Michaela Dwyer
“My work this week, “Making Stop,” is composed of five or six or seven easy (prose) pieces — about David Byrne’s hips, about regaining the tactility of language through dancing, about the fiction of teenagers holding phones — interspersed with photographic abstractions by Sarah Dwyer. ”
MAKING STOP
David Byrne’s hips onstage are a wronged metronome. The beat & the swing they enact are intact, but the linear rod — I’m not being cheeky here; I mean, let’s imagine the line that his hips distribute in space — is all off its axis.
Maybe there is no axis. After watching Stop Making Sense for the fourth time, barnacled to a section of the sectional sofa, I uncurl myself and queue again the YouTube clip of “Life During Wartime.” If you walked in on me, you’d think I was earnestly tethered to an Instagram-housed instructional dance video. Like: learn David Byrne’s apocalyptic hips, live at 7PM EDT.
To learn the hips, though, you must first learn that the movement — which writer Matt Singer likens to “a rubber band in an earthquake” — doesn’t actually originate there. In a studio setting, learning dancing is, or has been for me, an experience of watching and trying, and watching and trying again. (“Never mark!” a former Trisha Brown Company member demanded of my class during a summer dance intensive.) Language, the textual kind, buoys up around the gesture — supplementing it, undermining it — to help you along, to generate some productive confusion. A rubber band in an earthquake.
In my body, David Byrne’s hippy to-fro initiates from the knees and the balls of the feet. It requires, simultaneously, lateral shift and vertical lift. To get the airy whimsy of his hips, the heels rise and fall, the knees fight to synchronize, and the feet pronate dangerously. This, it turns out, is hugely destabilizing: the opposite of groundedness. Life During Wartime.
It’s odd to learn from a performance. There is no one helping you along, keeping you safe, securing you the space to watch and try and watch and try again. No one to marley your floor and clear obstacles.
And it requires a snuck imitation: you are approximating the affect of being in the room with those people. You are mining an unrecoverable intimacy.
Dear Personal Practice on Instagram,
It is very hard to learn your choreography.
It is hard to learn because I know you are improvising.
Have you ever tried to learn someone else’s improvisation?
Did you know spell check changes “improv” to “improve”?
I know you are dancing about not dancing.
How do I prove that I’ve learned your material when I have no notes, and no video, to show for it?
--
When you are out with your friends do they ask you to dance?
When you are out with your friends do they ask to film you dancing?
When you are alone have you found the perfect angle by which to film yourself?
When you are alone have you found the perfect angle by which to see yourself?
Three months ago, I was working my entire professional muscle around live, “in-person” performance: being present in my facilitative liveness to match the artistic liveness of practitioners visiting a university campus to create original work. I spent many hours in the studio observing an experimental choreographer direct young pre-professional ballet dancers through movement prompts. She’s fond of an introductory activity called “cooking,” wherein she instructs the dancers to embody oil in a frying pan as the heat increases. (It’s an effective warm-up.)
At its hottest, the floor — hold the metaphor; it’s an imperfectly squared vulcan Le Creuset — sustains and extends the dancers’ evolved gestural weirdness. No longer defaulting to familiar repertoire, they break arabesques into uncoded shapes. They feel out, for instance, what it feels like to initiate from the balls of the feet, from the nose, from the pinky finger. They look like hopped-up squiggles. Breath passes through the air, generating a faint, spat sizzle.
(One of my favorite dance moments in Stop Making Sense is Tina Weymouth’s dulled-out interpretation of a pas-de-chat across the stage to the Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love.” Her blonde curtain hangs in front of her face, shrouding the neck of her bass. After a few up-down prances, she lands in a wide stance, pauses, and bends her leg upward to form an akimbo “P.”
You can find this excerpt on YouTube, uploaded by a user named John Seven and titled, “Tina Weymouth does the terrible, horrible thing you can’t un-see.”
Language, the textual kind, buoys up around the gesture. I’d call John Seven’s language unproductive.)
One of the movement prompts distributed to these teenage technicians produces a phrase that a dancer names “tomato.” I don’t remember the movement, but I can imitate its outline and affect from my sectional sofa: a dribbling roundness, like the shape of a beleaguered exhale. And then, before the body gives out, a summoning of a tiny protective gesture: either clasped hands or a downward bow.
And then I think: “tomato” might’ve looked like something else entirely. As I turn and run toward this memory, I am as insistent in its fiction — in my unreliable remembrance — as I am in its fact: it is too vivid not to be true.
A wronged metronome forms the backbeat for a dance instruction:
In the corner of my living room, on a dull weekday night, a person I am seeing is surprised to learn that I — a dancer, a woman, a millennial — don’t know how to “floss.” They tell me it originates in the hips. They demonstrate, modeling a slouched undulation set to an internal rhythm. They’re confident the fixed rod-like arm comes naturally on top of the hips.
I can’t imitate it. I’m furious: not because I can’t nail it technically, but because I’m being told to perform something I know is wrong.
A righted metronome forms the backbeat for a dance instruction:
In the corner of my dining room, on a dull weekday afternoon, I take my first-ever Cunningham dance class, free through Instagram Live. The instructor — for whom I send a prayer of equitable compensation — moves through each instruction, snapping one finger, keeping perfect time. Before I attempt the bounces and tilts, I must first move all of my furniture along the wall. It feels good to clear the space.
I think Stop Making Sense is a dance film: everything from Byrne’s hip-swatting to the technical crews’ lumbering in and out between songs to build the ever-enlarging set. The overall concept is attributed, in the film and elsewhere, to Byrne. But when I watch, I search for the crevices where his reach slips away and runs up against another idea. I see Lynn Mabry and Ednah Holt jogging in place in drab gray sweatsuits, smiling at each other from a few feet apart, telegraphing their own language for what’s going on — undermining the official, productively confusing it.
Save for walking neighbors and shopkeepers, I haven’t seen anyone outside of my family the last three months. I have had a lot of time to prepare, or not-prepare, for the eventual widening of that circle.
In dreams, I land repeatedly on one image: I am standing on the bleachers of my alma mater’s football stadium, and someone important to me is standing eight or so bleachers below. We form a short diagonal. You’d think big space would encourage big words and grand gestures, a theatrics of distanced interaction: I love you, you’ve hurt me, I miss you, you’re wrong instead of hi, what’s for dinner, how’s the cat, public library, grits, dog, time clock. But we pass both back and forth, collapsing all into equal affirmations. The negative space encourages an intimacy for which I feel unprepared.
I used to spend summers working at a publicly funded immersive program for high school students. Teenagers are accepted and attend for a given primary discipline: English, Social Science, Visual Art, Dance, Theater, et al. (It will not take place this summer.) At the end of the six weeks, most of the disciplines stage a culminating performance or presentation. The Theater students, during those years, always made a from-scratch, devised performance on a topic of their choosing.
What I remember is this: a blackout in the tiny black-box theater on the bottom floor of a women’s college academic building. Then, a sprinkling of light from upstage (this move was notable because students were typically banned from using cell phones). A chorus began:
Well, we know where we’re going / but we don’t know where we’ve been.
I remember this beginning detail and little else; I hear their voices whenever I hear the beginning of the Talking Heads’ “Road to Nowhere.”
As I turn and run toward this memory, I am as insistent in its fiction — in my unreliable remembrance — as I am in its fact: it is too vivid not to be true.
It’s odd to learn from a performance: mine, yours, a dance company’s, a livestream; one from five years ago, three months ago, or tonight. What are we learning, outside of our memory of the mechanics of movement? Should we feel better, smarter, safer: that we can get through another day of this?
And the future is certain / give us time to / work it out.
Can you tell us a little bit about who you are?
She/her. I live in Durham, NC. My primary professional work — where I am from 9 until 5 and often, during “in-person” times, late at night — is in performance presenting/programming, where I design and facilitate artist residency projects at Duke and in Durham. I’m a dance critic for Indy Week and elsewhere (including for my Instagram, and for myself). I’m an educator.
I’m most interested in how performance collides and entangles programming, criticism, documentation & archiving, and education.
The things I was most excited about a few months ago were: campaigning for Bernie and learning to skateboard. I love water, clouds, disco. And I miss people.
There is a tension in your piece between the intimacy of the shared experience and the mimicry of said intimacy on internet platforms. You hint towards a lack of security or maybe unwelcomed vulnerability when engaging with online platforms.
MD: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been thinking about this a lot these past few months as dance artists and practitioners have mobilized (and, for those who are able, monetized) their teaching and artistry on online platforms. I see, through this virtualization, a beautiful opening of accessibility and participation and, actually, if I may be so bold, general interest in dance, which also makes me feel quite cynical as much of this (labor-intensive) content is being consumed for free and without the (labor-intensive) enriching context that complementary non-movement programming can provide and encourage.
As I’ve partaken in virtual dance classes, I’ve shied away from ones carried out over Zoom; right now, I’m not taking class to receive corrections. (Because I am not making my living as a professional dancer, I’m able to “get away” with this.) I’m doing it, as long as I’m healthy, to get back in the habit of taking class, which feels like a very important, albeit personal, thing.
I tend to lean confidently into vulnerability in my social media presence as long as it doesn’t immediately implicate my body, or my dancing body. Like most dancers, or former dancers, I have a complicated relationship with my continued attachment to and embodiment of it. However, I feel very comfortable posting a photo of a cloud and writing some searching abstract caption to accompany it. Because I don’t dance professionally or formally maintain a movement practice anymore, writing feels like my primary mode of expression; I devote more time to it, feel more practiced at it, and feel more comfortable staging myself that way.
Your photographs are a collaboration with your sister. The one word/image combination is striking. Coupled with your writings they read like a demand to move.
MD: I really appreciate this observation. I feel uneasy being attached to anything that could be interpreted as a “demand” to move, especially in terms of sensitivity to ability and access, but I think the text in the images can function a little bit like a movement prompt — something to generate movement, or movement possibility — or the resulting name for a movement phrase (like the “tomato” I reference in the piece).
The images were created by my sister, Sarah Dwyer, who is a photographer and graphic designer. I asked her to interpret photos I’ve taken on walks and runs around my neighborhood over the past three months, during which, especially in the early days of self-isolation, I was listening a lot to Stop Making Sense.
Sarah’s images are meant to be a direct callout to the images displayed onstage, behind the band, during the “Making Flippy Floppy” sequence in Demme’s film. I asked her to use some of the same words incorporated into the images in the film. But she intentionally created these images independently from my text. We wanted a somewhat randomized element.
The words you see in the images here are the particular words I latched onto upon first watch of the film. (There’s something really satisfying in the sonic slide between grits-dog-time clock.) When I see them now, they read like this whole constellation of things I want, need, and miss; like an aspirational grocery list for my life.
You grew up studying dance. You also point to movement often in your writing. How does dancing inspire or play a part in your writing practice?
MD: With varying degrees of abstraction, I always feel compelled to insist on the presence of my body, of the body, in writing. Sometimes I do it simply to remind myself I’m still there: a directive to be, and stay, present. I learned this entire sensibility through dance training, and figuring out methods to work it into my writing is my way of honoring that practice: both my own and that of anyone, of any ability, who has worked through some form of body-based training.
Dance and writing aren’t a one-to-one correlation — i.e., I don’t believe dance is a “text” we can “read” and vice versa — and I try to resist that assumption when I’m, say, reviewing a dance work and looking to describe, at least in some part, what “happened” in the dance. I really like this line from the choreographer Tere O’Connor: Dance is “an abstract documentary form that doesn’t search to depict.” In my dream world, I want to think about writing in a similar way — using words in a way that reinforces their existence and collection and shape apart from established narrative structure or meaning (I wish I’d had more early training in poetry, because they get this) — but there I am flattening O’Connor’s proposition by extending it to another art form.
There are so many different ways to approach dance writing. Critic Sally Banes has a book called Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism, and the energy of the phrase “writing dancing” has stuck with me as something to invoke. I need to move to write. I think this is true for many writers, not just those focusing explicitly on dance or performance. This zooms in on the privilege I have to move around right now: i.e., go to another room of the house and find a comfortable place to sit, or to do yoga, or to go outside. A lot of ideas settle as I’m tossing and turning back and forth, trying to fall asleep.
In pretty much all of my dance writing, you can see me trying to work out how it feels to me, physically, to be among those watching the performance. I’m very interested in the emergent choreography of audience behavior. (Unsurprisingly, this is something I’m thinking a lot about as we navigate virtual performance.)
How has your engagement with writing and dance changed during quarantine? If at all?
MD: I’ve felt more compelled to write overall, but, oddly — given I’m participating in this series — I’ve felt less compelled to write for the public eye. The way I made peace with this urge, for this work, was aiming to be intentional about interweaving these meditations on public and private, or private and personal. For better or worse, I gravitate toward the meta.
Because I’ve been privileged to be physically healthy, I’ve found space to incorporate a lot of different movement practices into my life these days. It’s necessary for me to move through the sadness and confusion of the right-now. I don’t even think I’m processing; I’m just trying to keep moving. (Dance is one of these movement practices, but so is running, walking, sleeping, doing yoga, being still, breathing.) I’ve been happy to find I have space to be a bit more mindful of how my body navigates movement right now. I’ve really needed that.
Casserole Recipe of the Week:
Mom’s Seven Layer Bars
I keep posting recipes that are not casseroles. But this week, I want sugar. You’re welcome.
Mom’s recipe translation:
Mix one stick of melted butter and 2 cups of crushed graham crackers on the bottom of the pan.
Then layer the following in order:
1 cup chocolate chips
1 cup butterscotch chips
1 cup nuts (you choose!)
1 cup shredded coconut
1 can of sweetened condensed milk drizzled on top
Bake at 350 degrees for 25 minutes (@ 325 degrees if using a glass dish)