Waves of Concern
Choreographer Susan Marshall's latest work, Cloudless, is beguilingly intimate and plays like a hallucination in the recalling. I had the pleasure of attending its last performance at Dance Theater Workshop recently. Through a skillful cast of five dancers, its expertly arranged series of choreographic aphorisms, its poetry of gags and non sequitur, it delivered a sort of shock. Perhaps it was only the shock of recognition of something I had forgotten - the basic values of contemporary performance that have informed me and a generation of "Downtown" dancers/performance artists. Cloudless brought home a fundamental goal of contemporary performance and that is that the best performance manages to push back the ever mounting waves of concern that inundate us to create a "preserved domain" - an imaginative space.
What are the waves of concern?
What is a "preserved domain" - an imaginative space?
First the waves of concern: It might be suggested if not illustrated by an anecdotal and less than exhaustive reporting of our recent Midwestern tour. On the morning of our performance of Blind Date at Minneapolis's Northrop Auditorium, I was asked by Doug Benidt, one of the kind and capable Walker Art Center staff, if I was happy. His question resonated with a similar query from Sage Cowles, long time collaborator and friend of the company, following my public discussion of the night before. Sage had wanted to know if I had been "truly engaged by the discussion?" Both questions caught me off guard.
My answer to the first was that my personal happiness is somehow beside the point as I am more and more simply doing my job as artistic director of my company and often as an advocate for a beleaguered field. In short, I have come to expect contentment as opposed to happiness.
The second question concerning my engagement in the public discussion was troubling in that perhaps I had miscalculated my approach to the event. I was a bit tired after the previous nine days of touring and had decided that I should keep my cool and not give too much - just lay out the facts. Minneapolis was the final stop on this tour, which began in Milwaukee (complete with a debate titled "Patriotism in the Era of the Patriot Act" hosted by our presenter at Alverno College). After the performance in Milwaukee, Bjorn and I had traveled to Chicago for a half-day mini conference sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. We had been invited along with important advocates from the worlds of theater, opera, classical music, dance and museum to meet Dr. Don Randel, the new president of the foundation, and share with him insights as to what such an enlightened and engaged foundation as the Mellon might do about the general health of culture. We had then joined the company in Madison for a performance at the fantastic, newly opened Overture Center followed by a post performance discussion.
A five hour bus ride to Minneapolis, a massage, a so-so night of sleep, a marathon breakfast planning meeting to plot out rehearsal times for new works, reconstructions and workshops, an afternoon in the glamorous galleries of the Walker viewing the deeply affecting retrospective of Kiki Smith's career from 1980 to 2005 had brought me to that evening's intimate public discussion with Philip Bither, the Walker’s Curator of Performing Arts.
Philip, as ever, was clear, considerate and perceptive. I had felt grumpy at first, blaming my mood on a phone interview I had just concluded with a writer from Colorado where we travel with Blind Date in April. He questioned the piece’s multi-layered structure. Didn’t I worry that certain audience might be put off by the burden I was placing on them to connect the dots, to make sense of all that was being proposed? Having that afternoon walked through the Walker Art Center's new facility with its gallery after gallery of quizzical conceptualism, elliptical personal signs and symbols, images that confounded, curiosities and riddles that inspired, I was offended to think that my brand of performing arts could be held to a different standard.
After my grumpiness subsided, the conversation swam through the dangerous shoals of what is political in art. What of the business of my art? How does a work get made? What is my intention in making a work? What is the nature of my collaboration with my company of young people? What is Blind Date questioning?
Was I engaged? I don't remember. I was trying to be as honest as possible without belligerence. I was striving for the clarity that comes when one is direct and personal even when the directly personal is contradictory or accusing. One perilous moment came when I found myself trying to describe how I saw my dancers as a group and as individuals. How not to misstep when those same dancers are sitting in the cool dark of Herzog and de Meuron's raked seating and side-boxes listening?
And back to the imaginative space, the "preserved domain." Cloudless, in its discursive structure held together by elusive gestures, video projected imagery and sound was like finding a curious grotto, park bench or, maybe, a chapel in the heart of one of today's many monstrously driven cities.
The imaginative space is met first with discomfort. Why? Perhaps it is the disciplined, pragmatic self that has come to be in charge of the other selves. This "self" does not believe that a place of repose and dreaming through childlike free association can be trusted. Other selves take charge, asserting their hunger for the recognizable sensations, the deep looking and hearing that a modestly scaled deeply felt work like Cloudless provides. Inevitably, when I encounter an imaginative space such as this, I start imagining my own next work.
Last week, while in the conference room of our light filled offices on Lenox Avenue at 120th Street, I stood looking out of the second story window. Lenox Avenue was awash in a curiously golden though cold late winter light. A woman of late middle age in black leather coat, black fur collar and hat hunched her shoulders against the breeze and strode with a heartbreaking determination uptown. This is the seed of meaning that I hope will blossom in Chapel/Chapter, the company's next site-specific venture. It will be premiered in December at Aaron Davis Hall's brand new Gatehouse Theater in Harlem...
-- Bill T. Jones (Thursday, March 23, 2006)
