Dance Program for Merging Bodies
i. Isadora Duncan’s Water Study, set to Schubert’s 12 Grazer Waltzer, D. 924, Op. 91, No. 12
Gravity dwells in the pit; there, it orchestrates
a movement the body can inhabit.
The dancer, knowing she is water, asks herself to move as such.
She is a spring in the deep ecology of motion.
The dance exceeds imitation toward forms of embodiment.
At the wave’s crest, a threshold where the unconscious spills into gesture.
Born by the sea, Duncan’s first idea of movement, of dance, came from the rhythm of the waves.
The body and the unconscious co-compose a movement; a watery motion layered with a corporeal texture.
Like water molecules enmeshing, the dancer is embedded with other bodies.
The wave signals a unity that runs through all manifestations of Nature.
Waters, winds, particles; everything obeys the rhythms of the wave.
A queer acoustics where the wave is a unit of dream language for the expression of the unconscious.
A queer kinesthesia in the motion of stillness that is water.
To study the interplay between surface and depth, sing the body into and out of motion, balance.
Spin in place to compose a third space.
The dancer, knowing she is water, asks herself to move as such.
She is a spring in the deep ecology of motion.
The dance exceeds imitation toward forms of embodiment.
At the wave’s crest, a threshold where the unconscious spills into gesture.
Born by the sea, Duncan’s first idea of movement, of dance, came from the rhythm of the waves.
The body and the unconscious co-compose a movement; a watery motion layered with a corporeal texture.
Like water molecules enmeshing, the dancer is embedded with other bodies.
The wave signals a unity that runs through all manifestations of Nature.
Waters, winds, particles; everything obeys the rhythms of the wave.
A queer acoustics where the wave is a unit of dream language for the expression of the unconscious.
A queer kinesthesia in the motion of stillness that is water.
To study the interplay between surface and depth, sing the body into and out of motion, balance.
Spin in place to compose a third space.
ii. Martha Graham’s Lamentation, set to Zoltán
Kodály’s 9 Piano Pieces, Op. 3, No. 2
With grief, you dance, animating the void that
inhabits you.
Heavy is the timbre of this anonymous ache.
The body, giving form to loss, is given flesh to fold itself into the world.
In this enmeshing, the self smears across an ecology of movement.
You are enclosed in a tube of green jersey from which only your hands, feet, and face emerge.
The first opening is an entrance to loss.
Here, you negotiate the flux of your ungrounding.
A wrenching as you pluck the filaments of your tethering.
The second opening is a window.
On one side, you; on the other, the abyss.
Where the infinite faces of sorrow cohere.
Dance emerges from the unconscious, where memory dwells; as such, it inhabits the dancer.
A swelling as the flesh reaches for the more-than of this inhabiting.
Rocking back and forth, the body says no, no, no.
With a vibrant stillness, the body saying no, yes, no.
Your contradiction breathes into a moment whose horizons you stretch like muscle fibers.
To test the boundaries of grief, you expand inside your own skin.
As you extend, the elastic tube furrows and translates your pain into distortion.
Window that forces you to face what you have lost.
Frame that reduces you to one who has lost.
You pull a horizon over your head like a hood.
Heavy is the timbre of this anonymous ache.
The body, giving form to loss, is given flesh to fold itself into the world.
In this enmeshing, the self smears across an ecology of movement.
You are enclosed in a tube of green jersey from which only your hands, feet, and face emerge.
The first opening is an entrance to loss.
Here, you negotiate the flux of your ungrounding.
A wrenching as you pluck the filaments of your tethering.
The second opening is a window.
On one side, you; on the other, the abyss.
Where the infinite faces of sorrow cohere.
Dance emerges from the unconscious, where memory dwells; as such, it inhabits the dancer.
A swelling as the flesh reaches for the more-than of this inhabiting.
Rocking back and forth, the body says no, no, no.
With a vibrant stillness, the body saying no, yes, no.
Your contradiction breathes into a moment whose horizons you stretch like muscle fibers.
To test the boundaries of grief, you expand inside your own skin.
As you extend, the elastic tube furrows and translates your pain into distortion.
Window that forces you to face what you have lost.
Frame that reduces you to one who has lost.
You pull a horizon over your head like a hood.
iii. Trisha Brown’s Floor of the Forest,
set to the ambient soundscape of SoHo, NYC
Moving through the world is an act of embroidery.
We stitch ourselves into environments.
We pull ourselves through to the other side.
The stage is a horizontal grid of ropes suspended at eye level and threaded through the arms and legs of garments.
These are tied across a 12 by 14 foot metal pipe frame.
You and I dress and undress our way across the tapestry.
The billowing shirts, pants, and shorts rock and bounce as we tug at the ropes in our traverse.
A new orientation to dance wherein the body’s propensities for movement lie in hanging low, inhabiting laterally.
Climbing horizontally into each garment, the time we take to clothe our bodies slows.
When we rest inside a shirt, it becomes a hammock.
There is space for cohabitation, movement, transition.
A fibrous swelling as we sink into the surface.
A fabric contraction as we vacate one dwelling for another.
Like mushroom blooms on a forest floor, you and I turn the environment over with our breath.
We distribute our bodies across the tapestry.
Our fibers and tissues form webs of relation between our bodies-as-environments and environments-as-bodies.
The fabrics become extensions of our muscles.
In these stretching threads, a somatic remembering.
A reorientation wherein the body itself is a field through which anonymous materials dance.
We are flattened into landscapes.
Our dwelling expands.
We stitch ourselves into environments.
We pull ourselves through to the other side.
The stage is a horizontal grid of ropes suspended at eye level and threaded through the arms and legs of garments.
These are tied across a 12 by 14 foot metal pipe frame.
You and I dress and undress our way across the tapestry.
The billowing shirts, pants, and shorts rock and bounce as we tug at the ropes in our traverse.
A new orientation to dance wherein the body’s propensities for movement lie in hanging low, inhabiting laterally.
Climbing horizontally into each garment, the time we take to clothe our bodies slows.
When we rest inside a shirt, it becomes a hammock.
There is space for cohabitation, movement, transition.
A fibrous swelling as we sink into the surface.
A fabric contraction as we vacate one dwelling for another.
Like mushroom blooms on a forest floor, you and I turn the environment over with our breath.
We distribute our bodies across the tapestry.
Our fibers and tissues form webs of relation between our bodies-as-environments and environments-as-bodies.
The fabrics become extensions of our muscles.
In these stretching threads, a somatic remembering.
A reorientation wherein the body itself is a field through which anonymous materials dance.
We are flattened into landscapes.
Our dwelling expands.
iv. Merce Cunningham’s Summerspace, set to
Morton Feldman’s Ixion for two pianos
Suspended we turn, a fibrous mobile.
Porous and permeable, we let the atmosphere in.
How to merge with the environment while still articulating the body’s movements?
The principle momentum is in steps that carry us not only into a space, but through it.
Birds pausing for a moment on the ground, then moving on.
Our pause is not inaction, but arrested motion; the pulse is still there.
The stage and background is one continuous layer of pointillist painting in the colors of summer: yellows, reds, oranges, greens.
We wear speckled leotards of this same pointillism.
Camouflaged into the field, we fold into the flesh of the world.
Feldman’s Ixion, floating in the intervals.
It sounds like dust motes in sunlight.
Composed on graphing paper using numbers instead of noteheads, the score indicates how many notes to play at a certain time, but not which ones.
The body feels as if it is moving through air, feels as if it is air, or a watery molecule hovering in a cloud.
How to merge with the environment’s vibrancies?
How to let the field come alive?
Each turn of the body is a turn of the landscape; it stirs the particles of the atmosphere.
The animacy of the field itself perforates our mood, thought, movement.
Threads of light, music, motion, embroidered through these perforations.
The dance has no center.
It continues in infinite space beyond the wings.
Porous and permeable, we let the atmosphere in.
How to merge with the environment while still articulating the body’s movements?
The principle momentum is in steps that carry us not only into a space, but through it.
Birds pausing for a moment on the ground, then moving on.
Our pause is not inaction, but arrested motion; the pulse is still there.
The stage and background is one continuous layer of pointillist painting in the colors of summer: yellows, reds, oranges, greens.
We wear speckled leotards of this same pointillism.
Camouflaged into the field, we fold into the flesh of the world.
Feldman’s Ixion, floating in the intervals.
It sounds like dust motes in sunlight.
Composed on graphing paper using numbers instead of noteheads, the score indicates how many notes to play at a certain time, but not which ones.
The body feels as if it is moving through air, feels as if it is air, or a watery molecule hovering in a cloud.
How to merge with the environment’s vibrancies?
How to let the field come alive?
Each turn of the body is a turn of the landscape; it stirs the particles of the atmosphere.
The animacy of the field itself perforates our mood, thought, movement.
Threads of light, music, motion, embroidered through these perforations.
The dance has no center.
It continues in infinite space beyond the wings.
