Ann Glaviano is a dancer, DJ, writer, and born-and-raised New Orleanian. (@annglaviano)

Still from performance at the Mary C. O'Keefe Cultural Arts Center, COAST DANCEfest, Ocean Springs, MS, March 2019

I’m working on an evening-length solo called an animal dance.

This solo came about because, in 2018, at my fourth workshop studying with [choreographer] Deborah Hay in Austin, Deborah gave each dancer in attendance a one-word description of a solo she thought might be “fun” (read: useful) for us to make. Deborah’s recommendation to me: “an animal dance.”

I hated the idea. In performance process, it’s common for the choreographer or director to ask for “animal” movements in warm-up. Move like a lizard! Move like a monkey! I hate this shit. I didn’t want to imitate an animal.

It took a few months before it dawned on me that my animal dance would not require me to imitate an animal. Because I already am an animal.

This, I’m embarrassed to say, was a real epiphany.

I began to think about the range of movement qualities that human animals have in their vernacular—violent gestures, tenderness, athleticism, coyness. I am a cisgender woman who spends a lot of time thinking about misogyny (the banal and the profound), trauma, sexuality, and gender performance, including drag, so all of this has gone into the mix. I’ve performed the solo four times since December 2018. Each performance is a new draft; for each I make substantial revisions. In one draft I sang. In one draft I derived movement from nasty Dorothea Lasky poems. In one draft I took off my dress and played an accordion. Every draft has included an adaptation of Anna Karina’s line dance in Band of Outsiders, and bright pink pump heels.

In my upcoming posts I’ll tell you more about the project, its challenges, and my support system. Today I wanted to share a short video, along with its rationale and process. I’ve been posting videos like this all year on my Instagram page. I think people generally understand that they are part of my solo-making process, and I think people also generally understand that dancers inexplicably post a lot of videos of themselves on social media. It’s a little weird. Are dancers just self-obsessed? Attention-hungry? Desperate for validation? Desperate for audience? Yes.

Also, I have found it useful to think of those videos as studies. The visual artists reading this already know what that means, but it’s a term less often deployed in dance. From Wikipedia: “In art, a study is a drawing, sketch or painting done in preparation for a finished piece, or as visual notes. Studies are often used to understand the problems involved in rendering subjects and to plan the elements to be used in finished works, such as light, color, form, perspective and composition.”

BEING DERIVATIVE

As an artist in training—or I guess we’re always in training, but I mean in apprenticeship mode—I remember there was much ado about “finding your voice.” The struggle to find one’s voice. How would one ever find it? The problem we were trying to solve was being derivative. After undergrad, I dated a guy in a very good band. Their band had a best-friend band. The best-friend band was, I thought, objectively “better” than my boyfriend’s band—they played cleaner, they took it more seriously, etc.—and also I thought, in those early days, that they sounded derivative. The best-friend band had great taste, and they were clearly copying their heroes. My boyfriend’s band also had great taste, also was copying their heroes. Maybe they didn’t sound derivative because they didn’t have the chops to render perfect copies of the bands they loved. But I suspect they didn’t sound derivative because they were drawing from a wider pool of sources. Like all the other bands on the local scene at the time, they were ripping off the music they loved, but they were working with a broad enough range of influences that their mix of influences was unique. The way they mixed them was unique. And so they derived their own sound.

I’m pretty sure that’s what’s up with “finding your voice.”

BRING HER WITH YOU

Still from rehearsal at the New Orleans Ballet Theatre Studio, late 2019, for a work-in-progress showcase with the re:FRAME choreographic cohort

In 2017, I took my second workshop with Deborah Hay. I was training alongside fourteen other contemporary dancers. We moved in the studio for five hours a day, improvising while Deborah coached us in the application of her [choreography] tools to what she calls our “practice of performance.” We were very eager to impress each other and Deborah with our legit contemporary dancer skills, so we were earnestly contemporary-dancering all over the room. One day we broke for lunch and, when we returned, Deborah had put on a pop playlist. I think “Heartbeats” by the Knife was on there. We went nuts. At one point we made a Soul Train line. Afterwards, Deborah said to us, rather sternly, “I haven’t seen any of you move like that all week. Where has it been? Why aren’t you bringing that into your dancing?”

One of Deborah’s tools is “bring her with you.” Bring all of you with you into the practice of performance. Not only your serious contemporary dancer, but also your eight-year-old self with tap shoes. The you who wanted to become a baton twirler and also does not know the first thing about how to twirl a baton. The you who has thirty years of classical ballet training. The you who has a sense of humor. The you with the ’90s and early 2000s playlist called “booty music.” All of you. Bring her with you.

If you’re worried about finding your voice, if you’re worried about being derivative, this is a good hack: bring her with you.

INPUTS AND OUTPUTS

I’ve noticed when I improvise that what comes out is basically a mash-up of my most recent inputs. If I just finished ballet class, my improv is all distal initiated movement. If I just took a Trisha Brown workshop, it’s sequential. If I just came from the gym, I wind up on the floor doing dead bugs. Seriously. It’s absurd. Presumably I should worry that I have no ideas of my own, because what I come up with is so obviously influenced by the last thing I did with my body. But I’ve decided I’m fine with it, because it also means that I am empowered to adjust my output by warming myself up with whatever inputs I think will generate an interesting improv that day.

Last week I was in Colorado teaching improv and composition at a summer dance intensive. Eliza Ohman was there teaching musical theatre; she is a rock star, and I love watching her classes when I can catch them. During the closing combo of her heels class, I was thinking—it’s been years since I’ve done any theatrical jazz. That’s a whole “her” I have not spent time with in a while; I certainly haven’t been bringing her with me in my solo practice. I remembered Eliza had posted some cute one-minute combos to her Instagram during the pandemic, from classes she was teaching at Broadway Dance Center. I figured I could try to learn one of the combos as an input.

DRAMA

So tonight I put on my LaDucas, which I probably have not worn since the professional production of Cabaret I did in 2012 at Short North Stage in Ohio. I attempted to learn, in my living room, a one-minute combo from Eliza’s Instagram, performed to Lena Horne’s “Give Me Love.” Pretty soon I abandoned the heels. After a while I also abandoned the combo, because I was getting super hung up on getting it perfect, which would be difficult for me to do without a mirror to help me fix my lines.

I figured by that point I’d learned enough of the shapes and movement pathways and musical accents from the combo to generate a thematically related improv to the Lena Horne song. I did a few iterations of that before deciding I should abandon the song. I was getting hung up on the music, on hitting the accents, trying to fit the shapes in at tempo.

I improvised in silence. But I found I was still moving at the pace of the song, singing the song to myself in my head, and it was making the improv very busy. I abandoned singing the song to myself. Sometimes I found the chorus would pop back into my head: give me love. I was filming all of this, iteration after iteration, and I decided that I hated watching myself dancing in my living room, because it reminds me of the pandemic. Which we are still in.

So finally I abandoned the living room, too. No heels. No combo. No song. I went outside in sneakers and danced in silence on a small patch of concrete in my backyard. This evening’s study: broken down dark abstracted theatrical backyard jazz.