1981 CONTINUED
Charles Moulton: Floating Out of the Whirlwind
The metronome never stops during the rehearsal as I watch Charlie Moulton and four ace dancers work on his new piece, Opposite Arch. The damn gadget looks to the ignorant like some sort of detonator: its tick is a small "crack" and, simultaneously, a little orange bulb on top flashes. The light in the old "auditorium" of P.S. 122 on First Avenue is ample, though about five of the hanging globes are out. And as the afternoon stretches on and the sun goes down, the room chills. The dancers are in running shoes and knee pads (for all the falling and sliding), besides all their regular dancer garb. I don't even know them yet. Chase (Winton) is a redhead, Barbara (Allen) has short, curly hair; she sometimes slips one glove on because she doesn't always land right on the slides and burns the heel of her hand on the floor. Beatrice (Bogorad) is slighter, with dark hair. For a long while I think that Keith (Marshall) is named Steve. Open-faced, blond, pale-complexioned - a sure bet for a Midwesterner - Moulton's the coach of this motley team, brisk and unmannered, moving with full-bodied assurance, directing with economy. He doesn't rush, but he doesn't waste a second either. The dancers dive under each other, jump over, get dragged on their bellies and on their behinds. The three women slide diagonally back, then jump over the men skidding through. Up in the air and down on the floor, fast and fearless. The strong rhythmic accents of the footwork get to me immediately, and the way the patterns of the group - splitting, reforming, changing directions - stay so clear, even tough they're in flux from second to second. Watching is exhilarating, like being caught in a wave that lifts you and just keeps on breaking.
The combination of the forceful use of the floor, the rushes and spins, the light clear shapes that appear as they leap and are hoisted or flung through the air, give a sense of sweep and resilience, of groundedness and levity, of daring with no time for reflection. This is what Moulton might call the "foosh" of the piece, the way it drives and whirls, springs and flies. But seeing fragments in rehearsal unprepares you for performance. There's a heightened formality and tension, a change in tone. Some phrases no longer occur in the location where you expect them. Daylight, the wide margins of space around the dancing, and a sense of outside space are inevitable losses. The American Theater Lab space seems tighter and two rows of people sitting on the floor crowd the dancers somewhat and flatten the performing area. The dancers have put aside their black and gray and no-color sweatpants, leg warmers and pullovers: they're in bi-color tops of salmon-rose, indigo, and a summery green, and loose, silky pants, still distinctively bunched mid-leg because of the kneepads. Beatrice is wearing her hair in braids; Barbara's is noticeably longer now. The beginning warms more slowly and regularly than I remember. It seems more of a thematic statement, an exposition, with its stamping rhythms and sudden stops.
But the biggest change is musical Before, I knew the rhythms as something the dancers took account of in their free, flyaway ride. Now, the amplified pulse has a more powerful sound and effect. I'm more aware of its restrictions, of how the dancing and the rhythm join. And the catchy, melodic element, new to me, creates a different sense of flow, a thicker ground under the dancing.
Different realms of movement activity have attracted Moulton's interest since he left Merce Cunningham's company in 1976. The maddening and fascinating precision ball-passing he's been working with (currently elaborating all the possible ways nine people can pass balls from hand to hand in quick rhythmic patterns without slip-ups) "is not a game, it's a precision activity, something rigorous and exact you can do in a human way. Not making it into a spectacle, not pretending it's dramatic. Allowing it to be an activity that happens to have an overwhelmingly ornamental quality.”
When he left Cunningham, Moulton still wanted to continue to work with movement in a structured way, he just didn't want to be in a professional atmosphere for a while. He began to investigate sports structures, and to devise three-team games. In those games, each time a goal was scored, the rules would change and a new structure triggered. (The evolution of patterns in Opposite Arch seems to owe something to this idea.) The games, he says, tended to have a circular quality, and to make nonsense of competition: if you're engaged in conflict with one group, you become especially vulnerable to the third.
It refreshed him to be in a situation where the qualifications for participating weren't based on your degree of specialization and excellence, but simply on whether you wanted to work or not. He enjoyed the opportunity to be playful in an intelligent way. And it delighted him that, in a sport, it was immediately obvious whether a rule or an approach worked or not: if it did, it was apparent to everyone. If it didn't, it got scrapped. In the course of this, his interest in dance and sport meshed. Their qualities interlace and balance in Opposite Arch. "You can't slap together some movement from sport and a thing from dance. That's gibberish. You have to find some way of looking at them together. I don't call this dance and that sport; I call them both movement, and look at them in general terms." Very broadly, Moulton characterizes a differential, one that he finds useful. "Sports have to go with necessary movement - whatever it takes to accomplish the goal. The time is felt" (not based on a rhythmic pulse) and the space is open (the whole field can be used.) Dance is essentially rhythmic, confined, and ornamental. But "I'm taking advantage of all the 'dancing' people have seen in their lives", utilizing whatever is familiar, standard and part of our "cultural language of movements." A big part of that language is athletics.
The guys go sliding through on their knees, one arm raised in a plain, guiding gesture, like a sort of salute. Or maybe that's just the best way to angle your wing. Moulton slides lazy as a hawk, as if the split-second it takes is all the time in the world. The group keeps dividing, penetrating, dovetailing, reshaping. The two men move in a quick grapevine around a line of three women. And then, with almost no discernible shift in the pattern, Moulton is paired with Beatrice, and the other three form the oppositional line. In performance, of course, there's no let-up, but in rehearsal it seems that even though the dancers are grateful for a pause to breathe and hang over, they're not worn down by this relentless push. Something seems to be giving them back energy. I'd guess that the rhythmic base provides that nourishment. When they're really going, the rhythm bounces them.
Back in December, Moulton, with composer A. Leroy plotted the structure of Opposite Arch, figuring out the rhythmic patterns that would intersect with "all the possible combinations of five people, all the possibilities of movement and spatial relationships." The structure is tight, strict. Yet the exhaustive, systematic exploration has a whimsicality shared with the ball-passing events in which all the permutations of pattern are laid bare. It would please the monks who designed the intricately interlaced capital pages of the Book of Kells.
Structurally, "I know exactly where I'm going and how I'm going to get there in time,” says Moulton. But he makes the movement fresh, never working on it more than a day before presenting it to the dancers. The structure is the challenge: he pits himself against it, is sparked by it, tests its limits. The idea is to be provoked, "to find out what can happen that'll be a surprise to me, that's outside my own process. The structure is a necessity, and I'm moving through it," he says. This sounds hard-ass and brainy, but, in the event, it's always informed by Moulton's deep feeling for movement - a feeling that is lyrical and flowing ("romantic too," he adds, "but let's not say that.") Moulton seems to work each small section again and again until it coheres; he doesn't seem to want to leave vague areas to fill in later. When there's a slip, they start over, run and rerun the sequence until it goes smoothly, spacewise and in time. How could he do otherwise?
The piece is life-or-death timing from start to finish. At some point, he tells me that the whole dance is 15 minutes long; he'd promised himself it wouldn't be more than 20. I wonder if he's pleased, disappointed, or merely surprised. The last section I watched them work on, a crosswise web of dancers sliding and jumping under and over each other, and which took about an hour and a half to set, timed out at 15 seconds. "This is tricky," says Moulton, introducing the wrap-up of one section. "This is very tricky." He tells Chase to lie down, third in a row of women. With some notion of his fiendish plan, Chase cozies safely up against Barbara, the middle person. "Further apart," Moulton urges. But temporarily chicken, probably super-sensible and joking as well, she rolls over Barbara and scrunches herself up in the middle. "Further apart." So she moves to her position and Moulton takes a running leap over all three. Evel Knievel. Chase, on the far end, flinches and scoots center as Moulton sails blithely over her. Now Keith replaces Moulton. On a dry run, he skips over and between each woman, and then, with practice, goes over them all with ease. Now to get it up to speed and work it in. They run it again and again, starting with the racing, intercutting section that precedes it, and as it pulls tight, it gets wilder and bolder.
I love watching this hot scramble take shape, rev up, and grow in precision until it fits the few counts allotted. I love the way single moments - Beatrice lifted, Moulton doing a tour jete hidden behind everybody - float out of this whirlwind, as if they exist in another, totally unpressured time frame. The whole sequence, once they've got it down, takes no time. They're briefly giddy, hyper, like anyone would be who's just done the impossible. "It was close," says Keith. "But it was great."
“It is close," says Moulton.
The combination of the forceful use of the floor, the rushes and spins, the light clear shapes that appear as they leap and are hoisted or flung through the air, give a sense of sweep and resilience, of groundedness and levity, of daring with no time for reflection. This is what Moulton might call the "foosh" of the piece, the way it drives and whirls, springs and flies. But seeing fragments in rehearsal unprepares you for performance. There's a heightened formality and tension, a change in tone. Some phrases no longer occur in the location where you expect them. Daylight, the wide margins of space around the dancing, and a sense of outside space are inevitable losses. The American Theater Lab space seems tighter and two rows of people sitting on the floor crowd the dancers somewhat and flatten the performing area. The dancers have put aside their black and gray and no-color sweatpants, leg warmers and pullovers: they're in bi-color tops of salmon-rose, indigo, and a summery green, and loose, silky pants, still distinctively bunched mid-leg because of the kneepads. Beatrice is wearing her hair in braids; Barbara's is noticeably longer now. The beginning warms more slowly and regularly than I remember. It seems more of a thematic statement, an exposition, with its stamping rhythms and sudden stops.
But the biggest change is musical Before, I knew the rhythms as something the dancers took account of in their free, flyaway ride. Now, the amplified pulse has a more powerful sound and effect. I'm more aware of its restrictions, of how the dancing and the rhythm join. And the catchy, melodic element, new to me, creates a different sense of flow, a thicker ground under the dancing.
Different realms of movement activity have attracted Moulton's interest since he left Merce Cunningham's company in 1976. The maddening and fascinating precision ball-passing he's been working with (currently elaborating all the possible ways nine people can pass balls from hand to hand in quick rhythmic patterns without slip-ups) "is not a game, it's a precision activity, something rigorous and exact you can do in a human way. Not making it into a spectacle, not pretending it's dramatic. Allowing it to be an activity that happens to have an overwhelmingly ornamental quality.”
When he left Cunningham, Moulton still wanted to continue to work with movement in a structured way, he just didn't want to be in a professional atmosphere for a while. He began to investigate sports structures, and to devise three-team games. In those games, each time a goal was scored, the rules would change and a new structure triggered. (The evolution of patterns in Opposite Arch seems to owe something to this idea.) The games, he says, tended to have a circular quality, and to make nonsense of competition: if you're engaged in conflict with one group, you become especially vulnerable to the third.
It refreshed him to be in a situation where the qualifications for participating weren't based on your degree of specialization and excellence, but simply on whether you wanted to work or not. He enjoyed the opportunity to be playful in an intelligent way. And it delighted him that, in a sport, it was immediately obvious whether a rule or an approach worked or not: if it did, it was apparent to everyone. If it didn't, it got scrapped. In the course of this, his interest in dance and sport meshed. Their qualities interlace and balance in Opposite Arch. "You can't slap together some movement from sport and a thing from dance. That's gibberish. You have to find some way of looking at them together. I don't call this dance and that sport; I call them both movement, and look at them in general terms." Very broadly, Moulton characterizes a differential, one that he finds useful. "Sports have to go with necessary movement - whatever it takes to accomplish the goal. The time is felt" (not based on a rhythmic pulse) and the space is open (the whole field can be used.) Dance is essentially rhythmic, confined, and ornamental. But "I'm taking advantage of all the 'dancing' people have seen in their lives", utilizing whatever is familiar, standard and part of our "cultural language of movements." A big part of that language is athletics.
The guys go sliding through on their knees, one arm raised in a plain, guiding gesture, like a sort of salute. Or maybe that's just the best way to angle your wing. Moulton slides lazy as a hawk, as if the split-second it takes is all the time in the world. The group keeps dividing, penetrating, dovetailing, reshaping. The two men move in a quick grapevine around a line of three women. And then, with almost no discernible shift in the pattern, Moulton is paired with Beatrice, and the other three form the oppositional line. In performance, of course, there's no let-up, but in rehearsal it seems that even though the dancers are grateful for a pause to breathe and hang over, they're not worn down by this relentless push. Something seems to be giving them back energy. I'd guess that the rhythmic base provides that nourishment. When they're really going, the rhythm bounces them.
Back in December, Moulton, with composer A. Leroy plotted the structure of Opposite Arch, figuring out the rhythmic patterns that would intersect with "all the possible combinations of five people, all the possibilities of movement and spatial relationships." The structure is tight, strict. Yet the exhaustive, systematic exploration has a whimsicality shared with the ball-passing events in which all the permutations of pattern are laid bare. It would please the monks who designed the intricately interlaced capital pages of the Book of Kells.
Structurally, "I know exactly where I'm going and how I'm going to get there in time,” says Moulton. But he makes the movement fresh, never working on it more than a day before presenting it to the dancers. The structure is the challenge: he pits himself against it, is sparked by it, tests its limits. The idea is to be provoked, "to find out what can happen that'll be a surprise to me, that's outside my own process. The structure is a necessity, and I'm moving through it," he says. This sounds hard-ass and brainy, but, in the event, it's always informed by Moulton's deep feeling for movement - a feeling that is lyrical and flowing ("romantic too," he adds, "but let's not say that.") Moulton seems to work each small section again and again until it coheres; he doesn't seem to want to leave vague areas to fill in later. When there's a slip, they start over, run and rerun the sequence until it goes smoothly, spacewise and in time. How could he do otherwise?
The piece is life-or-death timing from start to finish. At some point, he tells me that the whole dance is 15 minutes long; he'd promised himself it wouldn't be more than 20. I wonder if he's pleased, disappointed, or merely surprised. The last section I watched them work on, a crosswise web of dancers sliding and jumping under and over each other, and which took about an hour and a half to set, timed out at 15 seconds. "This is tricky," says Moulton, introducing the wrap-up of one section. "This is very tricky." He tells Chase to lie down, third in a row of women. With some notion of his fiendish plan, Chase cozies safely up against Barbara, the middle person. "Further apart," Moulton urges. But temporarily chicken, probably super-sensible and joking as well, she rolls over Barbara and scrunches herself up in the middle. "Further apart." So she moves to her position and Moulton takes a running leap over all three. Evel Knievel. Chase, on the far end, flinches and scoots center as Moulton sails blithely over her. Now Keith replaces Moulton. On a dry run, he skips over and between each woman, and then, with practice, goes over them all with ease. Now to get it up to speed and work it in. They run it again and again, starting with the racing, intercutting section that precedes it, and as it pulls tight, it gets wilder and bolder.
I love watching this hot scramble take shape, rev up, and grow in precision until it fits the few counts allotted. I love the way single moments - Beatrice lifted, Moulton doing a tour jete hidden behind everybody - float out of this whirlwind, as if they exist in another, totally unpressured time frame. The whole sequence, once they've got it down, takes no time. They're briefly giddy, hyper, like anyone would be who's just done the impossible. "It was close," says Keith. "But it was great."
“It is close," says Moulton.
Marta Renzi: A Regular Guy
The first rehearsal I watch of Marta Renzi's new piece, For the Love of the Working, is a muddle to me. Almost incoherent. I can't tell what direction it's going in. One dancer, Mia, is out today. Everyone seems to be having a pretty good time, but you'd think the performance was three months away instead of two weeks. This rehearsal is for the third of four parts. Renzi identifies it as "New York", and that's what she calls the group of six dancers who're in it. The other group in this piece, Renzi and three dancers from Boston who worked with her on a recent television project (You Little Wild Heart) for WGBH, is "Boston". Two members of Boston - Paul and Kendall - are trying to nap in their sleeping bags in the back of the studio.
Renzi seems astonishingly good-humored and casual. Why isn't she panicking? "New York" starts with smooth and precise hand gestures that begin to sweep the body around after them, swing around on the floor, wheeling up and back like a pendulum. The five dancers are moving in two groups, one in front and one behind. Each group starts slowing for the other, and the movement drags. "Somebody's got to speed up," says Renzi.
From time to time, she struggles with the sequence. "I have no idea what you guys are doing anymore," she says. Probably it's been a while since they worked on this section, so anything that wasn't perfectly clear has become thoroughly fuzzy. Not to mention the definite holes. "I want to make up another stunt here," says Renzi. Actually, she intends to replace one short transitional episode and a stunt is hardly what she has in mind. Nothing drastic or spectacular. Her "stunts" melt away into the fabric of the dance.
"I'm getting better at the glue," Renzi tells me later. "I keep making pieces and adding them. I don't ever do one thing for a long time." "Good morning!" Kendall is awake and she gets to be the missing Mia. "Basically, they're just going to pass you over their heads." The New York five line up on the floor. Kendall falls forward, is turned over the bodies on the line, and is hauled up at the end. But it starts with a "swivel": kneeling, the dancers sag outwards onto their hips in different directions, turn halfway around, and come up facing the opposite way. Two of the women repeat the move as Kendall comes into place and starts to fall.
The dance runs in longer sections now, and the atmosphere is gigglier. More situations that seemed doubtful earlier seem miraculously to be working out. "Look who gets the girl! You got the right girl!" Now Renzi wants to see it all from the beginning. "Make everything overlap," she says. "Keep it moving if you can." Renzi has been verbally tugging and pushing at something that seemed amorphous, but now it's no trouble to see the shape of this section emerging, flowing, to see how the individuals are drawn into a pattern of centrifugal movement. "The new stuff is different," says Renzi. This is the most logical dance I've ever made. The impulsive stuff is what I've done before. Sometimes I worry that I'm making formulas at my young age."
Renzi started off at six years old with "the best teacher I could have had - Joy Anne Dewey - she was really good at all the creative parts of dancing. If I had to move to Williamstown and had only six year olds to work with, I guess I'd be like that. She was my only dance teacher except for one year of ballet, until I went to college. I was disenchanted then. Got interested in the Cuban revolution and being a lawyer." Then she went to workshops at the American Dance Festival at Connecticut College, and to Wolf Trap. "That was my coming of age. Meredith Monk was at Connecticut. I was in Needlebrain Lloyd and the Systems Kid. I wore this burlap suit that was too small and still had the dirt of burlap in it. Maybe I was a potato. I was with this group in sombreros, and sort of hooted and sounded out the air like a sentry." "Erick Hawkins and Twyla Tharp were at Wolf Trap. I felt I wasn't quick and pretty enough in Sara Rudner's workshop, but in Hawkins they like people who are weighty and can't finish movement."
She hoped to come to New York and dance with Carol Conway, and after a year in Boston she did, but it didn't give her enough room. For instance, "the Hawkins aesthetic didn't allow me to have short hair - I was supposed to go to Union Square to a wig shop for a fall..."
"After that, I said I'm auditioning for the next thing that comes along. And that was another dead end. So I said, "I'll make my own dances." "I made Babel for 10 people - friends from college, non-dancers, Art Bridgman - nobody from an audition and nobody from the street. Sort of an epic. "Your Move we rehearsed on the pier near Westbeth. Did it for people on line at the Delacorte and places like that. We passed the hat and made subway fare. It was duets for every combination of two people - sort of Twyla-oriented, athletic, in sneakers, the beginning of the shorts and sneakers period we all go through."
"I took a workshop with Douglas Dunn. Somebody said, 'You want to go to the Hair audition?' Me and John Bernd were on line for hours. Renzi worked in Hair, but "it took so long to get that movie done." She got busy on a new piece, Artichoke for Two, and asked to be excused from the Hare Krishna section. She never danced with Tharp after that. And "I told Douglas I wanted to be in a dance of his and he said fine, so I was in Rille and I never was again."
What was nice about working with Tharp and Dunn at the same time was that "even though they had almost nothing in common, they were both watching what happened spontaneously and finding ways to recapture that." Two of her works were shown in Dance Theater Workshop showcases. Then David White put her on the "Split Stream" series. White's been "completely supportive." She feels he's going out on a limb for her. She's not exactly a downtown star. "He believes in me as an artist," she says, "though he may disagree with individual things I do." Like The Drunkenness of Noah, which she did last year. "People really disliked it, and disliked that I told the story in the program. I meant it to be embarrassing, but it still hurts me to see it. I prettify things as much as I can, but sometimes I have to tell the truth." The Drunkenness of Noah is a sculpture on the Bridge of Sighs in Venice.
"After we saw it, Daniel [poet Daniel Wolff] read me the story from the Bible. That is so fucked up I said. One son is cursed, but he's just coping the best he can. I had the confusion and anger I hope people have when they see Noah. It's the only dance I've done that's larger than my own experience. It's not about my own little life. The dance is a question, not a story. So we only want to look at beautiful things? Wen you look at something that's not appealing, what do you learn?"
A week later, the rehearsal's at DTW where they open October 1. They run through the first section, in which "New York" and Boston interpenetrate. "How'd everybody do? Renzi asks. "not bad." They're pretty up. Renzi searches for the right music on the tape. Punching buttons, rolling the tape back and forward and forward and back, loosing sporadic blurts of a rich soprano singing something from a Bach cantata. The "Boston" section has much more "ordinary" movement than "New York", more emotional and physical weight. Paul punches. David catches his wrist. They hold each other. One runs a finger down the mid-line of the other's chest. Leans his head against him just below the sternum, listening, resting. The other pair, Marta and Kendall, drop softly to the floor, roll, lie, rub their hands through their hair, tip into a controlled falling run that follows a flung arm. It's rich, sensitive, full. They're on the floor for a second half lying in a momentary doze, then keel over sideways, readjust."
"Boston" goes into a twisting, swinging pattern of shifting actions and feeling qualities - belligerent or tender, but always playful. Full of dodging, ducking, lifting, with the four mixing up the way they pair, or sometimes all gnarled and interconnected. The women haul each other over their backs, get slung over the hips of the men. Kendall gets swung between the men. There's a slippery grandeur in the way all this is tossed out, and a deep resilient softness. All this fighting, pushing, tumbling's like the rough-and-tumble of kittens or pups, and in some ways the women are bolder than the men. It's easier for them to touch and their roughhouse is wilder."
"New York" comes in when "Boston" is over. But the music's not right. Thanks for coming right in," says Marta. "That was magic. Now we're fucking it up." And punch, punch, punch, she searches for the right music, Meredith Monk singing. Meanwhile, "miao, miao, miao" sings Renzi, making the bridge with her own voice. "New York" is abstract and cool compared to "Boston", much more "dancerly". It runs surprisingly smoothly, overall, except for small things. "That's completely graceless, Francine and Mia. I mean it's not nice. We've got to find another way."
I love Renzi's bluntness and humor, the flavor of her attention and input. It lets the dancers be direct too. "Take your sweet old time, you guys," she encourages them. "A little softer, you three lying down." "New York" flows into a big oval pattern that moves clockwise and seems to spill frontwards as Monk's voice swoops and cascades time and again. "Find some passion in here, you guys. Listen to her." The larger space allows the grouping of dancers to be more distinct.
But Renzi's main concern now is with the qualities the dancers radiate. She wants to see them, see their faces. She wants them "available to the world," not closed in to their partners, but vulnerable. What she's looking for, in part, is a sense of the community that these dancers, for a time, actually are. "Not that you should smile at each other, but you should see each other. You don't need to think as much as you do. Feel more."
Time's running out. They're working on the fourth section, everybody, "Boston" and "New York" together again. "Okay, you guys, stop and start again. Don't fart around." This is the toughest I've heard her. "I'm going to push now." There's a kind of ambling feeling to much of this last section, with its re-arrangements of earlier material. "It's not sloppier than 'New York', it's just less full." "Marta," interrupts technical direction Donald Firestone. "It's 25 after." "Shut up," she says saucily, putting her hand on her hip. "...Marta, it's 3:30."
"Yeah. Thanks." Renzi quickly sets to wrapping up the section for the dancers who're eager to cinch it. Then to a runthrough for Firestone who's heading out of town immediately. And all before being bounced out of the theatre at 4:00. But, "Listen," she says to the dancers, "when I say don't screw around, I don't mean don't be your old human selves. Have the good nature to be yourselves. That's presence. Don't cut off your personalities just because you're sticking on a little discipline."
Artists: An Endangered Species
Increasing the behemoth defense budget isn't the only thing that makes the cuts in an already scrawny arts budget crazy. The government persists in the delusion that the arts are frills, that government appropriations for the arts are charity. But it has been demonstrated overt and over again that money given to the arts is an extraordinarily fruitful investment. Arts actively multiply jobs, income and business volume in other areas, as well as redevelopment of neighborhoods. "Individual artists have done the same regenerative thing," says David White, executive director of Dance Theater Workshop. "For example, in Soho they're turned the whole area around. No major institutions moved in there. That's the measure of the impact of those dancers and artists. And then speculators move in and evict the artists or make it financially impossible for them to stay. That's what the marketplace does to artists. They can't hold on to the benefits they've created." Economically, the point is unmistakable. The arts make money, but not for the artists.
Though no one is certain where the cuts will strike hardest, everyone will be hurt. Philip Semark, executive vice president of the Joffrey Ballet, has described the disproportionate slash of the arts budget as "the smallest pie with the biggest cut." Even a tiny cut on top of 16% inflation would be significant for dance companies, service and presenting organizations who operate on the most minimal of budgets, and dancers and choreographers who live close to subsistence already wait tables and clean apartments, as well as rehearse, perform, take class and teach. "There's a notion that the people who benefit from the Endowment are the wealthy, the elite," says White. "The people who'll hurt are the people who get foodstamps or are on welfare," and he recites to me a long, embarrassing impromptu list of distinguished choreographers and dancers who qualify for these programs. Middle-size dance companies have been struggling to improve their base of support for years - tightening up their administration, restructuring boards of directors, looking for new funding sources, spiffing up the way they resent themselves to corporations and private foundations. Ed Henry, who dances with the Dan Wagoner Company, and was formerly its administrative director, says, " almost everyone who sponsors our tours across the country is helped by the Endowment (through the Dance Touring Program), so we expect a real cutback in touring., which is the backbone of our budget. Those performances are the reason for the existence of the company. Unless the work is going to get around, unless people see Dan's work, meet him, participate in lecture-demonstrations, see performances...what's the good?" Possibly the people hardest hit will be some of the more established companies with large, constant production expenses, along with the youngest artists at the beginning of their careers.
Cynthia Hedstrom, of Danspace, is certain the people who'll be most hurt are "the next generation, the generation of people who are just starting. My feeling is that organizations or choreographers or companies that have been going for a number of years may have certain resources they can turn to. Of course, the arts programs that are most commercially popular and have a product that is known (like ballet as opposed to an experimental work), will have an easier time raising money from other sources. New choreographers and new organizations, without much of a track record, will have almost nowhere to go, because the NEA supported a lot of those new artists, and businesses and corporations looked to the NEA as a guide." One area of agreement and distress is that corporations and private foundations will be most willing to give support to highly visible and more commercial arts organizations with wide appeal. "When the NEA began," says Trisha Brown, "it signaled a period of enlightenment There was a realization that there was more to life than making it. Until now, one could continue to make an aesthetic research and still be funded - provided one presented a reasonable business profile. Now we're back to capitalistic fervor." David Gordon is a picture of anger and determination. "As a dancer/artist/choreographer, I have survived and I will." But many choreographers and dancers won't. "The administration is ignoring humanity, dealing with the world as if it were only a business organization." Larger companies should be better able to deal with the cuts, if only because money from the NEA, NYSCA, etc. is generally a smaller proportion of their total budgets, and they have more of the administrative manpower and machinery to hunt up funding elsewhere. Herman Krawitz, of American Ballet Theater, which dies a vast amount of touring, remarks that "as the NEA withdraws funds the marginal situations have to be examined. Small theaters that charge less will be a problem, larger theaters that charge more are safer." Any sizable chunk out of the dance touring program will have an enormous impact. Government support produced a traffic of artists who never really toured before, and White believes, is responsible for dance having the fastest growing audience of any of the performing arts.
"The fabric of touring has begun to buckle a bit anyway," he says, because of the increased expenses, and it will deteriorate further. "We started to combat a provincialism in the arts through interchange, and now there's the likelihood that activity will again become isolated in individual communities. This will have a serious debilitating effect on the ability of artists t support themselves. For some companies, a successful tour may generate income, This is one of the very few ways a company can make money to apply its creative projects or to its local season which is inevitably a losing proposition." White also described possible cuts to presenting organizations as false economies. "Accessible, affordable space is one of the main concerns for local companies and for out-of-towners to come in to. There have for to be venues that can provide space and help develop the audience."
In the best sense," says White, "the NEA, through the peer panel review process, has provided a fairly democratic overview of the arts in this country, and has provided leadership for the private sector. The NEA, NYSCA and the Department of Cultural Affairs have been the court of first resort for emerging artists and new groups." About $9 million was provided by the NEA to dance activities last year; only $2.2 million of that was in the form of direct support. According to a 24-page statement of the dance community presented by Jerome Robbins to the House Committee on Interior Appropriations on March 25, the companies which received this $2.2 million were able to use the money to raise an additional $25 million and to generate more than $45 million in earned income. In another recent rough survey, mentioned in that statement, a number of dance companies contacted received $587,000 in NEA funding in 1980. By comparison, they returned to the federal government $1,835,338 in withholding taxes and FICA contributions, triple the funding appropriations.
"The conclusion...must be that dance companies with a very small amount of federal funding are generating a substantial economic impact." The closing pages of the statement note the situation in dance pretty squarely. "The work of American choreographers and dancers has defined 20th-century dance for the entire world...Mr. Reagan's 50% budget cut, however, would be a step toward the destruction of the one area in which the U.S. is unquestionably the world leader - the arts...This in spite of the fact that dance in the U.S. receives the least amount of government support of any major country in the world."
Though no one is certain where the cuts will strike hardest, everyone will be hurt. Philip Semark, executive vice president of the Joffrey Ballet, has described the disproportionate slash of the arts budget as "the smallest pie with the biggest cut." Even a tiny cut on top of 16% inflation would be significant for dance companies, service and presenting organizations who operate on the most minimal of budgets, and dancers and choreographers who live close to subsistence already wait tables and clean apartments, as well as rehearse, perform, take class and teach. "There's a notion that the people who benefit from the Endowment are the wealthy, the elite," says White. "The people who'll hurt are the people who get foodstamps or are on welfare," and he recites to me a long, embarrassing impromptu list of distinguished choreographers and dancers who qualify for these programs. Middle-size dance companies have been struggling to improve their base of support for years - tightening up their administration, restructuring boards of directors, looking for new funding sources, spiffing up the way they resent themselves to corporations and private foundations. Ed Henry, who dances with the Dan Wagoner Company, and was formerly its administrative director, says, " almost everyone who sponsors our tours across the country is helped by the Endowment (through the Dance Touring Program), so we expect a real cutback in touring., which is the backbone of our budget. Those performances are the reason for the existence of the company. Unless the work is going to get around, unless people see Dan's work, meet him, participate in lecture-demonstrations, see performances...what's the good?" Possibly the people hardest hit will be some of the more established companies with large, constant production expenses, along with the youngest artists at the beginning of their careers.
Cynthia Hedstrom, of Danspace, is certain the people who'll be most hurt are "the next generation, the generation of people who are just starting. My feeling is that organizations or choreographers or companies that have been going for a number of years may have certain resources they can turn to. Of course, the arts programs that are most commercially popular and have a product that is known (like ballet as opposed to an experimental work), will have an easier time raising money from other sources. New choreographers and new organizations, without much of a track record, will have almost nowhere to go, because the NEA supported a lot of those new artists, and businesses and corporations looked to the NEA as a guide." One area of agreement and distress is that corporations and private foundations will be most willing to give support to highly visible and more commercial arts organizations with wide appeal. "When the NEA began," says Trisha Brown, "it signaled a period of enlightenment There was a realization that there was more to life than making it. Until now, one could continue to make an aesthetic research and still be funded - provided one presented a reasonable business profile. Now we're back to capitalistic fervor." David Gordon is a picture of anger and determination. "As a dancer/artist/choreographer, I have survived and I will." But many choreographers and dancers won't. "The administration is ignoring humanity, dealing with the world as if it were only a business organization." Larger companies should be better able to deal with the cuts, if only because money from the NEA, NYSCA, etc. is generally a smaller proportion of their total budgets, and they have more of the administrative manpower and machinery to hunt up funding elsewhere. Herman Krawitz, of American Ballet Theater, which dies a vast amount of touring, remarks that "as the NEA withdraws funds the marginal situations have to be examined. Small theaters that charge less will be a problem, larger theaters that charge more are safer." Any sizable chunk out of the dance touring program will have an enormous impact. Government support produced a traffic of artists who never really toured before, and White believes, is responsible for dance having the fastest growing audience of any of the performing arts.
"The fabric of touring has begun to buckle a bit anyway," he says, because of the increased expenses, and it will deteriorate further. "We started to combat a provincialism in the arts through interchange, and now there's the likelihood that activity will again become isolated in individual communities. This will have a serious debilitating effect on the ability of artists t support themselves. For some companies, a successful tour may generate income, This is one of the very few ways a company can make money to apply its creative projects or to its local season which is inevitably a losing proposition." White also described possible cuts to presenting organizations as false economies. "Accessible, affordable space is one of the main concerns for local companies and for out-of-towners to come in to. There have for to be venues that can provide space and help develop the audience."
In the best sense," says White, "the NEA, through the peer panel review process, has provided a fairly democratic overview of the arts in this country, and has provided leadership for the private sector. The NEA, NYSCA and the Department of Cultural Affairs have been the court of first resort for emerging artists and new groups." About $9 million was provided by the NEA to dance activities last year; only $2.2 million of that was in the form of direct support. According to a 24-page statement of the dance community presented by Jerome Robbins to the House Committee on Interior Appropriations on March 25, the companies which received this $2.2 million were able to use the money to raise an additional $25 million and to generate more than $45 million in earned income. In another recent rough survey, mentioned in that statement, a number of dance companies contacted received $587,000 in NEA funding in 1980. By comparison, they returned to the federal government $1,835,338 in withholding taxes and FICA contributions, triple the funding appropriations.
"The conclusion...must be that dance companies with a very small amount of federal funding are generating a substantial economic impact." The closing pages of the statement note the situation in dance pretty squarely. "The work of American choreographers and dancers has defined 20th-century dance for the entire world...Mr. Reagan's 50% budget cut, however, would be a step toward the destruction of the one area in which the U.S. is unquestionably the world leader - the arts...This in spite of the fact that dance in the U.S. receives the least amount of government support of any major country in the world."
Tim Buckley, Whizz Kid
Everything moves, and keeps on moving, in Tim Buckley's dances, every body part has some integral action, some twist. "I am so concerned with the body moving," says Buckley. "I can't bear to stiffen or hold the arms..." So they whip, fondle, slap, twine serpentine knots, swing back. They're not for balancing, or for framing the dancer. They're too expressive for Buckley to waste that way. He's not interpreting specific emotions in gestural terms, but he sees that the arm scan hardly help but speak the internal qualities of a person, a dancer, of someone's inner movement.
"People aren't experienced with the legs as being expressive in internal situations, but people are arm-oriented. Arms do their daily work." It's not just arms that are busy. The limbs tend to impel movement in Buckley's dances, but the head, say, is not more likely to go with the general movement than to deny it; the torso will just as soon pull back the thrust of a movement as rush with it. There's no perversity in all this but, I think, a kind of measured greediness, a lust for the many flavors of movement, a taste for complexity.
In Indiana, before he ever heard of Graham or Cunningham, Buckley thought he needed movement experience. So he looked up dance courses in the university catalogue (and found, as well, folk dancing to fill the academic requirement). He followed his academic interests to Earlham College, and discovered he history of modern dance in the library. At Earlham, he made his first piece: a duet to an alarm clock and a tape of someone speaking in Russian spliced arbitrarily with Ravi Shankar and played, by accident, backwards. He was encouraged to pursue his dance and theatre interests by a professor who sensed his seriousness, and he moved on to Ohio State.
"I went into dance so naively," he says. "I didn't really understand what was involved. I hadn't studied much technique. It was all intuitive." But he felt his intuitions supported. "Graduating from that environment leads to New York," he says. I left the day after the last class." He was drawn to Laura Dean, by articles he'd read, by the formal aspects of her work - circles, lines, repetition. "And the naturalness of folk dancing hadn't left my body." By 1979, he was working with Dean and Nina Weiner (who he'd met at Ohio State) simultaneously, which became impossible and schizophrenic. He chose to stay with Wiener - her work involved him as a choreographer, "as a seed to generate ideas and material," because the work itself involved choreographic problems and "even making up the problems." Eventually, he made a solo for her, and then, last summer, Irish Jumping Songs for the company.
"As an individual in this city, I could never have financed my own choreographic work." And even though Dance Theater Workshop, where he's performing December 10 and 11, has been generous, "you're working on less than a shoestring budget." The loft on Bond Street where I watch a rehearsal of Immigrants, a jigsaw of flings and swings for five people, is small and cold. Buckley is lean, with an amiably wolfish look and a sleepy smile. His own movement has a rare and beautiful abandon, and a kind of aggressive snap that you see, for example, when he'll throw an arm out and pull it back. The direction change occurs with amazing speed and distinctness. There's no blur, just a satisfying bite. Much of what he seems to be concerned about has to do with keeping things uneven.
Irish Jumping Songs "began with a response to the Irish music," he says,"but also to the Irish situation. I've always felt you need to open your eyes to the world...Listening to the music, I heard a spontaneous gaiety in it, and I hoped the dancing could reflect that first response." "I lacked that sort of cultural heritage, growing up in the Midwest, where it's so washed out." I guess he longed for it.
"Immigrants goes through a range of feelings and finishes sadly. The songs are Bulgarian, Russian...and the bluegrass song is sort of personal for me, here I come from. The Yiddish song is about being isolated in a factory, and calling for the loved one to relieve the loneliness...I wanted to make work that involved all those feelings - music, other people's plights, governments - but not dancing that has to mime or tell a story. The movement can be set to the tempo of the song, or to the tone of it." Or as in Irish Jumping Songs, where he made the movement to different music (an electronic tape) and then meshed it with the songs.
Buckley clearly loves cramming in steps, and body, head, arm gestures at top speed, while managing to keep things rhythmically sharp and an individual, and uncrowded. The effect is not of dancing that's thick and difficult, but that's deep, many-layered, and lucid, exhibiting a kind of detailed polyphony in the body. You don't have to notice all the elements or their specific effects (like arms that are slightly delayed, or the way a comfortable opposition of arms and legs may be avoided), but these details give the work character. Maybe you can't see them, but you feel their presence. Like painting isn't just a matter of where the blotches of color are, but brushstroke, the thickness of the paint, what's underneath... There's a lightness and finesse to much of Irish Jumping Songs, and exactness in the feet - but the footwork is far from the taunting sharpness of Irish dances. The feet can be used delicately, pointing, sliding and tapping, but they're stamp flat, too, smack on the top of the foot, thud the heels down. It's sexy stuff - not sexy, but avid and full of flavor.
On top of those intelligent legs and feet, the top minds its own business - the body's casually resilient, almost flat sometimes; it pulls over, pulls sideways, fizzles into a question mark and floods over, jerks one way, snags elsewhere, slops around jazzily through the middle. Arms windmill, swing aside, hands slap. Buckley flies into a crashing leap and lands with a vibrating thunk. The playful challenge of speed and complexity is reminiscent of some folk dances where the figures become increasingly elaborate, the rhythms speed up, the steps that cluster in a phrase multiply, the weight shifts get trickier. Endurance is the smallest part of the challenge; the big deal is in the joy of juggling all those subtle variations and in everybody pulling it off.
In a rehearsal of Jumping Songs, with Erin Thompson and Elisabeth Rioux, Buckley asks Erin to get a little more weight down into her feet, to strengthen the accents in a particularly rapid passage. He's concerned too that the movements get bigger as they recede, since an audience can't read movement in depth as vividly as movement that passes across the field of vision. With Elisabeth, something similar comes up. A diagonal phrase has grown too smooth. "It's too even in the sound and shape of it." Buckley shows what he means - "don't travel on these things, travel on these." Elisabeth had been traveling equally through the whole phrase; now the steps in one part are quite tight. "And take the sound out of these..." So throughout, a wealth of rhythmic but irregular sounds-stamps, whooshes, slaps, taps, thuds - interplays pointedly with the reliable, bouncy accents of the jig. Buckley is thinking of two simultaneous notions of rhythm: the rhythm of the steps Elisabeth does with her feet, which are unchanged, and the larger rhythm and musical shape of the whole movement which, now, is altogether different. This short, intricate passage had seemed mild. Suddenly, it's a whole mouthful of flavors.
"People aren't experienced with the legs as being expressive in internal situations, but people are arm-oriented. Arms do their daily work." It's not just arms that are busy. The limbs tend to impel movement in Buckley's dances, but the head, say, is not more likely to go with the general movement than to deny it; the torso will just as soon pull back the thrust of a movement as rush with it. There's no perversity in all this but, I think, a kind of measured greediness, a lust for the many flavors of movement, a taste for complexity.
In Indiana, before he ever heard of Graham or Cunningham, Buckley thought he needed movement experience. So he looked up dance courses in the university catalogue (and found, as well, folk dancing to fill the academic requirement). He followed his academic interests to Earlham College, and discovered he history of modern dance in the library. At Earlham, he made his first piece: a duet to an alarm clock and a tape of someone speaking in Russian spliced arbitrarily with Ravi Shankar and played, by accident, backwards. He was encouraged to pursue his dance and theatre interests by a professor who sensed his seriousness, and he moved on to Ohio State.
"I went into dance so naively," he says. "I didn't really understand what was involved. I hadn't studied much technique. It was all intuitive." But he felt his intuitions supported. "Graduating from that environment leads to New York," he says. I left the day after the last class." He was drawn to Laura Dean, by articles he'd read, by the formal aspects of her work - circles, lines, repetition. "And the naturalness of folk dancing hadn't left my body." By 1979, he was working with Dean and Nina Weiner (who he'd met at Ohio State) simultaneously, which became impossible and schizophrenic. He chose to stay with Wiener - her work involved him as a choreographer, "as a seed to generate ideas and material," because the work itself involved choreographic problems and "even making up the problems." Eventually, he made a solo for her, and then, last summer, Irish Jumping Songs for the company.
"As an individual in this city, I could never have financed my own choreographic work." And even though Dance Theater Workshop, where he's performing December 10 and 11, has been generous, "you're working on less than a shoestring budget." The loft on Bond Street where I watch a rehearsal of Immigrants, a jigsaw of flings and swings for five people, is small and cold. Buckley is lean, with an amiably wolfish look and a sleepy smile. His own movement has a rare and beautiful abandon, and a kind of aggressive snap that you see, for example, when he'll throw an arm out and pull it back. The direction change occurs with amazing speed and distinctness. There's no blur, just a satisfying bite. Much of what he seems to be concerned about has to do with keeping things uneven.
Irish Jumping Songs "began with a response to the Irish music," he says,"but also to the Irish situation. I've always felt you need to open your eyes to the world...Listening to the music, I heard a spontaneous gaiety in it, and I hoped the dancing could reflect that first response." "I lacked that sort of cultural heritage, growing up in the Midwest, where it's so washed out." I guess he longed for it.
"Immigrants goes through a range of feelings and finishes sadly. The songs are Bulgarian, Russian...and the bluegrass song is sort of personal for me, here I come from. The Yiddish song is about being isolated in a factory, and calling for the loved one to relieve the loneliness...I wanted to make work that involved all those feelings - music, other people's plights, governments - but not dancing that has to mime or tell a story. The movement can be set to the tempo of the song, or to the tone of it." Or as in Irish Jumping Songs, where he made the movement to different music (an electronic tape) and then meshed it with the songs.
Buckley clearly loves cramming in steps, and body, head, arm gestures at top speed, while managing to keep things rhythmically sharp and an individual, and uncrowded. The effect is not of dancing that's thick and difficult, but that's deep, many-layered, and lucid, exhibiting a kind of detailed polyphony in the body. You don't have to notice all the elements or their specific effects (like arms that are slightly delayed, or the way a comfortable opposition of arms and legs may be avoided), but these details give the work character. Maybe you can't see them, but you feel their presence. Like painting isn't just a matter of where the blotches of color are, but brushstroke, the thickness of the paint, what's underneath... There's a lightness and finesse to much of Irish Jumping Songs, and exactness in the feet - but the footwork is far from the taunting sharpness of Irish dances. The feet can be used delicately, pointing, sliding and tapping, but they're stamp flat, too, smack on the top of the foot, thud the heels down. It's sexy stuff - not sexy, but avid and full of flavor.
On top of those intelligent legs and feet, the top minds its own business - the body's casually resilient, almost flat sometimes; it pulls over, pulls sideways, fizzles into a question mark and floods over, jerks one way, snags elsewhere, slops around jazzily through the middle. Arms windmill, swing aside, hands slap. Buckley flies into a crashing leap and lands with a vibrating thunk. The playful challenge of speed and complexity is reminiscent of some folk dances where the figures become increasingly elaborate, the rhythms speed up, the steps that cluster in a phrase multiply, the weight shifts get trickier. Endurance is the smallest part of the challenge; the big deal is in the joy of juggling all those subtle variations and in everybody pulling it off.
In a rehearsal of Jumping Songs, with Erin Thompson and Elisabeth Rioux, Buckley asks Erin to get a little more weight down into her feet, to strengthen the accents in a particularly rapid passage. He's concerned too that the movements get bigger as they recede, since an audience can't read movement in depth as vividly as movement that passes across the field of vision. With Elisabeth, something similar comes up. A diagonal phrase has grown too smooth. "It's too even in the sound and shape of it." Buckley shows what he means - "don't travel on these things, travel on these." Elisabeth had been traveling equally through the whole phrase; now the steps in one part are quite tight. "And take the sound out of these..." So throughout, a wealth of rhythmic but irregular sounds-stamps, whooshes, slaps, taps, thuds - interplays pointedly with the reliable, bouncy accents of the jig. Buckley is thinking of two simultaneous notions of rhythm: the rhythm of the steps Elisabeth does with her feet, which are unchanged, and the larger rhythm and musical shape of the whole movement which, now, is altogether different. This short, intricate passage had seemed mild. Suddenly, it's a whole mouthful of flavors.