by Susan Sontag
QUARTETS. Favorite formation in Childs’s choreography, the first multiple of two. Among the short works choreographed for four dancers are Calico Mingling (1973), for four women, and Radial Courses, for two women and two men. In Relative Calm, the second section is for a quartet formation restocked several times from among eight dancers. Its sequel is the fourth section, which consists of two quartets, one of women and one of men.
RELATIVE CALM. 1981. The second of Childs’s evening-length productions. Music by Jon Gibson, decor and lighting by Robert Wilson. Ninety-five minutes, a prologue and four sections, for nine dancers. Though not so labeled, the sections make up one of the traditional four-part sequences, The Times of Day. This is the Symbolic-Romantic version of the subject—Runge rather than Hogarth. Prologue: a star backdrop and the moon swinging pendulum-like in front of the dancers sitting in diagonal formation in carpets of light. The first section, “Rise,” is early dawn—the dancers are in identical white jumpsuits; at the end, the stage brightens and the stars blanch out. “Race” is day; the dancers are in beige; it contains an homage to the quotidian, in the form of some inane sentences projected on the cyclorama and the brief appearance of a live dog. “Reach,” the solo, is twilight—the stars start to come out—and both stage and cyclorama are cut diagonally, with half of the stage and half of the cyclorama in shadow, and Childs, in black, dancing in a diagonal wedge of light. “Return,” with the dancers in royal blue, is starry, electric night. The conceit of the times of day evolved in conversations between Childs and Wilson; Childs invented the titles of the four sections, whose function was both to convey and to obscure a little the literalness of the scenic underpinning supplied by Wilson’s set and lighting.
REPETITION. Childs’s early notion of repetition, in the sprightly “silent” dances of the 1970s: dancers using the same steps or families of movements, going in and out of sync with each other. The notion becomes more complex in Childs’s solo in Einstein on the Beach: repetition as an accumulation of effects, as layering. (Versus the repetition-as-reinterpretation of Patio.) Strictly speaking, there is of course no repetition in Childs’s work, but rather a certain strict use of thematic materials, which are first stated and then gradually modified at a different rate of change (more evenly, not expressionistically) than audiences are accustomed to. In contrast to Wilson’s Judson-derived dynamics of slow movement, thin difference, low-contrast change, Childs’s work since the late 1970s has a greater density of movement, fast rhythms and few tableaux. (Whereas Wilson’s work tends naturally to take long forms, Childs’s work is only gradually assuming them.) Though usually presented as cool choice, repetition always suggests perfectionist zeal. Rainer in 1966 defended repetition because it makes movement appear “more objectlike”—more matter-of-fact, neutral, unemphatic. But repetition is also a method for inducing bliss. Repetition is a technique that seems to suggest simplicity, that in principle enhances legibility or intelligibility. (Rainer: “literally making the material easier to see.”) A way of ordering material associated with the idea of the minimal, it could more accurately be called the modern maximalism: repetition as exhaustive patterning; the exhausting of possibilities. Far from making material neutral, repetition has a vertiginous effect, as in much of Childs’s recent work—duplications, mirrorings, that are the kinetic equivalent of the static mise-en-abîme. See DOUBLING.
ROMANTIC. The “classical” tradition in dance is Romantic, so a neo-classical idiom in dance will inevitably be, in a restrained key, neo-Romantic. (But even this restraint is appropriate. Romantic art is, above all, self-conscious and critical.) The play of ghost, shadow, doppelgänger in Dance. The Pythagorean beauty of Relative Calm, with its allegorical underpinning: the Times of Day. (The contact with Wilson’s allegorizing sensibility and its innate affinities with a certain German Romanticism helped Childs move away from a dead-end puritanism in her own sensibility.) There are Romantic echoes in all the work since 1979. In Dance, having two solo sections, one in black (“Dance #2”) and one in white (“Dance #4”), like Swan Lake’s Odile/Odette. In Available Light, the arrival of Childs in the corridor, like the Queen of the Wilis in Giselle. When Available Light was first presented—in July 1983, at the Châteauvallon Dance Festival in an open-air version, with no set and with the dancers in the company’s allpurpose touring costumes, the white jumpsuits of the first section of Relative Calm—one saw the choreography in its naked state: without white tutus but very much a ballet blanc.
SOLOS. Childs choreographs for herself differently than she does for the rest of the company. As a soloist she gives herself a wider range of dynamic changes, more evolution in the material (rather than in space). There are two lengthy solos in Dance, one in Relative Calm. In Available Light, which is not divided into separate sections, Childs functions more as a member of the ensemble, less as a soloist. Still, she is separate—in white, when most of the dancers are in red or black. Although she has no solo section as such where she appears alone onstage, she is the only dancer who comes and goes. The rest of the company remains onstage for the entire fifty-five minutes (except for one brief pause when the music downshifts and all ten go off, then return). From her early solos, with their theme of the absent or disappearing performer, to her privileged comings and goings in Available Light, Childs’s solo presence—grave, hieratic, not wholly expressive—invokes both presence and absence.
SPACE. Dancers are travelers, “space eaters” (Childs’s words), using up a given space in a patterned, comprehensive way. (An early didactic solo, Particular Reel, 1973, in which Childs covers the stage in ten rows from right to left and then in ten rows from left to right, ending at the point where she started, is a model demonstration of the project of using up space.) The more space the better. Dancers are pulled along a line; and their relations are conceived as parallel or perpendicular. Dancers are always, indefatigably, going somewhere. In a state of non-imploring urgency, they never stop; though they may go into movement-absence, they do so in order to repopulate the space. When dancers “drop out,” others come in.
TITLES. After the capers of the mid-1960s, titles have been sober: usually two words, adjective and noun; often a structure or pattern word with a movement word, as in Checkered Drift, Calico Mingling, Reclining Rondo, Transverse Exchanges, Radial Courses. A favorite title form is a contradiction, an oxymoron—one that, in recent works, suggests the paradoxes of self-control: Relative Calm, Formal Abandon. Or a stylish appreciation of the possible: Available Light.
UNAVAILABLE. Dance is about the absent or unavailable object of desire.
VOLITION. The more formal dance is shown to be, the weaker the possible attributions of volition. Dancers in formations—all this mirroring, duplicating, and inverting of movement removes the impression of subjectivity. So does the neutral performance mask—the fact that the dancers don’t look at each other, or at the audience. (The effect is comparable to the anti-acting style favored by Bresson.) Dancers stop because they are being rearranged or repatterned, not because of any emotion or volition. To substitute rules or patterns—Kleist imagined them as mechanisms—for subjectivity in demeanor and movement is the prerequisite of grace. But the dancers are anything but automata.
WORLD. Dance, since the Romantics, has been about a phantom world. Childs’s counts, like the tiny dots of color in the paintings of Seurat, are the building blocks of an art of phantom presences. Things which both are and are not: the moment of plenitude is an evocation of absence; pleasure—as in La Grande Jatte—is shown as rigidity, restraint.
YEARNING. The body in diagonal is a pose of outreach, hailing; of longing—for space itself. However large, the stage is never large enough. Childs’s choreography projects onto the finite stage an infinitely large space or territory. Her love of space produces movements and structures—among them, the modalities of repetition—that seem choreographic equivalents of Zeno’s arguments (called paradoxes) on the subject of motion, according to which, since any line is infinitely divi
sible, and will be made up of an infinite number of units, each of which has some magnitude, every finite line or space is in fact infinitely great; and, despite appearances, no moving object ever traverses any distance at all.
ZENO’S TERRITORY. Childs’s early, provisional title for the work now known as Available Light.
[1983]
In Memory of Their Feelings
1. DANCERS ON A PLANE
I don’t see them.
There. The dancers are there, invisible—an analogue to racing thoughts.
Framed by the utensils of eating.
A meal to be eaten?
An invisible meal.
Two meals: one light, one dark. One sprightly, one stained with sexual dread.
Dancers on a plate?
No. They need more space than that.
2. EATING AND DANCING
Recombinant arts.
A domain of pleasure. A domain of courtesy.
Rule-bound. Who sets the rules? Behavior with standards.
“In Memory of Their Feelings” was written for the exhibition catalogue of Dancers on a Plane: Cage, Cunningham, Johns at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London, 1989. The exhibition centered on Jasper Johns’s Dancers on a Plane series. Framing the sides of the paintings is a sequence of applied knives, forks, and spoons.
An idea of order. First one thing, then another. Then one is full. Then it is finished—the belly sated, the limbs heavy. After a decent interval: then again. All over again. All over, again.
They remind us we live in the body-house.
Living “in” the body. But where else could we live?
Dancing as the realm of freedom, that’s less than half the story.
Eating as the realm of necessity. Not necessarily. What about eating idyllically (as in Paris)?
Everyone eats, everyone can dance. Not everyone dances (alas).
I watch dance, with pleasure. I don’t watch eating. If I watch someone eating when hungry, I wish it were I eating. A meal watched by a hungry person is always savory. If I watch someone eating when I’m full, I may turn away.
You can dance for me. (You do the dancing in my place, I’ll just watch.) You can’t eat for me. Not much pleasure there.
You can dance to please: Salome. You can eat to please too: as a child might eat to please its mother or a nurse. (As Suzanne Farrell is said to have said that she danced for God and for Mr. Balanchine.) But except to doting parents eating is a poor spectator sport. Mildly disgusting unless you’re doing it as well.
To eat is to put metal in one’s mouth. Delicately. It’s not supposed to hurt.
The eater fills the hole.
A dancer eats space.
Space eats time.
Sounds eat silence.
3. THE KNIFE
It cuts. Don’t be afraid. This is not a weapon. It’s just a tool to help you eat. See. Passing it to you—you asked for it—I proffer it by the handle, keeping the blade pointed at myself. The blade is pointing at me.
One should not move the point of the knife toward someone as in an attack.
You can lay it down two ways. Blade in, blade out.
Don’t be timorous. It isn’t sharp. It’s just a plain, ordinary … knife. Straight. Two-sided.
In the fairy tale, a mermaid who has fallen in love with a prince begs to be allowed to assume human form so she can leave the water and make her way to the court. Yes. She will have legs, she will walk. But with each step she takes it will feel as if she were walking on knives.
You can dance with a knife. (Between the teeth? Between the shoulder blades?) Hard to imagine dancing with a fork. Or with a spoon.
The knife seems like the master utensil, the one from which all others depend. (Swiss Army Knife.) You could spear food with your knife, eliminating the fork. (As everyone knows, you can eat the peas with your knife. You’re just not supposed to.) As for the spoon—well, we could do without that, too. Just lift up the bowl dish cup, and drink it.
Only the knife is really necessary. And it is the knife, more than any other eating utensil, whose use is most circumscribed. The evolution of table manners is mainly about what to do with knives. Use the knife more and more unobtrusively, elegantly. With your finger ends. Don’t grasp it against your palm like a stick.
“There is a tendency that slowly permeates civilized society, from the top to the bottom, to restrict the use of the knife (within the framework of existing eating techniques) and wherever possible not to use the instrument at all” (Norbert Elias). For instance, to eliminate or at least limit the contact of the knife with round or egg-shaped objects. Not all restrictions are successful. The prohibition on eating fish with a knife was circumvented by the introduction of a special fish knife.
That oxymoron: the butter knife.
To eat is to put metal in one’s mouth. But not knives. The mere sight of someone putting her knife in her mouth produces an uneasy feeling.
4. THE SPOON
The spoon seems to belong in the mouth.
The spoon is not quite grownup in the way the knife and fork are. It doesn’t menace. It isn’t a tamed weapon.
The spoon is the utensil of childhood, the friendliest utensil. The spoon is childlike. Yum-yum. Scoop me up, pour me in. Like a cradle, a shovel, a hand cupped. Doesn’t cut or pierce or impale. It accepts. Round, curved. Can’t stick you. Don’t trust your child with a knife or a fork, but how can a spoon harm? The spoon is itself a child.
The world is full of pleasures. One has only to be where one is. Here. Now.
Give me my spoon, my big spoon, and I’ll eat the world. A metal spoon is an afterthought. While a wooden knife is less of a knife, a wooden spoon isn’t less of a spoon. It’s just fine.
“Spooning”: embracing, kissing, petting. Lovers in bed fit together in sleep like spoons.
To bring about a music “that will be part of the noises of the environment, will take them into consideration. I think of it as melodious, softening the noises of the knives and forks, not dominating them, not imposing itself,” wrote John Cage, quoting Erik Satie.
What happened to the spoons? Don’t spoons make noises, too?
Softer noises.
And music. Music is made with two spoons (not with two forks, two knives).
Spoon music.
5. THE FORK
There’s a hesitation about the fork. You hold down the food with the fork in your left hand while you cut it with the knife held in your right. Then—if you’re not only right-handed but also American—you put down the knife, then transfer the fork to your right hand and send the speared morsel up to your mouth.
Grownups throw knives. Children throw spoons. Nobody (I think) would throw a fork. It may be four-thirds of a toy trident, but it can’t be thrown as one. It wouldn’t arrive, spear-like, tines first.
The weight is in the handle.
The fork as emblem—emblem of the real. Jasper Johns, explaining something about “my general development so far,” said: “That is to say, I find it more interesting to use a real fork as a painting than it is to use a painting as a real fork.”
What would a fork that isn’t real look like?
The fork is the youngest of the three great eating utensils. The Last Supper was set with knives and spoons only. No forks either at the wedding feast in Cana.
It made its appearance when the knife and spoon were well established. Invented in Italy, thought a foppish pretension when it arrived in England in the early seventeenth century: a set of gold “Italian forkes” presented to Elizabeth I by the Venetian ambassador were put on display at Westminster; she never used them.
The introduction of that vital implement, for a long time despised as effete, enabled people to distance themselves from the eating process by avoiding manual contact with the food.
The principle of fastidiousness. New forms of distance, new forms of delicacy.
New rules of finicky behavior at table proliferated. People were expected to manipulate an inc
reasingly complicated battery of utensils.
It seemed hard, setting up and keeping this distance.
Now we take forks for granted.
