Books

Geography: Art, Race, Exile. By Ralph Lemon. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2000; 200 pp.; illustrations. $29.95 cloth.

My Body, the Buddhist. By Deborah Hay. Afterward by Ann Daly. Introduc- tion by Susan Foster. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2000; 150 pp.; illustrations; $45.00 cloth, $17.95 paper.

We are dying. We think we are not. —Deborah Hay

Daily are the doors of fear. —Ralph Lemon

In physics, certain thresholds mark the point of transformation, or transition, of a substance from one physical state to another. These thresholds are known as a substance’s critical point. At these points, a substance does not endure any essential transmutation, but it gains a totally different physical form. Within the spectacularly long tradition of choreographers writing on their work, on in general, and on the many intersections of art with life, one can identify a similar condition. The pendular oscillation between writing and dancing that choreographers have been performing since the very foundations of Western theatrical dance, their consistent exchanges between the realm of the word and that of gesture as means of expression, mark so many of these critical points in the —those moments in which dance moves, while keeping its substance, from one state to another. In these critical thresholds of material trans- formation one can distill the fundamental stances of a period’s choreographic imagination. Western theatrical dance has been as intrinsically linked to writing as it has been to movement. Books written by choreographers abound. But how is it that one approaches these books on their own, in their expressive autonomy? The thematic specificities of this genre (if one may call it that), its ubiquitous presence throughout different historical periods and dance movements, and its nature and stylistic force are yet to be fully explored. What can provisionally be argued is that writings by choreographers provide us with a different form of choreogra- phy’s substance: that of always reflecting and refracting forces that shape behav- ioral and ideological structures of subjectivation and subjection. More radically, one could propose that Western theatrical dance only discovers its conditions of possibility once it claims writing as privileged partner, once it pairs writing with Western dance’s other two foundational “substances”: the body (as estranged matter of continuous re-articulation and refinement), and movement (as auton- omous aesthetic category and ontological imperative).

The Drama Review 46, 3 (T175), Fall 2002. Copyright ᭧ 2002 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402320351530 by guest on 28 September 2021 166 Books Thus, the role of the letter in the formation of Western theatrical dance is inextricably bound to dance’s ontology. I am not referring here to the various forms of “” techniques (techniques that, since Raoul-Auger Feuil- let’s seminal treaty Chore´graphie ou l’art de de´crire la danse, par caracte`res, figures et signes de´monstratifs [, or the art of describing dance with demonstra- tive characters, figures, and signs, 1699], have found in the graphed page a trusted memory-extension). I am referring specifically to a choreographic impulse to- ward writing, even a compulsion to write. From Thoinot Arbeau’s musings in the 16th century, through Pierre Rameau’s pedagogism; from Jean-Georges No- verre’s famous letters, to Isadora Duncan’s inflamed proclamations; from Vaslav Nijinsky’s still misread diaries, to Martha Graham’s Jungian visions; from Mary Wigman’s intriguing books so filled with the shadow of death, to the prolific Rudolph von Laban, a whole drive toward the word can be traced. Significantly, these choreographers’ writings (and the list can be expanded ad nauseam to include also Doris Humphrey, Ted Shawn, Merce Cunningham, Simone Forti, Bill T. Jones’s devastating Night on Earth...), have always been deeply concerned with narrating uncharted thresholds, those critical points of formless exchange between life and art that choreography, as persistent exploration of the body in time, brings so well to the fore. In that sense, every dance book maps a geography of forces under which dance explores and becomes its many potential states. An uncanny exploration of bodily thresholds and of physical and cultural trans- formations is certainly present in the two books under review. Both volumes can be read as narratives of quest: as explorations of the sifting boundaries and un- suspected porosities of skins, bodies, nations, identities, steps, languages, tongues, diseases, gestures, and deaths. In a way, both books perform narratives of vertig- inous descents, of a falling away from the familiar body, if only in order to find it and found it anew. Deborah Hay’s My Body, the Buddhist articulates in 18 short chapters the un- folding of decades-long quest for those unsuspected dimensions and critical con- nections of body and spirit that dance may reveal. For Hay, dance must always be an exploration “with unparalleled perspicacity” of “the imaginative body” (61). In this imaginative exploration, writing has been one of Hay’s most inspiring dance partners (she has written two other books, Lamb at the Altar [1994] and Moving through the Universe in Bare Feet [1975]). Ralph Lemon’s Geography narrates—through diary notes, poems, paintings, photography, some letters—the long creation process of a 1997 piece with the same title (now a trilogy-in-process). Lemon’s book emphasizes how choreo- graphing is always a process laced with a certain nomadic despair, and filled with the threat of an absolute dissolution of the body. For Lemon, the ultimate traveling is that of the choreographer exploring and exploding the boundaries of what he once thought was his body, and the body of his work: “What I have constructed here definitely wants to fall apart” (137), writes Lemon halfway through his book—not necessarily as a negative statement. Hay’s and Lemon’s books offer their readers excruciating portraits of the cho- reographer as alchemist, or to use Lemon’s term, as “catalyst” (92), operating endless metamorphoses within the labyrinthine paths of body and language. As such, both books can be read as travelogues—sparsely informed by always pro- visional points of arrival, and abundantly filled with an array of departure points and drifting images. The choreographer is always the one who will forever have left home behind, whether that home is his nation, language, or simply the au- thorial body. It should not be surprising then to read that both Hay’s and Lemon’s texts find their point of departure in that most radical critical point of being: the descent of matter from living to dead. It is the glistering opaqueness of death that

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402320351530 by guest on 28 September 2021 Books 167 literally binds the substance of these two (very different) collections of texts and some of the explored in them. The blunt invocation of death right on the very first pages of these two volumes forces the reader to face that otherwise unspoken secret at the core of choreographic imagination. What each author/ choreographer does within this critical point marks formal divergence in their artistic projects—but not necessarily in their existential premises. Since Doris Humphrey’s The Art of Making Dances (1959) and Mary Wigman’s The Language of Dance (1963), we are familiar with the invocation of death at the core of the dance. What happens in Lemon’s and Hay’s books is something altogether different: For Hay and Lemon, death functions as a symbolic and meta- bolic force, a force always dancing toward radical realignment of perception, lan- guage, and subjectivity. And, it is at this point that the specificity of each writing takes over our attention and begs for a careful scrutiny of its own unique way of descent. In following and falling with Hay’s and Lemon’s texts, we glimpse into a hazy and hazardous critical threshold in the current predicament of the subjected body. As mentioned earlier, Geography is the title of a 90-minute piece Lemon pre- miered in 1997 with a cast of nine men “of African descent” from Coˆte d’Ivoire, Ghana, and the U.S. The book is a collage of texts, paintings, drawings, photo- graphs, scribbles, nightmares, hallucinations, and rehearsal notes mostly gener- ated and/or collected by Lemon during the project’s rehearsal process—a process that, at a certain point in the text, Lemon describes as being “not art but ethno- anthropology. But not really” (92). It is in this foundational undecidability of Geography (not art but not really not art) that the book finds its way into motion. Geography becomes a poignant document on the excesses and promises of a cho- reographic imagination not bound to the tyranny of form but open to the chal- lenge of becoming what choreography may not always, or not yet, imagine it can be. It is a book in process—just like the work, it narrates failure more than success. Geography opens itself up to the reader hesitantly: a series of microprefaces, drawings, and short unannounced introductions occupy the first few pages, ap- parently doing little but postponing the lifting of the curtain. But once the curtain is up, it is hard to stop peering inside the choreo-textual void. It is a busy void, full of voices and expectations. One of these introductory short texts, forever deferring the book “proper,” is titled: “A True Story about Coming to America As Told by Stephen Senatus.” It is worth quoting the fragment in its entirety:

1. I wanted to travel. I saw everybody leaving. I got up and left. 2. The boat was too full. Some were thrown over, and some jumped themselves. 3. I don’t know when I disembarked. I don’t know what happened, because they killed me and threw me overboard. 4. I fell asleep. I don’t know what happened. I didn’t know if they had come or not. When I regained consciousness I found myself naked like my mother made me. All my body was burned and bruised. 5. And then a single hand, like this, my hand, that was what it was like. It picked me up like a little pile of garbage. It walked with me through the grove and dropped me against a wall. I stood on my two legs. I walked and walked. I found a house and found all the people I saw on the boat, and they said, “There is Stephen that died.” (13)

Why should Ralph Lemon choose this testimony, taken before the production had been fully articulated, to stand by the opening of the book, as if fulfilling the function of a cryptic preface or prophecy? It seems to me that the text touches

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402320351530 by guest on 28 September 2021 168 Books the dramaturgical core of the project on which Lemon was about to embark— that for people of color, the coming to America will forever be a complicated act, one always informed by the promise and potential of a violent second birth as a “little pile of garbage” (13), and the seduction of a new identity as one who has already died. What this story of Stephen Senatus does also, is to propel Lemon into his own abyss of uncertainties, which have plenty to do with the nature of privilege and neocolonialist dangers in every project that may desire a return to Africa as a return to self. Lemon’s principal hope in the collaborative, choreographic project he is embarking on is that of looking for intercultural contact, historical heritage, and racial exploration—the choreographer as catalyst hopes, optimistically, for a way to engage in a not-quite ethno-anthropology (92). Later in the text, he writes: “In some respects, this work is an evening-length solo” (126). The solitary figure of the choreographer as author returns, to haunt the fluidity of the dream. In a six-page letter to poet Tracie Morris (who collaborated with Lemon from the beginning of the project) Lemon offers a most candid, open, and poignant “partial autobiography about race and art” (32). It is a letter on the contradic- tions and shortcomings of racial and identity politics in contemporary America, on America’s bichromatic blindness and its implications for artmaking—includ- ing accusations heard by Lemon of him not being “considered a ‘black dance artist’” (35). So, when Lemon departs (literally) from the New York downtown scene to look for more possibilities, it was in Port-au-Prince that he found them. In a complicated move, it was in Port-au-Prince that Lemon ended up “finding [him]self inventing Africa” (7). That this invention of Africa passed through the revelation of seeing “real black people” for the “second time” (9) (the first time had been in Australia, which complicates what Lemon means by “black people”) and through the encounter with a narrative of death and resurrection, only tells us of the difficulties of Lemon’s project. The author’s urge to travel, an urge almost too close to a cosmopolitan flaneˆrie, crash lands violently against “Stephen- that-died’s” own narrative of traveling as survival imperative. Here, the drive to move (away) from one’s home is of another urgency. And so are its many dangers. Lemon knows of these dangers and one could say that the first few pages of Geography are nothing more than a careful staging of the choreographer’s aware- ness that his geography is one of bodily (im)possibilities, predicated upon his relative social and economic privilege. And, against and before Lemon’s desire as author and choreographer, there emerges a group of geographical, political, lin- guistic, bodily, and sexual agents (described, throughout the book as “the Afri- cans”) that will propose to Lemon a totally different body, whose temporality, laughter, and critical stance sometimes overwhelmed him to the point of paralysis. Indeed, Geography is filled with entries on uncertainty, despair, and doubt re- garding the nature and success of the choreographic project. Lemon’s is a geography of drifting rather than of navigation. It does not map as much as it despairs with the impossibility of mapping, of charting out, of identifying fixed routes toward composition, identity, (multi)cultural exchange, biography, historical pathways, narratives of self. Ultimately, the careful, generous articulation of despair is the most precious gift Lemon’s book has for his readers. Which means Geography is not only a unique document on the problematics of intercultural collaboration, but perhaps one of the best guiding manuals for a process-oriented choreographic dramaturgy. Echoing dialogically on page one of chapter one of Deborah Hay’s My Body, the Buddhist, are the words of Ralph Lemon. Hay had asked 18 artists, choreog- raphers, composers, directors, and poets each to offer a brief epigraph to one of her book’s chapters (mostly short texts or sentences, sometimes a drawing). Under the chapter “My body benefits in solitude” this is the text Lemon gave Hay:

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402320351530 by guest on 28 September 2021 Books 169 I went to sit in a cabin on an ocean. There was a small boy there who was without a father. And we became friends. My desire to be without caved into his cunning child earth. My isolation forfeited, I meditated on his knowledge of knots and tides. (1)

These same words appear also on page 102 of Lemon’s Geography at the end of a fragment that opens the section titled “Repose.” At this point of the narrative, Lemon is exhausted of the creative process, filled with doubts, body aching, mind restless. It is no wonder that Lemon is attracted to the child’s knowledge of knots and tides. So much of what goes on in his narrative of creating a choreography with African dancers refers to these impasses, to unexpected undercurrents of energy leading to breakthroughs, hope, and more knotting. These dynamics of energy, of the body’s ongoing call and response with its own tidal currents, its impasses, its points of loss and recovery, are exactly the dynamics that Hay explores with patient dedication in her short book. Again, the distillation of decades of studio and stage work through the written word proposes that dance is constant transubstantiation—that its imaginative force- field resides also in its affective power and textual transpositions. Which means that when Hay writes, “I have come to understand that the body’s form and content are not what they appear to be; likewise my dances do not coalesce around specific subject matter” (xxiii), she is positing both body and dance as always provisional, as hypothesis, which does not at all mean they are abstractions. Rather, both dance and body are generative mysteries, constantly reconfiguring themselves in their presentation to consciousness, perception, and creativity. Hay calls this type of dancing body an “imagined condition” (xxiv), but because this “condition” is also a concreteness that is always our “master,” our primordial teacher, its effects are never solely imaginary but brutally physical. Essential to Hay’s vision is the molecular threshold: “My Body, dancing, is formed and sustained imaginatively. I reconfigure the three dimensional body into an immeasurable 53 trillion cells perceived perceiving, all of them, at once” (xxiv). There is something of the formlessness of the cloud in her vision of the body as a cellular mass. This body has potential for endless transmutations and forms, it contains incalculable different states and dimensions and it is the task of the choreographer to listen to this body (always depicted by Hay as a “master,” “a generous pedagogue”) in order to learn its uncharted, vaporous geographies. It is also at this level that her invocation of death is clarified: “Dying has become a vital component in my performance practice. Attracted to the ephemeral, I have explored dying for years” (54). In this space of ephemerality and dying, in this absolute embrace of those critical points of the living substance as choreographic potential (which is a potential that also escapes the boundaries of choreography proper, that challenges choreography’s own critical points, its own boundaries with life), Hay finds a body that is always already traveling, always leaving and returning to itself as it dances on its way to both presence and death. What is remarkable in her book is how Hay shows that this path toward death and pres- ence is not at all contradictory. It is the path of a choreographic imagination as open potentiality: in movement, body, and writing.

—Andre´ Lepecki

Andre Lepecki is Assistant Professor at the Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts/NYU. His writing on dance has appeared in International, TDR, Contact Quarterly, Art Forum, Nouvelles de Danse, Dance Theater Jour- nal, and Performance Research, among other publications. He is currently editing The Presence of the Body: Dance as Critical Theory, for Wesleyan University Press, and coediting The Senses in Performance with Sally Banes for Routledge. In 2000, he

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402320351530 by guest on 28 September 2021 170 Books codirected the installation STRESS with Bruce Mau for the MAK/Museum of Contem- porary Arts of Vienna, a commission of the Wiener Festwochen.

Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World. By Jane C. Desmond. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999; xxv .pp.; illustrations. $30.00 cloth 336 ם

The thing about birds is that they can fly. (202)

The thing about performance studies is that it gives us license and language for looking at what’s obvious in ways that are both provocative and meaningful. Tourism is a growth industry, increasingly pervasive within the and internationally, constructing and marketing local identities in the face of and hand in hand with globalization. The tourist industry seeps into communities where the original sites of work, commerce, religion, and play—the way people live— have decayed and receded, re-creating and commodifying places, practices, and peoples as objects to be looked at. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, in Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage writes: “Dying economies stage their own rebirth as displays of what they once were, sometimes before the body is cold” (1998:151). In Staging Tourism, which was nearing completion when Destination Culture appeared, Jane Desmond looks through the metaphor of the social body to its actualization in human and animal performances for tourists. Much of her work looks directly at what’s obvious. Most birds (not all) fly, and: “Many, many people are willing to pay a lot of money to see bodies which are different from their own, to purchase the right to look, and to believe that through that visual consumption they have come to know something they didn’t before” (xiii). This is true, of course, not only of people and animal tourism, but also of the theatre and film, the peepshow and pornography—that is, of most performance practices. By juxtaposing her close reading of Hawaiian tourism and performance in the first part of Staging Tourism with a series of snapshots taken from visits to aquariums, animal theme parks, zoos, and ecotourist sites in the second, Desmond dislocates the practice of tourism and provokes more questions than she resolves about the poetics and politics of representing cultural and natural behaviors for the education and entertainment of others. In the first, most substantial part of Staging Tourism, Desmond delves deeply into the history and practice of hula performances, particularly through the con- text of the tourist lu’au in Hawai’i. She begins by describing her childhood love of hula dancing as understood in suburban U.S.A., acknowledges her hula teach- ers, and discusses her own experiences as a tourist in Hawai’i. Her research en- compasses both field and archival work, and she exploits a wide range of popular and commercial images, postcards, and photographs to draw a complex portrait of the construction of the “native” for tourist consumption. For the most part, Desmond is deeply concerned with the creation of the “hula girl”—the alluring, slender, and seductive brown (not black, not white) woman whose image acts as a synecdoche for Hawai’i itself—as an essential element of the discourse that represents the Hawaiian native as a gentle, playful, sensual antithesis to the afflic- tions of Western civilization and the affectations of modernity. That is, she doesn’t closely look at the hula dance in and of itself, but rather at the image of the dance and the dancer as developed over the past century. The level of detail assembled in this part is exceptional, although at least one error crops up early on: the Maori name for New Zealand is Aotearoa not Au Tearoa (23). And while Desmond’s

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