Danspace, NYC
“Perceiving affect, understanding by...engaging the self in something between sensation and perception...”
Susan Rethorst
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Excerpt from: “Behold Bold Sam Dog,” Presented at Danspace, NYC, 2002. (58 seconds) TRT: 49 minutes
Perhaps you watch a dance with your eyes. But if a dance is made from the body, how to learn to "see" with the body too? What if a choreographer could make you go out of your mind?
How can you learn to feel into a dance and let the unsaid lead you? Make believe you are dancing.
Draw on your sense of:
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Excerpt from: “Behold Bold Sam Dog,” Presented at Danspace, NYC, 2002. (45 seconds) TRT: 49 minutes
Rethorst's dances are straightforward, legible - right there in front of you, nothing hidden, yet possibly enigmatic; maybe you don't quite know what they mean.
Her dances - without story – are a kind of conversation. (You, a non-native speaker, are learning a foreign language.) If you drop into a felt sense, you can perceive what's going on.
Felt sense? Psychologist Eugene Gendlin describes it as the pre-verbal awareness one discovers by tuning into bodily sensations. Focusing your attention on your right-in‐the‐moment visceral experience and waiting, another kind of understanding comes.
Engaging your felt sense will allow you to "get” Rethorst's work.
“...we have decided to trust the spectator, to allow him, from the start to finish, to come to terms with pure subjectives. Two attitudes are then possible: either the spectator will try to reconstitute some 'Cartesian' schema – the most linear, the most rational he can devise – and this spectator will certainly find the film difficult if not incomprehensible; or else the spectator will let himself be carried along by the extraordinary images in front of him, by the actors' voices, by the sound track, by the music…and to this spectator the film will seem the 'easiest' he has ever seen: a film addressed exclusively to his sensibility, to his faculties of sight, hearing, feeling...”
---Alain Robbe-Grillet, introduction to Last Year At Marienbad, New York, Grove Press, 1962
To perceive more = slow down
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Excerpt from: “Undone” Presented at Sarah Lawrence College, 2009. (38 seconds) TRT: 14 minutes
Consider Rethorst's dances as "about" the movement itself. Consider that movement and space and timing and everything you notice about the site and the body is where meaning dwells.
“No idea but in things,” wrote poet William Carlos Williams
Is dance ever really abstract?
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Excerpt from: “Behold Bold Sam Dog,” Presented at Danspace, 2002. (1:14 seconds) TRT: 49 minutes
“Gesture is evocative: those moments which are not intended to express something, but are nevertheless expressive,” said Cunningham. In 1964 he made Winterbranch, which was interpreted variously as being about race riots, a shipwreck, a concentration camp, and, in Japan, the atom bomb.
“Everyone was drawing on his own experience,” Cunningham said, “whereas I had simply made a piece which was involved with falls, the idea of bodies falling.”