What is and isn’t dance? Who can be a dancer?

Editor’s note: This month on Stance on Dance, several dance artists have been asked to share a pivotal dance experience that changed their trajectory or the way they think about dance. 

BY KATHARINE HAWTHORNE

Lecture by Ann Carlson

Cantor Art Center, Stanford 2008

What is dance?  And what is not dance?  I remember first consciously asking myself this question after encountering Ann Carlson’s work.

Growing up living overseas in Singapore and then in the progressive and art-rich Minneapolis/St. Paul area, I considered myself to have a pretty inclusive definition of art.  While I could wrap my head around something like Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” pushing the boundaries of what is and is not art, the question of what is dance was much more personal and complicated.

I first met Ann Carlson in 2008 when she gave a lecture at the Cantor Art Center in which she shared excerpts from her past performance works in her “Real People” and “Animals” series.  Ann’s work features people moving and interacting in the real world; the performers did not have extensive technical dance training and the settings were everyday locations instead of proscenium theaters. “Sloss, Kerr, Rosenberg & Moore,” a film version of Ann’s live “Lawyer Piece,” involves four Manhattan attorneys performing in business attire outside of an elevator in a high rise office building.  The dancing is committed and precise and the timings and composition clever.  Ann got to the heart of what made people move, zooming in on the intention of an action and prolonging it for us to witness.

Sloss, Kerr, Rosenberg & Moore

Ann’s work challenged me with its minimal, pedestrian motions.  As a performer I savor technically challenging, expansive, and virtuosic movement.  As a choreographer I favor an unhinged, high energy and athletic vocabulary.  Ann’s pieces made me think about virtuosity and try to better understand my own value system in performing, making and viewing dance.  And it made me ask, what is and isn’t dance?  Who can be a dancer?

These were not abstract questions for me but rather revealed personal uncertainties; if I’m not wearing pointe shoes am I dancing?  If there isn’t an audience am I dancing?  If I haven’t warmed up am I dancing?  If I haven’t taken dance class in six months am I still dancing?  Is a bicep curl dancing?  If I go to college and get a degree in physics can I still be a dancer?

Whether the natural course of shedding the ingrained aesthetics of years of ballet school, or the result of young adult rebelliousness and a certain intellectual anarchism, these questions represented an artistic coming of age for me.  I decided that dance could be anything, and I didn’t need to wait for anyone’s permission to be a dancer.

Ann’s work allowed me to see dance as any movement performed with intention.  Dance could be behavior, whether naturalistic or amplified.  Dance could be anything and could happen anywhere.  I started to wonder if dancing is a state of being.

These realizations created an opening for me to be a dancer and a choreographer.  My experience with Ann and her work, along with my mentors Diane Frank and Hope Mohr, helped me substantially re-frame what I believed to be true about dance and dancing bodies.  My ability to write strongly, solve problems, see alternatives, ask questions and think critically became assets.  I felt an invitation to bring my full self into the creative process.

For more on Katharine Hawthorne’s work, visit www.khawthorne.net.