Dance Discourse Project #3: Dancers Debate the Body Politic

Hello folks,

In a few hours, we’ll host our third Dance Discourse Project at Project Artaud Theater in partnership with ODC Theater.  To get the conversation started, I’m posting comments from Rob Bailis, director of ODC Theater, who will not be with us this evening.

Please feel free to use this post as a jumping-off-point for a broader discussion about dance and politics.

I hope to get my comments up here as well, but for now, I’m off to the theater–

–Jessica

Notes from Rob Bailis for Dance Discourse #3:

“I feel like tonight is really about the artists and their perspectives, so I’ll limit what I have to say to a quick discussion of the reasoning behind my choice of this topic and the subsequent selection of artists.

Simply put, I chose the topic because I believe it is critical right now that we as a citizenry insist on governmental change.  Years of acknowledged, even illegal disconnect between the public will and the actions of the government have eroded any sense that the stewardship of our country is still public – and yet it is.  We have to come back from this disconnect and act in good faith again, see to it our voices are heard, our ballots are counted, and our will be made manifest.  I feel like everyone needs to do their part to make this happen; in this instance my part was to gather this collection of powerful voices and compelling arguments, and to offer them a conceptual frame and a platform.

Politics can be deadly in Theater, admittedly.  So to avoid too much soapboxing, I chose not to start with special interests, but instead with broad strokes.   I wanted topics that were built like nesting dolls – big on the outside, but layer upon layer of reveal, all the way down to the minutia.  I wasn’t looking for pieces on specific topics that carried a particular message, rather I was looking for artists who were messengers and for the pieces to be whatever they would design to carry their message.

So I started by selecting a definition of the word politics.  And I went for something very simple: the debate about and/or method for the distribution of power and resources.   That definition alone immediately offered four questions: What’s the debate?  What’s the method?  What’s considered power?  What’s considered a resource?

I took those four questions and I related them first to notions of Bay Area identity.  I asked, “what is the Bay Area’s method?”  Well, booms and busts are our history, Gold, Dot Com, Bio Tech, so our method is innovation – constant change.  “What is our debate?” Probably the most debated idea in the Bay Area right now is the radical shift in demographics – statistically, there is no cultural majority in our region, and yet we don’t want to acknowledge this paradigm shift so we argue fiercely about what’s right and where to go.  “What is our greatest resource?”  I believe it is the sheer physical beauty and potency of the land itself. “What is our greatest power?” My money’s on the progressive values and capacities of the people living here.

So I took those Bay Area distillations and used them to sketch a cultural landscape of our region, i.e. the things we think of as core values:  ethnic diversity, physical beauty of the land, thirst for innovation, and progressive social values.  Then I made a grid by crossing them with hot button topics being discussed during this election year: the environment, the seat of power in our government, immigration, and human rights such as a woman’s right to choose, and LBGT civil rights.

Each of the artists selected was someone I could locate on this grid, arriving at the intersection of one of our core cultural values and a political hot button.  For example Jo Kreiter, on my grid, exists at the intersection of progressive social values and the seat of power in our government, and Ledoh sits at the corner of immigration and thirst for innovation.

So that was my process and what guided me.  There were many people to choose from, and curation is, at the end of the day, all about really difficult choices.  Here’s what it came down to in the end:

I firmly believe that these particular artists are culture bearers and innovators – they carry forward our most deeply held beliefs though their creative practice, and they advance our capacity for growth as a society by explicitly voicing the unspoken or illuminating what we all can see, but often don’t want to look at.  Each offers a mixture of gritty realism and imagined worlds, incessant hopefulness and critical analysis.  And each of these artists has made a major innovation in their chosen field – so they know what it is like to have mastered something, and also to have improved it.  This means at some point, each of these artists had to be willing to locate themselves within an identity (be it aesthetic, cultural, or socio-political) which they then went on to radically reform, staking a claim to something built on history, but totally new in the world.   Regardless of their individual works in the festival and the triumphs I believe each has achieved, these are people we can learn from on a whole different level.  What they have done as individuals is what I hope we can do together for our country – examine the past, locate our beliefs, and innovate a new way forward.”

— Rob Bailis, May 7, 2008