raChael riggs leyVaand Valarie williams
Bridging Several Distances through Disappearance
To live for a love whose goal is to share the Impossible is both a humbling project and an exceedingly ambitious one, for it seeks to find connection only in that which is no longer there. Memory. Sight. Love.
It must involve a full seeing of the Other’s absence (the ambitious part), a seeing which also entails the acknowledgment of the Other’s presence (the humbling part). For to acknowledge the Other’s (always partial) presence is to acknowledge one’s own (always partial) absence.
— Peggy Phelan
As a way of bridging cultures, one must become somewhat of a chameleon. To become a performer embodying another’s ideal, the performer must “get out of the way” and serve as the vehicle for “becoming” the “Other.” Peggy Phelan expresses our sentiments of the importance of the dance/dancer relationship with her notion of
“disappearance,” of immersion into the movement, of “getting out of the way of the movement.” Lorry May, Director of the Anna Sokolow Foundation, offers a comple-menting view on the idea of “disappearance” while learning movement.1 She insists that the dancers never see a video of the dance while we are learning/performing the movement because she believes that once a dancer views another dancer doing the same movement, that image is stuck in the dancer’s head, and that becomes the thing that the dancer tries to emulate, not the actual movement itself. This philosophy brings forward Phelan’s idea of “disappearance,” in that the dancer disappears into the movement, and not the other way around.
Our own hope is that the movement takes over, and the performance, performer, and movement all become synthesized allowing the performer and the viewer a complete aesthetic experience. This resonates with Pia Gilbert’s idea of the aesthetic experi-ence2 wherein the performer and the audience become one through the (imagined) force field between the performer and the audience.
Focusing on the work of Sokolow, we emulated this approach, and began by teaching the phrases of Sokolow’s classic movement through various phrases learned from the score notated by Ray Cook 1967-75. We bridged the style of the 1950s contrac-tion, pristine lines, and required honesty that is the trademark of Sokolow’s work through our own bodies and imagery. The three dancers, and one understudy who were performing the work, were anxious about learning the movement due to their unfamiliarity of the style, but became masters of it through their repetition of movement during a 7-month rehearsal period and over 40 performances on mainland China and the United States. The movements that, at first, felt so foreign to their
1 May, Lorry. Personal communication, February-March, 2004.
2 Gilber, Pia. Personal communication, Juilliard, 1990.
bodies became part of them, and the dancers actually became the women in Rooms.
We became the bridges of time, teaching the work, relating the historical context and meaning of the work, and linking their own bodies to the past.
Historical Distances: Back and Forth in Time
As we moved backwards and forwards in time, from 1955 to 2014, we hosted Lorry May to coach and work with the dancers to provide even greater insight into the style and subtle nuances of the movements. We began the process with a dinner where the dancers got to know Lorry as a person, and not as a coach and the direct lineage to Sokolow, but as someone who was there to make them the best they can be in the dance they were performing. The three days of coaching that ensued were conducted in a firm and formal environment, but one that we set up as “safe” and “encourag-ing” and one in which any of the dancers were willing to attempt a new or different way of executing the movement.
The process is encapsulated in the blog post of one of the dancers, Leisa DeCarlo:
We were asked, today, to embody the narratives we had created to contextualize the movement of Sokolow’s Daydream. After perform-ing the piece once for our instructor, she questioned our motive. Our embodiment of the story had not looked genuine. Instead, it appeared forced. Deliberate. Contrived.
Immediately, as a cast, we contested. The intention was real! We had worked hard to develop and integrate the emotions within our narratives to the choreography, giving dialogue and imagery to each extension, port de bras, even the standing and sitting from the chair.
But what we, as performers, had failed to do was trust the innate emotiveness that lives within the body. Our over zealous expressions, the contorting of the curves of our mouths and squinting of our eyes had actually taken from the movement. We forced the movement into a realm of the detached and the fake. We had done the reverse.
There is a truth to the body that eludes even the face.
None of this type of honesty from the dancers, from us, and a complete trust and willingness to create in all realms, would have been possible had we not fostered an environment in which the dancers felt able to fail, and re-fail, time and again.
We modeled Elizabeth Ellsworth’s safe place of making referred to as “Transitional Space” or “Transitional Learning,” wherein the environment allows us “to get lost in oneself, to make a spontaneous gesture, to get interested in something new, to
surprise oneself, to organize bits of experience into a temporarily connected sense of self and then to allow those bits to ‘un-integrate’ so that they can be surprised by themselves and reconfigured in new ways” (61).
Building Bridges to Kinesthetic Distances
Through the staging from score process, we elicited a methodology so that the dancers could learn the technique and grow in their performance skills. Dancing repertory from score offers a valuable opportunity to kinesthetically experience dance history, wherein students learn not only through viewing video or reading about dances, but through enacting the movement within in their bodies creating a kinesthetic bridge to the past. By addressing technique and style nuances specific to 1950s modern dance, which differed to the collective training of the dancers, the students added new performance techniques and skills to their training.
Through the staging from score process, the dancers learned to negotiate the distance between their own contemporary technique training and the physicality required for Sokolow’s style of movement and expression. Certain aspects of dancing in Sokolow’s style were unfamiliar to the dancers. Affinities for particular dynamics and for spatial form presented the dancers with technique challenges. With the dancers’ contem-porary training, they preferred Free Flow and resilient Weight. In contrast, the Sokolow style requires dancers to dynamically negotiate between Strong and Light Weight, and uses much more tension and Bound Flow than the dancers were used to.
Further, the choreography highlights the visual forms and pristine lines made by the dancers’ bodies, in contrast to highlighting a body-centric sensing of motion. Finally, the dancers had to develop a trust that as they “disappeared” into the movement, the locus of expression was inside their bodies in action rather than in their faces.
Movement coaching therefore focused on training the dancers’ attention and bodies to develop strength and tension to execute the dynamics and the visual shapes.
In two phrases, the dancers bounce their centers of gravity while their upper bodies hang in space or arch side-to-side. Their resiliency was strongly pronounced at first, compromising a stable base from which their arms and torsos could move.
By focusing on Strength and tension in their upper bodies, rather than a resilient bounce, the dancers changed the focus of the movement. These moments became about the thickness of the pathways their spines and arms carved, restricting the motion of their centers of weight. In another moment, the dancers reach upward before quickly spiraling down to the floor. They completely released their bodies and fell, rather than controlling their descent and reaching the end point. Lorry, Val, and I coached the dancers to turn their attention to the beginning and ending positions as well as the pathways between them. With this newfound attention to spatial form, the dancers were able to increase the tension and Bound Flow, resulting in clearer canon form and dynamics.
Perhaps most importantly, through the staging process, the dancers discovered the potential for expressivity within their bodies, rather than through their faces.
In “Daydream,” the choreography communicates dramatic content of yearning, hopefulness, and isolation through tense reaching and gestural pathways, canon and unison relationships, and the spatial separation of the dancers on the stage. In this trio, the dancers sit isolated from one another in chairs looking outward into the audience. In canon, they reach upward, circle around, and lean onto their chairs.
They stretch upward and suddenly fall to the floor, embrace an invisible partner, and watch their hope escape their grasp. They alternate between the yearning for what is beyond their individual rooms, and facing the reality of isolation, never interacting with one another, rarely moving in unison.
Before developing the Effort and Space affinities required by Sokolow’s movement style, the dancers’ faces twisted and scrunched to express dramatic intention. The turning point came during the coaching intensive by Lorry May. Recalling, dancer Leisa Decarlo’s reflection from before, “What we, as performers, had failed to do was trust the innate emotiveness that lives within the body… There is a truth to the body that eludes even the face.” To coach the dancers into achieving physical expression, Lorry drew their attention to the overuse of their faces and encouraged them instead to trust the expression to come through their bodies.
Lorry provided further insight about choreographic and dramatic intention related to focus and space. Throughout the trio, the dancers reach upward with arms, legs, and their focus. These moments, according to Lorry represented the yearning and reach for hope, for something better. In contrast, the dancers look straight forward, often as they sit on their chairs, facing reality. Dancer Kelly Hurlburt describes her understanding of this contrast:
The movement in which your focus is forward is organic; it’s reality, whatever is on the other side of that window. You actually, genuinely press your face against that glass and see what’s on the other side. When the movement gestures upwards you are feeling that sense of hope, that potential for more in your life.
This realization about the dramatic intention of space, affected the dancers’
understanding of the choreography and their performance. This newfound mode of expression was especially present in the final moments of the trio. The dancers lean forward over the backs of their chairs as if gazing out their windows, stretch forward following their reach upward and circle their chairs before sitting and looking outward to the audience. Without involving their eyebrows or mouths, the dancers began to see what they longed for outside their windows. With great tension and control they reached forward then upward, seeing hope escape their grasp. The act of
simply looking forward as they sat down made a powerful image of the return to the reality of their isolation, three bodies in separate spaces on the stage.
Crossing the Bridge to Cultural Distances
…we are awake while other sleep, and in that wakefulness, we safeguard dreams
— Valerie Lee (King et al. 414)
The dancers learned through this methodological process, that learning is in the making, and that they learned new ways of doing while making. Thus the direct-ing from score and embodiment of movement as history become a full circle. The dancers discovered that the goal is not the end result at grasping “the right answer”
previously set by habit and history, but it is the “unmistakable, naked vulnerable look at simultaneous absorption and self-presence” (Ellsworth 16). The goal is the process.
However, within the absorption and self-presence the dancers experienced moments of “the right answer,” which helped them climb the next step towards clarity, and more ambiguity. This learning and more-learning (as opposed to re-learning) happened inside what Susanne Langer describes as the intersection of the existential- and phenomenological-learning-self, i.e., the “lived body.”
It is through these fully immersed moments that the dancers were able to work, to discover, to become, to believe that what they were doing lead them to new thought and new discoveries. Out of their new discoveries and solutions to their own self-imposed problems came more complex avenues to traverse and in which to create.
One grew out of the other, building complex roadways that intersect with others, and from those grew more building blocks for the dancers. They became so immersed in the solving, or the making, that they rarely knew what they accomplished until they stood back and reflected.
With a time span of over seven months, the dancers were able to embrace a philosoph-ical pragmatic approach to learning, and to engage in a long, ever-evolving process which allowed them to learn because they wanted to solve a problem (reaching back in time and embodying the movement), not because they wanted to use a certain type of method or find the right answer. The ability to be comfortable within the process is at the foundation of the directing from score approach, and helps our dance students learn something because it is useful to them. Our dancers learned things that were useful, that helped them solve not only creative problems, but also applied those to leading the world towards finding solutions to its problems. The transferable skill of learning how to live without anxiety, while in the learning process, will allow them to move from point A to point B in any situation in the world.
This type of learning and re-learning made it possible for our dancers to locate within themselves their own making of “Daydream” that transcended time and cultures throughout the tour of China. Through the staging from score process, the dancers experienced a bridging of distances in historical time, physical technique, and culture. The dancers’ embodiment of the movement in time allowed them to safeguard the dreams of Anna Sokolow and to safeguard their own dreams.
References
DeCarlo, Leisa. 2014. “A Truth that Eludes Even the Face.” Expanding Boundaries:
The Ohio State Dance Department Company Tour of China 2014. <https://
expandingboundariesblog.wordpress.com/2014/01/22/there-is-a-truth-to-the-body-that-eludes-even-the-face/>.
Ellsworth, Elizabeth. 2005. Places of Learning: Media, Architecture, Pedagogy. New York: Routledge.
Hurlburt, Kelly. 2014. “Scratch That.” The Performing Mind and Body. https://
hurlburt5.wordpress.com/2014/01/20/scratch-that/.
King, Toni C., Lenora Barnes-Wright, Nance E. Gibson, Lakesia D. Johnson, Valerie Lee, Betty M. Lovelace, Sonya Turner, and Durene I. Wheeler.
2002. “Andrea’s Third Shift: The Invisible Work of African-American Women in Higher Education.” This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation, edited by Gloria E. Anzaldúa, and AnaLouise Keating. New York: Routledge. 403-414.
Langer, Susanne K. 1953. Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 245.
Phelan, Peggy. 1993. “The Ontology of Performance: Representation Without Reproduction.” Unmarked: The Politics of Performance by Peggy Phelan. New York: Routledge. 146-166.
Sokolow, Anna. 1955. Rooms. Notated by Ray Cook, 1967-1975. Premiere: Anna Sokolow Dance Company, Theresa L. Kaufmann Auditorium, YM/YWHA, New York, 24 February 1955. DNB Dance ID: 506.