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)

Fruitful Friction by Eva

On the last day, after Vicky has already returned to NY, Lisa and I decide that the most challenging and therefore fruitful and creative places are not where we see eye to eye, but rather, those where we differ. (With Lisa, there is this element in our relationship. Coupled with the immense respect and love we feel for each other, there are places of divergence within our work. Are we able to express them more freely, the longer we know each other, precisely because of our closeness?)

Some places where the three of us agree:
- that 'how' is more important than 'what';
- that we want to dive deep into the heart of the matter;
- we demand specificity, rigor, intelligence from our dancing (most likely partly a legacy of having danced with Trisha);
- we all train and dance with a genuine respect for the body, all have many years of experience in 'somatic' techniques - we all want to keep dancing, injury free, into old age, so use our bodies wisely;
- we are all fascinated by movement, any movement, that we see around us, (like Vicky's description of the woman she watched in the subway making small gestures, that have inspired her to make some wonderful minimal-gesture material).

Some places where we differ:
- Our attitudes towards improvisation. Improvisation plays a big part for all three of us in our work, but we stand on various ends of the spectrum. Where Lisa and Vicky use improvisation as a starting point, then tend to set material and make repeatable compositional choices, I prefer to stay with improvisation to the very end, all the way into performance;
- How tight or how loose we're willing for a performance to be.

Over the two weeks, we've often spoken about structure coupled with intuition.The rigor of form coupled with the flight of free expression.We look at the Gee's Bend quilts and their incredible surprises - of line, color, shape, pattern, texture - coupled with such a sense of what sustains, not just catches, the eye.

Noting our tendencies, Lisa and I speak about the challenge we have of acknowledging, and giving space in this piece, to our different work modes and sensibilities. We agree that we want to learn from each other, to stretch, to grow. Yes, even now, having passed 50, we have curiosity for the unfamiliar and even the unknown.

some photos

Ordinary Eloquence - by Eva

Two weeks is just a drop of time in the ocean of our lives, but for the three of us, all working mothers, it takes meticulous strategy to carve out even this from the rush of our daily living. But this meeting of kindred spirits, respected and admired colleagues, is what the three of us want, and we've all done everything we've needed to do, to make this time possible. So here we are at Swarthmore, in this beautiful, spacious studio, lying next to each other with feet up against the wall. Such a familiar way to be together.

Talking seems to be the way we begin. This becomes a form, from the first day till the end. It's a way of locating ourselves for each other, catching up, noting similarities and differences, a de-briefing where we use words to offer facts and insights that somehow become the ground on which we then place our moving. We tell stories of our lives (laundry, kids, relationships, teaching, dancing), we ask questions, offer thoughts. 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. But at other times we become eloquent as we talk: about our passion for moving, our love of the art of dance, our visions of how we aim to create, our struggles, and ways we do succeed. Outside of this charged context, where the three of us are sparking each other, it's difficult, often impossible, to recapture such degrees of subtlety and articulateness in our language, so we want to have a record of what, and how, things were said. (Who will transcribe the tapes?)

And of course there's the dancing.We all recognize how important the time of being still, being small and close to the floor is for centering and integrating before moving big. We warm up together, sometimes just moving how we feel like moving (Deborah Hay enters the working space with her admonishment - get what you need), sometimes trying out on each other things we teach in our classes, sometimes doing the Meridian Stretches, the series of stretches, developed by Shizuto Masunaga, that Lisa and I taught students at EDDC, and that now I'm teaching to Vicky when Lisa heads home after a day of work. We play with scores and tasks, we agree and disagree, we laugh, and at times we cry. We move, we watch each other dance, then move in response. We are inspiring each other.

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)