Imprinting a Life:

The Physicality of Correspondence

Research Process:

My research process was three-fold. First, I explored text as a written history of a life. I read correspondence and letters of a number of women, particularly artists. Secondly, I was curious about the ways words and movements interact and create a framework for interpretation. I was curious about the ways movement could be interpreted and influenced with words and language, whether visual or spoken text. Finally, I experimented with paper as an object, looking at the physicality of paper and the ways it can be used in a performance setting.

The first phase of my research explored the texts I had selected. I read a number of books from a variety of sources that included women’s correspondence. Many were authors or artists, and all had a strong command of the English language. First, I read with an eye only for what intrigued me. As I delved into the material, I began to notice patterns and themes that continually evolved across the work. These themes soon developed into the central focus of my dramaturgical and choreographic process. My survey of women’s correspondence and literature found that several recurrent themes are important to women authors: love—the struggle to find it, keep it or the impact of losing it; history, both personal and societal; and finally the importance of creativity and imagination, particularly for women and children.

For my creative process, I thoroughly documented and recorded sections from each of the texts and compiled them for use in the future, when I will incorporate text and movement into my choreographic process. Some include:

“Thinking of your justifiable complaint, my soul goes out to you, my dear Sister, and words cannot convey to you how much the pain that tyrannizes you and makes you suffer so many sorrows overwhelms me. Your vehement passion is incessantly present before the eyes of my mind. However, I preferred to keep quiet rather than to drive this adversary away with a poorly written piece. If I could lend you assistance with some good remedy, like Zethus and Calais I’d force that false Harpy who has come up from the depths of Hell after which I’d let you know that what Love seems to make so beautiful, noble, and lively to you, is nothing but a vain image that will soon serve as plunder for the scythe of Old Man Time.” ¹

“You, alive, rarely put yourself on view, as though you knew the outrageous light shuttered away in you, seen straight and seen in its own stark elation, must shrivel its beholder. Yet latecomers, prying into your lines, are resolute on pawing over you. But I doubt somehow that you would mind. Like a star that’s left and left its light, grown stronger, gathering as it travels, as it has the space of dark and time to swell out in, you might smile at seeing them asquint to read you by your own radiance. Sly motes like butterflies, your winged words light on them, then flit away before their groping hands can clutch. And still they feel the cool and fragrant rainbow wind those wings fan up, feel shadows wading by inside them of a greater (for its being so elusive) light. And you will never give them what they want it more. And so they’re almost satisfied and so are you who long age discovered how to live, enormously, containedly, between the lines.”²

“Because we like acquainting ourselves with people even at a distance, that draw of letters as a means of getting to know their author remains strong. Their allure requires little explanation: reading correspondence is one way of constructing or reimagining a life, like assembling a jigsaw puzzle slowly out of various mosaic pieces. And letters by literary figures…offer double insight, or open a double window, into a writer’s work as well as his or her life.” ³

“Assembling a book of letters is a way of reimagining or reconstructing a life, and, like reconstructing an actual life, it requires many participants.” ⁴

“Who can say what is best? All I see out there is anarchy. Even when some implicit common standard might have been expected, I keep stumbling up against intractable disagreement. One responds to a piece of work, or else one doesn’t. Sometimes, in my own experience, not responding means simply drawing a blank. I have biases, as everyone does, and perhaps a greater share than many people; but more troublesome still, for the purpose at hand, are the blind spots—of which I begin to hear that I have a great many.” ⁵

“Dear Darling, I miss you. I’ll be back late on Friday next, so ring up on Saturday morning. I’ve got you a present, but it is no pleasure to contemplate it, between the enormous sums it cost & the enormous fury with which it will no doubt be received.” ⁶

“It is not understood that the greatest heroes and heroines are truly those who hold out the longest, or, if they do die young, do so unwilling , resisting to the last.” ⁷

“For the actor, as for the dancer, the body is the instrument. I can walk away from the typewriter or the piano; although they seem to be a part of me, in actuality they are not. But Hugh’s instrument is his body, his beautiful body. he has always been tall and lean. He has felt legitimate pride in his body, and has kept it well.” ⁸

“Of course they see death as failure. I have to trust them to be willing to fail. If we are not willing to fail we will never accomplish anything. All creative acts involve the risk of failure. Marriage is a terrible risk. So is having children. So is giving a performance in the theatre, or the writing of a book. Whenever something is completed successfully, then we must move on, and that is again to risk failure…” ⁹

“It seems as if I spent most of my twenties holding a lukewarm cup of coffee, hunched over a table, talking. Innumerable cups of coffee, countless tables: the booths of the Gopher Grill at the University of Minnesota where, probably around 1965, I first heard myself use the word relationship; a little later, the orange formica table of a federal prison where “the man I live with” (there is still no other term) was serving a sentence for draft resistance; and the second-hand tables of a dozen apartments, the wooden farmhouse table of a short-lived commune—table after table, friend after friend, rehashing our hardly ended (or not ended) childhoods. I may have the tables wrong; maybe the formica one was in the farmhouse, the oak one in the prison, maybe the chairs in the prison were orange and the tables gray. But they are fixtures, nailed down, not to be moved: memories.” ¹⁰

“It would be impossible to look into a past, even a happy past (especially a happy one), were it not for the impersonality that dwells in the most intimate fragments, the integuments that bind even obscure lives to history and, eventually, history to fiction, to myth. I will hold up negative after family negative to the light. I will dwell. Dwell in the house of the dead and in the living house of my relatives. I’m after junk. I want to make something out of what my family says is nothing. I suppose that is what I was up to when my grandmother called me out of the vestibule, away from the bookcase and the views of Prague, to eat my dinner with everybody else…” ¹¹

“We are haunted by history because we denied its reality when it was the present. It keeps coming back, as Kendura says. It will keep coming back until we get it right.” ¹²

“We are part of the evidence that all that raw material from survivors and witnesses has gone out of journalism, even out of the testament of history, and has plunged into the psychic life of all of us. The horrors and the sadness, the endless mourning, is floating there, careening to be transformed. Looking, in a world, for culture. As I am.” ¹³

My second phase of research began with a movement and media exercise: I was interested in the way spoken words impact movement and the perception of that movement. As an experiment, I used a video camera to record several minutes of movement and images. After gathering this data, I uploaded the footage onto the computer and edited the material down to the most vivid images and phrases. In selecting the text to use in this experiment, I turned to text from Tony Kushner’s Angels in America¹⁴ for several reasons. First, this text was from a play, and consequently written to be spoken aloud. Secondly, one of the main characters, Harper, addresses the audience in a way that I found to be similar to a letter. I read her monologues and chose sentences from several, so as not to focus on one particular segment and get a more comprehensive view of the character. I also sought a secondary source, Succulent Wild Woman¹⁵, because it was written as an inspirational, self-empowerment book for women, in a style reminiscent of a letter to a close friend. Thematically, I found that both of these texts were similar to the correspondence I had been reading, and addressed areas that were important to these women, as well as women in a more contemporary setting.

After selecting the words and sentences I was interested in using, I compiled them randomly, without considering how they would fit or relate to the movement¹⁶. Then, I recorded myself speaking the text and layered it over the video clip¹⁷. Another way I explored the interaction of text and sound was layering different choices of music over pre-recorded video of rehearsals and movement phrases.

The third segment of my research was based in observation of how paper itself was used as a theatrical object. I observed several dance performances including Cloudless¹⁸ and Stream of (Sub)conscious¹⁹, where paper was used as a prop. To further this exploration, I teamed up with another member of the European Performance class of spring 2008, Katie Elhoffer. Katie has a background in costume design, and she and I discussed the ways we could utilize paper in costuming: creating costumes made entirely out of paper or deconstructing a paper costume piece by piece onstage. From a design standpoint, both of these options are logistically challenging; Katie choose this as her final project and began a separate research project that focused on the use of paper in costuming.

Throughout the process I kept my own journal, which included writing letters to myself and other close friends. I also sought letters that I had received from friends for my dramaturgical process. Another beneficial exercise for me was the creation my dramaturgy pages. They reflect my process in that they allowed me to experiment with images and text on paper, to examine the stereotypical ways paper is used, and to explore the ways paper can be used to translate an idea.

My first page was a general overview of what I wanted to explore: sketches of people with overlays of paper. My second was a very literal interpretation of words in a letter, stained with coffee and having the appearance of being read over many times. The third of my pages was a statement on the power of words. Here I used the metaphor of scrabble, playing with the idea that words have weight and consequence. My final page was a paper doll in a sea of other paper dolls, but unique because the cut-out held all of the images and labels she had acquired.

Conclusions:

My research thus far has pointed me towards the ways language and words play into our daily lives, and in doing so leave a trail of our history for others to follow. This research has led me to areas broader than I had originally anticipated, but in ways that clarified the direction a more specific exploration has to take. For example, rather than focusing on a single author or correspondent, I was able to draw from many sources and in so doing discover that there were several universal themes in the letters. This knowledge will provide a much fuller pool of knowledge to draw from in Paris, where I plan to continue following the trail of “histories” I discover.

Since I plan to explore the physicality of paper in the workshops of Mélisey, I will be looking to incorporate the body in motion as a physical “recording device,” exploring the body as a site for memory, as well the implications of actually writing words on the body with pens or markers. In this way, I will investigate the ways that the human form can embody the functions of paper in terms of translation and storing material. Paper costumes will further underline this work.

I am currently planning on three sections to the piece I will present in June. First, exploring paper costumes as a mask or as an outline of the body. The next section will deconstruct the paper costumes and begin to use the body alone as recorder, integrating words and text together. A final section would reconstruct the paper merely as a prop, removing the implications it had as a translator and dealing with it in its most basic essence—physical material.

While in Paris, I plan to continue my research in the visual arts as well. I plan to see the Marie d’Orléans exhibit²⁰ in the Louvre, to further explore how a woman artist expresses herself in sculpture and portraiture. I also plan to visit the Musée Cluny to explore women artists and portraiture, as it is another way of recording a life. Additionally, I hope to view a number of live performances with similar themes to my dramaturgy. I hope to interact with these performances as an audience member and to reinterpret them actively and in continuity with my own creative research project.

The next phase of my research will include a further exploration of movement and choreography particularly incorporating the themes I discovered in my dramaturgy: relationship, love, history and creativity. I plan to utilize two or three other dancers in my choreography, as well as the use of paper in costuming and deconstructing paper costume pieces. This will include further collaboration with Katie Elhoffer. Ultimately, I plan to use both the texts I have compiled, as well as text generated from dancers in the choreographic process.