From Oct. 15–17, the Tufts Dance Program hosted an artist residency in collaboration with several other departments, including the Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora. Maria Bauman, a multi-disciplinary artist and director of the New York-based dance company, MBDance, held three different events over the course of the three-day residency.
On Tuesday, Bauman shared a research talk titled “Dancing WITH: Responding to our Environment, Each other, and Ourselves.” While “research talk” may evoke an academic presentation or a summary of findings at a conference, this event emphasized group discussion and movement. A group of about 36 participants, including students from various Tufts dance classes, were asked to gather in a circle — a shape that the artist said emphasized equality.
In that circle, participants were prompted to shout their names and pronouns while moving in a way that represented how they were feeling that day. While this activity seemed to engage the whole group, the purpose felt unclear as everyone simultaneously shouting created a chaotic noise rather than a real introduction.
Before beginning the next activity, Bauman spoke about the importance of consent. She offered a sign — inspired by the BDSM community — that could be used to opt out of any physical contact throughout the course of an exercise. The first activity involved finding three other people and touching elbows with them, which was seemingly intended to prepare participants for the improvisation exercise that followed.
In groups of four, participants gathered around a prop, such as a chair, a foam roller or a pencil box. Each group member had 90 seconds to dance with their “partner object” while the other three acted as witnesses to the movement sequence. This exercise challenged participants to reevaluate their interactions with the objects and consider different ways to engage with props, such as crawling under a chair, crumpling a paper or wearing a plastic cone.
In the group reflection period after the activity, Bauman then asked if anyone knew that Indigenous People’s Day had taken place the day before — a strange question to ask a group who had self-identified as being “interested in movement, the environment, and indigenous studies.” The artist then connected the activity and the dancers’ relationship with the props to colonization by explaining how movement choices are influenced by taught history.
In a demonstration, Bauman picked up a foam roller and danced while throwing, stepping on and kicking the prop. After this sequence, Bauman started another improvisation where she left the roller in one place on the ground, instead opting to dance around it without disturbing the prop. She used these two demonstrations to explain the way movements that might feel spontaneous or improvisational are actually rooted in colonialism. This analogy felt like a unique yet perplexing demonstration of her indigenous land research and land-based artistic practice. While becoming conscious of the insidious nature of colonization and colonial practices is a worthwhile cause, this lesson felt like a mistargeted restriction of movement.
The second event of the residency, an improvisation workshop titled “Dancing in Contact with One Another,” took place on Wednesday and had approximately 50 people in attendance. The event was described as being “open to all who are working in the intersectionality of race, gender, and decolonizing practices.” After repeating the same opening activity, Bauman invited participants to travel around the Jackson Dance Lab, moving around the floor in whatever way they chose while making eye contact with others in the group. Bauman’s discussion of eye contact and the discomfort we feel when engaging in it was fairly trite in that it didn’t add anything meaningful to the conversation.
Bauman then moved into the central activity of the workshop, which she referred to as “shaking cathedrals.” Participants were paired with random partners and asked to engage in a series of activities that involved connecting their body parts with their partners and improvisationally shaking their bodies in unison. Quite plainly, it was uncomfortable.
Although Bauman prefaced the activity by explaining that one could place their hand on their head to signal that they did not wish to be touched and noted that there was nothing explicitly sexual about touching “derrières” with someone, the intimate contact did not feel voluntary. Not a single person signaled the visual indication that they felt uncomfortable being touched, so any one individual would have been singling themselves out by doing so. Moreover, the entire activity was based on touching another person’s body and shaking, so participation in the workshop was presumably impossible without physical touch.
The “shaking cathedrals” twist on contact improvisation seemed organized with the intention of replicating a common practice used in MBDance. Like the workshop’s title states, this improvisation sought to promote “contact with one another.” However, without some baseline knowledge of partners’ boundaries, it was difficult to engage in the activity respectfully and meaningfully in less than 90 minutes.
On Thursday, Bauman presented a lecture/demonstration about MBDance’s current “dance-ritual-artwork” titled “These are the bodies that have not borne,” which she spoke about briefly during the first two workshops. The authors did not attend the third event.
Inviting an artist in residence to Tufts provides an opportunity to introduce students to novel approaches, techniques, and styles of dance. Bauman certainly has a valuable perspective, and her objectives with the workshop were admirable; however, elements of future workshops should keep the scope intentionally limited to goals that can be accomplished in short workshops rather than semester-long classes.
