{"id":150,"date":"2012-10-03T08:48:40","date_gmt":"2012-10-03T12:48:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jampole.com\/OpEdgy\/?p=150"},"modified":"2012-10-04T08:04:51","modified_gmt":"2012-10-04T12:04:51","slug":"me-you-nobody-who-pronouns-set-to-dance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jampole.com\/OpEdgy\/?p=150","title":{"rendered":"Me, you nobody, who: Pronouns set to dance"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Simone
Simone Forti in 40 Dancers photographed by Ian Douglas<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0by Tyrus Miller<\/p>\n

40 Dancers Do 40 Dances for the Dancers<\/em><\/p>\n

Conceived and directed by Clarinda Mac Low<\/p>\n

Based on the text by Jackson Mac Low, The Pronouns: A Collection of Forty Dances for the Dancers<\/em>\u00a0 (3 February-22 March 1964)<\/p>\n

Platform 2012: Judson Now, Danspace Project, St. Mark\u2019s Church, New York<\/p>\n

13-15 September 2012<\/p>\n

In 1961, poet Jackson Mac Low composed Nuclei for Simone Morris<\/em> (later retitled Nuclei for Simone Forti<\/em>), a dance piece that derived a set of actions by selecting verbs from a word list according to a set procedure. Mac Low\u2019s Nuclei<\/em> began from a poet\u2019s reflection on the complex interrelations of different media of meaning-making\u2014language, writing, sound, movement\u2014and what kinds of creative \u201ctranslations\u201d can occur when one seeks to cross from one sign-system to the other and back.\u00a0 True to their name, the Nuclei <\/em>not only constructed a framework of instructions for developing different instantiations of that one work; they also generated a whole new set of texts, The Pronouns<\/em>,[1]<\/a> utilizing the same underlying materials (the action card pack) and analogous, though further elaborated procedures for deriving texts and performances from them.\u00a0 The number of Mac Low\u2019s texts, forty, related to a list of English-language pronouns, whereby each of the texts is organized around a single pronoun, ranging from the obvious \u201cI,\u201d \u201cyou,\u201d and \u201cwe,\u201d to more complex ones such as \u201cwho,\u201d \u201cnobody,\u201d \u201ceither,\u201d and \u201cwhichever.\u201d\u00a0 These combine with other words to make texts with a somewhat Gertrude Stein-like flavor, combining phrases such as \u201cSomeone then says things as a worm would, \/ but also as one keeping sheep or seeing an offer, \/ while willing themselves to be dead or coming to see something narrow\u201d (17th<\/sup> Dance).\u00a0 Among Mac Low\u2019s interest in using the pronouns in this way was to explore how certain often-subliminal features of language imply and occasion different sorts of social interaction, segmentation, and identification.<\/p>\n

The category of pronouns occupies a special place in language, since their meaning is determined solely by their function of marking the changing positions in a discourse or conversation, rather than by reference to any fixed object or concept.\u00a0 Linguists even refer to pronouns by the special name of \u201cshifters,\u201d because a word like \u201cI\u201d or \u201cyou\u201d shifts from position to position as different speakers occupy the place of addressing others or being addressed.\u00a0 The old Abbott and Costello routine about \u201cWho\u2019s on first?\u201d imagines a comic world in which, rather than shifting in this way, pronouns function as names, rigidly designating the persons to which they refer: \u201cNo, who\u2019s on second. . . \u201c\u00a0 In contrast to these comedians, Mac Low\u2019s poetry even further radicalizes the shifting function of pronouns, asking us to understand pronouns as the paradigm of language as such, which for him was a vocabulary full of \u201cempty words\u201d (John Cage\u2019s term) that can be occupied in an open-ended, indeterminate number of ways. For Mac Low, language offered models, mobile spaces, and temporary positions for people to come together and interact in structured, but freely chosen ways\u2014and his poetic and performance works seek to heighten our awareness that language \u201chas room\u201d for us to be together in many different sorts of creative, emotionally rich, non-coercive encounters.[2]<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Levi
Levi Gonzalez and Anna Azraeli in 40 Dancers photographed by Ian Douglas<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In reviving and making new The Pronouns<\/em> in 2012, Clarinda Mac Low demonstrates a deep understanding of her father\u2019s artistic and political intentions, while lending the performances and project as a whole her own original, self-reflexive spin.\u00a0 On this occasion\u2014the first major presentation of the work since the 1980s\u2014I was able to attend two of the three performances, the second and third night, as well as speak with Clarinda Mac Low (hereafter referred to as CML) about the production and with one of the performers, dancer Lise Brenner.\u00a0 In her program notes, CML characterizes her work on this presentation of The Pronouns<\/em> as an anthropological investigation into the network of relations existing in the New York dance community, as well as an exploration of how an artistic work \/ performance event such as the 2012 Pronouns <\/em>may inflect the bonds of that community and help extend them in new directions.\u00a0 She writes, \u201cThe resulting piece is not so much an esthetic product as an esthetic by-product of a social situation, where the provisional community formed by a shared project is as important as the performance itself\u201d (CML, \u201cDirector\u2019s Note\u201d).\u00a0<\/p>\n

The cast was selected by a combination of existing connections and friendships and the various contingencies of who was available, whose name was raised in the course of working on the project, and other factors of what we might call, after the surrealists, the \u201cobjective chance\u201d of living in New York and working among its shifting, overlapping artistic communities.\u00a0 CML\u2019s selection brought together a diverse group of performers, ranging from senior dancers such as Simone Forti (who performed a version of Nuclei<\/em> each night) to various children, and from professional dancers of different training and artistic orientation to musicians, writers, and other artists.\u00a0 At the outset, each of the participants were given a copy of The Pronouns<\/em> and asked to select one of the dances for which they had a special interest, resonance, or affinity.\u00a0 Dancers who chose the same dance poem were paired or otherwise combined, while all forty dances were eventually distributed among the group.\u00a0 In turn, an algorithm was applied to determine the distribution of the dances among the three nights (while again, the exigencies of everyday life\u2014availability of the dancers, child care, etc.\u2014qualified the order somewhat away from the pure mathematics of a formula).\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Clarinda
Clarinda Mac Low and Masumi Kouakou photographed by Ian Douglas<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Each dancer was given considerable freedom to interpret the piece as they saw fit, but also confronted with the daunting task of realizing by some means or another every line \/ instruction in Mac Low\u2019s text and rigorously observing Mac Low\u2019s syntactical cues of sequence, simultaneity, and consequence (thus, attending to words such as \u201cthen,\u201d \u201cafterwards,\u201d \u201cat the same time,\u201d and so on).\u00a0 One of the most notable features of the performances, and something that I became even more aware of over two nights, was the extraordinary range of interpretative means that CML\u2019s performers employed to meet this challenge.\u00a0 At one extreme, there was pure verbal recitation of the poem, as in the performance of the 34th<\/sup> Dance on the third night: a voice speaking the lines in the dark.\u00a0 At the other, there were almost purely dance-gestural interpretations, largely free of any evident mimetic content, however much these might have been part of the dancer\u2019s original thinking about the various lines in the piece.\u00a0 (For example, as she explained it to me in conversation, in developing her performance of Dance 15, Lise Brenner obliquely used the music\u2019s introduction of the word \u201csaddle\u201d to capture Mac Low\u2019s line \u201cgets leather by language,\u201d while other parts of her performance were made up of relatively improvised site-specific interactions with the St. Mark\u2019s space.) In between these extremes of almost purely verbal and almost purely non-verbal interpretations, there were numerous shades of language use and vocalization: the poem\u2019s lines being chanted to a drone (third night, the 26th<\/sup> Dance), the poem\u2019s lines read alternately by different performers, as if part of a dramatic dialogue (third night, 24th<\/sup> Dance), dancers reciting certain lines while dancing (numerous dances), performers making vocalizations that enacted the poem\u2019s instructions while not directly reciting them (e.g. making interrogatory sounds to interpret the instruction of \u201cquestioning\u201d).\u00a0 A similar multiplicity of approaches marked the movement idioms of the performers: seemingly abstract dance movements, dramatization of lines, mimetic hand-gestures, enactment of everyday movements, drumming and other instrumental performance, interactions of live performers and the image of distant performers projected from Skype.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This plurality of interpretive approaches created a lively variety of performance types across the different pieces and across the three evenings of performance.\u00a0 It also, however, related in interesting ways to a hidden, internal \u201crhyme\u201d structure between the pieces, which contributed to the underlying cohesion of the three-night project as a whole, while never imposing an external design.\u00a0 To a very careful viewer or to a viewer (like myself) who brings a closer awareness of Mac Low\u2019s text to the performance, some of the means of this internal structure may become visible from time to time before submerging again in the flow of the individual pieces.\u00a0 Because Mac Low utilized procedural means to generate his texts, several actions appear multiple times across the forty dances, actions such as \u201creacting to orange hair,\u201d \u201cfingering a door,\u201d or \u201cdoing something under the conditions of competition.\u201d \u00a0Yet textual repetitions of this sort\u2014which, as noted, connote a relation to the work of Gertrude Stein for readers of Mac Low\u2019s book\u2014may remain nearly indiscernible for most of the audience, who are viewing the textual details only through the multi-semiotic translations of performance, which disseminates and greatly expands the compact terseness of Mac Low\u2019s poems.\u00a0 To the extent that one is aware of these verbal \u201crepetitions,\u201d for instance by referring the performance to the instruction-texts, one can understand how Jackson Mac Low offers a new pendant to Stein\u2019s important argument that her \u201crepetitions\u201d were not repetitive at all, but creative.\u00a0 Repetition, Stein and Mac Low both suggest, comes not from iteration, but rather from the failure to reinvent new ways of giving value to words, relations, and forms.\u00a0 In this regard, too, CML has avoided any antiquarian or merely historical interest in reviving this classic dance-piece of the 1960s Greenwich Village avant-garde.\u00a0 Her 2012 Forty Dancers<\/em> is genuinely a creative iteration, not at all a mere repetition of a past event.<\/p>\n

Notes<\/p>\n

\n

[1]<\/a> The texts and related essays are available in Jackson Mac Low, The Pronouns: A Collection of Forty Dances for the Dancers<\/em> (Station Hill Press, 1979).<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> I have discussed this dimension of Mac Low\u2019s work (including The Pronouns<\/em>) more extensively in my essay \u201cSituation and Event: The Destinations of Sense,\u201d in Ritual and Event: Interdisciplinary Perspectives<\/em>, ed. Mark Franko (Routledge, 2007), 75-90; and in several chapters devoted to Mac Low in my book Singular Examples: Artistic Politics and the Neo-Avant-Garde<\/em> (Northwestern UP, 2009).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 \u00a0by Tyrus Miller 40 Dancers Do 40 Dances for the Dancers Conceived and directed by Clarinda Mac Low Based on the text by Jackson Mac Low, The Pronouns: A Collection of Forty Dances for the Dancers\u00a0 (3 February-22 March 1964) Platform 2012: Judson Now, Danspace Project, St. Mark\u2019s Church, New York 13-15 September 2012 […]<\/p>\n

Read More… from Me, you nobody, who: Pronouns set to dance<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jampole.com\/OpEdgy\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jampole.com\/OpEdgy\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jampole.com\/OpEdgy\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jampole.com\/OpEdgy\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jampole.com\/OpEdgy\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=150"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.jampole.com\/OpEdgy\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":159,"href":"https:\/\/www.jampole.com\/OpEdgy\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions\/159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jampole.com\/OpEdgy\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jampole.com\/OpEdgy\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jampole.com\/OpEdgy\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}