Susan Rethorst

Perception

Process

Movement

Influences

Movement

Gesture & Text

Still from: “Behold Bold Sam Dog” Dancers: Vicky Schick and Jodi Melnick

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“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 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...”

Susan Rethorst

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Link to Susan’s essay “Dailiness”

Excerpt from: “Undone” Presented at Sarah Lawrence College, 2009. (2:49 seconds) TRT: 14 minutes

Some people think that Rethorst’s work can be read as a text written from the body.

Sometimes her dances make you think of literary structure. A sentence with lots of commas. A line like a short punch. A string of phrases you might think of as a paragraph. And the vast silence, a kind of white space on the page.

When one dancer enters, performs a phrase and exits: a soliloquy?

Could a dance with multiple blackouts be a kind of book with separate chapters?

Sometimes phrases echo the rhythm of speech. Dancers make eye contact, are aware of each other, sometimes seem to ‘talk’ via space.

Excerpt from: “Behold Bold Sam Dog,” Presented at Danspace, 2002. (1:14 seconds) TRT: 49 minutes

Space

For Rethorst, every place in space, nearness, and farness, and in the middle distance, has a feeling tone. The body in space, is emotive. The dancers are alone, and in relationship. They touch. They part. They move from a zone of intimacy into social and public spaces. We, the spectators, understand this with our bodies. We began to learn this, began to have preferences, even before we spoke, in our families, in our encounters, in the culture in which we were formed.

Excerpt from: “Undone” Presented at Sarah Lawrence College, 2009. (3:00 seconds) TRT: 14 minutes