Towards a poetics of restriction
Jung In Jung
​
PhD in Music and Music Technology
Centre for Research in New Music
University of Huddersfield
jungin.j@gmail.com
1.4. The role of the composer and the choreographer (… and my role)
I had an opportunity to present my research at the MSP PowerUser Symposium with two of my collaborating dancers Katerina Foti and Natasha Pandermali, at the University of Huddersfield in 2016. During the Q&A session, one of the audience members asked whether my collaborative compositional way changed who the choreographer was in my work, as typically the composer made the music and the choreographer made the choreography. My dancers answered that making choreography was everyone’s job, and explained our working process: “We try, we find ways, and we propose things … It’s always this relationship and collaborative. But [Jung In] had the idea and her concept, but we had to propose things” (Audio 1.1, Listen 5:52–7:00). Next, another audience member asked, “I’m looking for a very simple answer. From the dancer’s point of view, who is the ‘true’ composer? The dancers or the developer of the system?” (Audio 1.1, Listen 11:11–12:25). My dancers and I answered that composing was everyone’s job. One audience member even asked whether a composer was needed in collaboration, and another said that like a jazz musician playing solos there was no single composer. It seemed quite obvious that this kind of compositional method still confused some in the audience who preferred to clarify the roles of composer, choreographer, and performer in the traditional sense.
Audio 1.1: Audio documentation of the Q&A session at MSP PowerUser Symposium 2016 at the University of Huddersfield.
As previously discussed, the choreographic composition processes of Trisha Brown, William Forsythe, and Wayne McGregor, in which guided improvisation is combined with the problem-solving technique, has become the established method today for building choreography in collaboration. While Forsythe was the artistic director of the Frankfurt Ballet, because of this collaborative aspect he has often jointly credited his choreography to his dancers and himself so as “to break down the traditional hierarchy between choreographer and dancer”; he also presented the Frankfurt Ballet as a “choreographic ensemble” (Spier, 2011: 102). McGregor has also described this contemporary way of composing choreography as a “distributed cognitive process” (McGregor, 2012). Each individual’s intuitive response to certain tasks in improvisation became crucial elements in completing a choreography. On the other hand, John Zorn (2008: 197) mentions that the word improvisation was not very welcomed in the 1960s in classical music, and instead composers “felt compelled to justify their work with intellectual systems and words such as aleatoric, intuitive, and indeterminate – music that the performers were making up as they went along – but music that was truly envisioned by a musical mind and then passed down to the performers”. In experimental music, the performer’s intelligence, initiative, and opinions are all required to perform experimental scores (Nyman, 2008: 214), but composition and realisation are substantially divided. Perhaps the reason for this is that universal music notations have survived whereas dance notations have not.[26] For me it seems that this ‘objectification’ of music has reappeared as new musical instruments or interactive systems. Yet what I would like to draw out in my research is not only the technological development as a compositional act, but also the holistic compositional cycle in collaboration as a composition.
[29] The first printed notation was invented in the late seventeenth century by Pierre Beauchamps, Louis XIV’s dancing master, but by the mid-eighteen century dance notation was no longer in use since the ballet conveyed drama through facial expressions and postures that could not be notated universally (Foster, 2010: 32–35).
Another possible reason why the audience can be confused is the interdisciplinary nature of mixed media in my work. In the 1960s the boundaries between different art forms began to blur as a counter-cultural artistic movement focused on “making processes” by disregarding the delineation of discrete disciplines (Cox, 2008: 207; Salter, 2010: 154; Rosenberg, 2017: 2). Foster writes how in the dance world “the terms choreography and choreographers have undergone yet another set of modifications due to the changing nature of dance composition and performance” since the 1960s (2011: 36). Daniel Nagrin and Anna Halprin, for instance, used improvisation in their choreography and referred to themselves as directors, rather than choreographers. In addition, artists from the London School of Contemporary Dance explored new sources for movement and arranged them with other art forms such as sculpture, film, or spoken and recorded text. This resulted in them crediting works as ‘conceived by’, ‘directed by’ or ‘arranged by’, instead of ‘choreographed by’ (Forster, 2011: 36). I find a similar concern in the composer Earle Brown’s graphic score December 1952 in which he writes that his predominant influences are the works of Alexander Calder and Jackson Pollock. Calder’s works are carefully constructed but mobile, whereas Pollock’s work is abstract but physical and direct (Brown, 2008: 189–190). Brown writes that:
I felt that the realizable concepts of physical and conceptual “mobility” in relation to the graphic input by me was a practical and creatively ambiguous stimulus to performer involvement and sonic creativity. This is not an abandonment of composer responsibility but the musical result inherent in a provoked, multicreative, “synergistic” interaction of the composer’s concept, the graphic score, the performer’s realization, and the audience. Not one of them is independent of the others; there exists, rather, a truly collaborative, creative synergy. … What interests me is to find the degree of conditioning (of conception, of notation, and of realization) that will balance the work between the points of control and noncontrol. At that point, the work, the performer, and I will most clearly exist – both as entities and identities. (Brown, 2008: 190)
Reading Brown’s statement, I can see his effort to combine two different ideas – constantly evolving abstract composition and physically concrete performative nature – that his graphic score bridges (Figure 1.27). Similarly, I wanted to provide “stimulus” to my collaborating dancers to draw our abstract creative ideas together into our corporeal dance and sound performance. My use of physical stimuli through Gametrak controllers and other physical elements such as chairs in Temporal and the unusual performance space in The Music Room was my attempt to look for a “balance of control and noncontrol” by which to devise abstract movement and sound art in collaboration.
Still the terms choreographer and composer have been used in the traditional sense for the convenience of crediting someone’s work to public. However, as the future form of music and dance performance has been predicted as more complex format as they have evolved with other media (Percival, 1971: 17–18), I find it hard to define the collaborative multi-creative nature of my role solely within the term ‘composer’. It implies a hierarchical relationship with performers and a division of work between composer and choreographer that I do not identify with in my work. While I initiate the idea, establish parameters and intervene throughout in the development of the choreographic sound composition processes, I credit my role as ‘concept and direction’ throughout my portfolio to acknowledge the deliberate blurring of traditional roles in my work.
