This is the final installment from Sue Roginski! Enjoy! The Framers wish you a merry Monday to start the week! It’s definitely not too late to purchase your discounted tickets to our show this weekend, Ecouter!

————————–

Part 3 of 3

For some reason I was under the impression that after graduate school you would immediately pursue a job teaching in a college setting. This emerged as an unspoken expectation or perhaps something I concocted along the way.

job reality

I started the process of applying for jobs, specifically the full-time tenure track dance jobs in a college setting.

At this point I had a part-time job at a community college and was fairly settled in Riverside. It did not even occur to me to open up the geographic range of where I would begin the job search.

There might be more successful job search potential if you are willing to travel to another state. Nonetheless, I began seeking those full-time tenure track positions in state.

A few job applications began to lead to rejections.

side note

There are resources at school that enable you to always have a CV, cover letter and letters of recommendation on file, so that when a job becomes available you are already prepared to send those materials out.

job pieces

For whatever reason I did not take advantage of the school resource yet paid attention to job listing sites: HERC, Indeed, and the CCC Registry. Each time I applied for a job I would spend about two weeks gathering the pieces, and having contacts and colleagues write a letter or adapt an existing letter to speak to that job. I would typically create the cover letter to respond to a particular job listing. It seems the personal touch could be more effective.

I have had many thoughts throughout the full-time job search and process. Would I have better luck if I were a renowned choreographer (inside smile)? What if I could really fill all requirements of a certain job sometimes including the ability to teach ballet, modern, jazz, hip-hop, tap, dance history, somatic practices, dance pedagogy, dance theory, and specialize in a world dance form while trained in yoga or pilates?

There are rarely job listings that might speak to what honors you or your creative background specifically.

I don’t think I could fake a jazz class to get the job (although my teacher told me that I most certainly could-inside laughter)!

adjunct appreciation

Seven years post the MFA degree, the life of an adjunct has grown on me. I have had the opportunity to be in several communities at the same time and to move amongst a diverse group of individuals studying dance. I have witnessed the varied styles that full-time faculty bring to a program.

As an adjunct I am able to continue creating work and immersing myself in multiple community dance projects. A teacher of mine in college chose to be an adjunct because she just wanted to teach. Another professor I know retired because he “was overwhelmed with paperwork and just wanted to teach”.

What I have discovered as a dance artist and teacher piecing together the parts is that the possibilities for other ways in which to engage in a dance field are unlimited.

——————

Sue Roginski graduated from Wesleyan University in 1987 with a BA in Dance and from the University of California Riverside in 2007 with an MFA in Dance (experimental choreography). She is a teacher, choreographer, and performer who has produced her own work as well as performances to benefit Project Inform, Breast Cancer Action, and Women’s Cancer Resource Center. In the past few years, Sue has had the opportunity to share choreography at Anatomy Riot (LA), Highways Performance Space (Santa Monica), Unknown Theater (LA), AB Miller High School (Fontana), Culver Center of the Arts (Riverside), Society of Dance History Scholars (conferences ’08 and ’09), The Haven Café and Gallery (Banning), Back to the Grind Coffee House (Riverside), Heritage High School (Romoland), KUNST-STOFF arts (SF), and Riverside Ballet Arts (Riverside). She also has been privileged to dance and perform with Susan Rose and Dancers since 2005. Sue teaches at Mt. San Jacinto College and Riverside City College and divides her time between Riverside and San Francisco where she had a ten year career as dancer and collaborator with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company. Sue performs with Dandelion Dancetheater (Bay Area based ensemble) and Christy Funsch (SF dance artist) whenever possible, and in 2010 created P.L.A.C.E. Performance (a dance collective) with friend and colleague Julie Satow Freeman. Her ongoing creative process infuses choreography with improvisation.

In case you’re not caught up with Frame’s newest weekly series, Thesis Thursday, you can catch up on the last two blog posts here. In a nutshell, this series features installments of my senior thesis written for Rice University’s Center for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality. It explores the topics of Contact Improvisation, Feminism, feminist performance art, and female empowerment through movement.

Here’s a re-cap of my initial post:

I will argue that CI is a complex feminist practice. The relationship CI has to feminism is complex because it is not inherently feminist, but enables women to have a feminist experience.

If you don’t have time to catch up on the first two posts, have no fear! It’s a perfect week to dive in! This is the first post to go beyond the introductory material and into the “meat” of my first chapter. Enjoy!

——————————–

Chapter One: Influences, Feminist Connections and Contact Improvisation

Part I. Modernist Influences

By Lena Silva

Contact Improvisation, like feminist performance art, has a clear link to modern and postmodern dance as shown through the early career of Steve Paxton. He considered himself an outsider to the dance establishment. Despite having studied gymnastics in his childhood and modern dance at the University of Arizona, Paxton did not believe he was a “real dancer.” Only while dancing for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company at age 22 did Paxton begin to identify as a dancer. Paxton admits, “It took me a long time to admit that I was a ‘dancer’…Because I held dancers in such high esteem… it took me a long time to feel I was part of [the New York arts scene]”.[1] Perhaps his affinity with postmodern dance and egalitarian approach to dance making was related to his outsider mentality.

Steve Paxton worked alongside or under many women and men during his formative years as a dancer before CI was initiated. These included Merce Cunningham, José Limón, and Yvonne Rainer. Rainer identified as a feminist performance artist, and Paxton had other colleagues that did so as well. Feminist belonged to the three dance communities that were most influential for Paxton: the Judson Dance Theatre, The Living Theater, and the Grand Union. These individuals and groups provided an influential legacy of egalitarianism and non-hierarchical organization for CI.

Steve Paxton

Merce Cunningham (1919–2009), a major influence on Steve Paxton, was a dancer, choreographer and leader in the American avant-garde for over fifty years, at his most prolific in the 1950’s and 60’s when he worked with Paxton.[2] The most important legacy of Cunningham’s for Paxton was Cunningham’s reliance on collaboration with artists of many different types (including musicians, architects, painter, and actors) and his willingness to experiment. He coined the postmodern technique of chance choreography, which required collaboration John Cage a musician and Cunningham’s life partner. Cage composed musical scores for the dance shows independently of Cunningham’s choreography so that the resulting dance abandoned conventional efforts for dance to match music.

Merce Cunningham

However, Paxton’s style of dance making diverged from Cunningham’s insistence on heteronormative partnering. According to Sally Banes, “Cunningham could not, or would not, escape the heritage of classical ballet… men still supported and lifted women…in quite traditional ways. Men did not partner men, nor did women lift or support women.”[3] Paxton and other members of Cunningham’s company questioned the heteronormative conventions, which opened them to a less traditional choreography of gender relations in dance. As early as 1961, while still dancing with Cunningham, Paxton began complicating the gendered nature of choreography in “Proxy,” which the female dancer of the duet lifts the male dancer.[4]

Also during the early 1960’s in New York City, Paxton spent one year dancing with one of the most influential modern dancers in history, José Limón. Limón refused to codify his technique to avoid stifling the creativity of his students. He encouraged them to find their individual expression of a movement, an improvisational element shared by postmodern dance.[5] Limón’s sensitivity toward creative hierarchy was important for Paxton who also chose to set out a minimal frame of reference of movement for dancers rather than impose on them the necessity to dance exactly like him.

Jose Limon

Limón appointed Doris Humphrey to be the artistic director of his company rather than personally assuming the position. That he chose a woman is notable. Despite the prestige some women had in the modern dance world, such as Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham, many others struggled to attain prominence at the level of their male contemporaries. Humphrey is acclaimed for opening up modern dance to the nuances of gravity with her principle of “fall and recovery,” which focuses on organic falls and rebounds of the body that arise from shifts in weight.[6] Humphrey said gravity was “…the very core of all movement, in my opinion.”[7] Her style is similar to what became central to CI movement technique: focusing on gravity and sharing changes in weight between partners as impetus for spontaneous movement.

Dorris Humphrey

Hey Framers, it’s almost the weekend!

Why not start the end of the week with a good read?

Well… at least I think it’s pretty good, but I’m a little biased. Check out this second installment of my senior honors thesis written for Rice University’s Center for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality. It explores the topics of Contact Improvisation, Feminism, feminist performance art, and female empowerment through movement. 

Here’s a re-cap of last week’s initial post:

I will argue that CI is a complex feminist practice. The relationship CI has to feminism is complex because it is not inherently feminist, but enables women to have a feminist experience.

If you have time read the full article!

——————————-

Part II of Points of Contact: Contact Improvisation and Feminism

I will substantiate my argument by focusing on facets of CI that its founders acknowledge as fundamental: gender non-conformity, rejection of sensual repression, rejection of hierarchical and commerce-driven demands on the production of art, and complication of the sexual consummation ideal. This will be accomplished through examination of interviews with founding members of CI, some conducted specifically for this project and some recorded by others, as well as an examination of the periodical Contact Quarterly, founded in 1975 as a forum for the discussion of CI as it was emerging. This evidence will be supplemented by secondary sources from authorities, including Ann Cooper Albright, Cynthia Novack and Cheryl Pallant. These authors highlight the egalitarian and anti-hierarchical nature of the dance form.[1] I link the history of CI to feminist performance art and the recent forms of CI to feminist theories of sexuality, gender equity and embodiment.[2] To accomplish this, I will draw upon accounts from practitioners who testify to the usefulness of CI in solidifying their sexual autonomy, helping them cope with gender-based violence and body image issues, and liberating their experience of gender from the feminine-masculine dichotomy.

I had a blast going through old articles from the Contact Quarterly – dating all the way back to the 70’s! 

My first chapter provides a historical analysis of the proximity of CI to the feminist art movement of the 1960’s and 70’s. The feminist art movement emerged in the late 1960’s precisely at the time that CI was conceptualized. According to dramaturg and English scholar, Jeanie Forte, “Within this movement, women’s performance emerges as a specific strategy that allies postmodernism and feminism, adding the critique of gender/patriarchy to the already damaging critique of modernism inherent in the activity.”[3] The “personal as political” became a mantra for many feminists of the time who sought to politicize their personal experiences of gender in order to draw attention to sexism and criticize patriarchy.[4] Also according to Forte, “Women’s performance art operates to unmask this function of ‘Woman,’ responding to the weight of representation by creating an acute awareness of all that signifies Woman, or femininity.”[5] To accomplish this, feminist artists made use of autobiographical narratives, their physical bodies, and emerging gender politics, which simultaneously opened up the nature of performance art itself. Carolee Schneeman, Yoko Ono and the Guerrilla Girls are recognized as significant feminist performance artists from the past few decades.[6]

I read Rainer’s autobiography, Feelings Are Facts, to give me more background and perspective on her work and relationship to CI. The book was recommended to me by Nancy Stark Smith in one of our conversations.

Chapter One focuses on the collaboration between feminist performance artist Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton during the inception of CI. To analyze feminist thought as it emerged in the feminist performance art movement and alongside the development and practice of CI, I will use writings by art historian, Linda Nochlin, feminist philosopher, Judith Butler and historian Alice Echols. These scholars outline the power of structural conditions, performativity of gender, and importance of representation. All of which are engaged with, in some way, by feminist performance art and CI. I will also look at video recordings of the first CI performances in order to analyze gendered politics of movement and partnering. I will discuss interviews I conducted with Nancy Stark Smith on her stance on feminism and CI. Her remarks reveal the politicizing effects of CI and contribute to my larger claim about the dance form as a complex feminist practice.

Hey Framers! Happy Monday!

Frame Dance Productions has been running its series MFA Monday for the past seven months and it has been a whirlwind of wonderful insights into a Master of Fine Arts in Dance.

We’ve featured seasoned professionals like our own board member, Rosie Trump, as well as Mary Grimes, Diane Cahill Bedford, Matthew Cumbie, Amanda Jackson and Heather Nabors,

alongside fresh perspectives from an MFA student, Angela Falcone,

and more from a Frame Dancer, Laura Gutierrez, who is considering going to get her MFA

complimented by Dr. Alexis Weisbord who has her PhD in Critical Dance Studies.

It has been a GREAT run so far – check out some of these articles, they’re well worth the read! And look forward to next week when we begin a new three-part arc featuring Sue Roginski:

Sue Roginski graduated from Wesleyan University in 1987 with a BA in Dance and from the University of California Riverside in 2007 with an MFA in Dance (experimental choreography). She is a teacher, choreographer, and performer who has produced her own work as well as performances to benefit Project Inform, Breast Cancer Action, and Women’s Cancer Resource Center. In the past few years, Sue has had the opportunity to share choreography at Anatomy Riot (LA), Highways Performance Space (Santa Monica), Unknown Theater (LA), AB Miller High School (Fontana), Society of Dance History Scholars (conferences ’08 and ’09), The Haven Café and Gallery (Banning), Back to the Grind Coffee House (Riverside), Heritage High School (Romoland), KUNST-STOFF arts (SF), and Riverside Ballet Arts (Riverside). She also has been privileged to dance and perform with Susan Rose and Dancers since 2005. Sue teaches at Mt. San Jacinto College and Riverside City College and divides her time between Riverside and San Francisco where she had a ten year career as dancer and collaborator with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company. Sue performs with Dandelion Dancetheater (Bay Area based ensemble) and Christy Funsch (SF dance artist) whenever possible, and in 2010 created P.L.A.C.E. Performance (a dance collective) with friend and colleague Julie Satow Freeman. Her ongoing creative process infuses choreography with improvisation.

Stay tuned Framers, more to come!