Gangnam Style: a contemporary Macarena

Gangnam Style was a hit just a little after we had finished putting the show together which is a pity in a way as we would most probably have included it in the show if it had been around at that time. If the opportunity comes to work on the show again then I think we will have to master this one and work it in, most of the other dances are a little dated but this one shows that the impulse to dance in unison is as alive and well today as it ever was.

As with some of the other videos, this one is not so much a dance as a pop video that features a lot of dancing. This means there is not a very clear authoritative way to dance it.  There are people who will try and teach it to you but there is no precise original routine to go with the song. Compare it to the Birdy Song, for example, which is as much a dance as a song and which was doing the rounds before videos of songs became expected. The Macarena too is very clear as a dance, it's brutal simplicity makes it stand out from most of the other post video age dances.

Another song / dance that has come to my attention recently is Xiaopinguo (Little Apple) this, like Gingham Style, is more a song with a smart video featuring dancers which has become very popular (in China) and spawned countless imitators. When you start to see videos of kids doing it, friends, colleagues and shoppers at it too, then you are treading into Indifference territory. Embarrassing though it is to admit it, I have started to learn the lyrics to this one: in China it is always handy to have a karaoke number up your sleeve.

What we owe the Swiss

The presentation of the dances would not be complete without the fifth, the Birdie Song. This video captures it rather well in both its essential movements and profoundly unprofessional quality.

I cannot swear by it but I do believe I must have danced it in similar situations as a young boy. I am not aware when I first heard it, it feels as if it has always been there in the background. I discovered it is of Swiss origin and from Davos in the 1950s it has spread far and wide. It must be a close contest between it and The Macarena as to which is the most widely know of the dances we perform. Of the two the birdie dance has by far the more traditional feel to it, it sounds as if it could be very old and I could imagine a medieval version of it without too much difficulty. But no, it is a song and dance that took flight after the war. This time frame does in fact work in a sense with the text we overlay upon it, a collation of Marx quotes stitched together with my best efforts at simplified Marxist theory. It gives it a cold war time frame though to be honest I am just as conscious of how such a text can reflect our current economic plight. I rather like the way that they sit beside one another, Marx and the Birdie Dance, for without precisely undercutting one another neither do they amplify the message or mood of the other. They simply colour and contaminate in a very particular way.

What The Show Wants: a fatalistic dramaturgy

This is a wooly idea that is attractive nonetheless as it does offer some freedom. Basically what this amounts to is if we don't necessarily pull things out of the show if they don't fit our concept. Indeed, rather than working with a concept or rigorous structure up front, this process has been more intuitive. We have some very basic material in the form of these songs and dances and instead of getting rid of them we simply agreed that the 'the show' wanted them and it was up to us to work with them, to persevere and find something in them. As they are unpresentable in their natural form this "what the show wants" strategy has thrown demands upon us, demands that have resulted in a number of unusual ways we adjust the songs and dances. By saying it is the show and not us who has decided, we place responsibility for these decisions outside of ourselves and see our role as helping the show realise its full potential.

Of course I am well aware the show is not a living creature with its own freewill yet it is an entity with a distinct character, the nature of which is slowly revealed or, I should also say, constructed. As we go further in the rehearsals it becomes clearer what fits with the show and what does not so in this way we develop a shared understanding of what it is. Still, the idea that the show should make some unexpected demands of us is always attractive so we remain alert to these.

Waikiki: a story told forwards and backwards

Today we have been looking at the ending... We did not find it but found instead a penultimate dance routine. We have settled upon a line dance performed backwards. This will have words accompanying it, voices that relate two competing versions of a simple story. The first tells it forwards insisting upon a causal logic linking one episode to the next while the other tells the same story back to front insisting on a consequent logic operating in the opposite direction. The result is two different stories as the connecting tissue that makes the two causal sequences possible must necessarily vary depending upon the direction in which the story is being told. With such a complex set of demands it is fortunate that we have seized upon a very simple story of a beach encounter in Hawaii between a hula mistress and a melancholic Swede named Johan. The story is basically that of the song Agadoo. It is a story so common that we already know it.

I am not sure which has been the more demanding, dancing backwards or constructing this backward/forward tale. I rather think it opens up a new approach for me to engage with narrative, one which has a fatalistic dimension to. I suppose if this were taken to the extreme then it would end up with God or the big bang or some other creation myth as the line... or else the admission, and I don't know why that happened. 

Hybrid Dances

Today I was looking at the video we took of Saturday's show and taking notes, mostly mental ones. Even with the benefit of video to place my point of view in the spectator's seat it is still difficult to see this at all freshly and not be bound up inside the creating and performing of it. This does not doom the effort to introversion but it is a tension I am always working with. What did become clear was the idea that there should be a visible cueing system whereby performer, lights or sound could all initiate cues that would have visible repercussions on the other parties was not fully developed. I wanted to get away from the typical composite staging of all elements working towards a unified vision moment to moment. I rather wanted to see each have a degree of independence. In order to make this visible some clear stages building up to the complex system that it has become need to be made clear.

Something else that needs to happen is to go further into choreography. Here are some photos from rehearsals the other day. Yes it does look like dance. We have to persevere with the rather C-list material we have been given and arrive at a genuinely interesting physical staging of the ideas as that is a very significant part of the performance. In these photos Kayja is attempting to perform two dances at the same time: the leg movements of The Papaya with the upper body movements of Agadoo. The result is, strangely enough, like neither. This hybrid has its own ethereal quality.

Work In Progress Show

Yesterday was the first time we went public with any of this material and as such it was a revealing moment. I was nervous in that way that can happen when there is genuine uncertainty as to how it will turn out: it could go well it could turn very bad. Fortunately it was more the former than the latter and there is now enough of a sense that this is a show that will sustain itself and not just some sort of provocative one trick pony type of performance. We will have to continue to be involved in choreography in order to develop the show, as it will not rest as an ironic commentary on things we don't care much about. It has already pushed me into unknown territory in terms of my actions as a performer, I believe there will be further surprises in store.

One curious thing I found myself saying after the show was this. I was asked, why did we choose those songs and dances? My reply was, it was not us who chose, it was the show that more or less made the decision. I will explain the logic behind this elsewhere but this is a running theme so it should be pointed out now.

Getting Started: Agadoo

Hello, this is the first posting for this blog following the performance Indifference and as such I feel a duty to EXPLAIN what it is, why it is, where, how it is and what it will be. Needless to say I will not nor cannot do that. Instead I will simply drop into the middle of it and we will have to work out where we are as we go along.

Today will be the first day of rehearsals at the Nightingale in Brighton. We have just come from London where we were last week working at Chisenhale Dance Space. Katja and I will resume our dancing and philosophising to music that should have died a natural death a while ago but which we have brought back into the spotlight only to have it manipulated, speeded up, slowed down, pulled one way and another by the ever inventive James Dunn. Neither Katja nor I are trained dancers, though we both are experienced performers and can learn complicated sequences so the results are quite curious. It is as if the dance is used as a way to show the person rather than the person the vehicle to show the dance.

Here is the original Agadoo:

This was Black Lace's biggest and most distinctive hit from 1984. Like the other music we are working with, I never touched it at the time as it was about collective choreography, which seemed to me as an adolescent boy, the most desperately uncool thing imaginable. I am sure I have been to British wedding receptions and heard this playing and seen grannies and children getting up and following the movements. In a culture that supposedly values the individual so highly it is curious that there remain these group dances for amateurs that are not folkloric but contemporary. It is these dances that we are inspired by and it is only now with the distance of time and the filter of art that I can come to appreciate them and find something in them that completely passed me by first time round.