::sasha kukin dance company/CHOREOGRAPHER'S PAGE/chapter 2::

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Chapter 1

Chapter 2

First of all I'd like to apologize to my readers for the great delay in releasing Chapter 2. I was waiting to get the article by Yvonne Rainer that contains the text of her "Manifesto". I asked my friends in the U.S. to find this article and send it to me (the correspondence and searching took a lot of time), and ultimately Wendy Perron (New York editor of the journal Dance Magazine) succeeded in helping me, for which I am very grateful to her.
Yvonne Rainer's "Manifesto" is a small part of a larger article by her published in 1965 in Vol. 10, No. 2 of the Tulane Drama Review. The text of the Manifesto has appeared in numerous dance publications, but I had suspected that it was always being reprinted in an abridged format. However, after reading the article Wendy sent to me, I realized that I had been wrong and that the Manifesto is in fact only one small paragraph in length, taking up five and a half lines of standard magazine format. Here is the complete text of the Manifesto:

No to spectacle. No to virtuosity. No to transformation and magic and make-believe. No to glamour and transcendence of the star image. No to the heroic and anti-heroic. No to trash imagery. No to involvement of performer or spectator. No to style. No to camp. No to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer. No to eccentricity. No to moving or being moved.

       Thus, we have before us the twelve no's of Yvonne Rainer. But first a few words about Yvonne herself. She, perhaps more than anyone else, exemplifies the post-modern movement in contemporary dance, which began in the mid-1960s and continues, I would venture to say, up through the present day. She was an experimental choreographer, the creator of the conceptual "Trio A", one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theater, the creator of Grand Union along with Trisha Brown, David Gordon, and Steve Paxton, a film director, and a writer. And also the author of the Manifesto, which is traditionally considered the declaration of post-modernism.
       As much as I might like, I cannot go into great detail here about the "post-modern" conceptual phenomenon in American contemporary dance. To do that, I would need to devote more than one chapter. But I'll try to address this subject briefly. The post-modern era began with the first concert in the Judson Memorial Church, which was organized by Robert Dunn and featured students and dancers from the Cunningham School. This took place in 1962. The next fifteen years saw the intensive development of these post-modern ideas, but they didn't stop there. These ideas so powerfully changed generally held views on the technology of dance, on the choreographic process, on the performance space, and on much else, that their influence on today's modern dance does not need to be proven.
       I will point out three of what I consider to be the most important ideas of post-modern dance. The first idea is that one must strive to peel away the husk from the movement, to dig deep to get to its bare essence. In other words, one must work with the movement, constantly experimenting. The second idea is that the process is more interesting than the product. One must find new ideas for the process. This may be a game, an improvisation, or non-traditional classroom work or a performance that involves non-professionals. The third idea is that complete freedom is necessary. Freedom to choose the material, freedom of the choreographic idea, freedom of the location where the work is to be presented, freedom of costume, etc.
       If one replaces each "no" in Yvonne Rainer's Manifesto with a "yes", then what results is not so much its opposite as something that is totally different from the aforementioned ideas. What would this look like? Well, at first glance this would seem to resemble classical ballet. Spectacle, virtuosity, transformation, eccentricity, moving or being moved, the heroic and anti-heroic, the star image… all or almost all of these are attributes of classical ballet. Perhaps not of every ballet and not of the most modern ballets. Ballet critics might take issue with this assertion, especially the idea of "trash imagery", I would guess. I would have to agree with them. As for the involvement of performer or spectator, what Yvonne had in mind was a situation when the artist is dancing for a spectator (or the choreographer is choreographing for a spectator), and the spectator wants to see what he is accustomed to seeing and what is pleasing to his eyes.
       Yvonne Rainer, of course, did not view classical ballet as the antithesis of her ideas. All of her 12 no's were aimed squarely against what might easily become modern dance's legacy and domain. For objective reasons, classical dance has always been in the grip of drama's jaws. Classical dance has even always liked being in drama's grip and likes it still. The dance drama - the last achievement of classical ballet - still dominates today. The audience likes it when they understand what it is about. True, then there is William Forsythe, who maniacally continues to work with movement, which almost cost him his job at the Frankfurt Ballet.
       As for modern dance, it began with an understanding of the value of movement and of the value of the dance text. Modern dancers' experiments could as easily result in the formation of finished technical systems (Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham) as not. It all depended and depends on what you choose. If you are an experimenter by nature, then you cannot experiment for only a portion of your creative life. You simply won't want to stop. But to create a system is to stop. If you work with movement continuously, then virtually every time you will produce either completely new or partially new material. Moreover, as a composer you didn't try such-and-such, and you still want to try such-and-such. Theatre, or shall we say any verbal idea, retreats to the background, giving way to the dance. However, if you have created a system from which you do not wish to deviate, acknowledging that any more or less self-contained system comprises not only technique but also composition (see Chapter 1), then inevitably the "story" becomes the most important thing, which you must tell using the devices of your system. And if you're not versed in stage direction, don't know how to arrange the artists spatially, aren't able to put the emphasis in the proper places, aren't capable of working with a pause in the theatrical sense, then what you will produce is bad theatre. In ballet theatre you may be rescued by the stage director, scene-designer, or musical director. In modern dance such salvation usually doesn't exist, although in larger, well-financed troupes in America some of the aforementioned specialists may be part of the artistic staff.
       I recognize that my reasoning, in addition to being somewhat radical, is also somewhat abstract. For example, it doesn't quite fit the work of Merce Cunningham. On the one hand, he has always been obsessed with experimentation; on the other hand, he created a completely lucid and self-sufficient system. His work has never originated in literary or theatrical ideas. The public has long associated Cunningham's name with the dance avant-garde. However, the experiments by Cunningham that earned him this reputation were largely related to ideas of how his choreography existed and was executed on stage, and not to the choreographic text itself. He gave his dancers a certain amount of freedom on stage, but at the same time created obstacles so that their freedom was in fact something of an illusion. For his day and age, Merce was a very "leftist" choreographer, if such a term can be used, which is why so many students were drawn to his school. But, having sown the seed of freedom in the heads of his students and dancers, Cunningham could not stop the process. His students decided to move on, and some even headed in the opposite direction. This probably explains why the first post-modernists came out of his very school.
       As I see it, Yvonne Rainer's Manifesto aims to oppose bad theatre, which any choreography can easily turn into if at its core lies just about anything other than working with movement or movement invention. In truth there are a large number of choreographers who have been trained in a particular system of dance and who do not want (or, as more often is the case, are not capable) to go beyond that system's boundaries. They are not inclined to "play with movement" (a phrase used by Yvonne Rainer) and are content to keep all the baggage that they have carried with them. There is virtually no evidence of choreographic thought in their works, and what little thought there is can be discerned only by referring to their program text. Without the text there is no discernible thought and nothing to analyze. Such choreographers (whom I like to call "ballet masters" or "ballet mistresses") occupy themselves mostly with the task of compilation. The compilation of phrases from prepared formulas. Sometimes, though, they spy something new and add it in to their formulas. They aren't concerned with any "language", let alone developing their own. Among such choreographers there are definitely those whose compilations are successful. These individuals simply have taste when it comes to compilation and a sense of proportion. It is commonly said that such people have style. Let me reiterate that I come at this discussion from my experience in modern dance. In that context, style is the absolute opposite of a dance language. Look at it this way: if your choreography consists of pieces of the languages of other choreographers, then insofar as this combination of pieces is successful, you have style. This the meaning behind the eighth "no" in Rainer's Manifesto. Of course, if you yourself are a successful compiler who has style, or even just an ordinary compiler (a ballet master), you might want to object, "What good is choreographic text to an audience member? He won't understand it regardless. The audience needs a PERFORMANCE, they need a story, they need to empathize with the heroes of this story, and so on." I won't answer this, except to implore you, please, to read again my first chapter. As concerns THEATRE in the hands of a "compiler" choreographer, it needn't necessarily always be bad. The question of theatre and dance is a complex one, which I will try to examine more closely in one of my next chapters.
       Let's return to the Manifesto. In the preface to it, Yvonne Rainer writes that she personally likes many different forms of contemporary theatre. She explains that all her "no's" represent only a stricter set of rules and boundaries for her own work (playing) with movement. On the one hand, this, of course, is a gimmick to proclaim forcefully the metastases of the contemporary dance scene and to dissociate herself from that; on the other hand it is a statement of fact that a "positive manifesto" will never be an easy alternative to a "no-manifesto". In fact, only your OWN work with movement will help you to formulate your own "yes's", assuming, of course, you feel the need to have some. My own "yes-Manifesto", for example, is as follows:

Yes to choreographic text.
Yes to a technique capable of changing.
Yes to developing a dance language.
Yes to free experimentation.
Yes to improvisation.
Yes to the process.
Yes to the equality of all the participants in the process.
Yes to communication.

Sasha Kukin, August 15, 2003

Translated by Louis Saletan (Houston, USA).