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CoCo Loupe
Answer to Comprehensive Question #2
28 November 2005

Dancing with Ideas: Hay, Pollock, Reich, and Gehry

In order to make dances that fully express an idea or vision, choreographers employ a plethora of strategies in their individual processes that enhance their ability to be imaginative, original, and creative. Although it is nearly impossible to determine why certain people are more inclined to make dances, or any work of art for that matter, than others, it is slightly easier to understand the activities, thoughts, and influences that prompt and maintain the creative act of dance making. In an effort to better comprehend how information is recognized, valued, and used in relation to the choreographic process, this discussion will look across four disciplines for clues. The ideas and philosophies that have artistically driven Steve Reich (music), Jackson Pollock (painting), Frank Gehry (architecture), and Deborah Hay (dance) will be analyzed and used as a means to shed more light on the choreographic mind and body in process.

It seems natural at this point (before going into specific creative processes) to define the component parts that coalesce in a creative process: creativity and the creative person. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, states that "Creativity is any act, idea, or product that changes an existing domain, or that transforms an existing domain into a new one." He defines the creative person as "someone whose thoughts or actions change a domain, or establish a new domain" (28). From the startlingly simple to the stunningly complex, Steve Reich, Jackson Pollock, Frank Gehry and Deborah Hay’s works have all left indelible marks on their respective domains: music, painting, architecture and dance. Their works have been hailed as visionary and masterful and have over the decades sent shockwaves through the part of the world that concerns itself with creative and/or artistic endeavors. Their approaches to the doing of their work vary drastically but are all illustrative of a very intimate conversation between the creation and the creator that results in the expansion of the boundaries of human expression.

Steve Reich’s fascination with repetition and the transformation of sound led to his experiments with tape loops of recorded speech. Considered a minimalist, Reich tends to use a limited sound vocabulary - short snippets of someone talking or a few piano notes or drumbeats - that he manipulates through varying degrees of layering and phasing. His pieces unfold as a result of setting up structures or systems that are comparable to computer programs and then allowing the processing of the sound to make the work. He states: "I do not mean the process of composition, but rather pieces of music that are literally processes" (Reich, 9). His creative choices therefore happen in the making of the predetermined process or system. As a result, the style, sound and impact of final composition are not shaped by his personal aesthetic values. Reich clarifies this approach when he writes, "Though I may have the pleasure of discovering musical processes and composing the musical material to run through them, once the process is set up and loaded it runs by itself" (Reich, 9).

Reich’s phasing pieces were a breakthrough in relation to his theory of "music as a gradual process" (Reich, 9). Either in recorded or live works, he slowly increases the tempo of one loop so that it eventually stretches ahead of another loop that maintains a steady, unchanging tempo. The ability to hear the minute changes in sounds as they overlap, spread apart and then come back to unison is what he finds intriguing about the formula. This compositional strategy borders on the impersonal because it allows the listener to hear the actual sounds rather than the composer’s desires or influences. The following statement summarizes his desire to have sound heard rather than interpreted: "That area of every gradual (completely controlled) musical process, where one hears the details of the sound moving out away from intentions, occurring for their own acoustic reasons, is it" (Reich, 11).

His works therefore tend to be explicitly about the process rather than an attempt to express a philosophical human idea or feeling to the audience. In fact, when he uses spoken word in his recorded pieces, the language is chosen on the basis of melodic values and not for the meaning of the words. Of course meaning can be extrapolated from his compositions depending on the listener’s objectives and sensibilities but this is definitely not a priority for Steve Reich.

When used as a frame of reference to dance making, Reich’s ideas and philosophies call to mind the works of Lucinda Childs and Merce Cunningham. This is not surprising since Childs and Reich both participated in and emerged from the 1960s postmodern revolution that Merce Cunningham through his collaborations with the composer John Cage, helped to initiate. Childs’ works involve minimal amounts of actual movement vocabulary that over time expand and contract visually in a transformation of time and space. The passages of movement glide past one another in space so that the viewer’s eye perceives endless combinations of shapes and motion. Moreover, she places the repetitive loops of locomotion in close temporal, canonic proximity so that one action replaces another in a moment-to-moment fashion. Seeing action becomes the priority much like hearing sound is paramount in Reich’s compositions. Each change is perceptible because of the visual phasing, or pulling apart and putting back together of shapes and configurations, that occurs on stage.

Merce Cunningham and John Cage, famous for their chance compositions, pioneered the idea that a score or system could be set up and that the dance and music could develop from those processes independent of the artist’s aesthetic inclinations. More specifically, Cunningham’s use of a movement generating computer program parallels Reich’s utilization of programmatic processes in his production of sound pieces. They both decide upon the content of the pieces but at some point feed that content through an external device (a mathematical structure, score or computer) in order to arrive at a finished work.

Generally speaking, Reich’s obsession with the "gradual" processing of sound as a compositional tool has multi-faceted ramifications for the practice of dance making. If applied, it would foster a revelation of making, happening or occurring. Dance would begin and end naturally without interruption, according to an external set of rules, coinciding and combining with itself and other movement happening alongside it. Embodying that quality and developing the physical capability to actually perform such a feat would be difficult but a worthwhile endeavor. Reich’s words illustrate this esoteric ideal, all of which have a physical, motional and visual component:

Performing and listening to a gradual musical process resembles: Pulling back a swing, releasing it, and observing it gradually coming to rest; turning over an hour glass and watching the sand slowly run through to the bottom; placing your feet in the sand by the ocean’s edge and watching, feeling and listening to the waves gradually bury them (Reich, 9).

From Reich’s impersonal applications to the pure expression of human emotion, this discussion moves to the painter Jackson Pollock. If there is one artist who epitomizes motion, action and embodiment of a process it is Pollock. In fact, in photos of him making his drip paintings, he appears to be dancing along with the liquid paint, allowing his vision to pour out onto the canvas via an innate choreographic sensibility. In the final analysis, Pollock managed to put himself on the canvas. The paint is evidence that he was there, and the residue of the motion of his body is presented to the viewer in the form of swirling and splattered paint formations.

In an essay that appears in Jackson Pollock: New Approaches, Carol C. Mancusi-Ungaro quotes Pollock as saying "The method of painting is a natural growth out of a need. I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them" (Varnedoe and Karmel, 117). This statement puts Pollock’s creative tendencies into perspective. His work was an abstraction of himself, his feelings, and his view of the world made manifest through the delivery of gesture and the capture of thought in time and space.

Additionally, his work was not done in stages, through drawings or sketches, but instead in rushes of activity. He was known for staring at a blank canvas for hours or day or months before suddenly, and frenziedly, filling it in with pigment until it was finished. "The painter no longer approached his easel with an image in mind; he went up to it with material in his hand to do something to that other piece of material in front of him. The image would be the result of this encounter," Harold Rosenberg wrote in 1952 (Friedman, 195). Pollock’s process involved high levels of intuition and depended upon instantaneous composition.

This concentrated, spontaneous composition process shares many characteristics with movement improvisation. In particular it is closely related to improvisation as performance since what is being made is the final product and ready for audience viewing. The intimate and immediate conversation with intellectual and physical impulses and the interpretation of these into a collected and related whole are common parts of dance improvisation and Pollock’s construction of a painted surface.

Susan Rethorst’s process of "squinty sketching" (Rethorst, personal communication) bares resemblance to Pollock’s compositional flow and ability to intuit form and structure. Without too much concern for possible mistakes or accidents, she develops, in a fairly quick and continuous manner, a complete dance. This dance may be short and/or eventually be absorbed into a longer, more complex piece but it is nonetheless a finished work that she arrives at through her use of intuition and concentrated attention on the process. It becomes evident after witnessing a demonstration of this procedure that she is looking back at what has emerged for information about what will come next. This involves listening and being influenced by what has become content while simultaneously annexing and inserting more content into a form that is becoming evident in the moment.

Comparing a statement by Rethorst and a passage by Robert Goodnough about Pollock makes this similarity based on intuition between the choreographer and the painter extraordinarily clear. Rethorst writes in her article Dailiness, "that which is the intuitive imaginative self is interrogating and making a world, using equal parts circumstance and choice, responding to and being effected by, what is found there and what is internal, both" (Rethorst, 2). Goodnough speaks of Pollock’s process when he writes, "Pollock depends on the intensity of the moment of starting to paint to determine the release of his emotions and the direction the picture will take," and "Decisions about the painting are made during its development and it is considered completed when he no longer feels any affinity with it" (Karmel, 77).

Contrary to Pollock’s practice of intuitive action as a means of expressing an internal state of being, the architect Frank Gehry is influenced by the external world around him, specifically by art, literature and a fancy for things that move, (i.e., fish and sails) (A Constructive Madness). He also allows his personal experiences and interests to collide and combine with unorthodox building materials in such a way that his works appear to be accumulations of multiple thoughts jumbled on top of each other.

Considered a deconstructionist (Jencks, 195) Gehry pushes the ideals of postmodernism, with its concerns for dissonance, conglomeration and appropriation, to the edge of its visual and functional possibilities. However, after reversing, negating and destroying existing ideas he compiles everything in his midst into a final work that paradoxically juxtaposes incongruity with harmony. Initially, the buildings appear to be made of haphazardly placed metaphors but after more consideration it becomes apparent that they are held together by an invisible meaning; a conveyance of wholeness.

Gehry’s creative process involves multiple practices. One is his openness to everyday experiences. He lists watching people’s faces, going to museums, and touching fabric as entry points into architectural visions (Mack, 26). Once he becomes intrigued with a certain movement or idea, he sketches "relentlessly, passionately allowing inspiration to flow from eye through mind to body to be shaped by thought, knowledge and experience by functional ideas by the architect’s intuitions and sensibilities his feel for material and structure" (A Constructive Madness). He makes model after model and when necessary or desired "cannibalizes his own work" (A Constructive Madness) for materials and designs. Charles Jencks uses the word "bricoleur, or French handyman" (Jencks, 197) to describe Gehry’s methodology. He writes "Unlike the scientist or Classicist who tries to re-create the whole situation and its parts, the bricoleur tinkers and manipulates ready-made materials" (Jencks, 197).

Dance, since the Judson Church Theater era (1960s and 1970s), has gone through metamorphosis after metamorphosis and still grapples with its identity and place in the contemporary art world. Debates about whether or not it is following a postmodern, post-postmodern or neo-postmodern trend continue unabated. What is certain is that like Frank Gehry, today’s choreographers are tackling everything and using anything to redefine the body in performance and movement in choreographic form and structure. In this effort, modernist concerns reemerge and mingle with postmodern aesthetics to make the field of dance unclassifiable. The postmodern paradigm shift made it impossible to ignore multiple perspectives and options in making art. Dance obviously did not escape this phenomenon.

The most obvious comparison to Gehry in the field of dance is William Forsythe. Both begin with a classical form and deconstruct and distill it down to their own morphed visions. Forsythe has over time continually borrowed and torn away at the classical ballet idiom and body in order to make his warped, dense and multi-layered works. This mirrors what Gehry does when he takes a finished home and rips away the "perfection" of it in order to expose and comment upon what truly holds it together. Kate Mattingly discusses this similarity in the following passage:

But if deconstructionists dismember and manipulate a classical, existing vocabulary, Forsythe and Gehry go one step further. Through their examination of existing lexicons, Forsythe and Gehry produce new design vocabularies, one for movement, the other for architecture, that extend our conceptions as viewers as to what is possible. By this element their work is constructive at the same time it is deconstructive (Mattingly, 22).

Forsythe continually presents unexpected twists in his choreography. The role of the female in a ballet is questioned by allowing her to fight her partners rather than acquiesce to their controls. Men partner men in tender and sensuous configurations. He contorts arms, legs, and torsos through his choreographic machinations so that the act of moving through sequences of shapes requires a slightly violent approach to the muscle contraction and relaxation (Mattingly, 24). This same subversion of the classical style appears in Gehry’s buildings: outlandish curves birth tilting polygons and unfinished wood surfaces hug metal scales and glass that appears to be melting. Forsythe’s choreography and Gehry’s architecture both house elements that appear to be pulling away from each other while they simultaneously inhabit a common, grounded, and final place.

In general, this kind of subversion and deconstruction has become a way of life for most artists. It is an inescapable fact that as the world becomes more flat and communications more fluid, influences on dance making will continue to collide and mix at a rapid pace. Dance companies collaborate through webcasting, choreographers travel the globe to share their knowledge with young artists, and digital choreography can be sent thousands of miles in seconds. The sharing of information (physical, aesthetic, and theoretical) is instantaneous and influential. That information gets consumed, altered, redistributed and re-presented in a multitude of ways. Collage tactics via appropriation and subjugation are here to stay in the dance world until the blend becomes so homogenous that another subversive revolution is needed.

Lastly, this discussion turns to choreographer, Deborah Hay. With her artistic beliefs firmly planted in the Judson Church experiments, Hay has meditated her way through a 30-year creative odyssey. She explains her connection to dance in the following words: "Dance is the place where I practice attention...It’s a kind of alertness in my body that I have at no other time. So dance for me is about playing awake" (Daly, 43). For fifteen years, while living in Austin, Texas, Deborah Hay held group workshops in which non-performers and trained performers participated. For four months they would meet three-hours a day and physically practice a meditation (Daly, 48). Large group dances resulted from this process and then Hay would extract material from those pieces to make solo work for herself. However, it is the "practicing" that proves to be the most intriguing part of Hay’s process.

In My Body, The Buddhist, Deborah Hay writes about the ideas that lead her and her students to movement invention. She believes in daily physical inquiry and allowing the body and mind to constantly engage in a deep meditative discourse. Susan Leigh Foster writes in the forward of Hay’s book, "Each of her large group workshops has revolved around one of these directives, using it to provide the focus for daily movement investigations and for the final performance" (Hay, xiii). An example directive is listed as follows: "1987: I invite being seen drawing wisdom from everything while remaining positionless about what wisdom is or looks like" (Hay, xiii). Rather than invent movement that she deems teachable or performable, Hay allows movement to come to each performer and to herself individually, without pre-judgement or self-censorship (Hay, xiii).

This approach leads to movement possibilities that would never exist if Hay pre-constructed sequences in her choreography and then handed them down to be duplicated by a group. The attention placed on the meditation and the interpretation of the kinesthetic feedback through the body leads to unique movement ideas. Susan Leigh Foster writes, "It [the body] playfully engages, willing to undertake new projects and reveal new configurations of itself with unlimited resourcefulness…..The students "orient toward body as a generative source for ideas" (Hay, xv). As Hay witnesses her students and herself practicing particular meditations, she focuses in on certain characteristics and qualities that are evolving from each person. She then allows these to influence the way she links phrases together and how the whole piece will then be instilled with the energy of the meditation. Her pieces therefore tend to have many different components such as vocalizations, odd facial expressions, pedestrian and stylized movement in them. Everything is constantly circling back to the idea of the body giving way and offering itself to the attention of the mind. The content as well as the form and structure of her works involve the energy of the meditation. Again Susan Leigh Foster comments, "Many forms of prayer and meditation, even Buddhist meditation, encourage practitioners to sit and be still. In defiance of this opposition between action and reflection, Hay asserts the possibility of a consciously aware and critically reflective corporeality" (Hay, xviii).

Even though Deborah Hay has stopped her workshops and is now focused on passing her choreography along to trained performers through written scores, she is still questioning the very notion of choreography. Where does it come from and does it matter? Who makes it, invents it, influences it? Her approach is important because it is essentially disregards the ego. She surrenders herself to the process and the notion that art will come from the body’s ability to communicate rather than from her personal desire or need to express her ideas upon the world. Her creative endeavor is one of questioning. If she allows every cell in her body to respond to a question, what will the work at the end of the day look like? The work is based in the physical realm of the body; at the cellular level. It is kinesthetic inquiry at the deepest daily level.

Her notions about choreography inspire several questions when applied to the dance field in general and dance in the academy in particular. Firstly, is technique class and composition class the best place to develop an intimate knowledge of one’s body? Where is the practice in this context? Is it important for aspiring choreographers and dancers to self-guide through daily movement exercises, beliefs, and questions? Secondly, would this cause a paradigm shift in the academic canon? Is it possible to imagine a dance department without composition classes? Can composition classes be replaced with daily practice/invention/meditation/creation sessions? If those existed what would change in the evaluation of creative choices and aesthetic inquiry? Lastly, how would contemporary dance change with a different engine behind it in the academy pushing out practicing artists instead of dance crafters? The answers to these questions are elusive at best, but Deborah Hay’s alternative approach to choreography begs for them to be answered.

In conclusion, each discipline peers inside and gazes outside for information that will help continue to spawn expression, inquiry, construction, deconstruction, play, discovery, questions, and sometimes answers. Reich experimented with systems through which sound could be heard independent of his external manipulation. Pollock was obsessed with finding a way to place pigment on canvas in ways that purely expressed emotion. Gehry allows his fascination with contemporary art to guide his architectural visions. Hay spends months physically practicing a meditation. However, there is something universal that they all share and that is the expectation that it is always possible to see, hear, feel and imagine more extremes in the realm of experiencing life.

Works Cited

A Constructive Madness. Dir. Kipness, Jeffrey, Ball, Thomas, Neff, Brian. Prod. Frutchy Jennifer and the
Knowlton School of Architecture, The Ohio State University. DVD. 2003.

Csikszentmihalty, Mihaly. Creativity – Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.,
New York. 1996.

Daly, Ann. Critical Gestures – Writings on Dance and Culture. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2002.

Friedman, B.H. Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible. New York, MCGraw-Hill Book Company. 1972.

Hay, Deborah. my body, the buddhist. Wesleyan UP. Pub by UP of New England. Hanover, NH. 2000.

Jencks, Charles. The New Moderns: From Late to Neo-Modernism. London, Academy Editions. 1990.

Karmel, Pepe, ed. Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles and Reviews. New York, New York, Museum of Modern Art. 1999.

Mack, Gerhard. Art Museums Into the 21^st Century. Basel, Berlin, Boston, Birkhauser – Publishers for Architecture. 1999.

Mattingly, Kate. "Deconstructivists Frank Gehry and William Forsythe: De-Signs of the Times." Dance Research Journal 31.1
(1999): 20-28.

Reich, Steve. Writings about Music. Halifax, N.S., Canada, The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. 1974.

Rethorst, Susan. Dailiness. Class Handout. Current Issues, Winter 2004, OSU. Instructor: BeBe Miller.

Rethorst, Susan. Personal Communication. Workshop: Choreography for Choreography Teachers, Bearnstow, Mt. Vernon, Maine. 2005.

Varnedoe, Kirk and Pepe Karmel, Eds. Jackson Pollock: New Approaches. New York, New York, The Museum of Modern Art. 1999.