Do you crave depth? Chick Snipper wants to know

Chick Snipper asked 5 Canadian artists (4 dance, 1 theatre) to explain what 'depth' in art means to them. Have a read and see if you agree. Then plug into the comments box and let Chick know what depth means to you.

Chick Snipper – choreographer, teacher
For years I’ve been an audience member at Vancouver contemporary dance shows. It’s difficult to admit, but often I leave the theatre feeling disappointed.

I realize that because I’m a choreographer, I bring a bias with me. But that doesn’t preclude me from appreciating, enjoying, and at times reveling in dance that is strikingly different from my own aesthetic.

The one thing I can’t compromise, no matter what the form or content of the dance, is the quality of the choreography, i.e. the language of the movement within the context of the overall creation. I believe we have every right to expect it to be well crafted, engaging and, most importantly, display depth, be it intellectual, visual, spiritual, kinesthetic, or emotional (my particular favourite).

What do I mean by the word ‘depth’? I’m a little unsure — although I recognize it when I see it.  I looked the word up in my treasured New Twentieth Century Dictionary Unabridged. It was published in 1943 and it’s so heavy I almost gave myself a hernia lifting it from the bookshelf. As in any old-style dictionary worth its weight in poundage, the word ‘depth’ was followed by a lengthy series of words, phrases and quotes, including Shakespeare, Tennyson and of course the Bible.

Do yourself a favour: pick a word, any word, then go to your oldest at-hand dictionary to investigate further. I strongly recommend it pre-date the 1950’s. (And if you have any standards at all, please disregard your computer’s Thesaurus - the Coles Notes of word meanings.) Like me you will probably ask yourself “Who wrote the stuff for these older dictionaries?” Unnamed poets indeed.

Okay, so back to business. Having read through the numerous definitions, I chose these three:

Depth

1. a deep place, an abyss, a gulf of infinite profundity

2. the inner, darker or more concealed part of a thing; the middle, darkest or stillest part, as the depth of winter. ( You gotta love that one.)

3. immensity; infinity; intensity

There were several other definitions that impacted me, but for brevity’s sake, I will stick it to the above. Strangely, I was quite moved reading them; sadly, more so than by many dances that I have watched over the years.

In pursuit of answers to this question, I decided to poll several Canadian dance artists as well as theatre artist and Plank writer Alex Ferguson. All are recognized for their intensity and commitment to their contemporary form. (Seriousness does not mean humourlessness so I chose artists who find laughter even in the darkness, e.g. Kate and Deb’s discussion below).

I asked them what the word ‘depth’ means to them in art making, how they recognize it, what importance they attach to it in today’s contemporary culture. I also requested that they name several works/pieces that they consider rich in depth in any medium of their choosing.

Here is how we responded:

Brian Webb - dance artist, born in 1951, “He’s certainly no longer a spring chicken.” Artistic Director, Canada Dance Festival
I very much like the second definition Chick Snipper has chosen to define depth.  I connect immediately to the “stillest part.”  To me this refers to the core, the eye of the storm – that place where there may be no movement but infinite possibility for movement.

Dance, to me, is an expression of our aliveness in the here and now.  While themes of dances may be historic or intellectual, whatever the dance itself, the dancing that is happening as audience members witness it is a total expression of the moment.  As I oftentimes say, “There ain’t no dance without the dancing.”  It is alive at this very moment.  As a witness, one cannot separate the dance (let us say, the choreography) from the dancing.  They are the same – connected in every way.  This is in my opinion when a dance really works, and I then feel it has depth.

I want to explain my concept a little further.  The great American poet, Walt Whitman, developed the theme, “The body is the soul,” in most of his poetry.

“O my body!  I dare not desert the likes of you in other men
and women, nor the like of the parts of you,
I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of the soul, (and that they are the soul,)
I believe the like of you shall stand or fall withy my
Poems, and that they are my poems.”

What a magnificent comment about art and the body that creates it.  The body is inseparable from the work.  I believe that in dance this is even truer.  The dancing reveals everything of the dance.  The dancing is what the witness encounters and through which the witness enters the dance.  The dancing is the dance/the dance is the dancing.

Choreography that has depth is like the eye of the storm, the core, the place of infinite possibility where the dancing is free to express itself, to express what it is, and is able to allow me, the witness, to enter the dance where I am able to become an active participant.

[img_assist|nid=541|title=Getting deeper.|desc=|link=none|url=undefined|align=left|width=216|height=288]Lee Su-Feh - dancer, choreographer, dramaturge, teacher, occasional troublemaker
Depth to me means liver. Has the piece got liver? I recognize it if I can feel it in my own liver. But also, because the liver does not exist in isolation, this liver feeling extends to my intellect. A piece has depth when it fires up my whole central nervous system and I can feel from my cunt to my brain. A great work of art reminds me of how I am alive.

A few works I have encountered recently that, in my opinion, have liver:

The self-portrait sculpture by Jan Fabre at his recent exhibit at the Louvre where he has his nose pressed to an old master’s painting and it is bleeding into a pool of blood in which he is standing.
Tsai Ming Liang’s film I Don’t Want To Sleep Alone which has some of the best sex scenes I have ever seen on film.
Promenade, Richard Serra's recent installation of 5 giant metal plates sticking out of the ground at the Grand Palais in Paris.

Alex Ferguson – actor, playwright, director, Plank contributor
When I take part in a performance as a spectator, what I hope for is insight — small and large revelations, something revealed that I wouldn’t have expected. Surprise is important. There’s nothing that feels more dead to me than a performance where I can see everything coming a mile away. I love performers that keep me guessing. I love choreography and direction that crafts the material in such a way that doors to the unknown appear where I would only have expected a wall.

So for me depth is connected to insight, and insight requires an element of surprise. I guess ‘revelation’ is the word that encapsulates all of that.

Much to the chagrin of playwrights, directors, and choreographers, the number of variables present in any performance — for example: the mood of the audience, the number of full or empty seats in the house, external noises, unexpected associations brought to the performance by individual spectators, and most of all the interpretive instincts of the performers — are so great that authorial control is easily (and usually) lost to the moment. Regardless of the author’s intentions (or the director’s or choreographer’s), process — discovery in the moment — forces its way in.

If the artists have brought discipline, skill, and genuinely inquiring minds to the work, they’ll have created the right conditions for the unexpected to occur. Writer David George, who explores the nature of the performance event in Buddhism as/in Performance, writes of an axis between performer and spectator on which the experience of time is suspended. In such moments we are freed from conceptualizing about what we’re experiencing, freed from attaching value judgments and the habitual considerations of ‘like’ and ‘dislike’. It’s this suspension that artists try to extend as much as possible. Goerge talks about such events as the basic units of reality — for him, the ‘event’ is the basic unit of reality. What is an event? It’s a process. It’s energy. George parallels this to the evolution in thinking of 20th century physics. In classical physics, objects are the basic building blocks of reality. In quantum physics everything can ultimately be reduced to energy. Nothing is ever truly static. Each event, or process, is unique.

[img_assist|nid=539|title=Don't be frightened|desc=|link=none|url=undefined|align=right|width=216|height=288]But is each moment in time really unique? The question may seem facetious, but I ask it sincerely. In theatre we often talk about the ‘liveness’ of the art form, the uniqueness of every performance, the danger inherent in every moment — something could go wrong, an actor might forget his lines, a technician might start the wrong sound cue, a spectator might audibly protest (gasp!). But in practice this almost never happens. I think a more common experience is one of grinding predictability. A particular work has been directed or choreographed to within an inch of its life. It may as well be a film. The venue and the production encourage passivity on the part of the spectator, and the work has been crafted to resist audience intervention. If there’s one thing that live performance in a theatre usually isn’t, well it isn’t a social event. You get your ticket, you sit and watch, then you go home, or you go somewhere that isn’t the theatre — because the theatre is a specialized venue that does only one thing — put on a show. You paid your ticket, you consumed the product, thank you very much for your patronage, now piss off out of here. So much for a theatre being a public ritual space in which revelation can occur.

This is a relatively recent phenomenon in theatre, one going back only a few hundred years and tied to the patronage of a particular socio-economic class. The aesthetic of this kind of theatre, which is inextricable from the style of venue I just described, tends toward art that sticks quite narrowly to genre: a comedy shouldn’t be a tragedy, a tragedy shouldn’t be absurd, a dance shouldn’t be a play and vice-versa. If a tragedy is tainted with slapstick or farcical elements, it becomes an affront to the patron’s sense of self-importance. This social class doesn’t like to laugh at itself. Its self-image is one of seriousness, its accomplishments are not to be mocked, and its connection to the important issues of the day is not to be questioned.

The fact that television and film have been rudely genre-bending for some time seems to be lost on adherents of this theatre aesthetic. These makers of boardroom-sanctioned art are quite literally in a time warp of their own making. I would say this kind of theatrical experience, in its totality, is lacking ‘depth’, or revelation. Its goal is to affirm the values of the ruling class, or of those who want to be part of the ruling class and are trying to play by its ‘rules’.

A common feature of this kind of performance is rhythmic predictability—the kind of stately rhythm that an accountant or CEO might put into his or her walk when approaching the mahogany-laminate elevator doors that will take him or her to a leather-clad office overlooking the North Shore mountains. This rhythm is one of self-assurance connected to social status. As in classical physics, material objects do indeed become the building blocks of reality. Like the leather-clad office chair that speaks of position, affluence, and accomplishment, the stage objects in performance must in some way reflect this back to the audience. (When I say stage-object in this context, I include the actor or dancer — and this is where the project can get problematic for this kind of patron; usually performers come from a much lower social class, and the most talented ones can consciously or unconsciously leave a greasy residue of resentment in the air of the theatre). Surprise and revelatory events must be bled of a provocative colour palette. The hues must be kept tame.

Despite such class-based constraints, revelation can occasionally occur even in the crusty environment of a state-run regional theatre. But it’s such a rare occurrence; I won’t waste time trying to retrieve odd flashes of excitement from my wasted hours in such venues.

[img_assist|nid=540|title=Is this what depth looks like?|desc=|link=none|url=undefined|align=left|width=162|height=288]Instead I’ll offer an example of a different kind of performance world. A few years ago, I attended The Leaky Heaven Circus’ production, Ziggurat. It took place under a big top at the Britannia outdoor track near Commercial Drive in Vancouver. Acrobats, drag queens, at-risk-youth, professional clowns, veteran actors and burlesque performers came together to create, in a kind of controlled chaos, a 21st century take on The Oresteia, one that drew on the medieval traditions of Carnival and set itself squarely down in one of the city’s most diverse and economically mixed neighbourhoods. The revelations were many, as individual performers found surprising modern echoes of the eons-old passions that characterize Aeschylus’ work. It was bawdy, at times literate, and at times interactive.

After it was over, a woman I had come with, slightly disgusted by the whole affair, asked in frustration why the performers had to use such foul verbal and body language. The whole thing lacked dignity. It failed to affirm her sense of humanity, which was based on a very Christian, middle-class Ontario background. During the performance I had found myself at times laughing rapturously without always understanding why, and at other times losing my sense of self as I became absorbed in the acts occurring before me. Not my friend. Her sense of theatrical decorum had been violated.

So what am I saying here? I think I’m saying that revelation can occur in any kind of theatre. But if I were playing the odds, I wouldn’t look for it in a mainstream venue. I’m also suggesting that a well-ordered mainstream venue tends to exclude the kind of excitement and surprise that can occur at an event in which the audience has some ability to fulfill “the social end of the loop,” as one theorist put it. Am I tying the concept of ‘depth’ to class? I think so. But it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s just that revelation requires a sense of adventure — openness to possibility. Too much conventional theatre is about closing down, closing ranks, and shutting out the unpredictables.

Kate McDonagh - choreographer, teacher, performer, teams up with
Deborah Dunn - choreographer, designer, performer.
(Chick’s note: The following individuals named by Kate and Deb are Canadian dance artists:  Anne Cooper, Dana  Gingras, Marie Chouinard, Peter Bingham, Lola McLaughlin, Delia Brett, Chick Snipper, Daelik, Cornelius Fischer-Credo, Cori Caulfield.)

Deb: What do you cry about these days?
Kate: I cry when I am tired.
Deb: Have you ever had an out of body experience?
Kate: Yes, as a child in Newfoundland I flew outdoors. In Vancouver I flew from the living room to the kitchen.
Deb: Hmmm, but did you leave your body to do it?
Kate: No, I was in my body. It was an elevated body experience.
Deb: I have sleep paralysis sometimes, I am conscious but my body is asleep. It is terrifying. It is very hard work to move the body. I read that if you can relax, sleep paralysis can be a doorway to out of body experiences.
Kate: Hmmm, interesting. Who do you think is deeper? Alice Cooper or Anne Cooper?
Deb: Super Cooper
Kate: Dana Gingras or Dolce & Gabbana
Deb: Dana
Kate: Mariah Carey or Marie Chouinard?
Deb: Mariah Carey
Kate: Peter Bingham or Peanut Butter?
Deb: Hmm, tough one, they are both very smooth.
Kate: Good answer, Lola McLaughlin or Liza Minnelli?
Deb: Her name was Lola, she was a showgirl.
Kate: Delia Brett or Ding Bat?
Deb: Well Kate, I have worked with Delia a lot, she could read this.
Kate: Chick Snipper or Chuck Snapper?
Deb: Do you mean Dan Stabat? Chick for sure.
Kate: Daelik or Elvis?
Deb: I love Daelik
Kate: Cornelius Fischer-Credo or Chloro-Floro Carbons?
Deb: For Christ sake Kate, the Corn Man.
Kate: Carol Channing, Charlie Chaplin or for that matter Cori Caulfield?
Deb: Three-way tie.

Ok are you primed for further lightweight musings on gravitas?

It seems a trap to speak of depth without considering it’s opposite, levity. One person’s depth is another’s wading pool. Or as Nick Cave sings “you jumped into the abyss to find it only comes up to your knees”. Ballet teacher Earl Kraul used to say ”security is a deep demi-plie”. Knees, ankles, joints, tissue all conspire to create buoyancy and resilience. Is it not the same with the spirit? Is it not the same for a creator, an interpreter or an audience member? Next time you find yourself frustrated with the lack of depth on the stage, fill in the blanks and always read between the leotards.

Seriously folks, great failings, exile and silence fertilize depth, as well as spending time with old people.  

Deb: Kate what is the most profound dance work you have ever seen?
Kate: Well that would be ‘Burnt Norton’ by you. What tops your list?
Deb: Any thing you ever done, every step, every turn, every jump every…
Kate: Deb, you are one deep chick, I love you, don’t ever change.
Deb: Don’t worry I never will.

Plank: Did any of the comments by these artists resonate with you? Do you have other thoughts to offer about depth? Tell Chick by filling in the comments boxes.