Ethan Philbrick: “Slow Dances”
With Anh Vo, Tess Dworman, Niall Jones, Tara Aisha Willis, nibia pastrana santiago, and Moriah Evans
This Video Viewing Room features an audio-essay by Ethan Philbrick on the colonial history of a Baroque slow dance called the Sarabande, as well as video documentation of a first meeting in an ongoing, remote collaborative research process between Philbrick and six dance artists: Anh Vo, Tess Dworman, Niall Jones, Tara Aisha Willis, nibia pastrana santiago, and Moriah Evans.
Figure 1: An audio-essay overlaid on a recording of Philbrick performing the Sarabandes from J.S. Bach’s Six Cello Suites on September 29th, 2020. To read a transcript of this essay, click here.
Figure 2: Endpin holes from where Philbrick practiced cello, 8 to 18 years old. In the audio-essay above Philbrick writes, “When I was young and learning Johann Sebastian Bach’s Cello Suites for the first time, all I wanted to do was luxuriate in the rolled chords and harmonic intricacies of their slow movements. I’d play these movements, called Sarabandes, especially slowly, letting the phrases float out of time, capacious breaths opening up within the movements’ short structures.”
Figure 3: A Beauchamp-Feuillet notation step plan for a Sarabande from an early 18th century dance booklet. Philbrick writes,“Before the Sarabande became a slow dance associated with the white propertied leisure classes of the European courts in the late 17th century and used as a template for instrumental music by Baroque composers such as Bach in the early 18th century, it was a fast, erotic, and popular dance often pejoratively associated with non-white Europeans and colonized subjects. While often thought of only as a courtly social dance, the Sarabande is actually a dance form with a complicated colonial history that occupies a fraught symbolic space between Europe and its others, the metropole and the colonies, the Age of Enlightenment and the Age of Empire.”
Figure 4: A list of questions Philbrick sent to Anh Vo, Tess Dworman, Niall Jones, Tara Aisha Willis, nibia pastrana santiago, and Moriah Evans.
Figure 5: A selection of responses to the questions above from Vo, Dworman, Jones, Willis, santiago, and Evans (appearing in that order).
Figure 6: Documentation of a first meeting between Philbrick and Vo, Dworman, Jones, Willis, santiago, and Evans, September and October 2020.
Ethan Philbrick is a composer, cellist, and writer. He holds a PhD in performance studies from New York University and is currently a visiting assistant professor of performance studies at Muhlenberg College.
Anh Vo is a Vietnamese choreographer, dancer, theorist, and activist. Currently based in Brooklyn, they have earned degrees in Performance Studies from Brown University (BA) and New York University (MA). They create dances and produce texts about pornography and queer relations, about being and form, about identity and abstraction, about history and its colonial reality.
Tess Dworman is a Brooklyn-based choreographer and performer originally from Oak Park, IL. She studied at the Laban Centre in London and graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a BFA in Dance. In New York, her work has been presented by AUNTS, Center for Performance Research, Catch, Dixon Place, Danspace Project, Movement Research at the Judson Church, New York Live Arts, PS122, and The Chocolate Factory Theater.
Niall Jones is a 2017 Bessie nominee for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer, who works between dance, performance, and visual art practices exploring time and impermanence with an unruly fascination in affective environments, disorientation, seriality, and labor.
Tara Aisha Willis is a dancer and a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at New York University. She is Associate Curator in Performance & Public Practice at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
Based in San Juan, nibia pastrana santiago develops site-specific “choreographic events” to experiment with time, fiction, and notions of territory. She is co-director at Beta Local and also serves as the Dance Program Academic Coordinator at Universidad del Sagrado Corazón, the first of its kind in Puerto Rico. Currently, santiago is co-editing an anthology on Puerto Rican experimental dance with dance scholar Susan Homar, to be published in 2021.
Moriah Evans works on and through forms of dance and performance. Her choreographies navigate utopic/dystopic potentials within choreography/dance/body, often approaching dance as a fleshy, matriarchal form slipping between minimalism-excess.