What if Now Is? (2001)
The score for The Other Side of O (1998), Part 1 of dance trilogy Boom Boom Boom
choreographed, performed, and written by Deborah HayProgram notes: Touch the tip of one index finger to the other. Do the same with your thumbs. With these fingertips connected, open the space between them, to form an O. Now separate your hands. What remains is the other side of O. This absence of boundary is the choreographed site for The Other Side of O.
Over the years, my attempts to identify harmony have been impaired by the complexity of my cultural background. After all, I grew up in the United States at a time when harmony was not a realistic measure of individual worth. Having spent my childhood in a Brooklyn Jewish ghetto in the forties, I became aware of the suppression and repression at work in the following decade, an era of so-called prosperity and social harmony. When the upheaval of sixties confronted this fiction, I was immersed in the New York art world, which was at the frontline of political and cultural struggle. At this time, harmony could well have been perceived by my generation as the byproduct of friction. Once the rebellion was spent and in some instances disbanded, the seventies reclaimed the idea of harmony through a retreat to nature and an increased preoccupation with self-awareness. During the eighties and nineties, the doggedness necessary to pursue my commitment to the field of dance did at times feel to me as some form of accord. In spite of these occasional brushes with harmony through my life, defining it has never been a concern in my choreographic work.
The subject of harmony as reflected upon by dancers and choreographers throughout this century, through flowing movement, phrasing, lighting, physical relationships, and costuming, often suggests an idealism that finds me embarrassed and fearful for dance as a serious art form.
However, a whole new light on the concept of harmony was cast while choreographing The Other Side of O. My meditation practice was what if now is here? (my feminist centennial response to the sixties teaching “Be Here Now”, authored by Baba Ram Dass). This practice was meant to question my mental habits in regard to time and space, by proposing here as moment and now as place. A new question emerged out of this exercise; what if now is here is harmony? – i.e. what if I could consider notions of harmony through challenges to my sense of perceptual order by transposing time and space?
Here provided me with a strikingly vivid sense of location that included a constant repositioning of my body in relation to physical space. My body included a real and imagined presence of my history until now, and then now, and then now. Now was the immediate reading of juxtaposed experiences; a spectacle without motive or consequence. In this context, if here was temporal and now was personal, I had more than enough co-existing material to keep me decentralized and busy noticing how singularly theatrical and total each moment was. With no remaining time or space for an interpretation of harmony, what if now is here is harmony? became my back door approach to what I did not care to enter frontally.
What if now is here is harmony? is a self-perpetuating question that is continually applied to my perceptual field of activity while I perform the choreography of The Other Side of O.
I hate my costume. A red pouf hair ornament is arranged on my head and a gaudy red-jeweled ring in a bright gold setting is on the middle finger of my right hand. I never wear a ring. It makes all my fingers look stunted. I wear an oddly designed black jumpsuit with an attached pair of stiff organza pants that rise up and beyond the sides of my hips. A pair of flat crimson suede shoes turns my feet into spatulas. My ankles look weak. I steal a glance in the mirror and think, “O god. I look horrible, old, ugly, and idiotic,” which is precisely what the choreographer hoped to achieve. The dancer and audience must see through the costume to see the dance. Then I leave the mirror, look down, empty my head and get quiet. Always ready, in costume for at least five minutes before anyone comes to get me, I stand and wait just inside the dressing room door.
The square-toed suede shoes directly approach the perimeter of a large imagined circle on the stage floor. With simple means I trace its border so the audience can also see it. The hollow clacking of leather soles becomes part of the circle making process. I make musical choices with these sounds. What if now is here is harmony?
Completing the circle I place my body in it, like a cook tasting again and again the combined flavors of new stew. The movements are a little off-track and offbeat, not exaggeratedly, but “just enough”, which keeps me on my toes. I selectively alter the shape of my body and the apportioning of time and space within a shape so that the movements suggest, but fall short of association. I think that the alertness required of me alerts audiences likewise. They too are not quite able to determine where I am or where I might go next. From this movement away from material lodged in dance history, training, and culture, one movement starts to repeat, with clock-like regularity, and it repeats two, or up to nine times. A new movement surfaces and that repeats for a different number of repetitions. After the opening circle, The Other Side of O travels between two points, upstage right and downstage left. Fixed by the choreographer, it behooves the performer to conceal the linearity of this single diagonal unit. Travelling from upstage right to downstage left, I create a path that cannot read as a path, delighting in riddle-making. At the same time I am mediating these moments through my bodily responses to what if now is here is harmony? Waves of liberating energy flow within the confines of the choreographic structure. I feel generous, inviting being seen with few obvious connections to physical, social, cultural, and historical behavior. Some audiences may fear their inexpertness in seeing this as dance. Some learn to laugh at it. I adhere to the choreography, which gives me a sense of good conduct, refinement, and clarity. I feel generous where normally I describe myself as selfish. There is a difference between the performer and the same person who is not performing. The two entities may resemble each other but they are not the same.
Almost to the corner, I proceed to enact a single movement repeatedly. With each repetition my experience of it shifts. I perform the movement while turning in place, therefore what I see invariably alters. I note different body parts accentuated in the course of my many many repetitions – it may be the awareness of my wrist meeting space or the way my face is met by an audience member’s eyes, remembering what if now is here is harmony? I have a strong notion that the audience has noticed this unforeseeably fascinating bodiliness, including the sounds of my shoe soles hitting the floor. I inconspicuously slow down or speed up so that time appears stretched or shortened.
In the middle of the last repetition, I am out of it. The choreographer wants my return path so complex it cannot be recreated. What contributes more to complexity? Is it subtlety or the spatiality of a particular floor pattern or the spontaneous combinations of perky steps deemed necessary, by the choreographer, to cover space? At the end of each little combination I stand with my chest uplifted, rolling my head down, up, and back over my left shoulder. A new perky step combination then begins. However, like a batter with his bat, I am free not to accomplish the head roll the first time. I can return to the beginning of the movement, dropping my head down, before completing the full action. I get a kick out of this. I still want to get things right the first time. It’s nice having more than once chance. Ms. Glamorous toss-of-the-head, dressed in dowdy red flounce, ferociously penetrates her cultural taboos through her practice what if now is here is harmony?
My back is visible and crouched forward in the upstage corner. Whispers are issued as commands that I respond to with an assortment of small cries. Yet the cries and whispers are distilled into non-associative sounds before they leave my body. My crimson shoes’ leather heels and toes rapidly drum the floor. These three elements are spontaneously determined and rearranged as I return downstage obscuring the diagonal directive. Very tiny selective backward footsteps through an imagined restricted space slows the course of my action until my arrival, clear to me, is announced with a naturally spoken “boom.”
To void the “boom” my left arm shoots diagonally upwards across my chest. My arm retracts by cocking the wrist, pulling it slightly to me, and saying “ah”. My mouth stays open. There are innumerable options for closing it. I shift into a shiftlessness that hypothesizes not being anywhere long enough to experience being anywhere and here the stricture of the invisible diagonal pattern is finally broken. I cry aloud “waaaee”, thrust my left palm forward, and remove the gesture instantly. Bob Rauschenberg once told me, “Never wait for anything.”
My exit is my entrance. I leave stage,like a cook tasting again and again the combined flavors of new stew. The movements are a little offbeat, not exaggeratedly, but “just enough” which keeps me on my toes. I selectively alter the shape of my body and the apportioning of time and space within a shape so that the movements suggest, but fall short of association. I think that the alertness required of me alerts audiences likewise. They too are not quite able to determine where I am or where I might go next. At the same time I am mediating these moments through the bodily exercise what if now is here is harmony? as the light slowly fades.
[_writings and notes]