Over the past couple of years I have found myself dissatisfied with many of the ways in which I work. After the creation of the Man/Pet program (The Miraculous Mandarin/Petrushka), it occurred to me that the formality and tidiness of those pieces robbed them of their vitality and the structures were inadequate to support the theatrical experiences I wished the audience to have or ideas I wanted them to grapple with. For years my work had very much been grounded in a proscenium aesthetic (a framed picture through which the audience peered to observe what was on the other side). I had relished exploring the possibilities of proscenium theatrical devices as well as the visceral thrill and dynamic energy generated when the conventions were broken. But what had once seemed exciting now started to seem like mindless habit - irrelevant, artificial, un-thoughtful, automatic and gratuitous. These explorations had grown tiresome. This became clear to me during Man/Pet.

The PAMU projects (Beyond Dance: Promoting Awareness and Mutual Understanding), with their focus on complex geo-political issues, seemed to demand that I explore other ways of working and structuring. I saw these projects as a possible way, an opportunity, to break the old habits and begin to explore other kinds of structures and organizing principles, something more ‘authentic’- structures that mimic or attempt to replicate the complexity and the unknowable(ness) of the subject of the pieces or even of life itself. I was weary of the neat and tidy on stage, viewing things from only one vantage point, everything organized so that the eye could easily take it all in. I wanted something that was closer to how the contemporary world appeared to me – so unknowable and complex that order as it had been known seemed to disappear and become unpredictable, even chaotic.

But what of the dozens (or tens of dozens) of pieces I had created over the past decades before my current explorations into ‘authentic structure’? I cannot ignore the fact that the old works are in many ways neat and tidy (while the content might not be), are designed to be viewed frontally, and for the most part, they conform to and exploit traditional proscenium stage picture theory (even when breaking the rules they are the old rules being broken in old ways, they ask the same old questions). With those works I had set out to gain mastery in an old system with values grounded in the 19th Century and perfected in the 20th Century - the old pieces reflect those concerns. Then how should these old works be presented now? What is the best way for them to be viewed today in order for them to be, if not relevant, at least vital and engaging?

Perhaps one way to begin to answer some of these questions is to draw attention to what is most obvious about theses works: they are meant to be seen from a front/ there is one ideal vantage point, the images fit within conventional stage pictures, the viewer’s attention is clearly focused (with the things that are most important taking place center-center), and there are no decisions to be made about what is to be watched. One might say that their technical concerns are ‘nostalgic’ – a world as viewed with hindsight or as we remember it being, ordered and knowable, not how it is, unpredictable and unknowable.

With these questions and concerns in mind, I decided to begin our 2010-11 Season with “Peering Into The Ballroom”, three of my ‘ballroom’ ballets, La Valse, Act 2 from Bristle (1993), Longing (2005), and Le Bal Noir (2006) all new to Spectrum. My decision is partially driven by a desire to continue investigating the implied questions raised last season with the Byrd Retrospective Festival: 1) how do my older works and/or those not made for Spectrum create context for the current Spectrum creations and 2) how do they fit into a continuum of my artistic concerns, fascinations, and development?  They were chosen also because, 1) the relationship they bear to ‘le bal noir’ ballets of Balanchine (a strong an ongoing fascination); 2) my hope, desire, and need to keep these works relevant to my recent artistic explorations; and 3) to use them as a starting point to begin to self-interrogate my past work.

This has led me to wonder how to highlight, push or force the viewer to confront that which is most unnatural and ‘inauthentic’ about then – a carefully ordered and single perspective reality – in order that their vitality can reveal itself. I am proposing to make more visible the major conceit of these works – the proscenium or the notion that the viewer peers through a 4th wall to witness real life on the other side. We, the objective and omniscient viewer, like Superman with his x-ray vision (or God), watches as the performers engage in their ‘living’- we assess their actions as well as their skills as performers. And within this closed, self-contained, artificial system, this tautology, in which our perspective, unlike real life, is incontrovertible, we feel omnipotent. We are above the chaos and the unpredictability of life and therefore, we feel safe and secure. This sense of feeling safe, secure, and God-like is why I believe remnants of 19th Century Europeans aesthetic and sensibilities persists in our artistic cultures – That false sense of order and balance, of power, makes us believe we are above the fray, that we are in control and life is not dangerous and chaotic and we are not powerless over the unpredictability of existence.

For “Peering Into The Ballroom” we will divide out Studio Theater in two. On one side will be the audience/viewer (A/V), on the other the dancers/performers (D/P). Between them will be a frame – like a picture frame or a window frame – that would demarcate the two spaces. On the ‘D/P’ side a beautiful, velvet draped, chandeliered room suggesting a late 19th Century ballroom or salon will be installed and in which the performance of the three works will take place; on the ‘A/V’ side, chairs rowed for the patrons to sit and view the illusion on the other side. The effect will be very much like a 19th Century diorama. While dioramas were typically landscapes this analogy is to show the connection and similarities of the artificial and illusionary aspects of our room and the theatrical convention of proscenium framing. And like the audiences of the 19th Century that would peer through proscenium arches and the frame of the diorama to see an image that suggests a real life setting or even the modern dioramas that one encounters in museums of natural history, our patrons will do the same, all the while recognizing the falseness of it all. This recognition of falseness elevates the work from the realm of the inauthentic or deceptive to the domain of the metaphoric or poetic.

I think the point I am trying to make here is that unlike the ‘authentic structures’ that I am seeking to create for my newer work this hyper-artificial ‘framing’ of older works draws even more attention to the ‘inauthenticity’ of their structures and nature; thereby, making them poetic and ‘honest’. They are honest because we are conscious that the structures are false and simplistic fabrications and are not attempting to signify the world or life in its complexities but rather represent a narrow, simple, and easily perceivable world.  This contextualizing of the older pieces validates them inside the framework of my current aesthetic explorations. Suggesting that the ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ are both compelling ways to represent the complex and unknowable world in which we live, have lived, or wished we lived.

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I have long been fascinated by the ballroom ballets of George Balanchine. Le Bal, a work from 1929, was his first attempt in this genre that he continued to explore through out his long career. These ballets, including La Sonnambula, La Valse and Davidsbündlertänze, seem to be dance as envisioned by a surrealist or romantic poet and in this sense they are radically different from the cool and austere masterworks like Agon and The Four Temperaments that we usually think of when we think of Balanchine. Sometimes referred to as ‘Le Bal Noir’ ballet or The Black Ball ballets the above works which form the core of the corpus of the genre share some distinctive traits beyond their ballroom setting: undercurrents of something tragically wrong, bereavement and loss, ill-fated relationships, and destiny as indifferent and fickle.

In many ways, Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty anticipate the genre of ‘le bal noir’ - with Rothbart and Carabosse as agents of fate who make the party go terribly wrong. Yet, in these ballets as in all things 19th Century, conflicts are resolved, in one way or another, by the end. Many believe that Balanchine, whether consciously or not, modernized the genre by letting narrative points remain uncertain and leaving plot questions unanswered. To him, these works were not about happy endings or even tragic ones, but rather suggesting philosophical and human complexities through irresolution.

Many of the characteristics we associate with ‘le bal noir’ is present in other Balanchine works that do not fall obviously into this category - most notably in the first three movements of his 1966 work Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet (I first saw it in the mid 1990’s). [The first movement of this work also reminds me of the lavish finale of the 1937 Fred Astaire/ Ginger Roger musical, Shall We Dance, where Fred dances with dozens of masked Gingers before the real one reveals herself. How intriguing it is to think about the influence that Astaire and Hermes Pan had on Mr. B and his exploration of the genre.]

In fact, watching numerous performances of Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet at New York City Ballet over the years led me to obsess on Brahms’ Piano Quartet No.1 in G Minor, Op. 25 to which the ballet is danced. However, Balanchine chose to use Arnold Schoenberg’s 1937 transcription for orchestra for his choreography as oppose to Brahms’ 1861 original scoring. I remember wondering – why on earth would Balanchine not use the original score and why would Schoenberg choose to transcribe and orchestrate Brahms? Schoenberg gave the following reasons for his decision: “1. I like this piece. 2. It is seldom played. 3. It is always very badly played, because the better the pianist, the louder he plays and you hear nothing from the strings. I wanted [for] once to hear everything, and this I achieved.”

The sheer beauty and sonic colorations of the opulent Schoenberg orchestration might be one of the elements that attracted Balanchine. The other might be that the work was to be his first new abstract ballet at City Ballet’s large new home at Lincoln Center since it’s move from the much smaller City Center. And because Balanchine often said that chamber music was not suitable for large ballets,  “too long, with too many repeats, and are meant for small rooms”, Schoenberg’s large scale arrangement was perfect for Balanchine’s 55 dancers ballet and the big stage of The New York State Theater.

Although the Balanchine ‘le bal noir’ ballets were created in the 20th Century, the setting always referenced a late 19th Century European ballroom or salon. These are elegant sophisticated rooms, manifestations of the maturation and loosening of the strict mores governing social interaction between men and women at the end of the 19th Century. The introduction of the waltz earlier in the century had changed everything. Social dances done by couples before this time were danced with almost no physical contact, hands barely touching. The waltz by contrast was done with a couple in a close embrace, the man with his hand around the woman’s waist, continually spinning around the room. To a society where close physical contact in public with a member of the opposite sex was objectionable, this intimate, suggestive ‘waltz position’ shocked and was considered scandalous. By the end of the century while the sight of men and women dancing in a locked embrace was no longer shocking, the atmosphere of the room was probably still titillating and charged with undercurrents of sexual energy and desire.

Think of these late 19th Century ballrooms as a kind of social platform where complex personal dramas, charged relationships, distortions of memory and time, societal anxieties, anticipative excitement about, or despair facing impending change might play themselves out. These rooms were a place where the two previous centuries of European culture and its societies converged and were distilled into a single iconic image – elegant embracing couples spinning gracefully in a beautifully chandeliered room. It is in this setting, with all of its suggestive history and psychological implication, that Balanchine places his players/dancers for his ‘le bal noir’ dances.

For Balanchine perhaps it was also a nostalgic location – a place he yearned to return to, somewhere that had faded away and was gone. Like Europe, that soon was to be enveloped and engulfed in the chaos of the onslaught of World War I, this ordered, constrained and highly charged place was about to explode and disappear forever. And by the time the Roaring Twenties rolled in, these places robbed of their mystique, existed only as memory, as longing. The element of persistent and strong desire for a return to a place that exists only as memory is what gives the Balanchine ballroom ballets their fragrance. The faint smell of perfume from beautiful women lingers in the air, enshrouding the space with a desire to return not only to their arms but also to the past in which those arms belonged.

In 1991 with the creation of my ballet Dance at the Gym for The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater I too began to explore this same territory but in an American context. In many ways the mid-20th Century Friday night dance in the high school gymnasium had become an Americanized and democratized everyman or ‘everyteen’s’ version of the European ballroom. If nobody realized it before, certainly by the time Jerome Robbins created his “Dance At The Gym” sequence from West Side Story the gym dance or sock-hop had achieved iconic stature and was indelibly inscribed in the public’s imagination as the place where the period’s stories, relationships, and social challenges were being acted and danced out. Following Dance At the Gym, over the next 15 years, I made five pieces that explored the unique power generated by intimate interactions in public spaces where social dancing occurs such as ballrooms and high school gymnasiums. In 1993 saw the creation of my La Valse, Act 2 from Bristle which is set in a European style ballroom as was the 1997 Fin de Siecle (for The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater), the 2005 Longing (Cincinnati Ballet), 2006’s Le Bal Noir (Koresh Dance Company) and my second gym dance, Motown Suite (2006) for The Joffrey Ballet. All sought to capture the mystery, drama, and theater of this unique social ritual of public social dancing – couples dancing together publicly while simultaneously creating a quite, private, personal, and imagined place to connect.

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Several years ago in preparations for a new ballet using Motown hits that I was planning for The Joffrey Ballet (and because I was also thinking of the work as a possible workshop for a dance musical, a “dancical”, I wrote some thoughts down about the dance musical in general and Twyla Tharp’s Movin’ Out in particular. However, I never shared those thoughts with anyone - but I will later in this post.

With the recent opening of the new Tharp dancical, Come Fly Away (to the songs of Frank Sinatra), and the critical response to it, I started to think again about my own aspirations in this area and what I had written back then. Several other factors might have also gotten me thinking as well. Spectrum’s current collaboration with the 5^th Avenue Theater on its revival of On The Town probably triggered some thoughts. But my being fired from the Broadway bound musical White Noise, which I was scheduled to direct and choreograph this spring in New York, (as of this posting, it still hasn’t gone into rehearsal) is the most likely instigator. I had co-directed and choreographed the out of town tryout in New Orleans this past summer and with two show stopping numbers in it and tremendous audience response, I was thrilled at the possibility of my theater dances being seen the way I wanted them to be seen as opposed to how a director (not me) thought they ought to be viewed. I was also excited that with Bill T Jones’s Fela, the Tharp show, and White Noise, the current season might see three choreographer directed shows running simultaneously on Broadway.

The point being that with my firing from White Noise I realized that I had no power. That in the power/politics of the commercial theater, the most expendable member of the creative team is the non-author or the director/choreographer (especially if unlike Bob Fosse, Michael Bennett or Tharp he or she has no marquee value as a choreographer/director). Interestingly, composers, lyricists, and book writers are considered the authors of a musical, while choreographers whose work is also original and generative are not. So I guess what this might really be about is my desire to be in control or at least in control of the artistic material and the loss of control I felt with my firing. It seems that the only way to be in control or at least to feel like you are in the commercial theater is to author or produce. And as an artist, authoring is the better option.

Control I believe is an issue for Tharp as well. I think her work has evolved the way it has as she has struggled to gain more and more control over the circumstances under which it is produced and as she has moved closer to authoring (in the commercial theater sense). She has been smart – as she has maximized her control she has minimized her financial risk- from not for profit dance company director (you can lose everything) to Broadway author (front end guaranteed, back end the possibilities are endless). She has managed to do this by shrewdly maneuvering within or manipulating the current commercial system she works in. It was rumored that with Movin’ Out she gave up some financial benefits to gain artistic control - and it paid off. Movin’ Out was a hit and she was then able to leverage that success for her next project, The Times They Are A-Changin’. While that show was a flop, it demonstrated/indicated where her aspirations are – the commercial theater (though it could be argued this was clear even back in 1981 when her dance project with David Byrne, The Catherine Wheel, was presented on Broadway at The Winter Garden). After the closing of The Times They Are A-Changin’, she then did what she had done before (among other things like writing books on personal practices or memoir), retreated back to the concert dance or ballet world to rejuvenate, to realign herself with her beginnings and that which she understood and that had always artistically nurtured her.

I do want to say that I think Tharp, aside from being driven, shrewd, and ambitious, to be courageous. She has had her share of successes, failures and disappointments, yet, she is always pushing forward. Sometimes, I think I tend to minimize her accomplishments and talent by focusing on what I perceive as her major shortcoming – a desire for greatness. That desire/urge is what drives and propels her forward but it is also what makes her recent work seem to scream for acknowledgement of its brilliance and originality. It can make it seem needy, inauthentic, dishonest, and even distasteful. Often I think of her like Judy Garland in those old black and white CBS TV images, gaunt yet blotted with the need for love and approval, a big empty needy hole in the center of her being that can never be filled, a black hole of desire dangerously fascinating, all the while sucking us in.

Yet, I must admit I admire her. She takes risks. And when she fails, which I think is often (and oh so publicly), in spite of what must be soul-wrenching disappointment, she rebounds. She is one tough broad and I lik’em like that!!

I want to share my thoughts on Movin’ Out because I believe that Tharp created with it a model for a successful dance musical. She refined and defined the form beyond the revue or anthology formats of Dancin’, Fosse, and Jerome Robbins’ Broadway. She did something new for the Broadway stage– it was only the choreography and dancing that mattered! The dancical, as formatted and practiced by Tharp, is the one commercial theatrical form where the choreographer is the key artistic player, the top dog. It is about what the choreographer is “authoring” that counts most.

Recently, there have been several examples of the dancical that have had moderately successful runs on Broadway - Fosse, Mathew Bourne’s Swan Lake, and Susan Stroman’s Contact come to mind- but the Twyla Tharp/Billy Joel production Movin’ Out captured the public’s attention in an unprecedented way. Perhaps not since Westside Story or Bob Fosse’s Dancin’ has a Broadway production with so much dance had such audience appeal and financial success. With the success of Movin’ Out on Broadway, the “dancical” seemed to be maturing. It also created dreams of prestige and fortune for starry-eyed producers and rights holders of popular music catalogues and libraries.

Firstly, what makes Movin’ Out striking as dance narrative is that the story is original. It is not based on a well know story nor is it a re-imagining of a classic tale, like Bourne’s Swan Lake. Contact also presents an original script but its storytelling ambition is not so high. And secondly, a single lead singer, three back-up singers, and small rock band perform all of the music in Movin’ Out, not in a pit but just above the main stage picture. The band and singers act not as characters, but rather function like the famous bands in 1980’s music videos whose guitar-strumming image or histrionic singing periodically interrupts the visualized narrative of their song. However, in this case they are neither famous nor stars, and are placed uncomfortably above eye level so that the audience has to strain its necks to see them clearly.  They don’t highjack our attention or distract us too much from the main event - THE DANCING.

This places the dancing down front and center! All of our attention goes to the virtuosity of the dancers and the ability of the choreographer to convey not only atmosphere but also narrative. In its themes and tone, Movin’ Out, is the ultimate pop story-ballet. And as with all things pop, the audience needs no background knowledge or expertise to understand it. Watching the show might be a little disorienting at first if you have had little or no experience-viewing dance. But you quickly adjust and it all begins to make sense. Most importantly, you don’t need to know anything about ballet and its lexicon. The multiple-pirouettes, high leg extension, reference to vernacular dancing semaphore any meaning that is important. Add speed, sexiness, and exhaustive energy to the mix and dance literacy become about as necessary as high heel shoes. By the time the show ends, one feels pummeled into submission. We stand, applaud, and cheer. Tharp at her hyperactive worst has won out.

Movin’ Out is an ideal vehicle for a theatrical translation of the songs and music of Billy Joel. It creates a kind of nostalgia that hooks us (like Jersey Boys it’s a baby-boomers nostalgia). It is also a democratize nostalgia, someone else’s nostalgia available to any who wish to partake. With Movin’ Out, one gets to be white, working class, living on Long Island during the Viet Nam era. The experience is like a ride at a theme park with the music, dancing, and images triggering the imagination and causing “the ride”. We think, “So that is how it must have been”. So we end-up longing for something that was never a part of our personal experience or history but rather is the history and memories of another (possibly the creators/authors). Or it’s nostalgia for some pivotal moment in history, like Viet Nam, mythologized and all-purpose-sized for easy consumption. Perhaps any group of songs or music that speak to a specific demographic, an era, or a particular sensible would be ideal for translation into a dancical- like the songs of Frank Sinatra.

While the critical response to Come Fly Away has probably been equal to or better than Movin’ Out, only time will tell if it will equally capture the public’s imagination and have the same level of financial success as that show. But what I am most curious about is whether or not the dancical, like the book musical, is an enduring form or just a passing fad; and will the Tharp shows open the door for other choreographers and dancing to again to move down front and center in the commercial musical theater?

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In my first posting I wondered about how much of the personal should appear in the blog – what my personal life had to do with my professional choices and artistic creations. As I said then, the point perhaps of this blog is to provide some insight into my process of being an artistic director and choreographer and the complex array of things that go into making artistic and organizational decisions. This issue of the relationship of personal history to artistic meaning, output, and value has been around for a while in literary criticism – is knowledge of an artist’s personal history and psychology necessary to discern meaning from the work, and for an appraisal and valuation of it? But in dance these questions are seldom if ever asked. Mostly, it is that those personal truths and realities of the artists’ lives is thought to add a deeper understanding or insight into what is being seen on stage but not necessarily to contribute to the work’s artistic successfulness, worth or value.

Since so much of American contemporary dance is abstract, autobiographical elements are almost impossible to discern. One might say that American contemporary dance artists do everything they can so that who they really are as people and glimpses of their personal life goes unrevealed in their work, (Bill T Jones, David Rousseve, and Reggie Wilson might be exceptions and interestingly all African-American males). With abstract dance artists it is only through ongoing viewing of their work that we come to understand and appreciate (or not) their aesthetic concerns and interests. But seldom do we know what non-aesthetic circumstances drive them and the choices they make – how the non-aesthetic affects the aesthetic. Perhaps even the complex structures employed by many of these artists are like elaborate decoys designed to distract and to keeps us away from knowing who they really are.

I am raising the question because I recently saw a performance by a young (experience wise not chronology) and talented choreographer that caught me off guard. There were two moments in particular that were startling and caused me to gasp (and those of you that know me, know that it takes a lot to make me gasp). In the first, a woman was being violently “humped” by a man in the center of the stage just before the lights went to black ending one of the sections of the piece. The second involved the same woman being tossed upside down in a waste dumpster with her legs sticking straight up, just before another black out, this time signaling the end of the piece and the program.

The dance in general I would describe as a surrealist romp with many of the elements one would expect from a work of that nature - surprises, unexpected juxtapositions and non-sequiturs. And if you were inclined to interpret the moments I described from a feminist perspective there would be much to be dismayed, alarmed, and perhaps angered by. So, from both those viewpoints, gasping seems an appropriate response. However, what triggered me was neither. It was my knowledge of non-artistic biographical information about the choreographer and his relationship with the performers in question that provoked my reaction - the woman in the two instances is the ex-wife of the choreographer and the second man, who tosses her in the dumpster, is the choreographer’s current domestic partner.

With this additional information, other questions cascaded. What is he saying about his relationship with his ex? How does he really feel about her? What does he think of his current life with his current partner in relationship to his old married life? Does he realize that these kinds of questions might arise for viewers? How does the ex feel about what was happening to her on stage? …. I could go on but I won’t because what this points out is that none of these questions have anything to do with whether what happened on stage succeeded as a piece of good dance or not.

In someway, this is familiar territory for me. Back in 1993, I created Sentimental Cannibalism, a work that used as it reference point Jean Baudrillard’s On Seduction. The work caused quite a stir (not always positive). Like Baudrillard I was called anti-feminist (among other things). I recall vividly an incident at the American Dance Festival when David Dorfman and I almost came to blows when he said the piece was pornographic and demeaned women and that I was a misogynist. Interestingly, black women responded quite differently to the work and thought the images of women depicted in the work were not those of man eating “bitches” but rather of strong and assertive women who gave as good as they got. While my intention in the work was to create movement and visual configurations that were metaphors or signifiers of Baudrillard’s ideas, as well as to make an engaging piece of dance-theater, many considered the work to be autobiographical and interpreted it as a manifestation of my personal (and damaged) psychology. And because of that perspective many condemned the work and I was demonized. After that, it seemed all my work was scrutinized through the misogynist lens.

Now I find myself considering intent and meaning in regard to another male artist’s work. Not necessarily what his conscious intent was but what he might have unintentionally communicated. Is he (and was I back in 1993) being irresponsible by not considering how the imagery in the dance might be interpreted? Or are we as artists so caught up in our efforts to solve the technical and unique challenges and demands of creating new work that we naively create inside a bubble? And only after that bubble is burst by some viewer who is bringing all kinds of “other” information - perspectives, preconceptions, and histories (personal, generational, cultural) – are we made aware that we might have said more that what we meant to say… However, I am still left with the question – Was the work any good?

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When I moved to Seattle in 2002 to become artistic director of Spectrum Dance Theater, I felt sad (I had closed the dance company that I had spent 24 years building in New York); misunderstood (my board of directors here didn’t seem to understand a thing I was saying); alienated (I had moved clear across the country into a community whose culture seemed foreign); and lonely (basically I knew no one here). I felt so conflicted about being here that I didn’t even rent an apartment but rather lived out of my suitcase in a hotel for the first 9 months. What got me through this and my first two years at Spectrum was Kent Stowell reminding me (sounding like Tim Gunn from Project Runway), to “make it work” and Stargate SG-1, Showtime and later the SciFi Channel’s long running series. This is not hyperbole (well maybe it is) but it’s true — that television show saved my life!

Of course I knew the 1994 Roland Emmerich directed movie Stargate, staring James Spader and Kurt Russell, on which the television series was based but I had never watched the TV show. I liked the movie because the science titillated me. I loved the idea that a ring-shaped alien device could create a wormhole enabling personal transportation to complementary devices located cosmic distances away; and the quirky concepts partially based on the theories of controversial Swiss author Erich Anton Paul von Däniken’s claims about extraterrestrial influences on early human culture. The TV show with its fiendish but beautiful, vain, and arrogant parasitic villains, the Goa’uld, that marched, camped and vamped, strutted their stuff across the sets and chewed the scenery like glamorous stars in an old Cecil B. De Mille movie, were just so much fun to watch.

During that time FUN is just what I needed– and there was plenty of opportunity for it! Monday beginning at 6 PM four episodes from a previous season; Tuesday through Thursday, one episode beginning at 7 usually from the same season as the Monday episodes; then Friday one old at 7:00 follow by the current season’s episode at 8:00. The characters Daniel Jackson, Samantha Carter, Teal’c, and Jack O’Neill were my imaginary friends and companions. Their travels through the Stargate to distant place, encountering new cultures (usually enslaved and pre-industrial), harrowing situations, danger, and fighting the evil Goa’uld, thrilled and distracted me from the realities of Spectrum. The show provided a daily respite from the challenges of my hard work at a not for profit dance organization. It gave me joy and solace from my sense of isolation in my new home of Seattle and relieved my sense of dread and impending disaster at work.

When I think about the show objectively, Stargate SG-1 was not a great show, it was a good show and I loved it. There were many pleasures to be had – the “Urgo” episode with Dom DeLuise (so, so funny), the Aschen and first Chaka episode, Richard Dean Anderson’s consistently wry and sometimes sardonic humor, the episode when Dr Frasier is killed, the early Carter/O’Neill love/attraction/loss story, the robot SG-1 team episodes, and the growing sense of ensemble as the seasons progressed come to mind. Oh, how I relished those moments when they nailed it! But more importantly I felt that the cast, producers, writers and directors seemed to be completely engaged, passionate about what they were doing and that engagement was often palpable. They found pleasure in what they did and that was inspiring. Those first two years of my religiously watching the show boosted my spirit and showed me what I wanted to bring to Spectrum - ensemble (team work), engagement (passion), and pleasure (love of the doing).

During that period I also started to become aware of an aspect of television that previously I was not conscious of – the role of the series developer/writer/producer. And for Stargate SG-1 that was Brad Wright and Jonathan Glassner. Unlike movie making which is a director’s medium, in television it is the ubiquitous writer/producer that rule the roost. That person(s) has the power, and, controls quality, consistency, and vision. Even if they don’t write or direct every episode, their aesthetic sensibility and storytelling notions are reflected in everything you see on that screen. Just as Caesar’s image and seals were on documents and coinage authenticating their value, television producers stamp their seals on shows. For the the networks, they are the real faces of value for the shows - not the directors or actors.If Brad Wright/Jonathan Glassner and Stargate SG-1 is outside of your experience, how about Law and Order (or any of the Law and Order franchises, SVU or Criminal Intent) or CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and its franchises (Miami and New York) and “you betcha” that Dick Wolf and the Anthony E. Zuiker/Jerry Bruckheimer team respective seals of approval are all over those shows.

So what does this have to do with Spectrum? When I came to Seattle I had to use a new model for how to do things. What worked in New York did not work here. It didn’t work because my job was in many ways different. In New York I was a choreographer and by default an artistic director; while at Spectrum I was an artistic director and by default a choreographer. So, I began to model how I went about things like the developer/writer/producers of the television industry. At first, back in 2002, I was not conscious of what I was doing, but all that Stargate SG-1 watching had insinuated itself into my subconscious. It became clear to me that my job was to create a vision, oversee production, control quality, maintain consistency of product and deliver the highest quality dance that I could (set the standards by initially choreographing all the works myself, then begin to find others who could) and to do it all in the SG-1 spirit of ensemble, engagement, and pleasure.

Today, I still watch a lot of tv and am delighted by current shows like House, Fringe, Dexter, Califonication, Castle, Nip/Tuck, Glee, and TrueBlood. And I miss cancelled shows like Carnivàle, X-Files, Rome, and Firefly. My new role models seem to all be working in tv! The Scott brothers- Ridley (well known for his feature films Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise, and Gladiator) and Tony (Top Gun, Deja Vu)- new tv show The Good Wife, with Julianna Margulies, is superb. Also, at the top of my list are Ronald D. Moore (the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica), Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Firefly), Bruno Heller (Rome, The Mentalist), and Tim Minear (Angel, Firefly).

However, there are two “Televionistas” that leave me breathless and inspired with their audacity, intelligence, creativity and genius – J. J. Abrams and Ryan Murphy.  While Abrams’ recent feature Star Trek was a fresh and surprising visioning of a prequel, it is his string of television hits, Felicity, Alias, Lost, and Fringe, which thrill. Just the sheer volume of his creative output and the energy needed to sustain his production company Bad Robot Productions boggles my mind. Murphy who is the creator of the two most diametrically opposed shows on television, Nip/Tuck (the dysfunctional relationship of two South Florida plastic surgeons) and Glee (musical show about the dysfunctional relationships among members of a high school glee club, and between the school’s faculty and staff) exhibits less bravado but more heart. However, both men are brilliant.

But Nip/Tuck brings back that old Stargate SG-1 feeling– but richer and better. The writing is excellent, especially the dialogue, and in-spite of the sometimes soap opera-ish elements, it resonates emotionally mature and honestly in a way that Stargate SG-1 never could. I laugh, I squirm and I am touched by how fragile, vulnerable, flawed and human the characters are. They remind me of me. I feel for them and for myself when I watch. Their foibles are also mine and that insight awakens my compassion for other.

As I move into the next chapter of my tenure at Spectrum, again I find that I am taking my inspiration from television. When I arrive home from my day at the studio, like a passionate young lover, I rush to my big flat screen TV and the downloaded shows I watch nightly through iTunes and Apple-TV (Roku is my next purchase) and embrace it. I tell myself that it is a way for me to escape from the challenges of my work but in reality it draws me closer. For me, it is an entertaining, deceptive, and unconscious way to meet, consider, solve and rise to the job’s demands.

While tv and dance don’t appear to have much in common, that difference might just be superficial, on the surface. Beyond tv’s big money, advertising driven revenues, huge resources at its disposal, and scores of creative types working on every aspect and dance/Spectrum’s lack of all of the above, both good television and good dance require vision, creativity, energy, imagination, skill, mastery, and insight. With television, I am reminded daily that while money and staff would make my life easier, they are not fundamental to making good dance or building a great organization. They just help deliver them to the public.

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Around this time during the past several years, I find myself thinking that my work is out of fashion, out moded. Usually, I don’t know what causes it – a slowing down of activity, seasonal depression (this is Seattle after all). What triggered it this time, however, was an invitation from Zoë Scofield and Juniper Shuey to attend their APAP showing at The American Realness Festival. The details are unimportant in many ways but what struck me about the invitation and set me off was how aware I was of a shift in aesthetic tastes as evidenced by the artists that are the “real Americans”, those included in the Festival, Miguel Gutierrez, Ann Liv Young, Luciana Achugar, Layard Thompson, Jack Ferver and Jeremy Wade. Some of it is generational of course and of course I am not only another generation but also fall into another set of aesthetic values category as well… Wow, I think to myself — this is what old feels like!

The problem is that there is a tendency to think of these aesthetic shifts as absolutes; that generational shifts in perspectives are truths and not just a truth but permanent and absolute truths. Yes, these shifts are indeed real but just like dance they are ephemeral, transitory, and temporary. And like fashion or trends, well, even life itself, they will again shift, change and be different…

Last week in the New York Times Roslyn Sulcas and to some degree an unaccredited author in the Financial Times while writing on the Judith Jamison 20^th anniversary celebration as artistic director of the Ailey Company, repeatedly vomiting out and regurgitated the same half digested stale old rhetoric about the mediocrity of the works commissioned and revived by the company under Ms Jamison tenure. What they both failed to recognize is that those works in many ways represent the dance fashion of the time that they were created, pieces from the “ready to wear collections” of the choreographers, if you will. And like padded shoulders and thick eyebrows they were meant to be no more than what they were, popular and the look of the time. They help to sell the company; they brought audiences in to the theaters and put butts in the seats. And like the perennial Nutcrackers that populate our stages at this time of year, they delighted some and perhaps help to whet the appetites of a few for something more substantial. If these choreographies did not meet the “classic” test, well most things don’t, but they served their purpose - they made the Ailey Company the most well-known and successful modern dance company in the world!

Ms Sulcas concludes,” But the depressing conclusion to be drawn here is that, in the main, the choreography challenges neither the dancers nor the audiences. It’s even more depressing that everyone seems to like it that way.” I say - Who said that fashion or entertainment was about challenges? What Ms Sulcas and other like-minded critics might value might be of no value to Ms Jamison and the supporters of the Ailey Company and the opinions of such critics might be like people deliberately and continuously farting and fouling the air during a birthday celebration of a beloved relative.

Now back to my original thought. If my work or aesthetic values are outdated, do my past work and my current work have value? Do I need to dress-up what I do differently in order for its worth or content to be gotten or appreciated? Another set of questions might be: Is much of the American dance works currently in fashion today devoid of “content”? But rather the aesthetic packaging is the content? Its stylishness, its construction, its cleverness, how it’s accessorized (video, text, celebrity artists collaborator), its intellectual conceits, and its total visual appeal might be “the point”?

Perhaps what is most valuable for me in all of this thinking and wondering is - none of this has anything to do with why I do the work I do or whether I will continue to do it. I get value from what I do and the dances I create and there appears to be others that get value as well. During my 33 years of making dances I have found myself many times, to paraphrase Heidi Klum the host of Project Runway, being out one minute and in the next minute. But it has never been auf Wiedersehen.

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I just finished what my friends call a “donaldbyrdtrip”.

I departed Newark to Seattle, airport codes EWR and SEA (I’ve taken to memorizing the codes) at 8:20 am on Sunday 13 December. At 6:00 am on Monday December 14, less than 24 hours later, like a vampire retreating from the advancing sunrise hoping to avoid being fried to a crisp by the sun’s impending rays, I find myself walking, no, lurching through the same Newark airport … My mind reels and my body screams for sleep. A week earlier I had flown Gothenburg, Sweden (GOT) to Amsterdam (AMS), two days later Amsterdam (AMS) to Seattle (SEA) via Los Angeles (LAX), then the next day off to New York (JFK) and now this. I desperately need to lay down and close my eyes for a bit before I have to be at a 10:00 am rehearsal in mid-town Manhattan….

Ok, so the question is why? Why do I do things like take a 6 hour transcontinental trip to sit in a theater to watch an hour-long dance program, then turn around and make the reverse trip back all on the same day? Or fly to Sweden to perform a 15 min solo when the financial don’t really work? Why do I say YES to things when NO might be the more sensible response?

I used to think I made wacky choices because I was ambitious, driven, and being strategic (I am), or I had a deeply rooted need to people please (maybe), or “The est Standard Training” indoctrination of keeping my word (possible). … Those may all be true but I don’t think those are the only reasons. I accept that I am not always a sensible person and that I am driven by a need to succeed, but I am also a person who wants and has a need to serve and be fulfilled by what I do.

When I was in my late 20’s my friends would howl with laughter because I used to say I wanted to be a “modern dance giant”. “You mean like Martha Graham?” Convulsive, rafter-shaking guffaws followed. Inexorably, I was ridiculed into silence and I stopped saying it. But I still believed it…

Now I know that what I desired then was not to be a “modern dance giant” in an egocentric sense or in a public acknowledgment way (both which may also be true) but rather in the sense that I loved dance so much I wanted to not only be a part of it but wanted to make a contribution to it as well. How could I serve IT, The Dance? How could I give back to the one thing that had so transformed me? With The Dance I had found an identity (dancer, choreographer), a voice (a way of expressing how I saw the world), and my Calling. And I wanted to share my enthusiasm. My fervor would be evangelical in its intensity and passion. I would be a fiery John the Baptist for The Dance. I would serve that which had awakened and transform me. And the results would be monumental!

Some have said to me that Spectrum is such a small platform to do the things that I aspire to doing – but I don’t believe that. What might be true is that I have not always articulated the scale of the vision I have for Spectrum. Perhaps what has kept me quiet is I am still listening to my friends from 30 plus years ago shrieking with amusement at my big dream; that I have allowed myself to be silenced out of fear, seeming grandiose, egomaniacal, or just being told that it is impossible. But those donaldbyrdtrips are an indication of something and that something is a commitment to the transformation of Spectrum and Seattle’s contemporary dance scene into something that is glorious, magnificent, and unparalleled. Now I’ve said it.

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I’m not quite sure where to begin… Perhaps, I should create ground rules for myself about what I will or will not write about; make a decision on how formal or informal this blog will be… What I do know is I don’t want it to be like those Facebook postings that are mundane information that pollute with banality and makes me want to hide permanently that person’s comments. I hope I can find an inviting balance between information about Spectrum and my relationship with it and my personal thoughts/considerations on dance, aesthetics, and art - to create a tone that is not to loose and chatty but also not stiff and desiccated.

Also, there are the questions of how much or little of my personal life, details and experiences, should I include and what is the relationship of my personal with my position as artistic director at Spectrum?

For example, I am writing this in my room at the Amstel Hotel in Amsterdam (it is my favorite hotel in the world) … I am en route from Gothenburg, Sweden where I performed at 24kvadrat (an intimate, charming, and green colored performance space) with Maud Karlsson (former dancer in Donald Byrd/The Group), Siv Ander (a 70 year old beauty and former dancer with Cullberg Ballet) and Tommy Håkansson… Tonight I will have dinner with Scott deLahunta (an Amsterdam based researcher, writer, consultant and organizer on a wide range of international projects bringing performing arts into conjunction with other disciplines and practices, whose also a friend that has moved and touched me in so many ways with his intelligence and sensitivity). Does any of this contributes to or shapes my decisions as artistic director or helps you the reader to understand the choices I make in that position? Maybe what is more pertinent and directly related is I met with Paul Selwyn Norton, a Netherlands based choreographer, who I would like to bring to Seattle to work with Spectrum? I don’t know …

As I ponder these questions, information, and facts, they all seem to have some bearing on what might be happening and what you might be seeing and experiencing at Spectrum in the near future. How they fit together, I don’t quite know as of yet – but I am sure they must fit.

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