ABSTRACT
the idea for this piece actually occurred in 1972 while writing Metagexis. Instead of an autobiography, an autobiopathy—after Zen (and semiotics)—the subject … is supposed to disappear. Although I make notes and keep notebooks, I don’t keep a “writer’s diary” per se, hence this began as an open “ground” to try out, and write out, experiences and recollections in order to uncover their underlying formatory ideas. Since there is both a writer (1) and a dancer/choreographer (2) WHY NOT HAVE BOTH OF THEM TALK TO, AND INTERVIEW, ONE ANOTHER?…
What are you doing now?
Writing an Autobiopathy—what else!
An A UTOBIOPA THYl What’s that?
Well, everyone writes an autobiography; but this is an autobiopathy.
Oh; perfect explanation. Is the subjectthe disappearance of the subject, again?
Uh-huh; and more than that, too …
More?
Yes, it’s possible to write (ride) over oneself—we’re just a collection of processes.
Oh, what an optimist! And another doubly reflexive entendre retort, too. … The technics of disappearance?
Rather a writing out, over, and through experience—a survey of the transactional reapportionment of the subject’s interprecessionary bioenergetic, perceptual, and cognitive processes.
Sounds like multimedia—not only the mixing of forms, but the mixing of processes, too. … The dancer, likewise, tries to dance over himself (recollecting Nietzsche).
Writing can place a subject between “brackets” or under virtual x-rays. The problem and challenge is to move the ego past itself (i.e. subjectivity per se) so the autooperation (or synchronous remodalization) of these bioenergetic and psychophysical processes prehend and apprehend themselves, mirror and reveal a larger, holistic “circuitry.” And a note about the word interprecessionary—I discovered it in R. Buckminster Fuller’s two-volume Synergetics; it’s a very useful, systemic pivot.
In an analogous way dancing reflexes the elements, referencing a larger totality, too. Like swimming—while one’s body is submerged in water the intraleveraged equilibria of the double, elemental reciprocity gives it suspension from gravity, and an orientation to another kinetic terrain: the watery. Similarly while dancing, one moves on fluidic ethers, electromagnetic currents and space circuits. “Dancing is writing in space”—and since writing is coextensive with all of language, so an autobiopathy can be the merging of self with a greater field and flow?
Yes, and insight into sentience revolves around the f(r)iction or illusion that we, as subjects, are separate—appearing, experiencing, then (eventually) … disappearing (which one can do from moment to moment, too—transposing the metaphor of passage). Each cell has sentiency, is vitally alive, participates in awareness, and like language, precedes and supersedes both perception and existence. We think that we learn, control, manipulate, or fix language; but language is culturally and genetically an independent (meta)entity—its combinatory possibilities mean processes outrun ontology. Writing is not contained by a subject, but exceeds it; language too is a disembodied entity, and like a reservoir, potentiated and autogenic, i.e., beyond the parameters of any individuated intelligence. Language, no matter how accurately it mirrors mind, nature, or world, is also autoreferential; grammar, style and rhetoric create a self-referential, synchronistic, reflexive continuum. And the same with dance—the intensity and (implicit) immensity of movement transport one past (one’s) identity, merging with a greater (sense of) being. The writers fascination lies, in part, with the autonomy of language that in turn informs and connects all processes and procedures of perception and experience. Art is a means of emptying or refocusing the subject’s field. And, one doesn’t know what one thinks until one asks oneself, or, doesn’t really know it (perhaps) until one interviews oneself, or writes it out. The game thus involves a double reflexivity.
Or, of course, until it is danced out (or painted, sculpted, filmed, etc.), i.e., reflected through a virtual form. Likewise, there are some things that can be discovered only by dancing and that cannot be stated explicitly (or discursively), but that obliquely inform—at the margins and edges of b(B)eing (e.g. the mythic, spirit realms). Dancing is riding through space—all space; space is not only three-dimensional. Dancing takes one beyond what one can know, or what knowing is; then it becomes enjoyable puzzling (through dialogue) what it is, or means, or what its correlates might be, in, with and through words.
Writing that concerns and engages me, though not always about dance, comes about because of dancing in the larger context of the ontology of motion—movement of phenomena, dimensions, orders, contexts; and motion of words, thoughts, images, associations, worked over and through experience. And though I write at a word processor, it is not until we’re home and dancing that I check and sound rhythms, hear text, edit or tighten syntactical structures, and launch the next probe. Perhaps not until the next century will the relevance of writing and dance (i.e. transmedia bridges across disciplines and bicameral potential) be realized; we’ve been making case studies … (Hence, the writer must dance and the dancer, write.)
Anyway, an Autobiopathy—how (one’s) being is an intersection of ideas, issues, personas, beings. … (“All my pieces are ghost written,” I’ve exclaimed hyperbolically on occasion.) To (double and) remove oneself so as to be a medium, to transmute the personal into art, activity, action. The idea of an autobiopathy requires a technic of writing to remove (absolve? make transparent?) the subject by exploring the foundations and underpinnings of ideas that (pre)figurate the weaves of the self, and that inform its works, processes, activities and projects as transactive, semiolexic puzzles with unexpected configurations and metaconceptual matrices flexing perceptual, apperceptive and cognitive muscles.
And after all, “1” and “2” are just processes, separate but interrelated—and ittfraleveraged! (So what if they [we] share the same body, same house, etc.!) Ideas also “dance” interactively, intraconfigure systemically, become embodied and entrained, but are, nonetheless, always rooted in the mind of a specific identity (analogous to the way that any dance technique is always rooted in a specific style, there being no pure dance technique). The self becomes a site or scape as well as a foil for writing so the personal disappears; becomes reinscribed or recircumscribed. (And, unlike Bataille, writing on the impossibility of observing death while experiencing it, disappearance—Krishnamurti reminds us—can be a cosmic mode of meditation, and be virtually observable, transforming placements of the subject through metatheoria, and reflexivity, of hyperdimensional processes.) Metaphorically, an auto-biopsy like the successively generated pictures and macroscopically circular slices of a magnetic resonance imagery system (CAT scan), magnifies the inner structures and principles anterior to, and transcending, personal particulars—autonomic imageries that trace the automimetic trajectories of the passages of flexions and impulses. A bioscopy of one’s dances and texts; being an artist duly engages one in a series of virtual removes, and distances oneself personally and psychologically from being simply (or only) a subject—whats necessary are virtual biopsies of being’s action and activities whose interactive contexts autosimulatively splice together and weave microviews and metaanalyse, compositing a larger field and overview. Hence, “X” is a kind of meta-, transpersonal and/or transreferential, subject—a reflexivized (meta)entity transmuting the impulses of ego and actions of self so that identity per se is recentered, de-, reconstructed, and transformed—by intrasynaptic processes, synoptic actions, renegotiable sights and hybrid languages that intersect, and interact with it. (Jung’s clarification: the self orchestrates the parts and functions of body, ego, libido, etc.) This clarifies “deconstruction” to mean making transparent the processes and technics of analysis and perception (by micro-analysis of word, unit and matrix), and the reflexions of those processes supraposed in assembling a larger whole.
That’s what happens too when the body moves either very quickly or very slowly—other perceptually transpersonal processes transpire. What are your insights about the connection and differentiation of the cellular and the genetic?
Well, as a dancer you know that memory is not just neurological but extends through the cellularity of the body. At the same time, transformations in the whole organism become genetically entrained, as the “codes” underlying behavior and knowledge accrete and modify. Noam Chomsky’s point about the transformation of language through generations—that linguistic capacity transfers automatically between generations—is actually a genetic statement. The child does not have to start at the beginning (e.g., with the rules of language); generations pass information incrementally, i.e., genetically. Is that another plié you’re doing?
Yop. Then another and another after that. Thank goodness you’re not a dancer, and spared this daily drudgery.
Ha! Try the umpteen zillion textual rewrites, and you’ll change your mind.
Do I detect cynicism? Cynicism arises either from excess of experience or insight into the pervasive ethical deficiency of others.
Well, whether you know it or not, I get inspiration and ideas from you. Youre my transmitter.
Really? How’s that? You’re the one that reads. I get all my ideas from you.
My point is that if I could write what are in your dances, I’d have more than book or treatise.
Well then, get busy! My point is that if I had your words for all the movements I do I’d be a millionaire.
Well, keep practicing, but don’t get carried away. (Why I write texts—to be done with a dance! And so a reader might feel and sense them long after the fact.) Dialogue and dialectic—dialogizing exercises dialectic, i.e. multiple interpenetrating logics with transposable relation(s) … systems and systemics. Of course, this is a dialogue.
Well, they’re (we’re) not (not) separate and not not two.
You mean, we’re not not the same person?
It seems to amount to the same thing—anyway, ontology in extremis.
You mean, of course we’re not not the same person?
You mean, we’re not not being being the same person again. But let’s save the lesson on Gertrude Stein, the ontologies and ontotheletics of grammar for later.
Exactly, grammathics again.
And riddles. And what could be more fascinating than … grammatological riddles?!
Practically anything, including splitting hairs … or one’s identity.
Because our experiences of reading and using language double the ontological factor(s) …
You mean you’re the right brain in this bicameral brouhaha?
And you’re the left hemisphere?! No, that’s too literal—there are two parts and two intrapenetrating functions to perception, reading, and being an artist; one part observes and reflexes everything, (even the self that observes observation), and the concomitantly recombinatory, intraprecessionary processes of reflexion …
Explain why you assign a complex and important role to improvisation as a basis for process dancemaking and choreography, and the development of dancers.
Improvisation begins as movement play and spontaneous exploration. It can also be highly structural, formal, and systemic. Though it is more a modern dance than balletic phenomenon, it can combine the principles and techniques of both. Improvisation reveals the grounds and roots of ritual, showing that dance goes even deeper than our bones, being bonded in our genes. Dance can distinguish, then fuse, the digital and genetic: this might be its artistic horizon and challenge in the next century.
Ritual and improvisation: when teaching dance composition one is continually astounded to see (even with beginning students) how deep the sources of ritualistic response are, like a kind of primal grammar, or genetic blueprint of automatic, prescient activity—and seemingly as integral to genes and cells as to muscle and brain—activating passages and pathways of coded mimetic transferences between bodies, extending bioenergetic fields to realms mythic and ancestral.
Because the moving, dancing body can systematically engage concurring, recurring and interprecessionary rhythms, patterns, structures and perceptual tracks (built up from concatenating chains of entrained flexions and iterative impulses) one can also learn to watch and see the semiotropic convergences of volleys of signal chains emerging into signs (usually first as gestures), and constellations of signs into structures. One sees symbolic transactions of movement phenomena in a dance continuum extending the kinetics and somatics of movement before and after form per se, as dreams break the bonds and bounds of reality and perception.
Improvisation shows how the dance is a text—it synergizes the elements of kinetic syntax and factors of composition (line, structure, form, exchange, spacing, rhythm, configuration, texture, import, etc.)—the volleying of shifting delays of signals and signs permutes and realigns the relays of contexts, transformed by the tiniest change of temporal, corporeal, muscular or spatial detail.
Even the making of a very formal and finished dance work can involve improvisational strategies at any stage of its creation. Improvisation is artistically prestructural, as images can be prescientific. 1 Movement itself is a motor and motive phenomenon; dance, an art.
Improvisation is more integral to (post)modern dance because its semiolexical deployments and structural principles are more fluid, less determined; experimentation is at its core. The ballet lexicon is basically a closed system, though any mode of movement can catalyze and open the parameters of any other given technique or style. Modern dance, basically an open system, is akin in its free-form modes to sketching, action painting, free verse poetry and automatic writing of the painter or writer. The liberation of forms from representation, literality, narrativity, and tradition was furthered by abstraction—abstract expressionist painting in the 1950s, happenings and performance art in the 1960s.
Improvisation loosens the boundaries between form(s) and content, styles and techniques, the set and unset, the continuous and discontinuous, the symmetrical and asymmetrical—creative antinomies, indeed—and between the known and unknown, contained and uncontained, bound and unbound, self and other, objective and subjective, motivation and intentionality—because movement connects through, across, over and around polarities, spaces, landscapes and dualities. Dance can be so spontaneous and vital (even with beginners) that it leaves the viewer bewildered—complex kinetic exchanges, sequences and passages need not be (pre)planned, organized, nor set. Thus improvisation recasts hierarchical stratifications; even virtuosic movement makes the watcher’s eye sweep and scan the entire space and the configurative designs interactive with the other dancers, rather than holding a centralized (i.e. egoic) focus.
For observer and audience, improvisation generates different transactional modes of seeing, freed from expectation, presuppositions and assumptions—the simplest as well as an unexpected move or conjunction of gestures or patterned responses can surprise, connect, resonate or explode incredulously. Seeing, doing and making can be transactional and align modes by autoassemblage, where responses between bodies and dancers transpire faster it seems than the brain can think, presenting a new terrain and challenge. Improvisation reveals the spontaneous, organic dialectics of action dancemaking; it is the bridge between process and product.
Thus improvisation creates a site for multiply interactive processes. Where do our ideas about process originate? Undoubtedly from biology and physiology, and the fact that numerous autonomic (automatic) processes are intrapressional—digestion, sensation, breathing, circulation, respiration, reproduction, etc. The processes of improvisation project dynamically interactive, virtualized orders of imageries.
There is also a larger, more inclusive systemic and dialectical relationship between process(es) and system(s). The interaction of different processes compose the human biosystem. (As a choreographer I do not give dancers only specifically set, repeatable phrases, though we work toward that too, but rather pieces of phrases and steps that they have to recombine and work into the ongoing development of permutable structural schemas. These automatically build up volleys of steps and patternation options that can be reassembled and reordered to operate as rapid volleys of signs—as in-process indicators and recomposable clues for ways to assemble and order an ongoing dance’s materials. This assembling is or makes a kinelexic grammar of dancemaking possibilities.) Language, too, moves between systems of categorical differentiations and schematic orders (typologies) of combinatory and assimilable spatial topologies. It is the idea of the matrix conjoining several compossible and simultaneous processes, modular components, body logics and digital rhythms, that allows for further systemic transformations, and that points to a new compositional concept.
Improvisation can reflect, reflex and make the totality of human experience(s) transparent, as well as its own factors (of experience or motivity—symbolic or structural, also able to mirror its own prestructuralities, rhythmic conflations, etc.). Improvisation can double back on itself to fold the accretions of the moving body into larger contexts. Improvisation shows that movement and dance can be self-reflexive of phenomena, mirroring essences. One need not start with ‘a structure and construct or compose ‘a dance—doing and making are reciprocally inseparable. This points to a kind of futuric ontology—dancing is being being seeing. Shiva is before the creation of the wor(l)d.
Some dancers breakthrough to genuine kinesthesia so spatial apperception creates fluent, fluid meshes between motivity, balance, form, alignments of corporeal and spatial isomorphisms, the harmonies of transspatiality (‘geometry/typography’) and the further ranges of transformative possibilities tempered by gradients of qualities plastic and/or emotive. Usually a dancer following rote choreography need never bother with decision making in performance (as Isadora Duncan did), nor with conceptual concerns (and concepts shift as our facts, feet, eyes and experiences change, realign, or, gather momentum); the entire (pr)axis of the (post)modernist matrix finds that its principles, lexical pivots, conceptual premises, structural and stylistic boundaries are indeed transactional—connecting forms, process, impulses, flexions and realms with other disciplines.
Improvisation constantly explores (modes of) compossibility, and moves between and through the first and last dance. There is comprehensive, systemic play generating a continuum of spontaneously synchronistic processes, and dance invites semiolexical transpositions (and in Merce Cunningham’s instance, engineered, formally repeatable synchronistic processes, arrived at by chance procedures!). Coordinations of discontinuous, automatic motor sequences process raw passages of signals patterned into multiplex responses that weave the textural grains with the steady gain of momentum—that then congeal into concrete signs—reading indicators making transparent, eidetically identifiable traceries of line, design, structure, and gesture which coalesce symbolically as import, impact, resonance, and meaning, and reflexive, too, of natural forces, energy fields, and phenomena: rivers, eddies, whirlpools, waterfalls, vortexes, winds, currents, branchings, tributaries, etc.
The postmodern axis—or dance after Merce Cunningham—involves the (self-)reflexivity of movement principles and dance structures, breaking through to autonomous schematologies combining simultaneous logics and interactive body grammars. That these can be systemically open, observable, and coordinative in and through the acts of doing, deciding, making, dancing and seeing, is akin to the cognitive acumen necessary for creative problem solving, collectively experiential. (The idea that form as performance can be inclusive of interactive processes was polemically made explicit and extended by John Cage’s pioneering, experimental music; in Silence he says why worry about structure—its always there!)
There are motor-kinetic, tactile-somatic, and semiomimetic body grammars composing kinetic registers and kinelexic gradients—while reading, watching dance, film or television; even while talking, walking, thinking, and reading. The schematic complexes of “codes” that inform and navigate a dance’s (or group’s) course—and that coordinate the multiple dexterities of patterns, steps, and configurations—are both sub- and supraliminal. A dance can also incorporate written, spoken or projected texts with spoken or recorded voice, (electronic) music, projections and film/video to program simultaneous (and sometimes synaesthetic) processes. Even disjunctive and discontinuous processes can build up new senses of continuity and totality. Yet just how the intense enactments of impulses and responses, the concatenation of rhythms and qualities by one or more dancing bodies has analogues, axes and indexes grammatical, as well as grammatological, points to a further programmatic threshold utilizing multiple logics and pluralistic modes of intraprecessioning signal-sign assemblage. (Grammatological = orders of sign registers, schematologies of synchronous and asynchronous structurations. In the post-Cunningham, minimalist dance, simple everyday movement strategies structured in concrete, usually very repetitive and accumulative patterns, often with considerable systematic density, showed that themic and motific materials could be formally and contextually self-referential, and hence systemic within the parameters of its contained formal deployments.)
That meaning can be motor-mimetic involving the play of gradients throughout an energy continuum, that the eye can scan translitérai, kinelexic correlations and motoric-motive congruences, then polysémie structural schematologies involving multimedia principles and projections techniques, is rooted in interconceptual breakthroughs that eventuate in, and synthesize, new entrained orders, intrasensory ratios and logics and body grammars. Merce is the originary structuralist, and the diverse postmodern endeavors (and which really expanded the complexity of the highly refined, balletically oriented lexicon) prepared the ground for a grammatology of performative modalities and performance techniques.
These kinelexically enhanced, programmatic extensions suggest other digital (and digitated) formats whose principles are reflexively and compositively analogical and that apprehend, then apperceive, further logicalities of electronic locomotion and passage through the trans-versed virtualities of space. This is proximally experienced in normal daily experience when trying to unscramble the jumbled, partial and puzzling recollections of dreams, assaying their fractured asymmetrical sequences, dislocated transitions, or disjunctive juxtapositions of elements and orders with actual referents and intimations of concrete meanings. Dancing, too, is like scrying with crystal ball or palimpsest.
Before Richard Kostelanetz left for a vacation in 1991 he leant me the only copy of a manuscript for his forthcoming anthology of articles and criticism about Merce Cunningham, Dancing in Space And Time. It had just been readied for the publisher, and included my long SPACE DANCE AND THE GALACTIC MATRIX: MERCE CUNNINGHAM, An Appreciation. Presently, while proofing the galleys for publication by A Cappella Press, I (re)realized the expansive, all-encompassing endeavor necessary to develop a terminology suitable for an aesthetic overview to discuss his work—the pivot of modern and postmodern. (I worked on it during a three year period, from 1988 to 1991.) Just as there’s a kind of transformative quantum jump moving a dance from rehearsal studio to stage, so too from typescript and manuscript to the printed page. This was the first piece I wrote on the word processor …
… And that I began typing on a temp job at Dean Witter Reynolds in the World Trade Center, luckily a do-nothing office job with plenty of “down” time! What readily amazed and became unexpectedly useful about writing on word processors were the time and labor-saving electronic options of cutting, moving, replicating, aligning, and altering the text, which lets the writer readily learn editing techniques and spares retyping a piece in its entirety for each successive draft.
I started with that single, first paragraph. Like a kind of virtual replication it suggestively split into a second, and succeeding paragraphs. I resist writing from outlines and choose to organize my thoughts by assembling preliminary notes, fragments, possible sketches, and lists of issues. Sometimes the words come very quickly, requiring shorthand, or like a surgeon, very fast fingers. Writing is also cinematographic—contexts accrue without placement, and scenes are “shot” out of order; editing constructs continuity, focusing disparate logics and senses. Until actually beginning to write I’m not sure how contexts will configure their specific wording, structure or the grain of meanings, even, materializing in the process what I do not know, since hunches and the fleshing out of vague innuendo are part of any writer’s compulsive fascination; one follows the sense(s) of a context or trails of an idea. Sketching a piece also begins to collect appropriate words and phrases, juggling and juxtaposing their possible syntaxing to (re)focus these emerging sense(s). The necessary modes of constant free and cross association intermix by throwing nets through the grids and depths of mental topologies thereby extending the parameters of word, sentence, and the structures of conception, letting eye and mind range and syncopate, and giving a buzz and sizzle to the act of writing. Writing is also like cooking—exotic spices and gourmet sauces—adjectives and adverbial clauses further temper the qualities and tensities, and elaborate the alignment of modes, eliciting the possible transconceptual gradients and giving an inkling of its emerging totality. Then a larger kind of editorial process works over weaves of contexts by pruning, rewriting, reordering, concision; lastly a fine tuning where a change of a single word or the repositioning of a phrase or sentence will complete a whole paragraph or piece.
Some days I write at length, other days only work on a single paragraph or sentence. Just as an oculist aligns multiple lenses, the writer layers a multiplicity of references, inferences, and networks of associability; contextuation generates and realigns the summating accretions of complexity or completion. Theres also the problem of memory, history, and identity that further compounds the writer’s (and language’s) transformation(s)—hence Husserl’s (Ideas) and Nietzsche’s (EcceHomo) reminders that truth is in the realm of fiction, albeit an elegant one. (Cognition is also a capacity to envisage, envision, see.) And it maybe impossible to report anything objectively; writing transforms its contents and subject accordingly—the word relativizes experience and perception. Writing must be a transmissivity,; not just documentation. Facts hurdle themselves.
And as I’m finishing the final first edit here, wondering about the readers it might reach I find this presciently evocative reminder in Georges Bataille’s Inner Experience:
I carry within me the concern for writing this book like a burden, I am acted upon. Even if nothing, absolutely, responded to the idea which I have of necessary interlocutors (or of necessary readers), the idea alone would act in me … the companion, the reader who acts upon me is discourse. Or yet still: the reader is discourse—it is he who speaks in me, who maintains in me the discourse intended for him. And no doubt, discourse is project, but even more than this it is that other, the reader … 2
Writing is a continually challenging, probing process, and without doubt the word processor supplied the necessary next step. Between 1980 and 1983 I had written (that means entirely retyped numerous times) the long appreciations I was developing on Nietzsche, Susanne K. Langer, and Maria-Theresa Duncan. And of course one can look inside the old typewriters and see how they work mechanically, but the insides of electric typewriters and word processors are thin boards with microscopic transistors and multicolored, intricately coiled wiring. They’re unfathomable, and their digital capacity instantly corrects spellings or moves one to a word or passage anywhere in a text with one or two keystrokes of a “Search” key, or copies, deletes, or replaces text (the software being virtually invisible). Word processors reinvoke, with a trenchant technological twist, the meaning of wordsmith.
How did you become interested in theater?
In kindergarten I had the lead as a farmer in a musical production and had to sing! It’s a hazy memory and must have been dreadful! All I remember is the bustle of parents, the last-minute preparations, overdressing in two layers of clothes, a lot of straw, the final climb up the backstage stairs then having to perform while holding a little girl’s hand on the very narrow edge of the stage apron in front of colored footlights, the lights obscuring almost everything else. A few years later I would have repetitive dreams that my bed was on that stage! Another curious memory (I must have been eleven or twelve) was going to see a magician (who was a friend of our family) perform a show of his tricks, and being envious of his assistant. Also my mother was glamorous and theatrical, though a horticulturist by profession.
As a kid I was intrigued by, and made, puppets, undoubtedly because of seeing early television shows, especially the unusually imaginative Bil and Cora Baird marionettes. (I was in second grade in 1950 when we got a TV, a “Phoenix,” so I’m a card carrying member of the very first TV generation.) One puppet in particular, Spike, a stick puppet, exerted a special fascination—every day seated at a funky upright honky-tonk piano at the beginning of every show while playing and talking under and over the music, almost confidentially, in simpatico camaraderie to us kids at home—filling us in on the real scoop, the “dirt” or lowdown about what was about to happen, or what was really happening. He had a lean, gaunt face, like a steely tough with a cigarette dangling nonchalantly from the corner of his mouth, slits for eyes, heavy eyelids, and uncanny, mimetically mysterioso movements—jerky and quixotic like a pixilated phantom—droll, diabolical and scary (a spoof supposedly of the renowned jazz pianist Hoagie Carmichael). The way the (almost hidden) rods, connected at the wrists, controlled his taut, sharply angular verticality made the asymmetrical syncopation of his hands slightly disconnected, unreal and suspect, enhancing his spooky but captivating, endearing anonymity; there was something about his identity that was, or had to be, concealed. (His movements suggested something that could only be surmised, since I probably had no real idea of mystery at that age.) Spike gave me the chills, intriguingly quickening the prescient sense of mystery and play; he inspired a secret allure, allied with the forbidden and unknown.
Later, my parents had a puppet stage built for me as a Christmas gift that could be used for both marionettes and hand puppets, with a red velvet draw curtain, stage apron and little footlights. I made my own puppets—out of almost anything, constructed and performed homemade shows for my friends and baby brother, Grant, in the cellar playroom (real underground). One was an exaggerated Tallulah puppet, with some Auntie Mame mixed in—imperious, unreal, and with an archly ridiculous voice. Looking back I realize there’s another virtual ontology to the animation of puppets that suddenly transforms them from static and sometimes simple objects into beings that seem to have a life of their own—a kinetic semblance that is a “virtual illusion”—and morel The disembodied kinetics of puppetry—being moved from beyond the confines of the body, the transformation of inspired play and shifting textures of imaginary voices—impacted on my early dancing. I guess I secretly wanted to be the puppets and still be able to pull the strings!
We would go to our grandparents’ large, old house for Thanksgivings (over 150 years old, with over twenty rooms, built with wooden pegs instead of nails); their third-floor attic, hermetic and remote, had drawers, closets and trunks full of vintage clothing and turn-of-the-century costumes. My cousins and I loved going through the outdated garments and gear and dressing up in outlandish getups. After Thanksgiving dinner we would try to do impromptu shows, but the grown-ups always passed out—sounds avant-garde, right?! It was in their attic that I also found a variety of fabrics for my puppets as well as when I first sensed invisible presences.
Another early TV show that had a big impact on my imagination was Beat The Clock. It was sponsored by Sylvania, with a large lit-up clock used to measure the allotted time (in seconds) for each stunt. Married couples were the contestants, and the handsome, smooth, and charming emcee (Bud Collier) had a fetching, pretty blond assistant, Roxanne—sort of a 1950s X-rated “fantasy gal” in a snug black, lowcut frock or cocktail dress who sparked the proper innuendo. There were basically two kinds of fraught, unreal stunts for the contestants attempting to win tempting prizes (appliances, vacations, etc.). The first type featured improbable and near impossible riggings with props, stands, containers with fluids, and relay races. Each couple as a team was more often placed in baleful opposition to one another; the wife had to try coordinating some difficult tasks with gear like fishing poles, tilted platforms, precariously balanced cups or containers, whipped cream (their favorite) to avert an accident with the husband getting squirted, mauled, pummeled, whip-creamed or clobbered (not so subtle revenge). Roxanne was always there to clean up the embarrassed or humiliated husband, emerging ruefully from his plastic, protective suit, while the audience howled. People replicated the scenarios at parties. The other task involved language—a curtain opening rapidly to reveal a blackboard with a famous scrambled aphorism or saying. Each word had magnetic holds so they could be quickly repositioned. The time element, and the large, loud ticking clock (twenty seconds, usually) were anxiety- and suspense-provoking. This is what a writer is always doing to syntax—repositioning every word to gainsay the sentence. The shows improbable stunts, paraphernalia and bizarre accoutrements were an obvious, humorous setup, and undoubtedly the irrational, motley collection of improbable props and gear influenced my early dances. I still trace my fascination with sex perversions to this show—it was like a pop Krafft-Ebbing turned into not-so-sublimated charades (later I found an old, yellowed edition hidden in my parents closet!). TV is perverse.
