To Witness and Re-member: Movement Practices with Elders by Greacian Goeke and Kaethe Weingarten
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As dancers over 65 , we have been leading free movement and dance explorations in Oakland’s Mountain View Cemetery for the past four years as part of our project Walk- ing in Witness to Life and Loss . Our col- laboration continues to evolve as we mine the complex intersections of life, death and dance within the vibrant natural life of the cemetery. Here we reflect on how we first came to work together and the surprising places it has taken us. Kaethe: When I moved to Berkeley in 2013 from Boston, where I had lived since gradu- ating college in 1969, I knew I wanted to dance again. I had last danced in college in a Graham-inspired program, and then pur- sued a career as a psychologist and academic at Harvard Medical School. I hadn’t danced in over forty-five years! Where in this new home could I find meaningful dance oppor- tunities for women over sixty? After many disappointing leads, a phone call to Luna Dance in Berkeley led me to Greacian and her IMPROMPTU NO TUTU elder dance ensemble in the East Bay. Greacian: I also danced in college but focused primarily on literature and writ- ing and then visual art in graduate school. I returned to dance with new purpose in 1986 when my father died by suicide. This gut-level shock abruptly shifted my primary expression from photography to perfor- mance art. Moving as a performer, rather than observing passively, was essential for me to make sense of this loss. I completed an MFA at California College of Arts and Crafts (now CCA) in 1990 as the first gradu- ate in Interdisciplinary Performance Art. Since there was no dance offered at CCA I took classes in the community, most memo- rably on trapeze with Terry Sendgraff. I also studied theater and dance improvisation inspired by the participatory work of Anna Halprin and Liz Lerman. Later I received an Orff Schulwerk certification in movement and music for all ages. I became a teaching artist and have worked throughout the Bay Area in venues ranging from the San Francisco Conser- vatory of Music to the city dump (Recol- ogy’s artist residency). I am committed to strengthening community and build- ing hope through art. In 2008, I founded IMPROMPTU NO TUTU, the elder ensem- ble that Kaethe joined, to show the world what movement from the experience of a long life can be. Kaethe: I took classes with Greacian and participated in IMPROMPTU NO TUTU events for a year. She then invited me to cre- ate a duet with her for a performance with Dance Generators, the intergenerational company based at University of San Fran- cisco. We met regularly to rehearse at Moun- tain View Cemetery in Oakland, conve- niently located for both of us. Greacian: I have been practicing T’ai Chi in and around the cemetery for years. It’s quiet, obviously, but not as much as you might think. I’m at home in unusual sites and Kaethe shared my fascination with the physical and social space of this large urban oasis. Kaethe: While developing the duet we both realized that our previous work—for me, in communities in the aftermath of violence, and for Greacian, offering artistic means for elders to stay connected to life through imagination and community—had led us to
photo by Greacian Goeke
witnessing. This was a term I often use in a poetic sense and had experienced via Authentic Movement, but she meant it in a very specific way from her clinical and com- munity work. Kaethe: As a trauma specialist I have spent most of my professional life working with witnessing. I have published many articles and a book, Common Shock, Witnessing Violence Every Day: How We Are Harmed, How We Can Heal (Dutton, 2003). While most people are familiar with the terms “vic- tim” and “perpetrator,” few are aware that by far the majority of violence and violation we experience comes through the witness position. This is not the same as “bystander,” which implies that the person standing by is unaffected. Witnessing is a two-sided coin: one side is harmful to the witness, but the other side can be healing. As a clinician I had worked with a form of witnessing practice originated by the anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff with a Jewish community in Venice, Cali- fornia (documented on film and in the book Number Our Days ). She developed a story- telling technique that allowed these elderly displaced persons to “re-member” their lives. “Re-membering,” more than simple recollec- tion, is a communal engagement in witness- ing and reflection that offers opportunities for reviving and re-embodying what has been lost or diminished. Greacian: We transformed Myerhoff’s spo- ken language process into a nonverbal move- ment and dance score in which each dancer moves to commemorate a person or idea she wishes to “re-member,” with the group silently witnessing. Then the group reflects the movements they saw, with the dancer observing. Next, the original mover can incorporate new insights into her movement remembrance while the group joins in.
Kaethe Weingarten (left) and Greacian Goeke (right) / photo by Liz Wiener
Kaethe: The cemetery is essentially our silent third collaborator. While dancing there we have a visceral experience of being alive, in motion, and looking at our ultimate, inevi- table end. We are moving in this beautiful container of death. Greacian: In early 2016 we began designing monthly movement labs for dancers from IMPROMPTU NO TUTU and others from the community. They continue at no charge in the present. Each month a different group gathers to impro- vise in the cemetery using concepts and scores we have evolved from our own move- ment research on site. We call our project Walking in Witness to ground us in a basic movement form that unites many visitors to the cemetery. For our first Memorial Day lab, Kaethe had suggested we work with the theme of witnessing, since she realized that each previous lab had been an experience of
develop many shared values and practices. I first saw how similar Greacian’s pedagogy was to mine by taking her dance classes. Her way of both structuring and participating in the classes was the movement equivalent of how I teach psychology. We both have enor- mous respect for people’s creative poten- tial and relish the process of creating open- ended opportunities for exploration. Greacian: After our duet performance in 2015, which memorialized what would have been our parents’ 100th birthdays, we felt we had just touched the first layer of creative exploration together. The cemetery had deep- ened the themes in our duet and we commit- ted to meeting there weekly to improvise and see what else would emerge.
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