Poet and dance writer Karen Hildebrand hosts this episode focusing on how text and spoken word are used in dance. Included are examples from works by Liz Lerman, Joe Goode, and Carmen de Lavallade. Hildebrand is the former editorial director for Dance Magazine, and a past editor in chief of Dance Teacher magazine.
Poet and dance writer Karen Hildebrand hosts this episode focusing on how text and spoken word are used in dance. Included are examples from works by Liz Lerman, Joe Goode, and Carmen de Lavallade. Hildebrand is the former editorial director for Dance Magazine, and a past editor in chief of Dance Teacher magazine.
*Of note: the music that underlies Martha Wittman's monologue in Liz Lerman's piece, "Of Fertile Fields," was composed by Robert Een.
[Music begins, composed by J.S. Bach, performed by Jess Meeker]
NORTON OWEN: Welcome to Pillow Voices, a production of Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival with content from the Pillow archives. I'm Norton Owen, the Pillow’s Director of Preservation. And it's my pleasure to introduce this episode focused on how text and spoken word are used in dance. Our host Karen Hildebrand is a poet and dance writer, formerly the Editorial Director for Dance Magazine, and a past Editor-in-Chief of Dance Teacher Magazine. Karen offers examples from works by Liz Lerman, Joe Goode, and Carmen de Lavallade.
KAREN HILDEBRAND: When it comes to language, we humans tend to be more reliably expressive when we move, than when we speak. Martha Graham is famously quoted as saying, “movement never lies.” You can see this in the way you might pick out a friend in a crowd simply by their posture, or their gait when they walk. Consider how stage actors use body language to enhance and even contradict their spoken lines. Graham could convey tremendous dramatic tension without uttering a word. Yet, there are times that dancers specifically choose to speak. In the 1930s, when Graham created American Document in response to the rising threat of fascism, she quoted text from famous speeches and essays, including the “Declaration of Independence” and Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address.” From the earliest days of Jacob’s Pillow, visiting artists have sampled spoken word in dance, whether poetry, dialogue, narration, or other text-based elements. In 1947, Charles Weidman credited in his program notes, “spoken words from newspapers of the day.” On the same program was “Fables of Our Time,” with “Fables and Dialogue by James Thurber.” Sometimes the Pillow location itself has inspired the words, as when choreographer Liz Lerman discovered a diary kept one summer by the festival’s cook. “Dance expresses emotion through metaphor,” said choreographer David Rousseve during a post-show discussion about his work, Stardust, that involves text messaging. But maybe there are other ways that communicate differently that might enable people to see themselves in the work. The power of theater and dance would be to allow us to see ourselves in “the other.” In this episode we’ll look at four dance artists who’ve each approached spoken word in a different way, from inserting text into a dance-driven piece, to working with dancers who can also act.
In 1998, Liz Lerman and her cross-generational company, The Dance Exchange, embarked on a five-year project, Hallelujah. They traveled to fifteen different communities to make work that would resonate with each locale. For the Jacob’s Pillow segment, the company used found text—entries from a diary kept by Esther Miller who worked as cook for the Pillow during the summer of 1942. In Praise of Fertile Fields opens with a movement section for the ensemble, all costumed in white. The stage is strung with a horizontal grid of ropes about two feet off the ground in a way that evokes the furrows used for planting seeds and later to irrigate a garden. Then the ropes slip away, and Martha Wittman, a longtime Dance Exchange collaborator, begins to speak as narrator, the embodiment of Miller the cook.
MARTHA WITTMAN: This ground is so full of stones and big rocks. It reminds me of all the people who've worked so hard here. The farmers, the builders, the dancers. Shawn, of course. Miss Ruth. La Meri, Argentinita,Jack Cole and Pearl Primus. Donald McKayle, José Limón. And of course, all those great Shawn Men Dancers. Barton, Barton is one of my favorites. He’s right up there next to Mr. Shawn, a star. Shawn mentioned to me that someday he'd like to have a memorial garden here. Dancers could plan to have their ashes scattered in some lovely spot. My job here this summer, is to cook nourishing meals for all the dancers.
KAREN HILDEBRAND: The diary entries recount daily life of the community of dancers, including an anecdote about Ted Shawn and the opening of the Ted Shawn Theatre.
MARTHA WITTMAN: Rain, rain, rain. I had to keep mopping up the dining room floor. The roof leaks. Two tea kettles are leaking. Even the refrigerator has sprung a leak. Luckily, I have a new assistant in the kitchen today. A very good scholarship student, Betty Jones. Shawn taught her one of his old solos, “Boston Fancy,” a little folk piece. She performed it this summer on the festival. Shawn gave her her first dollar for her first professional appearance. Betty also had a good story about the building of the new theater. Shawn issued a directive that no one was to set foot on the new stage until he had personally inaugurated it. And there was absolutely to be no tap dancing [audience laughs]. Well, Betty and some of her friends sneaked into the theater one night and each took a turn climbing up onto the stage and practicing a little tap step.
KAREN HILDEBRAND: Sections of pure movement alternate with Wittman’s dairy recitations. Sometimes both are blended, such as when Wittman details a long list of notes made for learning a dance work, move by move, demonstrated by The Dance Exchange performers, with bits of a church sermon interspersed. Here's how the piece ends.
MARTHA WITTMAN: September 25th. My last day on the Pillow we had our first frost this morning. I thoroughly cleaned out the pantry and put away those thirty-six large glass jars of jelly that I made. I finished cleaning the kitchen and put the last utensils away. Now I'm very tired. The Pillow rest calm and serene tonight, under a full moon. The theater roof shimmers like silver. I seem to hear the beat of bare feet, faint strains of music. The throb of Asadata’s drums. The echo of happy laughter hangs over the place and peace, like a blanket, rests overall. Shawn left a little while ago. I'm getting ready to leave shortly.
KAREN HILDEBRAND: In 2001, the San Francisco-based Joe Goode Performance Group brought to the Pillow a triptych of original dance theater performance: What the Body Knows, Doris in a Dustbowl, and Gender Stories, created and performed in collaboration with Goode’s company of eight. In a post-show discussion led by Philip Szporer, Goode tells the audience how the use of text and song in his dance work helped him develop his artistic voice, and what this means for the dancers who work with him.
PHILIP SZPORER: Joe, one of the other things, which is so clear is that you love words. And you are a storyteller. And I'm wondering, just you know that that, what makes words and what makes storytelling so compelling for you, and to do that in the theater setting?
JOE GOODE: Well, you know, my training in New York in the 70s, when I was a baby artist, growing up, was very formal dance very, let the body, let the abstract shape, be all that you have to say. Pare it down. And it never really worked for me. But I tried it, I tried very hard to believe it. But I felt well, where's the emotionality? Where's the personality? where's the person, and all of that? That was always missing for me. And so, I basically had to quit dancing, I left New York. I quit my life as a dancer at the ripe age of 28, or 29. And I traveled around the country thinking I was gonna write the great American play, because that was serious, you know, then I could talk about issues. And, and I never quite got that play written, somehow. And I ended up back in the studio. But I wanted to use language and I wanted to use words, and I wanted to engage people about the things that were important in my life. I wanted to talk, literally talk about them. I also think some of that had to do with being a gay man, in a field, which everyone thinks, da, you're gay and you're a dancer, it's redundant [audience laughs]. But, interestingly enough, it's a, it's not a really very out profession. It's, there's a kind of cordiality and kind of, yes, you're gay, but don't talk about it, certainly don't talk about in your work. And stand in the back row and lift that girl, tall boy [audience laughs]. And, and that's what I did for many, many years. And, and I thought, but you know, there's a part of me, that wants to be fluid and bendy and fragile, in the front. And I'm not getting to explore that part, I'm not getting to tell that story, in dance. And so, when I went, when I ended up in San Francisco by a series of accidents, and I crept back into the studio, I really wanted to tell that story. And I really wanted to give myself permission, because the New York Times wasn't going to come. So, it didn't matter what I did. To tell, you know, the story that I wanted to tell, and it just say, hey, it's San Francisco, who cares? [audience laughs] And much to my surprise, everybody cared, and everyone encouraged me. And it was the right place for me to try to do that. And people said, Yeah, we like the combination of things that you're doing and keep doing it. And I did. It's always my interest to find textures that are difficult and risky for the performer. Sometimes that's your own material. Sometimes there's a kind of revealing of self that can happen in one's own material. Oftentimes, it'll be somebody else's material that will be more challenging for you. And that will take you out of any kind of easy sentimentality, or what you think you are, you know? This whole process of colliding material is about breaking down our expectations, about surprises, about surprising ourselves. And that's a perfect example of rarely does the material that somebody gives me get to the stage in that form. It usually is met with another piece of material that is layered on to it or it's truncated and shortened, so that it's just the it's the “uh” before you spoke, rather than the actual words you said. For instance, if I gave two dancers a problem to solve. One of them, trying to get over the other one without using her arms. I'm trying to get over you, but I can't use my arms to hold on or for leverage. And in that process, they get all entangled and she gets all frustrated and she starts grunting and cursing. Well, the grunting and cursing might actually be more interesting than the movement. So that's what I'll use. And can the movement, or put some kind of lovely tender duet to the grunting and cursing, you know? Those kinds of collisions are what I do. And, and the reason for that is to make the material you know, lively and textured, but also to make the performer a little off balance. So, as you're performing, as you're going through the performance, you're kind of going through a map. I have to do this, and this and this, and these are all these things I have to accomplish. And it's going to be fresh for me. And it's certainly not improvised. It couldn't be because of the technical difficulty of some of it, but it is, in a way, it's like going through an obstacle course. I gotta open my mouth and lift my foot and ah, and he's gonna touch me and I'm gonna think this and all those things coming together create a moment on stage that can feel very real. And that's our goal is to try to get to the truth of the material, rather than just acting it or just performing it.
KAREN HILDEBRAND: In 2014, Jacob’s Pillow hosted the world premiere of Carmen de Lavallade’s “As I Remember It,” a complete script narrated live by de Lavallade. It’s an example of text employed as primary production vehicle. The script is about a life in movement, yet movement itself plays a supporting role to the story. De Lavallade, 83 at the time, is an embodied performer, a trained actress as well as dancer whose grace and fluid movement beautifully brings the characters in her stories to life. The work is truly an oral history in modern dance as de Lavallade talks about Bella Lewitzky, Jack Cole, Alvin Ailey, her husband Geoffrey Holder, and others. Here’s a bit where you can hear her step into character as Lester Horton, and then as famous ballet teacher Carmelita Maracci.
CARMEN DE LAVALLADE: We worked on a stage, not in a studio. There were no bars or mirrors. And we knew our bodies, and we don't just dance. We sweep the floor. Floor vocabulary. We hang the lights, ariel vocabulary. We fixed a costume, dimensional tonus fortifications. And we cleaned the bathrooms [audience laughs]. We have to learn and do everything. We were there seven days a week. And one night we were tired and griping and Lester brought everyone on stage. Everyone on stage. Everyone. All right. Everybody together. 1-2-3, kvetch! Oye, oye, oye, oye, oye, oye, oye, oye, oye, oye. Okay, back to work [audience laughs]. Lester was a master psychologist. You know, he sent me to Carmelita Maracci, the famous ballet dance teacher. He said, she can give you what I can't. I never heard a [audio gets cut] say that before. But Carmelita is hard, and she could be a terror.
[sound interlude]
Stop. Now who do you think you are? When I say take your foot off on one, I mean one. Not and. What makes you think you're any different than the pianist? Nino [piano starts to play]. Ballet has to be perfection. You must have an attitude toward your attitude [audience laughs]. I want you to suspend like El Greco paintings. Rond de Jambe, kick the skirt. Frappé, Frappé. Carmen, talk to your feet. What are they saying to you? Help. Carmelita was looking for the detail. And Lester was looking for the whole. He gave us freedom.
KAREN HILDEBRAND: And here she is talking about a signature piece that John Butler created for her titled Portrait of Billie, referring to Billie Holiday, while a video plays of the performance.
CARMEN DE LAVALLADE: Now John Butler was a, like Lester, was a dramatic choreographer. A master storyteller. Now in the ballet of Billie Holiday, called Portrait of Billie, he created a signature piece for me. He said, when, when the music is fast, she doesn't want to dance. But when the music is slow, that's when she wants to dance [audio of Holiday singing]. Everything is cantilevered, off balance tilted, tipped, on the edge. He said, you have the courage to take the risk. That's what being an artist is all about [audio of Holiday singing continues].
KAREN HILDEBRAND: In the post-performance conversation with the Pillow’s Norton Owen, dramaturg Talvin Wilks, director Joe Grifasi and de Lavallade talk about their collaboration, and the task of turning a series of anecdotes into a full dramatic work.
CARMEN DE LAVALLADE: Talvin's exhaustive, exhaustive interviews with Carmen, which were fabulous, but they were, but their text and their anecdotes and their, their quotes, but it had to be turned into a dramatic vehicle. And that is the hardest frickin’ thing in the world to do.
KAREN HILDEBRAND: Grifasi first met de Lavallade as a student of her Movement for Actors class at Yale, so they had some history before they came together for this project. Here the two of them discuss the difference between working with dancers and actors.
JOE GRIFASI: When you came to teach us as actors you said, ah last thing I want to do is see you move like a dancer [de Lavallade: Oh. That’s right]. I love the way you move. I love the way you move, you shuffle you, you do, you trip [de Lavallade: Oh yeah, yeah]. And that was good.
CARMEN DE LAVALLADE: Yeah no. Actors were fun to work with because, you know, dancers like being in the in the army [audience laughs]. You, you'd have no opinions, you do what you're told, you know, it's things like that. Although Lester didn't do that he led I'm never time when he said point your foot or anything like that, he's assumed you're gonna put your foot. But he was more about the work. And John was like that. And most of the choreographers I worked with, allowed a certain amount of freedom, but they were, they were wonderful. So, and the actors, they had such imaginations because you know, they, they have opinions. You don't have an opinion when you're a dancer. You don't dare tell a choreographer I don't want to do that step [audience laughs]. You know, change the step. You know, you know, and I was shocked when they would cut some things out of words. And I thought, Oh, my God, they cut, but that would never happen with, with dance. So I was, had that kind of closed kind of mind for, for creativity. It's kind of stymies you.
JOE GRIFASI: It certainly, certainly happened in this process [de Lavallade: Yeah]. Because we had so many hours of wonderful interviews. And finally, we got to a point in rehearsal, we knew we had to make a dramatic animal out of it. So, we coined the phrase, “save it for the book” [de Lavallade: Yeah] [everyone laughs].
KAREN HILDEBRAND: As someone who has enjoyed countless hours watching and reflecting on dance, I am surprised by what the added element of text can do with movement. It's what I think David Rousseve meant about the ways spoken word can open a window to allow an audience to see themselves in the work.
[Music begins, composed and performed by Jess Meeker]
NORTON OWEN: That’s it for this episode of PillowVoices. Thank you for joining us today. On behalf of Jacob’s Pillow, we look forward to sharing more dance with you through the films, essays, and podcasts at Dance Interactive dot Jacob’s Pillow dot org. And of course, through live experiences during our festival and throughout the year. Special thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts for helping launch this podcast series. Please subscribe to PillowVoices wherever you get your podcasts, and visit us again soon, either online or on site.