Paul Taylor & Albert Camus come to mind watching Black Grace in New Zealand.

 I have to admit that I am better at paraphrasing than quoting, so I won't attempt to give you a word for word rendering here. But... Taylor was known for saying, and I have heard it from him directly, that if he got sixty percent of what he imagined in his mind from from his dancers, he accepted he was doing okay. Of course, the more important question is what was Taylor's standard percentage unit of artistic achievement for any given dance. LOL. I rely on the desire to see more than fifty percent of my expectations to assure myself, that I am doing okay in my role of building on Taylor's legacy for the current dancers and future generations in the dance field.

Thinking about the sub-culture out of which modern and contemporary dance was born, I often refer back to a quote from Albert Camus (I looked it up online, so I apologize if my quote is incorrect, but the sentiment is what I remember), "The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion." 

Black Grace: If Ever There Was A Time photo: Jinki Cambronero

Performances are running of this Double Bill with Paul Taylor's Esplanade and Neil Ieremia's world premiere If Ever There Was A Time. The contrasts are undeniable when looking at these two dances, and critics have been generously favorable in this vision of what Black Grace Dance Company aspires to bring to stages world wide as it completes its thirtieth anniversary of existence. From my perspective, it is amazing how similar the genesis of these works are in looking to express a cross section of a cultural zeitgeist through watching dancers move, and the worlds they create by their relationships to each other, and sometimes in counterpoint to each other. The look and sound of each dance is so radically different, that it seems to make little sense for me to describe them here. I will link to a couple of reviews below for you to read how local audiences might be responding to the dances in performance.

New Zealand Arts Review, Andrew Whiteside - blog review.

There is something fascinating about the idea of how an audience with different cultural references might view what is considered "pedestrian", and yet so much of American Modern Dance post 1950's has coined that term to imply a universal coding of "everyman" movement. Taylor's Esplanade is intended to be pedestrian (in the universal sense), yet some of his group patterns and impetus for locomotion or gesture are not as universal as one might think. Fortunately, Taylor's genius lay in crafting work that can transcend the unfamiliar, for attentive audiences. And viewers here in New Zealand have been infinitely curious and appreciative seeing Black Grace perform Taylor. 

But where I started this post is in considering how dance in the hands of Taylor and Ieremia is exceptionally detailed in their conceptions and subversive by their very existence. Both choreographic works on this program are intended to comment on how we look at and question the social environments in which we live. For Esplanade, the initial reaction is typically the joyful, romantic, playful nature of much of the dance. Yet there is a dark and profoundly tragic second movement that underpins the joy of the other sections, and without which the dance loses its realism that joy is a contrast to grief. For If Ever There Was A Time there is an equivalent sense of hope in the face of striving and despair without falling into melodrama, and Black Grace's audiences get that immediately.

I cannot know how far my contributions to the field of dance performance in New Zealand and beyond will ripple out. Yet I have seen the benefits to many young dancers around the world in every project in which I have had the privilege to engage with the support of Fulbright and the World Learning teams. I will forever be grateful for the Fulbright Commissions that have embraced dance amongst its Arts support, for myself alongside others of my peers whom have applied based on my example.

This blog (FNZdance25.blogspot.com) is not an official site of the Fulbright Program or the U.S. Department of State. The views expressed on this site are entirely those of its author (Richard Chen See) and do not necessarily represent the views of the Fulbright Program, the U.S. Department of State, or any of its partner organizations.