Where the Stress Falls

by Susan Sontag

  DOUBLING. A recurrent structure in Childs’s work: splitting the performer into two versions, the action into two levels, which proceed simultaneously. For example, in an early piece, Street Dance (1964), Childs’s voice, taped, was with the audience assembled in a sixth-floor loft, while she was down on the street, being seen performing the actions that she was heard describing. Doubling in the sense of several dancers performing the same movements on different paths became, starting with Untitled Trio (1968), the extended subject of the works she created for small ensembles in the 1970s. Transverse Exchanges and Radial Courses (both 1976) elaborate, delicately and strenuously, on the counterpoint of dancers who, using the same steps or families of movements, go in and out of sync with each other through changes of gait, direction, and relation to the floor. Having several people doing the same rhythmic thing—side by side, one in front of another, or one above the other—has always been part of choreographing ensembles, military, ceremonial, and balletic. Indeed, doubling is the most basic principle of artince—of form itself. Childs’s work concentrates on the implications of doubling as a formal principle and as the basis of choreographic syntax: the geometrical, or diagrammatic, idealization of movement. Her recent large works, created since 1979, allow for a more complex orchestration of the theme of doubling. The adding of decor is never merely decorative but functions to create richer possibilities of doubling. Thus, the film that LeWitt made as the decor for Dance creates a perfectly synchronized double set of dancers. For example, the split screen allows the audience to see the dancers in the film, never less than life-size, on top; the live dancers (behind the scrim) on the bottom. What LeWitt supplied for Dance with a film, Frank Gehry supplies for Available Light with an architecture. In Available Light, the stage itself has become two-level, allowing other variations on the theme of doubling. Instead of traveling ghosts, there are live trackers: one to three dancers are upstairs echoing, playing off, providing counterpoint to what the dancers are unfolding below.

  EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH. 1976. The “opera,” conceived and directed by Robert Wilson, with music by Philip Glass; Childs was a principal performer and collaborated on the text. The year she spent preparing and touring in Einstein on the Beach (Avignon, Venice, Belgrade, Brussels, Paris, Hamburg, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, New York) was a turning point. Her thirty-five-minute solo, constructed on three diagonals, that opens Act I, Scene I was a culmination of the second phase of her work and a bridge to the third. Her longest work so far (both as performer and as choreographer), it was the first time she choreographed to music—and the experience encouraged her to undertake the long work, for which Glass agreed to furnish the score, eventually called Dance.

  EMOTION. The leading notion of the great modern dance pioneers, from Duncan to Graham and Horton, was to return dance to ritual. Though dance-as-ritual looked more abstract than ballet, actually such dances were heavy with descriptive intentions based, above all, on ideas about the primitive, the authentic, both in movement and in feeling. Thus, Mary Wigman created her “absolute” dances, performed in silence and with a minimum of theatrical support, the better to render extremely emotional “inner states.” Childs’s turn (in 1968) to dance without props or music or words was an absolute conception of dance, for it did not claim to express anything interior. For Childs, as for Cunningham, all notions of dance as ritual are alien; she was drawn to using game-like forms of ensemble movement, in which the idea of inwardness is irrelevant. The view that dance should not express emotion does not, of course, mean to be against emotion. Valéry defined the poem as a machine made of words whose function is to create a distinctively poetic feeling: it does not “express” emotion, it is a method of creating it.

  FORMATIONS. Childs tends to organize choreographic patterns symmetrically, movement contrapuntally. The dancers move in formations—in twos, and their multiples, more than in trios and quintets. Though Childs most often deploys dancers in pairs, this is the smallest formation and has nothing to do with partnering in the traditional sense: neither dancer is the consort of the other, one does not assist or accompany or accommodate another. They are duplicates, and therefore equal. The two dancers are doing the same movements: the existence of a pair doubles the movement image. There are “delicate invasions” (Childs’s phrase) of one group by another, each keeping its group contour, as in the traveling diamond formations of the fourth section of Relative Calm. Men and women perform the same movements (thus shaving off the gender-specific extremes of movement vocabulary, such as very high jumps), wear the same or virtually identical costumes. All plugged into the same sound, the dancers move on paths, inexorably, to a steady underlying pulse. They rarely take up perilous off-balance positions, such as Cunningham favors. (He also favors asymmetrical formations.) The rule that each element in a Cunningham dance has its own autonomy and can be apprehended in isolation from the other elements of the spectacle also applies to the dancers. In Cunningham’s company every dancer is, can be, a star. In Childs’s work, as each element of the spectacle is strictly coordinated with every other, so is each dancer: she choreographs for the glorified corps de ballet—they become the star. Childs’s dances are not exercises in polyattentiveness; more generally, they are not examples of art conceived as a tool for perception. Her choreography demands a concentrated all-over attention; it is cumulative; it aims at transporting, not educating the audience.

  GEOMETRICAL. Available Light is the second act of Giselle as revised and corrected by Mondrian.

  HEAD. The positioning of the dancer’s head in ballet always implies a look—to a partner, or a central (noble) figure, or to the audience. In Childs’s choreography, the head is not posed in this sense; there is no such looking elsewhere. One of the basic conventions of Cunningham’s technique is a simple, unmannered use of the head and detached, cool expression. Even while taking part in cooperative tasks—a lift, a pull, a support—his dancers usually seem unaware of each other. (Much humor is milked from this incongruity.) In Childs’s choreography dancers never engage in cooperative tasks, indeed never touch each other. Hence, their intensely blank performance masks signify another, non-atomized detachment. The effect is never incongruous, or comic; rather, it underscores the feeling of purity, the striving for an elevated state of things that is the register of her work.

  IDEAL. Where are these dancers dancing? Not in the vernacular space, here and now, of Duchampian performance pieces; nor in the anti-dramatic, democratized space of Cunningham’s dances—dance as pure, noncumulative activity with detachable parts and movable borders. (Hence one of Cunningham’s characteristic notions: dance as a sequence of open-ended “events.”) Instead, Childs’s choreography suggests some ideal space, where ideal transactions and transformations take place. (In this, she is close to the ethos of traditional ballet.) Dance as the art of ideal precision; ideal spatial relationships; ideal, undiluted intensity.

  ILLUSTRATING. A procedure typical of Childs’s early (conceptual or didactic) work, in which she sometimes used words in the form of instructions or descriptions—as in Street Dance. This linguistic decor could be live monologues or words on tape that were illustrated by her movements. Some of the early pieces treat movement in the manner of the Surrealist objet trouvé: citing already existing positions, “found” through words. In Model (1964), Childs gives a mock lecture on modern dance and illustrates a few awkward positions. In Geranium (1965), she provides a taped sportscast: as the announcer describes a football player falling, tumbling, Childs illustrates the actions in slow motion. Museum Piece (1965) has nineteen dots in three colors cut out of heavy paper, each about ten inches in diameter, which are an enlargement of a tiny portion of Seurat’s Le Cirque. While delivering a mock lecture on pointillism, Childs sets out the dots like plates in a complex pattern on the floor. Then, gazing into a hand mirror, she walks backward, making a slow, circuitous journey through the dots, without stepping on them, speaking of why she wants “to enter this body of material.”

  J
UDSON DANCE THEATRE. Co-founded in 1962 by Yvonne Rainer (then, like Childs, a student of Cunningham’s) and Steve Paxton; disbanded in 1966. Childs was invited to join in 1963, and did a ten-minute piece called Pastime—her first work presented publicly—at the Judson Memorial Church, where she went on to present most of the work she did in the next three years, as well as to perform in pieces by Rainer, Paxton, James Waring, and Robert Morris.

  KLEIST’S ESSAY ON THE PUPPET THEATRE. Its subject is an ideal state of the spirit; written in 1810, it is also the first great essay on the dance. Kleist exalts as the summit of grace and profundity in art a way of being without inwardness or psychology. Writing when the characteristic modern oppositions of the heart versus the head, the organic versus the mechanical, were invented, Kleist ignores the obloquy already attached to the metaphor of the mechanical, and identifies the mechanical movements of puppets with the sublimity of the impersonal. The Romantic ideal of the absence of affectation is equated not with the free expression of personality but with its transcendence. These Romantic oppositions (and evaluations) continued to dominate sensibility for another century, mutating into what we know as modernism, into “romantic” modernism, which was challenged by “neo-classical” modernism—various ideals of the impersonal as different as those of Duchamp and of Balanchine (who thought ballet should be unconcerned with inner experience). The ideals of the personally expressive and the impersonal or impassive constitute a central contrast in the evolution of contemporary dance. Cunningham is the most important champion of the anti-expressive and anti-subjective, and most of the choreographers who studied with him have extended his emphasis on objectivity and impersonality. Yvonne Rainer’s work in the period of the Judson Dance Theatre aimed at “submerging the personality” in impersonal, task-like movements: “So, ideally, one is not even oneself, one is a neutral doer.” In Childs’s choreography, one is not a neutral but a transpersonal doer. Her emphasis on impersonality is closer to the virtues extolled by Balanchine than by Rainer, for she assumes that dancing is a noble art. The dancers move on paths, imperturbable—their comings and goings seem implacable. Their impassivity is not detachment, the cool ironic tone of Cunningham dancers. It is a positive impassivity that recalls the argument made by Kleist—as if grace and inwardness were opposed.

  LIGHTNESS, ART OF. Childs’s conception of dance is Apollonian: dance should be lively, playful, joyous. Beauty equals power, delicacy, decorum, unaffected intensity. What is ugly is timidity, anxiety, demagoguery, heaviness. (Other exemplars of the Apollonian style: Seurat, Mallarmé, Morandi, Ozu, Wallace Stevens.)

  MEASURABLE. Seurat calculated exactly the place and the disposition of some forty tiny figures in Le Cirque—cited by Childs in her early Museum Piece. Childs prepares placing of dancers and timing in the same spirit. Seurat believed that the beautiful had an objective, measurable basis; Childs needs to specify the structure of her work in numbers. The early pieces were timed to the second, but not counted. The method of working out choreography by counts started in 1968, with Untitled Trio, when Childs began choreographing in the normative sense: to choreograph means to give movement a rhythmic, countable time structure. It is through counting that space is connected with time, whether or not time is further articulated by music. All the “silent” works of the 1970s are precisely counted. (An example: a dance from 1976, Transverse Exchanges, has 1,449 counts.) In works created since 1979, counts are coordinated to—supplied by—music. For instance, in Relative Calm, Childs requested a specific pattern, and numerical phrase base, from the composer Jon Gibson—that the first section be constructed out of fifteen-count phrases and have eleven subsections; that the second section be composed of seventeen-count phrases and have nine subsections, each two to two and a half minutes long; et cetera. The intricate patterning (designed to activate the whole stage space) and subtle variations in timing may seem simple to dance audiences habituated to recognizing only the complexities apparent in movement itself.

  MINIMALIST. Unlike some other dumb labels that emerged in visual arts marketing campaigns (Pop Art, Op Art) in the last two decades, this piece of linguistic chewing gum, first applied to some painters and sculptors (Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, Carl Andre), has spread to architects, choreographers, composers, even to couturiers—imposing, as such label-mongering invariably does, a specious unity among widely different artists. Muybridge, Mondrian, Stein, and Ozu had the good fortune to pursue careers as virtuosi of obsessive repetition and strong patterning without incurring this label. Inevitably succeeded by POST-MINIMALIST.

  MOVEMENTS. Childs’s movement ideal: clear, clean, deliberate, intense. And directional. The dancers are moving or are absolutely still. When moving, they move continuously, with relatively muted accents and a softer dynamic than in classical choreography, recalling Rainer’s prescriptive idea of dance as “movement series”—with “no pauses between phrases and no observable accent … the limbs are never in a fixed, still relationship … creating the impression that the body is constantly engaged in transitions.” Childs has brought the aesthetic of the Judson performers, designed (in Rainer’s words) to impart to dance a “factual quality,” a deliberately matter-of-fact, more “banal quality of physical being in performance,” into confrontation with the high energies and lyrical solemnity of the classical dance ideal. Many of the movements that she recasts are ballet movements. In ballet, positions are reached, then held, allowed to shine. In Childs’s choreography, the classical positions (arabesque, attitude, tendu plié) are taken, cleanly, but only for a split second. Childs doesn’t use in-place movements (like penché, passé développé, grands battements) that exhibit positions, that display technique. Reacting against the modern-dance ideal, exemplified by Graham, of dance as a succession of climaxes, Cunningham and, in more radical form, the Judson choreographers proposed a style of movement that has no climaxes, in which nothing is dramatically framed. From that aesthetic Childs has retained the prohibition against devising positions that can be framed; but the taboo on climactic passages is weakening. Available Light has several clearly identifiable climaxes. It also has a looser weave—perhaps because, unlike Dance and Relative Calm, the work is not divided into separate sections. Adams’s score is a departure from the music Childs has previously used. Instead of the sharp boundaries of earlier scores, it evolves with soft-edge transitions; it has a more obvious emotional texture and consists, most starkly in the last fifteen minutes, of a succession of climaxes.

  NEO-CLASSICAL. It is the hallmark of a neo-classical style, whether in dance or in architecture, to be accused of being merely mathematical. If mathematical means quantifiably precise, insistently formal, majestic, stripped down—as in some Platonic or Palladian kingdom of forms—there is truth in the accusation.

  OPENINGS. In Dance: an empty stage, and the propulsive joyousness of the music … and then the dancers springing in pairs from the wings, spinning, prancing, skimming across the stage. In Relative Calm: the drone … and the dancers already in place, sitting (in diagonal formation) on their carpets of light. In Available Light: the blast of sound that fades into a drone-like hum … and the dancers coming on slowly to take their positions.

  ORDER. Beauty is identified with order, liveliness, serenity, inevitability.

  POLITENESS. The classical tradition of dance is related to courtesy. Ballet gestures are based on a system of deference, of hierarchy, and descend from the gestures of real courts. Childs’s dancers comport themselves as members of an imaginary, cosmic court, behaving with egalitarian courtesy. There are no angry or erotic emotions. The dancers are grave, imperturbable. They always leave each other enough space.

  POST-MODERN. The aging of modernism was remarked by astute observers when modernism was still in its prime. “The word ‘modern’ has changed meaning,” Cocteau observed in 1932, already situating himself safely beyond the modern (everyone’s favorite vantage point) and predicting that “the modern age will be a period between 1912 and 1930.” One of modern
ism’s perennial ventures, its demise, has recently been celebrated with the most successful of new labels—the word “post-modern,” first applied to architects, now as well to visual artists and to choreographers after Cunningham. Frequently a synonym for eclectic. But sometimes conflated with MINIMALIST.

  PRESENCE/ABSENCE. Dance, most present, incarnate of arts, is used by Childs in the service of an aesthetic of absence. This principle was first acknowledged in a Dadaist way, in the notion of the blank, the gap—as in the unpainted painting that is conjured up by discussing its absence, or the drawing that is illustrated by its erasure. Thus, the third section of Geranium, a monologue in which Childs announces: “This is supposed to be the third section, but there really is no third section, so it might be best to refer to the third section as a gap”—and goes on to discuss ideas for the third section, one of which is a glass enclosure that would contain a performer. (It was constructed, and could skim about the stage, in the last piece of Childs’s first period, Vehicle—presented in 1966 in the series “Nine Evenings: Theater and Engineering”: the dancer is inside a mobile Plexiglas box.) Many of the early solos are exercises in absence. Street Dance begins with Childs disappearing into the elevator after pushing the button of the tape recorder. (She reappears below on the street.) In Carnation (1964), Childs does a vanishing act under a white sheet. In her very first piece, Pastime, Childs assumes various poses inside a stretchable blue jersey bag. What starts as a Dadaist performance is eventually raised to a positive principle: a mysticism of space. The dancers are disembodied, dematerialized. The Duchampian whimsicality of non- or anti-appearance is replaced by the Mallarméan idea of beauty as a tribute to the ineffable, to absence.