IMPROV DANCER DANA REITZ: CHANGE IS HER GAME

“I move with the temperament of the light, not into it, not controlling the next move,” says improvisational dancer/choreographer Dana Reitz. “And I allow myself to go into stillnesses. I stand in darkness. I wait.”

When Reitz dances her “Circumstantial Evidence” at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions tonight, the forms of her improvisational movement language may force the audience to do what Reitz says she does before each performance: “I leave the need to be in control out the door.

“I don’t make shapes to last forever with my name stamped on them. This changes ideas about how people control what they look at.”

In fact, Reitz’s work, spanning New York productions since the ‘70s, European tours and a 1983 appearance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, rejects the ambitious slickness of the ‘80s avant-garde.

She eschews music, visuals, the presence of other dancers and even set choreography--though she improvises from a “score” or a strategy that she says she could work on for years. She admits that many consider her a purist.

“I never made ‘art product’ a priority over ‘process,’ a priority over my soul,” Reitz says, echoing movement philosophies from the ‘60s about repudiating the romantic notion of dance as a fixed moment of artistic expression.

She likens her belief system to an embodiment of Taoist philosophy whose key concept is to tap into, by effortless effort, the flow of nature.

“It’s like the martial art T’ai Chi where you are pushed or pulled by the directionality of weight, repressing, lifting, all those elements in the space which constantly change. There is nothing for me and the audience to hold on to but change, fluid transitions, no evidence, reality changing with each new circumstance.”

Does Reitz mean that her role as a choreographer changes from that of an entertainer to that of a teacher, educating the audience on outlooks in art and life?

“If I might be so bold,” she says with a laugh, “we’re talking about the basic issues of life. After all these years, I figure what the heck, and just stand up for the work, for the inner music I feel, for the fact that the work can be so perfectly imperfect.

“The more you play with the energy whipping throughout the body, the more you come to terms with how energy moves through you rather than begins in you. It hits the room, the audience, making the entire space into a field with you as part of that field, not necessarily in charge of it; it’s not ballet, you see.

“Listen to the great jazz improvisers. There’s an extraordinarily strong range of individual style, temperament, coloring, tone there. I don’t see any reason why a dancer can’t have that variety, that kind of investigation into the spiritual source, the depths! Into the gut.

“You don’t answer a question like where the hell does gesture come from by doing (only) one piece on the subject. And you don’t stop working with the difficulty of your upper back, for example, just because the perception is that some people want something different.”

Recently, Reitz has worried that even some of the more experimental artists mine material too quickly only to jump into the next project, trying to gain control over large companies, touring packages and the possibility of getting greater popularity. She calls the responsibility an artist might feel to the audience “a false responsibility.”

“It’s not as if the audience and I are part of different fields,” she says; “rather it’s a magnetic field,” and she emphasizes that the concentration that comes with “visual listening” creates the attractions.

“You see, I’m as surprised as the audience when I find the mid-line between mind and body. But I don’t say, ‘Look at me dance.’ You see, I’m looking for focus too, just like the audience, and sometimes I’m panicky too, and sometimes I find something genuine, but you don’t force it.”