Finding Form, Dancing Desert Island

After mulling over the paradoxes posed in our July work sessions, questions of ‘authorship’ and initiative loomed large. Three people saying “After you,” “Oh no, after you,” tends to produce a Marx Brothers bottleneck at the doorway. One way forward was to consider a process with individual authors of separate sections. And so our work in December involved taking turns giving direction and suggesting forms.

I offered up Desert Island initially with no explanatory information and was interested to see it mirrored back (this is my solo on a carpet which plays, more and less seriously, on the image of being a sole survivor of a plane crash). Vicky saw the ecstasy and suffering. Eva saw the abandon and tension. Here’s the initial score:

How to Dance on a Desert Island (psychological score)
- Don’t know you’re on one. Be confused, panicked, but hoping against hope that you didn’t really crash. Deny that it is what it is.
- Figure out the limitations of your situation, growing increasingly angry.
-Try to look on the brighter side. See the possibilities: lots of rehearsal time! Built-in meditation retreat! Try to figure a way out, make a deal with the Universe.
- Get exhausted. Surrender to that. And to hopelessness.
- Let go.

Anyone who recognizes Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages of adjusting to death and dying here would be on target. It seems a very hefty score laid out in this way. But it also has meta moments of acknowledging that it's just theater -recognizing the present moment reality of performer in a space with audience - plus a pure physical task sequence:

How to Dance on a Desert Island (physical score)
- Be shot out of a cannon, running in decreasing spirals until you run across the Desert Island. Hold your hands to keep them from flailing and to make the upper body lift. Once on the island, play with opposite directions in feet and upper body, causing the carpet to slide on the floor and to lengthen any moments of falling through counterbalance. Do this until you can’t stand it. Gap.
- Measure the space, feeling along its edges, respecting imagined ‘walls’. Pick up momentum and tension, as though pulling a slingshot back repeatedly and letting it hurl.
- Move all over the carpet with shreds of movement, talking to yourself with random memories and pep talk. Let energy shift repeatedly, working with levity and gravity, pedestrian and virtuosic.
-Gradually melt. Rest on your back like an insect with knees up, arms angled, elbows on the ground and hands palm up in the air.
- Lengthen the legs upward then flip them abruptly to one side to return upright. Soften back toward the floor and roll languidly , body parallel to front edge, off the carpet.