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Gotta Dance

When I think about dance, it goes to my essence – it's as though it were bound by DNA to be a part of my very being. I can't remember a time I didn't dance. Standing on an ottoman in my grandmother's slip doing a hootchie cootchie dance for the church ladies at the age of four, whirling until I collapsed in a heap and rolled down the hills at 6, lying on the floor high kicking with the JUNE TAYLOR dancers at 7, watching the old musicals with my mother and when I was finally old enough to stay up and see all the good stuff like LOLA FALANA and the Gold Diggers - well I was in heaven. Thank god for television, for really this was the only dance a boy being raised in the south was exposed to outside of church socials where the fox trot was downright heathenous.

But all that began to change by the mid 60's with the advent of a new found freedom of expression, it wasn't just in the streets but in the clubs and on stage and screen too. As our cultural values changed so did the mind set of dance and indeed the very form and function of dance. So HULLABALOO and AMERICAN BANDSTAND and SOUL TRAIN allowed me to vent in a new way. From the Twist, the Dirty Dog, the Alligator, to the Four Corners, the Running Man, the Harlem, the Cripple, break dancing, hip hop - to raving. Social dancing was freeing to the body but what I embarked on as an art was freeing to the mind. The creating of dance is like my mind on drugs. Now mind you this was never a considered something a boy would or could do. So when I got the chance, well to steal a line for the ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW "Hot patootie bless my soul I really love that rock n' roll" n' leap n' plié n' spin n' jeté and I still do.

All this began in 1973, when I went off to OSU to study ART. The Dance Dept. had courses that fulfilled the phys. ed. requirement so I signed up in a heartbeat. During this time TWYLA THARP's troupe come through and it blew my mind. I had been doing that in my head for years and never thought anyone actually did it and put it out there. I had an aptitude for dance and was talked into auditioning for the Department. I got in. Dance History was a required three year course and what we learned right off the bat was what was going on then. And the most recent history was of the HAPPENINGS and the likes of THE JUDSON DANCE THEATRE. I ate it up. LUCINDA CHILDS, YVONNE RAINER, DAVID GORDON, JAMES WARING,STEVE PAXTON, JILL JOHNSTON and TRISHA BROWN to name a few. With my innate ability I was able to get through the strict four year program in three years and couldn't wait to get to NYC. Once here I almost gave up dance for when you have only one real Mecca for your art and everyone who has that I'M THE ONLY ONE GOING THROUGH THIS feeling arrives it can be a little cut throat to say the least. It was down right nasty. You would show up at an audition and be #489 of 500+. "We will call you." "Next." I went to Joyce Trisler's classes with my little note from a teacher who had been in the company as an introduction and realized it didn't matter cuz by then she was a bit meshugana and second time that she hit me in the stomach to create that perfect contraction I booked. Thank god I had come with friends and we knew others who had come in the years before us so we had connections to play with folks who were experimenting in different modes of dance. So we were working at our art but not in our art, not just yet. I did however manage to find a Sunday morning job here in the nursery and will cherish the generation of "Judsonettes" I got to see grow up.

The things I have done in the name of dance. I was the Cherokee symbol of death in one of those historic outdoor dramas that theater majors flock to in the summer and as such I had the turning point moment in the show. It was billed as the largest outdoor air-conditioned theater was dug into a deep pit with a large center concrete stage and two revolving smaller stages on the sides where most of the "white man's" action took place. Us Indians and the war scenes took place on the big center stage. Well I had this moment in the show where I run around in a loin cloth and big feathered wings and mask in the pitch blackness (finally at about 10 PM in the middle of Oklahoma in a pit no less it is dark) carrying a torch. Well the cue that I was through and exiting was the sound of my feet running off over one of the smaller wooden revolving stages. This particular night the actor for the scene that was to revolve on as I ran off was late so he runs on to take his place stage manager assumes its me and gives the cue to revolve the scene on. As I climbed back up on to the stage from the front row of the audience, having flown through the air thirty feet after running into the revolving set, I hobbled off - the Indians - now on their "trail of tears" were reduced to doing a little stomp out the fire dance as my torch was actually hundreds of cotton balls soaked in alcohol. There were little balls of fire all over the stage. I laughed, I cried, I was out of the show for a week. Talk about what Sally Banes called dramatic deployment of dance materials.

Another time on tour in Germany, there was a mix up as to what type of group we were, going by the name of THE TROUBLEMAKERS, I guess confused the issue for the German sponsors who had us booked into a beer hall, an old pub and when we arrived and saw that our stage was a 10x10 raised platform with four microphones on it we fell out. Our choreographer, ever resourceful, managed to find the nearest purveyor of hash, a bizarre Afghani named ZOTI and we got totally ripped. We did the show, sans microphones, laughing our asses off every step of the way. The audience loved it, they lit sparklers when we finished. Hey it was 1983 and we were ROCK N' ROLL. That performance certainly went a long way toward challenging the social relations Sally Banes alluded to regarding post-modernism.

Once in London at the Dance Umbrella, out of sheer boredom, the choreographer dared me to do the opening 7 minutes of an hour long piece with a day cot we found in the dressing room strapped to my back. What a fool HE was for I upped the ante I did it with the cot on my back, a bag of chips in one hand and drinking from a big Fosters beer can in the other HA! I was deconstructing myself for the sake of the performance. In reviews I have been called a chubby Broadway show master, a truck driver with the cool of a Galouise cigarette hanging from his lip, an earth-mother goddess, a curiosity, a freakshow, and a baked potato that moves like the wind. Go figure.

And like Gracie Allen's character in A DAMSEL IN DISTRESS I have always done the work to become the one who is consumed or convinced of the world. For I have been fortunate to live out this life, so far anyway, taking on alternate personae, alternate worlds, alternate modes of being and inhabiting them for the sake of the performance. The fact that you the audience have been there - HERE - has been secondary. For it was part of the post-modern dictum that made that transference obsolete. It was Trisha Brown's rooftop dance, whereby dancers relayed movements over a 10 square block area of midtown, that changed everything for me at least. No one was there to see it. But it was still a performance. It was still a dance. That made history. And thus changed history. It was written about and now its history, it was the very point of post-modernism - that to take what was - history - and turn it on its head, thus making it while actually rewriting it. This is something we must not forget. Even in this place. History is meant to live. And living means change. I wonder who will come along and alter it next. I wanna be around, as one of my fave rave songs goes, to pick up the pieces. Cause putting them back together is what creation is all about.

I have danced professionally now for 27 years, and yes I'm still out there. I have done quite a few performances, both full evenings and as part of services here and have cherished every moment. In particular a performance that our dear Arlene asked me to do and that was the second World Aids Day, some of you may remember I did a cycle upstairs that repeated three times for our departed friends. What a beautiful evening. I thank you. All of this brought me here and it still does, though some of you may have no idea who the hell I am, I'm still here. Leadership may change and values - or should I say - what is valued - may come and go but what was created in this very room - in the form of HAPPENINGS, changed not just how dance was looked at but its very being. Its meaning. And in so doing reached out and touched/embraced the rebel/renegade in a southern boy like me.........And here I stand having pondered my very existence for weeks now as a prelude to this service. I feel as though I am dancing my way through this as well, only its the words that are spinning, jumping, jeteing, tripping, leaping, whirling and darting forth.

So began my education as a dancer for with all the arts, it seems to me that its a lifelong commitment to grow and thus learn to nurture the mind as well as the body. Sometimes the body has a mind of its own TIME as well as heartbreak and injuries can take a toll - but I gotta tell ya, there are times when I'm out there on the dance floor, whether its theatrically or recreationally, and my mind has no idea how old the body is - or lets just say it has a select amnesia. And I'm young again, beguiled again, bewitched and............... I GOTTA DANCE.

New Testimony
An excerpt taken from James Waring's musings

First dance lesson: put your feet on the floor. Now, put you mind in you Feet. What's it like down there? What's it like, dancing on sharp knives? The same as any other dancing no doubt. A floor is what's under you; Footing; he has his feet on the ground. If I can be happy standing on one Foot, that's better. Next, on no feet, rising to heaven.

When does extravagance become a necessity? Extravagance is exorbitant, Outside the orbit, outside the circle. In The Bald Soprano Ionesco says, "Take a circle, caress it, and it will turn vicious." In A DAMSEL IN DISTRESS, a Fred Astaire film of 1937, in the amusement park sequence, Gracie Allen runs in a circle, on a great, turning wheel, for a very long time. Later, off the wheel, she still runs. Throughout the film, Gracie shows us her world, she talks, sings, dances, mimes: we don't know whether to laugh or cry. It is real, but it is not our illusions, it is hers. Suddenly, our knowing is changed, our circling no longer makes sense, only Gracie's does, such is her center. Her world is the only possible world; its rules are inexorable. She does not convince, she is convinced. Her motive, simply, is the movement of spirit, the movement of mind, the spiraling or radiation of her belief from its unshakable center.

Post-modern testimony
Taken from Sally Banes "Earthly Bodies"

To say that dance is the art whose material is the human body is to restate the obvious. But it is also to reiterate dance's uniqueness and significance, and to understand why post-modern dance, which began with the Judson Dance Theater and its sources, has radically affected dance theory, performance, and style. For, ironically, although "post-modern" refers to the mode of theatrical dancing that chronologically followed classic modern dance and departed from its aesthetic canons, post modern dance is a "modernists" art, in that it acknowledges its materials and reveals its own essential qualities as an art form. The Judson Dance Theater was intensely engaged in an art-historical process that corresponded to modernist movements in visual, literary, and musical arts; it was simultaneously engaged in a dance-historical process that sought to free dance from its dependence on music and other arts. It was, thirdly, an extension of a social-historical process that began around 1900, in which women staked out a terrain - modern dance choreography - where they could operate as serious artists, using that medium traditionally disdained as a minor art and women's realm: the body. In making formal breaks from modern dance, post-modern dance raised certain questions about the body and the social relations expressed by the body that modern dance had generally approached indirectly through symbolic and dramatic deployment of dance materials. With post-modern dance, the subject of the artwork became the body and dancing itself.