All at Once: Dancing 'The Ridge' in New York City Parks
PDF:
vanderkolk.pdf
Figure 1: Hana van der Kolk in her adaptation of Deborah Hay's The Ridge, 2005
Photo by Carly Busta.
Author’s note:
This piece describes both a solo dance, The Ridge by choreographer Deborah Hay, and my own adaptation of that dance. The text alternates between first and third person voices. The first person sections are straightforward descriptions of Hay’s approach and linear, narrative accounts of the adaptation process. The third person sections describe my experience performing Hay’s choreography, including my personalized interpretations of and elaborations upon her instructions. Additionally, text appearing in bold italics is my memory of Hay’s instructions for The Ridge, accompanied by direct quotes.
The text forms one continuous choreographic narrative by combining moments from more than ten performances of the 25-minute work, taking place over the course of one month in at least seven locations throughout New York City. Each given moment in the choreography, as it was performed in a particular location, is linked to a following section of the dance, as it was performed on a different day, in a different space. The text creates a sense that a single day has passed and that a single performance has been completed, when in fact the reader has experienced many dances over many days. Anecdotes involving passersby who engaged with the multiple iterations of the dance are included in the description of the choreography. These are integral components of my realization of the work. The present tense description of the dance, the dancer's account of her own experiences, and her reported interactions with her viewers invite the reader into an enlivened and immediate experience of the choreography, placing him or her amongst the dancer’s eclectic actions and the myriad occurrences in the city that surrounds and accompanies the performances.
Again, she dons her flowered headdress and prepares to let mud soak through the knees and hips of her pants. The dance becomes like food, she readies to eat again.
A light jog, keeping the energy up,stepping in rhythm with a passing jogger.
She reviews her tools for practice of performance of The Ridge: “What if every cell in my body at once, 73 trillion and more, has the potential to perceive the uniqueness and originality of all there is? I use as my measuring instruments the perception of time, space, self, and other. I imagine inviting being seen from 360 degrees. My whole body at once is the teacher, the perceiver, and I notice the feedback from asking my body these questions, from giving it these instructions. I understand I cannot do any of it.”
She imagines seeing her surroundings with her “whole body at once,” her space defined: trees, people, a bench, a swing set, the relative unevenness of the land beneath her feet.
A groundskeeper in a dark green uniform climbs over the nearby benches and he approaches the dancer intending to stop the performance. She becomes distracted. As he nears she imagines perceiving him as 73 trillions cells and is reminded of the potential to reconfigure her own self, now, now, and now. He crosses in front of the dancer and has changed his mind, moving a sprinkler out of her path. She is practicing: failing and trying again.
In September 2004 I traveled to the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland for my second Solo Performance Commissioning Project with Deborah Hay. In Scotland, 21 dance artists from 5 countries learned The Ridge. At the end of the project we were invited to pursue an individual adaptation of The Ridge, contracted to practice the dance at least 5 days per week for at least three months before a public performance, and to make decisions about the costume, set, music, props, and text we might use. Each performer’s adaptation of The Ridge is different and each performance of the dance is different as a result of Hay’s methods of redefining choreography to include paradoxical instructions for movement and sound, and the “what if…” question that acts as a meditation for keeping attention awake throughout the performance. While another NYC-based artist, Arturo Vidich, performed his adaptation of the solo 5 nights per week for a month in a dark alley in the Soho area of the New York City, I embarked on a 15-performance tour of NYC parks. Others performed their adaptations in galleries and theaters.
She stops to the left and back of her designated dancing landscape, long enough to be perceived to be stopping. A hiccup. A breath.
The dancer begins to move across space performing deliberately inconsequential movement, keeping within her the rhythm of her earlier light stepping, light jogging. The rhythm propels the deliberately inconsequential dance.
Practicing The Ridge on a daily basis, I noticed its changes and developments while the piece in turn gave me feedback about myself as a performer and a person. Daily practice forced me to dance when I was ill, tired, grumpy, stressed, busy and demanded that I find a place for the dance each day: my living room, my friend’s living room, various studios, a frozen pond, Hudson Valley woods, and many New York City parks. When I practiced outside, the meditation “What if my whole body at once has the potential to perceive the uniqueness and originality of all there is?” seemed a simpler possibility to imagine and to “play out.” After 3½ months of practice, my “city parks” adaptation of The Ridge began to take shape. When I danced in the parks I had a set, a sound score, and a back-up cast that defined my adaptation. Cars, park-dwellers, people passing through, concrete structures, the changes in weather all joined me in the performance of the dance.
She performs smoke while trying to forget that she is performing smoke. Spontaneously, a love song, a love song is sung in fragments, a real love song, but one that has not existed until now. She dances smoke, while forgetting smoke, crossing it off the list, striking it from the record.
She performs three simple steps.
She turns to look over her left shoulder, TV Golf!
She remembers the few brief times she has seen and heard golf on TV on a Saturday afternoon. She feels her brow furrow as she strains to remember. She performs the sound of the approval of the crowd at the golf match and the polite applause after a particularly impressive play.
The dancer checks the sound to her memory, looking for a match.
Figure 2: Hana van der Kolk in her adaptation of Deborah Hay’s The Ridge, 2005. Photo by Carly Busta.
On May 15, 2005, I performed The Ridge six times in five locations in Central Park from noon until sunset. For two weeks during my stint with the parks I felt like a sailor, watching textures of clouds, direction of winds. That day the air was thick with moisture after a night of rain and the promise of more in the forecast and in the shifty sky. The park was lush, the true height of spring. I picked a hill framed on two sides by walkways and close to a high-traffic entrance to the park for the first performance of the day. The hill was moderately steep and helped keep me lively, perceptually awake. Tourists stopped and watched, some excitedly reporting to my friends or theirs what they saw.
She gets low. She dances office furniture, scientist, lab equipment, believing everything she is doing is office furniture, scientist, and lab equipment. There is a scientist, there is an overseer to the experiment, and there are goggles, and glasses, and goo. Sometimes she claps a little clap. She stays mostly bent over, as if the ceiling has become lower. She performs three simple steps, quicker now.
The dancer looks over her left shoulder and commits to performing the backwards, upside down, flipped-over version of the sound of the approval of the crowd at a TV golf match, and the flip-flop, fumbled take on the sound of the polite applause.
By the end of one of the performances, four children had glued themselves to a nearby fence, all smiles. The mother called me over, “Please, are you going to do it again? My daughter is crazy for it,” so I danced The Ridge again there. The two oldest daughters, about 5 and 7, sat right at my feet and made faces along with me, laughed, and imitated movement. I talked with them after about their dreams to be dancers and was happy that The Ridge was now imprinted in their minds as a new form they could use to define ‘dance.’
She moves back on a curve, headed away. Magnets: everywhere, inside and out, all around, far away and near.
There is no concern for success in the portrayal of this phenomenon.
Arriving at the back of her hill, near a dark cave of trees, the dancer surprises herself by having forgotten the next part of this dance, then remembers and performs three things: the sound Fttttt! made so quickly that the audience does not know where the sound has come from, a slicing of the lower arm backwards alongside the hips, and a small turn. Exclamation, period!
During a performance on Cedar Hill in Central Park, three young people walked by in elaborate mountain climbing gear and I briefly wondered if they’d come from a costume party or a cliff that I was unaware existed in the park. They passed and moments later I spotted them again uphill, this time mouths open in some strange mixture of disbelief, laughter, and utter embarrassment. It was clear they had spotted the title of the piece, displayed on my homemade sign. I hoped they had acknowledged the irony.
Facing into the center of the lawn the dancer begins a movement combination on a curve. She notes the rhythm, the steps, of the combination and repeats these each time she dances it. In the middle of one round of the dance combination…
A void! Weehaaaaw, wait, wait, wonder, wonder, weeeeeeee, whoa! Falling, falling, falling, wushooop too plip! She remembers that the combination will return, then forgets about it.
A man, walking east, glances to his right. From a distance, as a fleeting image, caught between two trees, he sees the dancer, her white, white pants, and the pink of her flowered hat against the gray and green of the stormy day.
The combination, here it goes again, facing to the outside of the curve, halfway back along it.
The combination disintegrates, but she does not forget it, it is an old friend in the back of her memory and it suddenly calls out again with a hop, a step, like a cousin of the original.
The sound of Fttttt! made so quickly the audience does not know where it came from, a slice of the lower arm forward in space alongside the hips, and a small turn, one leg crossing over the other.Exclamation, period!
The dancer heads directly to the right, facing forward on tiptoe. Stepping the rhythm of the previously performed combination without revealing this connection completely. When the rhythm is set up she adds her best operatic note with each coming together of the ball of her shoed foot and the earth. They are performed with the dancer’s best effort despite the fact that she is no opera singer. She is amused, having had a couple of awful experiences with opera singers.
Around 7 PM I arrived at Central Park’s Strawberry Fields. A dusting of white petals from the trees above mixed with a sprinkle of rain. I guessed the rain would stop and if it didn’t it was no matter. I was already sweaty, wet, and my white pants were stained dark with grass and mud. My feet hurt from my “slippery shoes,” a requirement for the performance of The Ridge: a pair of slippery shoes not worn until the first performance of the piece.
The opera warm-up is interrupted by a return to flat feet, a slight crouch, and pointing out to the audience accompanied by a word of encouragement: “fabuloso!”
The performer then points to the space she has been dancing in and utters different words of encouragement: “very good!”
She proceeds: back and forth, a word of encouragement here, a word there. She lowers her volume til she is silently encouraging towards the audience and towards the empty space.
At 7:30 I prepared to dance The Ridge again, the sixth time that day. It occurred to me then that there is no end to the possibilities of these park dances—the city is too big, diverse, pulsing and changing for the dances ever to repeat themselves.
Her hands are pulled together, as if holding a ball of moving, jiggling, goo. She attempts to blow air in and blow air out of her mouth at the same time, which she can’t do. One hand climbs a hands length over the other and the jiggling and blowing in and out stops. She moves on a curve across the grass. With the feet, the lower body, the dancer makes it look like she’s doing something important.
A long-haired guitarist was sitting by the Imagine memorial covering Beatles tunes while people sat on surrounding benches listening. I resisted my fatigue and acknowledged complete saturation of my senses and began the dance. The guitarist played “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”
Lightly jogging, I reviewed my instructions, my tools: “what if every cell in my body at once has the potential to perceive the uniqueness and originality of all there is? I use as my measuring instruments the perception of time, space, self, and other. I invited being seen from 360 degrees,” including by grass, trees, sky, people, and an imagined me, out there in all imaginable space. When I needed it,“I got moving and called it original and unique. My whole body, at once was the teacher, the perceiver. I noticed the feedback”from asking my body these questions, from giving it these instructions. The instructions are impossibilities designed to awaken my attention. I could not succeed in doing any of it. It was a relief and utterly relaxing to remember that. Then I could move, so I did.
When the hands have climbed, climbed, climbed their way up… jazz! She performs a jazz dance. The jazz dancer comes downstage on a short diagonal. She sees the audience and cheers!
The cheer is made up of one-syllable nonsense words: ‘pee,’ ‘poo,’ ‘lip,’ ‘eee,’ ‘doo.’ They flow out, cheer diarrhea.
They are performed in the rhythm of one, two three, one, two, three, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven:“pee,” “pee,” “poo,”— “lipp,” “eee,” “doo,”—“frick,” “eee,” “roo,” “ka,” “pa,” “pa,” “poo.”
She moves backwards, hypothetically inviting the audience with gesture to participate in her enthusiasm. Upon passing by center the cheer deconstructs. She becomes curious, seeing how the mechanics of the cheer break down in her mouth. She remains enthusiastic. Tcct! The cheer ends all the way back, by a large oak tree with a Tccccct!
In my continually shifting audience I saw expressions of delight and confusion. I heard joyous laughter and then grumpy commentary. I felt the impulse to reject some of my audience, those who looked judgmental or dismissive, wanting to select who was allowed to share in this place and time, but before I knew it I was judging myself too. I grabbed tools from the imaginary toolbox: “my perception of time, of space, the practice of getting what I need,” implemented them and moved on.
The Tccccct! launches the performer into meeting the most dramatic self while very distantly conjuring any number of landscapes.
It’s a balancing act. She becomes a Japanese fem fighting hero, a curmudgeon with a hunch back, a baby, un-nameable characters from around the universe, once they’re named, they are released, they become a sea, rolling hills, a rocky beach of sound and gesture. The dancer sees the ground, the earth. She sings a wordless incantation.
She imagines opening up sea, sky, and land, awakening the power from the lava-churning core of the planet, encouraging the flight of a flock of pigeons in Washington Square Park and a dust-swirling gust of wind. She raises shrunken mountains, cleans polluted waters, and un-dams great rivers.
Figure 3: Hana van der Kolk in her adaptation of Deborah Hay’s The Ridge, 2005. Photo by John Peden.
The incantation is interrupted; she drops her chin to her chest. She repeats. Head bobbing: chin to chest, chin to chest, chin to chest…a knee comes up. Chin to chest, forehead to knee, step, step, step, step…
The dancer drops into a wide stand with her butt out. One hand piles on top of the other palms down, a foot from the ground. The pile of hands rises up in increments. Each increment accompanied by an invisible ftttt! Two hands rise all the way up to the limit of the extension of the arms.
She falls to the ground. She lies there, tension in her body. Rolling in increments, she is a series of movie stills.
Behind her, a black clothing-clad teen “head-bangs,” throwing his greasy hair wildly and playing air guitar while his friend catches a photo. She rolls smoothly towards him, back from where she was, he runs away, delighted.
The momentum of her last roll brings her to standing, to a wide lunge, arms outstretched, palms down: airplane, bird.
A man stands on a bench nearby, holding his arms wide, his palms up. His friend, with a camera, standing only paces from the dancer, instructs the man on the best positioning of his arms so it will look, in the photo, as if he is holding the giant metal globe from the 1959 World’s Fair behind him.
Lilting her airplane arms, the dancer makes two sounds: the highest and lowest note at once, an impossible tone, silence, then low indiscernible speaking in the next room, uttered from the back of the throat, silence again. She shifts from the lunge into an upright stance with a poised gesture. The sounds continue. In increments the gesture falls away, arms lower til they hang at her sides. It is quiet. Her eyes close. It is dark.
During my performances in Central Park a few friends and I were moving between two locations for the last performance of the day. We stopped under a wisteria, smelling and marveling at the entwined branches. We stopped at a hybrid lilac bush, purple and white. We remarked that the smell made us want to taste, or embrace, or somehow unite the plant with our own bodies. I remembered a conversation during my first Commissioning Project with Hay, in which we discussed the Italian writer Italo Calvino, who claimed that if we experienced the world the way it actually is, with all there is to perceive at all times, we wouldn’t be able to handle it, wouldn’t be able to function.
She opens her eyes and is a toy, battery operated, wind up, for the enjoyment of a child:
This time it’s a girl doll named Melody with cute curly hair. After the “go” button has been pressed a few times on Melody, she starts to break down: mechanically, emotionally, metaphysically. She maniacally chops imagined scissors at her cutesy blonde locks, her voice rises to a screech, her mantras about friendship and being a pretty girl give way to expletives and nonsense.
The toy’s breakdown travels and takes the dancer to the edge of her dance hill, dance lawn, dance grove, dance dune, stage.
One observer noticed after my rainy day performance in Washington Square Park, that there is the possibility that a passerby questions my sanity and may wonder what is happening: is it a performance, a movement practice, a display of craziness? After observing for some time it will likely become clear that there is consciousness in the movements. Control, craft, repetition, and patterns emerge. Then maybe, The Ridge emerges as an entity, rather than the movements and sounds being random impulses of a person. Perhaps then there is a unity of performer, dance, and environment and that is the performance. As Hay offered us time and again while teaching, “your perception is the dance”: my perception is the dance, the audience’s perception is the dance.
Figure 4: Hana van der Kolk in her adaptation of Deborah Hay’s The Ridge, 2005. Photo by Carly Busta.
After the toy breaks down completely the dancer returns crawling on all fours. She sits, in a pose, tension in the body. She faces her audience: “nothing matching everything, inviting being seen.”
She imagines her toes perceive the whole city, and past it, the sky, unimaginable ending. She imagines her body can perceive far away places she’s visited and ones she has not. She imagines her body perceiving her audience, ones who stand and sit before her now, ones who passed through moments ago, ones she cannot see. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing matching everything, everything, everything. She puts it all in her pocket.
She salutes her audience, a gesture and a smile.
This text originally appeared in Contact Quarterly
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