Where the Stress Falls (19 page)
Read Where the Stress Falls Online
Authors: Susan Sontag
IT’S NOT THAT
the exotic, or the southern, is required to release the impulse of this “northern” sensibility to paint.
the exotic, or the southern, is required to release the impulse of this “northern” sensibility to paint.
But it may be that this painter needs to travel.
A trip is an intensifier, license to the avid eye (and other senses). You need the separation from home. And then you need the return home, to consider what you have stored up.
In principle, the painter could make pictures out of everything he has lived through and done and seen. This creates an unbearably acute pressure to paint, and an equally acute feeling of anxiety.
Travel, the impression that one has ventured outside oneself, can be used as a filter and goad. It organizes the desire to paint. It gives it a rhythm, and the right kind of delay.
It is important not to see
too much.
(And there is nothing to reproduce.) Hence, Hodgkin doesn’t sketch, doesn’t take photographs, doesn’t do anything obvious to commit to memory the scene or an interior or a view or a face—instead trusting what will happen when the sight of something has burrowed itself deep down in memory, when it has accumulated emotional and pictorial gravity.
too much.
(And there is nothing to reproduce.) Hence, Hodgkin doesn’t sketch, doesn’t take photographs, doesn’t do anything obvious to commit to memory the scene or an interior or a view or a face—instead trusting what will happen when the sight of something has burrowed itself deep down in memory, when it has accumulated emotional and pictorial gravity.
A way of feeling is a way of seeing.
What is worth painting is what remains in, and is transformed by, memory. And what survives the test of long-term deliberation and countless acts of re-vision. Pictures result from the accretion of many decisions (or layers, or brush strokes); some are worked on for years, to find the exact thickness of a feeling.
LOOKING CLOSELY
at what the swipes and plunges of Hodgkin’s brush have deposited on a surface is to feel, sometimes, that one has divined the brush’s itinerary, starting from the first, generative surge of feelings. The distinctive shapes in Hodgkin pictures read like a vocabulary of signals for the circulation, collision, and rerouting of desire.
at what the swipes and plunges of Hodgkin’s brush have deposited on a surface is to feel, sometimes, that one has divined the brush’s itinerary, starting from the first, generative surge of feelings. The distinctive shapes in Hodgkin pictures read like a vocabulary of signals for the circulation, collision, and rerouting of desire.
Sometimes it feels as if the flooding or brimming has spilled over onto the frame. Sometimes it is the frame that has moved inward, thickened, doubled, as if to contain what cannot be contained. (The fat verticals of
Snapshot,
like the sides of a proscenium stage or
a gate; the thick oval frame of
Love Letter
that squeezes, crowds the heart of what lies pulsing in the center.)
Snapshot,
like the sides of a proscenium stage or
a gate; the thick oval frame ofLove Letter
that squeezes, crowds the heart of what lies pulsing in the center.)
Framing hems in, keeps one from falling off the edge of the world. And framing gives permission to emote.
It makes possible the ambitiousness of Hodgkin’s work, and its tight, cunningly judged compactness of statement. Hodgkin has understood that if the pictures are dense enough, they can go in two directions, doing justice to intimate textures as well as to emotions of a large expressiveness. (Vuillard
and
opera, so to speak.)
and
opera, so to speak.)
VENICE: ONCE, AGAIN
. Imagining the imagined. When you want to see Venice again, and you have seen it many times, rising out of the sea, in winter perhaps, semi-deserted, what you appreciate is that it will not have changed at all.
. Imagining the imagined. When you want to see Venice again, and you have seen it many times, rising out of the sea, in winter perhaps, semi-deserted, what you appreciate is that it will not have changed at all.
Or you stand at the railing of the boat going up the Nile, a day’s journey from Luxor, and it’s sunset. You’re just looking. There are no words you are impelled to write down; you don’t make a sketch or take a photograph. You look, and sometimes your eyes feel tired, and you look again, and you feel saturated, and happy, and terribly anxious.
There is a price to be paid for stubbornly continuing to make love with one’s eyes to these famous tourist-weary old places. For not letting go: of ruined grandeur, of the imperative of bliss. For continuing to work on behalf of, in praise of, beauty. It’s not that one hasn’t noticed that this is an activity which people rather condescend to now.
Indeed, one might spend a lifetime apologizing for having found so many ways of acceding to ecstasy.
THE IDEA IS
to put as much as possible, of color, of feeling, in each picture. It’s as if the pictures need their broad border to contain so much feeling. As if they need to be painted on something hard, wood, since they embody such a large sense of vulnerability.
to put as much as possible, of color, of feeling, in each picture. It’s as if the pictures need their broad border to contain so much feeling. As if they need to be painted on something hard, wood, since they embody such a large sense of vulnerability.
The sense of vulnerability has not diminished. Nor has the sense of gratitude: for the privilege of feeling, the privilege of voluptuousness, the privilege of knowing more rather than less. There is heroism in the vehemence and the lack of irony of Hodgkin’s pictures. He labors over them as if painting could still be a vehicle of self-transcendence.
In such matters, with such purposes, the race is to the slow.
[1995]
AVAILABLE LIGHT. 1983
. Fifty-five-minute work for eleven dancers (five women and six men) commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles: the third of Lucinda Childs’s large-scale productions. Music by John Adams, set by Frank Gehry, costumes by Ronaldus Shamask, lighting by Beverly Emmons.
. Fifty-five-minute work for eleven dancers (five women and six men) commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles: the third of Lucinda Childs’s large-scale productions. Music by John Adams, set by Frank Gehry, costumes by Ronaldus Shamask, lighting by Beverly Emmons.
BEAUTY. The visionary authority of Childs’s work resides, in part, in its lack of rhetoric. Her strict avoidance of cliché, and of anything that would make the work disjunctive, fragmented. The refusal of humor, self-mockery, flirtation with the audience, cult of personality. The distaste for the exhibitionistic: movement calling attention to itself, isolatable “effects.” Beauty as, first of all, an art of refusal.
CHOREOGRAPHY. Childs started by defining herself as a “modern” choreographer; therefore, alienated from “tradition.” (Two decades ago, it could still seem plausible to regard modern dance as the antithesis and subversion of classical dance.) When she did start choreographing dances, in 1968, it was with the predilection for keeping the movement vocabulary relatively simple, seeking complexity elsewhere—in the intricate design of spatial forms and of timing. But in the music-based works choreographed since 1979, which propose a much more complex movement vocabulary, Childs has broken radically
with the anti-ballet aesthetic of the other ex- or neo-Duchampian choreographers with whom she has been grouped. Of all the adepts of the rigorously modern among contemporary choreographers, she has the subtlest and most fastidious relation to classical dance. If her use of portions of the ballet idiom is less easily recognizable than Merce Cunningham’s and Twyla Tharp’s, it is because Childs does not feed balletic movements and positions into an eclectic mix but wholly transforms and reinterprets them. In this, as in other matters, she is adamantly anti-collage. Thus the choreography of
Available Light
was not conceived first and then illustrated by the music, the set, and the costumes but solicited, presupposed, and worked out in strict relation to these—to the two-level stage devised by Gehry, the multi-layered music of Adams, the three-color constructivist scheme (black, red, white) of Shamask’s costumes.
with the anti-ballet aesthetic of the other ex- or neo-Duchampian choreographers with whom she has been grouped. Of all the adepts of the rigorously modern among contemporary choreographers, she has the subtlest and most fastidious relation to classical dance. If her use of portions of the ballet idiom is less easily recognizable than Merce Cunningham’s and Twyla Tharp’s, it is because Childs does not feed balletic movements and positions into an eclectic mix but wholly transforms and reinterprets them. In this, as in other matters, she is adamantly anti-collage. Thus the choreography of
Available Light
was not conceived first and then illustrated by the music, the set, and the costumes but solicited, presupposed, and worked out in strict relation to these—to the two-level stage devised by Gehry, the multi-layered music of Adams, the three-color constructivist scheme (black, red, white) of Shamask’s costumes.
COMPLEXITY. Cunningham in 1952: “For me, it seems enough that dancing is a spiritual exercise in physical form, and that what is seen is what it is. And I do not believe it is possible to be ‘too simple.’” The delicate rhythms and intricate configurations and tempi of Cunningham’s work, the way attention is commanded through a simple, unadorned, unexplained, often decentered presence, offered a new standard of the complex.
CUNNINGHAM, MERCE. Childs, who studied with Cunningham between 1959 and 1963, assumes Cunningham’s notion that dance should not express something else (an emotion, a story, an interior landscape) but not Cunningham’s method, which is to make the elements of dance self-contained, autonomous, even aleatoric in their mix (and sometimes in their look). “I didn’t like it,” Cunningham once said, “that a movement
meant
something.” This liberating stance has been associated with a large element of parody in Cunningham’s idiom: post-Graham movements (the Cunningham curved back is an ironic comment on the Graham contraction) and laterally tilted ballet positions. Out of this eclectic aesthetic, much irony. (Cunningham’s choreography is an art of disjunction and therefore ultimately comic.) Childs by temperament unifies; her aesthetic refuses the eclectic, the disjunctive—it never
quotes. Though playfulness is one of her chief standards of grace, her work is virtually free of irony. Its tone is austere but never cool. Embracing the Cunningham position (the refusal of plot, of “meaning”), Childs has drawn other consequences from it; she has dropped the jokes, the kidding around, the wistful lyricism, and reached for the sublime.
meant
something.” This liberating stance has been associated with a large element of parody in Cunningham’s idiom: post-Graham movements (the Cunningham curved back is an ironic comment on the Graham contraction) and laterally tilted ballet positions. Out of this eclectic aesthetic, much irony. (Cunningham’s choreography is an art of disjunction and therefore ultimately comic.) Childs by temperament unifies; her aesthetic refuses the eclectic, the disjunctive—it never
quotes. Though playfulness is one of her chief standards of grace, her work is virtually free of irony. Its tone is austere but never cool. Embracing the Cunningham position (the refusal of plot, of “meaning”), Childs has drawn other consequences from it; she has dropped the jokes, the kidding around, the wistful lyricism, and reached for the sublime.
Dance
. 1979. The first of the large-scale productions, a hundred-minute work, for the company of nine. Music by Philip Glass, lighting by Beverly Emmons, and a film by Sol LeWitt of portions of three of the five sections (“Dance #I,” “Dance #
3
,” and “Dance #
4
”). Choreographers as different as Cunningham and Pina Bausch have made works with an accompanying, simultaneous image-record, displayed on a TV monitor placed on the stage; in contrast to this additive, fragmenting use, the projection of LeWitt’s film, on a transparent scrim at the front of the stage, is a true setting and literal transfiguration of the dance. The synchronized ongoing of film and dance creates a double space—flat (the scrim/screen) and three-dimensional (the stage)—and provides a double reality, both dance and its shadow (documentation, projection), both intimacy and distance. Recording the dancers from different angles, in long shot and in close-up, LeWitt’s film tracks the dancers, sometimes on the same level, sometimes from above—using split-screen and multiple images. Or it immobilizes them, in a freeze-frame (or series of still shots) which the live dancer passes through. Or it waits with the dancer, as in the beginning of “Dance #
4
,” Childs’s second solo, when Childs appears both in large mask-like close-up on the scrim and as a small immobile figure in white on the stage. The film is a friendly, intermittent ghost that makes the dancers, seen behind the scrim, seem disembodied, too: each seems the ghost of the other. The spectacle becomes authentically polyvalent, though the film is finally subordinate to the dance. “Dance #
2
,” Childs’s first solo, and the concluding “Dance #
5
” proceed without the film ghost.
. 1979. The first of the large-scale productions, a hundred-minute work, for the company of nine. Music by Philip Glass, lighting by Beverly Emmons, and a film by Sol LeWitt of portions of three of the five sections (“Dance #I,” “Dance #
3
,” and “Dance #
4
”). Choreographers as different as Cunningham and Pina Bausch have made works with an accompanying, simultaneous image-record, displayed on a TV monitor placed on the stage; in contrast to this additive, fragmenting use, the projection of LeWitt’s film, on a transparent scrim at the front of the stage, is a true setting and literal transfiguration of the dance. The synchronized ongoing of film and dance creates a double space—flat (the scrim/screen) and three-dimensional (the stage)—and provides a double reality, both dance and its shadow (documentation, projection), both intimacy and distance. Recording the dancers from different angles, in long shot and in close-up, LeWitt’s film tracks the dancers, sometimes on the same level, sometimes from above—using split-screen and multiple images. Or it immobilizes them, in a freeze-frame (or series of still shots) which the live dancer passes through. Or it waits with the dancer, as in the beginning of “Dance #
4
,” Childs’s second solo, when Childs appears both in large mask-like close-up on the scrim and as a small immobile figure in white on the stage. The film is a friendly, intermittent ghost that makes the dancers, seen behind the scrim, seem disembodied, too: each seems the ghost of the other. The spectacle becomes authentically polyvalent, though the film is finally subordinate to the dance. “Dance #
2
,” Childs’s first solo, and the concluding “Dance #
5
” proceed without the film ghost.
DIAGONAL. A signature element in Childs’s choreography: a principle of avidity, about space. Dancers often go into low plié arabesque, with the arm continuing the diagonal—the longest line that the body can
make. And they often move on the diagonal—the longest distance one can traverse on a stage without changing direction. Childs’s adventures with the diagonal have their apotheosis in
Relative Calm
, two of its four sections being choreographed entirely on the diagonal. In the first section, the whole company dances back and forth on parallel paths from upstage right to downstage left for twenty-three increasingly blissful minutes; in the third, solo section, Childs dances for seventeen minutes in phrases of different lengths, punctuated by turns, on the opposite diagonal … And moving to the diagonal often means an intensification, as in the finale of “Dance #1” of
Dance
, when suddenly four pairs of dancers dash again and again from upstage left to downstage right. Or in
Available Light
: Childs’s arrival upstage right and slow progress downstage left through a corridor formed by eight dancers, four on each side.
make. And they often move on the diagonal—the longest distance one can traverse on a stage without changing direction. Childs’s adventures with the diagonal have their apotheosis in
Relative Calm
, two of its four sections being choreographed entirely on the diagonal. In the first section, the whole company dances back and forth on parallel paths from upstage right to downstage left for twenty-three increasingly blissful minutes; in the third, solo section, Childs dances for seventeen minutes in phrases of different lengths, punctuated by turns, on the opposite diagonal … And moving to the diagonal often means an intensification, as in the finale of “Dance #1” of
Dance
, when suddenly four pairs of dancers dash again and again from upstage left to downstage right. Or in
Available Light
: Childs’s arrival upstage right and slow progress downstage left through a corridor formed by eight dancers, four on each side.
DOUBLING. A recurrent structure in Childs’s work: splitting the performer into two versions, the action into two levels, which proceed simultaneously. For example, in an early piece,
Street Dance
(1964), Childs’s voice, taped, was with the audience assembled in a sixth-floor loft, while she was down on the street, being seen performing the actions that she was heard describing. Doubling in the sense of several dancers performing the same movements on different paths became, starting with
Untitled Trio
(1968), the extended subject of the works she created for small ensembles in the 1970s.
Transverse Exchanges
and
Radial Courses
(both 1976) elaborate, delicately and strenuously, on the counterpoint of dancers who, using the same steps or families of movements, go in and out of sync with each other through changes of gait, direction, and relation to the floor. Having several people doing the same rhythmic thing—side by side, one in front of another, or one above the other—has always been part of choreographing ensembles, military, ceremonial, and balletic. Indeed, doubling is the most basic principle of artince—of form itself. Childs’s work concentrates on the implications of doubling as a formal principle and as the basis of choreographic syntax: the geometrical, or diagrammatic, idealization of movement. Her recent large works, created since 1979, allow for a
more complex orchestration of the theme of doubling. The adding of decor is never merely decorative but functions to create richer possibilities of doubling. Thus, the film that LeWitt made as the decor for
Dance
creates a perfectly synchronized double set of dancers. For example, the split screen allows the audience to see the dancers in the film, never less than life-size, on top; the live dancers (behind the scrim) on the bottom. What LeWitt supplied for
Dance
with a film, Frank Gehry supplies for
Available Light
with an architecture. In
Available Light
, the stage itself has become two-level, allowing other variations on the theme of doubling. Instead of traveling ghosts, there are live trackers: one to three dancers are upstairs echoing, playing off, providing counterpoint to what the dancers are unfolding below.
Street Dance
(1964), Childs’s voice, taped, was with the audience assembled in a sixth-floor loft, while she was down on the street, being seen performing the actions that she was heard describing. Doubling in the sense of several dancers performing the same movements on different paths became, starting with
Untitled Trio
(1968), the extended subject of the works she created for small ensembles in the 1970s.
Transverse Exchanges
and
Radial Courses
(both 1976) elaborate, delicately and strenuously, on the counterpoint of dancers who, using the same steps or families of movements, go in and out of sync with each other through changes of gait, direction, and relation to the floor. Having several people doing the same rhythmic thing—side by side, one in front of another, or one above the other—has always been part of choreographing ensembles, military, ceremonial, and balletic. Indeed, doubling is the most basic principle of artince—of form itself. Childs’s work concentrates on the implications of doubling as a formal principle and as the basis of choreographic syntax: the geometrical, or diagrammatic, idealization of movement. Her recent large works, created since 1979, allow for a
more complex orchestration of the theme of doubling. The adding of decor is never merely decorative but functions to create richer possibilities of doubling. Thus, the film that LeWitt made as the decor for
Dance
creates a perfectly synchronized double set of dancers. For example, the split screen allows the audience to see the dancers in the film, never less than life-size, on top; the live dancers (behind the scrim) on the bottom. What LeWitt supplied for
Dance
with a film, Frank Gehry supplies for
Available Light
with an architecture. In
Available Light
, the stage itself has become two-level, allowing other variations on the theme of doubling. Instead of traveling ghosts, there are live trackers: one to three dancers are upstairs echoing, playing off, providing counterpoint to what the dancers are unfolding below.
EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH.
1976. The “opera,” conceived and directed by Robert Wilson, with music by Philip Glass; Childs was a principal performer and collaborated on the text. The year she spent preparing and touring in
Einstein on the Beach
(Avignon, Venice, Belgrade, Brussels, Paris, Hamburg, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, New York) was a turning point. Her thirty-five-minute solo, constructed on three diagonals, that opens Act I, Scene I was a culmination of the second phase of her work and a bridge to the third. Her longest work so far (both as performer and as choreographer), it was the first time she choreographed to music—and the experience encouraged her to undertake the long work, for which Glass agreed to furnish the score, eventually called
Dance
.
1976. The “opera,” conceived and directed by Robert Wilson, with music by Philip Glass; Childs was a principal performer and collaborated on the text. The year she spent preparing and touring in
Einstein on the Beach
(Avignon, Venice, Belgrade, Brussels, Paris, Hamburg, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, New York) was a turning point. Her thirty-five-minute solo, constructed on three diagonals, that opens Act I, Scene I was a culmination of the second phase of her work and a bridge to the third. Her longest work so far (both as performer and as choreographer), it was the first time she choreographed to music—and the experience encouraged her to undertake the long work, for which Glass agreed to furnish the score, eventually called
Dance
.
EMOTION. The leading notion of the great modern dance pioneers, from Duncan to Graham and Horton, was to return dance to ritual. Though dance-as-ritual looked more abstract than ballet, actually such dances were heavy with descriptive intentions based, above all, on ideas about the primitive, the authentic, both in movement and in feeling. Thus, Mary Wigman created her “absolute” dances, performed in silence and with a minimum of theatrical support, the better to render extremely emotional “inner states.” Childs’s turn (in 1968) to dance without props or music or words was an absolute conception of dance,
for it did not claim to express anything interior. For Childs, as for Cunningham, all notions of dance as ritual are alien; she was drawn to using game-like forms of ensemble movement, in which the idea of inwardness is irrelevant. The view that dance should not express emotion does not, of course, mean to be against emotion. Valéry defined the poem as a machine made of words whose function is to create a distinctively poetic feeling: it does not “express” emotion, it is a method of creating it.
for it did not claim to express anything interior. For Childs, as for Cunningham, all notions of dance as ritual are alien; she was drawn to using game-like forms of ensemble movement, in which the idea of inwardness is irrelevant. The view that dance should not express emotion does not, of course, mean to be against emotion. Valéry defined the poem as a machine made of words whose function is to create a distinctively poetic feeling: it does not “express” emotion, it is a method of creating it.
FORMATIONS. Childs tends to organize choreographic patterns symmetrically, movement contrapuntally. The dancers move in formations—in twos, and their multiples, more than in trios and quintets. Though Childs most often deploys dancers in pairs, this is the smallest formation and has nothing to do with partnering in the traditional sense: neither dancer is the consort of the other, one does not assist or accompany or accommodate another. They are duplicates, and therefore equal. The two dancers are doing the same movements: the existence of a pair doubles the movement image. There are “delicate invasions” (Childs’s phrase) of one group by another, each keeping its group contour, as in the traveling diamond formations of the fourth section of
Relative Calm.
Men and women perform the same movements (thus shaving off the gender-specific extremes of movement vocabulary, such as very high jumps), wear the same or virtually identical costumes. All plugged into the same sound, the dancers move on paths, inexorably, to a steady underlying pulse. They rarely take up perilous off-balance positions, such as Cunningham favors. (He also favors asymmetrical formations.) The rule that each element in a Cunningham dance has its own autonomy and can be apprehended in isolation from the other elements of the spectacle also applies to the dancers. In Cunningham’s company every dancer is, can be, a star. In Childs’s work, as each element of the spectacle is strictly coordinated with every other, so is each dancer: she choreographs for the glorified
corps de ballet
—
they
become the star. Childs’s dances are not exercises in polyattentiveness; more generally, they are not examples of art conceived as a tool for perception. Her choreography demands a concentrated
all-over attention; it is cumulative; it aims at transporting, not educating the audience.
Relative Calm.
Men and women perform the same movements (thus shaving off the gender-specific extremes of movement vocabulary, such as very high jumps), wear the same or virtually identical costumes. All plugged into the same sound, the dancers move on paths, inexorably, to a steady underlying pulse. They rarely take up perilous off-balance positions, such as Cunningham favors. (He also favors asymmetrical formations.) The rule that each element in a Cunningham dance has its own autonomy and can be apprehended in isolation from the other elements of the spectacle also applies to the dancers. In Cunningham’s company every dancer is, can be, a star. In Childs’s work, as each element of the spectacle is strictly coordinated with every other, so is each dancer: she choreographs for the glorified
corps de ballet
—
they
become the star. Childs’s dances are not exercises in polyattentiveness; more generally, they are not examples of art conceived as a tool for perception. Her choreography demands a concentrated
all-over attention; it is cumulative; it aims at transporting, not educating the audience.
GEOMETRICAL.
Available Light
is the second act of
Giselle
as revised and corrected by Mondrian.
Available Light
is the second act of
Giselle
as revised and corrected by Mondrian.
HEAD. The positioning of the dancer’s head in ballet always implies a look—to a partner, or a central (noble) figure, or to the audience. In Childs’s choreography, the head is not posed in this sense; there is no such looking elsewhere. One of the basic conventions of Cunningham’s technique is a simple, unmannered use of the head and detached, cool expression. Even while taking part in cooperative tasks—a lift, a pull, a support—his dancers usually seem unaware of each other. (Much humor is milked from this incongruity.) In Childs’s choreography dancers never engage in cooperative tasks, indeed never touch each other. Hence, their intensely blank performance masks signify another, non-atomized detachment. The effect is never incongruous, or comic; rather, it underscores the feeling of purity, the striving for an elevated state of things that is the register of her work.
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