REFLECTIONS ON BODY OF TEXT

by Ellen Chenoweth

EllenEllen (in red) with the group

MARCH 5, 2017

What would a piece of writing look like that was based on listening?
What are the most ideal conditions for you to read these words? Can I set them up for you, or just encourage you to find them for yourself?
Maybe take a breath. Maybe try not to do anything else for the next few minutes.
I want to tell you about this project that Nichole has embarked on with her collaborators.
One word that keeps coming to mind is communion. I think, is that really the word I mean? I look it up in the dictionary on my computer. This is what comes back:

com•mun•ion
The act or an instance of sharing, as of thoughts or feelings.
Religious or spiritual fellowship.
Intimate fellowship or rapport.

Yes, this project is about communion then.

There are three lines of inquiry, braided together, overlapping, reinforcing each other at times. Each is led by a different guest: an oral historian (Suzanne Snider), a writer (Karinne Keithley Syers), and a voice expert (Jean-Rene Toussaint). Eun Jung explains, “all three are offering tools to listen, to express, to connect, to be available physically and emotionally. They are giving us a range of tools to access information from other people and ourselves.”

It’s as if we are collaborators, but also co-investigators. As if we are on the trail of something beyond language, even if we don’t know what that thing is yet. We’re finding it together, coaxing it out of each other. From Karinne: “We’re moving towards blanks and absences, we know something is there. It’s about taking the time to listen and then riffing off of that.” It feels like a true laboratory.

Multiple people tell me that their minds are being blown, or their brains are being re-formatted. New neural pathways are being forged in these experiments.

A word that comes up surprisingly often in conversations about this work is texture. The texture of silence. The texture of people together in time and space. The texture of vibrations between humans.

Meg Foley tells me, “The point is to create open space that allows the other to tumble or find their own way. All of the strands move from creating conditions to not know, or not knowing.” There’s juiciness in this tumbling, in this ambiguity.

The oral history work has us listening to the shape of what someone is saying, not just the words. The ummms are preserved as an important part of the record. Jean-Rene has us thinking about the shape of our voice, and sending our voice into another body, and how that body shapes our voice coming back to our own body. The many ways we mold each other just by being in the same room.

It’s hard to ignore what’s happening outside of the room as well. The Body of Text work began in the days immediately following the November election, and will conclude within the first 100 days of the Trump presidency. Several dancers mention how crucial this work feels right now: this listening deeply to each other, these new tools to build empathy and be in conversation on levels that go beyond or around language.

Everyone in the room has different levels of comfort with various muscles or skills that are called upon in this work. Some are completely content and true experts at improvising with their bodies, but less used to improvising with spoken text. I feel self-conscious pretending that my hand is a sentient being, having a conversation with someone else with sounds but no words, but Jennifer Kidwell’s hand could riff for hours. Nichole points out that “nobody is comfortable with all of the channels, and we’re trying to open all of them simultaneously. I love what complex tasks bring out in people, accessing that vulnerability.”

Some softly beating questions:
What is the center of this work?
How can we get outside of ourselves?
Where do we become most ourselves?
What would kinetic stillness look like?
Where do we find playfulness and relaxedness even while we do difficult things?

One of the most remarkable aspects of this communion is the rhythm. The time together feels luxurious, out of step with our normal routines and pressures. It feels as if the studio is truly a protected, safe space, safe from pressure to rush or to dash off to the next commitment. Every session reminds me that it takes time to achieve real depth.

“Finding this sweet spot–this soaring, this place of take off that contains power and punch and motion and intimacy that is at once personal, political, performative, communal—and then looking at what were the conditions that were able to TAKE THEM THERE?” Helen sends these words from a train, heading for a retreat with the other collaborators. There is leisure and luxury in this project, but also urgency. These are tools we need. How can we create conditions for this kind of generosity and vulnerability in the world?

**These reflections grew out of conversations with the project participants, and from being in the studio for several sessions at Mascher and at The Whole Shebang.

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JUNE 20, 2017

“The roots are deeper than ever. The branches are longer than ever.”

Have you ever made a meal or read a book or met a person so exactly perfect for that moment in your life that you have to sit back, slightly stunned, and wonder how you and the universe pulled that off?

I think this is how Nichole must feel about Body of Text; that it responds to her exact individual curiosities and fed her passions in a most satisfying manner.

One of the most remarkable things about being in the dance field though is that our projects rarely happen alone, and I witnessed this one feeding the other project participants in fascinating ways as well. Body of Text was sprawling, but connected to each person involved, providing structure, but also freedom. So Jenn Kidwell is able to play with her sense of humor, unexpectedly spurting an orange peel out of her mouth during an exercise. Meg Foley’s brand of wildly unpredictable improvisation becomes paired with the new flavor of Scott McPheeters, with Scott acting as the voice of Meg’s body, both of them looking different than they ever had before.

With the distance of a couple of months, I’m still thinking about some of the project themes:

Vulnerability and how we access it
Language and movement
How we resonate with each other
Vibrating on full tilt

We played with sharing stories and voices, starting with an anecdote about Helen Hale’s morning routine that unexpectedly becomes a fantasy tale. We experimented with pairings and trios and quartets, watching energies bounce around the room together, atoms colliding. Just because you can’t see it in a photograph doesn’t mean it wasn’t there. This project often felt it was trafficking in the unseen, or the unheard.

What does it mean to share your story with another? What does it mean to pick up someone else’s story? What are the ethical implications that come with that hand-off? What liberties are best left unliberated? What do the gaps in the story tell you if you’re listening hard enough? If someone is watching you write, how does that affect the words you scribble? If someone is shadowing your movements, what happens to the dance you create? What does an efficient story look like? We grappled with these together.

I observed Nichole in the process, and listened to her reflections. She said, “It [Body of Text] allowed me to swim in the waters without leading all the time. The possibilities get wider.” One of the central challenges revolved around editing, and the need to develop a showing for a handful of colleagues at the end of one phase of the project. “Do we streamline this into a performance or open into other ways of exploring?”, she wonders. I can tell she wants to do both, but time is ticking. A ruthlessness is required in the editing process that seems a little uncomfortable. How do you decide which pieces to take from an hour-long interview when all of it is interesting, and reveals something of the person at its center?

Two dancers embody one body, one voice. Stories overlap and migrate into something new, layers accreting. We are rejecting the idea that a story is pure or simple. I remember seeing Ralph Lemon give a talk once in which he described a delicious messiness. I’m reminded of this lesson now, that a mess can be a good thing. A mess can be productive. Difficulty can be a joy.

I ask the dancers about control, about becoming another body:

“I was not me. I was out of my head.”
“It’s like leaning and no one knows who’s leading.”
“I felt so in what I was doing, it felt transcendent.”
“I became a dancer because that’s where I go to lose myself.”
“We were in touch with the thing that frees us.”

There’s a generosity at the heart of this work. How do you find another as you lose yourself? What is the practice of being vulnerable together, and how do you get there in a way that feels safe but also encourages risk? We play with performance practices and tools and strategies. The dancers improvise while moving with language, writing with language, speaking with language, voice and body and language channels all open at once, influencing each other. Different emotions get unburied if we talk while moving. We play with guiding, expanding, and contracting meaning. Does this sound like a jumble? It felt like a jumble, each collaborator a universe emitting a guitar-shaped sound.

We explored how language can be a good neighbor to movement, rather than a dominant dictator. One can illuminate the other, or they can refract back, or chase each other around the studio. I think we found some new places to play in Body of Text, some assumptions to question.

What’s not asked is important.