The
Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is sponsoring the symposium MAKING TIME: Art Across Gallery, Screen, and Stage
taking place from April 19-21, 2012. Participants have been invited to
respond
to the prompt “what does the phrase 'time-based art' mean to you?” in
advance of the event. This posting is by Joe Goode, Professor of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies at UC Berkeley.
Dance has been traditionally perceived as a time based form.
The conventional wisdom is that a dance should have a beginning, a middle, and
an end. Merce Cunningham disrupted this to some great degree by corrupting the
linearity of sequence in his dances. Chance processes allowed shards of the
dance to appear and disappear at different times. He also went a great distance
to getting dance out of the proscenium box and into spaces that were more level
with the viewer (museums, warehouses, studios). I think there is another
generation of dancemakers on the scene now who are taking dance into a more
site specific realm where the viewer can be volitional and move as he or she
chooses through the space in search of a very individual perspective on the
dance. In this type of work there can be a sense of discovery and participation
which I find truly exciting.
My own attraction to site work stems from my desire to offer
small narrative fragments, snapshots if you will, that suggest a larger
context, but never spell it out. Depending on the order in which these
“close-ups” are viewed, the viewer may construct many different narratives.
Again, this relinquishes a kind of control of authorship that I like. It
demands that the viewer bring his/her own intuitive power into play. The story
is not the important thing, the individual perception of the story is what
matters.
For example: In 2009, I did an installation at the Old Mint
in San Francisco (Traveling Light). The viewer roamed through vaults and
chambers of the building discovering little narrative threads that were somehow
related to the site. Some of the text was inspired by Edna Ferber’s wonderful
book, So Big, about the sea change in
America in the early twentieth century, where we went from an agrarian culture
to an industrialized one. Many of the sites within the building were inhabited
with snapshots of a newly minted capitalist mentality as it was just beginning
to burgeon and spread. Because the building offered so many different types of
spaces, from elegant balconied reception halls to dark steel clad vaults, there
were many textures to draw from. It was a delicious smorgasborg for an artist
looking to offer a fractured narrative. As it was the peak of the financial
melt down in the US, I felt I had hit the jackpot when I procured this site.
Two days before the opening of Traveling Light, Merce died. I was being interviewed about the show
by a local television station and I had a sudden realization- what I was
making, even with all its narrative trappings, was a salute to Merce, the great
pioneer. Without his courageous disregard for the conventions of time and how
dance “ought” to be viewed, I would never have arrived at this place.
I am eager to see where dance making can go in the next few
years. None of the cutting edge choreographers that I know are very much
interested in making work for the stage. And everyone seems to be looking for that
key to a more engaged participation of the viewer. Certainly, we will all be
following in Merce’s footsteps to some degree- looking at “time” and what it
means and how it can be reconfigured.
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