Clarinda Mac Low: scores and improv

The Score by Clarinda Mac Low
Critical Correspondence

Clarinda Mac Low reflects on dance scores in the second of a series of several writings for CC in 2012, which she has dubbed “The Year of Dance.” Mac Low will be presenting 40 Dancers do 40 Dances for the Dancers at Danspace Project this September 2012. The piece is based on The Pronouns: 40 Dances for the Dancers, a series of dance scores by her father, Jackson Mac Low.

A chat with photographer Ian Douglas

Will Rawls in Collected Fictions, Frontispieces (c)Ian Douglas

Photographer Ian Douglas

Click here for audio interview with Ian Douglas [14:54]

Since 2006, Ian Douglas has been actively photographing New York City's amazing contemporary dance and performance art scene, regularly working with artists like Ishmael Houston-Jones, Miguel Gutierrez, Yvonne Meyer and others. He is the photographer-in-residence for Danspace Project and Movement Research, and has photographed for the New York Times, New York Live Arts/Dance Theater Workshop and more. Douglas's work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Art Forum, Dance Magazine and various publications throughout New York City and the world.

Click here for Ian Douglas's Web site.

Scroll down for more samples of his work for Parallels.

Ishmael Houston-Jones, Parallels curator (c)Ian Douglas

Dancer-choreographer Nora Chipaumire (c)Ian Douglas

Click here for information on purchasing the Parallels catalogue and other Danspace Project catalogues.

Of related interest

Movement Research Studies Project presents Photography and the Performance Journal, a discussion with photographers Dona Ann McAdams, Anja Hitzenberger and Miana Jun, moderated by Ursula Eagly.

Tuesday, March 20 at 6:15pm -- Free admission

More information at Movement Research

Gibney Dance Center
5th Floor, Studio 1

890 Broadway, Manhattan

(map/directions)

Trust the public

So I'm reading Movement Research Performance Journal on the M15 crosstown to Chelsea. There's an interview with Bill T. Jones about how professional dance absolutely must change to survive. I'm staring down into that strange, typical soup of words, intense energy, blunt provocation and frustrating lack of specificity--and, yes, I do mean typical for both BTJ and MRPJ. But just before the bus pulls into its 18th Street terminus, I get to this passage from Jones:

Are you clear about what you believe and what you make and how you make it? Are you so clear about it that you could actually invite the most stupid person in there and give that person just a little taste of something that's human in what you do and that is not superior. This whiff of arrogance and superiority--believe me honey I have it, big time. And I'm telling you something, I've had to learn, because it sneaks through, that we actually feel, and this is the history of alienation, that somehow we are entitled because we are a privileged and long-suffering elite that is wandering in the wilderness of mediocrity which is the whole world. Now if that doesn't sound like a load of shit, then you tell me. (MRPJ #38, February 2011, p. 5)

I don't care for the descriptive "stupid," but I think I begin to get what he's getting at despite the fragments and tangents.

Jones is impatient for contemporary dance to break out of its cocoon and make both pragmatic and creative connections out there in the hell of other people. That's what he has in mind for New York Live Arts--the new entity formed from the merger of Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and Dance Theater Workshop--and it begins with the individual artist deciding that he or she respects and can trust the public.

Detail of Sarah Sze's STILL LIFE WITH LANDSCAPE (MODEL FOR A HABITAT), High Line Park (c)2011, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

A few steps, a few stairs, and I'm surrounded by the gorgeous, lush greenery and wildflowers of High Line Park, walking its new section. I take photos of a mourning dove alight on an elaborate wildlife sanctuary by artist Sarah Sze. The sculpture provides watering holes, seed feeders and places for resting and nesting. "It's like a mansion for birds," one visitor exclaimed. Yes, now even birdies, butterflies and ladybugs can find an upscale perch in Chelsea!

Detail of Sze sculpture (c)2011, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Above and below: Mourning dove (c)2011, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Above and below: Seen from High Line Park (c)2011, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

I stroll to 30th Street. Though reluctant to leave the flowers, the butterflies, the breeze, the views across this cityscape, I ride the elevator down to 10th Avenue. I'm off to the Sean Kelly Gallery for Robert Mapplethorpe: 50 Americans: fifty photographs "selected by fifty Americans of diverse occupations, ages, races and backgrounds...one from each state in the Union...invited to select a single artwork from over 2,000 images in Mapplethorpe's collection that resonated with them personally." Portraits, still lifes, a wintry landscape...the range of these selections is broad and lovely.

Right away, I stumble upon, like a secret wink meant just for me, a 1985 portrait of--yes--Bill T. Jones chosen by a 32-year-old woman from Birmingham, Alabama, a children's author and storyteller. Jones jumps straight up, his body breaching the frame, rendered headless, and as my mind helplessly starts to read something into this that the white Alabama native might not have considered, I move along.

A 66-year-old grandmom from Vermont enjoyed working through the photo collection with her granddaughter. She chose Horse #5 (1982) and wrote, "I was drawn to all the images of animals. I love animals. These horses reminded me of my farm....Lots of memories and stories came to life through his work."

Her response is fairly common: Lots of these folks found that they could relate to aspects of Mapplethorpe's diverse imagery on a personal level. They share their experiences here. Reading the plaques that accompany the photos and bear the selectors' words and a thumbnail picture of each, I find my heart going out to many of them.

Prior to getting involved in the gallery's project, most of the participants knew little, if anything, about the photographer and his work. Some knew just enough about Mapplethorpe's reputation for homoerotic imagery to be a little nervous about having to view it. Some clearly avoided the erotica when making their choices from among the collection's variety of subjects. Yet these non-experts crowd-curated a beautiful, instructive show, and their reflections on this work demonstrate remarkable perception and insight as well as appreciation for Mapplethorpe's sensitivity and brilliance.

I was moved by the capacity people have to meet art with open minds when given a chance to really look at it and allow it to draw close to them, to search their lives for common ground. No wonder repressive social orders seek to manipulate or destroy art. I was touched, too, by this gallery's trust of the American public, and that brought me back to Bill T. Jones.

I stopped for dinner on the way home and, once again, took out my now-rumpled copy of MRPJ. This time, I turned to "New York's Alright," an editorial by dance artist Eleanor Hullihan and was amazed to read this passage, including her reference to Mapplethorpe's great soul mate, Patti Smith:

Phyllis Lamhut and Patti Smith are two women I admire who in different ways have encourage people to get out of New York and either make work where they came from or where they can afford to live more easily.  We could benefit from decentralizing dance in the states. We can't keep talking about the rest of the country like it is full of idiots who don't understand us if they don't have the opportunity to see what we do. I recently had one of the most positive audience responses from a show I did with John Jasperse in Helena, Montana. Montana? Hell yes. It was not a dance audience but they came and enjoyed and wanted to talk afterwards. This may be a mission for our generation of makers. It may also be a mission for people younger than ourselves. (MRPJ #38, February 2011, p. 6)

Okay, Universe, I get it. Trust the people. Just get the work out there. Spread it around, that "little taste of something that's human in what you do and that is not superior." Just trust. Good for artists to remember. Good for people who write about art to remember, too.

Robert Mapplethorpe: 50 Americans ends Saturday, June 18.

Sean Kelly Gallery
528 West 29th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues), Manhattan 212-239-1181
(map)

Ishmael Huston-Jones reflects on writer Burt Supree

On BURT SUPREE

From Movement Research Performance Journal #6, spring / summer 1993, heroes and histories

[re-posted with permission from Ishmael Houston-Jones]

I hate moving. I hate making Solomon-like decisions of whether to toss or keep my mountains of magazines. I hate going through archeological digs through molehills of cash receipts. I hate trying to pack my files but finding it impossible not to read every item in each drawer. This has been my life for two months. While wallowing in this neurosis I came upon two ancient reviews by Burt Supree which, of course, I read. Burt’s keen observations about these two pieces made two and a half years apart tell a lot about my work as an artist and how it is informed by the times and frame of mind in which I live and create.

The first piece was Cowboys, Dreams, and Ladders a collaboration with Fred Holland that premiered at The Kitchen in February 1984. In Cowboys Fred and I used a collage of movement, text and visuals to explore and deconstruct the “western” myth through the eyes of two Afro-American “downtown” male performance artists. Trying to place our identities within and without this myth was key, and although we used familiar western iconography, (movie music and crickets on the soundtrack, tumble weed and cacti made of urban debris as sets), the idea of making a performance piece about “Black Cowboys” was often greeted by nervous or ironic giggles by our white peers. I worried that people would not get it. In his review Burt concluded that Fred and I “with the very potent intimacy of performers who have worked a lot together ... give Cowboys, Dreams, and Ladders the translucent depth of a world you’re not in a hurry to leave. And like diving to see the creatures of the reef, you’ve got to come up slowly when the air runs out.” In other words, he got it. He also wrote that he was able to find such easy empathy with our particular cowboy roles because “... it’s a cinch when they favor antic grace over stiffness of brutality.” I remember reading this review over breakfast at 103 feeling that I had found a critic friend who understood what it was I was trying to do.

The second review was of THEM a collaboration for six male dancers with writer Dennis Cooper and composer/musician Chris Cochrane performed at PS 122 in November 1986. Burt had seen an earlier work-in-progress version but found the completed piece “grimmer ... as if too many emotional and sensual options have been terminated since then.” And though he conceded that THEM wasn’t a piece about AIDS, “AIDS constricts its view and casts a considerable pall.” So again Burt’s critique was on the mark. By November 1986 I already had friends, ex-boyfriends, heroes who were dying of The Plague and making an upbeat work about the ways six men could possibly be together seemed impossible then. I remember feeling nervous the evening Burt came. I knew that his companion had died earlier that week and I was anxious about the nerves the piece tweaked. In the end he wrote a respectful review of a piece that I doubt he liked very much. He ended with what I took as a plea for Ishmael to lighten up (just a little bit) by writing – “Simple pleasures and affections are far away. In Houston-Jones’ outlook the bullying, clamorous, brusque, torn-up aspects of ... relationships are intrinsically knotted up with our passion and tenderness and need... (B)ut our rough human grace is overwhelmed by frustration and defeat.”

I hope that in the years since then, I have learned to regain some of that rough, human (and occasionally antic) grace.

I hate moving.

Ishmael Houston-Jones, 1993

Ishmael Houston-Jones has been living and making work in New York since 1979.