John Jasperse’s rehearsal was an enlightening experience. In it, I got to see how the dancers related to the choreographer, and the influence that both of those parties share on the dance itself; I got to see them change things slightly such as the positioning of a foot, or the tilt of a head; I got to experience the effect of the changing music accompaniment. These were all of extreme interest to me but I want instead to analyze and interpret what I saw, coming back to the others if there is room.
Jasperse went into the choreography session with an agenda, past his plans to tweak certain parts of the dancers physically, he had an overall goal of trying to mimic the concepts of emergence. His reasoning for doing so was that it was creative and synthesizing rather than combative and sparring. What is meant by this is that typically people’s art is representative of a certain way of seeing that is unique to the artist, who in turn considers his way of seeing, unique; this artist can bring the things that he sees into his own unique perspective. In establishing this new perspective the artist inherently creates his art combatively, proving why it should be considered right.
Jasperse considers an emergent dance to be more creative than a thesis-dance, where one is persuading someone to their side; and rightfully so, Jasperse is trying to evoke the spirit of something completely intangible and unknown to him. Essentially Jasperse is playing god by trying to create something out of nothing.
With this being his goal though, Jasperse fell short of attaining it. The concept of emergence can be explained as a new level in the general hierarchy with new properties that are obtained through the previous hierarchy. In using only two dancers, I don’t see how Jasperse has enough building blocks to make something new. Furthermore, Jasperse moves the two dancers around together, meaning that they are meant to be seen together, but there is no apparent purpose for their togetherness. Occasionally the two dancers perform the same moves and then continue the flow in similar moves, but neither dancer’s movements enhance or bolster the other dancer’s movements.
The two dancers seem like they should be interacting with one another in some way but the dance makes it seem like they are two individual units dancing two separate dances that happen to be the same choreography, somewhat. I liked the idea of two individual units, lending itself already to the hierarchical structure of emergence, but Jasperse seems to be throwing the building blocks around hoping for chance to create something new.
In fact, that is what he admitted in doing so by mapping out certain movements to each letter of the alphabet and then finding random alphabetical strings of characters to come up with dance movements. In doing this, Jasperse hopes to subvert his own artistic influence, but that seems to me, to defeat the purpose. I think the purpose is not to create something literally out of nothing; it is to create something new and with new properties out of a certain set of building blocks. Jasperse claims that he wants to reach true creativity, which is by creating something new, but I think in removing himself from the equation he doesn’t allow for any forces other than entropy to play on these building blocks, and then this dance changes from a dance on emergence of properties based on previous properties, to a dance on random occurrences – and that’s been done before.
Perhaps Jasperse is randomly throwing the blocks around because he thinks that emergence should come from nothing, and that if the pieces line up right this property will emerge, if only for a split second – this is what I interpreted from him saying that the geisha pose was emergent from the dance. Jasperse is not just the vessel for this project, he needs to have an active hand in its construction, and that is the hard part about playing god: making all the pieces so that they can fit together and then finding out the right way to connect them. Jasperse’s dancers seemed to be two disparate entities, waiting only for the right way to be connected.
