Critical Correspondence

MRPJ#18/release: Extras

[…] another interesting dichotomy, cos I think a lot of people find Graham’s technique very bound and tense, is that in reality, the way she meant it to be taught was that you only exerted enough. You were very careful with how much effort you used and there should be no tension anywhere in the body. That it’s a constant ebb and flow of paths of energy. And you know she would speak in very new age terms for the twenties and thirties. She became a yoga expert, so in all her exercises she was so aware of how closely related they were to a sun salutation, but the point I was going to make is, Oh, you know she goes to real extremes too about effort and tension and I love… there’s one quote… she used to get so pissed when dancers would sweat, she would just be furious. — from “Richard Move on Himself and Martha Graham”

Release was a memorable journal, not less for the cover and back-cover photos of Julie Atlas Muz in action, and the controversial “sitz bones to heels” Movement Research t-shirts and the dialogue they inspired around that time. The short quotes that cover the length of the issue by a broad group of current students, teachers, administrators, collaborators, presenters and, of course, makers, also serve as a portrait of the community surrounding and making MR at that moment, 1999. But the issue also captured a tremendous array of perspectives and attempts at articulating many bodies of knowledge that perhaps today we recognize as being more firmly defined. We’ve chosen a collectively written article on the work of Nancy Topf, on which we sense the originality, humbleness and devotion with which she developed her work, at a time when her recent and tragic passing was strongly felt by the community.

There was a period when I spent a lot of time in zoos, looking at how different animals move and trying out their movements in my own body. I wanted to understand my own movement in a very basic way, not in relation to any stylistic concerns. And though my body was a very different variation on the basic vertebrate structure (I also tried the way of the octopus and the way of the worm), the differences were not so great that I couldn’t somewhat manage those various movement strategies. One movement sequence that seemed so mysterious to me was the evolution from the tadpole to the frog. How to get from a watery lateral undulation to an earthy, symmetrical hop? I kept trying to ease my way through that transition and was eventually relieved to read that a young frog will often fall over before it gets the hop right. — from “Young Frog Falls Over” by Simone Forti