IN DEVELOPMENT// Sophie Shellbags, Allen Ardent, and the Sophie Allen System of Dance Notation and Choreography
By Michael Workman
File this one under shameless self-promotion. I’ve been working on a dance notation and choreographic system for the last year called the Sophie Allen system. What is dance notation? Essentially, it’s a way of “writing” dance, an idea I was initially inspired by when I encountered the the notation work of Remy Charlip, co-founder of Merce Cunningham Dance Company, in an issue of the Paris Review. He was drawing what he called “Air Mail Dances” for which, upon request from a dance company or ensemble, he would draw a series of figures that were then sent off via air mail. For all intents and purposes, that was the end of his involvement. The dancers would then produce a performance from his drawings however they chose to interpret them, free to choose the movements between the Charlip’s figures however they liked.
At the time, I was working on a graphic novel called Envy the Dead and Charlip’s drawings struck a particular chord with me.
Envy the Dead is a part of a total of 9 books that I’m calling the “Mortal Dreams” cycle: a meditation on the roots of nihilism in both intimate, interpersonal relationships, and in the greater global human culture as exemplified, for example, by the casual acceptance of mass shootings in America, the innumerable victims of the Syrian refugee crisis, or the increasing body-and-mind tolls of all kinds of violence against fellow humans.
Extrapolating from the visual work I was doing on the graphic novel, I decided to start mining the characters from my book projects, and started making drawings of a dancer I was dating at the time. Those drawings became the basis for the Sophie Allen system.
To give you an idea as how it works, take the video of dancer Jessica Cornish performing in rehearsal at the very top of this page; featuring the title characters from the system, Sophie Shellbags and Allen Ardent. Sophie is the only one who’s visible, because in the system as in the graphic novel, Allen is a ghost. The movement Cornish performs begins with this position:
…and ends in this position:
As you cans see, dear reader, the system works very well. However, my work on Sophie Allen and the graphic novel all those months ago was more of a struggle than I’d anticipated, and slowly, over time, things started to take a turn for the worst.
Inhabiting the dark and dreary world of Envy the Dead had begun to take its toll on me psychologically. After years of struggling with my diagnosed Major Depression, it began to get worse, even despite a regimen of daily medication. And my relationship was exacerbating the problem.
Still madly in love with her ex-boyfriend (while also still pursuing the boyfriend she cheated on him with), my girlfriend at the time started to gaslight me. She lied repeatedly, didn’t stick to boundaries we’d agreed to with exes, led me on, was constantly manipulative. Reality started to feel more and more distant, and I stopped being able to tell the truth from the lies, descending deeper and deeper into trauma, my mental state progressively worse and worse with each incident, each new emotional wound. She’d apologize, sometimes in writing, then casually do it again and again. Rinse, repeat. Rinse, repeat. After a punishing succession of broken trust agreements, in the grip of the worst depression I’d ever experienced, I couldn’t take it anymore and attempted suicide.
I’d have succeeded too, were it not for the quick intervention of my ex-wife and a friend, who immediately picked me up and drove me over to Swedish Covenent Hospital, where I was involuntarily committed to the psychiatric unit. It was a horrific, but necessary experience. When you’re held against your will, it’s like being in jail, and you’re in general population, exposed to people with everything from your basic Narcissistic Personality Disorders to the full-blown, physically violent psychopathies. I spent as much time as I could reading. After awhile, the pins-and-needles anxiety started to ever-so-slightly dissipate and I felt motivated to knuckle down and focus on my recovery. Eventually, I was diagnosed stable, and released.
Back out in the world, it took me awhile to pick up the pieces, one of which was the Sophie Allen system drawings. My gaslighter gone, I began sketching out ideas for how to move it forward, starting with the first two characters I’d drawn for it: Sophie and Allen.
For me, they started to cohere into a single, individual figure with two distinct personalities. Shellbags, for me, represents an investigation into the root cause of these destructive, tragidian losses of full emotional funtionality in the insular psyche, on the one hand pure Id, the character’s movements simultaneously evoke a narcissistic search for an unattainable grounding in absolute freedom and unconditional love; on the other hand, Shellbags also represents an intensely sensitive, innocently unaware human mind, if one ruled by fear, delusion, and its resultant pathological lack of compassion for others. The Allen figure represents a disembodied human ego and chalk-line concience in search of itself, cursed ghost-like to invisibly wander the earth, unseen and unrecognized, inhabiting the minds of the suicidal and spiritually broken. This combination represents an investigation into the weight of obverse notions of “connection” in dance, and the lack of exchange of energies between two equally balanced figures, suspended in an equilibrium at once material and immaterial.
And, of course, this is just the beginning. There are a total of nearly 40 other characters from the “Mortal Dreams” cycle to explicate into the Sophie Allen system, each with their own distinct personalities. My eventual goal is to produce a notation “vocabulary” a la Charlip, that can also be used like an alphabet to articulate whole, performable dances using as few or as many characters as needed; the “moves” in the dance arrangeable like letters in an alphabet representing the fantastical experience of one present moment arranged in whatever alphabetial order the user wishes it to represent. These can then be used to create endless potential “anchor” combinations for improvisation. The set also doubles as a deck of Tarot.
All this leads to where I am today with the project, about halfway through the 52 drawings needed to comprise a standard deck of cards. At the end of January 2016, and in events throughout the coming year, I’m working to further develop the Sophie Allen system, beginning with a presentation of the project as part of Research Project #9 at Outerspace Studios here in Chicago. I’ve created a Facebook event page for the event as well for those who’d like to join and get more information on the performance.
The goals of the performance at Outerspace is to receive feedback from the community on the project, inviting other dancers to model movements for the remaining cards, and locating funding support for the eventual printing of the deck, as well as to educate and instruct on how to utilize the Sophie/Allen system to produce uses of the body that surpass the merely instrumental, but also present new possible meanings for its inhabitants.
Ultimately, I also plans to expand the notational Sophie-Allen “figures” into a separate graphic novel, taking as its jumping-off point the connections between dance, the graphic novel, writing, dramaturgy, and collaborative art-making, with the shared goal of recovering the otherwise largely forgotten art form of dance notation.
Sophie Shellbags, Or: The Curiosity of the Female Rake takes place on January 31, at 7pm. Presented as part of Research Project #9 at Outerspace Chicago, 1474 N. Milwaukee Ave., Chicago, IL 60622. Nora Sharp, curator. Free.
Interested in modeling dance for positions for the system? Or in performing characters in upcoming productions built using the Sophie Allen system? An additional Facebook page has been created for dancers interested in getting involved.
ADDITIONAL INFO
BIO: JESSICA CORNISH
Born and raised in Pakistan, Cornish attended the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign to study dance improvisation with Kirstie Simson. After graduating in 2012, Cornish traveled to China through the Freeman Foundation Theatre Award for a cultural performance exchange. Funded by a Beverly Blossom Award, she continued on to India where she worked with Kolkata SANVED; a program that uses dance therapy to help women recover from sex trafficking and prostitution. After India, Cornish went on to Berlin to study with Andrew Morrish, a movement and voice improviser, and then on to Amsterdam where she worked with students and took class at SNDO, De Theatereschool’s BA in choreography program. Cornish moved to Chicago in 2013 where she has since worked with phenomenal movement and performance artists such as Hope Goldman, Victoria Bradford, Alana Parekh, and Lia Kohl. In 2013 Cornish was awarded the Beverly Blossom Alumni Award to support a choreographic project with Linda Lehovec in Santiago. In 2014, Cornish was a LinkUp artist in residence at Links Hall and began working on SKIRTS, a collaboration with Victoria Bradford funded by a Chicago Cultural Center DCASE grant. Cornish was a Guest Artist in residence at UIUC, and spent two months in residence at PLACE, Lake Charles LA, where she worked with a local Visual Artist to transform an old Social Security office into a Pop-Up Contemporary Art Gallery curated and organized by Victoria Bradford. After returning to Chicago in 2015, Cornish was invited by the Krannert Center for Performing Arts at the University of Illinois as an emerging artist to develop her Ensemble of Soloists Workshop in residence and travelled to Boston MA to perform with Victoria Bradford and Hannah Barco at the deCordiva Sculpture Park and Museum in Running with Scissors. Currently Cornish is working on the development of her Bridges project where she will produce performances on top of several of Chicago’s moveable bridges as well as her continued performance practice with one of Chicago’s upright bass musicians, Albert Wildeman.
PRESENTED AS PART OF RESEARCH PROJECT #9 AT OUTERSPACE; NORA SHARP, CURATOR
Sophie Shellbags is presented as part of Research Project #9, a low-tech, quarterly works-in-progress performance series hosted by OuterSpace Studios. RP brings together artists in the midst of their creative processes to show work, share process, give and receive feedback, and chew the fat. This opportunity provides a community forum for experimentation, emerging ideas, and artist-to-peer support. Recent performers include Hope Goldman, Joshua Kent, Courtney Mackedanz, MegLouise Dance, Lorene Bouboushian, Molly Ross, Joanna Furnans, Alana Parekh, Anna Martine Whitehead, BOOMERANG Dance, keyon gaskin, and Shannon Grayson. Curated by Nora Sharp.
ABOUT MICHAEL WORKMAN
Michael Workman is a dance, performance art and sociocultural critic, theorist, dramaturge, choreographer, reporter, poet, novelist, artist, curator, manager and promoter of numerous art, literary and theatrical productions. Over the last two years, Workman has been working on a series of books, and the “Sophie Allen” dance notation and choreographic system, all part of a collection of nine largely book-based works over a projected decade, called the Mortal Dreams Cycle. Characters for the Sophie Allen system, and subsequent performances generated from the system, are drawn from an ensemble of the more than 40 whom appear in his graphic novel, “Envy the Dead,” his children’s book for adults, “The Darkness Sings Songs of Itself,” a literary novel, “American Hell,” and a long-form poetry collection with accompanying watercolor drawings, “Hollow Harvest.” Future works in the cycle include “Rustaire,” “Burn It Down,” “The Journeys of Allen the Chalk-Line Ghost,” a “Sophie Allen” graphic novel, and an additional, undetermined novel to mark the cycle’s end. In addition to his work as dance, performance art and socio-cultural critic at Newcity, Chicagoist and elsewhere, Workman has also served as a staff writer for Gaper’s Block, reporter for WBEZ Chicago Public Radio, and as Chicago correspondent for Italian art magazine Flash Art. He is currently producing exhibitions, films and recordings, dance and performance art events under his curatorial umbrella, Antidote Projects, the last exhibition for which he produced a ‘zine, False Love, with original work by artists and writers including AA Bronson. Formerly, he was Director of Bridge, NFP, a Chicago-based 501 c (3) arts publishing and programming organization. Bridge, NFP published the Pushcart-prize winning bimonthly Bridge Magazine, for which he served as Publisher and Editor-in-Chief. Bridge, NFP also organized the annual Artboat exhibition during Art Chicago for two consecutive years at Navy Pier, The Nova Art Fair for another two, and launched the Bridge Art Show from 2004–2008 in New York, Miami Beach and Chicago in 2007, in cooperation with Art Chicago at the Merchandise Mart, as well as the Verge Art Fair in NY, Miami and Berlin, Germany from 2009–2012. He has also worked in supporting roles on a number of other exposition and exhibition programs around the globe.
Workman has lectured widely at universities including Northwestern University, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and The University of Illinois at Chicago, and served as advisor to curators of the Whitney Biennial. His reporting, criticism, and other writing has appeared in New Art Examiner, the Chicago Reader, zingmagazine, and Contemporary magazine, among others, and his projects have been written about in Artforum, The New York Times, Artnet, The Financial Times, The Huffington Post, The Times of London, The Art Newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, New York Magazine, Art In America, Time Out NY, Chicago and London, The Gawker, ARTINFO, Flavorpill, The Chicago Tribune, NYFA Current, The Frankfurter Algemeine, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Village Voice, Monopol, and numerous other news media, art publications and countless blog, podcast and small press publishing outlets throughout the years. He currently resides in Chicago.
