Facing Hard Truths Unflinchingly

Dance had already changed by Sept. 14, when I reviewed American Ballet Theatre in San Diego and watched international star Ethan Stiefel hold up an American flag during the curtain calls.

Clearly, it wasn’t enough anymore for Stiefel to earn applause by displaying his technical and interpretive skills in someone else’s choreography. He needed to make his own statement--not in speech but through movement.

The following week, I interviewed choreographer Bill T. Jones, who, at his first rehearsal in New York after the terrorist attacks, said to his dancers, “All the truth we need right now is in our work, in our muscles.”

Obviously, for dancers, their truths, their muscles, will be the matrix for change, and every group of them represents a microcosm of the art’s evolution. Which is why I’m sitting in a studio in the old Seventh Street Central Market downtown, watching five of L.A’s top modern dancers translate Sept. 11 and its aftermath into improvisational movement.

This four-hour experiment isn’t a regularly scheduled rehearsal or work session. The dancers are here only because of my proposal: Search for the roots of change or growth, and see where the search takes you.

Just four months earlier, these same dancers had improvised together in “Dances for White Rooms” at Cal State L.A. (They also work independently.) And, to help chart the difference between then and now, I ask them to revisit a moment or process in that performance as a starting point. They begin by lining up in a narrow hallway and using a follow-the-leader structure to pass a gesture or shift in stance from one person to another.

But their unity soon fragments, with Loretta Livingston breaking away and running down the hall, Johnny Tu bracing his body against the opposing walls to form a human bridge and Heather Gillette huddling in a doorway trembling violently.

Afterward, Gillette reveals that this is the first time she’s danced since Sept. 11--”the first time I could connect again”--and the release of her pain informs all her dancing. This first improvisation also confirms Livingston’s growing sense of isolation since the events, something she noticed during an early warmup and described by telling the dancers, “I’ve retreated. I didn’t want to go in with you, and I can’t stop it from happening.”

Her isolation doesn’t last long. Perhaps the most honored locally based dancer/choreographer still active, Livingston has always faced hard truths unflinchingly--for instance in the harrowing 1989 solo “Don’t Fall, Pomegranate,” in which she depicted radiation sickness and other war-borne diseases, using her body as a fever chart. She was the first person I called when planning this article, and she set up the session with the other dancers.

Insisting that “my interest is in the small gesture--the grand gesture’s been done,” Livingston pulls the group into a cluster against a sunny patch of wall and launches an improvisation using smallness as a guiding principle. The others respect her concept, but Livingston is soon violating it big time, caught up in physicalizing what she’ll later describe as “the scale of an overwhelming event.”

Some of her actions represent attempts at control--slamming Michael Mizerany against a wall and holding him there, for example, or angrily waving a photographer away as if he’s invading everyone’s privacy. But all control shatters in a series of visceral jumping, twisting, body-lashing outbursts, with each explosion accompanied by moans or cries until she jams Mizerany’s hand over her mouth to keep from screaming.

In contrast, Tu’s catharsis begins with a tiny hand motion. Early on, after forming the bridge in the hallway, he silently refused to dance, walking out of the studio and standing in the hallway as rigid as a soldier on guard. As he later explains, “If I was to do something, it would be too terrible.” But after a few minutes, when he inches back into the room, Livingston and some of the others line up behind him, and his clenched fist slowly opens to touch Loretta’s wrist.

Contact with the others is now bearable, but the extreme tension in Tu’s back doesn’t lessen until he’s put into a simultaneous solo with Mizerany--just as knotted up in his own way but more inclined to pull himself into a fetal position in a corner or use his bulk confrontationally. Soon after the solos begin, Tu reaches out, Mizerany begins running around him and their proximity leads to a high-velocity gymnastic duet in which the men’s soldierly backs become platforms for impromptu tests of trust and support, but eventually relax and grow supple.

The most indelible moment finds Tu motionless on the floor with Mizerany straddling him, his feet jammed under Tu’s ribs on each side. Urgently, almost angrily, Mizerany jumps straight up, over and over, yanking Tu up and then sending him sprawling. As Mizerany later admits, he’s desperate to make Tu move, get up, fight back, show he’s alive.

Alone among the five dancers, Alyson Little Jones goes through no obvious changes during our session. She has been to New York City since the loss, she says, and considers herself “at peace.” In every improvisation, she is supportive, cradling her colleagues and leading them from isolation into community.

Her most exposed and characteristic act comes when she draws Gillette into a duet in the center of the room, mirroring her nervous finger twitches and other body language and, as they grow nearer, taking into herself some of Gillette’s pain. Even though it returns when the women separate, it’s no longer as strong, Gillette says. Healing has begun.

On a day when the formal movement structures and processes of improvisational dance have become avenues to therapy, maybe that’s enough. Certainly the essential question in this studio isn’t how dance has changed, but rather how these dancers have changed--and what they need to do to regain their emotional balance and sense of physical integration.

Out of that need new dances and maybe a whole new approach to the art may emerge. But it’s early, and right now their job is learning to accept an unwelcome change in their hearts, minds, bodies and work, and letting the future of dance take care of itself.