Jess Curtis ► Dancing the Non/Fictional Body
Dancing the Non/Fictional Body
A few years ago, I was speaking to my friend and colleague Keith Hennessy after he had attended a dance concert at the University of California at Davis where we were both teaching. I asked him how the work had been and he replied, “It was like they were all choreographing for a fictional body that none of them had.” This phrase struck me as a thoughtful analysis of a problem that runs throughout many aspects of society, and one that can be particularly strong in the practice of dance. Many of us are making choices about our bodies on the basis of an imagination of a body that we want to have or think we should have and not in relation to the bodies that we actually do have. At the same time many of us feel alienated from the bodies that we do have (the bodies that we are) because they do not meet certain societal ideals of what a body should be or do.
This essay addresses two works I’ve been part of in the last two years, each of which address embodied differences and their impact on what a body can do in the world. Dances For Non/Fictional Bodies, a project I conceived and directed with my company Gravity, involved seven physically diverse performers ranging in age from 28 to 52 and presented performance events in a variety of contexts including Theaters, Festivals, Galleries and site-specific locations. (A complete web-archive on the project is available at http://www.jesscurtisgravity.org/dnfb/ ) The other work I will address is Jess Meets Angus: Episode 2 of Just Between Us: The Generation Project. A multi-generational project of Silke Z./resistdance from Cologne in which I perform with Angus Balbernie and was also a co-producer. (Documentation and information on this work is also available online at http://www.resistdance.de/resistdance/index.php/Unter_uns_Just_between_us.html )
When I was a younger dancer I quickly learned that I shouldn’t get my heart set on any kind of career in ballet. For the standards of traditional classical dance, only certain body types need apply. I was pleased to find a world in modern dance where the boundaries were less narrow, where my bodily proportions and qualities did not preclude my participation. In 1985 I joined the ranks of a post-Judson Church, post punk rock interdisciplinary dance company named Contraband, directed by Sara Shelton Mann, where we all identified as misfits or refugees from straight white American normativity. The aesthetics of this world were more open. We didn’t need to point our toes and we could have dyed hair and tattoos. Somehow though most of the dancers in this milieu would still stop performing at age 35.In 1998, as I turned 37, I was invited to France by the circus director, Gulko, to help create a small nouveau cirque company, Cie. Cahin-Caha, Cirque Batard. The French circus world opened a whole new set of possibilities. The levels of virtuosic physical talent were astounding. I met people that could do things I had never even thought of doing; beautiful young boys and girls in the prime of their physical prowess with the full support of the French government, literally flying through the air with the greatest of ease. In the midst of these perfect toned and talented bodies though, I noticed many not-so-normal bodies; bodies that could do spectacular things precisely because they were too bendy, or had a big belly, or an extra thick neck or very short legs. These performers often reveled in their physical differences because the range of sizes and shapes that they embodied created the variety (varieté) in the shows that they made. This diversity of physicalities in the circus also created a space for performers to remain active longer and later in their lives, evolving new performance possibilities as they aged and their bodies changed. The danger of not meeting expectations was still there though. More than one tiny voltigeuse acrobat I know has been abusively terrorized by her porteur partner for gaining 2 kilos over Christmas. Still, I was impressed by the mindset of many circus performers that I met as they imagined larger, higher, faster possibilities for their numbers or routines. The relation of imagining a possibility and then shaping the body in order to achieve it seemed both productive and intimidating, but I enjoyed seeing that interplay of flesh and imagination. Toward the end of my French circus adventure I was invited to give a workshop in aerial dance for a physically inclusive dance company Blue Eyed Soul in Britain. Rachel Freeman, the director, had seen some of the aerial work that I had been part of in Cie Cahin-Caha’s production, raWdoG, and wondered if our work with ropes and harnesses could be taught to people with mobility impairments. I thought “why not?,” the whole point of aerial equipment is the extension of physical possibilities. It can be as productive and interesting for any number of physicalities, not just elite performers. This led to my facilitating a number of events In Europe and America involving the use of Contact Improvisation, Performance and Aerial Dance as teaching tools for persons with physical disabilities and mobility impairments. I found that working with bodies that are visibly other than ‘normal’ started to reframe my entire sense of what is beautiful. Peeling back my expectations of normalcy I was able to appreciate a broader diversity of possible expression of the human body. These teaching experiences created extremely interesting elements for the making of theatrical work. For my next project I invited Claire Cunningham and Kaz Langley, two amazing performers with disabilities, to work with other artists who had more traditionally recognized abilities and examined the relation between virtuosity, ability and dis-ability. Out of these questions came Gravity’s award-winning work, Under the Radar, and an ensemble of talented performer-collaborators who made up the core of the work, Dances for Non/Fictional Bodies.
At a certain point in this process I had to ask myself what I had at stake in all this. My own issues around physical diversity may not be so apparent. I still fall pretty squarely within the ranks of what some disability activists call the ‘Temporarily-Able-Bodied,’ or TABs, but as this slightly discomforting label points out, time eventually takes its toll on all of us. Our abilities, inabilities, and dis-abilities are constantly changing. My body does not do what it once did. When the youthful vigor of the body is waning, is it possible that my body has something else to offer in this performative exchange we are in?
As we were making Dances for Non/Fictional Bodies I was also in the process of watching my father’s health fail as a result of Parkinson’s Disease. I found myself moved by his struggle to remain mobile and autonomous and his ‘dance’ with a walker and wondered how that might be staged as a choreography.
Our embodiment, our in-the-world-ness is the very stuff from which we make meaning on a daily basis. The importance of our bodies as experience and how bodies give or deny us access to the world cannot be over stated, whether it is a matter of what color my skin is, what kind of genitalia I have, or whether I move through space with the assistance of wheels or by my feet alone. How we imagine our own, or other’s, bodies to be, and how we experience the potential of what they could be, shapes nearly all of our relations.
In the work Dances for Non/Fictional Bodies we began the process with the idea of looking at our bodies as they are and making dances that reflected those ‘non/fictional’ qualities. One of our initial questions was to ask what kinds of functional, materially consequent things our bodies might do, such as the transporting of objects or the production of electricity on a generator equipped bicycle, or eventually even just getting to the toilet. Very soon it became clear that to examine the non/fictional we had to begin with asking what ‘fiction’ is and that perhaps a more pertinent question to ask was, “How do our imaginations and bodies interact and how do the objects in our world weave themselves into that dance?”
Photo of me and Claire – Bike and Space Man
One of the goals of this project was also to look at how performance actions that we developed in the creative process might resonate differently in different presentational settings. In addition to performing in the evening on a stage we also presented a 4-hour installation version of the work in the Gallery and Lobby spaces at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. One of the central issues we worked with in the piece had to do with different kinds of ‘gaze,’ and the power in how we see each other and are seen by each other.
Photo 2
In 2010 I was also invited to collaborate as a performer in Silke Z.’s project Unter Uns or Just Between Us: The generation project. The project is a series of now 6 Episodes pairing 2 performers of a particular age in a performed conversation regarding issues of that generation. The project was co-conceived by Berlin choreographer and performer Felix Marchand who also performed in the initial episode with actor Felix Voigt, focusing on the concerns of two “30-something” guys. Subsequent versions have paired two single mothers in their 40’s, two teenagers and two performers in their 20’s.
Photo 3
Being in this project underlined the fact that aging is something we are all doing all the time. It is not just an issue for the old. Each of us has a sense of past and future even if they might be perceived in different proportions at different times. The imagination of that past and future come together in the present to create our sense of what is possible for each body to do in each moment . The issues that Angus Balbernie and I dealt with as the 50-ish guys in Episode 2 necessarily dealt with scars and stories and memories. Claire Cunningham’s crutches, as objects with a history denoting a physical impairment are performatively transformed to tools that extend her bodily capabilities and create beauty and extra-ordinary ability.
I would propose that the lesson of dancing the non/fictional body is that each body dancing through each unfolding moment of life presents new possibilities and mysteries and challenges to be explored. Each new moment deserves the fullest imagination of the possibilities of our bodily experience as well as the appreciation of, and attention to, the beauty and potential of the body that is actually there.