TRISHA

Last Love Letter

Dear Trisha,

Remember that time you danced for me and only me, with Carolyn Lucas playing Bob's score on a cassette recorder? It was 1994, and you were about to premiere "If you couldn't see me," so I went to the studio to talk to you about it. (I think I must have been writing about it for "Goings on About Town.") And you took me into a nearby room, and faced away from me, towards a brick wall, and danced all of "If you couldn't see me," just for me. It was the most curious moment. This was before dancers started staring you down as you sat in the front rows at Danspace, before dance started occupying museums where dancers are two feet away from you. But there you were, and there I was ten feet away, all alone, watching you. You couldn't see me, but I could see you. I became, sitting there in the light, almost unbearably conscious of myself watching you. It wasn't the theater, in a cloak of darkness, in the solitary communality of watchers.  It was just daytime, and just me. And you were so beautiful, dancing just for me the same way you would dance for a full house. I've never gotten over it. I don't want to get over it. So much later, years and years, when we would meet and you knew you knew me but now not perhaps quite why, but yes, you would light up and say, "There she is." Yes there I was. And here I am.

Just outside this page, there is the faint music of a band, and you are glimmering, glimmery, shimmering, shimmery.... 

I love you (foret forêt) forever,

Nancy

from Dance Ink: Photographs (1997)

After some thirty-five years of performance and dance making, Trisha Brown retains both her potent allure and her singular astringency. Sorceress, enchantress, the cool mind in the hot body; over and over, she sees us for what we are, sitting in our seats in the dark, watching: voyeurs, the invisible fourth wall of the stage our window. Sometimes, she steps though to talk to us, to look right back.

Mostly, she pretends she doesn't know we're there.

Trisha Brown, "If you couldn't see me" (1994)  photo: Kaus Rabien courtesy Trisha Brown Dance Company

In the theater, we are her tourists. We find ourselves in a place thoroughly modern, yet reeking of the ancient--of Crete, of Minoan palaces, of lost subterranean continents. If Circe were a choreographer, these would be her dances: Set and Reset, Opal Loop, Glacial Decoy, Foray Forêt.  Although she is long out of the loft and into the spotlight, Brown's basic concerns are consistnet. Over the years, her compositions have grown more formal, her vocabulary more subtle, her expression more veiled, and her taste in music more classical. For Trisha, whose choreographic stance is rooted in rebellion, something old is something new. Her collaborators--major artists all--have varied, albeit with Robert Rauschenberg the abiding Brownian other. He has cloaked her in roses, built her astral convertibles, composed music for her to dance to, and taken bows on her stages.

Nonetheless, while the choreography evolves in cycles, each amrked by a shift in tone and each reflective of the choreographer's intellectual passions of the moment, its abstract elements differ only by degree. Always, the dances seem to be asking questions. What must goes up come down? What happens to momentum when an object changes direction? Can a wall be a floor? A leg an arm? Cal the laws of physics be made physical? Can dance dissolve? The choreographer answers herself in a style that makes of solipsism a virtue. For however different they may be from each other, her dancers are all Trisha, replicating not only her movement, but her very way of moving.

Hers is a method combining sensuality and denial--lush and languorous, but springing from the Puritan I-WILL-ERADICATE-TECHNIQUE aesthetic that characterized Judson Church, the experimental outpost of postmodernism's heyday. Denial undeniably looks best on performers who have something to deny. In this arena of negation, where the characteristic gesture is erasure, Trisha is nonpareil. This, then, is the drama--the conflict--implicit in her style. It is not loose, but loosened. When the dances and the dancers convey this illusion of letting go, as Trisha herself does whenever she so much as walks across a room, the audience is seduced. Thus mesmerized, we may never notice the other tension inherent in the choreography, the conflict between the rules of the dances and their ineluctable unfolding.

Limpid. Deceptively easy. Impossible to remember. Impossible to forget. Only Trisha. And only Trisha's moves.

Email to Deborah Hay, March 19, 2017

Dearest Deborah,
I found out at the theater tonight that Trisha died last night.I didn't want you to find out hearing it on the radio or seeing it in the news.The first time I saw her was  dancing with you in Austin--in that white box room near the TruValue Hardware Store on Guadalupe.  You both wore white t-shirts with long sleeves, and white pants, and you danced around--the most delicious noodling I have ever seen--for about forty minutes, in silence, in the heat. It was divine.
Love, Nancy

as published in

With continuous thanks to Patsy Tarr, publisher, Dance Ink: Photographs

©1997 Dance Ink, Inc.

©2017 Nancy Dalva

AN INTERVIEW WITH STEPHEN PETRONIO

first published in

 

STEPHEN PETRONIO with Nancy Dalva

Stephen Petronio
Confessions of a Motion Addict
(Createspace, 2014)

Stephen Petronio—iconoclastic and iconic, subversive, game changing, elegant, with just a gleam of something slightly depraved glinting off his spiky ear studs—is celebrating 30 years as a choreographer with a debut as an author. Here, he discusses it all with his new reader but longtime watcher, the Rail’s Nancy Dalva.

Petronio/Grenek.

Nancy Dalva (Rail): What do we learn about you in this book that we don’t learn from your dances?
Stephen Petronio: I wrote Confessions of a Motion Addict as text about my life and the forces that move me into action, both in the world and on the stage. While there is succinct discussion of my creative motor, dance works, and the collaborators I’ve worked with over the years, I wanted very much to verbally construct the back-story of my life.
It was important for me to create and perform with words: to paint my childhood and ascent into the New York dance/art worlds and the touring life that has been so key to who I am. So much of my dance is about the sound and force of motion, and Confessions is about the sound force rhythm of language.
I write quite a bit about the pleasures of the body (i.e. sex), that magic that is so outside of the dance realm. I suppose I thought it was important to track the stories in my body, repurposed for sensual, aesthetic, and spiritual interest. I also write frankly about substance (booze and drugs) use and abuse in Confessions. I thought it was important to parallel my interest in the extremity of these experiences and how they may or may not relate to my art making.
And you get a healthy taste of the crazy Italian family that I came from and how it impacted my social and professional needs.
Rail: I feel as if you have taken the same material and channeled it into two forms of performance art: one is choreography, the other is autobiography. Which one is more veiled? I am thinking here about the “truth.” Autobiography, in general, is seemingly so truthy, yet is a form rife with displacement, projection, selection, delusion, revision, and every other complexity arising from self-reportage.
Petronio: If you have the eyes to do so, you can see straight into my soul when you watch a dance of mine. They are always constructions wrought from mind, body, and taste—my taste, fueled by my desire.

STEPHEN PETRONIO

In advance of his New York season, some wonderful rehearsal video of Stephen Petronio's new work, and an interview with him in The Brooklyn Rail:

first published in

  

 

Like Lazarus Did | Joyce Theater | April 30 – May 5, 2013

Nancy Dalva (Rail): Your newest work, Like Lazarus Did, premieres this month at the Joyce Theater. Why not As Lazarus Did? Are you “liking” resurrection?

Petronio: You’re such an editor! The title is from one of the songs—from a publication of American slave spirituals that sparked the original idea for Like Lazarus Did. The language is lost to that era, but the songs giving off a faith and sense of elevation so far from the wretched plight of those singing these songs. Son Lux, a composer I’ve worked with on British and European projects till now, brought me this book of songs previously only passed down through oral tradition. Totally inspiring! Of course he’s using them as a springboard for new creation.

Stephen Petronio. Photo: Sarah Silver.

Rail: You are premiering a dance about resurrection during Easter season. Is there a credo in it? Some personal statement of faith, or rejection thereof? Did you go to church as a child? Did the pageantry appeal to you?

Petronio: I’m a fallen Catholic: attended parochial schools, wanted to be a missionary as a child. Wanted to be chosen. I suppose that resonates and the theatrical aspect is supreme. I mean, it’s hard to beat mystical transformation and redemption in gold trimmed vestments.

Last year my father passed, and I was sitting in the church that I attended in my hometown youth, and there was a priest speaking so eloquently about my father’s final resurrection. It really hit me hard—the power and comfort of that promise. And it’s power as a commodity. Who would want the ultimate prize—immortality—yet it’s a product that’s never seen or proven. Very impressive feat.

Resurrection and immortality: the final triumph over death is deeply bedded across many cultures. The need to continue is irrepressible. One of the only certainties in life is its end, and we can’t quite resolve that. The Judeo-Christian lore of Christ raising Lazarus from the dead, an act necessary to prove his divinity: the penultimate miracle that tripped his conviction of heresy, angering the high rabbis of Jerusalem and setting into motion the ultimate sacrifice of his life.

From the the sacrificial virgin whose death is necessary to promulgate the growth of crops in the pagan-themed Sacre du Printemps, to the phoenix rising from her dust to reemerge immortal and omnipotent, to eastern religion’s cycle of reincarnation: the continual need to renew, to look back at forms again, to bring them forward to see what remains of the original, or to see how something transforms.

Rail: Tell me how you made the dance. What was the participation of the dancers?

Petronio: My first instinct was to resurrect previous Petronio dancers, bringing forward signature roles in the bodies of new dancers and allowing them to transform in the process. I’m always fascinated to feel the essence of my early stars in the roles we created together after so many years still unmistakably there, but transformed by the current body and mind reinterpreting. But unlike a reconstruction—I sought out transformation in the new body and allowed myself free reign as the current artist I am to spring off from these sources.

Then I began to call back other iconic figures I love—small flashes of Michael Jackson, Merce [Cunningham] and Trisha [Brown], mythological figures, the snake and the phoenix—to see what emerged. And of course, so much of the early me, the initial sequencing and spinal whip that I was born with, to go back to see what it is now. I also looked to some formal devices like retrograde and accumulation, to revisit and retrace movement over and over to see how it changes and how it’s the same.

Rail: I saw a piece of yours in that strange Ukrainian dance hall on Second Avenue. You started out “dead” but then you seemed to raise others from the dead.

Petronio: Or from sleeping. If you take being awakened from sleep as a kind of resurrection—well then, you have Sleeping Beauty, just to begin. Not to mention the phoenix.

Like Lazarus Did is ongoing and evolving. Each new resurrection has a different set of concerns. At the ballroom, I was very interested in who was empowering whom: I as the author bringing the dancers to life or the dancers as my resurrected instruments breathing life back into me and my ideas.

Rail: How do you feel when you get up in the morning, Stephen? A whole new world? Or same old same old?

Petronio: I am extremely hopeful in the morning and have a very short memory. So my perceptions don’t feel same-y. Mornings are a renewal for me. I wake up fast and running.

Rail: Are you in this dance? And if so, who are you? Is there a role or are you playing your own role?

Petronio: I am the author; the snake; the fire starter.

Rail: Who’s doing the costumes? Décor?

Petronio: The costumes are by H. Petal, a British designer I’ve been working with on and off since 1990. The décor, including the element of the dramatic: the incredible artist Janine Antoni, who works in many mediums but will be making a “living set” where she’ll be suspended in a sculpture above the audience for the duration.

Rail: Your work has for a long time participated in the fashion world, and the company is always attired in something you don’t see anywhere else, as much runway and designer playground as theater. Why why why? (You detect a note of despair here, but that’s only me, because I love the work as is in the studio. Just the dancers and the movement.)

Petronio: What we wear is a key into who we are alone and in the world. Yes, stripped naked is delicious, but the discovery of the perfect thing to wear in motion is as exhilarating to me. The dance world’s chronic suspicion of the surface of things can be a denial of an important element of the whole.

Rail: When I look back at certain works—not only yours—I find the choreography is as fresh as today if not tomorrow, but the mise-en-scène dates it. Yes, no?

Petronio: I love it when the mise locates a thing in time and space. That’s part of the journal of the time we are capturing in my works.

Rail: You seem to be working again with a chorus. What’s with this? Where’s the appeal? It’s as if you are working on a Wagnerian scale. Every possible element. And yet, stripped down, your movement itself is formalist, unencumbered.

Petronio: I’m social and want as many different artists reaching for something together as I can manage. The Young People’s Chorus transforms the experience of the work for an audience, and we are now a part of each others lives. This is our third work together at the Joyce, and I will work with them as many times as I can in the future. We are building a language and history together.

I come from a history of multidisciplinary stages and must take that as far as I’m able. It’s a much lonelier world without my partners. I spend so much time alone with my dancers and I love that, but I am a social animal, and dance is a connection both with internal power, history and tradition, the social sphere, and then forward into the unknown.

Rail: Do the Like Lazarus Did collaborators all know what the others are doing? Is the dance finished first? Are you working to the music?

Petronio: The music—working with it and in the theater, including the singers, all of that. All the collaborators and I are working from a directive I’ve built, an arc from dirge to invocation to exploration of literal and abstract rumination of states of elevation. The work finalizes in a kind of birth. We are all building along this arc simultaneously and together.

I say invocation and Ryan [Lott] builds an alleluia. I say rebirth, Ryan delivers a lullaby. Janine studies this and internalizes this into a mental focus and sculptural form. Every day someone sends off some new discovery that in turn sparks off something else. It’s heaven.

Rail: Any advice for your audiences? Your reviewers? Things your dancers wish you would tell them?

Petronio:  1. Every second/moment is an opportunity for a kind of letting go and renewal.  2. Let’s not get too literal.

Rail: What question that people ask you annoys you the most?

Petronio: “Oh, do you mean like on So You Think You Can Dance?” 

©Nancy Dalva 2013

VICKY SHICK

first published in

 

EVERYTHING YOU SEE
VICKY SHICK with Nancy Dalva

DANSPACE PROJECT | APRIL 18 - 20, 2013

The next installment of choreographer Vicky Shick’s ongoing collaboration with artist Barbara Kirkpatrick, sound designer Elise Kermani, and lighting designer Carol Mullins unfolds this month at Danspace Project. A dancer’s dancer, a teacher’s teacher, this lovely and beloved woman is so unfailingly modest it comes as an astonishing contradiction—even in the theatrical universe of introverted extroverts­—that she goes out on a stage and holds the room in suspended animation, captive to her reticent elegance, her giraffe ways, her silvery, organza movement. Hers is work that is the opposite of epic: economical, allusive, elliptical; given to fleeting apprehensions, elusive epiphanies. And so, we tried to pin her down.

Nancy Dalva (Rail): If we think of your work as a series of short stories—as I do—where is this new one in relation to your recent work at the Kitchen? And La MaMa?

Vicky Shick: The nature of this dance is much more chaotic and that is unsettling. Not the individual little parts but the flow, the transitions, the connections—the whole. Usually the unfolding of an idiosyncratic logic grounds me; it’s harder to find now, the reason being that I’m constructing a dance with two fronts and audiences sitting on two sides. So in a way, there are two dances being performed simultaneously, while these two dances are also one big dance.

Rail: I know you say you don't work in narrative, but there is always to me the sense of a subliminal or suggested narrative.

Shick: Yes, I think my tendency is to have that hint of narrative, as I did in those two pieces you mentioned. This time, I’ve had to let that go and try for something more abstract because of the two fronts and the dancers switching sides. It’s unwieldy and messy, which I don’t necessarily mind, but the lust for that “hint” is, perhaps, inexplicably creeping in and interfering with needing to let it go.

Rail: Who is in it?

Shick: The dancers are Jodi Bender, Donna Costello, Olsi Gjeci, Lily Gold, Jon Kinzel, Marilyn Maywald, Heather Olson, Wendy Perron, Laurel Tentindo, and me. Some of them I met in classes I’ve taught, some I’ve danced with before, and some I’ve had very long histories with.

Rail:  How are you making the piece, working with these dancers? Can you get them in the room all at once when you need to?
Shick: It is almost impossible to get them in one room at one time—and I haven’t yet. In fact, one person lives in California. Even the scheduling is daunting.

I love working one on one or with a duet. I’m very interested in individual phrasing and highlighting imperceptible details. I have a notion that I don’t want it to look like coined dance movement, and yet I am drawn to it being very physically articulate and specific. I’m excited by individuality, “realness,” and intimacy, and want to somehow find a way to accent that. It’s definitely easier to locate that in a solo or duet. I would love my dance to look like film or real life.

Rail:  Where does a dance start for you? A movement, a notion, an image...

Shick: I most often start in a studio by myself, trying to find a movement vocabulary. I never start with an idea. Sometimes I do have an image that I know I’d like to include, but I always know it’s just a little spot, a little decoration, not the nugget that defines the whole. Again, I love working with individuals and with duos; it’s how I feel I can begin to define a world, a progression and an intimate relationship. I actually have infinite patience for these situations and find great value in the tiniest changes we might make. 

Rail: I see a lot of dances that call up universal emotions, some quite powerfully. But only yours seem to show me how I feel, I mean particularly, acutely, me. I don’t know what is going on, but I know the feeling behind whatever is going on. You’ve made me think that it is possible to “read between the moves” of choreography the way one “reads between the lines” of something written.

Shick: I hesitate to try for emotion because I know that’s not how to achieve it. However, I would love for people to feel something. Earlier this year, I fantasized making a dance and calling it “Sadness,” but I realized I didn’t have the courage to do it, to take on something so huge, and, in some deep way, knew that it wouldn’t be for me—someone nurtured in the age of abstract minimalism. I wish I could create a tragedy, like in some slow devastating Eastern European film, but I have to settle for some vague nuances that might point toward it.

Rail: You danced with Trisha Brown for six years. You have made your own work for decades. You are a cherished teacher here in New York, and in festivals, in workshops, at universities, and in your own hometown, Budapest. You perform in other people's work as a dancer—with choreographers including Yoshiko Chuma, Deborah Hay, Iréne Hultman, Risa Jaroslow, Daniel Lepkoff, Barbara Mahler, Juliette Mapp, Wendy Perron, Stephen Petronio, Susan Rethorst, Sally Silver, and Sara Rudner. You are so gentle about it all, but yet your own eye is so keen, so discerning. It seems to have inherent difficulties on so many levels, pragmatic, practical… And yet. Vicky, are you happy in your work? Is there some underpinning of pleasure that informs us, as we watch you? Or of sorrow? As a dancer, you are somehow affectionate with us, your public, and yielding to your dancing partners. What are you feeling in there?

Shick: I love dance; I love dancers; I love trying to make a dance and spending tremendous amounts of time in a studio with the people with whom I am working. I feel unbelievably lucky to have danced with many people—some of my dearest friends—and, right now, to be with these particular nine people working, laughing, struggling, learning, snacking. But I am most drawn to the rigor of practicing a physicality—defining and refining it over and over again, and then some more. And for this, too, I have a lot of patience, which, however, results in very slow progress….

©Nancy Dalva 2013

RASHAUN MITCHELL

 first published in

 

RASHAUN MITCHELL with Nancy Dalva

Interface | Baryshnikov Arts Center | March 14 – 15, 2013

One of the things that Western dance, and particularly here in America, has not explored in any formal or technical sense, is the disciplined use of the face. Every other part of the body has been subjected to many kinds of motion, the face left to its own devices.

—Merce Cunningham, “The Function of a Technique for Dance,” 1951

Enter Interface, choreography by Rashaun Mitchell, who danced in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company from 2004 until the company’s closure at the end of 2012. After the success of his Nox last year, Mitchell’s run at the Baryshnikov Arts Center sold out almost immediately, and a third late night performance was added. If there is something that’s “must-see” right now, it’s his new work.

Rashaun Mitchell. Photo: Nicholas O’Brien.

Nancy Dalva (Rail): How did you begin?

Rashaun Mitchell: We were at residency at the Dragon’s Egg in Connecticut, which is already a very magical and remote place. I felt that it would be necessary to bond on an emotional level. I wanted to foster and develop the relationships, get to a place of comfort with each other so that we could experiment without fear and self-consciousness. I asked them to walk with me into the woods during the day, to walk in silence and to take turns leading. Someone asked how we would know when to switch leaders. I replied with a shrug. It was a beautiful and intense walk. We got lost. That was the point maybe. Interesting things happen when one is lost. When we finally got back to the studio, I asked everyone to share their feelings. Tears are contagious. Then we danced. I don’t think any one of us will forget that day.

I decided to build the material from movement generated by the dancers. I set up a series of improvisational prompts, filmed them, and combed the footage for material. Then we began the meticulous process of learning the material and organizing it. About 70 percent of it was ultimately tossed. I also used certain techniques that I learned from Merce, applied them to different situations. For example, we experimented with separating the body, the way that Merce would build a phrase in layers: first the legs, then the torso, then the arms. We did this with the legs, the torso, and the face. We identified a list of emotions and each dancer was assigned a different part of the body to express a gesture pertaining to that emotion. They were then combined to make one total body gesture or phrase. This creates a movement language that isn’t naturally attainable. It allows for movement that is beyond my own personal tendencies. In this way I relate to Merce.

Rail: You use Merce’s dancers. (Silas Riener and Melissa Toogood from MCDC, and Cori Kresge from the Repertory Understudy Group.)

Mitchell: The use of Cunningham dancers in my work is mostly a practical choice. I started making this piece at the end of 2010. I made it during breaks in the Cunningham contract. I needed to work with people who had the exact same schedule as me. But certainly, there is an advantage to speaking a common dance language, to knowing someone’s dancing so well and finding ways to stretch that and push bodies and minds to explore new ways of moving. I think we were all kind of craving that. We kept putting the piece aside to continue the Merce Cunningham Dance Company Legacy Tour, and each time we returned to the piece, I had to reconsider my initial motives. Because of this, the piece changed so many times that its identity became confused for me. Instead of fighting this consequential result, I decided to incorporate it, to create a circuitous structure that reflected my state of being. In general, I find that most solutions masquerade as problems initially.

Each dancer is unique and has certain preferences, skills. I think it’s important to consider each individual’s interest in the project. Time is precious and there’s never enough money. These dancers all deserve to be paid buckets for their talents. This is why the extensive process needs to be something particularly worthwhile for them. But it’s difficult to satisfy everyone. Some people love to improvise. Others like to be told exactly what to do. I tried to strike a balance, to keep everyone engaged and invested. The dancers got used to me changing the entire piece with each new rehearsal period. They were forced to keep a distant relationship with the movement throughout. The piece has multiple-personality disorder, on purpose. But in the end, I’m the one to contextualize the movement, to place it in a particular space-time relationship, to draw out particular qualities. 

Function and necessity are important to me. I have to understand why something exists. And dancers bring their own set of stories with them, so my ideas have to be filtered through other people. This social act and transference is the part of the process that most excites me. It’s also the most difficult. In this way, Interface is autobiographical. Whatever the task is, it has to feel believable coming from that particular person. Melissa is the most talented mimic I’ve ever met. In addition to her exquisite technique, she’s very exacting, very reliable. Silas is completely committed to everything he does physically. He usually makes a choice that I wouldn’t make. This excites me. It creates a tension. His face is also extremely expressive. He dances like a knife. And sometimes it’s funny. I love this combination. Cori is very open, very sensitive. Her body is extremely malleable. She also adds a lot of conceptual information to the process and is an excellent improviser. I’m very lucky to work with these dancers.

Rail: In watching you perform in this piece (in Boston) and in Nox, I came to the retrograde realization that your extrovert performance in Merce’s work and in his roles really was performance. I saw you become a watcher, attentive and alert but standing back and allowing things to develop in a space you made for someone else to dance in. So, is this work of yours somehow more you, more Rashaun? More your own temperament?

Mitchell: I exist as a watcher in my pieces because of the practicality of having to view what it is I’m making. I love to dance and I love to make dance but I haven’t quite figured out how to do them simultaneously. I’m working on it and have spent the latter part of this process trying to re-incorporate myself as a performer in this piece. My plan is to deal with this problem head on, in another piece. I’m creating an evening length solo for myself for a future project. This is terrifying, so I’m doing it. Again, problems equal solutions.

Rail: When I saw an early version of this dance in Boston, some of what went on between the dancers and in the projected images seemed possibly to be about mirroring. Another clear possibility was that performing the physical act of a gesture absent the underlying emotion effected the same neural response in the brain as does feeling the emotion first. (Feeling follows form versus form follows feeling.) This leads us down many possible paths of thought about movement, about mimesis, and so forth.

Mitchell: I read a lot of writing from neuroscientist Candace Pert, among others. She states that evolutionary evidence suggests that we instinctively mimic other people’s behaviors in social situations as a way to communicate and express understanding. She writes “that the receptors on our cells even vibrate in response to extracorporeal peptide reaching, a phenomenon that is analogous to the strings of a resting violin responding when another violin’s strings are played. We call this emotional resonance, and it is a scientific fact that we can feel what others feel.” Basically there’s a lot of research out there about this stuff. It’s mostly geared towards healing techniques. I’m not trying to heal the world with my dance. This isn’t art therapy, but I do think the ideas are useful in thinking about the relationship between people on stage as well as the relationship between the audience and performers. When I go to see shows, I spend a lot of time observing the audience. I like to see how watching movement can affect one on a physical and visceral level.

Rail: So, your dancers learned their facial movements as choreography. Not as acting. Just the movements. How did this work, what kinds of feelings surfaced expected or unexpected? It seems like the opposite of method acting. It seems to be reliable, because technique based. You aren’t using sense memory to trigger emotion, or telling a story. You are relying on the movement itself—of the face—to generate narrative in two ways: by evoking the response in the audience as such a gesture does, and because the dancer him or herself is responding to the physical trigger.

Mitchell: The dancers and I have definitely found that expressing an emotion physically can in fact induce the emotion itself. The most emotional part of the piece for me is Melissa’s solo. It’s the one part of the piece where the face is covered. The face is so expressive, but the body really feels. The face is the surface of emotions. It’s the part of emotions that is seen. So along with body language, this became my concern. The visual component of emotions became a really enticing tool for me to use. Expression is decoded and rearranged. To take that a step further, footage of the face is spliced and projected. I was thinking about making sure the micro movements were seen from afar, but it’s not narrative, so that doesn’t necessarily need to be followed chronologically. I am also exploring the idea that we are all connected. It’s very Buddhist. I am not a Buddhist. I do think it’s fascinating to think of the self extending beyond what is visible, what is felt. I tried to actualize this idea by creating material with conjoined bodies. I was trying to create an image of a utopian body, a body that is multidirectional, a body that has more. 

Rail: And the images on the film?

Mitchell: The idea for the décor came from a trip to Turkey. The mosques I visited in Turkey didn’t have representational images or iconography, but rather a series of abstract images, architecture, calligraphy. I admittedly know very little about the history of Islamic art, but from my personal and subjective experience, this did not concern me. I even prefer the not knowing because my imagination runs wild. Regardless, the transference of beauty and serenity and focus was very real and palpable. Each tile being different and bumping up next to the other tiles creates a whole that is larger than the parts and this notion reminded me of dance making in that there are a series of images or movements and depending on how they are arranged, meaning shifts slightly. Depending on where a given movement is placed in time and space and in relation to other bodies, the implications change, so I began thinking about alchemy, optics, psychology. I took photos and sent them to Fraser Taylor as inspiration for his design. We also felt that these patterns related to the visualization of the inner working of a brain or the cellular patterns that the experience of emotions might create. The result is a very graphic interpretation. The entire space is transformed. I’m treating the Baryshnikov Arts Center’s Gilman Space like a site-specific space. This is an overarching interest of mine. I’m not presently interested in dance as a product that exists in a fixed mode with fixed coordinates. Why wouldn’t any space, with all of its idiosyncrasies, affect the identity of the piece? Dance is not in a conceptual vacuum. It exists in real time and space. All of the features of the space are considered.

Rail: The title? What does it tell us?

Mitchell: The title came to me suddenly, as most ideas do. When it came to me, I immediately hated it because it was almost too perfect. And it reminded me of a Cunningham title. But it was a persistent bugger. Even though I was making a dance that was utilizing the face as a tool, I was actually more interested in the moments that exist between the faces that are made. When people refer to the piece, they say, “Oh, the piece with the faces.” But the faces only make up a small portion of the material. It’s the in-between moments where the dance really exists. This is Inter-face. The piece is also an extension of my desire to connect with people and an examination of the successes and failures of those attempts. The point of connection between two or more things is the examined locale, which is an ambiguous and disorienting terrain. I refer to this place and moment (where one thing becomes another) as an interface. The points of connection between the performers and the audience and the outward reach of energy from the performers are treated as a palpable but ebbing part of the puzzle. The interfaces are the material that isn’t seen, the invisible strings of connection. It feels like a new way to approach the notion of authenticity in performance and conveying emotion and meaning. Because it’s kind of absurd anyway that we go to see shows expecting to learn something about our lives and hoping to be duped by the staging, but it’s what we do and we hope to be transformed. This is my way of making sense of all of that and poking fun a little bit too. I find that to create in this deconstructed way actually produces very whole, very inevitable results.

ELIZABETH STREB

 from

 

ELIZABETH STREB: An Introduction

“RHYTHM IS A DOMINANT ISSUE IN THE FUNDAMENTALS OF ACTION.”

Clang! Bound! Rebound! The wall is the floor! Slam! Gravity is negotiable by force! Elizabeth Streb was fierce before it was a fashionable adjective, and she revealed all of the exactions dance art used to strive to conceal (and often still does) before Post-Post-Modernism arrived with its underpants as outerwear. She was efficient, she was direct, and however unadorned, her work was somehow—then and still now, though it was more so with her in it—not inimical to metaphorical implication.

“I COULD SUM UP STREB METHODOLOGY AS INQUIRY INTO THAT WHICH IS UNQUESTIONABLY TRUE...”

STREB at City Hall in London in July 2012. Photo: Julian Andrews

I first saw her work after asking Merce Cunningham, “Whose work should I be seeing besides yours?” He replied at once, “John Cage and I are very interested in the work of a young woman named Elizabeth Streb.” (This was some time ago.) So off I went to an all white room downtown, where a lithe woman of my exact age climbed up walls and slammed off metal tables in vivid action that left contrails of concentrated energy—like Merce’s singular phosphorescence combined with some kind of rocket fuel.

Fast forward five or six years, to a panel at the Dance Critics Association Conference. There she was, talking about her work and taking questions. One of the things Streb proposed was an interest in only “real moves.” I raised my hand and asked, “What’s an unreal move?” It was, in effect, a challenge—but it turns out it was to me.

Because, today, I know the answers to that question. (It took me a long time, but I got there.) As I kept watching, she got more populist, with a generous acknowledgement that her early devotees might feel sorrowful as she ramped up the sound, the machinery, the applied narrative. Her enterprise got noisier. Gone were certain aspects of suggestion, and much of Streb’s personal and ineradicable grace. The calibrations were trickier, the projects got larger. Streb became a show called STREB.

“THE CAPACITY FOR CHANGE REQUIRES MOVEMENT.”

All the while, this perception held: to this day her work is seen as sui generis, outside the dance canon. But it is not. Elizabeth Streb’s work is not outside dance history, or the world of dance as we now live in it. She is a part of this tradition. Her philosophy of dance as physics is exactly what Merce Cunningham proposed when he said “Dance is movement through space and time.” This is formalism. Her statement that “You need to eliminate all preparations and all recoveries” describes exactly what George Balanchine did to make ballet modern. No more prepare, pose, pause. This is Modernism.

Although her programs now have themes—more about keeping an audience engaged, I think, than anything intrinsic to her own vectors of investigation—Streb is not about subject matter, or meaning. Streb is about form—the actual content of the choreography in terms of action.

And yet there is something large in the implications of the work—not in terms of imagery, but in terms of us: about possibility, about teamwork, about throwing yourself at invisible barriers. We all learned to stay upright by falling and getting up again. We all go around throwing ourselves at invisible walls—some we know are there, and some we don’t see until we crumple up against them. Or crash right through.

Elizabeth Streb. Photo: Mary Ellen Mark

Streb grew up in upstate New York, rescued from an orphanage at the age of two by a loving mother who sent her to a convent school. Nuns were her role models. Think of this not in terms of subjugation within the structure and strictures of the Church, but in terms of self-discipline, devotion, and working with others in an ordered way. And think about the imagery. What interests Streb and always has is the intersection of the horizontal with the vertical, and various feats involving the transcendence of fear and of gravity. (In other words, Stations of the Cross.) In one of her early pieces, she was a one-woman version of El Penitente, throwing herself again and again at an “X” of light on the ground beneath her.

“WE AT STREB ARE NOT PRETENDING…IT IS THE TIMING OF ACTION AND THE METHOD OF EXECUTION THAT HOLDS THE KEY TO REAL MOVMENT…”

Yes, Elizabeth Streb climbs down tall buildings (in calibrated bounds). Maybe what you do the day she does that is manage to get up and go outside and watch her do it. And yet, some day or other, you figure out that that’s a kind of action, that bravery is relative, and that the crazy things Streb proposes and makes happen aren’t alien even to the timid. You contextualize. See Streb’s work, and you realize at some point or other that psychic and physics are almost the same word. The moves are real. And so are the metaphors. 

The Streb quotations used are from her book called How To Become An Extreme Action Hero.  ©Elizabeth Streb
©Nancy Dalva 2012

DOUGLAS DUNN

A PHOTO FROM JAMES KLOSTY 

BELGRADE, 1972

ON TOUR WITH THE MERCE CUNNINGHAM DANCE COMPANY

CLICK HERE FOR A CONVERSATION WITH DOUGLAS DUNN

DAVID GORDON

first published in

Beginning of the End of the Beginning Of.

A Pick Up Performance Co(s) Production
JUNE 1 – 30, 2012 | JOYCE SOHO

In his 50th year as a writer/director/choreographer/performer, David Gordon and his Pick Up Performance Company move into the Joyce SoHo for a month, with a Pirandello rewrite called Beginning of the End of the Beginning of. Incorporating Six Characters In Search of An Author plus an antecedent short story and a later one-act play, it calls for eight “actors & dancers” and two puppets, and engages familiar Gordonian devices: script pages, things on rolling stands, door frames, chairs, and lighting by Jennifer Tipton. With music by Puccini, who was Pirandello’s peer, oddly enough. (You probably don’t think of them that way, but it’s exactly correct.)

David Gordon and Valda Setterfield. Photo: Andrew Eccles.

 Watching a studio run-through in Gordon’s SoHo space, it’s impossible to tell whose life, whose art, which life, which art—Pirandello, Gordon?—and where in the studio the rehearsal turns from performance to discussion. It’s as if David Gordon had ghostwritten the Pirandello before he was born. The correspondences between them run through-lines every which way. The atmosphere of the piece, even during a work-a-day rehearsal, is poignant, and curiously both anticipatory and retrospective.

Memento mori, whisper the rocks on the shelves, the folding chairs, the angling of the sun through the windows looking out on Broadway. The characters seem to telepath this urgent message: We are made up out of ourselves, but we are not unreal. We are all too real. At the center of the cast of 10 is Gordon’s perennially beautiful wife, Valda Setterfield, a beneficent presence whose technical accomplishments are entirely submerged while fully deployed, so she just seems to be, with an astonishing there-ness.
 “And who are you now?” Gordon asks, seated at a director’s desk within the play.
 “I am your wife, and you are the author and director,” she replies, circling behind him to place her hands on his shoulders. As if he might really have forgotten.
“This is the last dance to which there is no ending yet,” he says. And that, at least at this point, is the end of the play.
Next it is notes time. The actors mill about, spacing themselves.
 “So are we just staring into space here?” Scott Cunningham asks.
“No,” Gordon answers. “We are looking at the audience and telling them how much you love them and how happy you are to see them.”
“Find out what happens if just as Scott starts to bring that table, Aaron [Mattocks] starts to bring those chairs.”
 “Valda, one question I have is about David’s exit after that aria scene—if you don’t want to solve it now, fine. There is still so much time and I don’t know what to do with it.”
“I have some thoughts about that. Keep on keeping on, please.”
“Bye, everybody.”
Now, in a post-rehearsal conversation, Gordon muses on his muse-of-a-lifetime, and the trajectory that’s brought them here, to this place, this moment, this work. Meanwhile, Valda, her shopping tote in hand—it depicts a marvelous bunny rabbit in a tapestry-looking garden—leaves to run an errand, and then returns. While she’s gone, Gordon engages with his interviewer.
David Gordon: When I went looking for music in relation to Mr. Pirandello, I began to wonder who was composing—it turns out that he and Puccini were of an age. So the sentiment would not be too recognizable, I began to look for anything he had written that was not operatic or text-based.
Nancy Dalva (Rail): It would seem to convey the sentiment of your own subtext.
Gordon: I think the Puccini has about it unavoidable romanticism and sentiment in the melodic circumstances of the music, a built-in romance and poignancy that works for us.
Pirandello has about it simultaneously a narrative thrust and seeming abstraction—and it is the possibility of somehow simultaneously producing a narrative and being abstract that is interesting to me.
I was desperate to be an abstract artist and I couldn’t. I envied those artists of my moment who were abstract artists because it turned out that what I was, was a born storyteller, and I didn’t want to be that. It’s how I became interested in the use of language as a kind of music and the visualization of a fragmented narrative.
Rail: The Pirandello reads as if you wrote it.
Gordon: This obsession with illusion, reality, identity, family. That’s what it feels like to me when I read the Pirandello! I thought, did I write this? (Half the things I thought were postmodern inventions, half of which I thought were mine, Brecht had written.) It starts—really, you can trace me doing this kind of thing back to Chair in 1975. In every one of these things I have so-called—I would not call it adapting because that seems too classically conventional—I am rewriting. I read the whole play. I read and read before I ever start doing.
In 1975 I am married to Valda Setterfield, and I realize that when I come home I asked, “What happened?” And there is a long monologue about getting dressed. She is telling me what led to what happened… Valda doesn’t edit. Valda just says everything about everything. Valda is what causes me to listen to everything else as if it is all material. I have a wife who tells me too many things and a son [Ain Gordon] who tells me the history of everything my wife tells me.
I came from a family that never went to a museum, a concert, a theater, but went to a movie every Sunday and ordered the same food every time at a Chinese restaurant. How did I end up coming from that family? And this wife, in this world, and this son?
Rail: Do you think life has an arc and an inevitability?
Gordon: Life as it plays itself out may at some instant have an arc and an inevitability, but for the most part what the artist does is take the random events of real life circumstance and make some order out of them which re-examines them—not erasing their natural charm and power, while simultaneously taking advantage of it.
Rail: This show feels like a meditation on mortality.
Gordon: You can know the end before the end and now you can wait for the end. How soon do you want to know when the end will be the end?
I am step by step trying to figure out, Who am I now? (That’s Pirandello.) I don’t know the end of this story. I don’t know where it’s going. I don’t know how to be in control of it.
I didn’t know. I did not know. Step by step we just did what we did and what we thought of next. I only find out later——
Rail: And is that what you are still doing?
Gordon: At some points in time, I got very nervous about all of the things I could not understand. Then we moved here.
Rail: And you learned——
Gordon: To say yes.

©Nancy Dalva 2013

OCEANOGRAPHY: Cunningham / Atlas

originally published in

Ocean (2010)

directed by Charles Atlas/ choreography by Merce Cunningham

THE WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART | APRIL 11 – 15

“Could you make a dance in the round?” John Cage asked Merce Cunningham before the James Joyce/John Cage Festival in Zurich, in June 1991. Cage had in mind a dance performed in the middle of a circular space, surrounded by the audience and then musicians, in concentric circles. There being no suitable venue at the Swiss event, Cage’s idea was set aside, and a little more than a year later, he died, quite unexpectedly.

Photo credit: Cameron Wittig. Courtesy of Walker Art Center.

Cunningham, as ever persevering, finally realized their grand scheme in Brussels on May 18, 1994, at the vertiginous theater-in-the-round called the Cirque Royal. There, for the first time, 112 orchestra musicians played a complicated 2,403-page score, “Ocean 1-95,” by Andrew Culver, elaborating on Cage’s initial plans; at the same time, David Tudor introduced his live electronic soundscape, “Soundings: Ocean Diary,” comprised of eerily reprocessed underwater noise. Marsha Skinner’s sea-inspired leotards and filmy dresses painted the dancers in purples, turquoises, oranges, mauves, violets — the colors of the sun, the sky, the untroubled sea. The dance itself was an amazement: 90 teeming minutes of movement, perfectly without front, back, or sides.

The dance has since been revived thrice, most recently for a fantastic run in a setting for the Rainbow Granite Quarry in Minnesota, in 2008. There, Charles Atlas, Cunningham’s long time collaborator in filmmaking, captured the dance. Although you can’t see him in the film, the choreographer is there — just off the circle of the stage, near the ramp by which the second dancer in the piece enters, bundled in a winter coat and hat and scarf against the damp and bitter night air.

At the time of that revival, in July 2008, I asked Merce Cunningham about the process of making “Ocean,” in one of 19 interviews for the web series “Mondays with Merce.” Here are excerpts, never before published, from that discussion.

Nancy Dalva: Ocean took its title from Joyce, in a sense.

Merce Cunningham: Yes. I’ve forgotten when, but Joseph Campbell, the mythologist who was a friend of ours [Cunningham and John Cage], was talking once about Joyce, that he thought the next work Joyce would have done would have been about water—Ocean. That’s how it began. And John Cage began putting ideas about it with [the composer] Andrew Culver’s help into the computer. This would be a large work. We had both decided it could be 90 minutes, and we both liked the idea of not...no intermission, because I thought, well, that’s the length of movies and people don’t expect an intermission. So we could begin to think that way. And then there were, again from Joyce, I think it’s Ulysses that has 17 parts. Finnegan—the Wake—has 18. So we assumed that this could be 19. So in my choreographic scheme, I decided there would be 19 sections. That had nothing to do with the length of any given section, except the whole thing would be 90 minutes.

Dalva: How did you determine the length of the individual sections?

Cunningham: A great deal of it came up by chance. For Ocean I first thought to make 64 phrases, but I didn’t think that would be enough, so I made 128. Some of them are very short, some of them are long continuous phrases. Then the order I did again by using chance. So that often the length of the section was determined by how the phrasing came out. If it were a long phrase, it might take three minutes.

Working on Ocean was an absolutely extraordinary adventure. I came here [to the Merce Cunningham Dance Studio at Westbeth] on a Sunday. We were going to begin rehearsal that week. So I came and marked out—here by myself in this large studio—I marked out a circle. Then I thought, well, since I’m not in the circle yet, I—trying this out—would have to start off stage.

What was off stage? So I figured out—well, I’m practical, I put it at the back, and that was an entrance. Then I started the phrase that came into the circle—into the performing area—and stopped—

What’s front? It’s all front. So then I thought, well, if I use chance to determine—having come in—which way you face, how many space changes do you make…? So again, to aid in all this—or I thought it would—I divided this circle into a maximum of 12 possible spaces. Then again by chance I determined whether a phrase would stay in a given space or whether it would move from one to another. And in the course of all that, how many times did it turn, so to speak, front. Front was wherever you face.

Okay, well that you can see took a while, and it took me quite a while to figure out a way to translate this to the dancers because the whole thing was an adventure. But it was so fascinating to me the way something that I had always seen from one angle, now I was seeing it from three or four different angles.

Dalva: After the premiere in Brussels—just after the opening night party—you said to me, “Now all my dances look flat to me.”

Cunningham: Yes. With a proscenium space your focus is mainly front. Even though you can turn this way and that way [gestures with his hands], ordinarily, you see it mainly this way. Maybe this way. Maybe this way. How often do you see it from the back?

Dalva: It’s like trying to get through a canvas on a painting to see the other side.

Cunningham: Yep. But also the chance operation, using it that way made one shift constantly. For instance, the dancers were in one space facing this way. Then the next phrase having gone through the chance operation, you find three of them are going to be over there and one of them is going to be there. But when they get there, which way do they face? So that the thing was not always a reference constantly to one direction, but to this multiplicity of directions.

Dalva: There’s no bad seat in the house for Ocean.

Cunningham: Nobody has ever complained to me that they had a bad seat.

In his editing of the film he captured at the quarry, Charles Atlas has captured not an experience of seeing Ocean a single time, from a single seat, but the experience of seeing it many times, from various points of view; a notion of the work in its entirety. This was a last collaboration, because just as Cage died before the dance could be made, Cunningham died before the film was complete. Like Merce before him, Charles Atlas completed the work begun in tandem: a marvelous, monumental, and infinitely telling ending to their marvelous partnership.

 Photo credits: Cameron Wittig. Courtesy of Walker Art Center.
© Nancy Dalva 2008, 2012

PAUL TAYLOR

originally published in 
 

Paul Taylor Dance Company | PAUL TAYLOR with Nancy Dalva

by Nancy Dalva

MARCH 13 – APRIL 1 | DAVID H. KOCH THEATER AT LINCOLN CENTER

After decades of spring seasons at Manhattan’s City Center, this month the Paul Taylor Dance Company moves to the David H. Koch Theater, home of New York City Ballet at Lincoln Center. In anticipation, the eponymous choreographer answered some questions from Nancy Dalva.

 

Paul Taylor. Photo credit: Maxine Hicks.

Nancy Dalva (Rail): Wouldn’t Lincoln Kirstein be pleased! Here you are, opening in the house that he built.

Paul Taylor: You know, I think he would. He approved of my work and he actually helped me along the way, and I think he’d be glad that my company would finally be seen in that wonderful house.

Rail: He invited you to join New York City Ballet, yes?

Taylor: Well, it was Balanchine who invited me, but I think Lincoln had brought him to see me perform somewhere.

Rail: Did you see a lot of Balanchine’s work?

Taylor: In the early days, I did, yes.

Rail: Do you see any correspondences between your work and his?

Taylor: Oh, well not really. You know he’s classic ballet or his version of classic, and I’m not. I admire him, especially the way he worked. His rehearsals were so educational to me. Not a moment wasted.

Rail: Did you take his class during that time?

Taylor: I did, yes, occasionally.

Rail: Was it fun? Were you good at it?

Taylor: Not very.

Rail: You must have been divine in the jumps—halfway across the room before you landed!

Taylor: [Laughs.] My heart wasn’t really in it, you know. And I could get by, but I wasn’t a ballet dancer, really.

Rail: When I think of your work and Balanchine’s as being alike, I don’t think of what people are doing. I think of the paths they travel while they do it—the architecture.

Taylor: Yes, the patterns are wonderful, wonderful.

Rail: His architecture clearly comes from the music. Where does yours come from?

Taylor: I think from the music too, but also if there’s a plot, with characters, the architecture has to go along with that, and I sometimes go against the music. I don’t always follow it.

Rail: Do you start with the plot, the music?

Taylor: Oh, there are many ways. Sometimes it’s the plot, sometimes it’s just the music. Sometimes it—oh, many things. It’s never the same, really.

Rail: Do you think the plots are submerged or obvious?

Taylor: Some are pretty clear. Others aren’t. Intentionally.

Rail: Are any of your dances about you?

Taylor: No, never, I don’t think so. I’ve never wanted to do autobiographical dances.

Rail: When I think about your choreography—one dance, all of the dances—it all lives in a kind of continuous present, and also in what I guess I am going to call a “continuous psyche.” Where there are no barriers between id and ego and super ego, or between waking and dreaming. Is your mind at all like that, or is it just what I happen to experience with your work?

Taylor: Sort of. Except I’m not big on Freudian stuff.

Rail: What about Jungian stuff?

Taylor: No Jung, either. Martha Graham liked Jung.

Rail: Tell me about the new pieces that everyone who reads this will go see

Taylor: The recent one is called House of Joy.

Rail: Is that an ironic title?

Taylor: No, a “house of joy” is a whorehouse.

Rail: I get that.

Taylor: I see what you mean. [Laughs.] Well, there are all kinds of joy. It has characters. It’s more a pantomime than a dance, I think. There’s no real dance step in it. It requires acting, at which I must say these dancers are wonderful. We got it done in no time flat.

Rail: Why a whorehouse?

Taylor: Well, that was just the subject. Why? I think—I don’t know. It was something I hadn’t done before.

Rail: You’re going to get in trouble for objectifying women. You think?

Taylor: Well it’s short, so if they don’t like it, it gets over with in a hurry.

Rail: When you are making a new piece—any new piece—is it specific to those dancers?

Taylor: Well it is and it isn’t. I’m certainly aware of their strong points or what qualities they might want to add to their abilities, but I also have to keep in mind that if the dance is any good, it’s going to get learned by a whole other group. So there can’t be anything individualistic set in the choreography—not anything that’s important. There are some dancers who have wonderful quirks, but you can’t transfer them to other people because they’re their own. Everybody is his or her own self, you know. Nobody can look like somebody else, really. If the dance is solid it can stand a lot of interpretations.
Rail: You’re reviving Junction. What was it like to see it again?
Taylor: Oh, well, they do it very well. Junction (made in 1961 to music of J. S. Bach) was an experiment for me to sort of clarify my idea of what was musical in a dance, and I decided that I would try not just to go fast when the music went fast and slow when it went slow, but to complement and sometimes do the opposite.

Rail: Did you feel that you would want to do that again once you tried it?

Taylor: I think it’s affected everything that came after it in that way—the way I think of musicality.

Rail: So you’re proposing that in a dance, or a part of a dance, the movement is in counterpoint to the music.

Taylor: Yes, exactly.

Rail: Are you interested in the technicalities of choreography?

Taylor: Oh sure, you bet. There’s always some kind of flaw in things. But it’s good because then I want to keep going. If I did a perfect dance I think I’d quit, you know? It’s a goal.