This is part 2 of 2 on Susan Rethorst.
I want to talk about the chapter, “I SEE LIKE THIS: AFFECT IN THE SAFEWAY AISLES” from dance choreographer Susan Rethorst’s A Choreographic Mind: Autobodygraphical Writings. In “AFFECT,” Rethorst describes her sudden awareness, at age seven, of her extreme spatial, visual memory, something her mother realized through her daughter’s unfailing navigation of the Safeway where they did their weekly shopping. Rethorst writes:
…I had a map of our neighborhood Safeway grocery store clearly laid out in my head, and thereafter, [my mother] made her shopping lists in consultation with me. I would walk her down the virtual aisles, telling her what we were passing, and she would see through me what she would otherwise forget. I would never misremember the items and their locations…I became aware of my own particular way of seeing and understanding; a way I later came to think of as a part of a choreographic mind.
I love how this anecdote reveals the young artist’s psyche operating in “ordinary living,” i.e., grocery shopping, and how Rethorst is able to so beautifully trace her practical processing of the world as it transitioned into a conscious art practice. She further explores her experience of the Safeway as not only a map memorized, but also as individual objects felt, a la pathetic fallacy, to explain how those early sensibilities extended into her life as a choreographer: “It was simply that I felt, and carried with me, the affect of the aisles. I felt the places and their contents, and I projected onto them something close to sentience.” Because Rethorst associated different objects or sections of the store with different emotions, her manner of memory was aided by actual feelings about, say, the paper towel aisle. In this way, she wove a series of relationships between herself and the objects, creating a map borne of spatial as well as emotional memorization. Rethorst’s grocery store awakening reminds me that ordinary encounters can be overwhelming for someone who senses emotions from even inanimate objects; what a relief to find that these emotions can be used. That is to say, art provides a natural antidote—a necessary antidote—to hyper perception, lest one be undone by the look-feel of a dented peas can, or a stray sock on the lawn.
A sensitivity to objects, spacing, the lives of objects, the relation of the self in space, and the self relationally to objects—these factors that Rethorst experienced as a child in the Safeway formed a kind of template understanding for her later choreography. In the following passage she describes the degree of attention just one section of the store demanded:
Back on the left, behind the vegetables, were swinging doors out of which came men wearing white aprons spattered with blood, moving fast, leaving the door to swing back with a swish of cold air on the mysterious privacy of handling meat. The speed of the men, their male purpose, the proximity of meat, all combined to color that corner daunting, bloody, and bloodless—masculine efficient chill.
This description of a generic grocery store meat department perfectly meshes with my own experience of said space as a child; it feels marvelous in its accuracy. “Swish of cold air,” “mysterious privacy,” and “masculine efficient chill,” convey the degree to which Rethorst was engaged with the minutiae of her environment and its interactions, which she affirms saying, “These opinionated, reactive assignings I extended to the whole store.” Everything was felt, seen, smelled, remembered.
Another description that I love focuses more specifically on objects, or rather, food objects:
The fish lying in cellophane on an angle were more vulnerable due to that angle; their isolation due to that plastic; and the upturned edges of their packaging adding to their lifeless vulnerability and thus to sorrow…The possible terms were an attempt to translate an untranslatable affect: the affect itself is infinitely uncontainable. Certainly at the time it went unnamed, incognizant, lying somewhere at the back of consciousness, not needing cognizant awareness or naming to act on me… .
“The possible terms were an attempt to translate an untranslatable affect.” Yes. The beauty of Rethorst’s work lies in her attempt to translate, into dance, what could not, can not, be translated into language, such as whatever string of strange stirrings lie behind fish wrapped in cellophane, on their beds of crushed ice. I love this. It’s a reminder of how things are connected to other things, bodies to things and other bodies, a giant web of invisible energies waiting to be described, in the best possible approximation, in a way that really means something.
Like a dance. Like a poem. A good unearthing in fluorescent lights, above the unexpected stage.