I swoon watching the delicious, tall, brazen, butch presence of Peggy Shaw – lesbian theater artist – whose presence on stage is itself an act of cultural subversion (“I’m so queer I don’t have to talk about it, it speaks for itself!”). She doesn’t need a diatribe of gender theory to justify her work. She is the diatribe incarnate.  And I’m moved to tears watching aerial dance matriarch Terry Sendgraff hanging naked and fetal from a bungee cord; gradually, systematically revealing her one-breasted chest as she hovers precariously and confidently above our heads. The normalizing of the radical has a special place in my art heart.

That sense of “normal” has intriguingly evolved and changed in the Bay Area arts scene over the past 2-3 decades. When I first started making dances professionally, it was not at all usual for women to be lifting each other, much less lifting men. When my dancers worked with each other in this way, absent any gender assumptions, this was a radical act, made covert in the sense that the dances were not overtly concerned with gender. These were abstract dances, dances about the environment, about family, spirituality, relationship. The radical act that excites me has to do with the presence of a certain vocabulary or physicality that, by being intrinsic to the dance creates a visceral revolution. Now, the act of  women lifting men or each other is neither radical nor noteworthy – at least in most of the contemporary dance scene. In some archaic forms, of course, the old gender roles are alive and well and perpetuating old ideas through kinesthetic and visual cues.

Beyond even the usual covert acts – the assumption of a certain presence on stage, the subversion of visual and theatrical or gender norms – are the politics of the body itself. How the body performs the culture, how we physicalize our economies and our cosmologies has been an interest – obsession actually – for most of my life. I see the potential to awaken and rupture hegemonic views through conscious acts of kinesthetic art. When western thought and action aspire toward the sky in an unreflected passion that defies gravity, denies body, and disconnects from other beings, it becomes a radical act to cultivate a technique and language of the body that allows, that opens, that surrenders to gravity, that dissolves the barriers between body parts and among bodies. This is even subtler, more covert work. The soft ankle that opens the foot to the earth, the sternum that yields rather than hardens around the heart, the arms that hang and follow from the spine rather than forming themselves into preconceived lines and curves of fragmented speech – these are silent statements of revolution. This art is about the absence of striving, rather than its replacement with another sort of effort. Absence is not usually consciously perceived. Instead, it slips into the consciousness of the observer not through even the visual image, but viscerally, through the kinesthetic sense, transforming through the subtle transmission of ….less.

Think of the soles of your feet opening to the floor.

I can’t feel that at all.

OK, then. Think about the palms of your hands.

That’s easier. I can feel that. But my feet—they are just… so far away!

Really? Far away from what?

From me!

Where do we locate our identity, (I wonder obsessively)?

When exactly did we reduce ourselves to a mere part?

What fragment of me speaks, moves, dances, writes? What would it be to live a day identified with the soles of my feet? Would my words sound different? Would they resonate more deeply? Would my friends and colleagues look at me as though I was suddenly not myself? Or not visible at all?

Are we so broken that we not only forget our connection to earth and other beings, but even to that wholeness that exists within the boundaries of our own skin?

I think it may be nothing less than revolutionary to yield our dominant fragments—head, shoulders, chest—to the less accessible, or marginalized parts—pelvis, back, feet. Our western culture of aspiration has us pulled up out of ourselves, out of the ground, out of our centers. And there we are, beautiful vertical beings reduced to eyeballs and mouths, while our lower parts are somewhere in an alternate universe miles away, carrying their infinite wisdom with them.

I need all the information I can get. And I don’t fancy walking through life as an isolated brain. So, I need to cultivate foot consciousness, if for no other reason than to remember literally and metaphorically that there is ground beneath me.

Further, I have a hard time with boundaries, which should make this foot meditation a simple matter for me. And yet, I have to remind myself constantly that I am the totality; that my art does not spring instantly from neural activity, but is being cultivated in every move I make – conscious or unconscious; is influenced by every book, image, food, conversation, sonata, news story, and foot-fall I ingest or perpetrate on my way to the studio.

This issue of sole is a personal one, emerging from a determination to liberate myself from the calcification of habit. The practice of sole opening keeps me from locking down into the most available piece of myself and therefore forgetting, or sleeping. I suspect foot consciousness might in fact be a welcomed antidote to sleep-walking. At least it’s working for me. My sole opening practice settles me right down into the present moment even while the habit of a lifetime wants to pull me out of my skin and into the future.

Photo by Edward Casati- Jul 2009

Just to break into the land of blogging, I’m posting a piece that I wrote last July . These were some meandering thoughts as I approached the 25th anniversary of my dance company.

Pluto in Capricorn

First published in In Dance by Dancers Group 2009

By Anne Bluethenthal

The choreographer aging…..

yielding the bold energy of youth
that flings itself fearlessly into space
surrendering the agility garnered from
thousands of tendus and ronds de jembe
new unexpected dexterities emerge

habits, even personality dissolve out of necessity
fall away like old snakeskin
reinforcing this tacit insight:
we don’t really change
we arrive in a moment when what was becomes untenable
step effortlessly out of old skin and into what is now
bearable

at last you find the courage of your own convictions
and realize you no longer hold convictions

this is not cynicism – this is liberation

my body finds nuance in a narrow but rich corridor
of motion
every year I pour my self into the bodies of  young dancers
who paint my work across the floors of theaters

and grow into the painters of their own lives
my work tracing a broad brush stroke out the door

Some thoughts on a personal aesthetic….

“It is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what
we speak, but the truth of that language by which we
speak it.”   — Audre Lorde

I love to scrutinize the syntax and meaning of the dance language. As a young dancer, I saw that dance training involved pulling one’s self apart, one part struggling against the other and all parts against the ground – away from the ground. The meaning and implication of this as a practice seemed contrary to the principles I had embraced in my budding feminist consciousness (this was the mid 1970’s).

I have wanted to bring Audre Lorde’s imperative—that we cannot dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools—to the art of dance, questioning how we can create work that awakens consciousness and promotes social change while employing an idiom that is rooted in imperialism, patriarchy, and self-denial. My body of work emerges from a continuous meditation and active grappling with these issues.

I enjoy cooking up raw, free, woman centered, human, visceral yet content driven dances. I place my political obsessions into my movement vocabulary, use of dancers, use of space, subject matter, music, visual and textual work. Undoubtedly, the civil rights movement that I was born into and participated in throughout my youth is the single most formative political consciousness operating in my life and work. My choreography tries to undermine, feminize, queer, and ecologize the language of dominance while conceding its occupation in my body and while shamelessly using it whenever it can support my intention.

I am working on how to age inside this art form.

Right now, my most intimate agenda is to create community around my work, collaborate with brilliant friends, and to make dances that “the soft animal of my body”* loves.
My most high-minded agenda is to raise important issues, rage beautifully, and participate in a global eco-feminist artistic movement.

Pluto in Capricorn

We fall apart. We fear for our livelihoods and that of our colleagues and dancers. We wonder how we keep our self worth when the culture abandons us.  We keep making dances. I turn 51. The market economy goes the way of the arctic ice and to the extent that our accomplishments bring us a sense of identity, that too crashes into frigid seas.

This year is the 25th birthday of my dance company. As I prepared to launch a celebratory concert, and during a persistent period of mild depression, two friends, in an effort to comfort me in separate conversations remarked that Pluto was in Capricorn. Pluto, the planet (or not) of death, transformation, and rebirth has settled in Capricorn, the constellation of materiality, identity, and action. During the residence of Pluto in Capricorn, one can expect personal and global infrastructures to undergo major renovation. Any system or aspect of identity or career, etc. which is lacking in integrity or usefulness or which is not operating according to our values or which has outlived its function, will be destroyed.

We are all connected in this moment of dismantling. I hope we’ll rebuild in solidarity, not in fear, and with renewed commitment to a more radical, artist-centered sensibility that reflects the true emancipatory nature of west coast art.

I am working on how to age inside of this art form; new dexterities are emerging.

* Quoted from Mary Oliver’s, “Wild Geese”

Photo by Edward Casati