Cultivo una rosa blanca,
En julio como en enero,
Para el amigo sincero
Que me da su mano franca.
Y para el cruel que me arranca
El corazón con que vivo,
Cardo ni oruga cultivo:
Cultivo la rosa blanca.

  -Jose Marti

(I have a white rose to tend
In July as in January;
I give it to the true friend
Who offers his frank hand to me.
And for the cruel one whose blows
Break the heart by which I live,
Thistle nor thorn do I give:
For them, too, I have a white rose.)

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I reverberate in the motions of last week’s Movement Research Spring Festival, Hand Written Note(s), curated by the ever so thoughtful Aretha Aoki, Elliott Jenetopulos, Eleanor Smith and Tara Aisha Willis. The curatorial statement began with “thoughts scribbled in the margins, notes passed on the sly, the indominant culture hidden just below the surface” and we each unfolded what these words promised to our dance circle. My writing attempts to encapsulate my participation in the festival week as I looked to dance as an undercurrent of culture, a structure that moves, a sacred circle where bodies find freedom.

I was invited to show work on the third evening of the festival. The expectation to accent the program with my marginality did not present itself. I simply participated with the opportunity to gain access to studio space and be seen. I wasn’t stung with the label of other within the spaces the curators fostered and I thank them for making that space available to artists. We were with each other and not against the other at the festival events. In this nurturing each otherness, we traced lineages to our originators, finding commonality within our differences.

The curators composed something that’s unique to my New York dance community experience. They curated me in a bill with the illuminating Jumatatu Poe, a person of color and I thought “Wow! I’m in a dance show with another person of color,” but without a blatant people of color agenda, without a racialized platform designed for us to be seen within. In a world where people like me typically hold indominant roles, it’s very special to be invited into a space where my body is more or less “normalized” or even seen. Where the audience is invited to see me the way I’ve always seen myself, where I’m not asked to perform my othered self; where just being who I am is enough.

Jumatatu and I shared a studio retreat and residency in Northampton, MA two weeks before our show; a space and time to think and make work. Coincidentally, Northampton/the Pioneer Valley is where I formed the beginnings of my dance life as an undergraduate at Hampshire College (ten years ago). Northampton continues to be the place where I enjoy the visit but can’t linger for much longer than a short stay. I kept Juma in mind wondering what this might be like for him, as this was his first visit. I assumed his experience was similar to mine, very “city mouse” and different from urban life in Philly with a sustained dance proximity to New York. I thought about what he might have felt as a man of color in a New England town today, yes even still today, and what that meant. Perhaps it was a place where people were nice but it’s hard to know if we were actually welcome. Where everyone talks about something but they never start the conversation about you. A place where the people who look like me dominate the undercommon labor; they work from behind counters and kitchen doors and they buss the tables, mop floors, they work hard while others hardly work. These indominant individuals are the people “hidden just below the surface” too. These activities are obvious in a place like Northampton if you pay attention (I always had to) and though it’s been a place that has nourished me and has seen me grow, I know where its faults lie.

Jumatatu and I stayed at Jen Polins’ beautiful house, she runs The School for Contemporary Dance and Thought (SCDT) on the main street of the town. We were each granted 14 hours of studio access and we were so hard at work that we didn’t get to hang out with each other very much. We respected each other’s space because that kind of time is rare (at least for me) to come by. We worked diligently in our spacious studio, a pillarless dance hall built by Masons and once a space for only Masons. I was reminded again that there is labor in everything; labor in our respite from our bustling hometowns.

For our shared evening, Jumatatu presented his brilliant work, its light beamed directly into my center. He and dancer William Robinson performed with a pink hashtag (# also known as a pound sign) on their chest, I thought: #blacktwitter. They perform for an audience that generally (except for a few) doesn’t racially reflect who Juma and William are. He assures us he’s used to that and he’s accommodating of it. I can say I’m used to that too, festival curator Tara Aisha Willis writes:

“Juma has already reminded me that I’m one of a couple black folks in the room besides the two of them, let alone people of color, as per usual. But I rest easy knowing there are 15-20 of Juma’s black friends projected on the back wall of the stage, reacting to the piece. They each sit in their own little box in the video, too far away in the long room for me to make out their expressions. But of course, I’m not one of the people in the room who needs to check in with them, Juma reminds us. They are there in case the white folks aren’t sure when or whether to laugh during the piece. Familiar as it is to me to be one of a few in the room (if not the only one), the reminder triangulates me with the performers and the projected images, and I adore the feeling: each year I’m less and less capable of sustaining the suspension of disbelief required of me for smooth participation in some of my more lovingly colorblind, primarily white communities. I feel my attention turn inward and outward at once.”

Juma treads the line of humor and tragedy as he proposes to the Movement Research dance community to think about what we are actually enacting with this experience in this evening of togethering.

I zoom out and the scope is wide, the festival continues and there are events I’m unable to attend but I read about them on the Hand Written Note(s) website. Maura Donohue writes about a day she spent with Ni’Ja Whitson and mayfield brooks. The artists facilitated workshops that I’m so sorry to have missed. I’m grounded just reading Maura’s musings, simply learning that people are holding space together in this way. I should mention that I didn’t meet Ni’Ja or mayfield (who also made this) until this festival and I thank the curators for their expansive and inclusive reach that keeps the Movement Research community wide and in flux.

On Thursday evening the artists were invited to a dinner at festival curator, Eleanor’s house, a delicious homemade spread of tacos and desserts. I found myself scanning the room and I was excited (and a bit embarrassed) to realize I didn’t know two thirds of the people in the room; a major first for me as a member of the Movement Research community for ten years. I’m thankful to the curators who have brought us into each other’s timeline where I can see we’re happy to meet each other. A generous space to relish inside of and pause: my family is growing, so many of these people are underlings like me, my counterparts the “indominant culture hidden just below the surface,” an awesome tender space to be revealed. I speak with mayfield at the dinner, who shares about research on Whitney Houston’s bisexual lifestyle and about how this research currently enters mayfield’s work, I’m fascinated. Some people went to the Beyonce concert that week and confessed their marvel of big concerts, another populous mode of coming together, another brown person taking up a lot of space and we giggle. I should mention that the bike ride out to Eleanor’s house made the evening extra beautiful. The sun hung low and the trees, lush with leaves, threw spears of light onto the pavement. Deep into Brooklyn, the row houses were low, exposing sky, Bachata played from bodegas and back yards, people washed their cars, families chilled on their stoop; an evening to gather.

As the festival arrived to it’s beautiful ending, I looked back into the writings to see what else had happened during the week. I was taken by in the shadows of the american dream, by Jaime Shearn Coan. His is one of many voices with sentiments about what happened in Orlando and a first response on behalf of the festival. Jaime wrote about the Latinx community in Orlando, a space where  people “had also gathered together to celebrate each other, to move together in a space of their making” on Saturday night. There is a common practice between humans to come together to celebrate each other and the Movement Research community took part in dancing together on that night. What a beautiful life to allow us to come together and take action in this way, what a beautiful place dance is that it brings us to each other. I zoom out and imagine all the rooms of people dancing on that night, all the rooms of bodies taking up space, carving out dance circles from within a crowd, something that I’ve always thought to be inclusive and exclusive. It’s something that invites the eye to locate spectacle, the dance circle is sacred. To move your body and to have a life to do so has become a privilege; I am grateful to own it.

As a lesbian Latina, I’m not always accounted for but I’m always counted upon; courage is my inheritance when the lives of brown people are mourned again. I attended the vigil at Stonewall on Monday night and I was reminded of how invisible my people were. Not just my LGBTQ community but most of all, my brown skinned Latina/o and Latinx and Black community. I was raised on the dance floor, I was taught it was a good thing and believe it still. I was taught to dance for any occasion because it’s reverent to life, a space to be free when we’re not. At the vigil, I wanted music from the club to take to the streets and unite us all in dance, I wanted someone to give a speech in Spanish, not just the mayor (but good job I guess). I wanted The Battle Hymn of the Republic to stop taking up space for once because I yearned for a heart-felt Cumbia to play instead. I wished for a deep bass beat to pound inside my chest so that it could for just a moment beat louder than my tired heart. At least a Cumbia track would be something closer to home, to whom we came together for.

The dance circle is sacred, keep it moving, keep it free, celebrate, come together in dance and let’s not forget the history and courage of Latinx like her each day. Les mando mi mas sentido pésame a las familias y a los sobrevivientes de la masacre. Que lastima que vidas bellas, jóvenes, llenas de amor al prójimo y a la unión sin barreras hayan perdido a la batalla contra el odio. Bailemos todos que estamos de duelo! El baile inspira amor, alegría, unión y paz. No mas. El pueblo unido jamás será vencido. Presente.

Critical Correspondence invites founder of WXPT (We are the Paper, We are the Trees), taisha paggett, to discuss their most recent project, The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People, a large scale installation and performance platform presented by Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) during late October – early December, 2015. As a prologue to WXPT’s two-part conversation, to be published in our March edition of CC, paggett offers a letter written to her collaborators and fellow participants just weeks before their extensive project filled with classes, workshops, talks, events, and performances. Included HERE is an audio radio feature on The School which specifically features the final performance, titled Meadow. These written and audio pieces provide anchors and counterpoints for WXPT’s broader concerns, projects, and discussions.

LISTEN HERE

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LACE presents The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People, a large-scale installation and performance platform by Los Angeles based artist taisha paggett. This project, which takes the form of a dance school, is shaped by the question, “what is a Black dance curriculum today?” The installation itself, developed in collaboration with artists Ashley Hunt and Kim Zumpfe, serves as a temporary dance school, performance space and home for dance company, WXPT (We are the Paper, We are the Trees).

The core of The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People is WXPT itself — a temporary, experimental community of queer people of color and allies, dancers and non-dancers alike. WXPT was conceived by paggett in early 2015 to expand upon the language and methods of modern and contemporary dance practices, to shift the ways dancers of color are positioned within the contemporary field, and to explore questions of queer desire, responsibility, migration and historical materials that inhabit our cultural imagination. The company consists of Joy Angela Anderson, Heyward Bracey, Rebecca Bruno, Alfonso Cervera, Erin Christovale, Loren Fenton, Maria Garcia, Kloii “Hummingbird” Hollis, Jas Michelle, Meena Murugesan, taisha paggett, Sebastian Peters-Lazaro, Kristianne Salcines, Ché Ture, Devika Wickremesinghe and Suné Woods.

In May of 2015, paggett organized evereachmore, WXPT’s premiere performance created for the Bowtie Project, a partnership between Clockshop and California State Parks to activate an 18-acre post-industrial lot along the LA River. Amidst the recent unfolding of state violence against Black bodies, evereachmore sought to forge new economies of resistance, and new sensations of time, space and togetherness.

Inspired in part by a “school for colored youth” that members of paggett’s family founded in early 20th century East Texas, The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People extends the praxis of WXPT into a curriculum and pedagogy. The installation at LACE takes up the form of a school as an artistic and social problem, building the school’s curriculum and infrastructure through physical and social sculpture, performance and image, where the roles of artist and viewer, dancing and non-dancing body, art and learning coalesce.

The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People will offer a program of workshops, weekly classes and micro-performances initiated by members of WXPT. The curriculum will be open to anyone, blurring lines between audience and participant, while especially encouraging queer people of color to join. Across the bodies of the company and the members of the public who join the school, the curriculum will build an accumulative performance score in weekly increments, culminating in the performance of a “collective movement choir” at the conclusion of the exhibition.

CC co-editor Biba Bell shares an interlude-esque essay that expresses her ongoing project that thinks through the potential of dance to promiscuously move about, mobilize societal limitations, resist capture, and generally infiltrate disciplinary and institutional habits, aka business as usual… crashing the party; escaping the house. Woven throughout her perpetual proposition – “Would you like to dance?” – is an ongoing investigation of dance’s relation to its own domesticity, casting a new light from this line of flight. 

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“Would you like to dance?”

Setting the scene: scrim, backdrop, legs, wings, travelers. That instant when performance becomes “live.” What does this moment require? I’ll argue it requires the conjuring of ghosts, beckoning them to reveal themselves from within the houses of memory… archive, museum, or mausoleum. Let’s have some fun here. Listen now to Rosemarie Padovano’s Paloma (2012), whose heels flick the concrete roof/ceiling of a Greenwood Cemetery dwelling, turning its sleeping chambers into a bellowing drum. Step, step, turn, pivot, clack, clack, clack. The ghosts are shifting; the home is awaking.

Rosemarie Padovano, “Paloma,” (2012)

Stepping onstage can feel like jumping off a cliff. It can feel like swimming head-on into a hive of bees. As the mind whirs, the voluminous theatrical house hums with invisible electricity, overtones, sonic floors, and a quiet giant that slumbers before the storm. The house, awaiting this inevitable performer, visually accentuates the silence produced by an empty stage. Suspending the actions potentially initiated by this question to dance, the historically immersive, designed to absorb, edifice stands straight and tall like the conductor of a petrified, yet orchestrated, silence.[1] Hovering in the wings or an anticipant, waiting amongst the attentive audience, we are reminded of the stillness that sits behind an action, a bevy of ghosts yet to be unleashed before the maelstrom of vibrating gazes. The price of admission to this dance is the agreement to occupy a particular space, to participate within a ritualized act of looking and place-ing bodies on display. To enter this space is to turn and face, en-face, the site (sight) of the stage… an interpellative turn (in the Althusserian sense, or better yet, Butler, as the call that is “formative, if not performative, precisely because it initiates the individual into the subjected status of the subject.”) And so, we enter, and turn towards the public or one’s partner or one’s past or one’s building desire.

“Would you like to dance?”

I turn.

Who me?

The question does something; it moves me. Cloaking a profound intimacy, it asks me to take off my hat and coat and stay awhile.

The question is asked by a disembodied voice but it conjures the image of an outstretched hand and glimmering eye. So, I rise (from repose) in order to meet my response. There is always a pause, a leap, and a moment before a recovery. That fall in or out of grace, in or out of love. The body speeds forth without revealing its direction as does the intoxicating spin of the roulette wheel. Then, suddenly, the room is filled with dancers and sweat and stank. How many hours have we been here? How many drinks have we had? The city adjusts in daylight and nightlife amongst the sounds of bodies mingling. A ritual (thank you, Richard Schechner) is also a “hardening” of practice.[2]

But does ritual necessitate, or even enable, a hardening of place? My question re-emerges alongside a strange dialogue between Jacques Derrida and Christie V. McDonald and the dancer is produced to illustrate a lucidly poetic role of resistance against the stability, surveillance, and designation of place. “The most innocent of dances would thwart the assignation à residence, escape those residences under surveillance; the dance changes place and above all changes places.”[3] The impossibility of situating this dancer à residence is another way of resisting its archive. And within this “house, a domicile, an address, the residence,” dance is thought through the mobile, elusive figure that thwarts, disrupts, escapes, and intervenes within its locale, that (again) “changes place and above all changes places.” Dance is, ultimately, a sign of life exemplar.

Whether the theater, studio, a residency sanctuary, the bedroom, restaurant, bar, or moonlit beach, this dancing figure has always already moved on to the next scene, to the future event, to the tenuous prospects of that next landing site. Where can I find the when of making work (i.e. the contemporary conditions of the choreographer)?

Perhaps we could think of choreography in relation to the voluminous vault of this ritualized space where, from the wings, one enters according to the vectors and curtains and distribution of strength and power of the stage where organizing bodies in space and time might occupy the (sight)lines of constructed geometries in conjunction with what Brian Massumi and Erin Manning call “enabling constraint(s).” From this vantage of the choreographic horizon of possibility we might think bodies dancing out the formations of soldier drills or sensual orgies, even the potted plants reaching up to fill the glorious glass walls of the greenhouse (thank you Randy Martin for this enduring, fecund image of innocently docile, “neat rows of potted dancers, fronds upward.”).[4] And, it is from this site that I have been more recently adept at imagining my dancerly dwell.

Enabling dancing… what are the chances a dancer will agree to stay in place? To change place and to, above all, change places. We move from stage to train, from photograph to film, the effect of the cinematic. Now cut, edit, transpose. Suspended in time, multiplied in space: a step, lunge, contraction, or extension moves us from the wilderness to the studio to the museum, a Study in Choreography for Camera. Imagine now Bruce Nauman’s Tony Sinking into the Floor, Face Up, and Face Down. A man lies on the floor, fifteen minutes pass. What happens? Moving in place, the ground shifts, shudders, vibrates from which the image springs.

Bruce Nauman, “Tony Sinking into the Floor, Face Up, and Face Down” (1973)

Listen up! From seated to standing to dancing, how frequent is this action performed? How many people are making the moves, getting their moves on, at this very moment? Whether filled with elation or excruciatingly awkward, the transition requires an energy of abandon—of throwing or diving or leaping—a quick and directed choreographic act of immersion. Like the visceral impact of falling without landing, a soaring jolt of (altered) consciousness. Indistinguishable from lust, this inaugural movement marks a time before the designation of intimacy’s peaks and valleys, deserts and caves. This is a novel, inexhaustible time before maps are made, traced by the repetition of gestures, the affective rhythms of audible exhalations, or the expectant tendency to follow a wayward glance. Responding to this call to dance, Boris Charmatz exclaims, you must, inexorably, “suddenly throw yourself into matter.” ^[5]

“Would you like to dance?”

Martha Graham sat in her dressing room, inserting Isamu Noguchi hair ornaments into her ravenous up-do and famously states that it takes ten years to make a dancer. (From sitting to standing to dancing, ten years a dancer does make.)

Martha Graham, “A Dancer’s World” (1957)

From sitting to standing to dancing, again I enter the studio… the passing of decades identifies the hardening of practice. I find space on the beach, a deck, a driveway, handball or basketball courts, Veterans Memorial and Grange Halls, a garage. There are positions (in addition to first, second, or third) that succeed at harboring a well of lived experience. A posture, stance, or basic orientation is means of indexing memory. Assume the stance to crystalize the archetype. The body becomes its own landing site. Maybe there’s a window, a heater, a water fountain. Maybe there’s a musician. Maybe there’s a friend or an idol or a stranger. Maybe the room is filled with bodies; maybe it is filled with thoughts and emotions. The repeated action differs daily as does one’s relationship to a technical regime, a social atmosphere, or stamina, energy and desire, all marked by entry into a ritualized space. Even a laptop screen, a Skype session, a run, a bath, a coffee shop can provide this ritualized space. The search for dance’s sequestered place turns dancers and choreographers into nomads who momentarily set up camp (to make or rehearse a dance) as we migrate between residencies, theaters, studios, cities, countries, and continents. Thwarting its assignation à residence, this dancing (at the same time) can be a mode of finding one’s way home.

“Would you like to dance?”

For Laura Kipnis, in her essay “Adultery,” this is the quintessential question that inevitably paves the way to infidelity. Kipnis focuses on the affair as a space for rediscovering intimacy and the desire to move, and at the same time it critiques/disavows the institution of marriage predicated on property and surplus economies of labor. To enter this dance would mean to step outside of the sanctified domain of marriage, re-charting journeys toward intimacy.[6] I have less interest in how such an invitation rehearses adulterous acts between individuals and their arrangements/agreements than in how it supports a promiscuous and newly charted sense of place. I am interested in how dancing provokes transformative openings, punctures a domesticating edifice (the theater? the house?), and radically redistributes its mise en scène. This mode of dancing is of the affair. It is to step outside of the house, to cross the lawn,  (during the midnight of a moonless night) and freely follow the dotted line that traces the middle of our quiet, dimly lit neighborhood street in Detroit. It is to consider the ways that bodies move through space and create they own desire paths on the daily. In conversation with Trisha Brown, Jane Crawford, Roselee Goldberg, Alanna Heiss, Lydia Yee, and the ghost of Gordon Matta-Clark, Laurie Anderson quips, “That’s the key – the floor. No stage.”[7]

desire paths, Detroit (2009) www.sweet-juniper.com

Rather than staying at home, a dancer’s task is to engage the continuous movement of finding their way, of developing a keenly acute set of what Sara Ahmed localizes as “homing device” practices. “We learn what home means, or how we occupy space at home and as home, when we leave home.”[8] The very building blocks of home as a sanctified place, or as a disciplinary regime, begin to tremble and shift. (Look close and witness the fall of the house of Usher, for Robert Smithson an architectural equivalent of the studio whose crumbling liberates art from the bondage of craft and the periling snares of creativity.) To enter this mode of dancerly dwelling is to enter a trans-geo-choreography that invites bodies outside of conjugal, material confines. An adulterous relation to place, this is a diasporic dancer exceeds what Jane M. Jacob’s calls “monogamous modes of dwelling,” where, following Heidegger, dwelling involves a type of belonging to buildings, a belonging to place. One… two… three… from sitting to standing to dancing, dance’s ritualized place changes places; it multiples and becomes radically open.

“Would you like to dance?”

This question is always already a proposal, inviting us to cross the threshold into a place of promiscuous dancing. Most recently my involvement as a guest choreographer for a Dance Lab hosted by Nick Cave and his exhibition Here Hear has been the means by which to consider how dance can occupy complex, interstitial space, both in the urbanscape but also within the museum’s ritualistic standards for handling – of the art object, the body, the public. Us, sweaty, shifting, breathing, rolling, bellowing dancers enter a site often reserved for the careful caress of the white gloved caretaker. Dancing, the stakes of soil and speed, of wear and tear, have a different meaning. You never know where the lightning will strike: activist, dancerly impulses erupt in crowds of social and political unrest or amongst neighborhood games on suburban lawns; they pop up in cloistered garden parties or down the aisles of Youtube sensation wedding processions; exploratory footsteps fall to the beat at gallery openings or shuffle along through museum blockbuster exhibitions; and, libidinous rhythms cancel out traffic noise in living room theaters or sway the night away on clubroom floors. To respond to the force of this time- and place-less call is to dance a joyful seduction.

Biba Bell, Nick Cave Dance Lab, Detroit (2015); photo Randal Jacobs

Creator and curator Sarah Maxfield uses poetic structure to explore gentleness in performance.

Abigail Block with son Milo, photo by Pauline Kim

An Alternative
by Sarah Maxfield

Gentleness takes great strength. It is not a weakness.

That is a platitude.

Platitudes are overused, but not untrue.

Oh.

I am learning. Now. I am learning to be gentle. Deeply gentle. Not just for a moment, or because of a situation, but always and always gentle. Even when it’s difficult. Especially when it’s difficult. I am now a mother.

Oh.

No. Don’t say, “Oh” as if it isn’t worth your attention. Why are you so much more interested in ferocity? I hear you. All the time. “FIERCE” you say. It’s a high compliment. The highest.

So.

What does it say about us when we emphasize ferocity over kindness? Why is our goal as performance makers to “blow people away?” What if the goal was love?

Sap.

That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Gentleness is not fragility. It is not simply too dumb to know any better. Gentleness is savvy, worldly. Gentleness is wiser than ferocity, but we rarely see wisdom on stage. We prefer youth and vigor.

Now you’re just being bitter.

Bitterness is a balancing flavor.

I thought you were selling sweet.

Gentleness is not the same as sweetness. Sweetness occurs. Gentleness is a choice – and an active one. It is not giving up. Regardless of what Dylan Thomas would have you believe.

Poetry isn’t gentle enough for you? You’re fighting a losing battle.

Not everything is a battle.

Yes it is.

No it isn’t.

Yes it is.

No it… Oh, I see what you’re doing. You caught me. Fierce.

You’re giving up?

No, I’m just giving. There is a difference. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.

***

Sarah Maxfield investigates contemporary performance and its history through practice, discussion, and critical theory. She creates live performance and, with equal focus, creates structures for viewing and discussing performance and its context. Maxfield’s work has been presented by The Chocolate Factory Theater, P.S. 122, and the Museum of Arts and Design, among other venues in NYC and beyond. Maxfield has contributed writing to The Brooklyn Rail, The Performance Club, and the Movement Research Performance Journal/Critical Correspondence, and she was a Context Notes Writer for Dance Theater Workshop’s final season. Maxfield currently serves on the New York Dance and Performance “Bessies” Awards committee, curates two ongoing series (THROW and One-Shot), and is a co-producer of the WestFest Dance Festival. She is also developing a festival to honor the work of performance artist Tom Murrin and an oral history of experimental dance and performance, which will be compiled into a book titled Nonlinear Lineage. www.sarahmaxfield.wordpress.com

Click here to see all articles by Sarah Maxfield.

]]> http://old.movementresearch.org/criticalcorrespondence/blog/?feed=rss2&p=7467 3 http://old.movementresearch.org/criticalcorrespondence/blog/?p=6897&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=lance-gries-the-fifty-project-part-3-mapping http://old.movementresearch.org/criticalcorrespondence/blog/?p=6897#comments Thu, 21 Mar 2013 19:15:15 +0000 http://www.movementresearch.org/criticalcorrespondence/blog/?p=6897 For his fiftieth birthday, Lance Gries invited fifty dance colleagues, from a twenty-five year career span, from all over the world, to meet him in a studio for a fifty minute dance encounter. The intimacy, immediacy and vulnerability of some of the most beloved dancers and choreographers from New York and Europe is captured in these edited studio sessions. These fifty video documents are presented in a multi-dimensional immersive installation, a visual moving family tree of the New York dance community in a mass choreography of images, personal stories and dancing bodies. Critical Correspondence has teamed up with Lance to host a series of essays and visual documentation of this expansive project.

A map of THE FIFTY PROJECT participants, linking dancers through systems of education (design by Tony Carlson)

Download the map as a PDF.

A map of THE FIFTY PROJECT participants, linking dancers through creative affiliations (design by Tony Carlson)

Download the map as a PDF.

The FIFTY Project video prototype.

Download a PDF of this writing

pictured: Lance Gries with K.J. Holmes, Jonathan Kinzel, Jimena Paz, Jodi Melnick

Is there any configuration in dance more suggestive than the duet? From its very structure, the duet suggests relationships. Then the casting opens up variations upon the theme of the choreography. (Yes a trio is complicated, but once you get past unison or canon and triangulate, it’s just a duet and a solo. A quartet in like manner is, after you get past unison or canon, four solos; or a solo and a trio; or two duets. With partners assigned, or deliciously slipping from one to another.) This project has an added complication: When you see two duets side by side–double duets–and Lance Gries is in both of them, is he two Lances, or the same Lance? Watching them, you will waver on this point….

Here are some small number of the many possible structures of duets, all of which define and describe relationships: mirroring; lifting, supporting/being lifted, supported; dancing the same thing in parallel; dancing different things in parallel; lead/follow; and so forth.

This doesn’t begin to take into account initiation; attack; pursuit and evasion; varying speeds; direction; and the significant matter of facings. Do they look into each other’s eyes? Does one person look up? Down? Away? Do both look away? And then of course the roles can be reversed. Or just change.

Let us take just one example. Parallelism. A couple dancing side by side facing the same way doing the same thing (however simple or complex) suggest oneness of mind. They might be twins. They might be lovers. They might be any number of things. But they are in some kind of essential agreement.

(Gender? Yes there is gender, and it introduces other possibilities, not so much romantic and amorous–those exist the same way whether you have two women, two men, or one of each. But with same sex couples you get other possible relationships== the sisters, the brothers; the father and son, the aunt and niece.  Still, is gender any more important than any other physical contrast or similarity? Slight, muscular. Tall, short. Well maybe a bit more important at that, depending on the doer, and the maker. But really what is important isn’t so much gender as that gender’s intention in a given person. As they say on Facebook, it’s complicated. And in the theater and theatrical performance, often disguised or transformed by acting. But this is improvisation, and people are being themselves, at least as much as they ever are when in a room with a camera and another dancer.)

Then there is the entire issue of interpenetration of form–that interplay of line and volume– and what that can signify, suggest. In a duet, negative space is not only a place–as is, for instance, the space formed by a plié–it is personal territory.

pictured: Lance Gries with Diane Madden, Jimena Paz, Jonathan Kinzel, Vicki Shick

Let us say all these things and more are settled, fixed, and a choreographer makes a duet. Then come the vagaries of casting: physical harmony or contrast; temperament.

Take all of these permutations and combinations and you begin to see the simple complexities of Lance Gries’s 50 for 50 project. He’s been engaged in a long form fusion of speed dating and slow dancing.

Here’s how it goes. Invite 50 people to improvise in duet form. You are always one partner. You may vary according to your mood, your sense of well being, and your level of comfort with your partner. But you are always you. (Or in this case, Lance is always Lance.) But the partners are all over the place, within the wide perimeter you set. Some are men, some are women, some are your age, some are older, some are younger. Some have danced with you before. (A lot of them have danced with each other before, or have danced in the same company at different times, never mind whatever else lies in their back stories.) Some are familiar with improvisation, somatic techniques, certain qualities of fall and recovery, release, suggestion. Others are not. Some are much more familiar with a certain aggressive exchange than you are; others are reticent to the point of self-effacement. Then there is their chemistry with you. Hot, warm, cool, maybe unexpectedly icy at moments?

Each one of these meetings is different. There is no knowledge passed on from one partner to the next; they don’t see each other. Each duet is self contained, a little universe, its own story. You are always you; but maybe you are not the same you. You might, it turns out, be 50 different yous.

What do these duets tell us, seen side by side? If you put two films side by side do you get a quartet? Let’s say you are a mirror. (You, Lance, are a mirror.) Each of these dancers approaches you, finds himself or herself in your reflection. What do they see? Feel? And what about you? How are you different? And how does that tell us, and what does that tell us, about your partners? Isn’t the way you change a portrait of what they are?

pictured: Lance Gries with Diane Madden, Juliette Mapp, Jimena Paz

We are going to have questions, Lance, and so are they. Which was your favorite? Who was the most difficult? Which was the most romantic? The hottest? The sweetest? The one you wish could have gone on forever? Who did you miss while dancing with X? Who did you remember while dancing with Y? Whose eyes made you look away? Whose eyes were kind? Who offered comfort? Challenge? Who made you feel brave? Who made you feel gallant? Who made you take risks? Who was as comfortable as an old soft shoe? Who surprised you the most? Which one did you hope would never end?

And now: When you step back and look at the film, does any of that matter? Does pleasure in the doing translate into pleasure in the seeing? Or is there some perversely inverse ration? If you can forget what it felt like, what do you see?

Now we will see these. Will we feel what you felt when we see these? Or what your partner felt? Or will we be negotiating the terrain that lies between you, that you enhance or obliterate through some alchemy?  Who are you two, when you are together?

The better we know you to begin with—and many of us will know many of you at the outset, then as you move out into the world with these films, less so–the more particular will be our pleasure. The less we know you, the more the movement will tell the story. Improvisation as formalism. No story, no music, no characters, and not even movement given. Just the structure created in the movement, just this once, captured on film without any value judgments. Just the cameras, no intervening human eye.

Until now. Here we are. Mirror, mirror. Mirror.

–Nancy Dalva

Nancy Dalva lives in New York City. Her website is www.nancydalva.com.

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pictured: Lance Gries with Diane Madden, Juliette Mapp, Jimena Paz, John Jasperse

As my collaborators and I organize sixty hours of video and archival material into a form for public consideration, I hope that writing this will remind me of and ground me in my initial motives for creating this format, re-balancing my current desire and preoccupation to create a cohesive meaningful, even impressive, art work with my earlier intentions.

This project arose from a basic desire to dance with people–intimately–to rekindle, rediscover or discover for the first time deep personal dancing connections with a group of artists who have been formative to my identity as a dancer.

This project was designed to be a loving birthday gift to myself, a bouquet of moving experiences shared with cherished friends, a reminder of where I want my art making to originate from, a form which first valued and took as content the energetic exchange between people dancing.

Since July 2012, I have so far danced with, celebrated with and videoed forty-five sessions with wonderful colleagues.

Meeting each of these dancers in our native language has been a precious experience, an affirmation of the pure joy and importance of sharing our selves as movers and of the deep wisdom and humanity in what we practice as dance artists.

Producing a video installation is inspiring in its own way: seeing these physical memories adhere to time and space in otherwise impossible and unimaginable combinations.  But it is also technologically demanding, exhausting.  As my eyes become portals to a pixilated reality, I yearn for my analog soul, my sweaty dancing body against another.

I don’t recall the exact moment I conceived of dancing with fifty people.  I do remember passing the idea by some friends and how immediately the proposition excited them.  I also remember the anxiety that arose when I tried to imagine a list of who to invite.

Who are those people who’ve been present and formative in my dancing life?  Would these friends and icons of my world accept this invitation?  And what about all of those people I could not include now?

pictured: Lance Gries with Vicki Shick, Diane Madden, Eva Karzag, Randy Warshaw

It was safe to begin at the beginning, inviting life long friends I have known and danced with since 1982 as students at SUNY Purchase, followed by a group of deeply influential colleagues and mentors with whom I grew up aesthetically in Trisha Brown’s life changing vision and company.

It was a relief when the first acceptance emails came in.  This part of the written archive, responses expressing enthusiasm to share a birthday dance remains very touching.  I was reminded of how much I desired to be asked to dance, how much we all do; and so with that in mind, I went on an inviting spree.  (To date, there are fifty-six accepted invitees and I don’t want to stop.)

The next wave included colleagues whom I had known and respected since my arrival to New York in 1985. To me they represented the pillars of New York’s downtown dance community; embodying a history that I was just beginning to embrace as my path.  Over the years, some became dancing partners; but for most, a warm acquaintance developed, but not necessarily a dancing history.

The vagabond dancers’ life of touring and teaching followed and in 1997 I began to meet another community through my involvement with Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s school, P.A.R.T.S. and her company, Rosas in Brussels.  Many teacher/student relationships from there have grown into rich dancing relationships and are among the invitees.

With the list nearing fifty, finally there were invitations to people I only admired from afar, but whose work, individuality and integrity excited me; and so with a healthy dose of “why not”, I just asked.  Amongst those I have danced with to date, it is by far the norm that this was our first dance together in many many years; for about twenty invitees, it was the first.

In an early flash of idealism to preserve the purity of these meetings, I considered not recording these dances.  My informal board agreed that this was insane, artistic suicide; finally, each session has been recorded by two stationary unmanned cameras.

And so, day after day through one of the hottest summers in New York history, I met people in the studio.

Besides a simple suggestion as a starting point, there were no specific instructions or expectations for what could happen over the fifty minutes.  The natural rhythm of coming together, of exploration, developing trust, discovering mutual paths of movement and thought, allowing intentionality to deepen and shape longer arcs of action, to then disperse and recollect, or fall apart – all variations of sharing time and space were welcomed.  The occasion, the time frame, two camera “eyes” and the unknown provided just the right amount of tension to the environment and each time I loved the dancing that transpired.

pictured: Lance Gries with K.J. Holmes, David Thomson, Stanford Makishi, Eleanor Bauer

Nine months later, I now have a collection of forty-five neat packages, of two compact tapes rubber banded together, labeled with the name of a newly embraced dance mate and lovingly filed in a special box.  With this growing archive, I possess material evidence, a “real” birthday gift and tangible proof of my interconnectedness, a lasting artifact and record for the history books. As I write this, I feel a bit “Gollumesque” about this treasure. The loving sentiments of these private dances fading as deadlines approach and a necessary ambition takes over to fuel the long work of editing, of making something substantial and conspicuous for a public.

I want to show how connected we are through our dance practice and how my circle is only a small part of this, located alongside and inside other people’s trajectories, other personal maps extending the boundaries of my own.

These dances have forever shaped the narrative of my now “post fifty” dancing life.

–Lance Gries

Lance Gries is an independent dancer, teacher and choreographer. Besides continuing to expand on “The FIFTY Project”, he is also working on a trio with Juliette Mapp and Jimena Paz for the NYLA Studio Series in May and Danspace Project Winter 2014.

As part of this year’s American Realness Festival, held from January 10 through 20 at the Abrons Art Center, performer Ann Liv Young made regular appearances outside the venue in her Sherry Truck, offering free Sherapy and pink lattes. Lizzie Feidelson paid a visit to Sherry on the last evening of the festival.

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Two weeks ago, I climbed into the Sherry Truck for some free therapy. Ann Liv Young, her husband, two children (a toddler and an infant) and their dog huddled in the back of the van alongside Sherry’s precarious display of vintage oddities, a folding table crowded with Simulac baby food formula and an espresso machine, and a small electric stove. I was the last client on the last day of a week-long “Sherapy” performance outside the Abrons Art Center as part of the American Realness festival. Young wore pink moccasins and jiggled her cranky baby on one hip, while her husband prepared me a frothy pink “Baby-ccino” to drink.

“What can I help you with?” Young asked. She looked like she needed more help than I did. Young’s young daughter also drank, and subsequently vomited, some “Baby-ccino” while her mother counseled me on my love life. Sherry’s advice: take a week to think about it; distance can always help.

Young is most succinctly described as a shock artist: she has defecated onstage, rubbed rotting fish on the front row, and flung used tampons into the crowd. Sherry is her latest, and on the surface her tamest, creation. In a roving piece of performance art, Young travels the country inside her tricked-out Sherry Truck, dispensing free one-on-one or group therapy and $3 lattes, wearing a platinum wig and larger-than-life smile.

Warming my hands by the electric stove, it was hard to remember that I saw Young perform as a very different Sherry during her last New York City performance at MoMA PS1. The “Sherapy” stint at Abrons, visited by a hundred or so people over the course of the week, was one part of a much larger work, one which involves a bizarre combination of sending up talk therapy and rigorously exploiting others’ pain.

Ann Liv Young as Sherry in her Sherry Truck at MoMA PS1, September 2012.

The September PS1 show began innocuously enough with several hours of open “Sherapy.” Guests could browse a selection of secondhand baubles and relics from Ann Liv Young’s past performances (including a shit-stained tulle dress from Cinderella (2010), boxed for purchase in a Plexiglas display case). Visitors could also receive therapy from Sherry for $1 per 3 minutes. She sat on a low stool, with another, painted Sherry looming behind her, reclining on the side of her truck.

Then the show started with Young’s signature too-loud mic. She began with a fake lowball: “Why are you here?” She asked us. Agreeable answers wafted forth. “Because I think it will be interesting!” “Because I want to see what you will do!”

“But why?”  From the back row, someone called: “I’m here because I think you look misshapen.” Sherry cocked her head and turned a glinting eye on the speaker, a young girl in a red dress who smirked and looked instantly regretful.

“My dress doesn’t fit?” Sherry howled, rushing up the terrace steps. She was nearly nine months pregnant then. “Is that your defense when someone calls out to you in a public setting—to criticize their body type? Is that your tactic? Why is that? What are you doing? What is your message? Are you trying to tell me you don’t care about what I’m doing?”

Sherry was behind me now, but the microphone noise surrounded us. I sat very still and didn’t turn. The girl in the red dress seemed to be trying to ignore her, or maybe she mumbled, “I’m observing,” because Sherry went on: “You’re observing? You’re observing but you’re also participating, do you see that? Is it insecurity? What is it?”

She went on and on. One by one, bodies settled into the attack. People turned around in their seats to watch. Some began shouting out.

“Maybe she has nothing else to say!”

“I think it has to do with comfort!”

The girl in the red dress, visibly upset, made a stumbling, shamefaced bid for the exit. People cheered. “You don’t think I’m being nice?” Sherry shouted. “Did you come here for a hippie fest?” The microphone speakers peaked and buzzed, trailing the girl as she disappeared through the museum doors.

“What did you want me to do?” Sherry shrugged. “I can only be me. Isn’t that nice?”

Ann Liv Young performing as Sherry at MoMA PS1, September 2012.

John Waters once said that “If you could think of something that would get an NC-17 rating with no sex or violence, you would have the most radical movie of the year.” Sherry might not deserve an NC-17 rating, but she’s not for the kids. She subjected us all to our own ability to turn on one another in an instant—the only vulgarity on display during that show was that of our perhaps inadvertent willingness to feed on each other’s human vulnerability, and it was more than enough.

I thanked Sherry for her therapy as soon as I deemed it polite. “We’re outfitting the truck with solar panels,” Young told me as I put my shoes back on. She’s planning on taking the truck around the country for a “trailer park show,” and when she does, she wants her truck to be an example of clean, healthy living to the trailer park residents she visits. Despite acts of senseless verbal cruelty, Young seems just as willing to surprise her viewers with kindness, or at least consideration. My visit to the Sherry truck didn’t make me think of Young’s work as smarter, or more idiotic, than I did before (and I really can never decide which I think it is). But I couldn’t help it; I respect Young, a lot. I wish her well on her trip.

Lizzie Feidelson is a Brooklyn-based writer, dancer, and former CC intern.

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Deborah Hay Solo Festival, pre-show. Photo by Megan Bridge.

IN THE STUDIO, OUTSIDE THE STUDIO

Gregory

As we hear echoes of controversy over Hay’s work Blues (2012) at MoMA, witness the disruptions and hardship caused by Hurricane Sandy falling along entrenched social divisions and prepare for the national election on the first day of our workshop, the political significance of our practices–often private, often on view for ‘insider’ audiences–is insistently present.

We talk about the dance studio as a ‘bubble’/’laboratory’ but we are also critical of the idea of a ‘safe space’ with an illusion of autonomy from social conditions, from pre-choreographed behaviors and frames of seeing. As Deborah continually reminds us, “I have to be here to choose to ask the question: ‘What if I dis-attach?'” and also “No one can get it. No one can do it.”

We re-purpose a quote from Judith Butler that comes up, considering “choreography (formerly morality) [as] neither a symptom of its social conditions nor a site of transcendence of them, rather [as] essential for the determination of agency and the possibility of hope.” Hay’s never-meant-to-be-achieved practice is not a surrender or utopia–the question is how does asking the question change the concrete experience of performing?

Nicole

The students continually ask how this perceptual work in the studio could have relevance in the “real world.” Deborah insists that she doesn’t do this practice at the grocery store, rather that dance is where she practices relationship.

What would happen if I allowed my senses and perception to be this open out in the world? I think I would go mad. I practice for an afternoon imagining that every person and object in my visual field is inviting being seen. It’s a Pee Wee’s playhouse, where glasses, books, cars, windows spring out of the landscape and scream “HI!” But there’s no on/off switch. For me it’s a modulation of the senses, the widening and narrowing of the aperture. Sometimes it’s a conscious shift, sometimes the body takes care of it for me. The body takes care of me.

Deborah Hay workshop at Mascher. Photo by Tori Lawrence.

CATASTROPHIC LOSS OF FORMER BEHAVIOR

Nicole

Deborah says: “How do I recognize my choreography? 1) impossible to realize, 2) embarrassing to “do”, or, idiotic to contemplate, 3) maddeningly simple.” She also says she can recognize her work when she sees a: “self regulated transcendence of [the] choreographed body.”

The risk of idiocy arises from the juggling required to perform her work. There are simultaneous, parallel universes of perceiving one’s “whole body the teacher” and a relationship to space, time, others. It’s an impossible multiplicity. But there is a delight in the attempt to juggle these tasks, a delight in the embarrassment that results.

This work is radical in that it embraces nonlinear thought and experience. So much of dance is reductionist; it is about xyz… Hay’s work does not dismiss aboutness, but rather, enlarges experience to include what is known and what is not known.

Gregory

For me, the most valuable aspect of studying with Deborah is her refined techniques for unsettling habitual frames, such as including ‘perception’ as a fully active verb in my movement vocabulary. In fact, my perception can be a field of action that is as far-ranging or even broader than the field of actions more commonly associated with movement. The inclusion of this choreography really is a catastrophe of behavior.

IT’S NOT WHAT YOU DO, BUT HOW YOU DO IT

Gregory

…Unsettled and settled… It takes a lot of work to loosen the grip a frame has on our seeing.

Nicole

When Deborah says it’s not about what we see, but how we see, I begin to think about Oliver Sacks and his writing on perception: Stereoscopic vision (depth perception) is created by the reconciliation of what the two eyes see from slightly different angles. Those without depth perception, due to blindness in one eye or one “lazy eye” can imagine depth implied through shadows, size of objects, obscurity and motion. It’s possible to exercise one’s stereoscopic vision and increase the depth perception though specific eye training. Occasionally people have regained stereoscopic vision after surgical correction of a lazy eye plus rehabilitation. This experience has been described to Sacks by his patients as a sudden “popping out” of objects from within a flat plane.

I find after a week of intensive daily practice, sensing near, mid-range and far in my visual field, that my sense of space deepens. Although my world is far from flat, I experience a sudden differentiation of objects that I imagine Sack’s patients to be experiencing. The facades of the buildings outside the UArts studio on Walnut Street begin to grow new contours and shape. It makes me wonder how much material is out in the world that I can’t see because I don’t have the sensory capacity or the neural pathways to perceive it.

The corner of Mascher and Cecil B. Moore in Philadelphia. The left side of the building is Mascher Space Cooperative and thefidget space is on the right. Photo by Sally Doughty.

SOLO PERFORMANCES

Gregory

I’m back to considering our repurposed Butler quote- (choreography) is neither a symptom of its social conditions nor a site of transcendence of them, but rather is essential for the determination of agency and the possibility of hope.

At its best, as in Bindler’s adaptation of I Think Not (2011), Hay’s choreography is not ‘about’ this, but provides a structured realm where the practice of performance plays it out.

However, there are also times when Hay’s choreography can instead ensnare, as in the adaptations we see of Boom Boom Boom (2000), where white women don kitschy Native American accessories, dance “real and imagined earth dances,” and read poems authored by whites about Indians. Although the performers adapting this solo attempt to maintain their performance practice, they are not able to effectively challenge their complicit role in the stereotypes and the harm these images and actions continue to perpetuate.

Nicole 

On Saturday night Karen Schaffman performs her adaptation of FIRE (1999) simultaneous to Eric Geiger’s adaptation of Art and Life (2010). I imagine that they have found the fourth dimension, time traveling, meeting each other in the same space from different eras. They both wear black undies and then jumpsuits. They see each other and even partner in brief moments of contact, but their dances are of different times and there is an electricity surrounding them, as if lightning has struck.

On Sunday Deborah Black performs her adaptation of The Runner (2007). It’s the final solo in a matinee performance. She raises the black-out curtains to reveal a panoramic view of the Philadelphia skyline at sunset. The orange light reflects off the white walls, her white dress, her golden shoes, belt and bracelets. Her dancing is pure and crystalline. I feel like I’m drinking a cold glass of mountain water. She is transparent. I can’t see her, only the dance.

Deborah Black performing “The Runner”. Photo by Todd Carroll.

LECTURE ON THE PERFORMANCE OF BEAUTY (2004)

Gregory

In this lecture that Hay performs on Wednesday, she asks the question “what if every cell in my body has the potential to perceive beauty and surrender beauty simultaneously?” When I ask myself if beauty has any existence apart from our perception of it, immediately this question extends itself through other social constructions that shape one’s choreography–experiences of race, gender. What if every cell in my body has the potential to embody my racial heritage and dis-attach from that identity simultaneously? What if my gender is performed by 380 trillion cells simultaneously, who also display no loyalty to that gender? The questions I choose to ask are as political as everything else.

Nicole

Deborah proposes the role of the dancer as a researcher of consciousness, but lists some differences between the computational neuroscientist and the dancer. One difference is the following: “As a dancer, your methodologies do not require exactitude because your experimentation is deliberately unquantifiable.” The unquantifiable nature of dance research is demonstrated with veracity by the simultaneous juxtaposition of two videos of her performance of Beauty (2002), one from Finland and one from England. The two performances are of the same choreography, but two different outcomes. Deborah often says: “Same experiment, different experience.” In a scientific experiment, the same outcome occurring multiple times would be considered notable, but in experimental dance the potential for a multiplicity of experiences arising from the same conditions is celebrated. This multiplicity more accurately mirrors what it actually feels like to be out in the world.

The unquantifiable nature of our work is what gives it meaning and consequence, but also prevents us from being valued in a society that regards definitive answers over questions. I leave the lecture feeling a deep saudade (simultaneous joy and sorrow) for the state of dance.

thefidget space, pre-audience. Photo by Sally Doughty.

Gregory Holt is a choreographer and dancer working in Philadelphia. With an interest in collaboration and process-driven work, he has developed experimental dances through the Research into the Unknown residency in Budapest, the Swarthmore Project residency, and at the Offenes Kulturhaus Center for Contemporary Art. He has danced for Ishmael Houston-Jones, An Kaler, Meg Foley, and Jumatatu Poe. He was a 2011 Live Arts Brewery Fellow through the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival.

Nicole Bindler is a body-based performing artist, inspired by her studies of new dance, dance-theater, contact improvisation, and butoh. She is also a bodyworker and uses somatic practices, such as Body-Mind Centering, yoga and Feldenkrais as a source of creativity, inspiration and physical training. She has been presented throughout the U.S., Canada, Argentina, Mexico, Berlin, Tokyo, Beirut and Quito, Ecuador. Her work has been supported by Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Philadelphia Cultural Alliance and Dance Advance. Her piece “I made this for you” created in collaboration with Gabrielle Revlock was a 2011 finalist for the A.W.A.R.D. Show! Recent activities include co-organizing FALLS BRIDGE: new movement, improvisation and performance festival with Curt Haworth and participating in Deborah Hay’s Solo Performance Commissioning Project in Findhorn Scotland.

Gregory Holt and Nicole Bindler at the fidget space. Photo by Megan Bridge.

Mascher Space Co-op is a home for new dance in Philadelphia. Artist imagined, artist founded, artist shared and run, Mascher provides space that is affordable and versatile. Mascher is a community of support that cultivates a flow of ideas and modes of deep problem solving and inquiry. Bound not by aesthetics, but a common commitment to working cooperatively and sharing administrative tasks and resources, Mascher wildly nurtures the development of its Artists-In-Residence at various stages in their careers, lines of research, and explorations.

<fidget> is a platform for the collaborative work of Megan Bridge (dance/choreography) and Peter Price (music/video). As artists, curators, researchers, and writers, Bridge and Price opened thefidget space in June 2009. A warehouse, research laboratory, and performance space in Kensington, Philadelphia, thefidget space fosters a pocket of rich artistic experimentation. Artists and scholars with big ideas are regularly invited to inhabit the space, participating in a lively and engaged community of interdisciplinary art making and discourse.

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2ND DANCE—SEEING LINES—6 February 1964

 

She seems to come by wing,

& keeping present being in front,

she reasons regularly.

 

Then—making her stomach let itself down

& giving a bit or doing something elastic

& making herself comfortable—

she lets complex impulses make something.

 

She disgusts everyone.

 

Later she fingers a door

& wheels awhile

while either transporting a star or letting go of a street.

 

—JACKSON MAC LOW

From The Pronouns: A Collection of Forty Dances for the Dancers (New York: Station Hill, 1979) pg 14. Reproduced with the kind permission of Anne Tardos.

Stepping into the space of St Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery for the first time on Thursday September 13th 2012 for the first of three nights of performance, I realized that I had completely misconceived the production of this piece in my mind’s eye. The usual boundaries between audience and performers were not be drawn as tightly, nor the progression of linear time to be adhered to as stringently as I had expected. When I entered, the performance had already started, with dancers dispersed, improvising, along the risers around the perimeter of the room and moving among the audience. It was intriguing to watch people’s reactions to this—ranging from delighted participation to outright denial—and to sense how this intervention formed part of the meaning of the whole.

This unsettling of habitual boundaries had actually begun for me even before arriving in New York. Clarinda Mac Low—the show’s director—had offered an “Audience with the Audience” prior to the opening in the form of one-to-one meetings in person or via Skype. 40 Dancers is a staging of the extraordinary book of forty dance-instruction poems entitled The Pronouns: A Collection of Forty Dancers for the Dancers that her father, the late Jackson Mac Low (1922-2004) wrote in 1964. During our conversation Mac Low unfolded her intentions for the piece to explore how her lifelong participation in dance had made her aware of how art creates “little societies.” In returning to dance after ten years of making performance art[1] she was treating her approach to her father’s work as part of a larger research project on the anthropology of the dance world. Directing 40 Dancers was intended to honor her father but also to produce an auto-/biography of the dance world that made her, reflecting on twenty-five years of experience in art’s making of forms, community and family. The piece was to be an experiment in the actions and networks of art—its own affect and bonds—and how it produces a different kind of intimacy beyond the standard connections, a result of what Mac Low calls a “being-with.”

Levi Gonzalez and Anna Azrieli. Photo credit Ian Douglas.

A glance at the program told me not to expect an orderly sequential unfolding of the forty poems of The Pronouns. In fact there were fifty-nine dances in all—distributed more or less evenly over the three nights—with multiple versions of eleven of the poems. The total number of dancers actually turned out to be thirty-eight, although Mac Low told me that this figure had fluctuated a lot in the run-up to the opening. The programming itself had been given over to a chance-driven algorithm not unlike the one used in the composition of the original book. Mac Low and the staff of the space took pains to let the audience know that they should be prepared to move around in order to properly see all parts of the performance —advice which not everyone chose to heed as the event unfolded. I realized quickly that I would not be able to sustain note-taking in this space and would need to entrust my body with storing my impressions. This turned out to be an apt decision for a work so concerned with the body’s intimate relationship with language.

The first dance, Making Things New, began with only the announcement of a spotlight towards the entrance of the main space, where David Thomson and George Emilio Sanchez faced each other, with Thomson sitting on a chair. The duet unfolded as a kind of facing-off between the performers in which turns were taken to be an audience for each other via the chair position. One of the most memorable images of this exchange was Thomson’s lewd snake-hips, parodied by Sanchez’s deliberately gauche reply, which drew laughter from the audience. In this way, both performers developed a kind of intimacy with each other and with Mac Low’s dance-poem, but without, at this point, any articulation of the actual language of the poem.

Knowing the text of The Pronouns was both an advantage and a disadvantage over the three nights. Given that the poems were composed algorithmically using a constrained body of material (fifty-six index cards on which were written one to five actions—amounting to 173 different actions), certain actions recur over and over again, modulated according to a different pronoun for each of the forty poems. Thus the ability to recall even a small number of these actions gave access to a large number of different realizations. Reflecting on the first dance and comparing my memory of it to the poem, I interpret Thomson’s hip-swagger as a possible response to the phrase “having waves,” but I may be incorrect. Sanchez’s reply might also have been a version of “pointing to a fact that seems to be an error,” but I am unsure. One choice available to me as an audience member at the time would have been to follow each performance with my copy of the text and put myself in a position to analyze each performer’s interpretation. I certainly wondered how audience members who did not know the text at all were responding to the performances, including those in which the poems were verbalized. The printed program included the texts of five of the dances which were performed more than once, but this may not have been obvious. As it was, I felt that attempting to read along with the performers would be a sure-fire way of not only missing a lot of the detail of their work, but also of getting very confused along the way. I felt fortunate to have read The Pronouns previously. I had also gotten to know one dance-poem very well by writing about it, and, as the piece developed over the three nights, more and more of the text’s language appeared to remind me further of the other poems.

In his accompanying notes to The Pronouns, Jackson Mac Low’s instructions to would-be performers are surprisingly simple and straightforward, especially when compared to the performance instructions for some of his poems, which can run to several hundred words. Mac Low simply asks that performances of the work should clearly convey “the integrity of each dance—its having a definite beginning, middle, & end.” He requires dancers to “find some definite interpretation of the meaning of every line” and to “carefully work out the time-relations between the various actions.” Although Mac Low insists that “no line or series of lines may be left uninterpreted & unrealized simply because it seems too complicated or obscure to realize as movement (&/or sound or speech),” he certainly does not specify how these interpretations should be undertaken, thus giving considerable freedom to the performer. The consequence of this approach—and Clarinda Mac Low’s decision to ask forty individual dancers to participate—was a huge range of interpretative styles, some of which came across to me as lucid expositions of the poems, while others seemed more elusive. Importantly, this did not give me a sense that some realizations could be considered “better” than others because of how clearly they interpreted each text, as they all obeyed Jackson Mac Low’s wish to convey the integrity of each dance-poem.

Back to Thursday night. As if to dramatize this range of interpretation, the next three solos constituted three different versions of the second dance Seeing Lines (see above), which turned out to be the most interpreted single dance-poem of the entire show, being danced no fewer than seven times by different performers over the course of the three nights. Carolyn Hall began by taking the phrase “she seems to come by wing” as a hilarious chicken-walk along the risers on which some audience members were still seated. After doing some remarkably precise hip rolls on her back (a possible version of “making her stomach let itself down”), she picked up her foot and licked the sole of it to enact “She disgusts everyone”! Paz Tanjuaquio joined Hall briefly before allowing her own solo to develop on the risers by throwing a barrage of angular shapes as her response to “wing” and offering the first verbal gesture of the evening in the single, clearly-enunciated word “Then,” which appears in the text. Next was Abigail Levine, now in a corner of the space where she held one of the balcony-supports while looking up towards the ceiling before moving backwards in a circle towards the audience. Repeating this route several times, on each circuit she offered the development of a kind of skewed argument about facial hair and wiffle balls—demonstrating the phrase “reasons regularly” —while her response to “She disgusts everyone” was to lick the floor at her feet: like Hall’s, a powerfully shocking gesture.

This quick sequence of successive interpretations of the same piece was instructive in showing both commonalities and divergences in the performers’ devising strategies. While one could perceive a strong link between Hall and Levine’s use of their tongue to convey disgust, I don’t recall a clear interpretation of this line by Tanjuaquio. Conversely, there was a clearer relationship between Hall’s and Tanjuaquio’s responses to “wing,” than to Levine’s version. The decision to factor in multiple versions, and indeed to stage them successively and in a subtly overlapping manner, revealed a confidence in the underlying poetics of the work. It demonstrated a trust that the text would deliver variety—though repetition reigned throughout—and showed a willingness to expose the artifice of the work by comparing different approaches. In conversation after the performance, Mac Low described her approach as “structured improvisation” and “loose choreography”—giving a sense of a production which also questioned the troubled boundary between choreography and improvisation.

The contribution to 40 Dancers of the renowned dancer/choreographer, artist and writer Simone Forti also could be said to dramatize the tension between planned and chance action. Rather than performing texts from The Pronouns—the 1979 edition of which makes her a dedicatee[2]—Forti performed using Nuclei for Simone Forti, a pack of 108 cards with words and actions on them that Jackson Mac Low wrote for her in 1961. As Mac Low explained in an interview filmed at his apartment in 1981[3], he developed the cards for Forti to use after seeing her Dance Constructions at Yoko Ono’s loft. Mac Low describes how Forti did three or four “wonderful” performances of the Nuclei at George Mancunias’ gallery, including interpreting the word “angry” and the action “giving the neck a knifing or coming to give a parallel meal, beautiful and shocking” by shoving a very large conference table at the audience which she then chomped the edge of while shouting “hungry, angry.” Mac Low claims that Forti had been working with autistic and schizophrenic children at the time and was using some actions based on them.

Simone Forti. Photo credit Ian Douglas.

In her improvisations Forti worked with words and phrases as much as movement. Each morning she wrote a text in response to the Nuclei in order to generate material for the evening’s performance. In the first night’s piece she asked, pausing to give each word its full weight: “What’s the point of all this art?” As the piece developed, Forti’s line of thought/movement included notions of delicacy: “something as delicate as a piece of bread you hold in your hand, you could squish it”—deftly miming the action. At one point she declared dramatically, “That’s the point! Give me some!” Forti resolved the piece by opening her black hardcover notebook which had lain all the while within the performance space and reading her precursor text in which some of the themes and phrases from the improvisation could be heard—a generous and process-showing gesture. Because there are some actions which appear in both the Nuclei material that Forti was using and the fifty-six card deck which Mac Low used to write The Pronouns, it is tempting to interpret some images in this scene as a possible response to “going about and coming across art” and “delicate things.”

On the second night Forti—who worked in the same circular spot each night, slightly further than halfway up the left-hand side of the body of the church—unfolded an improvisation that seemed more explicitly autobiographical in its images, which were presented as if they were recollections. These included a description of a photograph of a woman with her mouth held open like “a wedge of watermelon,” and also the image of garter snakes in the grass which “you could tame, they’d become your pet.” Forti enacted the movement of the snakes in a very subtle and effective manner—reminding me of the line “handing or seeming to hand snakes to people” in The Pronouns. On the third night, her performance recalled a story about the famous zoologist Konrad Lorenz introducing a dog-fish into a tank of “lazy fish” in order to stimulate them to more normal levels of active behavior—at one point she suggested the darting moves of the fish with beautifully precise hand gestures. Again, each night Forti resolved the piece by returning to her notebook and reading the seed text which had formed the basis of the improvisation. In some ways this gesture felt almost too revealing—like exposing the secret of a conjuring trick—but at the same time it allowed a powerful understanding to settle on one’s experience of the performance.

In his afterword to The Pronouns, Mac Low explains at length the complex process of devising the Nuclei, based on the same fifty-six cards that he eventually used to write The Pronouns, but also drawing on a further 1200 cards on which imperative sentences were written which he had composed for his play The Marrying Maiden, a play of changes in 1960. Forti describes her own practice of using language and movement, which she calls “Logomotion,” as an “improvisational dance narrative form in which movement and language spontaneously weave together to explore thoughts and feelings about the world.”[4] The work of another distinguished participant in 40 Dancers—Sally Silvers—also explores the edge between movement and language in her collaborations with the poet Bruce Andrews. Like Forti, Silvers reprised earlier work with Mac Low in recreating a version of the sixteenth dance Being Red Enough which she had performed as part of a celebration of Mac Low’s sixtieth birthday in 1982.[5]

In her performance for 40 Dancers on Thursday night, Silvers appeared on the altar with two pink balloons (the “delicate things” of the poem), one strapped around her waist and the other free but held under her left arm. Slotting herself into the central space at the very back of the church, she created a stunning arabesque that was highly evocative of the phrase “being in flight.” Next followed a series of movements to the left and right of the altar space—a kind of testing of the boundaries—in which Silvers stopped short of the wall, raised herself on her toes, put her arms out straight and allowed herself to fall forward so that her hands met the wall and stayed taut, while she remained on tip-toe—each time conducted with a look of comic anxiety towards the audience, which the balloons also contributed to! These actions felt that they also might illustrate “going about & coming across art”—as if the anxiety was about confronting a painting or even the very boundaries of the proscenium arch itself and wanting to touch it, though forbidden to do so. The actions might also have been a response to “doing something under the conditions of competition” as they seemed to pit the body of the dancer against the space in which she found herself. Silvers then hunched down to the right of the altar and rapidly unfolded a sequence of actions using the balloons, including “making a structure with a roof or under a roof” by holding the balloons above her head. Finally she stood up, turned to her right—parallel to the altar—and let herself fall forward onto one of the balloons, bursting it instantly with a noise like a rifle shot which echoed through the space. This extraordinary gesture was a brilliant response to the phrase “finally damaging something foolish” but perhaps also enacted some aspect of “shocks somebody,” because of its surprising volume!

In an interview I conducted with Silvers and Andrews the next day at Silvers’ apartment in the East Village, she spoke about returning to her performance notes for her 1982 performance as part of her preparation for 40 Dancers. In the earlier version she had used two large industrial spools instead of balloons. Silvers explained her approach to Mac Low’s text as finding the main verb in each line of the dance-poem and developing her movement sequence from there—trying to give a suggestion of the verb’s context, but mainly focusing on the action. Silver’s use of the pink balloons typified Mac Low and the other performers’ playful approach in 40 Dancers. While we were constantly reminded not to take anything too seriously, the humor of the piece had the powerful effect of making it feel less separate from other areas of experience.

Immediately after Silvers’ performance, the sixteenth dance Being Red Enough received a second treatment in the form of a duet by Levi Gonzalez and David Thomson. The visual drama that they presented with Thomson’s lean figure dressed in simple black and white elegance contrasting with Gonzalez’s sturdy frame bedecked with colorful casuals, belied an underlying chemistry between them that made their duet utterly compelling. Gonzalez began what was effectively a solo on the floor which got more and more intense and involved as he got to his feet—swinging and arresting his momentum in powerfully interrupted arcs. Thomson—whose movement remained fairly neutral—simultaneously performed a narration about a child asking how people landed on the moon. As this developed, Gonzalez began to introduce objects into the space. Bringing in a flask, Thomson quipped “it was bigger than that!” and kept up his gently chiding comments as Gonzalez wrapped the flask in a plastic cushion cover and then laid out a long line of toilet paper on the other side of the space. Thomson’s discourse then diverted itself onto the subject of molecules. He touched the exposed skin of a nearby member of the audience with his finger and announced: “When I touch you, I’m taking something of you with me, and leaving something behind. Are you concerned about that? And what I’m going to do with those molecules?” to hilarious effect. At this point the performers switched roles and Thomson went into a silent solo on the floor, making intense sensuous eye contact with members of the audience—myself included! Meanwhile, Gonzalez began his own narration on the development of the fetus in the womb, including a fascinating piece of information about how developing cells differentiate themselves from one another, so that cells destined to become heart cells separate from cells destined to become part of the brain.

To the casual observer it would have been very hard to spot any common thread between these two versions of the same dance poem—a testimony both to the inventiveness of the performers and the suggestiveness of Mac Low’s uncanny writing which seems both concrete and abstract at the same time. The permissive looseness of the interpretive relationship certainly worked at eroding the edges between performance and everyday life, providing the occasion for all sorts of diverse actions and behavior—literally from the sublime to the ridiculous—the dance-poems functioning like a kind of strange attractor, drawing the full gamut of human expression into its midst.

In many ways family and kinship also function like a net, gathering disparate souls into relation, and this notion was given material form by the elegant “Kinship network sculpture” made by Peter Stankiewicz—a kind of giant cat’s cradle of interlinked string and wiffle balls hung across the space between the balconies and becoming part of the work’s set design. Mac Low’s tribute to her father also involved her brother Mordecai-Mark and niece Susan Mac Low (Mordecai-Mark can be seen in Peter Moore’s photographs of a 1965 production of The Pronouns) alongside mother and son duos Anna Azrieli with Ezra Holzman and Leyna Papach with Masumi Kouakou. On Thursday night, a tender and playful duet between a mother and child developed for the twenty-ninth dance Having an Instrument, portrayed by luciana achugar and three and half year-old Ignacio Achugar-Granoff, and another family performance of the thirty-eighth dance Keeping Sheep or Seeing an Offer came via Skype from Melbourne with Kim Sargent-Wishart and Llewelyn, Jarrah and Rico Wishart. For this last, the image was projected onto the altar space of the church while the children in the cast interacted with it, appearing to grasp dangling fragments of cut-up gummy worms being offered to the audience by the Melbourne family!

Clarinda Mac Low and Masumi Kouakou. Photo credit Ian Douglas.

The seventh dance, Being Earth, was also performed by a family team of poet E.J. McAdams and his daughters, five-year-old Jane and eleven-year-old Lyla. In this version, E.J. read the complete text of the piece while Jane and Lyla danced. Jane, wearing a beautiful wide-skirted crimson dress, bounced on a miniature trampoline—representing the earth—while Lyla ran around her sister. There were some touching, funny interactions between the two, especially around the line “doing something under the conditions of competition” in which they squared up to each other with relish, and the phrase “it hammers” which brought forth apt and gleeful actions. Jane brought the piece to a conclusion by sitting on the edge of the trampoline and reaching out toward her feet with the full length of her arms—evoking the last word of the text—“mouthing.”

There were many other memorable images and moments throughout this piece, not least my own opportunity to participate alongside other audience members in reading out part of the fourteenth dance Doing Something Under the Conditions of Competition. (I then worried about my performance!) The overriding impression of the whole was of a kind of liberating anarchy held within the firm but gentle arms of community. Indeed, it was this kind of contradictory tension that animated the piece—its dissolving of the boundaries between audience and performer, body and language, linear time and cyclical time, planned and spontaneous action, performance and everyday life. For Mac Low, the work was an “esthetic by-product of a social situation, where the provisional community formed by a shared project is as important as the performance itself.” In accordance with this view, Mac Low startled me by suggesting that the other work I had been doing on my visit to New York—interviewing Silvers and her collaborator, the poet Bruce Andrews and taking a workshop with Forti—was also a part of the larger overall piece conceived of in this way.

The real pleasure for me of 40 Dancers lay in its capacity to explore relationships of power in a playful yet penetrating manner. Its humor lay in transgressive releases of tension, but this was far from simple catharsis. Instead the piece involved one in a deep engagement with one’s social intelligence: activating an ethics of attention. I often felt as if I was witnessing, and participating in, a ritual from another world—one uncannily similar to our own, but with its social rules radically altered. If this suggests a utopian aspect to the piece, it was tempered by a much more pragmatic approach to politics, grounded in a sense of the deep potential held in the everyday as we move about our lives, tending to our art, work, families and community. If the community that Mac Low and her dancers convened was only a provisional one, it has created effects which will endure for a long time to come.

Scott Thurston is a poet and mover based in the North West of England where he runs a Masters in Creative Writing at the University of Salford and practices Five Rhythms and Contact Improvisation. His books include: Reverses Heart’s Reassembly (Veer Books, 2011), Of Being Circular (The Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2010), Internal Rhyme (Shearsman, 2010), Momentum (Shearsman, 2008), and Hold (Shearsman, 2006). He writes critically on contemporary poetry, co-edits the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry and co-organizes The Other Room poetry reading series.