In celebration of Movement Research’s 30th Anniversary, Critical Correspondence is reprinting monthly excerpts from each of the first 30 Performance Journals. We are featuring representative and relevant articles, selected shorter quotes, as well as each of the issues’ editorial notes. It is both enervating and challenging to look at the historical map that precedes our time – the continuity of mission, the diverse attempts to “word” a practice, the voices that have gone and the ones that keep returning, the ongoing development of discourse alongside political struggles and the ever changing landscape of being a working and thinking artist.

Many of these Journal issues are available for purchase at Movement Research. As always, we welcome your comments at the end of each reprinted article. We are also posting a table of contents for each issue for your reference.

Movement Research Performance Journal #13, entitled, Body/Belief focuses on the intersection of spirituality and physical embodiment. Contributions from artists, dancers, choreographers, theologians, and ministers question the very notion of spirituality, and how it affects their life and work, past and present. We feature three very short stories by Ralph Lemon – personal vignettes about the sacred and the profane. We are left without a statement from Editors Audrey Kindred and Peter Larose. Enjoy the reading.

Dance itself is thoughtless. It is its own event. It doesn’t follow anything and it doesn’t lead anywhere. It is not about gain or absolution. Dance dances itself and is not at all tied to the conceptual world or even to the concept of dance. — from “Dance: A Body with a Mind of Its Own” by Ruth Zaporah

Editors: Sarah Michelson, Tere O’Connor, Julie Atlas Muz

Editors’ Notes by Sarah Michelson,Tere O’Connor, Julie Atlas Muz

Letter to the Editors by Delisa Myles

Letter to the Editors by Remy

Letter to the Editors by Lucy Du Bone

Letter to the Editors by Lynda Ruffner

This is my article by Zack Fuller

An interview with Richard Move by Sarah Michelson

Graham-Type By-Product by Maxine Sherman

Dear Friends by Janet Elber

Ownership by Keith Hennessy

Georgie Boy by Greg Zuccolo

General Melvin and the Missing Pens (Ownership as Mental Illness) by Michael Kaniecki

Probe to Die by Antler

Stealing, Influence and Identity by Susan Rethorst

Dance Purchasing Project by Janusz Jaworski

Under Us by Julie Regan

A Life of Stealth by Chrysa Parkinson (illustration)

Own This by Brian McKormick

It Takes a Lousy Village by Juliana Francis

Improvisation on a Theft of Light (For Amy Sue Rosen) by Gary Keenan

She’s Given Me My Body Back by Jo McKendry

People of Paris by Gregore Paslawsky

Dancer X by Diane Vivona

Report from Dotcomland by Steve Grecco

“I would like to open my big mouth…” by Linda Martini

From: Safe as Houses: One Artist’s Life in New York City 1980-1990, Chapter 4 by Jeff McMahon

Images we own by Marc Russell

The Senate and House of Representatives are set to vote on final passage of the economic stimulus legislation – H.R.1, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act – which includes $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts. The compromise version of the bill with tax breaks and spending totaling $789 billion stipulates that the arts funding goes for grants to activities and projects “which preserve jobs in the nonprofit arts sector threatened by declines in philanthropic and other support during the current economic downturn”, with 40 percent of the amount going to state arts agencies and regional arts organizations (“in a manner similar to the agency’s current practice”) and the remainder going out in competitive grants from the NEA. Matching requirements are waived.

House and Senate negotiators on the bill dropped the language prohibiting stimulus funds from going to museums, theatres, and arts centers which was included in the version of the bill passed by the Senate. However, the legislation still excludes support from going to fund projects at zoos and aquariums along with casinos, golf courses and swimming pools.

Congratulations and appreciation to all of you who contacted your legislators in Washington urging their support for the arts funding in the stimulus package. The House allocated the money for the NEA from the beginning of the process, but the Senate did not include the arts funding in its draft of the stimulus bill. Your advocacy and the insistence of our champions in the House and Senate made the difference.

Yvonne Meier: And I’ll just tell you to turn yourself into a pig and crumble – probably the same results. — from “Conversation between Arturo Vidich and Yvonne Meier”

Using the recent Movement Research Festival – “Improvisation is Hard” – as a departure point, Improvisation is Dead, Long Live Improvisation takes a look at the various approaches to improvisation both as a historical movement and as a current idea. This journal was edited by a team of artist/practicioners on the same model as the MR Spring Festival, to try to get more artist involvement in various aspects of MR’s programming. The editorial team, as they came to be called, consisted of April Biggs, Kimberly Brandt, Levi Gonzalez, Isabel Lewis, Alejandra Martorell and Layard Thompson. The Journal highlights a wide range of thoughts (often at odds with one another) on what can be considered improvisation, as the quotes here reflect, as well as a New York still feeling the effects of September 11 and the domestic politics of the Bush Administration.

As the curators of last winter’s Movement Research festival are acutely aware, improvisation is hard. Of course, it’s not so much that improv is hard; rather, improvisation is something of a lie, and we all know it. When we do improvisation, it is knowingly, under the terms of “improv;” we are anticipating unpredictability, training for it and setting it up. When coupled with such falsehoods as spontaneity or liberation, it’s easy to see that improvisation is simply the gesture, always necessarily arriving withing a series of gestures, which produces the illusion that we’re free and creative subjects, that we aren’t perpetually reproducing the history that precedes our movements, our speech, our acts of invention.

What’s “easy to see,” however, is not always the truth of a situation, and I don’t even pretend to bring clarity to a theory of improvisation. Because, despite what I noted above, it’s also true that improvisation is the only thing we really know how to do. And even if I often don’t believe in it, I must advocate for it wholeheartedly… Each instance of an act, as a new moment made extemporaneously… is what makes life worth living, what makes life at all. — from “As We Move Away from a Theory of Improvisation” by David Velasco

I experience myself often in the movement between arriving and departing. This has led me to be obsessed with transitions and the moment of transformation from one state to another. Transitional events hold/release potential energy as one state becomes dormant and the next is about to kick in. One never knows quite what’s coming but one’s being is in preparation for it. Paying attention to the transition forces me to be extremely present and not jump ahead to a preconceived idea of what is coming next. It allows me to be simultaneously aware of both the mundane experience of moving literally from one space to the other, and the metaphysical sense of transformation as I shift, for example, from the power of the image to the evolution of self in the performance. — from “Weathering the Score” by Jennifer Monson

I try to see as much as possible. Each event that I go to has an audience made up of growingly familiar faces. I see a clear and present community here and regardless of how naïve it may sound, somehow by sitting among them I feel like a part of it. The real pull of the dance world is that it exists as a shared experience. You are part of it simply by participating, and your participation is simultaneously creating and shaping it. Its nature depends upon its/your openness. — from “Beer is an interesting subject matter or notes on a collaborative process” by Beth Gill and Chase Granoff

Editors: April Biggs, Kimberly Brandt, Levi Gonzalez, Isabel Lewis, Alejandra Martorell and Layard Thompson

Letter from the Editors

Conversation between Arturo Vidich and Yvonne Meier

Improvisation and/as Open Source version 1.2 by Isabel Lewis

curating is hard by Miguel Gutierrez

The Movement of Attention: An Interview with Daniel Lepkoff by Simone Forti

Improv #2 (video stills) by Lara Hanson

Reflections on a Panel Discussion “Outside in the City: Reframing the Kinetic Experience of the Urban Environment” by Gillian Lipton

As We Move Away from a Theory of Improvisation by David Velasco

Travelogue: An Improvisation Across Borders by Jonah Bokaer

The Ickey Shuffle and the Dirty Bird: African American Improvisational Dance in the Endzone by Maura Keefe, PhD

The Improvisational Nature of the Dramaturg/Choreographer Relationship: A Series of Extemporized Manifestos by Glenn D. Kessler

From El Sol Brillante Community Garden to Stuyvesant Cove by Yves Musard

Weathering the Score by Jennifer Monson

transcription, a study in us by April Biggs

The Space of Dancing by K.J. Holmes

The Improvisation of Curation: One Curator’s Observations by Ishmael Houston-Jones

new noise new meat by Chris Peck

Beer is an interesting subject matter or notes on a collaborative process by Beth Gill and Chase Granoff

Sleepover Intervention: Waking People Up By Sleeping by Andrea Liu

Coaxing the Unfamiliar – taken from a handful of interviews between Bebe Miller and April Biggs

Reflekt First Dance Improvisation Festival Sofia, Bulgaria, 28.IX.2004 – 01.X.2004 by Elissaveta Iordanova

In improvisation the moment is the crucible by Frances Alenikoff

Being Jon Kinzel by Alejandra Martorell

Psychic Network: Rapid Response by Jon Kinzel

Improvising writing about Improvising Chosen in NYC by Keith Hennessey

Recollections (Paul Benney’s) of a Performance (Keith Hennessey’s) by Paul Benney

Movement Research Artist-in-Residence Project Page by Sam Kim and by Heather Kravas

The recent Movement Research Festival 2004: Improvisation is Hard (November 29th through December 12th) provides a starting point for this discussion. Many of us perceived a new sense of diversity in the Festival’s choice of events, venues and artists. Structurally, the curation had shifted to a seven-member committee of artists who represented a larger sector of the community and varying approaches to what the festival could incorporate and address. During the Festival, questions arose. Did the curators have a consolidated agenda or vision? How pluralistic was the Festival? Was it thought provoking? What were the artists’ and audiences’ responses to it? What do we consider improvisation, and how is the term being stretched and contracted by current practices? And adding to those: How is the language of improvisation tangential to other art forms and disciplines outside the arts? Hos is improvisation activated by these discourses, or vice versa? We only began to address these questions. However, in this issue, current thoughts on improvisation are articulated, recipes offered, more questions raised and connections made.

It is a pervasive topic in formal and informal conversations that viable and extensive forums for discourse on experimental dance are lacking; that the preview/review format does not fill the need for a real discussion of the ideas and directions taken by artists; that mainstream dance criticism is lagging behind in its scope and focus. A variety of attempts and exercises need to be formulated to counter this neglect. The Journal is one such forum. Mirroring the approach taken to curate the Festival, a six-member Editorial Team came together for the production of this issue. We gravitated towards Movement Research with differing needs, interests and proposals, and eventually coalesced around the project of editing the next Journal. It is our hope that by continually incorporating the ideas of various artists in the publication of the Journal, we create a vehicle of analysis and dialogue that accurately reflects the diversity of our community.

Thank you and enjoy,

Editors: April Biggs, Kimberly Brandt, Levi Gonzalez, Isabel Lewis, Alejandra Martorell and Layard Thompson

In November/December 2004 Movement Research produced a dance festival entitled “Improvisation is Hard.” This was in part the occasion for Simone Forti to be in NY. I went to the Bowery Poetry Club and listened to Simone read from her new book Oh Tongue. I bought her book and began reading. A few days later I ran into Simone on the stairs of her Broadway loft and I told her how her words satisfied a hunger in me for an exchange of ideas focusing on the actual experience of moving. I shared my frustration with how the business of surviving in NY has squeezed down the space for this subject, and how certain kinds of information that can only live in an atmosphere that allows time for reflection are disappearing. She suggested doing an interview with me.

SIMONE FORTI: Can you say in what realm your questions or your thoughts are? Are they aesthetic or related to community, not that you’d have to separate those?

DANIEL LEPKOFF: From my observations of people around me in dance classes and performances, especially here in NY, I sense that a certain fundamental understanding or approach to dancing that used to be common knowledge and that once surrounded me, is absent.

SF: If I understand, you are saying there is a set of understandings or a field that used to be shared and that you operate by and that they can be forgotten if not reiterated.

DL: Yes, for example in this improvisation festival that just happened. I feel many of the younger dancers who are exploring improvisation or spontaneous composition are unaware of a wealth of inspired research and developed knowledge that I think might be very apropos to their questions.

I recently attended two performance showcase events at the “Improvisation is Hard” festival. I went to see my friends Vicky Shick and Diane Madden perform but I saw many different performers on each night. After the second show I realized that the atmosphere in both of these concerts offered no empty space. Both evenings I attended were facilitated by MC’s. The MC’s did more than facilitate the flow of events, they were themselves full blown theatrical standup comedic acts that kicked in between every piece, a rhythm similar to television. There were no gaps.

In many of the pieces I saw I felt the artists placed an emphasis on manifesting a striking and unusual image performed with total confidence and conviction. This idea that the performer is the creator of manufacturer of the image itself is a different paradigm than the performer as a vehicle for the audience’s images; that performing is a communication and when something magic happens in the theater it is created by a confluence or symbiosis of both the audience and the performer together.

SF: I think of years ago, what we were doing was exploring various interests, and performance was the medium in which we could explore them, so it wasn’t so much of a presentational thing but more of a sharing of thoughts and interests…and…it wasn’t that performance was something you could do…it was more a question of “lets look at this”…and the exploring could be very kinetic…by ideas and thoughts I don’t mean just verbally thinking.

Anyway, you said earlier there were certain understandings that you do not see now. Could you shed some light on these understandings? Let’s continue in this direction.

DL: My reaction to these recent performances shows me again that emptiness is very basic to my creative process, to my approach toward researching movement…an approach that involves observation, quieting oneself and having the presence of something come to you.

Watching Diane (Madden) was interesting for me. Years ago, Diane and I worked a lot together in a group called Channel Z and we also made two duet collaborations.* Ultimately Diane devoted herself to the work of Trisha Brown and even at the time we were working together she was deeply involved with Trisha’s work. So Diane’s dance career has been very different from mine, yet watching Diane dance I saw a physical practice that is very familiar to me. She walked into the performing space and began by taking time to tune herself to her physical state; how she felt in the first moment she entered the space, standing before the eyes of the audience. She listened to the movement that was there in her initial stillness and didn’t try to hide her nervousness and appeared to notice how her body was vibrating. It was obvious to me that she had a basic relationship to the activity of “being present” and tuning to what is; that “being present” was an acquired skill for how to arrive into her physicality.

In my own work the idea of “being present” was always fundamental, but as a dance concept “being present” is difficult to define in technical terms and sometimes I could only think of this as some kind of spiritual activity. The two movement forms I practiced in my early years of dancing, Contact Improvisation and Release Technique each proposed a more or less technical approach toward the activity of “being present.” Continuing to explore the physical details of this concept through the years, I have realized that “being present” is actually a movement and I have identified what is moving. “Being present” is the movement of my attention. I have developed a set of exercises that highlight specific elements of this movement and make them simple to practice physically. This has been a slow but exciting process of realization for me.

SF: Can you be more specific?

DL: At its roots my dance work is focused on everyday movement, the functioning of the body, how we navigate physically and how the mind and body work together to compose our movement. One basic fact that determines the nature of all my studio work is that our everyday functional movement is always in the context of a physical dialogue with our environment.

The relevance for dancing is that this dialogue is highly composed and full of personalized knowledge, sensuality and imagination. As a child, physical interactions with our environment are wondrous. As an adult we come to rely on tried and true habits. I’ve discovered that when I unhinge myself from my first impulses and read, re-read and re-read again, where I am, my current physical circumstance, and I take a second, third, fourth and fifth look, my environment literally transforms itself…it becomes a sensual presence, anything but neutral, and stimulates my imagination. This experience is a delight and fills me with a desire to engage. I really am hopelessly in love with this kind of dancing.

Taking a second, third, fourth or fifth look is what I am now calling the “movement of attention.” In the ordinary course of events most of our actions, at a deep level, are automatic. Walking for example is ordinarily relatively effortless. Imagine, however, you are walking out on a frozen lake; you are not sure the ice is strong enough to support you; the gracefully effortless walk becomes halting, hesitating, you listening for the sound of ice beginning to break, you test and feel the subtleties of the support as you shift your weight slowly from one foot to another foot. The boundary between what you imagine and what is real is slightly blurred. In this situation the movement of your attention is heightened; your attention reaches out and precedes your movement. In my studio work, I am experimenting with a physical state in which the movement of attnetion precedes the commitment to physical action.

This concept is a key for physical improvisation, but also for dancing set movement. I imagine what makes a classical piano player great. While they are playing a highly complex piece, their attention is able to move so they can hear the music through more than one filter, listen to the rhythm, harmonic structure, rhythmic phrasing, emotion and…all before the next note is played…so what sounds fast and complex to our ears is actually full of time and space to theirs. In the movement of a finger from one key to the next is a space in time that allows them to fine tune their impulse, hesitate or stretch the time between one note and another. This is music.

SF: Can you give a specific example of how you work with this idea in the studio?

DL: I have an ongoing fascination with the eyes and vision in connection to movement and performance. Recently I read in a book by Aldous Huxley, “The Art of Seeing” that in a state of deep rest, the eyes are actually in constant motion. To keep the eyes still is a strain. This reminds me of breath. You can hold your breath, but you cannot stop breathing. You can keep your eyes still, but eventually, when they relax, they move.

I have learned to feel the movement of my eyes while I am dancing. On a level of sensation the movement of the eyes is a stretch sensation. On the level of perception, the movement of my eyes is inseperable from the images of the space I am living in. When you first enter a new space, walk through a door, there is a “reading” that you take. I’ve realized this activity is literally analogous to the activity of reading a book. You cannot get any information from the page of a book if you just blankly stare at the page. You have to place each letter in the center of your vision and move your eyes from letter to letter, only then does the meaning come to you. Likewise, you need to move your vision to build a sense of where you are in space, you need to take a reading. Once I became aware of this activity of reading space I could allow myself to play with the way I read space, and feel and shape the rhythm of that reading. I have identified different ways to move my visual attention and these have become movement explorations. I have become interested in tracking how the space changes as I move. If you quiet the movement of the eyes and move the body’s center, as in walking while the eyes are relatively still, the visual image changes because your point of view shifts. It is interesting to experience “moving space” rather than “moving through space”. When you reverse your movement it is exactly like running film in reverse. I describe this exercise as panning. When you pan with a video camera, the motion of the image is created by the motion of the camera but when you watch it back on a TV, it is the image moving in the frame of the TV not the TV moving in the space. I noticed it is easier to experience this most profoundly when walking backwards. I once took my class, in a workshop I was teaching at PARTS, for a walk in the park across the street. We walked backwards for 1 hour, watching the environment move.

I have identified other visual activities that do not yet have names. When you “see” you also compose relationships between the various objects in your field of vision, you match groups of objects with each other and organize them in relationship to other groups of objects and in relationship to the background or foreground or what is above and below. I noticed this organization can shift and there seems to be innumerable permutations of how a single scene can be composed in ones vision. I experience these shifts of composition as a slight stretch sensation in the eye and at the same time as a movement in my mind. To dwell in this activity is quite pleasant. I often entertain myself with this activity, while walking in the streets.

Once in a workshop in Paris, after we had been working with the field of vision while walking as a group through the spaces between people, I asked the class to stop and sit against the bleachers in a certain place where the sunlight was reflecting off the dust particles that were floating in the air. From this vantage point the dust appeared as brilliant weightless crystals. We watched these crystals do their ensemble dance in mid air and began to laugh because the dust particles started to seemas if they had minds of their own and many of their choices were very clever and funny. I think the dust particles came alive because in fact we were moving our visual attention and gathering information, and not just staring blankly into space.

There is more.

SF: I think in terms of performance, I have confidence as you’re doing this activity of shifting your attention that I can tell by your timing of when you move, when you turn your head, the choices that you make, I can somewhat tell what is going on and so through you I can experience something similar to what you are experiencing.

DL: A lot of what I know about performance is through being an audience. The activity of moving my visual attention has really enlivened my own audience-ing and perhaps has altered how and what I now see when I watch a dance.

There is something fundamental in how people can understand each other through reading each others behavior. We can look at someone and assess if they are sick or shy or aggressive or whatever may be going on. We are sensitive to those things.

When a performer is engaged in this activity of “moving their attention,” unhinging themselves from the inevitable and taking a moment to alter their view, shifting their intention and playing physically in this way, as an audience we may not immediately understand what we are looking at. The behavior doesn’t read in the usual way. This creates a space for us, the audience, to move our own attention to compose what it is that we are seeing. This activity is deeply reflexive.

I remember watching Lisa Nelson and Karen Nelson dance together in a duet ppiece at St. Mark’s Church. I had the thought, “every time a performer shifts their attention and lets go of the image or relationship or sense of the meaning of what is going on, this shift triggers a message that gets sent out to the audience.” When a message travels though space, like a letter, it has to be opened and you have to read it…this is what I love to feel in the theater.

On the other hand when performers do not shift away from the transient images or perceptions that randomly pass by but identify themselves with one particular relationship, this becomes a label. A label is like a billboard, the performer is the billboard saying “look! I am sexy,” “look! I am serious,” “look! I am funny.” Where is the space for the audience to create their own images?

One thing I have come to value through my dancing is the importance for people to have a way to assess their own situation and not defer their opinions to someone else who supposedly knows better. In this time there are very divisive and powerful forces at work in our government and in the corporate world. We are surrounded by media images that are designed to manipulate our attention and control what we know and do not know. This is why I become concerned when an art event seems to offer no space for the audience to create their own images or meaning.

I think it is important to make work that does not tell people what they are supposed to see, or what it is supposed to mean, or indicate what is good or not good.

SF: I think you have got at something very subtle.

NOTE FROM DANIEL LEPKOFF: The physical insights, language and concepts that I am attempting to articulate in this article are part of a larger field of investigation and movement research that many artists have contributed to. Without this community I would not have been able to frame the questions that have kept dancing mysterious, magic and full of life for more than 30 years. I want to acknowledge the inspired teachings and performance works of Steve Paxton, Lisa Nelson and Simone Forti. Their insights lie behind my words.

DANIEL LEPKOFF Involved in early developments of Anatomical Release Technique with Mary Fulkerson 1970-75. Central to the development of Contact Improvisation with Steve Paxton and others since 1972. Founder of Movement Research. Teaches and performs his own work worldwide. Currently working with Vicky Shick, Diane Madden and Sakura Shimada here in NY. Daniel Lepkoff can be reached at dnlep@earthlink.net.

SIMONE FORTI’s latest book “Oh Tongue” can be acquired from Beyond Baroque Books: beyondbaroque@aol.com

*Channel Z was a NY-based collective alive in the 80s that rehearsed and performed improvisational work and included Robin Feld, Paul Langland, Daniel Lepkoff, Diane Madden, Nina Martin, Stephen Petronio and Randy Warshaw.

These epic double issues commemorating MR’s first 25 years — PJs 27 and 28 — are an incredible window not only into the history of the organization, but to the moment these anniversary journals were conceived and created. They include an array of interviews with almost all MR previous Directors and the artists who brought it into being. There are also notes from artists who were (and many continue to be) intensively involved with the organization in 2004 and a view into how change becomes part and parcel of the organization’s mission and nature. From Part A, we highlight a brief piece, with some manifesto-like tone, from Sally Silvers, where these tradition and evolution trends both find resonance, and where the political foundation of an aesthetic project finds clear expression. From Section B, we chose Ann Cooper Albright’s piece, Researching Bodies: The Politics and Poetics of Corporeality, because it seems to question some of the answers Sally gives in hers. Besides promoting a keen and necessary critical perspective, the issues raised by Cooper Albright ring relevant still today, and we think have been echoed through MR’s organizational life, both internally and externally.

Wendell Beavers: Danny Lepkoff and I talked about this. We talked about the needs of people who are in their fifties, and have been dancing since the seventies, how what they want is different from other generations. Why doesn’t each generation–whether it’s the late forties, fifties, or sixties, each with their own incredible experiences–why don’t they start their own Movement Research? Why not do it all over again with a whole new set of reasons? Our time was bizarre because we were working in a community in which we were all the same age, basically. The students were the same age as the teachers. We weren’t teaching younger students. We were all in our twenties. I remember when it started, when real students would show up, it was actually offensive in a way. It was like, ‘what is this demand from these kids?’ MR was quite a different idea; it was community in a looser sense. — from a conversation between Wendell Beavers and Clarinda Mac Low

Before I continue, however, allow me a moment of personal reflection. I moved to NYC in the fall of 1984 with a B.A. in philosophy and French literature and an M.F.A. in dance and choreography, and about $500 in cash. As I went looking for work and dance classes that first week, I happened upon an ad in the Village Voice for a workshop with Simone Forti, and one for an ongoing series of classes in Contact Improvisation. I glanced up to see what organization was hosting these classes, and there it was, at the top of the advertisement, “Movement Research, Inc.” Eureka! Suddenly, I felt like I was home! Because that’s exactly what I wanted to do at the ripe old age of 23, research movement – in all its manifestations. Research, the dictionary tells us, is the “investigation or experimentation aimed at the discovery and interpretation of [in this case, dance].” For that inquiring mindset, for bringing to New York an incredible roster of teachers, and for its beloved focus on improvisation as a physical and performative practice, I will always be grateful to Movement Research, Inc. Twenty years later, I am still involved in researching movement in ways that were fundamentally informed by my time studying under the auspices of this organization.

Nonetheless, (note the rhetorical shift, here comes the tough love part) I feel that it is important for Movement Research, Inc. to come to terms with its internal contradictions, not in order to erase them, but rather as a point of departure for a dialogue about them. As a multi-faceted arts organization, MR sponsors workshops in experimental dance (including a wonderful focus on improvisation), presents the work of emerging artists, hosts Open Movement, and produces The Studies Project as well as the Movement Research Performance Journal. I was thinking about Movement Research while at a conference entitled “Perceiving Gender and Performance” at Denison University last month. Intriguingly enough, most of the performers who were a part of the conference were Movement Research alumni: dancers such as K.J. Holmes, Chris Aiken, David Beadle, Peter Bingham, and Angie Hauser. Even though they were performing under the auspices of this focused inquiry, most of the dancers weren’t really all that interested in thinking about gender in their performances. In fact, a few thought that their training in forms such as Contact Improvisation had neutralized any internalized gender training they may have grown up with. While the program order was consciously organized in terms of a range of gender dynamics – a male-male duet, a female-female duet, and a male-female duet – there was a significant refusal among the dancers to engage with gender as a conscious element within the improvisation. That’s when I realized how much the tension between movement exploration as a product of a natural body, and dance as a form of cultural representation (and therefore necessarily a discourse about social identity and political power) lay underneath the workings of Movement Research.

Tension is an interesting concept, especially in light of the emphasis in American contemporary dance on release techniques. In the midst of our efforts to yield (into the floor, into our partners), tension gets a bad rap – somehow it smacks of corporate ambition. And yet the word itself doesn’t just imply hardness, or blocked energy, it can also mean a stretch, or a state of balance, something along the lines of what it takes to engage a half-moon pose in yoga. In other words, it can connote a “productive tension.”

There have been moments in the history of Movement Research Inc. where experiences of the body’s physicality and how those experiences operate in representation – either visual, written, or performed – polarized the organization. One such moment was the December 1983 Studies Project with Bill T. Jones and Steve Paxton. Another was the brouhaha surrounding the 1991 Gender Performance issue of Movement Research Performance Journal. Instead of sweeping those uncomfortable moments under the proverbial carpet, I think there is something to be gained by considering those lines of tension more fully.

In both these situations, the issues at stake revolved around the tension between cultural meaning and personal experience, between politics and art. For instance, the Studies Project was designed as an opportunity to see artists’ work and hear them discuss their conceptual and physical processes. But when Steve Paxton and Bill T. Jones got together, the dialogue got a bit dicey as Bill T. started pressing Steve on the question of audience reception. Bill T. was asking Steve to shift perspectives from one of process and investigation into one of representation. At the time, Bill T. was highly focused on how his own body – black and gay – was read by an audience. (Remember all those early solos with texts that confronted the audience with their own racialized gaze?) Paxton, whose identity had never been at stake in his dancing (a result of both privilege and choice), resisted and things got a bit personal. A lot was learned during that afternoon, but it did heat up. In an editor’s note describing her experience that afternoon in Contact Quarterly (Fall 1984), Nancy Stark Smith wrote a telling comment: “What I saw light up in the heat of that friction was each man as an individual; his unique perspective came into focus as it was forced to narrow from a more general field of vision to a distinct point of view, teased and poked and pushed into the light. And though I squirmed in the heat of that confrontation, I was at the same time struck by the commitment behind the stand.”

Both Bill T. and Steve warm to resistance, they like a feisty interaction. But after their afternoon session, each went back to their own corners. This was unfortunate, because that afternoon held a challenge for Movement Research to understand its own point of view. Like whiteness, the primary focus on experimental dance within Movement Research has been unexamined ideologically. Being a liberal organization, MR supports the artistic focus of individual artists on their specific identity (i.e. if you are black or queer), but that kind of work is seen as separate from much of the physical investigations done in workshops and classes.

I think a lot about this dichotomy these days, because my artistic and critical work straddles both the realms of internal investigations of movement possibilities informed by Contact Improvisation, release work, Body-Mind Centering, Authentic Movement, as well as questions of identity and cultural representation fomented by studies in feminist and queer theory. Each area carries a certain truth for me, and I like the tension between them. Interestingly enough, my willingness to submit to that pull in both directions at once, comes directly from my improvisational training and practice which was formed and informed by MR. Yet, I believe the potency of improvisational practices today lies less in the opening up of more movement options, but rather in understanding how to encourage a willingness to cross over into uncomfortable territories, to move in the face of what is unknown. Improvisation can lead us out of our habitual responses by opening up alternative experiences, encouraging dancers to explore new possibilities and desires not only physically, but critically too. Why not let our improvisational practice, as well as the physicalities that experimental dance cultivates, lead us into an engagement with the world instead of away from it? On the eve of its silver anniversary, I challenge Movement Research, Inc. to start teaching attention to the political and the cultural, as well as the personal, meanings that bodies carry. Only then do I believe that Movement Research will really be able to realize their mission into the 21st century.

A performer, choreographer and feminist scholar, Ann Cooper Albright teaches in the dance and theater program at Oberlin College. Combining her interests in dancing and cultural theory, she is involved in teaching a variety of dance, performance studies and gender studies courses which seek to engage students in both practices and theories of the body. She is the author of Choreographing Difference: the Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance, and co-editor of Moving History/Dancing Cultures, and Taken By Surprise: Improvisation in Dance and Mind (both by Wesleyan University Press). In addition to making dances these days, she is currently working on a new book entitled Traces of Light: Absence and Presence in the Work of Loie Fuller.