A Family Tree Story

I once saw a man in pajamas approach a tree and study it. And as he-did, his body subtly shifted, twisted, tightened, lifted, taking on some of the qualities of that tree. We do that, hardly noticing, bring what is outside, in for experiencing. I can imagine him telling about that tree, unknowingly dancing his tree dance once again.

But what if he changed text while he kept the dance? Saying something about a rodeo, or something about the softness of your lips? When I was working with Anna Halprin in California in the 1950's, in her Dancers' Workshop of Marin, one of the senior members of the group, John Graham, came from a theater background. He brought some theater exercises to the group. We had been improvising with movement and now we also had the use of words. It seemed we could put images right out in space. You could say "sky blue" and there would be this expanse of blue giving space to whatever movement you were doing, offering its own quality in juxtaposition to what was happening with the movement. We played these two elements against each other, trying for the most startling combinations. Of course often the movement and words complimented each other in a logical way. But this building of an image was just to better flip it with contextual incongruity. The overall picture was collage. Nonsense and sense, elements out of context, juxtaposed. The idea was to blow your mind a bit. I started calling this work the Nez Plays. I knew it wasn't Zen but it wasn't exactly not Zen either. It had roots in the theater and it seemed to be of the family of Surrealist theater of the teens of this century. I was reading about the work of Kurt Schwitters, and of one of his pieces wherein the performers remained entwined as part of the sets, background to lone sewing machines running furiously center stage. We started making pieces, recalling some of our improvisations and running them through again with spontaneous variations until a piece would evolve. Certain moods would emerge, even characters. I'm not very familiar with Ionesco but I was aware of him, and I think the work we were doing was also of the family of his work. But he was a playwright while we were dancers, basically improvisers. Our work was very physical. I think that the Grand Union performance group based in New York in the '70s was doing work belonging to that extended family, too.

To shatter sense through nonsense creates gaps, space. It feels to me related to air. To laughter. When elements are sprung out of context, they engender new experience. The mind is delighted with the unforeseen, unlikely pairings, is a bit unhinged for a split second then rushes in to fill the vacuum with, "Umm humm, of course. A steamship lodged in a rosebush I see it." John Cage used chance devises to bypass improvisational choice and to achieve really fresh juxtapositions of elements. For in improvisation there is always the taste, the choice of the improviser. Always agenda, which relates to familiarity of some kind of logic, even if it's the logic of how to scramble. 

Following is the transcript of a message Anna Halprin recently left on my answering machine:

"I remember a few [of the exercises that led to the Nez Play]. In one example we would take a word, could be 'strawberry,' and then we would explore that word in time, in space, and with force. And then we would also explore with ways that we would shape our mouth to organize the sound. And then we were generally working with no cause and effect so we might make an arbitrary movement and do that while we were exploring with the sound. Or we might let the movement be an extension of the sound. In another exercise we would take sentences, it could be anything, like 'up above,' 'Uncle John says no', or it could be something like 'over there.' We would say these sentences and we would have a task. Like throwing balls. So we would simply combine them and they would be delightful but meaningless according to cause and effect in a content way. And then we would take something like the word 'time.' And then we would just free associate with it. I remember A.A. [Leath] and John [GrahamJ doing an improvisation with the word 'time.' They were sitting on a bench. And as they were exploring and improvising with all their associations about the word time,' they would do arbitrary movement or they would do movements that were in response to the element of time, or they would suddenly shift into a fantasy role like becoming an animal and then do a quick shift back to being themselves. We did all kinds of exercises that were expanding all kinds of possibilities. A looking for perhaps unexpected content even. Looking for things that you couldn't preconceive. Actually I think that what we were doing and what I didn't realize we were doing at the time, we were really trying to get at the inherent mysteries which..." end of message."

Following is a reconstruction from my notes of a subsequent brief phone conversation with Anna, in continuation:

"We were scrambling words, but from our unconscious or superconscious. So it was coming from the wisdom in the body. Forgotten memories. Experiences hidden in the body, that we didn't have words for. Words from seemingly unknown places, mysteries in the body.
Now I'm working with words again, but in relation to drawings that come from dance experience. But still out of context so they don't immediately go into preconceived ideas. Words are symbols for experience we've already had When we plug into the kinesthetic, it gives off feelings and responses for which we don t have a ready-made vocabulary. So we reorganize ways we work with words we know. I use words in this way in working with people with life-threatening illnesses. First we dance, then we draw then we put words on the drawings. Single words From these can come poems. Or prayers. Things which couldn't have been put into words to start with It breaks barriers of how words can be used Breaks the predictable outcome It's a tool for having people get past fears and look at their deepest content. To survive. To motivate to live. It can lead to powerful self-knowledge."

I too have returned to working with movement and words. Not like the Nez Plays, but in a way that harks back to the pajama man, studying his tree, telling his tree story. The natural way that spoken language and body language slip out of us at once, contrasting and supplementing each other, helping us to get the feel of what we know, and to communicate it. I call this work Moving the Telling. The topic could be a landscape, the portrait of a sister, or an essay weaving three far-flung images. I often feel that movement is like paint and words like pencil, or vice versa, together on a canvas. They can contrast or follow each other, with a time lag or contrast of perspective, a detail against a broad indication. The references turn back around each other building a whole, quite spontaneously.

My return to improvising with moving and speaking came out of a need to process information coming to me from the outside. Specifically, from the news media. I started dancing the news. Talking and dancing, becoming the ships, the land, the peoples, the strategies, the connections. It helped me recall the bits and broad strokes of information. And as I ran it all through my body I could see how it fell together in my mind, in my imagination, in my feeling I called this News Animations. Later I started doing what I called a Gardening Journal Drawing on the intimate experience that gardening is. Rolling heavy rocks and collapsing for a rest in the sun on the super gravity charged earth. Gouging and pulling the invading burdock, its deep tap root giving way at dusk with a pungent artichoke smell. And maybe the thoughts that come through as they do, while gardening, of the free-fall of the dollar, radioactively tipped shells, and continental drifts.

The improvisational practice of Moving the Telling reminds me of the continuous timed-writing practice set out by writer and teacher of writing workshops, Natalie Goldberg, and used extensively by Christie Svane in her "Moving Words" dance workshops. In the timed-writing practice you must decide the length of your writing session ahead of time, maybe three, ten, maybe sixty minutes. And during that time you must keep your pen moving without stopping. What seems to happen is that in those moments when one would usually pause to consider the next step of presentation, one is bound to continue. So one grabs at the stuff that's flitting though, with its own wild affiliation to the thoughts that came before. The title of one of Natalie Goldberg's books on writing is Wild Mind. She often refers to her Zen master, Katagiri Roshi. I am reminded of Gary Snyder's book The Practice of the Wild. My sense of his meaning of "wild" is that most of experience, and indeed of phenomena of which our life is woven, is undomesticated. Out of the range of human plan or control. If the Nez Plays were about air, Moving the Telling is about earth. It can bring laughter too, but of a different kind. It tends to elude packaged agenda. It's the medium of the fool. In his pajamas.