A way to dance and connect during quarantine, the Pantone Duets is a choreographic and collaboration-based experiment configured to the virtual platform. The Pantone Duets bring together a range of professional dancers throughout the U.S. in an extensive series of interconnected duet choreographies. Each duet process is an excavation of the embodied aesthetics of each collaborator’s training histories/influences as a prompt to reconsider/reevaluate/disrupt performance principles, such as beauty, virtuosity and skill, and do to so from a pluralist and personal approach. Evolving into distinct variations, the duets become a discursive network of hybridized performance-training studies that, together, function like a Pantone.
The Duets
The nuance and exactitude of a color is most keenly observed in comparison to other hues, which feels similar to how I have often heard unison described as a frame for witnessing difference. In this project, pairs of dancers work virtually to learn a 10-minute (ish), meticulously unison base choreography. The movement is initially limited to dance “steps” that can be found across multiple dance styles: box step, step touch, waltz, pony, marching, grapevine, etc. By sequencing these steps in complex ways, the choreography becomes a gauntlet of rhythmic syncopation and physical patterning that is particularly challenging to learn. Existing rhythmic and coordinative patterns are offset by working in this way, revealing nuance, habit, and preferences that reside in each of us - a tapestry of training experiences that have seeped into our dancing selves.
We concentrate on reordering and (re)coordinating the base choreography, shifting and stretching it into a dance uniquely tailored to the people performing it. We prioritize personalized ways of moving that garner delightful challenges, enjoyment, pleasure, reverence, and/or badassery. Each duet becomes a distinct variation but remains a shared choreography that the collaborating artists can do with it what they want or need. My hope, of course, is that this choreography can be in the service of us and that I can be witness to future, wild, messy, crisp, choral, solo iterations as folx are interested.
Thinking thru with color studies and a dash of Rainer
The Pantone Duets are part of a larger body of my research, the Color Studies - a multi-installment, transdisciplinary study of color and choreography. In an earlier color study, a foray into color trade highlighted hierarchical (gendered, racial, and classist) traditions that elevate line (as the more “direct, masculine, intellectual”) above color (as the more “emotional, feminine, illogical” - a more thorough citation will eventually come, putting thoughts to text in this blog, for now Victoria Finlay, David Batchelor, Maggie Nelson are good entry points). Line, in dance, often refers to the aesthetic of long, gravity-defying, lean, ethereality that is emblematic of the ballet canon. Oh, the many times I’ve heard “so and so has a nice line” and it continues to feel more of a comment on body shape and ability as opposed to the mechanics of an action based on that person’s unique anatomy - curves and all. Many contemporary dance professionals have and continue to train in multiple dance styles, yet singular and hierarchical standards remain steeped with these kinds of singular notions of skill or beauty - embedded in training and affirmed through performance and opportunities. In this way, aesthetics can perpetuate power by determining the kind of work that is produced and deemed valuable and is therefore a dangerous gate-keeper if not regularly audited, reflected upon, and reconstructed in more diverse ways. I don’t want to see sameness everywhere or work towards assimilative and colonized standards. It doesn’t work and, frankly, it’s weird beyond the inequities it reinforces. No array of colors and expressions and perspectives.
It is my hope, personal charge, and delight to make space for and support each performer’s movement preferences as best I can. I’m excited by what our process together can reveal about each of our training experiences, through this shared time together, and how this all might help excavate some of the more not-helpful practice/thoughts in our dancing selves. I hope this would also help me invest in and practice a pluralist approach to aesthetic concepts in all regards. Regularly, I am aware of the absurdity of my self expectations and how they are tethered or rooted in what I think a “good dancer” is supposed to be - and how this is often what I am not. I think this kind of redefining for myself is paramount to my vitality - the ways I see myself and what I think I can do or be - a shared sentiment I am sure. Not saying I haven’t been trying to do this my whole life but also it is so deep it is hard to see it, name it, shift it. So these aesthetic concepts, such as beauty, skill, and virtuosity can be subversive really.
At times, I feel this project is a trans-temporal visit with Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A (1966) - a choreography made for a solo performer that continues to be performed by a range of non-dancers and dancers alike. The movement is purposely detached from the syncopation, expressiveness, and virtuosity inherited from Rainer’s dance training. Similarly, the Pantone Duets aim to detach codified movement from traditional syncopation and coordination. But to so to unearth the underlying aesthetics driving such syncopation and then derive a way of doing, and an aesthetic, burgeoning from the dancers’ performative interests and values. This helps me unearth my own biases in performance, particularly the visual markers that signify beauty, skill, difficultly, and virtuosity. I am biased towards dancers who deftly navigate the juicy weightedness of the body & the expressivity of rhythm with keen (and kind) proprioceptive attention. But my ability to recognize such attributes is tethered to somewhat singular signifiers that have been shaped by my training and reinforced in my professional experience. Thus, this research is a necessary audit of my work and self that engines my creative processes.
Process Archive + Field Guide (maybe its a zine…)
Each participant in this project generates a personalized map of their training history and creative influence in the form of a digital document. This digital document becomes a kind of working bibliography that archives the research process, and generates a valuable account of dance training and community. I envision this project developing into a communal repertory experience; a choreography that is meant to be passed onto others, a kind of choreographic “embodied history.” In support of this, I am developing a field guide to the Pantone Duets that consists of instructional materials to learn, modify, share, and teach the choreography. While much of this process emphasizes previous dance training, I’m pushing us towards a richer dialog about how dance training shapes performed works, the dance field’s evaluation of them, and the responsibility, magic, and potency teaching practice(s).