Day One - picking up the thread

Back in Arnhem! First time dancing in the new Dansacademie building. Because it's next to a landmark Gerrit Rietveld building, the space designed for theater and dance is completely underground - a huge atrium flanked by several floors of studios on each of its long sides. The skylight is covered with sail-like sun shades - feels a little like being on a boat.

We worked on two scores, one about arranging objects which seemed like a fitting extension of Eva and Vicky's "setting the table" (and re-arranging someone else's arrangement) dance. The other was a 'heightened energy' score which (a la Deborah Hay) is intended to clarify its form through repetition. The two forms couldn't have contrasted more completely.

Conceptual Warm Up

Here are excerpts from e-mails and phone call notes in preparation for our upcoming intensive in Arnhem:

(from Lisa): We all would like to come away with a form, a score, a series of sequences- that we can continue to practice/develop/evolve on our own afterward. The Deborah Hay model of “practicing” the dance and having it reveal itself that way applies.

Here’s a quote from Meredith Monk: “Every time you make a piece, fear is always there and you’re always working with it, playing with it, allowing the interest and curiosity of what you’re making to become more compelling than the anxiety. Then you’ve actually walked through the fear, and then there’s a sense of discovery.”

(From a phone chat with Vicky and Lisa:)
Craft what you want to see
Step back from the obvious
Overarching conceit that frames different kinds of activity
Feeling level wants to manifest fully
Layer in elements that are part of the process
Abstract personal emotional material to make it more universal (stand-ins)
Forms, conventions, strictures
Household scraps
Hanging in there until you see how the whole thing will interact
When you perceive something not “happening,” engage rather than withdraw
Persevere through “I don’t get it” – is there a piece of this that’s interesting?
Practicing the dance rather than building it or rehearsing it

(from Eva:) Red Thread tasks/scores/games/structures
July 2008- Post-it note grids
Supermarket Shoppingwalking patterns on a grid
Speaking while moving; tapping into emotion remembering our fathers
Catch 3 moves from each person, teach each other

December 2008 - Lisa shows Desert Island; we replay what we saw.
Vick - specific nothing - alone, then in duets.
Eva - "stitching" - stitching paths to travel lines,and lay grids and patterns."stories and spaces" and ways of supporting in improvisation.
Transformation - letting a movement transform itself through repetition.
Lisa's score for Eva: walk a straight line/straight lines (pedestrian action) and when it wants to happen, take journeys off.
Lisa's score: 5 stories and 3 spaces.
Things we like about stitches- the initial thrust of the first entry of 'needle into fabric'- the aspect of repetition- that small changes can enter- that feet can retain the same pattern and arms can embellish with other ones
Eva's score for Lisa: give time for resting, yielding - nothing time; softening, creating internal space, wrists and heart; connection of hands and heart, hands to earth.
Lisa's score for Eva: find scraps with which you could eventually build, but at this time, don't think of building, don't think of value; don't judge, don't think of having to entertain. Speak about the found scraps.
Eva's score for Lisa: you arrange your things into neat piles before we begin to work; it could bridge the gap between formal structure and the sensory world. Take some time to create a formal physical framework in the space, set up somewhere where you can then spend some 'formless' sensory time.
Lisa's score - 50 moves with repetition.Repetition not just to do it, but because it has a purpose.Play with timing, phrasing, musicality of the moves. Same task having a traveling path - gave clearer purpose.50 moves using the torso (Lisa), and 50 moves leading with the head (Eva) generated unusual material.50 moves with the addition of high drama gave surprising emotional twists in places.50 moves and gathering scraps can be a practice.

March 2009- Tasks: Grid Stitching and lacingMovement becoming smallerErasing Post-it notes

For Aug 2009- Instructions from Eva: make and bring 5 scraps - material you gather/ collect from around the house. Domestic scraps or in-the-home moves.

Sharing the Scraps

Here’s what we showed at Swarthmore on April 5:

-Stitching – one person is the upper thread and one person the lower on the kind of sewing machine that makes fancy patterns. This is hard to improvise and needs to be either very simple (just two actions) or set.

- Lacing- post-it notes become the holes through which movement laces. The notes are places for shifting direction/weight. Laying out post-it notes is a spare ritual. (But will there be actual post-its in a performance or will they give way to something stronger visually?).

- “Glimpse” – The photo above is from the beginning. Two solos and the duet between Eva and Vicky from Vick’s just-performed show. Unassuming movement, sometimes with multiple repetitions or sometimes one-offs full of rich detail and tiny adjustments. Meg and I slipped the “broken” duet of ours , growing smaller and smaller, into the middle which the two of them watched. Watching becomes a theme…

-Grid Game: One person (Meg) initiates a short dance within a square of space marked by post-it notes. Next person (Lisa) enters and does the “same” dance in her own way in an adjacent square. Then all four (Vicky and Eva enter) do their versions of the original together in a grid of four squares, followed by several variations where dancers and placements are unknown. It’s a formal plan, with interest in the ‘waiting’ time and simultaneous whooshing in and sweeping out.
Jano Cohen said she enjoyed bits of the showing where the “game” was obvious. This is one of those.

-Stillness and Moving Improvisation – half in silence/ half to Hungarian pop music. The most “open” of the forms with mutual moments of quiet and activity of all sorts and durations.

- “Natural” – Meg’s twitching hip-hop based material as solos and a duet with Lisa to Lil’ Kim.

- Kaffeeklatsch – narration of a traumatic story to a David Lang composition with stops and starts. A place-holder for the quilters’ sharing of personal stories with each other and its interconnectedness with their artmaking…

It felt like a lot. Not a bad place to be in roughly a year before the "premiere."

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.

A Letter Tied with Red Thread

A Letter from Emily Sweeney :

November 20, 2008

Dear Eva, Lisa, and Vicky:

These lines from your blog spoke to me:

—All three of us, Lisa, Vicky and I, have traveled the path from hard to soft. (Eva remembers me at a time when I was closer to hard than soft; she helped me take some of my first steps along that path)—

—Even without language, 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 get into the habit of recording, not only our dancing, but also our talking. Sometimes not much of real importance is said, aside from this building of history, this getting to know each other again, in depth, those small and big details of our lives that make us who we are. (This made me think of entanglement—more on that below.)—

It is unbelievable to me that four months (one-third of one year!) have passed since I watched you moving together in Swarthmore on a July afternoon. My response to the work you are making and the purpose of your making it was immediate and non-lingual, which has made it difficult to approach writing about it. But now that I’ve waited, I am glad I have, because I had my own brush with lineage in October—had a red thread surface on my skin and become instantly visible to another with whom I’d never danced. Forgive me… this will be rambling.

The piece I was working on over the summer when I came to watch you, assembling minutiae, is somewhat related to the Red Thread project because it also explores the notion of interpersonal connection, and how and why such connections exist. I was interested in exploring my movement relationships with dancers with whom I somehow established an instant rapport- thinking about why that might be, and trying to generate videos that captured moments in those relationships. I have been thinking a lot about how we feel inexplicably connected to people (the three of you spoke about your common life experiences, but I feel that your connection might go beyond your life experiences to touch something more deeply physical and elemental).

So, in the piece I surrounded myself with little video capsules of me dancing with those dancers with whom I instantly jived, and then imagined somehow that my experiences with them had become memories only. No specific circumstances surrounding why they might have become solely memories- only that the way for me to reenter those movement spaces was through my memory, and never again through actual physical contact. Then I treated the movement we had created together as though it were a beloved memory: rewinding, slowing down, speeding up, repeating- just trying to massage the phrases really thoroughly over time, getting comfort from the act of evoking these movement-memory spaces in the room. It was meant to be about the act of remembering- about creating a slightly melancholy, occasionally joyful space to linger in memory (evoking precious memories is one of my favorite things to do- a fairly common thing, I suppose, but interesting to consider as a kinesthetic state).The structure of the piece was further informed by my slowly growing knowledge of memory. It is currently thought that when we store memories, they are broken down into various components that are relegated to different areas in the brain. Each time we remember something it is a physical act that requires us to pull disparate elements together, and so to "remember" is really to reconstruct- to pull those elements together again. It is a physical act, and I think a physical sensation, too. I wanted to invite the audience into that memory space with me and have them experience that physical state of remembering as it was happening to me with regards to those women I have loved dancing with.

So, the interesting thing about my experience while watching you (this was particularly true during the duet that Eva and Vicky showed) was that I couldn’t shake the feeling that your common experiences were almost a secondary layer of connection—that your connection to one another was somehow established long before you met—long before you had even had the overlapping life experiences that caused you to meet and feel connected—and that your common experiences were more the result of your connection than the basis for it. I did a little research into entanglement during the creation of my memory piece:

From an interview with Brian Clegg:
Entanglement is a strange feature of quantum physics, the science of the very small. It’s possible to link together two quantum particles – photons of light or atoms, for example – in a special way that makes them effectively two parts of the same entity. You can then separate them as far as you like, and a change in one is instantly reflected in the other. This odd, faster than light link, is a fundamental aspect of quantum science – Erwin Schrödinger, who came up with the name “entanglement” called it “the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics.”

It seemed to me that the three of you might be somehow entangled.

Your showing resonated with me so completely (and it’s already taken four months!). But I couldn’t shake the feeling that the “factual” layers of text you had placed with your phrase material with regards to the dates, places, and events that led your lives to overlap were secondary, and that what was primary was happening regardless of whether I knew of your common experiences. There is definitely some transcendentalist thought happening here—I am a huge Emerson and Whitman fan—and perhaps even thoughts of reincarnation… or of simple physical stew, where you three, and, I would posit, Mariella and I as well, were somehow very close to one another in the primitive pot, and when we find one another now, some very, very deep element in us is touched, and we respond.

This is all very current thought on my part, so as I have new and perhaps more thorough thoughts, I’ll send them along.

Please let me know if any of this resonates with you—I would be very curious.

Much respect,
Emily (see more on Emily at http://www.uwishunu.com/2007/08/15/artist-spotlight-emily-sweeney/)

today's grid

photo: Ellen Gallagher by Nicole Bengiveno/New York Times

Amsterdam’s American Book Center had quite a sales table this August. On it I found After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art by Eleanor Heartney, Helaine Posner, Nancy Princenthal and Sue Scott. Here is a passage which addresses a thought I’d been having about “quilt” as a container for personal narrative. In Heartney’s essay on Ellen Gallagher she writes:

“It has been a long time since the champions of modernism have been able to argue that narrative and content were the enemy of quality, as Clement Greenberg did in 1940 when he proselytized for an art whose purity was not defiled by reference to any external reality. In a similar vein, forty years later, Rosalind Krauss could still celebrate the widespread use of the gird by artists with the pronouncement “The grid announces, among other things, modern art’s will to silence, to hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse.” The grid, she added, “states the autonomy of the realm of art.”

But many artists today see supposedly neutral modernist formulas like minimalist geometry, the grid, and the archive as empty shells to be filled with subversive content. When Haim Steinbach equates art and commodity by placing high-end running shoes and lava lamps on shelves derived from the minimalist sculptures of Donald Judd, when Peter Halley takes Mondrian’s geometry and makes it reference electronic circuitry and prison bars, and when Charles Ray homogenizes and serializes the family unit, presenting all members, from father to baby, as elements of equal size, they all make a mockery of modernism’s formalist pretenses by using them for quite different purposes.”

faster? slower

At the opening of the Olympics, the words ‘faster, higher, stronger’ were in the air. Having just returned from 2 weeks of moving with Lisa and Vicky, I pondered these words as they relate to my dancing.

My first revelation came when, in 1972, I met Pytt (Gerda Geddes) and started attending her T’ai Chi classes. In his book, ‘Dancer in the Light, the life of Gerda ‘Pytt’ Geddes’, Frank Woods quotes Pytt speaking about former Graham dancer, Jane Dudley, who was Lisa’s first dance teacher: ‘Jane used to teach in Studio 3, just above me, and I would hear her shouting: ‘Faster, faster, faster; jump higher, higher, higher,’ whilst I would be saying: ‘Slower, slower, slower; breathe deeply, sink down into the pelvis, and relax.’ . . . . Jane ‘was part of the dance training which was physically very, very hard. We discussed it and we always disagreed about the rigour of what she was doing against the softness of t’ai-chi. But Jane already had arthritis by then. . . . . . . I kept on saying to her, ‘Do be careful, listen to yourself, listen to your own body.’ But she would say . . . ‘oh no, you can’t be a dancer without using force, you have to use lots and lots of force, and this softness is no good.’ We had endless discussions. . . . . . Then she started coming to my classes and became very enthusiastic. I think she saw something in this softness, the yielding part of my movement. It was against her way of thinking, but despite herself she saw something important there.’

With many years of T’ai Chi practice behind me, I’ve found that when I slow down, I understand the subtlety of each moment in the pathway of a movement, its logic, its initiation, in a way that I can never perceive when I move fast. This slowing down and resulting deepened understanding then allows me to play the movement along the whole spectrum from slow to fast. With less effort.

Slowing, softening and deepening are words I use frequently when I teach.

Bruce Frantzis, in his book ‘Opening the Energy Gates of Your Body’, writes, sinking your chi ‘means a complete release, a complete letting go of any sense of control, contraction, strength or binding inside your tissues and nerves, until holding of any kind is replaced by a complete sense of openness, space and comfort . . . . . . In terms of working with chi, feelings of strength indicate blockages, places in your body where chi is not circulating in a healthy, steady flow. The paradox is this, the more you feel strength, the weaker your chi.’ Through this kind of letting go, ‘hard, stiff, tight muscles will become softer but with significantly more tone.’ One discovers ‘An easy, relaxed, and effortless power that cannot be gained by any amount of physical training or weightlifting.’

Lisa, Vicky and I, all share the experience of dancing with Trisha (Brown). In her liquid, easy style, we learned to smooth the edges. You can’t do this kind of dancing by pushing. Rather, the movement is ‘allowed’ to happen.

In her essay, "Dance and Art in Dialogue 1961-2001" Marianne Goldberg says,
‘Brown released the dancer's "set," a particular tensile way of holding the body in the forties and fifties, which she had learned through studies at Mills and at the Merce Cunningham Studio after she arrived in New York in 1961. Through Alexander and also intensive, long-term study of another emerging form, Kinetic Awareness, founded by the Judson choreographer and filmmaker Elaine Summers, Brown began to initiate movement from very different kinesthetic knowledge. These newly surfacing somatic ideas offered alternatives to how to hone her body for dancing. She shed the stylized use of her muscles and the tensile alertness through the spine and skin. Focusing instead on subtleties of elegant, relaxed alignment of her spine and limbs, she moved with ease and a spatial clarity that stemmed from innovative inner imagery. Brown looks at home physically in these moves, and a different virtuosity and creativity emerged, grounded in anatomically clear and efficient action. New sensations, perceptions, and energy developed within her body and between body, space, time, and geometry. . . . . . When she formed her company in the early seventies, she chose performers who also reconceived the human structure and the meaning of physical skill.’

All three of us, Lisa, Vicky and I, have traveled the path from hard to soft.

Vicky tells us stories about her Russian ballet teacher who used to tell the class to get their legs ‘higherrr, higherrr’. I watch Vicky now as she dances. Her ‘father’ dance is beautifully crafted. She unfolds stories within stories, threads opening, returning, weaving; humor, sadness, pain. She moves with a delicacy and fragility, a vulnerability that mirrors her speaking. But there’s also strength, visible in the clarity of her moving, her angular shapes, loose and weighted, abandoned, subtle yet compelling.

While Lisa and I were teaching together at EDDC, our children were still young. I became more generous with my acceptance of the shifting quality of time and space after I became a mother. My intuitive sense became honed to respond to my child’s needs. This quality entered my work. I watched Lisa’s dancing also soften during this time. Her ‘straight lines’ yielded more, her edges became more permeable. Watching her perform, I was able to drop even deeper into her inner self, her life blood, her source. Watching her now as she moves through her ‘father’ dance, I’m touched, both Vicky and I are touched, by her honesty, her passion. Her moving is laced with gestural detail, has intensity, is charged and totally committed. Her movement material is so undeniably her.

Even now, in our 50s, our bodies are resilient, our dancing is strong. We can call up integrated speed, and we can plumb our depths. I return to the words, ‘faster, higher, stronger’ and think no, I’ll stay with slower, deeper, softer, and more powerful.

(Eva)