COVER IMAGE(S) IN NO TIME. A Retrospective of Ideas in the choreography of Polly Motley SEPTEMBER 19-OCTOBER 19, 2014

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1 COVER IMAGE(S) IN NO TIME A Retrospective of Ideas in the choreography of Polly Motley SEPTEMBER 19-OCTOBER 19, 2014 with dancers Paul Besaw, John Jasperse, Diane Madden, Polly Motley, Lisa Nelson, Shelley Senter, Stacy Spence, Avi Waring, Willow Wonder Video by Molly Davies; Video programming, editing, and camera: Philip Roy Sound by Sean Clute and John King

Performance as Exhibition The activation of exhibition space has been expanding throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, from poetry in the galleries, to one-time performances, to gallery as studio,

2 Performance as Exhibition The activation of exhibition space has been expanding throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, from poetry in the galleries, to one-time performances, to gallery as studio, and now viewing dance performance as a contemporary art exhibition. In No Time by choreographer Polly Motley exists within the exhibition space not as a spectacle or a one-time occurrence, but as an ongoing installation viewed critically within the context of the contemporary art world. This perspective allows the viewer to reimagine what visual art can be, moving the viewer to consider performance as installation. In No Time blends the concept of gallery as studio or working space with the recent shift in museums to highlight dance performance as an integral part of programming. But by devoting a gallery to dance performance for a traditional exhibition length term, it pushes the boundaries of our perception and expectations of gallery or museum exhibits. Polly Motley s work is seen as a charged multimedia installation; a visual narrative. As with photographs, paintings, and sculpture, this exhibit tells a story, elucidates ideas of Motley s 30+ year practice, and conceptually combines past, present and future. But more specifically, it draws attention to movement and being - at times focusing on ordinary, (seemingly) unremarkable movements that contemplatively become singular and immense in their intentions. Polly Motley investigates the thread of ideas in her 30+ year career as they wind throughout her practice, and through a multitude of collaborators - in video, sound, and dance. The format of creating multi-media installations where participants become part of the space is not new for Motley. She and collaborator Molly Davies, video artist, have been doing this for years. They have used entire buildings for sitespecific durational projects. In No Time pushes this trajectory and presents a multi-layered working studio environment that additionally functions as a focused and singular contemporary art installation. It exists over a longer period, and functions both when Motley and collaborators are absent and when they are actively and physically present and engaged in the space. The performance is the exhibition. The movement or non-movement is the piece. It hangs not on a wall but in space, constantly shifting our attention and layering complexities of meaning. It questions how we exhibit movement, change, and process-based art. Rachel Moore Curator & Assistant Director September 19, 2014 Image: Lauren Stagnitti

Image: Lauren Stagnitti Fine Dancing I often find myself dancing a certain way, wondering how long it s going to last, riding the changing moment, letting it take me where it will.

3 Image: Lauren Stagnitti Fine Dancing I often find myself dancing a certain way, wondering how long it s going to last, riding the changing moment, letting it take me where it will. Sometimes it carries me to places where time is beyond irrelevant; it stops. Looking back at my performance-making all these years, I see how much I value the experience of no time. It is the finest dancing I know. moment to moment surprise. How, when and where does each element affect the other? It asks questions about composition and duration, about structure and scores, about what the mind does when dancing. IN NO TIME is an experiment. How will we dance when there is no end in sight except the dancing? This work is yours; yours to make of what you will. May it carry you away into your own no time. IN NO TIME the dancing is part of a whole. It is a collaboration with sound and video that is a Polly Motley

4 entertain ˌentərˈtān verb [ with obj. ] ORIGIN late Middle English: from French entretenir, based on Latin inter among + tenere to hold. As in to entertain an idea.

A note on how to read this essay: The contextual essay is by nature an act of translation, an attempt to provide a verbal landscape into which non-verbal work can be placed, a more concrete pathway

5 A note on how to read this essay: The contextual essay is by nature an act of translation, an attempt to provide a verbal landscape into which non-verbal work can be placed, a more concrete pathway by which it can be approached. But of course, Polly Motley s dances are their own pathways into themselves. So I invite you to read this essay as you might view an aerial photograph: not as a replacement for the experience of walking the terrain, but as an outside perspective that can be incorporated into an understanding of your surroundings. It is my hope that reading these words might help you reflect on a body of work, as writing them has helped me to do. POLLY MOTLEY: MAKING SENSE OF TIME by Sara Smith As the time right now is all there is...entire being, the entire world, exists in the time of each and every now. Uji, Dōgen Zenji Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it is caught in the Fabric of the world. Eye and Mind, Maurice Merleau- Ponty Intentional Attentiveness I have spent the past few months talking with Polly Motley about her thirty-plus years of dance making. This project has had a strange effect on me I have found myself reflecting on my daily activities as if in retrospect. It s an impulse toward condensed historical analysis: What does this moment look like? How will I remember it? Is sitting in this chair with my notebook, right now, the seed for important future events? I can only imagine that the process of preparing for her show In No Time: A Retrospective of Ideas has been stranger still for Polly, as it has required attending to the present moment in her creative life while simultaneously cataloging past ones. Indeed, simultaneity is central to the dancing itself. Deep awareness is at the heart of the scores Polly develops for her solo and group improvisational dance work. These are dances of radical attentiveness, active meditations on elemental processes with aesthetic, somatic, and philosophical implications. Seeing and Breathing, Extreme Repose, Weight/Wait these scores and others focus attention where it usually isn t: on automatic body processes, on duration, on architectural spaces. Polly writes, The choreography is the performance of experience. The scores are ways of knowing, being, imagining, relating, playing. It s a survival strategy: how to keep from becoming complacent. Each score in her repertoire has a particular, unmuddied center with far-reaching associations. Here s one for beginners: Seeing and Breathing Walk, stand or sit. Put your attention on the processes of seeing. Put your attention on the processes of breathing. Change between walking, standing and sitting if/when you like. When you notice that your mind has moved elsewhere, bring your attention back to the processes of seeing and breathing. Try it. It s not easy. To do this work well requires rigorous openness and practiced perceptual skill, but it s Polly s particular and wonderful interest that the work also be fun. Her scores offer opportunities to experience the pleasures of being. It doesn t surprise me that Polly works this way. The physical play of her dances has a direct relationship to her history with contemplative practices outside of the studio. As a young woman she made the decision to leave

6 the monastic life of the convent, taking with her Thomas Merton s writings on contemplation and existentialism. Her mind is extremely active and asks for places to land. Her early use of scores (Count 25, Dancing the Numbers) relied on counting structures as a way to engage with and manage fear and anxiety while performing. With all of Polly s scores, there is a mandate for pleasure as well as allowance for any natural progression inside the score or away from it. She believes wholeheartedly in cultivating what Barbara Dilley calls kinesthetic delight, moving in a way that is joyful to the dancer (also not as easy as it sounds). Her insistence on feeling physical and intellectual enjoyment inside this work and on a liberal interpretation of the rules of the score are not trivial points I think here again about her rejection of the restrictiveness of the convent. Polly says in the score for Weight/Wait: You will notice the mind move. This improvisational dancing exemplifies Rilke s famous dictum Love the questions themselves, or what in Buddhism is called the don t-know mind. Polly s artistic process involves language reading and writing are integral but the investigation is somatic. John Cage said, We are simple-minded enough to think that if we were saying something we would use words. We are rather doing something. The meaning of what we do is determined by each one who sees and hears it. Likewise, Polly writes, The performances are not trying to say anything. Through these forms/scores we simply are how we are, we transform to something different, transform again, affect each other, and experience ourselves as part of the whole. This tradition of using scores to attend to the moment has its Western concert dance roots in the compositional ideas of John Cage and Merce Cunningham, further expanded by post-modern dance artists like Yvonne Rainer, Deborah Hay, and Barbara Dilley. Like these artists, Polly works with formal experimentation in her choreography, blurring boundaries between the sacred and the mundane, the performative and the pedestrian, and between art disciplines. There s an affinity with installation art: an aestheticized environment, and time, space, and conceptual parameters have been set, and anything happening inside of this is the dance. There is no proscenium. As audience members, we are invited to direct our own experience and to interpret what we see. In No Time When I think about the phrase in no time in relation to Polly s choreography, I think both of a rush of time, as in, in no time flat, as well as a kind of suspended time. This suspended moment contains meditative possibilities, spaces of compositional potential. And relationships: to bodies, to spaces, to objects. In Polly s no time, the evolving present is composed and carefully attended to in a way that considers these relationships. She says Notice time. This means what it means; it is not a metaphor. The idea that time has characteristics to notice is no small thing. There are parallels between how time functions in Polly s work and the notion of space-time in physics. In this concept, space and time are interwoven. Hermann Minkowski (one of Einstein s teachers) said Space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality. Physicists understand this in the same way that dancers understand the mind and the body as inseparable (we sometimes call this bodymind ). Body, mind, space, and time are interdependent pieces of a whole experience in Polly s dances, components to be played with while composing in

7 real time. Philosophical concepts of time and consciousness are closely related, too: St. Augustine, Heraclitus, Zeno, Heidegger, Husserl. Eastern and Western philosophical traditions include the work of thinkers who saw time, space, and the body as inextricably linked. Merleau-Ponty and Zen master Dōgen, separated by several centuries, both wrote about the embodiment of time and space, and of the interrelatedness of past, present, and future. Finally, I think of Proust in relation to Merleau-Ponty and this past-present-future oneness, because literature is how the poetic implications of time and cultural memory have been documented most lastingly. And because Polly is a reader; books come up often in our conversations. Proust seems especially appropriate here, because of his writing on time, yes, but also because in my lifetime, Remembrance of Things Past was retranslated as In Search of Lost Time, which taught me about how powerful a shift in framing can be. In Swann s Way, Proust wrote: For it always happened that when I awoke like this, and my mind struggled in an unsuccessful attempt to discover where I was, everything would be moving round me through the darkness: things, places, years. My body, still too heavy with sleep to move, would make an effort to piece together and to give a name to the house in which it must be living. Its memory, the composite memory of its ribs, knees, and shoulderblades offered it a whole series of rooms in which it had at one time or another slept Proust is drawing attention not just to the union of time, architecture, and body, but also to the potential of liminal spaces to put us in a frame of mind in which more expansive associations and observations are possible. Deep improvisational dancing, like sleep, can facilitate an awareness of embodied connections that isn t usually possible. Every state within this space is permissible and can yield new knowledge, as long as a participant stays aware. Look up awareness in Roget s thesaurus, and you will find aliveness, attentiveness, consciousness, experience, intimacy, perception, realization, recognition the same words I have written in my notebook during my conversations with Polly over the past few months. Extreme Repose, perhaps Polly s simplest score, has at its heart the idea that just lying around is a vital human activity, an energy state that should be attended to like any other movement in a dance. As in Proust s description of waking, the parenthetical final instruction for this score emphasizes the potential for building new connections and understandings while away from the composition. As in Polly s other scores, I can find here a template for living with deliberateness and humility. Find/Embody a position on the floor that is completely comfortable and relaxed. Enjoy it. Stay there as long as you are comfortable. Re-pose when necessary. Repeat. (this may be done with eyes open or closed; If you fall asleep, try to continue the process when you wake up.) Image: Cori Olinghouse in Video Portrait Works referenced: Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dōgen. San Francisco: North Point Press, Merleau-Ponty, M., (1964a), Eye and Mind in The Primacy of Perception, Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press Polly Motley, A Repertoire of Scores and Notes on the Choreography (personal papers) Cage, John. In This Day in Silence; Lectures and Writings. Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press, Lorentz, H. A. The Principle of Relativity; a Collection of Original Memoirs on the Special and General Theory of Relativity. New York: Dover, Proust, Marcel. Swann s Way. New York, N.Y: Penguin Books, Sara Smith is an interdisciplinary artist, choreographer and librarian living in Massachusetts. She returned to her native New England in 2006, after ten years of choreographing and performing in New York and North Carolina, and her choreography, installations and designs have been seen and heard at venues throughout the Northeast. She has an MFA in Dance from Sarah Lawrence College and an MLS from Simmons College. She was previously the editor of Body/Language, a journal of critical and theoretical writing on dance, movement and performance. She currently is the editor of KINEBAGO.

Biographies & Websites: All biographies can be found at: helenday.

com John Jasperse: johnjasperse.org Polly Motley: pollymotley.com Sean Clute: seanclute.

com Image: Lauren Stagnitti Acknowledgements: THANK YOU to the collaborators who embody this work:

Spence, Avi Waring, Willow Wonder, and guests Maura Gahan and Hanna Satterlee, and to Cori Olinghouse,

To Rachel Moore for the invitation and to Nathan, Katherine, and Susan for supporting it.

To the team at Danspace Project in NYC: Judy Hussie, Melinda Ring, Jenn Joy, Lydia Bell and Susan

Special thanks to Motoe Landsman for her generous recordings, to Stefan Jacobs for consultation, and

Thank you to Steve Ames for early help, Lauren Stagnitti for the photos, Doug, Maralena and Jodi for

My deepest respect and honor to Barbara Dilley whose teachings integrate the mind and the body, being

8 Biographies & Websites: All biographies can be found at: helenday.com/east-gallery-current#in_no_time_artist_bios In addition: John King: johnkingmusic.com John Jasperse: johnjasperse.org Polly Motley: pollymotley.com Sean Clute: seanclute.net Maura Gahan: Hanna Satterlee: hannasatt.wordpress.com Image: Lauren Stagnitti Acknowledgements: THANK YOU to the collaborators who embody this work: Paul Besaw, Sean Clute, John Jasperse, John King, Diane Madden, Lisa Nelson, Shelley Senter, Stacy Spence, Avi Waring, Willow Wonder, and guests Maura Gahan and Hanna Satterlee, and to Cori Olinghouse, Joyce S. Lim, Ellen Smith-Ahern and Jeremy Olson for precedents. To Rachel Moore for the invitation and to Nathan, Katherine, and Susan for supporting it. To the Vermont Community Foundation and The New England Foundation of the Arts. To the team at Danspace Project in NYC: Judy Hussie, Melinda Ring, Jenn Joy, Lydia Bell and Susan Rethorst for Retro(Intro)spective, an inspiring model. Special thanks to Motoe Landsman for her generous recordings, to Stefan Jacobs for consultation, and to Adam Blue and Bente Torjusen of AVA Gallery in Lebanon, NH for a beautiful workspace. Thank you to Steve Ames for early help, Lauren Stagnitti for the photos, Doug, Maralena and Jodi for their willingness. To Addison and Brandon for the muscle and to Pat and Joost for their constancy. My deepest respect and honor to Barbara Dilley whose teachings integrate the mind and the body, being and doing, and to Joan Jonas whose exemplary work changed my way of thinking about video and performance. Very special gratitude to Sara Smith for her assiduous thinking, reading, writing and illuminating perspectives. My highest regards to Molly Davies and Philip Roy for expertise, curiosity, humor, creativity and cheer from beginning to end, and for the poetry they make throughout. HDAC SPONSORS REPORTER TODAY.COM Funded in part by the New England Foundation for the Arts National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation

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