Lab artistic director- Ana Sanchez-Colberg


Ana Sánchez-Colberg is artistic director of Theatre enCorps, Coordinator of the dance department at DEREE- The American College of Greece and Professor of Choreography and Composition, University Dance and Circus.  Ana also acts as the main mentor and director of the Lab.

For more on Ana see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ana_Sanchez-Colberg   and to see Theatre enCorps work go to: 
http://theatreencorps.blogspot.com/p/about-company.html

You can access most of Ana's written/published work through this site.

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Four labs.  Incredible.  I made it my personal challenge not to let it be one more of those things that disappears 'because of the crisis', we hear that a little bit too often around these parts of the world. Four labs.  To each I have arrived from a very different place, with different questions, different proposals, different ways of doing.

This time, I arrive at the lab after a year that has seen little studio time, little writing time, little creative time, luckily lots of reading time, enormous amounts of planning time (which means desktop time) for things/events that are still waiting to take full form, hanging on a delicate balance between 'it will be' and 'its not going to happen'.  This year I/we have seen a great deal of both. This year I became fifty.  It weighs.

I come into the lab with not just one theme, but a few intertwining ones, perhaps this space of one month that I have opened may allow me to see how they are interconnected, mutually supportive, my way of making sense of the otherwise seemingly chaotic juggling.  This is not about an exposition of my choreographic method, that is in the works (if I dare echo Pina's advise to me way back in 1984).  This page is about thoughts on choreographic practice generally within the context that we find ourselves in.  I will not say crisis, when in the history of the world has there not been one or another crisis? 'Crisis' has always been there, we were simply anesthetised to it.

Theme one: 
As I develop the lab and grow in confidence (and trust) of its structure, I begin to understand more and more my role as facilitator.  When I speak of this I don't only mean the fact that I have been able to facilitate the event, but actually how I facilitate the day to day, the orchestration of multiple expectations, of diverse and unpredictable ups and down of the participants individual and shared experiences.  I guess I have finally understood Lefevbre's concept of rhythmanalysis.  This has been an incredible humbling experience, finding when I need to take centre (at times it is necessary) and when I must disappear into the walls and just watch, record and archive for them, so they have something concrete, material to return/take with them after the lab is finished, prompt, softly (or sometimes forcibly) tweak things, just let it happen, offer no opinion, let it be.  If there is a choreographic method, it is precisely this one, made present in the actual bodies of my work since I began to elaborate with Kiriakos Spirou the series 'Corpus' (and its predecessors in Mahler's Fifths 2004-5, and 45,46,47 The Unbearable).  This is 'the work', the creative thing that I am doing, it is [a] work as much as any work of dance, equally ephemeral, equally transformative.  

Perhaps I am now able to articulate with more clarity  past attempts at making connections between choreographic practice and what Van Manen (2009) speaks of as a pedagogy of reflective practice; realising that this is not just about the moment of teaching, but in fact about the very nature of the work of art, with the proposal that choreographic process/acts are inherently reflective. In this instance reflection does not refer only to the act of 'thinking back', but the constant reflective feedback loop at the very heart of choreographic making/performance/reception (the triadic perspective of Dance and the Performative 2002).  The extension of the proposal now lies in seeing this as a process of becoming in and through  participation in the process (again I see the act of witnessing/spectator as one of process), not merely a triadic semiotic chain.

How is this 'reflectivity' in operation? According to Dewey, one of the earliest proponents, reflection, particularly reflection-in-action includes "perplexity, confusion, doubt' when faced with the new and yet unknown (which will become known throughout the process).  He describes it as 'thinking on your feet' (I  can but think that this describes precisely what we do as dance practitioners) and is further defined by "conjectural anticipation and tentative interpretation" en route to knowing "what we are about when we act.  Converting action which is merely appetitive, blind and impulsive into intelligent action".  I propose therefore, that it is not a hypothesis of the thing and its making (choreographic/dance making) but a hypothesis of us-through-the-thing (hypothesising our human-ness), we are not hypothesising a new theory of art, we are hypothesising myself /ourselves as subject(s). Perhaps this is why I never liked referential/structuralist theories of art. Hence I have begun using the term  choreographic act, in the Arendtian sense (a recurrent theme), a hypothesis of who and what we are in an through our deeds; through this strange but also tangible deed called dance/performance/choreography -which is not an alternative reality, but a peculiar one- yet as important in my subject constitution as each birthday.  When I use the word act, I don't  mean the postmodern method of 'doing actions', but embracing the full philosophical meaning of the term to act through which humans become participants (not mere existents) in the world. (For a full exposition of this see An(n)a Annotated:  A Critical Journey, 2002).

All this has given further clarity to elaborate the specificity of a choreographic acts practice(s); why we must ensure choreographic acts remain at a time when the 'crisis' has reverted so many to a mere state of existence,  whereby the uncertainty of a future has led to the increase of immediate gratification of 'blind appetites', void of any sense of personal/collective historicity (by that I mean simply, every man for himself, no matter the impact/effect). You see it in the city on a day to day basis, in the simplest acts of every day living:  I must get into the trolley first -even if I interrupt everyone else and create a delay-  I must amass more money just for myself, I cannot give anything 'freely' as this means I am losing out, I will shout in the middle of a public space without consideration to others, I will destroy the environment as I don't care what happens in the future as I will not be here then, I will deface, break, destroy that which is not mine as I cannot control my (juvenile / male?) anger (called anarchism by those who want to make a deathly tantrum sound important)... τέλος πάντω... In this scenario the potential transformative effect of arts processes has become a moral imperative.   For me  the choreographic transformation of bodied subject in their space and time defines the particular and unique contribution dance/choreographic practice can make.  However, I don't want this to remain a purely utopian sentiment, how does this [choreographic act] become a pragmatic methodology towards personal/social transformation?

[Note: Are we allowed to speak of 'ethical' of moral imperatives without being accused of being orthodox or 'old fashioned'?  We need to bring ethics back to the discussion of art processes. Do we even know what it actually means, and consequently what it means to apply this to life  Oh dear four years in Greece and I becoming Neo-platonic, I can hear Karalis laughing in the background.  Discussion of this has begun within a theatre context see Nicholas Ridout Theatre and Ethics that deals with issues of form rather than the ethical 'content of theatre'; although it cannot be transferred 100% to dance practice it offers food for thought].

Somehow this is related to something Kurt Jooss said.  Kurt Jooss, Pina's teacher and the man who made one of the most political works in the history of political works (The Green Table, 1932) stated, in a BBC Interview in 1955, that 'now' in his 70+ years of life, he realised he had been wrong, art does not change the world.  Rather art changes people who are then capacitated to understand that the world needs to be changed, and it is up to them.  Perhaps what I am trying to propose is the manner in which choreographic acts / knowledge and training/engagement with process-focused choreographic art gives tools and skills to first understand the nature of the situation (what in my process I call the physical conditions of 'the moment'), adapt/take a position/or understand one's position within the field and set out to effect that very change.


[Memory note: As I write this I remember the day that John Ashford asked me whether I was ready to leave teaching to become a real artist.  It was the reception after receiving the 1997 Bonnie  Bird Award for Choreography.  I said he could not ask me to do that, one dependent on the other. That single statement probably defined my career.  Today I realise as I begin to draw these strands together -doing/teaching- that notwithstanding the battles for recognition that came by having disassociated myself from the powers that be so openly, I said the right thing.  I did say earlier fifty weighs].

11.30 am Phone rings, it is Andreas (Dyrdal).  Have to stop to go meet him.

but so that I don't forget, I will elaborate further reflective practice, sustainability and dance, more on the workshops themselves.

Hopefully I will be able to be back to these in a few hours...Last time I said that in the 2011 blog...it never happened.
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7.07pm back to this. I hope I can resume the thread...

Choreography as reflection-in-action...as 'tact-ful' action.  Actually I don't have to expand so much on this, I have already done so in the paper given as part of the Narrativity in Dance Conference in Patras 2009.  However, brought to bear on current thinking, this 'tact' for me has become a kind of decision making based on touching and moulding, "an active intentional consciousness of thoughtful human interaction" at the moment when the interaction happens. There is no 'distancing', and therefore we are called upon to see motive (intention), causes and effect at the moment of their occurrence.  This awareness (on the moment), leads to modify/choose a course of action "tensed with a certain ....thinkingly acting" (Van Manen's mash up term, not a typo, perhaps what I constantly refer to when choreographing/facilitating as 'thinking physically') in order to act upon.  There is no 'losing myself' in the dance, an unrestricted expressionism that I have never subscribed to, and hence why I have always been highly critical of Fraleigh's phenomenology (being one with the dance' what the f****  does that mean, at fifty you allow yourself to curse like a drunken sailor....)  back to the point.


But precisely what is acted upon in the act of choreograph(y)ing?  For me, and I have tried to elaborate this in previous writings and blogs, what is acted upon is the specificity of knowing ourselves as participants in the world through  'tact-fully' engaging with the fact that as humans we are subject/material and tool of each others' world. That shaping of embodied time and space (and its political and historical implications) is what choreography is uniquely placed to 'deal with', and through the act of choreography to understand the enormous task that is to 'shape' (and I am using that word poetically not reductively to actually making someone make a shape) the time and space, of myself and others, and furthermore, understand the consequence, fragility, responsibility of such act. It implicates us and complicates us, to echo back on the title shared by two distinct pieces done in 2005-07.  Music cant quite do that, (although Kiriakos Spirou working with music and dance is trying!) definitely not painting, new technology  is abstracting this notwithstanding the ease of communication possible.  All these are still acting upon a field that is to some level metaphoric or in the case of new technologies alienating, only choreography brings it to the realm of the concrete, this body and not another. 

Perhaps, unknowingly, what I have arrived at is the proposal that choreographic acts may not make a concrete object but it is definitely a concrete experience (does it need to be objectified to have worth).  Time to rethink this cliché of choreography's ephemerality only because it does not produce a thing.  Perhaps that is our uniqueness, to impact on world and others as a thing that is no-thing.  Reads like something out of Lewis-Carroll, I can live with that paradox.  I like it , this thing-that-is-no-thing...  will let it play in my brain for a while.

So from this thing that is a 'no-thing', to sustainability.   But that will be tomorrow. 
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Tomorrow became the day after the day after the day after tomorrow.... In this time, Andreas has arrived.  The workshops have been an interesting and intense workshop on thinking/writing our practice, define it as a series of proposals.  The conclusion of the workshop will be an elaboration of individual 'statements' of practice.  Interesting to see if and how this will then be silently embedded in the physical practice/working the work of the labbers.  I sit in the corner and witness.   The timing couldn't have been better, time to consider this just as we had established an embryonic material exploration within my workshops....  But this was meant to be about another topic...


SUSTAINABILITY
The journey that has led me to embrace issues of 'sustainability' in my practice(s) goes back to the process that led to the creation of the solo Holds no Memory, a collaboration with Swedish choreographer Efva Lilja done between 2005-2006.  At the time the question was circumscribed by the need to find new ways to continue to dance when the basic resource of this practice - my body - was entering the 'critical' state of 'aging' (as normatively construed).  Part of the process ( shall I mention funded by the ACE)  involved engaging with a series of groups who were dealing with the subject of motility and aging.  I met with numerous dancers/choreographers who were now either retired or thinking of doing it.  I was terrified by the constant narrative of loss, not just of ability but loss of a place 'in the world - a kind of death before death-.  This was just not an option for me, I decided to eliminate this  even as a vague possibility, it ceased to exist in any thought of the/my future, it was not part of my universe.  The solo shocked many, was received in awe by others - I both love it and hate it....Then a move to Athens, an soon after that 'the crisis' hits.  So now I am in a double axial state of crisis, not only of myself at the microcosm of my practice, but at the macro level, of sustaining a/any dance practice.  To be in Athens then (and still now) is to witness on a day to day basis, a country, 'a people' losing their sense as a 'nation ', internally and externally. Yet I chose to stay here for reasons beyond what will be expressed in this seemingly extrovert yet not full expository blog.

So, sustainability, what is it?  Contrary to some thinking, sustainability goes beyond notions of 'greening the planet'.  David Orr (2002) suggests:
The dialogue about sustainability is about a change in the human trajectory that will require us to rethink old assumptions and engage in large questions of the human condition…the things that cannot be sustained are clear....the ongoing militarization of the planet along with its greed and hatred, a world of a desperate number of poor, the perpetual enlargement of the human estate, the unrestrained development of any and all technology, world divided by narrow , exclusive intense alliances to ideology or ethnicity, unrestrained automobility, consumption…the barriers to sustainability are not so much scientific and technological as they are social, political and psychological (Orr, 2002, p. 1457).

Orr's statement poses a challenge to the arts, and in particular the performing arts, we seem to be guilty of all the ‘unsustainable’ sins: divided by small allegiances, consuming with no return, validating arts practices only in terms of the untenable global –the sin of the international festival- whilst undervaluing (and underfunding) the local, training new practitioners to seek only the value of their work (of themselves) in the arts market, not educating for the purpose of creating a better individual, whose contribution to society is marked by operating from the stance of the arts whilst engaging with much more than selling tickets and being on tour.

My thinking/doing began to crystalize a proposal as to how choreographic practice taken as ‘the working out and working through of utopian, nevertheless ‘real’, social relations.’ (Hewitt 2005) may contribute to current debates about sustainable futures.  I propose that if I follow my thinking first exposed in An(n)a Annotated 2004 that within the arts choreography (and dance) offer a unique position in  as much as the body is simultaneously-  subject, subject of, material, tool and terrain.  Therefore, notions of the 'choreographic body' may delineate a particular terrain (an embodied situation) of thinking/doing where three separate areas of discussion –  systems of social organization and governance,  consumption and distribution of resources, together with notions of individual choice and affect may be brought together under the heading of sustainable futures of dance, in dance through dance.  If 'choreography' defines the ‘purposeful configuration of body, space and movement’ (Sánchez-Colberg (1999), (2002), (2004), (2008), (2009), Kozel (2008), Gabriele Klein 2010), choreography therefore is best posed as a laboratory to explore cause and effect on three of the major elements of any discussion of sustainability - body that consumes resources but is also itself a resourced consumed by other aspects of production), space -the utilization/making of space(s), and time (the time given, the time taken, time as a particular commodity).


Sustainability therefore became about transforming the critical conditions around me into a possible 'way forward', a way forward that given my commitment to pedagogy could not just 'be for me', but had to (by necessity and force), include 'others'.  Pedagogy of tact acquired pragmatic relevance at this poin, shaping an moulding creative conditions, through the facilitation of resources of time/space for new critical engagement with dance practice (curating three major festivals in the UK from my dinning room table together with Helen Shute -where we beg, stole and refurbished from every major venue in London was indeed good practice).  Artistically, this process of transformation was called 45,46,47 The Unbearable (meaning that which could no longer be sustained), and again, I will not repeat what Kiriakos Spirou says better than me about that process (in the essay previously hyper linked).  At the level of my wider practice, the search for sustainability became one of facilitation on a large scale:  how could spaces -- non antagonistic, participatory places of difference -- be opened (by me- by what I now know I can do sometimes by smiling and being nice, fluttering my eyebrows and wearing make-up and others by fighting tooth and nail, chopping heads off and not suffering fools gladly as dancer Karl Schappell once said of me).  Spaces (actual and mental) that could be opened with the primary intention to nurture a re-evaluation (both at the level of the personal artistic and of notions of 'industry' or 'a discipline' or a 'practice' as a whole), places to dialogue as a means to rearticulate not just the 'what' (a political thematization of dances/practices - which actually tend to radicalise very little) but more importantly the 'how' and 'why' of dance practice(s).  This took multiple shape:  in the creation of the research programmes for new circus (a new practice) in the University of Dance and Circus Stockholm, in the collaborations with CoDa 21 to create various projects towards life-long-learning of professional/veteran dance artists in Puerto Rico, and here in Greece, the redesign of the dance area at DEREE-the American College of Greece to create learning structures that reflect in a more realistic way the way in which dance happens nowadays, which requires much more than mere dancing,  and the establishment of the Lab.  The lab has been nothing short of miraculous ... more later....