Dance as an Collaborative Art

…Yea, I really cannot get enough of performance based arts. Because I have not had an incredible amount of experience in performance art, everything I find and explore has an enlightening appeal to it - much like if one was to uncover lost treasure. Although I might be partially exaggerating this wave of feelings that I get.

But seriously now, all these posts I have mentioned had to do with collaborated arts in which people speak face to face. What about if they didn’t? What if they didn’t speak face to face in the sense that no spoken word is communicated? What I would like to introduce is a collaborative art that is less vocally direct - dance. Dance as a form of collaborative art; an art in which communication is in the form of body movements.

Body language is often overlooked as people tend to put more meaning into spoken language. This is pretty much expected in that words are often more definable and give a solid explanation. Although it is tough to find the right words that a performer wishes to speak with the body, it certainly adds another level of connection with the audience. When one views the intricate movements played out by the dancers, our minds are put to work to make sense of it all. Even when there are no words, people are generally intuitive as to the emotions that are trying to be explained in such gestures.

What I enjoy about having a less direct form of communication such as the spoken language, is that body language leaves it to the viewer to interpret what is being said. And when it comes to interpretation, it is based off one’s own culture, background, experiences, etc. Thus, every interpretation is different. So when people explain a work of art or a performance in a straightforward explanation, it probably isn’t entirely true or entirely complete. Art is what you personally make of it.

Anyway, I just wanted to highlight an interesting dance group. They are called “China Disabled People's Performing Art Troupe”. This was partly why I was interested in exploring dance as a collaborated art and the connection that is formed between the performers without words. These performers are all hearing impaired so they do not communicate with the song played in the background – rather, they communicate with one another through the movements made prior to theirs. It was really amazing and inspiring to see their triumph over their disability and that they could do something so intricate through movements.

Flash Mobs

The preconceptions of art are pretty vested in the idea that it is an activity based soley on individual actions. Performance based art emerged and soon became a celebration of collaboration.

One of these mentioned arts is flash mobs - an example in which art deconstructs the stereotype that was created out of traditional art. Similar to Improv Everywhere, flash mob is a performative piece. A flash mob is an event in which a large number of people congregate at a certain place and perform a named activity for a certain amount of time. After completion of the named activity, the participants disperse as if nothing happened.

Flash mobs were first created by Bill Wasik in 2003. At first, the intentions of flash mobs were purely experimental. The socio-cultural experiment that was being conducted was to explore the psychological "needs" of people to fit into a particular "identification" - also known simply as conformity.

The idea that people would do something entirely ridiculous, such as having a world pillow fight, would invite many others to join. People are more willing to do these socially and cultural unacceptable acts when there is encouragement from a group. It’s all part of the sheep mentality – finding your flock to mingle with. I feel this experiment was a good way of bringing attention to the idea of how people react in social situations, especially since it gives a personal insight to analyze oneself.

Anyway, as this experimentation played out, it became more of a trend and part of an underground subculture. Although its intentions were to mock the idea of conformity, flash mobs took an unexpected turn and ironically, people embraced it. The Vancouver Sun wrote, "It may have backfired on him... [Wasik] may instead have ended up giving conformity a vehicle that allowed it to appear nonconforming." Flash mobs became popular for being “unconformist” and turned into a huge performative art venture.

Flash mobs, Improv Everywhere, and other collaborative based works in which random participants join, build a sense of community. In due time, they will perhaps, break the social and cultural barriers that dictate how a person acts when confronted by a total stranger. These norms tell us that we should be rigid, in our place, and “normal”. These sort of barriers tend to keep us from say, turning our head on the bus to talk to a stranger. I deal with this type of harsh mentality too – the kind where you create a space between you and a stranger. Perhaps part of the paranoia stems from the fact that the media tends to inflict a certain amount of fear. The fear of “don’t take candy from strangers” because the media tends to exaggerate the amount of kidnappings, rapes, and etc, that really happen in the world.

People fail to realize that we are all similar beings. We have favorite foods, favorite bands, and stuff like that. With these flash mobs and Improv Everywhere, I feel as if any conversation or word spoken between random strangers is a nice triumph over the spaces that society’s “norms” have shaped for us. I guess we all just have to start looking at people from a different perspective, such as how similar we are as opposed to how different.

I think I may be starting to go off to a tangent now.

IE: "We Cause Scenes"

... And so you ask yourself, "what are a bunch of half-naked, dashing young men laying on a field of the greenest grass?" These are Improv Everywhere "agents", and they most certainly caused a scene when they herded their bare-chested bodies into an Abercrombie and Fitch store in an attempt to manifest the brand's media image.

Created in the spirit of performance art, Improv Everywhere is a prime example in which this Collaborative Arts blog praises: art works that revolve around communication, interaction, reaction, and most of all, FUN!

But down to the facts: Improv Everywhere started in the year of 2001 in New York City by Charlie Todd, an improv-based comedian of the Upright Citizens Brigade. Todd sets up a "mission" that participants (anyone who wants to participate) meet up for at a set time and place. The number of participants can start with one up to a hundred-eleven participants. Most of the time it is on a grand scale for the amazement factor. After congregating, Todd finally tells them what they have to do. Improvisation occurs - and then the laughter ensues.

Some of the most notable missions include:


BEST BUY:

- This is where 80 participants dressed up as Best Buy employees and entered a Best Buy and browsed the aisles. A lot of confusion - keep the audience guessing and on their toes.


Frozen Grand Central:
-By far one of my most favorite missions that I have seen. This video clearly shows the interaction and reactions of the audience that IE elicits.

I think Improv Everywhere has created an exciting image for performance art. It is especially pleasant that anybody can sign up to participate and have a light humor in, as opposed to conceptual artists who perform on critical notions. There are other sorts of performance art that are similar to IE - they'll be mentioned later in the week.


There are over 70 missions that have been executed. If you'd like to see more, videos are posted on the IE website.

The Happening

..no, this Happening is not M Night Shyamalan's apocalyptic film about an infectious pandemic of a suicidal neurotoxin.

The Happenings I speak of is a type of performance art event that started sometime in the late 50's. What happens in a Happening (I enjoy being redundant. sort of) is that a crowd of people congregate at a specified location and perform either planned or improvised actions. The locations and actions always changes. Happenings were created to put an emphasis on action as art; According to the Museum of Contemporary Art website: "action is extracted from the environment, replacing the traditional art object with a performative gesture rooted in the movements of everyday life".

The really cool thing about a Happening is that many, many people participate so that at any given time, there is always an action taking place - even if someone needs to take a bathroom break. I really enjoy how interactive it is as the experience changes with each participant and their specified action and the viewer of the participant's action.

Just to give an example of how trendy a Happening was back in the 50's - Wikipedia stated that: "In the later sixties, perhaps due to the depiction in films of hippie culture, the term was used much less specifically to mean any gathering of interest, from a pool hall meetup or a jamming of a few young people to a beer blast or fancy formal party."



I'll think between the lines whenever I ask people, "What's Happening?".