Dear Dance Enthusiasts,

So glad you had time to watch the performance of The Transformations of Medusa over the holiday weekend.

It is absolutely true, as Stephen noted, that the swastika motif that first appears at that critical moment of release in “Section One, Temple Virgin” is repeated and developed in the later sections of the dance. In “Section Two, Lady of the Wild Things”, it appears fleetingly as the character struggles with, or against, her fate. By “Section Three Queen of Gorgons” the swastika motif is ever-present, marking the complete fulfillment of Medusa’s transformation from a devoted young priestess to the eternally raging Queen of Gorgons.

I find it fascinating that Stephen mentioned seeing/feeling the dancer as physically larger in Section Three. This is not something Jean talked about when she taught the dance to me and I don’t recall any critical writing about Jean’s performances that mentions it, but when I performed the piece critics did mentioned that, so now I’m wondering if it is endemic to the movement, or if it is something that I “found” in it and am passing on as I teach it to others. I really have to think about that!

As to the relationship between the music and the dance… as far as I know, Jean created the entire dance without discussing it with Horst, although he was well aware of her work. Horst was Martha Graham’s musical director. As a female member of Graham’s company, Jean was required to take his dance composition classes in which he used the musical structures of pre-classic European dances such as the galliard and the pavane to teach form in contemporary dance making. At the same time, he was also a strong advocate for using contemporary music to accompany contemporary dance.

Jean began The Transformations of Medusa as an exploration of the, unfortunately named, “primitive” style that she had been introduced to in one of Horst’s classes. As Jean related the story, when the dance was complete, she showed it to Horst who was known for his harsh critical comments.  To her surprise, he was unusually complimentary about it. When she asked him to suggest a composer for it, he reportedly replied, “Louis Horst will do it.”

When creating movement without music, Jean worked with what she called a “fundamental pulse” — a kind of heartbeat for the movement. “Section One Temple Virgin” retains the same fundamental pulse throughout. The two movement themes of “Section Two, Lady of the Wild Things” have two different fundamental pulses that alternate throughout the section. “Section Three Queen of Gorgons” maintains the same fundamental pulse throughout. Jean was musically trained and could easily count the number of pulses in each section to give Horst the structure of her dance to which he then created the music, literally reversing the process she had learned from him.

It’s been a real pleasure to participate in this conversation with you. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I have and that like me, you too feel this is a perfect time to bring it to a close.

Wishing you all a happy holiday season and many pleasures as you continue your journeys through the world of myth and dance,

Nancy

Dear Fellow Dance & Myth Enthusiasts,

Sorry to have been unable to comment on your responses to my last post. It has been an unbelievably busy and stressful time for me, as I imagine it has been for many of you, too. I was delighted to see that some of you had the time to watch the video links I shared about individual style in dance interpretation and that they inspired new thoughts and connections for you.

Robert’s comment about enjoying theatrical dances that deal with myth by “personifying the primal forces and dichotomy of nature, anthropomorphizing it into the duality of masculine and feminine” reminded me of Jean’s 1950 dance “Solstice”.  Superficially, the dance is a created myth in which the Sun Lion, and the Moon Bull battle for the love/dominance of the Bride of Spring.  But for Jean, these two antagonistic animal figures meeting at the solstice, represented the psychic forces of an inner struggle she said occurred   “at the time of heart’s renewal”.

Jean relates the origin story of this dance in Part 2 of the video archive series, Dance & Myth: The World of Jean Erdman. It all began in a conversation with Joe in which he proposed the idea that anything could be used as the basis for a dance. As an example, Joe offered the infinity symbol and the two began playfully sketching all the variations of patterns inherent in the horizontal figure-of-eight. At the same time, Jean happened to be reading a book about ancient solstice celebrations and so figure-of-eight floor patterns, as well as, cross-lateral figure-of-eight movements within the body became the basis of her choreography for this creative image of The Great Round.

For me, the dance and the story of its origin are wonderful examples of why Jean was lauded by New York Times chief dance critic Anna Kisselgoff as one of the choreographers of her generation responsible for “the more abstract direction that marks modern dance to this day”— a distinction for which I think both Jean and Joe would both be quite pleased!

So, I’m taking this opportunity to remind you that you can see an example of how Jean combined abstraction and archetypal, mythic content in dance in “The Transformations of Medusa” as part of the American Dance Guild’s “10 Years Over 10 Weeks Festival”. Free and unlimited access to the videotaped live performance begins November 23 and continues through November 29. The link to the festival is listed in one of my previous posts, but you can also find the festival easily by “googling”: American Dance Guild 2020 Festival.

I look forward to reading your responses to it!

All best,
Nancy

Dear Shaheda,

Thank you so much for “playing” along with my motion/stillness exploration. Kudos for your courage to share your experience with the group.

I’m so glad that you discovered something through this that you can explore further.  It’s wonderful that you could relate what you discovered to an earlier event in your life. I, and an ever-growing number of philosophers, artists, psychiatrists, neurologists, psychologists and body-mind practitioners firmly believe that the body stores every experience, joyful as well as traumatic, deep in its tissues and organs. It never forgets, even if the mind tries all sorts of tricks to deny the truth the body knows.

In fact, we believe that our bodies are communicating through movement, all the time. Like myth, movement communicates symbolically. We need only to learn the language of movement to understand the life-enhancing stories it is whispering to, or sometimes shouting at us.

Walking, running, skipping, hopping, turning, shifting, tilting, balancing, falling, rolling, wiggling, gesturing and on and on. This list of body action verbs is endless. I’m sure everyone in this conversation can add hundreds more words to the list.

All of these actions that we do, without even thinking about them, are the basis of the organized patterns of movement that we call “dance”.  For example, in the simplest possible description, both samba and salsa are composed of a series of shifts, forward and back, or side-to-side, combined with gestures of hips and shoulders. These basic body actions and their variations of time, space and dynamics are also the basis of a uniquely personal, subtle and complex language of movement that each of us develops over the years— a language that communicates to others because we all have bodies and we all live in the same field of space, time and gravity.

This notion of a uniquely personal movement language that communicates to others brings me back to one of the questions that Stephen posed in his opening post of this conversation. What did Jean have to do to prepare herself to “select, create and choreograph a specific role — to breathe life into a dance and character that never existed before?”  She, like every creative choreographer, had to explore the very essence of the language of movement —to find the unique movement palette for each dance creation from among myriad possibilities of movement choices.

Using excerpts from their own writing, Joe describes beautifully movement exploration journeys of both Isadora Duncan and Mary Wigman, two of the great female progenitors of modern dance, in Part 2 of The Ecstasy of Being. Jean describes some of her own journeys in the three part video archive Dance & Myth: The World of Jean Erdman.  There is no short cut for these journeys. They are body-aching, soul-searching work and the dances, the “boons” each artist brings back from his or her journeys, are as Jean said  “gifts that the artist then shares with the community.”

Despite the enormous effort required and the relatively little chance for material reward, I know there are at least hundreds, if not thousands of young men and women all over the world today who are courageously exploring the language of movement, each in his or her own way, with all the passion and commitment of our great dance ancestors; Isadora Duncan, Mary Wigman, Jean Erdman and Balasaraswati just to name a few. We need only to watch a video, or better yet, attend a performance and open our bodies, minds and spirits to the expressions they create for our lives to be forever enriched by their gifts.

All best,
Nancy

P.S. Will respond to R3’s many posts soon. Loved the Band on the Run video.  Gotta “run”out now to take advantage of early voting in New York!

Thank you so much R3 for all that you’ve found about The Coach!!! So wonderful that you don’t have to go  to New York to see the  Channel 4  “Viewer’s Guide ” anymore!

In what edition (pub date) did you find the quote with the title?

Hi All,

So wonderful to read all your thoughts and experiences!

As to R3’s last post, I can’t speak for ALL dancers, but certainly among the many, many dancers I know, I can say that many of us have experienced a sense of being in “the zone”, a state where we are no longer dancing the dance, but the dance is dancing us. We always hope, we will enter such a state during performance, but it doesn’t happen every time, just as it doesn’t happen every time for an athlete, or a meditator. You do your practice. You practice your craft. You work hard, but you can’t make that flow state happen.

I think that’s what, George Balanchine the great Georgian-American ballet choreographer of the 20thcentury was referring to when he said, “ First comes the sweat. Then comes the beauty if you’re very lucky and have said your prayers.”  (Balanchine was notoriously prolific and hardworking, as well as being a practicing Georgian-Orthodox Christian.)

And I think this quote from Balanchine also relates to one of Stephen’s many wonderful questions that opened this discussion.  A professional dancer (and even some amateur dancers) practice many hours everyday — at first to learn their craft and then to hone it. A ballet or modern/contemporary dancer who is fortunate enough to be a member of a company will take a one and a half to two hour class six days a week, followed by five to six hours of rehearsal, depending on his/her roles in a particular season. A day like this is often followed by a performance. The schedule is different depending on the season of the year and the roles the dancer is assigned, but morning class is a necessary ritual for all professional dancers. It is through this consistent communion with the endless rhythmic combinations and fluctuations of body, space, time and dynamics that the dancer prepares him or herself to be a vessel for that flow state where something bigger, deeper, more rarefied than “self’ with a small “s” can pass through him or her.

Now about stillness…I absolutely agree with R3 that stillness is the other half of motion. They are like two halves of a coin, heads and tails, yin and yang.  Motion arises from stillness and then resolves back into stillness once again. Dance is a constantly changing  flux between stillness and stir.

We are all familiar with this constant change. In the morning we rise, in the day we move from action to action and in the evening, “if we are very lucky”, we return easily to sleep once again. Plants and trees push up from the earth in the spring, run riot all summer and through the autumn and return to a quiet stillness once again each winter. This dance between motion and stillness is in us and all around us. Examples of it can be found from the micro to the macrocosmic.

I believe that being able to sense this basic alternation is the essence of dance training. Being able to embody stillness, feel the urge to move arise within us, give that urge its full expression and then feel all the stages as it subsides back into stillness again sounds so simple. In fact, it is simple —simple, but also complex.

Try it yourself. Chose a place to begin either lying, sitting, kneeling or standing. Stay in whatever position you have chosen, feeling the part, or parts, of your body that are supporting your weight. You may notice subtle shifts of your weight from the simple act of bringing your awareness to it. That’s fine. Consider these first small shifts of weight the first “phrase” of your motion/stillness dance. Continue moving whenever you feel the urge to move and coming to stillness whenever you feel the urge to be still. Allow yourself to be still as long as you want. Allow yourself to move as long as, and in any way, that you want.  Stop when you feel your dance is complete. Before returning to your everyday activities, take a moment to feel what just happened. You can even take some time to record your experience in a journal, or share it with us on this site.  I’d love to hear about it.

Finally, I have the time I need to answer Stephen’s question about why I think Joe may have associated the character of Medusa with Jean’s three-minute movement study —a study that was created, as you may remember, exclusively from her curiosity about the psychological state embodied in the two-dimensional archaic movement style.

As Stephen mentioned, the image of the Medusa is intriguing. In fact, according to “Dangerous Beauty: Medusa in Classical Art,” an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2018-19 curated by Kiki Karoglou, it is “one of the oldest mythological images we have”. Early images of the Medusa, from the archaic period in Greece (8th century BCE to 480 BCE), often placed above doorways to keep away evil spirits, show her as a terrifying androgynous figure with a large head, bulging eyes and a vicious expression revealing many sharp teeth. When her body is part of the image, she is most frequently seen with her arms and legs bent at the elbow and knee joints to create a swastika shape. Often, even without a body, four evenly spaced, right-angled lines sprout from her terrifying visage.

The swastika, as many of you probably already know, is even older. It is used in Hinduism and Buddhism as a symbol of divinity and spirituality. It represents activity, motion —the wheel of karma. In various Hindu traditions, the right-facing, or clockwise, symbol represents solar energy, while the left-facing, or counter-clockwise, symbol represents lunar energy and is associated with Kali, the terrifying goddess of creation and destruction. By 1941 or ‘42 when Joe first saw Jean’s study, he was most likely already familiar with the symbol, his interest in Hinduism having been sparked by a chance meeting with the Indian philosopher Krishnamurti during a trans-Atlantic Ocean voyage in 1924 and subsequently renewed, or reinforced, by his meeting with the Indologist Heinrich Zimmer at about that time.

So what does all this have to do with Jean’s dance? In order to answer this question, I need to describe the dance to you in some detail, so you can imagine what Joe saw on that Friday afternoon in her studio.

The dance begins with the dancer standing, from the viewer’s perspective, on the far left side of the stage. She is facing right, in complete profile. Her right foot is slightly in front of her left. Both arms are in front of her, bent 90 degrees at the elbows to form right angles. The palms face each other. All the fingers are gently extended, in what dancers, trained in Martha Graham’s technique, call “cupped” hands. More than likely, Jean’s beautiful, long dark hair was pinned up and she may have been wearing a piece of fabric wrapped around her waist to form a long column-like skirt.  The image, though static, is full of portent — a serious, young woman at the start of a journey.

She inhales, lengthening through her whole spine, tilts forward in one piece from her left heel to the crown of her head and then shifts back to her starting position.  She repeats this short, three-beat phrase two times. BREATHE—TILT—RETURN.  BREATHE—TILT—RETURN.  On the third repeat, as she returns, her right arm extends downward beginning an arc-like pathway that ends at shoulder level behind her.  Simultaneously her right leg brushes straight back along the floor until she is in a wide stride, her weight resting on her entire left foot and the ball of her right foot. She turns her head slowly to the right as her whole body rocks from foot to foot, in an anxious, foreboding rhythm. All at once, her right wrist flexes, her eyes fix on her right palm as if it were a mirror, and her whole body tenses.

For the next two and a half minutes she is mesmerized by the image she “sees” in her palm while she simultaneous fights to pull away from it. The struggle moves her forward and back across the stage in various rhythms, with various parts of her body pulling her now this way, now that, all the while maintaining the two-dimensional archaic style.

Finally, she arrives at the center of the stage facing left, in a long lunge. Her weight is evenly divided between her right leg, which is forward and her left leg, which is extended behind her. Her right arm remains extended at shoulder level, with her wrist bent.  Her eyes, still “glued” to her right palm. Her left arm is extended behind her with her elbow bent such that her left palm, lightly cupped, hovers by the side of her left hip.

Slowly, as if acting of their own accord, her feet begin a stamping rhythmic pattern that grows in intensity as her right arm, also seemingly moving of its own accord, traces an arc-like pathway up toward the ceiling. Her torso, accommodating her intense focus on her right hand arches upward and backward. Just at the moment that her right palm and sternum face straight up, she drops into a deep crouch, her torso curves forward, her right elbow bends bringing her right palm much closer to her still mesmerized eyes.

In this low crouch, her pelvis begins shifting forward and back, as her left arm slowly moves forward. When it reaches the same level as her right, it rotates so the left palm is now facing up. Then, still slowly, her left arm crosses over her right, and she shifts her focus to the left palm. The pelvis-initiated rocking stops, the right wrist flexes backward and the right hand wilts like a limp tulip.

Fascinated by the new possibility presented by her left palm, she rises slowly to her full height. Maintaining her focus on her left palm she slowly pivots 180 degrees. Her right arm is now behind her, bent at the elbow forming a right angle with her lower arm hanging directly down, palm facing in toward her body. From the viewer’s perspective her arms are now forming half of a right-facing swastika.

She inhales as she turns her torso to face directly toward the audience and her arms reverse. As she inhales again, even more deeply, arching her spine slightly, she releases the right foot from the floor, bending the right knee 90 degrees, appearing, momentarily, to float in the now fully formed left-facing swastika.

As she exhales, bending forward at the left hip joint, the whole “wheel” of the swastika appears to revolve. With her next inhale she returns to upright.  Then, she slowly turns to face the left as her right leg and arm extend behind her. Her right arm and leg continue moving along in an arc-like motion until they arrive in front of her, while simultaneously her left arm joins her right. Both arms are now lightly extended in front of her, elbows bent, palms, now soft, facing away from her body.

She steps forward on her right foot beginning a long slow rhythmic exit in which she brushes one foot forward, then lightly touches the ball of that foot to the floor and finally transfers her weight onto it. BRUSH-TOUCH-TRANSFER. BRUSH-TOUCH-TRANSFER. She appears to be released from her fanatical fascination with the images reflected in her palms, cautiously walking ahead, sensing her unknown future through both.

As must be obvious to most of you by now, I believe the main reason Joe told Jean she should name her dance “Gorgoneon” was because of her use of the swastika form. But it wasn’t only that. Jean’s use of space and her ever-changing body organization patterns in constantly evolving dynamic rhythms were all part of why the image of the Medusa was awakened in Joe’s encyclopedic storehouse of mythological imagery as he watched Jean’s dance. What I find truly amazing about this is that, as I have said before, Jean created this movement study without a single thought of a mythological character.  She followed only her emotional curiosity, along with her kinesthetic sensations and knowledge of aesthetic principles to structure this very severe, precise movement portrait.

According to Jean, she responded to Joe’s suggestion with just one word, “Why?”

And again, as Jean related the story, Joe said, “Because it’s about Medusa”.

Jean never went into detail after that, saying only that she and Joe talked about the Medusa story for some time, after which she decided to visit the Metropolitan Museum to look at its magnificent collection of Greek vases.  They served as inspiration to her to expand the dance into three sections that created an abstract image of the transformation of Medusa from a young devoted priestess of Athena into the monstrous gorgon who turned people into stone with her glance. The first section, the one I have just described, she called “Temple Virgin”. How and why she developed the second section which she called “Lady of the Wild Things” and the third which she called “Queen of Gorgons” into an abstract image of what she called “the embodiment of evil”, I will leave for another discussion.

Meanwhile, I’m delighted to tell you that you can soon see a video of a live performance of the complete dance on-line! The American Dance Guild, of which Jean was a founding member, is hosting a free on-line dance festival called “10 Years Over 10 Weeks”. Jean’s work will be represented by a performance of “The Transformations of Medusa”, staged by me on the great Graham dancer, Christine Daikin as part of the celebration of Jean’s 100th birthday in 2016. You can view the dance as often as you wish from November 23 through November 29 for FREE at:

http://vimeo.com/americandanceguild

Happy watching! I look forward to reading your responses after you see it.

All best,
Nancy

Hello R3,

Welcome to the conversation. Interesting questions you bring to the table.

I’m not a Joycean scholar, not even specifically pertaining to The Coach with the Six Insides.

Here is what little I can tell you:

I recall Joe mentioning in several lectures that I was fortunate enough to attend over the years that the title was taken directly from Joyce’s text. He probably quoted the section and  page number, but unfortunately, I’m not able to do that for you. I do recall his saying that the “coach” was a hearse, but I don’t remember what the significance of the number “six” is.

There is a wonderful television program at the Jerome Robbins Dance Resource Collection at the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center called “A Viewers Guide to The Coach with the Six Insides”   produced by WNET in 1966. It was an interview by Jean and Joe about her avant-garde dance/theater piece which at that point had taken the New York theater world by storm. I have watched the video tape several times. I seem to recall that the interviewer asked Joe about the title. Once the pandemic is under control enough that the library  can open, anyone can make an appointment to watch the program. The call number for your reference is MGZIA 4-7669 .

As far as any connections between Lucia Joyce and Erdman are concerned, I don’t know of any personal connection.  At the end of  Lucia Joyce:To Dance in the Wake, (Picador, 2003) Carol Loeb Schloss’ biography about Lucia Joyce, there is a discussion of The Coach with the Six Insides and Jean’s understanding of the way movement can convey an essence of the Wake. It is possible that Schloss interviewed Erdman for the book, but given the 2003 pub date, it is much more likely that Schloss was referencing things Jean said  in A Viewer’s Guide to The Six Insides. Another great reason to watch the video if you can!

Hope this helps a little. If there are any Joycean scholars listening in on this conversation, I hope you will add  any information you have that can help answer R3’s questions.

All best,

Nancy