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)