ABSTRACT
I approach putting words on the page in much the same way that I approach finding movement for the stage. My best writing is like my best dancing—instinctive, improvised and free flowing. I started using spoken text in my dances around 1977, when I first saw Trisha Brown’s speaking/dancing solo Accumulation with Talking. Although it was very different from anything I would ever make, I loved seeing and hearing Trisha keep switching back and forth between two stories and two dances. My own first experiments combining the two media left me stuck in a story telling mode. The work was really literal: it wasn’t writing for performance. Then I began to reduce the writing to its essence until finally there was nothing left but lists of words. No adjectives or description of any kind. Just words slamming, bumping or nestling against each other. Any color had to come from the context of being placed between the word that came before and the one that would come after. In D E A D—which I performed for my thirtieth birthday in 1981—I improvised a list of every death, real or imagined, that I could remember happening in my lifetime, while I fell to and rose from the floor repeatedly, in a simple dance of exhaustion:
De Gaulle / Piaf / Malcolm X / Helen Keller / Sid Vicious
