So not only is there the intellectual stimulation of being in grad school (I’m gettin’ me sum book larnin!), as exemplified by Bill’s visit today, there’s also the dancing side of things (a false dichotomy there between book larnin and dancing, but anyway…)  As in, I really think I’m getting a little better at this thing.  There are the incremental things, and then there have been two Moments.  Just like Bill’s visit is in itself enough to make it worth my time to have gone to grad school, likewise with these two Moments.

The first was last quarter in Abby Yager’s modern class (she danced with Trisha Brown.  Kinda nifty, don’t you think…)  It was just a moment of standing, which sounds so anti-climactic, but it wasn’t!  If you want details, let me know–I’ll give them in nauseating quantity–but suffice to say, it is a goal/hope of mine to have a moment of clarity like that again in my life.  If I’ve done it once, that means I’m capable of it, and I might be able to do it again, right?

The second was today in 8:45AM ballet.  (Yes, that’s right, 8:45AM ballet.  And I chose to take this class–it’s not required.  And I think that ballet before noon should be illegal.  Anyone smell a whiff of masochism?)  I’ve been taking class on pointe, because I like to be a spaz, which tends to make my pirouettes into a seeming petit allegro, as I hop my way out of them…  And even worse, this combination asked for an en dehors turn finishing by extending the working leg into arabesque as the standing leg plie-d.  Not my specialty.  But I would swear that what happened was I did two pirouettes, came to my final facing, stopped turning to balance on pointe for a moment, then smoothly rolled down into arabesque.  Now I know that physics says that’s not quite what happened, but it sure felt like it–and I have witnesses, too!

So two spectacular dance moments, Bill, and all my wonderful classes too.  Yes, grad school has been worth it.  But now, back to working on the midterm for the Postmodernism class.  Ack!

And why would I need to dry my chin?  Just the minor matter of sitting in the same room with William Forsythe and listening to him talk for 90 minutes…  He’s amazing, articulate, engaging, a genius, and I am reduced to grabbing a towel and saying “wow”–would that I could come up with a response as articulate and engaging, but no, it’s drool and “wow.”

Since I don’t have great stuff to say, how ’bout what he said?  He talked about the lack of dance readership–not reading about dance, but looking at a dance itself and reading its structure and narrative–having some understanding of its dialogue.  The lack of this is a problem for the future vitality and survival of the field–when his now defunct Ballet Frankfurt was being reviewed by the powers that be as to its future existence, he said that “no one came to our defense because no one knew what to defend.”  Further, that “if we are the only experts, we are not doing ourselves a favor.”

So he is working on projects to make structural elements legible, material that people can look at and see the relationships, linkages, through-lines, and so on that occur.  You can learn a bit more about it here.  As part of this structural exposition, he also made the case for the classicism of his work.  It may look wild and chaotic and unrelated to classical ballet and classicism at first, but it is built on classicism, carrying those principles into a new evolution.  He got up and gave a demonstration of this process–it took a few seconds to do, would take pages to try to explain, but it was beautifully clear, showing how he builds upon classical ballet’s concepts of geometry and interrelations of the body by taking those concepts and continuing them in a “if this, then what” sort of process.  Take my word for it, it was a wonderful and convincing demonstration.

And as for the act of performing: “You want to give people the gift of your attention–I don’t want to see Arthur Rubenstein sit don at the piano and not pay attention…I ask of my dancers that they give everything they know about the art at that moment.”  Amongst all the demands of the world, it is so easy to lose the moment, not pay attention, give less than what one can do–his talk was a wonderful reminder of our real aims.

A new day, a new quarter–after Winter quarter’s character-building experience (and I needed so much more character…) I am on to a fun and not-as-crazy Spring quarter. If only it were Spring quarter in Seattle–here’s the lovely University of Washington campus during spring:

But alas, I’m in Columbus, OH (moment of silence while I fondly remember my UW days…)

Ok, the pity party is over: one of the fun things about this quarter is continuing Labanotation, and the geek-frissons of delight the class gives me. We are centering the class around learning the Parsons Etude from the American Dance Legacy Institute. The Etude is a medley of his choreography and typical movement phrases that he put together into a 4-minute piece. It seemed like a good idea to work on when watching it on videotape, but it turns out that it’s kind of hard too–tricky how that works.

Anyway, it’s one of several pieces available from ADLI that come in a package of video, music, notation, performance rights and so on for $100 or less. I can’t give ADLI enough praise for making accessible the work of choreographers like Jose Limon and Donald McKayle–no huge fee, no special permissions needed, just buy the package and start dancing! A lot of people talk plaintively about the need to preserve dance’s past, and bemoan the lack of historical knowledge on the part of today’s dance students–but ADLI is actually doing something about it. I wish there were more efforts like this in the dance world, but we tend to be such control freaks that the idea of letting choreography go out into the wide world without supervision tends to freak us out. At least it’s a start! Through ADLI, dance students are getting first-hand experience of wonderful works and choreographers, and even if they aren’t performing the pieces like professional dancers would, the sky hasn’t fallen… Dare I suggest that more choreographers/holders-of-a-choreographer’s-copyright take this example as impetus to get over their own preciousness and just get their work out there?!

(But meanwhile I am grumpy about having to hold that balance for counts 4-5-6. Mean ol’ David Parsons!)

Ok, this is it for the moment. Another paper from Karen Eliot’s history class. It has a bibliography AND footnotes–I’m in grad school folks!

(I’d love to hear comments on any of these papers–and feel free to post up fabulous inspiring writings!)

Paul Taylor’s Esplanade: Illuminatory Locomotion[1]

The history of dance during the 20^th century in America is a fascinating story of questioning and experimentation. Early in the century, pioneers such as Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham questioned the supposed artificialness of ballet, and experimented with creating new ways of moving, in the process establishing the field of modern dance. As the century progressed, so did this process of questioning and experimentation, within ballet and modern dance both. But while the field’s practitioners might differ from their predecessors in methods, aesthetic values, movement vocabulary, and so on, successive generations of artists did not essentially differ from each other in their base worldview. That dance movement was another sort of movement, elevated beyond the movements of everyday life even if sometimes echoing them, was an unquestioned assumption.

Until the 1960’s. During that decade, artists in all genres were challenging the status quo and their art form’s boundaries, just as the counterculture was challenging the powers-that-be in the civil rights and anti-war protests. In the field of dance, artists started wondering why only certain kinds of movements were sanctioned as acceptable, and others, such as quotidian, pedestrian activities, were written off—after all, if dance’s material was movement, why not make use of all movement? These experimenters changed their question from “What is dance?” to “What isn’t?” (Reynolds 398). The dance that emerged from this new perspective went many different directions, but could still be loosely grouped together, and came to be known under the rubric of “Postmodern Dance.” If it could be characterized in its diversity, it was characterized by its rejection of codified dance technique and the “preening” look of virtuoso dancing, instead embracing the idea that any kind of activity could be dance just by deciding to view it that way (Reynolds 401). Arts audiences usually take time to adjust to and accept new developments, and postmodern dance was no exception. Though the ideas behind postmodern dance were democratizing and inclusive, open to any sort of movement, and open to both trained and untrained bodies as performers, in terms of its audience it tended to be narrower and more ingrown than the “elitist” dance it was challenging. Audiences didn’t immediately gravitate to the idea that they should go to a performance to see things they could see on the street or at home in their everyday lives. Many wanted the virtuoso spectacle of more traditional concert dance, and postmodern dance tended to stay within a small artistic and intellectual circle of people. But even if its audiences weren’t large, postmodern dance’s ideas persisted and percolated widely out into the field.

Paul Taylor’s dance Esplanade was born into this heady fermentation of ideas in 1975. Depending on one’s perspective, the work could be described as a bridge between the old and the new, a mix of the traditional and the postmodern dance worlds, or it could be rejected by each of those worlds as none of the above. Whatever category it belongs to, it is acclaimed as one of the classics of 20^th century dance, and continues to be performed and admired today. The most immediately striking aspect of the piece is that it is composed of everyday movements such as walking, running, skipping, falling, and reaching out to another person. But how they are performed! In our everyday movements, we might only wish to be able to walk, run, and skip like this. It is like comparing a pick-up game of touch football to the NFL. The postmoderns introduced everyday movements as a subject of dance in rejection of specialized virtuosic movement, and Esplanade turns that equation on its head by making the everyday into virtuoso movement.

Esplanade is performed to music of Bach: the three movements of his Violin Concerto #2 in E major, followed by the second and third movements of the Concerto for Two Violins in D minor.[2] The music, combined with the presentational aspect of the choreography and the standard proscenium stage setting that it was made for, serve to tie Esplanade to the modern concert dance tradition, and this is part of what makes the pedestrianness of its movement surprising. When it debuted, even noted dance critics didn’t know what to make of it, confounded by the dancers doing such things as even crawling (!) in a situation without the cues of a postmodern performance (Dunning). Anna Kisselgoff, in her New York Times review of the première, said of it: “Esplanade is the kind of dance work – if it is a dance work – that has never been seen before” (Dunning). On the other hand, Arlene Croce wrote in The New Yorker “when I left the Lyceum Theatre…I wasn’t thinking, How beautifully minimal! I was thinking that I’d seen a classic of American dance.” (123-4)

If you have ever started out down the street only to turn back in midstep for some forgotten but crucial item, you have performed the opening choreography. This sort of walking with crisp, surprising changes of direction is how eight dancers begin the piece. Each walks with a sprightly bounce, echoing the bright music, not out of line with how anyone might approach an outing on a refreshing spring day. Their walking paths, however, weave cleanly through each other, making geometrical formations and melting in and out of symmetry. They appear both spontaneous and organized, familiar and distant—no sidewalk has ever looked like this, no matter now cheery the weather. Additionally, the dancers move with a surety, clarity, and freedom that make you think “they aren’t just walking, they’re Walking.”

As the dance progresses, it continues to throw revelatory highlighting on the possible eloquence and expressiveness of movements we might take for granted. In the somber second section, the dancers create images of isolation and sorrow through simple gestures and glances. One part that sticks out in my mind is when two women perform the same steps at the same time, right next to each other, but seemingly without seeing each other. It is as if each woman has a person nearby who understands what she is going through, and could help her through it, but she is so shut off by her experience that she is unable to see beyond it. Their gestures and postures draw you in by their familiarity, while the choreographic use of sustained unison movement—not a familiar occurrence in everyday life—heightens the effect of the women’s gestures beyond the everyday. This image of being shut off from nearby people recurs later in the section. Several women enter in a group, walking simply and pausing individually to crouch down to touch the floor with their hands. Their posture in the crouch suggests vulnerability or bowing under a burden, and their lack of interaction with each other in this moment of need isolates them.

The piece continues to coax the audience along in similar fashion, presenting the ordinary in a decidedly unordinary fashion. It also gradually expands the scope of the ordinary. The walking, running, and gesturing of the first couple sections are fantastically performed, but much of it is still within the scope of what people do daily. By the third section, the dancers are leaning into their circular running paths at angles that would make any reasonable person think twice. In the fourth section, tender duets wherein the woman perches on the man’s thigh, turn into a tender duet wherein the woman walks on top of the man’s prone body. The slow transformation of the ordinary into the extraordinary is a set-up for the fireworks of the final section.

Even after repeated viewings, when I know perfectly well what is coming next, the finale still literally takes my breath away. The dancers run and throw themselves to the floor, fly back up off it, and do it all over again. They windmill extravagantly off balance, for the sheer fun of falling down, or even more miraculously, recovering and not falling, with a freedom and abandon that has to be seen to be believed. It’s the sensation of running just for the excitement of going fast, but taken several orders of magnitude beyond what seems even remotely possible. And in my absolutely favorite part, a woman runs, jumps up into a cannonball shape, keeps flying through the air in a cannonball past the point of being able to land (except badly), and is miraculously caught at the last moment by a man, amazingly far away from where she launched herself. Then it happens again, and again, and remains just as thrilling each time. This is astonishing to see live, but in a different way is just as astonishing to see on the 1978 Dance in America video of Esplanade, which is unusual, as video tends to flatten the dynamics of dance. But in this video, the framing is such that in the final section, you can’t always see the catching man until the woman lands in his arms, and it comes off as a brilliant surprise.[3]

One of the trends in recent choreography has been increasing use of wild acrobatics and risk-taking dancing—one might even use the term stunts (except dancers get no stunt doubles!) Yet even today, the last section of Esplanade pulls me in viscerally and stops my breath in a way that newer pieces don’t, even ones that are more athletically risky. I think that much of this has to do with the way Taylor’s well-structured choreography built Esplanade out of movement that the audience can recognize as from their lives, transformed. While I might be astonished by the acrobatics of newer works, they are outside me, “over there,” not made out of material that started off by seducing me into imagining it is something I might do too. Even as the everyday material of Esplanade becomes more and more rarified, the link is still there, so that at the end I feel the swooping excitement in the pit of my stomach as the dancers fly through space. The result is both pedestrian and virtuosic, and neither: it is some beautiful new amalgam of the two seemingly conflicting elements.

Works Cited

Croce, Arlene. Writing in the Dark, Dancing in The New Yorker. New York: Farrar, 2000.

Dunning, Jennifer. “When Dance Learned to Crawl.” Rev. of Paul Taylor Dance Company, chor. Paul Taylor. City Center. New York Times on the Web. 27 February 2005. 24 February 2008 <http://www.nytimes.com>. Path: Search.

Dance in America: The Paul Taylor Dance Company. Chor. Paul Taylor. 1978. Videocassette. Warnervision, 1999.

Reynolds, Nancy, and Malcolm McCormick. No Fixed Points. New Haven: Yale UP, 2003.

This is a paper I wrote this quarter for Karen Eliot’s 20th Century Dance History class, another great course (but part of what made it a nutty quarter!)  A quick thank you to her and my peer reviewers for their feedback!

(And this paper is complete with scholarly references and stuff–I’m really in school!  The bibliography is at the end.  Which is a better place than in the middle, I guess.)

Mirthful Martha

            There are people known for being light-hearted and funny, always good for a laugh.  Martha Graham was not one of them.  Her nickname “Mirthless Martha,” and dark dances full of psychological turmoil like Night Journey, Cave of the Heart, and Lamentation, are more often what come to mind with mention of her name.  Frolicsome hijinks don’t.  So Maple Leaf Rag, the dance that is considered her last completed work, surprises with its anomalously fun and parodying romp through Graham’s idiom.  Yet this piece is one of the most fitting summations she could have left us: although itself a choreographic trifle, it provides an ideal vantage point from which to survey her lasting power, legacy, and contributions to the dance world.

            Graham choreographed Maple Leaf Rag in 1990, at age 96.  She died the next year on April 1^st.  While she was working on Maple Leaf Rag, she was also working on what might be considered a more typical “Graham piece” named The Eyes of the Goddess, which was “a deeply tormented dance about death” (Dance).  It was left unfinished, and Maple Leaf Rag is the last statement of her seventy year career.  Some have questioned how much might have been choreographed by the dancers, since Graham was increasingly incapacitated by old age, but I do not find this an important debate (Acocella; Bannerman 31).  Enough evidence speaks of her involvement in the piece to know that it certainly wasn’t snuck out to the public without her knowledge and approval, even if she didn’t personally choreograph every single step (Dunning; Dance).

            The dance world luckily has Maple Leaf Rag preserved on video in a November 1991 live performance, filmed for the Great Performances series.  When older works are revived, especially after a choreographer’s death, there is likely to be a germ of worry in the viewer’s mind: “how have the intervening decades changed the version I’m seeing from the ‘original’ version?” But with this performance, just a year after the premier, we have a record of the work that is likely as faithful a representation of Graham’s “original” version as one can have on the not-always-kind-to-dance film medium.  While the piece has continued to be performed since then, it is this video to which I refer in the following description.  As always, the viewer is beholden to the camera operators and film editors: if I were to see the piece live, I might realize that I had missed some crucial moment that occurred outside of the camera’s frame or was cruelly chopped out by an editor.  With that caveat, what is it that one sees in Maple Leaf Rag?

            As Maple Leaf Rag opens, a man solemnly carries a woman overhead, followed by a line of dancers curving a series of heavy, earthbound jumps around the stage, all while a low note tolls portentously on a piano.  One woman falls to the floor, and as the rest of the dancers exit, she pierces space with her gaze, turns in an anguished spiral, and eventually comes to rest on what looks to be a simple single-rail fence, somewhat reminiscent of the beautifully minimal sets sculptor Isamu Noguchi famously designed for Graham.  The scene is set for another of Graham’s brooding dance journeys.  Except, as the woman sits down on the “fence,” it bounces irreverently underneath her.  It is no Noguchi sculpture, but a “joggle board,” a sort of wiggly, bouncy bench, that Graham found in North Carolina (Dunning).  Then a voice—Martha’s voice—intones “Oh Louis, play me the Maple Leaf Rag.”  This is what Graham famously used to request of her partner Louis Horst when even she recognized that she was down in the dumps and needed pulling out.  The piano launches into the requested music, and with the dark atmosphere broken, bright lights come up, and dancers dart across the stage in pairs, the woman on the joggle board bouncing and directing them cheerfully.

            What follows is a delightful mix of visual humor, mocking self-quotation, and just plain joy of dancing.  After the brief opening section, the low notes return on the piano and a woman whirls dramatically across the stage, holding her skirt out so that it presents a billowing circle to the audience.  She repeats this punctuating pass several times in the piece, between and during sections.  Then another Joplin tune starts up, and the stage fills with dancers doing a parody of Graham class exercises à la Acts of Light, including a delightfully distorted prance series.  Dancers exit and enter, skipping and leaping.  They delight in their movement, goof off with the bouncy qualities of the joggle board, and generally appear to be having a wonderful time.  In the next section, dancers pair off to exemplify different qualities of coupledom, much like in Diversion of Angels—except even in that cheerier piece from the repertory, one still doesn’t get to see a man cling to the underside of a joggle board like a monkey and creep down its length to look up the skirt of the woman sitting on it.  At which point, astonished, he promptly falls off.  Another couple mock tangos their way around, interspersing their high-drama ballroom moment with ostentatiously dramatic contractions and showy lifts.  Eventually six couples have settled on or around the joggle board in various poses of embrace, when they are rudely interrupted by a series of five frantic women.  These typical “Graham Furies” (Kisselgoff 1999) rage around the stage while the onlookers turn up their noses and exchange looks with each other as if to ask “what’s their problem?”

            The final section of Maple Leaf Rag is introduced by a man crossing the stage in a series of typical Graham back attitudes with spiraled torso, emphasizing the percussiveness of his movement by slapping his butt each time he steps into his pose.  (Every time I watch this entrance I have to laugh and ask myself “did he really just do that?!”  Then in a moment of pure prurient speculation, I wonder if Graham herself might have been known to slap the men’s butts more than occasionally—is she laughing at herself here?  Then the choreography and my thoughts move on.)  This section even more than the others makes me think of kids on a playground—it’s just fun!  A group of women skip through jauntily, two men play on the joggle board like on a jungle gym, leapfrogging, somersaulting, and daringly doing a tightrope walk of its length.  Amidst the leaping, playful partnering and general silliness, the woman from the beginning returns, couples skitter across like they did in the opening, and the piece ends with her sitting on the joggle board, brow furrowed: a pretend Martha in a pretend funk.

Throughout the sections there are sly quotations or allusions to other Graham works, the serious sources lovingly mocked by the comic send-up they are given.  Having seen many of her important works over the years, I can place some of the references specifically, while others just strike a familiar chord.  But what I find most remarkable about the piece, and Graham’s legacy, is that any viewer who has seen a single piece by Graham, or even just photographs and outside references to her work, would instantly recognize the allusiveness and self-parody of Maple Leaf Rag.  This is a tribute to the dance technique she built over the years, a system as internally consistent, aesthetically distinct, and instantly recognizable as ballet.  While most choreographers of note may be easily recognized by the way they put together movement, Graham went beyond that to create a new way of moving, a radical departure that was more than just minor emendations to the status quo.  Maple Leaf Rag would barely be possible, and certainly wouldn’t be funny, if Graham were of lesser stature and her work less distinctive.  To be ubiquitous enough to make fun of oneself and have other people get the joke is a rare accomplishment.

            When Maple Leaf Rag debuted, of course no one knew that this would be Graham’s last complete work, thought not many more could have been expected from her.  The work’s comic appeal made it a hit, and overall, critics acknowledged it as worthwhile frivolity, if not a masterpiece (Dendy 32; Dorris; Kisselgoff 1990).  However, Anna Kisselgoff went beyond its light façade to see in it a warning to artists, including Graham herself, against falling into comfortable clichés, and, in reference to the couples who spurn the five “Furies,” an indictment against a society that won’t tolerate deviation from its standards (1990).  While I can see how Kisselgoff draws these conclusions, I feel wary that she may be overdrawing them, especially the perceived indictment against an intolerant society.  The bulk of Graham’s choreography over the years pointedly portrayed and commented on the human situation, and when Graham had a commentary to make, she was not at all shy about driving her point home.  For instance, Heretic exemplifies the clash of an individual against an intolerant society.  If there is a commentary to Maple Leaf Rag, I see its main thrust rather being that Graham doesn’t feel the need to confine herself to the seriousness that was perceived as her genre.  Instead of warning against falling into clichés, Graham seems more to be celebrating the ability to surprise an audience still.

After Graham’s death, the legal troubles that plunged the company into millions of dollars of debt gave rise to the very real possibility that Graham’s work might largely be lost, despite her towering stature in the field.  The company—and thus Graham’s work—was absent from the stage for a time.  As the company emerged from underneath the court proceedings and regrouped, it was faced with reintroducing Graham to the viewing public.  When enough time has passed to look back on how this still evolving story turns out, Maple Leaf Rag may prove to have grown in importance by playing a role in keeping Graham’s legacy alive.  In order to attract new audiences, the company has been planning “audience-friendly” programs rich with historical material that attempt to show the wide range of Graham’s work (Acocella; Scherr).  Acocella notes that on a 2006 program, Maple Leaf Rag served as a strategic bit of fun, a chance for the programmers to say “Martha wasn’t so grim, Martha was fun, too.”  However, Maple Leaf Rag is fun for a reason: even in its lightness, it bears Graham’s signature ability to “unite emotion and form,” find the right gesture, and astonish the viewer (Kisselgoff 1990).  Its unexpectedness while being so identifiably “Graham” throws into relief her wide-ranging abilities, even as the references to other pieces give a wry primer on her technique and corpus of work.  These are enough reasons to argue for the piece’s importance: if it can play a part in enticing audiences to venture further into Graham’s work, it will prove to be even more important than its initial circumstances would have suggested.

Works Cited

Acocella, Joan. “Happy Face.” Rev. of Martha Graham Dance Company, chor. Martha Graham.  Skirball Center. New Yorker Online. 8 May 2006. 22 January 2008 <http://www.thenewyorker.com>. Path: Search.

Bannerman, Henrietta.  “An Overview of the Development of Martha Graham’s Movement System.” Dance Research 17.2 (1999): 9-46. JSTOR. 22 January 2008 <http://www.jstor.org/search>

Dance in America: Three Dances by Martha Graham. Perf. Martha Graham Dance Company. L’Opera de Paris, Paris. November 1991. VHS. Great Performances, 1992.

Dendy, Mark. “Graham without Graham, 1991.”  Ballet Review 20.2 (1992): 29-35.

Dorris, George. “Martha Graham Dance Company.” Rev. of Martha Graham Dance Company, chor. Martha Graham.  City Center.  Dancing Times Dec. 1990: 252.

Dunning, Jennifer. “Martha Graham, at 96, Dares Something Different.” New York Times on the Web. 1 October 1990. 22 January 2008 <http://www.nytimes.com>. Path: Search.

Kisselgoff, Anna. “Martha Graham: Up to her New Tricks.” Rev. of Martha Graham Dance Company, chor. Martha Graham. City Center. New York Times on the Web. 21 October 1990. 22 January 2008 <http://www.nytimes.com>. Path: Search.

—. “Tasty Graham Spiced by Self-Parody.” Rev. of Martha Graham Dance Company, chor. Martha Graham. Joyce Theater. New York Times on the Web. 6 February 1999. 22 January 2008 <http://www.nytimes.com>. Path: Search.

Scherr, Apollonaire.  “Martha Graham Troupe Puts Modern Spin on the Choreographer’s Great Works.” Newsday Online. 27 January 2008.  28 January 2008 <http://www.newsday .com/entertainment/arts/ny-ffdnc5549267jan27,0,4526894,print.story>

I’ve decided to be brave and post some things that I’ve written over the last two quarters. I’d also like to invite you to post (or send to me to post) things you have written that you like, or things you have read that you think should be shared.

That’s right folks, we’re dancers and we read and think… Shocking!

This first paper I’m posting was written last quarter for Candace Feck’s wonderful Dance Criticism and Aesthetics class.

Absence:

Or, Why I am Dancing

The absence of a thing can be more striking than its presence. The emptiness left behind takes on form; reveals in sharper definition what had been there; shows the web of relations, assumptions, desires, which are noisy in their silence.

During my childhood, my dad was a commercial fisherman. This meant that every spring he left for Alaska and was gone for three to six months, sometimes home for my September birthday, sometimes not. When he left me and my mom each year, there followed a dizzying period of re-orientation. At first it was hard to shake the reflexive expectation that he was about to walk in the door, or pick me up from school. Then life would calm into focus again, and he became incredibly present in all the ways that he wasn’t. His booming voice didn’t fill the house, so I thought of how rich his voice was. There was an empty seat at the dining room table that would have drawn no more attention than the other empty seats, except Mom and I knew it was his empty seat. These were some of the absences, the hearing and seeing what wasn’t there. There were also the presences, only there when he wasn’t. Mom and I did girl things together, just she and I, no worries of excluding, or worse, inviting Dad. My ears were pierced, we ate goofy things for dinner, and we enjoyed time together when I was my mother’s sole focus of attention, and she mine. The changes in our lives helped to reveal the shape of my relationship with my father, and I was more aware of it, more appreciative of it when he came home each year.

I have been dancing since before my earliest childhood memory, first around the living room, then around a dance studio, then around a stage, or a grocery aisle, or a park, or anywhere else I found myself. If asked what the most important thing I did was, the answer was easy: dance. But it is when I quit dancing that I started to learn—really learn—the shape of my relationship with dance. My dad’s absence had provided this heightened awareness of him and our relationship every year, but what about dance? I considered it the central aspect of my life, yet to that point I had never paused to ponder the shape of the space it inhabited in me.

The first thing I learned when I was neither dancing nor planning to dance was that I did not disappear into nothingness. This was a little bit of a surprise to me. It turned out that there was a person there, with her own self and life and interests, not a dancer who was pretending at being a person. I had from my childhood thought that I couldn’t be happy if I weren’t dancing; when I found myself at a point where I was unable to be happy while dancing, it was also a surprise to me that I was not only a person, but a happy person not dancing. And though it sounds silly in its simplicity, I realized I could do things. I could do things that had meaning to me, that were full in themselves, not needing the disclaimer “but really I’m a dancer.” I could present myself as I was, and people liked me and took me seriously, just me. Absence begot presence.

After a period of relief and discovery, I also started to sort out the relations, assumptions and desires I had towards dance, starting to see them in the holes they had left behind. Noticing all the new presences in my life had taken a while, but then I started to notice that there was also an absence, a rather large one. The impulse that had driven me to start dancing so early was not a weak or easily dismissible one. I found myself missing dancing, and wanting it to be a part of my life again, if I could detangle from that web of relations which strands were integral to what I loved in dance, and which strands were extraneous and detrimental.

I am dancing again. The renewed presence of dance in my life came with a clarified vision of what I would like to remain absent. I know every day that I am making the choice to be dancing. I am not dancing out of fear that there is nothing else I am good for, and I am not spurred on by fear of disappointing those around me if I don’t dance. Fear has remained absent. I now rejoice that there are so many wonderful dancers in the world, seeing more clearly the way they inspire and enrich me. Jealousy has remained absent. I have more appreciation for the person that I am, and for the ways that dance is a means to express my fullness of interests and abilities, not my only interest and ability. Self-deprecation has remained absent. The list can continue, with items large and small, but they all come to the same thing: what I value about dance is the love I have for it and the joy I get from it, whether it comes from solitary concentration in a studio, spending boisterous time with delightful people, or participation—as audience member or performer—in a work I find inspirational. Absence from dance helped clarify these principles that seem in retrospect all too obvious. It also gave me the perspective to realize that I could insist on dance being part of my life on my own terms, with my own values, and that wanting dance to be that way for me was a good enough reason why; really, the only good enough reason.

So I made it through classes in this crazy 24-credit quarter of mine, I am now diligently working away at final papers and projects (well, not quite at the moment), gleefully anticipating the end of the quarter, all the while wondering “why me?!”  You see, Columbus is having a magnificent snowstorm, with piled up drifts of several feet of beautiful fluffy white snow, the likes of which I never experienced growing up in Seattle.  All I want to do is bundle up and go outside to flop into drifts and make snow angels, and get snowflakes on my nose and eyelashes, and turn my cheeks rosy, and come inside to warm up with hot chocolate, and then go out and do it all over again!

But back to my paper on Dance for a City: Fifty Years of the New York City Ballet–it’s a marvelous book with amazing photographs, check it out!

So amidst the craziness that is this quarter, some little part of my brain is remembering that I will be performing in NYC on March 14th for the first (and perhaps only) time.  This is part of the amazing Anna Sokolow Steps of Silence experience.  Sadly, we are just doing an excerpted version of the piece, as the event–Hunter College’s Sharing the Legacy Festival–has a ten-minute limit.  If you must see the whole piece, we’ll be performing it in Columbus in the May Dance Downtown performances.

And what brought this subject to mind now, you ask?  Good question–last night I dreamed that the airlines lost my luggage and I was stuck trying to get ready right before curtain without any stage makeup, hair supplies, etc.  At least it wasn’t the dream where I don’t know any of the steps…

By tonight, I will have seen 4 different dance performances in 4 nights.  It’s an embarrassment of riches to be sure, and is pretty representative of this quarter: I am loving everything I am involved in, and also wish it would all just stop so I could get off the ride and breathe for a while…  It seems that everything I am doing is wonderfully thought-provoking, but there is no time to process the thoughts from one thing before another set of thoughts is presenting itself, demanding attention.  They trip over each other, get tangled, wake me up in the middle of the night, distract me when I’m trying to learn a combination in dance class and have me continually saying “that reminds me of x–now where did I read about x?”  It’s chaos up in my head!!!

And this is the part where I point out that it’s my own fault for deciding to take 24 credits, and why am I surprised to have so much going on…

Which is all my long way of getting around to say that there have been some amazing experiences that I meant to blog about, but I have been amazingly busy, and  then I freeze up whenever I try to choose one from among the many mention-worthy happenings.  But in random order, here are a few hints of what’s going on:

Lorry May coaching us in Anna Sokolow’s Steps of Silence.

Guest artist Amy Raymond’s ballet class.

I was actually able to explain phenomenology to someone.

Musings on what I might do for my MFA project.

Discoveries in Abby Yager’s modern class.

I like Labanotation!

It might be illegal that I’m not doing homework right now.

Going from confusion to understanding in the weight studies class.

Performances I’ve seen.

So at some point, I may come along and flesh out items on the list–or write on any of the 20 new things that have happened–until then, any suggestions for staying sane?  (Just kidding–I know it’s way too late for that!)

So the blog is back from winter break, and as for myself, this will be the masochistic quarter.  I’m taking a lot of classes, too many really, but I’m excited about them.  They are a good mix of stuff I enjoy doing, and stuff I want to push my boundaries in.

One of the classes that I think is going to be more fun than I anticipated is Labanotation.  It’s required for my degree, I’d want to take it anyway to have some familiarity with it, but after our first session today, I’m irrationally excited about it.  I think it will be a major nerd-out class for me, drawing the little symbols and asking “what if you change that situation to this situation?” all the way.  We did a little exercise today with just the couple of tools we had learned, and I was washed over by a rush of glorious satisfaction at manipulating the symbols and getting it to come out right.  (Kind of like math–and in fact, the teacher said that people with a math background tend to do well with Labanotation.)  If only the class required a graphing calculator and a pocket protector, my life would be complete…

Hey, if I can’t wallow in my nerdy side during school, when can I?