This was the subject heading of an email from Amelia Reeber in
my inbox when I woke up the next morning in response to an email I had sent
about the first day. Yeah. Take that.
You better fucking believe it.
Rah Rah Rah. Dynamic! Beautiful
song be damned! Rah!
I went early to the hall and did a yoga practice. Rah! (did I mention that was about 10 meters
away from where I slept?)
We did a practice then continued to learn the choreography,
stopping many times to look at things more closely. Man, did I think I had a handle on comic
movement without being funny. This was
my jam until it wasn’t 4 times later. I
think we ended the day (fittingly) with an unpretentious march off stage. Dum dum da dum dum.
Also, that day we added a practice with music and Deborah
surprised us with PJ Harvey, Catpower, the XX, Sufjan.
Remember to turn your fucking head
This is a newer mantra in her toolbox. She said she watched video of herself and was
mortified at its fixed frontal position.
What if front is everywhere? She cited the people that brought this into
her practice but didn’t mention Merce.
Maybe he arrived at it later.
Which reminds me. . .
I believe that was the day of her first history lesson where
she shared a bit about how she came to and developed this practice. We gathered in a circle. I thought I would tell you a little bit about
where this came from, she said and the magnitude of the history we were taking
part of became real. Deborah Hay herself
explaining the course of her radical dance pioneering. These things I had read, but now we were
having the real human experience of it. How she got to be an understudy and
then ended up performing Story and Eon with the Cunningham Company and how
terrible she felt afterward. She had
terrible stage fright. She was doing performances at Judson before she really
knew what she was doing and eventually moved to Vermont and lived in a tent in
a barn and dreaming up a way of working with the cellular body. She was in the process of trying to survive. She stopped performing and started making
large group pieces for non-dancers.
Eventually she took away the audience as well. She felt some need to remove all these
elements (herself as a performer, traditional training, and audience) in order
to cultivate a new understanding of performance that she could find endless
possibility within.
At the end of the day, I found that anxiety was mounting for
me. Is the only way you can actually get anywhere
with this practice by turning your life over to it? Or more specifically, by turning your dancing
over to it? Is there anyway you can just have it be a part of a whole, not give
it 100%? Maybe I didn’t fully realize what I was getting into. This was an nervous rant I had at dinner with
Miguel and Matthias that night and then the next day she said, it’s a
presumption, not a belief and things began to flow again.
My next big block was, it’s not what you are doing its how
you are perceiving. How are you
perceiving? How am I perceiving? I would say this over and over and over
answers jumping into my head (with my eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin, nerves,
softly, fluidly, while jumping, while lying down, etc, etc). The time between perception and dis-attaching was long enough to formulate sentences and answers. This is not the point.
Quote of the day: I’m
asking you not to follow you bliss. I’m
sorry.
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