worlds tend to remain separate, neither curious about the other. I think there are a couple of ways you could look at it. One is that dancing and writing draw on two radically different, perhaps even opposing, intelligences. The great dance critic Edwin Denby wrote a piece in 1944 called ‘A Note on Dance Intelligence’, which he begins like this: “Expression in dancing is what really interests everybody, and everybody recognises it as a sign of intelligence in the dancer. But dancing is physical motion, it doesn’t involve words at all. And so it is an error to suppose that dance intelligence is the same as other sorts of intelligence which involve, on the contrary, words only and no physical movement whatever.” Mind you, this is around the time of Martha Graham’s height, when the most modern of dance was something of an exorcism. Lots of dancers count the music and organise their movement recall that way. 6 I can’t do it, because even that degree of articulation – just to say the numbers one through eight – interferes with the articulation that (I hope) is functioning at another register and that, for me, has always been fundamentally aphasic. The other way I look at the relationship between dancing and writing is this: Both are performances. In both you get to decide to be whoever you wish. Of course as a dancer, you’ve usually got choreographers telling you what they want to see. I think that makes it easier – this wedge of external directions separating action from identity. The more ridiculous, the more you must commit to that ridiculousness with total seriousness. Physical limitations impose themselves too: there is no pretending to turn out five perfect pirouettes; there is only doing it (although rarely in my case). But even the most exquisite technicians can lack what dancers and choreographers call ‘commitment’ – the elimination of doubt and hesitation, the ability to collapse the line of thinking and doing onto a point of reflex. The necessary immediacy of dancing – the indispensability of repeatedly rehearsing a piece from top to bottom with your own irreplaceable body until you are prepared to carry out and commit to the performance of every gesture – grants certain gratifications and possibilities. For in the end, the work of dance can only ready you to take your place on stage and begin the piece from the top – at which point you’re only as good as your skill and fortitude, and the audience’s collective patience, on that particular evening. Writing can be more forgiving, and also more damning. Writers need not muster the energy, renew their commitment to every word, every punctuation mark, again and again, for an essay to subsist. You can scrap together facets of your writerly self over the course of writing it, paving over your graceless, fitful efforts until you’re satisfied (or until a deadline puts you out of your agonizing). The work of writing leaves a durable (though not necessarily stable) proxy on the page – a score, if you will. The rest is up to readers.
13
With love and admiration, Chelsea
September 22, 2015
Dear Lara, I noticed the Harvard Art Museum is hosting a symposium this week. Anni Albers’s 1926 ‘Wall Hanging’ is front and centre (you know, the one we lingered over with magnifying glasses last spring) – finally, some redemption for our beloved Anni. 7 I wonder if the museum will tweet about her weaving? “#BR48.132. German silk 3-ply weave textile, complex layering, made by beautiful memling #AnniAlbers in 1926 #itsabouttime.” Could a tweet absolve art history and the Bauhaus from about seventy years of footnoting the women of that studio and their progeny? In June, I walked through the museum one last time and noticed next to Albers’s ‘Wall Hanging’ a curious textual drawing: a typed pattern of ‘X’s and ‘O’s on printed newsprint.
Lara Mehling
5 ‘Edward Eigen responds to John Davis’, Open Letters , issue 12, April 11, 2013 6 ‘Mack Scogin responds to Chelsea Spencer’, Open Letters , issue 02, November 01, 2013
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