Authors: Susan Sontag

Where the Stress Falls (21 page)

BOOK: Where the Stress Falls

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REPETITION. Childs’s early notion of repetition, in the sprightly “silent” dances of the 1970s: dancers using the same steps or families
of movements, going in and out of sync with each other. The notion becomes more complex in Childs’s solo in
Einstein on the Beach
: repetition as an accumulation of effects, as layering. (Versus the repetition-as-reinterpretation of
Patio.)
Strictly speaking, there is of course no repetition in Childs’s work, but rather a certain strict use of thematic materials, which are first stated and then gradually modified at a different rate of change (more evenly, not expressionistically) than audiences are accustomed to. In contrast to Wilson’s Judson-derived dynamics of slow movement, thin difference, low-contrast change, Childs’s work since the late 1970s has a greater density of movement, fast rhythms and few tableaux. (Whereas Wilson’s work tends naturally to take long forms, Childs’s work is only gradually assuming them.) Though usually presented as cool choice, repetition always suggests perfectionist zeal. Rainer in 1966 defended repetition because it makes movement appear “more objectlike”—more matter-of-fact, neutral, unemphatic. But repetition is also a method for inducing bliss. Repetition is a technique that seems to suggest simplicity, that in principle enhances legibility or intelligibility. (Rainer: “literally making the material easier to see.”) A way of ordering material associated with the idea of the minimal, it could more accurately be called the modern maximalism: repetition as exhaustive patterning; the exhausting of possibilities. Far from making material neutral, repetition has a vertiginous effect, as in much of Childs’s recent work—duplications, mirrorings, that are the kinetic equivalent of the static
mise-en-abîme.
See DOUBLING.

ROMANTIC. The “classical” tradition in dance is Romantic, so a neo-classical idiom in dance will inevitably be, in a restrained key, neo-Romantic. (But even this restraint is appropriate. Romantic art is, above all, self-conscious and critical.) The play of ghost, shadow,
doppelgänger
in
Dance
. The Pythagorean beauty of
Relative Calm
, with its allegorical underpinning: the Times of Day. (The contact with Wilson’s allegorizing sensibility and its innate affinities with a certain German Romanticism helped Childs move away from a dead-end puritanism in her own sensibility.) There are Romantic echoes in all the
work since 1979. In
Dance
, having two solo sections, one in black (“Dance #2”) and one in white (“Dance #4”), like
Swan Lake
’s Odile/Odette. In
Available Light,
the arrival of Childs in the corridor, like the Queen of the Wilis in
Giselle.
When
Available Light
was first presented—in July 1983, at the Châteauvallon Dance Festival in an open-air version, with no set and with the dancers in the company’s allpurpose touring costumes, the white jumpsuits of the first section of
Relative Calm—
one saw the choreography in its naked state: without white tutus but very much a
ballet blanc.

SOLOS. Childs choreographs for herself differently than she does for the rest of the company. As a soloist she gives herself a wider range of dynamic changes, more evolution in the material (rather than in space). There are two lengthy solos in
Dance
, one in
Relative Calm
. In
Available Light,
which is not divided into separate sections, Childs functions more as a member of the ensemble, less as a soloist. Still, she is separate—in white, when most of the dancers are in red or black. Although she has no solo section as such where she appears alone onstage, she is the only dancer who comes and goes. The rest of the company remains onstage for the entire fifty-five minutes (except for one brief pause when the music downshifts and all ten go off, then return). From her early solos, with their theme of the absent or disappearing performer, to her privileged comings and goings in
Available Light,
Childs’s solo presence—grave, hieratic, not wholly expressive—invokes both presence and absence.

SPACE. Dancers are travelers, “space eaters” (Childs’s words), using up a given space in a patterned, comprehensive way. (An early didactic solo,
Particular Reel
, 1973, in which Childs covers the stage in ten rows from right to left and then in ten rows from left to right, ending at the point where she started, is a model demonstration of the project of using up space.) The more space the better. Dancers are pulled along a line; and their relations are conceived as parallel or perpendicular. Dancers are always, indefatigably, going somewhere. In a state of non-imploring urgency, they never stop; though they may go into
movement-absence, they do so in order to repopulate the space. When dancers “drop out,” others come in.

TITLES. After the capers of the mid-1960s, titles have been sober: usually two words, adjective and noun; often a structure or pattern word with a movement word, as in
Checkered Drift, Calico Mingling,
Reclining Rondo, Transverse Exchanges, Radial Courses
. A favorite title form is a contradiction, an oxymoron—one that, in recent works, suggests the paradoxes of self-control:
Relative Calm, Formal Abandon.
Or a stylish appreciation of the possible:
Available Light.

UNAVAILABLE. Dance is about the absent or unavailable object of desire.

VOLITION. The more formal dance is shown to be, the weaker the possible attributions of volition. Dancers in formations—all this mirroring, duplicating, and inverting of movement removes the impression of subjectivity. So does the neutral performance mask—the fact that the dancers don’t look at each other, or at the audience. (The effect is comparable to the anti-acting style favored by Bresson.) Dancers stop because they are being rearranged or repatterned, not because of any emotion or volition. To substitute rules or patterns—Kleist imagined them as mechanisms—for subjectivity in demeanor and movement is the prerequisite of grace. But the dancers are anything but automata.

WORLD. Dance, since the Romantics, has been about a phantom world. Childs’s counts, like the tiny dots of color in the paintings of Seurat, are the building blocks of an art of phantom presences. Things which both are and are not: the moment of plenitude is an evocation of absence; pleasure—as in
La Grande Jatte
—is shown as rigidity, restraint.

YEARNING. The body in diagonal is a pose of outreach, hailing; of longing—for space itself. However large, the stage is never large enough. Childs’s choreography projects onto the finite stage an infinitely large space or territory. Her love of space produces movements
and structures—among them, the modalities of repetition—that seem choreographic equivalents of Zeno’s arguments (called paradoxes) on the subject of motion, according to which, since any line is infinitely divisible, and will be made up of an infinite number of units, each of which has some magnitude, every finite line or space is in fact infinitely great; and, despite appearances, no moving object ever traverses any distance at all.

ZENO’S TERRITORY. Childs’s early, provisional title for the work now known as
Available Light.

[1983]

In Memory of Their Feelings

1. DANCERS ON A PLANE

I don’t see them.

There. The dancers are there, invisible—an analogue to racing thoughts.

Framed by the utensils of eating.

A meal to be eaten?

An invisible meal.

Two meals: one light, one dark. One sprightly, one stained with sexual dread.

Dancers on a plate?

No. They need more space than that.

2. EATING AND DANCING

Recombinant arts.

A domain of pleasure. A domain of courtesy.

Rule-bound. Who sets the rules? Behavior with standards.

“In Memory of Their Feelings” was written for the exhibition catalogue of
Dancers on a
Plane:
Cage, Cunningham, Johns
at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London, 1989. The exhibition centered on Jasper Johns’s
Dancers on a Plane
series. Framing the sides of the paintings is a sequence of applied knives, forks, and spoons.

An idea of order. First one thing, then another. Then one is full. Then it is finished—the belly sated, the limbs heavy. After a decent interval: then again. All over again. All over, again.

They remind us we live in the body-house.

Living “in” the body. But where else could we live?

Dancing as the realm of freedom, that’s less than half the story.

Eating as the realm of necessity. Not necessarily. What about eating idyllically (as in Paris)?

Everyone eats, everyone can dance. Not everyone dances (alas).

I watch dance, with pleasure. I don’t watch eating. If I watch someone eating when hungry, I wish it were I eating. A meal watched by a hungry person is always savory. If I watch someone eating when I’m full, I may turn away.

You can dance for me. (You do the dancing in my place, I’ll just watch.) You can’t eat for me. Not much pleasure there.

You can dance to please: Salome. You can eat to please too: as a child might eat to please its mother or a nurse. (As Suzanne Farrell is said to have said that she danced for God and for Mr. Balanchine.) But except to doting parents eating is a poor spectator sport. Mildly disgusting unless you’re doing it as well.

To eat is to put metal in one’s mouth. Delicately. It’s not supposed to hurt.

The eater fills the hole.

A dancer eats space.

Space eats time.

Sounds eat silence.

3. THE KNIFE

It cuts. Don’t be afraid. This is not a weapon. It’s just a tool to help you eat. See. Passing it to you—you asked for it—I proffer it by the handle, keeping the blade pointed at myself. The blade is pointing at me.

One should not move the point of the knife toward someone as in an attack.

You can lay it down two ways. Blade in, blade out.

Don’t be timorous. It isn’t sharp. It’s just a plain, ordinary … knife. Straight. Two-sided.

In the fairy tale, a mermaid who has fallen in love with a prince begs to be allowed to assume human form so she can leave the water and make her way to the court. Yes. She will have legs, she will walk. But with each step she takes it will feel as if she were walking on knives.

You can dance with a knife. (Between the teeth? Between the shoulder blades?) Hard to imagine dancing with a fork. Or with a spoon.

The knife seems like the master utensil, the one from which all others depend. (Swiss Army Knife.) You could spear food with your knife, eliminating the fork. (As everyone knows, you can eat the peas with your knife. You’re just not supposed to.) As for the spoon—well, we could do without that, too. Just lift up the bowl dish cup, and drink it.

Only the knife is really necessary. And it is the knife, more than any other eating utensil, whose use is most circumscribed. The evolution of table manners is mainly about what to do with knives. Use the knife more and more unobtrusively, elegantly. With your finger ends. Don’t grasp it against your palm like a stick.

“There is a tendency that slowly permeates civilized society, from the top to the bottom, to restrict the use of the knife (within the framework of existing eating techniques) and wherever possible not to use the instrument at all” (Norbert Elias). For instance, to eliminate or at least limit the contact of the knife with round or egg-shaped objects. Not all restrictions are successful. The prohibition on eating fish with a knife was circumvented by the introduction of a special fish knife.

That oxymoron: the butter knife.

To eat is to put metal in one’s mouth. But not knives. The mere sight of someone putting her knife in her mouth produces an uneasy feeling.

4. THE SPOON

The spoon seems to belong in the mouth.

The spoon is not quite grownup in the way the knife and fork are. It doesn’t menace. It isn’t a tamed weapon.

The spoon is the utensil of childhood, the friendliest utensil. The spoon is childlike. Yum-yum. Scoop me up, pour me in. Like a cradle, a shovel, a hand cupped. Doesn’t cut or pierce or impale. It accepts. Round, curved. Can’t stick you. Don’t trust your child with a knife or a fork, but how can a spoon harm? The spoon is itself a child.

The world is full of pleasures. One has only to be where one is. Here. Now.

Give me my spoon, my big spoon, and I’ll eat the world. A metal spoon is an afterthought. While a wooden knife is less of a knife, a wooden spoon isn’t less of a spoon. It’s just fine.

“Spooning”: embracing, kissing, petting. Lovers in bed fit together in sleep like spoons.

To bring about a music “that will be part of the noises of the environment, will take them into consideration. I think of it as melodious, softening the noises of the knives and forks, not dominating them, not imposing itself,” wrote John Cage, quoting Erik Satie.

What happened to the spoons? Don’t spoons make noises, too?

Softer noises.

And music. Music is made with two spoons (not with two forks, two knives).

Spoon music.

5.
THE FORK

There’s a hesitation about the fork. You hold down the food with the fork in your left hand while you cut it with the knife held in your right. Then—if you’re not only right-handed but also American—you put down the knife, then transfer the fork to your right hand and send the speared morsel up to your mouth.

Grownups throw knives. Children throw spoons. Nobody (I think) would throw a fork. It may be four-thirds of a toy trident, but it can’t be thrown as one. It wouldn’t arrive, spear-like, tines first.

The weight is in the handle.

The fork as emblem—emblem of the real. Jasper Johns, explaining something about “my general development so far,” said: “That is to say,
I find it more interesting to use a real fork as a painting than it is to use a painting as a real fork.”

What would a fork that isn’t real look like?

The fork is the youngest of the three great eating utensils. The Last Supper was set with knives and spoons only. No forks either at the wedding feast in Cana.

It made its appearance when the knife and spoon were well established. Invented in Italy, thought a foppish pretension when it arrived in England in the early seventeenth century: a set of gold “Italian forkes” presented to Elizabeth I by the Venetian ambassador were put on display at Westminster; she never used them.

The introduction of that vital implement, for a long time despised as effete, enabled people to distance themselves from the eating process by avoiding manual contact with the food.

The principle of fastidiousness. New forms of distance, new forms of delicacy.

New rules of finicky behavior at table proliferated. People were expected to manipulate an increasingly complicated battery of utensils.

It seemed hard, setting up and keeping this distance.

Now we take forks for granted.

6.
KNIFE, SPOON, FORK

A secular trinity—knife, spoon, fork.

No hierarchy. The list can only be varied, systematically. As in knife, fork, spoon. As in knife, spoon, fork. As in fork, knife, spoon. As in fork, spoon, knife. As in spoon, fork, knife. As in spoon, knife, fork.

Seemingly immutable (after all that history).

They lie there, flat. On a plain (plane) surface. Perpendicular to the edge of the table.

A trialogue.

A stately relationship. Not all on the same side of the plate. Three divides into two and one. Fork on the left side. Knife and spoon on the right.

The knife is scary by itself. But as part of a setting, something else.
Lying beside the spoon, the knife becomes quite domestic. Knife and spoon: the odd couple. They don’t go together, you don’t use them together. But they
are
together.

The fork is solitary. Always is. Even in an ampler setting, all you could have next to it is another (smaller, larger) fork.

That’s how they’re arranged at the start of the meal, one step down from the plate. Escorting the plate on either side.

No excuse now to eat with your hands. Civil eating (versus gluttony).

After finishing eating you arrange them neatly on the plate.

Not alphabetically. Not in order of importance, if there were one.

A trinity but quite contingent.

They seem to complement each other.

We have learned to use all three. But they can be used separately, of course.

7. DANCERS
ON
A PLAIN

On a plane? An airplane?

On a plain. As open (borderless) as feasible.

Low, level. Don’t try for any of those old heights. Depths.

What is essential about a surface that makes it different from another surface? How do we register smoothness in a surface, a movement, a sound, an experience?

Smoothness?

Yes. Something continues, plausibly.

Pleasurably. With parts.

What does it mean to be one part of something (a surface, a movement, a sound, an experience)?

The old heights. Mirroring. Look down. These are my genitals.

Be more modest; elegant.

Sometimes light, sometimes heavy—it’s all right to be heavy sometimes.

Makes it new. Yes. And make it plain.

8.
SYMMETRIES

Dancers on a plane. No center. Always off-side. Any place is the center.

We seem symmetrical. Two eyes, two ears, two arms, two legs; two ovaries—or two hairy testicles. But we’re not. Something is always dominating.

A mirror image: a fantasy of symmetry. The right the reverse of the left, or vice versa.

We
seem
symmetrical. But we are not.

They cross-refer (knife, spoon, fork). As in the brain. Right-handedness means the left side of the brain is dominant. Left-handedness means the brain’s right side dominates.

How to find out which side of your brain is dominant. Close your eyes, think of a question, then slowly think of an answer to the question. If while you’re doing this you turn your head slightly to the right, that means the left side dominates.

And vice versa.

The question-master.

An art that asks questions.

How do we understand how one part of a surface, a movement, a sound, an experience relates to another? Note: you have a choice of questions. But if that’s the question you choose to ask, you can be sure the answer will include a bias toward asymmetry.

“The non-relationship of the movement,” Cunningham has declared, “is extended into a relationship with music. It is essentially a non-relationship.”

The dancer must be light. Food makes you heavy.

You eat with your hands, dance on your legs. Eating can be right-handed or left-handed. Is dancing left-legged or right-legged?

Any place is the center.

A real symmetry: chopsticks.

9. SILENCES

Lots of prattle. That, too, is a kind of silence. (Since there is no silence.) The deaf hear their deafness. The blind see their blindness.

Controlling through silence. Whoever speaks less is the stronger.

Is there a warm silence?

The noise of ideas.

Take it to language.

No, take it to babble. Cut up the words in strips, like raw vegetables. Make meals out of words. A culinary relation to words …

Suppose Knife, Spoon, and Fork are three people. And they get together on a plane (plain). What would they have to say to each other?

I know. “Who brought the marshmallows?”

Mushrooms, surely you mean mushrooms.

As I said, marshmallows.

That’s not what I had in mind. Then what?

Then they get very particular about how the marshmallows are to be cooked.

All three of them know a lot about food. (About eating. Preceded by gathering, preparing, cooking …)

But these are just marshmallows. American junk.

You can be fastidious about anything. And marshmallows can be botched, too; can disappoint. It’s a question of (yes, once again) the relation of inside to outside. The inside has to be cooked very well, while not letting the outside catch fire. Ideally the outside will get crusty but not burnt, while the inside melts. Then, right before it falls off the stick, you pluck it off with your fingers and pop it whole into your mouth.

Stick? What happened to the fork? Don’t you toast marshmallows with a fork?

All right, the fork. But this is better as a gooey experience than as a refined one.

“Everywhere and at all times,” Lévi-Strauss has observed, “the European code of politeness rules out the possibility of eating noisily.”

And you don’t always have to be polite.

BOOK: Where the Stress Falls

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