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God in the Details, Humanism in Postmodern Dance
by Apollinaire Scherr Each week, I interview a couple of choreographers about their upcoming shows. I am used to them saying that their dances are about “gender,” “the body,” “violence” – issues, in other words. But suddenly this year, they began to describe the pieces (with a specificity that in itself was worth celebrating) as dramas – the kind of common dramas that, for example, street photographers and poets catch.
With September 11, the ordinary revealed itself as extraordinary. As with most occasions of great loss, we came to cherish God in the details – the image of a Ground Zero store window displaying the usual neatly folded pin-striped shirts, though now washed in a memorializing ash; shoes hanging from a bare-limbed tree; the dishevelment and shock particular to each person in the crowds escaping the inferno and hobbling homeward; the upward rush of shirt and tie as a man fell from the sky.
Currents in an artform build slowly – over years, not weeks or months. But the tragedy of 9/11 gave a legitimizing reference point to the intimate theater that a generation of downtown choreographers, now mainly in their thirties and forties, had been developing for the last fifteen years. “Humanism” is a dread word in dance precisely because dance is always human (what else could dancers be?); calling it as much tends to signal a schlocky desire to “celebrate humanity.” But 9/11 buttressed the assumption, from which these choreographers have consistently operated, that humanism has as many faces as there are people, and schlock is only one of them. Finally, the dance-makers’ talk could catch up with their work.
Such postmodern choreographers (and NYFA fellows) as Ronald K. Brown, David Dorfman, Yasmeen Godder, Neil Greenberg, Keely Garfield, John Jasperse, Tere O’Connor, Roseanne Spradlin, and Donna Uchizono present their dancers as individuals – more than elements in a visual design – who reveal themselves through a fine-grained, idiosyncratic idiom. The drama in the dance evolves from the dancers’ use of this vernacular as they find their way with one another.
In Ron Brown’s “Walking out the Dark” (2002), for his Brooklyn-based company, Evidence, four dancers, paired off into couples, stand along the perimeter of a circle of light, facing inward. They dance at one another, because they have grievances. A woman approaches her partner with steady, menacing steps and raises her arm – she’s only preparing to turn, but for an instant you think she’s going to strike him. A man flutters his hips up and down the torso of another woman and, when that doesn’t move her, collapses onto his back with arms overhead in an exclamation of surrender. As the piece progresses, though, people begin to dance together – giving and taking, as in conversation.
In his program notes, Brown has written, “I built the work as a danced conversation [that considers] what contributes to the inability to reach a brother or sister in need” -- a nice gloss on the work, but, without it, you’re not handicapped. Like a lyric poem or an exchange overheard on the bus, “Walking out the Dark” establishes its context as it goes. All we need to know to get swept up in the drama is there among its players.
The choreographers of this kind of intimate theater are heirs to the task-based, anti-theatrical work of the sixties and seventies. But for them, “task” means not only movement scores but also daydreaming, despairing, bickering – the task, in other words, of our feelings, especially for one another. In John Jasperse’s Waving to you from here (1997), these two kind of tasks –movement and feeling – converge.
Like such edgy contemporary novels of suburban life as Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm and A.M. Homes’ Music for Torching, Waving to you from here describes a terrain in which anomie is as basic as breathing, diminishment is a constant threat, and unavoidable intimacy with the people one would rather avoid dogs everyone. Jasperse lays out this landscape by pursuing simple tasks with such relentlessness that they end up carrying enormous emotional weight.
We hear suburban sounds – the shudder of dropped ping-pong balls, jets roaring close by, creaking doors, barking dogs, crying babies. Meanwhile, the four dancers arrange and re-arrange stacks of dog-eared paperbacks, each other’s limbs (and cheeks and ears and heads, all handled roughly), and their individual places on the broad staircase at center stage, from which they stare out impassively, as if from repressed family snapshots. The dancers even adjust their height – when, halfway through the piece, a metal ceiling begins to descend mechanically to the floor, eventually pinning them beneath it.
Continue to page 2 of this article.
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