Transcripts of veronica dittman stanich

(interviewer)  So I know that you have quite a bit of experience as a dancer and as a notator. Can you remember a particular moment  that you became interested in either dancing or dance notation? (Veronica)  Dancing was just like... I'd take ballet as a small child and never stopped sort of pursuit. Notation... and when I knew this interview was coming up  I was trying to think... I think in high school, a high school teacher of mine,  my home room teacher, who was like  a science teacher knew that I was a dancer  and told me there was such a thing as dance notation and happens to know  Lynne Weber who is now DNB executive director (interviewer)  I think she is. (Veronica)  Yeah she was just on the board when I was there. But anyway, and he or somebody said, "Are you interested in this?"  So from high school on I guess I knew it existed, but it wasn't until after  I dropped out of college that I started following up on it. (interviewer)  What...what caused you to want to follow up on it later? Like what, maybe, re-sparked your interest in it? (Veronica)  You know I don't remember. 

[ laughs ] I'm pretty old.  That was a really long time ago. 

[ both laugh ] (Veronica)  I think it was probably some combination of liking the brainy-ness of it,  of being analytical and having the skill or ability to put it into a written form.  And also some sense of a career option later, like being able to do something else  with dance if not performing. (interviewer)  Is there a, when you, when you took like your first like when you first starting learning  notation, was it in like a class or a one on one? What was it?  What was that experience like? (Veronica)  I was correspondance, which is how you used to do it with the DNB. So I was dancing with St. Louis ballet, which is like a  fourth tier ballet company in St. Louis Missouri, and I was corresponding with Sandra Aberkalns who was my tutor.  And it was a completely solitary pursuit. Well not solitary. I'd get her letters,  and she would correct what I had done, and she's a really interesting... mind. I'm glad she was my first tutor. I never got the reading part of it very well.  Like with the examples that came with the elementary workbook or the intermediate workbook, and there are examples and you  stand there, and you do them.  I never, and even once I came to Ohio State  and started doing that with classes and doing more and more of like reading. I've never become  a good reader, like it never is fully embodied, or maybe I just never spent enough time  with it. But it's always this stilted like, what do I do next? There's some wire that doesn't cross yet. That I haven't spent enough  time reading to make it fluent.  (interviewer)  Do feel that same way for writing notation?  (Veronica)  No, I was always much more attracted to the writing side, to thinking about the choices,  and how to write it down  and that was the exciting part.  It was that... putting dances down and the challenge of when there was the brief intersection of when I was dancing much more  sort of postmodern styles and still interested in notation,  trying to write a Lisa Race combination.  If not a combination, the idea of this support while turning and just trying... so much going  on trying to analyze the degree of rotation, but I don't even know what "up" is anymore.  So is counterclockwise this way or this way if I'm like this? And this support translate? That was, I mean, just to sketch it out. Like at least put the  supports. What was on what and what. Well now at least try to get which way  were you turning. Well I can't... I liked that.  (interviewer)  What were some of... like maybe what was your favorite thing that you wrote? If you have a favorite.  Or your favorite kind of thing to write? (Veronica)  I guess looking back on it, not the things that I did for assignments or even my certifying score. because they were very...  No, I guess the certifying score started to fall in that category. I guess the  things that I liked to write were the ones that ...to me... I guess were a) not like the things  that existed in the DNB archives, were something more current or more  towards my taste rather than traditional modern dance.  You know something carrying the release-y postmodern,  Trisha Brown, Movement Research aesthetic.  And then trying to think about how, how, how to write that. It doesn't look like this other thing. What symbols might I use that would be different,  that could somehow communicate that different-ness? So, I can't think of a particular thing,  but just coming home from a class I'd taken that was super  challenging to me, but that I wanted to somehow, not exactly for the fun of it but just on scrap paper,  like how would you, how would I, how, how would you do it to show that it's not like that other stuff.  It's something different.  (interviewer)  Yeah. What other kind of reading and writing do you do? I know now you're in graduate school, so you're doing a lot of reading and writing, but do you have any other sort of writing practices  or anything that you do in relation to your dancing? (Veronica)  I... I have done a lot of writing about dance in 'zines, and not any academic journals, but in 'zine I used to make,  and in Dance Insider which I founded with another guy...  I really love writing about dance, I think,  I wish I could have a career like that, but I don't think there's such thing  as a paid dance writer anymore so... not writing about dancing in a critical... critical, by critical I mean not like a dance critic would, but just writing about dance from a step back.  Why... there was an article I wrote that I loved... Look at me, I loved it. I thought it was great.  About what class means in New York at that time when I was there.  How you take class but it's not necessarily about just pure learning, It's about a pre-audition phase.  You take a workshop with so-and-so because that's how they get to know you.  And then you take another workshop and you become familiar to them,  and by the time the audition comes it's a three day process, but you've workshopped with them twice, and they know you.  And there's this feeling of who are you taking class with in a more directed or ambitious way, that what can I learn, but might I develop a relationship with this person?  It has to be done through class.  Anyway. I, I liked my (interviewer)  Was that, was that also your experience when you were a professional dancer? (Veronica)  Yes. The class thing? (interviewer)  Yeah. (Veronica)  Yeah. 

[ muted truck honking ] There was some writing I did about notation around  the time I was quitting notation 

[ laughing ].  (interviewer)  Uh-huh. (Veronica)  A series of essays I wrote and mailed to Lucy Venable who was sort of my mentor at  that time.  Just about my, my disatisfaction and frustration with the system.  And just kind of hoping that she would assuage those frustrations like, it doesn't do this and nobody is addressing  this and nobody is answering my questions. ...And I... I hope that somehow computer-wisethose essays are still accessible to me. I think wrote them on like a Apple Mac Classic, and I put them on a floppy disk,  and did they somehow make it through the computers I've had since then? I feel like there was something to those essays at the time.  They were, I thought they were good.  (interviewer)  And what what were some of those frustrations if you don't mind... (Veronica)  Oh no, not at all, I love talking about this stuff 

[ laughing ].  (interviewer) OK. (Veronica) Well for instance, I had this experience in notator training where there was one other trainee  at the time that year, in that class.  We were supposed to read these Isadora Duncan dances.  And then Anabelle Gamson who is a big Isadora Duncan person... perpetuates the style and performs the dances, was to come and watch us. And it was... disastrous.  I know nothing about that style at all.  My background is ballet and then a jump to like a postmodern release technique.  I don't have any of that grounded, Graham or Humphrey or Limón,  or anything that would give you a particular kind of weightiness.  And so my performance of it was completely unacceptable and didn't capture anything that she expected to see, and she pulled those particular scores form the Dance Notation Bureau archive and said, if that's what reading notation does, that she was, it was just a huge bruhaha.  And I remember the thing I wrote to Lucy at the time was that,  there are things in dance that can't be captured in the written language as it is.  And some of those things that can't be captured  may unfortunately be the defining characteristics of that dance. Like that defining characteristics of the Duncan dances are her quality. And that is not possible, not possible to communicate as we know it on the page.  Because what I got from those scores was the step pattern and the timing, and maybe there was even an Effort symbol, but even that Effort symbol that says Weight  means something different to people with different backgrounds. My idea of weight was not Anabelle Gamson's idea of weight, or weightiness.  I had this great analogy, to like... if you have never spoken French and you read je m'appelle, you have no frame of reference for the idea that the letter 'j' should be 'zh,' it's 'dj.' And unless you hear it, unless you experience  in the person, in person you couldn't possibly know. You could do your best reading.  How could you know if it's just off the page? And I think that's exactly analogous. How could I know that that dance was supposed  to look like THAT. Like THAT'S what weight meant.  I didn't have any experience with THAT weightiness.  And I thought that was a BIG PROBLEM with notation.  (interviewer)  Yeah? (Veronica)  So there. So I quit. 

[ laughing ] (interviwer)  So they had you doing a reading project while you were training to be a writer?  (Veronica)  Yeah, I don't remember... I don't remember why it came up.  It may have been something totally practical,  that Gamson requested it or why we were doing that random... Probably not random, but I don't remember why we were doing it. (interviewer) What did your certifying score end up being? (Veronica)  It was a work by a grad student here who was then graduated and working in New York. Not working in New York, teaching at Wesleyan in Connecticut.  His name is Pedro Alejandro. And it's a... the title of the piece is called "Nun Better."  It's a play on words, N-U-N. And it's got some political or social overtones,  but the choreography was interesting and hard, and the music was by Chris Cherry who used to be an accompanist here, so there was a lot of Ohio State influence already  because he had just left the school two years ago, as had I.  We both came to New York at the same time.  So that, that was my score.  (interviewer)  Like you said, it had the political and kind of social... (Veronica)  Yeah, he had all sorts of symbolism worked in. Mostly through the costuming. There were three men dressed as nuns,  and there was some symbolic green apple that got passed around. There were some innocence, or experience overtone or undertone. I don't even remember 

[ chuckling ].  (interviewer)  Do you remember if there was anything that you put into writing the score that might help someone, just thinking about the experience you just talked about with this Duncan thing  and the score not helping to get at what was essential. Do you remember anything about when you were writing that score,  thinking about those sorts of things?  What might be more important? If that made any sense at... (Veronica)  Well, I'm, yeah. I mean, I think as a notator in notator training, given the tools that you're given there. ...I th..I did an extensive glossary and word notes trying to explain what it was I was doing. When I use this symbol I mean this as practiced in this type of class or this type of training. And then the end of the dance had a duet that's somewhat improvised. It's like a structured improv, and I remember laboring over,  you know, how to communicate what the parameters of that improvisation... I imagine, probably the same thing that notators  go through. Not that my situation was so special but where things were not perfectly communicated just with the symbols, you know.  Word notes and what else can I write in text that will help illuminate this. (inteviewer)  That's very interesting. I, I think...  (interviewer)  Do you have any other, anything else you'd like to add, or? (Veronica)  Well, it's just that I think that coming back here to Ohio State...  I mean by the time I got certified in '95 or '96, I'd pretty much... like I had to go through that last step to be completely just  fed up with notation and abandon it completely 

[ laughing ]. Not only the, not only the theory of it but also the logistics or the practicality of it.  Like, I will never make any money from this. It will never be worth my while.  It was not what I hoped it was in terms of a career that ...and so I just chucked it. And my only relationship to it was through my friend who continued to notate  and who is very smart and has this whole other career trajectory.  But anyway, coming back here and hearing people  like you and Mara and Michael, who have a... ...I wish I could have known you back then because it felt very lonely.  Like, that I was the only one who had these interests or concerns about notation,  but that the establishment as it was just... It wasn't part of their agenda to answer these questions.  And here the types of issues that you and Mara and Michael have brought up, or the way you connect notation to... this sort of grad school scholarly pursuits that I'm more used to or more interested in now has been sort of inspiring. Like, it softens me towards notation.  Like, well look who's doing it now, look what questions they're asking, it's... possibility there.  So that's been cool. (interviewer)  Thank you very much.  (Veronica)  You're very welcome.   Wait. Veronica Dittman Stanich.  

[ whispering ] That's my name.