“Devotion” by Sarah Michelson

Sarah Michelson’s Devotion at On The Boards March 11-13,  troubled conventional notions of dance and theater.  The piece was performed on a skeletal stage of black marley floor, metal scaffolding (as when a cathedral wing is being repaired), and religiously evocative oil paintings of the choreographer and playwright (the beginning and end have narration written by playwright Richard Maxwell), suspended above the stage, so the creators of the performance are already canonized, looming above their creation.  The costumes wore track and field suits.  Shorts and tucked in T-shirts, track pants and tucked in sleeveless T-shirts, short tennis skirts and leotards, with contemporary exercise shoes.   Many reviewers have already stated that the costumes, music (Phillip Glass’s “Dance IX”) and even some of the movements, are taking from Twyla Tharp’s  In the Upper Room.   Some say, “appropriated”, others say “tributed” and still others say, “stolen.”  I would venture to say that Michelson’s dance was consciously highlighting the concepts of what dance is, art inspired by art, deconstructing narrative and emotive interpretation so much so, that the piece philosophizes Tharp’s dance, comments on Tharp’s directions and choices, creates a meta effect in terms of dance evolving from dance; but it is no way a rip off or a copy.  The performance was inherently inter-textual and utterly complicated not to mention completely wonderful.

I would not have know the characters if I had not seen a program, as the choreography carries no literal or directly emotive narrative; rather it is a series of stark, staccato and isolated movements (by isolated I mean there is no lyrical transition from one movement to the next) drawing from ballet (fourth position with upper body and arms reaching forward, deep second position plies, jeté to hop), yoga, and track and field. (I also was reminded of an exercise form I did in Germany called {sp?} tempoderum where the group runs and runs in circles and stops to do strengthening exercises.)  Running, backwards running, crawling, inundating repetition made up the choreography.  Jesus did strike a crucifixion pose twice, which was almost silly in it’s juxtaposition to the abstraction, which made up the rest of the movement.

Adam and Even were impressive in many ways.  Adam, an older gentleman, played by the actor Jim Fletcher ran and leapt in large circles on one side of the stage (furthest from the exit), in white track pants and a red sleeveless t-shirt.  Eve, strikingly like a vintage athletic photograph in cropped hair, short white skirt, red leotard and running shoes, ran to Adam and away to the other end of the stage diagonally, over and over again as a cluster of domed lights swung back and forth above the stage like a bell for what seemed like an hour.  The lights were being “rung” by a man just off stage (but visible as there was really no “off stage”) wearing a white suit with a deacon’s collar.  At one point, Eve was about to turn from Adam and run away again and he caught her hand, if I remember correctly, and she froze.  The music (listen to Dance IX if you haven’t) blared for the majority of the performance, seemed to drive this piece into pure poetry as Eve was lifted numerous times and jumped to be caught by Adam, a most dutiful and tired figure next to Eve- wanting so badly to be free but unable to extract herself from Adam’s side (heh heh).  The build up of the whole performance cruxes here in the interaction of these two dancers.  I began to cry, watching the existential pain inevitable in any individual entangled with another. They ran and ran and ran.  Adam lifted her, put her down, lifted her again, put her down…it was an endless interaction in that it feels like it is still occurring somewhere, though I’m not watching it.

Devotion does not create a narrative of movement.  It does not create the impression or memory of a narrative even.  The fourteen-year-old waif of a Mary, a pony-tailed and bony Non Griffiths, seemed to be dancing the mathematics of a memory.  The psychological labor that had gone into what it is to be a mother, once again, entangled so inevitably in another’s (her child’s) life.  Griffiths, so adolescent and small, made an impressive virgin mother.  Jeté to hop, over and over, running in place, walking in plied fourth position with the pelvis leading.  These are not the movements of the Mother of God, rather of a human marking a human experience organically, unobserved.  No virtusoic flourishes to make you feel dazzled and amazed; rather, a barrage of experience at a deconstructed level. Watching her, one believed she could endure anything as she executed the movements with such will.

I felt that the element of time was played upon again and again in this piece on different levels.  The performances did not begin, build up and end, rather they moved circularly, steadily and constantly as the Phillip Glass piece repeated throughout with sprinklings of Pete Drungle’s original music. The spoken narration at the beginning and end of the piece mixed a prose interpretation of Adam and Eve in the garden and Jesus and Mary with a contemporary biography read by Michelson. As the main focus was on Mary and Eve in their respective pieces, the men enduring the choreography like a sentence, drew a great deal of empathetic attention from me. I noticed some clip from the text, which focused on the idea of individuality and identity…“You are happy to share an identity”…”now you need space”… “cold attachment for now”…“Mary and Jesus need each other to affirm the other exists”.  Michelson’s voice also talked about a brother’s death and other seemingly autobiographical events, mixing the mythical with the present day.  I would quote some more of the text here if I could read any more of my own penmanship, but alas, my notes are too messy.   The text treated the biblical stories as modern narratives and vice versa. The contemporary story could have occurred a thousand years ago.  Another aspect of dealing with time circularly was the ages of the dancers.  I was surprised and pleased to watch a fourteen year old and a 50 + year old dancing in the same performance. This breaks free from the typical cast of all professional dancers, usually between 18 and 40.

The aggressive athleticism, repetition and endurance cast a gloriously encompassing spell, causing me to become stiller and stiller, mesmerized, as the performance stubbornly broke down expectations, refusing to present any traditional lyricism in movement, or literal narrative throughout the body of the work.  The performance followed a clear method, in my opinion, of negative discourse; recognizing the futility of using a traditional dance vocabulary to show an experience in its raw clarity.

I find so much of “Devotion” to be congruent with “negative discourse”.  The book Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language by Gerald L. Bruns says much on language that can cross over into the language of dance.  Many excerpts struck me as talking directly about what Michelson is doing.  So, I’ve written some excerpts below.  In the first two excerpts, I inserted the corresponding word in double brackets making the ideas relevant to dance as well as literature as the thoughts are true across the board for art.

“The idea that beauty comes into being at the expense of the world brings to mind once more Flaubert’s dream: ‘What seems beautiful to me, what I should like to write, is a book about nothing…’ The point to mark about the dream of such a book, or about Mallarme’s ideal of an absolute purity of discourse, is that it implies a form of literature {{dance}} that feeds upon its own impossibility: it implies an almost violently paradoxical form of literature {{dance}}, one which requires for its creation the failure of language {{dance}}. An entry in Valery’s Analects fleshes out this point: “ ‘The Beautiful; implies effects of unsayability, indescribability, ineffability.  And the word {{movement }} itself says nothing.  It has no definition; for a true definition must be constructive.’”

“…..to eliminate the intention to establish relationships and to produce instead an explosion of words {{movements}}.  For modern poetry {{dance }}…destroys the functional nature of language {{choreography}}. It retains only the outward shape of relationships [the interplay of signifiers], their music, but not their reality {the signified}. The Word {{Movement or Choreography}} shines forth above a line of relationships emptied of their content, grammar is bereft of its purpose, it becomes prosody and is no longer anything but an inflexion which lasts only to present the word {{movement}}…”

“ ‘Language’, Blanchot says, ‘perceives that it owes its meaning, not to what exists, but to its recoil before existence.’ Ordinary speech is just such a recoil- a withdrawal of language away from things into a world of signifieds, in which language itself exists only as a transparent and transitive medium. And yet there remains the primitive impulse of language not to speak of things but to speak things themselves…What Blanchot means is that to speak and yet to say nothing is a way of allowing language to maintain th plenum; and that is to say that a literary use of language, as it approaches the condition of negative discourse –a discourse which disrupts or reverses the act of signification- is a way of holding the world in being against the annihilation that takes places in man’s ordinary utterances…”

I could go on all day finding paragraphs in this book which I feel shed light on the important decisions made in “Devotion”.

Michelson’s dance challenged the usual vocabularly of movement used in performance and questioned the way in which narratives are communicated and received.  She looks at the experience of an event in the physical body and allows that event to be enough without insisting on inundating it with symbols or reference.  What is a story?  How do we tell a story?  How do we experience a personal story? For Michelson, the issue at hand is not what a story means or connotes, but it is how a story means or connotes; she is about process, exercise and the reexamination of meaning through movement. What can be seen as the redundancy of patterns throughout the piece; intead, should be understood as the continual questioning of the placeholders (Jesus Christ = grace, Eve= the fall, Dance= beauty, Personal story=personal identity) in narrative history.  The dance “Devotion” did what was essential in this time. It refused to present answers and instead presented a methodology; a way of questioning what it is that we believe and what it means to understand ourselves in the line of history.

March 28, 2011 | Categories: Article, Dance, New York Dance, On The Boards, Seattle Dance | Tags: Dance in Seattle, Devotion, Modern Dance, New York City Players, New York Dance Scene, On The Boards, Richard Maxwell, Sarah Michelson, Seattle | 1 Comment