Ah Live Art: Living in the moment and learning to deal with whatever gets thrown at you

Ah live art!

Nothing like it.

Jessica and I are onstage in our paper suits, in the middle of your newly created, just-out-of-the-box dance piece, The Crabbit Wee Tailors of Forfar at the Center for Performance Research in Brooklyn. The premier, the night before had gone well, though the audience wasn’t particularly vocal (masks?) and the applause at the end seemed a bit tepid to us.

We’re about halfway through the 12-minute piece when we arrive at the first sound cue -- the moment Jessica pulls on my shirt and says “This is falling apart.” We don’t hear anything, though the beginning is quite soft (the sound of rain and subway rumbles). After a moment we realize that nothing is coming out of the speakers and the rhythmic, precisely choreographed folk dance we are about to launch into accompanied by Burl Ives singing the jaunty Tailor and the Mouse will be done in silence. Brains are on overdrive thinking ahead while trying to stay even more in the moment, desperately focused on each other, trying to make each move count.

We caught each other’s eyes and blasted into the folk dance, which we magically (or not – after all, we’ve been dancing together for 38 years) kept in unison. Then to the next section in which we move down a long shaft of light to a moody string piece by Tin Hat, punctuated by sounds of chopping wood which we respond to with small twitches, distortions, collapses. The end of the light runway leaves us downstage looking at the audience, who we notice for the first time. We step up onto the wood stumps that create a kind of barrier between us and the audience and we look at them and simply stare. This moment was planned to last for a few seconds until a loud brringggg on prepared piano signals the blackout for the end. Of course, no brringgg (and we had told Ben on lights that we had changed the ending slightly) so we stood there for a long, long time (5 minutes in stagebrain time, probably no more than 30 seconds in real time). At some point Jessica and I looked at each other, then turned back to the audience with a little sneer and the blackout finally happened.

Big cheers and applause.  

After leaving the stage (we were the first piece on the program) we took a walk and tried to figure out what just happened. We felt quite liberated actually, as we thought about facing our friends in the audience including many of our dance colleagues. “Well you didn’t see it with the music,” we could say after they gave their critiques. When we returned and talked to our friends, they were extremely complimentary. “Not a wasted movement – totally engaging. The music would have taken away from the focus and intensity of it. It would have been cliché,” was part of what Phyllis Lamhut our longtime friend and dance mentor said. No music for that section was the universal response of our friends. The sound of the paper suits and our vocalizations were all that was needed. Music adds a whole other set of sensory and emotional overlays that can remove the audience (and performers) from the experience.

We certainly know that about music. And we usually choose to choreograph without music in mind, adding it later if at all. But once we’ve decided on music and choreographed part of the dance using the specific rhythmic structure and feelings of it, it’s hard to recognize how the dance would read without it. Honestly, we probably never would have tried that in front of an audience but now it seems so clear.

What did we learn? Trust your material. Be willing to drop anything (cut it back and make it bleed again, as Hanya Holm was quoted as saying). Be sensitive to the overload an audience can experience from too much going on. Trust your partner(s) onstage to respond in the moment. Performing for a long, long time builds a comfort level onstage that allows you to get through almost anything.

We look forward to expanding on this initial excerpt. Ideas are flowing, we love the costumes and sets, inspired by Jessica’s brother-in-law, Campbell Forbes, and perhaps the Burl Ives and Tin Hat will reappear later. But for now the soundtrack is us and that feel just right.