Tag Archives: John Jasperse

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all the people i can remember sleeping with … day 15 & 16 & this week

Libby said, “You’re panicking. Deal with it”. I said, “Oh I need to write that down”, it would go well with Gala’s “Shift the blame darl”. I didn’t, so I probably misquoted her.

An half hour is not enough for me to feel comfortable, even though the previous rehearsal we miraculously pulled the whole thing together … or maybe it was already there, and we just got on the right train … something happened and it happened. But on this Wednesday, there felt for me as if I was hounded, beaten faster with rattan and not just to a beginning and end and everything in-between in some semblance of complete but to – gods of horrors – show it to all the production crew.

The previous rehearsal – that would be day 15 I think, I’ve lost track a bit – we had found all the ins and outs, and while scratchy had made it through, it was there and we knew it and best of all, it worked. It was sad to lose Paea’s ‘frisking and saying it’s ok’ scene, Xuan saying, “This is how I like to be touched”, and all that followed, but it is too long a moment for what is obliged to be a short performance. Gone, then. Though along with all the deceased parts, it remains all through my notes. It’ll turn up somewhere again.

Gala came in and watched, though missed ‘rape fantasy’, ‘tampon story’, and ‘my first kiss’. Of everyone who isn’t us five, she is the only person I feel comfortable having watch this piece. She should be in it, and originally I conceived the piece as a duo with her and Daniel, then saw it expand to include somehow everyone who is in it, then rehearsal schedules failed us. It feels odd that she isn’t in this, the first piece in three years of mine that hasn’t included her.

It’s nice for me to have someone around who knows me and my work well enough to know and say if I’m … I suppose to say, not being honest. If I imagine my ideal horde of miscreant freebooters, sailing up the Danube and terrorising the populaces of every theatre we pass, she is always there. (Yes, I know you’re reading this).

So we come to the next day and back to me panicking.

I’m usually absurdly calm when it gets to the point of bedlam, and attribute this to having made three works in China, where rewiring the grid by hand a couple of hours before opening and engaging in insane motorcycle taxi rides across town to find homemade extension cords is normal and reassuring. I get so far beyond stressed in such situations, I actually enjoy it.

So here am I saying to Carol, “No, you can’t film it,” (why?) “Because I say you can’t”, (that’s not a good reason) “AAAAA!!! Ok! Because I don’t know if it’s even capable of being filmed yet!” In part it was a certain exasperation at needing another half-hour to just get it’s legs sewn on, but mostly it was apprehension, fear.

To make work at one step removed from myself, however personal it ultimately might be engenders a certain distinct nervousness when it’s seen outside our private little world where we have made it. To make a work that is entirely inextricable from me, that was so often embarrassing and hideously personal in our hours of rehearsal, to have this seen and knowing there’s no other way to read it than autobiographical is excruciating and exhausting. I had no idea the miasma I’d been snared in all day was solely this anxiety of having it seen, and in such rushed preparation, until it was over and I was sitting there utterly stunned at what Daniel, Paea, Tara and Xuan had done.

“It was beautiful and I can’t say any more”.

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all the people i can remember sleeping with … day 7

After my opening up during the last rehearsal, today’s three-hour endurance spectacle, resting on many pages of preparatory notes and too many hours in Cibo and staring at walls – and chocolate – was one of those fortuitous ones where everything seemed to flow along like an afternoon of eating and playing in the park. I was though, completely empty from two weeks of grant writing and other emotionally fraught things, and was very determined to get quite smashed on Saturday night, so I’m writing this at the other end of Sunday in-between preparing more pages for tomorrow’s rehearsal and the coming weeks … trying to accept I only have eight minutes, too few rehearsals, and that I don’t need to act like I’m making a full-evening performance.

Although, if I act like it’s all these things, I’m liable to be blasé and when it’s the first thing I’ve made in almost a year, slipping into the land of doing what I know and have done before is the last thing I want to have happen.

The Rape of the Sabine Women part has started to resemble what it will eventually become, yet when we spend only less than two hours with it … I was sitting on the bus this evening wondering what I’d do if I had say, three months full-time to make a performance. How much more would I develop something beyond the familiar ‘get it to where it’s looking ok and working and get started on the next thing’. In making dance, writing, almost everything, I’ve become so used to regarding the first appearance of something as more-or-less being what it will be, no major edits, no complete or partial revisions, maybe some minor amendments, but that’s all.

Despite these qualms, this scene has managed to become something that I really like, and continues to evolve into itself without the dread need for setting steps and counts. That in itself is secretly very useful for what I have planned in monadologie, and here in the studio has been often an hilarious tangle of limbs and teeth, and bite-shaped bruises.

With that part mostly coherent, the attention was really directed at what The Rape of Lucretia would become. So many notes pulled from two years of thinking of this work, and stuff that never made it into crush, stuff that might not make it in here, another tangle of little things, most no more than a line ore two. Some though, are things that have already been something.

Judith Butler talked about gender being the repeated stylisation of the body, “That congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being”, to which Nietzsche posthumously added, “There is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed – the deed is everything”, and within this, identity only exists through language. So of course Wittgenstein turned up and said, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent”, or at least Derek Jarman made him say that. And so again I find myself back in Zürich with Nigel doing bad things to me.

This was a scene with Jens during SiWiC, that really does belong here, and unlike say, all the 春宫图 Chungongtu stuff that started off as my infatuation with Agoraphobic Nosebleed and ended up in hell, or even the biting stuff now that I imagined as belonging in pestilence … this piece over the years seems like a playground where things get stolen by other works with less scruples.

Paea can act the Austrian Contessa like a charm, and Daniel never once has missed a chance to get all his clothes far away from his body (or burp loudly and at great length, or fart, come to think of it).

The Rape of Lucretia has become a very short almost formal tableau based on five paintings of the story, and nothing like what it began as. Similarly the very first thing we worked on, from photos of Deborah Paauwe’s works I’d taken during 42a, and the memory and amnesia in a body, reemerged through one of Paea’s tasks for me, “Frisking and saying it’s OK”.

I also found I have to teach them all how to do proper Black Metal head-banging, or hand-banging actually. So far I describe it as, “seize the sacrificed goat’s still-beating heart, shake it and squeeze the warm blood from its severed arteries, raise it high to the beast”. I awoke from my catalepsy last night to find them surrounding me preparing to do all that. Plus video camera.

Oh, and then there was John Jasperse. I’m really entering new territories of embarrassment here. The title of the work originally was a list called, “Everyone I have ever slept with”. The doubt insinuated itself and the name changed when I realised firstly I couldn’t remember people’s names and far worse, the longer I dwelled on this, the more people, tenuous ghosts, returned to me. Tonight I found the original Zürich list, also the list from crush last year. These, and my memory of both are so incoherent as to bring even the notion of faithfully recorded memory into disrepute. There is a third version also, that Anna recited, perhaps in existence on video still, most likely lost.

From the beginning of this, I thought also of people I had crushes on, and what the consequences such a public airing of my daydream world would be. Tara’s task was “Describe in words, while reflecting in movement, one of your fantasies”. I spent Thursday night on the internet trying to find video of John dancing. I settled for photos. There is a text also accompanying my memory of how he moves. Perhaps to save this for later.

Daniel’s task, that we didn’t quite make it to was, “Explain your greatest fear in regard to gender studies of any context”. My response to this, and the text that finishes this scene is, “That it’s all in my head and I have to be male”.

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becky, jodi and john

Not that I’ve seen much dance this year but come December, this will still be one of the highlights of the year. I really like watching showings, often more than the real work itself buried under the detritus of staging. To have John Jasperse explain the makeshift ledge at the back of the stage (in the theatre where it will be performed in a couple of weeks, it’s the cyclorama pit), that he will be wearing a portable smoke machine so he gently smolders, that a radio-controlled car will bring the props on and off, but for now he’ll just announce that, and call for when the video should start and stop, all this, and just a bare room plus tv and a couple of chairs … this nakedness of a performance can capture and transfix me.

Becky, Jodi and John should have had another title but Chrysa Parkinson, who only appears infrequently in a skype video call couldn’t swing the schedule, so John ended up as far from New York as possible where there is still some kind of contemporary dance. Chrysa says she wants to embrace shame, and do everything that makes her feel ashamed. Jodi says she won’t do any of that post-modern roll over the foot stuff, especially on her left leg in a long list of “don’ts” (she does). John gets told by a curator he is too formal, and wonders while standing naked in front of us, if she really meant, “too old”.

They all should have retired at least a decade ago, and certainly to hold aspirations to be making art for another thirty years … herein lies the heart of this piece. Four New York dancers who have known each other for nearly twenty years, who are obviously very dear friends, spread across the globe, and for a month together in Melbourne. We don’t see old dancers, even NDT3 is a novelty act in this context and maybe in Europe the average age for a dancer is mid-thirties, but here, to be over thirty and still wanting something that dancing can give, and – more pertinently as this is how worth is measured – to still be performing, is not so common, and makes conceiving dance a thorny proposition.

Almost ten years ago Becky, Phillip Adams, Lucy Guerin returned from New York to make dance here. Melbourne’s dance is hugely influenced by New York, as became readily apparent in the last few weeks when both John and Jodi taught class at Chunky Move. To see this trio perform together, is in part to see this, as it lives in their bodies. It’s also something like reading someone’s letters, or eavesdropping, it’s the life that surrounds this movement that is on display.

I really want to rave about this work, even though it’s unfinished, it was only a studio showing, there was no music. It is magic to watch them move together, to obviously enjoy being together and to know each other so well it is no longer three separate people. And yes they dance, and entangle themselves around each other, get a little slappy and breathe hard. And they take their clothes off. Well, Jodi doesn’t, she doesn’t like showing her arms. (And Becky has the superhero power of Disappointment).

What more can you do in the face an endlessly deadly climate that sees no value in the arts, and has scant interest in seeing artists develop over their entire lifetime than to make a work such as this. Becky Jodi and John is considered, poignant, beautiful and makes stars of all of them.

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