Walk Right Phantom Through
an ART LIFE blog
I haven’t been dancing or working on any performances since June. It has started to feel like I have a psychic phantom limb. It’s only been six months, but I’m missing it nonetheless. I’m using this neurophysical term to describe this feeling phenomena of absence, a sensation in and of itself. It kind of aches and there’s a tingly numbness too. I’ve been working on other things, and lately, it has been to the exclusion of my dance life. When I’m not active in a studio, or a specific process, like now, I start fiddling with videos of dances and/or other ways to engage the imaginative glow inside. I think about aspects of my dance-making life, and recently I landed on titles.
When I started out making dances the titles always came later in the process. What was happening in the studio informed what name it got. That started to shift a number of years ago. Titles came early in the process or even before I got going in the studio. For one dance they came from a dream I had1. They often come from intuition and inner rumblings. I think this is significant in terms of what gets made. And how it gets made.
Artificial Hollow is a dance that I made with collaborating performers Doug LeCours, Ursula Eagly, Eleanor Smith, and Jessie Young. We performed the material we had at the culmination of a residency at Snug Harbor Cultural Center (on Staten Island) and later at Movement Research at Judson Church (sans Ursula). I don’t think this piece was ever completed. I say I’m not sure because it became, in my mind, either a prelude to the next piece I made, or was the nascent stage of that piece. Despite their interrelatedness, they were decisively different. Their respective titles contributed to this in no small way.
The title Artificial Hollow came from me riffing with pen and paper after watching filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker2. I was recalling all the wet, mossy, otherworldly landscapes that the characters traversed, and a location known as “The Zone” and its ‘room of desires.’ Also, around this time I visited family in Virginia and stayed in an Airbnb basement decorated mostly in gray (you know, the classic coloring of the short-term accommodation world). There was (as always) a co-mingling of things: seeing Stalker, a family visit, and the very recent history of working in the studio. I like this title. And I like the spaciousness that “hollow” signifies. And I was drawn to calling the hollowness “artificial”—implying a sort of contradiction. Or refusal. Or oppositeness.
The next dance, Nerve Show, was named before we started in the studio. I was working with the same group of collaborators, with the addition of performer Justin Cabrillos. I asked the performers if they would send me a photo from the neck up, just a partial view of their face with some kind of strain or evidence of tension in it. I’m not sure why, it just felt evocative to me in some way. Shortly after I got their photos back, I knew it would be called Nerve Show. And this located the world to be built (or, turns out, to be deconstructed) in a specific way—a partiality towards agitation, a kind of audacious angst. Then the pandemic hit. When we were able to resume, our Nerve Show came to be a kind of fleshy breathlessness, a living, dizzy compression that the images hinted at, and the dance brought to life. The performances of it felt honest, revealing, and vulnerable. And the performers knocked it out of the ballpark.
Yeah, dances, people, and other things get named in various ways, by different “methods.” I don’t think one way is better than another. But I like having an awareness of how I choose to name and what the implications are. They’re all imaginative, but are sparked, perhaps, from different directions. I also love having words that I don’t know what they mean (yet), or a phrase that keep repeating in my mind, or that come from a dream and seeing how it plays out.
The words Novatia Tryer came from a dream. The dance would make the meaning of this nocturnal imagination. With collaborating performers Jesi Cook, Katie Dean, Scott Myers Sarah Sandoval. Recorded sound by Noé Cuéllar.
I highly recommend Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (and other films by him, especially Nostalgia)