Melting Gnomes; Performance, Movement, and Language

I was interested that I also got actual poems from working with Choreo. I thought going in Love and War would probably be unable to stand on its own as a poem and that has been true. I'm fine with that and don't feel capable of producing a piece that could be written collaboratively with a group of dancers and exist free from that movement. Right now,that's asking too much of me and the text.

But I have produced 2 poems that came directly from working with Choreo. One, what the dancer thinks while dancing, came from our latest performance at Duke. We needed poems for transition times in-between the dances, so the poets wrote pieces that came out of their working with Choreo. I had been planning on writing this piece anyway, so it was nice to have the deadline and assignment.

I was fascinated by the way the dancers talked about their pieces; dance seems to lack notation to preserve performances (this also makes me fascinated about the intersections of dance and film- i'll get to that later) or even give it a way to be tracked. So instead, there is a lot of use of language to keep phrases in memory and to indicate them. (in fact, it's sort of fascinating that a string of dance movements is called a phrase.)

The dancers kept referring to "clumpy puppies" "melting gnomes" "throwing hoboes" and other linguistic markers of place and movement. I was taken by how effective it was; i wasn't dancing but i would know where they were going to start on the stage, what came next.

However, it never helped me know where to start in the text. So say at rehersal, we would work on the transition between the 3rd and 4th sections. We might start at "melting gnomes." The dancers would know where they should be, I would know generally where we were in the whole movement, but I couldn't note the corresponding place to start in the text. Eventually I started noting on my text where certain movements occured , but usually by the dancer instead of the phrase title ("sarah across blanche" for instance).

This led me to wonder how this whole piece would work differently if Love and War was a spoken word or performance piece. I'm very influenced by the spoken word and performance poets; some of my poems have both performance and written versions, some poems started life on the page and transitioned into spoken word, (although never the other way around), and even in poems that only live on the page, I'm usually very aware of sound and rhythm above any other organizational methods. When I perform these pieces from memory, movement is one way I "remember" where I am in the piece and can trigger memory for the next section. If I ever get lost in a piece or feel my mind start to wander, I can usually look at what my hands are doing (although sometimes its walking or a different gesture) and get focused again.

All of that is a very long intro for a poem i won't post until tomorrow, but the intersections of language and movement were the direct inspiration for the poem.