R A N D O M   W R I T I N G    

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July 2, 2022

Dear ...,

Is it better, respectful, anti-boring, as we age, not to talk about physical degeneration? Sometimes I think so and act accordingly. Other times I've noticed disappointment, even irkiness, when negative bodily status is revealed later than sooner. For you close ones, I here summarize what's up with my corpus.

NYU Langone (Long Gone?) Hospital saved me from a serious bout of Sepsis. (I should credit my upstairs neighbor...G was in Arlington...who said, with as much suggestive "are you stupid" irony as any voice mustered, when she heard how I was feeling, "Douglas! 911!" She and our super W called for one and helped me into the ambulance.) I'd had similar "events" previously, not quite as dire, never finding the cause, and never imagining I needed emergency care. For my five days in the ICU they needled me up with antibiotics. They had to find the exact right one to kill off the specific bacterium that had grown in my bladder because, the prostate, normal with aging, enlarging and thus impeding the urethra, the urine was abiding there long enough for trouble, giving the bacterium cover, like Afghanistan not minding live-in terrorists.

The wonderful hospital folks (the place is considered the best in NYC; to boot, my 15th floor room had an oblique view of the East River...not that I was looking much), claimed to have eradicated the devils, or said at least they would all be goners after my short regimen of pills once home. But Dr. S, the urologist I saw as follow up, found some holdover meanies, so that the possibility of another out-of-the-blue (indeed, so unexpected!...I was feeling just fine that day when my whole body suddenly erupted in vibratory, excretory, feverish panic; innocent I was, like a young girl at the bazaar in Kabul, blown up by a suicide bomber standing calmly next to her ), as I say, the possibility of another crisis is not out of the question. In order to decrease the likelihood of something so little desired, Dr. S has put me on Tamsulosin.  It works. The prostate softens, flow increases, with any bacteria, like Taliban leaving Afghanistan because they're told there's a country to go to next door where the women already on their own volition dress all dark and don't mind not being educated. Behold, I'm on my first till-my-dying-day drug!

Amazingly, having left the hospital on a Tuesday, I danced in a week of shows here in the loft beginning the following Monday. A strange pain in upper left arm, however, persisted, five blurred days lying on my back not slack in producing a few physical glitches to match mind's reconsideration of the value of being alive. So, off to S, the PT man at Thrive (is that a good name for such a place? not easy to say). He has not only fixed the arm's whatever it was, but is convinced he will be able to teach my being to stand up straight. Better late than never?

Now, would I have dared to commandeer your readerly attention without a razzmatazz denouement? No. So, here it is---I have Covid. (It feels like: "Join the crowd!") Careful, yes, very careful, I have been. Double- vaxed. double-boosted, mask, mask, mask, no group events. etc. Many others say, as do I, "I have no idea how I got it." I'm in the third day. Like a bad cold/flu. Throat, sinuses, headache, body ache, fatigue, mind fog, mind noise. A giant overall lousy, so that the desire to do anything just doesn't arise. But already maybe a little coming out of it? at least enough to want to communicate with you all. And I'm taking a new medicine that is supposed to help. My regular doctor, C, said, "I took it when I had Covid and I think it helped." Another, more holistic doc I rely on, K, the one who gives me the un-approved peptides that help with my skin eruptions, is giving me more supplements to take. (He was unable not to say about the Paxlovid that C prescribed, "Yeah, doctors like to give you the drugs they themselves take,"---doctors competing like militarized Afghani tribes?) K went, without me, on a meditation rampage with his clients when the pandemic hit, saying he didn't trust the vaccines, etc. But now he too is suggesting I take a real drug, an antifungal, the possible side effects of which are scary. I'm deciding. I agree with you, S, that it's best to stay if possible away from even supposedly helpful drugs. We'll see if my new mix keeps quality of life in the positive zone.

I hope this recitation calms any worry that might have arisen from lack of data. Of course there's the matter of "Long Haul Covid," some nasty examples out there, even from "only" Omicron. The expression makes me think of truck drivers, as if I might turn into one. And then mind has its own progression of disintegration. My toe is in the water: I can no longer remember the names of any actors except Liza Minnelli and Humphrey Bogart. And this morning I put the heaping tablespoon of powdered hot chocolate mix, instead of into the saucepan with the Almond Milk, where it belonged, into the nearby bowl of waffle mix. G laughed---non-derisively!---and delicately removed it.

I used to wonder why elderly folks had so many photos on the mantle. Now I know. A lot of life lived, the system slowing unhappily, the past, memories of it, references to it, become a haven. You go there, lift your spirits. When able to concentrate on a meaningful task, so I find, the need for temporal escape lessens. Sometimes, though, just letting the present be, new angles do appear. Hear, hear! May ongoing discomfort, and insidious nervousness about future pain and sudden death not overwhelm the unique perspectives old age occasionally offers.

Love,

Douglas

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June 30, 2022

By Anne Waldman

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June 29, 2022

I Remember

For Susan

With Love

From Douglas

PAGE MILL

I remember Mom grabbing us up one at a time from the lawn and rushing us into the house. Then she ran back out with a hoe to kill the rattlesnake.

I remember the two of us on the slope below the artichoke plants crushing tall green grass to make a flat circle to lie there in a nest of peaceful silence.

I remember that neither of us liked having to traipse down to the barn early in the morning to feed the horses.

I remember a thin layer of ice on the horses' watering trough, the surface glittering in the morning sunlight. Sometimes I'd touch the glass-like expanse delicately, breaking it into odd-shaped pieces, like countries on a map.

I remember Dad, on his way to the barn, before he could see them, with his beautiful singing voice, calling to the horses. I could never figure out whether the sounds were words or just sounds. Something like, "Calm-buoy, calm-buoy." In twos, like that, repeated many times, as he strode down the hill.

I remember sharing a bedroom with you and our being allowed to paint and draw on the walls. Once, jumping up and down on my bed to show off, I fell and cracked my head open.

I remember you and Mom and I dressed up fancy to go somewhere and even before we left the house I pooped in my pants. I was wearing a blue sailor outfit with a flap on the back.

I remember going to Dad's basement shop to get a screwdriver. Back upstairs, sitting on the floor near the big oaken front door, I methodically altered the linear symmetry of some of the louvers of a heating vent. Mom and Dad appeared but did not react. When you and Tibby and Penny and I visited the house a while ago---seventy years later, and at least sixty since Dad sold the place---the louvers were still bent.

I remember the two of us on our four-wheel roller skates careening around the stout pillars of the murky garage, then shooting out into the driveway's bright sunlight.

I remember Queenie, our black and white outdoor-only Spaniel, a quiet, positive presence.

I remember those two-thousand acres, back to back with our sixteen, of protected Stanford land, rolling hills, steep ravines, green in winter, brown in summer, fences with limp barbwire gates that Dad called "Portaghee gaps."

I remember you and I becoming equally unhinged when once in a while a good-size tarantula, black, with eight long, obtuse-angled hairy legs and a spot of crimson on its center-of- body head, would appear over the half-round lip of the asphalt driveway. Despite its moving slowly and awkwardly, with no chance of catching us, we would run into the house hysterical. If home, Dad would laugh and say, "They're not very poisonous, the bite won't kill you." He'd take a shovel and smash it.

I remember liking standing next to Dad at his extra-high, built- in dresser. Then he'd brush my hair way too hard.

I remember being moved from our room (it became yours) to the dark hole-in-the-wall next to the garage in the basement. Had they been planning on a live-in caretaker? Once I dreamt that I couldn't get out the door to go pee. When I woke I was standing barefoot on the moist soil of the garden outside my window. It was the middle of the night. The window had been cranked open, and the ripped screen had a hole in it big enough for me to have passed through.

I remember our MD parents, Mom becoming warmer, even caring, when we were sick, Dad treating us with a cold, "professional" air.

I remember a foggy summer night when geese on migration northward flew low over the house honking. Dad roused me and we walked in the dark with our shotguns the mile or so out onto the Stanford property to Felt Lake. As the rising sun warmed the mist away, there they were, twenty or so, along the shore, drinking, resting. I knew from hunting quail and pheasant with Dad that he would never shoot a grounded bird. Our overlook being far away, if we moved closer they would fly up well out of range. I wasn't sure Dad cared to disturb them anyway. Perhaps it was enough for him to be on the hunt with me in the early morning air. The sky eventually cleared to all blue. The day's doings were calling. Leaving the geese to their migratory preoccupations, we walked home in silence, the guns cradled across the crooks of our arms.

I remember one morning to maximal mutual fright seeing Mom (the bathroom door opened and there she was) full-frontal naked. At half his stature, taking showers with Dad, I wasn't sure: was that water running off his penis, or was he peeing?

I remember while trying out my new bow and arrow down by the big turn of our private road that you went to pee in the grass and got stung on the butt by wasps. I ran on your heels up the drive at your world-record speed, followed you into the house and down the long zigzag blue-tile hallway, yelling, "I didn't shoot her, I didn't shoot her."

I remember Dad standing at the head of the handsome dining room table preparing to carve meat. His arms extended in front of him, the long knife in his right hand, the equally long whetstone in his left, with great speed, moving both arms at once, sliding the knife and the sharpener against each other, over-under-over-under-over-under, saying loudly in rhythm with the action, "Susie-Dougie-Susie-Dougie-Susie- Dougie."

I remember you and I would play sometimes with too much abandon and get tangled up in gooey worm-threads hanging from the branches of the lawn's grand oak tree.

I remember Mom's beautiful leather saddle, different in color and shape from all the others, sitting unused in the tack room.

I remember Dad insisting that I watch him "train" a horse. I sided with the animal and lost my love for him. Years later I dreamt that he and I hugged. As we did so, all the leaves of a nearby tree fell off.

I remember liking hearing anyone say the name of the high ridge to our west: "Loma Prieta." It was like the back of a whale. Some days it was gray, others blue, depending on the light. When there was fog, it wasn't there.

I remember liking Mom and Dad's bedroom. Because it was one end of the serpentine house, with no rooms beyond it, on entering I'd get a feeling of having arrived somewhere. The windows on three sides, facing east, south and west, offered great views, and kept the out-of-doors close. Mom's desk, a thick piece of blond wood set in the corner where the south and west windows met, looked like an ideal place to concentrate. Once I found Mom and Dad sitting next to each other on the room's built-in couch. They were filing their nails. Their responsibilities kept them almost always separately busy. But in this moment they were calmly enjoying each other's company.

I remember red buckets full of sand at various spots just outside the house. Years later I asked Mom about them. She said they were the recommended defense against the threat of bombing by the Japanese. When the war was over the buckets stayed where they were.

I remember the names of some of the horses who entered and left our lives: Surprise. Cinnamon. Ballard. Midnight. Pepper.

I remember, because no one lived nearby, and because you and I were often at odds, spending hours at a time by myself. I would either vigorously investigate the complicated terrain outside the house, or diligently invent physically challenging games. I also enacted imaginary adventures. There was a cluster of buckeye trees on a nearby ridge. High up in any one of them, I commanded a vast territory.

I remember our ways of expressing our reaction to being too- little loved. I wet the bed. You got fat. When Lillian arrived to be our nanny, she told Mom and Dad to ignore my "problem." It worked. I stopped. I wonder if she gave them advice about your ballooning.

I remember on my desk in my basement room placing in a certain configuration my spectacular collection of knives, and you, knowing that my goat was easily got, would misalign one of them---just a little.

I remember all of us swimming at the Ramsey's pool. Didn't they have four daughters? When it was time to leave, instead of using the changing room, Dad would step aside, turn his back, and take off his suit in plain sight.

I remember Dad being impatient with my moodiness. Drawing on his obscure-of-origin inventory of maxims he'd say, "Don't be a dog in the manger."

I remember that Dad liked your waking early and being ready for action. You also got credit for going to sleep, as he put it,
"as soon as your head hit the pillow."

I remember one Christmas Dad gave each of us a pair of boxing gloves.

I remember that Dad, who insisted he never read anything but medical journals, who alleged having no interest in movies or novels (because, as an obstetrician, he "had enough drama" in his life), and who never spoke to Mom about her musical interests, nor accompanied her to concerts, and so on, one day out of the blue said to me, "Someday you'll grow up and read The Magic Mountain."

I remember Mom stopping the car and getting out halfway up our long private dirt road to admire the springtime appearance of a lone Mariposa Lily.

I remember you were a better skier than I, faster and more balanced, so that we went neither up the lifts nor down the slopes together.

I remember Dad built an impressively large, beautifully constructed, wonderfully complicated swing set up on the hill next to the water tank, and neither of us ever used it.

I remember Dad also making a clever breakfast table with a plywood X as support so that we were unable to kick each other as we ate. Above the table, when unobserved, our more- angry-than-fun food fights continued.

I remember the daily carpooling to get us to and from Peninsula School. Mornings, the four Storey kids would spill out of their house holding half-eaten pieces of cinnamon toast. Of the various drivers, I recall best Gertie Williams. As she talked, and she talked continuously, her hands, one at a time, usually alternating, but not always, rose up from, and then went back down on, the steering wheel. Despite my young age, I noted that her sentences and her gestures were rhythmically out of sync.

I remember every day at Peninsula School you and I pretending we didn't know each other.

I remember sitting to the left of you in the back seat of Mom's brown Pontiac sedan for the long drive up to The Ranch. After crossing the hot valley (no air conditioning), as we twisted up snaky Priest Grade (the straighter, shorter Moccasin Grade being too steep for the car), one or both of us would begin to feel nauseous. Despite our entreaties, Mom and Dad wouldn't stop, probably for fear of the engine's overheating (which often it did). One way or the other, we'd throw up on the floor of the car.

I remember that on mornings when Dad had not left for work before we were up, we would assemble at the front door to see him off. As part of this ritual, he and Mom exchanged a light kiss. After some years, we still gathered, but they didn't kiss.

I remember sitting shivering next to Mom on the sand at Stinson Beach playing with my bucket and shovel while you and Dad swam out from shore and dove head first through high-curling Pacific breakers.

I remember in fits of self-pity going to sit alone under the apricot tree that grew on the ocean side of the Stinson Beach cabin.

I remember going across the small porch to the cabin's outhouse. Finishing, I caught my penis in the zipper. I shrieked. Aunt Eva came running yelling "Dougie, Dougie, what's wrong?" Before she could get to the door, I opened it and convincingly pretended to be fine.

I remember that the long steep slope up from Stinson Beach, with its many small cabins, was every night, and half the morning, enveloped in fog. All the dense, ubiquitous foliage of the myriad species of plants and flowers became thoroughly wet. Nearly always on the same daily schedule, as the sun freshened and cleared the air, millions of droplets on millions of leaves glistened.

I remember Mom and Dad telling us---after the fact---that they had sold the cabin at Stinson Beach. I said, "What about the model sailing ship that was on the window ledge?"

I remember one day Dad driving you and me home in Mom's Pontiac. Instead of turning left onto the flat driveway in front of the garage, he went straight up the steep pitch to park near the front door. He was wearing an especially fancy suit, dark blue with pinstripes. We got out of the car and were standing on the flagstones in front of the big oaken door when we heard a sound and turned around. Creepily, the sedan had begun slowly to move on its own backward down the slope. Without hesitation Dad ran toward the car. Moving alongside it with quick sideways steps, he opened the driver- side door and spun the steering wheel clockwise. The action turned the car ninety degrees and slowed it by sending it backward up a different part of the driveway. As the car swerved, the open door hit him and threw him onto the asphalt. Quickly back on his feet, he took control of the vehicle. The left knee of his elegant suit was ripped. Blood was flowing. He seemed calm, evincing if anything a hint of pride at having heroically prevented damage to the car.

I remember parking Dad's new Lincoln convertible at the same front-door spot. This was years later when he was allowing me, despite my barely being able to see over the dashboard, to drive up our private road. As with Mom's Pontiac, the three of us stood on the flagstones, heard a sound and turned around. The moment was once again dreamlike, but now rolling backward down the incline was a much more luxurious vehicle. This time no one moved. We watched in wonderment as the beautiful machine picked up speed. Arriving at a good clip where the asphalt levels off, its back wheels encountered the lip of the driveway. The hard bump lifted the car off the ground for a second. Then, spilling over the edge, it reared up vertically and came to rest, its nose in the air, wedged between the precipitous drop-off from the driveway and a sturdy tree. Without the tree the expensive beauty would have ended up fifty yards below, in the creek, thoroughly mangled. The moment was obviously comical, and, especially for me, potentially deadly serious. But to my surprise, the expected recrimination from Dad was not forthcoming. Did he chalk the mishap up to an inevitable result of his having chosen to allow me to learn by doing? Did his having years before made the same mistake with Mom's Pontiac prompt restraint?

I remember Mom watching for, and naming, birds from the porch at Alta. The rare Lawrence's Goldfinch particularly excited her. She liked to share her interests. She'd rouse us in the middle of the night to observe the constellations. We had to get out from under the tall Ponderosas. This meant walking down to the tennis court, or going out in a boat on the lake. She'd even drive us up to that reservoir where the sky was so vast we could see Scorpio on the southern horizon. Dad wasn't around much. He worked all year. Also, he didn't care for the place. He'd say, "There's nothing to do here." He preferred The Ranch, where it was forever impossible to catch up on what needed fixing.

I remember later in life seeing an early photo of the four of us and wondering whether Mom and Dad loved each other. They're wearing rustic clothing. We know that before we were born they went on pack trips in the mountains. Was Mom just tagging along, wishing she were home listening to Bach? Once she told you and me, with a hint of secret pleasure, how at one of their campsites the washcloth she'd hung out at dusk was the next morning frozen stiff. How does this dainty aesthetic detail compare with Dad's unspoken but obviously profound rapport with the High Sierra's austere domain, his determination whenever possible to place his robust body midst its granite slopes, spindly pines, snow-melt lakes and azure skies?

I remember that we were rarely allowed to enter on our own the elegantly appointed living room. One night when Aunt Eva was babysitting us, she decided against protocol to give us our bedtime reading in there on the big couch. Mid-story, you projectile vomited way out over and onto the exquisite coffee table in front of us. Eva could handle almost anything with equanimity. But this time she said, impatiently, "Oh Susan, why didn't you warn me?"

I remember vying with you to be the one to sit in the front seat when on occasion Dad drove us home late at night to the hilltop house. On arrival, the one in the front seat was the one he'd most likely carry up to bed. The portage was necessarily long: out of the car, through the basement (this would be before my banishment to the dungeon room), up the stairs, more than halfway down the long winding blue-tile hallway, into the bedroom and onto the bed. To up the chances of being the beneficiary of this rare embrace, I became accomplished at pretending during the drive to fall asleep.

I remember we came home from school one day and couldn't find Kittycat. Mom was mum at first. Then she said, "Dad shot her." We were grief-stricken but remained silent. (Was this the moment that without knowing it I decided no longer to hunt with Dad?) Mom conjectured that he had buried her down by the barn. We found a spot of loose dirt in what had once been the vegetable garden, made a small cross of twigs, and pushed it into the ground. Occasionally we went there to sit by the cross in silence.

I remember when Mom and Dad announced their dissolution. You and I were playing just inside the living room near the sound equipment. Solemnly they entered through the wide rectangular archway, passed us, and turned to face us. They were about eight feet away, standing, but leaning back lightly against the back of the couch. They were side by side, with a bit more space between them than was necessary. I'd never seen them so unsure of themselves, and so charged with feeling. I knew right away that something was wrong. Finally Dad said, "Your mother and I are going to separate." I had no idea what those words meant. I suspect you didn't either. But we both began to cry.

NOTES

These pages imitate a form invented by Joe Brainard in his I Remember (1975), a book that changed me. Till now I felt it should not be emulated. My humble thanks to him.

This June 2022 version is a revision of the original of April 2020. I'm grateful to Ethan Dunn, Janet Charleston and Sandra Gibson for proofreading and advice.

Edition of eight, numbered and signed.

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June 10, 2022

Hi A...,

I seem to be a dancer who does not conceptualize a great deal. Perhaps not ideal for your project? Here's a quick stab at addressing the four words you say you're working: presence - space - relation (or connection) - truth.

When I see the word presence, I wonder if that's what I sometimes call demeanor? Dancers throw off from their bodies vastly different feelings, even when moving in unison. Likewise people walking on the street. This is one of the great fascinations for me of being alive and of dancing, to experience the differences among us, differences visible even when the bodies are not talking, even when presented in stylized moving. The dancer doesn't attempt anything beyond setting about to accomplish the shapes, rhythms, and tempos given by the choreographer. The combination of the body she's born with, her training, and the attitude with which she approaches the task of realizing the phrases, makes for a trail of subtle emanations a sensitive dance eye is pleased to follow.

Space is what the dancer moves in. She interacts with it. She articulates it. She engages it. It's her partner. If she remains generous, out of the way of what she's doing, the space expands, drawing the viewer's eye wide, offering up the dancer as a participant in an expanding universe. The dancer trying to express more than just-doing-the-movement encourages the viewer to begin to wonder about her inner state, what she's thinking or feeling. What happens?  The space collapses around, and onto her. To respond adequately to the miracle of seeing an aeroplane fly, is it not best NOT to think about the people inside? Rather, if one cannot help but associate, one thinks about birds, the miracle of their (less polluting) soaring.

Relation / Connection
In radio interviews of artists often comes the question: What do you want the audience to take away from the experience of your work? The query assumes a lot: that an artist wants to communicate X, so makes a form that embodies X. But, embodied for whom? Does the artist think all viewers are the same, so that the message will affect them all equally? Is the purpose to teach? To please? To incite? Another possibility is: the artist ignores viewer expectation and begins to investigate the elements of the medium she's working in. Perhaps we shouldn't call this approach "communication." It is a simpler, less "personal" way of relating. It means putting out in the world an object, a book, a dance, that is just there, is not trying to "do" anything.  It's useless, it's not insisting, it's not aggressing. It's quietly waiting to be discovered.

Truth is a heavy word to be trying to lift this late at night. In these United States the term has over the last six years lost much of its potential value, becoming juxtaposed as the low-level opposite of a surfeit of political lying, intentional falsifying (in pursuit of power) that has spread like a virus through at least a third of the populace. A path to serious discussion of truth's, or Truth's, various depths is not currently in the cards. Still, a moment worthy of being called a coincidence occurred today. Grazia and I visited a gallery on one wall of which was painted a phrase by Matisse: “L’exactitude n’est pas la vérité." I think he's objecting to attempts by some painters at faithful representation of "reality." And I'm that way about literature; give me word play, please, at the expense of close rendering. But then some wit says, "A dance is made up of a million details." And it's true. Indeed, in my work I care a great deal about the precision of each action. I don't know if the "inspiration" for a given move derives from any sort of truth. But once the forms are in motion they become, for me and for the dancers, both in the moments we enact them, and in our lives outside the studio, an important sort of non-representational factuality...a deeper than mundane vérité.

That's all for now.

Best,
Douglas

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(The images referred to are at the end of the entry.)

January 24, 2022

Dear Friends,

A number of people have responded to Grazia's and my 2022 New Year's card by asking what it means. As with dance, doesn't analysis often guillotine feeling? Are not the people, things and fictions we encounter well served by allowing their wonderfully surprising demands, and the emotions they provoke, to bubble and rumble uncomfortably through our bodies? (Okay, sometimes thoughtful consideration deepens affect. You may for yourself answer this quandary in relation to the card after you've read what follows.) Luckily, for me, Fanny Logos, a woman of consistent attention to my work, has written a response to the card. She sent it to a mutual friend who broke the promise he had made to her not to send it on to me.  In lieu of diluting my own complicated rumblings by attempting to pick apart the intuitions that guided me, I relay Fanny's commentary.

Dear Marcus,

Thanks for writing. My take on Dunn's card differs from yours. Over the years, his annual offering, though often offbeat, and sometimes wry, has always followed smoothly the convention of upbeat celebration. Only in 2021 did he deviate. (See photo below.) The small bird alit midst circular arrays of razor wire I read as a statement of vulnerability, the vulnerability of feathered creatures for sure, but also, by extension, of all sentient beings. What conditions and attitudes we decide constitute threats to animals, to us, and to the earth that has so far sustained us, depends on what lenses we look at the world through.

The 2022 card takes an even bigger step away from buoyant jubilee. First of all, its four pages, unlike last year's single, double-sided one, lend it, not typical of Dunn's aesthetic, dance or otherwise, an air of insistence. And it's folded, generating, likewise anomalously, a hint of narrative. Let's take it page by page.

Page one. Two eroding pyramids say, I'd say: time passes, everything changes, nothing lasts. In fact, these are rather famous Egyptian structures, known to be necropoli, thus making them rather blatant as evocations of human (and stone) susceptibility to time. But is there perhaps more here? Do we want to push? “Mais, ou sont les neiges d’antan" is often quoted to refer to all kinds of lost pasts. But Villon had in mind specifically the fading of feminine beauty. Noticing the differing degree of ruin of the two pyramids, is it too much, given his lifelong struggle with female nurturance, to impute a reference, painfully personal, to the mastectomies of Dunn's mother, and of other women he knows? One way or another, we are not, here, by any stretch, entering an arena of holiday glee.

Page two. One might guess this painting, The Fall of the Rebel Angels, to be by Hieronymus Bosch. In fact it's by Peter Bruegel the Elder, and is said to have "reflected the political chaos in the Netherlands of that period." I think we can take it as an image of chaos in general, disorder instigated by the devils among us, the fallen angels inside us. The choice to reproduce the image in black and white instead of its original color compromises its striking beauty,* and continues the less than ebullient mood of page one. Having on that page been asked to acknowledge time's relentless ravaging, are we now not being told that bedlam is at hand, that the world is fully roiling by "virtue" of our own bad behavior? Where's the eggnog?

Page three. Unafraid of being demeaned by doggerel, Dunn has usually for his annual cards rhymed a word or two with the year at hand.** I'll bet he didn't know diddly about this character, but rather found him, Abezethibou, by the name's echo of "2022". (Let's not ignore the absolute fun of the choice of such a highly rhythmic word the mouth can't get enough of pronouncing!) But then the sense works, too, and continues the story begun with the painting. Abezethibou is "a demon and fallen angel described in the pseudepigrapha Testament of Solomon. He followed Beelzebub upon his fall from heaven." The question mark Dunn places below "Abezethibou in 2022" is asking, I infer: are we, like last year, because of humans' lack of  simple humility and existential gratitude, heading for big trouble again this year? The page itself being white (the only one of the four), wouldn't you say we are being shown implied purity, with resulting irony: words of ominous prognosis lying on a bed of innocence, potential, lost, or both?

Page four. Grazia and Douglas's pleasant, verbal, holiday greeting finally appears. Have we passed, then, from Inferno to Paradiso? Not exactly. Notably, the text is in black type (white would have been easier to read). And look where it's placed: on a wall. However beautiful the stones, it's a wall, and here again is that same shade of gray from pages one and two, a lovely shade, indeed, but by context suggestive of conveying its not infrequent association with fear or exhaustion. Another sip of the nog? Now we know that the phrase, "handwriting on the wall," is not cheery. "It comes from the Bible, (Daniel 5:5-31), in which a prophet interprets some mysterious writing that a disembodied hand has inscribed on the palace wall, telling King Belshazzar that he will be overthrown." What's going on here? In offering "Best Wishes for the New Year" in the form of an historical, ill-boding symbol, is Dunn simply fomenting for humor a discordant juxtaposition? Or is he sneaking in a more potent ambiguity? Namely: Either a) that the conventional greeting is meant to be undercut by this contradictory arrangement, thus continuing, at lower volume, the sense of the frighted imagery of the previous pages: imputation of human frailty, bad behavior, discord.  Or, alternately, b) that, looking closely at Daniel's prophecy, Dunn's page-four assemblage is pointing to the possibility that world leaders, the many who are becoming increasingly autocratic, will be, like King Belshazzar, thrown over. If the latter, is this a doubly ironic whiplash of optimism? That we have, as envoi, such a number of possible discrepancies to follow, or not, conforms, I'm happy and relieved to say, with the wry playfulness with which Dunn usually addresses the moment. I surely would not like to see him, after all these years, get dragged down into the weeds of sincere confrontational opinion.

I hope, Marcus, that my reading of the card dissuades you from your blander one. If not, we should talk. I anticipate your likely objecting to my introducing, for the last page, the possibility of political insinuendo, knowing, as we do, of the implicit (unadvertised) goal in Dunn's dancing, of preventing the topical to enter into and despoil the aesthetic. Why sideswipe the potential for individuals' unique responses to original form by overpainting it with the simplistic emotions attendant to social issues, is what I guess he must think. The pressure nowadays on artists to be party to "what's going on" is strong. The overseers of creators at this point seem ready to accuse formalists of right wing posturing, or at least to dismiss them as irrelevant. Of course it's fun to wonder what choreographers who have command of their craft might come up with by trying out alternative genres. But for Dunn to jump on the current band wagon at this late date in his working life would be, in my opinion, asking Delilah to cut his hair. In any case, Marcus, please, I admonish you, do not convey my ramblings to him. If he asks for my take, I'll respond. It seems more and more these days, though, that he prefers to be left alone.

Faithfully,

Fanny

*https://paintingandframe.com/buy/pieter_bruegel_the_elder_the_fall_of_the_rebel_angels_art_paint-62765.html

**Terpsichore / 2003 // spine / 2009 // Jan Steen / 2013

* * *

February 20, 2021

Elaine Summers and I lived in adjacent buildings. We had been friendly for many years. I had happily accepted her occasional invitations to participate in dance and film events having to do with her archive. Heading home one warm night, in the later years of Elaine’s long and marvelous life, I crossed Broadway at Spring to find her lying prone on the sidewalk. Had she just fallen on her face? A woman I didn’t know, oldish, but not ancient like Elaine, was standing over her, seemingly nonplussed, perhaps unsure what to do. She did not acknowledge my arrival. “Oh Elaine,” I ventured, bending down toward her, “are you all right?” The scene struck me as either deadly serious or highly comical. This woman was a performer. Was she pulling a leg? Was the other woman inert because enthralled by some shenanigan? But wait. I knew that by now even walking was difficult for Elaine; this cannot be an act. I worried that to move her might be inadvisable. I began to imagine an Ambulance, and a long night in an Emergency Room. “Shall I help you up?”, I asked. “Don’t touch me!”, with ardent fury she shrieked.  (There was a toughness, a profound autonomy in the tone of her screech, a toughness that betrayed the grit that underlay her always upbeat radiant friendliness; or, more accurately, her always upbeat radiant generous lovingness. It was impossible for me ever to be in her presence without feeling that I had been appreciating life far too little, and that I should work harder to emulate her unabashed, big-hearted joie de vivre.) Back to the scene on the street. Elbows first, she raises her arms like spider legs, places her hands flat on the concrete, and begins slowly to push herself up. This effort having raised her entire body a few inches off the sidewalk, she stops, holding the push-up pose for several seconds. Her sense of reality kicking in and overcoming her stubbornness, she then in a calmer, more familiar tone, and with no irony, says, “Now you may help me.” As I assist her to standing, I’m suppressing a giddiness rising within me. Giddy first because I’m witnessing, right here on my crazy mall-like New York City block, a classic example of the struggle between Mind and Matter; and second because the moment is turning out to be, not as I first thought, one or the other, but an event in equal measure serious and comical. Simultaneously, I’m tangentially aware that the woman who, when I arrived, had been standing over Elaine with a glazed gaze, is now wandering off. Despite my having taken control of the situation, I find this casual and wordless departure surprising. Who is she? What is their rapport? Where had they been? Supporting Elaine as much as she’ll let me, I walk her the twenty feet or so to her street door at 537 Broadway, and up to and into her loft. By the time we’re inside, she’s already laughing. By the time I’m entering my building next door at 541 Broadway, I’m re-registering how grateful I am to know this unique being.

Watch a video created by Douglas for Elaine's 96th Birthday Celebration Event HERE

* * *

October 2, 2020 - NYC

Dear Susan,

I've just finished reading A Choreographic Mind. What a gem! Thank you for writing it. And for sending it.

To my great pleasure, you walk gently, securely, happily, successfully, along that harder and harder to find tightrope: honesty. You fall into neither the abyss on its left, egotism, nor the abyss on its right, pretension. You manage delightful, factual self-interrogation that is eminently readable, serious, and playful---like Montaigne.

I happened during these same several weeks also to be reading Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard, another convincing first person voice of modesty and insight. He never sees The Leopard, and ends up confused about his quest, which is both external and internal. Your book, on the other hand, offers what feels like a thoroughly realized verbal corollary to your mute dancing.

Bravely, you even manage, in your erudite, deliciously unacademic, personal/ impersonal foray, to bring up dancing you don't care for. And instead of giving in to the temptation to demean shallow choreography, you offer such a good idea: to approach it by way of the uses it's put to. Were reviewers and critics to take this notion to heart, our reading them would indeed be less disturbing. To be witness to your eschewing irony and cattiness in favor of dexterously maintaining a steady beam of unabashed, thoughtful candor, has been a purifying experience.

One more note. I've been collecting quotes about the Self. As a result, because it describes so succinctly mind's strange ambiguity about what's inside and what's out, this passage on page 76 jumped out:

Through this play she is questioning what makes up her world. How to make sense of it, what the nature of the things around her are, what the functions, possibilities and limits of those things, and her own self, might be. This very intent and engaged investigation of our nature, and the nature of the world...

Thank you again. To have met you thus, out-of-the-blue, by way of your thoughts, has been bracing.

Best wishes,

Douglas

* * *

September 2020

Dear J,

Your painting the soundscape of Santa Fe has jiggled up a few auditory memories of my own. During those years at Princeton U, '60  to '64, a bell rang for the beginnings and endings of classes. You could hear it anywhere on campus. The sound was a little higher and thinner in pitch than I like, but its daily clanging added to the romantic sense that I was living and studying in a walled medieval town. At the time, the grounds of the university were clearly circumscribed, a large rectangle separated from Princeton the municipality. There was no traffic passing through, no non-academic life able to intrude. Plus, all the buildings were old. We might as well have been monks. I've been back. New buildings, some cheap-looking and some famous architect-designed-fancy-ass, have filled in spaces that used to give right proportion to architectural dispersion. It's hard to imagine the present atmosphere. The place is co-ed. They have the normal college problems, rape, etc. In any case, I'll bet the days there are no longer marked by chiming.

My better-loved bell tones are those I heard while working in France and Italy. Once in Barcelona we stayed in a hotel that had a large courtyard, articulated with huge urns, a good-size tree in each. This patio was the only quiet place for me to work out. Strangers did look from above quizzically out their windows at me. Over the years I had gradually grown less self-conscious when dancing in alien territory...but would they call the cops? Just what might they think I'm actually up to, so unfamiliar is dancing in this world? The tile surface, the urns, and the four surrounding walls, about six stories high, all were a deep red, a luxurious maroon. We were there a week, and I came to enjoy this enclosed world. Ah, but my point. Every day all day, the bells of three different nearby churches would sound the hour. Each offered a different pitch, and they were not temporally coordinated, making for quite a clanging. The deep resonance of this symphony would fill my exercising body with pleasure, encouraging me to continue.

In Paris, where I spent so much time in the '80s, I became infatuated with St. Sulpice, a large church just off St. Germain. Something about the square in front of it, the sculptures there, a lion or two (if I recall), the building's chunky facade, its macho towers, drew my sustained interest. And its bells: deep, with mind-opening follow-through. It's a double sound, comes along with a sort of downbeat, a lesser tone, going then right away into a longer stronger toll. I used to spend time there for the feelings the place and its peals stirred in me.

Let's ignore Taco Bell, but Hell's Bells let's not forget A Bell for Adano, Hershey's novel that I was force-fed in high school, setting me on a life path in favor of less contemporary fare. (Though I just read William's Stoner, to which I responded with sustained attention because of its narrative clarity, and because the lead character's life story might have been my own had not my wayward first wife's behavior driven me away from teaching and back to NYC where I fell under Merce's spell; and now I'm trying his Butcher's Crossing because I heard it serves as a cure for excessive romanticization of Nature, a condition to which I'm not immune.)

But the tale I really want to tell, though it does indeed relate to the partitioning of time by sound, is not about a bell at all. In 2000, Grazia and I had a six-week gig in Istanbul. For the first three we lived in an Italianate Villa on the Bosphorus. Two stories high, white with yellow trim, renovated, beautiful. As we were the only inhabitants, they heated only ours, a large room on the ground floor. The bathroom was down a frigid hall, and there was no hot water. I would run to it naked, bathe, run back, and dry off in the warming room. It was here that I had a remarkable reading experience. Having mentioned to Maggie Paley that I had read all the way through Eco's long The Name of the Rose without knowing what made me keep going, she said, Oh, then you'd like Sebald's The Emigrants. Based on her intuition, I'd brought it along. He takes you globally here and there, and then, unexpectedly, and so satisfyingly to me at that moment, he lands you in Istanbul. Or, more precisely, Constantinople. By now Grazia and I had been exposed to the all-day bumper to bumper traffic (I had to leave two hours early by bus, while the roads were still empty, in order to make it to my class each day; I would get there and sleep on the floor waiting for the students); the scary, irrational policing (they get paid almost nothing, so go around intimidating folks to provoke bribes), the parks full of debris, etc. So what could be more wonderful than Sebald's evocation of an earlier version of this metropolis. Instead of the present highway along the Bosphorus, he describes leisurely attendance at tea houses at water's edge. Small boats doing business (now huge tankers) plied the blue expanse between the two parts of the city. Walking up this street or that, you'd come to a fragrant garden, or an orchard, with birds singing, clear air. And so on. I'm lying there reading late at night and get to go to sleep my head spinning with visions of this urban paradise.

But I digress. Back to the sound-point. There we are at the Villa all by ourselves, except that there are caretakers. It's a family, extra dark skinned. Though, as I said, the rest of the ample villa is empty, they live in an unheated hut, almost like a tent, in the rear courtyard of the estate. Mother, father, two young kids. And a dog. Now this dog is huge, and has, all the way across the large courtyard from the family's hut, his own large dog house. He is always on a chain, a long one, but still.. and wears a metal collar that has spikes radiating out from it. We were warned to stay away from this creature, but I couldn't help myself, and managed, to the family's surprise, to cajole him into being petted on occasion without losing my hand. So he's there, and the other important fact is the presence of two mosques, nearby, on either side of the villa. Each morning two men would ascend to the top of their respective mosque's minaret, and, with full throated gusto, sing the fajr azan. Both dawn calls were beautiful to my ear, but like the multiple bells in Barcelona, they were not meant to be in unison, and were not. Still, their interweaving was not disastrously cacophonous. But wait. My friend the dog, whose name I cannot recall, could not, hearing these moaning morning prayers, resist voicing his own waking to the day. He'd set up a howl as loud and emphatic as the minaret singers, and this crazy trio was our unique daily alarm for more than a few days.

Love,
Douglas

* * *

September 6, 2020 - NYC

Dear Claude,

Your interest in Gondolages has stirred many good memories. As you requested, here below I respond to your wanting to know more about the piece.

I certainly was excited when Jean and Wilfride invited me to organize something for the three of us. We had met at the Paris Opera when I set Stravinsky's Pulcinella in 1980. Not only were they the perfect leads for that dance, they also welcomed me and supported my presence during the three months of work. It was only natural that Opera dancers would be suspicious of the entry into their realm of a young American modern dance choreographer whom they'd never heard of. Jean and Wilfride proved to be essential exceptions.

Equally agreeable was their invitation that, while conjuring something new, I reside in the studio across from their house. The immediate access, and the peaceful aura of L'ile de Migneaux, made it possible to concentrate full time on the dancing. The only problem, I add with a smile, was adjusting to their midday hospitality. The meal was always superb, always included radishes, and, of course, red wine. Sometimes I was a bit slow getting going in the afternoon.

Through Jean and Wilfride I met Uli Gassmann, the artist who would design our set and costumes. Uli is one of the most enthusiastic humans I've ever met. He presented many ideas to us, saying vehemently about each one, "It's only a idea! It's only a idea!" He seemed to be suggesting that we might choose among his offerings. But in fact he knew exactly what he wanted. For the set he came up with the unsymmetrical undulating wall of corrugated metal that I trust you have seen in the video. I never knew, and never asked, whether he understood that the part of the wall that bulged into upstage center made unavailable the "heart" of the space. But maybe it was not naivete, but mischievousness, that led him to imagine such a unique environment to frame our steps. Luckily, we had the huge stage at Centre Pompidou on which to cavort, so that losing upstage center was not in fact an impingement. You should know also that, though I just referred to that upstage center spot as the "heart" of the stage I consider all points in space to be of equal potency.

As for costumes, Uli seemed to understand the piece just by looking at the three of us, even before it was made. He allowed Jean and Wilfride to continue in their classical ways, dressing them simply and contrastingly, then garbed me as what, a comic foil? Was he responding to what we all knew, that the festival we were to be part of was called Drole de Danse? But my costume was so exaggerated that I took it not to be humorous, but ironic, or absurd. Did its oddity get in the way of seeing how beautiful it was? In any case, since I don't work thematically, the genre-less aspect of my steps probably prevented anyone reading the outfit (and the entire dance) one way or another. That's the way I like it: not satisfyingly familiar, but beautifully ambiguous.

Gondolages is a suite, the sections demarcated by pieces of music. There is no purpose in asking why. All my decisions, from a single step to the overall structure of a dance are back-brain intuitions of a kinetic and spatial sort. So, instead of trying to explain how things happened, I'll sketch a little history of my relation to sound and movement.

My mother played western classical music and claimed that I danced to Bach as a toddler. I have no memory of this sweet harbinger. We lived out of town. I had no playmates. I spent all my free time solo: roaming hills, climbing trees, befriending wild and domestic animals, and inventing physically challenging games. My "music" was the neighing of horses, chirps of birds, barks of dogs, mewing of cats.

In school, need for action led me to sports. I tried all of them, preferring the ones that called for deception, for faking out the opponent. At basketball and tennis I became rather proficient. Again, action without music.

My entry into dance was ballet (I was 20). I had no problem hearing and dancing to the tempos and rhythms of the standard training music. I sensed right way that there was leeway on either side of each beat, room for the body to enter into dialogue with the music. At this time, early '60s, I also went to see many works by George Balanchine. I appreciated greatly the subtlety and clarity of his joining various kinds of music to clear and interesting kinetic invention. Still, there was something obvious and over-determined about these marriages that left me unsatisfied.

When in 1968 I became entranced with the work of Merce Cunningham, and he invited me into his company, the lack of rhythmically supporting music connected immediately with my silent childhood ramblings and athletic pursuits. I felt freer as a mover addressing the tempos and rhythms of the steps themselves. I enjoyed five years dancing next to Merce in this way.

When I began to make work on my own in 1971, it did not occur to me to use conventional music. I proceeded in silence, or, when collaborating with live electronic musicians, danced, in the Cage/Cunningham mode, in parallel with the non-metrical sounds.

By 1987, however, I found myself with no funds to continue to pay for live music. Remembering my uneasiness about Balanchine's pieces, I asked myself a question that had till then not occurred to me to pose: given my distaste for the dances-to-music I've seen, might I be able to make a version that I DO like. I realized right away that I knew a lot of music, so could start immediately feeling my way toward what to use. With delight, I quickly found numerous ways to avoid what I saw as the heaviness of conventional dance/music mergers. One way was to be extra-literal, physically to hit every beat, setting up a sort of joust with the score. Another was to address not the rhythm so much as the atmosphere evoked by the composition. Another was to have the movement acknowledge the beats, but dare to play fast and loose with them. And on the larger, structural level, I found that using many short pieces of music helped prevent a dance from becoming beholden to (having to fill up) the eventual completion of an extended composition.

By the time I traveled to L'ile de Migneaux, I had made one dance in this for me new mode. I don't recall whether I brought music with me. I think so. It might also be the case that Jean and Wilfride had tapes (it was the era of the cassette) at the studio, from which I made choices. The basis of what to use was, again, intuitive. Given the result, I must have been fixated on variety. I had to like the piece on a basic level, and be able to "see" dancing in it or alongside it. Because I made early the decision to set a section for each of the permutations of us three dancers (solo for each, three duets, a trio or two), and wanted each to reflect a different "feeling," the number of pieces was not in question, likewise that they be contrasting.

Which brings us to Gondolages itself. From here on I try to parse how the steps and the music relate. I do so not from what I knew then, because I didn't "know", but from looking at the piece now. No doubt you are able to see these relationships as well as I. But because I am, as a result of the pandemic, unable to work with my company dancers, it is interesting for me to take time to try to see into what those long ago circumstances engendered. I go in order of the dance.

Wilfride and Jean Duo

I guess I lied above. As is the case with much of western classical music after 1850, I don't really like this "symphony" by Richard Strauss. But here it functions as atmosphere (although there are a few points of recognizable merging, as when Jean, turning while carrying Wilfride stage left to right, sets her delicately on her feet (at 3.57) as the music arrives at a comparably sensitive juncture). Does Strauss's evocation of mountains, of thin cold air, provide a mildly ironic high-scape in which to see an American modern choreographer's version of a European duet? You know those endless kitschy duos by Bejart and others? My pairing looks to me now like an attempt to purge those muddles, those crude entanglings that come about when the choice to show rapid-fire emotional shifts takes precedence over kinetic continuity. My clear-as-mountain-air version uses some of the same kinds of relating, but spreads them out and does away with the typical overlay of emotive urgency. Clearly, also, I was eager to make use of the balletic virtuosity of these elegant dancers. I would not be asking my company dancers in New York City to try those two difficult and rather classically familiar big lifts. Here they show off the dancers' strength and, because such extravagant moves are few in the section, ironically acknowledge the bombastic element of the music. Musical mountains? Really? Then too, the severity of the duo sets up the abrupt entrance of the highly contrasting third character. Into crisp, high-mountain air, falls a figure from an unknown land. Back to the beginning: not fifteen seconds into watching the duet, I laughed. I wasn't, in 1988, consciously intending to make anything funny. But the juxtaposition of the grandiose music, the restraint of the dancing, the enigmatic metal wall, the familiar yet odd use of a mixed vocabulary, all add up even now as a hit on my funny bone. I notice, too, that moment at 3.30 when Wilfride drops out of stretched elegance and walks around Jean as if on holiday. As if to say, We don't have to be moving exaggeratedly, except that we love to do so.

Jean Solo

In contrast to the first section, I see that in the solo for Jean I play close attention to the music. Some big stretchy arch-arounds match some of Pavarotti's arcing phrases. And the running/prancing near the end which imitates the singer's vibrato (an idea the Jean found amusing, as I recall), is also on the literal side. But other places I begin a phrase tied to the musical rhythm, then immediately vary the relationship, as in the two backward double hops at 7.40, and the two paddle turns at 8.24. In both moments the synchronicity of the first move gives way, at its immediate repeat, to syncopation. Like everyone else, I find this aria beautiful. But it is so well known as to be a cliche. And it is, to my ear, also bombastic. So to choose to dance to it comes close to being a joke. But rather than making fun of such excess, I go with it. Instead of making fun of something silly, I meet it half way, so that a mellow irony emerges. And the steps show a sort of wry respect, demanding of the dancer that he take on the obviously impossible task of aspiring to the heroism of the boldness of voice, and of what it is singing about. Thus the latter part of the section is full of difficult jumps and turns, the only means non-acted dancing has of suggesting valiance.   

Wilfride Solo

Now we arrive at a piece of music I genuinely love, and when I watch Wilfride dance to it, I feel the simplicity and sincerity (the lack of irony) that the song provokes in me. The staunchness and brusque attacks of the solo for Jean here give way to sinuosity and lyrical flow, and the initiations of the hips contribute to this undulatory current. You can see that at 11.41 I must have felt that I'd gone on long enough emulating the score. From 11.41 to 11.50, suddenly there's a phrase that rushes ahead of the music, ignores it, fills a few bars with twice as many moves as there are beats. The song, if I read it correctly, says, unabashedly contradictorily, that the singer is both bereft and relieved---at the same time. So it's appropriate that Wilfride just keeps going, smoothly (except for the brief flurry, a momentary waking from a dream?), as if meditating on, internalizing, and rising above, the heart's passionate incongruities.

Douglas Solo

An interesting feature of this next music is its uneven rhythms. They seem to come right of the use of a bow. Now drawing the horsehair long, now using it to beat on the viol's strings on even, successive notes...it's like watching a cat constantly changing its intentions during play: now she jumps, now she runs, now she stops suddenly to lick her paw. Following kinetically these sonic meanderings ends up delivering variety without having to contradict the music. The light elegance of the score, and the delicacy of the dance, are both at odds with the cumbersome costume. Voila, no danger of too much conventional unity.

Trio 1

If there is any narrative aspect to Gondolages, this next section is where the characters slide toward getting to know each other. There is the moment at 16.57 when they slow down, go to the floor, then get up seemingly troubled, perhaps in doubt about whether togetherness is a good thing. But mostly they frolic, trying out the contrast in feeling between individual and collective action. The looseness of both vocabulary and use of space, in contrast with previous sections, hints at their willingness to let go of being first and foremost who they are, and to consider the value of interrelatedness.

Wilfride and Douglas Duo

Now that these folks are better acquainted, it is possible for one of the "normal" ones to dance with the oddball. I'm surprised at my saying that, because I don't recall any such conscious intent for narrative progression as I made Gondolages. Wilfride and I have a bumpy first part, confused about how to interact. We start out several times on the same path but cannot sustain the journey, breaking off into minor spats. It seems I took this first music as a turbulent container within which we dance out our agitation. But there is some connecting with the phrasing of the music, the repeats, and arriving still on phrase endings. Then, as if to say, enough with this cavil, let's enjoy knowing each other, let's leave acting behind, we both luxuriate in the lyricism of the second music, matching it closely. The fast tempo of the waltz allows dancing to the phrase, to the measure, or to the three quick beats of the measure. I see I threw in some syncopation, too, and was playful when the music slowed, as when we turn around each other at 22.28. Here again I have to admit that I did not stick with my preference of western classical music up to 1850. Schumann in general is not my cup of tea. But in fact I really like these bits by him. And they perfectly fit my purpose, however unconsciously the choices were made.

Jean & Douglas Duo > Trio

Now here's some music I truly dislike. But, again, for the sake of variety, and to introduce an ironic macho feel, it fills the bill. The voice of the song is a male singing to a female, yet I allow Jean and me to dance together. The ambiguity of the section is intense. I get nervous watching it even now. Who is "with" whom? When Jean and I dance together there is a sense of cohesion. But then he keeps going back to Wilfride, and I dance alone as if both free and disappointed. Once Wifride joins us, tensions subside. This is the most extreme case of the music being background, the dancing having no rhythmic relation to it. The song serves as a third party, helping to create the clash of elements. The addition of the foreground string of lights was a way to alter the set, but also to give Jean and me a non-dance something to do, a bit of stereotypically male work.

Trio

The last section sees the three of us balanced in our relating, able to dance both together and separately with pleasure. There is sweetness pulsing between us and the music. We dance sometimes freely within it, and sometimes more closely on it, never contradicting it. And my alien character has been integrated. We have become acceptable to one another. At the same time, there is a tone of fatality in this score by Granados. Any humor and absurdity to this point are undercut. We can dance, but we cannot control life.  

The rather odd ending of the dance was functional. The constructing and taking down of the metal wall took quite a while. In order not to have too long a break between my piece and the other piece on the program, we decided to begin with mine, the wall having been put up pre-show, and then to have the stage hands begin to take the wall down, loudly, bang bang on the metal, as the dance was ending. This rude breaking of the moods of Gondolages was to my liking. It reminds me of how Balinese gamelan players, having made music for hours, get up and walk away as if the rapturous sounds they had produced were no more special than any other part of their daily doings.

Being not sure what you have available as visual record, I'm sending along links to two Vimeos. The first is the one I used to indicate (numerical time score) in my letter when certain things happened. The second is a Vimeo of a solo work of mine that includes some of the bits from Gondolages. 

I hope these comments fit what you have in mind, and again I thank you for your interest..

Best to you for all you do,

Douglas

Gondolages video HERE

The Myth of Modern Dance video HERE

* * *

June 2020

Dear Jennifer,

Here, for the Cunningham Technique Project, as you requested (though less on point than perhaps you're gonna like) are some impressions on taking class with Merce Cunningham, 1968 to '73. To help reimagine this long ago experience, I have written in the present tense. I do not mean to suggest, in doing so, that my descriptions apply to any other than those six years. I send two versions, one taking off from your format, with just headings, the second (likely more than you were fishing for) filling in the categories. I have also attached a text I wrote the year Merce died. If you're in a hurry, the last four paragraphs are those that refer to his Technique Class.

But first, a comment.

One hopes that an attempt to define the primary elements of Merce's Technique will provide valuable information for future dancers. I think it fair to say, however, that such reification could well end up distorting, by omission, what his class work class meant to me, and what those dancing near him at that time meant to him. A salient feature as he trained us was a vibrant sense that anything could happen, that the body was capable of an infinite variety of stylized expression, and that we were engaged, under his hypnotic guidance, not in a project of narrowing and consolidating, but in a daring adventure of exploring new worlds of kinetic possibilities. And although he would never say so directly to me or to others working with him, he was keenly interested in us as people. To be in his Company, each dancer had to demonstrate prowess for intricate stylized movement. But the disparate physical and emotional attributes among the dancers were just as much a source for his inventions as was his interest in choreographic risk-taking. Through his observation of each person's uniqueness, the daily classes offering him plenty of time to take us in, we became the differently colored tesserae of his mosaics, the non-uniform, sensuous texture of his dances.

Version I: Headings only

Formality

Restraint

Focus on the Present Moment

Centeredness

Muscle

Equality of the Body

Equality of Space

Equality of Movement

Equality of Dancers

[Chance]

[Individualism]

Version II: With filler

Formality

The class has implicit rules of decorum: no talking, no outward emotion. You watch and repeat. The dancing is approached as an experience in itself, not about something else, not a thought of mind, not a metaphor, but rather, as an activity that needs no justification, no outer reference. This atmosphere of seriousness and separate-world wholeness, of dancing-itself-no-matter-what, is not explained, but conveyed solely by Merce's attitude as he demonstrates moves.

Restraint

The temper of the class is classical, a matter of passion restrained, of feeling wrung into stylized movement. The work tends to attract middle class kids (like me) who have not found a way in society to live out unconscious energies. The rigor and complexity of the dancing offers a safe playground in which to make use of repressed and suppressed urges without having to deal with their content. One day, during an over-long summer residency in Berkeley, Merce, mid-class, touches with one finger his tummy just below the navel and declares, "Isadora says dancing comes from here, but we know what she meant."

Focus on the Present Moment

Because Merce shows each exercise, and because the warmup exercises and the phrases vary each day, you have to watch. Your thoughts and feeling are not impinged upon, your inner life left to its own wanderings, if any. But to succeed in the class you have to pay attention to what is going on in the room moment to moment. There is nary a second of relaxing from watching and doing, especially as Merce confines his speaking exclusively to counting: no explaining the movement; no commentary to think about; no images; no metaphors; no showing what is it not; no correcting of individual dancers; just the occasional, "The foot goes here." A corollary of this emphasis on the here and now is Non-attachment (possible category?): as you move through the phrases of a class, there is no suggestion that one is more important than another. Even if you find the adagio thrilling, for example, it is appropriate, once you've danced it a few times, to let it go, as tomorrow there'll be another. Dancing passes, and is to be forgotten. Consciousness is fleeting, and may be acknowledged as such.

Centeredness

All action, whether in place or moving in space, proceeds from a centered body. The resulting dancing image is of someone able to make choices about what to do and where to go at any moment.

Muscle

The class aims to develop strength and flexibility equally and simultaneously. The energy to be expended is that required by the movement, no more, no less. The limbs stretch to show clear shapes and to make possible visual continuity of even disjunctive movement. The idea is to repeat constantly re-ordered elements of the vocabulary, so that the body becomes able to achieve the positions and moves without ambivalence; yet, at the same time, to accomplish the positions and moves with the freshness of improvisation. Merce's own dancing, in the classroom and on stage, is proof that this kinetic oxymoron is possible. His spare style he communicates by example, showing movement free of flourish, of panache, of arrogance. His phrases emerge as if originated as one of Plato's ideal forms. Our task is to fit our bodies into them.

Equality of the Body

All parts of the body are of equal expressive value.

Equality of Space

All points in space are of equal expressive value.

Equality of Movement

All moves are of equal expressive value.

Equality of Dancers

All dancers are of equal expressive value.

A couple of Disagreements

A) [Chance: Jennifer: I don't consider chance (your paragraph is below) relevant to Merce's Technique. Is this category not best reserved for consideration of his choreographic processes? Especially as there was so much confusion early on about his use of it. People wrote, for example, that the dancers were improvising.]

6.  Chance/ Breaking Habits. Chance is seldom used directly in class work, however, breaking away from moving only by habit is a core principle of the technique.  The class work aims to strip away excess flourish and embellishment to train the body to move in a straightforward, almost practical way.  The classwork also includes unusual movement combinations to challenge the mind and body so that the ability to change and explore something new are a part of each class experience.

B) [Jennifer: The language in your 4. Individualism (your paragraph is below), to my mind pushes to the edge of giving the impression that dancers have more "freedom" than was my experience. Above I mention the lack of imposition on our inner thoughts and feelings, yes. But I think it important to emphasize the severity of the technique. The class (again, my era) makes a point of obligating the dancer to attend with as much accuracy as possible to the shape, rhythm, tempo and space of every move. My seeing a phrase demonstrated, my body may struggle to move within its given limits. But I never ever feel I'm being asked to come up, intentionally or accidentally, with an alternative version, just because I'm who I am. I'm to do the movement as shown, movement always demonstrated and counted with precision. Merce's steps are forms one tries one's best to fulfill. We're not dancing our feelings. We're bringing our feelings to the dance.]

[4.   Individualism. In Cunningham’s dance company, there was no hierarchy per se, and the individual dancer, their unique characteristics, and temperament were explored and celebrated.  There was a great amount of freedom for each individual to take ownership of the movement and simply be present on stage, as oneself.  Classwork reflects these principles as well.  An individual is challenged with the task of learning what their own body can do and then expanding its possibilities for movement.]

Best Likes

As for what I like best about Merce's classes, first would be their Overall Rhythm. The reason his restraint works to produce dancing of visual interest and pleasure, is because he has something to restrain. A passionate man and a superb actor, he has gone to some trouble, influenced by John, to arrive at his updated, deadpan classicism. What's tantalizing is how the suppressed content, to the empathetic eye, cannot help but be seen to be bubbling up. In the classes this dynamic shows itself most obviously in how the hour and a half builds from calm to excited. Of course the calm, on the material level, has to do with warming up: in keeping with the needs of the human body for safety and awakening you start with small, slow moves. But as the material becomes more complex, as we move through space dancing larger and faster movement, the action itself becomes inherently exciting. It's clear to me that Merce's inner elation participates in, hell, incites, this outwardly neutralized ferment. There is, that is, a not accidental dramatic arc to the class, both outer and inner. There's even, at the end, a sense of catharsis, a word Cage/Cunningham rhetoric would consider anathema.

A second favorite feature of Merce's class is the very presence of Merce's Unusual Dancing Body. Some days his legs seem longer than his torso, so that a pneumatic relation to earth is palpable, and foremost. Other days his torso seems longer than his legs, and this uprightness, and his sinuous spine, which he treats as a flexible fifth limb, carry my eye into the sky. This double valence, extending equally north and south, adds up to an overall relative lightness, conveying metaphorically a positive, even witty attitude, dancing not as angst, but as non-sentimental celebration. In the horizontal plane, too, his long limbs charge and change the space around him, so that his dancing becomes not about the body itself, but about its relation to the air, the studio, New York City, the planet. The adopting of an attitude of outward emotional neutrality makes a statement: Look not at me, but at my dance. But the actor in Merce makes his moving far more than matter-of-fact enacting of a structure. Without allowing me access to the specifics of his inner narratives, his cunning genius still manages to convince me, move to move, that he is dancing meaning, and dancing it for me.  

* * *

August 1, 1997

Dear Nina,

Hello hello, Lazy Madge, well I could go looking but think I'll start here instead.

For Lazy Madge (1976-77) I wanted to invent movement ongoingly, to work with a large group, and to allow the impulses of the individuals to influence the situation. I had no money, so told the ten dancers to come whenever they could, making myself available some number of hours each day at the loft. If one person came I made a solo, if two a duet, and so on. All the movement was thus customized. I worked fast and didn't rework. When the opportunity for a performance arose the instructions were to do any material at any time with any of the four flat fronts. So the form included choice within a language I had contributed. If you didn't want to dance with someone on a given evening, you could avoid the material that involved that person. If you felt an attraction, you could repeat your duet over and over, or at least try to. If you were dancing a duet and saw another bit you wanted to join you could without warning, within limits of safety, leave your duet. You could just as well make decisions based on formal considerations, the impulse to add something fast to the slow texture presently on stage, for example, or to enter into the slowness yourself. It was within the rules if no one entered the space at all. But these ten people liked to dance and mostly liked to dance with one another, so there was plenty of action. And they were diverse in training, age, and personality, looked less like the then current image of a dance company, more like an enthusiastic social dance club. We would move through this semi-open structure until, at 70 minutes, blackout.

* * *

DD Text for Jamie Cunningham's and Tina Croll's The Horse's Mouth, in honor of Deborah Jowitt, at The Theater at 14th Street Y, March 22 & 23, 2019

Ecstasy Text for Horse’s Mouth as of Feb 15

Having graduated college, I arrived in Manhattan and took a job on the lowest rung of the corporate ladder with the huge dairy company Sealtest Foods. I was second mail boy. There was no third mail boy. My boss, the first mail boy, and I worked in a small windowless room on the lower of two vast floors in a glass skyscraper in the east 30s. Twice a day I had the pleasure of taking the mail upstairs and handing it, one packet at a time, to each of the many well-dressed secretaries stationed outside the men’s oak-paneled offices. After a several weeks I was summoned to the inner sanctum of the Director of Personnel. He was young and handsome. He wore a beautiful, dark-blue pinstripe suit. He sat behind a desk bare save for a telephone, the outer glass wall of his office looking high out over the East River. After a few moments of small talk, he said he found it curious that a Princeton alumnus would seek such a lowly position. What was I doing here? Would I in fact honor the two-year contract I had signed? I was struck dumb. I had not yet learned how to lie. I admitted that after work I was studying the psychology of art with Rudolf Arnheim at the New School, and, further, that my true interest was dance, that I was taking ballet and modern classes whenever possible. His face altered suddenly, losing its charm. He threw his torso back against the large, flexible swivel chair, his arms flying into the air. “Dance,” he all but screamed, his head lolling back in what was now a complete bodily guffaw of maniacal disbelief, “Dance, that’s nothing but ecstasy.”

* * *

A DANCER WITHOUT A LIVE SPECTATOR IS

—a bird without a twig (or air)

—a fish with no ocean (or prey)

—a sun without planets (or space)

—a planet with no rotation (or elephants)

—hair without a head (or color)

—a dog with no master (or mail person)

—a shoe without a foot (or sole)

—a book with no reader (or shelf)

—a leader without a country (or compassion)

—a pen with no ink (or hand)

—an heart without a loved one (or aorta)

—a mirror with no reflection

—a computer without keys (or CPU)

—a push pin with no pin (or cork board)

—a calendar without days (or months)

—an elephant without a trunk (or big ears)

—a polar bear with no ice (or water)

—a sadist without a masochist (or vice versa)

—a lei with no flowers (or tourists)

—a police person without crime (or badge)

—a cat with no meow (or claws)

—a firecracker without a fuse (or match)

—a bow with no arrow (or string)

—cam lobes without a shaft (or car)

—a friend with no friend (or enemy)

—a parent with no child (or vice versa)

—Africa without elephants (or Lake Victoria)

* * *

Letter to Alia, March 28, 2019

Dear Alia,

Thank you for getting us started. We must find a way to make the most of such a large group of dancers, without individuals getting lost.

If I’m reading the schedule correctly, we meet seven times. But I’m not clear if the Cornish dancers are included when the class is at UW. If not, then maybe we separate them for the showing. If we have ninety minutes, that’s a lot of dancing. (As long as one of Cunningham’s Events!) Maybe we have several groupings presenting several “sections.” Or, more challengingly, a Grand Mix, with individuals and groupings entering when they wish. (My first group work Lazy Madge, was structured thus. As I write, I begin to think this might be a good format. It allows for a wide variety of kinds of material, and keeps the dancers on their toes, as they have to decide when and what to do during the time allotted to performance.)

I do so like that we will be preparing for a showing, as, in my experience, having that goal focuses attention more pointedly.

Speaking more generally, I like to begin with The Dance You Love To Do. That is, giving each and all time to do some of their least conscious moving. I consider this personal crux an important starting point, the still point from which their range can expand. Then I tend to work up and down, back and forth, in no particular order, on the spectrum of Open Structures: from no instructions, through various stages of knowing what one is doing, to doing set material. I’m interested in Instructions that lead to everyone being constantly on the edge of Personal Invention. Sometimes this means saying what to do, sometimes what not to do. I like gradually to shift the source of the making of the Instructions from me onto them. With such a large group, I imagine dividing into smaller groups, having each develop first How they want to proceed, then to Proceed. With a result that could include (“should”, if we decide so), the entire range: no intent, various degrees of intent, set material. As we have the music class as collaborators, I sure hope somehow we can connect them, even if the outcome ends up being, for lack of time to mix more deeply, the parallel motion the Cage Cunningham promoted.

I’ve been teaching an improv class at NYU since the middle ‘90s. I’ve noticed in the last few years that a great deal of my approach is not new to the students. When I and other Grand Union members were teaching in the ‘70s, students were surprised to be goaded toward autonomy rather than being asked to work in rigid structures we provided. I hope the approach I've outlined above is not old hat to your students. Has finding one’s way without depending on staid forms of the past now become a staid form of the past?

One of the NYU students a few years ago said that when he entered the field he was taking it for granted that there was nothing new to be done in Modern Dance. And on a program at 92Y in NYC that I shared with a young choreographer, he presented a piece by a well-known choreographer of my generation, without attribution, that he had taken off the Internet. But my perhaps old-fashioned take on what the Modern Dance arena has best to offer, are attempts to invent interesting organizations of human bodies in action. I’ll be curious to see what those who are dancing on the home ground of Merce and John now consider the art form to be good for.

See you soon,

Douglas

* * *

Letter to The New Yorker, December 2018

Douglas Dunn wrote:

In Whose Pants? (November 26) Joan Acocella draws a straight line from Dada through Merce Cunningham and John Cage to the recent improvisations of Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Reiner at the Joyce Theater. In doing so she bypasses two giant responses to Cage/Cunningham: Judson Dance Theater of the early ‘60s, and Grand Union, 1970-76. The first took the rigors of the Cunningham’s work as academic, exploding it in every direction. The latter chose not to rehearse; they walked into performance with no instructions and built forms as they went along. Both groups were made up of dancers who had been in Cunningham’s company or were strongly influenced by his work. There was confusion on the part of early dance reviewers who took Cunningham’s choreographic process using Chance Operations to mean improvisation on stage. Mr. Cunningham did not favor improvisation. He set every step. He was wont to say, “The trouble with improvisation is, you repeat yourself.” In other words, you’re less free. Also, to be fair to his legacy, Cunningham and other leaders of dance groups of that era were heading toward a democratizing of the situation; other than the director, there were no stars.

What The New Yorker printed:

WINGING IT

Joan Acocella draws a straight line from Dada through Merce Cunningham and John Cage to the recent improvisations of Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Reiner at the Joyce Theater (Dancing, November 26th). I was in Cunningham’s dance company from 1969 until 1973; in the seventies, I was a founding member of Grand Union, a group that chose not to rehearse — we could walk into performances with no instructions and build forms as we went along. At the time, reviewers took Cunningham’s choreographic process using “chance operations” to mean improvisation onstage. But Cunningham did not favor improvisation. He set every step. He was wont to say, “The trouble with improvisation is, you repeat yourself.” In other words, you’re less free.*

*Published in The New Yorker, The Mail, December 10, 2018.

* * *

I’m asked for advice on how to use stillness in choreography. As if there are right and wrong ways of working in art? As if making a dance is a collective endeavor? As if experienced artists know something younger ones should learn? As if dance is yet another competitive market? I’m for individual vision. For listening only to inner friends and demons; for daring to offer the steps they demand. As for stillness, it’s like silence. It doesn’t exist. 

* * *

Apologia pro motu in vita sua (2013)

Modern Dance has no place in American life. As colonists we build forts, grab land, kill Indians. As pioneers we trek, we plant, we grow families. We industrialize, we technologize. We have bombs to build, wars to wage, gadgets to invent to outwit our enemies. We have plastic to mold to give us cancer that we be challenged to conjure its cure. There is no time for “frivolity.” The aesthetic life requires sensitivity of feeling based on listening, seeing, touching. Sensitivity of feeling demands a slow pace and an open mind. Success in our American world demands suppressing these delicacies. Breakneck competition is the way to achievement and to prosperity. We work hard, then celebrate with spectacle: melodramas, blockbusters, porno flics, arousing easy emotions to orgasmic peak as reward for preternatural vitality. So a few forests fall, a few species disappear. Who needs trees, we have benches made from bottle caps. Who needs cheetahs, we have robots to clean our homes. Soon our organs and limbs will be synthetic, our brains computers. Soon we will live on Mars in artificial environments, won’t we be proud, and our programmed sentiments will infuse us with numbed acceptance. Modern dance is retrograde. It sees the complex body/mind as a temple to be dwelt in, lived from, revered. It says that any possible spiritual progress must emerge from an unembarrassed physical being. Thus we dancers are un-Christian. We are not afraid of the flesh. We are interested in its sexual potential and its urges toward pleasure and ecstasy as well as in its capacity for discipline and rigor. We aim to integrate all human vital energies, transforming even the lowest and meanest into radiant beauty and meaning. How have we fallen so far off track? Modern dance is also elitist and we know now that elites are reprobate. Dedication to excellence makes for cliques and thus militates against homogenized democracy. We should be ashamed. But ashamed of what? That we constitute an insult to the psychic infrastructure of our society, even to our so-called culture, already thoroughly commodified? Or that we are so cowardly that we accept our marginal status and rest on localized laurels, dancers dancing for other dancers forever? Like scientists we investigate, we hypothesize and test our guesses, but we don’t produce results helpful in upgrading weaponry or increasing computer power. We are useless. Our dances are no more than provisional proposals of ideal or hazardous relational configurations. Reluctantly we rely on western expertise to make our lives manageable, though our practice requires nothing but human presence. We play like serious children as the machine age gyrates toward self-inflicted cataclysm. We try to resist being dragged into the vortex of responsibility as defined by property and money. Or we accede and enter the fray in order to find space to move and the wherewithal to pay one another to dance, compromising our ideals in order to demonstrate them, polluting the millennially evolved stratosphere by flying here and there to show our steps. Modern Dance isn’t even a burr under the saddle of Marlboro Man’s imperious ride into an atomic sunset. Modern Dance is mostly women and men-in-touch-with-the-feminine. The over-muscled American male has beaten the American anima down to near silence, transforming our life-giving earth into a grave. And we are dancing on it.  

Excerpt from Dunn's collected writings, Dancer Out of Sight, available at Amazon.com

 * * *

Response to Even Now These Images are Eroding, a dance by Dana Florin-Weiss and Hannah Verrill presented at Wiseacres on November 29, 2015.

As we enter Cathy Weis’s lovely loft studio at 537 Broadway, two young women are working the niche-like indentation in the redbrick wall. One is tall and lanky, the other short and compact. They face the wall, their bodies loose and informal, their attire trim, neither dance wear nor street wear. One throws up an arm, touches the brick with her fingers, the other swipes the arm away, or throws her own arm up, making for a moment of loose-limbed unison. One or both drop onto their heels, fall out onto one hand, away from the wall, in our direction, looking out at us with what I take to be an intentionally ambiguous expression. There are quite a few basic moves, with variations, which they repeat and repeat (this bit goes on during audience entrance and beyond, a good twenty minutes at least), but the moves and brief poses do not appear to have a fixed order. The attitude of the actions is mildly friendly, mildly annoyed, as if each is sometimes bothered by the other, sometimes glad she’s there. Along the wall, their bodies sometime overlap and sometimes separate slightly. Is this an image of two women as one, two as two, somewhere between? One frequent gesture is, facing the wall, bending all the way over, legs straight, head near floor, to throw a hand up between the legs toward us landing it on crotch and butt. Sometimes two hands overlapping. Sometimes the hand of one dancer overlapped by the hand of the other. Because the action is slapdash, the sexual suggestion, though present, is mitigated, all positions and moves equalized in import by a look of, “We’re doing these things for no reason; we know we are women, and sexual beings, but don’t count on us to conform to your idea of what that means and how we should therefore behave.”

Once away from the wall, they stand side-by-side, shoulder-to- shoulder, a few feet out from the back white wall. They are facing us on the diagonal. (It’s important to note that the audience seating is oriented toward what would normally be the upstage left corner of the square space. This untypical arrangement of audience un-squares the room and brings the studio to life in a fresh way, especially for those of us who have been attending Cathy’s Sunday Salons consistently. Thus they are facing us directly across the diagonal of the space.) They sway slowly side to side, keeping the shoulder-contact. The image is sweet, two friends enjoying each other’s touch and sense of motion. But they don’t let the feeling grow. Still swaying, gradually they screw their faces into grimaces, nipping the suggestion of affection in the bud. Continuing the sway, they repeat the plain-to-grimacing faces. The replay further formalizes the action and whiplashes or response. They are facing us, looking right at us, their gazes and demeanors emphasizing that they are not being sincere. The structure and the way they embody it says, “We are acting as well as dancing, we are not aloof, hiding in a dance bubble you look in on. We are right here with you. We know your expectations and are not about to give in to them.”

Even Now is made up of discrete sections. The dancers go from one bit to the next the way one goes in the morning from opening the curtains to making the bed, simply and directly, without pretending that the two activities are kinetically or otherwise related. In the next section, leaving the shoulder-to-shoulder moment, they run around after each other, giving weight with their hands against the wall as they go along it a few steps, then push out into the space, circling back to the wall. Around and around they go. Again we have many repetitions of the same figure, but loosely, so that, if not annoyed by sameness, one enjoys the slight variations in each circling, and the subtle differences in how each performer handles the task. Do the minor variations in tempo mean anything? Are they chasing each other? Is one trying to outlast the other? Is their desire to be near each other in a rut?

Perhaps this is a moment to attempt to generalize about the two performers. The taller woman is slightly more confident and authoritative in her demeanor and in her kinetic attack. She becomes thereby, if only by a hair’s breadth, and despite their making all the same moves, the leader of the two. She’s the more assertive friend, perhaps, or the big sister. Or maybe she’s the lover, and the shorter, marginally less forceful woman is her beloved, looking up to her?  

Suddenly they run and sit down right up against the audience members who are seated on the floor. Each draws a mustache on the other. Are they questioning their gender? Then quickly they go to stand at the back of the audience, becoming part of us, shedding for a second their roles as performers. They rush to another sit-down at the other end of audience. I cannot see them. Abruptly up, they dash out into the space and drop, seemingly onto each other, into a close entanglement. Just as they hit the floor they thrust their arms forward and up over the shoulders of the other, making a strikingly contradictory image of an embrace with swords sticking out from it. This precipitous pose of physical nearness, combined with the rigid tension of the dagger arms, subverts sentimentality, foreclosing any hint that the dance is attempting with naïve sincerity to narrate a true-life relationship of conventional feeling. The image is multivalent, and brilliantly terse.

The next and last section has them walking back and forth on parallel paths from stage center to the upstage left corner. Again, because we are seated on the diagonal, as they head for the corner, they are walking directly away form us. They always face the corner, walking forward toward it, backward away from it, with a hard, fast, robotic strut. On each pass forward, they remove, one at a time, in the same order, their three pieces of clothing, shirt, pants, and black underpants. On the way back they recover them from the floor and put them back on, barely breaking stride. I did not count, but I’d say they made at least twenty passes, many more than necessary to see the moves, one always going one way as the other goes the other way---thus, always out of sync. The suggestion of sexuality and intimacy in previous bits here is most pronounced, but now implicates the audience as well. On the one hand, the two of them are exposing their bodies to us. On the other hand, we never see their vulnerable fronts. And the moves are routinized, depersonalized, almost mechanical, qualities that adamantly undercut the erotic aspect. Finally they make a last little fast-walking circle putting on as last item their shirts, and exit through the upstage door.

On their return, the applause is hearty. Oddly, however, instead of bowing, they begin to clap back at us, as if they are not comfortable accepting our thanks.

As one who favors dancey dancing, is impatient with abundant repetition, and cringes at duets that attempt beyond movement to depict inner aspects of human relationships, I had much to overcome, or to let go of, to allow Even Now to cross my thresholds of resistance. This dance had not a single jump, but its delicate mix of formal values and amorous intimations swept me off my feet.

* * *

Roman Holiday (2017)

Monday, May 1

212-777- 7777

To JFK 

Jamaica 

Queens Boulevard

---Dunkin Donuts: GRAND OPENNG

---Criminal Attorney

---Portofino Diner

---Liberty Avenue

---Our Lady of the Cenacle

---Trump Pavilion for Nursing and Rehabilitation

Tuesday, May 2

Ah, Rome. You're still here, dreaming the long descent from your empire, still showing these monumental but marvelous large stone buildings, and your innumerable smaller ones with their satisfying earth colors, all tantalizingly irregularly arranged under, today for example, skies of an azure hue not seen in New York City. 

Step from the narrow streets into any church interior: Che grandezza! Look a hundred yards down past the pews to the altar to the explosion of gilded symmetry. Then throw the gaze way up to people in robes lolling among clouds on the insides of the huge domes as if in the sky, or higher than. 

As we dine al fresco, the ochres and browns, greens and purples, and other hues of the exteriors of nearby buildings change color.

Bicyclists here, both men and women, mostly women, ride easy, upright, not forward. As if where they're going, or even if, doesn't matter. As if they're knitting. 

It's not whether the wine itself is any good. It's how you drink it, how you taste it.

Wednesday, May 3

Grazia's father's apartment it but a stone's throw from the northern end of Piazza Navona (Piazza Nirvana?), just out of reach of daily throngs of tourists, on the tiny Vicolo dei Soldati, some of the walls of which curving narrow passageway are covered with ivy, or its ilk. It is within these vines that birds gather. Not the occasional seagull, with its guttural caw, a vibrato the sounds as if it's going into instead of out of the throat, the big bird arriving at street level to scavenge the garbage often late in being picked up, with usually delicious extras scattered over the piled up bags. No, I'm talking about what I assume are smaller birds, and it is their song that I wish to sing about. Here's the score: two sounds, cheep and chirp. Each is abrupt, propulsive, short. The cheep is higher, the chirp two whole notes lower. Each utterance embodies the oxymoronic combination of harshness and mellifluousness, and contains a subtle break, so that maybe their transliteration should be: che-a-eep (though that looks too long), and chir-i-up, (though the interior warble is quicker than that). Now as a solo, which is how I first heard these notes as I lay jet lag sleepless at 5 a.m., the singer was offering several cheeps in a row, then throwing in a chirp, and back to the cheeps. But shortly another bird chimed in, and a remarkable duet began. The tempo picked up immediately. The mode was antiphonal, impatiently so, as if neither could wait for the other to finish before responding. It became impossible to predict either sound. They played every variation.  Unison cheeps, unison chirps, the two together, or overlapped in whole or in part. The resulting rhythms became erratic, as if the goal was to derive, from the most limited amount of material, maximum playfulness, an aesthetic I associate with Alvin Lucier, among others. Whether this singing was a morning ritual, or a one-time-only mating game, I won't know till tomorrow.

An item, content not known, but possibly crucially important, has been, as no one lives full time in the apartment, returned, undelivered, to the post office. We arrive there, take our paper number from the machine, wait, and finally step up to the relevant person. Ably prepared, Grazia presents a) her own US and Italian passports, b) a copy of her father's passport, and c) a letter giving her control of her father's bank account. It isn't enough! As the conversation progresses, never turning angry, but pleasant for neither party, the seated woman, looking up at us across the counter, makes, three times, with talk time between, the gesture of simultaneously lifting the shoulders, lifting the arms with the hands upturned, and protruding the jaw, her intonation matching the action: "What can I tell you, what can I do, these are the rules, you need a paper written and signed by your father delegating you to pick up this item." This typical, frustrating combination of bureaucratic strictness with, as everyone knows, loose, and more effective person to person dealing in almost every realm, is not unlike the facades in this neighborhood: the fronts of the buildings are beautifully finished in wonderful colors, no aesthetic detail unconsidered; then telephone lines and other necessary wires are strewn messily willy-nilly all over them.

Thursday, May 4

For us New Yorkers, the wondrous beauty at every turn and the relatively relaxed pace of this city are soothing. Not to mention that we have left in NYC the pressing concerns of our daily lives. So it was a jolt to visit the new MAXXI Museum. It stands apart from every architectural norm around it to the same extreme as the Bilbao Guggenheim in Spain. The new building's inspiration was surely a train wreck where the cars piled up on one another. Volumes twist, ascend unexpectedly, and stick out---way out. Stairways and ramps snake through the un-square interiors. No sense of rooms. Rather, a continuous meander, both horizontally and vertically. The highest, 5th level gallery has a sloping floor! I imagine dancing there including rolling like kids down the incline.

The main show was of work by Piero Gilardi. Why have we never heard of this man? He began in the sixties, and by the end of the decade had switched from an aesthetic to a political posture, the latter including instigation of seriously playful street events taking aim at specific issues, the participants wearing his handmade, bigger than life costumes. The costumes were on view, as were large-screen videos of the events, interviews, etc. I became interested in the fact that though the work shown and the radical architecture of the museum had neither sensuous nor intellectual appeal for me, the experience of being there penetrated. We passed the rest of the afternoon lolling midst the trees of the gardens of the Villa Borghese, exited finally at the Spanish Steps, and trekked all the way back to our part of town, all the time sensing how the jarring experience of the museum and its contents was still at work countering the re-establishment of our pleasure in the soothing antiquity of the city. 

Friday, May 5

From so much walking about last year, I recognize almost every piazza, street and intersection, church and ruin we encounter, but still never know where I am. Piazza Navona, however, is at the center of my mind's map. So close to the apartment, we pass through it, or stroll around it, every day. The moment of emerging from narrow streets into its sky-bathed expanse is never less than thrilling. Today I find myself there alone and sit down on a backless bench to the left of, and of necessity close to, a dog. Medium build, short-haired, brown, slightly golden, its elderly master to its right. Both are sleepy. The dog is lying across the bench, head and forelegs extending, next to my knees, over the edge and down, as if he's studying the pavimento. Looking up, I marvel at the patience of the many vendors spread throughout the piazza, each with a cozy little setup. They sell paintings, toys, textiles. Do they enjoy being still all day, everyone else in motion around them and passing by? Two pigeons walk in jerky unison near my feet. Three young daughters dance nearby in off unison as their parents read, at length, the map. After a while the dog sits up. I look to my right at him several times before he returns my gaze, his nose and mine inches apart. An unkempt man approaches. He wants to pet the dog, so engages its owner, asking the dog's name. Billy, the old man responds, un-encouragingly. A dog being walked, much larger than my companion, goes by. Billy growls at it until his master calms him. The master then does some imitative growling of his own, gutterals that then shift into quiet singing. After another, for me, pleasant while, with some difficulty, the old man rises, encourages Billy to follow, and heads awkwardly away, Billy trailing behind. After only a few paces, Billy stops, flops over on his back and writhes furiously on the stone surface. The old man turns, Billy gets up, abruptly calm once again, as if he had not just recharged the universe, and the two set out slowly across the plaza. 

Saturday, May 6

Zero nil

Niente non

Nulla nessuno

Neanche

The dawn of a do-nothing day is a threat to a striver

Sharks always encircle a tentative recreational diver

Excel as you idle? Not likely. Be a conniver

Go for a stroll along the river Tiber

//Spritz

//Sopressata, Salami, Prosciutto

Porchetta, Pancetta, Guanciale

Coppa, Bresaola

//Bucatini ai funghi 

//Ortica, Agretti, Cardi

Barbabietole, Finocchio, Puntarelle

Carciofi, Cicoria, Melanzane

//Strudel

FOR EXAMPLE

The Academia San Luca, historically interesting as an institution, and as a result of its mission full of a stylistically wide variety of paintings and sculptures, is located in a large palazzo just up from the side of the Fontana di Trevi. You enter through a vaulted hallway that opens to a small walled garden of orange and lemon trees, then ascend five floors up a spiral ramp. The continuous progression is dizzying and claustrophobic (no exits), relieved only by a small window that marks, one assumes, each floor. Despite the blatant differences (that there is no vertiginous empty center to the spiral to keep you off balance, and there are no paintings on the walls), this rising round and round cannot but evoke NYC's Guggenheim. As I strode, however, wondering should I stop to puff, or make the effort to keep up with the other twenty people on the tour, that mental, hometown association quickly passed, and another came to mind. My mother Editha and my sister Susan came to Paris for the premier of Pulcinella in 1980. We then headed south to visit chateaux in the Loire Valley. Perhaps not having understood the car rental man in Chartres, and unable to decipher the gauge, we quickly ran out of gas. The only human in sight was a farmer tilling by horsepower at some distance. I approached across the clods rehearsing my fledgling French, but of course the case was obvious. Leaving his animals to what might for them have been a welcome reprieve, he without hurry walked me to his farmhouse, filled his own five-gallon gas can from his own private source, semi-filled our tank and sent us on our way. Of the many sites we visited the one with the most memorable name was Fontevraud. Why?  Because I struggled so hard to make my mouth make the sounds of that sequence of syllables. Of the ridiculously excessive and at the same time magnificently beautiful chateaux themselves, the most lasting in memory to an American has to be Amboise. Not because the name coincides with a famous male dancer of the New York City Ballet, but rather, finally to come round to the gist of this digression, because of its remarkable spiral ramp. The chateau is set on a bluff overlooking the town and the river. You enter low and end up high. But this is no tight, canted tunnel, a la the Academia. It was designed to accommodate a four-horse carriage! So sensational are the scale, the presumption, the very ambition of this whirling tower, the towering whirl, that you might as well be being propelled like a Tantric carpet traveler along the inside-out surfaces of a Möebius strip. As I walked, with mother and sister, mind thus flying, on the slippery-from-wear dark red brick, around and around, up and up, I wondered at a life so different from mine, a not-that-long-ago carrying on with an extravagance and grandiosity hard to imagine, at least for a middle-class, mid-20th century, California kid. 

Sunday, May 7
                                          

                                                              L'anatomia romana

                                                                       Testa
                                                                       Collo
                                                                      Spalle
                                         Mano/Braccio destra Braccia sinistra/Mano
                                                                       Petto
                                                                        Vita
                                                                      Bacino
                                                                      Vagina
                                                                          o
                                                                       Pene
                                                   Gamba destra Gamba sinistra
                                                                      Cosce
                                                                   Ginocchia
                                                                    Caviglie
                                                                       Piedi
                                                               Dita dei piedi


Music concerts in churches are a favorite. The pews in Sant'Eustachio are not comfortable, but are full with us and others, and the orchestra and choir are large. Right away a jolly man announces that the printed program is from a previous concert so doesn't say what will be played. And then the verbal recital before each three pieces is not comprehensible even to Grazia, except that there would be something by Piazzolla. Indeed, I recognize his style, and feel more than ever that his approach works best as movie music. About an hour in, the jolly man (later extolled for being in his fifty-seventh year as a priest, though he is dressed secularly) reappears, and, in a most ingratiating and disarming manner, speaks for at least ten minutes, saying how the orchestra and choir are donating their services in the hope the we the audience will, on the way out, give money so that the church may continue its work with the destitute, categories of whom he delineates at length: soldiers, babies, street people, etc. After this long, unexpected interruption of our aural aesthetic pleasure, they take up Mozart's Concerto for Flute and Harp. From my experience of previous versions I judge the tempo way slow. Is the cringe-making awkwardness of the execution a result of the conductor's choice to walk instead of run? Or is this gait perhaps the outer limit for these two soloists? At moments, oh dear, they and the ensemble seem to be falling out of sync. You're looking at a building, the earth trembles. You see the structure shift. Will there now be a full on earthquake? Will the facade fall off? Will the entire edifice of 18th century music come crashing down? Back in the apartment, still not used to the ease of current miracles, I find the piece on YouTube and sure enough, here are the same intricately textured melodies and harmonies realized much lighter and faster. Whew, rebalanced are the aesthetic proportions that live within and work to maintain the integrity of my flesh and bone. 

Monday, May 8

In the Museo Nazionale Romano, Palazzo Massimo, is a rather large relief of a seated, classically robed young woman in 3/4 view tousling gently with her extended right hand the forelocks of a friendly goat. Her head is inclined slightly as she looks down at her action. If the scene is sentimental, her touch is convincingly tender. It reminded me immediately of a painting in one of the many churches Grazia and I can't keep out of: a standing man with wings on his back is touching ever so lightly with his right index finger the right shoulder of a small boy in front of him. The boy in response begins to turn his head around and to look up at the angel. Touch in the ballet is so conventionally repetitive, finger turns, lifts, etc., that it is easy to forget to notice individual differences. I've been told that the delivery of food and drink in restaurants in the USA is considered crude by Japanese, who value the deliberateness of placing an object. Up to the mid 2000s, in my teaching of Open Structures at NYU, I was uninhibited in participating physically with students, ending up sometimes rolling about on the floor with them; now I wouldn't dare. Dance interest over the last fifty years in a more pedestrian look on stage, arms hung and swung rather than shaped and surrealistically paced, precludes stylized delicacy and other attendant Classical qualities. Within the wide variety of physical presence now in use, a touch that is sensitive, yet functional enough not to be affected, is a middle ground I find satisfying as a counter to the back-slapping manners among the males of my youth, not to mention the abrupt gestures and the all-but-if-not-violent interactions of not a few of our national sports.

Tuesday, May 9

During the day, vendors stand before small storefronts encouraging us strolling vacationers to buy intriguing gizmos. He lifts an arm and throws a little wad of something onto a tiny platform. As it hits it turns into, what, a fried egg? A plop of vomit? (If I look too closely he'll only harangue me more.) He spins tops and herds mechanical animals toward my feet. To proceed I must break into a momentary Paso Doble. Nighttime selling is a different matter. The Piazza Navona turns into a vast ship. It's the one Virgil arrived on, still moving, now slowly, through its self-paced, historical arc. The slender obelisk of the central fountain is its transfigured mast. No longer confined to their storefronts, vendors cruise the deck. Well knowing our aimlessness, our less than heroic ambitions, they stalk us. Mysteriously, the silhouetted man propels at great velocity in a straight vertical line, high into the night sky, a filament of colored light. It is difficult for your eye not to be caught by this abrupt, unexpected visual accent. You follow the object up, becoming aware, above it, a pleasurable side effect, of a cobalt sky appointed with several surprisingly bright stars. Unlike its blue-streak, accelerating ascent, the toy descends slowly, twirling like a mini helicopter, often wandering far from its point of lift off. The thrower moves as necessary, sometimes having to run to catch it, its point of touchdown bringing him fortuitously near new prospective customers. At the feet of anyone who doesn't immediately buy, appears suddenly on the pavement, a skein of pointed lights, blue or green. Either by the action of the peddler's hand, or on it's own, the web-like display moves erratically over the stone surface. It's at first a scary, elusive image, like insects running amok. But the activated filigree soon loses its ominous suggestions and becomes beautiful. A chant accompanies this earthbound dance of interconnected pearls. I don't understand the words, but the gist is of course commercial. Were I a kid I doubt I'd mind the hard sell, and for sure would insist on having one of each of these giocattoli eccezionali. 
 

Wednesday, May 10

Standing out, by its sheer size, in the overstuffed bookshelves of Grazia's father's apartment, is a veritable tome with a leathery green and red spine. On this spine, a designation too slight for the width of the book, I read, in golden letters: Torquato Tasso. What a pleasure, the simple saying of these two words. And somewhere in the deeper vaults of my memory bank I find them stored, all by themselves, but with no supporting documents. The book, it turns out, is a collection of essays about, not of poems by. Getting used now to the loss of enjoyment of previous pathways of pursuit and discovery, I immediately go online. Did I know that "until the beginning of the 20th century, Tasso remained one of the most widely read poets in Europe." No, I did not. There's no need for me any more to anticipate the delight of browsing non-existent stores of used books in lower Manhattan. Right here on the screen we have: 

Ecco mormorar l'onde
E tremolar le fronde
A l'aura mattutina, e gli arboscelli,
E sovra i verdi rami i vaghi augelli
Cantar soavemente,
E rider l'Oriente;
Ecco si specchia nel mare,
E rasserena il cielo,
E le campagne imperla il dolce gelo,
E gli alti monti indora:
O bella e vaga Aurora,
L'aura 'e tu messaggera, e tu de l'aura
Ch'ogni arso cor restaura. 

Now the waves murmur
and the boughs and the shrubs tremble
In the morning breeze,
And on the green branches the pleasant birds
Sing softly
And the east smiles;
Now dawn already appears
And mirrors herself in the sea,
And makes the sky serene,
And the gentle frost impearls the fields
And gilds the high mountains:
O beautiful and gracious Aurora,
The breeze is your messenger, and you the breeze's
Which revives each burnt-out heart. 
 

Thursday, May 11

The "Fast-Train" Rome/Naples is fast. It covers the 140 miles in an hour. It was between Paris and Lyon years ago that I first experienced being unable to appreciate landscape as it raced by; I was unable to enter into the moods of stationary cows. Missing by absence the time I would be wasting in NYC watching NBA playoffs, I discover edited down replays on YouTube. All but scoring plays, and many of those, edited out, you're left with what you might think would be enjoyable, nothing but "fast-train" action. But it's too much too fast, all flow, no ebb, no time to savor, to coast down before the next up. Taking in the team's setup as they bring the ball down the court, the personality differences in each free-thrower's style, these and other quieter moments of the game, it turns out, are part of the pleasure of appreciating the awesome prowess of contemporary athletes. 

But to get back to Napoli: the archeological museum is fascinating, the authentic pizze unsurpassed, the shimmering sea inspiring, and Caravaggio's "Le opere di Misericordia" in la chiesa Pio Monte della Misericordia rewarding of long viewing. Equally interesting is the traffic. How people relate on the street, with and without vehicles, is not a new interest. Two years ago in Vietnam I stood a good while looking down from my eighth story hotel window onto a large, complicated intersection with no stoplights. Hordes of motorbikes, only the occasional car, flowed through without stopping. They slowed or sped up, went straight or swerved, generously and gently making way for one another in unhurried, work-oriented travel. The rare honk was not “Get out of my way”, but “Please be aware that I'm here”. In NYC I no longer strike with fist or foot cars that cut me off, but they still do so, and with unapologetic vehemence. On the narrow streets of Rome the relations of vehicles and pedestrians is milder. You hear them behind you approaching, you stop, step aside. The communication is not antagonistic. In Napoli there is the same ethos of accommodation, but with a difference: everyone cuts all the action closer, much closer. Motorbikes weave around the cars. You don't rest your arm on the taxi's windowsill. Braking is last-second, and the space between bumpers minuscule. Stop lights do no more than continuously blink yellow, leaving it up to each walker and driver to assert or not, to pause or to move. There is an expected rhythm. When a car ahead of us waited too long for pedestrians, all hell all around us broke loose, raucous honking and yelling. Implicit protocol had clearly been breached. This hell seemed a mini version of the one I sensed the entire town to be on the verge of. As if at any moment a cultural earthquake might erupt, everyone and everything descending, or ascending, into a chaotic, pagan, apocalyptic free-for-all. 

Friday, May 12 & Saturday, May 13

The extant temples of Paestum are three
Under huge lintels, fluted columns stand: massively
Though toward the top they narrow slightly

The famous Tufatore is a commercial success
Fortunately aesthetically he's also one of the best
A lovely example, his sailing body, of action at rest
They say, what's more, that his dive affiliates life and death

The stones of Roman roads are five-sided
Lizards scatter over them, directions undecided
A slender snake and I all but collide
Hard to know whose response is more excited
Grazia says, Never seen you so wide-eyed

Sunday May 14

In San Pietro in Vincoli is the over-life-size Moses by Michelangelo. Having just descended from Mt. Sinai, the commandment tablets held under his right arm, the leader of the exodus sits, fingering his long beard and looking to his left. He is outraged because his followers have, in his absence, reverted to pagan ritual. Reportedly, he breaks the tablets (and according to Woody Allen remembers in his fury only ten of an original twelve edicts). But Moses worries that if he loses control any further he might well break the bond between him and his followers. In Moses and Monotheism Freud describes the statue just so, as that depicting a man torn between anger and calculated restraint. To me the figure appears less riled, even calm, with the turn of the head to the left thoughtful rather than fraught. And indeed there is reason to consider Freud's view (based on the very concepts he gave us) "projective." Having taken on Jung as his heir apparent, he discovers after some years that Jung is sleeping with a patient and is lecturing out of keeping with psychoanalytic theory. Thus Freud finds himself, as he begins his essay on Moses, in a comparable situation: angry at his follower, but not wanting to disrupt the network of relations that is furthering the progress of his ideas. Is his interpretation of the statue biased by his inner conflict?

Monday, May 15

Harry Levin comments:

"...that the sense of sin is more intimately related to inhibition than to indulgence; that the most exquisite consciences are the ones that suffer most; that guilt is a by-product of the very compunction which aims at goodness and acknowledges higher laws; and that lesser evils seem blacker to the innocent than to the experienced."

"...a man blessed in every other regard, but cursed with the crowning misfortune of a cold heart, so that everything seems unreal to him."

"When works of fictitious literature are constructed, their plots are predetermined by our reliance on the limiting concept of causation; whereas the functioning of the universe is free to achieve the perfection of indeterminacy."

"'Then we sallied forth into the streets, arm in arm, continuing the topics of the day, or roaming far and wide until a late hour, seeking, amid the wild lights and shadows of the populous city, that infinity of mental excitement which quiet observations can afford.'"

Tuesday, May 16

In the Piazza Sant'Eustachio, at an outside table of the Bar Ginger, sits a lithe young woman with a dog, its leash tied to a chair leg. A sheep dog it is, black and white, with a vivacious personality, rather more eager to play then the woman has time for. But occasionally she takes a red ball, offers it to him, he lowers to the ground like a camel, mouths it. Shortly she takes the ball back, repeating the game now and then. These intermittent interactions, and the charisma of the dog, are drawing attention. But so is the woman herself. On the edge of beyond elegant, she is wearing rose-colored, sparkling leggings, black and white pumps, and a nearly sheer, black, taffeta-like blouse. She's tall and attractive, managing by her manner to stay just this side of flaunting her appeal. So much is this pair of beauties the focus of all of us eye-wandering do-nothings, both stationary and passing by, that a shadowy figure moving quickly under an obscuring sidewalk bridge on the far side of the piazza goes unnoticed. But not unnoticed by me. I see and recognize her immediately: it's Audrey Hepburn. Knowing that my friend Jim will be forever grateful, I jump up and rush toward her. She's dressed all in black, her face appearing and disappearing under a wide, loose-brimmed hat. I confront her, take her by the upper arms, say, "Jim says hello!" Her delicate features begin immediately to form a look of disgusted boredom, but then right away the look dissolves and she smiles. I begin to swoon. Simultaneously she moves forcefully upward and toward me, kisses me high on the left cheek and into my ear whispers a short sentence. Before I'm able to recover, she flees around a nearby corner and is gone. What did she say? I'll never tell.

Wednesday, May 17

Dear Friends,
Having arrived here means that you have sustained your attention over seventeen days of sent notes. Possibly superfluous for you, these entries have been necessary for me. Necessary because you are my USA, a place no longer, as during the years of intense touring, like any other, but a home that pulls when I'm away. The time in Rome has been rich, but more than usually also, for me, fish out of water. I'm happy to have upcoming small gigs to return to, and I look forward to the comfort and stimulation of your company. 
A presto,
Douglas

 * * *

Douglas graduated with an AB in Art History, Princeton University, Class of 1964. This is the text of comments he made at a memorial gathering on March 11, 2017 on the Princeton campus in honor of Yu-Kung Kao. Professor Kao, who taught Chinese literature and history, was a lifelong lover of the ballet. He helped guide the dance program at Princeton that began in 1969 under the direction of Ze-eva Cohen. He died on October 29, 2016.

Good afternoon. I am pleased to part of this celebration in honor of Gene Kao.

It was Thanksgiving vacation. I had stayed on campus to work on my junior paper. Procrastinating, I wandered around in the late fall air with Jim Freeman, a student of Chinese. He was about to leave for extended study in Taiwan. He asked if I would accompany him to visit one of his professors who was in the hospital suffering from an undiagnosed, possibly terminal illness. In order to support my friend I reluctantly agreed. I stood near the entrance while Jim sat close to him and talked. After a few minutes the man spoke loudly across the room to me. “Have you ever taken a ballet class?” Not only had I not done so, I had never attended a dance concert of any sort. “No,” I responded. “If I get out of here,” he continued, “will you promise to go to class with me?” How could I refuse? “Yes,” shyly I answered. Jim went off to Taiwan. I returned for spring term unhappy, wondering if I might drop out. One day there is a knock on my door. Standing there is the professor from the hospital. He introduces himself as Gene Kao. He has with him two pairs of black tights and another student, John Thorpe. In keeping with my promise, we walk to the Princeton Ballet Society, located, despite having nothing to do with the university, right next to the Dinky station. There are at least a dozen young girls wearing white outfits in the class, all of them familiar with Gene, as he has been taking class there for a while. John is not intrigued and does not return. Entranced, I become a regular, and now have an oblique reason to continue my Princeton education. Little do I know that this moment, thanks to Professor Kao, is the beginning of my lifelong career as a dancer and choreographer.

We went to see the New York City Ballet often. On one occasion I was waiting on Nassau Street and Gene was late. Finally he comes running urgently down the sidewalk. Once on our way I say, “I never thought I would see you run to catch a bus.” Smiling, he responds, “The difference between you and me is, if I missed it, I wouldn’t care.”

Thank you.   

                                              * * * 

     Wandering home from the interview, it hit me that we touched on, but did not leverage fully, a rather savory category: the primary social meaning, for me personally, of dancing then and now. I’m talking about a vague sense of importance that buoyed the NYC dance arena, and thus me, being in it, for the first twenty years or so. I took joyously for granted a feeling of connection with other dancers and choreographers, even those I did not know personally. Touring widely in Europe furthered this semi-conscious current of, dare I say power? At least of acceptance, of filling a useful place in the hearty arts of the west. An important aspect of this usefulness was the “uselessness” of the dancing: no theme, no social purpose, no message or idea for viewers to take home to nail on the wall. Dancing for dancing, leavened with a bit of wit. Empty art. Form as form. Daily diving into aesthetic bliss. For me personally, and, if I read it right, for the field too, this sense of estimable relevance has waned. 

     Yet another after-the-fact notion arises, the very kind of change I think you’re addressing. Early on I paid a great deal of attention to various visual stimulants leading up to working: post cards, paintings, people on the street. Still loving to look, lately I’ve become aware that all I really need to get going is to enter the studio. Maybe in fact I was not reliant on pre-piece voyeurism, was just enjoying being visually occupied. In any case, this is a definite shift. With hardly a reference to what else I do during the day or at night, there is now an unmediated flow right into the steps.

     I offer these belated thoughts in appreciation of your project on the aging of dancers and choreographers. 

[Email to Gia Kourlas - July 2017]

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     If the dancer decides to dance beyond the years of peak prowess, there is, I see now, on the heels of talking to you, a tendency, indeed a need, to stay positive. I can no longer make that move, but I can make this one, so I'll put my attention here, on what's possible, and ignore what's not. Thus I maintain a level of emotional stability and confidence that keeps action happening. Stepping back, however, dropping this pragmatic pretense of all is well (there were always limitations, now they're just different), I think we can say that the change for the dancer from youth to creeping decrepitude deserves to be called, without exaggeration, an unmitigated disaster. To push off suddenly in a new direction, to go airborne and soar, to dive to the floor and rebound...to have risen to this scale of gesture and then to see and feel it declining, is, emotionally speaking, a crushing defeat, a depressing state of affairs, a symbolic ending of living. For the human animal, no other physical activity, and no degree of mental gymnastics, come close to replacing the daily ecstasy of unimpeded kinetic exploration, of ebullient interaction with immediate and infinite space and time. Let's make no bones about the apocalyptic status of this shift. And let's take, therefore, a moment to acknowledge and to sympathize with those lovers of full-body articulation who fulfill their potential, who achieve personal dance-mastery, and then face, without choice, however abruptly, and for however long, a searingly painful fall from grace. 

[Email to Gia Kourlas – July 2017]

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