Alex Ketley: A choreographer's failure

I once watched a team of Tibetan Buddhists in the final stages of creating a sand mandala. For three weeks, they used small tubes to pick up particles of colored sand, then deposited each granule into a spot on a predetermined pattern (click here to see a video). However, the instant that one of them laid down the final particle of sand, the monks— to ritualistically embody the "transitory nature of material life"— swept away their painstakingly crafted design.

Some spectators around me gasped in awe. I balked at a wasteful destruction of beauty.

A similar exasperation possessed me a few weeks ago while listening to choreographer Alex Ketley during a talkback after BalletX's Fall Series. In response to a question about how he notated the choreography for his mesmerizing work, Silt, Ketley responded that he didn't write down the work's movement patterns at all. Instead, he and the company members watched video sessions of the previous day's rehearsal and adjusted or re-learned their dance steps anew each day from the tapes.

Ketley— an itinerant choreographer who also runs The Foundry dance troupe in San Francisco— added that he came to Philadelphia to create his world premiere in collaboration with BalletX's company members— and, that being the case, never expected to see Silt performed again. Anyone who missed the five performances of Silt in November would never experience its beauty and power.

Two mandates of Western art

To me, this failure to write down choreography surpasses the Buddhists' wasteful destruction of their art. Unlike the Tibetan artists— who at least left behind the pattern upon which someone could recreate the mandala— Ketley failed to notate his piece so that another company of dancers could restage Silt for a new audience.

(To be sure, BalletX could have videotaped the performance. But Ketley fully expected that no other troupe would perform his work.)

Also unlike the Tibetan monks, Ketley functions in the Western artistic tradition, which— at least since the Renaissance— has operated upon two over-arching mandates: the idea of formalizing a canon, and then archiving that canon for the benefit of future generations. An itinerant choreographer's refusal to notate his output cannot fulfill either of these mandates. Consequently his art loses its fundamental ability to communicate in that word's most basic sense: to create a community based upon shared experience.

Lucky to be there

Of course audience members may disagree about the value of a given work; even the establishment of a canon (say, Shakespeare's Hamlet or Beethoven's Fifth Symphony) rarely homogenizes reactions to a work. But an archive at least ensures that future generations can access the piece.

Without that archive, audience members, reviewers and even performers can leave behind only unverifiable testimonials about the work. Outside of a very limited subset of people fortunate enough to have seen the work— because without an archive, exposure to the work boils down to the sheer luck of having been there— no one in the future can connect with each other through that particular work of art. As a further consequence, the artist's creation cannot integrate into the larger culture; it can't provide a common ground that might unify disparate people across boundaries of nation, class and ethnicity.

Imagine the state of civilization if scientists similarly declined to write down and share the results of their experiments?

Two cheers for YouTube

I wouldn't raise this issue if I didn't hold Ketley's Silt in high regard. Not every work of art is worth preserving. Some artists with sufficient self-awareness can still delight audiences while knowing that their output might never achieve canonical status (think of Willi Dorner's Bodies in Urban Spaces at this past fall's Fringe Festival, or Patrick Dougherty's ephemeral earthwork "Summer Palace" at the Morris Arboretum.). Choreographers indulge this practice every week on shows like "So You Think You Can Dance," where choreographic works viewed by millions will never be repeated again—except, of course, in living rooms, high school dances, YouTube videos, etc., where— guess what?— the works, via repeated performances, then contribute to the creation of a shared culture.

By passing down the mandala ritual from one generation to the next— not to mention subscribing to an organized religion— the Buddhists at least acknowledge the "transitory nature of life." And, to be sure, sometimes a recorded work of art may be lost or destroyed— as happened, say, in the Dark Ages, when monks drunkenly mis-transcribed Latin or Greek documents and priests destroyed objectionable documents wholesale. But without some record to begin with, how can we connect or go forward?♦


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