When is Not Enough Too Much?
Certain minimal dances loiter in my memory long after I've seen them. By minimal, I don't mean just dances that make a point of everyday behavior and any-old-movement, but dances tenanted by one plain, vivid movement image or dances in which a few sturdy patterns are repeated so many times that the viewers' muscles begin to flex in response.
When I got home from Lucinda Childs's concert at her bare whitewalled loft with its new golden wood floor, I tried to do her Reclining Rondo as smoothly and flatly as Susan Brody, Judy Padow, and David Woodberry had performed it. I'd liked watching it and I liked doing it. Doing it emphasized the even, easy-going bending and stretching of the body as it moved through the carefully arranged pattern of sitting crouching, and lying. Watching it, I had, of course, seen also the ingenious per mutations of patterns created by three bodies performing in unison and had sometimes tried to anticipate the changes of direction or spacing that the pattern's occasional asymmetries (e.g., a quarter roll right or left) would produce.
Childs's dances are very brainy. It's hard for me just to look at them. Watching her walking pieces like Calico Mingling or Duplicate Suite, my mind is almost feverishly busy. It notes whether the patterns unroll in six or eight counts (Childs's dances usually are insistently metrical), and then tries to figure how the curving paths relate to the straight ones and whether one dancer is moving inexorably to the left. The separateness of the dancers is awesome and slightly chilling; they pace in their distinct and complicated orbits as cooly as planets-as if each were surrounded by his or her own atmosphere and force field.
In a new piece, Congeries on Edges for Twenty Obliques, James Barth and Susan Brody join the three people who performed Reclining Rondo. Congeries is another path dance, but this time, after they've established an eight-count walking pattern (with half-time and doubletime variants), they begin to fill the phrase with more elaborate movement. At its fullest, it contains two different jumps, a spin in a squat, and a cartwheel; then it empties back to walking. Not all the dancers execute the pattern-so-far together; you see one, now three, now two, now five spring into the air. Watching an individual, you see a phrase with a climax; watching the group, you see a pattern of unpredictable but steady pops and thrusts rist out of the texture of the walk.
It pleases me that in Reclining Rondo and Congeries the dancers get tired. In the former, their bodies want to cuddle into comfortable positions and not move on; in the latter, they breathe hard and brace themselves for jumps. I respect Childs's insistence on neutrality, but don't find it pleasant. Watching her in her solo, Particular Reel, I feel her gentle tenseness tweaking my own arm muscles and wonder again why she should want to erase from her body all indications of ebb and flow.