/ molissa fenley dances
CoCo Loupe - MFA Candidate
- Choreography
The Ohio State University
Department of Dance
Dr.
Candace Feck - Professor
Dance 759 - Postmodernism
June 7, 2004
Molissa Fenley Dances Regardless of Labels
Molissa Fenley, an American choreographer and dancer who was born in 1954 in Las Vegas, Nevada, defies categorization on the modern/postmodern continuum. Unlike most of her contemporaries, she did not grow up in the United States but spent ten years of her childhood in Nigeria, West Africa and two years of high school in Spain (Cooke, Dia Art Foundation). Difficulty in positioning Fenley in postmodern discourse partly springs from the fact that she began to study dance after the revolution of the 1960’s that served to fundamentally redefine the terms "dance," "dancer," and "dancing." In "’Drive,’ She Said: The Dance of Molissa Fenley," Sally Banes points out this problematic issue when she analyzes Fenley’s unconventional upbringing.
Her situation is unusual in that she is an American who grew up in another culture. In some sense an outsider to two dance cultures – a white American growing up in Nigeria, Fenley returned to the United States as a young woman who had lived through neither the theatrical nor the social dance traditions of the 1950’s and 1960’s in the U.S. – she has a certain objectivity about movement styles that seems to free her from conventions (Writing, 259).
By the time Fenley returned to the United States and entered Mills College as a dance major, the Judson Church Theatre’s influence on the dance world had solidified. The Grand Union was still touring universities around the country, and experiments with "happenings" and environmental works had rooted themselves in the West Coast artistic circles. When she moved to New York in 1977, contact improvisation was still thriving as a social dance form, but the
practice of it had already been adopted by choreographers as a tool by which to arrive at movement invention and structure. In spite of these drastic shifts in how the nation perceived and practiced dance, Fenley, having missed out on the formative years of these changes, seems to have gathered only what she felt she needed from them and followed a more personal artistic tangent.
Initially, she was guided by her experiences with the movement vocabularies of modern dance pioneers (Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey), and the composition methods taught by Louis Horst (Banes, Writing, 260). However, instead of fully adopting these influences into her creative process, Fenley began to mix and combine them with kinesthetic, emotional memories of African social dance movement and ritual and Flamenco stylization (Banes, Writing, 260). She also opted for an unorthodox regimen of physical training that included strength and endurance activities such as weight-lifting and long-distance running in lieu of taking traditional dance classes. She adopted this strategy in order to find new ways of approaching movement and alternative kinesthetic sensations (Bush and Ipiotis, Eye).
Because her aesthetic influences
and physical practices culminate in a cross-fertilized, hybrid form of dance,
Molissa Fenley seems to exist in a theoretical and historical middle ground
of sorts. Her works are built, not by consensus, collective effort or through
approaches that subvert her biases (a Judson initiative), but by her, the singular
artist, in an effort to express a unique vision (reminiscent of the early modern
dance practitioners). On the other hand, she explicitly dabbles in postmodern
practices by blending high and low art forms, collaborating with musicians and
artists, examining the plurality of gestural meaning, and deconstructing the
relationship between time and movement, movement and performer and performer
and audience. The question for me in this paper is, "Is Molissa Fenley’s
work postmodern and if so, why?"
My assumption is that like
the many scholars and critics who have peered into her work looking for an answer,
I will find that she is neither and both. Ironically, this supposition has in
its very language a postmodern tone that reflects Lyotard’s premise that we
are currently living in a "postmodern condition" (Best and Kellner, Postmodern Turn, 35) that denies rigid, universal truths of definition.
Plurality and multiperspectivalism will always subvert the ability to find a
"there there", and that defining something or someone will inherently
have another meaning when looked at or analyzed from another vantage point.
Fenley voiced this opinion in Michael Blackwood’s video Retracing Steps:
American Dance Since Postmodernism. When asked whether she thought of herself
as a postmodern choreographer, Fenley dodged categorization by stating the following:
I think that was probably the thing that I was disassociating more than anything was the idea of postmodernism being something that wasn’t dancey and I feel like I work in dance and the methods I use in terms of its craft could certainly be considered not normal modern methods but I think that the result of it is that it’s really a dance thing.
More often than not, in an attempt to facilitate discourse, scholars and critics have referred to Molissa Fenley and her peers of the late seventies and eighties with a wide range of labels. However, if her approach to choreography and her works are to be considered examples of the "postmodern" label, whether or not the label denotes a theoretical categorization or just a historical reference must be considered. In order to do this, a brief examination of dance as it relates to postmodern theory is required.
As many dance scholars have argued, dance in the 1960’s has been referred to as postmodern simply because it came after what we call modern dance (i.e., the projects of Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Jose Limon, etc). Furthermore, they argue that modern dance was not modernist at all. Their conclusion is that the reason the genre was coined "modern" is that it was developed by way of rejection of ballet and all of its antiquated trappings in favor of
dance created by and for the people of that specific time, thus making it a "modern" or "contemporary" project (Banes, Terpsichore, xv). Ironically, when the postmodern dance of the 1960’s is examined theoretically rather than historically, at least part of the inquiry appears to follow modernist goals. If we compare the dance of the 1960’s to the evolution of thinking in architecture and consider the following passage from The Postmodern Turn, a noticeable parallel between modernist architects and the Judson choreographers exists.
Modern architects sought a new, austere style that abondoned symbolism, ornamentation, and decoration in favor of unity, simplicity, and purity of form, paring down line and space to their bare essentials. In the words of Mies, "Less is more," and Adolph Loos even denounced decoration as "a crime" (Best and Kellner, 143).
The refusal to express any internal human emotion, the discarding of theatrical elements from performances, the belief that any body could do any movement anywhere, and the implementation of pedestrian, uninflected movement pulled the focus of inquiry to the essential nature of the artform. Once again, Kellner and Best write of this decisively modernist venture.
Indeed, a primary characteristic of modernism is its belief in the autonomy of art, involving an active attempt by the artist to abstract art from social ideology in order to focus exclusively on the aesthetic medium itself (126).
Roger Copeland echoes this sentiment in his article, "Postmodern Dance, Postmodern Architecture, Postmodernism," when he states:
To an architect, the term postmodern connotes a rejection of the very sort of austerity and reductivism that characterized so many early postmodern dances. In fact, Yvonne Rainer’s manifesto of renunciation ("no to spectacle no to virtuosity no to …magic and make-believe," etc.) sounds very much like the holier-than-thou puritanism of the orthodox modern architects (against whom the postmodern architects rebelled)" (Performing, 28).
However, in an effort to strip dance down to its fundamental essence, the Judson choreographers implemented tools and philosophies such as indeterminacy, games, scores, deconstruction, parody, irony, collaboration, plurality, multiperspectivalism and bricolage as ways of subverting the habits and biases of the creator/author, thus throwing a decisively postmodern slant on the whole process (Banes, Terpsichore, xv). By exploring the effects of these processes on the structure and form of movement, choreographers such as Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Douglas Dunn and Steve Paxton, called into question the very hierarchical, dramatically expressionistic, artist-as-genius philosophy that their predecessors had upheld. In an essay entitled "Everyday Bodies" from her book Time and the Dancing Image,Deborah Jowitt explains this phenomenon:
Unlike the pioneers of modern dance, these choreographers at first neither established companies around themselves, nor founded training techniques. They performed in each other’s works. The rejection of elitism and hierarchies and the attempted democratization of dance’s processes, ingredients, and nature became focal points – with one goal being to free the dancer from the tyranny of rules, ideals, and "technique," as it had come to be taught (313).
Additionally, in an effort to expunge dance of artifice, the Judson choreographers tested all of dance’s previously accepted parameters, and when one boundary’s strength was tested and broken, the work that resulted from the test was discarded and they moved on to another boundary. The product was deemed unimportant because they were not interested in entertaining people with the dances they made. The process of making the dance was paramount and became the vehicle for questioning the status quo. The dancer, thrust out of the elitist role of highly-skilled entertainer, became much like a laborer or a "doer," not the tragic hero of a narrative illusion. The dance became the activity that needed to be worked on or "done," not a literal translation of a glamorous, dramatic story (Jowitt, 309). This rejection of illusionist, fantastical art exemplified the Judson artists' skepticism and weariness towards the metanarrative that artists were visionary, to-be-revered geniuses that were born with an innate ability to create genre defining masterpieces. They believed that anyone could make dances and perform them and that the elitism that surrounded modern dance and ballet made dance inaccessible to the public. The somewhat anarchist approach that these artists visited upon dance and performance resulted in an incessant cycle of creativity based on questioning and doing that ultimately led to dance being able to jump onto the "postmodern paradigm shift" (Best and Kellner, 253).
Furthermore, at the end of the 1960’s and into the 1970’s, with the help of the Grand Union’s ad hoc, spontaneous, collaborative performances, human movement as the medium of an artform had been deconstructed, bared and exposed to such an extent that there was not much more to do with or ask of it. The choreographers of this era had repeatedly proven that the stage, church, art gallery, forest, university campus, loft, street, rooftop and wall could be a place for an egalitarian, democratic, and communal existence in the pursuit of art (Jowitt, 335). The participants of these collective endeavors, having exhausted their creative energies within this project, began to separate philosophically and geographically in order to pursue their own personal visions in relation to the new dance landscape they had helped to create. However, even though the collective project was losing steam, many of the answers to their questions had "proved durable: no grand manners, no pretense, no showing off, no body set that announces, ‘I am a Dancer’" (Jowitt, 335).
For many young artists who began presenting their works in the late 1970’s and early ‘80’s, Jowitt’s list of lasting values from the Judson era on some levels seemed meaningless and hollow. However, the bare ground that had been laid for them in the sixties and early seventies, appeared fertile for investigations into the possibility of saying "yes" to everything that had received a negative nod in the past (Blackwood, Retracing). They nodded affirmatively to theatrical elements such as lighting, costumes, music, characters, and most shockingly, the proscenium stage. Virtuosity was welcomed back and it called for a movement vocabulary that required a specific set of skills particular to classically or traditionally trained dancers. Narrative form, linear and non-linear alike, was reexamined as a rich resource of drama, context and subtext. All of these strategies suggest that there was an overwhelming need to reunite movement and meaning, two entities that had been divorced from each other in the Judson era. Even though Sally Banes is referring to the use of classical compositions by postmodern choreographers when she writes, "If in postmodernism anything can be used, why not old music, beautiful music, highbrow music – as well as commissioned? In other words, all the contradictory sides of the dance-music debates seem to coexist comfortably in the late eighties postmodern dance." (Writing, 326), her question inherently supports the development of new idioms via the adoption of old traditions by post-Judson choreographers of the 1980’s.
Now it is evident that because Molissa Fenley does not adhere to the all-encompassing Judson Church philosophies and practices (indeterminacy, scores, pedestrian movement, real time) and revels in the spectacle of speed, virtuosity, classical vocabulary, cross-cultural references and the display of grace through a finely tuned, anything-but-everyday body, she does not fit into the historical category scholars refer to as postmodern dance. However, in reference to postmodern theory that lists as its tenets implosion, decentralization of the author/creator, subverting audience expectation, incredulity toward metanarratives, pluralism, mixing high and low art, and what Robert Venturi refers to as "messy vitality" (Complexity, 326), it is clear that Fenley involves herself in one or more of these constantly, even though these tendencies may be presented in a more formalistic, singular style that seems contradictory to the postmodern aesthetic. Sally Banes further explores these complex features of Fenley’s work when she writes:
She blends an African sensitivity to ritual dance, in which music, song, movement, and the symbolism of cultural expression are inextricably interwoven, with an acute awareness of her heritage as a modernist, American choreographer. For Fenley, what is singularlyAmerican about dance – and what she stresses in her own choreography – is speed, motion, and change, in both an immediate and historical sense (Writing, 259).
Also, where the Judson choreographers emphasized the human body in everyday tasks and strove to illuminate the essence of human movement in performance, Fenley was propelled to use the body’s actions as commentary on a larger state of affairs. Ann Daly quotes Fenley as saying "It’s time now that we need a humanist point of view, because we’re living in a ‘state of darkness.’ It’s time we have to be vulnerable and giving" (Critical, 113). Sally Banes, writing about the change in American societal trends between the 1960’s and the 1980’s explains:
A wave of democratic romanticism in the arts, valorizing the natural, the spontaneous, the commonplace, reflected the optimism of a country in motion. Twenty years later, the American temper has changed. In an age of economic distress and political cynicism, we seek glamour, style, and artifice in life and art……In the 1980’s, art no longer frames real life; it turns toward something better……Fenley’s dances turn matters of community, drive, and vivacity into energy (Writing, 268).
Fenley’s plea for a more humanist approach points to the changing winds of the American political, economic and social environment. Civil Rights had been fought for and perceived as won. Feminism was getting a foothold in critical theoretical discourse. The Cold War was at its coldest and fears of nuclear holocaust drove many into a culture of excessive productivity and consumption. Commodification of art and the demand for singular, marketable artists became manifest in avant-garde art showing up in banks, malls, and suburban homes (Best and Kellner, 133). HIV/AIDS was fast approaching epidemic numbers and the gay population was being further marginalized and ostracized because of the public’s need to find a scapegoat for the disease. The so-called glamorous, night-clubbing, cocaine-snorting yuppie was born out of this environment and the cultural norm and expectation was that one should stay out all night and work all day, in essence squeezing and obtaining everything valuable out of life (i.e., money, enjoyment, pleasure, information, material goods, etc). External physical beauty was at a premium and the rise in popularity of aerobic exercise drove many people to work out not as a health benefit but as a way of shaping their bodies in order to be socially acceptable. Popular culture was dominated by "greed and glitter" (Banes, Writing, 44) and shaped by "the garish colors, shapes, and sounds of punk rock, new wave, and street style" (Banes, Writing, 254).
In reaction to these issues, Fenley takes the body out of its everyday situations and places it on a metaphoric level. The well trained body performing seemingly impossible feats of stamina and strength makes a statement about the overall persistence, tenacity and preparedness it takes to survive in a world that seems to be falling apart. Fenley explains,
The point of view is one of constant change so that as the body is going one way, there’s an accent that will be shifting it to another light to another area and it’s that constant shifting of the upper body to the lower body or the head vs. where the torso is going that to me is a real statement on the modern experience and that is the interest I have in dance is that it be expressive not only in a personal manner but also as an expression of our times (Blackwood, Retracing).
In 1986, as if to illustrate this very point, Ann Daly reviewed one of Molissa Fenley’s concert and stressed what she found as the "thirst for speed and precision that is thoroughly modern," (Critical, 103). Moreover, Fenley’s appropriation of classical ballet vocabulary, possibly borrowed from her studies with Cunningham, add attention to line and shape, a fit and harmonious body, and an overall flair of virtuosity to her dances thus reflecting the tendency in 1980’s America to focus on external representation of strength and beauty. Ideas of intimacy, self-sacrifice, limited resources, humanistic endeavors, relationships, death, reconciliation and survival of the fittest become what the body is communicating through gesture and kinesthetic bombardment in Fenley’s dances. Like the Judson choreographers she is dealing with everyday life, but for her it is important that the body is reacting, interpreting and presenting the
psychological, social, and emotional aspects of contemporary existence. The difference between the two, is summarized by Ann Daly in "Fenley’s State of Darkness":
Fenley is hardly alone in her choreographic move toward what she calls ‘humanism.’ The current climate of death and alienation in America is hitting the dance community especially hard. Though postmodern dance has traditionally emphasized issues of physical form and aesthetic inquiry, it now seems to be making small steps back toward the expression of emotion (Critical, 113).
Thus far this paper has discussed, in general terms, Molissa Fenley’s inspirations, processes and works as they relate to modernist and postmodernist theory, dance history and influential societal trends. Going forward, the discussion will be centered on specific stylizations, movement lexicons and choreographic goals that were pervasive in her works of the 1980’s. Three in particular call attention to themselves as defining areas of Fenley’s artistic project, and they help to, at the very least, explain if not define her position within the postmodern paradigm shift; speed/stamina/virtuosity, the upper-body’s expressive power and ritual revealed through choreographic complexity. Of course, none of the three are mutually exclusive and they all are used to in various ways throughout her canon of works to illustrate her artistic viewpoints.
From an early age Fenley was involved in being physical. She participated in sports, enjoyed being outside on safaris, ran long distances and was "fascinated by motion" of all sorts. She chose to study dance because in her words, "Even cars passing would interest me. It didn’t coalesce as an interest in speed until I started working that way. But I had an interest in the perception of motion in space. I wanted to be involved in it somehow" (Banes, Writing, 260). This deep interest is apparent in her pieces and her process. Fenley is infamous for her eclectic choreographic choices. She often links Western classical ballet vocabulary, abstract and expressive gestures, gyrating and rolling pelvic movements, and everyday activities such as running, skipping and hopping together in rapid fire succession. However, regardless of the types of movements Fenley strings together in her dances, she increases the tempo of individual phrases until she finds a natural rhythm or musical phrasing particular to the motion of those actions. Fenley speaks of her use of this choreographic tool by saying, "My interest is in speed. In the past, I worked by always making myself go faster. In that way, an underlying rhythmic sensation would evolve, and I would either stay with it or change it. Then it would become very clear. The movement would make the rhythm occur" (Banes, Writing, 265). By doing this she undermines the legibility of the single actions that constitute the lexicon of the dance, and as a result, the subject matter of the work shifts from dramatic representation to speed and rhythmic flow. This deconstruction subverts any preferences she may have for overtly displaying emotional context and instead allows overall meaning to be derived from a kinesthetic response to her dances’ constantly shifting kinetic landscapes (Banes, Writing, 267). Her dedication to the idea of speed, motion and endurance as thematic material is illustrated by Sally Banes in the following statements about Fenley’s work Energizer (1980):
Fenley has arrived, in Energizer, at a "wall of dance" whose dynamics are so dense and so rapid they are almost impossible to index. In devising movements for the dance, she says, she was interested in neither floor patterns nor body shapes, but simply in motion. "The endurance of performing fast motion seems to hold the key to new experimentation" (Banes, Writing, 267).
There are several ways to think about Fenley’s obsession with speed and endurance, and they all seem to overlap and co-exist in her works. As stated earlier in this paper, these two facets of movement were in fact pervasive qualities of life in 1980’s American culture. It seems only natural that as an artist, she is investigating her existence in a fast-paced, consumer-driven and technologically advanced society and using the body as a metaphorical display of her findings.
In addition to mirroring and reflecting societal trends, Fenley, by manipulating movement on such a basic level, alters the audience’s perception of dance. Her dances become "about excitement, rather than order. Although Mix was difficult for the performers – they did not rest for nearly an hour – and for the spectators – its length and complexity overloaded the perceptions at a certain point – it was an important dance in terms of focusing on these contradictory elements" (Banes, Writing, 264). This sensory bombardment denies observers the opportunity to react intellectually or emotionally therefore they are practically forced to participate in the "kinesthetic experience" of the movements as they observe the "swiftness of their execution" (Banes, Writing, 264). She pushes her movement, her dancers, and her audiences to extreme physical limits, and in doing this, she seemingly reaches her goal of causing "the audience release their ideas about what dance is supposed to be and allow the rhythmic knocking of what the dance really is" (Blackwood, Retracing) to become apparent.
Yet another consequence of creating works that require strength, stamina and precision is that Fenley’s dances become examples of the renewed interest in virtuosity that was taking place in the 1980’s. Making dance "meaningful" by "reinstating technical virtuosity" is "connected to an eighties attitude of professionalism and control, as well as to the related changes in body culture in that decade of aerobics and health clubs" (Banes, Writing, 336). Whether or not specific meaning can be derived from Molissa Fenley’s works, as a choreographer she can certainly be included amongst the artists of her time that were allowing virtuosity to reemerge in their works. Banes lists common features of eighties concert dance, almost all of which can be placed next to Molissa Fenley’s name, that explain this shift:
The turn to virtuosity is manifested in ways ranging from the use Of highly-trained, multicompetent dancers, often with professional degrees in dance; to the presence onstage of dancing bodies that look athletic and built; to the building of permanent companies and repertory; to the rediscovery and proliferation of techniques, from ballet to baroque, tap and ballroom dancing, to the use of complicated steps and partnering devices; to a fascination with stamina, precision, and balance; to a refined sense of musicality. Molissa Fenley, for example, used muscular women and music with a disco beat in ongoing "walls of dance" that display skill and endurance (Writing, 336).
Overall, Fenley’s affinity for speedy brilliance and the display of heightened, physical, sensory information irrevocably places her in the postmodern category. This is possible because she tears down the illusion of effort required to perform her movement thereby blurring the lines between art and life. Moreover, because her works can appear to be about one thing (the pure display of difficult, fast, long-distance dance marathons) and can simultaneously be interpreted as anything else (representations of internal, emotional, and/or physical reactions to the world at large), they are distinctly double-coded. This pluralistic approach promotes the ability to read her works through multiple perspectives and suggests that nothing concrete can ever be obtained as a result of seeing the dance. Depending on who is watching the dance, the intention, goal and overall meaning of each piece can be constructed, reconstructed, arranged and rearranged each time it is performed. Undeniably, these features of Fenley’s works align her with postmodern theory.
Another dominating feature of Fenley’s work is her development and use of a detailed, stylized, and overly complex, upper-body vocabulary. After many years of watching dance she noticed that there was a wholesale lack of attention to both the functional and expressive possibilities of the arms, torso, neck, and head. Fenley vocalized her lament by saying, "Seeing that the upper body which to me as a child was so expressive from watching African and Flamenco dance and that in American dance it seemed to be pretty much non-existent, I decided that that would be a good avenue to sort of explore because it seemed to be really sort of uncharted territory" (Blackwood, Retracing).
What resulted from her frustration was a commitment to exploring the visual, contextual and choreographic implications of allowing complicated port-de-bras sequences to evolve with and around the shifting, locomotor patterns of the lower body. By investing in this project, Fenley began to make works that appeared richer and more visually stunning. Critics and audiences alike were baffled and titillated by her ability perform intricate upper-body movements that, on one hand, appeared to be highly disjointed, other-worldly and improvised and on the other hand, screamed of precision, flow and connectedness.
Initially, Fenley used arm movements and hand gestures in a more static and sculptural way. She modeled them after "iconic" images and placed them in "diagrammatic arrangements." In time her use of the upper body evolved into patterns that were more "motional, rather than stopped in space, gestural." Fenley elaborated on her objective when she stated, " I wanted to use the back as fully as I could, and to use the arms as more than simply extensions of the spine, as they are used in most techniques. After Planets, I did not want to use gestures to conjure up metaphoric meaning in the spectator" (Banes, Writing, 261-262). While she has concentrated on a more abstracted, continuous flow and motion in her upper-body combinations, she is still intent on providing opportunities for many interpretations. Fenley still derives her gestures from a plethora of diverse cultural images that reinforce her belief in eclecticism and plurality. In a website journal column entitled "Gesture: Molissa Fenley" author Nancy Dalva quotes Fenley as she relates a list of visual and cultural influences she uses to build her phrases:
I think of Cycladic sculpture – the arms held in horizontal and diagonal places across the body, Haniwa – the protective and salutary gestures. African dance – the arms held in rhythmic variance. The mudra of classical Indian dance. The Russian constructivists. And sculpture, both ancient and contemporary (2wice).
Based on this list of Fenley’s, it is evident that although she strives to excise specific emotional overtones from her choreography, the culturally loaded images she uses inherently have associative, expressive power.
According to a review by Ann Daly in 1986, Fenley may have successfully arrived at her goal of allowing multiple interpretations. While there were no references to specific, signatory meaning in her writing, Daly reports that Fenley’s stylized use of the arms, head and torso inevitably triggered a response and assignment of general meaning. Daly commented on the overall response she experienced because of the upper-body’s use when she wrote, "The dancers bent low from the waist, stretched high with arms curved heavenward, held arms straight out to the side with hands flexed, or pushed arms high with hands curved forward like bunny ears. Fenley’s arms became almost disembodied, because all their impetus came from the outside of her upper arm rather than from the hand or forearm. This gave her dancing a distorted and ecstatic look sometimes, as if she could not control its exuberance" (Critical, 102). In another essay, Daly describes Fenley as a "sorceress, with her placid intensity and her spindly arms constantly conjuring up the space around her" (Critical, 113).
Fenley may be the one who explains her intentions the best. Nancy Dalva again quotes Fenley:
I incorporate the idea of gesture as being the most communicative part of the body’s potential, yet abstract it in my choreography, so as not to be specific in meaning. It is wide open, not locked into only one culture – but a human expression that we can all "get." Gesture is the one thing that can tie us in at this point in time with the human body of history (2wice).
It is noticeable in her language that she is dealing with the postmodern issues of multiperspectivalism and plurality once again, only this time, they relate to the expressive power of her personalized gestural choreography.
Finally it can be argued that the speed, complexity and virtuosity of Fenley’s works (and the stamina that they require) coupled with the incessant employment of an expressive upper-body vocabulary, produce a ritualistic fervor in her works. Dancers enter the stage and do not leave for long periods of time. They are in constant motion and performing incredibly dense movement in fast-paced rhythmic structures. To the observer, this endless stream of energy can be either inviting or overwhelming. The exhausting nature of something so extreme invokes a sense of irony that can not be avoided. While obviously healthy, physically fit and athletic bodies in one way appear to be celebrating the joy of dancing together, the sense of physical exhaustion from performing something so extreme casts a darker light on the event. Suddenly, the observer becomes aware of a mystical, fatalistic and possibly dangerous force that is propelling the dancers forward into an unknown territory of either physical demise or personal redemption. This contradictory and compelling irony is one of the ways in which Fenley presents the human condition to her audience. It also can be assumed that she uses it to question society’s dependence on the idea making the most, having the most and doing the most. Ann Daly talks about the meditative, inevitable tension of Fenley’s on-going, complex choreography:
Not that there was a big push toward climax – on the contrary, the repeating, gently permutating figures were equally mesmerizing at every moment, like a long train passing by, each car following the next in a thrillingly predictable manner (Critical, 102).
When Fenley describes her feelings about dance the source of inspiration for her powerful, magnetic and remarkably moving pieces lay in her words.
Dance is something that is such an extreme force that it’s not known. It’s really unknown by most people and so the words that I would try to use to describe that became those that are more about mystical things. More about intangible things because it is truly an intangible understanding that I think I’m trying to express. And the pounding of that dancing was like a tapping the door, knocking on the door, trying to get in (Blackwood, Retracing).
Her need to express these feelings through movement become manifest in her use of space. In some pieces the movement pours over the stage in no discernible pattern although there appears to be an unspoken spatial order that the dancers follow. This hidden but obviously known information between the performers creates an atmosphere of communal activity and something that reminds Ann Daly of "a ritual or worship ceremony" (Critical, 188). In other pieces, "the cumulative effect of her swelling and converging formations, circles, chains and crisscrossings was intensified by music with the hypnotic pulse of a disco dance hall" (McCormick and Reynolds, No Fixed Points, 623). These choreographic choices can be related to the unending stream of visual stimuli that began to dominate and hypnotize American society in the 1980’s.
There is probably no other piece in Fenley’s repertory that presents ritualistic behavior more explicitly than State of Darkness (1989). Choreographed to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, it has at its center the idea of ritualistic sacrifice and redemption. Fenley performed this solo topless as if to show the vulnerability of the human body. McCormick and Reynolds quote Laura Shapiro when they write about how Fenley danced the whole piece alone without stopping, and by using "her body with the icy clarity of a dagger’s point, she concentrated all the power of the music into a single stream of pure movement, abstract but flooded with the imagery of ritual, terror, and triumph" (No Fixed Points, 623). Ann Daly calls this work "an incantation: a rather desperate act of faith in the future of humankind" (Critical, 113).
In quite a lengthy observation of dance and its role in contemporary society, Anna Halprin in an interview with Judith Ross predicts the inevitable shift toward ritual as a way to find hope in a world that faces seemingly insurmountable challenges. She says the following:
Stylistically I think postmodern dance is now in a transition to something else. And I think that something else is "meaning and content," things that make a real difference in people’s lives, in the life of the local and global community. I think that where postmodern dance is eventually going is to myth and ritual. There isn’t any other place to go. Where else can it go?
She continues,
We’re facing a world filled with challenges from every direction – war, poverty, homelessness, abuse, more war, starvation, pollution, cancer, AIDS – the very ground we’re standing on is shaking. It seems to me we have a wonderful opportunity to make dances that once again have the function to transform. Myth making and ritual seem like the next step. Ritual has got to be the next way (Daly, Drama Review, 6).
This statement finds a home in Fenley’s "walls of dance" that kinesthetically move people. The ritualistic manner in which driving speed, seemingly arbitrary spatial patterning and circuitous, curling arm gestures affects the viewer on a very base level is calls to mind trance and/or dervish ceremonial rites. For Fenley, the meaning and content is the speed, is the kinesthetic effect, is the incessant drive and ritualistic repetitiveness and fervor. Her choreography espouses strength, stamina, speed, power, grace, tenacity, persistence and self-sustainability. All of the qualities purported to be essentials for the person who wants to be successful in the seventies and eighties.
The ritualistic overtones in Fenley’s works can be viewed as an attempt to reinstall an thus revive a sense of expressive depth to what had become a "waning of affect" and a "coolness, blankness, and apathy" in postmodern dance (Best and Kellner, 134). Therefore it can be said that this part of her project has a modernist or perhaps avant-garde bent, in that ritual serves to promote a vision of the self and its responsibility to the possibility of social change. Best and Kellner articulate this comparison:
Against modernism, the avant-garde movement saw art as a means of social transformation and sought to integrate art into everyday life…..the avant-garde strove to subvert dominant aesthetic ideologies and to effect revolutionary social change. Nevertheless, the avant-garde remained bound, with modernism, to the romantic notion of the artist as privileged social figure or visionary (as in Shelley’s claim that artists are the "unacknowledged legislators of the world") (129).
They also state that "Modernist works also expressed the personal vision of the artist, his or her own unique view of the world, and the modernist masterpiece attempted to generate new modes of art and new ways of seeing and thinking" (128). Fenley seems to walk this modernist path by creating works that demonstrate her personal take on the world. Her tendency to remark on societal issues through a blatant, self-defined style and movement language suggest that she herself is prognosticating for change and revolution. Once again according to Best and Kellner, "’Modernism’ took shape as a tendency in the arts that articulated new artistic styles and techniques and new ideologies about the function of art and the role of the artist in society" (126). From this perspective, State of Darkness can be categorized as Fenley’s defining modernist masterpiece since it presents her, the soloist, in her vision and vocabulary, as the personification of societal downfall.
In conclusion, it is clear that Molissa Fenley has vacillated between modernist ideas and postmodern practices. However, she seems to have bridged the gap in many instances by combining the two and by borrowing from the past to look at the future. In a larger context, she can appropriately be considered postmodern for the simple fact that her works fall on a historical continuum that could have possibly gone nowhere else. In the microcosm of the eighties, Fenley carries with her vestiges of formalism and unique artistic vision from her predecessors while at the same time pushing the parameters of the possibilities of movement and meaning. The legacy of 1960’s postmodern dance was left to the choreographers of the 1980’s and from there, they appropriated what they wanted and began to put their own signature styles and opinions to the test.
A quote by Sally Banes, with its oppositional and comparative language, finely illustrates Fenley’s ability to hug both sides of the modernist/postmodernist position:
Molissa Fenley’s choreography bewilders the eye, entices the ear, and challenges both the memory and the intellect. Incessant, ever- changing, saturated and polymorphous arm gestures, performed to a driving, repetitive beat, the dances are complex series of tensions between constancy and mutability, structure and disorder, abstraction and imagery, exoticism and familiarity, social and theatrical forms (Writing, 259).
The duality that exists in describing Fenley’s work is entirely postmodern, and the intriguing aspect of this paper’s inquiry is exactly that duality. From one angle there is one answer and from another, another and so on.
In a confusing pile of labels and categories maybe it is best to let Molissa Fenley be simply "involved in dance" (Blackwood, Retracing) and allow the contradictory terminology to fall away. For in the middle of the discourse, the art is being made and that is the important part. As Fenley states, "I just think that the thing to remember is that no matter what, I’m going to have a dance company and no matter what I’m gonna make art….it’s something that you have to want to do and it’s just the thing that will always be so it’s a given. You know, I will always try to have a dance company and I will always try to make work" (Blackwood, Retracing).
Works Cited
Banes, Sally. Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance, 2nd ed. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1987.
---, Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1994.
Best, Steven, and Douglas Kellner. The Postmodern Turn. New York: Guilford P, 1998.
Copeland, Roger. "Postmodern Dance, Postmodern Architecture, Postmodernism." Performing Arts Journal No. 19. 1983.
Dalva, Nancy. "Gesture:
Molissa Fenley." 2wice: Rites of Spring. Vol. 4, No. 1. 2001.
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<http://www.2wice.org/issues/spring/rites/gesture.shtml>.
Daly, Ann. Critical Gestures: Writings on Dance and Culture. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2002.
---, Ed. "What Has Become of Postmodern Dance? Answers and Other Questions by Marcia B. Siegel, Anna Halprin, Janice Ross, Cynthia J. Novack, Deborah Hay, Sally Banes, Senta Driver, Roger Copeland, and Susan L. Foster." The Drama Review, 36.1, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 1992.
Dia Art Foundation. Curator, Lynne Cooke. "Introduction to Latitudes." 1995 – 2003. 20 May 2004 <http://www.diacenter.org/fenley>.
Eye on Dance: The Experimentalists #65. Prod. Jeff Bush and Celia Ipiotis. Videocassette. ARC Videodance. 1982.
Jowitt, Deborah. "Everyday Bodies." Time and the Dancing Image. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.
McCormick, Malcolm and Reynolds, Nancy. No Fixed Points: Dance in the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale UP, 2003.
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Dance Since Postmodernism. Dir. Michael Blackwood. Videocassette.
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Blackwood Productions/Westdeutscher Rundfunk. 1988.
Venturi, Robert. "Nonstraightforward Architecture: A Gentle Manifesto." Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966.