Theatre and Culture from Scotland, starring The List's Theatre Editor, his performance persona and occasional guest stars. Experimental writings, cod-academic critiques and all his opinions, stolen or original.
Critics do not provide useful consumer guides to art. Artists dislike being given a label. Baudrillard spotted the rise of the simulacra. These statements may be related. I'm rarely certain. Only, when it was suggested to me that Robbie Synge's Douglas can be better understood as clown rather than dance, I immediately appreciated it more. Three shows on the stage, three cups on the table: Douglas, Void, 5 Soldiers. Beneath one cup, a pea. The pea is the definition. The definition is dance. Move the cups, and try to keep your eye on 5 Soldiers. Lift the cup and reveal the definition. It's dance! What does dance mean in 5 Soldiers? Five performers, all alike in ability, only arriving at the same place through different disciplines. Their training lends them diverse physical skills, but certain movements - the extension of leg, the comfort in the body, the range of expression through limbs - don't come from sitting and typing.
Sara Teresa (credit)
And Rosie Kay, choreographer, takes these bodies and applies a vocabulary of gesture. Either suggested by or sampled from military experience, the choreography evokes aspects of soldiering. It starts in boot camp: tight, minimal, forceful and drilled. It goes on a night out, where the body is set free (the change of costume for the woman signifying her femininity in sharp and sometimes uncomfortable contrast to the four males), and the men camp it up like a body band on the piss. Then combat, then wounded, then mutilation, back in civilian life (and wouldn't it be good if the final scene was a metaphor for the soldier outside of the army? Disabled, struggling without help, not a physical loss but psychological?). Isn't that what dance is: the representation through a series of gestures of psychological and/or emotional states?
Move the cups. Keep your eye on Void. Find the pea. This time a single dancer. Void has the same visual business as 5 Soldiers: projections across walls and bodies, only this time, a tighter cage. Episodes, each one a version of alienation, the trained body battling against enclosure. Note the enhanced physicality. Trained, evidently. The tension between this body's expansive potential (when she hangs from the wall, or tries to climb the wires mesh) and the restricting environment... Move the cups. Lift the cup. Douglas. Tries to balance, only to tumble. Moves props around the space. Music is present. As in all three: maybe that is important to dance. Maybe sound. Douglas makes himself, slowly. He is tentatively working out the movement vocabulary that builds his personality (he's more fun than soldiers or dwellers in the abyss, only he is vulnerable funny, not telling jokes). Trained body here less evident. Telegraphing meaning in flashes between long, attentive routines. He builds. It collapses.
In the aftermath of The Glasgow Effect excitement - it's the weekend, so the print media is giving it some, still - Loki commented that many commentators will discuss any aspect of the stushie as long as they don't have to talk about class. Since my current catch-phrase is all art is bourgeois, it's probably time for me to define my understanding of class consciousness.
The Bourgeoisie According to the Urban Dictionary, the bourgeoisie was actually a legally defined social status during the French Revolution. It's most popular usage is within Marxist critiques of society, which identifies them as being the owners of the means of production: they are the people who own the factory, invest in the company, tell other people what to do. Sometimes bourgeoisie is used as a synonym for... The Middle Class Although I see 'middle class' as being a wider category, since it doesn't just include the owners of production, but those groups who stand to gain from a society dominated by capitalism. So Doctors, Teachers, people who get a good wage, that kind of lark, are middle class without necessarily being bourgeoisie. To mark this collaboration with the bosses, I use the adjective Bourgeois I read somewhere or another that bourgeois society is another way
of saying capitalism. I tend to use it to describe anything that works to the advantage of capitalism, the middle class and the bourgeoisie. I do this because I read some Diderot, and think I can see how his massive project was an attempt to define reality to the advantage of these groups. Bourgeois was once a revolutionary energy, aiming to break the hegemony of the absolutist state or aristocrats. Now it is the dominant culture, having created the social framework within which most activity happens. That's why I say all art is bourgeois, since its terms have been established by a bourgeois culture. The Working Class This is where I get stuck, perhaps because recent models of capitalism try to dissolve the boundaries between working and middle class.
There are a bunch of easy stereotypes that can stand in for the working class. I don't like them (the stereotypes, not the class). So I jump to something more specific... The Proletariat Marx liked a bit of this... the proletariat are the urban group who do not own the means of production - the exploited masses who have nothing to lose but their chains. Again, working class can be used to mean proletariat, but at least the fancy French word has a bit of political context. I've got a few more words to explain, but I'll pause here for a bit. I think my Waitrose soup and Lidl toast are ready.
Definitions are tools. I know that Plato saw them as an end point in his philosophy, but I prefer to fashion something then use it until it breaks. Then, I either fix it, or pick up whatever broke it, and use that instead.
Every so often, I need to come back to definitions, so that I can move forward, deeper into my analysis. These definitions might not be helpful, but they provide some kind of code that might clarify my postings, at least for a week or so.
Dramaturgy The whole process of making theatre. Key uses include: dramaturgical choices (decisions made by the maker of a piece). Most frequently used to examine the way that a performance is made: to look at the dramaturgy of a play is to discuss the ideas and theories that formed its form and function.
Warning: there is a school of performance studies that uses dramaturgy to look at any human behaviour (the same school, inspired by Goffman, that regards all behaviour as 'performed'). This is useful because it expands the scope of theatre studies, and can explain stuff like gender identity or the reasons why certain groups act in the way they do (e.g. that Chelsea fan made a dramaturgical choice to use a stanley knife rather than a broken bottle). Dramaturgy is often described through the use of metaphors (such as when my friend Elliot Roberts talks about 'the dramaturg as pyro-maniac'). This is useful for makers, but does not cover the full range of dramaturgy's functions. I am going to stick with the definition given by Graham Eatough in a recent seminar: it is about making a structure in time and space. Dramaturg This is where the problems start: the dramaturg has no fixed role, but is variously described as 'the outside eye' or a fixer. Roughly, the dramaturg comes into a rehearsal process at various stages, and offers advice. Different dramaturgs have different approaches.
Warning: a dramaturg is not your mate coming in a week before production deadline. And there are far too many people who claim to be dramaturgs with no training or awareness of the possible strategies. Unless the person has had many years of theatrical experience, or has been trained as a dramaturg, odds are that they are a chancer. Many writers double up as dramaturgs, and a responsible one will clarify their role - and they won't be writing the script.
The challenge of performance art - or live art, or contemporary theatre practice or whatever name it gives itself this week - is the same to both the enthusiast and the sceptic: what the hell was that? RoseLee Goldberg, one of the first writers to grapple with its history, offers a definition that is pretty much her hands thrown in the air: a 'permissive, open-ended medium with endless variables, executed by artists impatient with the limitations of more established art forms.'
"Something is not avant-garde unless it is provocative and a challenge. This is certainly what the general public in America believe. The last performance to confirm this golden rule was that of Anne Bean and the Kipper Kids. Bodies painted in the most obscene fashion: vulgarity in every form, savage cries, nauseous smells: songs taken to the level of paroxysm, and guttural sounds were the clue to this show, which broke every record at the box office and has achieved a large following." The Avant Garde Savaged by Anne Bean, translated article from Playmen, May 1979
Goldberg gets cited in Marvin Carlson's Performance: a critical introduction. I guess the point is that any attempt to define 'live art' is going to run into trouble, either by being too vague (live art is art that happens live, huh?) or too prescriptive (does it have to be by impatient artists?).
"Live Art is the radical, vital and creative force behind some of the UK's most exciting, innovative and important artists, and home live art, as a company of creative producers, is privileged to be part of the sector's development." - Home Live Art My irritation at performance art - and I speak as a believer - is that it too readily falls into this Western European idea of 'the artist' as a being distinct from the general run of the species. That can be through the mystification of the creative process (all that banter about 'the genius' of Shakespeare or Pina Bausch), or the professionalisation of an artist class (a degree does not entitle a graduate to a life pass as an 'artist'). Since whatever phrase is used - performance or live - includes the word art, it runs headlong into the basic problem common to dance, music, whatever: is there a quality, a vital spark that makes something art rather than anthropology, craft or scientific experiment?
What is live art? Well, at its most fundamental, Live Art is when an artist chooses to make work directly in front of the audience in space and time. So instead of making an object, or an environment (a painting for example) and leaving it for the audience to encounter in their own time, Live Art comes into being at the actual moment of encounter between artist and spectator. Or at least even if they are not physically present, the artist sets up a situation in which the audience experience the work in a particular space and time, and the notion of ‘presence’ is key to the concerns of the work. Here's where Carlson, and the other books littering my floor, come in handy. The field of performance studies, which overlaps with but is not the same as theatre studies, offers an examination of many different social activities as 'performance.' Admittedly, they are frequently written in a jargon heavy style (why use the word 'theatrical' when 'performativity' can mean the same thing and give the essay a pseudo-sociological flavour?).
But they break down the idea that 'art' is something that only happens in a sacred space,and that the gap between theatre (let's pretend for grown-ups) and life is huge. It does for the idea that anybody who participates in any social event, or indulges a solitary vice, doesn't like theatre. They are constantly performing.
Live art, an artistic discipline that "defies all definition", is experiencing a remarkable renewal, it is, however, still little known to the world at large. To bridge this gap and strengthen the position of new forms of live art in Europe, eight cultural structures have come together as partners in a five-year European project entitled A space for live art. Through each partner’s programming and the different forms of exchange – co- productions, dissemination, residences, international symposia – the diversity of the artistic approaches will be highlighted. Meetings on theory and practice, the constitution of a critical corpus written by professionals and documentation of projects in sound and/or images will strengthen the reflexive and documentary aspect of live art. There will also be room for mediation and transmission, through an infiltration of the public area and a teaching strand, in particular in art schools where young talent will be encouraged. Performance artists have often been happy to collect the catch-phrases of performance studies, without recognising that it undermines their right to claim special privileges as 'artists.' Falling back on the idea of training, they reduce the status of artist to the same as accountant: have the relevant qualifications been passed? And I flutter in doubt between ideas of 'genius' defining the artist - I might accept this, on the condition that the full meaning of genius, which includes an almost supernatural quality, is respected - and a rejection that the artist is a status which is anything more than the product of particular attention to a skill. The National Review of Live Art (NRLA) Archive is primarily a video archive that holds footage of performances from the prestigious NRLA festival. The footage covers the period from 1986 (when the festival was first documented on film) to 2010 when the festival closed. As well as the recordings of performances, there are also tapes of installations, discussions, and interviews with participating artists. What made me think that the theories of Jerzy Grotowski would make an interesting blog post? I'm struggling with his essay Towards a Poor Theatre and I am only on the first paragraph. Jerzy Grotowski was a revolutionary in theatre because he caused a rethink of what theatre actually was and its purpose in contemporary culture. One of his central ideas was the notion of the 'poor' theatre. By this he meant a theatre in which the fundamental concern was the work of the actor with the audience, not the sets, costumes, lighting or special effects. In his view these were just trappings and, while they may enhance the experience of theatre, were unnecessary to the central core the meaning that theatre should generate.
Mind you, Jerzy has a nice anger: he's getting annoyed by people asking about the 'origins' of his 'experimental' theatre. He's not experimental, he says. He's just trying to work out what the relationship between audience and actor might be.
'Poor' meant the stripping away of all that was unnecessary and leaving a 'stripped' and vulnerable actor. Applying this principle in his 'laboratory' in Poland, Jerzy Grotowski jettisoned all costume and staging and preferred to work with all black sets and actors in plain black rehearsal costumes, at least in the rehearsal process. He made the actors go through rigorous exercises so that they had full control over their bodies.
I keep moving through the article with my usual inattention to the whole and preoccupation with detail - the detail that backs up this week's obsession. For the record, it's 'dialectic,' the shifting word that I translate as conversation, in which two parties aim for a higher truth through comparing their parts of the puzzle. As usual, that's not a good translation. As usual, I've found my phrase: Jerzy saying that he likes Stanislavki's approach to acting because of 'his dialectical relationship to his own earlier work.'
What was important to Jerzy Grotowski was what the actor could do with his or her body and voice without aids and with only the visceral experience with the audience. In this sense he overturned the traditions of exotic costumes and stunning staging that had driven much European theatre from the 19th century. This is not to say that in public theatrical performances he completely disregarded lights and sets, but these were secondary and tended to complement the already existing excellence of the actors. Indeed he wrote:
After discounting every other model he can think of as definitive, without saying their processes are useless or that he doesn't borrow bits from here and there, Jerzy explains the essence of his approach: 'without the least trace of egotism or self-enjoyment... the actor makes a gift of himself... the body vanishes, burns and the spectator sees only a series of visible impulses.'
By gradually eliminating whatever proved superfluous, we found that theatre can exist without make-up, without autonomic costume and scenography, without a separate performance area (stage), without lighting and sound effects, etc. (Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre. Simon & Schuster, 1968, p.19)
That's all very zen, breaking down the division between reactions in the actor's mind and the actions of the body, making the actor a sort of perfect expression of their internal state. While Grotowski is heralded as part of the avant-garde (a status he probably dismisses in the first paragraph), there is something ancient and spiritual in his process. It's exactly the opposite of what Noel Coward and his gang thought up, that acting was a series of physical tricks (can't cry? blink three times or get out the onion).
I get lost in the next bit, where he talks about the spiritual process, but my attention gets called back when he says 'we compose... the dialectics of humour behaviour.' I'm less than half-way through the article, but I have my bone to chew. 'A sign, not a common gesture, is the elementary integer of expression for us.'
That's enough for me. If Grotowski's process has anything in it, he is basing it on something that is intrinsic to theatre... that is, if his training for actors is going to work, it has to connect with some quality within the theatre. A sign suggests that theatre is a sign system (well, yeah), that it is a symbolic drama that strips away the common-place, guarded actions of real life (whatever that is) and replaces them with movements that express their meaning perfectly.
Sure, I'm busking now, but here's how I think this works. If, in daily life, a ghost turns up, the emotional experience of seeing the ghost (I'm thinking terror, but it might be delight, depending on the situation), social codes and upbringing transform that emotion into a mediated expression.On stage, the actor's sign represents an unmediated emotional response - something authentic.
So when I bump into a spirit the next time I am in a haunted house, my exclamation 'I think I've shat myself' is merely a conditioned response - and a bid for a cheap laugh in a macabre situation. When Hamlet sees his father on the battlements, the Grotowski-trained actor does something that is more expressive - possibly symbolic of an inner state.
So what? I'm poking around at the importance of theatre as 'a lie that tells the truth,' trying to find a solution for the problem that, in the society of the spectacle, theatre is just another distraction. This might help - it might not. It might help the reading of a performance.
It strikes me that Grotowski is putting the actor at the front of the theatrical experience - not the script, but the embodied person doing (or pretending to do) stuff. It's another step towards devised theatre (dropping the script as template), a move towards 'physical' theatre. And another inconclusive blog post, presented by The Vile Arts.
C Carr's collection of essays On Edge covers the art scene of America in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly focussing on the performance art scenes: she covers the emerging cross-border experiments of Guillermo Gomez-Pena and the Kipper Kids unique slapstick vaudeville. Throughout the collection, Carr identifies the rawness and brutality of the performances, echoing the dynamism of the No Wave scene in New York, with bands like Sonic Youth and Swans adding a punishing volume and art-school aesthetics to the British punk template. Indeed, two artists she reviews, Diamanda Galas and Lydia Lunch, have their roots in No Wave.
While the rage of the 1980s precludes much of the playful joy of the happenings of the 1960s -
Those than can, create. Those that can't, critique. And those that can't critique, get a load of books from the University and play pick and mix with concepts and phrases.
In the conclusion to A History of European Puppetry (it's a big book, and I started at the end), Henryk Jurkowski ponders on how puppetry, having been consistently a folk-art form throughout human history, had become part of the high-art corpus following the modernist dream of 'total theatre.' From Wagner onwards, performers have fished for the show that contains aspects of all the arts, and puppetry got caught up in the trawl. Jurkowski is delighted that puppetry's place seems assured in the pantheon, but doubts a further taxonomy of puppetry is possible: logging all the different forms would involve assigning a genre to every production, since each one has its own style and characteristics.
He even gets a bit snotty about what would now be called 'object manipulation': having studied the history of the puppet, he remembers that they were once regarded as magical or holy objects: 'the puppet has lost its leading role,' he cries.
He does identify the same problem faced by the critic looking at manipulate, or the physical theatre section of the Edinburgh Fringe. While loose ideas of compositional style or content provide connections, finding a common aesthetic that binds, say Planet Luvos and the aerial arts of Paper Doll Militia. And unlike devised theatre, which has its own set of icons (Lecoq, Forced Entertainment, Bausch), there is no list of Important Artists who have defined the techniques and genres of visual theatre.
I battle with a definition of visual theatre every year: ranging from vague gestures towards 'theatre that is not on the radio' over to a more concrete 'theatre that uses the image as the point of conversation with the audience,' I never quite get to the magic of the genre. I accompany that essay with further mystical meditations on the status of puppetry in sacred art, tracing it through medieval liturgical theatre to Indian shadow story-telling. I detour into the idea of the actor or dancer as a puppet (a status that devised theatre has fought to undermine, by making the performer part of the creative process and not a mere pawn in the hands of the director).
Jurkowski gets away with it by stopping at some time around 1987: just before technology made all sorts of cross-platform multi-media possible, and before the post-modern really took hold and encouraged rejection of simple genres (and difficult language to explore them). I'm left pondering, in the vague hope that all these words and phrases might add up to something that moves me into the category of being able to critique.
On The Vile Arts Radio Hour, there is an ongoing joke about the host's ability to silence artists with a single question. Usually directed at a visual artist, but including variations that irritate theatre-makers, musicians, film-makers and curations, it revolves around asking how the artist would define their work.
Examples of this question include "What media do you work in?" and "Would you say that you are physical or visual theatre?" or the perennial favourite, addressed at dancers: "Is this ballet or contemporary dance?" What these questions share is an assumption that artists, when they make a piece, are consciously identifying with a particular approach, and have a theoretical understanding of what that approach means.
Vile has acknowledged that this question came from his personal interest in developing a dogmatic, Aristotlean understanding of art, and did not necessarily reflect anything that artists consider themselves. "As a critic, I am always grasping at a way to communicate the essence of a performance - or exhibition, or festival - as succinctly as possible. By dividing things clearly into genres, or media, I was hoping to be able to identify a context for the work that would appeal to particular audiences."
This kind of critical analysis, which belongs both in the academic and more populist forms of analysis, has a long and respectable history: Plato's dialogues are frequently obsessed with definitions - The Republic begins with two brothers challenging Socrates to define justice - and Aristotle took considerable pains not just to describe Greek tragedy but define the salient features that made individual tragedies important. And while aesthetics is a relatively modern branch of philosophy - Bumgarten is credited with giving the word its contemporary meaning in 1735 - attempts to pin down the nature of art and its impact have been a consistent part of the broader response to creativity.
Although Vile draws on academic traditions - somewhat half-heartedly at times, preferring a "wikipedia version of ideas" - his primary interest in definitions is as a tool for his more populist criticism. He is careful in his use of "populist' rather than "popular" criticism, as he observes in a later interview. "Criticism is never going to popular - there is always someone who hates on the critic, usually the performer who feels that their play has been misunderstood, or the actor who was doing that silly voice on purpose to explore the character's innate instability. By using 'populist,' I am simply setting the criticism that appears in newspapers, magazines and on-line against the more rigorous academic criticism in journals or in universities. 'Populist criticism' is more accessible, less precise."
This allows a broader series of definitions to be drawn: suggestions towards categories rather than absolute descriptions. The sporadic forays into more comprehensive analysis of genre or medium operate more as frameworks for closer examination of specific pieces or programmes and the use of terms like "physical theatre," "contemporary dance" (a phrase he abhors for its lack of precision) and "visual theatre" are merely signifiers, allowing the reader or listener to make a snap decision about the work's relevance.
Vile suggests that there are two reasons why his interest in definitions has become increasingly important in the past decade. "First of all, the rise of the festival has seen programmes of associated art-works, usually curated with a particular vision. In Glasgow, barely a month goes past without a new festival or programming strand, often dedicated to the sort of work that wouldn't have existed twenty years ago. I am thinking of Sonica, an audio-visual festival, or Buzzcut, which followed on from the National Review of Live Art... finding ways of talking about these performances is crucial to broadening their audience appeal and encouraging public engagement."
The second justification emerges from one of The Vile Arts' fundamental beliefs about the role of performance. Vile has occasionally claimed that individual art works are less important than the subsequent discussion - even to the point of believing that missing a particular performance can be as important as attending. This claim, made about The National Theatre of Scotland's Blackwatch, is beyond the scope of this essay but does explain why a series of working definitions are crucial. There needs to be a foundation for this discussion around art, even if they are abandoned.
I apologise for this article in advance. Anything labelled as "Vile's Rucksack" tends to be an exercise in throat clearing, and reading this can be the equivalent of clearing phlegm from a computer screen. Then again, if you are interested in my definition of Live Art, join me on my adventure.
I have frequently made the mistake of describing my interest in Live Art when trying to explain what I write about. Back when I taught Latin, people knew why my conversation had suddenly turned dull - dead language, the beauty of grammar, the importance of the past to appreciate the present. Unfortunately, the glazed expression Live Art elicits is not due to boredom, it's incomprehension. Live Art isn't in the glossary of popular culture.
This introduction is swiftly followed by my pitiful attempts to prove that Live Art is really exciting. Even allowing for the idiosyncrasy of my own tastes - I believe Pina Bausch is easily enjoyed, but my sister and mother, both ballet teachers, beg to differ - there is plenty in that Live Art bucket that is accessible and fun. Some of it probably does need a doctorate to be understood, but there's enough that even a relatively uneducated character like me can get.
Saying that Live Art is analogous to the descriptor "Queer" doesn't make for a lively conversation over the Christmas pudding, I discovered and although I'd argue that both categories exist to cover those things that don't simply fall into comfortable, popular definitions, making a connection between the two lends Live Art an association with sexuality that isn't necessary. At this point, I usually surrender and remember that most genres are pretty hopeless, anyway - illustrating my point with World Music, a term which sounds like what Sting plays when he isn't tuning his lute and ignores the differences of geography and social context, reducing high and low traditions, east and west and central, contemporary and ancient into a bland mush.
The first step is to ignore "art" - I am happy not to get into that definition just now, and save it for the later stages of a three day binge, when the alcohol trumps common sense. Next, I'll focus on "live," and insist that it means that the art has to have a duration and a location. That sounds close enough to "performance." I'm pleased, because Performance Art can be a synonym for Lve Art.
This leaves choreography, scripted theatre, improvisation, rock gigs and that stoned bloke on the podium at the nightclub in the category - all genres and happenings that don't need to have another label.
So, yes, I have a definition, but it is too vague to clarify much more than the actual phrase. Like saying that Saturday is the day between Friday and Sunday, it might suit a dictionary but ignores the emotional resonances, and the usage of the phrase in particular contexts. Back when I had a proper job, Saturday had associations that didn't come from "the last day of the week" or "named after a Roman God." A definition so simple and so neutral doesn't explain why I even care to define it.
I did have to do a course in linguistics once - before I became completely lost, I did hear that there is a difference between "prescriptive" study of language (how I taught grammar) and "description" (which observes usage). To give an example - ironically, one that really irks me - the word "performativity" ought (prescriptive) to be used to relate the manifestations of gender identity; it is (descriptive) used as a catchall to express the performance qualities or potential of certain subjects.
If I go more descriptive - and more subjective - I do associate Live Art with a certain set of performance activities. It tends to be personal, interested in the experimental, has a set of influences that include but are not limited to the avant-garde of the twentieth century, it blurs categories, enjoys a challenge and privileges the new and challenging. It sits outside easy definition, rubs shoulders with feminist, anti-capitalist and post-modern philosophies, holds a romantic ideal about the status of the market and can be absurd and sublime.
I am not sure this helps much at parties, so it is probably better if I fall back on my second profession at parties. Sure, I am a teacher... I teach young people how to appreciate Live Art.
Please browse away now if you don't want to hear the result.
The phrase "contemporary dance" contains no meaning.
Attempts to define dance often end in bitter arguments or a reductio ad absurdum. Contemporary used to be a short-hand for "not ballet". These days, companies that share ballet's emphasis on line, musicality, discipline or training undermine even that thin sliver of meaning.
They did solos that lasted about a minute, contained a trick or two, and expressed nothing.
They did duets - the only one I can even remember was called Prom Night, and garbled big band jazz and 1950s Americana.
A big panel of experts pontificated. I'm all for the critic being given more importance than the performance - it is the foundation of my every application to Creative Scotland. Yet this sanctified the structure of the post show discussion, in which everything gets addressed to the performers and nothing about the performance gets expanded into a broader discussion.
The audience did that screaming thing, which means "I like you personally, but haven't got an opinion on the qualitative value of the work."
The dancers were reduced to crowd-pleasing tricksters.
Cat Deeley bellowed.
They did some things they called contemporary dance. They were a bit like Kate Bush videos. I like Kate Bush, and I liked the way she danced back in the 1980s.
However, I wouldn't suggest that the video to Wuthering Heights became the foundation of a movement within dance in the way that Yvonne Rainer or Isadora Duncan might have done.
I have always regarded television as a poor media. It flattens. It fragments.
SYTYCD, by using contemporary dance, becomes another problem in using the phrase to mean anything.
When I was a lad, I liked art that disorientated. By that aesthetic, I ought to love SYTYCD. I try to write about it, but the format, the content, the atmosphere baffle me.
Ideas float in and out. Nothing develops. Opinions are static hiss.
