Drawing the Surface of Dance
For Molly
Contents
Stuff
An Essay
In the aftermath of a performance, choreography is a discarded thing, the paper in the gutter that looks like a dead bird and reminds you how complex the body of everything is.
Choreography is more perishable than dancing, and dance is more perishable than fruit.
When the choreography is finally performed and then the piece closes, I think to myself: Draw the nouns. The objects are the nouns in the piece. The dance material is the verbs. The dancers are the sentence constructors, and sometimes the subject, but not always.
The making of the charts of the work happens after the choreography becomes “a dance,” after the dancers and the audience have at it. Post-post-post everyone else involved in the work, the choreographer (me) reclaims stolen property in some dingy bus station. Have you ever been there? It’s a sordid affair to be sure.
The charts are indexical, a cataloguing of the materiality of the piece. The charts are an anti-vanishing, the un-evaporation of the work into the ether. They are the:
“I am still interested in elements here and want to regard them again.” The charts are a reclaiming of real estate after moving away, a squatter’s right.
Charts: a graphic digression, new works from old works: a folk song.
The shape of the chart is a new choreographic structure. The charts are their own dance piece where the proscenium stage is the horizon line of your eyes, and the floor is made of paper. The lighting is your desk lamp. The music is the sound of you.
When you go on a trip, and come home, there is a closure to putting everything away in your drawers. The drawings put the objects back in the drawers. They’re the old card catalogues in the library. They reference decaying books in broken stacks in libraries that you walk to one morning, but now they’re condos or something, you’re not sure.
Drawing is paper as theater, manifesting these ideas once again in space, but this time in a two dimensional space, and in a driverless durational mode. Here’s how duration works in drawing: The creation of the drawing is happening in real time, sometimes in an instant and other times with great muscle and pain, a kind of slow motion. And the charts are structured to be viewed in quick time, a glancing. But, the lack of durational control for the reading of the drawing, from a choreographic stance, is freeing.
Look at the nature of the stuff in the work: its coloration, its texture, its architecture, and most importantly the repetition of ideas from piece to piece. You can count the number of times sticks appear in each piece and then see that idea glide from work to work, as if sticks can never be exhausted, because of the nature of Mother Nature. You may note the repetition of placing microphones in objects; this idea was sewn into many of the earlier works, and then vanishes. Slippers appear over and over again, as do dots: snow, water, smoke, petals.
What is missing in the charts, what endures.
Please note: the introduction of furry things in 1999 and then the falling away of them by 2010. Please note: the introduction of things that light up in 1993 and disappearance of this motif by 2001. Surface matters.
Furry matters. Matters of slippage, matters of folding, matters that roll around, matters of the emanation of sound. Matters of things falling, dropping, floating. Matters of materiality, and its spirit. These things matter to me. Matter matters.
Objects are animate. Objects hold messages from other planes of consciousness. Be careful of those objects!
The [object] sang. The [object] sat next to her facing the same direction. The [object] went on a daredevil ride. The [object] rotated like the dancer. The [object] fell and splattered all over the floor and made a mess. The [object] flirted with the {object). The {object} sat still, meditating.
Annie-B Parson
1
Charts of Works 1991–2018
Pre-Big Dance Theater, this was the first of the many large-scale dance/theater works I made. The piece, as I vaguely remember it, was concerned with feminism and brides, Americana, kitsch imagery, and the start of a long-standing fascination with the properties, promises, and assumptions of the iconic red velvet curtain.
Based on the dry, ironic and moving short story of the same name by Gustave Flaubert, with two dancers dancing the role of the protagonist simultaneously. An early exploration into compositional notions around complex symmetries, reverse mirroring, and duality.
Based on both Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger and illicitly taped audio from Paul Lazar’s movie auditions,1 we combined two very disparate sources to talk about despair and aspiration, the after-life and magic. Big Dance made the piece at and for Dance Theater Workshop, and later it was made into a film by Jonathan Demme.
