ART & PERFORMANCE NOTES Ann Bogart’s production of Charles Mee’s bobrauschenbergamerica at BAM. Photo: Courtesy Richard Termine. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/152028104323048287 by guest on 29 September 2021 LESLIE SATIN AND THE DANCE OF MEMORY Nicole Plett Leslie Satin and Dancers, The Construction Company, New York, New York, April 26–27, 2003. ne of the first dances I saw by nal dances Satin made in the early Leslie Satin, Walking the Plank- 1980s during a three-year stretch in the Oton in Santa Fe, in 1980, up- Southwest, following six years of zigzag- ended much of what I thought I knew ging between New York and New about dance. It also brought me into Mexico, showing dances in both places. dance criticism. She and I were both Then, as now, her persistent wordplay much younger then, both products of and ambiguous, sometimes inscrutable American university arts education (in movement and gesture choices reso- my case art history in California in the nated with sentient and sensuous hu- late 1960s; in her case dance in New man impulses. As an undergraduate at York in the early 1970s). What contin- SUNY Buffalo in the early 1970s, Satin ues to astonish me is that I can still studied ballet and composition with recapture the tone of that “Plankton” James Waring; this was a formative dance—its playful, punning title, the experience that still reverberates with structural complexity of its movement possibilities. “What I learned from themes, its real-world references to divers Jimmy Waring was to be open to any- and diving boards, its dance abstrac- thing—he taught me to keep my eyes tion. And there was the indisputable open,” she says today. (Satin’s essay on materiality of its planks: those pine Waring, “James Waring and the Judson boards, hefted about by the dancers, Dance Theatre: Influences, Intersections, defining, redefining, and carving up and Divergences,” is included in the space, that slotted right into my intense 2003 anthology Reinventing Dance in interest in minimalist sculpture. Out of the 1960s: Everything was Possible, ed- that meeting and shared dance-art con- ited by Sally Banes. Her thoughts on nections, our long-lived friendship arose. the relation of the dancer and the dance may be seen in the introduction to Walking the Plankton, Cross Sections, “Performing Autobiography,” a special Pressing Matters, and Oat Cuisine were issue of Women & Performance, a Jour- part of a flurry of challenging and origi- nal of Feminist Theor, Spring 1999, that 74 ᭿ PAJ 77 (2004), pp. 74–79. © 2004 Performing Arts Journal, Inc. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/152028104323048287 by guest on 29 September 2021 she co-edited with Judith Jerome.) Other pioneers such as Trisha Brown (whose influential teachers and mentors have Accumulation with Water Motor and Talk- included Merce Cunningham, Peter ing of 1971–77 some of us still consider Saul, and Robert Ellis Dunn, who led the mother of all talking dances) irre- the initial Judson Dance Theater work- sistibly toward spectacle. Satin has stayed shops of 1962–1964. Long-time col- with the intimacy of movement for its leagues and collaborators include own sake. Her gentle and idiosyncratic Marjorie Gamso, with whom Satin has dance vocabulary, rooted in her own danced, on and off, since the mid- body and drawn in part from the plea- 1970s; and, beginning in the mid-1980s, sure of studio practice, luxuriates in Sally Gross. For the past several years, qualities of stillness. This is movement she has been studying Klein Technique with few bravura jumps and none of with Susan Klein and Barbara Mahler. that post-Judson running (à la Twyla After returning to New York, Satin Tharp); hers is a conscious, forthright combined her dance practice with walk. Satin has also remained wedded academia, completing her Ph.D. in Per- to the Judson’s potent coupling of dance formance Studies at New York Univer- and text; and the advantage here is her sity. Navigating the traditional bound- uncommon gift with words. Her texts ary between scholarship and art-making, are marvels of complexity and double between interpretation and creation, she entendre, rooted in history, literature, remains both artist and scholar. ideas; they give her works a heft not always found in dance and text pieces. Satin’s scholarly work for some time “Talking and dancing can’t replace each focused on the interaction of autobiog- other, but they can embrace and they raphy and formalist dance of the early can fight like cats,” she wrote in a recent 1960s. Citing tastes and beliefs that are essay on “Talking and Dancing in the as deep-seated as they are contradictory, 21st Century” for the Brazilian per- she is drawn to formalist work and forming arts journal Gesto (Issue 1, work that is demonstrably linked to the 2002). world outside the stage. In her intro- duction to the 1999 issue of Women & Performance that examines autobiogra- ᭿ phy and its variable relationships to truth, she makes a general observation Satin’s April 2003 New York concert that rings true for her own dances: “Not started simply enough with a coming every autobiographer returns to the past; and going dance. Far From It (2003), some anchor us in the present moment which opened a concert of four works or urge us into the future.” From the under the title “Leslie Satin and Danc- first, Satin’s dances have served to an- ers,” presented by the Construction chor this viewer in the present moment. Company, begins with a lone dancer finding her way onto a darkened stage Still watching Satin’s dances more than that gradually fills with warm light. twenty years down the road, I am struck Barefoot, wearing a rustling black circu- by the dual paths of continuity and lar grass skirt and a dark blouse, Satin evolution. Market forces of the late- stands in silence, facing her audience. It 20th century long ago drew most Judson starts with three rises, sometimes quick, PLETT / Leslie Satin and the Dance of Memory ᭿ 75 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/152028104323048287 by guest on 29 September 2021 Top: Take-Off and Landing, with Leslie Satin, Iris Rose, Vicky Slick. Bottom: Shadow Load with Vicky Slick, Barbara Mahler, Dages Keates, Susan Osberg. Photos: Courtesy Tom Brazil. 76 ᭿ PAJ 77 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/152028104323048287 by guest on 29 September 2021 sometimes slow. As she rises, she swings Far From It is a collaborative solo built both arms outward; hands and arms of movement material choreographed knead the air, probing or grasping for for Satin by Marjorie Gamso; it contin- balance. The motion is repeated, incor- ues a working friendship that dates back porating a brief passage of frenzied, to the earliest years of Satin’s career. ineffectual arm waving before the dancer Gamso had also been a student of Jimmy resumes her quiet stance. Waring, and the pair met at the Cunningham studio in the early 1970s. Erasure—or, one might even say, de- Erasure was a concept that both chore- struction and obliteration—is an ex- ographers first investigated in the 1970s plicit theme of this post-9/11 concert and 1980s. The work’s understated and program, a suite of four challenging and unpredictable vocabulary includes sen- intelligent new dances. Even Satin’s suous passages for the dancer’s bare complement of titles—Far From It, arms and hands: a hand stubbornly Shadow Load, Take-Off and Landing, pushes back on a shoulder, the hand Dis/Place—seems to chew over the ter- pat-pat-pats the air, then fingers flutter; rible terrain of our new world. In an small, irregular hip thrusts provide the adagio duet within Dis/Place, the di- punctuation. minutive choreographer pairs herself with her tallest dancer. Moving in uni- Minutes into the ten-minute dance, son, one behind the other, against the Satin walks a circular path and returns studio’s upstage wall, she, the smaller to face front. This is the moment that partner, is rendered effectively invis- defines the junction between the dance’s ible—an absent presence, a ghost, a coming and going. Now music joins the receding memory. mix—fragments of John Cage’s 1942 In the Name of the Holocaust for string Yet there is more than demolition going piano—as Satin begins again. But this on here: the new work is also about time she subtracts and adds, cumula- building and rebuilding. Satin’s gentle, tively bending and shaping Gamso’s meditative works express her perennial movement score to make it her own. In affection for movement for its own four successive permutations, performed sake—no matter how unexalted. A fin- in slightly different orientations within ger flutters, a foot brushes the floor, a the space, dance phrases are embodied, leg rises to arabesque; such nuances of embellished, and corrupted by the per- gesture ask only for the viewer’s close former until the source material is attention. And over the course of the erased—or rather, overwritten and made evening, in the succession of dances new. that unfold from Satin’s opening solo, we see a personal movement vocabulary The concert’s second dance of erasure, gradually amplified and multiplied by Shadow Load (2003), is a twelve-minute an ensemble of eight performers. And collaborative quartet with video, cre- even as themes of loss and erasure are ated by four performer-choreogra- made explicit, the affirmation of the phers—Dages Keates, Barbara Mahler, primacy of art-making becomes this Susan Osberg, and Vicky Shick—from choreographer’s implicit Ground Zero.