Art is Not in Some Far-Off Place

I have been thinking about the prologue for The False and True Are One.  I am using, as the text, a chapter in a Lydia Davis story, comprised of one sentence: “Art is not in some far-off place”. The prologue is about the simplicity of being alone with your thoughts—you choose what to focus on and how to phrase an idea. Before any of the Lydia Davis stories are read and the dancers have spread throughout the space, the audience occupies the set; the space is mostly dark. The only areas that are lighted are the central square where the actor sits and writes at her desk, and the furthest most points of the two back squares, where a duet and a solo unfold.

I began the process of creating the prologue last May, using the story Marie Curie as a springboard. I love that story for it’s odd rhythms and shifts of focus, but it is too convoluted for what I needed—solitude.

A Prologue–Marie Curie Developing Movement and Ideas

We have been rehearsing for two weeks now, on movement that will become the prologue for The False and True Are One at our next performance at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in November.  In this very short rehearsal period, I am seeing where my ideas go and am videotaping the movement and structure, to take up again in the fall. The Lydia Davis story I am using to underpin the movement is Marie Curie, a biography that moves from one period of Marie Curie’s life to another with an odd combination of delicacy, humor and awkwardness. The sometimes fluid and sometimes uneven rhythm of the writing—oddly balanced and unusual sentence structures—conveys Marie Curie’s clear-cut drive and intellect, and her reserve. Lydia Davis, with precise and delicate language, creates an emotionally touching and factually interesting portrait of Marie Curie.

I am still figuring out why this story intrigues me so. I think it is because an image of a person becomes a finality, based on a biographer’s interpretation of events and available information. And, for the prologue we are working on, I am interested in memories, and how, over time, our recollection of an event or a moment changes; and how one person’s memories differ from another’s. How is a final portrait of a person determined?

To help develop ideas for this, I posted on Facebook some sentences that I asked people to complete in whatever way they wished. The responses, whether abstract or realistic, pointed or vague, have been rooted in emotion.

The sentence beginnings are:

“At that time, I felt……….”

“I did that once, and now I……..”

“If I had only understood……..”

“When it happened, he/she looked……”

“I knew it was happening again because….”

On May 22^nd at 2:30 we are going to live stream a rehearsal on Ustream.com of a rehearsal.  We want to hear what you think and see how our ideas come through in this format.

April 1, 2011: The Recent Past, the Future and a Quick Thought

The Recent Past

We performed The False and True Are One at the Mill Valley Public Library on February 4.  All the furniture in the reading room was removed so that we could lay down the four sections of Marley in front of the imposing fireplace, the floor to ceiling windows that overlook the redwoods and in the stacks. Between the delineated areas for the dance and around Jeri Lynn’s desk, people, lots of them, stood and walked.  Without the set—translucent screens dividing and surrounding the four areas, creating a layering of images—the piece was more informal and personal. It felt as if Jeri Lynn Cohen was talking directly to the people, who were sitting at the edge of her raised platform and walking close by her, through Lydia Davis’s internal monologue with its’ rhythmic cadences and introspective and surreal images.

The Future

Because of a chance viewing at Z Space of the dress rehearsal of The False and True Are One, I was invited by Steve Oliver to create a site specific performance for the Tower at the Oliver Ranch.

On a Sunday in March, in the pouring rain, Matthew, Ed and I drove out to Oliver Ranch to see the Tower with Steve Oliver.  The structure is eerie and stunning—it is a tall, smooth, concrete cylinder with two parallel stairways against the wall, five feet distant from each other, spiraling to the top.  There are 128 steps, so the maximum audience is 125.  The floor of the structure is filled with water that is 30” deep and is fed by an underground spring.  The top is open, so when we were there the rain was falling into the pool at the bottom.  The two entrances to the base of the two staircases are horizontal openings, opposite each other and about five feet long by three feet high, that you climb through.  The openings on the sides of the tower to the outside are horizontal, differently sized apertures built into the wall, wide enough to sit on, stand on or stretch out on. The “back” wall of the seat—so you don’t fall to the ground—is a block-like protrusion on the smooth outside cylinder that is open only at the top to let in air and light.  There is a graceful and sturdy metal railing on the inside edge of the stairway.  From the top, you can see hills and fields and trees and vineyards for miles, as well as the reflecting pool far below.  From the bottom, you can see the circle of sky and the endless seeming spiraling stairs.
The experience here is visual and aural; so I am thinking about what kind of visual experience I want this to be.  The amount of movement that is possible on steep, narrow stairs is limited, however the perspective creates drama.

A Quick Thought
A thought about brevity….one striking aspect of one of Merce Cunningham’s dances—Pond Way—was the way it ended.  The dance was exquisitely beautiful—delicate and fleeting. By ending unexpectedly, when it felt as if it could have gone on, it captured mid-stream a sensation of lithe and powerful energy. The ending seemed like it was a transition, and then the lights went out.

A Final Word on the Progress of The False And True Are One

There was turmoil this week when I felt that Happy Memories, the last story being performed, was too long a monologue for the dance.  Although I looked for another story to replace it, I realized that the piece has to end with Happy Memories, because that story is the summation of  the ideas in all the others we are using. Also, we have already worked out a lot of movement/text connections that don’t make sense with another story and, work well with this one. Then I realized that I needed to better understand the structure of the story to make it work with the movement.

When I finally understood the momentum of the story—beginning with her mulling over insignificant events and ending with her reminiscing about emotionally piquant ones—the trajectory of the choreography fell into place. I am trying to encapsulate the sense in her writing of moving forwards, stopping, going in another direction, circling back and going forwards. In this story, as she is going through her list of memories, the energy of the dance gradually becomes more fluid and consistent; the tedious list at the beginning of the story becomes an emotionally energized series of thoughts and recollections. Happy Memories ends on a  thoughtful and quirky note; it keeps moving forwards. So the piece ends strongly.

The False and True Are One–Almost Finished

I am getting more drawn into Lydia Davis’ stories as I work on the piece and determine ways in which the movement and the text connect. I like the restlessness of Lydia Davis’ writing; her internal, questioning monologue. The False and True Are One is about seeing things from multiple angles—interesting, intriguing, mutable, funny, sad, frustrating, etc. The trajectory of the dance was determined by the choice of stories and the order Jeri Lynn is performing them in. We chose stories for their cadence, their images and their emotions. Beginning with New Year’s Resolution in which a friend, an ordinary person, is juxtaposed to herself, someone a little outside the norm, the stories grow increasingly imagistic and internal and then return, with wit, sorrow and thoughtfulness, to the realistic world around her. The dance ends with energy, because, for me, Lydia Davis’s writing moves and her mind doesn’t stay still.

This project has been filled with challenges and is now at the fun stage of seeing it all pull together. The structure of the dance space, which uses the 60-foot depth of the stage at Theater Artaud to create 4 distinct areas in which the dance occurs, has made the movement I have choreographed more contained than is typical for me— no large phrases across the entire stage, no control over what a viewer will focus on, no using entrances and exits to heighten drama. Instead the audience is moving about and is close to the dancers, the dancers are moving between areas and never out of sight, and Jeri Lynn, the actor, is Lydia Davis—wry, probing, imagistic, spare. Dan Wool is creating the score as the dance develops, so that we mostly have not worked with sound.  Now there is less than a minute to choreograph, we are practically at the end of the last story, Happy Memories, and I am thinking of what the final image is.

The stories we are using are (in the order they appear):
New Year’s Resolution p.354
Almost Over: What’s the Word  p. 732
This Condition  p.244
The Thirteenth Woman  p.155
The Cedar Trees  p.165
The Transformation  p.471
Almost Over: What’s the Word  p. 732
Her Mother’s Mother  p.634
A Second Chance  p.256
Happy Memories  p.399

Progress on The False and True Are One

The False and the True Are One has turned out to be one of the most interesting and difficult projects I have worked on. We are using the 60-foot depth of the stage at Theater Artaud and, within that, creating 4 distinct areas in which the dance occurs—the audience walks around these areas of dance—we are not using the seating; there will be benches to sit on, as in a gallery. In the center, Jeri Lynn Cohen sits, walks and enacts the stories of Lydia Davis. The stories are abstract, internal, descriptive, droll and imagistic. I am particularly drawn to her stories of invisibility, and of seeing something from multiple angles, never quite knowing where the truth lies.

The stories Jeri Lynn is reading during the performance are:  New Year’s Resolution, Almost Over, This Condition, The Thirteenth Woman, The Cedar Trees, The Transformation, Her Mother’s Mother and Happy Memories. The trajectory of the pieces we have chosen begins with the here and now, down to earth; it moves into a more internal state, and then her spare writing becomes deeply emotional. Throughout, her writing is spare and droll; even in the most moving pieces, there is humor. I have worked with the images, feeling and rhythms of the stories, their circular structure and odd tangents, in choreographing and structuring the piece.

To coordinate the four spaces that the dance occurs in, I am working with a spreadsheet, which helps me get an overview of what is happening and where.  Although in the beginning this process—the spreadsheet and four separate spaces functioning both independently and in concert—was driving me crazy, now that I have a handle on how the piece is developing, I am enjoying the puzzle. The dancers have taken the base movement and recombined it, altered the phrasing, added their own dynamics, made it a reflection of themselves. With the audience standing next to the dancers while walking around the gallery-like spaces, and Jeri Lynn in a central area speaking, the The False and True Are One is intimate and multi-layered.

The False and True Are One–Performance Installation

I am on to the next project—The False and True are One, a performance installation,   working with Jeri Lynn Cohen of Word for Word, who will be enacting short stories of Lydia Davis, Matthew Antaky and Dan Wool. We are deciding on which stories to use, what themes to work with.  My favorite story so far is Marie Curie, with Thyroid Diary and Her Mother’s Mother up there too.  I love her circularity, her tangential associations that are funny, odd, moving. Even the uneventful sprouts unexpected offshoots of thoughts.

Inside Matthew Antaky’s architecturally designed, gallery-like set and Dan Wool’s immersive sound score, the company, in collaboration with Jeri Lynn Cohen, creates a world of shifting relationships and perceptions as the audience moves through the set. The dance is ongoing, with the dancers in different areas of the space, and the actor centrally placed. There is no set order to the piece— whatever route an audience member takes in traveling through the “set” determines the dance that he/she sees. The individualized order in which the audience sees the dance heightens the ephemeral and arbitrary aspects of thought and perception.