expanding time: centers of a whirling world
Jacob
Burkhardt (video) Andy Dances at Judson Church September 17, 2019
by
Douglas Messerli
During
the night of September 20th, I dream a long dream in which I was
dancing—at first making miraculous leaps in the manner of Rudolph Nureyev and Mikhail
Baryshnikov, but then gradually settling into amazing spins, something that I
might have associated more with ice skating dance than with ballet. The spins
were startlingly tight and intense, a bit like a balletic version of the
Turkish whirling dervishes, but without their flowing, whirling skirts; I
seemed dressed in a more traditional male ballet outfit that represented more
of a continuously spinning top instead of the mesmerizing, trance-like
movements of the Turkish dancers.
I have long loved dance, and when I was
young I studied briefly with the Joffrey Ballet, as I’ve written elsewhere,
after being encouraged to take up dance by Paul Taylor, who I met briefly in
Madison, Wisconsin in the late 1960s. In New York, I signed up with the Joffrey
company as a student, and after weeks and weeks at the barre doing the
traditional dance exercises, the males were called to do a pirouette, my strict
dance teacher commenting that I had done it quite well, a comment that thrilled
me, even if soon after I began to realize that I would be a great dancer given
the structure of my body and my late-coming to the art. So, while dance
continues to thrill me and I attempt to review it as often as I can, I have
never since—particularly as a now quite fragile 72 year-old with a knee
replacement—dreamt about me dancing so brilliantly as the images of my dream
contained.
Perhaps the dance-opera, The Want,
directed by Adam Linder, which I’d seen a night earlier, stimulated something
in my brain. And I was delighted, even if more than a little amused, by my sleeping
terpsichorean pleasures. By early morning I was comparing them in my mind with
my memories of the hero of Paul Auster’s early novel, Mr. Vertigo,
wherein the character Walt learns how to fly. I have certainly had many
so-called “flying dreams” throughout my life, which with simply grace and will-power
I can remain vertically in the air for very long periods of time.
Every morning after coffee and toilet, I
check Facebook, first my own messages and then those of others. This morning I
suddenly saw what appeared to be a short film on the choreographer and dancer
Andy de Groat. I vaguely remembered his name—although I had seen Robert Wilson’s
Einstein on the Beach, choreographed by Lucinda Childs and de Groat, but
otherwise I knew nothing at all about him and his career. If I try to write on
dance as often as I can, I admit I am no dance critic or expert about the
field. Literature, film, these are my specialties and wherein my major
contributions lie, along with a long history of art through my husband, art
curator Howard N. Fox.
I rarely click on such Facebook
offerings, except to hear jazz and singers from the past. But something this
morning called out to me. As I have long maintained synchroncicity and coincidence have been major elements of my life. But this hour and one-half
tribute to de Groat, who I quickly perceived, had died on January 1 in France,
at the same age I was on that date, suddenly took me down a rabbit hole that I
might never before imagined.
The first figure who appeared, I
gradually recognized was my dear friend from Cedar Rapids, near my hometown of
Marion, Iowa, Mel Andringa. What was he doing, directing an event for this
dancer, obviously a memorial in honor of de Groat, held at Manhattan’s Judson
Church on September 17th?
I now presume it harkens back to one de
Groat’s early collaborations with Wilson, Deafman Glance (1970), first
presented at the University of Iowa where Andringa was then a student/artist/performer.
I later brought Andringa and his companion F. John Herbert to perform at Temple
University when I was an Assistant Professor there.
I knew he had been long involved with
experimental performance and theater, but now he was discussing so many figures
I knew of and whose works I had seen and read—Jerome Robbins, Robert Wilson, Merce
Cunningham, Christopher Knowles, Douglas Dunn, Meredith Monk (see my review of
her Atlas in this volume) and Yvonne Rainer, many of whom I also met. Other
figures such as dancers from the Bird Hoffman School of Birds, Sheryl Sutton
(reading a comment by dance critic Deborah Jewitt), while numerous others
presented dances and videos of de Groat, including his “Waiting for Godot Fan
Dance,” and his famed “Rope Dance.”
Just
as importantly—and I hadn’t known this at all—de Groat, who had a romantic with
Wilson, had been particularly known for his “spinning” in both his own dancing
and those pieces he choreographed for Wilson and others.
As de Groat has himself written: “I
think of spinning as the base for my dance. There’s something about spinning
which just seems kind of present. I can’t explain it.” Although he does go on
to explain it, quite specifically, as the natural movement in dance, tracing it
back to several ancient cultures.
The commentary, videos, and dances were
stunning, and I suddenly felt I was reliving a world that I was never quite
involved in previously. In a strange way, it seemed a slightly metaphysical experience.
Why had I dreamt about the spinning dance, and how had this appeared to me so
suddenly the next morning?
Inexplicably, in my entire lifetime to
date, I have never once experienced what is described as déjà vu, something
that almost everybody has encountered in their lives. Perhaps these remarkable synchronicities
are my version of that phenomena. All I can say is this series of coincidences
compelled through most of that morning, and the emotional substance of them
brought serious tears to my eyes.
Los
Angeles, September 21, 2019
Reprinted
from USTheater, Dance, and Performance (September 2019).
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