John Haskell
The stage is bare except for a woman, the floor below her, the air around her, and for the duration of the dance, as she bends an arm or lifts a leg, her body seems to speak to her, or really it's speaking to itself, telling itself when to turn or jump, and because the woman is attuned to her body, inhabiting a space completely inside her body, although she's supposed to be expressionless, and she is expressionless, she seems to be having a good time.
The film of Yvonne Rainer dancing Trio A was made in 1978, twelve years after she created it, forty years before I started thinking about what it must have felt like. And feels like. And when I say having a good time I mean the kind of enjoyment that comes when you're so engaged with performing the task at hand that you forget yourself, leaving behind ideas of who you used to be, or who you think you are. And The Mind is a Muscle. That's what Rainer called her dance, and the problem is stretching that muscle. Actually, the problem is locating the muscle, and then, having found it, moving in a new way, like a tin man in a fairy tale, arms rusted, legs corroded, or tin woman, feeling the rust dissolving, feeling a current of energy moving through the tightness and constraint and the limitation, and if it is a tin woman, what changes? The axe is still poised, mid swing, ready to come down and chop the wood but not coming down because, although the action might be physically, and even emotionally, fulfilling, the outcome is going to be unknown. And partly it's that unknown outcome, but it's also the fact that, if it's a woman holding the axe, what has to change in me?
I imagine Yvonne Rainer, when she danced in the short, silent film, filling herself with uncertainty as a way to empty her mind of everything she already knew or wanted. Being empty, she could then be possessed by what might resonate in her, something we call greater than her but it's not greater; and it's not lesser; it's what she is, or was, and that's the rub. Who she was is constantly changing. I know she came to New York in 1956, full of ambition, ready to make a mark on the world, and because dancing was a way to do that, she studied the people she admired, dancers and artists, and even the people she didn't admire had something to teach. The technique of Martha Graham, for instance, was rooted in a movement style that valorized an emotional life that didn't align with Yvonne's emotional life. And in 1965, reacting against the authority of that style, protesting the constraint it placed on her body, she said no. No to spectacle and virtuosity, no to magic and make-believe; no to both the heroic and the anti-heroic, and the point wasn't to be new or radical. Her manifesto was meant to clarify what was obvious to her, that dance should be free to be something it wasn't before.
Sometimes when I'm writing, when an idea is about to appear but the words I have don't quite reveal what it is, I get impatient. I get critical with myself, judging my idea and inhibiting its desire to expand into other ideas, and other desires, and although I understand that constraint exists, that wanting is one thing and not getting what you want is a fact of life, I want to experience what might be possible when memory expands to include those moments that aren't just reiterations of what I already know. And it ought to be possible. I remember the first time I rented a car, standing at the linoleum counter, exchanging the information on my driver's license for a set of keys. I remember the expansion in my chest, the tingling up my spine as I slid into the newish seat of what for me was a new experience, driving alone in the car, my hands on the wheel, the windows open, the air and car and even the world passing outside the car was part of a new experience that, because it doesn't last forever, I'm looking for moments when it almost does, when the performance of self melts into a larger performance that includes what I don't even know I am. And any act, if it honestly engages with the world, gives the performer of that act a reason for being, for doing whatever it is you're trying to do, and what I'm trying to do is see, in Yvonne and in myself, a way to be, a way that worked once, and now, although an essay can't actually change anything, by attempting to change myself, by letting a moment from the past evolve into something different, maybe it can.
Yvonne originally presented Trio A at the Judson Memorial Church. Although I don't think of a church as a role model, in the 1960s the old brick building transformed itself, becoming an incubator for the let's try something new because what's been tried before isn't working sense of exhilaration that was in the air. It gave birth, in a way, to the Judson Dance Collective, named for the church, and certain historical moments are like that, moments when ideas coalesce to form communities that rethink what works and how art might work, and in the 1960s, a period of gestation and transition, the dancers aligned with the Judson probably didn't realize what was happening. Or maybe they did. Yvonne would later say about that time, ''There was new ground to be broken and we were standing on it." People didn't necessarily know what they were looking for, but because they were looking, they questioned accepted ways of being, experimenting with ways of performing that reflected the times, which were notoriously a-changin'. The upheavals of the 60s were in full swing, and the Judson became an ad hoc collaboration whose goal was to blur the distinctions between art and life, between performer and choreographer, and even the audience was invited to participate in a transformation that, although it was a different time then, is still possible.
The Judson Theater was born in the summer of 1962 when a group of performers presented the First Concert of Dance. That's what they called it, and because first implies a beginning, and because the process of any beginning is basically the same, I'm looking at what they did for a clue. Like when a tree falls in a forest. After a while it starts to rot,. and in the process of disintegration, seeds sprout from the spongy wood, rhizomes wriggle their interconnected tendrils up through a life that has died, and, nourished by that life they rise out into the world. The Judson dances rose out of a choreographic tradition that wasn't necessarily dead but was dead enough, and from it they created a new beginning. Not the beginning because there is no actual moment when something begins. When you think about moving your arm, the arm that comes into consciousness has already been there, part of a previous movement, a gesture now over but the seeds of that gesture, like the seeds of the Judson, blown from oak trees in California, floating into abandoned lofts in New York City, eventually settled and sprouted, and Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown and Lucinda Childs were all part of a workshop, led by a composer named Robert Dunn. On July 6, for the end-of-the-workshop performance, because Merce Cunningham's studio wasn't big enough, and because the 92nd Street Y wasn't interested, the First Concert of Dance happened at the Judson Church. There wasn't money for anything fancy so the performers used what they had, and what they had, first of all, were their bodies.
Trisha Brown was a Judson dancer who made, in 1971, a dance called Roof Piece. In it, the dancers were positioned on various rooftops in downtown Manhattan. You can see them, in photographs made at the time, standing on their individual rooftops, watching other rooftops and waiting, and because the dance was transmitted from roof to roof, the dancers were waiting for the dance they would copy, thereby transmitting it to someone else who would copy them, each dancer replicating the dance they saw by dancing it, and by dancing it, sending it to the body of the next dancer. The rooftop was a prop, an obstacle that would physicalize both the distance between them, and the time between what they did, and now, how a meaning gets communicated across that gap is still the question.
In one of her essays on photography, Susan Sontag quotes Diane Arbus, who talks about becoming like a soldier, crawling under what seemed like barbed wire, getting behind the enemy line to do the work of the artist. "I am creeping forward on my belly" she says, "like they do in war movies." She knew the danger, the "stricken feeling where you perfectly well can get killed," and she was willing to risk it to do what was necessary to become the person who got the perfect photograph.
Yvonne was thirty years old when the moment of Trio A burst out of her. Or more likely it evolved out of her, churning and gestating and solidifying into an experience of life she was able to embody and express, and fortunately she made the film. That record of her dancing, and the inscrutable joy I imagine her feeling as she moves through the dance, is the example we have, the model of what being can be, and when the dance is over, what we have is the choreography. The experience of life she was able to discover, and live, is revealed in that, and hidden in that, and I say hidden because the choreography is a container. And being a container, why wouldn't it be possible, by learning to inhabit the container, even if it's only for a few short minutes, to learn the experience.
In the Spring of 2017 I decided to take a class. Along with about fourteen dancers and ex-dancers, at a performance space on the lower east side of Manhattan, in an airless room with a Marley vinyl floor, I enrolled in an introductory workshop called Learning Trio A. It was a class that would, by teaching us the individual moves of the dance, give substance to the video we'd all seen. I signed a contract stipulating that I wouldn't teach Trio A or perform Trio A, and we were told to wear shoes because Yvonne had danced the dance in shoes. Along with the other dancers, I put on my sweat pants, tied my shoes, and I was worried there might be an audition process to weed out uncoordinated people, but because the teacher wanted a range of experiences, my inexperience wasn't a problem. I sat on the floor pretending to stretch like the other dancers, and I did stretch, spreading my legs and trying to reach between them, lengthening the front of my spine while the teacher reminded us that the 16 millimeter film of Yvonne, dancing in her black shirt and pants, was only a recording, made years after the original event, shot from a single angle, and learning the dance by watching the video of the film of the dance would have been impossible. Every movement was embedded with imperceptible details that connected it to every other movement, and because the teacher was part of a lineage, having learned the dance from Yvonne herself, a way for us to become part of that lineage, to inherit, if that's possible, the physical experience of dancing like Yvonne, was to become Yvonne.
By reimagining this extant piece of history, and by bringing it to life, it ought to be possible to bring myself to life. That's what I thought. And it could have been anything, a sport or a martial art, and even the words I'm writing would do the trick. But it's not a trick. It's deciding to actually imagine Yvonne, living and dancing, and the trick is, once you've chosen a life, to commit to that life. When I write down a word, the life of that word has meaning only as it relates to the words around it. And there's always the question, what word, or grouping of words, will lead to the meaning I want. And often, because I don't know what meaning I want, I don't know how to say it. And how can I say anything about a life that wasn't mine and isn't mine, and can't be mine because I'm limited by my own perspective. Ideas about women and men are just that, ideas, and although ideas can be liberating, they can also constrain and limit, and feeling those limitations I get stymied. I get lost, like now, not quite believing that my voice isn't just another version of the same old voice, and why does any voice deserve to speak? I remember a copy of the I Ching I used to keep in my bedroom, a yellow, cloth-bound book on the top shelf, and I remember the narrator of the book always talking about perseverance or persevering, and what they meant was belief. That if I take the word that came before, and follow that with a new word, and follow that with what comes next, although the process is often haphazard, if I believe the words, something does come next.
Trisha Brown. Trisha Brown was a dancer. Trisha Brown was a dancer who, in 1971 created a piece called, appropriately, Accumulation. And the dance begins like that. The dancer lifts her forearms, rotates her thumbs inward and outward until, at a certain point, she adds a second gesture, extending her arm, still rotating her thumbs, returning back to the first gesture, then the second, then adding a third, and the piece accretes like that, or accrues, a literal accumulation of gestures triggered by what came before. 1, then 1+2, then 1+2+3, and Brown referred to the form as a "perfect dance machine," the machine being the conceptual armature on which the dancer could replicate. . . and I'm tempted to say perfection but it's more like choicelessness. The goal isn't the meaning, it's the dancing. And a lot of people at the time, musicians and artists and dancers, believed that by taking an existing action, and inhabiting it, meaning would happen. That's why chance and indeterminacy were important. Any action could become, not perfect but transformative. And when I watch the videos of people dancing Accumulation, I can't help being mesmerized, not by the choices they make but by the pattern, watching their arms moving in ways that seem familiar, but then become unfamiliar, by changing, and although I know the dance is changing, I can't be sure what it's changing into.
The first step, they say, if you want to change yourself, is to know yourself. And although that's not absolutely true, by practicing the steps of Trio A I was getting to know what my mind was doing, what it wanted and rejected, and because the mind is a muscle I kept practicing. In French they call it repetition, and the belief is, by repeating an action over and over, knowledge is absorbed by the body. In English we say rehearse, and that's helpful too because you also have to hear. Not so much re-hear as hear for the first time, which requires listening, which requires being empty enough to attend to the part of the dance that's invisible, therefore difficult to think about. Sometimes my mind would wander off, following a thought that led in one direction, my body having other thoughts, taking me in another direction, and learning the dance means yoking the two together, getting the mind to lodge inside the body, and the body to lodge in itself, and when I lifted my leg or flexed my foot I believed these movements were affecting me. I was learning them by heart as they say, and the heart has reasons they also say, and muscle memory is just that, the muscles remembering what they'd never done before.
That's why, on the first day of the Trio A workshop, we had to forget what we already knew. I wasn't a mover like some of the other people, but I did have my habits of moving, ways I'd learned to use my body, and because those habits would get in the way of learning the dance, we started at the beginning. Beginnings are important because they mark a divide between the old and new, a moment when intention coalesces, and when we stood together on the black, slightly padded floor, we tried to focus our intention. When the dance begins you're supposed to just stand there, at a right angle to where the audience would be watching, letting yourself get acclimated to the space, your body occupying space, and then you move. You bend your legs while simultaneously turning your head to the left, letting your arms swing loosely, three times, back and forth across your body, then pivoting on your left foot and stepping with your right, and with the sole of that foot on the floor, the left foot perched on its toe behind you, you raise your arms to shoulder level then move them in small, counterclockwise circles. Practicing these moves, and perfecting them, was meant to get us to a place in which, when we bent our legs, it wasn't the mind telling the body what to do, or what it should do. There would be no volition. At a certain point the legs would just bend, and because there's no music in Trio A, when we stood on the rubbery floor and practiced the dance, although we weren't all in unison we moved more or less together, bending and turning and opening our arms, and now and then the teacher corrected us. At the beginning of the dance, during a moment when I was supposed to turn my head and swing my arms, apparently I was also turning my torso. I was told to keep my body facing forward, to turn at the neck, and the teacher's assistant was a young woman with very good posture who walked up to me, held my chest between her hands, one hand on my breastplate, the other between my shoulder blades, and demonstrated to my body the details that made the dance what it was. Part of any learning is learning to trust the teacher, including an assistant teacher, and although I could feel my body resist, I submitted to the adjustments she made, letting her pull me away from postural habits I didn't even know I had.
In 1970, Trisha Brown made a dance called Man Walking Down the Side of a Building. It consisted of a person, her husband at the time, adjusting his physical relation with the world by walking down the side of a brick building. There were ropes holding him up, and pulleys, and a camera must have been perched on a fire escape because I've seen the photographs of people in the SoHo courtyard, looking up as the man slowly tips over the edge of the building's roof. He gets lowered from an upright position to a sideways one, and when he takes his first few vertical steps down the building I can feel, or imagine I feel, what it felt like to change perspective entirely. It wasn't just gravity but the habit of gravity, the attachment to what had seemed real before, being replaced by the new reality of being no longer supported by the earth, being supported by nothing, and the wires and strings were jerry-rigged, and the possibility of falling and dying was real, and the man walking down the bricks was hardly walking. Without the gravity that normally held him up he seems to be half flying, or wanting to fly, and whatever parts of the inner ear cause us to proprioceive ourselves in a certain way, when that was changed, everything else must have changed. Not everything. The title of the piece is Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, and the emphasis is mine because why didn't Trisha walk down the building herself? It was her idea, to turn everything on its head, including gravity. Not on its head exactly, but by changing the angle of experience, by perceiving the world from a different, literally 90 degrees different, angle, although the man doesn't ever seem to adjust to it, the dance was asking the question. How, after substituting a new conception for an old one, do you then let the old conception die?
Sometimes, walking down a stretch of sidewalk, especially if I'm in an unknown city, deserted if possible, I close my eyes. I take a mental picture of the path in front of me and let my memory of the path become the path. I note where the obstacles are, a hole in the sidewalk or some forgotten dog shit, and I walk like that, blind but trusting my memory. Sometimes, instead of closing my eyes I open them, trying to imagine my mind, instead of thinking, instead of liking and disliking and judging, just noticing, just choicelessly seeing the world, and mainly its hearing, letting the consciousness that resides in the front of my brain move to the back, to the so-called reptilian part of my brain. Because the sense of sight is usually the dominant sense, because when we look out the world seems to be in front of us, consciousness is usually forward facing. To live in the back of the brain means living in an altered world of pure perception, and sometimes when I do it I can hear birds chirping in trees, or cars going by, and when people approach me, walking toward me on the sidewalk, although I would like to retain my newly altered consciousness, instead of concentrating on the world I turn my attention back to myself, to how I appear. Not wanting to seem like a crazy person, I find myself inhibiting myself, reverting to habits I know, my body contracting, losing the pleasure of expansion and connectedness, and instead of responding to events in a clear and honest way, I act in a way I think of as normal, performing a version of who I think I'm supposed to be.
In her instructions for dancing Trio A, Yvonne stipulated that the dancers never acknowledge the audience. In the video of her performing the dance, at no point does she raise her eyes to see the camera, watching and recording her. This was partly her attempt to free herself from the judgments of the spectator, to negate the power of anyone that supposedly knows best, or better, and it's also a way to negate yourself. You say no to the part of yourself that submits to the craving, which is for attention, which Yvonne called "seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer," and because she distrusted the desire of the spectator, she also distrusted her own desire to woo them, to win them over, and like Brecht, who distrusted the audience's easy identification with the performer, Yvonne sought to take her personality out of the equation.
When we practiced Trio A during the workshop, dancing on the rubber floor in the basement studio, because everyone followed their own internal timing, some of the dancers were faster than others. And being one of the slower ones, I was always trying to catch up. My mind, instead of trusting my muscles, was thinking about the phrase I was supposed to be doing. And that's why Yvonne didn't want us thinking about phrases. The dance, she said, was continuous, "no one thing is any more important than any other," but because I was trying to figure out what step was supposed to follow from the step I'd just finished, I wasn't feeling it. By it I mean the mental state connected to the dance which would connect me to a larger, and I would say larger picture but part of the point of the dance was that it wasn't a picture, wasn't something to be viewed and judged, but instead was experienced by the performer who'd internalized the movement. Not that Yvonne performed in empty theaters. People came to watch her, and she let them watch, and when it was announced, about halfway through the workshop, that we would perform the dance for each other, I was willing to try. Willing but underprepared, and my teacher helped me prepare by giving me a little more attention, by calling out to me what move came next, not like a mother but it felt like a mother's concern and I wanted her to be proud. The movements in Trio A are called pedestrian, but it wasn't as if anyone walking down the street could perform them. Some were very un-pedestrian, some very difficult, at least for me, and although I needed my teacher's help I didn't want her seeing me when I was lost, or doing the wrong movement. I wanted her to see me when, now and then, I found myself doing the right movement, found myself in the groove as they used to say, inhabiting the dance and letting the parts I'd managed to memorize change the part of myself that had put them in memory. Turning my head, for instance, or looking over my left shoulder, letting the memory of what I was doing move from my head to my body, lodging itself in my muscles and tendons and sometimes I imagined I felt the spirit of Yvonne as it entered my body, an experience that would have been transcendental except the minute those moments appeared I noticed them, not just noticed, I enjoyed them and admired them, and admired myself for having them, and if anyone was looking, I wanted to show them what I'd done, wanted to show my stuff, such as it was, and the teacher told me that I had a nice verticality, that Yvonne had that too, and it's funny when you get a compliment, and calling me vertical seemed like a compliment, you begin to play to that compliment.
How marvelous it all does seem, in retrospect. That's Susan Sontag talking about the 1960s, about its boldness, its optimism. And it's easy, looking back, to forget that the people who were part of that optimism were just living their lives. They weren't necessarily better lives, or happier, but as the Wizard of Oz might've said, they had one thing we haven't got. A sense that what they were doing mattered. That's why Yvonne, when she danced Trio A, because she didn't want to be distracted by what didn't matter, closed her eyes. When she danced with Robert Morris on the wooden seesaw, what mattered was that she pay attention, that she maintain her balance by attuning her mind-slash-muscle to him, not knowing what would happen but adjusting her response, noticing his shifting intention and shifting her response from what had happened a second ago to what was happening now. That's one reason I enrolled in the Trio A workshop. To shift in myself what had come to feel stuck, worn out. Like Sontag's boldness and optimism, my desires had become, not ghosts, but like ghosts they didn't seem to have a place. They were old, therefore probably corrupt, and whether it's me or forces acting on me, it was time to be shown, by someone who knew, that I could experience desire undistracted by the influence of other desires. That's why I listened to the teacher describe a complicated dance that happened fifty years earlier. It's why, at the end of the two-hour workshop, I sat in a corner on the floor, my legs forming a V, stretching the muscles around my pelvis. With the memory of the dance still percolating in my body, I tried to release the entire length of my spine, letting my body connect to my brain and adjust to a new way of being. And because there were people around me, talking and getting dressed, possibly watching me, as I sat on the bones of my pelvis, reaching my fingertips out in front of me, although I wanted to be watched, because I wanted to be free of that watching, I closed my eyes, the way babies, because their sense of self is so tenuous, when they close their eyes, believe they disappear.
There were bound to be moments when, in the course of learning Trio A, having practiced a certain section over and over, I felt I was getting it. But mostly I didn't. Mostly, in the middle of forgetting where I was I would look over, and we weren't supposed to look but sometimes, looking at my teacher sitting on the plastic chair, the mirrored wall behind her, I would imagine Yvonne. In my mind, Yvonne was standing beside the chair, or behind it, watching me and either approving or disapproving, and because Yvonne was the progenitor of the dance, by performing her dance, for her, how could I not be performing a version of her? My daughter does the same thing with me. She imitates me, repeating what I say, or when I do something, she does it after me, showing me what she's done, and of course she imitates me. She imitates everyone. And because I was the child when I imitated Yvonne, although I knew I was making mistakes, like a god or like a good enough mother, she let me make them. That's how you learn, by making mistakes, and because I tend to be careful, meaning it's difficult for me to forget my mistakes and move on, every mistake I made when I danced Trio A made it harder for me to remember where I was and re-enter the dance, to remember the steps and take the steps, and even with an imaginary Yvonne watching over me, because I felt her watching over me, my body refused to do what my mind was asking it to do. It rebelled, saying no to my mind's assumed authority and no to Yvonne, fending off the authority I'd given her to show me the way, but it wasn't my way, certainly not the only way, not even a very enjoyable way, and although I stubbornly slugged it out, doggedly repeating these gestures I didn't actually believe would cement in me the habit of the gesture, each gesture supplanting another gesture and another habit, one habit after another, I got tired. And even Yvonne got tired. In her autobiography she talks about her relationship with Robert Morris, an older artist she lived with and probably loved, a successful sculptor and performer who she knew was having affairs, cheating on her with other women, and she didn't want to be cheated on, but she was dependent on him, both of them dependent on each other for the life they were living, and one of the unspoken rules of that life was: the one with less dependency wins. And maybe Yvonne had lovers, too, but the betrayal, what it felt like, must have devastated her. There was a suicide attempt, an extended foray into psychotherapy, none of which helped her solve the bigger problem of who she was and how she fit in the world. And when I say what choice did she have it isn't a rhetorical question. For her it was real, and one day, under the spell of desperation, she walked into an alley, probably infested, reeking of urine, and she took off her clothes. She knew it was inappropriate and she did it because it was inappropriate, because she wanted to be noticed, not praised necessarily but her desperation needed an outlet, and a policeman took her to Bellevue hospital, a hospital for insane people, for people with problems she didn't want, and when Robert came back they probably tried to change, probably promised each other they would change, and maybe she never intended to kill herself but how does a person change?
At some point, when the Trio A workshop was over, having absorbed the lessons of Yvonne's dance, I would be able to break away, to say okay, we've come this far and now I'm on my own. But that point hadn't yet come. I was still learning the choreography, still struggling with the steps, still imagining Yvonne, sitting in a folding chair at the edge of the dance floor, waiting for her to guide me, to tell me what to do but she wasn't talking. And because it felt as if she'd abandoned me, I started talking to her. In my mind I started telling her what I thought about her dance. That it was old, wasn't pertinent, not pertinent to me and not that interesting, only a shell now, a remembered reiteration of what she had been, growing fainter and fainter and what she had been was someone who wanted to be noticed, and she was, and what do you want from me? What person can I be to become the dancer of your dance, and I say your dance because the stupid dance is yours, not mine. My dance is another dance, a dance only I can dance like only you could dance Trio A, which you hold the copyright on, which makes dancing what the dance is supposed to be impossible. And maybe impossibility is what I need. Maybe I need to struggle with the same thing I always struggle with, unsuccessfully, and although my failure doesn't destroy me, it is a kind of destruction, a kind of small bomb going off and the explosion, after it kills you, after you recover, maybe the destruction was necessary.
On the last day of the Trio A workshop we were all going to perform our individual versions of the dance. Over the course of the two weeks we'd taken in this information, using it to inform our bodies, and now we sat on the floor, our backs to the mirrored wall, and the teacher, who looked Irish, or Celtic, sat in her folding chair. The first volunteers were the dancers who'd studied Yvonne, the ones who knew the steps, and although I wanted to postpone my own performance I didn't want to postpone too long. I didn't want to be the final performer, my ineptitude sticking in people's minds. So about halfway through the examination I volunteered. It wasn't an examination, but I stood up, walked to the place on the floor where the dance was supposed to begin. Years before I'd taken a workshop with Lucinda Childs, a Judson dancer who'd worked with Yvonne, and I had a pretty good idea what it meant to begin, to stand on the spot we all started on, stage left, and I took my time getting ready, acclimating myself to the fact that people were watching. Yvonne expected the dance to be seen; she just didn't want the dancer corrupted by that seeing. And that's why I closed my eyes. I let my body relax as much as it could, noticing the heels of my feet, the mounds of my toes inside my shoes, and the person who'd gone before me had done a pretty good job of imitating Yvonne but she hadn't quite abandoned herself. She'd done all the steps, the steps I was about to do, or try, and I was trying not to compare myself with her. The teacher was half kneeling in her chair, one leg curled under her the way a dancer would curl her leg, and then I felt the moment begin. I bent my knees about thirty degrees, turned my head, and because this was the part I'd practiced, this was my chance to give my body the reins as they say, and like watching a leaf blown by the breeze I felt my arms swinging in their sockets, the momentum of the swing propelling me forward, my left leg rising and stepping, and all I had to do was keep going, stay out of my way and follow the momentum, letting my mind have its thoughts but not be distracted by those thoughts, taking the next step, and the next, and when I stretched my arms out like an airplane, moving them in circles, I could imagine the air circling around my hands, the trajectory of the circle leading to a turn which led to a difficult move for me, standing on one foot, bending the back of my neck while lifting one leg up, then down, then rounding my back, my whole spine curling in, and although it wasn't perfect, what was supposed to happen was basically happening. I'd forgotten about the teacher, and about the other dancers, my peripheral vision seeing everything but without focus, but with total focus, not thinking about what came next because what came next would come, would call itself into being, acting on me and in me and at some point I came out of the trance to notice how good it felt. And when I noticed myself noticing, that's when I tried to get back to the dance, back to the muscles and bones inside my body, and that trying is what I had trouble with, the trying that becomes an impediment, that posits a thing you're trying to achieve or grasp, separate from what you are, and I try to let go of that trying but of course that's just another form of trying. But what can you do except try. So I tried to listen. Listen, I thought, to my feet on the floor, and the sound of the air in the studio, the cars outside on Grand Street, or East Broadway, it doesn't matter which because it wasn't about what you hear, it's the state of hearing, of perception becoming just that, perception, and when I turned, landed again on one foot, although I remembered to flex the foot I forgot if I was supposed to look to my left before taking a step, or after the step, and what was the next step? And not knowing what I was doing, but knowing a jump was supposed to happen, at some point, I did a little leap, which was more a stumble, but a graceful stumble, and I was still listening, still hearing the trucks honking outside the windows. And I'm thinking now about Hedy Lamarr because, besides being known as the most beautiful woman in the world, she invented, with a composer of modernist music, what was called a frequency-hopping missile guidance system. During World War II, the radio signals that guided American torpedoes were being intercepted, and once they were jammed the torpedoes went off course. Hedy must have known a different system was needed because she figured out a code, like player piano music, that directed the torpedoes with a frequency the enemy couldn't figure out, seemingly random, and if I am going to inhabit a life instead of just performing it, I need to change the frequency of the signals I'm sending myself. Although I could hear the trucks on the street, honking, and the sirens doing what sirens do, my feet on the floor weren't getting the signal. They were losing the thread of the dance, or I was, and because the thread was invisible, the more I looked for it the more invisible it seemed to be, so invisible that I forgot the thread, forgot the admonitions of the teacher who was watching this half-deflated puppet, which was me, half-heartedly trying to be some thing or do some thing, and because the thing wasn't me, was outside of me, I stopped. I raised my eyes to the mirror in front of me, and although I believed the old adage about the tough getting going when the going gets tough, I didn't go anywhere. I stood there, dumb in both senses of the word, and when the teacher clapped, signaling the end of my dance, although everyone joined her, nothing had changed. The clapping didn't mean anything because I didn't deserve it.
My attempt to learn Trio A was bound to fail, partly because, having imagined the euphoria Yvonne seemed to have felt, all I saw was possibility. And possibilities are fine but I demanded them. And because I did, the desire to incarnate myself as a version of Yvonne was impossible. Because I wasn't Yvonne. And can't be Yvonne. And I can't be myself because every time I try to be what I am, whatever that is, something demands I be something else. That's not right. It's me doing the demanding. And failing to satisfy my demands only makes me more adamant. Writing this essay, I know, isn't going to change the person who's writing it, but still I keep trying. And it's not about failing better, it's just failing differently. In the dance, even if I'd managed to move my hand in the way I'd been taught, I never felt the satisfaction that moving my hand that way was supposed to engender. My mind was directing the moving, and because the memory of that moving, instead of residing in my body and liberating my mind, stayed in my mind, I kept repeating the same habits, turning them into stories that acted on me and molded me, and because it was my story I couldn't get out. Although I would sometimes relax enough to enjoy my ignorance and understand, briefly, the dance Yvonne had danced a lifetime ago, it didn't happen often. Most of the time I was too busy thinking about Yvonne to be Yvonne, and Yvonne couldn't save me, and even if she did, or maybe she did, or maybe I have the wrong body.