a straight line?

7-19 (The blog is gradually catching up to the experience.)

We watched the Alabama PBS DVD “The Quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend,” each of us moved by this art that starts with next-to-nothing, that communicates vibrancy and joy despite the harsh conditions under which the makers have lived. These ladies, the (until recently) geographically isolated descendants of slaves in Alabama, have made quilts that are bold and visionary in a relaxed, everyday way. One woman interviewed said that she at first couldn’t imagine making a quilt but got started because she had no choice. Her family needed bedclothes to keep them warm. With no money, she picked up her needle and thimble. This woman’s quilts are among the most stunning, in part because she uses scraps that are obviously worn out clothing – many gradations of blue in the jeans with faded knees.

In being inspired by these women we recognize an appetite for the social aspects of the quilting circle - the conversation and singing that take place while they stitch. We have been listening to each other. One aim of Red Thread is to pay attention to how we weave our daily and dancing lives. We seem to naturally begin each morning with a debriefing that veers into a particular subject: our children, our marriages, our parents, caretaking, our relationships with our bodies, our difficulties in carving out sufficient time for our creative work and hewing to “dailiness” - continuous process, especially when not engaged in collaboration or under a deadline. The effect is less kaffeeklatsch than coming clean – airing issues and transmuting their energy from individual burdens and joys to shared understandings to be folded back into the work.

We improvise as a starting place - solos which are “fed back” as duets. I am inspired by Vicky’s physical veracity. She may not know what she is doing in a given moment, but what I see is the her bemused involvement with the movement she is finding, absent any sense of awkwardness about exposure while “not knowing”. I feel more self-consciousness.

What do we do when unsure, not “at home”? Stay loose and awkward? Or pump out movement, repeating an action, maybe part of our bag of tricks, putting oomph behind it that rings false? In this open dancing I see so much of who we are. Even without langauge, without having made something composed, there is a complete transmission of personality. The idea that we have to be "clothed" with worthy material is suspect. The three of us agree on this: it's not so much what you do as how you do it.

We pored over “The Architecture of the Quilt,” the catalog for the Gee’s Bend quilters’ show that was in Baltimore last winter. (It’s coming to Philadelphia in September). How strong the choices are – to put a bunch of big, nearly same-shaped squares around a block of a bunch of little bitty ones, to have three rows of four blocks of a pattern all in parallel lines and then the fourth row slid off that grid. To use blacks and whites and subtle colors over an entire quilt and then place two little bits of red, one on the side edging, one in a tiny square. Most striking is the fact that the lines are rarely straight, as though each fabric piece is a lively entity, not completely subsumed by right angle and grid. In a finished patchework, curving lines can easily produce puckers. Rather than aiming for the Amish's quality of linear precision, these Gee’s Bend ladies use their skills to produce flat finished patchwork comprised of lots of curves and not-straight lines.

"The greatest straightness looks like crookedness." Lao Tzu

the first two days

7-15 Swarthmore College

We intend to make part of the material of Red Thread our shared roles as women artists who weave art-making with domestic work, just as quilt-makers have long done. Getting settled and shopping at the food Co-op is then part of the work: What foods to buy, how many, of what quality? How to negotiate these things? Who sleeps where? Who gets and does what domestically?

Eva and Vicky remark on the beauty and atmosphere of Swarthmore. The big dance spaces have high ceilings and windows looking out to Crum Woods. They are the kind of quiet that’s not just about sound, but about being settled. The people around are supportive, good-natured colleagues.

In the studio we start on the floor laughing and catching up about children and spouses and our aging bodies. This is the material too. Three pairs of legs leaning against the wall, feet up, as we lay on our backs – the classic parallel joint-folding action.

I recount how at the recent 36th birthday for Contact Improvisation, a younger dancer with whom I was doing a ‘one-on-one’ told me that my legs are out of alignment and that I should do this very form. The others were slightly indignant on my behalf. I don’t know; we are really all beginners all the time. The same tendencies I had in the 70’s that prompted Elaine Summers to encourage me to practice that parallel alignment exercise are tendencies I still have today. Although we think we are resolving issues, it may not be apparent to anyone else. How many times has a student told me that my physical feedback to them is exactly what other teachers have told them before?

Eva asks “what are our practices in the studio, what do we do?” We begin to answer, moving and telling, for each of us the commentary shifting between reflecting on developing performance work and on teaching. The question feels too large. We will answer it day by day, in installments.

Here’s a distinction – Eva senses herself always eager to move; a perennially kinetic being. Vicky and I are less motivated that way now. I do not usually want to move until propelled by an idea, like a shape I want to try, or a piece of great music, or the goading of others around me with energy rising. I need a big motivator to get really activated. Is that from years of stress, too little regeneration time, or aging?

We hit a few points of not exactly tension, but places where we stretch away from each other. I propose an exercise – after an improvised solo, the other two enter to repeat what they’ve just seen. That implies relating as a duet, so at issue was having to both recall and form a new relationship. Too much for Eva and Vick who prefer attending to one or the other. I find doing both liberating because it’s more than one can easily encompass; moving from a score and working with what’s unfolding in the space. But how you think about ‘repeating’ is crucial here. Is your goal to mirror, offer feedback of what you recall, respond, extrapolate, or continue?

On day two when we dive into stories about our fathers, all deceased, we begin to wonder about finding a right approach to emotional exposure. Working with very personal material brings with it the delicate relationship of art-making to therapeutic practice. If we are using authentic movement-like forms, moving with a memory or a deep emotional score, how does it become a seed for good theater – not indulgent, but clean.

Questions hang in the air about using language. I feel, even after incorporating text for many years, that I fundamentally still don’t know how. Eva suggests that simpler is better. I think of the John Jasperse monologue that opens Misuse Liable to Prosecution – a spiel on class and consumerism, tongue in cheek and barbed simultaneously. Palatable but stinging. I say I need to really study this language thing and Eva suggests that working in the trio is an opportunity with feedback immediate for clunkers.

With a group of younger dancers who I’m paying, I don’t care whether they like a form I propose or not, I just want to see it not for itself but for what it might lead to. But with these peers, I want them to see what I see – the potential for something to be of interest. The spatial form I suggest, lifted directly from looking at the Gee’s Bend quilts in “The Architecture of the Quilt,” is one that has a kind of foreign-ness for the others. I have been dealing with space and floor pattern extensively from the work on the Partita Project and its baroque antecedents. But with Vick and Eva I want them to like the form = to like me. Time to just let that one go. (Lisa)

get set, go

Three women, seasoned, coming together to dig deep and find shared form. One a Bessie-winning New York choreographer and performer, one a Netherlands-based dance adventurer and gifted transmitter of body knowledge, the third a slow-cooking Philly teacher, writer, choreographer and presenter. All imprinted by the legacy of dancing with Trisha Brown.

The first time I saw Eva Karczag was when she was dancing for Remy Charlip. She crawled from one end of DTW to the other balancing on rubber balls, kicking one ball forward and placing a hand on it each time she took another feline step. I had never witnessed such liquid simplicity. I thought she was the most beautiful dancer I’d ever seen.

The first time I saw Vicky Shick was at the 1977 Contact Improvisation gathering in Putney, Vermont. We met through a mutual friend, Richard Colton, on whom I had choreographed my first dance at age 13. We shared that watershed dance moment when attention to feeling and touch were transforming how we all moved.

All together in Brown’s Glacial Decoy, Line Up, Locus, Son of Gone Fishin’, going to the limits of strength and complexity. Witnessing the unfolding of genius and sometimes the drudgery of maintaining exactitude.

Fast forward nearly thirty years. A decade shared with Eva at European Dance Development Center in the Netherlands. Grown or nearly grown children, graying mates. Continuous activity in the dance world, both humble and heralded. Now - a rehearsal studio.

What will we find? What matters today? In a post-Judson, post-9/11, post-oil boom world, how does dance making continue as an eloquent medium for us?

Beginnings, with their limitless possibility, are so simple. Hopefully maturity will aid us in drilling down into the heart of what we find and sticking with the faint currents of unfamiliar direction. We will share our findings here. (Lisa Kraus)