Matthew Goulish and Lin Hixson:
Responding to Netta Yerushalmy’s Paramodernities #1
The Work of Dance in the Age of Sacred Lives

Matthew Goulish

The dance begins with the injury that precedes the dance; injury a precondition of dance.

A voice reciting text issues from a cassette player on the table where David sits. Endearingly, he switches out the tapes from time to time, projects slides onto a screen from a carousel.

Netta enters to stand beside the table, and David’s live voice interrupts the recorded voice, with “one not so small amendment.” Marc enters, a dancer replacing Netta beside the table. Netta takes a seat on the stage floor, to watch.

An injury has left Netta unable to perform this dance. Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring has injured her. David announces this. He calls the injury a sacrifice, in reference to the Rite’s sacrificial dancer.

Marc dances fragments of choreography, “decreated” and remixed by Netta. At times Marc’s dancing interrupts David’s speaking, as if the stage and the audience’s attention can only hold one but not both. The silence of the dance silences language.

Watching Netta watching Marc dancing, I am thinking of the phrase, “injured while doing this choreography.” Were these abject inturned feet the culprit? This sudden scissoring leap? This knee crumpling and body cascading to the floor like a fallen runner? This pinwheeling leg, pulsing stomping foot, funneling arm overhead? — choreography that injures and resembles injury. Somewhere behind the veils, behind imagining Netta dancing pre-injury, beyond imagining the intact choreography, I see Nijinsky, deep in that echo chamber, an origin dance, spectre- thin, faint and small as a dry leaf, scudding along a remembered sidewalk.

Half of what I know of Vaclav Nijinsky I have learned from this performance. I know Igor Stravinsky tapped into pre-Christian rituals to compose The Rite of Spring in a two-piano version that he performed for fundraising purposes. Dueling pianos traded syncopations in conversation like dancing skeletons, all lucid polyrhythms and harmonies, none of the orchestral coloration. I hear the music in the dance’s silence, a distant sabbath of broken breakfast dishes. This dance begins with injury. It breaks and issues from the brokenness, from beyond the body’s limit. That has always been its objective, its start and end, to begin after sacrifice, after dancing “unto death.” Nijinsky’s broken mind, twilight of the idols, silence beyond speech, beyond the ends of the human, injured body, ruptured body politic.

Out of the rupture, a dance of suffering, in history’s hall of mirrors and stand-ins, extending to this day, to us—this is what I watch when I watch Netta watching. An injury at the start of every dance in these paramodern times. We dance into, dance out of the impossibility, dance so beyond us it breaks us. It begins when one of us stops dancing, and another takes up the relay. In watching the dance that appears we watch the dances that do not, cannot, appear.

We watch a whole dancer displaced, emergent, an open question that all who watch assemble, watching a dancer into being, networked between partial dancers, distributed and patchwork as a scarecrow, as the Scarecrow after the Flying Monkey attack, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion frantically rejoining his scattered parts.

This dance, a premonition never at rest, stares ahead into the abyss of the 20th century. Here we are now, entertain us as we look back, tour the ruins, ruins ourselves, poke around down here among the archivists and gravediggers, suture and reconstruct, with all the tender technologies, but loosely and collapsing.

Here is my question to Netta: What do you watch when you watch? How far back can you see? How far in time?

Lin Hixson

He stops. Approximately eight minutes before the end of Netta Yerushalmy’s dazzling work, Paramodernities #1, the solo dancer Marc Crousillat, who has moved almost nonstop for a demanding 20 minutes, stands exhausted. He stands in front of a small table for approximately 90 seconds where David Kishik, narrator and technician, operates a slide projector and cassette player with a voice, not his voice, reading a text that Kishik wrote. He stops. Kishik changes the slide from Nijinksy in a suit, in a sanatorium - caught in the air, jumping - to a red square as a point of emphasis, matching the costume of the dancer.

In this moment of stillness, with red reflecting on the wall and the body, where the physical breathing of the dancer is heard and the intermittent, interlocking eyes of the narrator and dancer seen, an invisible geyser erupted in my mind. I use the word geyser for its characteristic, tall verticality. Prior to this moment, I was enthralled by the horizontal, closer to the ground movement with its emphasis on the floor and the feet rather than the upright, aerial movement I associate with ballet. Simultaneously, I listened to Kishik’s words as they initiated fleeting insights into dance history and theory and created a tension between adjacent language and physical gesture.

But here, in the space of this ninety second pause of unmoving quietude, the geyser activated. My eye and mind were interrupted and when interrupted in their forward flow, a vertical dimension opened up from the horizon of the performance. Suddenly I encountered layers of meaning squeezed upward from the pressure of what came before. The hushed dancer now belonged less to kinetics and more to an intensity that demanded a new regime of attention and care. Under the gaze of Kishik’s eyes literally but Yerushalmy’s conceptually, sediment of actual bodily and creative experience covered the moment. Dance’s relationship to the economies of time, mobility, and labor were questioned. The whole legacy of dance history with its linear march forward — one seminal work begetting the next, fractured. Thinking back on this moment and being aware of the project as a whole, Yerushalmy instead unleashed these legacies as a circulatory system like life-supporting oxygen. She captured the organic transmissions back and forth, both in memory and in body, of iconic dance choreography acknowledging the overlooked kinesthetic dimension of modernity and history.

The anthropologist Nadia Seremetakis writes,

Stillness is the moment when the buried, the discarded, and the forgotten escape to the social surface of awareness like life-supporting oxygen. It is the moment of exit from historical dust.

After this 90-second suspension, Kishik presses the button on the cassette, and a voice is heard. The dancer moves again with choreographed agitation. But this time, it seems, he is equally filled with euphoria and gratification.

Lin Hixson, director, and Matthew Goulish, dramaturg, formed Every house has a door in 2008 to convene diverse, intergenerational project-specific teams of specialists, including emerging as well as internationally recognized artists. Drawn to historically or critically neglected subjects, Every house creates performance works and performance-related projects in many media. Based in Chicago, the company presents work for local, national, and international audiences.