Schneemann\'s Crystal

Manuskript Judith Rodenbeck: Text 2.000 words, 12.000 signs incl. Currently 2600 words, 16.487 signs incl.

 

Schneemann’s Crystal: Water Light/Water Needle Judith Rodenbeck In the spring of 1964 a friend gave Carolee Schneemann a ticket to travel from Paris, where she had just concluded the triumphant presentation of Meat Joy, to Venice for the Biennale. “I walked off the train and across the station into startling reversals of figure and ground, water and stone, dazzling light and shadow, solidity, transparency,” Schneemann recalled in her notes. “It seemed musical, contrapuntal: echoing footsteps in narrow alleys, the surge of bodies, the constant unexpected appearance of water lapping at the side of a street, the recurring verticality of steeples, spires, posts, masts, and the human figure itself—cubistic, spatially ambiguous. Palaces rose out of the water—closed, impenetrable, or festive with lines of blowing clothes. Moving fluidly by vaporetto along the irregular canals induced a sensation of floating, suspension.”1 It was Schneemann’s first encounter with this filigreed oasis, its reflective properties, the confusions of figure and ground, the play of liquidities, orthogonals, and crinoline built form. The imagery for a new performance began to shape itself. By November of 1965, the concept had developed into “an elaborate, dimensional work using a network of pulleys and nets in space on which the performers, lights, materials, and contact microphones move.”2 Nearly fifty years later, this technical prospectus translated into a visually telegraphic recollection of the piece that had emerged: “[Water Light/Water Needle was] based on my having been in Venice and the amazing sense of merging and melting between sky and water and questioning the dimensional weight of the human body between these illusory, shifting essences and tonalities. What’s sky, what’s water and how do you carry your own gravitational weight? It’s about gravity and an aspect of almost floating the body horizontally across space.”3 Water Light/Water Needle was conceived as an aerial work for ropes rigged across the Grand Canal, off the Piazza San Marco. The Venetian mode is one of registers: a city sliced up                                                                                                               1 Carolee Schneemann, More Than Meat Joy: Performance Works and Selected Writings, 2nd edition, Bruce R. McPherson, ed. (Kingston, NY: Documentext, 1997), 103. 2 CS to Aldo Bruzzichelli, 23 November 1965, Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of Carolee Schneemann and her Circle, Kristine Stiles, ed. (Durham, NC & London: Duke, 2010), 97. 3 Gia Kourlas interview, “Carolee Schneemann Talks About Judson Dance Theater,” Time Out (16 September, 2012); http://www.timeout.com/newyork/dance/carolee-schneemann-talksabout-judson-dance-theater. 1/7  Rodenbeck_Judith_Schneemann_JR2-­‐clean.docxRodenbeck_Judith_Schneemann_JR2.docx    

Manuskript Judith Rodenbeck: Text 2.000 words, 12.000 signs incl. Currently 2600 words, 16.487 signs incl.

 

by canals, by an architecture in which one element speaks across the public space of the piazza to another element, by the vectors of an empire whose territories were liquid rather than solid. Schneemann’s title verbally echoed its crystalline reflective properties, sketching the realm of the visible against an opaque surface (water/light) and then took that surface as the ground upon which an architectural element was elevated (water/needle), rotating gas and solid through liquid. In performance these pairings would be articulated in the figure/ground relation of bodies dressed in white reflected across the horizontal register of ropes and against delineated ground, of body melding with and pressing against body, of audience on the ground in “water” and performers, like filigree, shimmering above. In a letter penned early in 1966 to Jean-Jacques Lebel, who had produced Meat Joy, Schneemann described the new project. Meat Joy had deployed ecstatic blossoming formations of dancers across a prepared floor; the new piece, she told Lebel, would be “…all in the air, performers over heads of audience; strange objects.”4 And where Meat Joy celebrated fleshiness, Water Light/Water Needle explored the ethereal. In the publicity for Meat Joy’s New York performance Schneemann had used a sequence of photographic images of a chimpanzee whose frontal address to the recording camera and thus acknowledgement of the viewer is matched by the dynamism of leaping gestures and a body that curls, jumps, spreads akimbo, celebrates motility, set across a fractured collage ground. The same chimpanzee reappears in the poster for Water Light/Water Needle, this time as a line drawing swinging joyfully across the negative space of the blank page on a drawn set of ropes. The reuse of imagery is typical of Schneemann’s recycling, and it serves motivally to tie Meat Joy to Water Light/Water Needle, the first grounded and the latter aerial.5 It also provides a larger clue to some of Schneemann’s concerns. Water Light/Water Needle was first performed in the parish meeting room of St. Mark’s Church on the Bowery in March, 1966, in New York City, and then again several weeks later, for filming purposes, outdoors on the old Havermayer Estate in Mahwah, New Jersey. The New York version took place in a large open room that had two thin steel columns in the middle; three                                                                                                               4 CS to Jean-Jacques Lebel, 7 February 1966, Correspondence Course, 102. And she would add, parenthetically, “(Imagery begun in Venice into Vietnam.)” At the time Schneemann thought the piece would be performed at the Cinematheque. 5 Asked about her early life with animals Schneemann once told an anecdote about a monkey at a zoo, teased by her father, flinging shit at him—a gleeful Oedipal episode, surely, and one that thereby encodes the ape’s actions as fully self-conscious. A further simian motif stands out: the trapeze appears in the score for an early performance, Banana Hands (1962), a piece which predicts Paul McCarthy’s “Bossy Burger” character of some thirty years later. More Than Meat Joy, 26. 2/7  Rodenbeck_Judith_Schneemann_JR2-­‐clean.docxRodenbeck_Judith_Schneemann_JR2.docx    

Manuskript Judith Rodenbeck: Text 2.000 words, 12.000 signs incl. Currently 2600 words, 16.487 signs incl.

 

tiers of ¾ inch manila rope were installed (after extensive structural consultation) using a system of steel supports, pulleys, and rings and were tethered to the walls and the columns, transecting the volume on a loosely rhomboid plan. The audience was seated on the floor beneath. The twohour performance proceeded in five regally paced movements: 1) audience is seated in metaphorical “water”; 2) dancers emerge and move across low ropes; 3) “clouds” rise and fall as dancers move on low and middle ropes, accompanied by tone clusters; 4) clouds rise and fall as dancers move amongst and upon one another on middle and high ropes; 5) to the sounds of Vivaldi dancers move on rope structure and back to their starting points. “I love this work,” Schneemann wrote to her friend Jan Van der Marck, noting the “visual richness” of the piece along with “a very delicate, crystalline quality.” The performers were “very intense and giving” and the technician “amazing, devoted”; “the almost impossible technical complications, the dangerous rigging of the ropes, the plastic ‘clouds’ filled with blinking lights which had to pass through the audience on ropes and pulleys, layer upon layer of newspaper covered with plastic to shine like a sea (covering the entire floor), the Guides—girls in plastic work suits with bamboo poles to seat the audience in the ‘sea’ for their journey…lights, sounds, props, cues…all worked out organically, precisely.”6 In the account of Schneemann’s friend, Rochelle Owens: “The performers…climbed the ropes, walked and swung on the ropes functionally. The character of movement was not acrobatic or balletic but as natural as that of monkeys. I was fascinated by lovely human bodies moving with the skill and innocence of monkeys, making natural faces and sounds while doing physical actions, their spontaneity was delightful!”7 As Carol Bergé recalled, “‘dancers’ moved on heavy rope through air like romantic animals, making a musical score without sounds. A glamorous piece…”8 The richness of the performance and of the lyrical footage generated by its restaging outdoors a few weeks later (which Schneemann would manipulate, optically printing it to redouble the mirror effects), the dear simplicity, was hard won. “The ropes required, more than I ever thought, a great deal of calluses and muscle memory; initially, it was [based on] a series of drawings of bodies almost floating across space on the ropes, and the ropes were at three levels and crisscrossed—some were very high, some were medium height and some were rather low. The instructions for the work have to do with the motion between the ropes; also, every time you come up on another person, your intention has to change and absorb theirs.”9                                                                                                               6 CS to Jan Van der Marck, 2 April 1966, Correspondence Course, 104-6. 7 More Than Meat Joy, 270. 8 More Than Meat Joy, 272. 9 Gia Kourlas interview. 3/7  Rodenbeck_Judith_Schneemann_JR2-­‐clean.docxRodenbeck_Judith_Schneemann_JR2.docx    

Manuskript Judith Rodenbeck: Text 2.000 words, 12.000 signs incl. Currently 2600 words, 16.487 signs incl.

 

An inveterate researcher, Schneemann consistently draws from a broad array of sources in literature, music, biological sciences, current events, and beyond. She has, for example, cited D’Arcy Thompson, the early-twentieth-century mathematician and biologist perhaps best known outside his field for his 1917 book on morphogenesis On Growth And Form, which provides lush illustration of primary and evolving organic configurations, exploring symmetries and patterned sequences, as a crucial influence at certain points. For Thompson, pattern can be natural and motivated at the same time, whether by programming (or score) or environmental response—an observation about emergent structure which neatly aligns with Schneemann’s deliberate conscription of both intention and improvisation in her instructions to performers. A second, less well-known figure whose name recurs in Schneemann’s diaries, her notes, and eventually in her book More Than Meat Joy, is Sir Richard Paget, whose 1930 book, Babel, or The Past, Present, and Future of Human Speech, proposed a theory about the origins of speech. Paget postulated that the expressive body found physical echoes of its larger movements duplicated in the space of the gorge and the mouth, and that this eventually led to the development of speech; he formulated his theory through detailed observation of animal behavior and of human musculature. A 1956 obituary explained: “Paget advocated the theory that the roots of speech lay in universal gestures. Eventually these postures and movements of the body and hands were copied in the mouth and became singular shapes of the oral cavity and of the ancillary bunched tongue.”10 The gesture-speech theory, then, is one of sympathies writ from the macro (communities of bodies) to the micro (the voice box), and operates according to a “logic of contagion” necessarily focused on “energy, vitality, and liveliness as rhetorical elements that cannot be fully accounted for by theories of argumentation grounded primarily in cognition, reason, or epistemics.”11 Thus understood, “speech gestures are communicative because they are both communicable and communal.”12 Animal communication has been a consistent through line for Schneemann, as evidenced by the large body of work concerning a succession of companion animals, beginning with her cat Kitch, whom Schneemann credits with the idea for her first foray into performance. Her interest in Paget concerns his somatic (and transspecies) theory of communication. Schneemann parsed                                                                                                               10 John W. Black, “R. Paget and Human Speech,” Science, New Series 123:3189 (Feb 10, 1956): 215. 11 See Debra Hawhee, “Language as Sensuous Action: Sir Richard Paget, Kenneth Burke, and Gesture-Speech Theory,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 92:4 (2006): 331-354; quote is on 333. 12 Hawhee, 335. 4/7  Rodenbeck_Judith_Schneemann_JR2-­‐clean.docxRodenbeck_Judith_Schneemann_JR2.docx    

Manuskript Judith Rodenbeck: Text 2.000 words, 12.000 signs incl. Currently 2600 words, 16.487 signs incl.

 

this in 1963 in this way: “the muscles of tongue and throat adopt a position in conformity with the muscles with which an act is performed. Instance: gripping, reaching, pulling, and mouth simultaneously grips, reaches, pulls. Then vocal response to body action—choral commentary; the implicit sound gesture and the conscious vocal release on physical act/gesture; here tension of performance and response (evaluation and perhaps psychological frontage…)”13 In fact, Schneemann here has partially copied a passage out of the work of the literary critic Kenneth Burke’s Philosophy of Literary Form.14 Indeed, Burke’s theory of dramatism bears several features that resonate with Schneemann’s own practice. Burke, for instance, held that both “animal nature” and symbol systems motivate human action. Language is the most important of these symbol systems, though obviously there are others, some of which lie in gestural accretions; rhetorical, communicative competence is multimodal, social, aesthetic, and political, not simply linguistic. And Burke viewed “ritual drama as the Ur-form, the ‘hub,’ with all other aspects of human action…as spokes radiating from this hub.”15 Communicable and communal, ritual hub and Ur-form: performance, says Schneemann, is “psychic research for the whole cultural system. That’s part of what we’re doing.”16 In a text on motion written at the time Schneemann observed that “…reorganizing patterns of times and space…when you shift the predictable perceptual base, you begin to unlock structures in the social and political spheres as well…. It might be through something very obvious that simply hasn’t been done before…”17 Notes to performers in Water Light/Water Needle instructed the following: “Think of the ropes as flesh extension—conveyance.                                                                                                               13 More Than Meat Joy, 16-17. 14 The passage is from Kenneth Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action (New Orleans: Louisiana State University Press, 1941), 12; quoted in Hawhee, 344. Here is Burke: “According to Paget’s theory, language arose in this wise: If a man is firmly gripping something, the muscles of his tongue and throat adopt a position in conformity with the muscles with which he performs the acts of gripping. He does not merely grip with his hands; he ‘grips all over.’ Thus in conformity with the act of gripping, he would simultaneously grip with his mouth, by closing his lips firmly. If, now, he uttered a sound with his lips in this position, the only sound he could utter would be m. M therefore is the sound you get when you ‘give voice’ to the posture of gripping.” It is conceivable that Schneemann encountered Paget in researching gesture independently, but in all likelihood she came across this figure via Burke, who was on the faculty at Bennington when she and James Tenney were in residence in Vermont; the first mention of Paget in her diaries is in her notes for Newspaper Event of December 1962. 15 Burke, Philosophy, 3rd edition, 103, quoted in Hawhee, 344. In 1966 Burke writes of man as “the symbol-using animal” in Language as Symbolic Action (Berkeley: University of California, 1966)—the same year the chimpanzee Washoe began to learn American Sign Language—and, of course, the same year as Water Light/Water Needle. 16 Interview with Robert Coe, “More Than Meat Joy,” Performance Art Magazine 1 (1979): 12. 17 More Than Meat Joy, 188. 5/7  Rodenbeck_Judith_Schneemann_JR2-­‐clean.docxRodenbeck_Judith_Schneemann_JR2.docx    

Manuskript Judith Rodenbeck: Text 2.000 words, 12.000 signs incl. Currently 2600 words, 16.487 signs incl.

 

Concentrate on ‘feeling’ HERE—not a literal emotion but a sense of connectedness.”18 As with the work of her Judson colleagues, this connectedness expressed itself in rule-based movements that derived from preparations involving contact improvisation; but in Schneemann’s work, facial expressivity as well as bodily sound was encouraged rather than repressed. Schneemann’s use of ropes here, too, is distinct from, to cite three contemporary works by her colleagues, Simone Forti’s Hangers (1961), or Trisha Brown’s Man Walking Down the Side of a Building or Floor of the Forest (both 1970), for these latter all emphasize gravity’s pull on the individual body, along with neutrality of expression, while in Schneemann’s piece performers traverse one anothers’ bodies, melding and grunting and, importantly, experiencing the ropes not as “there” but as “here,” not as planar constraint but as rotational axis and volumetric edge. For Schneemann, the ropes operate as drawing in space and as social prompt—thematics she would explore repeatedly in other work and which here she playfully takes up in such a way as to exceed the language of her dance colleagues. We can extend this observation further, for the intersecting rhomboids described by the manila ropes combined with the complex reflective movement-images suggest, inter alia, the crystallography of the icosahedron used by dance theorist Rudolf von Laban to describe the kinesphere, the body’s range of motion:19 “The skeleton delineates in its functional as well as expressive movements the edges and inclinations of an invisible spatial crystal.”20 Laban’s choreutics as well as his notational system were well-known to Schneemann’s Judson colleagues, many of who had trained with Robert Dunn, who had taught the system. If anything, Laban provides Schneemann with a second, lapidary theory of “contagion,” for his claim was this: “[Crystallography] explains that the construction of crystalline forms occurs according to the same basic rules as the construction of artistic harmonies in dance, music, speech, poetry and thought.”21 That is, for Laban crystallography provides a fundamental aesthetic grammar (to be sure, a grammar of “harmonies”) that, as shared, implies transferability from one expressive mode to another. Yet inasmuch as Laban’s functional structure serves as constraint, it is visually

                                                                                                              18 More Than Meat Joy, 106. 19 He called his system Choreutics. See: Evelyn Doerr, Rudolf Laban: The Dancer of the Crystal (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2008), especially pp. 82-88; Vera Maletic, Body, Space, Expression: The Development of Rudolf Laban’s Movement and Dance Concepts, Approaches to semiotics 75, Berlin, New York, Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter, 1987 20 Rudolf von Laban, quoted in Maletic, 157 fn 26. 21 Rudolf von Laban, “The World of the Dancer,” The Laban Sourcebook, Dick McCaw, ed. (New York, London: Routledge, 2011), 47. 6/7  Rodenbeck_Judith_Schneemann_JR2-­‐clean.docxRodenbeck_Judith_Schneemann_JR2.docx    

Manuskript Judith Rodenbeck: Text 2.000 words, 12.000 signs incl. Currently 2600 words, 16.487 signs incl.

 

no different than the liquid-filled crystal inhabited by the dancer in Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus. Schneemann “reorganizes” that crystallographic thought, exploring the very terms of its structure through the play licensed by, shifting “the predictable perceptual base”: What is it like to be HERE, swinging not within but around and through the crystal’s edge? Reading Paget, or Burke on Paget, Schneeman had invoked the “vocal response to body action” as the collective articulation of “choral commentary”; sliding back from the chorus to the tension “performance and response,” a deliberate infusion of bodies with voices and voices—“vocal release on physical act/gesture”—with bodies—bodies that intersect, divide, flip, cross, rotate, synchronize, part in kinespheric contagion. We are rotating through the tesseract, the four-dimensional crystallography, of Schneeman’s thought: rotating gas through liquid to solid, from light to needle, from the steam of Meat Joy and to the frozen flash-frame intensities of the performance to come, in 1967, Snows: as Schneemann wrote to her friend Lebel before Water Light/Water Needle had been completed: “Imagery begun in Venice and into Vietnam.”

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