Jennifer Monson: Dancing with Leaves

Posted on September 17, 2006 by pica-blogger

photo credit: Serena Davidson
The smell of mint pervades the room as the dancers swing buckets of wild grasses and play with large rectangles of ultra-light wood that whisper and swish to the floor. This is lovely, and I wish I could say as much about the performance as a whole, but the truth is it lacks cohesion and focus. I’m no dancer, but even I could tell that the dancers were unprepared and under-rehearsed. Someone else on the blog compared them to Tahni Holt’s Monster Squad, which is interesting; I was also comparing them, but noting that while Monster Squad dancers have a rough and hard-hitting movement style, they also have great skill and control over their bodies. In contrast, the performance I saw came across as clumsy and unpracticed. The dancers had no control over the evocative objects they were wielding, which could have been a choice– but expressing a lack of control is very different from actually having no control. In one case, a dancer sent a rolling square of grass across the floor, then ran to try and catch it before it rolled into the legs of audience members (she didn’t reach it in time). In another sequence, all five dancers kicked the aforementioned light-wood flats in the air while laying on their backs, except half of the time the flats fell awkwardly to the floor, and one flat finally broke in half. I am baffled as to why you would incorporate an element into your piece that you do not know how to work with, in the same way I’m baffled as to why you’d attempt to lift another dancer when you are not confident you can pull it off. There were several points where it was clear to me that a dancer had made a mistake and then morphed into another move to cover it up. Was this piece really trying to mimic the flight patterns of birds in non-native environments? What I saw was five people kind of moving like birds and rolling around on the floor a lot. And in one sequence donning tutus and sort of invoking Swan Lake. For no reason that I can fathom, except that swans are birds.
In its defense I will say that a good friend of mine loved it (and perhaps she will comment here as to what she liked). I remain baffled. It reminded me of high school students messing around in someone’s living room, pulling cool looking objects out of the basement and tossing them around, raiding their mom’s closet for costumes. I’m all for bringing work that experiments and doesn’t succeed, that attempts more than it can pull off, or that is working hard to appear unpolished and tossed off, but I couldn’t tell what this piece was going for. And honestly, I’m not sure what PICA was thinking when they added it to the TBA lineup.
But, again, the smell of mint in the room was nice, and the grasses in buckets set a nice tone. And Disjecta is looking good.
– Faith Helma

photo credit: Serena Davidson

photo credit: Serena Davidson

Click here to view more Time Based Art photos by Serena Davidson

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6 Responses to Jennifer Monson: Dancing with Leaves

Lisa Radon says:

September 20, 2006 at 11:18 am

” I am baffled as to why you would incorporate an element into your piece that you do not know how to work with”
I didn’t see this piece, Faith, but your comment brought up the notions of risk and failure for me. One of the things I loved about Vivarium’s use of attempts at flight as a theme (and I may have already mentioned this) is that it makes room for beautiful failure.
In any performance, we take risks. I would argue that better performance takes bigger and more compelling risks. I realize this notion is not new, but I think that the release of control of outcome is a very interesting risk to take: to ask in performance, “what might happen if I do this?” not “how can I do this successfully?”
In my own work, this release of control is problematic because I’m old fashioned enough to cling to a certain responsibility for the experience of the audience member. But I have great respect for the performance scientist who actually conducts a live experiment on the stage (see most improvisational dance and music) allowing for brilliant success and brilliant failure.

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Lisa Radon says:

September 20, 2006 at 11:19 am

” I am baffled as to why you would incorporate an element into your piece that you do not know how to work with”
I didn’t see this piece, Faith, but your comment brought up the notions of risk and failure for me. One of the things I loved about Vivarium’s use of attempts at flight as a theme (and I may have already mentioned this) is that it makes room for beautiful failure.
In any performance, we take risks. I would argue that better performance takes bigger and more compelling risks. I realize this notion is not new, but I think that the release of control of outcome is a very interesting risk to take: to ask in performance, “what might happen if I do this?” not “how can I do this successfully?”
In my own work, this release of control is problematic because I’m old fashioned enough to cling to a certain responsibility for the experience of the audience member. But I have great respect for the performance scientist who actually conducts a live experiment on the stage (see most improvisational dance and music) allowing for brilliant success and brilliant failure.

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Lisa Radon says:

September 20, 2006 at 11:20 am

er. This has happened more than once that I post a comment, get an error message, repost it, then it appears twice. Sorry.
The Doublemint Gum Twins

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Jessica Bromer says:

September 20, 2006 at 5:39 pm

Lisa,
This attempt to post a single comment was a brilliant failure–I love the way you turned it into a joke, while continuing the mint theme introduced by Faith. I hope you leave it as it stands. That said, I’ve had the same problem and have discovered that we, as PICA bloggers, do have the power to delete comments. I don’t want to give away too many Secrets of the Blog, but I’m sure you can figure it out if you explore the blog’s nerve center.
You bring up an interesting point and I agree that work that incorporates the risk of failure can be pretty compelling. Your comments brought to mind the work of Bas Jan Ader, who made several films of himself failing in some way or another–falling off of bicycles, out of trees or off rooftops, or in “I’m too sad to tell you” [1971] simply facing the camera and crying–before his eventual death at sea, at the symbolically loaded age of 33, during a failed attempt to cross the Atlantic alone in small boat, for a performance entitled “In Search of the Miraculous.”
Also compelling: Bruce Nauman’s “Failing to Levitate in the Studio,” Yves Klein’s “Leap into the Void,” Tracy Emin (sometimes). Olympic figure skating and gymnastics, Yubiwa Hotel’s performance in which the women were required (impossibly) to shed clothing, masks and wigs while dancing and snapping their fingers in unison, smoking cigarettes, and best of all, attaching ice cream cones to their heads.
But I agree with Faith’s assessments of Flight of Mind’s failures. The dancers weren’t incorporating the possibility of failure into the piece and willfully exploring it; they were enduring it and trying to cover it up when it happened. It was distracting, and while it did offer some of the same food for thought as “successful” failure art, it didn’t reveal anything about failure (to me) that couldn’t be gleaned from spending ten minutes observing human traffic on the bus mall.

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Faith says:

September 21, 2006 at 3:29 pm

Tracy Emin is a great example of someone who I admire for taking risks, though I’m not sure she always (if ever) “succeeds”. I love it when a great artist risks something and fails, when they tie up my feelings in a way I can’t sort out for days. The singers I like best are pushing their voices past the point where they are in total control, and I find this thrilling, even when their voices break. Great work comes out of pushing yourself past your comfort zone. A figure skater who attempts a very difficult move and falls flat on the ice is often applauded more than the skater who aces an easy program.
All of this is very different, in my opinion, from failure that comes from not pushing enough, from winging it (no pun intended) and hoping it all works out, from walking onto the ice having not sufficiently practiced your routine, and missing a jump and awkwardly trying to cover it up. That is what Flight of Mind looked like to me. Their bodies & movements were uncertain and they used these beautiful, interesting objects clumsily—and not in a way that furthered their piece.
I think an artist owes the audience a bit of preparation and clear boundaries within which to experiment. I’ve been to enough poetry readings where someone gets up and just reads from their journal for forty-five minutes to not have much patience for this kind of risk. I have great respect for improvisational work but it requires MORE skill, more preparation, more concentration, not less.
I don’t know where Jennifer Monson and her dancers fall on this continuum, what their process is, how the created the work and how they approached its performance. But they did not look prepared, and the piece suffered for it. I saw them make some fairly big blunders that made it clear that they were not in control of their bodies, their objects or their choices– and that they were trying to hide this. I would have been fine with less-than-perfect dancing if the piece as a whole spoke to me, or if they had made a strong CHOICE to dance this way— but since they didn’t do these things, I think it’s important to say that it did not succeed.
Making art is inherently a risk. When a piece doesn’t work, we shouldn’t leap like wild dogs and rip it apart for its failure. But neither should we pretend that it did not fail. I wrote and performed in a piece several years ago that in many ways didn’t work. Would I have grown as an artist if everyone patted my head and applauded me for taking risks? I don’t think so. I needed to know which aspects of the work were strong, and which weren’t. Even if it was painful to hear.
I’ve already talked about which aspects of Flight of Mind I thought worked, and which didn’t. I don’t think, because the piece ultimately failed, that Jennifer Monson should be run out of town or never allowed to perform again. If she’s a good artist, she’ll take the feedback in and use it to make stronger work next time.

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