Dance and Memory: A Choreographic Response

"What Remains" by Sandra Tanner Mack, presented at the College of Marin Dance Department 2014 Spring Concert, “Earthly Flight” April 4,5; 11,12

For dancers there are curious moments where the body and memory are inseparable. The most obvious is in performance when the rehearsals have implanted the movement so firmly in the body the dance springs from the dancer seemingly of its' own will. The performer and the audience both experience dances' immediate, breathtaking beauty.
 

This training creates not just a dancer’s technique, but a unique chemistry of memory and movement in a body where emotions and positions mix, meld, and remain long after the dance is done. When this remembered knowledge and passion is released there is no "technique" to shape the force of memory. This alchemy of memory and movement for  dancer is what Sandra Tanner Mack explores in her piece, “What Remains." The program notes tell us the piece is dedicated to the memory of Catherine Sim, 1939-2013, former College of Marin Dance Department Coordinator. She was an inspirational dancer, teacher choreographer, writer and treasured colleague."

The stage opens with the sound of the woman dancer/writer, Shellie Jew, furiously tapping away at her typewriter in a kimono. She may be based upon Cathi Sim, but we are not given clear guidance; perhaps she is simply a dancer, who at the other end of her career wonders “What remains,” of these old loves, and old lives. What would happen if they become dislodged from her tissues ? Perhaps they would live again. Perhaps she could dance with them again. 

The lead female dancer, Shellie Jew, stands up from her typewriter, takes off her kimono, and heads toward the barre where the other four dancers are warming up. The choreographer and male lead, Christopher Leon Di Biase stands at the front of the barre, giving them corrections.
 Ms Jew takes her place at the front of the barre, as a grande porte bra sequence is layered upon tondue, plié, rhonde' jambe, balance'. 

It is the balance' that takes her away from the comfort of the barre. She begins to dance with him and we enter into their misty dream world. Their partnering is a fluid combination of simple spins, lifts and runs with her gently alighting on his shoulder. She seemed to float like a memory even when she's on his shoulder. They didn’t seem to physically connect, but each interaction is like a spark, that pulls on a thread that keeps them returning. Their vibration is like a memory of dancing, a fantasy of a time that is not now or then, but something else. 

Ms. Jew is both delicate and deliberate, her movements birdlike yet controlled. Her naturalness seems to spring from an instinct so deeply layered with technique that her emotions are hidden within her flawless dancing. Even in her partnering there is restraint. She is as smooth as a gazelle in her leap to his shoulder and yet as she slides down his body her head is only slightly inclined toward him and her heart is lifted away.

Mr. Di Biase, her partner, is intoxicated within this dream.  He cannot help but respond to her pull. Even as he is catching her, lifting her, feeling her body glide down his chest, he knows she is evanescent. His time with her is limited. An exact gesture trying to pin her down, or a piercing gaze to scrutinize her, would destroy this vision.

He holds her hand in a last twirling partnering. There is a final arabesque that seems to point to something that is not reached, but longed for. 

She turns and walks away. Sits at her desk. Looks away and then up as if remembering. And then for just a second she looks back to where she was. The lights go blank.

The choreographer gives us a story without words, and points us to the stories that live in our bodies. We recall them in a way past language, thought or reason. What we are left with is  something we can never completely understand, only ponder.

Here's to the beauty of life that holds onto its mystery. The story that is just beyond our telling. So we must dance it.

Yours in dance,

--ID

Choroegraphy? What's that? Choreographer? Who's that?

Dance Magazine titled April as "The Choreography Issue."  ID (inveterate dancer) got to thinking-- What is choreography? Who is the choreographer? If you're a dancer choreography and is what the choreographer tells you to do, how to move. (often in collaboration, but still)

If you're a choreographer, you are making the dance, choreographing something out of an idea, a gesture in your body, or someone elses', something you see, or feel.

And for ID in the audience it’s a little bit of both. Choreography that I can feel, that's what I long for in performance.  It's like poetry where even as I read the words, I know what it means, not because the sentence makes sense but because it evokes something that I understand intensely and  purely. Martha Graham would say it has "necessity."

I have the great good fortune to have a friend  who teaches and choreographs at the College of  Marin. For the last 5 years I have watched Sandra Tanner Mack, and her ever changing groups of dancers, ping-pong, swirl, swoop and dive like birds, in and out of formation, while making pieces.Sandra calls herself a "choreography doctor, " and a few Saturday's ago I popped in to see the "good doctor" at work.

Sandra was there with her six dancers, five women and one man, and her cards.  She would periodically go and check her dance notes, at the front of the studio, addressing the dancers and the mirror. She would watch them, check the movement flow, correct, re-design, re-purpose, then apologize for "not taking a picture of myself doing this." She is reaching for her thread, what she had in her head, her body, when she made this piece, while still being here, now, in the studio with the dancers.

They want to get it "exactly." They want to take the steps into themselves, and make them more than phrases, sections. Sandra listens to their questions, answers a few, trying to give them confidence.

Then she stops, cues the music, "Lets run it."

They run it. Over and over. And then it happens. A world takes shape, its edges, its colors, the movements become a sensation surrounding and taking me in.  I'm seeing differently, my breathing in in tune with the sweeping arms, the swinging legs.

It has happened.It's a piece. Ready as any dance ever is, for opening night.