by Ana Isabel Keilson
MR Festival Spring 2008: Somewhere Out There
Some thoughts on how we can rethink what it means to archive and document our work and our community:
1. The film screening last Tuesday was something of a family reunion, a picnic in the dark, a giant sprawling meal of associative chains—the people, spaces, dances, movements and moments that we know, directly or indirectly. The first film was good, and is a good example of the archival memory I believe we all, perhaps unknowingly, have: Steve Paxton, dancing with props, dancing alone, wearing a swimming cap, dark glasses or goggles, moving in and out of a studio. I don’t know him, but I know so much about him, what he does, how he dances, where his influence extends. I know so many people who know him. Watching the excerpt of him dancing, I know his movement immediately and, already, intimately, his athleticism and falls, his upper body twists, torso quirks and bends. Everything he does is vaguely familiar: there, that kick, the one that was so popular a few years ago in contact jams but not on neighborhood proscenium stages; that, there, the spin around to the back, I can name five different instances in which I saw that move in the past year; that gesture with his hands and his head, I see that everywhere these days; etc, etc. Is it because I’ve never watched him dance but have seen everyone around him dance? Is it because I’ve carried those same props—metaphorically speaking—through that studio doorway—literally, that same door, I rehearsed there last week? Paxton’s dance turns on the catalogue of so many subjects in my head. I dig in.
2. My great grandmother was a pack rat of epic proportions. Among her many quirks was her insistence on hiding her family jewelry underneath the kitchen sink. She wrapped everything in rags—not unfamiliar, they had survived the pogroms and two world wars in much the same way—and bound the bundles to the pipes in her apartment. As a child, I saved knick-knacks and ticket stubs in shoe-boxes; in school, we made time-capsules. Can we embrace the tendency to save things, the junk and clutter that are seemingly unimportant in the moment but are in reality the treasures that age into our heirlooms?
3. Chase’s A Library wasn’t a roundtable discussion, as I’d been given the impression it would be. It was, instead, low key and lovely: a few people hanging out in the Judson gym, a folding table of Chase’s books, back issues of the MR Performance Journal and some other collected treasures in print, newly made friends from Austria cataloguing unread books, small groups and casual conversation that seamlessly digressed into things to read, zines, catch-up chatter, unrelated banter, miller high life. Oh, and back-issues of Karinne Keithley’s Ur-zine, check it out if you haven’t lived here long enough to know that Karinne is the queen of the downtown dance zine (http://www.fancystitchmachine.org/).
4. For one reason or another, I’ve been reading excerpts of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, and I think it relates to my obsession with archives. In her discussion of the polis, the Ancient Greek city-state, Arendt dissects the way in which the Greeks maintained power via its organizational and structural composition, and how, ultimately, the city-state is not so much a physical space, but rather a network of relationships: “the organization of the polis […] is a kind of organized remembrance. […] [It] is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be” (Arendt, HC U of Chicago Press 2nd Ed, 198). Arendt goes on to locate much of Greek oral history—and it reason for being such a lasting force throughout history—within the function of the polis. I think this idea is applicable to the dance community. We, dancers, exists despite our shifting spaces, and while of course we are greatly conditioned by them, more often than not we are the quintessential band of roving performers: tear down a warehouse, we perform in the street or a park; turn a studio into a luxury loft, we will rehearse somewhere else; cut our funding, fire our advocates, abandon our programs, throw away our columns and columnists, we will still be dancing just as hard, our choreography will be just as meaningful, our work and our discussions will have just as much integrity. And we will, collectively, remember everything along the way.
5. Lastly, a reminder about one aspect of our origins, and one (again, perhaps unknowing) reason for all of this archive fever: in 1966, Yvonne Rainer reminded us that the mind is a muscle. Many of us were not there, many of us were, sadly, not alive yet, but as dancers and movement-based artists, our identity lies in our muscle memories; I therefore urge us all to find new ways to articulate our knowledge and memory that comes so easily to us. The 2008 MR fest is in many ways a celebration of our collective muscular birthplace, Judson Church, which has become a steadfast symbol in the most beautiful, most authentic and most bibliographic sense. So, then, here’s to you, Judson, and all of the archives you inspire.
