Creation Process for Tick and Talk of Common Time –- by Margaret Dragu
COVID-19 triggered the moving of my Fitness/Yoga personal/small group training from IRL to ZOOM allowing me to teach people around the world without leaving my living room. This was kewl. But I longed for more intimacy/connection with my participants so I added TikTok dance crazes to my lesson plans and began ZOOM recording my participants and me dancing together. This was popular and fun but at the end of the week (months, years) I still felt displacement, absence, and longing.
Historic dance crazes (Charleston, Jitterbug, Twist and Macarena etc.) were performed live in dancehalls/nightclubs or on TV shows like Ed Sullivan or Soul Train. On the other hand, TikTok dance crazes, while viewed by a large public on the internet, are recorded by individuals/small groups very privately in their living rooms or workplaces with the social aspect only being a possible future connection between the dancer(s) and their phone–scrolling viewers.
When I watch TikTok dance compilations (and even my own footage), I feel a rupture between public/private, and longing/desire. This rupture reminds me of art concepts and processes of John Cage & Merce Cunningham with whom I have had a 50+ year fascination.
The Merce Cunningham Dance Company was founded in 1953 at Black Mountain College. This was also the year I was born. Although my formative dance training is German
Modern Expressionist Dance via Nikolais and Hanya Holm, the Cunningham–Cage art concepts always appealed to me. Cage-Cunningham created dance and sound independently, then employed chance operations and tasks to combine them in live performances inviting accidents, surprises and overlaps to occur. Their separate-but-together collaborations expanded the fields of dance, music, moving image, and visual art to dismantle hierarchies and create new forms of choreography and syncopation. Cage–Cunningham stated their work was rooted in the scenic space of a “common time”. I am borrowing their term and bending their concepts for this interdisciplinary project called Tick Talk of Common Time.
For this project, I recorded dancers and artists from Vancouver (live) in dance studios, parks, walking paths, and my living room. National & international participants were recorded with me via ZOOM. I edited all this footage together to make 5 TikTok dances. I gave one dance video to each of the five composers. They stripped off the popular music tracks and composed original music and soundscapes.
The 5 videos with original compositions were the immersive frame for 5 live-to-tape Entr’actes. Each entr’acte was an improvised 2 minute performance by a dancing duo and a vocal transcribing duo created in the moment for camera.