history in the making #3 :::: 12 January 2009

Yvonne Rainer || Deborah Hay

After the December session being canceled due to weather, it was great to get together with everybody again last Sunday January 12, especially since the talented and articulate Linda K. Johnson was present to share her expertise on Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A. Attending were Linda K., Linda A., Lisa, Lily, Lilly, Lois, Kathleen, Anne, Chelsea, Catherine, Emily, Meg—the ‘L’s win every time!

LONG Background—skip if you like—this writing is practice for a grant application!
I have been working on and off on a piece called “Paired Spectacular”– inspired by my direct physical and perceptual interactions with dance works by two women of the Judson generation. I learned, practiced for a year, and performed a recent solo by Deborah Hay and am again in the process — after almost a year hiatus — of learning Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A from Linda Johnson. We are lucky here in Portland to have Linda for many reasons: one of them is her position of custodian of Trio A. She is one of three people Yvonne has approved to teach the piece to other people for performance.

It’s been so fascinating to me to note my own instinctive alignment with the work of each of these women, disparate though they are. Yvonne’s piece (from 1963) has a very exact and exacting physical score, and an avoidance of engagement with the audience (at least with the eyes). The teaching of the piece avoids using images or metaphorical language. In contrast, Deborah’s piece, an example of recent work (2005), has very few prescribed movements. Its score consists of a precise set of directives that, in essence, choreographs the dancer’s perceptions, often through “impossible” tasks that may or may not be couched in imagistic language. Another interesting difference is that , whereas Trio A is all Yvonne, my version of “Room” is called a “solo adaptation” of Deborah’s choreography, incorporating my own expertise as a choreographer.

Yet, as singular and individual as each work is, I also love sifting out their affinities. Both have aspects of juggling two or more discrete tasks at once: on the physical plane (Yvonne) or in the perceptual realm (Deborah). Both subvert conventional demands of beauty and virtuosity in dance, albeit in different ways. The work of both, and of their peers in the Judson dance group, have been absorbed, refined, transformed by succeeding generations of experimental dance artists like myself. I feel such a personal passion for this stream of work because it is what made possible the rather delayed entrance into dance of a non-technically trained person like myself when I was in my mid-twenties and living in New York City.

Throughout my own trajectory, I have noticed in my making an attraction to making precise prescribed movements in a stinging-beads manner, as well as a love for approaches that are more open physically yet still very specific.  (OK OK! I admit it–I like to improvise. Deborah, however, doesn’t like that word applied to her work.)  Somehow it came about very naturally that after practicing one day what I knew of Trio A,  I started to create some movement that was Trio A “like”. That was the germ of the idea to create two dances, each following the approach as I understood it, of each iconic figure.  The process becomes then a kind of measure of my own response — because sometimes I unwittingly can’t stick to it, to being “true” to the procedure I have laid out. Sometimes I simply and consciously rebel. Negotiating all of this is part of what holds my interest in this undertaking. Although this negotiation isn’t apparent to audience members when I perform the final work, the threads that tie it all together are certainly my own choreographic choices, my own body and consciousness and that of other performers.

There is also a hinge section at the midpoint that is perhaps more freely “me” as I’m just doing what I want irregardless, and that both separates and connects the two sections. It involves a sound-making visual element that remains present in the 2nd dance (the Trio A-like part)

The vision for the Jan. 12 history in the making session was to bring some of this comparison out into the open for the workshop participants, to introduce both Rainer and Hay to those who didn’t know their work and place in our own dance lineage, and to take advantage of Linda Johnson’s expertise in all things related to Trio A.

Description of the Jan. 12 doings
After brief introductions, I talked about my piece in progress “Paired Spectacular” described above. Then Linda K. told the story of how she first got involved with Trio A–from seeing a video at the Guggenheim Soho (not sure what year this was)  of Rainer, Steve Paxton and Robert Rauschenberg performing it. Linda K. described very eloquently her bemusement, befuddlement, fascination and her subsequent determination to intimately know this piece.

When she had an OAC fellowship, Linda K.  went to NYC to learn Trio A, first from Clarinda Mac Low, who had learned it from YR for a Judson retrospective in the 90s??. (Small world data: Clarinda was my roommate in NYC for my last years there!) Later, Linda re-learned it from Yvonne with Shelley Senter. Those tow performed it together at Reed College a few years ago as part of a project that revisited Rainer’s work as well as works by Bebe Miller, Remy Charlip, and Trisha Brown, whom Shelley had danced with for many years. Linda’s connection to  Yvonne and this work in other contexts has resulted in her being in the position of being able to pass it on to others.

Linda gave us the text of Yvonne’s comparison of some post-modern dance characteristics with minimalism in visual art. We talked about some of the ground rules YR was using as she accumulated the piece, working every day back in the early 60s: averted gaze from audience, discrete movements linked together with no stops and an even pace, no one thing more accented/emphasized than another, no momentum, etc. We worked making our own short sequences using same ideas and shared with a partner.

Next Linda K. performed Trio A twice, in the way Yvonne likes it: first in silence and then accompanied by Wilson Pickett’s “Midnight Hour”, which led to talk about the function of the music and its power to seemingly tie the movement together, in spite of the fact that it’s on a separate track, i.e. the dance doesn’t “go” in any sense with the music, but has its own (evenly-paced) timing and in fact must resist being pulled into  accenting the beat.

Then Linda K. demonstrated the rigorous “cleaning” that goes on the teaching/learning of this dance. I hadn’t had a session with Linda in months and months, and only a couple weeks ago started trying to practice it again, so it was very real life. I did a short bit from the beginning and Linda K made corrections, I asked for clarifications etc.

Then we all sketchily learned a small section from Trio A: the iconic arm windmilling sequence, lowering the body to the floor through the “hand flipping” sequence.

We talked, Linda answering questions….wish I could remember all this richness. Her motivations in avoiding the audience gaze was one topic.

Linda left for family and we had a break.

Then it was Deborah Hay’s turn! We didn’t spend as much time on her as we did on Yvonne, but we will come back to Deborah in the session on “choreographic transmission.”

We did a short session moving to the directive “What if every one of my 300 trillion (correct number?) cells at once had the potential to perceive the uniqueness and beauty of all there is.”

Then I showed them my booklet of the score for “Room”, talked a bit about learning it at Findhorn for the Solo Performance commissioning Project, and how Deborah writes out the dance as a “libretto” in 3rd person. We recreated and practiced a bit from the opening of “Room” — Kathleen, Lisa and Lily G had already experienced learning part of it from D. at SFADI a few years ago.

Interestingly enough I remembered a detail afterwords that I hadn’t at the time: when singing “you are the only one” to the tune of Tico Tico at the beginning, there is a slight sway to the body. This was not part of the original libretto, but something Deboray observed in one of the dancers at the Findhorn residency and added to the score. The sway, “of course!” is on its own timing, separate from the singing!

Finally, I showed a little bit of each section from “Paired Spectacular.”

Hmmm. Maybe in the future, I will assign someone to take notes of what comes up in the talking part of our sessions. Most of that has vanished, leaving only the feeling of having had some great discussion.

Comments, corrections, additions welcome and encouraged!

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