Apropos Johannes' remarks, I want to say (if I haven't before), that I learned a huge amount working with Foofwa; he was the leading dancer of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and before that, the Stuttgart ballet, and his training and ability were incredible; in one of our earliest works (the Parables of Nikuko), he balanced on a thin rickety wooden railing on one foot, high above a frozen pond, in 19 degree F weather, pretending he was about to fall or about to fly - anyone else I've known wouldn't have even gone up on the thing; he would have been seriously hurt if he fell. So that knowledge of the body, without accoutrements - and another time, we went into the Alps and he danced nude above the Aletsch glacier, with a very low frequency (VLF) radio antenna which made roaring sounds against his skin - anyway that kind of expertise and the very long warmups needed to do even a five minute piece - was amazing to me; it was like working with Charlie Parker or Mozart. The body was the body was the body, and it went beyond Cunningham's emphasis on the modernist visage; it was the supple, sexualized, neurotic, hardened, softened, psychotic, rigid body - it was any body but not anybody. He was hardly elite, he worked with everyone from schoolchildren to punks to all sorts of communities, but he demanded something from himself and I learned about the physicality of music from him, from Jackson Moore and others. At times he used technology of course (I provided a lot of that in some performances in Geneva), but the body was central, even in a way it wasn't in Cunningham or even Graham. And he introduced me to Lionel Messi, for which I'm eternally grateful -
Alan == email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 718-813-3285 music: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/ current text http://www.alansondheim.org/tc.txt == _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
