Interview date:  September 27, 2010

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Peggy Jarrell Kaplan: Knowing that you were going to ask me questions, I started thinking of how much I love going to dance in New York. I love the community. I love seeing the same faces even though I’m apart from everything that’s going on.

Juliette Mapp: That goes straight to something I was curious about: You say that you’re “apart.” You’re on the outside, but you document in a way that is important to the community. I’m wondering if you can speak more to that.

Peggy: I’ve never studied dance. I feel it’s both a strength and a weakness that I don’t really get inside what’s happening.

By the way, in general I don’t photograph anyone else other than choreographers. I started photographing performance visual artists whom I came to know in the 70’s, like Chris Burden, Vito Acconci, Hannah Wilke, Charlotte Moorman. Judson Church had been floating around in my mind. I wanted to track them down, and I wanted to track down the people who had performed Einstein On The Beach. [That piece] didn’t change my life, it changed my mind. … [Then my work] very clearly became [focused on] choreographers.

Steve Paxton, 1984 © Peggy Jarrell Kaplan

Juliette: There’s a sense of the outside eye [in your work]. How did you cultivate that role as opposed to seeing yourself inside the community?

Peggy: This whole process, in my mind, is the process of being able to see someone’s work and then to [photograph them].

It’s wonderful when the choreographer is also the dancer. It makes me think, “How would I make a portrait? What is it about this work? What would I do?” It’s very important to me that I can see the work first.

You know, Sidi Larbi [Cherkaoui] said that the dancer or choreographer, as compared to the visual artist, is both the draftsman and the pencil. This is what I’ve felt. It’s an immediate way of creativity, somehow related more to what that person is than painting with a canvas.

Juliette: That’s an incredible quote. I have to say I’ve been looking for something like that myself.

Peggy: I’ve always seen [live performance] as something that’s on the way to disappear. Nothing lasts after the dance. This made me think of all sorts of metaphorical, existential things. [My work is] an homage, really. I don’t understand people who can devote their life to the body in that way and where their intelligence comes from. It’s a group that’s really outside of the norm in a way.

Juliette: There is that sense of honoring people in the way you care for them in the images. There’s such a specific tenderness with each photograph. I don’t know how you make that happen between the performer and you, the photographer. I’m interested in that process and that intimacy in the studio. Is it always at your home?

Peggy: Yeah. Except for… [Pina Bausch] didn’t come to my home. [both laugh]

Juliette: I was looking at your archives and there’s that one of [Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker] standing against a brick wall. I love that photograph so much. And that’s one where I can really say, “Well, that wasn’t at her house.” I’m really really curious about that.

Peggy: Well, I’m afraid of that a little bit, because I don’t want to think of it as an homage and I don’t want to think of it as sentimental. I don’t want to think of making myths. The real tool of photography is to see. It’s not to make something. But what I do is… make something. There’s a problem for me. But, I guess in some sense the choreographer is a form, a still life. And this sounds so wrong in terms of no deconstruction… I don’t even really think I’m going to say it.

Juliette: [laughs] You can shoot from the hip. It’s fine.

Peggy: It’s the sense that the choreographers are pretty tough, and they don’t seem to be invested in how they look. There’s a certain freedom in that.

You were photographed! Do you remember what that felt like?

Juliette: Absolutely. I absolutely did. I remember John Jasperse had his photo taken previous to me and he said “I’m not sure she got what she wanted.” He had this anxiety about how the shoot went. And I remember going and feeling instantly really comfortable. Like, “Oh well, I’m just here in her house.” I met your husband and your son and there was a conversation about Madison as I Imagine It. Then, when we went into your studio, it just felt like a continuation of what had happened outside. It didn’t feel like there was an agenda that you were presenting me with, and that, I think, is what I’m so curious about. What is your intention in [your studio] environment? What are you communicating with the performers or choreographers?

Peggy: There have been shifts in my interests, but the process has been the same, because it feels slightly improvised… well, very much improvised.

The first portraits were very much focusing on expression and concentrating on the face and the position of the head. It also seemed like the first people I was photographing, the Judson Church group, had something inside that was very intense and thoughtful.

Lucinda Childs, 1984 © Peggy Jarrell Kaplan

Then I started to introduce things like… I’d start making a table. People could lean on it, It seemed like it was easier somehow to establish something different. I started using some objects from around my home, and once I exhausted ideas related to the object, I could get rid of it.

Maria Hasabi, 2003 © Peggy Jarrell Kaplan

I guess at a certain period I must have been fascinated with hands on the face, and I must say they were really awful. [laughs]

But for my latest photographs, I decided to have more of a plan. I’d been photographing so many people from Europe, and there was a predominance of men… I decided, wouldn’t it be great to photograph eleven New York-based women? So then it was like, well, I’ll see who’s performing in the summer and that’s what [this next series of photographs] will be. Summer seemed a time to loosen up, to try new things, so I asked each subject to bring a costume or something that related to the work.

Juliette: What attracts you to a particular performer? What is it that you feel sparks your imagination?

Peggy: I don’t have a critical judgment. I like people that are far out there.

I have to mention something that Olivier Dubois said: “Maybe you photograph choreographers because you’re trying to steal something.” He said it with a French accent. It was such an original thought, a great beautiful thought. What does “stealing” mean? What is it influencing?

Juliette: I’ve seen your photographs since I was a young dancer, ones of Bill T. Jones or Mark Morris or the Judson group. There was the possibility, as a young dancer, to project a lot onto those portraits. They invited my creative imagination into who these choreographers were. As I’ve gotten older, and I know a lot of the choreographers you’ve taken pictures of, there does seem to be to me, an actual resonance in the photographs and their work.

Peggy: Well, I have always felt that with a portrait, meaning an image of a face, there is always a resonance. When I first started, there weren’t a lot of portraits of this group of people. So in that sense, it seemed interesting to do that. I feel that it’s frustrating to capture movement. How can you? How can you in a photograph? It’s so difficult.

Juliette: That’s what’s so interesting [about] what you do. There’s something that stays with you, brings you back to who that individual is as an artist, not just as an object of a portrait.

Peggy: I made a timeline of all the New York dance [that I’ve photographed].

Juliette: I want to read some of these names. I’ll just read 1987: Trisha Brown, Martha Clarke, Steven Petronio, John Kelly, Lance Gries. That’s 1987—just one year, you know?

John Kelly, 1987 © Peggy Jarrell Kaplan

Peggy: [My work] seemed to go in waves too, when exciting things were happening. All of a sudden, there would be this group of people that I was photographing. I was taking the temperature of what’s going on.

Juliette: I’m so glad you mentioned that, because you’ve seen such a spectrum of dance over many decades. This is something I’m curious about in my own work: how generations are connected. What do you think is a defining characteristic of this moment?

Peggy: Of this moment over the summer? Well, it was interesting that there were so many women performing in the summer.

Juliette: But [the focus on women] was an idea of yours beforehand?

Peggy: Yes, so I was thinking it’s in the air. I find—now [the artists I photographed] may disagree about this—but everything felt lighter and less tortured to me. There are two people making the portrait: me and the person.

Juliette: You’re seeing a bunch of work that corresponds to the individual.

Peggy: Yes, but I can’t speak about the work, because I don’t really respond critically. It’s a very emotional response. So much [about being] in the audience depends on your mood or what you feel like. Sometimes you just have to give yourself over to it.

That feeling of Paige Martin’s piece [PANORAMA]. That was such an extraordinary experience for me. I don’t know, I just loved it. The hot weather and the dark, dusk, and going out to the beautiful park that I hadn’t been to, waiting in line, seeing the faces of so many I had photographed, and then not knowing what was going to happen. Then, I was just hysterical after thinking, “Why is this line going so slow?” and discovering that you squeeze through [the entry doorway] as a quote [from] MoMA’s show [Marina Abramovic’s The Artist is Present]. And then you enter this brightly lit room and they give you champagne and there are these crazy things lying around and you don’t know what’s going on and you talk. It was just special. I could go on and on.

Paige Martin, 2010 © Peggy Jarrell Kaplan

Juliette: I’m really happy to hear you describe your individual experiences, because I really appreciate that you bring yourself to each moment uniquely, as opposed to looking for some sort of zeitgeist at the moment that you’re trying to capture.

Peggy: Well, sometimes I can be a little harsh and not going along with it. This summer was very special. Robbinschilds did an improvisation event that was very smart. But again, you had to give it time. They’re subject #11 [for the CPR installation]. The audience was encouraged to submit a request. I usually don’t participate, but I had such a strong feeling to ask them to “do” a portrait. Well, I’ll tell you, their portrait was devastating and very funny. It was the most posed and artificial possible, so much the danger of what portraits are. Then one of them said, “Okay, make a tableau.” They went on to make a larger tableau. Then one of them said, “Now animate it.” So they all were still touching each other and still moving like some kind of creaking large toy. I got away from something.

Layla Childs & Sonya Robbins, 2010 #2 © Peggy Jarrell Kaplan

Juliette: This is helping me understand.

Peggy: This is one thing, and I don’t think this fits at all. I always feel whenever I talk about it… And now I’m going to disappoint you…

Juliette: [laughs] You could never disappoint me.

Peggy: My sister led a troubled life, and we were estranged. She came to San Francisco the same time I came to New York in the 60’s. In a sense, we were both product of our times, because I had my eye on New York and she had her eye on San Francisco for a freer life. She was very much taken with the love generation. She was very artistic and now there would probably be terms for her condition, but not back then. I guess she suffered from depression. She died from undiagnosed diabetes when she was 53 in 2003, and it turned out she kept journals since her late adolescence. Starting in the 70’s, she began to make a drawing each day that illustrated herself.

Juliette: Everyday?

Peggy: Everyday. They were to show her moods and what she was feeling that day. I was thinking—I have a collection, and she had a collection. Hers were self-portraits for herself, and I’m making portraits of others as my own obsession. So I’ve had some plans to somehow exhibit both, but the whole thing is very risky. What does “portrait” mean to my sister and me?

Once I went to a photography gallery and showed my portraits, and was told, “Well we don’t show portraits at all.” What is a portrait? It doesn’t seem like a photograph. It seems like something else. I don’t even think of myself as a photographer because I’m not really that technical and I’m not experimenting. With a portrait, since it is a face, there is always something that works. If half the shots don’t come out it doesn’t matter.

Juliette: One of my questions was where and how you picked the set pieces that are in more recent portraits you’ve been doing. I’ve been wondering for a while, “Where did that pole come from?” or “Where’s that little bird from?” Now to know that they’re actually things that you have a relationship to and in some sort of unconscious way choose to plant and manipulate… it’s very interesting because it shows that there’s this other level of connection to the moment, to the subject.

Peggy: I was grasping for a way to not only have a face.

Juliette: So you were trying to change the way in which you were working?

Peggy: I was, unconsciously or not. That’s why I was interested in double portraits. It’s interesting why I wanted to photograph you because at that time, you weren’t a choreographer.

I actually have photographed dancers who I really like. I followed the Pina Bausch dancers and Rosas dancers and Sasha Waltz’s dancers and [William Forsythe’s] dancers and John Jasperse’ dancers… I photographed you.

I was so struck by your face. I had the feeling that your face would be on a Roman coin. That’s why the photograph always meant a lot to me. I had a concept first and felt that I had achieved it, and that was a nice moment.

Juliette Mapp, 1999 © Peggy Jarrell Kaplan

Juliette: It was a great experience for me as well. Did you feel in the moment when you were taking the photograph that you achieved it?

Peggy: It’s funny that you mentioned [John Jasperse] thinking after the session that [he wasn’t sure if I got what I wanted]. I also feel like [that]. When I’m talking to someone after we have closed down shop… I notice new expressions, and I think “Maybe the portrait should be every time I don’t click the shot.”

Juliette: [laughs] That would really be a performance. So while you’re taking it, you never have an idea like, “This is what I want. This is working.”

Peggy: I do have that feeling sometimes, but it’s not necessarily accurate.

Juliette: I see. Just like a performance. [both laugh]

[See also The New York Times article “Choreographers Are Becoming Curators, Too”]

Jean Butler: I am talking to Juliette Mapp about her current role as curator in Danspace’s new initiative called Platforms. I was wondering if you could talk about how and when you first heard about it.

Juliette Mapp: The whole thing just started with a conversation without focusing on this idea of a platform or curation. Two years ago I had a show at Danspace called Anna, Ikea, and I, which focused on teachers, how influences are passed on, and things that fall away or remain between choreographers, teachers, and students. Judy Hussie-Taylor, the executive director, and I were talking about these subjects and about something I didn’t address in my piece – how women tend to be the ones that continue passing information on. So often dance teachers are women. How does this happen?

She then called me up saying she was thinking about doing this project of inviting artists to guest-curate at Danspace Project. I remember thinking it was so brave of her to come in to Danspace and hand over the reins. I agreed and one thing she asked me to do was to focus on artists making work in New York. I wasn’t thinking about anything but New York dance anyway, and it became a prism to structure my ideas around the artists that I wanted to bring in and the conversations that I wanted to be having around dance making. New York became the framework.

Jean: The complexities of living and working in New York are a metaphor for dancers’ lives. That is represented in the bios of the booklet, which are invitingly alternative and interesting to read.

Juliette: When I decided on Jen Rosenblit and Katie Pyle, I wanted to tell Judy more about them- more than I knew. She asked them to send me a bio. They both sent these ‘back of the program bios’ that we are all so familiar with.

Jean: That are one-dimensional.

Juliette: It doesn’t give us any information about what the influences are or what has brought us to this point. So I asked for more information about what has inspired you and what teachers have brought you to this place. I got back these beautiful rambling essays. I was so moved by them. I started to ask for similar things from other people. These are the center of what the catalog has become—these artists writing about themselves and claiming their own histories. It is not about achievements. It is about interweaving experiences that have brought them to New York.

Jean: Reading the catalog was really comforting, and it points to your exploration of the intersection of people. Being a dancer in New York is not always about dancing, per se. Recently, I’ve gotten to this stage where I feel that it’s about who my friends are, what I see, what I listen to, what I read. It is not a separate thing that happens on the side.

Juliette: Dance is so defined by the community in which it exists. We witness each other dance and then it is over. But there is an energetic interplay between creating, making, performing, and being witnessed. This bleeds into other aspects of our lives.

Jean: The language that is used in the catalog struck me. It is not the language of funding institutions. It is artists speaking directly.

Juliette: I have a deeper respect for that having worked with Deborah Hay. She has done a great service to dance with her rigorous relationship to language and in her effort to communicate what is happening in her dances. She claims authorship of the experience as opposed to leaving that up to someone else. There is a certain responsibility we have to deal in the world of words. That is the real history. Without that, the history is lost and rewritten. This is potentially a tragedy if these documents don’t exist. Judy was a visionary in terms of the catalog. Using our own language ups the ante. Critics, historians, and students can reference it.

Jean: There is validity to it.

Juliette: And accessibility. Language is always open to interpretation, but there is something so great about having it on the page. I remember reading Movement Research Performance Journal and Contact Quarterly in college and thinking how amazing it was there were these documents. I could enter into it because it was on paper.

Jean: These journals are not academic or scholarly.

Juliette: That is a different thing entirely. I am in graduate school right now, and I see how academia chooses to frame these things within their own power structure, not to disparage it.

Jean: Different writing techniques and power structures change the intention of something. If an artist is talking about their work and has to put it into a different structure, it changes the meaning of what an artist is trying to communicate because those words don’t suit the work.

Juliette: It is important that the voice of artists is heard. Not just about their work, but what are the conditions of art-making now? What are the ways in which people are inspired by each other? How do people manage to make a living? That is inspiring.

Jean: Could you talk about why Judy’s Platform is a brave step in the ecology of the downtown dance scene in terms of how dance is presented?

Juliette: Giving the curation to an artist is an act of trust in that artist’s process. She is enlivening curation with the presence of individual artists.

Disassembling that power structure is brave especially when there is such limited funding. You look at our experimental performance makers from decades ago and they can’t even get gigs. Their work is still considered too experimental somehow, or there hasn’t been an evolution in critical thought to keep up with where they are. Or they are not fashionable. With the economy tanking, Judy went the opposite direction. Instead of clamping down and narrowing what Danspace does, she has blown it open. It was a brave move because it goes against prevailing instincts.

Jean: There is much more transparency than in the traditional structure of having work presented. You have been presented as a dance artist. Could you compare the two models?

Juliette: I came at dance-making circuitously through being a dancer. The primary information I was getting was through my body and the experience of dancing. There came a point after working with John Jasperse for seven years when I realized I could use dance to talk about what I care about in the world. Dance is a big enough container for me to explore these other things. Once I realized that choreographing gives you so much more freedom, I wanted to make dances. It felt liberating and exciting to create that context for myself. I am an artist of circumstance inspired by possibilities that are present. I feel lucky that what I have had to say with my work has resonated with people.

This process is really different. Some of these artists have been around for decades and are part of a particular canon. With other artists I have chosen, it is not about their work. It is who they are, how they are working, and the ways in which they are unique members of the dance community. You can look at David [Thomson], who has worked with so many people–Trisha, Ralph, and Bebe. It wasn’t about look at David as a choreographer, but look at David at this moment doing something that he made and appreciate who this person is. Same with Shelley [Senter]. She sets Trisha’s work all over the world and is a renowned Alexander teacher. Here is Shelley onstage with something she has been working on- Shelley the artist, the teacher, the person.

Jean: Did you ask the artists for specific works or did you give them free reign to do whatever they wanted?

Juliette: I was really hands-off in terms of the work but not in terms of the context. It is about cultivating these connections and relationships to each other. How that enters into the work is for the artist to decide. I don’t think it is the curator’s role to decide what the work is. It can help the piece if the artist elects to have feedback. I knew that I wanted to be engaged with Jen and Katy’s processes because they are younger artists. It was an opportunity to be in a mentor role. It was not about getting my hands inside people’s work and I don’t feel that what people were showing is a reflection of me. The artists that I have chosen are a reflection of how I am engaged in the dance community. I don’t think the work reflects my aesthetic values or what I care about. It is more about the people and what they have done.

Jean: The Platform could, however, be viewed as a direct reflection on your personal aesthetic, your current dialogue with the community, and your relationship to specific people. Where is the line that separates these?

Juliette: There is some reverberation from me in what these artists are up to. But then there are people like Paige Martin, whose work I haven’t seen in a long time. She is such a rigorous artist in the way she engages with the world. I wanted her to make something for the theater, for people to see. She does not want to call it a dance. She wants to call it an exhibit for mature audiences only. I was interested in creating a context for her creativity.

Jean: Jen’s opening night at Danspace felt less about expectation and more about relevance and currency. There is value in creating a context for people to be able to work well in.

Juliette: I think there are other contexts for the pressure for success or failure, which can be a vital pressure cooker for good work to emerge. But having this space to make and not project in which the artists can dive in… They have to make their piece, but they don’t have to create the context.

Jean: Was it hard to know who was going to share a bill? How was the creative process within the curation?

Juliette: I respect what curators do now. Judy said to think about curating as an extension of my own work. That energy of making a dance fueled the whole thing- how does this feel to me? I work directly with circumstance. A lot of this had to do with who was available when. I would have done it differently in terms of who opened and closed it, but because of the way it lined up, it has its own logic. Some things I had to push to make happen, like Deborah’s travel from Australia. I wanted Deborah to do this thing called A Lecture on the Performance of Beauty, where she talks about the experience of performing this piece called Beauty. She agreed, and then called back later and said she wanted to do a solo.

Jean: Was it something you wanted to ask her and thought she wouldn’t be into it? She hasn’t done a solo in a long time.

Juliette: I know Deborah pretty well. I know she was working on this book. The solo is in relationship to the book and is a culmination of what she has been experiencing in the last seven years. She has a daily practice in the studio. This is an example of the exciting detours from what I thought would happen.

When I approached Paige, I had an idea of what I thought she could do. But she is doing her own thing that has nothing to do with what I suggested. I knew that it was important to me to have a number of generations present. There is a constant flood of inspiration that comes from knowing that people have struggled to make work long before I got here. Young people are coming here and making work with great determination despite difficult circumstances. Rents are higher than when I moved here, and it is more difficult to secure affordable rehearsal space.

Jean: The platform seems to be about being open and opening.

Juliette: All of that openness needs to be protected. There has to be a context for being open and trusting. As we see other structures fail under this economy, like real estate, what better time to come back to the possibilities that dance offers us? It is clearly of value.

Jean: You mentioned that this process has changed your understanding of the role of curator in relation to artistic director.

Juliette: Artistic directors can protect the act of curation. Judy has done that. Doing this art of curation would be very difficult without support from above. Judy and I have had lots of wonderful conversations. She has been a participant in every aspect of this.

Jean: What is the sustainability of this as an ongoing project?

Juliette: Judy wanted me to focus on New York, and I came up with the title, Back to New York, which is from a Dylan song that I have used in my work. “I am going back to New York City. I think I have had enough.” There is an underlying theme of coming home to the things that inspire you. I would hope that as a sustainable structure, these things would be open. Maybe there would be a year with no artists from New York or only young artists. It would have to be a malleable structure. It is so brand new, and it would have to have the ability to recreate itself every year, which is difficult. It is hard for artists to do it in their work and [difficult] for organizations, as well.

Jean: Three years down the line and twelve people have gone through the process, would it feel as fresh?

Juliette: Maybe it wouldn’t be important in the future. It feels responsive to the moment now.

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Photo: Courtesy of Brazil

I haven’t written in a long time—it’s been an eventful couple of months. However, not writing doesn’t equal not thinking feeling watching and thinking some more. I have a whole host of “posts” built up in my brain, and they will be bleeding out onto your screen over the next few weeks. Check back weekly, every Monday morning, from here on in, and for the next two months you should be getting something new each time.

What do we take away from performance? The answer to this question is in many ways entirely subjective and constantly mutating. Do different defined disciplines of performance leave us with distinctly different traces? Is what we take away from “theater” different from what we take away from “dance” or “music,” and if so how? I put scare quotes around these names because the line between the disciplines is often blurry—is opera theater, or music? Does it matter? I sometimes think that these labels can mislead and limit us, but I know my view is skewed by my own performance practice, which is squarely situated in the interdisciplinary, and by the performance world I live in, where most everything is fair game in getting the point across.

A recent conclusion I have is—yes. Yes, but don’t be fooled by the marketing classification of that performance into thinking that’s what it actually is.

This conclusion was precipitated by viewing Juliette Mapp’s recent performance, Anna, Ikea and I, at the Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church in New York City. Juliette Mapp is a choreographer, and I’m pretty sure she would say that she makes dances (Anna, Ikea and I was billed as “a little dance about a lot of things…”). The piece was full of dance, dancers and dance history, but it seems to me that it was actually, first and foremost, theater in the most classical Occidental sense.

Western theatrical traditions are rooted in the Greek theater, which was rooted in Dionysian transformational rituals. The tradition of tragedy (which means literally “goat-song.” Why? Well, it could be because a goat was a prize for a poetry competition, or it could derive from the origins of theater as part of a Dionysian ritual and the role of the goat there—I found several explanations) gives us the habit of catharsis, where a theatrical experience allows us to empathize with the characters depicted, as a group. Karen Armstrong, a religious anthropologist, talks about tragedy at the height of classical Greek tradition, in the 5th Century BCE, where Greeks wept unashamedly when they went to the theater. In fact, it was a place where they went expressly to weep together, and share the experience of empathy and sympathy, to feel as a group and examine their history in the light of strong emotion. [1]

Anna, Ikea and I had an epic quality. It was a historical and aesthetic chronicle masquerading as an autobiography. Discussing her history as a dancer, Mapp let us intimately into very select parts of her personal story, which were presented with passion, but also a humorous detachment. The story was expertly crafted, nuanced and beautifully told. Through her story, we were slyly taken on a journey through the history of contemporary dance. Through the story of her aesthetic development, we were taken through the aesthetics of a certain segment of the experimental dance world. The history came alive, literally, through the presence of interpreters and creators who were her teachers, choreographers, peers and students—a cast of 12 that ranged in age from 20s to late 50s, and included several luminaries of this dance world.

The wealth of intimate detail in her narrative about coming to grips with being a dancer, and the lack of detail on other parts of her life (except in passing) laid bare the depth of feeling that informs creative and interpretive processes. It was a concentration of the passion, confusion, and analytical delights of one dance artist, but told in a way that gave access to many.

Through Mapp’s story I found a way into my own story. My personal epiphany from this piece has everything to do with my own place in life, but this I believe was part of why the piece was successful. Everyone could feel some part of it for their own stage of life. My moment came while watching Mapp and three of her peers, all in their early to mid 30s, dancing a quartet towards the end of the piece. They were strong, clear and vital, but not young and callow, joyful and full of possibility. I suddenly wanted so much to be younger again, to have certain possibilities in front of me rather than behind me, to feel that strong and possible again. I even missed the torture of that time–the striving and the wanting, the doubt and desire. This has everything to do with turning 42, and feeling so clearly that I’m entering into a new phase in life, and being very afraid, and wanting to go back (a feeling I’ve never had before) at the same time that I’m excited, happy and relieved to be moving into this new state. For me, it was an ideal of a theatrical moment, in the sense of the classical Greek theater–a catharsis that led me to the heart of my own personal emotional turmoil, in public, and in relationship to a history and a tradition.

This is part of what we take away from performance—an insight into the parts of ourselves that are hard to face. Mapp’s piece led us on that classical Greek journey of theater (the other performers even functioned as a quintessential Greek chorus), using a story that speaks deeply to its community. Its place as a “dance” is immaterial to this effect.

[1] Karen Armstrong. The Great Transformation: The Beginning of our Religious Traditions. Alfred A. Knopf:USA, c2006. pgs. 225-227.

Next post: Observing from the inside out…