“Portrait of the Dancer’s Physical Memory” – an article from the WM call
By: Anne Grete Eriksen
Imagine looking into a dance studio: the dancers’ concentration sparkles as they efficiently, keenly and sensitively absorb massive amounts of new information. Every moment they show the will to struggle, repeat and remember. Yet how, many years later, can dancers recall long complex series of movement? What supports the memory of a choreographic work, and how do dancers describe their own remembering process in words?
To illuminate these questions I have interviewed seven dancers, representing a broad range of experience at a high professional level. Richard Suttie, Suzie Davis, Mattias Ekholm, Ingunn Rimestad, Cecilie Lindeman Steen, Therese Skauge and Toni Ferraz. All have in common the relearning of choreographies from the past.
The body remembers
Dancers use the terms redo, recall, retake or relearn interchangeably and assume a shared understanding of what signifies these terms. Personal experiences outside the dance world may colour the way a dancer processes the movement, according to Richard Suttie, former soloist in The Norwegian National Ballet. Toni Ferraz, dancer in musicals and choreographer for ODE (Oslo Danse Ensemble), puts it like this: what happens in the meantime is what we call life. Everything one has done, thought or felt the body remembers.
The challenge of remembering the dance material is, however, that memory is prone to entanglement. Dancers, therefore, have developed specific methods to remember. Ingunn Rimestad is a performing dancer as well as a pedagogue at Oslo National Academy of the Arts who describes the significance of how the dance initially was learned. To several of the dancers this initial learning is connected to the memory of the atmosphere in the rehearsal room, thus, if it is good, movements are more easily remembered. The experience of having had a generous amount of time also makes the remembering process clearer, as opposed to the pressure of time and its experiential effects.
The sensory significance of the dancer
For most of her career Therese Skauge has been a dancer in The Norwegian National Company of Contemporary Dance, Carte Blanche and is now a freelance improvisation dancer. The dance, she explains, is created and improvised in front of the audience’s very eyes, she says: “I open myself up to feel the audience”, and in some moments this gives her intense moments of communication. Many years later she will recall the physical feeling of connection between herself and her surroundings, including the audience. As she says, she will begin the reconstruction work at this point and continue until she reaches another level, where new sensory information may be integrated into the dance.
The majority of dance artists in our time are trained to make personal choices, to give choreographic work spontaneous content. Peggy Noland (US) has launched the term “chaining” to describe the independent work a dance artist performs in connecting and integrating transitions between sequences. On the one hand then, in connecting different sequences, a dancer utilises the capacity to feel, listen and link different sensory impressions whilst, on the other hand, retaining the ability to spontaneously play and bring the dance alive. Ingunn Rimestad accentuates listening. She pays attention to the changes or shifts. With 40 years of experience as a dance artist and still active in dance improvisation, Ingunn has explored the body’s capacity to communicate at cellular level, a vitally important discovery to her.
In The Thinking Hand (2009), the Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa, states that our connection to the world goes through our senses, our active receptors for stimuli, and the body will absorb the world through our senses. The whole body structures, produces and stores our wordless experience- based and existential knowledge. Pallasmaa’s theory clearly echoes the remembrance techniques of dancers: the body does not remember in an isolated manner, it remembers in the situation or circumstance, the context. Pallasmaa also refers to scientific research proving that chemical substances affect our actions and our ways to express ourselves. Thus, it may be relevant to consider Ingunn Rimestad’s experience, that of dancers communicating at a cellular level, in a similar light.
The body’s remembrance repertoire
Therese Skauge states that her body can remember the movement when she recalls the assignment of the improvisation. Suzie Davies has been dancing in Carte Blanche for a number of years and she is active in several choreographic contexts. Along with Richard Suttie and Toni Ferraz, she underlines the connection between music and remembrance: that the body remembers when hearing the music. The body also remembers through rediscovering the themes of the choreography, as Ingunn Rimestad and Cecilie Lindeman Steen report. The latter, a freelance dancer with broad experience from several companies, and an associate professor at Oslo National Academy of the Arts, reinforces the notion that the body remembers when recognising the feel of the movement. Naturally, one has to practice and drill, repeating under new creative headlines every time. Then, eventually, confidence enters the dynamic procedure: A bit more weight here, a bit more flow there, a bit more emphasis on another detail during this run-through.
The body also remembers through rediscovering where the others are in the room and when the objects with their texture, weight, shape and smell are touched. When repeating one also discovers memories, intentions and nuances showing that repetition and rediscovery make up a coherent experience, both for an improvisational dancer and a dancer who rehearses predetermined material. Independent of genre the interviewed dancers talk about presence, life and spontaneity as qualitative choices made in the moment.
Body codes
Warren Lamb and Pamela Ramsden worked with movement analysis in London towards the end of the 1970s. They developed an observation method, described in the book Body Code (1975) in which they used the terms attention, intention, and decision to further develop Rudolf Laban’s movement analysis, Effort. A central focus here was the examination of a dancer’s movement preferences and how different qualities express themselves whereas other qualities are more latent. Cecilie Lindeman Sten, provides evidence in support of this analysis by exemplifying how she has worked with quality as flow, force, time and space and how these aspects are distributed in different combinations for tension-filled dynamic expressions. Similarly, Ingunn Rimestad remembers the movement when remembering the intention, whilst Therese Skauge remembers when recalling the choice she made. Some dancers remember best when they recall what they were focusing on.
Perfect machinery
As a 58 year- old I danced in a performance originally made 24 years earlier. Dansdesign’s Film- Dance to be Murdered by was revived during the CODA festival in 2011. We used video documentation from several of the rehearsals and collaborated in remembering the choreography. During this revival work I became aware how intertwined my own memory was. Firstly, I experienced joy in the collaboration, followed by a sense of sorrow that the muscle elasticity, strength and stamina had changed so much. Only after rediscovering the spatial pattern of the choreography did it become possible for me to recall singular movements that make up what I will refer to as the inner landscape. At last I felt happiness in the moments where we were all precisely spaced at the right time, an experience timed like perfect watch machinery.
The philosopher Gaston Bachelard, (Poetics of Space, 1958), may illuminate the dancer’s experience of the “perfect”. He provides beautiful images of what is included in the term memory from a phenomenological and poetic perspective. According to Bachelard memory, dream and imagination may be inseparable because the imprints are located in the same place as the memory. As a dancing choreographer, one consequence for me may be that the dream is a place in which not just the processing of today’s steps takes place, but also one in which new dance sequences may materialise for the first time and become future. In the awake state the dreamt steps, events or landscapes make up the basis for ideas, becoming new works.
The tangle
In Of the Presence of the Body (2004), André Lepecki describes how the audience may experience it when the memory of a dancer’s performance mix with visual information, such as the poster, photos and video documentation, or the program notes and text on the dance. These may filter in together with the subjective ideas of the spectators, as they experience a dancer’s body in movement. This visual response to movement may be triggering a physical response often called ‘kinaesthetic response’.
The tangle, between a dancer’s movement and the audience’s experience of now and then, here and there, may make the remembering process porous and unstable, a state that by one of the writers in Lepecki’s essay collection, ‘Peggy Phelan’, is described as impure, unclean. This expression signifies how memories perceived as extraneous may be uncovered and filtered.
In interview, Cecilie Lindeman Sten, Ingunn Rimestad, Mattias Ekholm and Suzie Davies, have shared how they work on their memorising process: Suzie refashions through meditating into it, imagining herself in the physical course. She has developed the capacity to visualise herself in the situation, not as an observer, but from within the movement. Toni Ferraz recalls remembering a dance as an emotional experience, connecting it to the atmosphere in the room, the people, the music, “the mood of the dance”, and he interjects himself into the situation to remember. He does not talk about the steps, even though jazz dance is so full of elegant steps and sophisticated rhythms he highlights the context and refers to his upbringing in Trinidad, where every room in the house had a radio or gramophone, playing lively dance rhythms.
Similarly, emotion plays a part in what Mattias Ekholm describes as “his” method. He has danced with Carte Blanche and many other ensembles for a number of years and has begun to choreograph. In his experience of relearning choreography he may often start with the group to feel the “bonding” before he splits the structure into technical and emotional parts. Mattias further explains that he tends to wait relearning the solos, as he experiences them as much more personal and emotionally demanding. Thus, he manages the emotional content of his remembering process.
The limitations of video
Movements are remembered in many ways and today a common method in relearning work is observation of video documentation. However, Richard Suttie points out that, in videos of performances there may be mistakes or imperfections and the dilemma is whether the dancer should follow the video or the physical memory at these points. Some develop scripts, scores or notes, but these are not the dance, as a musical score is not the music.
In conclusion, my work as both choreographer and former dancer in Dansdesign and currently leading the artistic development project moving memory at Oslo National Academy of the Arts, I experience a vital mixing between documented choreographic material, personal memories and biography, all of which combine to make up a web through time, extending into the past, present and future. I have interviewed dancers and indicated, of possible relations of work on physical memory to other professional fields in which memory is a core theme. I hope I have provided an image of how complex and deeply personal the memories of the body may be and how quickly they enter a situation. Thus, I have presented here a short excerpt from a larger project in order to suggest that dancers’ reflections may add new insight and nuance into the professional language and facilitate communication between the dancer and the audience.