Stillness and the Dance
“Exploring Stillness”
Flamenco Festival
New York City Center
New York
March 9, 2018
Since at least the beginning of modernity, movement has been considered the essential element of western theater dance. Movement is what gives dance its autonomy as an independent art; stillness, accordingly, is the antithesis of dance, a void. Occasionally contemporary choreographers have looked at aspects of stillness and its relationship to dance, but it is rare. Consequently, it came as a surprise when this year’s Flamenco Festival was announced and with it an event entitled “Exploring Stillness.” This experimental project, according to the announcement, would consist of a five-day workshop culminating in a performance and a conversation with the audience. The workshop participants were to be three dancers at the peaks of their careers: Jésus Carmona and Lucia Campillo, flamenco artists, and Joaquin de Luz, principal dancer with New York City Ballet. The workshop and subsequent performance would be overseen by modern dancer and choreographer, David Newmann, and conducted by Ivan Bavcevic, founder of the School of Awareness and Spiritual Mastery, which operates predominantly in Eastern Europe and Spain. The prospect of seeing such an unusual concert with three dance masters was intriguing, and I must not have been alone in thinking so because the spacious fifth floor studio at City Center was filled to capacity.
The performance began with a brief introduction by Newmann, who said little about the workshop or what the audience might expect. The performance, it seemed, was going to speak for itself. The dancers entered in a flurry of activity, each in his or her respective genre: De Luz with balletic jumps and turns, Carmona with lightning heelwork, and Campillo twirling and whipping the bata de cola, the dress with its long train, often worn by female flamenco dancers. Also on hand was musician Antonio Lizana, who accompanied the dancers on (another surprise) a saxophone. Throughout the performance he used the instrument to emit a variety of sounds, from loud breaths to honks to an occasional intimation of a tune.
After entering, the dancers moved into a rough line, where they halted, as if between steps. They were not posing nor were they frozen in position. On the contrary, they seemed alert to each other and to the space they inhabited, their bodies infused with energy. They remained in these positions for a time and then slowly moved, like Noh actors on a Kyoto stage. The stillness and slow movement gave the audience members a chance to meditate on what they were seeing, to closely observe the dancers and their relationships to each other. Sometimes the evolving actions were intimate, a head resting on another’s shoulder, sometimes it became a partnership, one supporting the other, sometimes a dancer acted alone but always with a sense of being in company with the others. Occasionally, too, the stillness turned to small bursts of activity that would then settle once again into extended periods of quiet.
The technical language of the performance was interesting because it seldom reflected either flamenco or ballet. It more closely resembled an extremely slow contact improvisation with occasional hints of Spain in a gesture or a turn of the torso or head (all the participants were Spanish). When the performance finally ended, after about half an hour, the dancers merely walked to the side of the room, placed a small table and chairs in the center, opened a bottle of wine and toasted each other. It was only then that I realized they had always been themselves throughout the dance. They had not assumed stage personas, there was no sense of spectacle. So this last action — an everyday one of moving furniture, opening a bottle — although obviously planned, felt like a natural extension of what had come before.
When it was over, Neumann invited Bavcevic and the festival director, Miguel Marín, to join the dancers to answer questions from the audience. The idea for the event had been Marín’s, and he acted as translator for Carmona, Campillo and Lizana. Most of the queries had to do with the workshop process and how the dancers felt about it. Bavcevic said the workshop included many exercises meant to push the dancers outside the comfort of their habits and trained techniques—to encourage them to simply attend to the task at hand and to work from within the body instead of the other way around, which is how a western dance technique is taught and imposed, from the outside, like an inscription on the body. It was, as Bavcevic said, an exercise in giving something without moving, not permitting everything to be seen, to be on display, but rather felt from the inside.
Neumann said that the performance was not choreographed in the usual sense. Rather, meeting points were arranged at various moments in the performance where the dancers would locate themselves before beginning another segment of exploration. As for the dancers, the word they used most often to describe the experience was “liberating.” They also spoke of feeling present in the moment of stillness, which rarely happens as stage artists. Speaking to De Luz after the event, he said that the workshop was hard at first. In the quest for technical perfection, dancers always feel they are wrong; it’s like a constant noise, he said. Often, too, dancers are uncomfortable with stillness, they don’t know what to do with it. Even choreographers can view stillness with apprehension. He found through the workshop that stillness brought a silence that allowed him time for reflection, to think and feel the body differently.
In her book “The Senses Still,” Nadia Seremetakis calls moments of stillness “still-acts.” This is an apt description of what occurred in Friday’s performance, where stillness was indeed an action and not an empty space waiting to be filled. Stillness gave the dance an unaccustomed level of expressivity, one in which the dancers seemed unselfconscious and open, and gave, at least to this viewer, a new experience of these dancers and of dance.
copyright © 2018 by Gay Morris
