Open rehearsals for the performance “Battleground,” which were held outside the University of Minnesota’s Northrop Auditorium, concluded on Oct. 4 after a periodical practice schedule since May.
The piece is performed by Black Label Movement, a Twin Cities contemporary professional dance company, and is scheduled to premiere at the American Dance Festival in North Carolina on Friday.
“Battleground” demonstrates how the state of constant military alertness and conflict lives inside peoples’ bodies.
Black Label Movement Artistic Director Carl Flink said he has always had a fascination with the U.S. as a global superpower that has consistently been involved in military conflict since World War II.
“Rather than describing that, we really have created specific tasks,” Flink said. “Sometimes (performers) are digging aggressively in the dirt, sometimes they’re plowing themselves into the dirt or throwing someone else and sometimes they might be in a place that might be recognized as a dance movement.”
Flink said rather than just describing the uncomfortable and challenging topics of war and violence, the performers show a level of effort they believe is needed to engage with such topics.
Within Black Label, Flink said members very consciously do not describe themselves as dancers.
“Everybody in the company is a dance artist. They’re trained dancers, but we actually describe our members as movers,” Flink said.
Flink said it does not matter whether company members are doing athletic movement, labor or dance because all of these things fall under the umbrella of movement.
According to Flink, “Battleground” incorporates elements of Bodystorming, a concept he created with biomedical engineer David Odde using bodies, space and choreographic techniques to create models of Odde’s and other scientists’ research.
“There is a very violent, collisional nature of the interior of the cell,” Odde said. “Carl’s been able to help us convey that idea and what it means by bringing collisional elements to the choreography that we do when Bodystorming.”
Flink said in both Bodystorming and dance-making, Black Label has developed a technique of impact, meaning they sometimes exhibit an athletic-level impact akin to contact sports like hockey, soccer or even football.
“Bodystorming is a way to simulate biological behavior using human movement,” Odde said. “We often develop computer simulations in my research, but we find these human movement-based simulations are also helpful because they give us a better intuitive understanding of what is happening in a given system.”
Odde added in “Battleground,” that he sees elements of his collaboration with Flink, specifically in terms of collisional encounters and how they happen in biological systems.
“Maybe the movements can be metaphorically related to collisions we have at the human scale of nations and other groups,” Odde said.
Flink said there are different moments throughout “Battleground,” exploring intense themes of violence and war.
“There are some moments where the people get very quiet, serene and calm because in any human conflict, there are peaks and valleys, and it is important to capture those,” Flink said.
Black Label is not trying to be soldiers or fighters through this piece, Flink said. Rather, they are asking people how they think about and interact with concepts of violence.
“This piece doesn’t in any way try to ignore any of these crucial conflicts, but it’s taking a different perspective on the larger picture of how we engage in that world,” Flink said. “How do we affect that world? How do we participate directly?”