Psychic Strand
how, how, how, more, more, more, work, work, work
I like the challenge of writing. I like how many things, over many weeks, float and swim through my mind and how there is this peripheral “vision” of how it might be put together. And/or how I can frame fragments and allow the functional aspect of a meandering consciousness to take form. I like thinking of how this process is similar to making a dance. And how it’s different. How, how, how.
Mark and I went to Dia: Beacon recently, a gargantuan art institution known for featuring Minimalist royalty such as Richard Serra, Donald Judd, and Abstract Expressionists like painter Agnes Martin. I was, surprisingly, taken by these mostly white canvases by the late artist Robert Ryman. 1
I’m not a minimalist, at least not evidenced by the last 30 years of my dance-making. It’s more of a more is more situation. More, more, more. Most, but not all, of the time. Here is an example from my 2009 piece Fever Drift, that I was revistiting recently. 2
Something appealed to me about these Robert Ryman canvases with various shades of white and cream, revealing the material and color they were painted on. Some of them looked like they were actually only a white canvas, of various sizes, all squares or rectangles, mounted on the wall, or standing up on the floor. It was less an aesthetic experience and more of a movement toward a speculative way of thinking. I’m intrigued by what I imagine to be the time and thoughtfulness going into these and the seemingly simple “results.” There is something mysterious and open about them. And they draw my attention to perceptual activity. In reading about Ryman he said that his intention was never about making white paintings, but that using “white enabled other things to become visible.” Voila.
I can relate. I had an experience in a Deborah Hay3 intensive workshop that maybe feels akin to this. I was work, work, working with whatever we were working on. Work, work, work. When we took a break she came over to me and said something like “I see your working…all of it. What if (?) you experimented with not showing all of the work?” Work here = movement. At first her suggestion needled me a little, I felt that my nervous system needs to create a lot of movement (and there are times and places for this), but then I thought yeah, I should try it. I did, after all, travel and pay money to study with her. Maybe there’s something for me to discover here. And when I allowed less to be more, or at least for “all of it” to not be visible, it was pretty transformative. For those moments. And as a provocation for further practice. There was not less intensity to my experience dancing (which was what I had imagined would happen). Instead intensity remained but the experience felt closer to me. Not in a solipsistic, private way, but perhaps analogous to what it feels like to watch someone who is deeply engaged in what they’re doing. But not to the exclusion of the audience. Someone who is receptively sharing.
And the fact that I am choosing to say it’s like watching is intentional. There was a sense of doing and being the watcher of the doing - an outside eye, but with my own perception. I had a momentary sense that I was both the clapper, the loose piece that swings and strikes a bell, and the bell itself. I know…it sounds sappy. But this was no small thing and this experience encouraged me to sometimes practice in a new way. This kind of perceptual acumen, in part, is what draws me to performing and to other performers.
Another thing I like about writing is the going-down-a-rabbit-hole element. This process of tumbling down in there is also akin to dancemaking. The: this - leads - to - this - jumps - to - here - to - crackle - underneath - to - blur - outside - the - sounds - we - gentle - inferno - amphibian - fluctuate - seesaw - seeing - turning - staying - go - on - here.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/09/obituaries/robert-ryman-minimalist-painter-dies.html
Created in collaboration with and performed by Anna Goldman, Jessica Wright, Jessie Young. Recorded sound by The Kallikak Family. Performed at Hamlin Park Theater, Chicago and University of Wisconsin, Madison. Thanks to Wilson College residency time and space.
https://www.artforum.com/columns/deborah-hay-2-210896/