Jacob's Pillow Associate Archivist Patsy Gay hosts this episode featuring excerpts of a 1998 PillowTalk. In this conversation between choreographers Ralph Lemon and Susan Marshall, we hear insights about their own beginnings in dance along with their individual ways of creating work.
Jacob's Pillow Associate Archivist Patsy Gay hosts this episode featuring excerpts of a 1998 PillowTalk. In this conversation between choreographers Ralph Lemon and Susan Marshall, we hear insights about their own beginnings in dance along with their individual ways of creating work.
[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 Patsy Gay, our Associate Archivist. Patsy will guide us through a little-known gem in our collection, a 1998 PillowTalk with choreographers Ralph Lemon and Susan Marshall, each sharing insights about their own beginnings in dance and their individual ways of creating work.
PATSY GAY:One of the most fun things I get to do as the Associate Archivist at Jacob’s Pillow is encounter thrilling happenings from the Pillow’s past. Though I rarely get to read, or watch, or listen purely for my pleasure, sometimes while doing my work I will run across things that are simply so enticing I will add them to my list of “must find time to revisit this later!” One such intriguing item I happened across recently is an August 5, 1998 talk between artists Susan Marshall and Ralph Lemon. Susan Marshall is probably best known for her work with her dance company: Susan Marshall & Company, which she founded in New York City in 1985. On her company’s website today, Marshall is described as “an innovator who expanded the formal structures of post-modernism to include everyday gestures and theater experiments.” She works frequently with collaborations across disciplines including virtual artists, scientists, musicians, and more. In 2009, Marshall became a professor and the Director of Dance at Princeton University where her teaching centers on choreography and creative practice. Ralph Lemon founded his dance company, the Ralph Lemon Company, in that same year: 1985. But, after a decade of performance touring, residencies, and creating commissions, Lemon disbanded his company in 1995 to create project-based work. He now self-describes in his bio as “a choreographer, writer, visual artist, curator, and the artistic director of Cross Performance, a company dedicated to the creation of cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary performance and presentation.” Additionally, Lemon has also held a range of teaching roles including recently as Professor of the Practice with the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University. Marshall and Lemon were both at The Pillow in August 1998 because Marshall’s company was performing her evening-length work The Most Dangerous Room in the House and Ralph Lemon was on faculty in the Modern Traditions program of The School at Jacob’s Pillow. And lucky for us, some clever person decided to take advantage of their happenstantial co-location to sit these two fascinating artists down for a chat with Scholar-in-Residence Maura Keefe. While you can always come visit us in the Pillow Archives and hear the whole talk, in this PillowVoices episode, I’ll be sharing some curated excerpts from their engaging discussion. So, as the entry point to this compelling conversation, let’s start with hearing from Ralph Lemon and then Susan Marshall about where they began their journeys into dance and choreography.
RALPH LEMON: I was a visual artist before I was a dancer. And then from a student of visual arts I went into English literature. And then theater arts. And then in theater I started dancing. And when I started dancing I started with Nancy Hauser who is from the Wigman lineage. And Nancy was great because she didn’t really teach technique, she taught theory. And she would talk on about how all the artists in the 30’s were communists. And, you know, art was about this whole sort of life and political system and… So, that’s kind of what I grew up with and by nature of me being in that room with her, I was an artist. And plus, all those forms that I had sort of dabbled in before I started dancing really kind of prepared me for the idea of making work, basically. And I found dancing in a company as a dancer really difficult. Nancy, as a choreographer, would tell me that I didn’t understand space, that I was always in the wrong place, and I was always off the music. And all that was really frustrating to me because I thought: "yeah. I’m really bad at this.” [audience laughs] But, then it became clear that: no, I’m not bad at this, I’m just making different decisions about, like, where I should be. [Lemon laughs] And so, I danced for about, I don’t know, two years with Nancy. Then I moved to New York and worked with Meredith Monk for a couple years. And then after that I started choreographing. So, I had a very short life as a dancer. And I guess it was sort of clear to me early on that I wanted to kind of make work. Or that I could make work–it would be a very easy transition for me. And that dance as a form was just that. It was just another medium of something that I was already really practiced in.
SUSAN MARSHALL: Well, I think I always was interested in moving in various different ways. [Marshall laughs] To be clear about that, I was in gymnastics in high school and it’s very similar stuff, so I just sort of segued into dance. And I just always loved moving. And loved watching people move. So, that’s the launching pad. And then the transition for me to choreographer was that I was always choreographing from the beginning just as it happened as well. And then, similarly to Ralph, but maybe for different reasons, I was of the theory that you’re not necessarily going to become a good choreographer just dancing with someone else for fifteen years and then deciding to become a choreographer. So that was in my mind. I would just keep choreographing. So, I was choreographing and dancing, choreographing and dancing. And the choreography took off and then I let the dancing go. [Marshall laughs]
PATSY GAY:Both Susan Marshall and Ralph Lemon are known for their innovative choreography and much of this fantastic conversation centers on creative practice and philosophies of the craft. Early in the talk, Maura Keefe prompts both of them by asking about their creation process and what role their dancers play in the generation of new choreography. Let’s begin with Lemon.
RALPH LEMON: When I had my dance company it was an easier answer, we would just work daily. I would come in and move around and come up with phrases that my body felt like doing on a particular day and then the dancers would respond to that. I wouldn’t ask for exact steps. I would ask for an interpretation. And then as a choreographer I would have to step back because I can’t see my body–I can feel it–but I can’t see it. And then via the dancers' translation of that I would have a visual discourse on what it was I felt moving. And then from that I can just sort of–I would then mold it, direct it more, refine, and ultimately and eventually come up with something that was completely different than what my body did. Which I think is good cause otherwise I could just work as a soloist.
SUSAN MARSHALL: Similarly to Ralph, I’m someone who has to see what I’m doing. So, it’s not really useful for me to be in it, you know? In fact, I’m even a step behind Ralph in... [Marshall laughs] Some choreographers can feel something and from how they feel it on their bodies… When I do something, I have not a clue what it looks like. So, I just take myself out of the process pretty much. And I give suggestions. You know, I interact with them: “try this, try that.” But, it’s really a real verbal process with me. It’s a back and forth. A lot of suggestions. Sometimes I come with a lot of images and ideas to feed to them. And sometimes I have nothing and we just start with looser improvisation and see where that goes. Eventually though I do end up with a lot of manipulation of whatever is developed and refinement.
MAURA KEEFE: Can you talk about what you mean by manipulation?
SUSAN MARSHALL: Well, once the…It’s all in service of the work… Once the work begins to establish its identity, it’s a question of structuring the work, and making sure that just… It’s manipulating the actual movement. Manipulating how it’s sequenced. Where it is in space. Just everything about it.
PATSY GAY:This talk came only a few years after Ralph Lemon made the daring decision to disband the company he had run for a decade–Ralph Lemon Dance Company–and shift his focus to multi-year project-based work. Let’s listen to him talk about his journey into creative struggles and triumphs in this still relatively new way of working.
RALPH LEMON: Now that I’m working with these artists from these very, very different cultures and different movement backgrounds, I can’t rely on what my body does because it’s a different language to them and it makes no sense. So, now I’m literally allowing artists from these different cultures, these different dance art forms, to sort of bring what it is they do and then see how that intersects with my more constructed formal concerns. So, I’m less choreographing physically on them and choreographing more about structural form. How they’re moving across the space, how they enter a space, how they exit a space, and how to kind of inform what they do energetically. But, it’s very collaborative.
PATSY GAY:Later in the conversation, Lemon digs more into the creative process in his specific choreographic projects that he was working on at that time.
RALPH LEMON: And I’m doing a trilogy. It’s called Geography and this is the second part. The first part was working with these West African dancers. And I went to Africa a couple times within that sort of two-year process. And the first time I went to look at African dancing I had no idea what to look for. You know, if I’m going to work with these artists what is it that I’m going to work with? They’re so different from me. They’re so physically different. And then once I was able to just sort of sit and look and watch, it was about their energy. So, the dancers I picked and brought over were the ones I felt like I could relate to on an energetic level. And that was a breakthrough for me.
PATSY GAY:Susan Marshall also ruminates on the challenges and surprises of being commissioned to create a work for another dance company.
SUSAN MARSHALL: Well, I guess there are two main differences in my mind when I work on my own company and when I work on a ballet company or basically any other company not my own. One is: with my own company I have a history. So, there’s a huge amount of information that we can draw on that has to do with our process, that has to do with our communication, that has to do with our… we already have a base of movement knowledge that we can draw from, so I could even use some other movement as a starting place. When you go to another company, you have none of that. They don’t know how your process is. They don’t know what you’re… who you are. And you can’t say: “Oh, let’s take something like such and such” or “Let’s start here.” You don’t even… you can’t even agree on your starting places. Everything has to be spelled out. So, it’s a more difficult process. It doesn’t mean it can’t be really rich. Because they can bring new and different things to it that you wouldn’t expect from your own company. It can be very... It can take you into new directions. But, there’s a lot of gearing up that has to happen that doesn’t happen with your own company. And for me, almost the biggest consideration is that I have the luxury of time with my own company because I can set the schedule according to my preferred working pace, which is slow [Marshall laughs].
PATSY GAY:I keep calling this compelling conversation a talk–and it absolutely was part of Jacob’s Pillow’s PillowTalk series with lots of talking involved–but, in this amazing instance, Maura Keefe also turned the afternoon into a surprise mini composition class. Keefe had given Susan Marshall and Ralph Lemon a choreographic assignment beforehand. So, both of the artists performed live for the PillowTalk audience short, freshly crafted, dance sequences based off of the following instructions: “in any order: stand, sit, make a circle, gesture, head movement, stand on your stool or part of stool, and freeze.” Now, you will have to wait until your next visit to the Jacob’s Pillow Archives to see the fun, impromptu, mini dances these two artists came up with. But, what this unexpected movement interlude also unearthed, which we will now enjoy, was a well of even deeper discussion about choreographic practice. To begin, let’s hear Marshall reflect on what resonated with her from Keefe’s generative prompts and its connections with her larger creative process.
SUSAN MARSHALL: Well, I like natural gesture a lot. Gestures such as this. And standing up and sitting down. All that really appeals to me because it’s a language we all share. And we just get on the same page immediately. We don’t have to go through the head. And so I like to use that material a lot in my work. It’s not all that material. But, there is… I draw on that as a source and as a way of continually keeping in touch with you the audience. And also I think what I was hoping to do with the duet was.. I don’t know if a relationship… if you saw a relationship? Or a cause and response? Or action and response? But, I like to deal a lot with action and response. So, in Ralph’s case, I gave him no response to whatever it was I did, which I think establishes a relationship: a relationship where one person simply isn’t responding. And in a way, his response, or lack of response, may have spoken much louder than my actions. And so, anyway, I like to work a lot with relation. Because I feel that sometimes we can define what is happening between us… one person can define another person. And I like to work with that a lot just through how they’re… what the response is. So, that dialogue.
PATSY GAY: Ralph Lemon too, reflects on his experiences working with Maura Keefe’s instructions and what they generated for him.
RALPH LEMON: Well, it was nice having the instructions in the beginning because I am one who is imprisoned by, or married to, or completely in love with form. And so if I can have helpful information that helps me create structure, then within that structure I find a kind of emotional and physical freedom to try lots of different things. And so having those instructions, plus the stool, and the tension of my not wanting to dance with a prop, you know, created something really interesting for me. And then it’s like, who knows? I don’t know what that communicated. That was sort of my little exercise from a larger instruction. And then I tend just to create a structure and then play within the mystery of it. And then later I think I find out what it might mean or could mean. But, I think a lot of my work when it’s done is as mysterious to me as it probably is to an audience. So...
PATSY GAY:This theme of mystery and the unknown was clearly a powerful one for Lemon, and he returned to grapple with it again later in the conversation.
RALPH LEMON: Because for me the process is… you know… and I don’t know if I’m playing games with myself… but I like… I… I embrace the being unknown to me. For some reason that’s important. So, that if my process is unknown to me and I’m structuring it in a way that I’m trying to find coherence in that unknownness then that should also be the experience of an audience. But, I want to be able to give the audience a form where they can somehow visually connect, energetically connect, to my commitment. To what it is I’m lost in.
PATSY GAY: I will leave you today with Susan Marshall picking up this thread of mystery as she spoke about how she sees shared meaning–and shared mystery–being generated between artists and audiences.
SUSAN MARSHALL: I think that we may not agree on specifics, but we will tend to agree on a family of meaning. And we’ll know when we’re working with something clearer and something less clear. And I think for me that’s clear. [Marshall laughs] You know? And if I need more mystery in the work–if the work is getting too spelled out and I want more mystery–I will draw on materials that are more mysterious, that have more of an emotional quality. Or you know… For me it’s a question of being aware of all those resonances at least in how I’m responding to them and orchestrating them. And knowing that it won’t be the exact same thing, but the emotional contour that an audience goes through will have a similar throughline. You know? Maybe the specific path may be different, but there will be a throughline that we can share.
[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 onsite.