Wandering Thoughts

In which the author, yet again, attempts to tell the dancer from the dance

I’ve been thinking recently about James Baldwin’s essay on The Creative Process. I agree with him almost entirely — except on one point. Not all artists seek out the condition of solitude to create. The writer must, certainly. The traditional painter, likely. But the dancer? The comedian? The musician? So many art forms depend on other players — theater, of course — and on an audience. So how does art balance that inner “war” that Baldwin eloquently names as a condition for creativity with the public sharing that is crucial for those art forms we name “live”?

I don’t have a grand answer to that question of course, but I confront it anew whenever I have the chance to witness live art — dance in particular — respond (or as we say ‘activate’) the visual or plastic arts. There are technical questions to consider. Like how the affordances of the white cube — made for distanced, reverential looking — butt up against the sweat and stir of humans in the contact zone. I am interested in those questions. But beneath them, I am interested in another set of Baldwinian questions: what is the point of contact between the still and the moving that lets us in on the space art opens up between itself and unfreedom?

Wandering, the collaboration between painter Julie Mehretu and choreographer John Jasperse, is alive, this week, at Marian Goodman Gallery in Tribeca. It extends a dynamic I first witnessed when Mehretu large scale paintings to Monochromatic Light — which were then activated by Flexn dancers to a live score by Tyshawn Sorey. Here, at a more intimate scale, and standing around rather than seated, we are invited to wander through the galleries as in opening hours, while a dance was happening. While the dance commanded our attention, it also shrugged its shoulders to it. And at any given moment one of those spectacular new paintings — phosphorescent with activity — threated to capture the attention. An anti-absorptive performance that nevertheless felt communal rather than dissociative. At any given moment, there is movement happening in another room you are missing, a dancer turning behind a translucent canvas. It was like a 60s happening: no one viewer can experience it all.

I saw at least two other people like me taking avid notes — signs of life in the downtown dance intelligentsia I reckon. What were we noticing and for whom? I turned to a friend and lamented, as I always do, my lack of any technical vocabulary to name, and thereby remember, what I am seeing. Dance for me exists at the vanishing point. And so in the end, rather than depend on notes, or even the photos and videos I took, I sought another route, that sourced in Wordsworth’s classic definition of poetry as that which “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” In this context, I am thinking of a criticism that approaches poetry on the precise point where poetic language abandons fidelity to technical precision, where it becomes ungovernable.

Dance is a strange art to search for such ungovernability in bodies, given how docile and useful both dancers and audiences are trained to be. The paradox of constraint leading to creative breakthrough applies here. As we were conducted across three floors, occasionally knocked around like billiards by bodies moving at imperious speeds, and made witness to dancers pressing ear to canvas, I could not help but feel a small portion of that freedom could be mine.

Wandering, in other words, is a work that risks virtuosity. This is a scary term for an art form that has struggled mightily to let go of the master-muse hierarchy of “making dances on bodies.” This did not feel like that, is all I can say. This felt closer to the ethos of “sharing the dance” that was developed by my dance teacher, the late, missed Cynthia Novack.

In the highest moments the dancers answered the paintings directly — taking gestures from the canvases and throwing gestures back. The vibrant primary color costumes by MX Oops enhanced their passage in and out of the wandering crowd as they did so. And the hypnotic split score by Hahn Rowe and Will Johnson both grounded us and took us higher, all the way up to a closing moment built around Nina Simone’s immortal I Wish What I Knew What It Felt Like to be Free.

A friend found the closing return to musical blackness too convenient, but I had to demur. By the time I made it to the third floor I needed (black) music with every fibre of my being. Or maybe I am just pretty much always ready for a dithyramb, wherever, whenever. I was twitching at every hint of a beat, even though I knew of course this was not the sort of setting that would turn into group dancing. The possibility that it might combined with the certainty it could not was where promise hidden and that use of the high priestess of soul was held.

Jonathan González’s magic hour–golden time, currently at the Whitney Museum as part of the Biennial, is asking a related question from a different angle. Five performers activate the museum’s outdoor terraces over three hours, borrowing scenery to slowly decompose bodies into figures in the portion I got to see. I want to go back to magic hour — golden time to think more about dance wandering across art spaces now. And I want to ask: this freedom Baldwin found alone in the writer’s room; does the dancer find it in the gap between what the room permits and what the body remembers it can do?

Wandering runs through this weekend — Wednesday through Saturday, May 20–23, 5:30 and 7 pm.