We give below some excerpts from the Deep End symposium Contemporary Heritage: a fusion of horizons. Participants shared valuable artistic and pedagogic information but the discussions were sprinkled throughout with amusing anecdotes from Cohan about working with Graham and from Chris Bannerman, Ross McKim and Kenneth Tharp about working with Cohan.

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The principal focus of the discussion was the legacy bestowed to British contemporary dance by Robert (Bob) Cohan. Our major questions concerned the connections between the methods used by Bob and today’s somatic approach. We took the term somatic from the Greek ‘soma’ meaning body but we used it to define a way of teaching dance that encourages students to listen to their individual bodies. We asked: ‘what can we recapture from the traditional signature techniques to help us enhance this somatic approach and to move forward in our search for excellence in dance training and performance’?

Throughout the symposium, Bob Cohan provided interesting insights into his life with Graham. He also went into the roots and principles of his teaching which formed the bedrock of London Contemporary Dance Theatre and consequently the heritage of The Place:

In discussion with Kenneth Tharp, Cohan reminisces about working with Graham and how he passed on that experience in forging a distinctive style for London Contemporary Dance Theatre:

You had to be very careful what you showed her [Graham] or what you didn’t because she was a real guru in the sense that she could strike you blind if she wanted to. […] Of course when I came here [The Place, London] I actually stayed here, I didn’t go back to New York for the first three or four years because I didn’t want to, I thought it was wrong, if I was going to be here I had to be here. I wasn’t going to go back and get fed from the source, I was going to try to find it here. So I just stayed here, period, and never went back to the Graham studio, never went back to teach or refresh myself or anything  […]. I was using the Graham forms, stripped down, changed, but I was using what I thought was the Graham physical interior experience to send it, give the material core value.

Kenneth Tharp:  [In response to Cohan] Well I seem to remember, and Chris you may agree that when the company were in New York in 1983, Peter Sparling who had been a dancer with the Graham company came backstage after we had performed, making a comment that we were more Graham than the Graham company, maybe for that reason.

Early in the discussion, Chris Bannerman talked about his experience of working with Cohan as a teacher and made some useful points about the term ‘somatic’:

I received teaching that was direct and yet linked to wider contexts which stemmed from Bob’s ability to communicate very specific information and to relate it to a wider view of dance and even life itself ... This was the first time that I had heard how dance was both physical and metaphysical. There was an element of what we could call physiology but the physiological terms weren’t limiting - there was a precision about a network of crystallized, physical information that was just mind-boggling really, coupled with I think […] a very deep understanding of the psychological motivation of human beings, and ability to look at the world and see significances -recognise them and read them and not necessarily interpret them but to see them, recognise and to point to them […]

I think we use it [the term somatic] today in a culturally constructed way to mean something quite different.  And largely I believe we use the term ‘somatic’ to describe disciplines such as Alexander Technique, Yoga, and Feldenkrais - we don’t associate it with things like Graham Technique.  Of course there’s nothing in the definition of the word itself that separates the world of Graham Technique from somatic understanding.  This is a kind of a cultural construction […]

Ross McKim described Cohan’s influence on his teaching and his experience of watching performers like William Louther: 

I do teach every day, and I think of what I teach as Cohan-based, […].  It’s what one does oneself, but there is a sense of energy […] in the body and the way it flows through the body to make it move.  I think what you’re trying to do is to get a student to feel something special inside them, and I think that makes them a special dancer and it makes people like Tina Turner a special dancer too and Michael Jackson some time ago. There’s certainly people like Nureyev or William Louther  who have a fire inside them and you’re seeing that fire which is partly again unconscious, so that they’re experiencing something that is in the liminal area between consciousness and unconsciousness […]. The trouble is that means stepping out of the body, so I invented the word ‘sarxisty’ which comes from sarx the Greek word for ‘flesh.’ So you don’t step out of the body you step into it, and that’s what I’m trying to get the people I teach to do.

Kenneth Tharp chaired the symposium and shared his recollections of his time at London Cotemporary Dance School and as a dancer with London Contemporary Dance Theatre. He also talked about the demands of Graham-based work and the breadth and flexibility of style demanded of dance students today, both in training and in professional careers:

I teach Graham-based work and I use a lot of Bob’s material, but I think there are a number of tensions for me as a teacher - as well as for any training institutions […].  And perhaps one of the reasons why Graham-based work seemed to go out of fashion was that people could no longer see the connection between either the work they wanted to see on stage or, or for young dancers, the work they aspired to dance, or for choreographers the work they wanted to make, and the training in the classroom  […]. But I feel the technique is so demanding that I’m not sure whether you can actually realistically begin to meet those demands in […] a short space of time. And therefore there becomes a tension – is it worth doing unless you really commit to it? […]

The full transcript can be purchased at a price of £7.00. We plan in due course to produce a DVD of the symposium so please email if you are interested in purchasing it.

Published: 16 January 2007