THROWdisposablechoreography

Forever Tuesday

2011-09-26T14:49:00.002+13:00

Forever Tuesday, a free event at the Film Archive
The Film Archive presents four evenings of new choreographic works, combining to create an accumulative exhibition of moving image and performance. Curated by Kristian Larsen, Forever Tuesday brings together some of Auckland's finest progressive experimental choreographers including Sean Curham, Brent Harris, Mark Harvey, Alexa Wilson, Cat Ruka, Val Smith, Rachel Ruckstuhl-Mann, and Anna Bate.

This event is free, showings are at 7.30pm on the following dates:

Tuesday October 4 - Sean Curham and Alexa Wilson

Tuesday October 11 - Brent Harris and Anna Bate

Tuesday October 18 - Mark Harvey, and Rachel Ruckstuhl-Mann

Tuesday October 25 - Cat Ruka and Val Smith

Shameless Crowd Pleaser 6th Oct @ Q Theatre

2011-09-05T11:48:00.003+12:00

A new self titled work by Shameless Crowd Pleaser featuring (but not limited to) Kristian Larsen, Josh Rutter, Julia Milsom, Georgie Goater, bonehead, Paul Buckton, John's Radford and Bell.

An interdisciplinary cross wash of real time mad fun utilising instruments, bodies, and coitus interruptus

One Night Only 6th October, 10 pm, Q Theatre loft space, $15 and $20

Some videos on Vimeo

2011-08-08T22:06:00.001+12:00

link here

From 'The Man in the Suit'

2011-07-18T00:24:00.004+12:00

This writing is a personal reflection on 'community' and some implications of a single review in the light of a recent project I've collaborated on...

On the 10th of July 2011 Jack Gray published his review on theatreview of Sean Curham's latest performance construct 'Are You Scared of Me'. In the thread that followed an unusual polylogue has emerged - unusual in that vitriol is by and large absent from the tone of the arguments, conjecture, and responses. Instead what has accumulated is a deeply engaged, largely informed, honest and generous cluster of communiques. These writings have formed a fluidly mutating context for Sean's latest work, throwing new light, angles, and reflections on the event itself, raising worthwhile questions, and pinging its possible implications.

Val Smith called for responses to the review and/or the emergent issues raised in the thread from the performers in the show. I'm answering that call on my blog rather than on on theatreview primarily because I am deeply critical of the efficacy of that particular forum as a healthy ecology to learn in.

Jack's writing wasn't the thing that really interested me (although I admit to being distracted by the careless omission of both mine and Mike Holland's names from the review). That aside I became very interested in a question thrown out there by Raewyn Whyte in which she expressed coming away from Sean's show wondering "whether this show manages to create for the audience a sense of community that lasts longer than the show itself.." Beautiful question.

As a performer I see in amongst the audiences I perform for - friends, family, members of the communities to which I purport to belong to, mixed in with a whole bunch of other people I don't actually know. But from my perspective a random grouping of spectators isn't a community, its a gathered crowd.

A gathered crowd can be a container for commonalities among the individuals its made up of. People are all looking at the same event having varied experiences and thoughts with potentially convergent linkages and divergent breakages with / to the people next to them and the performers themselves. The event itself may have a strong focus on ideas of community, or at least be informed by notions of community as Sean's did.

But here's the thing, I reckon that the stuff that makes a community function and grow is the socialising. Its a mix of the hanging out together and the shared activities and the conversations that makes the glue. A performance can help activate all of that but its in the opinion of this artist that a theatre or dance performance or an exhibition isn't the most effective place to create community even if it is an interesting place for the choreographer / artist to investigate that very thing. At best it can affirm community and/or excite that community.

I loved Sean's work and I also feel that it was deeply conventional in the sense that, via its format it could only fail to create a sense of shared community among the groups and individuals that formed its gathered crowds. All that said though, I learned things from reading the thread on Jack's review. What held my attention was the accumulated collective response, the incomplete mosaic of view points enervating further conceptual, imaginative, and emotional connections. And even though I don't trust the platform named 'theatreview' overall, in this particular thread I perceive a morphing entity of shared meaning fed by individuals with something to say. And that thing may actually be something that is "a sense of community that lasts longer than the show itself.."

Like Shooting Fish in a Barrel

2011-06-07T01:50:00.006+12:00

This is a bizarre but common interview on a conservative media TV news channel with 'interpretive dancer' Margie Gillis in which the artist is confronted with, and forced to qualify her funding status over one specific remark (link here)

This is a very difficult performance to watch. There seems to be an overt mismatch of handicaps between the debaters; one one hand a wannabe 'Barbie/Phil O'Reilly' news presenter reducing all argument to a financial bottom line in a tone of moral indignation, and on the other a relatively harmless 'too-nice-to-be-intimidating' interpretive dancer (Margie Gillis) from an easily scorned discipline.
I think the news channel got very lucky finding a guest that they could so easily roast. The interview comes across as a very public beating of a single individual utilising the 'taxpayer dollar' sound byte. That's an easy and cheap button for a conservative media news show to push.
Although Gillis was introduced at the beginning of the show as a consummate achiever and contributor to dance both in Canada and internationally, it seemed she then walked into a nasty trap.Gillis looked unprepared for the bullying tone that the 'Barbie/O'Reilly' clone took and floundered underneath pleas for compassion and flimsily communicated 'humanitarian' aspects of her work. I can't help looking at this event as if I was in Gillis's shoes. I felt sorry for Gillis, bored with the TV presenter, and I silently fumed at yet another pointless scaremongering attack on an individuals fundamental right to express, contribute, and communicate without retribution.
But like it or not I don't know if I could have done any better in a public debate in which I had to formally justify my work against a corporate argument that takes takes the whole function of art and reduces it to a fiscal narrative.

"I pay money to be wowed"

2011-03-21T10:39:00.002+13:00

Audience participation: a squeamish and risky event that can be seriously disconcerting for audience members. When performers signal that participation is part of the show most people in the audience feel as if they would rather die than risk the potential humiliation of being included in the performance. However in the Auckland season of Jerome Bel's The Show Must Go On this tendency towards coy diffidence went into convulsions exposing  individual responses ranging from playful dancing, teasing, joyous generosity, stony passive -aggressive silence, multiple walkouts, ugly demands, and even outright hostility.

As a performance piece Bel's 10 year old work could be a long lost theatrical cousin of John Cages '4,33' in which silences were used as the compositional materials. Minimal and rigorous, the choreography exposes and deconstructs the banalities and conventions of bourgeois theatre. As a performer the minimal action left me feeling very exposed, however the strict adherence to the tasks in each section was a solid anchor. That anchorage underpinned the camaraderie of the 20 strong cast but it did nothing to prepare us for our audiences.

The tech-dress was an open rehearsal to which people had been invited, friends of the cast and students mostly. Most were youngish, and all had come to watch for free. As we performed the applause was generously heaped upon us and the laughter was so abundant that I began to suspect that people thought the show was a series of gags and were missing the point. It became very difficult not to play each scene for the laughs. Afterwards I felt a mixture of elation, shock (at the intensity and volume of audience reaction as playful as it was), and a vague trepidation about the official opening night. With tickets prices $32-57 I guessed that other tensions would be activated.

One of the choreographic assistants who'd recreated The Show on a New Zealand cast confided that he had felt frightened as he sat amongst the opening night crowd. The tone of the rapidly growing murmurs quickly became very patronising.  After the performers entered and performed the 3rd section In the third section a jeeringly sarcastic cat call "REALLY GOOD!" was yelled out by one man who later walked out. At the end of that performance there were people giving us a standing ovation, and others who were boo-ing. In the foyer afterwards I began to hear stories about overheard conversations such as a group of middle aged woman who muttered about writing a letter of complaint to the festival. The following day when I repeated some of the stories to two friends they both refused to believe me. Fair call. As a performer I saw some New Zealand audiences activated in ways and degrees I've never before experienced.

From side stage on the second night we could hear the audience talking at cafe volume level, which they kept up throughout the entire show. Onstage we had no way of gauging positivity or negativity from this. But it felt at one point as if the psychological age of the audience had been collectively lowered to that of a naughty classroom of students happily engaging in consequence free chatter because the teacher wasn't there to tell them off. This was perplexing but they were not hostile. As I stood front of stage in a line with 20 performers looking out into an audience who were looking back at us the lights brought the audience clearly into view creating an expanded sense of 'us'. Some people began smiling, some put on sunglasses, some waved, one woman shielded her face with a program, but mostly they talked to each other as they have throughout the entire performance. However on the second night they began to stand up intermittently as if rising to some kind of throw down. Then they began dancing, and cheering. Dancing for themselves, each other, us. The Mercury Theatre turned into a kind of gospel church at that point with a community of converts and performers on stage and off.

Closing night they were quiet, this worried me. However as soon as we stepped on stage three women in the audience began dancing, there were another three who simply got up and left together. Overall this group was quieter than previous nights but still had its fair share of extroverts whose sense of entitlement to be entertained was evident during the show including a comment that has become my personal favourite "I pay money to be wowed".

‎"At the performances of The Show Must Go On in Paris at Theatre de la Ville there are stage invasions, interventions, slow hand claps. J says he got the message: if you do not dominate this audience, they will try to kill you." (Tim Etchells).

For me the experience of performing The Show became a bizarre and enjoyable social experiment. Unusual audience dynamics emerged from a provocation of almost nothingness. The piece activated an uncommon register of conversation and behaviour from audience members who seemed surprisingly compelled to amplify their presence and break the unspoken normative conventions of politeness and respectfulness that tend to govern crowd behaviour in a theatre.

Do You Still Think of Me

2011-02-14T06:56:00.001+13:00

Do You Still Think of Me

A new experimental dance - physical theatre by Maria Dabrowska, Wellington's own uber kinetic movement inventionist, and hyper fluid improvisation savant Kristian Larsen.
A charismatically mad homeless middle class white male and his asexual bisexual A.D.D. female companion, find themselves in an abandoned cinema without a thought in their heads or a reason to leave. Exposing the indestructible vulnerability of two eccentric characters, Do You Still Think of Me blends highly inventive movement vocabulariy with humorous images of madness, banality, and crass beauty.

entry by koha

Paramount Cinema, Courtenay Place, Wellington

24 and 25 February at 22:30

Up and Coming

2011-01-26T12:22:00.005+13:00

Nest (nominated for four awards in Tempo Dance Festival 2010) is an original cross-disciplinary collaboration ingeniously mobilising a colourful array of skilled performers from the realms of dance, music/sound, theatre, object manipulation, and comedy. Nest is a constantly shifting theatrical event embracing the logical and irrational.

This anomalous ensemble of innovative performers deviously deploy a heady spectrum of skills to create and scribble over images evoking and invoking memory, desire, dreams, and death. Navigating unexpected collisions, deciphering new physical and sonic theatrical languages, Nest is at once charming, infectious, multi-layered and elusive. Each cast member uniquely contributes to a performance resulting in original imagery, narrative tangents and sonic invention.

Add caption

36 words on contemporary dance

2010-09-22T23:26:00.000+12:00

"Emerging from 20th century European and American modernist traditions, contemporary dance is a hybrid movement and performance practice concerned with questioning choreographic and performance processes, whilst blending movement languages to generate new aesthetics and philosophical discourses."

signed

March, or April

2010-07-18T21:52:00.003+12:00

Nest

2010-07-14T15:27:00.002+12:00

The next little thing...

At Auckland’s Basement Theatre on the August of the 6^th at the 8pm Vitamin S presents “Nest” a shameless multidisciplinary crowd pleaser. Nest is a unique ensemble of 8 people.

Described as the crash test dummies of performance this anomalous batch of performers create a world in which the logical and irrational meet and have a big pash up. It’s a metaphor. Nest is a theatrical event evoking and invoking all the usual words you tend to associate with this kind of thing; Memory, Desire, Dreams, Death, and Memory.

Deviously deploying a heady spectrum of skills from the realms of music, theatre, and dance the roll call is thus;

The object focussed visual punster John Radford, master of cardboard and woo-er of women.

The volatile tsunami dancing of Julia Milsom, she actually CAN bring down the house

The movement savant Kristian Larsen, he’s like; Brain’s from Thunderbirds meets that liquid terminator dude from that Terminator movie.

The hypnotistical concentration densities of musical samurai John Bell. Try distracting him, just try.

On guitar the monosyllabic Paul Buckton, don’t mess with him if you don’t have any calamine lotion - he’s an itch that you can’t scratch.

On electronic sonics, Bonehead. He’s got a laptop, and he often uses it to go on the internet, Skype usually.

From the world of theatre Jo Smith, breaker of hearts the world over. And she just doesn’t care. She doesn’t.

Nimble minded Tahi Mapp Borren, a Jack in the Box of theatrical skill. She has maybe too many R’s and P’s in her name but that doesn’t usually slow her down.

There will be a short 15 minute interval. In the middle. And quite a long one at the end. Cost wise it’s either $10 or $15 dollars, depending. You should come along.

Yield

2010-07-12T02:53:00.000+12:00

Peter Ralston's work has become an inseperable thread in my work as an improviser. Give me a few hour's, I will explain

Alumbra Tides (Samilton!!)

2010-07-10T02:11:00.003+12:00

A Common Language

2010-07-08T23:49:00.002+12:00

A common discourse in dance making practices is that improvisation is a process which evokes new and innovative movement languages. This can and does happen, but far less frequently than people tend to think. The word “improvisation” is a term that connotes an infinite spectrum of possibility, but the specificity of the words meaning doesn’t touch the sides of the territory it alludes to. Too large and too small, too assumed to be ‘universal’ as its a word that could be applicable to any creative action in any context. But in Western contemporary dance improvisation tends to be regarded as its own genre.

Typically performed improvisations tend to throw up identifiable materials ie; the historical stuff in the dancers bodies. Generally a hodge podge of modernist and post - modernist movement vocabularies informed by the dancers proportions, abilities, tendencies, dynamics, cultural inflections, and behavioural tics under the stress of performing. All that can be recognized, even named. Its possible to see what the dancer has trained in be it breaking, releasing techniques, butoh, ballet, etc. But what is the collective name of all of that? Those are specific movement languages which are undergoing their own evolution. Improvisation is actually just a dynamic in the blending of those languages with the unfolding events in performance.

Generalising the performance event by calling it improvisation usually masks it and distracts me from the material itself. At one level I don't actually care if the performers are improvising, I care more about what they are doing and how well they are doing it. When I lead a recent professional development workshop in dance and movement improvisation the questions through which I focussed the workshop were:

1. What is the language we are improvising (creating, in the moment, emergent, contingent) ?

2. What is the language in which we are improvising? (that which is already known, learnt, familiar in our bodies) ?

With those questions as the lens for the work I positioned improvisation as the method of making, the compositional paradigm I happen to be most interested in. This helped to remove obsolescent assumptions which, when allowed to remain unaddressed tend to make a lot of improvisations look very similar.

At the moment my experience is that in order to improvise skilfully, movement languages have to be trained and refined (amongst a very large spectrum of other sub practices). Otherwise it just ain't jazz

Some recent work with Touch Compass

2010-07-08T16:25:00.001+12:00

I'm currently developing a new work with mixed ability dance company Touch Compass. The dancers are directed to improvise with specific skills, shared understandings of composition, time, and character. The core idea for the work will emerge out of further developmental work, including small improvisational performances.

In these photos: Julia Milsom, Emilia Rubio, Kerryn McMurdo, Alisha McLennan, Daniel King, Jesse Steel, Adus Smith, and yours truly.

Thelonious Monk's notes

2010-07-08T15:21:00.000+12:00

On developing a cough

2010-07-08T12:12:00.008+12:00

What makes a good dancer? I think there's a cluster of attributes that are not necessarily all skills, some are attributes.

Personally what I go for are dancers with high technical skills and low self esteem, dancers who care more about the choreography than the money (so low pay or none at all). And will tend to want to do anything that I ask them to do in the name of dance or the art form and will make the (my) work look good which is ultimately the outcome. So basically a kind of subservience laced with interesting stage presence.

I have a tendency to work with very good looking people from other countries as it 'spices' up the work, A strong classical ballet training is actually essential even though I am constantly departing from it in the name of contemporary innovation, but any dancer who doesn't have it is just dreaming! Of course its best if the classically based dancers have one or two other minor secondary skills such as being expertly competent and /or brilliant at singing, acting, acro balance / acrobatics / tissue / aerial work, contact improvisation, at least 4 name brand contemporary dance techniques (such as Cunningham, Cage, or Babooshka), Salsa or any other generic Latino type partnered dancing (Zumba for example), hip hop, breaking, krumping and hip hop, typing and administration skills, some stage managing and production / marketing experience, and of course an interest in 'other' art forms such as painting or dancing.

But mostly I look for a positive attitude and someone who is not racist. I hate racists.

Hope this helps

My Heroes

2010-03-31T17:27:00.011+13:00

These four reviews are rule breakers; I have for a long time felt that the idea of writing and publishing reviews about my peers was a personal conflict of interest. However after being consistently dismayed with the general quality of reviewing in New Zealand (Raewyn Whyte and Cat Ruka excepted) I decided to publish a few reviews on yellingmouth. But I now return to my previous position regarding publicly reviewing peers,colleagues, and other artists which goes like this; "nup."

Playing Savage A Dance / Solo Protest by Cat Gwynne Friday 29th May Kenneth Myers Centre

At the outset let me make this clear; my role as mentor / advisor / friend / supporter to Cat in the making of this work means that this is not so much a review as a personal endorsement. Written as a review. 'Playing Savage' was a solo work that I consider to be significant by dint of its astute conceptual clarity, and its wholesale trashing of cliche and catharsis. It was a powerful politically charged piece of performance art that transcended its makers artistic ego. Instead it succinctly foregrounded the performed image. Those images ultimately called the broader culture out on its own complacency. Yes that's right....us. Not the government, not the corporations, but us. Gwynne touched on a fleshy hypersensitive collective unconscious that is lil ol' New Zealand. And I felt it flinch. From Gwynne's program notes - "Playing Savage is a performative ritual that attempts to re-organize, hyper - extend, and subvert some of the ideas, symbols and images that wahine Maori (Maori women) are perceived in relation to. " Gwynne's opening image was of a sexually aggressive seated figurine. Her face made up like a cartoonesque skull, torso naked save for a fake gold neck chain with a chunky dangling gold dollar sign, and a piupiu (traditional skirt). This was a brash and dense image to greet the already intensified crush of a predominantly white audience. It both set the tone for the work and set the barre for an extraordinary hybridisation of thefictitious and the realistic within each of the characters that emerged throughout the performance. This character made her way off the chair and moved on her knees emphasising femininity and precision within a spectrum of 'beautiful dance' postures. Intelligently though in placing herself low to the ground whilst making direct eye contact with her audience Gwynne distorted status, simultaneously undermining herself and confronting the gathered crowd. This continual undermining/confrontation became a signature cycle making the uncomfortable images weirdly palatable. As her character began to eat her own hand in a self cannibalizing gesture to the hyper sexualisation of pop culture Gwynne made her graphic vulnerability opaque. Taking the performance into a kind of 'solo as heroines journey' territory Gwynne made physical pathways through the performative space via stations. Each station had its own objects. Each object with its subsequent discovery along the pathway carried its own dense narrative and triggered a transformation of Gwynne's character. Although predictable as a device this was easily forgivable given the power and heft of her character images, and the content of the work itself.Images such as the washing off of her mask / make up with a sodden Tino Rangatiratanga flag, Or the self sellotaping of a plastic Maori girl doll to Gwyne's mid riff which provoked odious connotations. For me though the most pleasurably jarring image was that of an intimidating leather jacketed (and patched) cigarette smoking solo mother wielding an over sized poi. It was in this character that Gwynne made her naturally powerful presence shine through and spark up the warning lights on the dashboard. The music of Currer Bells (Angeline Churnside, Tim Coster) defragmented thus completed the design of this section. As this character swung her poi in a perpetual warning, the aggressive tone of the gesture was ultimately made futile by its repetition. An empty gesture brokering no mutual agreement as to its meaning, and garnering no sympathy it just died. Gwynne's final image was defused by a slow lighting fade out during which a highly processed version of the John Key victory speech was played. Directly evocative of that moment in the last election when it seemed New Zealand had signed its own political suicide note. Jill Singer wrote in Sydneys Herald Sun "New Zealanders had voted for change...a leap from right to left - with all the enthusiasm and reasoning power of a doped slug." And our resolve was dissolved. Fade to black. Although this all may sound like essay on wholesale hopelessness I came away from the performance with a quiet optimism. This was borne out of the experience that I had just been witness to someone saying something important with depth, humour, skill, and from a deeply informed position. This isn't the part where I say "Kia ora Cat", this is the part where I say

"Encore"

Kristian Larsen Mashed up Key Speech avail. here

'Carnival Hound' by Maria Dabrowska. The Print Factory Wellington May 2nd 2009 Closing night

In my (predictably) forthright opinion this show is a technical, theatrical, collaborative, and personal breakthrough for choreographer Maria Dabrowska. Despite being in step with offshore theatrical progressions Carnival Hound is of a lineage that hasn’t really taken hold round these parts. And that’s the anomaly. This is essentially theatre where dance and choreography are the meta language. Despite repeated exposure to adept choreographic sophisticates overseas no one here has been able to convince a New Zealand dance audience that this kind of shit is current, worthwhile, and downright fucking enjoyable. This devised work played in imaginative detritus offering up complex but direct imagery. No single person or genre or idea seems to have taken overall lead in the construction process. The choreography, music, theatre design, dramaturgy, and performance all roamed together on a horizontal plain as a pack with fun and dangerous motives. Deliberate without being cautious, this creative group hasn’t flipped the bird at audience expectations. For example when performer Mariana Rinaldi leaves the stage as part of a solo to confront and lick an audience member there was no transgression of spatial convention - the audience had been inseparably integrated into the theatrical space from the beginning. Anyway it has been implied that maybe Carnival Hound’s crew jumped the shark. Can’t say I agree with that though. When expectations surrounding specific content (built out of marketing and program notes) are jettisoned in favor of actually seeing and listening to the work itself, starting points are more of a point of interest than of direct relevance to what’s in front of us. I don’t care if the word ‘post apocalyptic’ is in the program notes, despite text being used as a useful interface for dance, ultimately programs and marketing are for the tourists. There was a narrative inevitability built into the two female and one male trio that eschewed all of the weighty notions that the show had been built on and subsequently departed from. I got into my own reading that Josh Rutter’s clown prince puppet master of the ‘deep subtle’ character lived alone in a contemporaneous somewhere. In his own personal junkyard he imagined female mannequins coming to life and playing out fragmented duets of displaced violence. Dabrowska’s punky Warholian hyper kinetic doll character found company with cold tongued sexually charismatic Rinaldi, All three performers communicated deftly using an open palette of materials, props, costumes, text, and movement aesthetics. This impressionistic reverie was floated by the masterful theatrical hand/eye coordination of Jo Randerson, and by Eden Mulholland’s sensitive, sonically weighted, and ultra sorted sound composition. Kudos to the designers’ Stu Foster and Piet Asplet for making use of the gruff plasticity and depth of The Print Factory. Lighting was a heavily dealt hand; metallic, foggy, and cold, making use of television ambience and fires. With the exception of the eerily cool floating stage most of the objects were of the found variety; a rubbled pile of plastic body parts, the Orwellian TV face specters, the small fires, and bandaged chairs. Carnival Hound has been dogged (sorry no pun intended) by the gap between its creative berth and its voyage. But that argument is of little consequence. The piece itself is at a point where its artistic development would probably best occur under the pressured conditions of continued performances. That said however it’s not coming to Auckland as advertised. Guess you can’t believe everything you read now can you.
Kristian Larsen.

'Push'. Russell Maliphant and Sylvie Guillem. ASB Theatre. Auckland

The Introductory Bit
On Sunday 26th April around 9pm night at Aucklands ASB Theatre about 2000 or so paying spectators attended a dance performance. At the end of the show they gave a standing ovation and 3 rapturous curtain calls to a pair of dancers. I'd never before seen a New Zealand dance audience do this after a contemporary dance performance and I felt suspicious.
Part 1: The Part Where I Talk About Guillem's 'Technique'. Let me state this up front: Sylvie Guillem is one fuck off dancer. She has the looks and proportions of a supermodel combined with a contortionists range of motion and 110% of the bizzo that makes a great classical dancer. I witnessed an exceptional artist in her forties make very restrained and dignified choices. Occasionally Guillem would turn herself into a Swiss Army knife and her abilities became incomprehensible - almost alienating. But for the most part her expertise was applied to executing tasks that were well within her range. As a performer Guillem was invested but at a relatively low level of risk. Watching Guillem was not a transcendent experience. The demi god like status so frequently assigned to her in the press should be more appropriately recognized as rock star status. Guillem's onstage presence was commanding without being overbearing. However the situation seemed theatrically and aesthetically overplayed. Emphasis on top lighting in both of her solo's turned her face into a mask and her body into a hyper-real, semi-human intrigue-athon. This combined with the music was doing way too much work creating an atmosphere of 'mystique'.
Part 2: The Part Where I Discuss Maliphant's 'Choreography'.
'High end mild' is how I'd summarize Maliphant's aesthetic, 'contemporary dance' for ballet aficionados.With an emphasis on the standing body Maliphant wrote from a generic globalised movement vocabulary. Whilst departing from the classical ballet movement repertoire, this vocab has actually entered the stable of the ballet movement lexicon -bum rolls, handstands, partnering generated from contact improvisation, bits of capoeira, knee spins all performed with well stretched feet. All four of the works; Solo, Shift, Two, and Push, were Maliphant's choreography. Each piece bore consistent signatures; medium paced tempo, and soft body dynamics. The unerringly even tonality of the whole evening was lifted by the consummate skill explicit in the dancing. What drove me mad though was that I couldn't locate anything in the choreography that told me where it was from, not geographically, not culturally, not politically, not socially, not sexually, and not emotionally. The work was safe as houses. It could have been made anywhere. In that respect the choreography seemed to be of a globalised culture, and somehow unilaterally white.
Part 3: The Bit Where I Talk about the 'Audience'.
At the beginning of this piece I referred to '2000 or so paying spectators'. The notion of spectator is different that of being a witness. A witness has some degree of responsibility to the situation. In this context however people paid their money and got high on the detail of the performative cuisine. You don't usually take responsibility for what you see when you are busy being exultant. Maliphant's choreography was unchallenging without being completely unstimulating. Guillem's body and cult of personality gave it wings. Beautiful and unchallenging; an effective recipe for popularity anywhere in the developed world.
Kristian Larsen

Regression Test. by Dave Hall and Joshua Rutter. The Basement. Auckland.

Performed by Josh Rutter, Dave Hall, and Tim Coster. @ The Basement Theatre last nite.

These three gents pulled off an understated coup with Regression Test. That is to say that the work came over as a flawless and witty understated interaction. What made it even more special was the absence of hackneyed angst, critique of dance, and clichéd self commentary so common in an increasingly feminized, hyper polite, touchy feely form of performance. These guys are making art baby! So remove the dance carrot from your arse and go see this work.

The performance began with Dave Hall standing in solo wearing diapers and holding an umbrella. His proximity to the front row as a pseudo nude caused an immediate tension with the audience but his sustained vulnerability disarmed any sense that he was there to confront. His exit with the umbrella conveyed an implausible sense of fun and set the tone for Josh Rutter to enter.

Rutter began his solo behind the audience and immediately turned on the charm - not an easy thing to when you’re performing something that looks like butoh. Rutter’s movements became like micro lectures, brief but intensely informing. The two opening solo’s served as an introduction to the ship of fools we were to be spending the evening with. After that the party started.

It’s got to be said that both Hall and Rutter used duration and timing cogently all the way throughout the performance, thus allowing the eye to rest on the image. But although the images in Regression Test had a harrowing comedy there was a spookily undetectable dynamic within them. That dynamic acted as an invisible slider that moved the image from amplified banality to hilarity, and then to profundity every fucking time.

Hall pulled off the undetectable transition particularly well in this piece. His skill as an artist in performance has been borne of economy of choice. Hall makes no extraneous movement statements and his concentration is inspiring. His comic timing is on the up and up too and this is where Rutter should be high fived.

Tim Coster’s live music although ever present was sidelined by the visible. Its subtlety was foregrounded only momentarily when Rutter scraped his fingernails along the floor. But Coster’s sonic decisions and deftly observed interplay with the dancers provided a constant elemental swim for the show to lightly occupy.

The dance duo’s sustained depictions were graphic and potent; the woman in the dress blithely greeting everything, the shrieking white faced fool with the amplifier, the manimal in the bucket, the ineffectual head-in-the-sand of the umbrella-ed body corporate, the twittering finger tip and leg beastie thing, the impossibly thin fragility of the fabric of the umbrella intensified by a feeble croucher vainly looking for protection. Through all this the evocation of a thermonuclear future replete with radioactive rain, cosmetically gross jelly, complete unknowingness about what to do about anything, and effete’ madness of the last remaining inhabitants seemed to just sit there to be laughed at. Which is what we did, without anger, without cynicism, and without making it all way too important.

Kristian Larsen

A music video with me innit

2010-03-22T19:45:00.011+13:00

Review ‘Pro - Man Renaissance’.

2010-01-01T12:09:00.020+13:00

Performances at Auckland Zoo are part of its marketing engine, A strategy to maintain or boost numbers - not so much bums on searts but eyes on animals. Usually performances are by musicians playing in publicly user friendly zones of the zoo. However the marketing dept at Auckland Zoo have taken a big risk with a very subversive event. Amsterdam based De Laatste Groep van het Werk van de Bank (translation - The Last Bank Work Group) have created something of a performance art coup. Paying homage to and going way beyond Janice Claxtons 'Enclosure 44 - Humans at Edinburgh Zoo' this 48 hour long installation not only evicted the divisions between animal and human, it also slammed culture and species together with head fucking simplicity.

De Laatste Groep van het Werk van de Bank is a seven strong group of performers headed by couple / co - directors Femke Bathhuis and Matz Van Doorn. This is a collective of independent artists, a format typical of the networks of European artists that have functioned quite happily outside of the antiquated 'company' model for some time now. This particular constellation seems to have referenced the 90's European dance movement which itself strongly referenced Judson Church. The Judson artists deployed pedestrian movement and heavily deconstructive conceptual frameworks to depart from previous era's of dance. However this group has stayed true to two movement languages that emerged from that time: Contact Improvisation and pedestrian gesture. Those two movement languages were used to construct a vocabulary that connoted a dying culture and species. Although a decidedly conventional movement pallet, it was deployed with devastating effectiveness.

Van Doorn and Batthuis have created a kind of cultural anti-statement in response to the age of spectacle. Known around Europe for their politically subversive performances, De Laatste Groep van het Werk van de Bank's new work is an event that is almost too good to be true. Reminiscent of shop front window performances where the performers would live on display for twenty four hours a day, this group have taken that format a step and a half further. Housing themselves in an enclosure called Giraffe Valley at the Auckland Zoo, the colony of seven humans cohabited an enclosure with relatively benign zebras, giraffes, and ostriches.

The dancers looked both terrifyingly vulnerable and at the same time discomfortingly 'normal'. They also accomplished a deeply natural sense of disinterest in their surroundings which made their integration into the enclosure almost seamless. Miraculously the animals reciprocate this disinterest and were not intimidated by the presence of the colony in the slightest. They simply wandered around, ate, and did their thing as did the dancers. There were no predators, bar the audience.

Over the course of a day the dancer's employed an improvisational loop structure that allowed them to navigate a consistent world of material via endless theme and variation. Familiar activities such as gathering and preparing food, sheltering in bivouacs, and walking in meandering choreographic patterns, were blended with contact duets, trios, and even a group unison phrase that consisted entirely of everyday gestures. The members of the group interacted only with each other, never with the animals, and never with the audience. The shifting and confused crowd of onlookers were largely disregarded - eye contact between performer and audience was incidental, even accidental. Occasionally the dancers spoke to each other but it wasn't really possible to discern what they were saying, or even if what they were speaking was a made up language.

Within this terrain there were elements that seemed so natural that they were easy to overlook. The most obvious being that the performers were naked. To a seasoned punter nudity is de rigeuer, to be expected. However in this situation the placement of naked humans in an animal enclosure desexualised them, turning the performers into a crude cultural artefact. This played havoc with deeply entrenched notions of packageable entertainement housed in comfortable environs. 'Pro - Man Renaissance' not only subverted the tedium of spectacle that saturates performance across most media, it also reframed human beings as an endangered species to be ogled for entertainment and consumption.

This work was an outrageous social experiment. But polarising the ourageousness was the 'typical' New Zealand muted emotional response. I didn't see parents pulling their children away, rather most adults were either ignoring the performance outright, or just pretending to look at the animals in the enclosure. The strongest reactions were ones of faint embarrassment or discomfort as if some reality tv cameras were present. Which they weren't.

Call me cynical but I wasn't surprised by this. I was however deeply impressed with the multilayered audacity of the event. I had one question as I moved on to see the kiwi's in their little night house enclosure; if on the one hand a zoo is a place where humans view animals, and a 'zoo' is a metaphor for a place where chaos and unrestrained behaviour takes place; how can an audience remain so complacent or even just socially awkward in the face of imagery that is so spectacularly ironic, confronting, and profoundly questioning? Oh well, I soon lost track of that thought as soon as I saw the ocelots, my oh my they were just too adorable!

PS this is a fake review of an event that never happened. Largely a creative excursion provoked by Paul McLaney, and by my own wishful thinking for a work I'd like to see in New Zealand but not make.

Ascension

2009-12-27T20:48:00.003+13:00

It was around 3 a.m. when I made this. I had to make something and I was too tired to dance or write.
1 metre away from me my father was in his chair, sleeping. Terminally ill. I told a friend I made this not knowing what the images meant to me and not wanting to know. But they all signify death in some way or other. Even the family shots. Those moments are gone. And I sit here just trying to stay present to everything thats happening and everything I'm feeling. I could be doing a better job of that.

Mixed message

2009-11-08T19:49:00.040+13:00

Being sad
Being fooled
Being able
Being understood
Being grateful
Being shot
Being loved
Being sexy
Being bad
Being creative
Being confused
Being alone
Being popular
Being funny
Being 37
Being 15
Being 25
Being inebriated
Being alive
Being awake
Being a New Zealander
Being poor
Being 40
Being outspoken
Being victimized
Being young
Being supported
Being pragmatic
Being supportive
Being stupid
Being weird
Being Elvis
Being fat
Being honest
Being aware
Being diseased
being old
Being alright
Being funny
Being a man dancing

Being myself

Latest choreographic projects

2009-10-10T11:21:00.017+13:00

'Adze'. A collaboration with Claire Lissaman

Footnote Forte Solo Series 09 review here and here

and here

're/set' , a collaboration with Geordan Wilcox as part of Prime Cuts 09 review here

and here

Armando Iannucci on art

2009-10-08T01:21:00.003+13:00

extract from "Relational Aesthetics"

2009-08-26T20:54:00.005+12:00

"An overwhelming majority of critics and philosophers are reluctant to come to grips with contemporary practices. So these remain essentially unreadable, as their originality and their relevance cannot be perceived by analysing them on the basis of problems either solved or unresolved by previous generations. The oh-so painful fact has to be accepted that certain issues are no longer being raised, and it is, by extension, important to identify those that are being raised these days by artists. What are the real challenges of contemporary art? What are its links with society, history, and culture? The critics primary task is to recreate the complex set of problems that arise in a particular period or age, and take a close look at the various answers given. Too often, people are happy drawing up an inventory of yesterdays concerns, the better to lament the fact of not getting any answers. But the very first question, as far as these new approaches are concerned, obviously has to do with the material form of these works. How are these apparently elusive works to be decoded, be they process related (italics authors) or behavioural by ceasing to take shelter behind the sixties art history?" (p.7.)

Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 2002

An Improvisational Performance Using Improvisational Performance to Examine Improvisational Performance

2009-08-24T22:10:00.009+12:00

At the final stages of a 2 year process of master's research, Kristian Larsen presents a 45 minute solo performance of new dance, and new text. More than just a bunch of dancing around Larsen breaks open the husk of good old post modernity and points at things! Ironic! Pointy! Fun for the whole family!

Where: Kenneth Myers Centre, 74 Shortland St, Auck CBD When: September 11, 12. 8:30 pm. Entry by Koha (in the truest sense of the word)

Vitamin S reflection/refraction

2009-07-25T12:44:00.006+12:00

image by Phil Dadson

I dropped in on a Vitamin S workshop last nite. Bit of background: Vitamin S are a network of musicians who improvise together on a regular basis. Their website software randomly selects musicians names to play together in different configurations each week, then notifies them via email. Then whoever turns up is whoever turns up. This is a good old fashioned chance mechanism that produces ‘interesting results’. I have danced with them on and off for a couple of years now. From time to time they run workshops for each other and last night I dropped in on one just to have a gander, not to ‘play’. In between sets the group had little discussions, reflections on what was just played and the provocations that the workshop leader was deploying. Some interesting things came out of those discussions. One topic was ‘listening’. The amount of listening sensitivity going on within any of the improvised sets made an impact on how things would go in the process of making. In watching several short sessions I got the impression that the more that individuals in the group listened to each other, the simpler and more refined their individual decisions and offers were. However there seemed to be some discontent amongst some people in the group about this. Because the simpler decisions emerged as an identifiable tendency there was an immediate mistrust from some - some of these guys get a little twitchy when anything ‘familiar’ occurs, or a sonic pattern emerges within the improvisation. This seems to come from an assumption that improvisation is a constant moving away from the familiar and the habitual. Yup I reckon that improvisation can be driven by that. It still seems to me that when it is, the performance always seems to manifest a very recognizable set of aesthetics in spite of a compulsive ‘moving away from the familiar’. From experience an increased quality of attention / listening is attainable through dedicated practice. And during that practice certain bandwidths of imaginative processing narrow down whilst one attends to the task of improving ones improv-ing through increased conscious attention. So I’ve found that I become less creative for awhile and some old patterns re-emerge when I work on this. ( There is something to be said for mastering stereotypes, and I don’t think you can fully depart from a thing you haven’t actually mastered - you can't give up what you don't have). In the context of deepening a skill or developing a new one I’m all for old patterns - if I can re-experience / recontextualise them fully they open more doors of possibility than when I resist them, or when I make a goal of being evermore inventive by compulsively departing from whats there. Anyway, it was nice to hang out with a bunch of musicians, who were gently and sincerely playing for their own enjoyment and curiosity in a basement off K Rd. July 25th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 0 Comm

Artist / Autist

2009-05-15T18:38:00.003+12:00

Aspergers - more common in adult males

Average or above average intelligence
Inability to think in abstract ways
Difficulties in empathising with others
Problems with understanding another person's point of view
Hampered conversational ability
Problems with controlling feelings such as anger, depression and anxiety
Adherence to routines and schedules, and stress if expected routine is disrupted
Inability to manage appropriate social conduct
Specialised fields of interest or hobbies.

Also as part of the autism spectrum

Superior pitch perception and other musical abilities
Better at noticing details in patterns
Better visual acuity
Less likely to be fooled by optical illusions
Solve many puzzles at a much faster rate
Less likely to have false memories of particular kinds

Superior desire and talent for assembling and ordering information. Especially when they are given appropriate access to opportunities and materials, autistics live the ideal of self-education, often to an extreme.

Autistics also have, to varying degrees, strong or even extreme abilities to memorize, perform operations with codes and ciphers, perform calculations in their head, or excel in many other specialized cognitive tasks. The savants, while they are outliers, also reflect cognitive strengths found in autistics more generally. A recent investigation found, with conservative methods, that about one-third of autistics may have exceptional skills or savantlike abilities.

The Five Corrosions

2009-03-18T11:20:00.019+13:00

Poisons in the practice of making dance. These things perpetuate dissatisfaction and hostility. These things prevent us from slaking our thirst. These things play together to create the conditions for obsolescence.
Solipsism Self involved, self absorbed, self protecting, self aggrandizing one dimensional approach to making. The inability to flex with other points of view. The refusal to truly reapproach.
Melancholia Humourlessness, bleakness, public self flagellation. The tragic that fails to be universal. Angst and catharsis without the maturity of design. The hard done by attitude amongst the elders. Spirit of celebration buried under the weight of self consciousness in performance.
Disingenuousness Dishonesty in ones art, desires, actions, perspectives, communications and relationships.
Dilettantishness Inadequate skill and historical information, an ahistorical approach to the form. Absence of reverence. Premature birthing of works. Confusions of the post modern with the conservative. Superficial investigations.The prolific amateur.undermines diversity with earnestness and cliche'. A position of anti skill based on shallow misunderstanding of the No Manifesto and a futile engagement with a search for originality.
Lovelessness A profound absence of generosity and a debilitating culture of hyper criticism. Withholding. Ubiquitous lack - commonly its in the work, its in the performances, its in the audiences, its in the foyer conversations, its on the net, its in the body.

The Settlement project Wellington 08

2009-01-10T18:44:00.024+13:00

above image by Kate Baker, the rest by Hans

Settlement was created and performed by: Amber Stephens, Anuschka Von Oppen, Andrew Rutherford, Alyx Duncan, Callum Strong, Cathy Livermore, Claire Hughes, Claire O' Neil, Crystal Scia Scia, Elle Loui August, Francis Christeller, Hadleigh Walker, Hans Van den Broeck, Joshua Rutter, Juliet Shelley, Kerryn McMurdo, Kristian Larsen, Maria Dabrowska, Megan Adams, Merenia Gray, Rose Beauchamp, Sophia Elisabeth, Tessa Martin, Zahra Killeen-Chance, and Sarah Knox.

This work was re-created in 2 weeks with a local group of professional performers from different ages/ origins/ backgrounds. We constructed a temporary village/ settlement with found and collected materials. 'The Print Factory' a disused industrial space was chosen as a site that honestly evoked a gritty roughness. The creation process took place in that environment.

"Built from improvisations, the works of SOIT revolve and turn around ideas in very ‘real’ ways, giving the audience a sense of watching it unfold for the very first time. Life imitating life from tragedy to celebration, Hans Van Den Broeck’s studies in psychology and film brings characters of subtle complaint towards their own breaking points." from press release

Favourite Things 2008

2008-11-27T00:15:00.015+13:00

Guy and Malia's wedding..seriously the best social event of the year and the nicest time I have ever had with a large group people from the dance community. The MAU Forum, including Lemi's latest version of The Tempest. At the end of that piece, I looked at Sean and said "That was GOOD." Performing at Melbourne's Dancehouse with a group of fantastic artists "You Are Not Alone You are Just In New Zealand". Put together by the tireless Malia Johnstone. Performing in Settlement in good ol Wellington..gotta love that dust Claire O'Neill's MTYLand performed by Footnote, seriously contemporary, seriously about fucking time! The Trial directed by Stephen Bain, with exemplary design by Andrew Foster and a deeply cool collaborative cast of interdisciplinary performers. Kraftwerk at the Auckland Town Hall. Flawless Will stay with me for a long time (Thanks for the ticket and the company Paul McLaney). Robot Chickens Star Wars Episodes. I havent fully grown up yet. The Article that Summed It All Up (Kay S. Hymowitz) Collaborating with Simon Ellis (a very smart man) on improvisation, online. Hofesh Schecter..I just like what he's doing. Peter Ralston's Cheng Hsin workshop in Auckland Santeri Ojala, aka StSanders and his virtuosic overdubbing. I know he made this stuff a couple of years ago but whatever, I laughed in 08. Personal Thanks and Awards ‘High End Conversations’ award (s)…Sean Curham, Larry Lavender, Alys Longley, Brenton Surgenor, Natalie Medlock, Helaina Keeley, Cat Gwynne, Simon Ellis, Chris Jannides (keep on plugging CJ)

‘Ass Kicker of the Year’ award…Lemi Ponifasio

‘Hospitality & Generosity’ awards…Guy Ryan, Ali East, Malia Johnstone, Allen Roberts, Sian Tucker (keep those social cogs oiled!), Raewyn Whyte and Derek Tearne

‘Damn Fine Flatmate’ award…Charlotte 90

‘Dedicated - Hard Working - You’ll Go Far - etc’ award…Jess Quaid

‘Nice Work Dude’ award…Josh Rutter

"Take Your Place Among Them' award...Sarah Foster

The ‘I Like Where You’re Going with This’ award…Dave Hall

‘Damn Fine Human Being’ award…Drew MacMillan

Special Thankses for keeping me going …Vitamin S peeps, me folks out West, Douglas Wright (for addressing it directly and getting what was going on), Geordan Wilcox, David Zeitner Smith, Ash, teaching opportunities with Touch Compass and 101 stuff at Uni, Ralph Buck, Nick Rowe, Camille Boyte (for understanding), Matt Smith, Claire O'Neill, Jenny Macarthur

...and in the end when the fire burns out, you're left with whatever it is that you're left with.

New Online Collaboration

2008-11-18T10:13:00.004+13:00

Simon Ellis and I have set a new blog in motion here. The new blog is focussed on practices of improvisation. Take a look, contribute, etc.

RUGBY

2008-09-04T12:53:00.010+12:00

From a conversation online between myself, and an esteemed colleague (read: 'good mate')..... (A part of our discussion touched on) 'recognition' versus 'understanding'. This made me think of of the word 'reading' - literally means to re-cognise. But this act of recognition is part of how we develop an understanding of a work. Perhaps KL is suggesting not to put the cart before horse in how we go about perceiving/witnessing performance? My bugbear in this part of the 'problem of dance' (or perhaps art in general) is the notion of having to "get it". As if it has a solution. Strange in a way b/c we can be so sophisticated in our understanding of the nuance of physical action (only need to look at our understanding of the action of rugby in NZ (for example), but within an arts context there is suddenly a pressure to 'get it'. This 'problem of dance' is ongoing, and probably cultural. For example there is no identifying cultural or national dance representing the pakeha population of New Zealanders. Although there could be an argument made for ballet given its proliferation of schools country wide, and there is a national dance company; The Royal New Zealand Ballet - which still tends to be perceived by NZ male's as effeminate, and homo-erotic. Contemporary dance has a kind of guilt-by-association in that respect also. But anyway that's beside the point. Problematically contemporary dance is far from simple in its movement intentions. Rugby by comparison is easy, no one really looks at its movement in terms of nuance for nuance sake. It's a GAME. It's very clear that that's what it is. Therefore the movement and the intentions behind the movement are very easy to read - 'He threw himself at the other man in a full body blow in order to get the ball and win the game' Simple. However in contemporary dance - 'He threw himself at the other man in a full body blow because...' a - He was demonstrating or illustrating or expressing an issue around relationship and /or sexuality in gender specific, ambiguous imagery in order to satisfy the choreographers sub agenda(s) around deconstruction, interrogation of sexuality in contemporary culture, cliche' in post post modern concert dance on mainland Europe (and its outlying areas), issues about the portrayal of men dancing together on stage and/or undescribed intuitive hunch(es) about intersections of bodies in space.

or perhaps

b - In attempting to move away from issues of identity, sexuality, and meaning the choreographer in collaboration with the dancers was working from conceptual provocations that resulted in a movement vocabulary that was; new, innovative, hybridised, and uncharacteristically honest in its attempt to be nothing other than movement for movements sake with no subtext, narrative, construed meaning, or any other cloying non linguistic coding even if driven by therapeutic somatic concerns. If this is the case as often as I suspect it is, I can see why rugby is usually the winner on the day.

The One Right Tool

2008-07-29T12:46:00.005+12:00

If the rule that you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?

William Forsythe: Improvisation Technologies- A Tool for the Analytical Dance Eye

2008-05-28T23:05:00.011+12:00

Some diligent bastard has put the whole thing up on yutube here Apparently CD-ROM still available for purchase here

2008-05-22T18:18:00.002+12:00

You’re Not Alone…You’re Just in New Zealand

Including: You’re Not Alone…You’re Just in New Zealand, Broken by Design, Locked, Ink

Choreographers: Malia Johnston, Kristian Larsen, Julia Milsom, Maria Dabrowska

Performers: Malia Johnston, Kristian Larsen, Julia Milsom, Paul Young, Maria Dabrowska

Design: Paula Van Beek & Martyn Roberts

Thursday 5 June to Saturday 7 June @ 8.15pm

Dancehouse, Sylvia Staelhi theatre, 150 Princes Street, North Carlton

Bookings: Dancehouse 03 9347 2860 or info@dancehouse.com.au

Throwing The Baby Out With The Bathwater

2008-04-27T11:40:00.004+12:00

n 1989 Wendy Preston, Maggie Eyre and Alison East established in Auckland what was then called the Performing Arts School to offer a full time dance programme for a two year Diploma of Contemporary Dance. In late 1994, PAS relinquished its independent status to join Unitec, by which terms the school would gain improved facilities, financial viability (dependent on targeted levels of student enrollment), and the right to develop a degree programme. In 1998, as The School of Performing and Screen Arts (PAS/SPASA) began offering NZ's first dance degree, with students in effect majoring in choreography and contemporary techniques. This was its vision statement: "The Performing Arts School is committed to encouraging the development of personal creativity and artistic process through the theory and practice of the contemporary dance discipline and its related arts. There is a strong commitment to identifying a contemporary dance form that reflects the social, cultural and geographical environments of Aotearoa,

New Zealand

. The broad based holistic education programme is designed to develop a disciplined and sensitive human being and dance artist." Sadly the current population of students attending Unitec's dance program know nothing of its history, its original vision, and its aims. Their level of exposure to and interaction with the community of people that now exist as a result of that vision is token. This is compounded by a narrow and generic training programme that has come about through endless waves of restructuring. Unitec was never focused on creating company dancers, that’s the New Zealand School of Dance’s specialty and no one does it better than them. Rather this was a dance course with a vision to create dance artists capable of mounting and producing their own work, people with unique voices, and most potently community. Under the original direction of Ali East it was policy to implement an industry led curriculum. This is something that was done in line with other leading edge institutions such as the School for New Dance Development (Amsterdam) and the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (Perth) After Ali had left, Chris Jannides (alongside industry stalwarts such as Felicity Molloy, Raewyn Whyte, Charles Koroneho and too many others to list) continued to evolve the programme. They also continued to invest in the development of graduates in order to support a healthy vibrant scene of contemporary dance performance in the real world. It’s fair to say that a lot of shows wouldn't have gotten made without the significant time and energy given freely by these people. Chris was the last one left in that institution who not only maintained an agenda that supported the original core values, but who also had the ability to provide a conduit between the professional world, and the students. Management didn’t really approve of his methods - Unitec was providing the resources unofficially to get work made. It couldn't last. At the end of 2006 Chris Jannides left the dance course after a radical restructuring (over seen by an educational policy maker, the current head of Unitec’s School of Performing and Screen Arts) disestablished his position as Head of Department and replaced it with a lesser role of Programme Coordinator. Lesser in terms of its autonomy, the job description was almost identical to a department head. That role was filled by a South African classical dancer with plenty of administrative nous, but no experience in making contemporary choreography. In a financially strategic and fairly typical move for an educational institution, a policy limiting the hiring in of part time tutors was enforced and the proportional salaried staff took the brunt of the teaching workload. This was at the expense of the the programme’s unique approach that exposed students to new, progressive, informative practices in dance, choreography, art, interdisciplinarity etc. Teaching nutrition and somatic anatomy (as well as classical ballet) is a former ballet dancer and sales representative for a diet supplement company called Ultimate Sports Nutrition. He was hired by an interview panel of three that included his wife - the new Programme Coordinator for the Dance Dept.

Curriculum staples that set this course apart from other full time dance institutions are no longer taught: Skinner Releasing, yoga, improvisation, Feldenkrais, Alexander technique, & Contact Improvisation. All current practices within the industry globally, all so deeply interwoven into the original course philosophy and practice, all but non existent. However a commercial jazz dance teacher has been hired. Choreography was once taught by anything from seven to ten different current practitioners throughout the course of a year, industry professionals who were out there working on the practice. Now this is handled by two proportional staff, one of whose background is in classical ballet choreography and the visual arts.

The interdisciplinary approaches and projects inherent in the contemporary dance course (and now interestingly enough being favoured by other institutions such as Toi Whakaari) are gone. The initial vision that the course was built on, the culture, direction, and spirit are also gone. It’s a historical turning point. The new direction appears conservative, retrogressive, fiscally driven and mediocre. Unitec's dance course was a peerless construct with a spirit deeply devoted to the uniqueness and longevity of the people who went there. As it detaches from its history in the name of progress it seems out of step with the times. Just when the NZ School of Dance is focusing more on outreaching to the community and industry it seems sad that Unitec is unable to sustain those same relationships intrinsic to its identity.

Lets hope that this period of transition will result in the eventual manifestation of unique vision and soul in the work being done there. Thats something many of us want to see out there in the world anyway, something that I think a lot of us are going for in our own work.

comments posted here

(Thanks to Raewyn for the editing feedback and input, and Ali for inspiring the title)

Mau Forum / School of Turbulence 2

2008-03-19T14:26:00.006+13:00

Videos for you

2008-01-14T21:16:00.007+13:00

Technical Idiot

2007-04-09T13:05:00.006+12:00

When I consider my work in dance I am conscious of how the ongoing practice that underpins it constantly shifts and alters. Practice and technique are inextricably bound in a complex relationship and the dance class is the more common format for those fields of information to correlate. The outcome of technique class was never something I questioned in the past. Instead I summarily rejected class as a format for practice. This was because I almost invariably ended up questioning my ability as a dancer as opposed to questioning the material I was being taught. Class isn't a forum for debate and a good dancer just shuts up and does the exercises.

The primary emphasis in my early dance training was on the rapid assimilation and mastery of form. Typically in a traditional dance class situation, the singular most important task for the dancer is emulation. The dancer trains to render shapes, lines, dynamics, pathways and transitions as graphically as possible. It is through this process that the dancer gauges their capabilities. On the surface this is a straight forward template for understanding and progress. In a contemporary dance technique class other concepts give the template greater complexity. The outcomes in a class do not necessarily centre entirely on the emulation of a prescribed form. For example enquiries dealing with somatic concerns, choreographic deconstructions, open ended investigative processes, understanding principles of say applied physics, anatomy, engineering, architecture, and psychology among others mean that the template becomes multidimensional. There is no one 'right way' under those conditions.

Apparently. When the class is taught by a choreographer their own personal aesthetic comes into play. The template slips from its multidimensionality back to more generic simplistic values again regardless of how progressive the conceptual pathway the choreographer is taking in their thinking. There will be actually be a 'right way' to enact the movement under these conditions. When I last traveled to Europe I ended up going back to classes and found movement practitioners who were working on specific ideas and areas of information in a matter of fact way. There seems to be a refreshing absence of both authoritarianism and rebellion in the culture of dance there. Technical and artistic practices were mutually and congruently formatted. One thing was of the other and vice versa. Yes there are practitioners working in this way in New Zealand, just not nearly as many of them. On return I had greater clarity about the substance that made up my artistic approach but my technical practice was sketchy. So I begun to construct a dance class and simultaneously retired the two surrogate practices I had been using to stay in shape (yoga and capoeira). My line of inquiry centered on the idea of integrating multiple movement practices by way of understanding principles that united those practices (although this was initially an unconscious and intuitive process, I just began by putting together stuff that I liked) That meant that I was less interested in the external look of a thing, I trusted that clear understanding of principles would give technical shape to the movement. So far this seems to work very well.

This is by no means a particularly innovative approach, in fact its fairly common area of practice in contemporary dance. What excites me about working with this ethos is I am now preoccupied with how the movement is understood and how the movement manifests as a result of that understanding. Under these conditions there's is no one right way to do the movement. Right implies that there is a wrong and organizing information against that value system is an over simplistic research method.

If a technical practice is driven by self concerned insistence on being 'right' then energy is being squandered rather than getting to the work at hand. Arguments of 'generic versus investigative', 'form versus content', 'ballet versus contemporary', 'my technical aesthetic versus your somatic practice' are a red herring. We live in times that are insisting that we choose 'either/or' in our political, religious, sexual, educational, philosophical and deeply personal aspects of our lives. This binary model of thinking is fundamentally flawed in that it doesn't represent the complexity of real life. If you move from one belief system to another then all you have done is trade beliefs. You are not necessarily closer to any kind of truth. It was in Min Tanaka's 'Body Weather' practice that I recognised the simplicity of integrating all of my movement history in order to facilitate greater choice and possibility in my artistic practice. No particular technique has to be rejected or unlearned. No singular movement has greater or lesser value than another. All movement can be used in whatever way I choose according to what it is I want to do, say, and be in whatever context or situation is occurring. At the time this realization was both liberating and immediately problematic. Despite my new clarity at that stage I was still a long way from understanding it's implications. I had yet to develop a forum where this understanding could be expressed. Endless possibility. And no specificity. In other physical disciplines I can locate clear models for outcomes, reasons why the practice exists and what it aims to do. In Iyengar Yoga which has very strict methods and forms, has historical context, and the outcomes for learning the system are very clear. Ballet also has the same systematic organization and historical context although it struggles to find relevance today. Martial arts also have this clarity of form, function, and history. The beauty of a martial art is that regardless of style its movements are understood as singular events that have function and purpose. It is known what the movement is for and what it does. In a martial art there is also a generic outcome. Martial arts are about the study and mastery of physical power. It is through the physical practice that potential for deeper understandings of the self can emerge and the practice can be extrapolated out to becoming a lived model for everyday interaction with life. The physical practice supports the outcome and is deeply tied to that very thing. So what are the outcomes of contemporary dance and how do the myriad of techniques support those outcomes? Is the primary manifestation of a dance practice always and only aethetiscisation of a performance vision? Can a dance practice have application in everyday life & in relationships? Is there other context for this besides the generation of choreography? Beyond therapy? If the practice and technique of contemporary dance is located primarily in the mastery of form and does not look outside of that spectrum of learning then it is constantly in a state cycling through endless loops of relevant/irrelevant - fashionable/unfashionable. Which leaves it by turns potent/impotent. I once heard a martial artist refer to punches and kicks as 'self expression.' That statement recontextualised those movements as powerful communications with emotional content and meaning. It is possible to build a movement practice that is primarily concerned with dance as a compositional language with a healthy degree of power and meaning. A language that takes into account and understands dance as an event in daily life, not merely an idealized representation on a stage. A knowable field of information that can communicate potently with the society of which it is a part. A practice that provides potential for transformation at a very human level, mastery as a communicator, as well as physical virtuosity, open ended research, and a place to stand as an artist in society. Or I could go to class and just keep trying to get the exercises right.

Back in the Day (Radio 2003 Fringe Winner)

2007-04-07T13:54:00.003+12:00

"Radio" 2003 Fringe (winner Best Dance Award). Performed by Sarah Foster (nee Sproull), Solomon Holly Massey, Kristian Larsen (dancers all) med, Jen Lal on lights, Francis Cheetham on projection (and designer for all the media), Lesa B'do on sound (DJ), and produced by Kassey Hayden. Performed at the Adam Art Gallery in Wellington

Kristian Larsen reviews Bernadette Rae

2007-03-12T15:03:00.003+13:00

Monday 12th March a piece of writing appeared in the 'World' section of the New Zealand Herald (click on blog entry title to read) written by an evidently inelastic & discontent Bernadette Rae. The work 'Dark Tourists' was a contemporary dance work choreographed by Malia Johnston in collaboration with director Emma Willis. The writing was apparently posted as a review. But it was not a review, nor was it a critique in any sense of the word. It was a vitriolic piece of hate mail. The opening of this embarrassing act of pettiness consisted of a series of descriptions. When a reviewer wastes valuable text space musing on banalities I begin to wonder if they actually have anything of value to say at all. But the eleven paragraph review devoted four of those paragraphs to such descriptive gems as the objects placed in the space ("more coats hung on long wires"), the seating arrangement ("four or five long rows of chairs"), a one word description of the lighting state ("gloomy"), the time the work began ("half past seven"), and the space the work was set in ("an interesting one"...."there is probably a name for the upper boundary of a backstage space"). Its in sentences like that that the reviewer began to reveal an annoyingly useless self absorbed attitude and an inability to interpret, contextualise and illuminate. Dark Tourists had both striking flaws and potent strengths but it was a work that was clearly beyond Rae's capacity to reach outside of her own highly prioritised tastes. In stark contrast to the glowing review of the ballet on the same page also written by Bernadette, a bludgeoning statement was issued, "The most boring show on earth had begun." This kind of bloated self importance re-appeared when after an hour and half of performance time "we were none the wiser." Apparently Bernadette can think and speak for us all In a continued orbit around the rational Rae perpetuated the conceited tone of her attack. The dancers were insulted, "reduced to semi-spasticity" and the movement vocabulary was treated thus; "ugly, undisciplined, and achingly repetitive". Is the word 'ironic' in relation to this particular observation about 'repetitive' movement coming from a ballet aficionado appropriate? Or stupefyingly absurd? What struck me was not so much the suburban brutishness of the writing, but the fact that this was a commonplace and stylistically consistent communication from this particular individual. And it ended up in a mainstream publication that should know better. Instead of an intelligent critic we got a woman who made heavy handed observations without knowing very much about contemporary dance history at all. When she writes that Mia Blake performs "the longest walk in history" it showed that A: Rae has never seen a work by Pina Bausch, and B; that she just enjoys writing in an abrasive and condescending tone. When she noddded positively at two of Johnston's previous works, 'Miniatures' and 'Terrain' it was a little audacious to say the least. That reviewer had never seen Terrain, and had at best written a preview piece on "Miniatures' based on its press release. The last sentence of the review was a vile and self satisfied note to the writers own prejudicial whims ;"Good news is the season finished last night". Everyone is entitled to their opinion and that's all this piece of writing was; a low resolution opinion built on an alarmingly limited knowledge base. Ultimately Bernadette Rae made a highly unnecessary statement that added no value and revealed a disturbing lack of respect for anyone in that production. Kristian Larsen Derek Tearne's response to Dark Tourist Alexa Wilson's review

Performance at The Wine Cellar

2007-02-21T11:04:00.002+13:00

"This is Not a Drill" performed at the Wine Cellar as part of the Sound Invention Convention 2007. Paul Buckton, Julia Milsom, Kristian Larsen Images by Derek Tearne

Touch Compass remixed by THROW

2006-12-20T22:28:00.004+13:00

I was recently involved in a professional development process called Improv-E with Touch Compass, a mixed ability dance company based in Auckland New Zealand. The focus was to build a consistent and formalized practice of performance improvisation. It began with a four day workshop taught by Janice Florence and Martin Hughes (State of Flux, Melbourne)which was designed to develop the company’s improvisational skills. The information Martin & Janice presented in the workshop had a generalized focus ie; looking for ways to support the main action in an ensemble performance improvisation. Martin's teaching was flavored with the positive feedback model used by Al Wunder in Australia. There was a lot of improvising in groups followed by analysis and feedback. The feedback was specifically pitched in an uncritical and positive fashion for example: what worked or what was liked and enjoyed in that situation. Working in this way nurtures recognition and instinct but more importantly generosity and enthusiasm. This is particularly healthy for the culture of contemporary dance here in NZ. I am not convinced of its effectiveness in creating sharp critical and intelligent thinking in a devising situation however. I felt that the workshop was without a clear technical framework to improvise from and many fundamentals were not addressed. In spite of the positive feedback in the social setting of the workshop there was communication 'behind the scenes' as it were about the groups limited skill base. So in the subsequent sessions leading up to the performances at Auckland's Tempo Festival I decided to teach a skill base could be practiced, that allowed for an abstract movement composition to happen, in real tine, in front of an audience. In those sessions I taught theoretical and practical information that was designed to enable the performer to improvise and understand situation in an ensemble. This included practical processes such as understanding time space in a movement composition / performance sense, recognition of structure as it occurred, physical vocabulary skills, dynamics, reading and listening skills, performance states, exits and entrances, sensitizing the eye, ear & skin to the physical conditions, working with repetition and ongoing critical analysis and discussion. There probably needed to be considerably more time given to the process of rehearsal for Touch Compass. Rehearsal is not antithetical to improvisation; it is in fact vital because it is skill based. So the lead up to the Tempo performance could have been more dense, comprehensive and consistent in order to filter directly into the stage work of the company. Having said that, the learning rate of the group in terms of their ability to read, compose, and generally improvise was rapid and beautifully understood. The first Tempo performance was calm, clear, and there were abundant instances of individuals reading each other superbly and making creative and sincere gestures to each other. This is profoundly important because what makes the company work so well is their collective spirit and their abilities as performers is of an extremely high standard. The second performance was less coherent and this is where the group’s relative lack of experience with the skill set began to show. The group was more diffident and performers had less of a sense of the whole composition. Touch Compass has only begun to work in a technically detailed way in their improvising. Time and practice in front of an audience as well as consistent studio time is really the only way to address this. In the follow up discussions there was articulate and concise discussion. Watching the videos of the performances provided new perspective despite the fact that video tends to distort the information to a degree. Out of this discussion several things came up. But the most prevalent was the need for individual and group practice. More specifically identifying what those practices needed to be for each individual. This included defining and understanding the word ‘technique’ in the context of a physical practice, a practice that facilitated creative response that could be used in an improvisational performance situation. A practice that invoked and addressed limitation in such a way that each artist could find new ways of understanding and making use of their physical limitations as well as an expanded movement range. Touch Compass are a group of remarkable artists with an extraordinary range of skills that is underpinned by a deep and humorous sense of humanity that makes them a remarkable and unique entity in New Zealand contemporary dance. It's been a pleasure and an honour as always, to play with them.

bathwater comments

2006-12-20T02:30:00.021+13:00

Jack Gray wrote:


I want to tautoko what Kristian has brilliantly captured in his blog re: Unitec's changing of the times and disassociation with the practicing arts community. I have previously had a great connection with the performing arts school, being a first year student in the 'last' year at the Ponsonby studio before moving midway to become the 'first' at the Unitec premises under Alison East in 1995. I returned to complete the first degree year in 1998 with Chris Jannides. My first teaching job was at Unitec a year out of school, which flourished under Chris's passion and spirit and most of all love for choreographic practice. I was lucky enough to have maintained an ongoing relationship with the school as a teacher/guest lecturer, being a guest choreographer in 2005 and having assessed the students choreographic works throughout the years kept my finger on the pulse. My role was important I believe in that I had an empathy with having had been a student, yet also brought the practical experience of having worked around NZ and the world and seeing how the students measured up in terms of development and creative direction. With the recent policies that led to massive restructuring by Unitec, I have felt more and more distanced as a practitioner from having any connection with the current school, students and artistic vision. The offshoot will be a generation of dancers dispossessed from a community that thrives on its collectivity as much as its individualism to survive. NZ is a small country but fostering and acknowledging it's history is a significant pathway to creating links and development of contemporary dance (contemporary as opposed to ballet!).

Ali East said...

Tautoko, tautoko, Jack and Kristian. Thankyou for taking the time( unpaid) to express, so clearly, your deeply felt views regarding the direction that the Unitec dance programme has sadly gone. You are both absolutely right. The original kaupapa upon which the course was founded and which provided the driving underpinning philosophy would seem to make as much sense today as in 1989 when the programme began. Our mission to educate (and I use this word rather than “train”) intelligent and versatile dance artists with a sense of connection both to their own community and to the broader (local and international) community of artists, art theory and practice did not exclude study of classical forms (European and pacific). Some of our earliest supporters were members of the Samoan, cook island and Maori communities along with Dorothea Ashbridge, who made it clear that no more than two ballet classes per week should be taught- and that those would focus on solid training for contemporary dancers. As Kristian states, when an institution loses its connection with the very community that will feed and foster it then it simply becomes like floating dead wood , waterlogged and weighed down by its own arrogance and administrative top heaviness, and in danger of sinking out of sight. Unfortunately those poor unsuspecting current students are likely to go down with it unless they can find some lifeline to cling on to from the outside professional dance world. Oh well, perhaps the phoenix will rise again somewhere else. It’s not the dance that will die even if the Unitec programme does. I want to salute all of the many former Unitec and Performing arts dance diploma students that are still making wonderful and innovative work. Lets keep our connections and conversations going. By the way we should come together in 2009 ( 28 May 1989 to be precise) and celebrate twenty years of the programme’s existence. Regards, and aroha

Mark Harvey said...

Hi, Kia ora all, Thank you Kristian, Jack and Ali for your comments and sharing your insights, as a graduate and former casual staff member of Unitec, these issues and sentiments concern me as well. I have heard quite a lot of graduates and former staff express similar stuff. (Please note, I am not representing where I lecture in this email - Dance Studies at the University of Auckland - I speak here as a graduate and former employee of Unitec.) It's definitely not a stable world in the land of dance tertiary institutions - yes, I agree with you in that we who are in the institutions need try to keep in touch with our surrounding communities. This is no easy task when you are not often able to have complete control over your dance programmes due to institutional demands such as funding pressures and student demands for employability when they graduate - I'm not trying to justify the changes at Unitec here, because I am not aware of them enough to be able to comment on them, however, I think it's important for us to consider the complex variables involved in such situations, no matter how they may appear and feel. (And, I am not also assuming that neither of you have considered such issues, but I feel it's important to bring this into the conversation here.) Considering what you bring up, how about as a professional dance/choreographic/artist community we propose to have an open public consultative meeting with the head of the Dance section and Tina Hong at Unitec for all stake-holders? This way we may be able to air such concerns and hopefully contribute to some positive developments for Unitec. I understand that Unitec has in recent years called for input from the local professional community, though I do not know the outcome of such calls (having been too caught up with where I work and with family life). Perhaps making attempts to dialogue with Unitec in relation to such concerns may have some positive outcomes - giving direct feedback to institutions can be constructive and I have seen it work on many occasions, both at Unitec (years ago) and at the University of Auckland in recent years. Such a meeting may also open up dialogue between Unitec and other dance teaching institutions so that we can work together in a more efficient manner for our surrounding communities. If possible, can you please indicate by replying here if you or your colleagues would be keen for such a meeting? If we have enough of you then I suggest then let's propose as a community to Unitec for such a meeting. As graduates and/or former staff who keep up our practices, I believe it is important for us to keep positive working relationships with our dance training institutions for many reasons and it seems that this is not happening in this case enough at present (at least from what I keep hearing). Let's try to be constructive as a community and attempt to do something about this, at least so it is all out in the open in a positive way. Cheers

Jillian Davey wrote...Thank you, Kristian for posting such a bold and true blog. I'm currently enrolled in UNITEC's programme and because of its unfortunate headlong jump away from its original kaupapa (along with my utter disgust and disbelief that they have chosen to hire a commercial jazz tutor) I have decided not to return next semsester. I realised, not even two weeks into this year, that the golden days so fondly recalled by former graduates, are gone. I've learned more in these past few months from my flatmate, who just so happens to be a graduate from those golden years, than I have from the programme as a whole. Although I do respect the industry professionals they bring in as a token window to the outside community, I sometimes feel the majority do so grudgingly and without the desire to take the new generation under their wing. I'm now forced to forge my own path and while it does seems exciting it's a shame NZ no longer has an alternative contemporary programme to point a path out to me.

"Changing the bath-water" Michael Parmenter I have been a little disturbed by the tenor of the current debate concerning the change in focus at UNITEC. Firstly, I am surprised that within the discipline of contemporary dance, which defines itself by continually re-defining itself, there are those that expect that UNITEC should cling to a decades-old vision. The dance scene in New Zealand is constantly changing, and one would hope that the training institutions would be changing along with it. Also I would certainly not, as Kristian does in his blog, want to consign the training of dancers solely to the New Zealand School of Dance. This is something that we all need to be interested in and take responsibility for. Yes UNITEC has changed, and there are many changes that I personally feel are changes for the better. One only needs to look at the sophistication of the choreographic contributions of the current students to recognise that a lift in the technical standard of the dancers will result in a more articulate and informed dynamic to their choreographic ventures. Dancers who are well versed in the negotiation of somatic and kinetic possibilities will learn to think with their bodies, and not just in their journals. A number of correspondents complain that UNITEC has lost contact with the dance community. However among the choreographers and teachers currently working at UNITEC, I can name Charles Koroneho, Malia Johnston, Taane Mete, Moania Nepia, Louise Potiki Bryant, Katie Burton and myself. Charles in particular is making a remarkable contribution and certainly keeps alive the vision of creative invention that has marked UNITEC’s past. I personally have a number of concerns regarding the generic nature of the theoretical component of the course, but it must be acknowledged that the dance faculty are very focused on keeping dance-specific studies before the students. The UNITEC course is running efficiently and smoothly. The enrolment numbers have improved markedly over the past couple of years, and I can testify that the focus, sense of enjoyment and morale of the students has never been higher. It seems that UNITEC is fulfilling the desires of the students who are the reason for its being. As for the “South Africans”, rather than bagging, them, I think we owe them a huge show of thanks. They stepped into a difficult situation, when others abandoned ship, and have worked tirelessly to keep the course focused on a creative and rigorous, practice-based pathway.

Unitec never responded to this my blog post publicly or otherwise. That was predictable. Michael predictably did respond but doesn't represent the views of Unitec. Simply his own. His letter makes it sound as if things had improved at this institution. If you actually talk (and listen to) the students a slightly different picture emerges; its more of a case of life goes on. Its not that things things are no better, they are simply no worse. Since Michaels letter The Beijing Dance Academy mysteriously withdrew its interest and presence at Unitec. Michael himself has dramatically declared that the students are not interested in learning and will not teach there again.

Life goes on. Some things never change eh Mr P.

Carly Townrow wrote...

I would like to begin by asking some of the well informed, ready to judge, very respectable persons who have commented on this forum how many of us currently studying at Unitec that they know personally? With what grounding and knowledge can they so confidently elude to the fact that we are a bunch of dull, uninteresting clones without the tiniest spark of creative ability or artistic voice? I am particularly upset Kristian that you chose now as the moment to air your views when so many of us who you know well and who respect you are still attending the course, doing our best to graduate and clutching at the straws of advice we can remember you and yes even Chris giving us. Not because they are more worthy than the advice we are being given now but because we, unlike a lot of people apparently, respect and appreciate every opinion given to us with regards to our work because the world does not have just one mind. By the way I think you would have really enjoyed the recent Year Three choreographic showing Kristian. Also, is it so wrong that I want the technical proficiency that will enable me to express my creative notions in a clear and interesting way? Why do I seem to be getting the feeling from these posts that real ‘art’ should not have a technical base? In defence of Charene; We are very lucky to have a head of department who puts so much time, passion, energy and care into us and our development. Everything she does she does for the benefit of the students and Michael is right when he says that morale is generally pretty high. And we are very lucky to have as a ballet technique tutor an ex principle danseur, he has extensive knowledge to offer and he was hired for that reason. It must be no easy job teaching ballet to a bunch of frowning girls who don’t always want to be there. He does remarkably well. I have the upmost respect for the way Unitec used to be run. I can almost remember word for word the speech given by Chris Jannides about the foundation of the school on my first day more than two years ago now when I was so wide eyed and hopeful about the future. But I also have an immense respect for the way it is run now. It only wish that this was a mutual respect and that the community which I am very shortly about to join will not belittle me for having attended, and the most horrible of all actually enjoyed Unitec, like it seems that they will. Kristian, I respect your opinions and I miss your classes but don’t create this kind of animosity for our sake. We’re doing just fine. You should know that. It was you that gave us our choreographic grounding. Have more faith in yourself for teaching and us for listening. And as for those newbies who weren’t lucky enough to have you teach them, they’ve still got Charles. Have faith, we’re not that bad.

Kristian responds to Carly...

I think youve taken this kind of personally, the key issues in the blog post (and lets get this into perspective people, its my OPINION on my little corner of the internet ) are; insularity, and the question of Unitecs accountability to the profession. Its not about your potential as practitioners or about technique or any of the other 'interesting' topics that have sprung up out of this storm in a teacup.

Fear

2006-12-17T12:53:00.002+13:00

This image was taken by Robert Fear, a man whose dance imagery has in my estimation been overlooked and undervalued. The image is of me dancing a solo called "You Are Not Alone, You Are Just in New Zealand" (credit where credit is due, that title was a line from an email from Lisa Densem, a friend in Berlin)

Beautiful City

2006-10-16T12:19:00.004+13:00

Rob Appierdo (camera) Larsen (leather jacket)2005 There was a show called Beautiful City which was the brainchild of multimedia artist and project director Rob Appierdo. Its initial manifestation was as a film idea shot in a Wellington car park the night of the London Underground bombings last year. As a result of this work Rob sought to develop it into a live performance format. It went to Interdigitate, the Dunedin Fringe Festival, Wellingtons 'Dance Your Sox Off' festival, and returned to Auckland for Tempo dance festival. At each venue there was a different configuration of performers. At the Tempo festival Beautiful City was a real time collaboration between artists Eden Mulholland (music) Rob Appierdo (projected visuals), Paul Young, Julia Milsom, and yours truly (dance). This work was at one level an attempt to drive a dance/theater work with VJ style multimedia and a solitary theme;urbanization and its effects on the human psyche, or something like that. Ultimately I was never able to fully grasp the point of view or commentary that Rob was trying to communicate. This weakened the creative relationship and subsequently the work itself. In attempting to deal with a situation where dance did not lead the project,it was integral and subservient to other sentiments I came up against the limits of my own practice, and at times my own ego. After spending years working to understand space, time, form, trajectory, vocabulary, meaning, theatrical conventions, dance techniques / practices, and composition in this context I can say that all I am doing is making dance, essentially I have the same outcomes as set choreography. Its simply different in that the processes occur in real time; building structure whilst performing that structure to an audience. But this is only where my practice currently lives, I have not addressed narrative, text, sub text, moving image directly...yet. Nor have I grasped the apparent 'crush' that we seem to have on technology, its benefits for theatrical dance, and I have deep suspicions that it is something that is moving us still further from our bodies and reality. The performance space had challenging attributes for dance. There was a screen behind the dancers, set a meter or so off the floor, the galley like space of Galatos with its cabaret style table and chair set up for the audience, and clutter that distracted the eye. Then there was the conflicting natures of two of the media; dance and projected image. Projected light onto a flat screen is media that exists in 2D or planar space. And the images by themselves exist on their own terms. They don't need to reference the situation as it exists ie: there is an audience in a space with dancers etc. Digital light flickers and draws the audiences eye. By itself it can seduce audiences brains into forgetting the immediacy of their surroundings. This seduction gets interfered with when performers are placed in front of the projection. Dancers exist in 3D space and deal with the actuality of the architecture they are in, and the implications of the events and pathways they creating in real time. They are responsible to their own actions. There is no fiction when a body goes to the floor, or when a hand accidentally strikes a face. But projected digital image has no such responsibility, it can do whatever it pleases without having to justify its actions in the material world. This work provoked critical analysis and frustration for me, partly because its sentiments were admirable and honorable. It's important that work gets made, that people can engage with performance, that practitioners get to put their thinking out there. The other edge to this is when a project feels impotent, when it doesn't manage to transform beyond its individual elements, there is a sense of dissatisfaction that distorts the perceived value of the experience. Beautiful City provided an arena for provocation at a personal level, helped me to consider what to keep and what to let go of.

Spelling for the Lord

2006-10-10T16:17:00.002+13:00

A journalist from Radio New Zealand recently contacted me about this blog. He mentioned that he'd looked for this site but on typing it into the browser came up with a web page that advertised bibles. Then he said "oh I've spelt it wrong" In the spelling of 'blogspot' he had gotten the 'p'and the's'the wrong way around. As it turns out there is a website that just happens to advertise religious product; Christian inanity. Have a look for yourself: "http://throwdisposablechoreography.blogpsot.com/" For the record THROW disposable choreography is not in the slightest interested in the use of bibles in contemporary dance.

Last notes on Last Year

2006-08-26T17:32:00.005+12:00

Performances and Collaborations: The Boiler Room – National All Media Improvisation Laboratory (Hobart, Australia) This is a laboratory set up by ex-pat Ryk Goddard. Improvisers from around Australia gathered to share up their practices by teaching workshops and performing in different configurations in curated performances. The most memorable performers for me were Ryk Goddard (physical theatre, text), Clare Bartholomew (clowning, comedy)and Tony Osborne(physical theatre, text) The most challenging situation for me in all of this was on the "Movement Night" curated by Ryk. It involved being placed behind a screen, sitting on a chair, atop a bench, back lit whilst two performers improvised in front of the screen. What made this deeply uncomfortable was that I had no way of reading the audience or the material being created by my 'collaborators'. So when the audience laughed I had no idea why or what I was doing was even being seen. I think I crawled out of the theatre that night. THROW disposable choreography @ the OT301, Amsterdam Dancers: Kristian Larsen, Sarah Sproull Sound Design: Kristian Larsen Sound Op: Andrew Foster Lights: Ellen Knopps The OT301 is a former film theatre that has been developed into a squat/ cultural centre. This was the host venue for my inauspicious 'European Premiere'.The audience was intimate – between 15 & 20. No reviewer was present. Marketing was a thumbnail image on a website accompanied by a few lines of text and an en masse email from Katie Duck to her contact list. I performed a solo approximately 20 minutes in duration using a sound collage made on cool edit pro.2 (using 'found' sound from NZ, Melbourne, Hobart, & Rotterdam)I can’t comment objectively on the quality of my own work save to say I have never performed to an audience in Europe before I was scared shitless. Ellen Knopp's lighting design and extraordinary timing combined with Andrew Fosters empathic sound mixing made this a survivable experience. This was followed by a 30 minute duet between Sarah Sproull and I. We'd decided that Sarah would begin in solo. I came in after 5 or so minutes with a performance energy residue from the solo I'd just done, but my energy was a total mismatch of what Sarah had set up. This made for an interesting and unusual chemistry. Under normal circumstances Sarah and I perform wild and irreverent improvisations. But there was more at stake for me and I was not feeling so playful so I found myself being less trusting. Again I feel I was carried through by the others on this one.

As Guest Artist with Magpie Music Dance Company @ the OT301, Amsterdam on Two Evenings What struck me from the outset was the family / rock band empathy that was prevalent in this groups chemistry. The pre-show warm ups were held at Katie’s apartment where she has a small studio. This involved people doing their own ballet barre, taking bath's(me - my back went into spasm for no apparent reason in Sylvain's class) drinking of wine, smoking of cigarettes, low conversation, stretching, massage, and generally relaxing pre-show. There is something to be learned here. The last night of Magpies 10 year Anniversary was a collaboration between the dancers and a punk band called ‘The Ex’ This band have been together for twenty years and have toured with Sonic Youth. Katie didn't really relax that night so she set up an improveography score whereby there were no more than 2 dancers on at any one time and they had a limited timespan to do their thing and get off. I tended to not stay on for a short burst then leave apologetically and felt like I got in the way.(Later when I met another Amsterdam based improviser - Lily Kiara she said that in that show my timing had been 'a bit predictable', thanks Lily). The band simply did not care who was on or off. “ALSO” @ Dans Centrum Jet, Brussels Dancers: Kristian Larsen, Claire O’Neill Musicians: Herman Martin & Sam Gyselbrecht

This was a duet with Claire O’Neill, in collaboration with two musicians and performed in a single lighting state. This is one of the finest improvised compositions I have ever performed. Claire is an outstanding dancer with acute choreographic skill. Together with the highly accomplished abilities of the musicians and their understanding of the improvisation process made this a high resolution work. That was witnessed by a small group of students Claire and I had been teaching and a couple of their friends. Roxanne, the woman who ran Dans Centrum Jet made sure we all kept the noise down over our post - show wines and got us the fuck out of there by 9.55pm just in case the neighbors complained. Teaching: Improvisation workshop over 2 days (@OT301, Amsterdam) In a truly unusual turn of events out of 8 people who registered for the workshop, 7 canceled. The remaining one failed to show up. Luckily there were three New Zealanders around at the time: Sarah Sproull (dancer), Andrew Foster, (director/writer/actor) & Anita Alexander (acrobat, performer) who cheerfully agreed to let me practice teaching my material to them. I'm grateful that last person never showed up because I would've felt very small. . Improvisation Workshop over 5 days (@ Dans Centrum Jet, Brussels) This workshop was taught with the support of Claire O’Neill (who also got me the gig) and was taught to approximately 11 or 12 twelve people. Claire taught the technique part of the morning. Then the studio provided a meal for all participants. Then I took the afternoons. I felt a little less confident in this environment because A: English was a second language for most of the participants and B: I was acutely conscious my work has been developed largely from the work of practitioners here in this part of the world. I would also have liked to have had musicians to work with. However one thing that set this workshop apart from any other I have done as a participant is that the dancers got the opportunity to test their skills in front of an audience before the workshop finished. Classes and Workshops Magpie Workshop (Improvisation/Composition) Teachers: Day 1 Sylvain Meret (France)/Masako Noguchi. Day 2 Martin Sonderkamp. Day 3 Michael Schumacher. Day 4 Sharon Smith (UK)/Vincent Cacialano. (@ The OT301, Amsterdam, Nederlands) This workshop was formatted into 4 days with 4 sets of teachers. There was a warm up followed by skill building work and exercises. The musicians would also be work shopping in the studio next door. After a short coffee break the latter half of each day was devoted purely to jamming sessions between dancers and musicians. The floor was concrete, I hurt my back. Sarah hurt her knee. Katie Duck is by far the most gifted teacher out of all of them. Frey Faust (Contact Improvisation Workshop) @ Espace Catastrophe, Brussels, Faust is a highly competent teacher, dancer, and thinker. Creator of the ‘Axis Syllabus’, an accessible method of organizing information in order to facilitate deeper efficiency in movement Faust has a remarkable understanding of the body in movement. Faust unfortunately has an unusual edgy aggression that surfaces in his teaching and transforms him into an egocentric asshole. Sigh. Another one. David Zambrano (classes in his Flying Low technique – a rigorous approach to floor work) @ Michele Anne De May’s studio This was the cheapest 'workshop' available (5 euro per class for 5 classes) with this man who is in demand all over the place as a teacher and as a performance improviser. His hybridised work is rigorous, tricky, and fun. Peter ? A 23 year old adept from Slovakia. Taught a class using focussed improvisational exercises, acrobatics, and a lot of floor work. An unpretentious class from an unpretentious & talented man. Conference on Improvisation Panel: Mary O’Donell (USA) dancer, choreographer, academic, creator of Release Technique Jaap Flier (Nederlands) founder and former director of Nederland’s Dans Theatre George Lewis (USA) a professor @ Columbia University Vitor Garcia (Portugal) former member of Frankfurt Ballet and Pretty Ugly Kristian Larsen (New Zealand) etc A 3 and a half hour conference / forum / debate attended by about 40 or so people that was chaired by Mary Fulkerson O’Donell. Organized by Magpie this occasion was a remarkable dialogue with intelligent people fielding relevant questions about the practice of improvisation and where the arts are heading in the current macro economic climate. (This conference will be addressed more explicitly in future writings, it was too important to just be allowed to slip by) Performances Witnessed: Studio Showing @ Dancehouse, Melbourne Duet with Jacob Lehrer and David Corbett Two improvisers from “State of Flux” (a group that uses contact improvisation in a performance setting) have been away in Canberra at doing research together and came up with an impressively rigorous duet that showed contact as a primary technique but didn’t use it as a compositional tool. That sentence means ‘I liked it’. Danceworks, Melbourne "The View from Here" choreography Sandra Parker, Composer/Performer: Steven Heather, Text/Performer: Siegmar Zacharias Minimal. Relevant. Under rated and overlooked.( I believe their funding has been recently cut also) Magpie Performance(s): The gig @ the Muiderpoort Theatre, Amsterdam Dancers: Katie Duck, Sylvain Meret, Eileen Standley, Martin Sonderkamp, Vincent Cacialano Lights: Ellen Knopps The opening of Magpie's anniversary week offered some blistering moments of genius and energy. In particular the drummer, Michael Vatcher astounded me again and again with his choices and timing, and an opening provocation from Martin Sonderkamp. A spectacular example of virtuosity came in the form of the group working a highly integrated ensemble of explicitly diverse material whilst maintaining an extraordinary awareness of each other. Six dancers, three musicians all working on solo like material - but together. This kind of 'telepathy' is rare and extraordinary. The gig @ the Bimhuis, Amsterdam Dancers: Vincent Cacialano, , Martin Sonderkamp, Eileen Standley, Katie Duck, Michael Schumacher, Sylvain Meret, Sharon Smith, Masako Noguchi, and guest Vitor Garcia. Muialano, Masako Noguchi. Musicians: Mary Oliver, Yannisicians: Han Bennink, Mary Oliver, George Lewis Lights: Ellen Knopps This particular evening was made up of 3 half hour sets. Magpie have never before worked with all of their dancers together in one constellation. This performance although providing a broad swathe of stimuli seemed to speak more openly of incoherency and diversity of ideas within the group. There was a standing ovation at the end of the show at the Bimhuis. In my own view I felt that there was some kind of incongruence between the spirit of the group and the energy and psychological impact of the structure and atmosphere at the Bimhuis. My concentration was admittedly lacking as an audience member on this particular night. That’s because I kept going back to the bar to get more wine during the show and would kind of forget to go back in. “Desh (the second part of the night)” Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker & Salva Sanchez. Kaaitheatre-Brussels-Belgium The wings of the stage had been removed revealing two men whose job it was to fly the backdrops. When the first 2 dancers entered they did so in a state of affected nonchalance that was a consistent performance quality throughout. In this choreographic collaboration with Spaniard Salva Sanchez, DeKeersmaeker danced in different groupings of solo, duet, and trio with one other female (Marion Ballester). Her facial expression seemed incongruent with the technical flow of movement vocabulary. At times she seemed to be commenting on the piece, sometimes disinterested, at other times she looked simply pained. Partnering work was all but absent from the choreography, floor work was relatively unexplored. The movements were executed with a technical thoroughness that became both tedious when it took precedence over the performers humanity, and insincere when the pretension of DeKeersmaeker. Salvas solo caused me frustration. Here was a work that was improvised but in a way that was too safe to be satisfying to witness. The audience was highly appreciative but I was bewildered by that. It was a feeling that persisted the next two times I saw work in Belgium. ‘05/06 Opening” Charlerois / Danses (Michele Anne de Mey, Pierre Droulers, Thierry De Mey) Charlerois / Danses is a company & a choreographic centre. It makes the states ib its promo blurb publicly that it is representative of Belgium’s French community. It currently has 4 artistic directors. Three works were presented this particular evening. The first by choreographer Pierre Droulers was a solo for a male dancer who came on stage with a piece of chalk. Working from the outside of the stage into the centre he then marked off sections of the stage using parts of his body as measurements. After completing this task he removed his clothes and made completely inexplicable movements. The second work was by composer Thierry De Mey. It featured the man himself playing with expensive software. He placed his hands into beams of light that crossed the stage and the movements were processed & projected onto a wall behind him. Also the movements created sounds. I felt like I was watching a children’s show by Jean Michele Jarre’. The third work by choreographer Michele Anne De Mey saw groupings of young dancers in “rehearsal gear” outfits throwing themselves through space using partner work reminiscent of Wim Vandeybus but without that level of imaginative flourish. Their group work looked reminiscent of De Keersmaeker’s Rosas but here again just looked poorly rendered and assimilated. I came away from this evening feeling as if my intelligence had been insulted. “Chunking” Needcompany/Grace Ellen Barkey. Kaaitheatre - Brussels - Belgium Needcompany is a popular physical theatre group in Belgium. In this work a man in overalls entered making Chaplinesque movements. The set he performs in is a whole lot of freestanding upright plinths covered in wallpapers of gauche and childlike design. Similarly these wallpapers covered the back wall. He fumbles with 5 microphone stands and sets them downstage front.. A woman appears wearing black lingerie and sings lines of a song into the different microphones. Variously she is interfered with by new characters that appear on stage. One who moved in a permanent forward bend appeared to be obsessed with her ass and crotch,burying his face in it repeatedly and placing his hands there. Other characters hump each other. Commonly the movements look sexually infantile and so do the facial expressions. Sections were given overlong durations in the performance. These characters exited after an hour. A projection of children’s drawings appeared on the screen behind. Eventually new characters emerged in brightly crocheted costumes that make them appear like human sized sock puppets. The 1st threw the plinths harmlessly offstage, then 3 more made appearances consecutively, repeating childlike movement motifs to a Sonic Youth track. Before the 5th entered and the work finished I left the theatre to listen to Radiohead on my mp3 player and drink wine. “Catastrophie Communication Combinatoria” Caroline Hainaut & Palle Dyrvall (Part of the Klapstuk International Dance Festival #12, Stuk – Leuven - Belgium) In this solo work a man in a suit (Palle Dyrvall directed by his partner Caroline Hainaut) made clear gestural choreography and established a character very early on in the work. After a time he came up to the audience and looked as if he was going to speak. To my relief he did. And he made sense. His words were bound to specific gestures. The ending was both intense and somehow comical. I felt like the whole thing worked. “Tongue Tied” Sacha Steenks, Dansateliers, Rotterdam, Netherlands An interesting feature of this work in progress showing was that it was the third of three showings in as many days. This allowed the choreographer to try different ways of presenting the material. Two dancers, a story teller, video projection and pre-recorded original music were the primary elements. The strongest idea of this work was in the way it was presented. The choreographed section with the dancers and sound and projection was performed first. Then after a break the storyteller (who also featured in the 1st section) came in told the story of Rapunzel. Her movements were minimal. As she told the story memory of the 1st section began to resurface for the audience causing them to find new meaning and associations in retrospect. A potent but simple device. This writing is an oversimplification of a multi layered and complex work. Sacha Steenks

Larsen/Magpie at the OT301Amsterdam 2005

2006-08-26T16:54:00.004+12:00

These images were taken over a year ago at the Overtoom 301 in Amsterdam. The occasion was Magpie Dance Music's "10 years in a Blink Anniversary." In a stroke of cruel irony this was also the year their funding was cut. Pictures from top to bottom 1. Masako Noguchi(foreground) Sylvain Meret(lying on floor, background) 2. Musician from Dutch punk band "The Ex"(foreground) and Kristian Larsen 3. Sharon Smith & Vitor Garcia 4. Martin Sonderkamp and Sharon Smith 5. Vitor Garcia 6. Sharon Smith backlit very nicely thank you.

Spoilt for Choice

2006-05-31T18:29:00.002+12:00

This piece I wrote for DANZ magazine re: a trip to Europe last year. Photos by Francisco Rodrigues, taken at a workshop led by yours truly at Dans Centrum Jette in Brussels 2005 “How does New Zealand dance compare to dance in Europe?” It is a question I was asked not long after I arrived back after a recent work and research period in Brussels and Amsterdam. And it is a question that is impossible to talk about with any degree of accuracy because European dance is far too diverse to oversimplify with generalizations like “European dance” for example. What I am prepared to say is that dancers in Europe have access to a large array of technical approaches from gifted, accomplished, and influential teachers In Brussels (where Claire O’Neill is well respected as a teacher and performer) on any given weekday there are professional dance classes in two or three studios in different areas of the city. Company classes are also accessible to a lesser degree. The teachers are often choreographers drawing on a very broad knowledge base to create their own hybrid practice which in turn is what they offer professionals. The atmosphere in class was consistently friendly and supportive. At one studio there was a volunteer whose job it was to simply welcome you at the door. The range of abilities, skills and backgrounds of the freelance professionals are so diverse that it sabotages any narrow notions of what a good dancer is. It seems acceptable to be who you are, working on whatever it is you want to work on. Walking into any freelance class you are likely to encounter trained dancers at student, semi professional and professional level with technical influences too extensive to list. Also you find circus acrobats, martial artists, breakers, contact improvisers, and people with relatively little training who have somehow found work with choreographers (men relatively common in this category). There is a constant and extensive choice of workshops available. A few things I saw were: acrobatics and floor work for dancers, ballet adaptively geared for contemporary dancers, the usual physical theater and voice workshops and a workshop devoted entirely to learning the air track (a break move). I attended a four day workshop in Amsterdam in improvisation and composition taught by two different members of Magpie Dance Music Company on each consecutive day. There is extensive history in this group. Each member has their own artistic concerns and are very strong individuals. But onstage and off they work together like a cross between a punk band and a close knit family. As I was invited to perform with them I got to experience that directly. I got to sneak in a ‘rehearsal’ and share ideas on the practice of composition with another accomplished Amsterdam based improviser Lily Kiara at the School of New Dance. Lily is a disciple of Julyen Hamilton whose work I studied in 2003 in Spain. In Brussels I attended a contact improvisation workshop with Frey Faust whose system of movement organization called “The “Axis Syllabus” not only helped me sort out a chronic knee condition but also taught contact improvisation in easily understandable biomechanical principles as opposed to the more mystical language of image based approaches I’ve encountered. At a jam at the PARTS school I found myself being caught off guard simply because people I didn’t know smiled at me as I entered the room and I wasn’t used to that. Every person I worked with that evening was a highly competent dancer and capable improviser. David Zambrano, a veteran improviser and a teacher in high demand all over Europe, taught a week of classes at a special price of five euro per class (when he runs a workshop there is a higher price tag) Approximately forty to forty five dancer’s attended everyday and the guy on the door whose job it was to welcome you also got to stop excess dancers from coming in. David’s technique is called ‘Flying Low’, works on getting in and out of the floor efficiently at high speed, and has been in development since before Catherine Chappell encountered it in the nineties An essential idea that I gleaned from all this is the idea that technique is treated as a servant of the required task. By this I mean that the aim is to achieve efficiency of function rather than being focused on a look. In working in this way the dancer was not a victim to the aesthetic of dance. A lot of practitioners are working this way. I was surprised at the common usage of improvisation in a class setting. It was used as an exercise to achieve specific technical aims and to facilitate different enquiries. This meant that there were sections of class that were tightly choreographed exercises and sections where guided improvisation was used to appropriate a specific outcome. The net result was that the dancer worked on developing a body consciousness that was intelligent, sophisticated, articulate and responsive. Of the performances I saw I observed that hybridization and references to the past were prevalent in every single work. Influences from the eras of romanticism, modernism, late modernism, post modernism, and whatever phase we are in now were all on display. Minimalism, athleticism, complexity, simplicity, physical theatre, abstraction, multi media, fashion, design & performance improvisation were all made use of in different ways. Hybridized vocabularies of cultural dance, popular dance, martial arts, somatic practices, character based movement and different contemporary dance techniques meant that anything was put with anything. And voice was used, often extensively in almost every work. Contemporary dance appears to be a significant blip on the broader cultural radar in Europe. The art form is both relatively visible in the media and prolific in output. Dance and its practitioners interact with popular culture in a range of media. From artist initiated spaces and squats, to project based networks, to fulltime companies there is an abundance of practitioners and works. And they have a public that are both relatively dance literate and very willing to meet what it is that dance demands of them.

How to Provoke Dialogue with Postive Feedback

2006-05-24T14:01:00.002+12:00

I was given this by a visiting masters student from America. Its about a solo performance I did for Late Nite Choreographers.
These are notes Rachel Bruce sent to her professor in the US.

"I went to Late Night Choreographers tonight to get a glimpse of the local fare. Almost everything was crap except for an improvisation performance by Kristian Larsen and some interesting film work by a woman who's name I will insert later (damn, my memory). He has a really keen sensibility for improvisational choreographic structure and his piece was satisfying at multiple points. He set up a dialogue with the space almost immediately – actually, yes, immediately. He was in performance as we approached the building. He was sitting in a chair in a suspended glass hallway outside the entrance. In the performance piece, there was more than just repeating motifs, they informed our sensibilities as the piece progressed. We were set up for the experience and then carried along throughout the duration. As he tried to get reception (almost like antennae reception from some outside communica), I found myself totally immersed in the details of what was being received and yet I was unconcerned with what it all meant and how it might inform me. What I mean to say is that I found myself unconcerned with what the 'big message' was and was instead intrigued at the business of him placing himself in a position to receive it rather than the 'message' itself being the end-all-be-all. I just received it as it came and as I experienced it. I found myself complying with the suggestions to relax but perceiving tension as a result – living somewhere in between, in some sort of liminal space, like the space of a door frame in between two rooms. He ended with that song, 'stuck in the middle with you…' as a sort of closure to an unfulfilled expectation. Relief didn't come, but relief wasn't needed. Being okay with ambiguity was. The trying could continue, this was the course and I was fine with it. Nice bit of work."

An Appropriate Metaphor

2006-05-22T20:16:00.002+12:00

An Appropriate Metaphor A consistently awkward social experience for me is being asked by a stranger what it is that I do for a living. “Contemporary dancer? What’s ‘contemporary dance?’ Or if they do know something about it they often follow up with something like “Is there any money in it?” Given that our luminaries in NZ are barely known outside the sphere of the dance community, it’s very tricky to describe our work without common ground references between practitioners and the mildly curious. Then again it’s tricky to describe contemporary dance…period. During one project I spent a great deal of time and energy working with a designer and a publicist on providing text that integrated marketing language, and dance speak for the layman order to describe improvised contemporary dance. This was specifically done to attract an audience that was likely to be unfamiliar the genre. It was a difficult task. I used a story to describe a personal experience and used metaphors such as a dinner party. After one show an audience member left me an angry note saying that the show was nothing like a dinner party and wanted her money back. The language of marketing and advertising is not the language of dance. It has its own agendas and outcomes to fulfill. That’s why it has evolved the way it has, to sell product. If dance was clearer about is functions and objectives its text would be clearer. When asked what he felt was the most important development in New Zealand culture in recent times a representative of the British Arts Council talked about the publishing of the dictionary of New Zealand English. As part of the coming of age process of our ‘national identity’ we have taken ownership of a language otherwise known as English and made it distinctly ours. Somehow Any subculture, special interest group, trade, corporation, nation develops its own ‘language’ over time. This is part how it finds context and relationship (or not) within the larger culture that it occupies. Our language for communicating about dance isn’t yet sufficiently developed for us to communicate concisely and clearly to each other, to other groups and to the broader culture that we are a part of. This makes it very difficult to take ownership of who we are and what we do. To quote Steve Paxton: “...we have but we do not use our literacy. We are still pre cultural. A culture after all is a construct understood by its members. We have no useful words to define that construct, nor ways to limn aspects of that construct. We remain mystical and so fail to provide the terms with which the public could understand that culture…” The old argument that one media does not adequately describe another i.e: words don’t serve movement, that a dance performance should speak for itself is an argument that refuses to understand that actions are based on motivations. Onstage there is a reason for the behaviors and actions of the dancers. There has to be otherwise it’s nothing but an irrational act. I recall a review of an art exhibition in the Listener and feeling a degree of envy as the writer did more than a good job of contextualizing the works in the exhibition. There are not many reviewers and dance writers up to the task of identifying and describing our work to a high degree of detail. We shouldn’t complain though because most practitioners can’t either. An overlooked component of the relatively sporadic development of dance here is the lack of understanding of history of art, dance, politics, significant individuals, events, & practices. The things that specifically shape and influence who we are and what we do in dance. We don’t seem to demonstrably and accurately locate genealogy, materials and references. Without a capacity for developed communication it’s not only impossible to describe dance but it’s impossible for us to locate social context as artists living, working, functioning and making quality contributions in the broader culture. Without a developed language we don’t have permission to speak. Clear and intelligible process articulated by clear and intelligible language is a key to sharing information with each other. It is also a key to taking ownership of what it is we do.

Glossary of Terms (non alphabetical order)

2006-05-12T16:24:00.002+12:00

Fundeographer - A dance maker whose key talent lies in their ability to consistently secure funds for their copious output of relatively benign works.* Choreopathy - Therapeutic choreography. Cathartic work based on intense periods of suffering endured by the choreographer for future benefit of an audience(& usually made at the expense of the dancers immediate sense of well being) Choreopath - A tyrant. A sociopath with choreographic tendencies.(NB: male examples of this genus are mystifyingly popular with female dancers) Improveography - A combination of set choreography and improvisation. Obviously. Neurophiliac - A compulsive mind fucker. Foresighth - A quality strangely lacking in various funding bodies who pull the plug on artistic initiatives that a:work and b:are actually any good. Fourth Wall - Imaginary barrier between audience and performer(s)Doesnt actually exist, although there is one behind the audience. Keeps the heat in the theatre. *thanks to Johnny Second CDE for this one

A Critical Masse

2006-01-03T10:45:00.002+13:00

“How does New Zealand dance compare to dance in Europe?” It is a question that is impossible to respond to with any degree of accuracy because European dance is far too diverse to oversimplify with generalizations like “European dance” for example. In Brussels and Amsterdam contemporary dance appeared to be a significant blip on the cultural radar. The art form is both relatively visible in the media and prolific in output. The Netherlands has a population of over sixteen million people on a landmass one eighth the size of New Zealand. There is audience enough for anyone’s work and attendance was either high or healthy at the performances I saw. As for the work shown it was as good and as bad as anything I have seen here. However I was more intrigued by what I perceived as differences between dance audiences in Europe and dance audiences in NZ. There was generally a greater degree of sophisticated critical engagement. Responses were mostly ‘positive’ as exemplified by full houses, standing ovations, and a proliferation of performances. Negative critical reactions did not seem to taint the art. Dance in general was not perceived as a failure because of adverse reaction to a singular work for example. Nor for that matter were the choreographers or dancers perceived as failures. There was a certain kind of maturity of approach on the audience’s part that gave me the impression that they weren’t simply being passive consumers of entertainment. On return home what struck me immediately was a sense of the coming of age of New Zealand culture. There currently seems to be a buoyant mood of national pride, a celebration of identity as such. Some modalities of the arts are thriving as vehicles for that mood, notably film and music. It’s interesting to note that these are also powerful industries with a high degree of influence on popular culture. New Zealand culture is young. Its history and development is short and alarmingly accelerated. The arts, particularly the more Eurocentric arts (as distinct from Maori and Polynesian) are especially young. There is a shift towards the arts playing a more significant role in cultural identity however a great deal of that identity is arguably still tied to, amongst other things, sporting achievement. Given the youth of the arts it follows that the arts audience is even younger. By younger I am referring to a state of maturity as well as measurement in years. In my perception the overall audiences for the arts in New Zealand have significantly less critical facility than our European counterparts. There is intolerance and impatience for that which is not understood and does not entertain. Commonly when a dance show provokes a negative response there tends to be an associative generalization that all contemporary dance must be ‘this bad’. And then there is the frustrating infatuation that audiences here have with overseas performing artists that sees attendance rates soaring above numbers for local content of equal merit. In saying this I am not blaming the near invisibility of dance in this country on the amorphous entity I am calling ‘the arts audience’. The subculture of dance is very young and is still has a fair way to go in establishing its place in this country. Subversion is inherent in contemporary dance. Any noteworthy practitioners who have significantly developed and influenced this art have done so, at least in part, as a response against mainstream culture and to perceived conventions of the form. Currently that dynamic of subversion is being muted by a growing need to be recognized by mainstream culture. We want a piece of the pie. Contemporary dance doesn’t seem to intersect with popular culture here. The practitioners are confronted with isolation from each other and other arts. We struggle to define and illuminate our work. We haven’t yet found a way to communicate the terms by which an impatient and consumption orientated public can understand what it is we are communicating. Currently marketing and business skills are being held up as keys for greater visibility and viability. What isn’t considered is that the processes in marketing and business are antithetical to the spirit and values that drive contemporary dance. Art and culture are not actually valued beyond a fiscal motive. Everything that goes into the marketing shopping trolley becomes commodity. The game is to sell product and this is symptomatic of the broader drive for economic ‘growth’ that is propelling New Zealand’s fervent need to achieve significance in world affairs. We have a healthy number of capable choreographers and dancers. But without access to affordable spaces for class, rehearsal and performance, without interacting with other arts practitioners, and without a rethink of the project funding model then business and marketing plans are premature. We can’t ‘market’ when we have precious little to offer Creative New Zealand currently puts more funding into the dance sector than it does into the entire Pacifica arts sector. And there is growing organizational support; working to create infrastructure, lobbying to gain official recognition from government departments, and providing educational opportunities for dance practitioners in management, production, and marketing. But despite good intentions these are top down solutions. Transformation for contemporary dance isn’t being achieved partly because the greater picture isn’t being understood by the dance ‘sector’ and thus we are not organizing ourselves and our resources appropriately to meet current conditions. All we want to do is dance. But if we continue to work in isolation from each other and from practitioners in other forms, if we continue to pursue personal ambitions without recognizing the value of contributing to the whole and sharing resources, if we do not proactively rethink the framework that favors the success of individual, and most importantly if we do not understand what it is contemporary dance has to offer the wider community then we will not reach critical mass. K

Johns response

2006-01-02T13:36:00.002+13:00

Thank you Kristian - I hope you feel better now. My first response is that the assumptions you make about me and my approach to my work are so personally pitched and so offensively judgemental that I feel no desire to buy into a dialogue. Not at that level anyway. Secondly, you may wish to know that I have set up a blog through NBR so that people can respond to this year's reviews and some sort of meaningful dialogue can happen. For the record, the only preconception I have about any performing arts event is that it should engage its audience. And because 'entertainment' is made up of'enter -to go in' and 'tain - to hold', I think that anything that draws its audience in and holds their attention is, by definition,'entertainment'. I tend to feel especially positive about a work when its component parts add up to more than their sum; when it transcends itself through 'chemical change' rather than remaining a mixture. I freely admit I do not have a professional background in dance,although my drama school training (NIDA) did include a lot of class work with Margaret Barr (Martha Graham-trained) and Keith Bain (jazz ballet). This gives me some small understanding of what it takes for dancers to 'tune their instrument' and dance. But I know I don't talk the same dance language as contemporary practitioners. At best I know enough to know what I don't know. My partner teaches school teachers to teach dance and is instrumental in implementing the dance component of the primary and secondary arts curriculum but (although she is a member of Jan Bolwell's Crows Feet group)she does not claim to be a contemporary dance practitioner. I always ensure she comes with me to any dance shows I review so we can discuss it,although she doesn't always concur with what I write and is in no way is responsible for it. We also see quite a bit of dance I don't review and often discuss it at length with dance fan friends. I only began to include dance in my performing arts reviews because producers asked me to. I've usually told them its not my specialty and I can only approach it as theatre performance from the point of view of the more'general' audience. If I didn't say that specifically to you, I apologise. Nevertheless I still feel awkward about bursting into print about it - and you've probably convinced me not to do so again.Regarding my Certainty review, I chose to put it in the context of improvised performance for paying audiences because provoking thought and discussion on that level seemed more relevant than exploring the detail of a performance that would never ever happen again. They points I raise may or may not have provoked such thought and discussion - and/or may now do so on the DANZ website. It is what it is and if anything it displays my ignorance. Critics always expose themselves in this way. It's a risk we take in the process of contributing to the wider discourse. The bits in quotes are clearly your words and don't purport to be anything else. It's a principle of mine to represent the rationale of practitioners wherever possible so their intentions are understood. Of course I read your entire performance manual but when it came to the performance I cleared my mind and opened myself to what was happening moment by moment - as you and your colleagues were doubtless doing. For the moment I'll keep and eye on the DANZ website and await the response of others. I may or may not respond there myself. Best wishes for whatever you're up to this year.

Kristian Larsen reviews John Smythe

2006-01-02T13:35:00.002+13:00

One typically overcast humid Auckland Christmas Eve I was in conversation with a dancer friend.. Among the numerous sub topics’ lazily being poked at was the subject of ‘dialogue between artists’. I said that in terms of what I was doing in improvisation this idea of dialogue was fundamentally important. It had been the main thrust of recent research and practice for me. As the conversation progressed I expressed a sentiment, a kind of frustration at not having as clear a sense of communication with the audience as I was with the people I was collaborating with. This was underscored by a suspicion that this relationship was a more important station in the process of making art than I had previously considered. At this point my friend interjected with a questioning statement about this audience / art interface; “Isn’t that what it’s ALL about?” Communication with audience is something I have given more priority to in the publicity and marketing stage of a work than during the performance itself. This is from a tunnel vision mindset of “get the audience in the door first then hope they like it.” So in that vein I go about publicity and marketing in consultation with specialists in order to create media that will both draw an audience and represent the show and the art form in general. It’s from the same mindset that I have invited reviewers to attend. It has never occurred to me not to. They are part of the publicity machine. Admittedly my motivations have included vanity, I want them to love my work, think I’m fabulous for making it happen and tell the whole world in writing. I am inevitably disappointed, sometimes hurt if the review is negative or even seems like a personal attack. However if I get a positive review I generally feel dissatisfied. Something important has usually been missed. Somehow there is a lack of equality in the dance producer / reviewer relationship. A review seems to be both beginning and end of a dialogue with a singular audience member. This particular audience member has the power to influence ticket sales, and to provoke distress and other strong emotional responses in the artists they are reviewing. They are not answerable to the artist in any way. And the artist has little if any recourse to the public statements made by a reviewer. The hardest thing to swallow is the knowledge that these few paragraphs will be read by a greater population of public than the entire group of people who attended the total season. It is increasingly rare to find a reviewer who is as intent on contributing value to art as the artist they are reviewing. A review is seldom an act of bravery on the writer’s part. I question the value of the review in the current media environment. What is the benefit to someone who at tremendous personal cost has put on a show only to have it attacked, belittled, misunderstood or even ignored? I am curious as to what the public make of such writings. And very specifically I am wondering if I will ever bother to invite John Smythe to write about my work again. There is writing on dance that has some degree of quality, research, thought etc. There are infamous scathing attacks and petty snipes. There is even the odd encouraging note every now and again. Then there is writing that is simply bewildering. This review was written by John Smythe & appeared in a high profile publication called the National Business Review. The work he reviewed (‘Certainty’, created by yours truly) was night four of a season of fifteen new works over a fifteen night season. The cast originally consisted of four dancers / choreographers, one lighting designer/operator, one musician / composer, and one video mixing artist whose projections were beamed at the floor into the dance space that audience members sat either side of. A fifth dancer / choreographer joined us when one of our group sustained a back injury. The task we had set was clear and simple: unilaterally collaborate to create a brand new live performance every night. We all improvised, dance, light, moving image and sound. This reviewer attended and wrote about one of those works. He did not attend any of the other fourteen. At first I didn’t feel compelled to respond to this review at length. However I feel that this is one of many instances where a reviewer has done nothing to add any value to, shed any light on, or invigorate any quality discussion about contemporary dance. I find this low resolution communication hard to tolerate A letter of response could’ve been submitted to the NBR however it’s far too late for it to get published. It’s very likely that I would’ve come off second best anyway i.e., looking like a bad sport, on the defensive etc. And although I have a personal stake in responding to this particular example of mediocrity (because it’s about my work), I also feel it points to a greater issue. Critic Walter Benjamin puts it better than I ever could” We are turning into a nation of instant but uninformed critics and we are developing a keen impatience for what art demands of us.” This review indicates that Smythe has made no effort to understand the work on its own terms, to engage with it at all it seems. When a poorly informed opinion dressed up as benevolently authoritative critique is passed off as a piece of quality writing then a disservice is done to two things: Art, and Thinking. There is a vulgarizing of culture when art is confused with entertainment and it seems that to John Smythe the two are approximately the same. In Smythe’s review I see an example of an uninformed critic. This is hinted at in the second paragraph of the review. Paragraph two wasn’t in fact written by Smythe. It was written by me. An entire section has been lifted out of ‘Certainty’s’ performance manual and transposed as filler. And further into the review it appears it seems that the last two paragraphs of my personal statement in the manual appear to be solely what that the reviewer has read. There are those who argue against the necessity of programme notes saying the public shouldn’t need them to access the work. I disagree. I use them because of the abstraction prevalent in my work. I state explicitly what’s going on, & how the dance is being made. This I believe is particularly necessary in a country where the public’s knowledge of contemporary dance is as negligible as the profile of contemporary dance itself. ‘Certainty’ was problematic from a marketing point of view because few people have any idea what contemporary dance performance improvisation is. Often seasoned and schooled dance professionals do not know how it works. This is because it’s largely unpracticed. The key reason I was concerned with marketing was because we were doing a three week season in a little known sub genre of a marginalized art form and I wanted to have an audience every night. . So the thrust of the marketing was to ‘inform’ and one of the things we came up with was the performance manual. It outlined clearly some of the principles we were rehearsing with and developing onstage. I explained how our improvisation worked. There is coincidentally a great deal of space given to explanation in this review. There is a break down and justification of improvisation as a devising tool, and how actors use it. In theatre sports to be exact. Smythe seems at a loss to explain how it worked in this dance production: “But the Certainty audience, unlike those who flock to theatresports and its improv spin-offs, is not told what game is being played”. Everyone who came to the show got a performance manual for free. It also went out as part of the press kit. So not only is this statement peculiar, it reveals the reviewer has simply neglected to do any reading. Which in my mind equates to neglecting to do his job. Smythe got hung up on what the improvised dance wasn’t i.e.: theatre sports. Mystifyingly, jazz too is linked to theatre sports (see paragraph 4 of the review) which lead me to imagine Smythe getting impatient at a jazz concert when the musicians fail to make him laugh with their unscripted comedy routines. All that aside the rules and outcomes of those two genres are different as are their attributes and processes. Sculpting is not photography, opera is not painting and theatre sports or jazz is not improvised contemporary dance. Admittedly this writer’s biases were interesting in that they may reveal what the layman might want from contemporary dance. For example”humour”, “narrative” and “a sense of play, of human emotion, of relatedness and possibility.” Smythe craved the obvious when there was a woman and two men onstage: The “eternal triangle.” The thing about the eternal triangle is that it has been done and is bound to be done ad infinitum. If you want romantic cliché’ Mr. Smythe there are other forms of dance you should be going to see. Shouldn’t any contemporary dance reviewer know that narrative and its variant structures is seldom a key feature in developing contemporary dance choreography? Granted these things can and are used. But this is an art with a history of experimentation, investigation, and questioning of established practices. It’s an art form that is built on rigorous intellectual pursuit and abstraction as a means of expressing those ideas. This reviewer has only recently begun watching and writing about contemporary dance. Why he has made this choice is lost on me. From the writings I have read he appears to lack any real affinity for and knowledge of the art. His apparent lack of research and understanding is frustrating because it is a public criticism made by someone who has hardly put a fraction of the thought into their statements on art as I have put into my work. Same goes for any other artist he has reviewed for that matter. This taking for granted of not having to write a worthy response to a considerable amount of effort by groups of talented and intelligent people is shall we say…common place. And shows a lack of generosity. . Another example of lack of generosity in this review is a curious turn of phrase that Smythe has used in other reviews. Here it turns up again: “For my money…” We gave him a free ticket to the show, it was our money not his. And this example self satisfied ‘critique’ is the kind of thing we as dance makers pay for again and again. In his last paragraph Smythe talks about having to see a number of performances in order to get a clear indication of the works success. This is something that other reviewers, to their credit actually did. I have read a number of Smythe’s reviews. I tend to think their consistently earnest tone to be a cover for not knowing nearly enough about the topic he is attempting to write about. This article is yet another garden variety opinion piece. It fails to add anything to the broader dialogue about art. So Mr. Smythe, for my money I think contemporary dance can do without absurd commentary in a national publication from a man who has in the past criticized Saturday Night Fever for being little more than a celebration of disco.* *See John Smythe’s review of Saturday Night Fever on the National Business Review website

John Smythe reviews Kristian Larsen

2006-01-02T13:28:00.002+13:00

“Dance: Uncertainty is when the game might be up John Smythe http://www.nbr.co.nz/home/column_article.asp?id=10733&cid=6&cname=Arts Certainty By Throw Disposable Choreography Initiated by Kristian Larsen At Bats, Wellington To November 27 At first glance Certainty may seem a strange name for an improvised dance show. "This is the way I want to move," writes the initiator of Throw Disposable Choreography, Kristian Larsen, in his programme note for this contribution to the 2004 Bats Stab season. "Making my own decisions in my own time with people who know how to listen and respond back with authenticity, wits and skill. Despite the seemingly tremendous risks and vulnerability in performing this way, I feel a perverse kind of safety onstage. That safety is linked to the feeling I am not interested in dancing anyone else's steps. Of this much I am certain." Improvisation can be a useful development tool in the performing arts rehearsal room. Trial, error, rejection, acceptance, reworking and refinement are key components of all creativity. Usually an audience turns up trusting that such a process has already created a distilled product deemed worthy of being recreated in exchange for their time and money. And the challenge for performers is to make their recreated performance seem spontaneous every time. The first requirement for public improvisation, like jazz, theatresports and other forms of improvised drama, is that the audience is in on the deal. Audiences know the rules and what challenges must be met for the game to be won, and they respond in the knowledge that what they witness is spontaneous, ephemeral and singular. Only they will witness it. (It's worth noting that such creations are never transcribed and regurgitated for further performance because audience expectations for predetermined work is entirely different.) All forms of group improvisation require participants to let go of their egos and respond generously and constructively to the offers made by others. The fundamentals of theatre- sports, for example, are don't block and don't wimp out. That is, accept an offer with alacrity, build on it, don't anticipate the counter-response but accept that too for whatever it is, respond with alacrity ... etc. Thus every part of the spontaneous creation remains germane to the whole and whatever evolves contributed to a coherent and cohesive whole. Improvised theatre, in its various forms, has become a popular spectator sport, with humour high on a short list of predictable outcomes. By contrast, Throw Disposable Choreography's Certainty show, comprising four dancers (Kristian Larsen, Guy Ryan, Stu Armstrong, and Solomon Holly-Massey), a lighting designer/operator (Jen Lal), a live sound exponent (Jeremy Mandrake) and an AV operator (Rob Appierdo), takes itself very seriously indeed. As with improvised theatre, what gets practiced in the weeks before a performance is committed starting points, sensing when to finish something and the skill of being creatively inter-reactive in the space between intuitively timed entrances and exits. But the Certainty audience, unlike those who flock to theatresports and its improv spin-offs, is not told what game is being played. The night we went (the fourth of a 15-night season), the first half involved the four male dancers in various combinations (quartet, trio, duo, solo), exploring space through movement with a fairly studied seriousness that was reasonably interesting and impressive in and of itself. But because I was not privy to the principles that guided their games, the outcomes rarely transcended the simple statement "we are dancers, see us move." In the second half Holly-Massey was replaced by a guest-appearing Sarah Sproull and the dynamic changed significantly. At last there was a sense of play, of human emotion, of relatedness and possibility. There was even a moment when humour happened, accidentally but nicely developed by Larsen and Ryan, whose work together was especially responsive and cumulatively creative (mostly, I think, because Ryan was willing to build on Larsen's moves). But the potential for the development of some sort of, dare I say it, narrative, involving the classic eternal triangle, came to nothing, not least because dancers have to keep watching each other to know what's happening, whereas jazz or speech-based performance is not so limited. For dancers in the audience, Certainty may well offer levels of intrigue and empathy beyond objective interest. For my money, however, the evening lacked the cumulative surge of creative energy I have often experienced with good jazz and the various forms of improvised theatre. If the statement "I am not interested in dancing anyone else's steps" means even one dancer in the ensemble is resistant to accepting wholeheartedly what others initiate, it is inevitable that the work will not transcend its component parts. But one would have to see a number of performances to conclude that will be a certain outcome of every Certainty show.”

Texts - Other

2005-12-29T12:42:00.017+13:00

Application Form 705b/12 Please enter full name here ___________________ and date of birth here _________________________________________________________________ Multiple Choice. Please circle appropriate answer.

1. How would you describe yourself? a. A force of nature or b. A cowering simp c. An effete intellectual or d. A primordial mammalian brained tempest of emotion 2. Do you..? a. Linger upon the touch of warm skin on a winters day or b. Spend time alone perpetually writing entries in an almanac of torment 3. Have you ever...? a. Gazed into a pair of eyes that gushed an unfettered wellspring of loveliness all over you or b. Stiffened into sullen convulsions of adolescent aversion when a promise turned away 4. In recent times have you...? a. Left no stone unturned or b. Left the rocks as they stand; in stonewall silence 5. Do you...? a. Breathe fire or b. Rasp through lungs that are now charred chambers of loss 6. Have you...? a. Let go of those moments together or b. Allowed yourself to cling to tenuous filaments of hope 7. Have you...? a. Pursued your vision relentlessly or b. Walked away from the crumbling fabric of the dream you thought you'd be living 8. Do you tend to...? a. Glimpse the vista of your own life through the eyes of a loved one or b. Play the part of a rubber necker at the crash sites of your mistakes 9. Have you...? a. Known timeless moments with another soul or b. Settled for squandered telephone affection during your nights off 10. Within the last ten days have you...? a. Unbuckled the armoured robe you wear over your vulnerability or b. Let the fibrous mathematics of past conflicts grow thick over your eyes

Please respond to the following questions by circling Yes (Y) or No (N)

1. Would you let someone place their head on your stomach if that was what they wanted?

Y/N

2a. Have you recently tuned into your favorite radio station only to find it broadcasting dead air?

Y/N

2b. If 'Yes' were you unsettled by that?

Y/N

3. When stepping onto a pedestrian crossing with speeding traffic approaching, do you feel a curious lack of fear?

Y/N

4. Do you agree with the following statement? : "I would rather breathe the toxic fumes of raised voices than spend another day resting in the icebox of your absence."

Y/N

5. Have you ever really actually noticed the sheer scale of the barrage?

Y/N

6. When encountering a void that seems incalculably vast, do you tend to look for a small place to curl up and go to sleep?

Y/N

7a. Have you ever heard the faint slaps of gold coins falling on skin?

Y/N

7b. If 'No" then could you imagine that sound?

Y/N

8. Has the following scenario ever happened to you or anyone that you know? A man is talking on the telephone "Hi mum, how're you doin'?...yeah...yeah thats great!...yeah I'm good...I'm ok....mmm, mm...well I think she's taking it pretty well actually" Cut to close up on a womans face snarling and clawing at the camera

Y/N

9. Do you like watching television?

Y/N

Thank you for completing this part of the application. Please bring this form with you when you attend the follow up interview.

Kristian Larsen 09/04/1999 _____________________________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________

BOG RAMPING

In a new wave of Anti-Sport creationism, the tenuous Amsterdam based collective 'Het Deeg Van de Voet' this week unleashed a dynamic new urbane activity - BOG RAMPING!!!!!!!! This group of de-activists are fast gaining a reputation for developing non intuitive innovationals for todays proactive dehydrater. Famous for previous brands of Anti-Sport such as 'Under Hill Snorkeling' and 'Non Invasive North American Crack Ball' and of course don't forget their unforgettable debut hit '43 Man Squamish" these cheese hounds have really hit the big time this time. Their proclivity knows no bounds and this week they have unleashed or shall we say "de-hinged"....BOG RAMPING!!!!!!!! Not for the sullen or the unimpaired this new Anti-Sport is sure to burst your bubble and antagonize your sleep debt as you morbidly work yourself into a downlather of disgust. ARE WE MAKING SENSE YET!!?! Ok then lets kick off with a bilateral undersumnmation of how it works but before we do that lets first fornicate with our corporate sponsors: "Knike - Just Fuck it!" anyway blah blah BOG RAMPING sold separately everything sold separately save your money now ____________________________________________________________________________ Self Portrait Draft 2 I could start with when I was born. If that were really the beginning. But it’s not a beginning. It’s a decision. A singularity. No event is ever isolated. I was born an unisolated event and found myself in a box, quite alone. My existence was a kind of blasphemy, something that need never be spoken of again. When I was eleven they gave me a typed copy of the family tree. My name had been added in blue biro at the bottom of the last page. I met him when I was eleven. We sat next to each other on the couch exchanging no noise. It was painless and puzzling. What do you say in a situation like that? “ “Hey Dad, it’s been eleven years. How’ve you been?” So we spoke in gaps and silences with moving jaws and parted company without caring. That wasn’t a beginning. It was a decision. I’d recognise her face in an instant. It’s like my face. It looks back at me from the bathroom mirror, a butoh avalanche of skin with the nose of a clown. I used to like that face. Our faces had a conversation thirty years after the unisolated event took place. I watched the exchange from behind my bloodshot eyes, unmoved and unmoving. She was attempting to ratify a version of the past using commas, pained looks, and uncomplicated shuffling. It was a plan that could never work. They keep calling me. And texting. They insist on valuing and including me. And they were the ones who had sought me out from the beginning. The long lost sibling meets two other words written on a different page by the same hand: “brother” and “sister”. It was that same hand I refused to shake when I saw him again at the wedding. . As a boy I knew I was loved. And shunned. Popularity and shame. An unfalteringly precocious failure with a will to live and a lot of promise And that young mind…it resembled a jazz score written in ironsand – problematic, weighted, easily disturbed, but light enough to be played anyway one cared to. When is not where. I grew up in Hobsonville. They had an airbase there. And there were houses that all the married ones lived in. In Whenuapai. In Bulls. In Blenheim. In civilised ways best not spoken of. One day it hit me. A car that is. A dirty great hulk of a car drove its number plate into my hip. It was as if I was a product marked ‘To Be Discontinued’. I had walked in front of it. That wasn’t a decision. It was a beginning. ____________________________________________________________________________ VENT "You docile, indolent, naive, thorny, emaciated, unattainable, destructive, divisive, dangerous, distorted, slovenly, lazy, fat, obsessive, disconcerting, unsuccessful, objectionable, hypercritical, impatient, reprehensible, inconsiderate, unclean, duplicitous, evil, derivative, mute,obsessive, insubordinate, fragmented, maladaptive, truncated, infertile, derisory, mundane, orthodox, suppressive, illogical, facile, infantile, passive, overaggressive, undependable, frail, negative, vomitous, arbitrary, undisciplined, patriarchal, nostalgic, inconsequential, presumptuous, undemocratic, unstable, transient, distant, obstructive, forgetful, imperfect, exclusionary, obscure, privileged, unresponsive, tainted, poisonous, disruptive, hypocritical, dichotomous, deceptive, blocked, scornful, unattractive, transparent, sad, impenetrable, empty, saggy, hesitant, awkward, vacuous, parasitic, inarticulate, vapid, shambolic, withdrawn, unworthy, tiresome, manic, irritable, anemic, futile, fraudulent, irremediable, portentous, immobile, flaccid, incongruous, pompous, silent, reptilian, bombastic, elitist, misogynistic, decripet, childish, nervous, cheerless, sadistic, useless, juvenile, fatuous, unmotivated, racist, murderous, bloodless, drunken, crippled, torpid, unctuous, nihilistic, cretinous, spineless, lecherous, robotic, miasmic, stiff, unwelcoming, unpromising, solipsistic, intolerable, filthy, dull, vengeful, despotic, idiotic, corrosive, volatile, grotesque, formulaic, gormless, bilious, toxic, frigid, noncommittal, plastic, wooden, stereotypical, lackluster, disposable, indecent, uninformed, dribbling, leaden, stony, acrid, unkempt, imposing, interloping, unapproachable, haughty, sexless, devious, dwarfish, insectoid, pestilent, bossy, flowery, flimsy, coarse, obtuse, stubborn, acidic, narcissistic, beaten, soulless, lifeless, fragile, inconsequential, diffident, effete, didactic, unflattering, diseased, monochromatic, illiterate, brutish, plagiaristic, voyeuristic, fatuous, ambiguous, foolish, domesticated, barbaric, tasteless, ambitious, scarred, scared, boorish, morbid, unyielding, awkward, inconsolable, wretched, asinine, beastly, ungrateful, cynical, witless AND argumentative, bullish, churlish, peevish, cantankerous, swollen, servile, syrupy, cocky, waspish, flabby, vain, misshapen, undesirable, fornicating, frozen, crapulent, populist, decaying, parasitic, stinking, opportunistic, wheezing, paranoid, nepotistic, inelegant, forlorn, damaged, masturbatory, inflated, traitorous, treacherous, fucking asshole!" _____________________________________________________________________________

The Banality of Death

It’s not that I should’ve known better. It’s more that I should’ve acted in accordance with the obvious. The water around Lions Rock at Piha Beach is unpredictable, indiscriminate, dangerous, and indifferent. I know this well enough but it didn’t stop me setting out to pester the surf like an over sized puppy. At waist level water I began to dive into the waves, not noticing how quickly I was being dragged sideways, and not caring about the sudden watery abscess beneath my feet – no sand to push off of. After gliding along with the second wave the water abruptly shifted temperament and began to boil. An acquaintance in the water near me became visibly distressed. And that was when I forgot that I know how to deal with a situation like that when I’m on my own - relax, go with it, float, and breathe. So I tried to swim to her to somehow help, not that I could. Then against all prior experience I began to fight to get out of there, mostly in an attempt to stay with my friend - it seemed important. As the waves churned, repeatedly cycling me under I struggled to breathe choking on seawater instead. I became exhausted almost immediately, barely able to swim let alone get enough air. I saw my companion now some way ahead of me signaling to the surf lifesavers. As I floundered, totally out of rhythm with the sea I refused to signal for help – it seemed absurd, as if it shouldn’t be happening and I was going to bloody well get back myself. I couldn’t though. Then everything came into focus. I felt like giving in, or giving up, or letting go, or surrendering although none of those phrases quite describe the moment. There was just me in the moment of death right there in the water. There was nothing else. Not even exhaustion. The lifeguards were alerted by a TVNZ camera man from a reality TV show. (Later my gratitude towards him would be tainted by disgust as he did my friend the indignity of filming her vomiting seawater into a bucket). The lifesavers little rubber boat sped out and collected my companion. Then they came over to where I was still kind of swimming. One of the young guards asked if I needed help. Ridiculously I told him no, that I was ok. I must've looked ok because they instantly sped off to shore with the person who was no longer my companion. She was now a spluttering slumped shape in a boat choking on her drama oblivious to my precarious position. My feet had found sand. I 'stood' in a peculiar mixture of exhaustion, irate disbelief at the unspectacular circumstances surrounding this near fatal incident, and the realization that I wasn't going to able to stand for much longer. The water began to suck backwards I knew I didn’t have the strength to fight again so I raised my arms to signal the lifeguards and was assisted back to shore. Looking back on that moment of being in direct relationship with death it seems so very ordinary, so matter of fact. Barely worthy of scrutiny. Death seems over hyped, given far too much press. It’s not that I don’t understand the impact of death on the people you leave behind. But that’s a different thing. That’s grief. I recall the moment itself didn’t have any sense of profundity. I felt no fear, no life flashing before my eyes’. Just reality. Just a clear simple experience of Now. I’m left with an inability to comprehend that moment. But I feel no need to give meaning to it or create a philosophical perspective to compensate for this state of not knowing. And I don't feel compelled to make choreography about the experience. There’s no point. It just happened. I nearly died. It happens all the time. Waitangi Day 2008 ("It happens all the time" Yikes!! Maybe I should be more careful what I say.. two weeks later a large truck clipped me whilst I was riding my bike. It forced me into the gutter where I flew over the handlebar & rolled onto a concrete verge..luckily... as opposed to going underneath the truck and getting turned into sauce) ____________________________________________________________________

Follow Your Heart and Suffer the Consequences ;

The Ghost of S

The second time I saw her I didn’t so much remember her name, I understood it.

S the Beautiful

S the Harsh

S the Devoted

S the Generous

S the Destructively Honest

S who Waited.

and waited

How to begin when the moments tell themselves

How to begin when her distrust

retensions all bindings

forewalls the truth

How to end it?

I never tell it the same the way.

never have,and I never can.

This’d be easier to talk about if I’d ever recanted the story.

Ever poured it through the air

Ever admitted I was out of my depth

Arrogance and self doubt are not a workable combination in a man

Innumerable Psychological misfirings & & & & misteppings

interspersed with sweetness

wholeness that was difficult to measure up to

with A Full Heart.

You are still in my body I have never recovered Never measured up No one has has made as deep a mark on my life

I love you

I surrender you.

Be happy

2008____________________________________________________________________

Fan Mail

My friend, My experience of you is like a non recurring number Ceaselessly subdividing beyond any arid geometry I cannot gauge the bandwidth of your resonances nor the impact of the shockwaves as you scythe space with a sensitivity that is almost brutal The light you throw out is as brief and piercing as the glint of an hourglass during an electrical storm I am Blinded gladly and again Those moments of grief they swell and flinch Pain of beauty so exquisite as you pour measure upon measure into a thirsty cup. I see your serpentine magic uncurling and recoiling slow imploding devastation gravity so immense power so fragile I wish you would stop dying And I wish I could know how you do what you do How you inscribe life and death on each other with a subtle ripple of spine But maybe thats none of my business Theres more I could write descriptions endless but such graphic indulgence in wordspeak never yielded more than a moment lost in phrase So I'll finish perhaps on this thought; The gifts I receive from your dance of life are too abrupt in their departure too long in their lingering Like musical notes that leave an infinite expanse of feeling long after their vibration has left the air I am deeply honoured to have had the opportunity to have listened so intently to what you say when you move Kristian Larsen 05/08/1999 Thank you Douglas for your choreography, your writing, & your art. I wish you well in your retirement from dance. __________________________________________________________________________________________________

Working Text for 'An Aversion to Light'

Choreographed on Touch Compass for Aquisitions 03 A man makes movements in a place he has no memory of. He struggles to learn the rules here. It is a place of forgetting, of loss, of denial. It is a waiting room a long corridor. A satellite beyond emmision range. He feels both dapper and absurd. He is alone to himself. A woman has hallucinations of home. Within this dream she can ask questions of him. In her own dimension she speaks in binary code. No one listens there She is comfortable but she is aware something is missing... something in her possesion that does not belong to her This something can be taken from her because she lacks the ability to own it She wants him to investigate to locate to Help. But she cannot feel the crime. He suspects that Time, Knowledge, and Memory have played a part in the perpetration of this act. He understands that these three things have the power to kill any child of the imagination. And as he tries to look for what caused the sense of loss he realizes that it is possible for a world to be created by taking things away. That a sense of who you are can be eroded by naming a thing, a place, a feeling. All these lost things inside an atrophied imagination. How can a detectice solve a mystery when everyone is laughing? How can you see whats around you when you have an aversion to light? _________________________________________________________

I am a (Good) Dancer

2005-12-29T12:40:00.003+13:00

One year I was invited to conduct some research with a group of dancers through the Choreographic Platform. In the course of this workshop questions came up about the challenges intrinsic to the work being undertaken. At one point I asked the dancers to come up with movement they were good at. The workshop rapidly ground to a halt. After a little enquiry it became apparent that the reason no one felt they could achieve the task was because they felt that there was in fact nothing they could do well. As the choreographer and key observer in the room I felt that this was patently absurd. I had been repeatedly amazed at the individual skills and generosity of the participants. So I steered the task towards contemplating an 'I statement" then discussing responses. What ensued was a discussion that took up the rest of the afternoon. The dancers felt this statement was too challenging to say out loud. It was simply this: "I AM A GOOD DANCER" Every dancer in the room felt that it was impossible to or even a little dangerous to say that statement with any real conviction or justification. The reasons behind these objections were a familiar variation on a theme for anyone who is or has ever been a dancer. Examples were "wrong body shape/overweight" "not flexible / strong / fast / dynamic / musical / experienced enough" "am never offered any work so I mustn’t be good enough" "not very fast at learning movement" "I ask too many questions / am not obedient enough" etc. What it seemed to come back to again and again was a feeling of low self worth as a dancer. This begs the question - WHY? As stated earlier in this essay we work in relatively impoverished conditions and this can and does have a debilitating effect on morale. The primary emotional response under current conditions to the success of a peer is usually jealousy. But there are other factors at work here. The negative ideas and attitudes become evident when listening to the conversations that dancers have when they get together, & by observing how they behave towards one another in class and in work. There are astronomical expectations and demands that they themselves place on their own abilities to deliver. There is a kind of callousness that is common place amongst choreographers and teachers towards the dancers and towards their own peers. There is a lack of generosity when appraising each others work. I have not met a dancer who does not have an overdeveloped ability to be critical of themselves & others. There are dancers who attempt to compensate for this by inflating their own sense of stature and self importance (an absurd and redundant behavior in a culture that barely even recognizes contemporary dance) There is an abundance of tertiary dance students who act as if they genuinely believe their knowledge and abilities surpass those of current working practitioners. There are extraordinarily talented freelancers who cannot accept a compliment about their abilities to save themselves. How has this happened? I was having a conversation with a colleague recently, a choreographer. This colleague had been teaching at Unitec and had come across a student who was unable to perform handstands because of arthritis in her wrists. Disbelief at this students even considering a career in dance let alone being accepted on a dance course was expressed along with the comment "... y’,know there are dancers and then there are dancers" If that were true then Catherine Chappell’s 'Touch Compass' would be discredited as a dance company. Statements like this are dangerously false. It is more of a graphic indication of the mentality that underpins the disillusionment experienced all too often by the dancer in New Zealand. I believe that there is an insidious elitism at the heart of this unhealthy psychology. and I believe that it's roots lie deep in the womb of modern dance - ballet. Not in the technical aspect of ballet but in a preposterous and over simplistic point of view that needs to be thought about more sensibly. That point of view is a belief that in order to be a good dancer one must have extraordinary technique and that this, and this alone is the yard stick for measuring ones self worth as a dancer. I am not disqualifying technique nor the work that needs to be done to become a dancer. I believe that form and clarity are critical aspects of quality communication. What I am saying is there is no celebration or even validation of the extraordinary diversity that exists in the community. There is a mentality of "put up or shut up" in class and rehearsal. What does it take to feel good about oneself as a dancer? Isn’t it about time we did?