although ironically, one was creating the other.
"I learned a lot and
I know exactly what I would do if I would have another opportunity to work
at that level with these artists," said Brown, "It was just too
short of a time: in the actual physical process of development of the piece
I had less than three weeks."
"And dance takes time.
To get bodies up there and to teach the materials, and for me to understand
what it looks like and interface with that."
