Three Choreographers Stumble Into a New Century

There’s a song by Simon & Garfunkel called “The Only Living Boy in New York.” A cover version of the song by Everything but the Girl came into my iPod shuffle while I was waiting in the Atlanta airport for my connecting flight from NYC to Charleston on May 28, and these lyrics seemed perfect in my feverish, sleep-deprived state:

“Half of the time we’re gone but we don’t know where; we don’t know when. Here I am……….”

Seemed perfect because there I certainly without a doubt was. Yes indeedy.

I’d like to say more about Khmeropedies, Corella Ballet, and something about Shen Wei, the three big dance companies I saw at the Spoleto Festival. Specifically about the experiment I believe choreographers Emmanuele Phuon and Christopher Wheeldon are working out on their respective companies, with varying degrees of finesse, versus Shen Wei’s seemingly effortless creation of an individual movement vocabulary.

Anyone who has read me in the past knows that I feel averse to removing traditional (folkloric, “ethnic,” indigenous) forms of dance from their traditional performance spaces and occasions and made into a proscenium-stage concert experience. I feel it’s like putting an animal in a cage at the zoo. Not that these forms shouldn’t be given the respect and equal legitimacy they’ve long been denied. But parading them onto the world’s stages like a kind of lecture/demonstration does not serve their usually lived-through, lived-among, intimate, sometimes sacred natures and cultural specificity.

You’d also know, if you’ve read me in the past, that I’m sort of a balletophobe. There are many reasons for my aversion to this rarified vocabulary based on a dead French king’s eccentricities that I don’t need to list here. But it might be worth noting that I view ballet itself as an “ethnic” form. Specifically French. Not a universal dance language.

So I come to this conversation acknowledging that I’m not an expert in either form. But I have a big mouth.

I see both these choreographers looking for ways to revitalize their respective forms, to bring their movement language into the 21st Century. In Wheeldon’s case, as it is in the seating schematics of opera houses across the United States, it’s partially a strategy to lure younger audiences to the box office.

As I sit in the dusky humidity of various Charleston theaters listening to the audiences around me ask each other what they’ve seen, what they’ve enjoyed, I hear most prominently, Corella Ballet. “So beautiful,” “I’ve never seen anything like it,” “I’ll never forget it.” Now bear in mind that the bulk of these audiences come from the osteoporosis and oxygen tank crowd. I don’t mean that to be hateful, just descriptive. So Corella’s experiment, specifically Wheeldon’s work, is reaching them deeply. Really working for them. And that’s a good thing. A sweet deal.

But it does not work for me, specifically DGV: Danse a Grand Vitesse. First of all the set pieces look like leftovers from Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari. Michael Nyman’s cinematic score reinforces the filmic mise en scene. Composed to commemorate the opening of a high-speed train between Paris and Lille, it’s perfect for the snark in my soul that Nyman’s propulsive score now accompanies a visual train wreck. Then we meet a tribe of spastic turtle people, who gobble up modern and postmodern pastiche with their balletic partnering tropes, and what the hell, let’s throw in some jazzy, Broadway quirks and idiosyncrasies and some June Taylor Dancers kaleidoscopic patterns. Too much too many. The male corps de ballet seem particularly ungainly, like gawky teenagers whose faces haven’t yet grown into their noses. I don’t know if this is “revitalizing” ballet or dumbing it down, and I don’t know if, as he ages, Wheeldon won’t absorb all these glue-ons and make them into something new and wonderful and entirely his own. But it ain’t happening yet. Well, the piece is 5 years old; things could have shifted already. Simply cutting and pasting 4 counts of jazz torso onto 4 counts of ballet pelvis does not an integrated vocabulary make.

Phuon, in the dances she has made (or directed; there is a strong sense in the work that the dancers contribute their natural qualities to the choreographic process) for her younger Cambodian dancers, has perhaps been less ambitious, allowing the evolution from historic to contemporary be more organic and develop on each dancers’ body at his or her own pace. Some of the material looks a little too well-made for my taste, too White Oak-y, while other sections achieve a synthesis of contemporary musical/dance energies and the traditional bound flow and elegance of Cambodian court dance in surprising and saturated, satisfying ways.

But Shen Wei nails it, a syncretism of forms and framing devices, for an end product he probably never foresaw. By just looking around carefully and slowly, allowing everything to be just as it is, he seems to have stumbled on a movement vocabulary that gathers postmodern dance forms, the traditional Chinese forms he grew up studying, and whatever else he has absorbed: a true movement ethnographer.

The first section of the “Re-“ triptych, about Tibet, is my least favorite, perhaps because that is the culture, of the three Shen investigates, I know the most about. The dancers have created a mandala on the stage floor before they begin dancing from what must be Post-It sized slips of colored paper that swirl up and around their shuffling feet to suggest snow while clouds are projected on the scrim behind them. Then comes Cambodia, primarily created around impressions from Ankgor Wat. The final Butoh-paced tableaux stuns with its spare, inert bodies that could be the mass graves of the Killing Fields. As Antony & The Johnsons have sung, “From the corpses, flowers grow.”

I can’t help but being terrifically amused by the fact that after this, two couples sitting near me (both middle-aged and apparently heterosexual) leave the theater and don’t return. That old in-bred disgust at partially nude elements; oh no titties! Oh, how the morally pejorative, reductive, ridiculous South never disappoints!

Then a third section inspired by China’s Silk Road. Is it my imagination or do the dancers, dressed identically, walking all in the same direction, leaning on each other but falling down, comment on the strict regime of modern China? And what about the juxtaposition of this militaristic regularity against that first section, the open sky and freedom of Tibet? I begin to see elements in Shen’s movement that might echo Lucinda Childs, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, or the pugilism of La La La Human Steps. But it’s still his own deeply personal investigation. This guy might be the hope we’ve been awaiting who will create a new dance boom, popular from that Olympics gig, yet keeping true to his esoteric roots.

Writing about art as art

In a few hours I leave for Charleston. Preparing my body-mind-heart to write again. I haven’t revealed myself in this way, stripped off my skin and displayed the stinking gut of my brain, for nearly 3 years, except for a few lackadaisical posts. I’ll be dispatching daily or periodic blog entries about my experience attending 10 days of the Spoleto Festival. I got my press badge through Arts Voyager, and I’ll link simultaneously, perhaps slightly altered entries, to Know Your Own Bone.

The container of the experience will be simply being again in my beloved Charleston, the city of my becoming (1981-1985), and how do I even talk about that. It’s physically painful, the throb of nostalgia, regret, the solipsistic regret. The smell of pluff mud transports me to a ditzy 23 years old. Many of the houses are gone where I had my joys and sorrows, my starving hysterical naked love affairs. They were wiped away by Hurricane Andrew. Many of the lovers are dead.

Secondary will be throwing myself again into the fray of critical discourse. Will it go tits up or nipples to the wind I wonder.

I approached Dance Magazine and Musical America to see if there was any interest in placing traditionally formatted reviews of specific shows in either place. Both said no … dance projects that aren’t premieres have already been reviewed and music projects are being covered by someone else. I don’t want to write that deadening format any more anyway but I thought I could make a few bucks. At this point in my life, I feel finished with the objective journalistic who-what-when-where of the traditional review. It’s just another form of advertising that serves on one except the artist who maybe gets a pull quote for their next post card. Buy me! Consume me! The New York Times/Village Voice deems me worthy!

But wait. As Burroughs said, the ultimate addiction is to being right. And now already here I am, scrambling in one of my hamster wheels again, the rung of sour-grape festooned hell reserved for sufferers of post-traumatic embitterment disorder.

So what is it I aspire to write if not “deadening journalism”? Let’s see if I can gather and clarify my thoughts on the subject. What is my project anyway? I thought I’d like to call it dharmic criticism. Then I came up with non-canonical post-historicism. I think I’d feel proud if I could produce subjective, performative writing—like Jill Johnston or Gary Indiana—that captures everything in the constellation of my identity. The stuff I’ve spent my life studying: praxis, theory, and history of visual art, theatre, and dance. Through the lens of the rest of the stuff I’ve spent my life studying: the bottom rung of the ladder, the gutter, frailty, falling down and getting up, getting laid and getting high, passion, art, radiant hootenanny happiness, enduring love.

“A woman like that is not ashamed to die. I have been her kind.” —Anne Sexton

And what the hell does this writing look like and can it be accessible? Wikipedia tells me that performative writing is mostly feminist. I’m OK with that. But the entry sounds a bit surly: “It [performative writing] is often loosely semi-autobiographical, free-flowing in an ersatz stream-of-consciousness mode, and heavily informed by left-wing critical theory, but arises ultimately from linguistic ideas around performative utterances.” It cites Peggy Phelan, whose writing is about as penetrable as week-old pumpernickel. If I need to puzzle and puzzle till my puzzler is sore to understand it, what good is it? Why does it exist except to exalt the ego of its utterer? And how the hell can stream-of-consciousness be ersatz exactly?

I think I once wrote in Movement Research Performance Journal that I wanted people to read my writing because I wrote it. Otherwise it wouldn’t be criticism but program notes.

Since then I’ve spent time clarifying:

• The body in the body
• Feelings in feelings
• Mind in mind
• Phenomena in phenomena

I have stumbled across the idea of listening with my tongue. This is my invention entirely. I was at a program at Karma Triyana Dharmachakra on Meads Mountain to receive a reading transmission from Lama Karma Drodul. We had been instructed to absorb or receive these texts with our hearts, to allow them to fill our hearts, and I had been experiencing a lot of tension in my jaw and throat. An acupuncturist there mentioned that Tibetan medicine considers the tongue to be connected to the back of the heart, so I tried receiving the sacred sounds with my lolling tongue—like an open-throated baby bird with a song in the bottom of its heart reverberating with the sound of Lama’s Tibetan phonemes.

Since then I’ve been experimenting with grokking art objects and performances this way, just kind of hanging out with and corresponding to them. It seems to help remind me that everything is exactly as it should be, if you slow down enough to notice.

I’ve learned a distinction between judicious criticism and judgmental criticism, as defined by Thanissaro Bhikkhu, who has written: “So how do you know if your criticism is going to be judicious? Ask yourself four questions before you say it:

• Is it true?
• Is it beneficial?
• Is this the right time and place to say it?
• Am I the right person to be saying it?”

I’m not clear who receives this benefit. I’ll be working that out as my writing gets read again and people send me death threats or marriage proposals. Is criticism “for” the reader, me, other people who saw the thing I’m criticizing, the object I’m criticizing, or its maker?

I used to categorize my interaction with the world as expression and relationship. Now I prefer the words response and connection.

Brenda Dixon Gottschild said something once, and I’ve paraphrased her many times in trying to understand the role of a person who writes about art and who wants that writing to be considered art: “Criticism is a response to a primary source, a kind of choreography for the page.” I would go further. I want to make friends with the performers in this hard-copy choreography of mine. The elements of personal memory, the absorbed knowledge of history and context and nomenclature, the goddam canon, the images that come unbidden—Joni Mitchell’s lyrics or Tenniel’s Alice illustrations, Plath Sexton Giorno, budding virions, sluts, slatterns, the performance of gender as an imitation for which there is no original (thank you Judith Butler), the ersatz stream-of-consciousness, my ongoing unflinching gaze at despair.

Who am I ideally writing for, other than myself, because I’m fond of the flatulent sound of my precious voice? I’d like to speak to and for the Queers, the fatties and pizza faces, the wallflowers, the Ichabods, the disease-riddled whores with hearts of gold, the androgynes with bird-like wrists, the flatsies, the tomboys, the unseen, the unclean, the doomed the damned the dead.

In other words, the people David Gere referred to, in his book How to Make Dances in an Epidemic, as “women, freaks, and marginalized others.”

So that’s it. What am I hoping to do? How am I hoping to do it? And who is it for? As Chiang Kai-shek said to Henry Kissinger, when asked what impact the Napoleonic Wars had had on world events, “It’s too soon to tell.”

Now the solo is archived online. See this link:

subject_part1.mov

So I watched it again, and I interpreted my original notes, and I’m throwing these few words together. In the present tense:

Some time ago, the legend Yvonne Rainer wrote: “no to transformations and magic and make-believe no to the glamour and transcendence of the star image.”

Megan Bridge, bombshell provocateur, assimilates this wisdom, yet flaunts its precepts. In her solo, “Subject: Part One,” she inhabits, mimics, and rifles through echoes of feminist, post-feminist, and anti-feminist icons—from Jane Russell to Carolee Schneeman—mashed up against Talking Heads lyrics and classic disco.

Her subject is the abundantly female self, its objectification, transformation, transmutation, and transubstantiation: a screen upon which a multitude of personae can be projected. She shifts on a dime from flirt to crone, as she melts into an emotionally fraught elder for whom diamonds are no longer a best friend. She ends as a helmeted spelunker, perhaps in the cave of her own heart.

Bridge and her collaborator, digital artist Peter Prince, strut through contemporary interdisciplinary forms and tropes with fertile footsteps.

If I was trapped in the rigid format of journalistic review, I’d need to end there on a snappy, sappy nut graf or some shit. That’s all I have to say really and I ain’t framing it. Bridge is a gifted performer and she’s had the great good fortune of finding a collaborator who can enhance her ideas and melt them into his own for a cohesive “third mind” whole.

I have a few things to say in response to the review linked above.

1. Robert Ellis Dunn, one of the most important and brilliant dance thinkers of the past hundred years, always advised students (I paraphrase): “Watch the dance you’re watching, not the one in your imagination that you wish it was.” So: I wasn’t intending to or wanting to do mime. Gestural or pedestrian or vernacular (plain, everyday, ordinary) movement does not want to be and is not mime.
2. For Mr Abelman: You might not want to mask your inability to grok an unfamiliar form with cruelty. Yes, some of the best-paid critics in America write with poisoned pens, and yes, snappy one-liners and witty bon mots are seductive. But. Please consider if that is the kind of critic you want to become.
3. I believe that “modern” dance stopped being created around 1962 or so, when the postmodern moment reached its tipping point. We are now past that as well, into what I call non-canonical post-historicism.
4. I actually see myself more as Fatty Arbuckle than WC Fields.

Looks like I’m finally entering the clogosphere. Or as the guy from Arts Journal, Doug McLennan, might say, “creating a Web presence.” I’m not convinced that anyone will find what I plan to write in this space worth reading: observations about what I see or do or make and observations about how I absorb and process what I see or do or make.