29 August 2010

Paris Journal: l Entry 2

8/29/10

What new rhythms await me? Can I shed the habitual responses to originate a new response to a new set of tensions?   In her chapter on “Time” from Poetics of Contemporary Dance, Laurence Louppe states:

An accent or release between a tension and counter-tension within the body, however, is never a break but rather always a transition. Dalcroze: Rhythm is the product of a struggle against a resistance and the effort made to avoid rupturing an equilibrium. It is a compromise between two opposing forces. In this compromise which includes all the elements of movement, how does the rhythm organize these transactions: through a created space, and a ‘score’ of corporeal durations.

This rhythm, then, creates the momentum of the flow of a duration, obliterating or circumventing time, vs. Cunningham’s “epiphanies of time” (LL) in which he lets durations imposed upon movement materials radically form and alter their character, flow and rhythms.

Paris. A new space. A city of light, dreams and ruptures-- potential, imagined, real. Encountering resistance, real or imagined, and making effort to either rupture (intentionally?) or restore equilibrium. Throwing the cards in the air. Caution to the winds. Transitions.

How does this dynamic of compromise affect/effect the “habit” of pre-composed materials? Can I consider the danced phrases I take with me or import as a model or metaphor for “equilibrium”? Or how does this compromise evolve something new, yet to emerge? How is it or can it be authentic to that moment, that place, that space? A “Travelogue” redux, a reopening of the case, 17 years later… How, at age 59, have I changed my engagement with “struggle” to understand flow differently in my body? Accents come with different degrees of force, bound energy, attack.  They come for different reasons, as a response to a changing, aging body.  How does this change affect/effect my way of encountering the world? Do I recognize, identify and understand resistance differently—such that it may or may not threaten “equilibrium”? Am I less clinging to what I consider the handgrips on my equilibrium?

Why everything in the form of questions? To whom do I address these? You, the imaginary reader? Myself? I know best what I do not know… (although I have hunches, inklings and near-answers waiting in the wings). I trust the dance will in time provide its solutions and answers to me and to the viewer of my dances—whether I perform them live or on screen. That’s about all I know.