this page was last updated
July 14, 2003
Artists’ Talk:
after
the ball...
by Penelope Thomas
Sue Newman sat upstage right with her accordion and told
us that there is no cure for sexual jealousy every week for months.
Each time she had a funnier accent and gesture, and Kate Story
and I needed the entertainment as we girl-wrestled our way through
the choreography for the danciest piece in the suite of pieces,
The Cure for Sexual Jealousy, presented at the Gordon
Best Theatre on May 29 with direction and writing by Susan Spicer
and design by Martha Cockshutt.
I fell only once in that show, from a grand-jete done laterally
traveling in a half-circle, supported by one arm on the floor. It
was supposed to end in a push-up position, but it didn’t. Somewhere
in the process the blue ball gown and crinoline strangled my legs,
and down it all went. Fortunately, it was mostly hidden by the sheer
size and frou-frou of the costume, but I wish I hadn’t said: "Oh
crap” quite that loudly.
We had a few generous and thoughtful email responses to the work,
and lots more verbal ones. The Cure Collective was sort of
puzzled by many people’s reticence to talk or write about the first
piece, The Cure for Sexual Jealousy — the one I fell
in. Was it the subject matter: too sensitive and triggering for
some? Was it the medium: dance is abstract and sometimes more challenging
to talk about than theatre? Was it the fact that, as something a
bit more polished than the other pieces, it didn’t invite the kind
commentary that the more obviously work-in-progress components did?
Or did it suck? (We still want to know! Email us at thecure4sexual@netscape.net)
The possibility of it being a dance-related reticence hooks me
in somehow. Why? I don’t know. I like dance. I like words. But I
am always unsatisfied by the way words and dancing come together,
and all the scholarship problematizing the slippage between them…you
know, the bedtime reading that puts colons in the middle of words
and always (un)does all of its own re/workings from the margins…it
gets up my nose. I’m hungry for the experience of formulating or
receiving words about dance that touch the experience of dancing,
or at least touch the slippage in some way that gets close to what
it’s like to spend twenty-four years training your body to do something
articulate and then actually, non-metaphorically, slip.
|
