Latvia Part I ... Contemporary Art As I Know It

I do not dance – not well, not professionally, not publicly, not even in most well-lit areas.
I do not know anything about dance in a technical or artistic sense.
I know when I like a dance and when I don't, and sometimes I am even capable of appreciating certain qualitative differences between certain dancers and certain performances.

Sometimes.

Mostly, I just sit quietly in the dark, appreciating the lighting and muttering to my internal dialogue, asking myself what the hell is going on.

Contemporary dance is an especially humbling experience, as I like to imagine that I am a relatively intelligent person with a certain propensity for appreciating the arts.
Unfortunately I must admit to spending most of my time at contemporary performances trying to figure out if everyone in the audience is really that much smarter than me and then attempting to read the mind of whoever it was who invited me to this blasted thing in the first place in a desperate attempt to gauge whether or not the performance is good; whether I should say I like it or not when the lights come back on.

Historically, this person trying to share the wonderful world of contemporary dance with me is Line, my german friend who invited me to visit her up in the cold land of Latvia, where she is working as an intern for a contemporary theatre.
She (the jerk) has spent at least the last 7 years studying contemporary performance arts in a very in-depth and analytical (see "German") way.
She can (and has) watch a performance in which a woman, standing on a chair and wearing a giant black paper-maché balloon as a mask, slowly becomes tangled in stretched ribbons and at the end say "Hmmmmm, I think it was about female sexuality."
Really!?
I was just sitting there trying to decide if the mask was heavy, and if her neck hurt by the end. I was thinking that the lights were kind of nice, but a little poorly timed. Where the heck did anyone say anything about sexuality?

In short, I have experience with Line and theatre, and I have, with time, grown a bit wary of anything she describes as "contemporary."
Given this tendancy to feel like an idiot whenever "contemporary" meets "dance," I was less than stoked to go see the performance at the new theatre where Line's working.
I'd been working all week on posters for them. I'd seen oh-so many pictures of the shows they do and I can garuntee that I would struggle to understand a single one.

But I went. Because she is my friend, and well gosh, the ticket was free.


As it turned out, Line didn't end up sitting with me because she had to work the ticket counter, and the lighting design was pretty underwhelming, so I was left with no choice but to actually contemplate the dance. And you know what? I liked it! And for the first time, I felt like maybe I understood it.

It was kind of beautiful and chaotic in a loose way. There was one piece especially that made me think of human relationships – there's all this flailing about trying to make some sort of contact, and when finally that contact is achieved, it is followed by long stretches of awkward reaching out. Like insect feelers almost, exploring the other person, trying to find meaning, trying to matter, spinning out of control, only to collide again. And from time to time, there are perfectly synchronized moments. Moments when each person is perfectly in time with the other. Moments of sensuality – beautiful and fleeting, and then returning to chaos.

The final piece as well had all three dancers spinning, crashing into one another and then those perfectly choreographed, albeit ephemeral, moments. It made me think of communities – people occasionally leaving their busy schedules and hectic to-do lists and actually just making connections.
It was nice.
It was enjoyable.
And most importantly, I understood it.

After the performance was over, I reunited with Line, feeling so proud that for once I had something to say _ human contact... chaos... sensuality... blah blah blah –
"What did you think?" she asked
"I liked it."
"Well," she said "they seemed really unfocused tonight. This is not my favorite style and..." well crap. There I go.

"The music was cool though. I liked how the guitarist built upon a looped recording."

"Yeah, electric guitar gets used a lot right now in contemporary pieces."

"Hmmm, well, it was nice...?"

"Yeah. It was an easy one."

So there you have it. Finally I understand and relate to a piece of contemporary dance and it's because it was unoriginal and easy.


Sometimes I hate academia.

I'm about one more performance away from writing a diatribe against pretentious contemporary art as the masturbatory and nombrillistic fancies of an under-worked, over-privileged society. You don't see cryptic dances or impossible installations being made by people who have to hold down day jobs.
All of their stuff is pretty straight-forward.