EXCERPTS FROM DANCE NOTES, 2000–2001
This adaptation of my talk contains excerpts from my dance notes, more or less in chronological order since January 2000. The format conveys how my practice of performance brought me to an understanding of my work as I describe it now, and I point to the continuity of discontinuity material on the easel. There is some repetition because it took years to adapt what I was learning into my daily practice of dance.
It may help to give an example of what I experience as feedback from my zillion-celled body when I am dancing: “Kjdfv hrtrjtwnr. Litjw hc; rt3, tfkgnu6t. Ejl.”
What is not included in this adaptation is a forty-minute video of dancer/choreographer Jeanine Durning performing her early adaptation of the solo No Time to Fly. That video would begin right now, projected on a large screen behind me. There would be just enough volume to hear Jeanine’s footsteps and her singing.
January 2000: What struck me most was how clearly Misha (Mikhail Baryshnikov) stated that he was a dancer, not a choreographer, and that his work was to serve the choreographer. I would like to have had the presence of mind to respond to him by saying that I, as the choreographer, could best be served by his feeling served by the choreography. The word “serve,” used by Misha in 2000, became integral to my personal practice in 2014.
Past/Forward was the re-creation of several dances by choreographers associated with Judson Dance Theater in the early 1960s, including the commissioning of new works from those choreographers. I choreographed Single Duet, which Misha and I performed during the US leg of the tour.
I did not think that he really ever understood how I worked, yet when I looked at some of the videos of the duet, I much preferred watching him. When he looked at me dancing, his blue eyes penetrated every detail of my movement, and I associated that look with how he learned from his dance teachers as a young boy. He always wanted me to go onstage first because he said that if he could see me, he could then follow.
Most dance training assumes that there is a single coherent being who dances. My work succeeds when there is no single “one,” no single moment, or meaning, movement, image, character, emotion, that exists long enough for either the dancer or audience to identify an “is” that is happening.
If I remove movement as the primary component of dance making, can the ways I perceive space and time suffice as material within the choreography and performance of my work?
For many years it was my surrounding space that I perceived changing as I moved. Gradually my experience of perception enlarged to include the whole studio or theater in which I was dancing. This expanded field increased the material available to me as I danced. Why do I need to limit myself to what I am doing in space when I can include my perception of the outer reaches of that space in my dancing? There is nothing abstract in how I experience space and time. On the contrary, I am alert to my whole body’s sensual mutability.
How I perceive my bodily experience of time passing feels like lying still between the banks of a shallow moving river.
I set up a proposition in the form of a “what if ?” question. The question is framed through a turn of language found to excite the imagination of the person who is dancing. The question is meant to inspire and engage the dancer in noticing the sensuality of the feedback from the question as it unfolds in his/her cellular body. The question is not there to be answered. And, to not look for an answer requires a lot of work for everyone. That is why the question has to be so attractive for the person who is dancing: “[N]on-knowing is not a form of ignorance but a difficult transcendence of knowledge” (Bachelard 1994, xxii, quoting Jean Lescure, Lapique [Paris: Galanis], 78).
The group piece I choreographed for the Past/Forward project was titled Whizz. The primary question the dancers were to engage in their practice was, “What if every cell in your body at once has the potential to perceive your loyalty to DANCE, and your disinterestedness (in the loyalty) simultaneously?” Disinterestedness referred to loyalty and nothing else. (This question, among other things, helps to undermine “the look” of the serious artist.)
As Marian Chase Lecturer, I began my talk by barking for one minute at a podium before an audience at the American Dance Therapy Association in Seattle, Washington, in October 2000:
“Woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof Woof WOOFWOOF Woof Woof woof woof woof WOOF WOOF woof woof woof woof WOOF WOOF woof woof woof woof woof woof WOOF woof woof woof WOOF.”
Within the art form we call dance, I experiment with words to disrupt, often violently, conscious and unconscious movement behavior. “What if alignment is everywhere?” or “What if where I am is what I need?” or “What if my will is my destiny?”
Barking, too, has had a transforming effect on my career as a choreographer, performer, and teacher. I was influenced by a Dutch actress, one soloist among a class of performance artists who were studying with Marina Abramovic during a conference entitled “The Connected Body” at the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam in the early 1990s. The actress presented her work in a stairwell alcove between two floors. I sat on the steps looking down into her shielded glass enclosure. Other people were using the stairwell to pass from one showing to another, and some stopped to watch her briefly. I stayed. She was nude and had the flawless body of a tall, thin thirty-year-old. When she moved it was on all fours: loping, pacing, stretching, attacking, protecting, watching us, or lying down and panting.
At times she stood on hind legs to paw at the walls in protest. She barked, growled, moaned. She was not acting. Her whole body was dog—flesh, bones, essence. I remember thinking that I had never seen “dog” before seeing her “dog.”
I have friends who own several Labradors. Early one morning during a visit to their home in Louisiana, my ritual cup of coffee in hand, we sat on a patio that opened onto acres of pecan orchard. First he, then she, then both, for more than an hour, threw sticks into the orchard for the three dogs to fetch. The sticks were then wrestled from their dripping jaws, only to be thrown into the orchard and fetched again. It was clear that the dogs would not be the first to stop playing. I remember thinking that this was the most wretched way to have my morning coffee.
I did not grow up with a dog, so it was almost thirty years into my professional life before I realized I had in fact trained myself to be a good dog in relation to my master/my body, my teacher.
My devotion to the practice of dance is similar to the Labs’ to the game. The Labs’ attention is on the master’s whole body, the energy being summoned: the force behind the throwing arm, the moment the stick leaves the hand, and the direction the stick is aimed. When I go into the studio, my attention is on my whole body in response to a set of conditions I set out to explore in the course of my work that day. I am poised, in a metaphorical sense, at the feet of my body, my teacher. My tongue could as well be hanging from the side of my mouth, dripping signals of readiness to be served by my body through dance.
April 2001: Zen saying: Being in the moment is not necessarily a great thing; however, it is all there is. My response to this is that there can be more to the moment than simply being in it.
Immensity at work is your openness to enlarging your experience of movement to include the space in which you are dancing. “What if every cell in your body at once has the potential to perceive all of space moving as you move through it?” “Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests” (Bachelard 1994, 184).
“What if every cell in your body at once has the potential to perceive time passing?” These questions can both enlarge and deepen your experience of being in the moment.
How I practice performance stimulates my perceptual activity to such a degree that I no longer rely on my wonderful earthbound body and what it can do.
If I turn from movement as a primary component in making dances, replacing it with how I perceive space and time, will they suffice as the two primary components in my choreography?