by Dean　Moss

 

This text is taken from an email exchange between 2019 Dance Camp participant and Ph.D. candidate Sam Mcgilp, and myself.

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There was an environment of critical discourse in the 1980’s that I was definitely immersed in and supported by. What I (and Yasuko) do is based fundamentally on a critical development tool for dance artists employed by an organization called The Field in the late 1980’s, early 1990’s.   I’ll quickly outline that journey below.

 

First two names: Steve Gross and Liz Lerman.

 

Steve Gross took over the directorship of The Field (a dance studio/service organization)  in 1987, a year after it was founded. He developed there an artist feedback process called Fieldwork based on a "peer review" model of critiques. He brought this idea to The Kitchen when he was the Dance Curator, 1990-1992. There it was first called Working in The Kitchen, then re-titled Dance-in-Progress and finally today's Dance and Process. It’s the longest running program of The Kitchen. Steve Gross is currently a psychologist in private practice.

 

Though my first contact with it was through a videomaker's version in 1992, I facilitated the Dance-in Progress program at The Kitchen, twice a year, for the five years while I was the dance and performance curator, and for another five years while I was a curatorial advisor, (1999-2009).  The basic form of the workshop, as established originally by Steve Gross, involved 8-10 weekly meetings with 4-8 participants, managed by a single facilitator. Each weekly meeting lasted 6-8 hours during which works were shown in succession, afterward the group met to talk. The discussion was formal with the artist whose work was being critiqued unable to comment. This was to enforce a space for listening and hearing the critique without the internal noise of reflex defensiveness. Participants were also encouraged to use "I statements” when giving feedback so to locate their subjectivity. The too long meetings were often a kind of managed chaos of high emotion, with the facilitator as referee. 

 

Liz Lerman is a very respected choreographer/director who founded Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in 1976. The company was a very early exponent of what we now call “social justice” work. She also developed the very formal and respected Critical Response Process, like Steve Gross’ Fieldwork before it, largely based on  a “peer review” process.
She has a website .  

She has a book

 and here is an overview.

 

Liz Lerman’s carefully controlled CRP 4 step method, put structures in place not only to focus the feedback, but also to both protect the artist’s ego and support the their intent. Though very useful for didactic message driven works, and as a community building tool, IMHO it is problematic for the development of more subtle, complex or experimental expressions. This is because CRP effectively reenforces through its methods, the binding of the artist and the artwork. This is logical as it relates to the fact that the vast majority of emerging performance artists make work on their own bodies. So to critique the dance artist’s work is also to critique that person, so “care" must be taken. But that care itself is the difficulty, as it both infantilizes the artist, and ties the possibilities of the artwork too closely to their identity and internal processes. What makes the method Yasuko and I employ significant is that we want to do the opposite; to loosen the relationship between artist’s persona and the performance object in which their body is engaged; to establish, as in visual and other art disciplines, a separation between the artist and the artwork.

 

In 2002 I thought-up the Dialogue Workshop for Emerging Choreographers with that in mind. Developed initially with Yasuko, DW was a process that took very short works from each of it’s artists and asked the other artist participants to re-make them. At first as replication, and then with variation. Each original work would go through several re-imaginings and the originator of the work was therefore able to witness and experience not only an expansion of their ideas but multiple forms of performance composition. The workshop abstained from sharing artist intent (what i was trying to do was…) or the offering of direction (if it were me i would…). Time was used to keep feedback and working sessions light. Giving people very limited time to speak or work limited both self-conscious meanderings, and self-censorship. Also having two facilitators grounded the whole process in dialogue and conversation. Participants were repeatedly encouraged to understand what was essential about a work, and to divine how to assist the audience with tools to discern and experience it.  

 

The Dialogue Workshop had several variations most notably was Form and Practice (2005-07) at The Kitchen with Levi Gonzales an artist and dance activist. In that variation the facilitator roles were internally formalized into “provocateur" & "academic". Also, generously, The Kitchen agreed to pay the selected participants a small stipend to take the course. Also Levi and Melinda Ring, a visual artist who makes dances, did a version of DW in California for a time. (I don’t know much about it though.) Also in most versions of DW there was not a public culminating performance. This was because the workshop is about process and composition, and not the pressures of trying to produce a performance. (though that pressure can be useful as you know) Of course many elements of the original DW were not employed in the Dance Camp circumstance but much of the thinking behind it was.