edgeofthegorge May '13

a 75 minute foreshadowing

May 11&12, 6 and 8 p.m. Class of ‘56 Dance Theatre/ SB10, Schwartz Center
direction and staging: Byron Suber
choreography: Byron Suber, Hannah Doyle, Yannick Lingelbach and Dan Levine, including improvisational and choreographic contributions by all company members
company: Sarah Bolander, Yasmin Fouladi, Tabea Hoffstaetter, Valerie Green, Zoe Jackson, Amanda Quain, Molly Dasso, Shoshana Das, Jocelyn Hahn, Dan Levine, Yannick Lingelbach, Atticus DeProspo, Nate Bates, James Massier
videographers: Ryan Larkin, Amanda Steckel and Mahitha Rachumalla
music: Melora Creager of Rasputina, composer, vocalist, cellist; Harold Budd; and Nina Simone
Apart from a few departmental publicity stunts in dining halls on campus last semester, this is the first theatrical public performance of the newly founded company edgeofthegorge, a performance and media group with the goal of researching methodologies that move us away from our habitual ways of working and familiar ways of organizing performance and media presentation. 
You are witnessing us adjusting and maneuvering through what may seem like subtle impositions but the ways in which these constrictions and liberating moments affect our work across the range of our contributions is a massive learning experience for all involved. 
That said, we find pleasure in this process of continuously working these problems out and hope you will enjoy the messy but sometimes beautifully spontaneous results of an ever-changing process. And further, we hope you are interested in what questions arise out the process and what can be learned. 
Being in the beginning stages of our exploration and experimentation, very little of what you see will remain in the form it is presented to you this weekend. The work is not intended to be a final edited project but rather an offering of a moment in our process (including a request for constructive feedback from all of you) and your participation is an invitation for you to be part of the edgeofthegorge with us. 
This weekend’s performances are the first iteration of a long term, multi-year, multi-project endeavor and each time we perform, some of what you see will of course be further developed, some of it discarded and some new components introduced, including spatial reconfigurations of the performing arena. 
Some parts of this performance have been worked on for two semesters (or even 25 years in some cases), others just a few days, and similarly, some performers are beginners while others are pre-professional. Their performance practices range from dance to acting to filmmaking and all are asked to accomplish challenges they have never before faced. All of this is a negotiation. 
We have simultaneously been working on 8 different projects and each project, at this point, consists of 1- 4 episodes in a series. Each project is extremely different in scope and style and we  place these various episodes in an order that allows them to speak to each other. We are not working to present individual projects as isolated events but rather we are interested in what can be produced by a juxtaposition of the many parts of these projects, interlaced in episodic moments peppered throughout the evening. 
And if you come to a future event of edgeofthegorge, while you may recognize some moments, you will see new ones, in new spatial arrangements that is intended to produce new knowledge about the body, the voice and the projected image as it moves through spatial organizational practices of performance and media.

 next  is a description of the conceptual framework, or research challenge of each of the projects of edgeofthegorge 

Bach Reconfigured
Tonight there are three versions of a 25 year old ballet set to Bach’s solo cello suite #1, 1st movement. A goal for this work is to change the interpretation of the music for future iterations. The work is re-transpositioned each time, reconfigured by forcing redistributed floor patterns and by using digital video projections and ideally, manipulation of the original unique musical recording. The ballet was naively created in 1985 as a purely an aesthetic project. I have since come to understand the work as extremely politically and socially motivated. This work particularly demonstrates the ways in which musicality can be utilized to break habitus of a tendency to romanticize trauma. And much can be gained about our understanding of presentational spatialities by forcing a reconsideration of front, back, right, left, top and bottom, forward, back, etc.

Doberge Serialized
This is only a small section of choreography taken from what the performers learned from a much more recent work where I returned to utilizing ballet technique after several years of experimenting with other forms of movement techniques or bodily presentation. This work requires the dancers to question habitus of their ballet technique while at the same time accessing it. Digital video may be added to this work in the future to more fully examine the sexuality of the body to a level of ludicrous exploitation.

Color Film Test Series
The film test series addresses an attempt to slow down my work to a degree previously unavailable in live performance by utilizing digital video in combination, in contrast, and in concert with, live bodily performance. Digital video imaging allows for levels of stillness that would seem indulgent in a live performance. Also a focus on the face in close up allows for a narrative impulse to emerge at a level unavailable in the requisite physical distancing of live performance. The film test series examines a poetics of, or the limits of, audience engagement of live performance as compared to filmic performance, including a comparison between, or combination of the two forms.

Dwell, Do Tell: The Glass House Narratives
Originally this work looked to Philip Johnson's domestic compound, the Glasshouse, and uses the architectonics of the spaces there to create bodily movement that is analogous to those principles of design. Additional to the abstract movement created through this process, drawing from raw archival film, video and sound, quotidian narratives of Johnson's life, personality and his philosophy of living in those spaces, is brought into the choreographed work in a sometimes intentionally unremarkable way to emphasize the gap between building and dwelling, as theorized by Heidegger in his essay, "Building, Dwelling, Thinking". This work is to include other inspiration from other architects and in fact, the solo you will see tonight performed by Yasmin Fouladi was based on drawings of a Zaha Hadid building.

Fast Talking Ladies and Soft Spoken but Talkative Architects in Episode
You will see two episodes from what is to be a multilingual, mostly text-based work, drawing from mid-century American, French, German and Italian films, recreating scenes where the melody and tempo of the spoken word can take precedent over content. This work also experiments with the level of comprehension that can be accomplished with the least amount of recognizable vocabulary whether it be English or a tongue foreign to the viewer/listener.

Myths of Sisyphus and His Twin Brother
Using two male bodies that are opposites in their histories of physical training but similar in physical attributes, movement has been developed that challenges both of their physical limits in short segments that are metonymic to the other works in the evening in that the tropes of repetition, pain, sheer force of the will being tested, and the very strong possibility of risk and failure, are episodically presented, questioning the theoretical permanent linear progress of modernist products as conflated with ephemerality of popular art practices.

Untitled by Hannah
This work is being developed by Senior Hannah Doyle and is a response to the music of future collaborator Melora Creager, whose previously recorded music makes up much of the score of tonight’s program. Hannah is one of the more gifted choreographers (of many) I have seen come through the Cornell dance program. Hannah will continue to work on this piece and it will stand alone as a repertory work but the movement, will also be extracted, reconfigured and manipulated and act as a structure for improvisation.

Recycled and Reconsidered
Often times we will reach back to work done in the past and extract elements or ideas that never had the opportunity to be fully fleshed out. Those moments can become fully developed pieces are exist as filler for a costume change… practicality is sometimes the mother of invention.


A great deal of the structure and inspiration for this evenings iteration of edgeofthegorge came out of an interdisciplinary history/theory/criticism course I taught this term. Like the motivation in edgeofthegorge, I have been developing new teaching methodologies in other rubrics and while this course focuses on the role of the moving body in media and performance, it follows a series of concepts and themes rather than a linear historical chronology. The students developed a taxonomy of the body that came include such categories as: the emotional body, the dancing body, the crying body, the discursive body, the superhero body, the receptive body, the pedestrian body, the honey boo boo body, the digital body, the grotesque body, the naked body, the ideal body, the pathological body, the healthy body, the prosthetic body, the abstract body, the criminal body, the pornographic body…

This course, like tonight’s performance, is in no way intended to be adequate as an exhaustive exploration of a topic but instead, creates several of many possible trajectories such an endeavor can produce. This way of working is partly inspired by the trajectories of exploration encouraged or emphasized by new forms of work and play enabled by developing technologies. Accepting this mode of inquiry as not only inevitable but as having historic precedent, this method of research is analyzed, evaluated and questioned in the process.

In both cases of practice and critical analysis, we begin by defining and questioning, in order to facilitate clarity within our particular path, working definitions of the terms "body", "media", "performance", and "history". We are discovering the nuanced insinuations of such definitions within transcultural, transhistorical, interdisciplinary contexts, that will inevitably weight the intrinsic directions emerging from the students' and instructor's interests in practice, history and theory. For example, students interested in spatial organizational practices develop a concept of space as defined by volumetric division and enclosure in contrast/comparison to space as defined from the point of view of the moving body. On the other hand, those interested in the traditions of western concert dance bring to the table forms of practice and analysis that are in some ways superior if not simply an alternative to textual analysis. Additionally, those interested in literature focus textual representation of moving bodies and the spaces inhabited by those moving bodies. These are just three possible discipline specific avenues of exploration and more are encouraged in our working process in the classroom and in the studio

Thank you for coming and thank you for reading this (if you got this far) and I hope we see you again in future edgeofthegorge events.

More information about events, mission and participation in our projects can be obtained by contacting the director, Byron Suber at pbs6@cornell.edu

Thanks to Kathy Hovis, Pam Lillard, Dan Hall, Fritz Berstein, Lisa Boquist, Sabine Haenni, Tim Ostrander, Dick Archer, Charlie Fay, Randy Hendrickson, Tanya Grove and Caroline Palladino and all the performers for their contributions, patience and creativity.