Dance Techniques 2010

Lance Gries — Release and Alignment Oriented Techniques
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Topics revolving around identity–politics came to the fore
in the 1970s and 1980s. Soul became an important musical
genre for artists in downtown New York (after the protest
songs of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez). In dance, it was the
black identity of Bill T. Jones, who was also active in the
gay movement. For countless artists like Keith Hennessy
in California, questions of gender and hetero / homo / bisexual
orientation became a central focus of their work,
from which—while taking into account the intellectual
achievements of Karl Marx, Wilhelm Reich, Fritz Perls,
and Michel Foucault—all other societal topics could be
extrapolated. Women explored their own history and—as
the musician–performer Meredith Monk already had done
with Education of a Girlchild—brought it to the stage.
Artists worked in several fields simultaneously: after the
Happenings that Robert Rauschenberg created with dancers,
experimental artists from the minimalist scene, such
as theater director Robert Wilson, composers like Phillip
Glass, and choreographers like Lucinda Childs emerged.
Laurie Anderson designed musical performances by playfully
deconstructing words and sounds. Trisha Brown, in
turn, used Anderson’s music for her seminal piece, Set and
Reset, which showcased dancing and dancers who were
embodying Release Technique. Among them were some
of the same dancers who earlier collaborated with Steve
Paxton and would later become Lance Gries’s dancing
partners and influences. In his first year with Trisha’s company,
Lance lived in dance historian Sally Banes’s SoHo
loft for a time, sharing the space with a friend from Merce
Cunningham’s company, and it became a meeting point
for colleagues. Lance says, “The story is much more tactile
than historians often tend to make it. It is basically about
people sharing lofts, people knowing certain people, and
circles mingling within the small New York art scene.” 11
Relevant Theoretical
Discourses
As mentioned previously, the beginnings of various Release
Techniques can be considered to start with Mabel E.
Todd’s research in her seminal work The Thinking Body,
published in 1937. Dance as discourse and research—this
improvisational, process–oriented approach by the release
community can be traced back to the 1930s. The director
of the dance department at the University of Wisconsin,
Margaret H’Doubler, who was greatly influenced by Todd,
did not define improvisation as a means to a finished
dance product, but rather as a scientific research process in
John Dewey’s sense. Anna Halprin adopted this approach,
which was then shared by Yvonne Rainer and the Judson
Dance Theatre. The Contact Improvisation scene also
took up this line of thinking.
What became important was, on one hand, the developing
somatic approaches, and, on the other, Asian
approaches that were making inroads into parts of the
American art scene. Artist and composer John Cage disseminated
D. T. Suzuki’s ideas, a Japanese philosopher
who had lectured about Zen Buddhism at Columbia University
in New York from 1952–57. Suzuki’s influence
reached the humanist movement at California’s Esalen
Institute through his student, the philosopher Alan Watts,
and through the music teacher Charlotte Selver. Here,
body practice techniques were taught and researched that,
in turn, sprung from dancing, therapeutic, and philosophical
contexts like those espoused by Fritz Perls, Moshé
Feldenkrais, Ida Rolf, Anna Halprin, Alexander Lowen,
and Rollo May. Ideas and the body practices taken from
meditation techniques spread, particularly on the U.S.
West Coast and in New York. D. T. Suzuki’s writings were
just as popular as were, later, Robert M. Pirsig’s work Zen
and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Ram Dass’s Grist
for the Mill, and the Chinese I Ching, and—somewhat
later—the convergence of Western science and spiritual
Eastern traditions of thought in The Tao of Physics.
Dance historian Sally Banes became a central figure of
theoretical discourse and analysis for postmodern dance
as it developed from 1960 onward. Dance students training
in universities in and around New York received
their education in dance theory and dance writing from
her—like Lance Gries, for example. Within the New York
dance scene from the 1980s to the 2000s, theoretical discourse
took place in the Movement Research Performance
Journal, which had been founded by artists. The periodical
Contact Quarterly was also an important forum for
discussion and debate.
Current Practice
Release Techniques are currently used in many artistic
and educational processes, especially by those dance artists
who come from the postmodern tradition in the U.S.
These artists are connected to the Judson Dance Theater,
later with Trisha Brown or Steve Paxton, and the Contact
Improvisation scene. Most major dance festivals in Europe
offer workshops based on Release Techniques.
In Brussels, choreographers like Anne Teresa De
Keersmaeker invite release teachers like Lance Gries to
P.A.R.T.S. in order to teach students body awareness, clarify
their alignment in space, strengthen them physically,
and to acquaint them with the practices and movement
vocabulary of American Post Modernism. The curriculum
includes courses in contemporary training methods developed
on the basis of various Release Techniques.