Critical Correspondence

MRPJ#11/conversations: Extras

Hay: I think that the language of dance could open up and be explored and be able to include all that experience of so many things at once in watching your pieces. I wish that there was a language of dance that could help us see better. Help us see the thrill. And I think it’s happening. I think there is some wonderful writing happening now in the world of dance. And I hope more and more happens.

Brown: My work is abstract. However, I went through the experience of choreographing Bizet’s Carmen, under the direction of a filmmaker. […] Suddenly I am looking at my dancers as character now. […] Enter meaning and abstraction in my work. And I played with that edge from then forth. And still do. And the way I know it has meaning is that something tugs my heart when I see it. And I am probably average in heart tugs. I know it is probably happening to other people in the audiences. And so I modulate it. I tug the heart and I erase it immediately. And then I do something very straight and then I do something funny. So I know that these stimuli are randomly splattering the audience. And some people, and things, are being triggered, but then it’s not there. And on and on and on and on and on… I don’t think that you can write about that. […] …when you are working with the kind of molecular energy that you speak about, and I talk about random splattering of meaning, I don’t think that it can be written about, yet.

–from “Deborah Hay and Trisha Brown: Paths from the 1960s to the 1990s”

Journal #11: conversations was the last journal of co-directors Cathy Edwards and Guy Yarden. As the title suggest and much like CC, the issue uses the interview and conversation format to let artists engage with each other and articulate, question and challenge their ideas among themselves. We have taken the lead and made new connections among the different articles in our choice of quotes. Take a peak and let us know if something grabs you!

Hay: […] the cellular body was the way in which I broke up the three-dimensional body. All it is is a different concept of the body which is infinite. The cellular body is infinite. Three-dimensional body ain’t! […] Thank heavens for it, but hell, I’m going into 53 trillion cells and we’re at once playing this dance rather than my bones and muscles. And so I feel more awake and alive. And it’s impossible to do. I mean, you can’t do it. So, I can’t ever accomplish what I am practicing. Which is fabulous. I just have the rest of my life to play.

Streb: I don’t manipulate our skeletons, only because I feel like my subject is action, we are action facilitators, we aren’t body as object. It’s action as subject. […] I think the assumptions that exist in the dance world have not been questioned enough in the last decades. Like, a formal decision has been made to camouflage gravity. The whole “leg technique” is about absorbing the shock. And what I do is simply to develop a technique to not camouflage gravity. It’s a formal choice. I’m not been reckless or carefree.

Brown: I try to deliver in a choreography the terms of it as fast as I can in the beginning. That this is the subject of the choreography and then when I think they get it, understand it, then I begin to play with it, break it up, reorganize it, redistribute it, and I think that is interesting to them.

Paxton: I have seen choreographers being just astonishing in the way they make choices. They set up some kind of world in the first 30 seconds or minute, where the expectations are established, and then it’s how they play those expectations and it seems to me like a very great game. Just a wonderful game.

–from the above, plus “Chaos and Order: Improvisation Taken to the Limit” and “Neil Greenberg Talks to Elizabeth Streb about Subjectivity and Objectivity in Art but Discussion Turns to Life and Death.”