The Lights in Marfa: A Reflection on Dancing in the Desert

If you drive the stretch of Texas road between Marfa and Alpine for about 10 minutes, you will come across a big dome on your right hand side where people come from all over just to stargaze. I am 1 of 40 plus people who have come to watch the performance tonight, this natural phenomenon that the locals call the Marfa Lights. They surf just above the horizon like gigantic fireflies, magnetically pulling towards and away from each other. Some of the beams turn as if to look back at you and it is easy to be hypnotized by the sheer beauty of their celestial glow.

Rarely does it happen that I am engaged by an environment so deeply that I allow myself to be completely overtaken. I have grown so far away from the natural world. My metropolitan life filled with concrete and skyscrapers has reduced me into a consecutive series of meetings and rehearsals and performances, so much that I forget about nature and all its dances. I am always working inside walls. I realize I have not seen stars as intense as this in years.

So now, in Marfa, encased between two deserts (one outside filled with humidity and the other one sweltering inside my core) I feel blessed to have practiced the art of improvisational dance where I could finally begin to melt away all the dryness that has engulfed me for so long. For the past week I’ve been in the presence of others, much like myself, who have come from all over the nation to study a performance technique called Ensemble Thinking.

Rebecca Bryant, Kelly Dalrymple, and Andrew Wass are the leaders of Marfa Dance Ranch 2009, a program that is supported in part by the Marfa Live Arts. I’m surprised that such a small town in the middle of nowhere has an art scene, and, a pretty intricate one at that. It’s a mixture of wealthy New York transplants, blue collar intellects, and pure everyday folks. Early on, I learn nothing is what it seems in Marfa.

There is something about leaving everything I recognize for the tumbleweed, open sky, and 100 plus degree weather of Marfa that allows real creative change to occur and sink deep into my fibers. Something about not worrying about getting to the next place to do that nextthing allows me to open up enough to explore what’s really happening inside my movement-self.

My transformation is a silent color that only I can see and hear. But I can show it. My body can show what it knows and has learned. Lower Left has taught me performance compositional forms and tools such as…

I don’t know…yes
Fussy
Economy
Finding/creating status
Finding the hot spot
Using spirals, kinetic, chaotic, and/or neurological states
and most of all Inviting being seen (which is probably my favorite)

All of the tools that I have learned while studying with Lower Left have been in me all along. However they have been less explicitly projected in my choreography. I know that my concerns are not traditional choreographic ones, but I am learning how to be more explicit in specifying what my performance concerns are. Traditional composition tools are certainly meaningful in making live performance art, but one does not have to limit himself to these elements to have a successful piece. I am highly attracted to dissidence and the avant-garde; to kitsch, spectacle, and humor. But I know that I need to pay stronger attention to form and detail if I’m going to be understood by my audience and competitive as an American dance-maker. I’m certainly eager to see how these ideas express themselves in my forth-coming work.

Now having completed this workshop, much about the movement I want to use for An Expectation of Violence has become clearer. The vocabulary that I want to use in this project and the exercises that I will use during warm-up have all solidified. I’ve learned that there is a perfectly balanced place between improvisation and set movement where an articulate, fully embodied idea is best conveyed. I love that place, and now that I’ve felt it in my own body, I can begin to carry it into my group oriented process. I feel that I am at a place where I can communicate what I want artistically from my dancers, and have a straight forward vocabulary to get there.