Jacob Burkhardt | Andy Dances, a Memorial for Andy de Groat, at Judson Church September 17, 2019 / 2019

expanding time: centers of a whirling world

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jacob Burkhardt (director) Andy Dances, a Memorial for Andy de Groat, at Judson Church September 17, 2019 / 2019

 

During the night of September 20th, 2019, I dreamt a long dream in which I was dancing—at first making miraculous leaps in the manner of Rudolph Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov, but gradually setting into amazing spins, something that I might have associated more with an ice skating dance than with ballet. The spins were startling tight an intense, a bit like a balletic version of the Turkish whirling dervishes, but without their flowing, whirling skirts; I seemed dressed in a more traditional male ballet outfit that represented more a continuously spinning top instead of the mesmerizing, trance-like movements of the Turkish dancers.

    I have long loved dance, and when I was young I studied briefly with the Joffrey Ballet, as I’ve written elsewhere, after being encouraged to take up dance by Paul Taylor, who I met briefly in Madison, Wisconsin in the late 1960s. In New York, I signed up with the Joffrey company as a student, and after weeks and weeks at the barre doing the traditional dance exercise, the males were called to do a pirouette, my strict dance teacher commenting that I had done it quite well, a comment that thrilled me, even if I soon after began to realize that I would never be a significant dancer given the structure of my body and my late-coming to the art.

     While dance, accordingly, continues to thrill me and I attempt to review it as often as I can, I have never since—particularly given the fact that I am now a 72-year-old with a knee replacement—dreamt about me dancing as brilliant as in the images of my dream.

      Perhaps the dance-opera, The Want, directed by Adam Linder, which I’d seen earlier, stimulated something in my brain. In any event, I was delighted, even if more than a little amused, by my sleeping terpsichorean pleasures. By early morning I was comparing my dance moves, in my mind, with my memories of the hero of Paul Auster’s fiction, Mr. Vertigo, wherein the character Walt learns how to fly. I have certainly had many so-called “flying dreams” throughout my life, which simply evince the grace and will-power in which one can remain vertically in the air for very long periods of time. Sometimes in these dreams I just barely hover over the landscape—without flying off into the sky—proving only to myself that I can maintain a slight spin across the long paths home, probably based on a childhood memory of my long walks home each evening from my high school, from the southern end of town to the north where we lived.

     Every morning, after coffee and toilet, in those days, I perused Facebook and then YouTube, first checking the responses to my own postings and then visiting those of others. On this particular morning I suddenly was greeted by what appeared to be a short film on the choreographer and dancer Andy de Groat. I vaguely remembered his name—I had seen Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach, choreographed by Lucinda Childs and de Groat—but otherwise I knew nothing at all about him and his career. If I try to write on dance, I admit I am no dance critic or expert in the field. Literature, film, these are my specialties and wherein my major contributions lie, along with

a long history of art through my husband, art curator Howard N. Fox.

      In those days, before my work of queer film, I rarely clicked on Facebook offerings, but this morning the video on de Groat called out to me, and the synchronicity and coincidence that have long haunted my life as astounded me yet again as I quickly perceived he had died in January 1, 2019 in France, and what I was now witnessing was his memorial at Judson Church that took me down a rabbit hole that I might never have imagined.

      In fact, the very first figure who appeared to welcome the audience was my dear friend from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Mel Andringa. I momentarily blinked my eyes in disbelief. What was he doing, hosting an event for the dancer in honor of de Groat at Judson Church.

 

     I quickly recognized that their relationship might have harkened back to one of de Groat’s ealy collaborations with Wilson, Deafman Glance (1970), first presented at the University of Iowa where Andriga was then a student/artist/performer. I later brought Andringa and his companion F. John Herbert to perform at Temple University when I was an Assistant Professor there.

     I knew he had long been involved in experimental performance and theater, but now he was discussing personal relationships with so many figures I knew of and whose works I had seen such as Jerome Robbins, Wilson, Christopher Knowles, Deborah Jowitt, and numerous others.  

     The program was more than fascinating:

 

Welcome: Mel Andringa

Andy Dances, excerpt from “Syracuse Sequence” (1975)

with Andy de Groat and Julia Busto; film by Robyn Brentano,

“Get Dancing Poem” and reading by Christopher Knowles, 1975

“Rope Dance,” choreography by Andy de Groat, 1974

Translations Performed by Ritty Ann Burchfield, Charles Dennis, and Buck Wanner,

Reading Text by Deborah Jowitt; read by Sheryl Sutton

Tribute Molissa Fenley

Remarks Robert Wilson on video by Jacob Burckhardt

Tribute Makram Hamdan,

Reading Texts by Andy de Groat; read by Cindy Lubar Bishop, and Robyn Brentano,

“Fan Dance,” choreography by Andy de Groat, (1978) Performed by Martita Abril, Patricia Beaman,

Ritty Ann Burchfield, Satya Celeste, Molissa Fenley, Catherine Galasso,

Patrick Gallagher, John Gutierrez, Makram Hamdan, Meg Harper, K.J. Holmes,

Benjamin Kimitch, Michael O’Rourke, Kathryn Ray, Austin Selden, Viviane Serry,

Vicky Shick, Buck Wanner, and Emily Wassyng.

Remarks by Viviane Serry,

Tribute by Catherine Galasso,

“Willows/Angie’s Waltz” (2018), music: Alan Lloyd; voice: Julius Eastman; playback:

Dizzy Daisy May Schube’t-mahn a.k.a. Andy de Groat; Chamane Simone: Stephanie Bargues; Film: Do Brunet,

Tribute by Frank Conversano,

“Swan Lac,” choreography by Andy de Groat

    Of particular interest were the videos of his “Waiting for Godot Fan Dance,” and his famed “Rope Dance.”

   I hadn’t known previously that de Groat had a romantic relationship with Wilson. Or had I known, moreover, that de Groat was best known for his “spinning” dances, which he did in his own work and in pieces he choregraphed for Wilson and others.

    De Groat himself wrote: “I think of spinning as the base for my dance. There’s something about spinning which just seems kind of present. I can’t explain it.” He goes on to explain it, quite specifically, as the natural movement of dance, tracing it back to several ancient cultures.

     Suddenly this celebration of de Groat’s life seemed to have been recorded particularly for me, and I was slightly frightened by the coincidence of it. I hadn’t even known much about de Groat, let alone that he had recently died. How could I have dancing before I’d truly comprehended it? And why I had come upon this very video the morning after my dream?

    The commentary, videos, and dances were so very stunning, and I suddenly felt I was reliving a world I was never quite involved in previously. In a strange way, it seemed like a slightly out-of-body experience. It was as if my dream called into reality the existence of a figure whom I had been just waiting to meet.

    In my entire life to date (as I revise this essay, now at 79 years of age), I have never once experienced déjà vu, which nearly everyone I know has encountered numerous times. Perhaps my life of synchronicities and coincidence are my version of that experience.

    Finally, I should mention that in 2002, some years previous to this remarkable video, I received a substantial grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, established by John Cage, Jasper Johns, and numerous other artists deeply connected to the Judson Church. In the year I received a grant for poetry, one of my very favorite composers David Lang received a grant, as did Robert Ashley, both icons of avant-garde music and opera for me. I surely met them at that event, but was so in awe I never got to express my appreciation for their art. I never visited the Judson Church, but I remember how furious I was with my beloved friend David Antin when, in one of his more or less unscripted talk pieces he mocked their activities to a class of students at CalArts, and I told him so in no uncertain terms how I felt he was wrong and actually delimiting the imagination of the students.. But then David was a remarkable poet, who despite his wife Eleanor’s fantasies of being a member of the long past world of ballet, knew very little about dance.

    It was a bit confusing to me when I told a straight friend about the piece I had just written and he looked blankly at me, wondering why it might be of gay interest. Beyond the fact that almost all of the figures about which I had written were statedly gay, I was momentarily taken aback. I answered: "Straight people—unless perhaps they are in some religious elevated or drugged-out state of mind—generally do not spin." 

 

Los Angeles, September 21, 2019

Reprinted from World Theater, Opera, and Performance (September 2019).