I am stepping back into the world of horseless dance. Like Gillian’s sculptures, the ground beneath my feet is marked with hoofprints, indelibly changed from spending fourteen years dancing with horses. But at this moment, the theater calls.
Besides the time in the studio, besides the dancing, the dreaming, the focusing inward, there is also the parallel underworld of fundraising and booking. I am trying to make friends with that world. Not by sucking up to it, but by noticing if there is a way in which it can support me, in which I can offer my work without losing my mind and my soul.I think there is, but viewing myself through that lens can make me question everything about what I am quietly, wildly exploring in the studio.
I went online to one big funding site and looked at a long video of choreography by recipients. There I found Michelle Ellsworth, whose work so delighted me that I Googled her further. She is a gorgeous mover, a witty performer and exactly the kind of person I would like to hang out with for an afternoon at Starbucks. I watched some of her videos online, and this one gave me pause. What I found intriguing and disturbing was how easily I was convinced that what I had been working on was, in fact, a bad idea.
It isn’t really. But doubt is the demon that besieges artists, my quicksand of choice. It is the outfit I wear when I am filling out grant applications, or even thinking about it. It is the great derailer. So check it out, if you dare.
In a discussion with some Consciousness Collaborative folks in Boston over the weekend, the question of “What is horsemanship?” came up. Someone had said that they work with horses but do not do horsemanship. I thought that was odd, and wondered out loud how one could spend time with horses and not be doing some kind of horsemanship. I thought about the word dance, and how narrowly defined that can be. The dictionary defines it this way: “move rhythmically to music, typically following a set sequence of steps.move in a quick and lively way.” A fairly 18th century definition and the one that comes up first on a Google search!
This article on the philosophic problems of dance breaks that idea wide open:
Avant-garde experiments use such everyday movements exclusively and without stylization. One choreographer, Anna Sokolow, says she sometimes wonders about “. . . the dividing point between movement and dance. I don’t know and I don’t really care.” Aestheticians and many dance critics, of course, do care about such things. Most would hesitate to call a person walking across a room (even with a radio playing in the background and another person in the room watching) a performance of a dance, although identical movements and accompaniments might be found in a performance.
The use of random movements is another rejection of formalized dance movement. Merce Cunningham, who has collaborated extensively with avant-garde composer John Cage, uses random selection methods for the choice of steps and step-sequences in his dance performances. Randomness and everyday movements again suggest that dance is in part a function of something other than the characteristics of the movement per se, such as the relationship between spectator and performer and the standards for appreciating and evaluating the movements. The room-walking would be art if the walker did it for the purpose of being observed, appreciated, and evaluated as a performance by the other person, and if the observer also appreciated the movement as a performance, despite the absence of a traditional theater. Standards for appreciation and evaluation as dance might involve unity, meaningfulness, and so forth, rather than non-art standards of, say, how efficiently the walker crossed the room to answer the doorbell or how carefully he walked to avoid toys on the floor.
Traditional assumptions about the role of music are also being challenged. Historically, views on the role of music have shifted from (1) the belief that music should provide only the “beat,” but otherwise not “interfere” with the dancing; to (2) the nineteenth-century view that music should complement, but not overwhelm, the mood of the dance; to (3) the twentieth-century view that music and dance should be integrally related, with the dance providing a visualization and expansion of the complex relationships in the music. Avant-garde choreographers challenge all of these views.
My own very spacious definition of dance is basically “any movement in time and space with intention in the presence of a witness.” Intention is the trick word here – what is the mover/movement-maker intending? The witness could be an audience of one or thousands. On the other hand, when I am rehearsing alone is it dancing? Yes. I find it easy to feel when my movement has morphed into some kind of dancing. On the other hand, the minute I enter the stable, I am practicing some kind of horsemanship. The thing that makes it horsemanship is the quality of consciousness in the relationship.
Horsemanship is, according to one definition, is “the art, ability, skill, or manner of a horse(wo)man.” I actually like that and find it commodious. To me, that includes all the practices of equine assisted this or that, riding, and spending any kind of intentional time with horses, regardless of the specific intention, place, time, horse or practice. Is there good horsemanship and bad horsemanship? You bet. Is it easier to determine than bad or good dance? You bet. An offended or bored audience can pretty much up and leave at any time. The horse is not so lucky. They have to stay around for the whole performance. If they do up and leave, it does not end well for the horse.
Yesterday, I spent a lovely morning with my friend Elvia, doing Embodied Horsemanship. What were we doing? We started with some horseless work – somatic movement awareness practices, some improvisational games, some of the softness and balance exercises from Mark Rashid, some conversation about intention, balance and listening. Then we went over to the Equus Effect and played with the lovely Tango. We focused on attunment, listening, on integrating some of the improvisation strategies and somatic exercises into the simple groundwork with Tango. We played in the Tellington-inspired labyrinth. Horsemanship? Yes.
My friend Ann Carlson has one of the stretchier approaches to dance of anyone I know. For your dance and cowmanship pleasure. (In case you cannot see, the anonymous-making hooded raincoats are filled with cash – a comment on the monetization and facelessness of our food animals).
This came to mind after reading Pam White’s blog post. May all beings be free from suffering, may all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free from mistaken identity.
What is a mistaken identity? How can we tell? As an actor and a performer, different identities are my stock in trade. They become mistaken if I get stuck in them, or start to believe that there are too many points of connection between myself and a character or role. When we are older, I believe, it is harder to sustain a mistaken identity. There is too much evidence accumulated, too many instances of un-masking, and it is too much effort to sustain the theater of false personae.
For the young, though, especially those who have had a terrible, traumatic childhood, mistaken identity can be a great La Brea tarpit. What I am learning, through my research into adoption and trauma, is that children who lose everything when they are very young – before the age of two especially – can re-enact that loss and may chose self-destructive, delusional paths in a confused search for identity. The problem for parents is that those alarming choices can become causes, can take on missionary zeal, can become cemented in rebellion, resistance and fear.
My own youthful mistaken identities nearly killed me. The problem is that if you don’t unmask, don’t see through the haze of false selves, your bones will be found there in the pits, sunk into the delusional muck. I pray for my beloved child, that this mistaken identity releases her before it is too late.
I am back in the studio. Not the arena. New dances, no horses. For the past thirteen years, I have been dancing with horses. That work is still extant, but I am drawn back to the theater. For the first time in that many years, I am making solo work and duet work. It feels exhilarating, wild, unhinged in the sense that the horse is not there to shape things, to create a certain kind of boundary, intention and necessity for the work.
I have been doing Authentic Movement more too. Setting my witness-goddesses in the corner, and letting them hold the space, hold me. There is weeping, There is opening, there is stillness and darkness and light and quiet.
When I was teaching at Boston University in September, a student asked me where I start. How do I begin a dance? I liked that question, and reached back all the way to the beginning of making work for answers that were as varied as an elephant is from a mouse. An image, a feeling in the body, a poem, a painting, some music, a dancer’s movement, something observed, something read, something felt, a place, a journey, a memory, a fragment of gesture that keeps interrupting, demanding. Something quiet, something loud, something big, something small. Welcome all.
I am letting myself be called now. Maybe it is that I am older, but I am surrendering to these calls more easily now, letting myself be shaped, asking fewer questions, and allowing the wild body to speak.
Photo: Pam White; Sculpture: Gillian Jagger
