Danspace Project

I work at an office, and my movement will emerge when I walk down a private stairway or sometimes in the bathroom. Occasionally when I think I’m alone I’ll get caught in the act of a sweeping movement and I’ll try to transition to a benign looking stretch to disguise it. To me, madness in work can be perceived as a distance between a reality of the imagination and what others are willing to acknowledge or consider. I embrace the moments of awkwardness or danger in an idea being revealed: evocative shapes, a tone of the body that supports or contradicts some emotional resonance, or sensuality that is supple and then tense.”

On wit and absurdity as strategies:

“I follow ideas earnestly and try to be committed to them fully. Juxtapositions emerge that I find funny, but the work usually arrives at those moments organically. I do try to be cognizant of the moments that strike me as absurd or silly and then push them to see how the new angles inform an action.”

On transformation:

“I aim to move between physical manifestations and more abstract ideas and concepts, such as building an architecture of gestures that evaporates or shifts into something more energetic or emotional in the body. I find durational change compelling—I like the game of seeing something, identifying it, and then watching repetition re-define an intention or a physical identity.”

Catch Schlichting’s nationally-touring work Stripe Tease, “a dance, crafted from the elegant layering of patterns and shapes in space, like a pen-and-ink drawing sketched in real time" (Washington Post) this Thursday-Saturday at Danspace!

His partner in real life, my old friend Mika Kurosawa, is revered as the “Godmother of Japanese Contemporary Dance.” I met Mika in 1996 at a dance festival in Korea. She presented her solo dance which remains in me as one of the best solo performances I have ever encountered.  

For me Mika’s presence in Hangman Takuzo’s life actually grounds it to the weight of the human body, both viscerally and psychologically, in contrast to Takuzo, a man whose nature prefers to float. The movie is a simple love story of a man and a woman, showing the strong bond between two people cemented through body and expression.

In addition, Namiko Kawamura, a 74-year old performance artist joins the two. Active in the Japanese underground since 1974, her outdoor performance art is known as “Zenshin-hoko” and translates into English as “walking forward naked.” She has performed outside by the sea, inside a gymnasium and journeyed into a variety of natural settings over the course of 35 years. The act of being naked in public is synonymous with contemporary art in Japan and an easy way to provoke or appear to be taking a risk. The significance of Namiko Kawamura’s nudity is her deep deliberation and consciousness.

The film was shot on location on Osaki Island in Japan. The island is located off the coast of Takehara city in Hiroshima where I was born. Osaki Island has always been a special place for me. One reason is that my mother was born and grew up on this island; the other is that my grandfather, two uncles and one aunt disappeared into the Setouchi Sea off the coast of the Osaki Island during a boating accident half a century ago.

Twice a year on Buddhist holidays, we visit Osaki island by ferry to pay our respects at the empty family tomb; their bodies were never discovered. A small old house where my grandparents once lived remains. There’s a small garden attached to the house where several lemon and tangerine trees stand tall and strong. Every spring, the entire garden turns yellow, and in winter bright orange, all under the beautiful sunlight reflecting off the Setouchi Sea. Incidentally, this is the same sea that Yasujiro Ozu once adored while filming “Tokyo Story.”

The Japanese glass doors facing the garden of my grandparents’ house trace the transformation of a magical play of shadows throughout the day. I chose this location for making the film precisely for its cinematic beauty.

After bringing these three idiosyncratic and extraordinary artists to Osaki Island, we filmed indoors, outside the house, in the garden, on the beach, and in the bamboo bush. Shooting took place in January and May 2010 in Tokyo and in April 2010 in Hiroshima. The images capture the naked and powerful presence of the performers, against the backdrop of the island’s landscape and the architecture of the house.

The film “Hangman Takuzo” will be screened in its entirety on September 27 as part of Cathy Weis Projects’ Sundays on Broadway series.

8. I had all these ideas about female ballet dancers becoming creators … this didn’t exactly happen in the way I envisioned it, but when Emily Coates said, I think at the closing conversation, that the work she made for this Platform was her first as a solo maker (I think that’s right, am I imagining that?) … this felt perfect. A gift.

9. I’m sorry that this is so sentimental and also I’m not sorry at all.

10. I wasn’t prepared for how exhausting it is to hold the accountable yet neutral ground of a curator. It gave me new appreciation for how protected writers are, what is both vital and dangerous about that.

11. I got to watch Yvonne Rainer teach Trio A. As a sub. She couldn’t remember certain parts of it; this felt right. She’s had other things on her mind since then.

12. Pam’s day felt like candy.

13. The magic of Yve Laris Cohen and Perry Silvey and D’ANSER 

14. Yvonne walking out. The electricity of that.

15. I think those who felt Kaitlyn Gilliland and Will Rawls “didn’t dance enough” misunderstand language entirely. And dance.

16. Sterling Hyltin, Sara Mearns, Jodi Melnick, and Rashaun Mitchell making something together, and yet what I remember most are the ineluctable (that isn’t quite the right word, but I love how it sounds) moments of each alone.

17. Jillia Peña and Troy Schumacher still debating in Porsena …

18. I am impressed by David Hallberg’s courage.

19. How a curator feels she must say something about everyone (a different sort of global view?); how a critic doesn’t. What is important, crucial, about both of those stances. Everything in its place.

20. You can never say something about everyone.

21. That final exhausted toast with the Danspace gals in the back room.

22. Those early heady and awkward meetings, trying to get everyone in one room and not quite knowing what to do once that happened.

23. The catalogue!

24. Whatever I am forgetting that I will remember and regret not saying as soon as this is published.

25. The closing party. The East Village on fire, actually. Dancers, bodies, people in the streets.

Claudia La Rocco is the author of THE BEST MOST USELESS DRESS (Badlands Unlimited, 2014), a selected writings encompassing poetry, criticism and performance texts. An ARTFORUM columnist and professor at the School of Visual Arts’ graduate program in Art Criticism and Writing, her work frequently revolves around interdisciplinary collaborations and performances.

It started first with a reading of Edwin Denby’s poems. Denby as a source of inspiration, the way he looked at the dance (title of one of his books): I was transported. I read Denby’s dance writings such as “Notes on Nijinsky Photographs.” I knew the photos well and Denby’s lines about Nijinsky’s expressive neck were like a movie camera going down the arm, circling the torso, then around the thighs…awesome and erotic.

The affiliations suggested by Claudia La Rocco, Balanchine-Cunningham-Judson were clear throughout the series while the downtown/uptown route was fortunately blurry avoiding any preconceptions of the work. The door was open for thoughts and imagination.

I experienced traveling through time, through memories and strongly felt reverence for all the people, these people, altogether who made and who make history.

I attended three Dance Dialogues and one workshop and nicknamed them based on what I experienced:

First: Solitude and the Possibility of Being Second: Night, Sun, and Earthquake Third: Reverence Fourth: Unpredictability

February 19th - DANCE DIALOGUE I

Four highly trained dancers and solitude.

#loveyoumeanit, parts I and II or a courtship dance, or better, a written courteous exchange between Kaitlyn Gilliland, an ex-NYC Ballet dancer using emoji ideograms abundantly to express herself, whimsical, looking for love, obsessed, and Will Rawls, a downtown performer and artist, good-natured, relaxed. They are both muses to each other; they play to each other and it is amusing to us. Amidst their games I see solitude.

The second dance without title pairs Silas Riener, dancer, choreographer (and ex-Cunningham company member), with Adrian Danchig-Waring, from the NYC Ballet, the later only visible on a film dancing with Silas in an identical pas de deux; Silas instead is well present and enters the stage as a virtuosic interpreter, one immediately notices his one-piece too large costume, a bit like a student uniform, the top beige with a hood, the bottom black -- by the costume designer Reid Bartelme -- in the series of movement perfectly and playfully executed, there is a vague reminiscence of Cunningham. One can trace a mischievous light in him preparing us for what is next: getting rid of his student costume, the dancer appears dressed in a bathing suit whose top ends below the breast with blue, grey, green patterns, long dreadlocks and a headset; one looks puzzled as the dancer reveals his body and his feminine traits. The quality of the movements changes, becoming more sensual. “It is me” he seems to say. “It is me.”

Solitude, One and Unique: Possible.

March 5, 2015 - DANCE DIALOGUE II

He and she embrace each other, and fall on the floor -- death She poisons herself and dies -- Juliette She jumps at his neck, he and she embrace each other, fall on the floor – death She runs and falls on the floor, drops dead – lost love

This is a strong introduction for and with dancers who, as in the first dialogue, definitely know something about movement and acting. The evening features drama with subtlety and play.

Then follows a duet between Jodi Melnick and Sterling Hyltin – duration 7-ish minutes says the program. They are both delicate and sensitive. I don’t see much in their dances, it seems they both stay very close to what their bodies know and have experienced, but watching Sterling‘s long arms is captivating and troubling; they are not exactly graceful, but they are dramatic, carrying emotions. With Jodi, it is more her feet and fingers, they seem fragile contrasting with the darkness in her body but they create immediate connection, like invisible vibrations.

Something that kept on running through my mind while watching them was that they almost look alike one smaller than the other; the anxiety in their faces and tiny, piercing eyes are striking.

What attracted Claudia La Rocco in pairing these two women, what did she see? I asked myself, did she see what I saw: their dramatic bodies.

The two other dancers were Sara Mearns and Rashaun Mitchell. If Jodi and Sterling are like the light in the night, Rashaun and Sara are like the fire under a bright sun. No boundaries here. They are both such a force. All St. Mark’s church’s walls were melting.

There is an interesting duet again when Sterling is teaching Jodi an excerpt of La Sonnambula based upon a text by Allegra Kent. This is a funny part, with Jodi letting herself loose, with enough abandon and control to make us laugh.

The four are reunited for a game of chance that no one will take seriously with short moments of dance in different corners of St. Mark’s, punctuated with readings of James Waring. Reverence in the church.

Then a series of duets and solos, unleashed, follows ending with Rashaun with four (was it five?) chairs entangled in between his arms, neck and legs – the dance people certainly make a connection with the Cunningham’s solo with a chair. Rashaun carries the chairs that obviously obstruct him but doesn’t prevent him from moving from up to down. It is the sorcerer’s dance. Sara has a solo too. Wild: she turns, kicks her legs up and up, bends, curves. I may be wrong but I feel her shy even through her smile.

Night, Sun, and Earthquake.

I enjoyed tremendously seeing these immensely talented artists performing.

A question kept on running in my mind: what could and would dancers do with such intelligent and skilled bodies?

There are many answers to this question as these dialogues proved it.

My interrogation (if not a quest) had one clear answer with Incarnations (Sketches for A Longer Work), a duet between the dancer Emily Coates and the physicist Sarah Demers.

March 21st – DANCE DIALOGUE III

Emily Coates, pregnant, explores Newton’s laws and Einstein’s theory of relativity with the particle physicist Sarah Demers, first through the practice of the ballet fourth position re-imagined by Balanchine, then through the choreography Apollo by Balanchine, based on the interpretation of the dancer Jacques D’Amboise.

The work is brilliant and captivating. Physics and Dance: the precision in the details, the description of the body placement, the gravity and the weight, and the cleverness and brilliance reminded me of Denby’s descriptions in “Notes on Nijinsky Photographs”.

The second one between Jillian Peña, a media artist and Troy Schumacher, a dancer at NYC Ballet and choreographer, was like a couple quarreling about prejudices about uptown and downtown dance: Jillian fierce, and Troy, sticking to what he knows: how to make a dance. They create a dance interpreted by Cassie Mey and Kaitlyn Gilliland – two powerful ballet dancers – it is well composed; they did work together, but it remained polite.

The third pair of that evening was Yve Laris Cohen and D’Anser, present in the dismantling of an entire wooden floor set in St. Mark’s Church -- I learned from the program that D’Anser is the touring sub-floor for the NYC Ballet. Thinking of the floor supporting generations of bodies jumping, gliding, and tap dancing, one pays homage to the craft behind it (the program says that the floor is sprung with a basketweave of wooden battens).

Reverence.

March 13th and 20th: YVONNE RAINER’s TRIO A WORKSHOP

Pedestrian qualities and memories of dance.

To learn and experience Rainer’s Trio A (from The Mind is a Muscle) from Emily Coates, then from Yvonne herself was a challenging moment.

Weight down, attention up! Open your mind!

The movements look simple. The pedestrian qualities look simple. However it is all but simple.

Right leg in front of the left with the right foot turned in, clinched fist, eyes looking the other way from the direction of the turned-in foot. My body, my brain, wants to do the exact opposite. I insist on doing it, surprised by the many associations with dance styles passing through the movements: an arabesque with a soft touch of the wrist on the forehead, elbow down, reminds me of a ballet movement. Hands clutched in front of the chest, one leg up, and it is Martha Graham. A straight line of the arm, an extended leg, and Merce pops up. An inward foot, the eyes the other way, and it is The Rite of Spring by Nijinsky. The history of dance is running through my mind while I wonder about the complexities of the many directions of the phrase.

Surrounded by high school and college students, and some professional dancers, I cannot do it; I try counting. No, it doesn’t work. I need more time; a bit choked by my weakness, some anxious thoughts about aging, about memory loss, cross my mind.

Yvonne, she was doing it, rolling on the floor, explaining the direction.

As Yvonne herself said, she composed the combination while questioning narcissism, frontal dance -- the norm either in Ballet or in modern dance -- eliminating any specific stories, a kind of minimalism, fundamental concepts that are still influencing many artists today.

The many directions remained extremely difficult for me to apprehend, and I asked her: why? She answered: to go against predictability!

Yvonne’s answer is now engraved in my memory.

Nicole Birmann Bloom works as Program Officer, Performing Arts, at the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York.

Iris became a professional ballet dancer, and later studied German Expressionism; she was in Dore Hoyer’s dance company. A comprehensive study of those traditions took her deep into experimentation. Her most provocative work was presented at the revolutionary Instituto Di Tella in Buenos Aires (in the late ‘60s early ‘70s) and she had an international career as a solo dance maker. It is said she had to leave the country during the dictatorship because her work was not only artistically daring but also a denunciatory account of the time.

There was much necessary discussion about the economic division in our dance world(s) during the Danspace Platform, yet we are all so privileged in different ways. Even Iris, she spent 8 hours a day in her studio/home making work. She taught and made work without a sprung floor, in her living room. It was a small living room; we had to move all the furniture before and after rehearsals. The good thing about being in a living room (surrounded by books) is that we could stop and read poetry. Iris was in close contact with great writers of her time in Argentina, she was a muse to them. And she was a poet herself, she spent the last ten years of her life only writing. I remember reading a lot of women poets; Alejandra Pizarnik immediately comes to mind.

The multiplicity of Iris’s practice: What she called the outer line and the inner line, the importance of how things are done in spite of the aesthetics involved in making choices. In a way, honoring the dancer as a maker. The work the dancer does within the work. (Something I also remember former Cunningham dancer, Frederic Gafner-Foofwa d'Immobilite talk about). For Iris there was an active place, the interior of a work, the invisible part of the work that manifests the outer.

Somehow during the Platform I saw more the dancer than the work/dialogue being shown. Maybe what I saw was the dancer at work, the beauty of that. And that brought a lot of interesting questions about dancers as makers. Also how we still have certain hierarchies at play in that regard. It seems choreographers are regarded and treated as sole authors most of the time.

The multiplicity of Iris’ practice also included teaching, and she was extremely generous, there was no money involved. Teaching was another interesting aspect in the Platform—what Judy Hussie-Taylor called the pedagogical spine. I often think of how little time we spend honoring teachers: it is kind of embarrassing. Teaching is an enormous source of transmission in dance, and perhaps, I dare to say, has a greater impact on the form than performance.

“You are a dancer if you can dance for a tree”, Iris said. I think this statement meant different things. The caliber of one’s commitment to work regardless of being seen or acknowledged in any way. It was also a message of her profound respect for what is not human, a different kind of devotion.

I wonder where these experiments would have gone if there had not been an audience, a formal audience. A question I would like to contemplate, though I truly appreciated being there and thinking about all these things in the presence/absence of Iris.

Jean Butler:

At dance talks I tend to take endless notes, writing down every poignant utterance, capturing the words of others in ink, making thoughts permanent. Documenting, for myself. To read these notes after the event, on the subway home perhaps, or months later as I trawl through the thousands notebooks that contain sometimes undecipherable script, I continue to be inspired. But that is only part of the reason for my note taking, my notebook filling compulsion. 

Truth be told, the majority of the time I am afraid of missing out, of forgetting something important, or beautifully stated, or both. Afraid that if I do no write it down I will not remember it. I love to listen to dancers talk about their work, where it comes from, why and how it happens. I love to feel the moment when the light bulb goes on and I think- “I know how you feel, I know what you are talking about.” I belong. 

On Friday February 13, I entered Danspace for Silas Riener’s workshop and in honor of Cunningham, decided to abandon my notebook. Whatever I would write as a Respondent to Claudia LaRocco’s Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets Platform would be left entirely to chance. Over the course of the platform I attended Riener ‘s Cunningham workshop; the opening Conversations without Walls; Dance Dialogues: Kaitlyn Gilliland and Will Rawls, Silas Riener and Adrian Danchig-Waring; Kaitlyn Gilliland’s Serenade workshop; and Dance Dialogues: Sterling Hyltin, Jodi Melnick, Sara Mearns and Rashaun Mitchell. 

So what didn’t I write down? And what do I remember? 

Many things of course, but the one that sticks with me is Adrian Danchig-Waring’s remark about ‘dancing with ghosts.’ Having never met his movement master, Balanchine, Adrian talked about being part of his legacy, an interpreter of an interpretation of something Balanchine thought and made. But Balanchine is dead, as we know. And Adrian never met him. Neither did Kaitlyn whose workshop on Balanchine’s Serenade was so beautiful, so honest, and so generous. So moved by a particular part of the music, Kaitlyn cried repeatedly every time it played, and I thought of the little deaths that occur every time a dance happens to never happen again. The idea of Balanchine’s ghost haunting the company stays with me. The legacy of Merce Cunningham and the profound insights into his work revealed by Silas, in what was essentially a private class, hang in my mind. 

The question of legacy, of masters, of absence and inspiration stays with me. 

Who are my dance ghosts then? Four people came to mind, some of which were taught by my dancing master, teacher Donny Golden. Stephen Gallagher, Laura Kelly, Winiford Horan and Frieda Gray. Dancers, great dancers in the tradition of Irish Step Dance, unknown to most who will ever read this post. The most important difference between Adrian’s ghost and mine though, is that all my ghosts are alive.

When I was a young girl going to Irish step dance classes 5 days a week in Long Island, Brooklyn and the Bronx these 4 dancers were talked about in hushed tones, as if having witnessed their dancing was such a remarkable, life-altering experience to talk about it could only be done in the quiet tones of a haunting. These dancers, all one and two generations older then me, had finished dancing. Quit with nowhere else to go. No record, home video, documentary footage existed of their performances, their achievements. How they danced would always be a figment of my imagination. I would never know, but I wanted to dance like them, be talked about like them. I wanted to haunt someone someday. 

When I finally met and befriended a few of my ghosts years later I thanked them for being these immortal role models of my youth. Though completely unaware and utterly modest about the impact their dancing has had on generations after them, these friends, these supernatural gods and goddesses turned humans, will always have a slight glow, an aura around them that lingers. 

It was the not seeing and the not knowing that was the thing. I had to imagine how they moved and what moved them to move an audience. 

Balanchine, Cunningham, The Judson Dance Theatre and Edwin Denby. I did not know these names growing up. Having come from an entirely different and segregated traditional dance world, I did not know some of these masters until relatively recently. So, in some ways they are double ghosts to me. But I can see their work, their impact, and their legacy. And that feels very, very real.

Born in Buenos Aires, Jimena Paz is a dancer, teacher and choreographer.

Dancer and Choreographer Jean Butler is Professor of Irish Studies at NYU who’s work bridges the gap between a culturally specific practice and a contemporary approach to dance-making.

The two postmodernists maintained the impassive facial expressions of the Cunningham-trained dancer, while the ballerinas were prone to a wide range of affects, from classic finger positions to the dramatic yearnings, aches, and aspirations of romantic ballet, manifest not only in the face — Hyltin’s silent impassioned appeal to an audience member, for instance, morphing into an expression of tragic despair familiar in 18th and early 19th century paintings — but in the slow motion expansions of arms and upper torsos, especially apparent in the almost too exquisite back archings of Mearns. Thus, on the one hand, Melnick’s or Mitchell’s landings on the floor could be described simply as that, whereas I read the ballerinas’ landings as “collapse”, “swoon,” or “romantic death”, the latter indicated in the program but more fully enacted by the ballet dancers. (I admit to the possibility of an overly subjective projection in this regard on my part.) Another instance of difference was revealed in a duet by Melnick and Hyltin that entailed an unusual moment of unison in which they executed some shuffling ronde de jambe steps with arms held high. In other respects I must commend the postmodernists for having been able to hold their own in the many classical references to Balanchine no less than to their own Cunningham heritage. 

The program contained some hilarious folderols. Melnick loosens her hair and begins a somnambulistic walk with arms stretched ahead of her a la Allegra Kent in Balanchine’s La Sonnambula while Hyltin reads instructions for proper interpretation, ordering her to express “a sense of danger”, a “haunting” and to “bump into him.” Melnick, doing her exaggerated best to comply, juts a hip, the whole of the exercise eliciting much laughter from the audience, including me. Later, Mitchell struggles Laocoon-like with four chairs that his colleagues have piled onto him, this time alluding to Cunningham’s solo with the chair strapped to his back, also to subsequent work with chairs by members of the Grand Union. In fact, a few of this group’s antics reminded me of some of the best GU bits.

I’ll skip over the chance procedure involving the rolling of a big soft die to determine which pair was to do what where, a playful game that demonstrated yet another performance mode — obviously indebted to Cunningham/Cage — one among many that the foursome cheerfully mustered throughout the evening. 

A culminating solo by Mitchell to the music of Azealia Banks blew me away. I have been accustomed to saying that I don’t care for improvisation because it usually gives rise to uninteresting personal habits and clichés. (Not that I am averse to clichés per se; depending on context and use some are more interesting than others.) Solo dancing is especially risky. However, in this case Mitchell seemed acutely attuned to the risk. His movement phrases — full of reversals of vertical and horizontal directions in space, changes of tempo, precarious balances in quick succession giving way to pedestrian energy or an unforeseen hurtling across the room followed by crawling behind seats — flummoxed any notion I may have entertained about the predictability of improvisation. At the end, as he calmly walked off, I almost applauded, but when no one else did, resisted the impulse. 

The evening ended as the four wunderkinds sat in a rectangle of chairs and looked at each other. Fade to black. The audience responded with an ovation. Someone I spoke to afterwards found the program too sketchy. To which I responded, “So was vaudeville.”

Excerpts from “Dance Adjectives” by Emmanuel Iduma

...She had gathered herself in a pose and her body was unmoving, only the blinking of her eyes and the rise and fall of her diaphragm. People walked in while she lay there; some checked their watches when they saw her. Had the performance began? A body had been incised in the middle of the room, a calming image.

Yet I had to labor toward calm. When I saw Melnick’s body on the floor, my mind made frightening associations. Even now I am not clear why I fought persisting gloom, or whether the afterimage I conjured was from a story or a photograph—but it was there, bodies piled on bodies, bodies expelled in the dark, felled by hunger or the harsh desert wind, waiting for the end to come. Days later, still confounded, I found a poem by Yvonne Rainer, “1977.” [1]

I dreamed of bodies burning at the edges When I awoke my belly was cold as an abandoned stove The streets were cleared, trees bent The air so still, as though just inhaled When next I noticed it was spring

...Watching their “8 unfinished dances,” when the dancers walked about the room with the confidence of property owners, I thought the best moments were those when their gestures would become similar, one arched elbow imitating the other, or feet strutting at the same time. These dances, without middles or ends, seemed almost like the gyrating fits of fraternal worshippers; spread-out on a rostrum, hoping to reach ecstasy through enthusiasm and fervor. 

Yvonne Rainer, co-founding member of the Judson Dance Theater, made a transition to filmmaking following a 15-year career as a choreographer/ dancer (1960-1975). After making seven experimental feature films - Lives of Performers (1972), Privilege (1990), MURDER and murder (1996), among others - she returned to dance in 2000 via a commission from the Baryshnikov Dance Foundation for the White Oak Dance Project. Her dances since then include AG Indexical, with a little help from H.M., RoS Indexical, a Performa 07 commission, Spiraling Down, andAssisted Living: Good Sports 2. Her dances and films have been shown worldwide. A memoir - Feelings Are Facts: a Life - was published by MIT Press in 2006. Rainer has received numerous awards and fellowships, including two Guggenheim Fellowships, two Rockefeller grants, a Wexner Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship.  A selection of her poetry was published in 2011 by Paul Chan’s Badlands Unlimited.

Born and raised in Nigeria, Danspace’s Platform 2015 Writer in Residence Emmanuel Iduma is a writer of fiction & art criticism.

Seated on opposite sides of a small table and reading from scripts, the two charmers at first seemed like the outcome of an on-line dating service. Had Claudia “set them up” with more in mind than a choreographic collaboration? Had they been too busy to meet in the flesh, thus enabling them to fantasize a love or sex relationship risk-free in the remove of cyberspace? The suggestive and at times frivolous dialogue was formalized by frequent use of the term “hash tag.” Since I don’t twitter or tweet (but can only whimper plaintively from my octogenarian heights), much of the neologizing sailed over my head. Nevertheless, I could appreciate the play-acting aspect of the proceedings, which transformed them into ironic, cranky characters — she no-nonsense arch, he glib. Eventually Gilliland states “We should talk about race and gender and love.” Anyone waiting for serious dialogue on these matters would have been disappointed. It never went further than that, as far as I could tell. 

In the second half of part 1 they leave the table and Gilliland offers words — like doughnut, 5-year process, big stretch, eye contact, riding the 1 train, etc. — which Rawls interprets or demonstrates in wide-ranging movements. Returning to their scripts, I heard from her “…slightly racist” and his response, “Do you feel racist?” Again, the theme was not explored, charged as it seemed in the context of this interracial pairing. 

Next came Silas Riener and Adrian Danchig-Waring’s research, beginning with an upstage projection, mostly in long shot, of the two of them working on Agon. The rest of the space was taken up with a long solo by Riener, first costumed in a somewhat baggy all-in-one, later stripped away to reveal a sexy, geometrically patterned tube, the top part of which ended below his hairy chest, the bottom in very short shorts, what my generation used to call “hot pants” many years ago. His movements were reasonably interesting, reminiscent of his work with Cunningham in the use of balletic, fully extended legs (though Cunningham might have formalized the contrapuntal shaping of arms to a much greater degree) combined with his own quirky steps, falls, and twists. The problem was that without the presence of his live partner, who I understand was, for whatever reason, unable to be present, Riener’s solo was much too long and thus became a kind of narcissistic indulgence. (Admittedly, I have limited patience with virtuosic, show-offy solos except in the circus.) 

The program ended with #loveyoumeanit, part 2. Rawls sat apart and watched, perhaps coached, Gilliland in a series of en pointe variations that could have originated in a Pointe Class 101. At the end she called for a projection of a cartoon figure that signaled “thumbs up”, which elicited one of the infrequent laughs from the spectators. They then returned to their scripts. Prefaced with a projected title “Scenes From a Marriage, 5th Scene – the Illiterates,” Rawls and Gilliland seemed to be reading a section of the Bergman script. She wandered off and continued the dialogue from the upstairs balcony while he listed the names of saints. Somewhere in there I heard my name and that of Edwin Denby. (Should I be flattered at being included in this mysterious citing?) Rawls too ended up in the balcony. As the lights faded to black, I heard him ask, “Have you ever danced the Black Swan?” A New Age relationship, a new kind of romanticism, made fragile by technology, with a poignant ending.

The whole evening, if it could be called a failure, was certainly an honorable one. To paraphrase Jimmy Waring, “There are high class failures and low class failures.”[1] This was certainly of the high class variety. I look forward to future such failures in the series. 

[1] James Waring: “There is low class boredom and high class boredom.” I should add that I was more mystified than bored.

Excerpts from “Dance Emoji” by Emmanuel Iduma

...I sit there thinking: “I want to write in this place where distance becomes desire.”

The desire I see is the desire to read the mind of a dancing body. They are dancing through language. Watchers become listeners.

What would happen if dancers appear on stage like actors rehearsing a play—the deliberate off-handedness, a room inhabited as if without an audience. What would happen if words are passed from mouth to mouth, and while in motion they become poised and affectionate—the affection of knowing your partner first as a mind, then a body.

Listening to them I am overcome by despair. Are these friends or lovers or intimate strangers? Is intimacy collateral to dance? 

...

Desire bears distance as its shadow. How much affection is sufficient for “the best kind of fake” date, as Gilliland and Rawls call their dialogue? The desire and intimacy is embodied by Emojis, object-like characters used in electronic communication, or electronic figurines used in the Gilliland-Rawls exchange as emotional (even critical) emissaries—maybe virtual technology is the best kind of fake. 

...And the pathos I feel, a nervousness bordering on despair, is the fear that once the dialogue is staged, its intimacies fizzle into the ears of the amused audience, ungraspable.

...

In the eye of the onlooker a body arching and twisting and stretching disappears. Sometimes my eye would twitch in recollection of the near-impossible ways Riener had put his body to use. At the moment of recollection, I would feel that in a stage set in my mind a blinding light has been cast. There shadows dissemble.

This is the trick of a dancing body. It never really disappears.

Yvonne Rainer, co-founding member of the Judson Dance Theater, made a transition to filmmaking following a 15-year career as a choreographer/ dancer (1960-1975). After making seven experimental feature films - Lives of Performers (1972), Privilege (1990), MURDER and murder (1996), among others - she returned to dance in 2000 via a commission from the Baryshnikov Dance Foundation for the White Oak Dance Project. Her dances since then include AG Indexical, with a little help from H.M., RoS Indexical, a Performa 07 commission, Spiraling Down, and Assisted Living: Good Sports 2. Her dances and films have been shown worldwide. A memoir - Feelings Are Facts: a Life - was published by MIT Press in 2006. Rainer has received numerous awards and fellowships, including two Guggenheim Fellowships, two Rockefeller grants, a Wexner Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship.  A selection of her poetry was published in 2011 by Paul Chan’s Badlands Unlimited.

Born and raised in Nigeria, Danspace’s Platform 2015 Writer in Residence Emmanuel Iduma is a writer of fiction & art criticism.