Simon Portigal - Dancer
What drew me to dance?
I was also always dancing when I was young. I’d find myself passing the time either dancing in our front hall to blaring music, or playing pretend, alone, or with friends. Using my/our imagination’s around the neighbourhood, transforming it how we’d see fit. Turning trees into monsters and inventing ways to turn them back into trees again. Fighting imagined ghosts. Playing with matches… Dancing and using our imaginations were an instinctual activity. All children do similar things, no?
Through elementary school, I used to watch my sisters dance recitals and constantly wished myself up there. At around twelve years old I started taking class because of some abstract desire to move in those ways.
Throughout high school I took class and was involved with a youth company on weekends. Dance and theater, at the time, kept me academically sane and mostly willing to go to school, where I was asked to learn a great deal of things I had no interest in learning. Math. I still have trouble getting myself to do things I don’t want to do, or can’t do. I am a bit juvenile in that way. Dance and theater, during that time, gave me a way to air angst, heartbreak, confusion, joy, etc. that we all know.
Upon graduating I was hungry to learn more about dance on a professional level. I remember seeing a large Montreal company in Calgary and being absolutely blown away. I used to actually dream about doing that work. It was the only thing I could see myself doing, perhaps because it’s what I spent most of my time doing. I never really gave anything else a thought, besides parties, and being social, until my fifth year of professional studies. At that time I also went through an intensive crisis period, much like Melina and Jenn’s, because I didn’t know what else I could do, or if dance was bringing me what it used to. I came out the other side knowing that if I wanted to do other things, I just had to do them. I had to make an effort to at least find out why I wanted to do those things, by doing them.
Presently I choose to work in live performance because I believe it is a medium with great affective, creative, intellectual, emotional, and reflective potentials. I have trouble with dance’s ability to only communicate one specific thing, but am continually surprised at its ability to communicate so many things at once. I go to see live performance because of its capacity to use bodies to speak about socio-political, intellectual, emotional, and epochal issues, which are always somehow closely related to the body. How bodies are treated, perceived, spoken about, cared for or rejected, transformed, disfigured, what they produce, why they do what they do, etc. I choose to dedicate time and energy to contemporary performance because of its potential for materializing radical thought, in situation, representation, and in the surprising links it makes between things I had never thought would, or could, be made. It allows me to think, see, and move in different ways. And like any art it creates some sort of space for dialogue, if it’s desired. The things dealt with in the work, that you go to see, or that you make, give context so that those things can be discussed. It allows me to focus on something outside of myself.
What is it about dance/performance in particular that allows you to express yourself over other forms?
Well. It is what I’ve learned how to do, technically, so far. It is the community I currently exist in. It’s not that I love performing above anything else, although I do take great pleasure in it, but using my body to say something is much different than taking a picture, making a film, etc. I think it is a much vaguer medium in some ways, there is so much, and so little, that can be done. I am limited by my body, but also take pleasure in finding ways to use that onstage.
The challenges you set out for yourself have to be dealt with in very real ways when you’re dealing with the body. You feel the effort. You can see the effort. It’s not that it’s the more effort, the better, but some sort of exchange is going on with the audience because of it. There is a built-up expenditure of the performer and maker’s creative, intellectual, sometimes emotional, and physical energies that is evident from the whole event of a performance. It is absolutely alive when you experience it, and unique in that it is in the Here and Now.
A performance itself is not, and cannot be, for the most part, a pre-fabricated, mass-produced, and distributed object. Even if you’re in an audience with 499 other people, or more, it can be a very intimate exchange, and it is still a communally shared event. I’m not quite sure how to explain it exactly. Although I think I just did.
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I agree with Simon when he says that dance can be used to express a myriad of things, and that the challenges posed are with limitations of the body. But in saying that, the best work comes with having the greatest limitations. I feel like dance should be used more to create dialog to tackle issues of the time, and to some extent it does in conjunction with many other artistic mediums. Perhaps its intimacy and its inability to be prefabricated and mass produced can be used to really bring home a point that mass media can sometimes miss its mark, with pre context of being entertainment.
On this idea of the media and public only seeing dance as ‘entertainment’……The struggle for dance artists is that the body is so often used publicly as a commercial commodity to be admired or disdained based on its perceived ‘beauty’; a concept shaped (again) by our culture and time. The body as language, as sculpture, as texture and energy, as a vehicle to raise questions or confront current ideas, is unfamiliar to most viewers/participants in dance art. The body, in its individuality and imperfection is somewhat messy–and is always changing; influenced by its biological workings and its environment-both emotional and physical. I think many people run away from that ‘messiness’ (valuing only the perfection of the body image and ability) and those of us that love that beautiful messiness, we embrace dance and movement as fundamental human expression.
We (as dance artists) often contribute to the media’s perception of dance as entertainment in interviews and in print) when we (in an effort to attract an audience) respond shallowly to questions that address these commercial aspects only. I love that Bob Clark always asks me “why should someone come to see this?” and every time I struggle to answer honestly–Actually, I believe that they should come because we are all enriched by returning to the body as a fundamental form of connection and expression. Personally, I hope they will come because I want to reach out my hand and touch them.
Hi Melissa, i’m totally with you on our current society being obsessed with bodily beauty and perfection, and that we don’t value our bodies in anything more than an expression of beauty or perfection in form through physical excellence (sports). And the other aspects of the body as language, expression and moving sculpture is lost when it deviates from the expected norm.
I think what most people struggle with when it coms to contemporary dance, and this is something that i’ve expressed to the dancers, and one of the reasons i joined the project, is that many of us outside dance, don’t know what dancers/choreographers are doing, expressing, trying to achieve and how they go about it.
That is also compounded by the feeling from people on the outside that this is not something for them, but more an internal experience from dancers for dancers. When we ask “Why we should see this?” or “Whats the show about?”, we expect an honest introspective answer to what brought you to create the show. What we usually get is something vague that doesn’t really connect us with the piece or the dancers and various artists involved.
For me, as the developer of the online and social media side of this project is to be able to pull these ideas and topics from the dancers and have them be able to explain, explore and connect with an audience removed from dance. And to do it in a forum which is not just the post-show schmoozing, which is really just adulation and applause.
This discourse i feel will have the dancers and artists more in tune with the audience, and the audience more connected to the art.
melissa….i just want to say that your last sentence in your reply truly exemplifies how i feel as well. i really just want to connect somehow to the viewer. we use dance or the language of the body to do this…and perhaps we find it special? i feel like perhaps it is because we put our body through an experience and put ourselves “on display” during this journey in an effort to connect…hoping that the audience will also come along. (in any way, shape or form that they are able to do so…)