Just this week, Johannes has started putting together our new piece, Selbstausloeser. We spent the previous 6 weeks developing movement and improvising on the themes: lying/self-deception, sexuality and gender, truth and secrets. We developed movement about trying to hide something, about something that keeps slipping away, duets where we are attracted and then repelled from one another, or inhabiting only the negative spaces around the other person, never making contact. We each developed our own solo material, mine starting from the idea that truth and lies are relative - "all in your head" - a solo full of turns and spins and circles. Theatrical tasks like: choreograph a dream sequence to 10 seconds of music of your choice. And, for a month, we spent half an hour each day going around the room in a sort of grown-up show-and-tell, bringing in an object each day that represented a secret, a wish, a lie from our personal life.
Most of what we make, or show, or write, or discuss, gets thrown out. Like Fred always says, "Art is inefficient." The small portion that remains is transformed. This is a difficult but exciting stage. Particularly difficult is the fine line one walks as a dancer, between obedience and experimentation. When we are developing material, it's necessary to let the imagination run free, and to let the body work on instinct. How else would we find unique, unusual movements and risky scenes? But very quickly this changes, and a big part of our job becomes precision - being in the right place at the right time, doing a movement just like the person next to you, being able to repeat the difficult movements over and over.
Meanwhile, I am reading Carolyn Brown's book about her time with John Cage and Merce Cunningham during the first 20 years of the company. She quotes Andre Malraux, the French Minister of Culture who, after WWII, was instrumental in developing a system of theaters throughout France: "Art - and not any social or moral system - is humanity's only permanent expression of the will to triumph over fate." And then I remember a speech I heard last month in Dusseldorf for the International Tanzmesse in August, in which a Dutch speaker said that art is one of the few things that distinguishes us from animals, because it allows us to see the world from another person's eyes.
Not that the day-to-day life of being a dancer feels fate-defying or grand. On the contrary, most of the time I feel more like a carpenter or a gardner - hammering the nails, watering the seeds, working slowly and methodically to build something. But what I have realized, is that the thing we are building is something that does not previously exist in the world. We have no script, we have no steps, we have no melodies. In this way we are unlike the actors and singers and violinists we share a theater with. We are making something from scratch. And what we make---is it the truth, or is it all lies? Both. Like Picasso said, "Art is a lie that tells the truth"
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