I point to the second line of the three listed on the large pad of paper. A discontinuity of continuity provides avenues for experimentation that lead to personal insight impossible to realize without risk-taking. It is a necessary step in understanding the power of choice and the recognition of one’s limitations. A discontinuity of continuity can also be dangerous, and I have a great example of that.
About ten years ago, I wanted to see if I could unlearn an involuntary action and decided upon sneezing. I never told anyone I was doing this. It wasn’t until two years into this experiment that I noticed an annoying itch on the inside corner of my left eye every time I blew my nose. I realized I had ruptured a once-secure membrane that was probably created for the sole purpose of preventing nose blowers from subsequent eye itchiness. I am certain the rupture was a direct result of the fairly violent eruptions within my sinus cavity every time a sneeze happened. And some time later, following a workshop in Brussels at which I remember sneezing a lot, I was dining in a fancy airport hotel the evening before returning to Austin. My jaw locked while I was spooning French onion soup to my mouth. I returned to my room immediately. During the flight home the next day, without much range of movement in my jaw, I panicked, trying to place my head near the retractable tray in order to eat. After getting home, I immediately went to my dentist to be fitted for a bite guard, which eventually caused painful stiffness in my neck. The bite guard was soon in the garbage, and with the help of a massage therapist my normal jaw activity resumed, along with a commitment to return to my God-given right to sneeze. A dear friend, who never knew about my experiment, recently told me that on some occasions in local restaurants I would sneeze with such appalling sounds and spray that she considered not dining out with me again.
Pointing to a continuity of discontinuity, I say, “How I arrived here is the context for my talk.”
Until the age of twenty-five I held these beliefs about myself:
Dance technique was not something I could bring myself to master. My intellect, my thinking mind, was fallow.
I did not know how, nor was I motivated, to engage in research. To this day, I do not know how to use a library.
Ten years later, paralleling the decentralization of my three-dimensional body into a cellular one whenever I danced, I had unintentionally replaced the need to master a way of moving with a body that was now a site for inquiry. Dance became a way for me to learn without thinking, which in turn diminished my fear of not being smart. The attraction to and the determination to keep noticing my cellular body as my teacher showed no sign of weakening. If methodology or attainment were my goal, there would be a fundamental absurdity to my research. How could noticing feedback from five million or a zillion cells possibly compute? How would I even do it? Without a technique to master or a predictable outcome to my dancing, the only evidence I had to support my research was the fact that I continued to learn from my practice. And I became a smarter performer, in that there were aggregates of instances within any given performance when I was not governed by learned behavior.
EXCERPTS FROM DANCE NOTES, 2000–2001
This adaptation of my talk contains excerpts from my dance notes, more or less in chronological order since January 2000. The format conveys how my practice of performance brought me to an understanding of my work as I describe it now, and I point to the continuity of discontinuity material on the easel. There is some repetition because it took years to adapt what I was learning into my daily practice of dance.
It may help to give an example of what I experience as feedback from my zillion-celled body when I am dancing: “Kjdfv hrtrjtwnr. Litjw hc; rt3, tfkgnu6t. Ejl.”
What is not included in this adaptation is a forty-minute video of dancer/choreographer Jeanine Durning performing her early adaptation of the solo No Time to Fly. That video would begin right now, projected on a large screen behind me. There would be just enough volume to hear Jeanine’s footsteps and her singing.
January 2000: What struck me most was how clearly Misha (Mikhail Baryshnikov) stated that he was a dancer, not a choreographer, and that his work was to serve the choreographer. I would like to have had the presence of mind to respond to him by saying that I, as the choreographer, could best be served by his feeling served by the choreography. The word “serve,” used by Misha in 2000, became integral to my personal practice in 2014.
Past/Forward was the re-creation of several dances by choreographers associated with Judson Dance Theater in the early 1960s, including the commissioning of new works from those choreographers. I choreographed Single Duet, which Misha and I performed during the US leg of the tour.
I did not think that he really ever understood how I worked, yet when I looked at some of the videos of the duet, I much preferred watching him. When he looked at me dancing, his blue eyes penetrated every detail of my movement, and I associated that look with how he learned from his dance teachers as a young boy. He always wanted me to go onstage first because he said that if he could see me, he could then follow.
Most dance training assumes that there is a single coherent being who dances. My work succeeds when there is no single “one,” no single moment, or meaning, movement, image, character, emotion, that exists long enough for either the dancer or audience to identify an “is” that is happening.
If I remove movement as the primary component of dance making, can the ways I perceive space and time suffice as material within the choreography and performance of my work?
For many years it was my surrounding space that I perceived changing as I moved. Gradually my experience of perception enlarged to include the whole studio or theater in which I was dancing. This expanded field increased the material available to me as I danced. Why do I need to limit myself to what I am doing in space when I can include my perception of the outer reaches of that space in my dancing? There is nothing abstract in how I experience space and time. On the contrary, I am alert to my whole body’s sensual mutability.
How I perceive my bodily experience of time passing feels like lying still between the banks of a shallow moving river.
I set up a proposition in the form of a “what if ?” question. The question is framed through a turn of language found to excite the imagination of the person who is dancing. The question is meant to inspire and engage the dancer in noticing the sensuality of the feedback from the question as it unfolds in his/her cellular body. The question is not there to be answered. And, to not look for an answer requires a lot of work for everyone. That is why the question has to be so attractive for the person who is dancing: “[N]on-knowing is not a form of ignorance but a difficult transcendence of knowledge” (Bachelard 1994, xxii, quoting Jean Lescure, Lapique [Paris: Galanis], 78).
The group piece I choreographed for the Past/Forward project was titled Whizz. The primary question the dancers were to engage in their practice was, “What if every cell in your body at once has the potential to perceive your loyalty to DANCE, and your disinterestedness (in the loyalty) simultaneously?” Disinterestedness referred to loyalty and nothing else. (This question, among other things, helps to undermine “the look” of the serious artist.)
As Marian Chase Lecturer, I began my talk by barking for one minute at a podium before an audience at the American Dance Therapy Association in Seattle, Washington, in October 2000:
“Woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof Woof WOOFWOOF Woof Woof woof woof woof WOOF WOOF woof woof woof woof WOOF WOOF woof woof woof woof woof woof WOOF woof woof woof WOOF.”
Within the art form we call dance, I experiment with words to disrupt, often violently, conscious and unconscious movement behavior. “What if alignment is everywhere?” or “What if where I am
