March 29 of this year marked exactly 10 years since we first appeared on the professional stage. This took place in the Liteyny Theatre. Understandably, we were nervous. Among us there were those who had never before performed on stage as a dancer. However, most of us had performing experience of some kind. As amateurs. What experience we did have was not that great. We were nervous not only because we were somewhat or completely out of the habit of performing. There was another, possibly even more important reason for our nervousness. And that was that this was the first ever performance of a Russian modern dance company in St. Petersburg and, as we later learned, in all of Russia. And there was even a third reason: from the very start of our work we knew that we were a REAL modern dance company. Prior to March 29 only we had known about this, but know it was time for the audience to see and understand this.

I am absolutely certain that there are those who will object and say that 5 or 10 years before our first concert, someone or some group did such-and-such…. I'm not going to dispute this. I simply want to explain what it means to be a REAL modern dance company, and then my presumed opponents (assuming of course that they agree with my reasoning) will be able to assess their own or someone else's experience more precisely.

I will not be delving into theory or history here. In this chapter I will be dealing with the facts that lie on the surface. When a thoughtful audience member trained to appreciate a certain type of choreography goes to his first modern dance performance, something pops out at him other than just the obvious differences from performances he has seen before. It is a quality that modern dancers and modern dance choreography have, not immediately perceptible, which can best be defined by the banal expression "something inside oneself". And in fact, if we examine this more closely, we see that modern dancers, when compared to any other type of dancers, are not trying to demonstrate anything for the audience. Their attention is usually directed at one another or within themselves. Finally we understand that they are dancing not at all for the audience. Of course, the expression "dancing not for the audience" is not entirely accurate in regard to a dance company that is performing in a theatre before a gathering of the public. So, we understand that dancing for the audience is of only secondary importance for modern dancers; but then primarily for whom or for what do they dance?

How dancers behave on stage depends solely on the choreographer. That, at least, is how it is with modern dance. There is no intermediary between the dancer and the choreographer (whereas in classical ballet a rehearsal director may figure in). Moreover, a contemporary dance choreographer is generally the founder and director of the company and, naturally, its ideologist.

So now, let's leave modern dancers alone for a while and talk generally about the people who compose dances. In my observations, there are two types of choreographer. The first type consists of those who begin composing a dance from a fable, a plot or scenario they themselves have invented, any theatrical or quasi-theatrical idea, or finally, even from the music, i.e. from whatever you like, just not from the dance movement itself, not from dancing. The second type consists of those who maniacally strive to create a choreographic TEXT. These strange birds begin each work with the composition of dance phrases -- phrases taken from their own, personal dance language, of course. Choreographers of the first type usually create dance performances or finished dances, while the second type creates choreography. The first type is what I personally call ballet masters, the second is what I call choreographers.

In the vast majority of cases, to which group a choreographer belongs is determined not by choice, but by whether the person is at all inclined to compose choreographic text. Inclination, understandably, has a lot to do with one's capacity and innate ability, which naturally can be developed. Probably no one would dispute that a choreographer who composes choreographic text must have a dance language, just like an author who composes prose or poetry must know the language in which he writes. A dance language is a complex phenomenon. It is not simply an alphabet or a dictionary, i.e. a collection of movement words. It is the spatial and temporal organization of dance units, it is the process of developing movement, it is the understanding of center and periphery, of stable and unstable positions, and a whole lot else. Academic rules never took hold in modern dance. There are no textbooks or a single set of methods that everyone must use. There is only the teacher, or more accurately, a multitude of teachers. Before you get the chance to be accepted into a professional dance company, you will study a lot and instill in yourself many different language systems. It is very fortunate if then you are accepted into a company directed by a choreographer whose understanding of dance is close to yours. Dancing for several years, you will learn this choreographer's dance language and, finally, will uncover within yourself the desire to work independently. By this time you will already possess your own dance language. It may be one of the dialects of a language you love, it may be the antithesis of your teacher's language, or it may be a completely original language - whichever it is doesn't really matter. What's important is the fact that you have your own language and are prepared to use it fully. But how? There is only one method - to teach the rules of your language to your dancers.

A dance language is indeed capable of becoming a completely self-contained system. When this happens, you are overcome with the temptation to delight in its sophistication and orderliness. You don't feel like changing anything. But the way things are in the world of modern dance, the process is considered more important than the result. Almost everyone senses the need to develop a dance language for the very purpose of keeping modern dance from turning into a system and dying. What's more, for many this is not at all a necessity, but rather a means of existence in the dance world. One might interject that systems are either open or closed, but these are only words. What happens in reality is that when you work a lot and fumble to find your own language, everything you do is organic and eventually works out. Though your dancers are still not satisfied, audience members already are. Of course, these are your average audience members, of which, alas, there are so many. They ask, and sometimes even demand, that you stay the way you were. But you feel that your technique is fettering you and so you reject it, smash it to pieces, and start over from scratch. Thus, you are constantly changing your language.

And so, you studied a lot, then you danced in a company, soaking up and analyzing the teacher's language, then founded your own troupe, discovered your own dance language, and began teaching it to your dancers. Finally, you have trained your dancers and, with their help (which means with the help of your language), have begun creating dances.

So now let's ask a question. What helps a language survive? And let's answer this question quite naturally. Communication helps it survive. If, for example, you have learned English, but have no constant communication and conversation in this language with any other person who knows English, your language will leave you. It's almost an axiom. It does little good just to study a language - you need to speak it. The place where choreographer and dancers communicate is the rehearsal space and the stage; the time when they communicate is during a daily or regularly occurring class, the setting of a new work, a rehearsal, or a performance before an audience. Modern dancers want to let the audience inside their circle of communication. To do this, they take specific actions: they make their company classes open to the public; they perform in schools, galleries, museums, and on the street. They try to avoid orchestra pits, which separate the audience from the dancers. If modern dancers continue their communication during a performance before an audience, then the latter is compelled to direct its energy, imagination, and intellect toward the dancers. All other forms of stage dance do just the opposite; they splash their energy out at the audience and set up a distance across the orchestra pit, a distance that the audience cannot possibly bridge. The alienated audience member is left only to marvel at the dancers' mastery, to shout "bravo", and to applaud a long time after the performance has ended. Since you have a program in your hands that describes to you the content of the performance, there is no reason for you to engage in any mental activity, all the more so since there is nothing which you might contemplate. All you can do is marvel, shout, and applaud, assuming, of course, that you're not just an incidental observer.

And so, during a performance the dancers continue to communicate in the language of dance, forcing the audience to meet them halfway, and this vector (from the audience to the dancers) is the only means by which they (the dancers) can be understood. This is why the audience, which stands outside the ritual circle, is simply obliged to step inside that circle, in order to join in the ritual.

It is quite obvious that communication leads to understanding. And understanding, in turn, strengthens one's interest in, and love for, the object of communication. If a choreographer works continuously on his or her own dance language, then despite its apparent unusualness or strangeness, this language acquires the characteristics of orderliness and organicness, which a thoughtful audience member ready for active participation (dialogue) cannot help but sense.

Now I will return to the question I posed at the very beginning of my perhaps not entirely focused exploration: why do modern dancers dance in the first place? And I will answer this as follows: to establish paths of communication. The first of these paths is between the dancers themselves. They "converse" in their own dance language and their stage conversation is nothing more than a continuation of the studio conversation they were having. The second path is between the dancers and the dance objective which the choreographer has set before them. The third is between the dancers' intellect and their bodies' physical features (or more specifically, their physical abilities). The fourth is between the context and the music (or whatever substitutes for the music, even silence). Finally, the fifth (but by no means last) path is between the dancers and the audience. Only secondarily do modern dancers dance for the audience, because if they dance primarily for the audience, then no paths of communication will be established. I am completely convinced of this. And let me add that if the dancers follow through and fully realize the idea of using dance to communicate, then they dance for the audience not in the second place, not in the third place, but NEVER. And if these dancers are representing a dance troupe, then this troupe is a REAL modern dance company.

I know for certain that some readers of my commentary will want to ask me, "What exactly is the difference between your 'real' modern dance company and one that is not 'real'? After all, if you work outside the framework of the official doctrine, if you do not drift along with the current, if you, working without money or support, are not in any line to get hand-outs, and finally, if you are creating something new and have your own audience following, then isn't all that already justification enough of your activity?" I do not dispute that all this is true. I am prepared to support any dance company and any choreographer that works in opposition to the SYSTEM. But I am a practitioner, not a theoretician. And as a practitioner, I can say the following: if a choreographer is not working on her own dance language and choreographic form, if she thinks of herself only as a "ballet mistress" and is not in shape enough to teach her own technique class, if she cannot compose a 16-count phrase that at the very least demonstrates some kind of internal logic, if only her own internal logic, then such a choreographer, regardless of what kind of experimenter she may be, is simply weak and is not sufficiently professional. And if, in addition, she easily replaces her dancers without much thought, if the troupe she directs is always performing at festivals and competitions the goal of which is to determine winners and give them awards, then such a choreographer either mistakenly believes herself to be a modern dance choreographer, or, as is customary to say in such situations, is intentionally misleading the public.

Though they may use different terminology, there are certain choreographers who deserve our respect. For example, rather than "modern" they may call it "contemporary". In principle this is a suitable term. It is possible, for instance, to have no interest at all in the history of modern dance and its ideas. It is possible to know nothing of Yvonne Rainer's Manifesto. This is where I will leave it for now, because in my next commentary I want to talk about that very document. And also about the concept of "dance theatre", about the training and forming of dancers, about dance festivals, about children and teenagers, about America and Europe, and in general about anything that comes to my mind.

Thank you for your attention.
Sasha Kukin, September 2002

Translated by Louis Saletan (Houston, USA).

First of all I'd like to apologize to my readers for the great delay in releasing Chapter 2. I was waiting to get the article by Yvonne Rainer that contains the text of her "Manifesto". I asked my friends in the U.S. to find this article and send it to me (the correspondence and searching took a lot of time), and ultimately Wendy Perron (New York editor of the journal Dance Magazine) succeeded in helping me, for which I am very grateful to her.

Yvonne Rainer's "Manifesto" is a small part of a larger article by her published in 1965 in Vol. 10, No. 2 of the Tulane Drama Review. The text of the Manifesto has appeared in numerous dance publications, but I had suspected that it was always being reprinted in an abridged format. However, after reading the article Wendy sent to me, I realized that I had been wrong and that the Manifesto is in fact only one small paragraph in length, taking up five and a half lines of standard magazine format. Here is the complete text of the Manifesto:

No to spectacle. No to virtuosity. No to transformation and magic and make-believe. No to glamour and transcendence of the star image. No to the heroic and anti-heroic. No to trash imagery. No to involvement of performer or spectator. No to style. No to camp. No to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer. No to eccentricity. No to moving or being moved.

Thus, we have before us the twelve no's of Yvonne Rainer. But first a few words about Yvonne herself. She, perhaps more than anyone else, exemplifies the post-modern movement in contemporary dance, which began in the mid-1960s and continues, I would venture to say, up through the present day. She was an experimental choreographer, the creator of the conceptual "Trio A", one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theater, the creator of Grand Union along with Trisha Brown, David Gordon, and Steve Paxton, a film director, and a writer. And also the author of the Manifesto, which is traditionally considered the declaration of post-modernism.

As much as I might like, I cannot go into great detail here about the "post-modern" conceptual phenomenon in American contemporary dance. To do that, I would need to devote more than one chapter. But I'll try to address this subject briefly. The post-modern era began with the first concert in the Judson Memorial Church, which was organized by Robert Dunn and featured students and dancers from the Cunningham School. This took place in 1962. The next fifteen years saw the intensive development of these post-modern ideas, but they didn't stop there. These ideas so powerfully changed generally held views on the technology of dance, on the choreographic process, on the performance space, and on much else, that their influence on today's modern dance does not need to be proven.

I will point out three of what I consider to be the most important ideas of post-modern dance. The first idea is that one must strive to peel away the husk from the movement, to dig deep to get to its bare essence. In other words, one must work with the movement, constantly experimenting. The second idea is that the process is more interesting than the product. One must find new ideas for the process. This may be a game, an improvisation, or non-traditional classroom work or a performance that involves non-professionals. The third idea is that complete freedom is necessary. Freedom to choose the material, freedom of the choreographic idea, freedom of the location where the work is to be presented, freedom of costume, etc.

If one replaces each "no" in Yvonne Rainer's Manifesto with a "yes", then what results is not so much its opposite as something that is totally different from the aforementioned ideas. What would this look like? Well, at first glance this would seem to resemble classical ballet. Spectacle, virtuosity, transformation, eccentricity, moving or being moved, the heroic and anti-heroic, the star image… all or almost all of these are attributes of classical ballet. Perhaps not of every ballet and not of the most modern ballets. Ballet critics might take issue with this assertion, especially the idea of "trash imagery", I would guess. I would have to agree with them. As for the involvement of performer or spectator, what Yvonne had in mind was a situation when the artist is dancing for a spectator (or the choreographer is choreographing for a spectator), and the spectator wants to see what he is accustomed to seeing and what is pleasing to his eyes.

Yvonne Rainer, of course, did not view classical ballet as the antithesis of her ideas. All of her 12 no's were aimed squarely against what might easily become modern dance's legacy and domain. For objective reasons, classical dance has always been in the grip of drama's jaws. Classical dance has even always liked being in drama's grip and likes it still. The dance drama - the last achievement of classical ballet - still dominates today. The audience likes it when they understand what it is about. True, then there is William Forsythe, who maniacally continues to work with movement, which almost cost him his job at the Frankfurt Ballet.

As for modern dance, it began with an understanding of the value of movement and of the value of the dance text. Modern dancers' experiments could as easily result in the formation of finished technical systems (Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham) as not. It all depended and depends on what you choose. If you are an experimenter by nature, then you cannot experiment for only a portion of your creative life. You simply won't want to stop. But to create a system is to stop. If you work with movement continuously, then virtually every time you will produce either completely new or partially new material. Moreover, as a composer you didn't try such-and-such, and you still want to try such-and-such. Theatre, or shall we say any verbal idea, retreats to the background, giving way to the dance. However, if you have created a system from which you do not wish to deviate, acknowledging that any more or less self-contained system comprises not only technique but also composition (see Chapter 1), then inevitably the "story" becomes the most important thing, which you must tell using the devices of your system. And if you're not versed in stage direction, don't know how to arrange the artists spatially, aren't able to put the emphasis in the proper places, aren't capable of working with a pause in the theatrical sense, then what you will produce is bad theatre. In ballet theatre you may be rescued by the stage director, scene-designer, or musical director. In modern dance such salvation usually doesn't exist, although in larger, well-financed troupes in America some of the aforementioned specialists may be part of the artistic staff.

I recognize that my reasoning, in addition to being somewhat radical, is also somewhat abstract. For example, it doesn't quite fit the work of Merce Cunningham. On the one hand, he has always been obsessed with experimentation; on the other hand, he created a completely lucid and self-sufficient system. His work has never originated in literary or theatrical ideas. The public has long associated Cunningham's name with the dance avant-garde. However, the experiments by Cunningham that earned him this reputation were largely related to ideas of how his choreography existed and was executed on stage, and not to the choreographic text itself. He gave his dancers a certain amount of freedom on stage, but at the same time created obstacles so that their freedom was in fact something of an illusion. For his day and age, Merce was a very "leftist" choreographer, if such a term can be used, which is why so many students were drawn to his school. But, having sown the seed of freedom in the heads of his students and dancers, Cunningham could not stop the process. His students decided to move on, and some even headed in the opposite direction. This probably explains why the first post-modernists came out of his very school.

As I see it, Yvonne Rainer's Manifesto aims to oppose bad theatre, which any choreography can easily turn into if at its core lies just about anything other than working with movement or movement invention. In truth there are a large number of choreographers who have been trained in a particular system of dance and who do not want (or, as more often is the case, are not capable) to go beyond that system's boundaries. They are not inclined to "play with movement" (a phrase used by Yvonne Rainer) and are content to keep all the baggage that they have carried with them. There is virtually no evidence of choreographic thought in their works, and what little thought there is can be discerned only by referring to their program text. Without the text there is no discernible thought and nothing to analyze. Such choreographers (whom I like to call "ballet masters" or "ballet mistresses") occupy themselves mostly with the task of compilation. The compilation of phrases from prepared formulas. Sometimes, though, they spy something new and add it in to their formulas. They aren't concerned with any "language", let alone developing their own. Among such choreographers there are definitely those whose compilations are successful. These individuals simply have taste when it comes to compilation and a sense of proportion. It is commonly said that such people have style. Let me reiterate that I come at this discussion from my experience in modern dance. In that context, style is the absolute opposite of a dance language. Look at it this way: if your choreography consists of pieces of the languages of other choreographers, then insofar as this combination of pieces is successful, you have style. This the meaning behind the eighth "no" in Rainer's Manifesto. Of course, if you yourself are a successful compiler who has style, or even just an ordinary compiler (a ballet master), you might want to object, "What good is choreographic text to an audience member? He won't understand it regardless. The audience needs a PERFORMANCE, they need a story, they need to empathize with the heroes of this story, and so on." I won't answer this, except to implore you, please, to read again my first chapter. As concerns THEATRE in the hands of a "compiler" choreographer, it needn't necessarily always be bad. The question of theatre and dance is a complex one, which I will try to examine more closely in one of my next chapters.

Let's return to the Manifesto. In the preface to it, Yvonne Rainer writes that she personally likes many different forms of contemporary theatre. She explains that all her "no's" represent only a stricter set of rules and boundaries for her own work (playing) with movement. On the one hand, this, of course, is a gimmick to proclaim forcefully the metastases of the contemporary dance scene and to dissociate herself from that; on the other hand it is a statement of fact that a "positive manifesto" will never be an easy alternative to a "no-manifesto". In fact, only your OWN work with movement will help you to formulate your own "yes's", assuming, of course, you feel the need to have some. My own "yes-Manifesto", for example, is as follows:

Yes to choreographic text,
Yes to a technique capable of changing,
Yes to developing a dance language,
Yes to free experimentation.,
Yes to improvisation,
Yes to the process,
Yes to the equality of all the participants in the process,
Yes to communication.

Sasha Kukin, August 15, 2003

Translated by Louis Saletan (Houston, USA).