Footnotes

Six Choreographers Inscribe the Page

Elena Alexander, Jill Johnston, Douglas Dunn, Marjorie Gamso, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Kenneth King, Yvonne Meier, Sarah Skaggs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9789057010828
• eBook ISBN: 9781134393497
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

The writings of six choreographers are assembled in this book and the leap they have taken to go from the medium of choreography into written text constitutes a form of translation. Some of the texts investigate the possibilities of written language as invention, others use it as a means to illustrate specific tenets or describe choreographic projects. All yield insight into the process of coaxing language from the body.

part one
Context

IN THE TASK OF THE TRANSLATOR, Walter Benjamin stated: “Languages are not strangers to one another, but are, a priori and apart from all historical relationships, interrelated in what they want to express. … The task … consists in finding that intended effect … upon the language into which he is translating which produces in it the echo of the original.” He goes on to quote Stéphane Mallarmé: “The imperfection of languages consists in their plurality, the supreme one is lacking: thinking is writing without accessories or even whispering, the immortal word still remains silent; the diversity of idioms on earth prevents everybody from uttering the words which otherwise, at one single stroke, would materialize as truth.” Benjamin and Mallarmé were speaking quite specifically of writing, but their words have application to the involvement of six choreographers in a textual project. The making of any work of art in any form manifests intention; the reasons why one form is chosen over another are myriad, and though interesting, not the object under scrutiny in Footnotes.

The figurative leap taken by Douglas Dunn, Marjorie Gamso, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Kenneth King, Yvonne Meier, and Sarah Skaggs from the medium of choreography into written text constitutes a form of translation. Part I, “Context,” inscribes the six within and among other writers, poets, and journalists as ensemble, fabrication, poem.

context

My dessicated formulae are translated into palpable workings of the senses, abuzz with aberrant life, and at once I recognize the flaw in one of my earliest equations compounded a dozen pages on by a further error, and later still, I note a third lapse that, by the merest chance, reconciles the former two, and since — this broken logic to the contrary — my theorem nonetheless holds, I am tempted to leave the manuscript unchanged in homage to the persistence of corruption and the happenstance of rectitude.

—Eric Darton, Free City

1

THE LYRICAL nature of pure circulation. … The direct star-blast from vectors and signals, from the vertical and the spatial. Hey! The whole body changes frequency, picks up signs and signals … Dancing … riding through space—all space. … Dancing … beyond what one can know, or what knowing is. … I think we deal with other wisdoms, all more real than our own. … Sitting in a chair by the window, I see a man go by … and I wonder at the precision with which each foot advances, so controlled … so sure. I would hope that if the man and I were to trade places, he might think the same of me … but I am not at all sure that he would. I walk along, waving my arms and mumbling almost wordlessly, now shortening my steps so as not to interrupt my mumbling, now mumbling more rapidly in time with my steps. … Where this basic dull roar of a rhythm comes from is a mystery. In my case, it’s all kinds of repetitions in my mind of noises, rocking motions or … any phenomenon with which I can associate a sound. On the one hand … we have this rhythm … on the other … we have the4 ego,” situated within the space of the language … no longer rhythm, but sign, word structure, contract, constraint. … Only by vying with the agency of limiting and structuring language does rhythm become a contestant—formulating and transforming. Listen here. Iv’e never played it safe. … Ask my imaginary brother, that waif, that childhood best friend who comes to play dress-up and stick-up and jacks and Pick-Up-Sticks. … Or form a Piss Club where we all go in the bushes and peek at each other’s sex. Pop-gunning the street like crows. Not knowing what to do. … In kindergarten I had the lead as a farmer in a musical production and had to sing! Its a hazy memory and must have been dreadful! … A few years later I would have repetitive dreams that my bed was on that stage! An endless and flooded dreamland, lying low, cross-and wheel-studded like a tick-tack-toe. At the right, ancillary, “Mary”’s close and blue. Which Mary? Aunt Mary? Tall Mary Stearns I knew? … A high vox humana somewhere wails: The gray horse needs shoeing! It’s always the same! What are you doing, there, beyond the frame? … One sees symbolic transactions of movement phenomena in a … continuum extending the kinetics and somatics of movement before and after form per se, as dreams break the bonds and bounds of reality and perception. Something like living occurs, a movement/Out of dream into its codification.…

2

SIDERATION. Star-blasted, horizontally by the car, altitudinally by the plane … by television. … Glorify it how one will, the contents of television are proof against even the most eloquent stylists gifts. … [I]t simply will not do to treat television as a mirror, a reflection of our culture, refusing the possibility that programming may exert a significant—and debilitating—effect on the life of our times. I’m surprised at how little invective is directed at the corporate octopus … behind every wall plug. Can it be that a critic … really thinks that the tube is a thing we turn to in order to see the world rather than a force that significantly shapes the world … that the medium shows us who we are rather than what a group of mammoth corporations thinks we’ll agree to pretend we are? … [T] he fairy tale world of America is more of a dreamed up social life with the kings and saints of big business—Jennifer Goodale, manager of cultural programs for the Philip Morris Companies, [when] asked about scant corporate support for [a well-known, not-for-profit, photography publisher] said, “We re not in the business of giving away money,” to keep an operation afloat. Nonetheless, Philip Morris is backing a … book [put out by the same publishers] on the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham. “We’ve been a backer of Merce since 1983, so this was a wonderful extension of our support,” she said. “But it is something we would not do often because, frankly, companies want something back in terms of marketing visibility. Thats the reality.”

If you set out afresh the sum to which you attach value and of which you take account

If you were an airman and, without quibbling, flew your arc … set the controls for the heart of the sun.

[F]avorably disposed viewers, too, want to fly. … They, too, want to transcend the clouds and have a place in the sun. Sheltered by this dazzling light, the semiotician carries on his survey on this side of blindness, in the opaque night of the form he is to illuminate.

[H]ere there is only torment, because … you cannot find the right word and solve the problems of the world.

You only solve the equation which the world also is.

Admit that you are merely living in a country furnished by the ancients, that your views are only rented, the pictures of your world hired. Admit that when you really pay … you do so only beyond the barrier, when you have said farewell to everything that is so dear to you—to landing places, flying-bases, and only from there do you embark upon your own path. … The actions are specific. We had to hike up a mountain. It took something like eight hours. It was completely awful. Then, it was always the question of whether we were going to the restaurant on top of the mountain or not. My parents would never want to go. They brought sandwiches with them; that’s what they wanted to eat. I hated it. I couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.

Something has innocently changed. Physical appearances … belonged to solid bodies. Now appearances are volatile … mirages; refractions not of light but of appetite, in fact a single appetite, the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• contents
• Introduction to the Series
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• part one • CONTEXT
• part two • EXEGETICAL ROMP
• part three • TEXT
• Selected Bibliography
• Biographies