I designed this class, “How Movement Makes Meaning,” (HMMM) to interact with Trajal Harrell’s residency at the NYUAD Art Center as he develops a new work called O Medea. I am extremely grateful for a continued partnership with The Arts Center at NYUAD, for this is now the second time The Arts Center has supported a semester long collaboration with an NYUAD J-term class. “How Movement Makes Meaning” is designed to interface with the resident artist, and it is much different from the first incarnation of the class in 2018, for it follows the current preoccupations of artist who shares her or his creative process with the class. So what you see here in this digital dossier is the result of a lot of careful coordination and also much thrilling improvisation. We start the class with a loose structure because the course is based on the premise that the most important material in the room are the people who are engaged in the work; we make meaning from how students and professional artist absorb and share knowledge by expressing it through their bodies in a collaborative environment.
And what is this thing called dance dramaturgy? Why is a prominent concept in the title of this course? It is because the class moves through different kinds of engagement with dance and movement in order to study choreography as a phenomenon and as a means of embodied somatic knowledge and expression. Dance studies professor Katherine Profeta said that a dramaturg has moves too. (Clearly we are finding out that everyone has moves!) The dramaturg occupies a position between being inside and outside the production, sometimes jumping in to dance with the dancers, and other times watching the creation process from afar. Profeta teaches us that we can choreograph how we observe life and art, and she argues that closer engagement engenders intimacy with the artist while other times a critical distance becomes useful in order to see how the overall artwork coheres and develops an expressive form and structure.
This class follows Profeta’s lead. We danced with Ondrej Vidlar, the rehearsal director for Trajal Harrell’s production of O Medea, and one of his longtime dancer/collaborators. We traveled to Varanasi, a holy city in India, that has been a creative inspiration for Trajal Harrell as he pursues his research on the practice of Butoh and thinks about how “the dead can dance in the living.” And the students in class learned about some twentieth-century important historical dance movements, including the Judson Post-Moderns, Voguing and Harlem Ball subculture, contemporary European conceptual dance, and Butoh dance. We choreographed our own dances that were imaginative encounters between the ideas posited by these historical cultural movements. We also made our own interpretations of Harrell’s dance propositions and brought other cultural texts, like Euripides Medea, into our choreography. If you look closely, sometimes you might see a fleeting glance of a recognizable movement, but mostly we learned to abstract ideas that inspired earlier choreographers’ work and then filter that through each of our own unique perspectives. Daily dancing, reading, writing and observing helped us to better understand the ways in which dance can negotiate different meanings of time and mortality. For me, it’s comforting to know that our class has had the opportunity to dance a short collective moment with one another, and with Trajal, Ondrej, and the incredible company of O Medea, at NYUAD, here in this beautiful Arts Center.
Please enjoy this book. There are many ways to produce knowledge. We’ve found that dancing allows us entrée into the most incredible worlds.