Part 1 of 2
A Choreographic Mind: Autobodygraphical Writings by choreographer and dancer Susan Rethorst is a beautiful meditation on the act of making and memory as it manifests in the physical body. The writing is so good that I’d recommend it to anyone, especially if you’re interested in artistic process and the psychology of artistic fixations (and, the book has sold out its first run! check back here later this year). In Writings Rethorst traces the effect of personal memories and her manner of remembering (i.e. spatial, visual), to her dance making process, exploring the whys of a hand’s impulse to wring, or how a general shifting beside a stranger holds a million meanings inside it. Rethorst argues that even if we don’t consciously consider these movements, they are “realized” by the parts that enact them: the mouth’s got a brain, so does the ankle, the hip and so on. In short, the body is occupied by constant recollections that affect the way we physically inhabit space. At any given moment, not even talking, or hardly moving, we speak volumes.
As a choreographer, Rethorst is aware of these volumes, buried in nuance, and the potential to unearth and orchestrate them into emotional resonance. Speaking about her dance making process, she writes:
“You have to spend time…Placing the foot somewhere, tossing an arm, shifting the balance, shifting a limb, adding a curl, a tic, teasing out the answers to how fast and how tense and what next, when you join, when exit or pause; watching and allowing the mind to roam, and consider, and take inventory, to hum with decision, next, change, pause, repeat, test, test; feeling the heart beat with the possibilities, feeling the internal eye on the alert, senses tuned in to the seconds of this, that, here, or maybe there.”
This description gets at the patience and attention required for any art: the slow back and forth, testing a word, color, note, like testing a gesture in air—until it feels right. In this way, Writings offers reassurance for the lonely and uncertain hours of making, and serves as a reminder that we must inhabit fully the uncertainty if we hope to get anywhere interesting. Or, as Rethorst says:
“…staying there; allowing the involvement in the hints of meanings and communications to be what holds you. Staying—with nerves of steel—in that poorly lit place. Not in spite of its lack of light, or any other lack, but for its own singular reality, its own singular engagement, the minuteness of it, the curiosity in it, the buzz of your attention, the small communications of the choices.”
Here Rethorst captures the most trying and powerful moment of a creative act: staying in and loving the “poorly lit place,” because of what pursuit in uncertain light can yield. Too, I love “the small communications of the choices,” the maker’s culmination of not this but that, endlessly, to final form.
This is also how a poem is born. Trust, attention.
So where does memory fit into all of this? Rethorst suggests one must work backwards from the surface of the body’s multiplicities to remember the underlying emotions generating its responses; as a choreographer, she highlights those emotions by building back gestures, now floodlit as deliberate.
In my next post I’ll focus on a section of Rethorst’s book about a childhood epiphany in which she realizes her unique way of seeing. It’s called, “I SEE LIKE THIS: AFFECT IN THE SAFEWAY AISLES.” May the title alone bring you back.