In the program for BLEED I have stated that I will post these author’s notes on the blog as a place where people may leave their thoughts about the work or the process. Please also read Jenn Joy’s wonderful recent blog post, Requiem Ascending.  Above we have one of Paula Court’s amazing photos of the work.

BLEED is the culminating work of a two-year project during which I constructed three other pieces, Secret Mary, poem and Sister, all from very different source material and each with an entirely different cast. I then collapsed these into this fourth work simultaneously remembering and forgetting the previous dances. All eleven of the magical performers from the other works are here yet the movement material is gone. Ghosts of the other dances resonate through the new work and shape its form but they are subterranean and exert their pressure on this new construction from the caves of memory.

The ephemeral — overly romanticized in dance history in my opinion — is an actual tool for me and is integral to my process. In this expanded version of a concept that has always been central for me, erasure is a form of construction. Each image or section of a dance is absent in the next, but its essence remains to color the forthcoming events. I craft these wafts of memory into my choreography privileging them over the recapitulation of dance movements. Because inference, essence, quality, reference and affect seem to be some of the purveyors of meaning in dance, I long ago ceded any desire for the expression of specific ideas to the ambiguous contours and endless associative pathways of the choreographic mind.

This work is sparked by my immersion in the poetics of dance and the information I have gleaned from 30 years of wrestling with its indeterminate qualities. My experience with crafting dances has been a journey away from the exigencies of definition or resolution that might be useful in the construction of “cogency”. I have moved decidedly towards abstraction and its potential to mirror consciousness. Contradictory impulses coexist in these temporal constellations. A search for singularity of meaning gives way to a complex weave of disparate elements. I work with a willfully convoluted palette where recognizable imagery and the anomalous enjoy equal value. I am not looking to shape hidden stories into dance but rather to understand how the sequencing of events accrues meaning in choreography. The viewer joins me in the definitions of the parts but I must provide a structural frame that allows for this and perhaps promotes the dislodging of memories in the viewer in order that they might comingle with the images of the dance. People’s projections are braided with my construction to finalize the work.

I am conflicted about author’s notes, so forgive me this indulgence. I am just attempting to help the viewer come on board with what might feel like an enigmatic project. The intense complexity of living on earth right now finds a good friend in dance. Spending some time with an information system that does not hope to deliver messages but rather acts as a container for multiple individual responses, might prove to be an antidote to the polarizing dogma that holds our world in its grip.

Thank you for coming to see our work and the work of others engaged in dance, this fragile, yet powerful form. I would love to hear from you. You can go to our process blog where I will repost these notes and where you can leave your own thoughts – http://bleedtereoconnor.org/

The studio is crowded, even more so now. Leaving rehearsal, Tere, I sense BLEED as a requiem for the three previous dances or perhaps for a limited idea of dance beholden to representation that you have no interest in delivering on. Instead, you conjure other worlds baroquely melancholic, dark, vertiginous and electric. I wonder watching BLEED if I am not too haunted by memories of gesture, of phrase, of image traced in Secret Mary, poem and my imagined sense of Sister. What to do with these many ghosts unleashed through physicality and voice? How do these recollections sit against the gorgeous vivisection happening in front of me now?

BLEED is deeply tied to disappearance and memory as the individual dancers almost disappear into the crowd coming into view only in flashes as devynn and Mary roll into the waiting laps of other dancers becoming airborne swimmers or later in their oblique duet—a dance of throat as much as body. So many fleeting small intimacies as devynn touches the back of Michael’s head, their hand entwined in brown hair, or as Cynthia brushes Ryan’s hip in passing, ask how it is that we become visible to ourselves and to each other and how we engage in these transitory passages. Importantly the work plays with the edges of visibility not as recognition but as something closer to witnessing a series of vanishing points or corporeal apparitions. Deeply promiscuous, the relations within the piece constantly shift as the dancers exchange partners, hand and gaze touch and shift away, touch and shift, as the encounters continue.

At last viewing, Heather begins with a solo, her arms a tenuous architecture now round now abruptly bent now round again taking over body. Her movement crescendos tossed and shaken by winds simultaneously psychic and climatic until she catches herself. Hooking a finger in her mouth she pulls herself backward and away. Lips frozen in taut circles or hooked by her finger, these gestures render the mouth as a strangely metonymic figure that is never mute even when silent. Heather joins Cynthia and Natalie and the three now circle their arms as Ryan, Oisin, Silas, Michael enter in line along the back of the space in slow balanced arabesque.

BLEED tears against dance as representation, imagining dance as consciousness, as so many constellating architectures inscribed in lines and pools of sweat across emotional and aesthetic terrain. At moments these lines are physically danced, virtuosic technique reiterated and decomposed entangles in spiraling repetitions not only of movement but also of gaze. So when the dancers attach in a serpentine frieze across the floor moaning in agony or pleasure, in their momentary stillness they take on qualities of sculpture as a temporal apparatus. History flashes in time’s dilation.

I imagine these accumulations—spatial, temporal, rhythmic, textural, emotional—as the deeply affective work of BLEED’s perceptual vivisection. Perhaps this is what Giorgio Agamben had in mind when he wrote of dance as phantasmata, arrested as if we had just seen Medusa’s head. In their gorgeous congealed stillness, the dancers hold the shimmering cacophony of earlier moments—David and Cynthia swaying to bend and stand as if gathering energy along the perimeters as Ryan, devynn, Tess, Mary slowly curl into themselves collapse and rise as Silas, Oisin, Michael, Heather, Natalie splay arms out sternum exposed then all join in thrashing leaps around the room.

Maybe it is not stillness at all, but restraint. The truncated tempo and spacing of the leaps, the way that David holds Michael’s wrists as he attempts to escape backward turning away. Oisin’s glance around the space before he lies down again. How Michael lifts and carries Heather in a rigid line or he and Silas propel Heather in a circle around the room pulling her knee to step, hands supporting her lower back, pushing gently or as they lift her up after she collapses repeatedly a less violent flash of Pina’s Café Muller.

Ohhhhhhh, they sing or murmur voices echoing against the textures of the score. Held in the static crash of waves, industrial and oceanic, sound diffuses narrative and historicity, working instead to suspend disparate elements in sweet paradoxical proximity. Sound acts as another choreographic texture a submarine erotics trembling just under the surface of the dance that also evokes qualities of requiem submerged within BLEED.

As I write, I am admittedly deeply saddened by the recent passing of my beloved teacher José Esteban Muñoz who not only taught me of the shimmering value of what is beautifully illegible, but also the urgency of choreographing these spaces of intimacy and sensation and consciousness for now and for the future. As José reminds:

Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness’s domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present.

Choreography as witnessed in BLEED becomes another “structuring and educated mode of desiring” that imagines new and gorgeous worlds in vertiginous dissolution. We have not yet arrived, and so we must continue to dance…

Mary Read in Secret Mary

Jenn Joy: Hello from the still glittering Brooklyn snow. I have been reading my notes from the last rehearsal of poem and Secret Mary in that vacuous hall as piles of supplies for Sandy moved in and out of the adjacent sanctuary and thinking back to the performances.

Secret Mary feels to me so much like a series of shifting landscapes. The dancers establish perimeters through their initial spacing and then amplify the boundaries as they side step, spatially demarcating the choreographic terrain, but then as I watch it seems that the topography is also embodied as if the dancers play with level—standing, bending over, lifting, carrying, lying down—as so many shifting altitudes within the piece. Does landscape or topography enter into your thinking about the composition?

Tere O’Connor: I think dance is an act of traversing expanses of thought. Through moving, internal landscapes unfurl and register as trajectories in space. As a director, I am aware of shifting landscapes and suggested architectures that the human body references. My perspective on choreography reveals an organic dialogue with poetic space—an ongoing slide show of invisible architectural blueprints—shifting, growing, shrinking in hallucinatory ways around the inhabitants of the stage space. I attempt to order this multitude of shifting spaces to create kinetic reactions in the viewer. This is accomplished by directing the gaze of the performers and their intention. I design the differentiation of their reach, alternately aiming their extremities to draw large lines in the space or refer to a use of the arms that evokes manual labor or gesticulation. There are many other subtle tools of construction to draw the eye to spatial differentiation, manipulating the viewer’s eye to see the human figure now in an inferred domesticated space and now contending with the monolithic proportions of the theater and so on. A subterranean drama is created that exerts pressure on the dance yet it is difficult to trace and acts as a second kinetic layer parallel to the dynamics of the movement itself, modulating in and out of harmony with it. There is also a relationship to modernist applications of the stage space that informs my work. Since most of that work is in dialogue with the rectilinear, diagonals and lines and circles are willfully incorporated as generic ground zeros from which I launch into more anomalous spatial forays.

Jenn: How do you describe the quality of the movement in this work? Against the crystalline language within poem, Secret Mary evokes a different kind of physicality—one that feels more individuated, more specific to the performers, more questioning in its relation to traces of gender and sexuality. How would you describe this physicality? How much comes from the dancers or from your direction? And here I remember commenting at the first interrogation and devynn countering to say that this is not the way their dancing/movement looks…

Tere: This is a big question so I will provide some tidbits that may get us closer to an answer.

The physicality of Secret Mary comes in large part from the dancers as they contributed much to the movement creation. They have a lot of training, but also a strong sense of self-awareness that allows their pre-trained bodies to recalibrate the more “sophisticated,” acquired embodiments they have mastered. The background tension between their impulses and mine is a tacit force in the work, but we meet on harmonious terrain as well. We did a lot of improvisation as a way of thinking together and in the process there was a breeching of boundaries, creating an atmosphere of multiplying choices. Improvisation plays a role both in the development of the material and in the structuring of the work. Sometimes they improvise and I extract movement and shape it further as a way of bleeding more information from the material. I would place a new focus on the improvisation or they would and we continued to work that way to “thicken” the material. In the finished work there are a number of places where they are fully improvising.

Somewhat different from poem where I select a narrower movement realm, a larger spectrum of styles and movement individuation are incorporated into Secret Mary. There is no lexicon for the work that restricts its elements yet in the final edit I am making decisions that shape the work and these come from a different part of the mind than that used to design poem. I restrict the movement realm for some works, and others are more open. This is not a statement of any sort, just an aspect of fluidity from work to work. I am not looking to land on a single modality. It is characteristic of my work to incorporate many different styles of dance with their attendant histories, as divergent as they may be. It was wonderful for me to be able to stripe the work with the ballet training of Ryan and Tess’s deep commitment to improvisation and everything in-between. But really the discussion isn’t about the styles used at all. I am thinking more about the tensile structure of a dance and its qualitative modulations over the arc of a work. The surface of a dance is simply material for the internal motor of a work to render itself visible on. The style of movement matters only to a degree.

The movement spectrum in all my work is a polyglot experience, where continual hybrid manifestations in the form of diverse movement clusters are placed in close proximity or blended into each other with no effort made to define their relationship. Their coexistence promotes syncretic systems of meaning production. It is not about erasing the singularity of the components but framing them in relation to each other. This is a method I use both for making the works and structuring them.

The people in my work are not always “being human” nor do I perceive them exclusively that way. They shift from being people to dancers to ideas to qualities to graphic elements to absences to potentialities to characters to themselves and on and on. The intentions of the work and of its inhabitants are in a state of constant shift throughout its temporal unraveling.

I have been dealing with gender in my work since the day I started. I don’t want to engage with it as a topical element; it is a background condition. I have always wanted to live in a place where fluid gender and androgyny were a given. I prefer to create an androgynous atmosphere where the performers shift from masculinity to femininity without question and more importantly without any political proclamation. There is a deep, almost childish desire to be past this issue in my work. Many people who see this combo of poem and Secret Mary remark on the androgyny which makes me happy but isn’t something that is so prominent for me. It is partially that I am a lucky enough to have these cool young people offer their expansive selves to my work.

Jenn: How do you imagine the work of the gaze or vision within this piece? What happens when the dancers become voyeurs within the piece, even momentarily?

Tere: I think the word “gaze” causes an explosion of misunderstandings, so I will speak to how it exists in this work. One of the more important elements I am trying to learn about in constructing dances is how to harness the viewers’ internal dialogues with the work. Each audience member is processing at a different rate. Some are trawling along with the work and others are frozen at junctures they still need to take in. The dancers’ stopping and watching the others is a prompt to the viewer. “You are in this experience doing what I am doing right now.” It is the dancer as audience member creating a transitional space that makes the viewer’s mind visible on stage.

I also have a great love for the anonymous “supernumeraries” of life; all the people you don’t deal with at the airport or in any crowd who are just there. The easy disregard that we have for those people and for their full stories somehow enhances the “protagonist” stature of those engaged in action. The audience plays that role as they are not revealing their histories but witnessing ours…for now.

Jenn: I have an almost illegible note that says “impossible vision” which I think refers to the impossibility of seeing everything that is happening at once. Can you speak about the dense synchronicity or simultaneity within the work? Does this piece have any specific counter-points/references/influences of particular films?

Tere: I think the dense synchronicity that you mention is born of the “everything” aesthetic that I have worked with from early on. It also comes from the idea of the audience as editor. I am placing them in an expanded role urging them to make selections and to take note that they are already creating identifications and references without my understated request. Being subtly forced into choosing what one sees can bring into consciousness the fact that they are already making selections. I don’t work with causalities, yet a free-flowing, abstract choreographic sensibility moves us through many consonances and dissonances. I can’t separate out thematic information and I don’t want to, so the choreography is a network of possible relationships between the elements inside a work. Unlike practitioners of the aforementioned modernist aesthetic I don’t search for thematic presences to make abstractions of. The audience may or may not look for a singular through-line or theme but that is part of the porousness of this form and one of my beloved ideas about dance. One of the root metaphors I am engaging with in the creation of choreographies is the relationship of the force of human control and the involuntary effects of nature upon us. When things align or are in agreement for a moment we notice them because we see them as more valuable. Like when you are driving in a car and you wait for a tree you see down the road to line up with a pole further away. It is so fulfilling and momentary when it hits and so sad to lose. It feels like you and nature coming together but it is really just the car moving forward.

Jenn: What is the value of illumination in the work? And here the secrets of Mary hidden in so many illuminated manuscripts feels not only like a bad pun on my part, but also a way to ask about the varying textures of light within the work. How do you think about light in relation to illumination/vision/knowledge production with the piece? Tess’s opening solo feels quite spectacular with the strobe-effect but then the lighting becomes subtle, minimal, as a backdrop for the idiosyncratic gestures and pairings.

Tere: In this instance lighting is a manifestation of architectural ideas. Since Secret Mary is simultaneously a piece about experimentation and a paean to the early stages of making, I wanted the theatrical realm to be one of spare theatrics. Upon arrival at the rehearsal space that we made the piece in, generously provided through a space grant from the Lower Manhattan Cultural CounciI, I was shocked to find a long rectangular floor wedged into an office space. I felt that initial impact must ring through this whole experience. I wanted the rectangle to be invisibly present as all architectural imprints are in dance. In fact, they are dancing on an invisible replica of the rectangle in the performance overlaid onto the stage itself. The light hits, revealing the rectangle on the floor for a second and fades slowly when the dancers splat themselves upon the floor. They only leave the imagined rectangle once when they walk over to the side and stand in the blue light. This shape will ring out all the way into the set design for Bleed.

At the beginning of the piece there is a “lighting storm.” I was playing with an idea of the annunciation trying with theatrics to bring that forth and hopefully mitigate the inevitable religious connotations associated with the name Mary. One film (to answer your previous question) that was stuck in a crevice of my mind and became dislodged here, is the thrilling Je Vous Salue Marie by Jean-Luc Godard which is a revisiting of the immaculate conception featuring a young girl, Mary, who works in a gas station with her dad. In a certain way inspiration is an immaculate conception. So I wanted there to be a moment of hyperbolic heavenly creation to begin, where the lights are very present and then recede to general stage light except for a couple of moments. Lighting pushes us towards the obvious only to leave us without that for the remainder. I have returned to a place where I want dance to be the protagonist of the work and movement to be the generator of everything.

Jenn: And what of the silence? Of the emphasis on breath and sounds of the dancing itself?

Tere: The dual-purpose of braiding process and product in this project, equates stages of making with the character of each piece. Secret Mary was the first dance created for this project and is of course very precious for us. It is imbued with threshold moments, from the inchoate instinctual beginnings of making to the blind first stabs at shaping and asserting “knowledge” onto the material. The dance places the audience inside the terse atmosphere that characterizes the beginning stages of making something. It is an undecorated space created to evoke the hard-edged plainness of beginning and to create an aesthetic from that.

Jenn: Can you speak about your work as mentor and teacher within this particular work or as it connects to your choreographic practice?

Tere: My work as a teacher and mentor is present in this work as one of the most fulfilling aspects of my life. Over my career I have had phenomenal dancers associate themselves with my work and at all levels there is a constant elliptical transference of influence culled from the experience of moving together. The earliest memory of this and the first time I took note of the weight of this in dance was at the start of my 13 year dancing relationship with Nancy Coenen who remains a great friend. She was someone who I so admired in college. I tried do dance like her. When she said she would be in my work I was thrilled. She and I danced in my first duet Boy, Boy, Giant, Baby in 1985. It was the first work I made after school that wasn’t a solo for myself. She embodied a kind of self-deprecating royalty—a female Pere Ubu ricocheting between real emotional discovery and cartoon exaggeration. She was a brilliant mover. I would teach her the movement and then she would “Nancy” it in super subtle ways and we spent our rehearsal in this pendulum. We created a really nuanced embodied vocabulary for a moment, together, never really stating it but daily passing it back and forth until its authorship was indistinguishable. Ever since that moment I have looked for that in the dancers who grace my work with their presences and I have found it in abundance. Ryan and devynn and Mary and Tess are the next in a line of special beings I have been surrounded by. They are all very clear artists who are committed to investigation as a given in their work. Like all the generous artists I work with they are open to something occurring without knowing what it will be like. This blending of influences is so subtle and intimate. It is an agreement to be with each other in ways that stand outside cultural norms, in the U.S. at least. It is an iteration of the same process by which a viewer breeches my choreography with their projections and hopefully finds a quietly receptive network.

Teaching started out as a way of making money but quickly evolved into a necessary engine for my making. It is a way of staying connected to younger generations of makers. I lead students through a morass of contradictory realities that must find a poetic restructuring through investigation. I feel obligated to ask the same complex questions of myself that I present to students and mentees . Even more importantly I must withstand the ground shaking challenges they launch that strafe my certitude. I have had interactions with thousands of students over the years. Whether it is one of my dancers or a student who took a one week long workshop, their pronouncements and physical answers float in my mind forming an important part of the constellation of elements that comprise my dance making. Once I read an essay by a retired gay porn star who wrote that all the men he slept with were with him in every subsequent experience. They provided an erotic anchor for the amplification of sexual experience. Not blessed with this level of sexual good fortune I will content myself with parallel experience in the making of dances.

Jenn: A final question, perversely perhaps, I wanted to ask about the initiating prompt last… what did you see during the very first run after the dancers were instructed to make the work?

Tere: I always start working by moving. I don’t start with an idea. I don’t translate ideas into dance. I dance to engage a parallel discussion with the world of ideas and ultimately to unearth an umbrella of meaning that will serve as the container for a given work. This prompt was an extrapolation of that premise.

On the first day I said to the dancers “Ok lets run the piece which is 35 minutes long.” They improvised a work and attempted to dissect its make-up, to extract information. The process was an exercise in reading dance and immersing ourselves in a sensibility that favored choreographic systems. After many days of talking we began to build a new work out of the embers of those discussions. We did not try to replicate the first version they danced. We started rebuilding with ideas unearthed by dancing.

The Hudson Movement

In 1981 I had a beautiful boyfriend from Italy named Enzo Cosimi. He loved me very much and I him.  He was studying in New York for two years at the Cunningham studio when we met.  Together we learned about dance and sex and art and film. We were both in the early stages of becoming choreographers and found support in each other for our individualist natures.  For the next decade I lived for part of each year with him in Rome.  One day as we were transferring from one bus to another at Piazza Argentina in the elegantly chaotic center of Rome I said to him, “I don’t think Judson is so important for me.”  The aforementioned love appeared to drain from his face as though he’d been hit with a tranquilizer dart. I realized in that moment that I was treading in dangerous waters and I thought it best to keep those thoughts to myself for a time.  So I tried to shut up for years as I watched Judson come in and out of focus, its mutable definitions appropriated by artists and producers and many dance critics as a catch phrase for  “alternative” dance.  The enormous surge of Judson in the last ten years, perhaps due in part to Baryshnikov’s Past Forward experiment on the White Oak Dance project, in addition to many other factors had me asking – are we still here? Have we not assimilated this information?

Back in the early 80’s, as we traversed the lengths of Soho where galleries resided at that point, Enzo and I were both dazzled by- and critical of – the mega-paintings of Julian Schnabel, Enzo Cucchi, Robert Longo, Frank Stella, Elizabeth Murray, Susan Rothenberg, Jennifer Bartlett and so many others.  Molissa Fenley, Dana Reitz, Trisha Brown, Laura Dean and Lucinda Childs were offering movement based choreographic visions on BAM stages.  The burgeoning “East village scene” in art, dance and performance was breaking conventions. In addition there were the ballet companies of New York City.  City Center presented the larger modern companies such as Cunningham, Lubovitch, Ailey, Taylor, Tharp and others. Mark Morris was in his beginning stages.  Patty Astor’s FUN Gallery had already had a huge affect on the art world boldly facilitating the way for rap artists and graffiti artists to join “high culture.” In Europe people like Jean Claude Galotta, Dominique Baguet, Karine Saporta, Jan Fabre, Ann Terese DeKeersmaker and numerous others were part of an amazing moment of change forging a new European dance.  Unfettering themselves from the influence of American modernists they created unprecedented works produced with funding and government support that Americans could never imagine.  They defined a creative territory that was theirs alone. All of this was about to collide with the AIDS epidemic and its subsequent activism which ignited the field.  Most importantly, this was also a moment that occurred well before globalization had created a necessary wash over all pre-existing stances and the Europe/America binary was up for serious questioning. The art I was seeing then was moving in divergent pathways.  Some of it reflected the Judson aesthetic but much didn’t. In fact many of the dance folks were reclaiming virtuosity and spectacle.  Trisha Brown was on a migration from DIY conceptualism to ethereal movement based explorations. Herself a Judson participant, she evolved away from its tenets, blending some of its relevant correctives and revolutionary zeal into her vision, but not heralding that. This woefully undocumented, but amazingly complex moment in dance was where I started to choreograph.

At that point for me, Judson offered an ideological myopia that seemed to be at odds with my nascent choreographic research which told me repeatedly that choreography eschews singularity of meaning by its very nature.   My work in dance didn’t seem to move towards a platform for delivering my own politics to the world but rather towards the creation of a container that could assess relationships between ideologies.  My work had a lot of ballet in it at that point because I had just come from Purchase where we received a heavy dose of New York City Ballet based training.  I felt politically distant from ballet and angry at it, yet it had been such a big part of my embodied experience that I needed to work away from it through process as opposed to just chopping it off.  I liked having it and other elements as obstacles to my individuality.   Was I to cleanse my work of anything that wasn’t born of my own ethics and didn’t behave as I wished?  Must I represent the dismantling of power structures by announcing my position on the surface of my dance or can I include it in the substrata of my work as a homeopathic element?

Now don’t get me wrong.  I have great respect for the artists of Judson.  They changed our minds and created an important moment in history.  But it is a ”moment in history.”  Art forms go through transitions and the momentary manifesto, often a motor for change, should not be confused with a point of arrival.  I have changed my work drastically over the years and in earlier times felt somewhat convinced that the new mode I’d found was “it”.  But after awhile these adamancies were smoothed out and became components layered into the whole spectrum of considerations that comprise my work.  They found relativity in the network of elements I use instead of vying for primacy there. I think it is like this with artistic movements as well.  They are necessarily born of revolutionary stances but where they end up is personalized and diffused throughout the work of many artists over time.  These moments need to be absorbed for them to have done their duty.  Of course someone had to introduce pedestrian movement, anti-spectacle, and anti-institutional concepts into the art form. It is part of a natural growth pattern already documented in other art forms and in the political weather of the sixties.   As ideas that augment the potential of choreographic thought these are welcomed additions.  As militant statements against the status quo they have become enervated for me.

Reinterpreted outside the original artists’ intention, Judson can be mistaken as the purveyor of great restriction not unlike the institutionalized classicism they pushed against.  Particularly inane is the expression of “no” as a basis for an aesthetic. Although I imagine it to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek, Yvonne Rainer’s “no manifesto” which I also found to be bratty and youthful, was particularly disruptive for me at the point when I was faced with an ocean of information as a young artist.  I loved, and still love, works that are born of various, conflicted political realms both stated and inferred.  I am particularly drawn to works that reside in integrated zones where the ethics are not shot from a canon at you by the author but where you are responsible for finding your own.  I am more interested in work that locates its aesthetic over time and doesn’t brandish the artist’s belief system as its sole purpose.  Work that searches to place its proclamations into destabilizing dialogue with a larger view of consciousness draws me in.  An internalized Judson is useful as a balancing device that looks askance at historical influences in one’s own work – to temper these and to clarify them, not necessarily to annihilate them.

Sadly the “no manifesto” still seems to be the bellwether for artists who place themselves at the vanguard via the suggestion that the excising of “old” elements defines their contemporary status.  All that came before is irrelevant and to be trashed.   I recently read a quote by Tino Seghall in The Guardian: “For me, politically, to sit people down, shut them up and ask them to look in one direction, somehow doesn’t belong to our times.”   I have never seen his work and I have heard wonderful things about it, but for me this kind of statement is what belongs to another time.   Finding the political content of one’s work by placing oneself in a contentious relationship with history is a banality for me.  Especially because these proclamations often include a historical amnesia and an insular scope arguing issues that would be quickly diffused if viewed through a lens including all history and peoples. There are many usages in art practices- not just one. A relationship to history is a much more variegated affair and its complexity finds fertile territory in dance.  The pronouncement by artists of “a new way” that they have located and that you need to find is the true anachronism.  I am aware of all the potential political points of view available on earth and do not require artists to point them out.  Is it really the realm of our work to position ourselves in a place of certitude creating encampments of politics from which we proselytize?  Or is this perhaps a saleable posture embodied unconsciously by artists and congratulated by presenters and curators? Many of the provocations in art of recent years have been accompanied by some of the most simplistic and unambiguous politics.  Perhaps this simplification is due to the fact that provocation has become a commodity and a capitulation to the market.  Marketable objects are not enhanced by convolution or uncertainty. What really seeps through some of these expressions of self-anointed contemporariness is a longstanding anxiety around the entire project of dance and a need for it to deliver definition.

In their efforts the Judson artists necessarily moved away from Merce Cunningham but in so doing discarded the enormity of his vision. His work extended way beyond his chosen style and the technical dancing employed, which is purportedly one aspect of what they had a gripe with.  In fact the look of his work was just a kind of spray used to bring into evidence the complex, irresolvable knots that drive human psychology and experience.  He created for me the incredibly liberating nexus of irreconcilability from which I still ideate my works.  I remember the end of a Cunningham piece, which I believe was a “Minevent”, at the Joyce Theater in 2006.  As often in his works, the curtain came down as the dancers were still moving and the lights were still on. The way in which this was simultaneously an expression of his taste and an obstacle to its full manifestation struck me. It was a climax deadening, unspectacular ending, implying that you the viewer will finish the dance as you survey it in your memory.  It suggested that this is not a place of dogma, but a place of expanded vision -inclusive and horizontal.  I am so much more interested in the ambiguous and unknown quantities that find themselves at home in the choreographic mind. I am excited by the work of artists whose singularity of vision is arrived at by how many contradictions find their way into its assemblage and the diversity of readings it can sustain.

Cunningham was definitely my biggest influence in dance and his work offered differing advice over the years. Validating a range of practices from the aleatory to the hyper-designed, his presence aided my understanding of what to look for in my work.  I used to stay at Westbeth in the summers during college and I remember thinking – “He’s up there.“  Because his studio was in Westbeth on the west side of Manhattan, right next to the river and blocks from the Judson Church, I used to think of starting another movement of his followers called the Hudson Movement.  Its manifesto would be: Continue in any way you wish, stay awake and question your own and any other certitudes.  You are contemporary because you are here and processing the world right now so don’t worry about that.

Tere O’Connor is choreographer and professor who splits his time between New York C and The University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.

I stole this epigraph from Rosmarie Waldrop who opens her meditations on Lyn Hejinian’s writing with a turn to Gertrude Stein. Already the room is crowded. Waldrop continues… she parses the disruptive syntax of Hejinian’s poetics to call attention to a more porous refusal of singular meaning, metaphor or analogy. All of these rhetorical tropes fall static against acoustic rhythm and repetition. Do you sense this?

Here I translate my thought

into jump-language, to double fate

But fate imposes its very interesting exercise: select

—Hejinian quoted in Waldrop

Reading these passages on the train, in transit, returns me to the studio and rehearsal where “jump-language” is quite literally something else and multiple things all at once. The condensation of techniques, states, flights—arabesque and fingers as gnarled tree; architecture rendered in three distinct spatial orientations; his relevé and her hip-shaking velocity; horizontal trajectories interrupted by oblique leaps and broken angles; her long arms extended with fingers writing in air and their hyper-articulate walk—reveals the power of choreography to do composition (and meaning) differently. Following Hejinian and Waldrop and Stein, composition proposes not only an obscure tautology but rather enacts an intrinsically relational, citational and temporal relay that resists closure even as it works within limits.

The compositions within poem and Secret Mary refuse any singular viewpoint, conjuring instead a series of vanishing points and unstable horizons, enabling momentary dependencies and fierce individuation. The works trace a series of erotic edges through disorienting encounter, shifts in urgency and withdrawal, the impossibility of ever seeing everything happening in front of us.

This is incredibly difficult work, intellectually, aesthetically, physically. It demands everything from the dancers. Silas and Michael stand on opposing edges of the space with arms extended, shaking their hands even as their heads turn away, then they run toward each other. Michael lifts Silas. Silas slides down to lift Michael. A slow refrain: they touch, exchange weight, carry, lift, drop, shift roles. Always slowly, always changing the orientation with each encounter: one climbs to stand on the other’s shoulders and the other is held upside down.

And so, Tere, you may ask why again I have defaulted to literary allusions to write about my encounter with your work. Of course, it is always difficult to unhinge one’s habits and obsessions. Yet more than that I want to try on the reverse view. What if I not only rely on the choreographic impulse within these writings—the ways that Stein takes us to an edge and runs us back to the beginning, or Hejinian evokes jumping, editing, a translation of mobile experience through paratactic virtuosity—but how the generatively illegible labor of dance materially and physically interrogates these ideas.

As witnesses to poem and Secret Mary we risk capture, affectively and emotionally. It is never only about reading, but learning how to read and understanding that everything is not the same. —Jenn Joy

Tere explains the project below.

This project is an expanded manifestation of the ways I have always worked. I don’t start with any strong thematic ideas. I begin from day one to make material as a way of thinking and sensing ideas. I develop material from multiple unrelated sources down divergent pathways as a way of entering the realm of consciousness where nothing aspires to order. I then bring these ideas/materials together by placing them in close temporal proximity. A splintering journey begins through this assemblage. Eventually, a decidedly choreographic alchemy commences and alters the singular attributes of each element as they begin to act upon each other. Abstraction becomes a distinct idea becomes a musical reverie becomes an emotional circuitry becomes a clear idea becomes nothing…but becomes is the important word.  Finally, through the entanglement of these disparate elements I shape a new construction in shared imaginative space. I am replicating this process in this new project by creating different works and then merging them into a final iteration.

Over the next two years, I will make three distinct dances with totally different casts and points of departure and then collapse these into each other to create a fourth dance. I have identified and separated out three strains of my thinking as catalysts for each work. These elements, always entwined in my dances will then be remixed into the fourth work.

Dance 1: Mentorship, relationship, improvisation
Dance 2: Artifice, formalism, complexity
Dance 3: Sameness and otherness

 Dance 1   I have taught and mentored many emerging artists. Drawing on the impact of the relationships I have had with students and artists I have mentored over the last 30 years, this dance focuses on how these interactions have shifted my thinking. The effects of these myriad relationships have become deeply integrated into my making.  Dance 1 was constructed as a collaborative process with the performers Mary Read, Devynn Emory, Tess Dworman and Ryan Kelly using improvisational techniques. I include the individual nature of each dancer —both fictionalized by me and actualized by them—allowing them to be the primary material for the work. The generational difference is both exhilarating and rife with inevitable distances. The piece plays with redefinitions of authorship by giving the performer’s choreographic agency, making on-the-spot decisions that shift my own and alter the work each night.  These people are all very clear, wonderful artists and they understand where their artistic affinities reside. They all create their own work and come from very different backgrounds. Dance 1 was performed as a work-in-progress at the River to River festival in NYC in July 2012 and as part of the Anti-Establishment show at the Center for Curatorial studies at Bard College,

 Dance 2     This work is based on my unwavering affinities with more formal, crafted,artifice-oriented elements of dance making. Although eschewed by many choreographers at this moment, I don’t feel these aspects have even begun to be exploited as the truly transcendent components of dance that they are.  I am working with a different group of amazing performers whose extraordinary abilities internally transform the fixity of the choreography into a fluid vehicle for  individual expressions. They are Natalie Green, Michael Ingle, Heather Olson, Silas Riener, Natalie Green and Oisin Monaghan.  I will re-embrace design and incorporate the technically driven body back into my work in addition to the range of embodiments I normally explore. In some ways this piece hearkens back to my earlier work. Please see the process notes area to hear more.  Dance 2 will be performed together with Dance 1 at New York Live Arts Nov 27 – Dec 1 at 7:30pm, Nov 30 at 10pm http://newyorklivearts.org/event/2-new-works

Dance 3     In this work I will be looking at sameness and difference in co-existence. I am very pleased to create a duet for the amazing Cynthia Oliver and David Thomson. They are two longtime friends and colleagues with whom I share a common community and at the same time diverse racial, professional and stylistic experiences.  Just as Dance 1 and Dance 2 reveal sameness inside of difference this dance will braid these two ideas together. I will create this dance in May-June of 2013 and it will have its premiere at the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois in Urbana where I am a professor, as is the esteemed Dr. Oliver.

Dance 4   Will be a final iteration of this series as the first three works become material for the fourth. They may be completely altered or reiterated or, or, or…     The work will be presented in New York City in late fall of 2013 at a theater TBA.

Tere speaks of this as an oceanic surround or consciousness of the work; choreography as a condition of memory—ours as witnesses, the dancers as performers, as one of the structures of the piece. As a labor that cultivates attention against distraction (to shift Walter Benjamin’s prognosis), choreography creates enclosures for encounter. Not to say that as a witness I never lose focus, but rather that poem is intrinsically porous and generous enough to leave room for openings or exits within its internal dynamics. This is part of the pedagogical work of the piece; it teaches me how to read if I closely attend to its intimate variations.

Reading a text is never a scholarly exercise in search of what is signified, still less a highly textual exercise in search of a signifier. Rather, it is a productive use of the literary machine, a montage of desiring machines, a schizoid exercise that extracts from the text its revolutionary force.  —Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

poem, written with no capital letter, illuminates a subtle resistance to syntax even as the piece flirts with grammar as a structuring force. Intensely iterative and citational, the phrases repeat and return. At moments it feels baroque as wrists become gnarled, limp, elegant, age, turn, write, writhe. And then flashes of balletic force interrupt angular geometries and splayed limbs conjure ghostly traces of Merce Cunningham.

Watching an excerpt of Cunningham’s Septet (1964), I am reminded of the balance within poem. Cunningham acts as a spine or architecture for the three women held, extended, suspended around him, sometimes touching, more often leaning into and away; fragile intimacies maintained at a precisely articulated distance. The moments when the dancers hold each other by the wrist turned away rather then facing each other, their figures cut elegant intrusions into the negative space. Is this perhaps what Tere mines of Merce’s “abstraction beyond obfuscation”?

During this rehearsal the dancers begin at the mirror and run toward the wall, backlight by daylight streaming through the glass. Distinct textures of running, backwards, turned almost sideways, they each swoop and swoon with a slightly different interior focus.

Natalie and Heather stand to the side watching Oisin, Michael, and Silas in their circle dance: high kicks to center and side to slide to the floor on their backs. Self-reflectivity and metonymy played out in parallel; we see them seeing each other; the dancer’s legs animated as if on strings. The juxtaposition of these modes reveals one of many logics within poem as so many clues toward our reading.

They perform articulated balletic leaps to land to stand. Oisin and Silas pull the front legs of Heather and Michael forward drawing them into a low lunge. Partnering in this moment is not only about intrigue, pleasure, collaboration, flirtation, effort, but assistance or even enabling.

Silas and Oisin rise to stand with heads bent over. The bent head becomes a refrain in Franz Kafka’s writing, or at least if we believe Gilles Deleuze in his mediation on Kafka. The politics of such a gesture figure a turning away from desire, from connection, a turning inward that blocks sensation, memory and connection. This is truly a strange moment even within Deleuze’s world. And yet, what Deleuze proposes is a reading of Kafka’s work as syncretic machine that contains expression and content that does away with intention and narrative and representation as it relates to sense. He writes:

To enter or leave the machine, to be in the machine, to walk around it, to approach it—these are states of desire, free of all interpretation. The line of escape is part of the machine. Inside or outside, the animal is part of the burrow-machine. […] Desire is not form, but a procedure, a process.

A process: Heather and Oisin stand close to the audience. They touch hands, turn, smile, subtle, their play of fingers speaks of writing, of romance, of frustration, of anger, and then all of these again undone. A process: Natalie stands at an oblique angle to the audience and shakes her hips and arms with bent elbows, rising and falling slightly with vibrating intensity. Later Oisin takes on these movements while turned obliquely away from the audience toward the mirror in the back corner of the space. Now vibration becomes citation, momentarily, until it becomes something else. A process: Michael slowly lifts Silas, holding him upside down. Silas carries Michael. Michael bends down as Silas climbs onto his shoulders, slips down. Michael slides under Silas’ legs and is pulled, an odalisque, across the floor.

I sense a different weight in the transitions as one scene or movement or gesture transforms into something else—her hand slides over his wrist, his arm twists under his leg, their gaze absorbs the seemingly empty space of the room.

As I write an image comes to mind: a sculpture by Luisa Kazanas, Untitled (To Reach You). A taxidermied songbird dressed in a resin space suit with a glass helmet waits on the edge of a tree limb. Suspended under a glass dome, the bird and the tree and a small reflecting pool appear otherworldly. Science fiction or muted bird in a strange crystalline world or melancholic elegy turned prosthetic or another metonymic slip?

Exquisitely beautiful and incredibly sad, the silent immobile bird in her pale blue landscape calls out: to escape, to wait, to fly. I am not at all certain and quite suspicious of this shimmering image in my mind. And yet, perhaps it acts as a cipher for virtuosic restraint or a stilled velocity of movement of sound that illuminate some of the many surfaces of poem. An exit and a return participating in what Tere describes as the “braiding of choreographies” so much “powder sprayed on consciousness.”

—Jenn Joy

Standing at the ballet barre, the dancers run to the mirror turn, almost swoon and sweep arms bend over to rise and return to the barre. This is to be the opening refrain, the establishing shot as so many initial lines of flight come undone. The dancers run to leap to circle.

Tuesday is a day of trespass—Providence to New York, sculpture to dance, seminar to studio—of choreographic preoccupations. Returning to the studio, the detritus of teaching lingers in my mind. How do we sit, who sits where? How is knowledge produced? What does it mean to read critically? How do we watch closely with concern and interest? What kind of techniques and skills are required and which ones become so many limitations? Perhaps part of the work of these interrogations is to open up the spaces where discourse, talking together, critically, creatively, might happen. I hope. Can we attempt something provisional, even promiscuous in its reach?

Natalie and Heather watch Oisin, Silas, and Michael lie with raised legs on the ground. I think of Tere remembering his first viewing of Swan Lake as a child, of seeing no swans but other architectures, the trio, the triangle. A structure to add to the concern with line, duet and trio, established, danced, then dissolved, recomposed again.

Between the barre and the mirror. Of course, this space is just one of the transitional locations of Dance 2 resulting from complicated rehearsal schedules, classes, work commitments, economics, time. And yet, the effects of the studio participate in the viewing of this particular moment. The barre and mirror act as so many ciphers for the questions of training, of technique, of virtuosity called up in the dancing. To state the obvious—the dancers are all exquisite movers and performers—and yet the piece asks something more than simply the display of virtuosity; it invites a reflexive play with structure, with authorship, with meaning

They step to slide, to step, to slide.  Side step, side step… Is this a rehearsal line along the barre or a chorus line. At some moments the dancers form two lines facing each other and the empty space becomes a column, a ghostly aporia, transposed across the space in different and shifting directions.

Natalie and Silas dance in distant proximity. My mind wanders as the density of movements overlap in the space. Three hold hands, barely touching each other. Often one faces away from the other during this precarious balance. Gestures collapse in distant proximity is this a portrait of intimacy?

Tere describes the dancers as witnesses inside the work, such that it is not collaborative in the same ways as Dance 1. The voice of the choreographer directs and conditions. From the periphery leaning against the piano he intones: “and”… “and”… The dancers continue. The choreographer’s voice becomes command, yet his words gesture toward a more open additive compositional quality. Stillness is immanence or latent texture. Now facing the audience, the dancers’ deep plies expose a vulnerability of throat as their heads fall back and arms sweep up. This constant accumulation of micro-gestures of fingers, of wrists, of neck, of hands, always transforms into torque and extension and movement.

Sometimes her hand is a claw and sometimes theirs is a tree and sometimes his is a tool for digging and sometimes it is pinched to judge scale relations and sometimes the hand is just a hand.

To hold. To touch. To look. To assist. I want to think about choreography as a series of infinitives that point toward and back and sideways simultaneously. Here repetition might escape some of its mimetic restraints to do more inventive reparative work. Or perhaps these many refrains generate what Jen Rosenblit describes as the “hot spots” in the space, a more phenomenological and affective rendering of the spatial and temporal through temperature and tone.

They walk on relevé. As Heather’s arms open toward an unrequited hug she makes visible a soft nebulous architecture within the space of the studio. This is not pantomime but the body taking on a shape in relation to an imagined force or form; moving to foreground the background.

—Jenn Joy

—Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart

Returning to Clarice Lispector is always a strange gift; a poetics inscribed in the seemingly familiar that struggles and abrades meaning. Her words perform a sensuous and at times abusive labor, virtuosic and unnerving. I had been reading her novel Near to the Wild Heart on my way to rehearsal and her voice continued to whisper as I watched—a lacy rough yet quite precise vocal texture, seductively cool alienating syntactical advances and retreats. Lispector conjures an aporia between language and desire, not a void per se, but a densely saturated intensity of sensation, emotion, loss, desire, lust, indifference. Her writing fights against sense demanding something else of language than any singular or legible representation. She choreographs desire as it touches the uncanny tics, twitches, and shudders of the quotidian rendering a complicated poetics that approaches (for me) what Tere describes as the “de-languaging” work of dance.

Some notes from Dance 2, a rehearsal, in no particular order:

Oisin and Silas bend over with arms stretched out behind them, running fast without moving; broken seagulls fighting against the wind, no direction only futile effort.

Standing along the periphery of the studio, they slide to step, slide to step, repeat, shifting balance from one foot to the other and back to trace or smooth over the ground. Writing about the relationship of ground to dance, theorist Paul Carter claims that the ground must be flattened and colonized before any dancing can happen. Karl Marx would say that we must eat before we dance. These regimes (economic, social, cultural) work with the studio apparatus evoking something of a governing force in the work. Even without the barre or mirror, there is nothing neutral about this not really empty studio. The dancers’ clothes, leg warmers, bags, snacks, Styrofoam rollers clutter the wall by the door and we, the small audience, sit watching from the side. Life accumulated in piles along the periphery. How do these ciphers of the exterior of the dance and of experience, of living, animate each rehearsal? The residues of working, classes, rehearsals, relationships, conversations, headlines, subway rides…

The dancers stand, leap, fall; they carry each other.

Heather is lifted into the air, very very slowly. A slowness that alludes to a careful attention to weight and the impossible aspirations of verticality but also of intimacy, the kind that follows after an accident or fight when something is broken or bruised. We never witness the breaks only the prosthetic after-effects.

Standing with their heads falling back, chins upturned like the strange headless creature of Brassai’s photograph that graced Man Ray’s surrealist treaty, Anatomies, they expose the vulnerability of the neck to the knife or camera. Anatomy becomes momentarily unrecognizable and strange. The almost uncanny imagined through the exquisite physicality and technique of the dance evokes a generative illegibility that exploits choreography’s power.

They are couples or partners; sometimes they count.

The dancers form a line close to the audience staring out above my head. Their gaze aspires to non-expressivity, yet reads as the frozen blank look of the dancer concentrating on the dancing internally. When I watch this iteration I experience a confusion of expressivity, or perhaps this is part of the layering of the choreographer’s vision and direction layered over technique in relation to the differential velocities, extensions, textures, qualities of each performer.

Leaving the group, Oisin walks to the back of the space and lies face down on the floor, now behind the other dancers, alone. Disengaged, exhausted, alienated, he almost seems to give in to gravity’s pull, to resist the rise of the other complicated geometries and architectures surrounding him. In the silence between the steps, you might almost hear his breath; his back rises and falls with this subtle effort. Asleep, exhausted, distant, his elegant pale tension holds the other laboring bodies as if suspending the movements all around him. His momentary extraction from the group calls to mind Jérôme Bel’s Véronique Doisneau (2004) that features the almost retired ballerina Véronique Doisneau executing extracts of dances she has performed as a member of the corps de ballet in the Paris Opera House. Yet, in Jérôme’s piece she is now alone in the corner of the stage, her corner as it were. Jérôme distances this piece from an idea of dancing to focus specifically on how it writes a specific body in a specific space and how this encounter narrates not only the relationship between dancer and company, but individual and society. Choreography, etymologically the intertwining of writing and movement, now becomes an intricate entanglement of relations, “a frame, a structure, a language” as Jérôme describes this constellation. Against his imposition of language or riffs on the semiotics or pop cultural sentimentality of words and memories, Dance 2 demands a more subversive play with the structure of the dancing and of the language within and surrounding it. The piece attempts a constantly shifting series of orientations as the dancers exchange roles and positions, never with narrative intent but always in relationship to events—spatial, sensational, temporal.

Always following, always anticipating future trajectories.

—Jenn Joy

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