and again, to signify my daily resolve to follow the path that was not yet drawn on the paper. I also described the fundamental question that guided my daily practice for more than a year: “What if every cell in my body at once has the potential to perceive beauty and to surrender beauty simultaneously, each and every moment?” I then joked with audiences, trying to reassure them that I knew the question was unknowable, but that at the same time the process of entering into the question was transformative, although I could not say how.
TIMELINE FOR A Lecture on the Performance of Beauty
o beautiful was choreographed in 2002. That winter I commissioned Laura Cannon, a young dancer/costumer from Austin, Texas, to design an outfit inspired by the film Blade Runner. I was distraught about the state of affairs in the world. Audiences could see me performing o beautiful in the Blade Runner costume on the left screen a little further into A Lecture.
January 2003 saw my first public performances of o beautiful at Zodiak Center for New Dance in Helsinki, Finland, and later at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. Following those performances I decided against the postapocalyptic attire because of how it influenced my movement and colored my behavior onstage. I found a simple pair of pale blue linen pants and a matching tailored shirt to wear instead.
My solo practice of o beautiful continued through early summer in Austin, Texas, where temperatures rose into the 90s. I made a point of not turning on the air conditioner in the downtown studio because I was not paying rent. My arrangement with the proprietor was an exchange of practice space for acknowledging his support in my dance programs and newsletters. The studio was a large room within a suite of smaller massage cubicles above a bicycle shop. One morning I stripped off my clothing and danced. I was an animal dancing, and the movement felt naked in the most pristine environment imaginable. Nudity became the costume, and on the spot I changed the solo’s title to Beauty.
The London program, in July 2003, began with my solo Music. After intermission, clothed in blue linen, I approached the audience and invited a volunteer to the stage. Speaking quietly, I asked if this young woman would follow me upstage and undress me there before returning to her seat. Like a caring mother, she carefully removed, folded, and stacked my garments on the floor. Beauty was performed only once, at the Greenwich Dance Agency. It was a quintessentially satisfying experience for me, and the minute it was over, in the dark, even before the audience began clapping, I knew I would never perform Beauty again. A Lecture on the Performance of Beauty is what replaced Beauty.
I signal the technician to start the video of the London performance of Beauty, which is then projected on the right screen. I then begin reading from the text.
NOTES FOR THE PERFORMER OF Beauty
What if the you who dances is less like a dancer and more like a computational neuroscientist whose research currently defines our understanding of consciousness and normalcy? Here are some differences between your work as a dancer and that of the computational neuroscientist:
1. Your laboratory functions best when it is empty, whereas a computational neuroscientist needs at least a desk, chair, computer, and so on.
2. You are not required to write papers in order to be recognized, … although I can attest to the fact that it can help your career.
3. Your discipline is in schooling your body to perform, whereas the scientist disciplines her mind.
4. Your methodologies as a dancer do not require exactitude because your experimentation is deliberately inestimable.
What if there is a question, applied like a guideline for Beauty, a question that functions like the rudder of a small boat heading out to sea at night? The rudder is in the hands of an experienced navigator, just as the question is in the body of the dancer. The rudder keeps the boat on course in the same way that the question guides the dancer. The steering hand on the rudder bar is relaxed and responsive, like the mind of the dancer. The boatman is inseparable from his world: the water, the night sky, wind, and the currents that slap against the surface of his launch. In much the same spirit, the theater is your world, and you attend to your navigation by keeping the question current. It is the question that guides you through the night of Beauty. To seek an answer is to narrow the immensity of the question.
You are alone onstage and noticeably different from the person who was alone in the dressing room moments ago. Your body brought you to this stage. Here you shimmer. What if shimmering is how you experience time passing? Here and gone, here and gone, here and gone … with an emphasis on the here in the here and gone. Without words to describe it, what if your audience senses these shifting boundaries of your body?
What if, as a counterpart to shimmering, you exercise your skills for undermining the ordinariness of time? As strong as your genetic and bodily responses to your inner pulse may actually feel, you operate like a jazz musician, who turns a song into an eclectic reconfiguration of notes and phrases that defy order, subvert the expected, and yet coalesce masterfully. Your experimentation questions automatic or naturally flowing movement, movement shaped by behavioral patterning that flows from all of us like a reservoir of training and acquired tastes, which lodge like a fashionable ski resort at the foot of a beautiful mountain in the Rockies or Alps, as the case may be.
THE CHOREOGRAPHER’S CONFESSION
Stage directions: I drop my manuscript and begin talking to the audience about the political crisis in the United States. I describe my inability to articulate my concerns about US policy, and I hear only my anger and rage. I am fully aware of how ineffective my arguments are under these conditions. I apologize for my lack of factual information and analysis and end with this remark: “Dance is my form of political activism. It is not how I dance or why I dance. It is that I dance.”
CHOREOGRAPHER’S QUESTION
FOR THE PERFORMER OF Beauty
“What if every cell in your body has the potential to perceive beauty and to surrender beauty, simultaneously, each and every moment?”
I signal the projectionist to start the video of o beautiful on the left screen, and I position myself, with a marker, beside the easel and pad. I hold both microphone and written score in my left hand and will gradually draw the floor pattern for the dance with my right, all the while reading from the written score. It is my intention to (1) get wound up in the microphone cord, (2) adjust my glasses frequently, (3) constantly negotiate holding and reading the manuscript and drawing at the same time, and (4) sing beautifully. The italicized phrases in the written score (below) are snippets from several patriotic American songs that I sing in the course of A Lecture.
THE CHOREOGRAPHY
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив
