written and performed by Fitzgerald and Stapleton
Blackout
The stage is empty. The dancers enter in silence. One dancer enters and remains upstage right, the other dancer enters and remains upstage left. Both dancers make the sound of incense and it fills, purifies and clears the whole space.
Lights Up – Stage and Houselights
Magnificently alone together in a sacred space the dancers travel towards the altar – downstage centre.
The dancer on the left travels a straight path, as she travels her right arm, held in a straightened and extended position extends incrementally upward.
The other dancer swiftly raises her hands to a full extension overhead before instantly dropping them – she travels a curly path to the alter, during this journey her left arm, held in a straightened extends incrementally upwards.
The dancers use the extending arm to balance and measure the space around them – the straightness of the arm and its gradual yet arrhythmic motion upwards functions as a counterpoint to any predictability in the journeying upstage.
Having reached upstage centre each dancer conducts a blessing with the legs upon the audience.
Each dancer emits a brief sound which calls to mind our sins in the same way a shepherd might call his dog.
By means of many small separate, articulations of the bones of the hands and arms the dancers gradually extend their arms to an open “T” position.
The dancer who travelled the straight path contorts violently in a bid to abolish symmetry – the desire to abolish symmetry carries her all over the stage where she leaves a trail of fire behind her. The act of abolishing symmetry also serves as fodder for a wind which blows her. This continues until she gradually acquires a form which eliminates the hazard of wind.
Through-out this action the dancer who initially travelled a curly path gradually brings her arms down to her sides.
Without stillness both dancers then adhere to a straight path which renounces sin noticing that inhabited space transcends geometric space. They travels from stage left to stage right and each step leaves an illuminated print where the foot has been – in the same way that light travelling through a stained glass window leaves an illuminated print.
During this a-rhythmic stepping journey across the stage each dancer spontaneously turns her head to the audience in order to hear what sounds the eyes of the audience produce – ‘speak to me only with your eyes, it is to you I give this to’ at particular moments both dancers can briefly draw the upper-lip towards the nose while turning her face towards the audience and drop the upper-lip while perceiving a rose petal falling from the sky past her nose.
Spontaneously – one dancer follows a curved path which takes her into the audience where she sits down and sings a rock song inspired by both the sounds she has collected from the audience’s eye-speak and the following text from an informative poster about hens,
“avec ses deux ailes la poule pourrait voler
longtemps si son corps était moins lourd”
This dancer continues her song which simultaneously makes her light enough to fly, lifting her from her inhabited seated place to upstage centre, following an enlightened radiant path, with the back of the body twice as illuminated as the front.
The other dancer follows this radiant path and is directly parallel to it, counteracting its lightness by perceiving darkness until they meet upstage centre to assume the position of the virgin and child. When two strange images meet they become stronger.
Blackout
Lights-Up
The dancers can see everyone but no-one can see the dancers as they move to assume a position inspired by Saints depicted in stained glass. One dancer is up-stage right and standing and the other is downstage left in a position which ‘occupies the floor.’ Light travels through each body illuminating them like stained glass windows in a chapel.
The dancer up-stage right begins to find a simple and repeatable sound and travelling-movement – the fruits of her labour and the bread and wine of the performance.
The dancer down-stage left finds and offers stillness and silence as the fruits of her labour.
The Consecration
Here begins the great prayer of the consecration in which our bread and wine become Christ’s body and blood alone capable of offering us dignity and saving us. The dancer who is upstage right repeats sound and movement which travels in a wide arc curving across to down-stage left, looping outside the other dancer and travelling inward towards the centre of the stage.
The sound and movement repeatedly produced by this dancer are transformed during interstitial pauses into the body and blood.
Simultaneous to this journey the stillness and silence of the dancer downstage left are transformed into body and blood. This dancer uses sounding and dancing to Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana to transform the fruits of her labour into the body and blood.
Communion
Having completed the offering each dancer maintains a still position in a standing pose which replicates a stained glass window, and spontaneously sticks her tongue in and out to erase any element or elements of the performance so far.
The dancer centre stage begins to move backwards through a continuous doorway of light which she creates by singing the song of the angels, this doorway leads in the direction of the other dancer. The second dancer eats this song by simultaneously eating and regurgitating the word “eat” until the whole song has been eaten. The arms of the dancer who deals with ‘eat’ withdraws her hands via a series of imperceptible movements until they hang long and empty by her sides.
In this way the audience are given communion and experience a personal transformation.
When the two dancers are side by side they bend over and touch the floor gently with their hands – this is to be done solemnly and respectfully – a gesture displaying the typical flexibility of dancers and a tribute to training and discipline.
Contact without context is the theme to the carrying of one dancer on the back of the other as they pass from downstage left to right.
At downstage right both dancers hop towards centre stage where they perform a raising and lowering of the arms accompanied by tiny celebratory movements in the feet. Waves of tranquillity spread out from the centre of their intimacy and reach the ends of the world. They continue to travel an upstage diagonal; the motion of the arms through the air balances any excitement resulting from the celebratory movements of the feet and hops. Upon gaining positions upstage left, without pause, they turn around and begin to repeat the same movement travelling towards centre-stage.
As they near centre-stage the motion of the arms and use of legs to command direction becomes warped. This effect may be due to the proximity of the ending at this point which creates a drag on the dancer’s future relationship with her dance.
One dancer folds herself into an economically reconfigured pose on the floor – occupying one fifth or less of height usually occupied and one third or more of floor space (extended limb of choice not to be included in calculation).
As the other dancer exits stage left she is accompanied for part or all of the journey by the folded dancers interpretation of division in vocalisation.
Exit locomotive dancer
Blackout
END
We saw you today at the Judson Memorial Church in New York. It seemed that the only thing you had to offer to the audience was your body. No movement, no sound, besides some onomatopoeia, a few vague gesticulations and random walking around the stage. It was the dance equivalent of John Cage’s “4’33” of silence… But we are in 2009, and all that abstract deconstructionism has already been accomplished decades ago! We initially thought that you were two tourists visiting NYC, who made a bet that they could strip naked in front of a befuddled audience in a performing space, some sort of bet made around a beer on a Saturday night in a pub in Dublin. I was disappointed to discover that these are your real (“artistic”) names. Before avant-garde, you need to do your homework!
by PM at 10 March, 03:53 AM
interesting comments. i saw the same show in dublin and loved it: beautiful, honest, graceful, funny, delicate .. it makes me wonder about the different ways to receive dance . i am in no way a literate watcher of dance, i couldn’t place the performance within the continuum of dance performance history, but as an event, it moved me . maybe it’s the difference between
a dancer’s body … seen as a tool (or instrument) for representing a general idea
and
A dancer’s bodily knowledge [as] the ability to stay within the immediate and instantaneous “here-in-the-situation” moment, in the integrity of the body-mind, in which the instrumental and habitual everyday way of conceiving of the body is released into revealing the non-concealed, poetic manner of being.
as Kirsi monni puts it …
i certainly felt myself growing extra-spectral antena, sensing a kind of natural presence, a hidden dimension bleeding in, mystery . .
and i think the choreography/text reflects that in its strange dissociative beauty
by jg at 10 March, 12:24 PM
why did it disappoint you that they used their own names?
by vincent rock at 10 March, 12:29 PM
JG, please forgive me my ignorance on the matter of dance, but if the Bolshoi, Batsheva and Preljocaj are three dance troupes whose performances can be considered as “beautiful” and “graceful”, what was “dog of all creations” supposed to represent? The mathematical opposite?
What beauty is there in two girls just plainly walking around a stage like we walk down the laundry room or to the mail box, not trying to move in any aesthetic way, and belching/screaming?
At best, I thought it was a reference to Lars Von Trier’s “Idiots”…
When it comes to other fields, such as cinema and photography, there is a certain amount of skill that is required to show raw and beautiful reality. For instance, just taking a camera and shooting a picture of a laundry room is not enough. You need to study the light, the geometry of the room, set up an angle, etc… that conveys what you want to express and generates a moving, touching, delicate picture. It is not something that anybody can do. A paramount component of art is skill and effort.
There was no skill and no effort in “dog of all creations”. Worse, it was an insult to modern dance. To make an analogy to movies, it is as if somebody pretended to make cinema verite by making a 20-second movie of his desk using his webcam, uploading on YouTube, and branding it: “the planar supportive infinity of future subjugation to the digital machine 2.0”. Sorry, art is not that easy…
I was disappointed that the two girls used their names because it seems that they really have no shame! They made about a 100 people lose 20 min of their time. The reason why nobody booed was that the performance was free and that it was in a church next to Washington Square Park, a folk/beatnik/bohemian symbol of tolerance…
by PM at 11 March, 10:19 PM
Speaking as somebody who traveled from London to see the performance in Dublin last night, and is trained in the art of contemporary dance, I feel that the New York comments are clearly unjustified. So you are comparing the company to several other art forms, but I believe these girls have clearly devised their own form of ‘art’, which you feel justified in criticising not only for you but for a hundred people in the NY audience. Personally, I was entranced by their facial and bodily movements, and their raw use of voice..stunning work. Speaking on behalf of the group of people I was with, it was clear that they all enjoyed the performance.
by David at 10 May, 12:03 PM
I was at the Judson performance in March, and from the first moment I understood that in order to properly see the piece I had to re-evaluate my own process as a viewer and forget about preconceived notions of aesthetic, beauty and virtuosity. To respond to PM, I think s/he needs to do a little research of his/her own into where dance has come since the inception of modern dance 100 years ago. Aesthetics have changed. The process by which artists arrive at a dance has been diversified, no longer singular. The bodies upon which dances are inscribed have been vetted by cultural theorists, assigned and re-assigned a spectrum of values.
I am friends with Aine and Emma, and know they have studied with Deborah Hay. I believe Hay’s practice has been a starting point for their work. They are not the only ones; there has been a resurgence of interest in viewing Hay’s work, with commissions and presentations coming from well-established dance (and non-dance) venues like the Pompidou and the Whitney. I wonder what PM would say about the majority of Deborah Hay’s dance pieces. Hay’s work requires the viewer to suspend his or her agenda as a viewer and engage the performer on a different sensory level, a quiet and perhaps less pornographic level. What PM failed to intuit about Dog of All Creation is that months were spent crafting the quality of each moment as it occurred in time— the internal choreography is complex and based in perception. Unfortunately PM seems mired in the 2-D conventional aesthetics of modern/ballet, a pity, because there is so much happening in our contemporary culture that passes under the Radar of Spectacular Illusion. Art is not an HSBC advertisement of opposites. If the unconventional dance artist is judged only by the limiting standards of mathematical propriety, prescribed shape, and satisfying viewer expectations, we would never have had artists like Yvonne Rainer and Jerome Bel, and post-modern movements like the Grand Union, Punk in all its forms, New Dance of the 80s, 90s, not to mention the innovators PM mentioned (Cage, von Trier, etc). None of the contemporary dance artists who give a damn about experimentation and questioning the status quo would have a foot in the door. Good art has always strived for more than what’s visible on the surface.
To me, Dog of All Creation was the “mathematical opposite” to failure. But I feel, and I’m sure Aine and Emma would agree, if failing is never an option for artists, or any profession, the evolution of craft and dialogue stagnates. PM might do well to place less emphasis on whether or not a piece failed to match his/her projected desires, and place more emphasis on identifying the risk the performers took and how far they took it.
It’s good the PM tribe was befuddled, but rather than attach a negative connotation and blame the performers PM might consider looking inward. When something befuddles me I examine it closer, try to learn about it, ask questions before I pass judgment. I do not write it off immediately and remain in my cushy throne of exclusivity. Before commenting on dance other than Bolshoi, Batsheva or Preljocaj, do your homework.
by AV at 12 May, 05:35 PM
PM’s expectation that there is no beauty to be found in dance unless it involves “girls” moving in an “aesthetic way”, not only demonstrates that his or her expectations about contemporary dance and performance are facile and simplistic, but also that Fitzgerald and Stapleton’s piece did precisely what it was intended to do: challenge the socially prescribed roles and norms that women’s bodies are permitted to take.
The piece is challenging. Fitzgerald and Stapleton are entirely nude save their decidedly unwomanly footwear (scuffed red hiking boots on Fitzgerald and yellow flipflops on Stapleton). They look out to the audience with wide unflinching eyes, unceasingly demanding our attention. They move across the stage in stilted, stunted and erratic movements, emitting guttural sounds, snarling, grunting, curling their lips. They run into walls, fall into shapes, their limbs gasp for size and space; there is a constant furling and unfurling as the dancers find each other and lose each other, they oscillate between companionship and solitude.
It is precisely that these dancers are not ashamed to present the female form in a manner that is outside the economy of desire and the tyranny of normalized beauty standards, that this piece is extraordinary. Fitzgerald and Stapleton are both attractive, white, slender, pretty “girls” and trained dancers, who have undoubtedly mastered the acceptable and very narrow aesthetic standards for appearance and comportment which dominate our media saturated reality. These girls could be dancing gracefully or seductively, adorned in glossy costume, delighting and tantalizing us with their “beauty”. Instead they choose to offer the naked body as a non-sexual object; they choose to inhabit a space beyond desire, a space in which women are rarely permitted to relax as social pressures dictate that the social, personal and professional success of women is determined largely on how well they conform to prevailing hetero-normative beauty norms. Beautiful (read neat, unmarked, coifed, well-behaved) bodies, we see in almost every mainstream media, make better people who amass social and professional success. It is refreshing to see a performance which challenges this superficial reality to which we are all so completely enthralled.
The discomfort the audience experiences under the gaze of these two dancers reveals just how deeply ingrained are our social expectations for female bodies. Bravo to Fitzgerald and Stapleton for having the imagination and bravery to challenge our expectations. To suggest that they do this without “skill or effort” is misguided. The piece is well-executed, imaginative and well-structured. Tension is lifted with comic moments, but the piece maintains a raw honesty of flesh, which keeps it highly charged until the very end.
by LD at 13 May, 11:56 PM