Emergent Meaning: Stable Structures / Shifting Associations

Peggy Baker (2009)

I am fascinated by the fact that dances are created in such random and arbitrary ways; that throughout the creation process choreographers must constantly make choices driven by intuition, experience, logic, taste, habit, chance or circumstance, without really knowing where those choices are leading. Over a span of time, through planning or by chance, through discussions or quiet thought, and most certainly through work in the studio, a dance takes on its unique form according to the accumulation of actions taken and choices made. Knowing when a dance is finished could be based on anything from the choreographer’s hunch to having run out of time to work. Once the choreography is complete, it is considered to be an established structure, and from that point on great efforts are taken to maintain its integrity through the physical and mental precision of the dancers. For its rendering, the finished choreography is completely dependent upon the performers’ embodiment of the movement vocabulary, and their navigation of space and time, all within a prescribed aesthetic.

The content or meaning of a dance emerges in just as mysterious a fashion as the choreography itself. In most cases, the awareness of emergent meaning is only spoken about privately – among a small group of the dancers, or by a dancer with a close friend, by the choreographer and a design collaborator for instance. But unbridled discussions in the studio, especially as part of the rehearsal, have been avoided in almost every dance project I have ever been involved with. Speaking directly about meaning, and grooming one’s performance to communicate a particular and specific meaning, generally does not support the choreographic structure in contemporary dance, because while a dance is stable and definite, the possibilities for meanings it might convey are as numerous as all of the people who will ever see it or be involved in staging and performing it.

The great Montreal choreographer Paul-André Fortier describes all of his choreographies, before they exist, in the same way. He says that they are waiting to be discovered in the studio space and in the bodies of the dancers. Fortier’s works are so precise and uncompromising that it is difficult to imagine him entering into their creation without a perfectly clear idea of what he wants to accomplish and some notion of how he might do that. He trusts that the work in the studio – the exertion, the experiments, what he sees and experiences, responds to and builds on – will result in a strong dance, though he has no idea what that dance might contain. Once on the stage, each of his works gives the impression of being laden with meaning, often complex and disturbing. Doubtless, by the time his dances are performed they have accumulated meaning. The apparent subject matter of his dances, the images he creates and the associations those images conjure, has sparked passionate response and debate by critics, the public, and fellow artists for his entire career.

While each choreographer approaches creation in a unique manner, I think that most of us would say that our dances manifested themselves in unexpected ways as we proceeded with the work of making them and that any meaning they might communicate, even in respect to plot and character, is not as stable or predictable as the steps that make them up. Movement vocabulary, compositional structure and style emerge, are developed, and become established as rehearsals progress. The steps, spacing, and timing provide a stable structure that we identify as the dance. An audience watches the dance, and each individual in that audience perceives it differently, notices different elements, makes their own associations, attaches their own meaning. A second viewing might shift the reading of the dance subtly, or a change of cast alter the reading dramatically, for that same audience member.

Most dancers inside of a choreographic work tend toward believing that the dance’s deepest and most authentic meaning has been revealed to them through their engagement in dancing it, even when the choreographer has not offered any suggestions as to meaning or has warned against investing in a particular meaning. I hazard the opinion that a dancer’s reading of the choreography will be just as subjective and unique as that of an audience member, but that dancers are more likely to commit themselves to a single interpretation over a very long period of time, even for the span of their career.

Meaning can also emerge and impress itself upon choreographers in unexpected ways. In spite of their original intentions they may discover associations in their work that they did not in any way expect. They might purposely encode allusions to their personal life within the dances that are impossible for others to read, or they might discover connections between the dances and their personal lives that they did not intend. They could become attached to particular interpretations of the dances themselves, or suddenly read their own work in new ways through any of the infinite variables that attend their dances – the force of an image that gains clarity or resonance due to a dancer’s shift in musicality, by seeing the work in a smaller or larger space, seeing it lit and costumed, performed by a different cast, by dancers with a different technical training, and on and on.

The beautiful and unsettling irony of the stable choreographic structure producing shifting associations and variations in meaning for everyone who engages with it is one of the greatest glories, deepest mysteries, and truest hallmarks of dance.

Photo credit on Collected Essays - Emergent Meaning:
loin, très loin (2000)
choreographer: Paul André Fortier
dancer: Peggy Baker
photo: Martin Beaulieu