Conference Agenda

Over the past thirty years, choreographers have delighted in reimagining The Nutcracker using modern styles of dance in order for the ballet to reflect and attract more diverse audiences. Matthew Bourne’s contemporary/lyrical Nutcracker! (1992) adds pathos to the familiar score with a whimsical scenario in which Clara is an orphan fighting to win back her Nutcracker from the evil Sugar Plum Princess. Jazz and ballroom dance take center stage in Donald Byrd’s Harlem Nutcracker (1996), which uses Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s adaptation of The Nutcracker Suite to tell the story of an elderly Clara watching the life flash before her eyes. And Jennifer Weber’s Hip Hop Nutcracker (2013) plays with pre-conceived notions of musical gesture in the ballet by setting Tchaikovsky’s original melodies to hip hop dance vocabulary, featuring a time-traveling Clara who must mend her feuding parents’ relationship by reminding them of their shared love of dance.

Opening a window into this world of variation and inversion, I examine the specific ways in which Bourne, Byrd, and Weber adapt Vsevolozhsky’s original libretto and Tchaikovsky’s score to make this Christmas tradition speak to different communities, age groups, and sexual orientations. I zoom in on one particular moment: No. 8 in Act I, Scene 2, also referred to as “Journey Through Snow.” By examining the role of gesture in three different versions of the same dance, I aim to unpack ways in which Nutcrackers of today hold up a mirror to modern audiences and help invite people from all walks of life into the historically exclusive realm of ballet.

In 1961 Alvin Ailey premiered his solo dance Hermit Songs, set to six songs from Samuel Barber’s cycle that had been premiered by Leontyne Price in 1953. Ailey choreographed Hermit Songs to Price’s recording, which also accompanied subsequent performances by Ailey and solo company dancers. Given the songs’ sources in monastic texts and Ailey’s conception of the hermit dancer as akin to Saint Francis of Assisi, as well as the proximity of Hermit Songs to Ailey’s choreography of Spirituals for his seminal Revelations, it is not surprising that Ailey’s Hermit Songs explored religious themes: pilgrimage, repentance, praise, redemption. Using Ailey’s notes (Library of Congress), and archival material from the Ailey Dance Foundation and New York Public Library, I demonstrate that Ailey navigated religiosity at the intersection of sexuality, race, and gender in a uniquely mid-century moment.

The devout backdrop of Hermit Songs served as “a morally chaste frame for the theatrical revelation of [Ailey’s] torso” (DeFrantz 2004). As a gay man, Ailey’s choice of music by the queer Barber was thus meaningful. Ailey claimed Barber as “one of my favorite composers” (1995), witnessed by his choreographies of Knoxville: Summer of 1915 (1960), Antony and Cleopatra (1966), and plans for a work “about his former lover Christopher” set to Barber (Dunning 1998). The “chaste frame” of the hermitage was partly necessitated by the contemporary, conspiratorial “homintern” discourse, the trajectory of which was concurrent with Barber’s (Sherry 2007) and Ailey’s careers.

As a gay Black man, Ailey regarded Price as “one of the giants I have known” (1995)—from the “heyday of gay opera cultures” (Kostenbaum 1994, see also Simmonds 2021) and golden age of Black opera singers. In Ailey’s Hermit Songs, Price’s acousmatic voice complicated what Eidsheim deemed the “phantom genealogy” (2019) of racialized opera casting: her voice crisscrossed lines of sexuality, race, and gender through music coordinated with a dancing body. Furthermore, the transformation in Ailey’s conception of Hermit Songs from group to solo performance resonates with debates about the individual in relation to community and assimilation versus separatism in the advancing Black Dance and Civil Rights movements.

The synergy of interest in using biofeedback methods in music in the 1960s and 70s is one of the earliest instances where a substantial collection of music performance practices emerged through biofeedback technology. The resurgence of biofeedback research through DARPA funding of biofeedback and the establishment of the Biofeedback Research Society (BRS) brought forward more research and made the needed equipment more accessible. Composers such as Alvin Lucier, David Rosenboom, and Richard Teitelbaum famously used electroencephalograms (EEG), electrocardiograms (EKG), respiration belts, and more to make connections between the external sonic experience and one’s internal experience. While the contributions of these composers were pivotal in integrating biofeedback technology with music, other significant figures in this field have been largely overlooked in historical discourse. This paper is a study on the impact of biofeedback technology and research on one of the most influential works by Pauline Oliveros, the Sonic Meditations (1974), and how these methods impacted her approach to her artistic practice.

Pauline Oliveros' Meditation Project, initiated with research funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and sponsorship from the Department of Music at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD), was a testament to her interdisciplinary approach. The project, conducted at the UCSD Center of Music Experiments, was a collaborative effort with the ♀ ensemble, Sonic Meditations Research Group, and a transdisciplinary group of researchers. It explored the intersections of conscious and unconscious, attention and awareness, hearing and listening through sound, autogenic exercise, experimental psychology, Zen philosophy, the study of dreams, Indigenous studies, telepathy, martial arts, feminist health practices, extended musical instruments, and more.

Drawing upon the Pauline Oliveros archives housed in the UCSD Special Collections, this paper discusses how biofeedback techniques and working with biofeedback sensors/equipment influenced the daily exercises that would materialize into the Sonic Meditations. I situate Oliveros’ research process alongside feminist health practices that were being celebrated and developed in California in the 1970s (Murphy, 2012), the resurgence of biofeedback research in the late 1960s/early 70s, and frustrations and breakthroughs experienced by the participants and her through collaboration. The paper concludes with a discussion of two pieces that explore these process-based methods, Phantom Fathom (1972) and a collaborative piece with Bruce Rittenbach, the UCSD fellow who oversaw the use of the biofeedback equipment, Biotheater (1975).