Readers,
When I reached out to a handful of people about this new project, the very first to send me a draft was Ashley Anderson, a choreographer and dance educator I’ve known for more than a decade. I’ve danced in many of Ashley’s pieces over the years and the dry humor evident in her choreography is also present in her writing. My hope is that this short piece she’s written can be the first in a series in which I ask writers to consider how time (or in this case time and technology) has changed their tastes, aesthetic prejudices, and what kinds of art they want to see in the world. I didn’t intend for this piece to be the first thing we published after my introductory letter, but the more I returned to it, the more it felt like a particular artifact of the moment we’re living through that I didn’t want to sit on. So here you go. Enjoy Ashley’s micro-essay, and write to me if you’d like to share your own thoughts “in praise of imperfection.”
Samuel Hanson, Editor
My social media feed often shows me dancing that it believes I want to see. It might sound like a relief to watch dance in between images of global catastrophe, but this is not what I experience. Instead, I am haunted by the feeling that I’m now a stranger to the art form I’ve been participating in for my entire life.
Most of the dances I see when scrolling are in aggressive unison. There is a particular percussive cadence which, when repeated, reaches the point of banality. Faces contort to exaggerate whatever sentiments we are all supposed to be feeling through the glass. The only sensory experience I have is sympathetic pain for some of the repetitive positions that have a stranglehold on the form.
In most of these dances there is an A/A/B structure. “A” is repetitive and quick, followed by the slowly-elongated “B.” I think that B is supposed to stand in for striving and longing, but I know all too soon the A/A will return and the performer will have reached a perfect battement or some other equally precise position. There is meant to be a juxtaposition between striving and attainment, but there is only relentless perfection.
Imagine my relief when an image of Ruth Andrien diving into Nicholas Gunn’s arms re-entered my FYP. Yes, dear reader, it was Paul Taylor’s Esplanade, a dance I’ve seen many times and even disliked, which reminded me what dance can be and what I’ve been missing.
The company’s show notes tell the viewer that esplanade means an outdoor place to walk and that at some point in the mid-seventies, Taylor saw a girl running to catch a bus and was inspired by the found movement — an appropriation of the quotidian aligned with the visual arts practices of the time. Esplanade takes place in five sections, using Bach, and it is the latter section which I saw on Instagram where the dancers run, fall, and leap into one another’s arms over and over and over.
In June 1975, Arlene Croce remarked in The New Yorker, that Esplanade “confers a mythic dimension on ordinary aspects of our daily lives — it’s unfaked folk art. The dancers, crashing wave upon wave into those falls, have a happy insane spirit that recalls a unique moment in American life — the time we did the school play or we were ready to drown at a swimming meet. The last time most of us were happy in that way.”
Yes!
Exactly!
Instead of a uniform artifice standing in for human imperfection, the dancers in Esplanade were, in fact, imperfect on their own. The dancers were actually running, they were actually falling, really risking their partner catching them without the choreographic screw wound up so tight.
The brief clip of Esplanade spoke to me for the reasons it spoke to Croce, it raised itself above the fray as something deeply human and deeply real.
I find that I don’t have much more to say — just that in our quest to mine human experience we have also mined the depths of technical skill, far beyond what is interesting. In praise of imperfection, I invite us to stop the digging and start running, with a real risk of falling.
Ashley Anderson is an artist and educator based in Salt Lake City and recipient of the 2014 Mayor’s Artist Award in the Performing Arts. Her choreography has been presented locally by the Rio Gallery, the BYU Museum of Art, Finch Lane Gallery, the City Library, and the Utah Heritage Foundation, as well as national venues including DraftWork at Danspace Project, Dixon Place, Performance Mix at Joyce SOHO; Crane Arts Gallery, the Arts Bank in Philadelphia; and the Taubman Museum of Art in Virgina, among others. Her work was also presented by the HU/ADF MFA program at the American Dance Festival and The Kitchen in NYC.
She is currently adjunct faculty at the University of Utah, Utah Valley University, and Salt Lake Community College, having taught previously for the American Dance Festival Six & Four Week Schools, Dickinson College Dance Theater Group, University of the Arts Continuing Studies, Westminster College, and many K-12 schools and community centers around the US.