(Studies in Dance History) Katherine Profeta - Dramaturgy in Motion - at Work On Dance and Movement Performance (2015, University of Wisconsin Press)

Dramaturgy in Motion
S o c i e t y o f D a n c e H i s t o ry S c h o l a r s
The Society of Dance History Scholars [SDHS] advances the field of dance
studies through research, publication, performance, and outreach to audiences
across the arts, humanities, and social sciences. As a constitue nt member of
the American Council of Learned Societies, SDHS holds annual conferences;
publishes new scholarship through its book series, proceedings, and Conversations
across the Field of Dance Studies; collaborates regularly with peer institutions in the
United States and abroad; and presents yearly awards for exemplary scholarship.
SDHS President: T
homas F. DeFrantz, Duke University
SDHS Editorial Board

Chair: Sarah Davies Cordova, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
Sherril Dodds, Temple University

Norma Sue Fisher-Stitt, York University
Jens Richard Giersdorf, Marymount Manhattan College
Ellen Graff, The New School, New York
Vida Midgelow, Middlesex University
Gay Morris, Independent Scholar, New York
Rebecca Rossen, University of Texas at Austin
At Work on Dance and
Movement Performance
Katherine Profeta
The University of Wisconsin Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Profeta, Katherine, author.

Dramaturgy in motion: at work on dance and movement performance / Katherine Profeta.
pages cm — (Studies in dance history)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-299-30594-9 ( pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Dramaturges. 2. Dance—Technique.
3. Dance—Production and direction. 4. Choreographic collaboration.
I. Title. II. Series: Studies in dance history (Unnumbered).
GV1782.P76 2015
792.8—dc23
2015009229
To
James
Asako
Pehoula
Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Preface xi
Introduction: Where Did This Dramaturg

Come From? 3
1 Text and Language 24
2 Research 61
3 Audience 88
4 Movement 139
5 Interculturalism 168
Postface 210
Acknowledgments 215
Appendix 219
Notes 225
Bibliography 243
Index 251
vii
Illustrations
Figure 1. Notes from first Geography workshop xv
Figure 2. Author translating for Geography performers before dress
rehearsal xvii
Figure 3. “Tire Talk” section of Geography 33
Figure 4. Tree 39
Figure 5. “Wall/Hole” section of How Can You Stay in the House
All Day and Not Go Anywhere? (2010) 41
Figure 6. Walter Carter 41
Figure 7. “Mississippi/Duluth” section of Come home Charley Patton
in rehearsal 47
Figure 8. How Can You . . . ? workshop residency 51
Figure 9. Djédjé Djédjé Gervais and Ralph Lemon in Tree 57
Figure 10. Okwui Okpokwasili during How Can You . . . ? 83
Figure 11. Okwui Okpokwasili in Untitled 84
Figure 12. Helen Kent and Ralph Lemon, 2001 104
Figure 13. Okwui Okpokwasili, Katherine Profeta, and Ralph Lemon,
at work on Patton 118
Figure 14. Okwui Okpokwasili and Ralph Lemon in rehearsal
for Patton 119
Figure 15. Okwui Okpokwasili, Katherine Profeta, David Thomson,
and Ralph Lemon in rehearsal for Patton 124
Figure 16. “Wall/Hole” section of How Can You . . . ? 134
Figure 17. “Wall/Hole” section of How Can You . . . ? 134
Figure 18. “Sunshine Room” section of How Can You . . . ? 136
Figure 19. Author in rehearsal for Patton 138
Figure 20. Geography 144
Figure 21. Didier “James” Akpa and Djédjé Djédjé Gervais in
“Endurance” section of Geography 145
Figure 22. Asako Takami in Tribhanga pose 154
ix
x I l l u s tra t i o n s
Figure 23. Asako Takami in Tree 161

Figure 24. Gesel Mason and David Thomson in How Can You . . . ? 161
Figure 25. Omagbitse Omagbemi and Darrell Jones in
How Can You . . . ? 161
Figure 26. Darrell Jones 163
Figure 29. Darrell Jones, Omagbitse Omagbemi, Gesel Mason,
David Thomson, and Djédjé Djédjé Gervais in “Wall/Hole”
section of How Can You . . . ? 165
Figure 30. Mr. Li in performance of Tree 199
Figure 31. Katherine Profeta and Ralph Lemon at work in 2014 212
Preface
I’ve always been drawn to performance, and I’ve never much cared if the people
performing were dancing, or acting, or sitting still in silence. As long as it was
somehow built upon a heightened consideration of the moment passing, I was
curious, and quite possibly fascinated. I began working as a dramaturg before I
knew to call it that, but it wasn’t a singular career choice. At the outset of my
professional life (though let’s be clear—“professional” in the early years did
not mean well-paid, or even paid at all) I also worked as a choreographer/
performer for a theater company (still do), a dancer/choreographer in a perform
ance collective, a props craftsperson, and a stage and film electrician. Drama-
turgy was just one of many tacks I took to help construct, and get closer to, that
place in space and time, that magical condition, where everything was real life
but not real life. For me, dramaturgy was one of many ways to engage perform
ance’s elusive, paradoxical promise: that in those heightened moments I might
somehow both escape daily existence and answer existential questions, both
avoid and encounter the materials of the everyday.
Performance was also where collaborative, quasi-familial relationships would
form—some very temporary, some life long—assembling and disassembling
around short-term goals. There may have been a polite division between art
and life, but it was certainly not a bright line, and at the very least the two were
built in parallel. Performance was where the curious could research human
behavior and expressive capabilities, both onstage and off. Performance was a
laboratory for everything else: ontology, epistemology, anthropology, sociology,
politics. I understood “performance as research” before that phrase took on its
current cachet; I knew I was in that rarified world to explore what I didn’t
know about the larger world—what it was, what it was not, and what it could
become—and to test my hypotheses, over and over and over. At first there was
the hope of eventual mastery. Eventually I saw that even as I accumulated useful
knowledge and experience, an embrace of not-knowing and beginning-again
was the more valuable gift.
xi
xii P re f a c e
It’s no accident that I’m writing a book about dramaturgy after an early
career spent in a myriad of roles. In a culture full of specialists, dramaturgy offers
one of the last refuges for the obstinate generalist. It offers a field of activity for
those who would like nothing more than to engage, repeatedly, in what the
education field has dubbed “project-based learning”—to kindle a fascination
with a set of questions, around the formation of an impending event, and then
stoke that fascination by approaching it from as many different angles, as many
different knowledge bases, as are possibly relevant (and a few that aren’t, for
good measure). A renewable curiosity is the dramaturg’s main stock-in-trade.
This book is built from my work for over twenty years as a dramaturg,1 and
particularly my past eighteen years as a dance dramaturg with and for choreog-
rapher Ralph Lemon, and the other artists he assembled around the pieces that
bear his name from 1997 to the present (2015, at this writing). The material in this
book should be understood as emerging, inevitably and purposefully, through
the lens of that relationship, and through the lens of the specific projects—
experimental, intercultural, interdisciplinary, and all presented within an
American contemporary performance setting—I undertook with Ralph.2
The American dance scene of the mid-1990s into the first decade of the
twenty-first century was a particularly rich one for a dramaturg to step into,
with shifts in choreographic process leading to shifts in performance product.
One impetus for these shifts was located, for Ralph Lemon as well as others, in
a fatigue with tailoring working process to suit the usual funding structures for
the modernist company model.3 But other triggers were emerging more affirma-
tively from American movement artists’ growing fascination with performance
as research, the questioning of disciplinary boundaries and set venues, a rise in
intercultural collaborations, and intriguing glimpses of the growing conceptual
dance movement appearing from across the Atlantic, itself fueled transatlan-
tically by the European rediscovery of Yvonne Rainer and other American
artists who constellated around the Judson Dance Theater.
When I began working with Ralph in 1997, he had just embarked on a
journey toward a new model for creating work. After a final concert two years
earlier, he had formally disbanded his eponymous dance company—with its
movement labeled variously modern, postmodern, or post-postmodern, but
still evincing a distinctly modernist inheritance for how a choreographer went
about making a dance on a company of dancers. That preposition “on” is
revealing. Its presence signals some acknowledgment of the particular dancers,
more than its absence would—a choreographer just “making a dance” is not
P re f a c e xiii
tailoring it to the skills and idiosyncrasies of a particular group, as she or he is

when “making a dance on a company.” However, the preposition still figures
the dance as something that descends upon the dancers from above, in a top-
down hierarchical arrangement. Making a dance with a group of dancers, on
the other hand, signals a more collaborative, devised process—one that was
not entirely absent in Ralph’s work before 1995, but increased markedly there-
after. As part of his search for a new approach, Ralph had applied for, and
received, an unusual commission for a choreographer: to serve as a resident
artist and create an evening-length work for the Yale Repertory Theater (YRT).
For YRT he proposed an intercultural dance theater collaboration for himself,
one other African American performer (Carlos Funn), and seven West African
performers (Moussa Diabate, Didier “James” Akpa, Djédjé Djédjé Gervais,
Nai Zou, Kouakou “Angelo” Yao, Zaoli “Tapé” Mabo, and Goulei Tché
poho).4 In an early proposal he explained that “as an African-American removed
from any obvious African culture by many generations,” he intended to “find a
voice that creates a new language, one that heightens and disguises the apparent
bond of color of skin.”5 This was Geography (1997), part one of what would become
the project-and process-based Geography Trilogy (1997–2004).
I began working for Ralph as a student dramaturg assigned to him by my
institution, the Yale School of Drama (YSD).6 Ralph had never worked with a
dramaturg before. But he was welcomed into the YRT production process,
which was adjusted, though not fundamentally changed, to respond to the con-
trasting needs of a choreographer instead of a theater director. As the YRT
institutional structure was designed in part to put YSD students to work on pro-
fessional productions, he was assigned not just one but two student dramaturgs—
myself and Peter Novak7—and invited to make use of us somehow. Thus, in
Ralph’s case, the entry of a dramaturg into his work was a direct consequence
of the collision of a shifting dance production process with a relatively stable
institutional theater production process. And the collaborative dramaturgical
relationship that developed between us cannot be separated from Ralph’s
search for a new way of working and a new relationship to the stage.
This is not the story of my “discovery” of dance. I had trained and performed
as both a dancer and actor, and had spent six years working as a choreographer
and founding member of a theater company, Elevator Repair Service (ERS).
This is also not the story of a young white woman “discovering” African dance
for the very first time. I was no expert, but I had taken a fair number of djembe
classes in the NYC of the early 1990s, taught in Guinean style. But though this
is not a story of dramatic “firsts,” it does recount a reversal of expectations. I
had assumed that when I chose to pursue a degree at an institution famed for
its productions of classical and new plays, I was committing to move away from
xiv P re f a ce
dance and to increase my engagement with text-based theater. I’d made that
choice because I loved dramatic literature as well. Instead the opportunity to
work with Ralph materialized, and suddenly my choice to accredit my drama-
turgical work with a degree did not have to be a choice to turn away from
movement-based performance. I was thrilled, but I still did have to figure out
what it meant to be called the dramaturg for a dance production, and whether
that work would have any resemblance to the training I was getting.
Our initial sit-down was pleasant, but vague. I could see Ralph was a nice
person who had no idea what to do with me. We noticed that we came from
more or less the same New York experimental performance world, though we
had found our way there in different decades. At the end of the meeting Ralph’s
one request was that I keep a notebook of daily observations on Geography’s
rehearsal room. Since Geography was to be an experimental dance theater piece,
devised with his intercultural cast, he may have anticipated that the way the
piece was made would be just as interesting as the final result, and that we
would want to use these observations to fold process back into product. On the
other hand, he may have just been giving me busywork.
As the one-month initial workshop went on, I was the faithful student,
recording the rehearsal room with sharpened no. 2 pencil on blank loose-leaf
pages. I wrote down steps, discussions, arguments, brainstormings. Sometimes
I transcribed as fast as my hand could move. Sometimes I jumped up to join
the discussions as a second-string interpreter (my rusty French got sharper and
more Africanized as the month went on) and only later entered a summary in
my log. Everything I wrote was, of course, filtered through my own perception
of what was interesting, relevant, surprising, or useful. Since one of Ralph’s
points of departure was the difficulties and rewards of intercultural under-
standing across the African diaspora, I tried to notice how those difficulties and
rewards were manifesting themselves in day-to-day communications, overtly
or subtly. I was also fascinated by the nuances of the intercorporeal work going
on, as Ralph and the cast attempted to translate and hybridize each other’s
means and modes of dancing. I tried to notice which sorts of physical experi-
ments produced intriguing results and which fell flat, and in my notes wondered
about why.
In July 1997, a month after the first workshop had closed, I met Ralph in a
NYC café and dropped a 169-page transcription—thunk—onto the little round
table in front of him.8 He may have been surprised at how much there was. He
read it over the next few weeks. If forced to choose a single moment, I would
date the beginning of our current collaborative relationship to the moment that
manuscript changed hands. In the e-mails and further meetings that followed,
we grew a conversation with a promising level of give-and-take, and Ralph
P re f a c e xv
Figure 1. Transcribed notes from first Geography workshop. (Courtesy of the author)
generously invited me into larger conversations with the cast, instead of keep-
ing our dialogue entirely on the side (as he might well have done, particularly
with a student collaborator). That notebook manuscript was formative, I believe,
because it revealed both a similarity and a contrast in our perceptions. The
baseline relationship grew from his recognition that my perspective was in
sufficient harmony with his own. If I hadn’t shared a good portion of his interests
and priorities, there would have been no arena for fruitful conversation. Yet he
xvi P re f a ce
had to also recognize enough of a contrast to be useful, for who wants to stare
into a mirror all day?
Contrast, of course, easily leads to disagreement. And disagreement always
entered into my collaboration with Ralph, even early on when I was just the
student dramaturg. I realized that I had a certain kind of power in being power-
less. In other words, I felt relatively free to “shoot from the hip” and share
whatever I was seeing or thinking, because I assumed that if Ralph didn’t think
an idea or question was relevant, he would be able to dismiss it. Thus I shared
opinions—diplomatically, but without pulling punches on content—with
which I knew he might not agree (examples flow freely in the chapters to follow).
And he didn’t always agree. But this wasn’t a standoff; after all, it wasn’t a
symmetrical relationship. There was no question that Ralph had the final say. I
was more than willing to be wrong, but if I was, I wanted to hear why. I wanted
to catalyze a process, create a productive tension, touch off a conversation. We
found, and shared, a faith in the idea that a certain kind of disagreement could
be a crucible for the work.
This book is, in part, the fruit of those eighteen years, and counting, of
conversation.
As the dance world has changed and challenged its boundaries over the last
twenty years, the discourse on dance dramaturgy has grown from next to
nothing into a reliable wellspring of panels, conferences, and articles. 9 This is
true particularly in Europe, where in the 1990s the dance dramaturg as a species,
although not previously unheard of, experienced a population explosion. But
in the United States our live discussions have not yet materialized into much
published writing, and there is very little on the record about dance dramaturgy
within a specifically American setting. This is a gap into which this volume leaps,
hoping others shall follow.
My primary goal in this book is not to define dramaturgy in dance and
movement performance but to share what sorts of ideas and questions emerge
when one engages in the activity of dance dramaturgy. Although I do touch
upon the eternal question of definition in the upcoming introduction—offering
a brief summary of the considerable theater history that spawned the terms
“dramaturgy” and “dramaturg” and lent them meaning—I do so as a way of
preparing the ground for the more personal rehearsal room experiences that
populate the five chapters that follow. Insofar as I attempt a definition, I want
to refute the concept of the dramaturg’s role as a static position within an artistic
chain of command. Instead, building off the ideas of European dramaturg
P re f a c e xvii
Figure 2. Author translating for Geography performers before dress rehearsal. In front of Nari Ward’s
bedspring curtain, left to right : Kouakou “Angelo” Yao, Katherine Profeta, Ralph Lemon, Goulei
Tchépoho; standing below : Jenny Friend. (© T Charles Erickson)
Marianne Van Kerkhoven, I contend that the role of the dramaturg, if it can
be defined at all, can only be as a quality of motion, which oscillates, claiming
an indeterminate zone between theory and practice, inside and outside, word
and movement, question and answer.10 The chapters that follow are my attempt
to evoke that motion.
Introduction
Where Did This Dramaturg
Come From?
L et us begin with the word. “Dramaturgy” came first—“dramaturg” is what

is known in linguistics as a back-formation. “Dramaturgy” is often found in
phrases like “King Lear’s dramaturgy” or “Shakespeare’s dramaturgy.” In this
usage it indicates the proprietary structure of a single play or a body of work.
We might intuit that it points to the skeleton of the work—my preferred meta-
phor since it refers to a structure that is both weight-bearing and enabling of
motion and articulation. The skeleton remains after allegedly less essential
components are removed, and yet is still particular to the organism it held up,
not so generalized as to claim universality.
Dramaturgy includes but then extends beyond the text as structure: “Shake-
speare’s dramaturgy” is a skeleton found on both page and stage, concerning
both how the play was written and how it was meant to be performed. The dual
usage acknowledges that the structure of the text is going to imply and inform
the structure of the event. Webster’s current definition for “dramaturgy”—“the
art or technique of dramatic composition and theatrical representation”—
accordingly acknowledges both page (dramatic composition) and stage (theatri-
cal representation).
When the word “dramaturg” was first derived from “dramaturgy,” it simply
meant a person who was responsible for “the art or technique of dramatic
composition and theatrical representation.”1 Before the late nineteenth century,
before the differentiation and professionalization of the director’s role, this
person would often be the playwright. Accordingly in European romance
languages, some variation of “dramaturg” is still the word for playwright (e.g.,
French: dramaturge, Spanish: dramaturgo). This presents a possibility for serious
misunderstanding, at least in translation. But the English-language dramaturg,
3
4 I n tro d u ct i o n
as an inheritance from a German word, is decidedly not the playwright.

Shakespeare may have a dramaturgy, but in his own language he would not
have been a dramaturg. Dramaturgs in the traditional theater world are people
who attend to “the art or technique of dramatic composition and theatrical
representation”—people who notice it, think about it, perhaps write about it,
but have not written the play in question.
The next possible source for confusion comes with a second usage of the
word “dramaturgy.” Dramaturgy is also what that the dramaturg does; it can
mean “the activity of the dramaturg.” This meaning does not crop up in
Webster’s, but it appears in almost every place where I have found dramaturgs
at work. The first definition of “dramaturgy” did not require a dramaturg—the
work’s structural particulars, whether it be finished or in progress, will be
noticeable whether or not someone called the dramaturg notices them—but the
second definition depends on one. So dramaturgs find themselves sandwiched
between two kinds of dramaturgy, one that emerges before them and one that
extends from them, attending to the former and enacting the latter.
Analyzing the grammatical chemistry of these words is helpful to break
down casual usage, but it does not do much yet to reveal what dramaturgy, as
the activity of the dramaturg, can imply. For that it is necessary to historicize
the term. The vast majority of publications on dramaturgy start with the oft-
dubbed “father” of modern theater dramaturgy, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing,
who began his career in Enlightenment Germany as a prolific drama critic,
and less prolific but respected playwright. He became the “first” dramaturg
when in 1767 he accepted an invitation to serve as resident critic for the Ham-
burg National Theatre and used the position to evaluate, publicly and with not
infrequent disdain, the quality of the productions and the tastes of the Hamburg
audience. As Joel Schecter points out, the National Theatre, in hiring Lessing
and funding his biweekly publications (under the title Hamburg Dramaturgy),
must have expected that Lessing would put his respected imprimatur on their
institution, rewarding his employers with favorable notices.2 In other words,
they may have intended to hire a public relations copywriter, but they hired
“the first dramaturg” instead. Lessing’s theater institution soon went bankrupt,
but his published writings lasted far longer as a clarion call to shift German
taste away from a slavish worship of French neoclassical standards and forge a
German national theater.
Under Lessing’s example, the activity of the dramaturg was established as
writing, critiquing, evaluating, and imagining a better future for the theater.
Lessing, with his “Age of Enlightenment missionary stance,”3 educating a pub-
lic that allegedly did not know what it should want, establishes a model for
the dramaturg’s activity that may be inspirational in seeing the dramaturg as
I n tro d u ct i o n 5
forward-thinking idealist, helping build the future of the field, but is nevertheless
unfortunate in its implication that the dramaturg’s work is the creation of a bitter
medicine that must be swallowed for the good of the institution, the audience,
and even the emerging nation. Lessing’s example also establishes the model of
the “institutional dramaturg”—the dramaturg whose purview is the mission and
planning of the theater institution, and not the inner workings of a rehearsal
room.
Two centuries later dramaturgy (as activity) entered the rehearsal room
with another revered German figure, playwright Bertolt Brecht.4 With Brecht
the “institutional dramaturg” morphed into a “production dramaturg,” and
the historical figure of the dramaturg became more relevant to the future incar-
nations of the dance dramaturg. In his Messingkauf Dialogues Brecht wrote out a
discussion, intended one day to be staged, for four main characters—the Philoso-
pher, the Dramaturg, the Actor, and the Actress. Messingkauf is by no means a
naturalistic window on a Brechtian rehearsal room; it is an allegory meant to
illuminate how Brecht’s ideal theater might operate in relation to the world
around it. But the Dramaturg here, as a symbolic construct, reveals something
about Brecht’s conception of working “production dramaturgs.” In the char-
acter list he is introduced as follows: “THE DRAMATURG puts himself at
the Philosopher’s disposal, and promises to apply his knowledge and abilities to
the conversion of the theater into the thaëter of the Philosopher.5 He hopes the
theater will get a new lease on life.”6
Shades of Lessing are still apparent—the theater must aspire to a grand
new ideal, and the Dramaturg will serve that purpose. But here it is the Philoso-
pher who serves as the fount of idealism—in this case, the Marxist ideals of
Brecht’s Epic theater. Brecht’s Dramaturg is not the idealist as much as the
person charged with converting ideals into onstage realities. He is a translator
of sorts; his particular “knowledge and abilities” are the interpretive tools
needed to transform theory into practice. In this dialogue he is the one who
insists that the conversation occur on stage instead of in his stuffy office, because
“that will allow us to stage a small experiment or two to clarify matters.”7 Thus
the Dramaturg is a man of practice, rehearsal, and research; he puts theses to
the test, and he facilitates the kind of active discussion upon which Brecht’s
Epic theater depended.
Where is the Director in all this? We might consider the theatrical Director
the more likely choice to symbolize the passage of theory into rehearsal room
practice. Yet a Director is strangely absent from the Messingkauf allegory, as is a
Playwright—two other roles Brecht had assumed himself, and more notably.
Instead Brecht selects his third professional hat, the Dramaturg. Perhaps he felt
the Director would be too close to the practical mechanics of the rehearsal
room, and chose the Dramaturg to more evocatively represent someone poised
on a threshold, moving between idea and action.
Allegory has limits as history—Messingkauf ’s Dramaturg is a symbolic con-
struct, and there are more specific details available elsewhere about what
Brecht actually put into the job description when he himself enacted the role of
dramaturg and later trained production dramaturgs for his theater. The young
Brecht was inspired by the work of Erwin Piscator, to whose theater he was
hired as part of a team of playwright-dramaturgs in 1927–1928. Piscator had
reimagined the dramaturg as part of an active team using research and writing
to “rework . . . texts in the light of our political standpoint.”8 Brecht as a play-
wright also thrived on collaborative group work and worked best with one or
more usually female mitarbeiterin (collaborators), who would offer him research,
an editorial eye, and sometimes considerable ghostwriting.9 In the pre-WWII
years they were not yet called his dramaturgs, but notably two of them (Elisabeth
Hauptmann and Ruth Berlau) were later assigned that title. Lastly, once Brecht
had created the institutional structure of the Berlin Ensemble, he trained his
own team of students to become directors, critics, and dramaturgs, considering
that the three roles should branch off from a shared educational foundation.
The skills he required of Berlin Ensemble’s production dramaturgs included
many previously associated with the institutional dramaturg (selection of plays,
consideration of the theater’s season and mission, translation, and adaptation)
but also new ones such as bringing relevant research into the rehearsal room,
taking detailed rehearsal notes, and creating “model books” of a production
process.
Under Brecht’s example, the activity of the dramaturg is still, as it was with
Lessing, to write, critique, evaluate, and imagine a new future for the theater,
but he has added a number of functions that put the dramaturg into a writing
collective as a generator of raw materials and an editor, even part author, of
plays, and into the rehearsal room as an archivist of the production process.
His model, especially as enacted by himself, also granted the dramaturg power
to go beyond passive observation and note-taking to intervene, commenting,
questioning, and otherwise prompting dialogue. The clearest theater-world
ancestor for the work of the dance dramaturg today is found here, in the produc-
tion dramaturg with a presence and activity in the rehearsal room.
Besides putting the dramaturg into the rehearsal room, Brecht’s model also
left one distressing legacy: it opened the door to the possible formulation of the
dramaturg as a political “police dog or concept guard,” to quote Myriam Van
Imschoot’s dismissal.10 This is part of what Brecht inherited from Piscator—
as evidenced in Piscator’s quote above, where the dramaturg’s labor served
a decisive goal in singular terms: “our political standpoint.” Messingkauf ’s
Dramaturg threatens to fall into the same pattern, if we understand his relation-
ship to the Philosopher as a commitment to create practical solutions that serve
a narrowly constructed political philosophy, rather than (in the more generous
interpretation of Epic theater) to open up a dialectical process. Production
dramaturgs working in 1970s Germany are often cited as a low point in this
trend, as their practice was to build an advance conceptual framework for a
production in collaboration with the director and then regularly evaluate the
rehearsal room in light of whether accruing practical decisions were in service
to this preordained goal, intervening when matters seemed to go astray. But in
fact this manifestation of the dramaturg had already hit its nadir forty years
earlier in a very different political register. In 1933 Hitler had appointed the
“Reichsdramaturg” of National Socialism to label and ban all “degenerate”
performance and advance the creation of approved propagandist spectacles.
This is an instance where glib contemporary metaphor—today we might call a
dramaturg operating this way a “concept Nazi”—dovetails with an all-too-real
historical antecedent. Thankfully the “concept guard” interpretation of drama-
turgy is thoroughly discredited today by most practicing dramaturgs, although
it may endure, subtly, in the assumptions other collaborators have about why
the dramaturg is in the room.
The first collaborator to claim the title dramaturg within a dance context
came along in 1979, when Raimund Hoghe began working with Pina Bausch,
collaborating for ten formative years on her articulation of Tanztheater.11 (It is
certainly possible to reconsider earlier dance-associated collaborations as drama-
turgical labor—examples have been proposed in John Cage’s work in collabora-
tion with Merce Cunningham, and Sergei Diaghilev’s work building the Ballet
Russes12—but the decision to name a dramaturg in a dance context is formative,
not least because naming opens up more possibilities in its wake.) Hoghe was a
journalist, writing magazine pieces about celebrities, artists, and outcasts when
he first encountered Bausch as a subject for a Theater Heute profile. Somehow
through the process of collaborating on Hoghe’s writing, the two decided they
might also make good collaborators on Bausch’s Tanztheater. Hoghe’s previous
experience as a dramaturg was nonexistent, though he had covered both the-
ater and dance in his magazine work. The little he has discussed regarding his
own role in the Bausch rehearsal room characterizes his involvement as sharing
and enabling a search for a structure (that first meaning of “dramaturgy”) to
be built from the many potential ingredients for a piece that were thrown up by
Bausch’s then-novel working process. Marianne van Kerkhoven summarized
Hoghe’s work with Bausch in a profile she wrote for Kaaitheater: “from the
material the dancers assembled under instructions from Bausch, he helped con-
struct a choreography, a dramaturgy, a composition; he came face to face with
(as he wrote in his rehearsal notes, now in book form) ‘the sense of his own
speechlessness in view of the simple, the obvious, and the everyday’; he shared
with Bausch the conviction that one always has to seek a form: a form ‘that
takes the personal beyond the private, and prevents mere self-presentation or
self-exposure.’”13
This quotation certainly aligns Hoghe with the definition of “dramaturgy”
as a work’s skeleton; he is the one in the room who helps construct that motile,
weight-bearing form out of all those raw materials. In programs he is credited
with “dramaturgy” instead of as the “dramaturg” (under a rubric where other
collaborators are credited with “set” or “lights”). This implies that in the same
way we might blame the set designer if the set falls down, we might blame
Hoghe if the structural composition of the piece does not seem up to the task at
hand. That structure, to take him at his word above, may be evaluated according
to the extent that it offers a frame to transcend facile self-exposure.
André Lepecki has pinned a significant shift in the field of dance on the
moment when Pina Bausch went into her rehearsal room and “dared to ask
dancers a question.”14 Famously, starting with her work on 1977’s Bluebeard—
While Listening to a Taped Recording of Bela Bartok’s “Duke Bluebeard´s Castle,” Bausch
began posing questions to the dancers that they were to answer with any means
at their disposal—movement and speech—and without clear separation between
their trained bodies and their everyday ones. In instigating this new choreo-
graphic process just a few years before she began working with Hoghe, Bausch
led the dance field away from modernist constructions of meaning captured
within “pure movement,” handed down from a knowing choreographer to the
receptive bodies of virtuosic dancers, and offered up to interpretation by a
knowing critic.15 She effectively proposed a shift in the definition of a choreog-
rapher, from someone who has all the answers to someone who poses generative
questions. As Lepecki puts it: “Bausch was changing the entire epistemological
stability of the dance field. (Other ‘disturbing’ elements in her process of working
also contributed for further dismantling such stability, most notable the intrusion
of the dramaturg in the dance studio). . . . Now, the different dancers, the drama-
turg, the designers share with the choreographer the same premise of departing
from not knowing and using dance as a field of knowledge.”16
A closer look at the implications of Bausch’s rehearsal room during the
1980s thus reveals Hoghe as a figure poised between contrasting notions of
“dramaturgy.” His dramaturgy (the activity) was, most explicitly, to take special
responsibility for dramaturgy (the structure). His task and talent, just as when
he wrote magazine profiles, was to propose a compelling sequence, a passage in
and through and out, from a collection of engaging, disparate materials. But
he also portends a shift from the figure of a dramaturg as one who generates
structure toward one who participates actively in a questioning process, “depart-

ing from not knowing.” This shift has continued post-Bausch—and on the heels
of contemporaneous triggers in the working processes used by Yvonne Rainer,
the Open Theater, and the Wooster Group, to name just a few—such that in
1997, American theatrical dramaturg Mark Bly wrote that “I question” was the
best possible definition of his work as a dramaturg,17 and in 2010 European dance
dramaturg Bojana Cvejić dubbed the dramaturg “the friend of the problem,”
explaining that the “methodology of problem” is that which creates “questions
that will clear the ground and slowly eliminate the known possibilities.”18
I do not suggest that these two meanings of dramaturgy (the activity)—
shoring up structure and posing questions—are mutually exclusive. I certainly
recognize the slightly vertiginous sensation of moving between one and the
other as the situation warrants. And it is certainly possible to ask one’s questions
about structure. Nor do I suggest that the image of dramaturg as questioner
was entirely absent before the 1970s—Brecht the dramaturg, with his admiration
for dialogue and dialectic, would recognize that activity. But I do note that a
split in the word has occurred, one that can even create confusion whenever
the word “dramaturgy” is casually tossed into a conversation with little context.
Does the action of dramaturgy build or dissect? Construct or deconstruct? Or
rather, when should we think of it in which manner? If it is both, how is it both?
Following Hoghe, the dramaturg became more prevalent in the field of
European dance and movement-based performance, though it did not gain
momentum there until the early 1990s. Flemish theater dramaturg Marianne
Van Kerkhoven first worked with Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker on the 1986
piece Bartok/Aantendeningen and continued that collaborative relationship on
and off for many years. American scholar Heidi Gilipin began working as a
dramaturg for expat American choreographer William Forsythe at the Frankfurt
Ballet in 1989, holding that position over seven years. In 1995 Hildegard De
Vuyst began working for Alain Platel and Les Ballets C de la B and continues
to this day. André Lepecki recalls first being told “you are the dramaturg” in
1993 based on the work he was already doing with expat American choreographer
Meg Stuart, which was similar to his collaborations with Portuguese choreog-
raphers João Fiadeiro and Vera Mantero in the same period. Lepecki dates his
growing awareness of his role to the publication of the “On Dramaturgy” issue
of Theaterschrift in January 1994, edited by Van Kerkhoven.19 That volume in-
cluded Van Kerkhoven’s influential definition of “new dramaturgy” as that
which employs “a process-oriented method of working”20 and her statement
“there is no essential difference between theatre and dance dramaturgy.”21
Lepecki recounts that after that volume came out “both Meg and I realized we
were not alone in this collaborative practice in dance.”22
In an American context (and it should be obvious from the above that by

“context” I describe the geography of where the work is funded and made,
rather than the birth country of the artists) dance dramaturgs have also become
increasingly common, yet they have not yet found the same degree of shared
discourse as has grown in the European context. Talvin Wilks began working
as a dramaturg with Bebe Miller in 1997, roughly the same time I began working
with Ralph Lemon. Thomas F. DeFrantz has taken on that role for Donald
Byrd on an occasional basis since 2003. Mark Lord began as dramaturg for
Headlong Dance Theater in 2004. Anne Davison has worked with Doug Elkins
since 2006 and has also collaborated with David Dorfman and Jane Comfort.
Choreographer Jack Ferver, who has been making pieces in NYC since 2007,
works regularly with Joshua Lubin-Levy. Susan Mar Landau started working
as a dramaturg in 2009 for choreographer Vanessa Anspaugh. And Susan
Manning recently served in this role for Reggie Wilson, for a work that pre-
miered in 2013. But, at least from where I am standing, it looks like the American
dance dramaturgs’ awareness that they are “not alone in this collaborative
practice” has been dawning at a somewhat more gradual rate.
With the advent of the theater aesthetics that Hans-Thies Lehmann famously
characterized as postdramatic—or that Elinor Fuchs, on this side of the Atlantic,
dubbed theater after the “death of character”—theater artists have increasingly
discarded or downgraded Aristotelean models of mimesis and dramatic coher-
ence, as well as the playscript as a singular recipe for performance. 23 In doing
so, they made contemporary theater that looked more and more like contem-
porary dance, which itself had only recently discarded its own codes of charac-
ter and mimesis. Lehmann in his 1999 preface quickly cites a number of artists
or groups making what he considered postdramatic theater; among them he
includes at least seven who would conventionally have been labeled dance and
not theater artists (e.g., Pina Bausch, Meredith Monk, Anne Teresa de Keers-
maeker).24 Notably he acknowledges no distinction here. Later in the volume
he does comment that “dance theater,” using the term that Bausch made
famous, is “an important variant of postdramatic theater.”25
Writers addressing dance dramaturgy inevitably and rightfully tie the
advent of the dance dramaturg to a larger shift toward postdramatic theater
aesthetics. Heidi Gilpin, an American dramaturg working with an American
choreographer (William Forsythe) in a decidedly European context, seems to
have done this first in a 1997 article on what she chose to label, significantly, not
“dance dramaturgy” but the “dramaturgy of movement performance.” She
characterized recent performance modes as “shift[ing] the focus of our attention
from the words spoken to the location of speech, and to the notion of the visibility
or invisibility of the speaker.” With the phrase “movement performance” she
aggregated artists who would conventionally be labeled under both dance and
theater; her list of practitioners was overlapped significantly by Lehmann’s list
two years later. For Gilpin, the particular dramaturgy of movement performance
was tied to the understanding of multidisciplinary perception. She saw multi-
disciplinarity as a phenomenon that arose inevitably when a singular dramatic
text released its stranglehold on meaning.
It should not go without saying that a crucial influence behind the demotion
of the centralized dramatic text and the concomitant explosion of postdramatic
theater is Antonin Artaud—or at least, the practitioners and thinkers who, in
the 1960s and 1970s, interpreted Artaud’s oracular writings.26 While crying “no
more masterpieces” and decrying the influence of canonical texts, Artaud also
craved performance as embodied experience (for performers and spectators
both, who he notably threw together in the same physical space). He did not
just demote the text; he actively sought an alternative body-language. Artaud,
with his feverish visions for the theater, wanted to stimulate spectators’ “nerves
and heart” and create experiences that acted “directly . . . through the organs,”
declaring that “it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter
our minds.”27 Through the legacy of Artaud’s inspiration, the postdramatic
theater went on a quest for the body-knowledge and corporeal textuality with
which the field of dance was already familiar.
Thus it certainly seems as if, when theater lost the primacy of the playscript,
gained a fascination with the embodied performer, and generally started to
appear more like dance, and when during the same decades Judson and Bausch
invited their dancers to speak and use quotidian movements, and generally
started to appear more like theater, the increased porosity between disciplines
allowed the stealthy figure of the dramaturg to slip across the divide.
Dispersal, Redundancy, Fluidity
This does not yet answer the question of why dance needed a dramaturg, once
the dramaturg had arrived on its doorstep. Mulling this over, looking from all
angles for evidence of necessity, I can only conclude: it didn’t. For no brand of
contemporary performance does. Is that an odd conclusion? My own gesture
of self-abnegation?
No, for I want to argue for something more interesting than necessity here.
Of late in the evolving discourse on dramaturgy, largely generated by Euro-
pean dramaturgs, there has been a turn away from any lionizing of the drama-
turg in favor of a discussion of “the dramaturgical.” Dramaturg Myriam Van
Imschoot initiated this tack and took it furthest in her 2003 article “Anxious
Dramaturgy,” in which she suggests that dramaturgy as an activity is crucial
enough that it is increasingly democratized, and should be. Thus as the drama-
turg’s role is shared, the specific dramaturg disappears, resorbed into the col-
lective. This is, we can assume, what could make the professional dramaturg
“anxious,” though to be clear Van Imschoot welcomed this shift. Others pur-
suing this line of thought allow for the retention of an individual with that title
but still find that much less interesting than a discussion of the dramaturgical as
denoting “a field of operation that is ‘dispersed’ in different dimensions of the
work of art.”28
I recognize this terrain. Before putting on a “dramaturg” hat for Ralph
Lemon, I was already working with ERS, making what many call “devised”
theater work—in other words, pieces that do not depart from an existing play-
script, but rather from the shared fascinations of company members, which
may manifest themselves in words, movement, image, sound, music.29 I recog-
nize “the dramaturgical” as a shared and dispersed function in the ERS process,
especially in early stages, when all company members are bringing in research,
posing and proposing questions, offering structural principles and generative
games to be tried out and discarded in turn. Until very recently ERS had never
credited an individual as “dramaturg,” yet its rehearsals were always rife with
dramaturgical activity. A large part of the approach I brought to Ralph’s re-
hearsal rooms was based on my previous experiences with ERS. In fact, during
the first years of my work with Ralph, when I was asked to answer the question
“what is it like to dramaturg a dance?” I first replied with a few choice words
about attending to bodies in motion, but then shifted the topic to what felt to me
like a more relevant question: “what is it like to dramaturg a piece of devised
work?” In both these rehearsal rooms the dramaturgical labor felt dispersed,
shared; despite the fact that the directors/choreographers had final word, we
were all building and dissecting the piece, from scratch, together. And yet,
there was still something different about my role with Ralph—being granted,
and taking on, the specific title. In that context I was the only one in the room
with no reason to be there except to support the dramaturgical.
When nevertheless attempting to define the dramaturg as a singular, non-
dispersed role, one runs into definitions that easily overlap with existing institu-
tionalized roles: director, choreographer, critic, producer, development director,
literary manager, audience outreach coordinator. All this redundancy is a major
source of definitional frustration. And redundancy implies waste within a puta-
tive Taylorist system for efficient artistic labor. But is that the kind of system
that contemporary dance and theater are trying to build? The rise of the drama-
turg (and the dramaturgical) over the last forty years suggests that something
more interesting than a wasteful redundancy is going on.
I recognize something about active collaboration that gains momentum with

an alchemic blend of similarity and difference between collaborators. In Ralph’s
rehearsal room I have some of the same purview as other collaborators—in
particular I overlap with Ralph himself—and yet my relation to, and responsi-
bility for, the objects of my attention are very different from theirs. I enjoy this
difference, and that enjoyment in turn is also a source of collaborative momen-
tum. Out of potential redundancy, play and possibilities spring. I smiled with
recognition when I first read a comment from Hildegard De Vuyst, dance
dramaturg for Alain Platel, who said, “I feel that it works best when I’m not
really needed somehow, when I’m not the embodiment of something that is
missing. Because if it feels like I’m not necessary, in fact, then I have a sort of
freedom and a playground to stand on.”30 Here De Vuyst sounds like she could
be claiming for herself a freedom to play in excess of that granted other collabo-
rators in the room. I might quibble, countering that the dramaturg’s redundancy
allows greater play for all involved, as functions overlap from all points of view—
but in the main, she describes a dynamic I recognize.
Mark Bly develops this concept of the dramaturg’s definitional fluidity as
creative wellspring by introducing an example from evolutionary science into
his exploration of the dramaturg’s labor. He shares his reading of an essay from
the evolutionary biologist and popular science writer Steven Jay Gould, who
explains that within any snapshot of an evolutionary process will be found
moments of “one-for-two” (one organ performing two functions) and “two-for-
one” (one function performed by two organs). This overlap is not a mere side
effect of evolution. It is instrumental: the creative ferment of evolution can only
achieve complexity via phases of multitasking and redundancy. Bly then analo-
gizes the dramaturg performing multiple roles to a “one-for-two” arrangement,
and a single role shared by the dramaturg and others to a “two-for-one,” and
quotes Gould to seal his argument: “rules of structure, deeper than natural
selection itself, guarantee that complex features must bristle with multiple
possibilities and evolution wins its required flexibility thanks to messiness, re-
dundancy, and lack of perfect fit. . . . How sad then that we live in a culture
almost dedicated to wiping out the leisure of ambiguity and the creative joy of
redundancy.”31
Bly closes his essay asserting that the dramaturg’s role has not yet fully
evolved in the course of theater history, and for that reason we need not assert
it a premature stability; we should let evolution do its work. But I think with this
final gesture he locates the process of evolution in the less interesting place. I
would counter that there’s no need to assert a teleological process for the drama-
turg’s role, eventually evolving to a more fixed job description some time in the
undetermined future. That might happen, but then again, it might not. Perhaps
it is more interesting if it does not. Instead we might recognize all artistic pro-
cesses as micro-evolutions that thrive on the redundancies and flexibility offered
by dramaturgical labor (sometimes to be offered by a person brandishing the
title dramaturg, sometimes by the shared “dramaturgical”), and in fact may
always be in process, offering only the fiction of a final product on opening
night. If we find evolution there, we need not find it in the definition of the
dramaturg; rather we can define dramaturgs by how they flexibly contribute to
a work’s evolution.
A Quality of Motion
The danger, of course, with the previous line of thinking, is that dramaturg and
dramaturgical are described in such broadly beneficial terms that they retreat
into the unassailability of the abstract. This is why, although those who have
claimed the role of dramaturg are surely fatigued by the endless debates over
definition, they are also, if they are being honest, still sympathetic to the fact
that it always comes up. After all, one wants to be able to explain what one does
to a favorite relative, a curious student, a cocktail-party acquaintance, with
both honesty and concision.
To that end I keep a list of terms in mind that I can either support or refute,
sometimes both in turn, as more specific models or metaphors for the drama-
turgical role. The list goes something like this: researcher, editor, questioner,
catalyst, historian, archivist, literary manager, outside eye, inside eye, advocate
for the audience, advocate for anything but the audience, witness, midwife,
gadfly, friend, and even amateur shrink. Note that there are some historical
models that I did not bother to include: the Lessing-inspired “in-house critic”
and “conscience of the theater”; the Brechtian side-effect “concept guard.” (I
also purposefully left out “coauthor,” even though that term represents a debate
that once made it all the way to the courts.32) But I do include other models for
dramaturgical labor that have been discredited in one way or another ( prin-
cipally “outside eye,” “advocate for the audience,” and “amateur shrink”).
They still make the list because I find something of use lies in this assembled
collection, specifically in all its clashes and intersections.
With a nod to Heraclitus, let me declare that what seems most consistent
here is change itself—the fact that my role in a rehearsal room can and does
oscillate between any of those descriptors. For instance, I might land on an
editor’s role, putting my effort and attention into proposing a composition for
whatever raw materials we have on the table, or even the turn of phrase in a
single phrase of spoken text, the turn of wrist in a repeated gesture. Or I might
deem those sorts of propositions premature and instead spend effort and at-
tention on questioning, hoping by asking and listening to catalyze a discus-
sion by which we will eventually generate more, or better, or just plain different
materials. I cannot define my role by one term or the other; if I have to find
a definition, I will claim it as a quality of motion that passes between these
descriptors.33 Primarily I am set into motion in response to the needs of the par-
ticular work, my chemistry with the collaborators, and our location in the work’s
timeline.
The questioner model for the dramaturgical role is often cited, and perhaps
most familiar. Recall Mark Bly’s two-word response, “I question,” when asked
to sum up his work, and Bojana Cvejić’s description of generating “questions
that will clear the ground.”34 Ralph has also contributed to this model when
introducing me as “Katherine Profeta, whose job it is to ask me questions about
what it is I think I’m thinking and what it is I think I’m not.”35 However useful
it may be, though, an unequivocal embrace of the questioning model for drama-
turgical labor is unhealthy. Ric Knowles points out the danger when he indicates
how questioning can become combative instead of fruitful, if the questions
come as an onslaught and begin to imply a lack of respect for terms held dear to
the artist. This discussion comes in the context of Knowles’s piece on drama-
turgy for intercultural productions, and he quotes an e-mail from a Native
American female playwright who felt uneasy with the line of questioning from
a white male dramaturg, particularly the “aggressive ignorance” that accom-
panied his queries.36 It is easy to see how this dramaturg’s cultural alignment
dovetailed with his conception of his role to create a particularly uncomfortable
situation. Yet in any cultural context, if dramaturg-as-questioner is so single-
minded that he or she morphs into dramaturg-as-interrogator, the useful rela-
tionship has been lost, and it is more than time to move to another role descriptor.
Many have found the idea of dramaturg as “advocate for the audience”
troubling (from both sides of the equation, asking both how the dramaturg
could presume to represent an entire collection of diverse individuals, and why
those collected individuals would be so feckless as to require an advocate). I
agree with these concerns, but to dismiss this metaphor entirely risks ignoring
the sheer amount of time I nevertheless spend trying to conjure the perceptions
and thoughts of imaginary spectators. I prefer to complicate the notion of audi-
ence advocacy. André Lepecki spoke of the audience as an “invisible ghost”
from which the performance makers may be displaced, but to which they attend,
speculatively, nonetheless.37 (I will add that we the makers are their ghosts as
much as they are ours—an idea I expand on in chapter 3.) At moments it may
be useful to advocate for a willful ignorance of these ghosts, in order to help
discover new forms of performance that would be invisible were one intent on
communicating something already recognizable. Of course, as ghosts are

persistent, and exorcisms temporary at best, that position is doomed as well.
Thus I find both the acts of advocating for and ignoring an eventual audience
to be fruitfully impossible, and I find it most accurate to speak of the drama-
turg’s quality of motion as an oscillation between these two impossible tasks.
Oscillation is not only to be found between role descriptors, but also at the
level of involvement. Sometimes I may be completely wrapped up in the daily
process, warming up with the performers, participating in exercises, brain-
storming minutiae, caught up in the fascination of the day. Other times I can
disappear for a week or more and then return to the rehearsal room to watch
with a different perspective. The terms “inside eye” (or its close analogue, “wit-
ness”) and “outside eye” are generally used as shorthand to characterize these
two positions. “Outside eye” has rightfully been discredited for pretending a
detached, impossible objectivity.38 For even if I sat in the presence of a work-in-
progress to which I had no previous exposure, I would bring along the fascina-
tions, prejudices, past experiences, and lack of past experiences that come as
part of the deal of collaborating with me. What’s more, the completely outside
eye would see only a closed door: when I visit the rehearsal room after spending
time away, I must still cross from outside to inside in order to perceive. So
perhaps the more accurate metaphor, one that would capture the distinction,
would evoke perception-from-outside-crossing-in, versus perception-from-
inside (later crossing out to begin again). And the threshold that must be crossed
repeatedly, both literally and figuratively, is the door to the rehearsal room.
I imagine the dramaturg as a figure engaged in a dance of entrance and exit,
of play across the doorsill. This dance is how I make meaning and catalyze
conversation. Were I to stake out one stable position, I would have much less
to offer. As Marianne Van Kerkhoven put it, “If I stand still, I understand
nothing.”39
There is another way in which the dance dramaturg’s perceptions can
be usefully “outside,” and one that occurs with much greater frequency in
movement-based performance than it does in theater-based performance.
That is if the primary maker, the choreographer/director, is also in the piece as
a performer. In this instance “inside” and “outside” do not refer to the rehearsal
room door, but rather inside and outside of the smaller, even more charged
arena of performance. With the frequency with which choreographers also
serve as performers, sometimes the dramaturg ends up being the only trusted,
informed, or reliably present person who is both inside the room but outside of
the piece. In these instances the dramaturgical role stops oscillating for a moment
and snaps into focus with a particular responsibility. I remember moments in
the development of Geography (1997) and Tree (2000), two pieces for which Ralph
kept himself offstage for long stretches of time but appeared in a few key solos
or duets, rendered more significant since his presence was otherwise withheld.
When working on those sections my task was to destabilize Ralph as he had
destabilized the performers and to assist him in his own difficult transition from
outside to inside. I remember watching him improvise one solo for Tree, repeti-
tively engaging a circular motion when I knew, from listening to him speak, he
had intended to challenge that familiar dynamic. It was my job then to nudge,
to provoke, to suggest there might be something more to explore. It had been
easy for him to take on that role with the cast, and more difficult to take on that
role for himself.
Related are instances where my task was to stand outside to gently encourage
(or laughingly shove) Ralph inside, toward the space of risk, within the perform
ance or rehearsal arena. Early in the Geography rehearsal process this arose
when Ralph exhorted his skeptical West African cast to explore a mode of
movement that would be somehow “like trance” without being either fake-y or
inappropriately dangerous. He asked Carlos Funn, the only other American
cast member, to demonstrate what he meant. I asked him, in front of everyone,
if he would consider demonstrating himself, so that the cast could see what he
meant from his own body. Unable to say no, he caught my eye and warned,
only half-joking, “You’ll pay for this later!”40 Interestingly, as Ralph moved
further into the Geography Trilogy, past its initial intercultural experiments and
toward the consideration of material that was closer to home (Come home Charley
Patton [2004, hereafter Patton] and then moved on to How Can You Stay in the
House All Day and Not Go Anywhere? [2010, hereafter How Can You . . . ?]), I played
this particular role less and less. In these rehearsals he was much more likely to
return the favor and goad me to participate in physical experiments, instead of
letting me sit safely on the edges of the room.
Overall, the dramaturg’s work expressed as a quality of motion adds to the
concept of creative redundancy to offer one more way to understand the drama-
turg as particularly free and flexible to respond to the needs of the work at
hand. In the kind of work I like most—those devised or collaboratively generated
performances, common to much of contemporary dance and theater—that
flexibility is particularly valuable. Flexibility grants any collaborator, including
but not limited to the dramaturg, the ability to respond to the real course of
inspiration, as it evolves. And in devised work, where collaborators do not depart
from a set of rules or recipe, but rather work to locate the rules or recipe, that
responsiveness is crucial.
It might be argued that all this shape-shifting makes the dramaturg’s employ-
ment particularly vulnerable to the vicissitudes of interpersonal relationship—
if I am not having productive interactions with the other folks in the room,
there is no other, more stable reason for me to be there. This is true. Yet I
would argue that the position of the dramaturg only exposes the extent to
which all collaborative art-making is based on the vicissitudes of interpersonal
relationship. Sure, if the dramaturg finds no fruitful connection with other
members of the creative staff, he or she might be out of a job right away,
whereas if the lighting designer has no connection . . . well, we probably still
need some lights for opening night. But that lighting designer will not have
a job with that group of collaborators the next time around. Otherwise put,
the dramaturg’s position offers a window to better expose the nature of pure
collaboration—if “pure” were ever a word that could describe something so
unruly. This includes exposing the fact that when it doesn’t work, it just doesn’t
work. There seems to be no way around using the language of interpersonal
relationships to describe the collaborative process, and the figure of the drama-
turg makes it particularly obvious that a search for a bright line between the
personal and the professional is fruitless.
That much said, I must situate my discussion within specific conditions of
production, because all I have set down so far applies much better to some
varieties of dramaturgs than to others. The discourse on dramaturgy within the
“new dramaturgies” of contemporary postdramatic performance speaks of
dramaturgs as overwhelmingly freelance and project-based, serving as collabo
rative witnesses from within the process (they may oscillate between inside and
outside of the room, but they are granted an insider’s freedom of passage.) Note
that these sorts of dramaturgs generally find minimal direct financial support
for their role; like me, they are likely to find more stable employment within
academia but find their dramaturgical work indirectly supports them insofar as
it relates to academic research. There are other incarnations of the role, most
notably those of institutional dramaturgs working on salary for resident theaters
across the United States, who embrace their role as editorial and “producerial”
judges from without, wielding an unabashed power over what does and does not
get produced. (Witnesses, judges, advocates . . . I cannot help but notice how
the language of the courtroom accumulates.) These institutional dramaturgs
organize and shepherd commissions of new work, deciding what moves from
workshop to full production, and generally have their hands more directly on
the spigots of money and resources. That dance dramaturgy in the United
States belongs overwhelmingly to the former model has more to do with how
dance gets made and seen here ( produced by the artist/company and subse-
quently presented by venues) and less to do with some inherent nature of
dance versus theater. It is, after all, the institutional structures and conditions of
production that do the most to retain the disciplinary boundaries between
contemporary dance and theater today—challenged as those boundaries may
be by a variety of artists.
In her “Anxious Dramaturgy,” Myriam Van Imschoot wrote critically

about the role institutionally assigned dramaturgs played in the European
dance scene of the 1990s, finding them wolves in sheep’s clothing, assigned to
impose the wishes of the institution upon the artist without clear transparency
about their allegiance. Her essay was certainly a symptom, and perhaps even a
further cause, of the lionizing of the freelance dramaturg in Europe. Here in
the United States, dance dramaturgy never had that problem because the free-
lance dance dramaturg has been the default mode. I know of relatively few
examples of institutions assigning dramaturgs to dance-based productions—
though my own introduction to Ralph Lemon was certainly one such example.
Yet in my case, since I was still a student offering my free labor in exchange for
an experiential education, I was not quite in a position to operate as the covert
force Van Imschoot describes.
Maaike Bleeker has written of dramaturgical dialogue as born from closeness
and distance, intimacy and distrust, where the shifting difference between the
dramaturg and choreographer/director is the “difference that allows an en-
counter to take place.”41 She also reinforces my consideration of the dramaturgi-
cal encounter as an irreducibly interpersonal relationship by characterizing the
thinking of that encounter “as movement that takes place between friends.”42
Jacob Zimmer, dance dramaturg in Toronto, concurs, saying the work is “like
friendship: delightful and messy, emergent and distinct . . . full of coming and
going with faith. It can involve fights and falling out and weekends away that
heal the wounds without erasing difference.”43 This idea of a “friend” is neces-
sarily complex—it describes no Hallmark-card vision of idealized harmony,
but rather someone with whom one may differ, and with whom that difference
is not easy, has stakes. Bleeker uses the example of the collaborative friendship
of co-philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, which Deleuze charac-
terized by explaining “we don’t work, we negotiate. We were never in the same
rhythm, we were always out of step.”44 This image, which as Bleeker notes does
figure the two as terrible dance partners, describes a generative dissonance that
nevertheless creates the productive motion of thought.
Research from the social sciences on difference and dissent within collabo
rative creativity also supports this model of disagreement as productive. Psycholo-
gist Charlan Jeanne Nemeth began her career researching the value of dissent
in social groups and, finding dissent led to broader and more creative problem
solving, was led to consider the importance of dissent for both individual and
group creativity. In doing so she famously countered the unexamined wisdom
of the corporate-style brainstorming process, where the advice had been never
to criticize anyone else’s suggestion. Instead she offered evidence that “authentic
dissent” (her term, to characterize the articulation of sincerely held conflicting
views instead of the more theatrical act of devil’s advocacy) increases the range
and fitness of proposals generated by group problem solving.45 This form of

dissent might manifest itself in unruly ways, instead of filtered through a given
code of brainstorming conduct. Nemeth’s findings relieve us of the model
where the dramaturg should serve as an uncomplicated midwife, merely assisting
the delivery and soothing the labor pangs of the choreographer/director. At
the same time, they also relieve us of the model where the dramaturg should be
a kneejerk gadfly, believing in the value of challenge above all else. Instead the
dramaturg may seem to oscillate between those two modes but in fact matches
neither, because the goal is neither to be a midwife for midwife’s sake nor gadfly
for gadfly’s sake. The goal is to enter into an encounter through the frank nego-
tiation of inevitable similarity and difference; from there the motion springs.
Throughout this volume I return to the theme that while the crucible of disagree-
ment is not equally welcome in every collaborative moment, it is a powerful
source of discoveries with the potential to surprise all parties involved.
Gender, Literal and Figurative
One more introductory lens remains through which to view the dramaturgical
relationship, and that lens is gender. Recall the figure of Brecht, whose embodi-
ment, theorization, and subsequent training of the theatrical dramaturg were
largely responsible for ushering the dramaturg out of the literary office and into
the rehearsal room. Though he worked as a dramaturg himself, history remem-
bers Brecht far more as an influential playwright, reflexively casting him in the
role of solo male genius. Yet he was an artist who thrived on discussion, dialogue,
and collaboration, and a series of female mitarbeiterin collaborated, less visibly of
course, on the Brecht persona of genius: Hauptmann, Berlau, and Margarethe
Steffin. Their labor went beyond the purely dramaturgical, sometimes profes-
sionally (dramaturg Hauptmann likely wrote large portions of key plays), some-
times personally (in sexual affairs). The figure of Brecht seems to transpose the
dynamic of male creator and female helpmate, familiar to anyone reviewing
the matrimonial relationships of European figures of vaunted genius, onto the
dramaturgical relationship.46
A female dramaturg working for a male artist does so uneasily within the
long shadow cast by this gendered helpmate/genius archetype. Cindy Brizzell
and André Lepecki elaborate upon this model when they write about the drama-
turg’s work as conventionally occurring “within an already socially abjected
space of feminine labor.”47 They read the action of dramaturgy as the threading
together of a performance and thereby connect it with the mythically and his-
torically feminine labor of weaving. The dramaturg-weaver allegedly travails
“with delicate moves, light touches” so that her thread does not assert itself as a
thread of authorship. To that activity of weaving, cast in its most self-abnegating

rather than creative light, they add “a certain fantasy of the maternal,” wherein
the dramaturg “solves problems, smoothes out the psychosis of the production
and, upon request, must always be able to provide the right answer.”48 I recog-
nize moments, disturbing in this light, where a maternal image has dovetailed
with my understanding of my role—chief among them the impulse I describe
in chapter 5: to serve as the good hostess to performers from other cultural loca-
tions, to act with the caretaking born of etiquette.
Bojana Cvejić argues similarly that the dramaturg’s role has been tradition-
ally feminized insofar as her labor offers a service and not a product.49 Here the
path from “service” to “servile” seems etymologically foreordained, and one
conjures a stereotypical image of the dramaturg as a long-suffering nurse or
waitress. This gendered association holds sway notwithstanding the number of
stereotypically masculine professions that vaunt some form of service (for starters:
police, politicians, and priests) and could be useful in dismantling this assumption.
Ultimately Brizzell/Lepecki and Cvejić invoke the gendered archetype in
order to discard it. They cast their lots instead with the image of a dramaturg as
a potentially disruptive force, an “enemy of complacency”50 who by means of
“intense dialogics”51 works against and across established categories, gendered
and otherwise. I cast my lot there as well, and yet I do want to take a moment
to acknowledge the female dramaturg’s enduring consciousness of how her
labor may be misread. As she works, and especially if (as with me) her primary
collaborator is male, she remains mindful of how others might perceive her
falling, or not falling, into that gendered genius/helpmate script.
Valuation and understanding of dramaturgical labor depends on a valua-
tion and understanding of collaborative labor that, current Silicon Valley paeans
notwithstanding, have not fully entered the collective consciousness. Within
the artistic realm it also requires a re-engineering of the model of solo artistic
genius, such that collaborators with a headlining artist are not automatically
cast in the roles of servile helpmates.52 Yet this is not to suggest a rosy utopia of
ensemble equity, either. The amounts and types of work done by collaborators,
dramaturgs and others, can fall all over the map. And a director or choreog-
rapher often does the most work, and certainly gets the most blame when things
go awry. What’s needed is a more sophisticated conceptual toolkit for under-
standing existing collaborative systems, so all such creative relationships do not
snap immediately to a two-dimensional grid, in either a vertical relationship of
served and servile, or a horizontal relationship of fifty-fifty authorship, neither
of which feel familiar to my working process. The understanding of dramaturgi-
cal collaboration as a complex mode of friendship can also be helpful here. If
collaborative possibilities are no longer understood in such a binary fashion,
gender will similarly cease to provide an attractive metaphor for understanding

collaborative labor.
Also worth pondering is what happens to that gendered script once drama-
turgy moves from the field of theater into the field of dance. A contrasting set of
assumptions now overlay those just articulated: the dramaturg’s masculinized
association with logos and text, seen next to the physically expressive, often-
silent, and feminized body of the dancer/choreographer. As I make apparent
in the next chapter, the allegiance of dramaturg to text, reductive but not always
possible to refute entirely, feeds in to that tiresome and entirely refutable dichot-
omy of mind versus body. But with one kneejerk gender assignment straining
against the other, the “servile mind” of the female/male dramaturg meeting
the “genius body” of the male/female choreographer, we start to toss off these
stereotypes in a hermaphroditic blur. And thus dance dramaturgy as a field is
in an excellent position to delegitimize power assumptions based on actual or
metaphorical gender and to imagine the dialogue between the dramaturg and
choreographer, as well as among the rest of the collaborators, as a more fluid
field of play.
In the following five chapters I examine five potential registers of the dance
dramaturg’s engagement in the working process, grounding my thoughts in
participant-observer narratives from my work with Ralph Lemon. The first
chapter begins with text and language, in a nod to frequent assumptions about
the entrance of the historically literary dramaturg into a movement-based
rehearsal room. Here I analyze my dramaturgical activities, thoughts, and con-
versations regarding the range of possible relationships between words and
movement. I share four provisional categories for those relationships, as well as
a few thoughts on the role of narrative, even wordless narrative, in dance. From
there I devote a chapter to research—another common association with the
dramaturg inherited from the theater-world context. Research frequently
provides the dramaturg a point of entry into the working process, yet from that
point the path is not straightforward. The consideration of what exactly the
word “research” can mean, how and by whom it might be deployed, when
exactly it becomes inspiration, and the varied natures of the archives that fuel
it, provides the dramaturg much food for thought. The next chapter departs
from the familiar but much-contested dictum that the dramaturg is the “advo-
cate for the audience,” and looks at how my own understanding of an eventual
audience, and the dramaturg’s relation to it, has been broken down and rebuilt
over the course of my work with Ralph. In anecdotes about audience I touch
upon the areas of most conflict, and most evolution, in Ralph’s and my working
relationship, and I explore the subjects of privacy versus presentation, racialized
viewing, and generosity. The fourth chapter turns away from inherited asso-
ciations with the dramaturg’s role and instead investigates what the dance
dramaturg brings to the conversation about dramaturgy: the art of attending to
movement. I share how the dramaturg might think about perceiving motion,
sharpening those skills of perception, and how movement makes meaning. But
I land on a consideration of the movement experiments that broke down all my
hard-earned competencies for viewing movement and convinced me that
deskilling my own viewing was my more important task. The final chapter
takes on the rich and thorny subject of interculturalism in performance, as my
work with Ralph since 1997 has involved two major intercultural projects, plus
intercultural aspects within two others. I begin the chapter detailing a founda-
tional interest in hybridity and then surveying the ideas of several major thinkers
who have been important to my understanding of the ethics of interculturalism.
I end by developing a list of points of attention for the intercultural rehearsal
room.
Throughout these five chapters I inevitably shift between first-person
rehearsal room narratives and a more distanced analysis of their implications.
Thus my approach to writing this book enacts the labor it describes, mirroring
the dramaturg’s frequent travels from theory to practice and back again—
until, in motion, the distinction blurs.
1
Text and Language
T he first three chapters of this book depart from received notions of the drama-
turg’s role to explore what sort of thinking contemporary dance dramaturgy
generates. In this first chapter I take up the association of dramaturgy with
logos—the word, the text, the language—inspecting it from several angles to
illuminate what sorts of thoughts emerge when the dramaturg (or anyone
partaking in dramaturgical activity) considers the use of text in and around
movement-based performance.
I begin with text because it describes the commonest association with
the dramaturg. In the dramatic theater, text serves as both recipe and main
ingredient for performance; the dramaturgy of the work inevitably extends
from its textual skeleton. Even as a work’s dramaturgy addresses how it manifests
itself theatrically, conventional priorities tend to focus on how the performers
articulate the text, and how that speech is supported or contradicted by the
theatrical apparatus that surrounds it. In this mode of theatrical production we
always know what came first: the Word.
The historical models readily support this. Lessing offered us the image of
dramaturg as critic and playwright, generating words constitutive, descriptive,
and analytic of the dramatic theater. Brecht as a production dramaturg but also a
playwright and director seems more aware of theater’s extratextual dimensions,
even using them to fuel the dramatic ironies necessary to his epic theater, but
he nevertheless takes text as his point of departure. And if we look at Raimund
Hoghe, arguably our first dance dramaturg, we find that even though he at-
tended to nonverbal events in Bausch’s rehearsal room, he also entered into his
new role from a role as a journalist, a wordsmith, just a few years after Bausch’s
dancers started speaking out loud.
I can easily conjure the stereotype of the text-bound dramaturg, in snap-
shot glimpses: the dramaturg with her head in a book, planning to move between
theory and practice just as soon as she finishes reading up on her theory. The
dramaturg lugging books and printouts into the rehearsal room to sit in an im-
posing pile, so that others may read too (though they may be perfectly happy to
24
Te x t a n d L a n g u a ge 25
outsource that task). The dramaturg scribbling in a rehearsal notebook, archiving

a long process in a string of quotations and description. The dramaturg posing
questions and provoking dialogue so that the director/choreographer and
collaborators can dissect the work from multiple angles—sometimes in the
bright light of the rehearsal room, sometimes after hours in a dark pub, but either
way animatedly verbal. The dramaturg sourcing and compiling text to be spoken
on stage. The dramaturg assembling the program notes, laboring with hope
to find the perfect combination of words that will bring audience members to
the brink of the performance in the most receptive mood possible. In all these
snapshots, reductive yet still familiar, we find the dramaturg amid a cloud of
words.
Accordingly, collaborators may perceive the dramaturg as entering the
rehearsal room as language’s special representative, there to interpret the
words already present, and to that dose add some more. In the case of dance
dramaturgy, this allegiance can create suspicion. Has the dramaturg come in
to the room to turn dance into something it is not (insofar as we accept the dis-
credited but enduring modernist premise that dance’s purview is pure move-
ment), or once was (insofar as the era of the story ballet is past)? Is she there to
“translate” dance away from its strengths? Might the choreographer have to
protect the delicate nonverbal nature of the work from the pernicious influence
of the verbal dramaturg?
Taking on the role of dramaturg in movement-based performance makes
me exquisitely conscious of language’s role in the room, both within the work
being rehearsed and in the interstitial moments when that work is reflected
upon. Language’s power is also its danger, and as I do my work I find myself
meditating frequently on the nuances of usage that might harness the former
while skirting the latter. European dance theorist and dramaturg Bojana Bauer
writes that one fear dancers and choreographers have of dramaturgical work is
that it “can ‘close things too soon’ by naming them.”1 Within the performance
work as well, language can also be deployed in hackneyed ways that might, for
instance, seem to resolve or explain away the questions or sensations left hanging
in the air after a particularly evocative nonverbal passage. But just because
language can be used that way does not mean it need be.
Movement-based rehearsal rooms, even when dramaturg-free, are not word-
less locations. It is worth noting the sort of language that is regularly deployed
there during the working process. On an anatomical level, where the body is
irreducibly literal, language is as concrete as it can be: psoas, trochanter, scapulae,
rib cage. The part is simply named in order to draw attention there, and perhaps
to redirect its use. But other utterances, those that share ideas about what the
moving bodies are or are not achieving, are or are not evoking, proceed
26 Te x t a n d L a n g u a g e
through copious simile and metaphor. Here the figurative language is laid up
against embodied experience in order to evoke an overlap, but not an equiva-
lence. For instance, the words now there is a snake curling up and down your spine will
conjure a particular quality of movement, without referring to the presence of
any actual snake in the studio, or an expectation that the words should operate
representationally and conjure a snake in the mind of a viewer. In these in-
stances language does not name as much as create new webs of connection and
new potential meanings, in what André Lepecki has called a “metaphorical
explosion.”2
Ralph and I have long maintained a playful fight about the use of the word
“language” as a verb, as in “If I had to language that I would say . . .” or “I’m not
sure I can language that yet.” This dancerly neologism (I can only trace it to the
New York dance world of the late 1990s and early 2000s) irks me to no end. He
is not especially attached to it but still finds it serves a useful purpose. And it is
true that in the midst of my longstanding resistance I nevertheless appreciate
what the fact of its coinage reveals. First of all, it is a linguistic shortcut for well-
trod territory—it means that movement artists talk frequently enough about
the issues that surround “putting into language” that they would like to save
themselves a little time by just talking about “languaging” instead. Secondly, it
makes “language” into an active agent, its noun form turning into something
wielded, or applied, or catalyzing, in order to create the activity of the verb.
Language is tool and process, not just result. Lastly, and perhaps most impor-
tantly, it implies language always comes second, for first there is something to
be languaged, to which the languaging process is applied, and that thing is
movement, or other embodied experience.
Enter the dance dramaturg into that process, bringing her linguistic affinity,
actual or alleged. She is already aware of the potential suspicions around her
words—the fear that they might prematurely fix the questions being researched,
or reduce the useful indeterminacy of movement. But she may be equally
aware that counter to that reductive power of naming also runs a transformative
power of naming. She may wish to harness that power. Naming can transform
especially if what is named was until then invisible—an unnoticed assumption,
an unexamined pattern. The dramaturg—or anyone engaging dramaturgical
thinking—may use her words and say, for instance, “This movement always
turns to the right. Is that a choice?” or “When there is speech, Performer A
always begins. Should we emphasize that?” No answer need be presumed; it
could be yes or it could be no; no opinion need be stated, though the drama-
turg may also have and share one. But the same way the words “rib cage”
simply draw a dancer’s attention to that anatomical location, this sort of naming
of assumptions draws attention to something that was always there but perhaps
not noticed. Deborah Hay, the American choreographer whose long career
extends from the Judson Dance Theatre to the present day, once explained
that when she began scoring her dances in language, she “learned things about
other dimensions of the dance that I did not know were there until I wrote
them down.”3
Of course, naming can still be a horribly blunt instrument. But when acti-
vated by metaphor, dialogue, and the play of language, words gain nuance. In
fluid dialogue it is even possible to use words to express one’s distrust of language
or wish for silence, or make linguistic gestures in the direction of what cannot
exactly be spoken. And this kind of thinking about the nuanced use of language
crops up for me not just regarding speech in the rehearsal room process but
regarding performed language as well. Even though it is convenient to make
the distinction between rehearsal rooms and performance stages, I often end
up with the same line of thought in both locations. In both, words and movement
may jostle alongside each other to create the larger range of meaning of “what’s
going on,” to expand or contract experience and understanding.
I have built the first section of this chapter around a meditation on the
dramaturg as the friend of words, language, text. Now I would like to complicate
that association from two directions.
First, collaborative relationships with dramaturgs may certainly depart
from the dramaturg’s putative allegiance to the text, but in remaining alive to
the work at hand, and entering into the kind of fluid dialogue characterized
above, they may travel somewhere where allegiances are less predictable. In
work with Ralph, I find this pattern throughout, from our first collaboration to
our most recent. For Geography (1997) I began the process assuming that, since
Ralph’s written proposal and inspirational imagery for the piece were based on
Aeschylus’s Oresteia, my personal responsibility would be to immerse myself in
that narrative and shepherd its translation into dance and poetic text (to be
written to order by Tracie Morris, the poet and performer Ralph had invited to
collaborate). After the first two weeks of the first workshop, during which Peter
and I dutifully carried around dog-eared copies of the play, it was clear that
Aeschylus’s text would never offer anything more than a loose set of imagery,
and our task was decidedly not to narrate that story. Instead, through dialogue
with Ralph it became clear that the real course of inspiration was to be found in
the recursive movement translations I witnessed and helped facilitate daily, as
Ralph asked his West African collaborators to perform their versions of his
versions of their dancing, or fracture and reassemble familiar movement that
flowed with mastery from their bodies according to unfamiliar structural prin-
ciples derived from his. That mostly wordless story, instead, was the story to
which I ended up attending. I may have framed my initial interest in terms of
storytelling, but it ended up being the movement of the rehearsal room, not the
text of the Oresteia, that took most of my focus.
Much later with How Can You . . . ? (2010), Ralph conceived of a first section
(“Sunshine Room”) entirely spoken, by himself, sitting solo in a plastic chair in
front of a projected film. This was a deliberately, even provocatively, textual
gesture. Though there were plenty of film visuals, some of them of dancing
inside the rehearsal room, there would be no live dancing, no live bodies save
his seated figure. I had first assumed I might have a particular allegiance to this
spoken text, if only because I enjoy writing and thinking about words. And I
did spend time discussing and editing it in the final stages. However, the mono-
logue was so acutely private to Ralph (narrating the death of his romantic
partner, as it also mused on art-making and philosophy) that my role was limited
to a very late editorial dialogue. For instance, I would suggest he omit a sentence
when the previous sentence had already done the same job better, or move a
pause so that more of a particular section of the film would fall in silence. But
my only input into its initial creation was three words, after viewing an early
version: “yes, more, please.” Instead, the section of the work with which I had a
much more active and thorough collaborative role was the twenty-minute
passage of wordless, unruly, furious movement for six dancers (“Wall/Hole”).
This was the product of a much more open, shared process, generated with the
cast in workshops in venues across the United States (Walker Art Center in
Minneapolis; MANCC, or the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreog-
raphy, at Florida State University), to which I was witness, sometimes partici-
pant, certain interlocutor. More on these discussions follows below.
The second way in which the association of the dramaturg with the text can
and should be destabilized is simply based on the fact that any ironclad oppo-
sition between words and motion as forms of theatrical expression cannot
hold. Arguably it never could, but especially not now, in light of contemporary
performance developments. Artists find ways to make words dance, or motion
speak, and play one mode against the other so that meaning is rarely carried
discretely in word or motion but in another sort of dance, the one to be found
in their interaction. Increasingly post-Grotowski and post-Bausch, value is
placed on performers who can access and find fluid passage between these
forms of expression. Generally this is called “interdisciplinary work,” implying
a relation to the received disciplinary boundaries that assign words to theater
and movement to dance (not to mention visuals and conceptual work to fine
art), but Lehmann makes a good point when he argues against the “interdisci-
plinary” label and promotes instead the consideration of a new form (but
which, by calling it postdramatic, he unfortunately pins more decisively to its
theater legacy).4 In my own New York performance habitat: since 2005 the
Under the Radar festival, while still declaring itself “a festival tracking new
theater from around the world,” has invited myriad performances that are
movement based or wordless; since 2007 we have had the Crossing the Line
festival, designed to present the work of “trans-disciplinary artists transforming
and furthering cultural practices on both sides of the Atlantic”;5 and in 2011 the
venue Dance Theater Workshop renamed itself New York Live Arts—still
describing its primary allegiance to “the nation’s dance and movement-based
artists”6 but in that choice of name opening up space for a wider range.
To be clear, this is not to posit some utopian interdisciplinary unity. Rather,
it is to assert that to the extent there is a tension between the word and body,
speech and gesture, the future belongs to all collaborators—choreographers,
directors, dramaturgs, and performers—who are curious about that tension
and can imagine how to engage, explore, manipulate, or even undermine it.
These are artists for whom that tension is fodder, not limit. And that includes any
dramaturg who is attending to the full range of contemporary performance.
So instead of identifying the dramaturg as someone who thinks about the
word over movement, or flipping that for the dance dramaturg to claim move-
ment over word, I want to instead talk about the kinds of dramaturgical thinking
that arise when confronted with the relationship between movement and word.
For that, in the final portion of this chapter I share some relevant examples
from Ralph Lemon’s rehearsal rooms, to illuminate what was at stake in those
moments, and the evolution of our dramaturgical dialogue about this nexus.
In so doing I offer some ways to think about potential relationships between
words and movement in performance, using rehearsal room anecdotes to illus-
trate four modes that feel to me, at the moment, like familiar fields of play. The
danger of creating this provisional taxonomy is the same as the danger of
language to which I have already referred: it could close off a process, setting
myself up to later match a definition rather than discover something new. Thus
what follows should be read as partial and descriptive, not complete and pre-
scriptive, in order to better skirt that danger. The four modes that follow are
built of not just my text but my subtext, and that subtext is the desire for oppor-
tunities to test these characterizations, or discover new ones, in future work. As
Tim Etchells puts it, inside the “making process . . . dogma never prospers,
[and] the surprises of improvisation, mistakes, and changing one’s mind are the
only certainties worth clinging to.”7
Words as Evidence
During the work on Geography (1997), Tracie Morris, the spoken-word poet
Ralph had invited to collaborate on text, hit a point of frustration. Back on the
first day of the first workshop, in that innocent time when we were still sitting
around wearing Hello My Name Is stickers, Tracie had introduced herself as
someone who liked to play with both the abstract sound value of words and the
valuable stories they could signify, sliding across a full spectrum of use. Particu-
larly, she told us, for this project she was interested in using her writing to evoke
stories of African culture as translated across the African diaspora to the United
States. In the month-long first workshop, sheaves of paper regularly arrived in
the rehearsal room, some hand-delivered when she was in town, others dis-
gorged from the office fax machine when she was not. She offered Ralph poems
designed to tease out the themes of his chosen Oresteia in their collision with the
themes of an African American man (himself ) encountering African men for
essentially the first time. But of these many offerings Ralph selected only the
most elliptical haikus and sound poetry to deliver himself; nothing that came
close to narrating the Oresteia or clearly articulating Transatlantic culture made
the cut. He was interested in one end of the spectrum that Tracie had offered,
but not so much the other. Thus Tracie wondered out loud, in a production
meeting mid-process: what purpose was the text really serving? As she put it,
“The dancers’ spontaneous vocal expressions—when they yell to encourage
each other, or when they make rhythms vocally—are grounding this piece in
a way [my] text is not.”8 I wanted to help her, but at that point all I could do
was agree—yes, the actual, everyday utterances of our dancers were more
compelling.
Tracie even made a valiant attempt to write a blues song for the African
cast to sing, hoping to create a bit of expression that would land, culturally
speaking, somewhere mid-Atlantic. (Perhaps the treacherousness of this loca-
tion, when understood in the context of the Middle Passage, should have given
us pause.) It was not easy to find English lyrics for the West African cast that
would be intelligible when sung to an American audience. As Tracie went
through many drafts, we also rehearsed the cast’s delivery. In the midst of these
explorations, I entered the auditorium one day to find, framed perfectly in the
proscenium, all seven African men sitting assembled around the feet of a white
speech instructor. The instructor simply intended, as was his job, to coach better
stage pronunciation, but in that one snapshot he looked like nothing so much
as a colonial schoolmaster. In an instant it was obvious to me that this particular
tack was not working, and I shared my feelings freely with Ralph, Tracie, and
Peter. They responded with concern, though Tracie asked for more time to try
and make it work. She tried for a week or two more before relinquishing the
idea of writing a song for the cast with decipherable English lyrics. These men
from Francophone West Africa were not the right performers to narrate a
description of Ralph’s cultural position, his particular late twentieth-century
“blues,” no matter how much the American collaborators might want that
position to be conveyed to an American audience. It was neither their story to
tell nor their language to speak.
As I was also discovering quickly, the real course of inspiration for the work
was growing within the daily negotiations on sharing and disassembling move-
ment styles in the rehearsal room (as I describe in more detail in chapter 4).
Our rehearsal room language was animated and even heated, as the dancers
took apart tricky movement passages and recombined them. This process,
which alternated intense passages of dancing to live drumming with long dis-
cussions of what had just happened (or not happened), proceeded in response to
Ralph’s prompts and challenges, but without his continued input (as it occurred
in an African French far beyond his ken). I jumped headlong into the fray as a
second-string translator—my French was not as good as the hired company
interpreter, but I more easily understood Ralph’s dancerly language, both in
terms of body-mechanics and metaphor. There was no single person in the
room, however, who understood all the words spoken there, all the time. That
was the work’s chaos, and joy.
Meanwhile Ralph’s and my conversations in the interstitial spaces between
rehearsals circled around the idea that the rehearsal room activity I have just
described, with its inevitable and myriad failures of translation, would always
be the most interesting thing created. Agreeing that the Geography process would
always exceed the stage product, we searched for more ways to fold the former
into the latter. We did not yet know each other very well, but I made a decision
to be “noisy” in my interaction with him (as he later put it, affectionately).9 I
baited him with long strings of propositions for how this could be done: What if
we had one dancer teach another movement onstage? What if he and Djédjé
did the same choreography simply but differently, side by side? Most of my
suggestions were not fruitful in our emerging context. But I nevertheless had
faith that they, like projectiles lobbed willy-nilly at a moving target, might dis-
lodge some new ideas even if they did not hit the target directly.
After relinquishing the idea that I, as dramaturg, was in the rehearsal room
to support the intelligibility of the Oresteia source material, I looked to better
understand my relationship to the other spoken text in the piece. Why was it
there? Ralph had chosen a project that was interesting enough in its wordless
incarnation; why was he also so sure that these dancers should speak? Was it just
because the Yale Repertory Theater was footing the bill, and he felt obligated
to engage with their theater tradition? Or was there something else here about
the tricky power dynamics of intercultural collaboration between relatively
monied Western arts establishments and less monied international artists (as
played out increasingly in the 1990s and 2000s) that made it important to hear
the African dancers speak, as a literal way of assuring they were not denied a
figurative voice in the making? Would I watch these dancers moving (virtuosic
and assured, at least until Ralph purposefully destabilized them) differently if I
could also hear them speak? If so, what was that difference? How much did it
also matter if I could actually understand the words they spoke? Was it more
appropriate to hear them speak in French and African tongues, fully within
their own competencies, even if that risked mystifying or romanticizing them
for an American audience? Or was it more important to hear them speak their
limited English, insofar as that might better communicate some referential
content to the majority of our audience? What’s more, might that second option
also be understood as an honest manifestation of the awkward position they
had all agreed to take on, by flying to the United States and working here for
our audiences? I knew that I believed, in general, post-Bausch and on the heels
of my own practical experience with ERS, in the possibilities offered by bodies
both moving and speaking on stage. Now I had to put that general affinity of
mine to the test, wondering what it meant, or could mean, in this particular
context. I posed the questions above to Ralph, “noisily,” over countless cups of
tea and in countless e-mails. But I also had faith that the answers, to count,
would not spring fully formed out of those conversations. They could only be
found in the bodies and voices of our cast.
Meanwhile, Tracie continued to work through the role of her words in the
rehearsal room and the piece. She created a sound poem using the interjections
she had overheard in the cast’s everyday deliberations—a collection of short
words and exclamations from French, English, and several African tongues.
The text was deployed so as to focus on its musical sound value, and in rehearsal
it was orchestrated in detail. Already this was a move toward putting the lan-
guage of the rehearsal room onstage, but Ralph found it too carefully composed.
After a week of trying, this scripted poem disappeared. In its place Tracie
provided the cast with a divisive subject—in a nod to the Oresteia, she chose
capital punishment—and created the conditions and a structure within which
the cast would enter into an argument on stage. It would be minimally orches-
trated but retain the rhythms of their daily conversation. It was dubbed “Tire
Talk,” as it began with the cast rolling out chairs built by visual artist/set designer
Nari Ward from repurposed automobile tires. They sat in a closed circle center
stage and deliberated. Ralph was included in the group, though just as in the
rehearsal room, he had a hard time keeping up. Tracie, Peter, and I sat outside
the scene and helped to score it, as Ralph had no access to the audience’s point
of view. The episode began with a verbal explosion from Angelo and was
modulated internally by subtle physical cues from Nai, but within the set frame
we asked the performers to conduct themselves freely, as they might in their
everyday rehearsal room deliberations.
Figure 3. “Tire Talk” section of Geography. Visible from left to right : Didier “James” Akpa, Carlos
Funn, Moussa Diabate, Kouakou “Angelo” Zao (standing), Nai You, Djédjé Djédjé Gervais, Goulei
Tchépoho. (© T Charles Erickson)
The chosen topic did alter the stakes in comparison to those deliberations,
but in which direction was unclear. It raised the stakes insofar as political
stances toward human life, not a few tricky dance steps, were at issue. It lowered
them insofar as the cast discussed a hypothetical scenario instead of their actual
dancing. But either way, the topic of the discussion was never easily apparent
to an outside viewer; that was not the point. The language was not deployed for
the audience in terms of what it directly, as words, signified—it was deployed as
evidence of something else.
In the final performance version of the piece, several of Tracie’s more
abstract sound poems remained, delivered primarily by Ralph and Carlos (the
one other American dancer/performer). There were also two sections in which
the African cast, led by Djédjé, sang songs they knew well, with lyrics in several
different West African languages. But the “Tire Talk” section felt like the real
spoken-word discovery of the piece. Here language made a claim to reveal
backstage behavior and a glimpse at the actual conditions of production for the
work. In other words, the spoken language onstage resembled (without equaling)
the spoken language of the rehearsal room, reframed. Here words were not
declaimed and delivered so much as offered up as evidence of the work behind
the performance, even if that authenticity was inevitably a theatrically framed

fiction. This gesture was able to both demystify the usually mute dancer’s body
(see, they are speaking humans like the rest of us, not aliens from Planet Virtuos-
ity) and to reveal the cultural specificity of that body (here through a range of
West African languages).
Geography’s conception as an intercultural collaboration made this deploy-
ment of words as evidence of the work process and the performers’ cultural
specificity particularly important. Accordingly, when Ralph prepared Tree, the
next work in the Geography Trilogy, and conceived it as an intercultural collabo-
ration as well, our early conversations built on the assumption that we would
begin with this mode of language and push it even further. In Tree the inter-
culturalism was compounded, as Ralph’s collaborators came from not two but
six different cultural locations: China, Taiwan, India, Japan, Africa, United
States. In e-mails, Ralph declared that he wanted to work on the “basic experi-
ment of talking and dancing and who we are.”10 I found it very easy, as drama-
turg, to be intrigued by this line of inquiry. Ralph also asked me to take on the
function of “Text Arranger” for the piece. My task would be twofold: to locate
and edit found text and to help generate spoken material by suggesting improvi-
sations for the performers.
An early workshop in August 1999 contained a battery of text-driven
experiments. In my notebook I wrote down one of the rhetorical questions that
drove our initial rehearsal tasks: “what if Chinese, French, Japanese, English,
and Dance were all equivalent terms?”11 We devised, and continually readjusted,
a series of improvisational games that would require dancers to speak. Ralph
also decided to give the act of translation greater emphasis in speech (as it had
already had, in movement, with Geography). And so our experiments with expos-
ing what was for us a common “backstage” act, language translation, began.
For instance, performers David Thomson and Asako Takami read out loud
excerpts from e-mails chronicling the actual bureaucratic negotiations that had
been required to secure travel visas for performers Wang Liliang and Li Wen
Yi. The e-mails were already written in Chinese-inflected English, revealing
one imperfect act of translation. Then Ralph asked Pehoula Zerehoulé, sitting
on the sidelines, to periodically interrupt David and demand he explain what
was going on in French, on the fly.12 David’s French was passable but certainly
not perfect, and the pressure to immediately produce a translation flustered
him. This particular exercise did not continue past the first New Haven work-
shop, but the idea of pressuring David to spontaneously alternate between
the two languages did make it to the final stage incarnation. As we went on, we
affirmed that “letting the real problem [of rehearsal room translation] become
part of what’s investigated” was a priority.13 My attention was often absorbed
in the mechanics of a number of spoken translation game structures, noticing
the range of outputs we would get based on an initial rule, and how they would
shift if that rule were adjusted. Improvised speech was unruly, and that was
part of the point. But exactly how much unruliness had we signed up for? When
did we want to tinker with the conditions of the translation game to exercise a
measure of soft control? How and how much were we framing and manipulating
this evidence?
Words as a Field for Movement
Tree also deployed spoken word in a different manner, not as evidence of the
conditions of the piece’s creation, but as a more composed delivery of informa-
tion to an audience. Within those spoken words, the dance could then play. I
imagined this mode as words generating reverberations that would linger, into
which the dancers bodies would then move, glossing and expanding upon the
more literal information.
As a result movement did not take place in an allegedly abstract field, aspir-
ing to refer only to itself, as it might in the modernist tradition of a Ballanchine
or Cunningham. Instead, movement engaged wordlessly the reverberations
left behind by words; it operated within an articulated context but moved freely
within that bounded area. Sometimes this mode might also operate in reverse—
where movement first established an event, perhaps mysterious, and the lan-
guage then offered a description of that field of play. There is nothing ground-
breakingly new about this mode. It has been in play since early Modern dancers
choreographed to spoken poetry, if not before. It had not always worked so
well with Tracie Morris’s poetry in Geography, but I felt sure it was open to new
discoveries.
In Tree this mode began with a road not taken. I was not present for Ralph’s
first workshop, which was a solo residency at the Miller Theater, his only col-
laborator being sound designer James Lo. He undertook it just after having
returned from his research travels abroad in India, and he used it to process
that raw experience and think about how it might become creative fodder. The
resulting informal performance made much use of excerpts from Ralph’s journal
entries during the trip, alternating and overlapping them with minimalist physi-
cal actions. He told matter-of-fact stories about the details of his days: visiting
temples, responding as a Westerner to aggressive beggars, witnessing the after-
math of copious traffic accidents, shitting on sand dunes, and noting the vora-
cious sexual habits of his paid guide. Meanwhile he dropped a rock repeatedly
at his own feet and performed slow variations on repeated sitting and lying,
with bows of the head and washings of the feet—all reminiscent of the physical
components of devotional prayer. Text and movement interwove with stark
contrast: profane versus sacred.
Ralph asked me to be at the showing and share my reactions. We had

already had many discussions about the initial framework for Tree; I knew he
was planning to use his travels and collaborations with a series of Asian artists
(as-of-yet unchosen) both to explore his Buddhist-inflected spirituality and to
challenge his assumptions about how and why he continued his work as a per-
former. But this was the first I saw of anything performative. The e-mail I sent
him after the performance was lengthy. A portion of it went like this:
I was very inspired and engaged by all the physical rituals you came up
with for that concert/showing . . . My only hesitancies would be about the
text. You warned me it would be a little too much like a travelogue, and I
agree. The way I saw it, you used the India travel experience to let the
scales drop from your eyes, and see things fresh, but India in all its own
self-knowledge couldn’t get a voice in the piece. . . . there has to be a way,
ultimately, to allow elements that aren’t entirely mediated by your point of
view into the piece, like there was in Geo I. In the end the whole piece is
framed by you, but there have to be more elements that give up that
power, however provisionally.
I know you’re trying to acknowledge and even embrace the extent to
which the piece is about YOUR experience of Asia. I’m trying to think
through how you can do that and yet at the same time not make a piece
about being a tourist. Maybe the answer is just more time, more time for
the narratives to settle, and feel a little deeper than the descriptive “and
then this, and then this” of a travel journal. I think the intensity with which
one observes even the most everyday things in a strange new place might
be a bit of a red herring.
A few days later I talked about the showing with a friend of mine, an
anthropology student . . . She said she thought that contrast [ between
sacred and profane] didn’t really portray India, because in India the
contrast wouldn’t be possible, the whole point is that sacred and profane
there (or rather what we Westerners see as sacred and profane) are inex-
tricably blended. So for her the attempt to set up the contrast was the most
Western-oriented part of all.
I wonder why these issues of cultural interpretation came up for me
with the text, but not with the movement. Perhaps with the movement it
was much clearer to me that you had been inspired by the India experience
but weren’t attempting to represent it in a definitive way.14
I could not imagine how Ralph’s particular journal material, spoken

aloud, would construct a field of reverberations in which a larger group of Asian
dance artists would find a way to move, explore and play. But the part of the
e-mail above that is most interesting to me now is the final two sentences above.
Why did it seem to me that Ralph was attempting and failing to “capture” his
experience in India in words, while in movement I was willing to grant that he

was expressing an influence without attempting to define it? In other words,
why, with the written word, did his inability to get past a limited viewpoint
seem like a liability, whereas in movement, did it seem like a confession and
exploration of those limitations? An analogous “failure” in both media had, for
me, a contrasting effect. The text seemed like a simple failure, falling flat,
whereas the movement seemed like an interesting failure, revealing difficulty
and dissonance.
After this e-mail Ralph shelved the idea of working with his travel journal
on stage (though he did publish much of it in his art book, Tree: Belief/Culture/
Balance). Many years later, when I commented on how much I valued the
highly personal text he spoke on stage for How Can You . . . ?, he laughed at me
and said I had scared him away from using anything too personal for years,
with the dialogue that had been triggered by this one e-mail above. My jaw
dropped. Really? I tried to remember our subsequent conversations, of which I
can find no written record. Might I clumsily have dismissed all varieties of
personal text with a single gesture? Or if I had not, had I still been heard by
Ralph in that way? Such are the vicissitudes of collaborative communication.
There is no way to go back in time to clarify an opinion or point toward a road
not taken.
In any case the pendulum, at that moment, swung far away from journal
material. The text we began working with was scientific in tone. My task was to
research and gather a selection of scientific texts about natural disasters—
moments of profound disruption to the earth, the kind of events to which our
now-growing and diverse cast, by virtue of being citizens of the unstable earth,
could share some relationship. The theme was born in part from their lived
experiences—Manoranjan Pradhan and Bijaya Barik had recently been fortu-
nate enough to survive a cyclone in Orissa in which more than ten thousand
people died. Cheng-Chieh Yu had recently been fortunate enough to survive
an earthquake in Taiwan in which more than two thousand died. And Asako
Takami had lived through a massive Japanese earthquake as a four-year-old
child, preserving the experience in a child’s vivid memory fragments. A piece
of Ralph’s inspirational imagery also fed into the theme of natural disasters.
The Tree of his title was a plant representing the cosmos, with roots in the under-
world, trunk in the known world, and branches in the heavens—an early anchor
for the intended spiritual focus of the piece. Gradually we began to see the inter-
relationship of those three levels implicated in all natural disturbances. As
Ralph wrote in his journal: “Cyclone = sky comes down to earth. Earthquake =
underworld opens up to ground level.”15 Thus a disruption of the usual physical
order of heavens and earth might imply disruption on a spiritual order as well.
I looked for scientific texts that both described an earth event of some
magnitude and might do so in a way that reverberated, creating a fertile field
for the performers to move through. All the texts I brought in laid bare a basic
condition for human existence: that we are granted the ability to live on this
earth only as long as massive potential energies, operating on a scale way beyond
our usual experience, remain dormant. We heard many such texts spoken
aloud, watched them in juxtaposition with many different movement passages,
and continued to work with any combination that seemed greater than the sum
of its parts. I certainly had some idea of what might work as I pored over scien-
tific books and gathered a selection—anything that hinted, with a bit of tension
in the midst of its scientific tone, at the mysterium tremendum or the fact of having
a body—but we had no magic formula for discerning in advance when that
reverberation would occur. We had only the art of trying, and noticing, and
naming what seemed to resonate.
In the final stage incarnation of the work, we ended up with performance
moments such as Cheng-Chieh Yu describing plate mechanics during an earth-
quake. Cheng-Chieh delivered this directly to the audience, near the end of
the performance, soon after Nari Ward’s set wall had fallen and landed at a
dangerous-looking angle, hovering aslant over the stage floor. Meanwhile the
entire cast assembled in a simple line, facing the audience, all smoking cigarettes
and matter-of-factly presenting their differences for inspection. As Cheng-Chieh
launched into her text, Asako Takami, standing stage rightmost, fell against her
neighbor David Thomson, who then fell against Mr. Wang, and so on down
the line—a small impetus of physical force continuing like a wave through the
collective. Their modest body experiment with cause and effect echoed the
much larger cause-and-effect relationships in Cheng-Chieh’s earthquakes, but
added something more—a sense of motley, temporary community in the midst
of relentless force.
Another moment in this mode: David Thomson’s delivery of the “Modified
Mercali Earthquake Intensity Scale.” This was a list that attempted to take the
unruly effects of disruption to the earth’s crust and neatly categorize them in
twelve masterable categories. The cool scientific tone contrasted alarmingly
with the nature of what was described, in its progression between levels “One:
Not felt except by very few under especially favorable circumstances”; “Five:
Felt by nearly everyone. Sleepers awakened, liquids disturbed, some spilled”;
“Nine: General panic. Weak masonry destroyed, ordinary masonry heavily
damaged. Buildings shifted off of foundations”; and finally “Twelve: Damage
total. Waves seen on ground surface. Lines of sight and level distorted. Objects
thrown into the air.”16 This text reverberated both forward and in reverse,
coming as it did soon after a disorienting “force duet” for David and Ralph.
Figure 4. Tree. From left to right : Asako Takami, David Thomson, Wang Liliang, Bijaya Barik, Li
Wen Yi, Carlos Funn, Wen Hui, Manoranjan Pradhan, Ralph Lemon, Cheng-Chieh Yu, Yeko
Ladzekpo-Cole, Djédjé Djédjé Gervais. (© T Charles Erickson)
Moments before, David had held a microphone while Ralph repeatedly and
vigorously contacted him and threw him off balance. Ralph pulled, pushed,
swung, and dragged him as they tumbled across the floor, mic cord tangling
and flailing. David’s subsequent delivery of his text, spoken out-of-breath into
that same microphone, resonated as both a recovery from the previous turmoil
and an evocation of it. Then as his text established its tale of mounting forces,
Bijaya, Mr. Wang, Mr. Li, and Mano entered to drop palm-sized rocks at their
own feet, always pulling away at that last minute, flirting with a small taste of
that large destruction.
Ten years later: the text for How Can You . . . ? offered me a very different
means to think about this mode of language use. Ralph’s aforementioned
“Sunshine Room” monologue began each night’s performance. He delivered a
highly personal lecture directly to the audience, as he sat in front of moving
images that ranged, in their relation to his words, from illustrative to associative
to mysterious. As mentioned before, I had little to do with the creation of this
spoken text. Early on, the most input I gave was to affirm that I found those
words—which recounted, among other things, the ailing and death of Ralph’s
partner, Tree-collaborator Asako Takami, and his subsequent attempts to create
an invisible, furious, flailing dance with the reconvened cast of Patton—quite
moving. Late in the process I helped edit it, gently.
I did, however, have a lot to do with the creation of that allegedly invisible
dance. In numerous workshops across the United States, the cast, Ralph, and I
gathered to experiment with the devising of a structured improvisational dance
that might “disappear,” possessing “no form and no style.” We would not start
from scratch; the point of departure was a three-minute improvisation titled
“Ecstasy” that had concluded the previous work, Patton. Ralph’s idea was that
this three-minute flight of nonstop unruly movement, already exhausting at
that length, would now expand to an impossible twenty minutes. He titled it
“Wall/Hole,” as a nod to a Buddhist perspective of walls as illusion. In brief
intensive work periods spaced over a longer stretch of time, we worked to de-
velop a physical language of improvisational “fury.” We shaped it in discus-
sion, with scores and keywords, with instructions and assignments. But the
heart of the work occurred mutely, in sustained passages of high-velocity physical
exploration, never the same twice. Ralph encouraged me to join many silent
improvisations, which I did gladly, intuiting that there would be no good way
for me to help develop this material from the remove of an outside observer. In
the final performance version, which was moderately shaped but never pinned
down, our audience was invited to consider a silent stretch of slippery motion
that purposefully frustrated any attempt to coherently view or interpret it.
Ralph thus hoped, impossibly, that the dance would go so far as to become
“invisible.” I go into more detail about how this movement section was built to
evade clear perception in chapter 3 on audience. For the moment suffice it to
say that the “Wall/Hole” section offered a sometimes-frustrating, but often-
captivating invitation to get lost within a whirl of constant mute motion.
Yet this mute movement passage was also preceded by a long stretch of
Ralph’s words, unaccompanied by movement. After trying out so many different
ways, since the start of the Geography Trilogy, to interweave spoken word and
movement, Ralph starkly resegregated them and mystifyingly began what was
marketed to audiences as a dance piece with his twenty-minute “film talk.”
Ralph spoke elliptically, poetically, yet unmistakably about love and harrowing
loss. He talked about his dancers and the dynamics of the rehearsal room; he
exposed some of that room in footage on the screen behind him. He also shared
video of his collaboration with a ninety-eight-year-old man, former sharecropper
Walter Carter, whose imminent departure from the mortal world was made
poignantly concrete by his donning a low-budget astronaut costume and
clambering into a homemade spaceship.
Figure 5. “Wall/Hole” section of How Can You . . . ? From left to right: Omagbitse Omagbemi, Djédjé
Djédjé Gervais, Darrell Jones, Gesel Mason, David Thomson. (Dan Merlo)
Figure 6. Walter Carter. (Courtesy of Ralph Lemon)

The furious, uncapturable movement of the “Wall/Hole” section may

have occurred on an empty stage, with no set and minimalist lighting, but it by
no means occurred in an abstract field. It occurred within the reverberations
still lingering from Ralph’s words. The dancers were moving furiously as their
particularized selves, hurling themselves up against their mortality: both private
and shared, as mortality always is. They were also moving furiously as surrogates
for Ralph, in his aching love and deferred mourning. And for Asako and Walter,
in their trip to the beyond. Ralph’s words at the outset did not name this, or
plan it, but the reverberations from those words did prepare a field that would
allow us to sense it.
Next time I work with text and movement on stage, with Ralph or anyone
else, this starkly segregated relation between them will be on my mind. Perhaps
it will even offer a model from which I want to depart. Not to repeat it—its
particular content will never repeat. Rather to test it, to see if it has another
variation, to see if I have, in fact, learned anything.
Words Moving and Dancing
The text for Geography and Tree was more direct, and serious, than not. Tracie
Morris’s poetry in general could be quite playful, riffing on multiple meanings
and words that popped between sound and signification. But the text she wrote
for Geography, combined with the way it was delivered on stage, rendered her
work less playful than her usual output. Tree found a measure of play in the
translation games improvised on stage every night, but the scientific texts we
chose to convey natural disasters were, as one might expect, earnest and grave.
Within this manner of delivery we wanted things to be, more or less, what we
said they were.
That mode of language shifted with Patton. After venturing abroad with the
first two sections of the Trilogy, Ralph had set this third piece up as a return
home. He planned to approach the United States with eyes made strange by
years of travel. What’s more, he planned to take on the American South, where
he had never lived but where his mother and paternal grandparents had grown
up, and which he dubbed the “Ground Zero of black American history.”17 Patton
was, among other things, an opportunity to wrestle with America’s checkered
racial history and his own place within it.
It had been safer to consider issues of race in the first two parts of the Trilogy,
where they were upstaged by starker differences of nationality, culture and
language. Now he was set up to consider race in an American context—a subject
significantly more fraught, personally and professionally. He might even have
to tell some stories about himself—an idea to which he was allergic. It had been
easy enough to consider personal journal entries about travel in a faraway land
as text, but addressing his own upbringing, and the fact of being African Ameri-
can, without falling into embarrassing self-exposure or cliché, seemed daunting.
In an early e-mail to me, at the outset of the research process, Ralph asserted
a positive spin on these anxieties, explaining, “I’m very excited about part
three. If only because my ambivalence MUST become a house, acknowledged
and offered as an interesting place to visit.”18 I recognized this statement as a
keeper, one of those early assertions I should remember, vow to support, and
remind him of at key moments later on. Which I did. Ralph’s ambivalences
towards his subject matter needed to be the point of, rather than the obstacle
to, his work. We—the collaborators, the eventual audience—should all visit
that house, together.
At a 2002 residency showing at the Walker Art Center, Ralph took a step
away from literal self-exposure when he had performer David Thomson begin
the evening by walking up to a microphone and saying, “Hi, I’m Ralph Lemon.”
David then explained the nature of the residency, what we had achieved—all
accurate information except for his identity. It did not seem a coincidence that
during this same showing Ralph told a personal autobiographical story for the
first time, a story about growing up as a teenage boy in mostly white Minnesota
and running away from a white bully at a school dance. The David-as-Ralph
falsehood released Ralph from his literal identity, and paradoxically freed him
up to try out autobiographical material for the first time.
We ran one of those ubiquitous Q&A sessions at the end of this perform
ance. Ralph took the opportunity to confess his true identity. He then called on
a college-aged woman in the front row who identified herself as a literature
major. She told him that his approach reminded her of the literary technique
of the “unreliable narrator.” By the next rehearsal that term had become a
touchstone—the only time in my memory that a post-show Q&A has had
such an impact on a work’s development. From that moment on, it was woven
through our conversations on how the storytelling in Patton might operate.
Ralph asserted we were no longer going to be so “direct and honest” with
the audience. Instead we’d work with a slippery mix of truth and fiction, playing
with the audience’s perception of what might, and might not, be based in truth.
He had already been traveling through the American South, tracking old blues
singers and Civil Rights protests, components of a heightened and fraught
southern history. He later noted of those trips: “once you start negotiating
something as elusive as history and memory, it becomes slippery—and it be-
comes what the art process always is for me—part fake, unreliable.”19 Now
instead of trying to “correct for” the unreliability of the art-making process, we
would try and emphasize it.
I thought of the advent of this mode as a moment when movement and

dancing entered into our use of language, instead of just operating alongside
it. Linguistic meaning was freed to jump and leap instead of attaching so tightly
to the truth of “what happened” or “what we want to express.” The tool of
the unreliable narrator also implied that the particular manner in which one
danced away from the literal truth could, in itself, be a source of interest. The
release from the imperative to describe exactly “what happened” opened up a
whole field of playful possibility. The lies that wove through a narrative could
themselves be evocative. Of course, to the extent that they were evocative, they
could open up the work to other registers of “truth.”
Soon after, three performers—David Thomson, Okwui Okpokwasili, and
James Hannaham20—worked to build up a portfolio of unreliable storytelling.
Ralph asked them to think about either the first time they were called “nigger”
or the first time they had a heightened awareness of being black, and to tell a
story about it—but it did not actually have to be true. He clarified: “Tell us this
story about this thing that happened to you, but maybe it didn’t happen to
you, and that’s OK. But I still want to believe it happened to you.”21 He then
requested they add particular enhancements to their stories—for instance, they
had to include a reference to classical music and a drum, or they had to include
a reference to the South. And once the three narratives were under develop-
ment, a chosen element of each one—something as incidental as a name, or an
object—would somehow have to be inserted into the other two. These processes
of unreliable alteration we dubbed “infecting.” From these instructions the
performers found a liberating sense of play—and this within a confessional
monologue, a form allegedly dependent on sincerity.
My major task at this time became working with Okwui Okpokwasili on
the construction and delivery of her story, the only one that made it to the final
stage performance. We would duck away together to another room while
Ralph used the main rehearsal room for movement, joining the group hours
later to show-and-tell the results. Some measure of her tale was true, but we
added many more new details to “infect” it—she gave herself an “Aunt Tempe”
to match a character in another story Ralph would narrate, she included refer-
ences to both African drumming and Verdi’s Otello (anticipating the latter’s use
as sound score later on), she put a quote by James Baldwin in one character’s
mouth. To preserve the playfulness of the way these elements had been added,
I suggested that the text should never be set. Instead, Okwui would just memo-
rize the points she had to hit, and the order in which she would hit them, but
use different language each time. At that time, in that circumstance, I felt my
dramaturgical task was to protect Okwui as a performer, to make sure she had
the space to be spontaneous in the moment of storytelling, while at the same
time defining the structural skeleton that would best allow her the safety to
roam.
The story, despite its serious premise, was told funny. We worked hard to
keep it that way. It was set in a racially mixed elementary school classroom in
1970s Bronx, as young Okwui was under the care of a white art instructor who
liked to play the djembe as the students worked on their art projects. Young
Okwui makes the mistake of saying out loud that all this drumming gives her a
headache, and that in fact what she’d really like to hear is an aria from Verdi. A
white classmate named Lily jumps on the purported incongruity, trying to put
Okwui back in her place: “yeah whatever, nigger.” Young Okwui threatens to
slap her if she says that word again. Lily does, and Okwui slaps, adding, “you’re
the nigger.” The interaction devolves into a rhythmic back and forth that goes
on just a little too long: “nigger / Slap, you’re the nigger / nigger / Slap, you’re
the nigger,” and on and on. Finally Okwui’s teacher stops playing the drum
(arguably Okwui’s goal all along) and comes over to her charges. When young
Okwui explains that Lily has been calling her a nigger, the teacher is appro-
priately outraged. But when Lily counters that Okwui has also been calling her
a nigger, the teacher turns, looks confused, and then offers, “Well, Okwui, Lily
can’t be a nigger.” The last sentence landed as if it were a punch line, given all
the laughs that Okwui’s telling had generated so far, but then immediately cut
against the humor as the teacher’s misguided pedagogical impulse sunk in. It
was always interesting to listen to the audience’s reaction live, and hear the
laughter stop short, to listen to who was caught off guard versus who saw it
coming. (Further consideration of the language used in this story, and pointedly
not used, arises in chapter 3.)
In the opening pages of this chapter I mentioned how the dance dramaturg,
as a collaborator perceived (accurately or not) to maintain a particular allegiance
with language, might be seen as a threat to movement-based performance. Might
she limit the wordless expression of dance by fixing meaning in language?
Might she name things too soon, thus prematurely narrowing the range of
potential meaning and encouraging onstage text that would do the same? The
use of language that we discovered in the Patton rehearsal rooms countered this
fear. This was, for me at least, one of the largest discoveries of this working
process. The fear of the reductive, labeling power of language has not caught up
to the last century of fiction writing, which has embraced the limits of linguistic
meaning into its field of play, with techniques including the unreliable narrator.
The realization that language has the playful power to redirect and misdirect is
freeing. When we explore language as material that can dance in how it signifies,
or move in its import, it becomes much less a threat to the way dance and
movement make meaning. The impulses of a choreographer suddenly have
relevance in words as well. This is not the same as saying that words in dance
performance should be abstract, referring only to their own sound value.
Rather, I’m speaking of allowing a spirit of play into how words mean what
they mean, and thinking of that play as dance.
Words Creating a Negative Space
During Patton, disagreements between Ralph and me were more uncomfortable

than they had been before. They were, in retrospect, probably still productive
disagreements, but in the moment they just felt disagreeable. The stakes of this
piece were higher. In this third part of the Trilogy, Ralph was turning back to
reflect on his home culture after gazing outward at Africa and Asia and dealing
with the American South as that “ground zero” for the African American
experience. The nature of his research material, preoccupied in part with the
grave history of racial violence against black Americans, made me feel that it
was more important than ever that his research be “legible” to an audience,
that our viewers understand what he was grappling with. As a result I grabbed
onto that “advocate for the audience” aspect of my role a little more firmly
than I had before. At the same time, here I was as his white dramaturg, whose
ruddy cheeks threatened that she might not really, fundamentally, understand.
Exactly what audience was I standing in for, anyway?
We butted heads over the larger context for a particularly evocative and
sobering flight of choreography. We both loved it—no disagreement there.
“Mississippi/Duluth” was a collection of relatively simple gestures and actions
for a cast of five—Djédjé Djédjé Gervais, Okwui Okpokwasili, David Thomson,
Darrell Jones, Gesel Mason—arrayed in a simple line across the stage, their
medium-to-dark-skinned bodies in colorful clothes against a stark white back-
ground. The dancers’ actions were similar without being the same. Something
uncanny, hard to place, was going on in how they created visual “rhymes”
without creating unison, how they seemed to be sharing something sobering
over a distance, while remaining in isolation. They moved without words,
without music, with only the sound of their bodies as they occasionally slapped
a leg, or fell to the ground, or whistled, or hyperventilated for a few seconds.
They were, in fact, all responding to common keywords that Ralph had
assigned them, each in his or her own way. And the keywords referenced ghastly
events. Ralph had derived them from his research at sites of historical lynchings,
most in Mississippi but one in his home state of Minnesota, in far northern
Duluth. For example, the slaying of civil rights leader Medgar Evers was trans-
lated into the four keywords “open car door” (referring to the fact that Evers
had just exited his car when he was shot), “shot,” “crawl,” and “frozen in time”
Figure 7. Ralph Lemon watching “Mississippi/Duluth” in rehearsal. From left to right : David
Thomson, Darrell Jones, Okwui Okpokwasili. (Dan Merlo)
(referring to the decision of Evers’s widow to preserve their home exactly as it

was on the day he was shot). Some of the other keywords were “whistle” (Emmett
Till’s alleged action that triggered his lynching) and “lie on ground” (from
Ralph’s own ritual at the site of the Duluth lynching, imitating one of the three
bodies in a horrific souvenir photo of the event.) Ralph asked that the performers
respond to these words in as cool and task-oriented a fashion as possible, without
showcasing an emotional reaction to the material. As Okwui put it, “we focused
on what it is to just do these things, instead of creating a movement vocabulary
that was redolent with weeping.”22
The resulting flight of movement was, to my eyes, deeply moving. I watched
these dancers’ bodies set through their paces, making connections with past
atrocious events, conjuring the image of a community of people, each made to
feel isolated in the midst of the group, responding to the same situations but
somehow prevented from banding together. And yet the sounds they made—
the falls, the hyperventilations, the slaps—created a music that allowed them to
synchronize actions. After watching a while one realized that they did connect,
albeit across a distance.
At the same time, I was very conscious that my knowledge of the source of
these movements, these keywords and their referents, was feeding the way I read
the choreography. There was no one in the room innocent of these associations.
Most of us had joined Ralph on the day he made his pilgrimage to Duluth and
performed the source ritual there. I tried to imagine, impossibly, how this
movement would be seen by someone without the layers of information I had.
Yes, there was something haunting captured in movement alone. But how far
would that carry us? Ralph had told us all that he did not want his lynching
research to be translated into just a “compelling little movement study,” 23 that
it needed, ultimately, to be something more than that. So was it not my job to
hold him to that standard? Was “Mississippi/Duluth” in danger of being read
that way, if its source material was not made more evident?
I argued strenuously that we had to let our audience in a little more on the
context for this movement, else it be misread as abstraction. I felt that we, in
the room, were currently the ideal audience for “Mississippi/Duluth,” with all
that we knew, and we had to generously provide so that other audiences could
also get to that point. We had to let them in a little more, somehow. Ralph, while
appreciating my argument, rejected all my fledgling proposals for how this might
be achieved as too blatant and reductive. I did understand his reluctance—he
was worried about cliché and worried that the big word “Lynching,” once
uttered, would cut off access to the specificity of the atrocities he was looking at,
or the specificity of his response. He did not want to cheapen a specific instance
of atrocity by using it as a metaphor for a whole past of racial injustice. And he
was afraid the “L-word” had become the sort of buzzword that no audience
member could get beyond. Nevertheless, that was the word for the pattern of
past behavior he had chosen to research over the past several years of his life.
Into this tense standoff, thankfully, entered a piece of earlier inspiration. I
recalled the concept of the countermemorial, a term that Ralph had used to
describe much of his early research, when he was creating private, solo rituals
at sites of historical violence across the South. The idea of a countermemorial
was borrowed from a German movement in contemporary art, in which anti-
monuments, conceptual and ephemeral, mark a process of memory but do not
try to substitute something solid and knowable for the absences of the past. In
Germany they appeared primarily as Holocaust countermonuments (Gegendenk
mäler). Ralph had visited one when in Germany for a Berlin workshop—Horst
Hoheisel’s negative-space fountain in the town of Kassel. The original fountain
was a Gothic spire built by a Jewish businessman in 1908, and in 1939 the Nazis
disparaged and destroyed it, three years before they also destroyed Kassel’s
entire Jewish population. Hoheisel built a hollow concrete form of the missing
original and sunk it, spire first, into the ground on the original site. What is
there now is essentially a hole in the ground with running water, which instead
of falling delicately over Gothic spires rushes into the negative space below.
Only the sound of the water indicates that there is something of importance
underneath, and the viewer standing above, atop the grill and glass that cover
the hole, becomes the true monument and site of remembering. As art historian
James Young has helped clarify, whereas traditional memorials may actually
trigger forgetting, as the viewer displaces a responsibility to remember onto an
inanimate monument, a countermemorial is crafted to trigger thought.24 Its
incompleteness makes the viewer confront absence and complete a memorial
process by wondering “what is missing here?” The project of memory is thrust
upon the viewer, who finds the active memorial within his or her own mind.
What if that word “lynching” were just another traditional monument, a
monument of language, which by standing in for unspeakable acts made it too
easy to think one had understood and digested them? Was Ralph’s resistance to
using that word on stage—even though it did crudely describe his subject—
part and parcel of his countermemorial impulses? This thought seemed right.
Now he and I had a dialogue again, instead of a standoff.
I characterized our problem: if we edited out all reference to the word or
concept of lynching, we risked creating a countermemorial that worked only
for us. With Hoheisel’s negative-form fountain, it still was important that the
absence be a conspicuous absence—a hole in the ground, noticeable, that
would serve as the trigger to contemplation. Likewise, we did not have to use
the word “lynching”—yes, I understood how its use could flatten and resolve
the confrontation with history and memory. But we did need to feel the space
where the word would go.
From here it started getting easier to know how to proceed. We never put
the word “lynching” into the show, but its absence was made more conspicuous,
the outlines of its negative space were felt. Okwui told a story transcribed from
Ralph’s then-ninety-four-year-old collaborator, Walter Carter. Walter had
offered Ralph, at the latter’s prompting, the story of the one man he knew who
had been lynched, for sleeping with a white woman. But in the midst of the
transcription, when Okwui came to Walter’s sentence “they hung him from an
old plum tree,” she left a silent pause instead. Likewise, near the end of the
show, when Ralph narrated a video of his countermemorial actions at the
lynching site in Duluth, the most he said was that it was where “something bad
had happened.” Meanwhile the video showed him leaning against, then lying
down at the base of a single traffic pole. The listeners had to confront the gaps
and complete the missing information themselves.
In the final stage incarnation of Patton, the Mississippi/Duluth choreography
occurred twice. Once was at the near-beginning, establishing the cast and a
tone for the piece. But besides the slight intimation that the cast was dealing,
simultaneously but separately, with unspecified unease and danger, this viewing
did not reveal much below its surface. Yet we would let the audience see this
choreography once again. When “Mississippi/Duluth” came back around for

the second time, even if its exact references had never been spoken, their outer
boundaries had been well traced. We had used words to circumscribe the subject
of “Mississippi/Duluth,” and let the movement do all the talking within that
space.
The recognition of this mode of language use—very similar to the second
mode, in that movement operates within a field established by language, except
now the field was defined indirectly and negatively—felt like a gift to me. I
would recognize it again in How Can You . . . ?, though more offstage than on.
Ralph’s spoken film talk did leave plenty of lacunae for the unspeakable, but
the place where I felt this mode most acutely was in the rehearsal room use of
language.
Before the cast could throw themselves into the twenty minutes of furious
movement that constituted the “Wall/Hole” section, they needed to discuss
what they were doing. This kind of experiment admitted no marking or breaking
down. The only way to rehearse it was to dive in, full throttle. Yet it was difficult
to measure anything that could be called progress. What would make doing it a
second or a third time more valuable than doing it only once? Ralph and I
could share with them some very basic notes about the shape of the external
view, stating, for instance, that it seemed more promising in a particular section
when everyone was within close proximity. But the most important arbiters of
how things were going, and of whether we were experiencing something that
might, perhaps, be called progress, were the casts’ own reports of their internal
states in the midst of this fury. Thus we all talked a lot, a LOT, in the spaces
between each attempt. And we devised, used, discarded, and reused endless
keywords as tools.
One of my dramaturgical tasks for this piece was to be the compiler and
keeper of the score. I interviewed each dancer about his or her passage through
the improvisation, noting the formal constraints and cues (it was structured
insofar as each performer had several “appointments” he or she had to make
with another performer during the course of the twenty minutes) and eliciting
from them the keywords they were using to bring their attention and energy to
the desired state. Sometimes these were keywords that had already been assigned
to them in rehearsal (e.g., “empty the tank”; “spine and pelvis fury”; “chemical
body”; “rescuing”). Sometimes they had been privately generated, and the
performers were sharing with me their until-then-secret discoveries (Okwui
confided how in one section, when she stretched her long arms wide, she always
thought of them as reaching from the beginning to the end of an entire life-
time). I married all these interviews into one document, tracking what each
performer was doing, and on what they were concentrating, at what time. But
Figure 8. How Can You . . . ? workshop residency. From left to right : Omagbitse Omagbemi,
David Thomson, Ralph Lemon, Gesel Mason, Darrell Jones, Djédjé Djédjé Gervais, Okwui
Okpokwasili. (MANCC / Courtesy of Ralph Lemon)
my task was impossible, for the score could never be finished. It was never
correct for more than a day after the last version had been written. A keyword
that had been valuable inspiration one day was tossed aside the next, spent, as the
work of this section continually slipped outside any attempts to set it in words.
And I marveled at the negative-space use of language once again. It was
not that we did not need words—we needed them badly. We needed to talk, to
process, to decide what this unruly experiment was, in order to spur it to slip
outside of our discussions again and again. With no language at all, there would
have been no motion of escaping language. That was the motor of it.
Coda: Narrative
I cannot conclude a chapter on the potential roles of language in movement-

based performance without touching upon a distinct but associated term:
“narrative.” When we talk about narrative we first think of stories told through
language, but of course that does not have to be the case; narratives can be
wordless as well. There is something about even wordless narrative, however,
that has a whiff of language. It implies that a process of translation either from
or to words is possible. Either it has already occurred (silent enactment of a
familiar narrative we previously learned through words) or it is waiting to

happen (once we assign words to what we are seeing, we have expressed or
marked our narrative perception of events).
The process of making dances involves framing movement for perception
in sequence and over time, and as a dramaturg I repeatedly find myself won-
dering about how something resembling narrative arises from perception in
sequence and over time. I am in sympathy with William Forsythe’s observation
that even performance conventionally considered nonnarrative has a “narrative
quality” insofar as the viewer perceives “alignments” over space and time and
can “watch the emergence of patterns and relationships.”25 That is the basic
thinking I wish to expand here. Forsythe seems to be arguing for what I shall
call a “soft narrative understanding”—nothing quite so distinct or representa-
tional as the tale of a three-act story ballet, but nonetheless a kind of under-
standing that is bound up in what Manfred Jahn calls “the storied nature of
perception.”26 I would like to argue for the reimagining of “narrative” to apply
much more broadly to how a viewer perceives movement that unfolds and
emerges through time, as all performance inevitably does. Time-based arts,
insofar as they sequence events, engage narrative understanding. Sometimes
they neatly satisfy it, sometimes they complicate or frustrate it, but in being
temporal they are never able to entirely disengage from it, so they are always in
relation to it. And if that is true, this ‘soft narrative understanding’ deserves full
consideration, both by those who would make dances and those who would
view, think, and write about them.
Dance makers have spent many important years claiming the territory
of textless and abstract expression—this was, in the middle of the last century,
arguably crucial to Western concert dance’s finding itself as an autonomous art
form. Indeed, it was a distancing from the particular narrative goals of theater
and opera that allowed Western concert dance to come into its own. Cunning-
ham and Cage led dance away from a preoccupation with psychology and
dramatic arc and thereby opened up broad new vistas. Thus the implication that
narrative could still be relevant to the perception of contemporary movement
performance might seem like a threat to the hard-won innovations of the field.
But now there might also be a residual blindness to how, in simply creating
work that extends actions through time, dance makers enter into a realm open
to narrative understanding—perhaps encouraging it, perhaps frustrating it,
but unable to delete it entirely, so engaging it in some fashion.
Peggy Phelan writes about a “deep resistance to narrative common to some
of the most significant performances ever made” and places the present-tense
nature of performance in tension with the proposition of narrative: “Perform
ance exists in the arc of its enactment; while sometimes this arc is structured as
a narrative, the ontological quality of performance rests on its ephemeral

nature.”27 For Phelan, the ephemeral, hyper-present moment of much contem-
porary performance is precisely what makes it resistant to story; a performance
renounces narrative insofar as any given performance moment renounces its
connection to a before and an after and lives only in the disappearing “now,”
what Gertrude Stein called the “continuous present.”28
To be clear, I do not suggest the perception of movement narratively relies
on a reading of movement as a code. This would align it with the understanding
of dance in late Renaissance geometrical ballets, described by Mark Franko
and others, where single poses or configurations of multiple bodies stood in for
written characters or words. In this historical manifestation of dance as text, the
dancer’s body operated as a sign through the careful display of an interpretable
pose. Thus paradoxically it took on the most meaning in moments of halt, in
temporary suspensions of the dance. Accordingly, the pieces of text that these
poses signified were either static characters (an alphabet used to spell out the
monarch’s name) or noun phrases (such as “Powerful Love,” “Happy Fate,”
and “Crown of Glory”29—all appropriately unchanging in their flattering tribute
to the king’s power). What was missing in the moment of decoding was not just
the movement of the dancer’s body, but the movement potential of words:
there were no verbs, no expressions of action and change. The type of text did
not evoke a full range of textual options, since it was itself static, operating as a
list. If this particular reading of dancing created a narrative, it was a simple
narrative of the subjects’ inexhaustible forays into the display of devotion, since
its central subject was posited as unchanging. In his writing about geometrical
ballets, Franko calls our attention to the unstable moments between those
interpretable poses, what he calls the “flight from the figure,”30 and in which he
finds a “textless body”31 engaging in an autonomous, proto-modernist dance
that refers only to itself. Yet I would like to examine the contemporary off-
spring of those moments of flight—the moments that seem at first glimpse to
escape all textual equivalent—for hints of narrativity.
Franko clarifies that the “textless body” suggests “an independence from
verbal, Aristotelian theater whose model is the rhetorical one of verbal and
phonetic communication and whose goal is the imitation of human action in a
progressive and linear sense, and the psychological consistency of character
that imitation also implies.”32 This sounds like nothing so much as the post-
dramatic theater described by Lehmann and the theater after the “death of
character” described by Fuchs: in other words, the world of contemporary inter-
disciplinary performance that has released itself from complete obedience to
these codes. Yet in doing so, that variety of performance has not released itself
from text and narrative entirely. Even within Franko’s seventeenth-century
example, the textless body writes an alternate story of escape, as it evades the
monarch’s controlling narrative. Certainly by now one can discuss narrativity
in dance without implying the specter of Aristotle or other single-minded linear
plot constraints. To wonder about narrativity in movement-based performance
is not to imply that one might always prefer to watch a story ballet, because
narrative’s purview has shifted and expanded. Franko addresses this when later
he adds, “the vanishing of figure implicit in writing’s temporary disappearance
also partakes of textuality. Flight is part of the writing process.”33 And thus
that “textless body” in flight might still offer some connection to a narrative,
after all.
For Gérard Genette, narrative was defined quite basically as the “develop-
ment” or “expansion” of a verb34—that part of speech devoted to action,
perhaps the very action of that textless dancer. “The dancer flew from the
pose” tells us, according to this most basic definition, a very small story, driven
by the word “flew.” To be clear, Genette also thought expression in words was
a prerequisite for narrative. Yet Roland Barthes, who like Genette thought a
sentence showcasing a verb was the basic unit of all narrative, offered a broader
definition when he asserted, “[Narratives are] able to be carried by articulated
language, spoken or written, fixed or moving images, gestures, and the ordered
mixture of all these substances.”35 Thus Barthes tells us if we have actions
extending in time, whether carried in language or image or gesture or combi-
nations thereof, we already have the ingredients of story. And these sorts of
actions are, of course, in plentiful supply in movement-based performance.
Other definitions of narrative require a little more; for instance, a perception
of cause and effect. To satisfy this definition viewers would need to form im-
pressions about what triggered the dancer’s flight, or what event it subsequently
catalyzed: “Disgusted with the pose, the dancer flew from it” or “The dancer
flew from the pose and collided with the dancer next to him.” This slightly more
restrictive model still seems relevant; it seems fair to say that when we watch
movement, and we watch actions extend, iterate, or sequence through time, we
form impressions about how these sequential events might be causally related.
We may even jump to hasty conclusions. Barthes had something interesting to
say about that jump. He noted: “the mainspring of narrative is precisely the
confusion of consecution and consequence, what comes after being read in
narrative as what is caused by; in which case narrative would be a systematic
application of the logical fallacy . . . post hoc, ergo propter hoc.”36 It follows that the
tendency to see something coming after as something that is caused, in being
the “mainspring” of narrative, is a generative fallacy. It is the error from which
new stories inevitably spring. As a dramaturg watching performances develop
and wondering what diverse things they will do when they land in front of
audiences, I often feel like playing both with and against the creative potential
of this error.
What my definition of narrative does not require is overt character or psy-
chology, beyond the fact that human performers may be read as the actors of
the relevant actions. Along the same lines it does not require mimetic representa-
tion, for it is always possible to tell a story about what range of actions is possible,
and what might seem to cause what, within the confines of onstage space and
time. Lastly, it does not require that audience members agree on what narrative
is being told—the relevant aspect is that they are all engaging this “soft narrative
understanding,” even if through it they construct very different stories.
I bring my conviction about a “soft narrative understanding” and its rele-
vance to movement-based performance with me whenever I enter any rehearsal
room to watch. Because of it I attend carefully to what might come first and
what next, what might establish a code or break one, how patterns form,
whether causal links between events are suggested, encouraged, or discouraged.
I have no particular agenda to create or enhance narratives; my conviction is
that they are always already present, as engaged through the act of perception.
My agenda, insofar as I have one, is to notice them, or their potential, and fold
that awareness into our conversations. As an example, I offer the following
excerpt from an e-mail I sent to Ralph during the Tree rehearsal process:
I was thinking the other day about a particular sensation I get from certain
moments of your work—a pattern where you have me look at something,
then you have me look at it with a new element added, and then you take
that new element away and I look at the thing as before. [This ABA pattern
is] telling me that change happens, certain events are evanescent, and
other conditions endure regardless of those changes.
I get this feeling in moments like: Asako’s brief appearance and dis-
appearance alongside the circle in the Lotus choreography, or the use of
the gongs during the Memory choreography (now it’s silent, now they’re
here and very loud, next moment they’re completely gone, silent again).
I love this aesthetic, and at the same time I recognize that it’s
anti-dramatic—the principle in drama being that a new event occurs and
catalyzes the whole, spinning it into a new direction, thus the stage can
never be the same again. In a dramatic structure [ABC] we can’t go back
to A after having seen B. So maybe it would be interesting to talk about the
structure of the piece in terms of these two competing kinds of structure,
and ask [when do we want to engage each?]37
Note that I was not expressing that ABC was a story and ABA was not.
Both structures of events happening in time carried, for me as a viewer, a
narrative implication. Even though ABC was the shape of a flashier story with
dramatic cause-and-effect (B added to A catalyzes C), ABA, I imagined, was

the quieter story of the realization that A endured despite B’s arrival and depar-
ture. I viewed them both as telling me tales, different tales, about the world.
Through the conversation begun by this e-mail, I realized that Tree, built as it
was on an attitude of spiritual contemplation, was rife with ABA structures,
micro-narratives that told a larger story of continuity underneath change. But
it also had a few large contrasting moments that told a more dramatic story: the
massive fall of Nari Ward’s back set wall, which triggered a falling, in extremis
solo for Cheng-Chieh Yu. Or the improvised narrative that David Thomson
attempted to tell the audience every night, until he found himself interrupted
first by Wen Hui and then Djédjé Djédjé Gervais, their interventions catalyzing
a very different telling than he had intended. The ABC stories were appropriate
enough for a piece in which the irrevocable events of natural disasters were
inspiration—if B is an earthquake, C is likely to be a very different state than A.
But in a piece that attempted to take a more distanced, Buddhist-inspired view
on those disasters and see them as common events all denizens of the world
could share, the ABA story was also appropriate. Clarifying that these patterns
operated as small stories, and as such were building impressions about the on-
stage world we were creating, helped me, and Ralph too, better understand
what was taking shape in front of us.
Beyond the narratives constructed by a series of actions within the frame of
the performance event—be they characterizable by ABA, ABC, or any other
constellation of letters—a dance also weaves corollary narratives into its perform
ance. I am thinking here of the work of Ann Cooper Albright in exposing how
the dancer’s onstage presence engages with the way it is culturally coded, or
situated within a culturally specific context. Those codes imply a “backstory”
that is imagined retrospectively, leading up to the present moment of perform
ance.38 Thus even the first instant of a dance is already rife with implied narra-
tive. As Susan Leigh Foster suggests, the performer’s backstory then becomes
entangled with the evolving narrative of the performance. She writes: “choreog-
raphy theorizes corporeal, individual and social identity by placing bodies in
dynamic rapport . . . that suggests an unfolding of their relations that inevitability
charts a narrative trajectory.”39
I remember watching rehearsals and helping shape one moment of Tree,
where Ralph, marked as an American postmodern dancer in dress, carriage,
and manner of moving,40 improvised a duet with Djédjé Djédjé Gervais, corre-
spondingly marked as a contemporary West African dancer. Every time Ralph
jumped on Djédjé’s back, attempting to engage him in his own mode of contact
improvisation, Djédjé reacted by tossing him off and continuing implacably
with his own step. In that single gesture a whole story sprung up about their
Figure 9. Djédjé Djédjé Gervais and Ralph Lemon in Tree. (© T Charles Erickson)
contrasting histories and the implied imbalance of power within their inter-
cultural collaboration. As the duet unfolded, this story was challenged and
became increasingly complex, with Ralph’s aggression seeming more and more
of a restless tic and Djédjé’s movement slowly flowering in response to the
stimuli he shrugged off. As we observed this passage, we considered not just the
movement itself, but how the stories legible from the performers’ bodies in
motion were both engaged and destabilized.
Thus far: a narrative sense may arise from the simple sequencing of actions,
with the invitation that sequence makes for cause and effect interpretation.
And it may arise from the implied backstories keyed by the performers’ physical
presence, which may in turn inform or complicate the interpretation of those
onstage actions. But the most crucial narrative in question, and the one to which
the dance dramaturg ultimately attends, is the narrative told by a putative
spectator, responding to a friend who confronts her after the performance and
asks, “What did you just experience?” This overarching narrative may include,
but is not limited to, the types mentioned above. It is the narrative that the
spectator writes as well as reads, for it is the narrative of an encounter over
time. When we derive meaning from motion, we inevitably find that meaning in
motion—changing, evolving. And when viewers track those changes over time
they construct narrative.
This narrative has as many potential incarnations as potential viewers. It
may jump in time, as the spectator narrates actions that connected powerfully
for her, and then flash back as she recalls earlier actions that related secondarily;
it may offer alternative versions of a single event or alternative backstories to
the performers’ projected personas; it may question its own construction and
narrate the process of that questioning. The putative spectator’s narrative can
be as fractured and self-referential as any found in a postmodernist novel. But
it is, still, in noticing events over time, narrative. An attention to actions in
sequence, and their relationship, has been engaged, and the resulting encounter
with those events can be told.
The field of computer gaming studies offers a useful distinction, discussing
“embedded” versus “emergent” narratives and considering both types as part
of the total narrative potential of a game. The former are stories authored by
the game’s designer, to be told at designated interludes. The latter are stories
created on the fly by the gamer in interaction with the game, arising “from the
set of rules governing interaction with the game system.”41 With the current
emphasis in contemporary performance on an “emancipated spectator,” who
also creates her own meaning on the fly from her interaction with the events
before her (and who is discussed further in chapter 3), it seems apt to think of
performance in terms of its “emergent narratives” as well.
In concentrating on perception of the performance event as the creation of
an emergent story with the viewer as protagonist, I am encouraged by recent
work in cognitive science that focuses on the construction of consciousness as
an ongoing process, always built and rebuilt in relation to perceptual input. In
the words of Antonio Damasio, “the self comes to mind in the form of images,
relentlessly telling a story.”42 For Damasio, the self needs to “protagonize” in
relation to those stimuli, and this continually renewed protagonist stars in what
he takes care to clarify is a “wordless narrative.”43 For Damasio, the creation of

self-story precedes anything congealed into a grammar; it is absolutely non-
verbal, occurring in image and in motion. This is the same self-story that is
incessantly emergent, then, for the spectators who find their perceptual stimuli
in the nonverbal images and motion of movement-based performance. While
the watcher watches the dance, the dance constructs the watcher, through a
narrative activity that enfolds them both.
The most eloquent challenge to my assertion that a “soft narrative under-
standing” imbues allegedly nonnarrative performance arrives via Stein’s concept
of the continuous present. Stein famously asserted that watching plays inevitably
made her “nervous” because “the scene as depicted on the stage is . . . almost
always in syncopated time” in relation to the emotions of the spectator.44 In
other words, the viewer was always temporally located a little bit behind or a
little bit in front of the events unfolding on stage, either ahead of the narrative
or struggling to catch up. Stein acknowledged that syncopation could be a
productive tool for a jazz band, but she resisted it herself, preferring to write a
new kind of play that would keep the viewer suspended in the present moment.
She declared, anticipating Phelan’s description of performance’s ephemeral
ontology, that “the business of Art . . . is to live in the actual present . . . and to
completely express that complete actual present.” Stein explicitly linked her
temporal adjustment to the rejection of narrative, saying, “I tried to tell what
happened without telling stories,”45 though of course the ambivalence of “telling
without telling” signals how difficult this is. Stein’s continual present does not
narrate and is not narrate-able, it just is. It denies connection to a before and an
after, denies temporality, to live in a suspended instant instead of within story.
And yet: even when as a viewer I feel a flight of movement performance
entering that “continuous present”—not referring to any moments before or
after, but just the electric now—that elusive sense of presence is fruitfully im-
possible to sustain. It eventually syncopates and spawns a narrative of how we
entered or exited that particular state of grace. I construct a story for myself
about the moment I realized I was in that state, what it felt like while I was there,
and how I eventually fell out of it. In other words, syncopation is our inevitable
fallen state, but a fruitful one, generating not just musical intricacy but the kind
of narrative understanding that allows perception to make and retain an impact.
To finish this chapter I have to acknowledge the residue left by my asser-
tions. I am left with a question I cannot answer. Damasio may assert that the
“self-story” precedes language, but nevertheless I am only able to think about
how nonverbal events engage narrative sensibility insofar as I translate them,
later on, into language. Thus does my belief about the soft narrative under-
standing of movement-based performance depend on both language and
memory? For that narrative to exist, does there have to be a spectator who
could later on, if asked, articulate it out loud? Is a narrative understanding still
evoked in the viewer even if that viewer is unable or unwilling to put what he or
she saw into words? Is my narrative understanding—my curiosity about what
happened after what, and what that particular order might mean—still engaged
in the heat of the moment even if I cannot, later on, remember the sequence of
events? Do I think a narrative sensibility still has an impact on how spectators
view the ephemeral, the moments of presence that do not translate well or at all
into language or the future?
I can’t prove it, but I think so.
2
Research
I n Europe in 1999 a group of dance dramaturgs and writer/researchers held

two public conversations about the nature of the dance dramaturg’s role. Ac-
cording to the published transcript, when the dramaturgs of the group were
asked to “try and tell us what you do,”1 only one of them, Heidi Gilpin, then
dramaturg with William Forsythe, mentioned research in her response. After
leading with her role catalyzing “endless conversations” with Forsythe and
translating ideas from one form to another, she spoke of bringing in “packets of
information” for the dancers. Immediately she qualified this, saying that this
was not so that the performers would have to “understand in a didactic sense.”2
Gilpin’s hesitation toward allowing her research work to cast her in a dry peda-
gogical role is reflected in my own experience as well, as someone whose interests
often include the location and curation of disparate pieces of information, but
who experiences a careful dance around when, how, and if to bring this informa-
tion to a working process.
“Research” may offer a conveniently succinct way to label one facet of the
dramaturg’s labor, but its importance and implications are far from straight-
forward. The dramaturg’s relation to the research function varies, both from
dramaturg to dramaturg and from project to project, perhaps more than her
relation to any other function. What’s more, thinking closely about what exactly
constitutes “research” in an art-making context leads into a thicket of complex
issues, including how art builds on or generates what we understand as knowl-
edge, the unreliable framing of what is inside and what is outside the rehearsal
room or analogous sphere of inquiry, the capricious nature of creative inspiration
and how it may be kindled or extinguished, and ethical responsibilities to col-
laborators and sources.
In the pages ahead I first take up the definition of research—a word we
may think we know, but the shifting implications of which we may not always
recognize. I offer my own thoughts for understanding what is behind the word
when it is used in common parlance, and engage briefly with the extensive dis-
course on practice-as-research (and other variations on that term). I then land
61
62 R e s e a rc h
on research as an increasingly potent metaphor or model for artistic practice

over the last forty years and consider the related concept of the body as archive.
The next section addresses the historical association of the dramaturg with the
research function—again departing from the role’s emergence in the theater
world, then moving into its manifestation in the “new” or “expanded” drama-
turgies of postdramatic performance, where collaborative creation is ascendant
and the research function may be dispersed among many. The final section
takes up the problematics of research, asking, regardless of who performs this
function, and whether they call themselves dramaturg, what concerns do they
have as they set about the task? I attend to the question of when research be-
comes inspiration, the unstable designation of what is internal and external to
the rehearsal room (or other framed arena of inquiry), and the idea of the
“active archive,” which serves the future as much, or more than, the past. This
final section is also where I provide the most detailed examples from my own
experiences working on three of Ralph’s pieces, as a means to think through
these issues in practice.
Research: Definition, Metaphor, Model
What are we actually doing when we “do” research? At the word’s core is a
search, but of what sort? In the French language, which provides the source for
the English word “research,” the prefix “re-” is intriguingly ambiguous. Some-
times it means to do something again, sometimes it means to do something
with extra emphasis, and sometimes it encompasses both. The definition of the
French rechercher thus includes “to search again; to search for something lost,”
but also offers “to search to know; to search with care, method or reflection.”3
Following the first definition, the “re-” in front of “search” might imply that
research is the process of looking for information that preexists the researcher
and has already, at least once previously, been found. Perhaps this information
was lost, or just not noticed, but it has already been placed at least once in a
frame for someone’s attention. This definition leads to what I call research in
the first register—research as the act of compilation. Here the researcher locates
and collates existing information for re-presentation to human awareness. This
research—the verb—is the action of retracing steps, and the aim is to organize
that existing information according to already established means of under-
standing. That material, thus compiled, becomes ‘ “research,” the noun.
In the latter definition, there is no sense of return. The emphasis on knowl-
edge, together with the implication that more than a usual amount of care,
method, or reflection will be necessary if the search is to be successful, starts to
suggest what I will call research in the second register—research as the act of
R e s e a rc h 63
creation. Here the researcher directs human awareness to new ways of looking,
thereby creating something that did not previously exist. It is generative;
through reflection it creates knowledge and meaning where there was none.
The existence of that meaning did not precede its discovery, and the exact
mechanism of the search is less generalizable. This is the sort of research that is
assumed in the university setting, in those research institutions that, theoretically
at least, offer the epitome of research practice. Here the implication is that
existing information should still be collated, but only in order to disclose new
connections, or contradictions, or limitations, and create, from putting that
earlier material through a literal or figurative test, something new. In the second
register, whether found in the arts, humanities, or sciences, research is a creative
act. This time the noun “research” refers to the new material, that which has
been created, not compiled.
These are two registers of a single word in the vernacular, revealing a
potentially important distinction that is often elided in casual speech. Yet as we
might also expect, these registers are not entirely distinct; they slip and blend.
One could easily argue that the way one chooses to curate and frame preexisting
information inevitably constitutes a creative act. The simple act of recategoriza-
tion is certainly sufficient to create new meanings. But above all, one hopes and
assumes that the potential for new meanings goes beyond recategorization, and
that research in the first register leads to not-yet-categorizable discoveries in
the second. As performer Okwui Okpokwasili put it, when we use the word
“research” in a creative context, we can mean “both the generating spark and
also the result of that spark.”4 Thus arises the attractive potential for a feedback
loop, where research shifting between these registers drives a productive confla-
gration. This is a loop the dramaturg seeks to better understand, and to foster.
When Gilpin, above, fears the image of herself as a dramaturg bringing
“packets of information” into the rehearsal room and triggering a tired didacti-
cism, she fears the resonances of research that sits firmly in the first register,
unable to flow into the second. She resists a description of her role where her
sole function would be to collate and teach what is already known. In an art-
making context, the first kind of research only seems valuable when it offers
that spark of inspiration for the second, in an unpredictable but crucial passage.
Any discussion of research in an art-making context must also acknowledge
the considerable discourse that has sprung up around what is called, variously
and with key distinctions, practice as research, practice-led research, research-
led practice, and more.5 That discourse rests securely on the second register of
the word “research,” arguing that artistic practice creates new cultural knowl-
edge, possessing an analogous value to academic research. It has triggered
in-depth thinking on the nature and definition of both research and artistic
64 R e s e a rc h
practice, from which my own thinking has benefited. However, the major pur-
view of this discourse is “creative work within the university environment,”6
and its aim, implicit or explicit, is to develop strategies for making creative
work assessable within that institutional context. Thus it starts to drift away
from direct relevance to research within dramaturgical practice, where there
may indeed be affiliation with the academy, but such affiliation is not a prerequi-
site, neither for the dramaturg nor the other collaborators. I’m more interested
in understanding what is at stake when the term “research” is used in a more
generic sense by those collaborators. I want to notice all the ambivalences and
nuances of vernacular usage, instead of taking on the more finely argued dis-
tinctions from the specific discourse of practice-as-research in the academy.
The two registers I have outlined above seem to me a good starting point by
which to parse vernacular usage; we may also look to histories of how “research”
as a term has been used by performance artists in describing and understanding
what they do. In the United States, it certainly seems that since the 1970s the
term has gained currency as either metaphor or literal model for artistic practice.
For instance, the vital organization Movement Research, still going strong
today, was founded in New York in 1978 as a collective organization for twenty
artists. Six years after its founding, it was lionized by Village Voice reviewer Burt
Supree as follows: “It exists to keep channels of information open; to keep ques-
tions and answers flowing; to make connections between basic facts of anatomy
and aesthetic theory and technology. It is a laboratory; it is concerned with the
processes of dancing and making dances.”7 Supree here makes explicit the
connection between research as a model for artistic practice and the burgeoning
attention to process over product—in other words, the research model could
have still prioritized an end result of any research inquiry, but it did not. Here
the use of the word “research” also signals a fascination with the research process
itself, a process that operates more qualitatively than quantitatively.
The artists who founded Movement Research defined their shared interest
in part as working “with improvisation both as exploration and as performance.”8
Thus one potential source for the research laboratory model might be found in
the growing practice of improvisation in an arts context—here, in particular,
Contact Improvisation. In Contact, a collectively evolved practice that is often
dated from Judson dancer/choreographer Steve Paxton’s work Magnesium in
1972,9 the labor was found in a moment-to-moment testing of possibilities
between two or more dancers, and a session could only begin with a premise
for mutual exploration, not an articulated end goal.
Paxton elucidated his understanding of research as artistic model for the
public record in 1983, during the course of a contentious postperformance
conversation with Bill T. Jones, who came of age as a dancer/choreographer in
R e s e a rc h 65
the decade following Paxton and had trained, in part, in contact improvisation.
Jones intimated that Paxton might not be concerned with his audience’s recep-
tion of the work and was avoiding the sort of recognizable dance vocabulary
that might better speak to that audience. Later he also suggested Paxton might
be “ungenerous.” Paxton responded: “If you’re going to have a research branch
of an art form, which most art forms do, you’re going to get some research that
doesn’t connect. . . . There are new things to be discovered which, when pre-
sented, will not be a language yet. And can thereafter be quoted. But first the
quotes are going to be indecipherable.”10
Paxton here was staking out his own work as occupying one branch of a
larger field—implicitly allowing that other branches, much less concerned with
research, could coexist and have value. But his case had been made for an artistic
practice that explored what was not yet known, where the newness of creative
output was not just the newness found in new combinations of recognizable
elements, but a newly researched experience that would evade familiar form.
Paxton’s distinction between different branches of a larger art form remains
valid today. Though one can imagine many sorts of artists claiming they are
looking for something “new,” that newness can be located at widely different
orders of experience. However, Paxton’s image, of an experimentation that
generates an experience so new that it may not yet be recognizable, retains a
powerful hold on the contemporary artistic imagination. For instance, a recent
public conversation between choreographer William Forsythe and philosopher
Alva Noë echoed Paxton’s belief that anything radically new would fall outside
familiar language and thus be indecipherable, or as Noë would have it, “not
perceptible”11 (a point to which I return in chapter 3 on audience).
Other examples of the advent of the research model into artistic practice
anticipate or build on Paxton’s model and substantiate the sense of a larger
turn in thinking about artistic practice in Euro-American culture of the 1960s
and 1970s.12 For instance, Jerzy Grotowski relabeled his physical theater com-
pany the Laboratory Theatre in the 1960s; then in the 1970s he ceased making
performances open to the general public in order to conduct research into how
one might melt the distinction between audience and spectator. He defined
his work—which went through several more stages until his death in 1999—as
an evolving research practice. Or the example of Pina Bausch: as previously
noted, André Lepecki located a significant turn in 1977 when Bausch began
posing her dancers’ questions as a means of creating a piece. Suddenly the group
was “departing from not knowing and using dance as a field of knowledge.”13
In that gesture, Bausch made the cast into both the archive and the fellow
researchers and continued with that mode of creation until her death in 2009.
The common thread of the research model for artistic practice is that the artist
66 R e s e a rc h
or artists depart from a founding question or questions and develop the perform
ance, if not as an answer, then as an articulation of provisional findings that
might make those questions contagious.
The examples traced above all add weight to the second register of the
word—research as a generative act. Our attention is drawn not to what collec-
tion of knowledge the process might be building upon, but rather what new
knowledge it might generate. Scratch the surface, however, and it is apparent
both registers are always in play. The crux here is in the notion of the archive.
Even in the Bausch example above, with its departure from “not knowing,”
those dancers, with their embodied memories, are the archives of prior knowl-
edge to be explored. And thus the research in the first register, the collection
and collation of existing information, has already occurred in the all-important
moment of casting. But what is less clear with an embodied archive than with
the sort containing .pdf files is the extent to which the knowledge inside the
archive is immanent, waiting to be re-searched, refound, and re-presented,
versus the extent to which it is creatively generated by the research process.
In Lepecki’s 2010 essay on the body as archive, he writes about the corporeal
archive as “a system or zone where works do not rest but are formed and trans-
formed, endlessly.”14 Here Lepecki is explicitly referring to bodies performing
reenactments of past choreographic works, but his point seems relevant in a
broader sense as well. He explains that dance works are reenacted not to fix
their meaning as a singular historical instance. Rather, reenactments unlock a
trove of possibilities, both potentially consistent and potentially inconsistent with
the original, which have lain dormant, or virtual, within those first instances of
the work. It does not seem a large step to conclude that any research done with
or through the embodied knowledge of archival bodies has the power to unlock
new possibilities, instead of merely staging a repetition. A revisitation of physical
memories, knowledge, and techniques is always more than a revisitation. It
always bears opportunities for expansion and contradiction, and can always be
generative—in fact, it may not be able to avoid being generative.
It is important also to remember Rebecca Schneider’s counter to the idea
that performance is ephemeral and disappears. Schneider famously offered
that performance remains, but remains differently, with a logic that challenges
the conventional understanding of the archive. In that conventional under-
standing, what is stored and re-accessed within the archive must remain self-
identical. If a document is placed in a temperature-controlled vault, the archive
functions properly to the extent that a researcher, retrieving that document
years later, finds it exactly the same as before. But Schneider suggests that the
performing body instead offers “a different approach to saving that is not in-
vested in identicality.”15 In this non-identicality, in this string of difference born
R e s e a rc h 67
by every “messy and eruptive reappearance,” the performing body generates,

even as it collates past materials.
I delve a little further into the notion of the archive, embodied or otherwise,
below when I address the notion of what falls “inside” and “outside” the framed
space of the rehearsal room. But first I return to research landing primarily in
the first register, with a look at the historical associations of research with the
dramaturg’s role.
The Dramaturg and Research: Perfect Together?
The assumption that research is a key term in the dramaturg’s job description
dates back to Piscator and Brecht, with their development of the production
dramaturg as active collaborator in the process of writing playscripts and staging
plays. Here I mean research as both verb and noun—the labor and the result—
but in both the weight falls primarily in the first register—the compilation of
preexisting information. When Brecht was hired as one of Piscator’s team of
dramaturgs, among his key tasks was to assemble a collection of politically
relevant research materials. With these he would help shape an evolving script,
in collaboration with the director and playwright. Brecht then retained this
team-driven process in his own work. He surrounded himself with collaborators,
frequently female—only sometimes assigned the title dramaturg but all working
dramaturgically—who would furnish research materials, translations, and
other ideas, engage him in catalyzing conversation over the evolving playscript,
and write portions of the work themselves. (As I addressed in the introduction,
the relationship between Brecht and his female mitarbeiterin is the subject of
highly charged recent scholarship that brings up some complex concerns of
authorship, collaboration, appropriation, and gender politics.)
In one emphatic 1949 letter to legendary collaborator and dramaturg
Elizabeth Hauptmann from the midst of his writing process, Brecht made no
less than forty-two distinct and detailed research requests, concerning the his-
torical backgrounds of the sixteenth-century German Peasant’s War and the
nineteenth-century Paris Commune, effectively requiring her to hunt down the
answers in a wide variety of different disciplines.16 In Brecht’s context, it seems
that the dramaturg’s research function answered several needs: it could
heighten accuracy of historical reference, yes, but far more importantly, it was
a key to broaden purview away from individual experiences and draw attention
to larger sociopolitical contexts, and it could provide inspiration to generate
new ideas for dramatic structure. If historical truth were stranger than fiction,
research could be a reliable source of that motivating strangeness: turning the
dramaturg’s research of the first register into the playwright’s research of the
68 R e s e a rc h
second. In Hauptmann’s case, she fully participated in the second, inspired to

suggest story lines and write large portions of Brecht’s plays herself, though this
aspect of her role was long downplayed or erased from the historical record.17
In the theater-based dramaturgy training I first received, the system late-
career Brecht devised to train the dramaturgs of the Berliner Ensemble was a
clear ancestor.18 We were asked to create a “Production Casebook” at the
beginning of every play-based project, at the earliest stages of work. The case-
book would contain “a diversity of research materials,” described as follows by
my first-year professor in dramaturgy:
[ It] might offer, but not be limited to, the following elements . . .: (1) perti-
nent cultural, historical, and social background of the play; (2) significant
biographical information on the playwright that may help to illuminate
critical issues in the play; (3) commentary by the playwright in the form of
interviews, letters, or passages from other works by the writer; (4) relevant
criticism or commentary by other artists or critics; (5) images from painters,
sculptors, and photographers that can feed, complement, and challenge
the work of the director and other artists on the project; (6) a listing and
brief commentary on related films and music and their direct or associative
value for the stage production; and (7) a highly selective production history
of the play. The emphasis is placed on making the casebook a tool for
exploration, rather than a prescriptive, formulistic guide.19
This collection of material would then be copied, three-hole punched, and

bindered for presentation to the director. We were instructed to lead the col-
lection with a carefully composed cover letter, asking trenchant and thought-
provoking questions about the director’s planned approach to the work. The
cover letter was supposed to function as an open-ended spur to a collaborative
dialogue, though it sometimes felt difficult to deliver on a casual, conversa-
tional tone when the letter sat imposingly atop a ream of carefully photocopied
8½˝ × 11˝ paper. After all, it’s not just what you say, but how you say it.
The casebook model for dramaturgical practice cuts both ways. On the one
hand, it figures the dramaturg as detective and curator, someone who enjoys
both the thrill of the archival hunt, and the subsequent winnowing down to
collate the material most “pertinent,” significant,” “relevant,” or most likely to
“feed, complement, and challenge.” This job description thus lands drama-
turgs firmly in the first register of research but suggests that they must be able to
attend to the likelihood of movement toward the second. As stated in this
volume’s introduction, a renewable curiosity is the dramaturg’s stock in trade;
the research function is one of the places where that curiosity can flourish.
R e s e a rc h 69
And this spark of curiosity for exploration within any sort of archive is crucial
to a creative process, whether or not it is spearheaded by someone called a
dramaturg.
On the other hand, the casebook model is in danger of figuring the drama-
turg as someone who has done all that troublesome work in advance, on behalf
of everyone else, and then turns to assume an instructional role toward other
collaborators. This is the risk Gilpin hedged against when she said she might
bring in packets of information for the dancers, but “not so that they would
have to understand in a didactic sense.”20 It is also the risk hedged against in
the instructions above, with their caution that the casebook should be “a tool
for exploration, rather than a prescriptive, formulistic guide.”21 However useful
that caution, it can easily be overwhelmed by the image of the dramaturg as the
sole person responsible for introducing an imposing array of outside information,
whether via photocopies in the 1990s or .pdf attachments today, at the outset of
the artistic process. An invitation to explore, when it comes with a full comple-
ment of tools already chosen, does seem rather less of an invitation. If we agree,
as previously established, that the dramaturg’s role hinges on relational acts, on
collaborative conversation and back-and-forth, then any moment when research
serves as a cudgel against conversation is to be avoided. If a stack of printouts
or an e-mail full of attachments creates the suspicion that the dramaturg already
has all the answers, the genuine conversations, and thus the heart of the drama-
turgical function, will migrate elsewhere.
Tim Etchells (artistic director of Forced Entertainment, a longstanding
British theater ensemble) has put it eloquently. He asserts that the creative
process thrives on partial fragments, in the same way “that half-demolished or
half-built houses [are] the best places to play,” and so his group “had this un-
spoken agreement that no one would bring anything too completed to the
process.”22 The power of the fragment, and its role in fostering the kind of play
that moves research from the first register to the second, is something that the
dramaturg needs to be keenly aware of.
A fragment can be both mournful and generative, gesturing back toward
an implied past or forward toward what might yet be. It encapsulates both loss
and possibility. That is why the Romantics adored it, and that is why experi-
mental artists, arguably their direct descendants, are drawn to it today. And as
art historian William Tronzo clarifies, “fragment implies fragmentation,” an
unruly, often violent process. This “leads us to see the fragment not simply as
the static part of some once-whole thing but as itself something in motion.” 23
Having declared itself partial and in motion, the fragment is volatile, triggering
activity in art-makers and audiences alike, who themselves spring into motion
70 R e s e a rc h
to imagine the past or future whole(s) suggested by the part. Note that we don’t
have to believe such wholes are actually exhumable, achievable, or singular to
believe in the kinetic energy generated by their fragments.
Another element I would add to the power of the fragment is the power of
what I earlier called a “motivating strangeness.” With ERS we used to joke that
we should only bring things we liked to the group as source material if we didn’t
quite understand why we liked them. The strangeness of the attraction was then
a point of departure. Or perhaps the research would cause us to regard what
we thought we knew in our own contexts as newly strange—research materials
as tool for defamiliarization. In either instance there is still some discovery
potential in the research, and what a rehearsal room needs is discovery. What
is brought in should be material that can trigger more work, more play, and
even more research—then the process will not be prematurely understood and
closed off, but rather will open up in all its mystery.
Understanding research as a prompt for conversation, and as an opportunity
to locate the potential energy in what is fragmentary and seemingly strange,
helps relieve us of that image of the dramaturg’s research as a preproduction task
to be checked off a list, or a completed collection of material to be delivered
and taught. Instead, research is a longer-term creative process to be shared, in
which the dramaturg is an active, perhaps even catalyzing participant, but not
the sole responsible party. In this we find a more sustainable (and, in my experi-
ence, recognizable) model. In the introduction to this volume I wrote of the
potential democratization of the dramaturg, where dramaturgy might be seen
not as the action of a distinct individual called a dramaturg, but a “field of
operation that is ‘dispersed’ in different dimensions of the work of art.”24 The
research function is an excellent candidate for this dispersal.
What’s more, the democratization of the research function goes hand in
hand with the growing incidence of collaborative creation in the performing
arts. Research is, thus, no longer something done on the side to buttress the
inspired vision of a single choreographer, playwright, or director—whose vision
is, if not preformed, at least further developed than anyone else’s. Research is
instead the very substance of the group’s collective work, and even if there
remains a charismatic leader of that group, it is a leader who has dispersed
some share of the artistic responsibility. When Bausch made her cast into both
archive and fellow researchers, she did not just advance the research model for
making dances; she also portioned out some new responsibility to the collective.
Contemporary shifts in working process evolved in the theater world in parallel,
in work seen as part of the postdramatic turn: the Open Theater, the Wooster
Group, Forced Entertainment. And further: with the more recent flowering of
Google, YouTube, and the open-source model for composition, both the act of
R e s e a rc h 71
delving into the archive and the act of thinking about points of connection and
context as the work comes into focus are shared functions of the collaborative
group. At the close of this chapter, I provide examples of the variety of research
performed within the How Can You . . . ? process, taken on by a wide range of
collaborators, which well illustrate research as a dispersed function.
More potential researchers mean more potential points of inspiration,
more potential associations, as well as more potential chaos (for good or for ill).
There is no longer any need to assign one member of the creative team complete
responsibility for this labor. And yet, I find that where dramaturgy has been
democratized, there is overall encouragement for dramaturgy, creating a hos-
pitable environment for someone who has no other agenda but to do that work,
and the experience to do it well, with curiosity and drive. Thus the democratiza-
tion of dramaturgy is not necessarily a threat to a person called the dramaturg,
if we understand the dramaturg’s position both in motion and as a catalyst for a
larger group motion.
Ultimately, worrying about who is performing the research function and
whether or not he or she is called dramaturg is much less interesting than won-
dering about what that function really is, and what the issues are that arise
when it is performed. And thus for the remainder of this chapter I explore what
anyone engaged with that material or that activity, in either register, might be
wrestling with, whether or not they answer to the title “dramaturg.”
The Problematics of Research
In addressing earlier the two registers of the word “research,” I left off stating
that one of the issues for creative practice was when the research of the first
register (collation) might lead to research of the second register (creation). And
thus a key question concerns if and how research becomes inspiration—literally
a breath of air that animates, bringing something that did not exist into existence.
I also noted how certain research practices of the rehearsal room might find
their inspiration, not from external research, but from the bodies and embodied
knowledge of the collaborators inside the room. Thus this sort of inspiration
may not require research in the first register, beyond what we might ascribe to
the collating activity of casting the group of collaborators, a profoundly signifi-
cant initial step.
Part of what is at stake here, in the idea of bringing outside material into
the rehearsal room, is the very construction of outside and inside. (“Rehearsal
room” here is meant sometimes literally but always figuratively, designating
the area where we say work is being done.) In thinking about doing so-called
outside research we quickly come up against the conception of the rehearsal
72 R e s e a rc h
studio as a protected inside space, an experimental laboratory kept sterile from

outside contamination. Within the terms of this ideal, the chosen collaborators
agree to screen out any connections between their project and ideas outside
that room. Once they go into their clean, mirrored box and shut the door, they
are purposefully reinventing the wheel, hoping a willful ignorance will result in
a newer, rounder specimen. Selected bits of the “outside” world may be given a
pass to enter—for instance, if they assist with a mimetic function—but by and
large the inspiration is thought to spring forth from the mind of the artist or
artists under these controlled conditions.
This construct falls apart quickly, of course, as soon as we realize that the
archival bodies of the performers already contaminate the sterile environment,
carrying their own stories, assumptions, memories, past training, and past per-
formances. And so the proper subject for this nonsterile rehearsal room might
become the embodied knowledge of the collaborators—the potential that one
brings in the door without carrying any additional “packets of information.”
But is this scenario now optimal? Once those bodies, now embraced for their
particular forms of contamination, walk in the room, should the door still close
behind them?
I have no stable answer to this question; answers can only be specific to the
terms of a given project, a given proposition. However, it something I think
about a lot. When does it make sense to broaden the sphere of investigation,
making the walls of the rehearsal room more porous, and when does it make
sense to instead deepen work within whatever field of attention we have estab-
lished? When are we even certain of what is already there within our field of
attention? Do we need a broader view to better understand what is already
there with us inside the room? Below I share an example from Ralph’s rehearsal
rooms where it could have been useful to go beyond the information established
by the performers and their embodied knowledge, to further inform the terms
of the experiments.
G eog r a p h y a n d t h e L i m i t s o f t h e E mbo died A rchive
This example concerns the brief, ultimately discontinued investigation into

trance-like movement that Ralph undertook in 1997 with the cast of Geography:
West African dancers Didier “James” Akpa, Djédjé Djédjé Gervais, Nai Zou,
Kouakou “Angelo” Yao, and Moussa Diabate, and African American dancer
Carlos Funn. It is a narrative of a highly instructive failure, a research tack that
proved problematic but nevertheless fed both the larger performance process
and, eventually, my own understanding of the intricacies and ethics of the
research function. At stake was the extent to which it was fitting for us to embrace
R e s e a rc h 73
the physical actions and conversations of the rehearsal room as the primary
archive for our research actions. There are limitations to treating internal
archives as more sacrosanct than other archives, as this anecdote helps explore.
Ralph had already witnessed two trance phenomena in 1995 while making
an experimental documentary film among Miami’s Haitian population: one
the violent, unexpected trance of a novice; and the other the expertly controlled
trance of a Vodou priestess. And he had originally hoped that Haitian collabo-
rators, with direct knowledge of this practice, would join the West African
collaborators for Geography. He had figured Haiti romantically in his early notes
as “an island between Africa and myself ”;25 in other words, an intermediary
step in this planned conversation—even though Haiti might be more accurately
figured as the endpoint of a different trajectory, an alternate diasporic landing
place. Unfortunately, preproduction logistics with the Haitian artists proceeded
with difficulty, and that portion of the planned collaboration fell through. The
idea of using trance-like movement as a point of inspirational research, how-
ever, did not. In 1997, as part of the first workshop for Geography, Ralph screened
for his West African collaborators a film of Haitian trance phenomena: Maya
Deren’s Divine Horsemen (1977). I saw it for the first time when the cast did, all of us
sitting along the front edge of the stage, watching a static-y VHS copy of footage
shot by Deren in Haiti in the 1940s and 1950s, but compiled and edited by others
after her death.
Ralph understood that it would be completely improper to ask these per-
formers, coming as they did from spiritual traditions where trance was a famil-
iar, even vital component, to “do trance” on his stage. And he was not interested
in presenting West African traditions simply reframed on an American pro-
scenium, anyhow. What he did ask them was more complex than that, but it
turned out to be problematic as well. After turning off the video he asked the men
to get up and break into partners. Then, he explained, with a partner supporting
their weight they should find an “individual translation” of the kind of physical
energy they had seen in Deren’s film. The dancers hesitated, and then com-
pletely refused to undertake the exercise.
Ralph clarified that he was not interested in trance per se, but rather the
physicality manifested by it. He did not want real trance, or fake trance for that
matter—he just wanted to explore a sense of physical freedom, a genuine loss
of control. This distinction was laughable for the cast, and they explained that
if they were to throw themselves into the physicality he wanted, there was a
danger that they would then enter into an actual trance. And then, as James
added emphatically, “What you would need to get me out of it, you don’t have
here in this country!”26 Tracie Morris, the poet/writer for the project, added
that the idea that trance represented “freedom” was a misunderstanding of
74 R e s e a rc h
trance, for the dancers in the research video were not free, but rather controlled
by a god. The cast agreed.
Ralph asked Carlos, the other American in the cast, to demonstrate what
he had in mind: an “improvisation on the idea of complete freedom.” In a
moment I remember well because it was the first moment of friendly contention
between us, I goaded Ralph into getting up and demonstrating alongside
Carlos. Eventually, after watching several of Ralph’s and Carlos’s inconclusive
demonstrations of “complete freedom,” a few members of the cast decided
they could learn to draw a protective distinction between the physical and the
spiritual realms, even though they did not normally operate with that dichotomy.
They thought they could do the work that Ralph wanted, “exploring muscles
in a free physical form,” without actually endangering themselves. Others
demurred.
As these few dancers began to agree to the experiments, Ralph and I had
many discussions about whether he should back off, whether his request was
simply too inappropriate, or too dangerous. But he ultimately decided to trust
the dancers to tell him what was possible, since they had shown no hesitation at
telling him when he was off base so far. These experiments—now relabeled
“meditation” since “trance” had proved such a problematic point of reference—
continued throughout the workshops and rehearsal period. When James re-
turned to Côte d’Ivoire between the first and second workshops, he even per-
formed some sacrifices to protect himself, spiritual entreaties to cordon off the
physical and spiritual realms. Yet the rehearsal room experiments that followed
were never performed in the eventual stage piece. Ralph never figured out how
to stage them safely, or with enough cultural respect, or to turn them into some-
thing that an American theater audience could metabolize. The trance-inspired
experiments in Geography “failed,” but in a way that nevertheless informed the
larger process.
How does the concept of research track through this experience? First,
Ralph’s showing of some of Maya Deren’s footage of Haitian trance was an
initial bit of external research—a piece of preexisting visual information he
found, shared, and hoped would be inspirational—which had followed on the
heels of his more experiential research in Haiti and among the Haitian com-
munity in Miami. From that, he hoped the cast would then research, within
their own bodies, a “translation” of that preexisting information into unknown
new information of their own generation. He expected his research to become
their inspiration, as he sent a piece of diasporic cultural information back to-
ward its source. Instead, the cast schooled him, providing him with a new
source of research as they shared their own understandings of trance practice,
and the inherent dangers of his request.
R e s e a rc h 75
In my enactment of the role of dramaturg, I used the cast as an archive of

knowledge, embodied and otherwise, for my own research into what we were
attempting. I wrote down much of what they said in these heated rehearsal
room discussions, and later parsed their words carefully in discussion with
Ralph. I chose to take them, and whatever they brought with them into the
room, as the ultimate authorities on how they did or did not identify with the
Haitian footage, and on the traditions of trance and possession in their home
cultures. To do any other “outside” research, I felt at the time, would have
been to imply a lack of trust and respect—I kept my research process, in relation
to this one aspect of the work, fully inside the walls of the room.
Perhaps that was as it should have been. I was not going to become any
sort of authority on trance in Africanist cultures in a few months’ time, and I
certainly was not going to come in to rehearsal one day to hand out photocopied
“packets of information” to our West African dancers, regarding practices
most of them knew directly and about which I could only speculate. But in the
years that followed this experience, I had occasion to think back on these events
and do some deeper research into the context behind those heated rehearsal
room discussions. I explored the nature of Haitian versus West African traditions
of trance and the complex circumstances surrounding the filming, editing, and
release of Deren’s film. I found out that Haitian Vodou’s considerable retentions
from African religious sources were from the pantheons for the Fon, Yoruba,
and Kongo, none that were the particular cultures from which the Geography
dancers originated. I discovered from scholar Karen McCarthy Brown that in
the evolution of Vodou, possession “became more elaborate and more extempo-
raneous in Haiti than it was in the African homelands.”27 And I understood
that while trance possession in Vodou had evolved to be something available to
all who were present for a ritual, in the Sub-Saharan West Africa it generally
occurred less spontaneously or democratically, usually only to members of a
trained religious elite. That made it, perhaps, a more potentially dangerous
phenomenon in West Africa than in Haiti—at least in terms of the threat of it
occurring in an impromptu fashion, outside of culturally established controls.
I also learned more about the curious history of that film Ralph screened
for us. Maya Deren, the white former assistant of choreographer Katharine
Dunham, had followed her employer’s path of research to Haiti, where she
originally hoped to make an art film that would look at Haitian dance as “purely
a dance form,” attending to its “purely visual impact.”28 This made her initial
impulse uncannily similar to that of Ralph, who freely admitted in conversation
with the dancers that his first impulse, upon seeing the film, was to exploit it as
visual material.29 But in the process of working on her Haitian art film, Deren
was drawn into the spiritual context for Haitian dance and became unable to
76 R e s e a rc h
consider the movement as pure form. Her project metamorphosed from art
film to written ethnography. She found herself unable to cut any of her film
footage into a piece of shorter duration, and so sought repeatedly and unsuccess-
fully to have it viewed as an ethnographic film, without edits. As she explained
in the preface to her book: “I had begun as an artist, as one who would ma-
nipulate the elements of a reality into a work of art in the image of my creative
integrity; I end by recording, as humbly and accurately as I can, the logics of
a reality which had forced me to recognize its integrity, and abandon my
manipulations.”30
Deren and Ralph were similarly schooled by their co-collaborators and
forced to recognize the naïveté of their original plans for turning research
materials into inspiration. Their research, and their collaborators, talked back—
as they should have—for it is only through an ongoing conversation, sometimes
difficult, that research shifts to become the most valuable sort of inspiration.
Because of Deren’s reluctance to manipulate her footage toward an artistic
end, it was never edited or screened during her lifetime.31 Instead, the film that
Ralph showed the Geography cast was the result of posthumous editing. As a
result there are distortions in the documentary that Deren would never have
accepted, this despite its official title, Maya Deren’s Divine Horsemen. For instance,
the released film foregrounds the most spectacular moments of possession
without indicating the long process that led up to that event. It also suggests a
correspondence between soundtrack and image that in fact did not exist, so the
dancers we viewed were not actually dancing to the drumming that we heard.
Thus all the points Ralph attempted to make about the dancers being freed
from the music were ill-founded.
What might have happened differently if I had done this research back in
1997, during that workshop period, instead of years after the fact? No matter
what I learned, it was not anything that would have made me a greater authority
on trance phenomena than the dancers, who had all experienced or witnessed
it in person within their own cultural context. But in teasing out the range of
differences we had elided between Haitian trance forms and West African trance
forms, I uncovered the existence of a category of information that our dancers
already knew but may not have thought important or relevant to articulate. Or
perhaps, that they had not felt entirely free to articulate. There was no avoiding
the power differential between Ralph and the dancers, whom he was paying to
come to the United States, alleged land of opportunity, and work with him
every day. The gulf between Haiti and West Africa was of potential interest but
never became part of this conversation. What is more, if I had also uncovered
and shared the tensions Deren had felt over the proper use of her footage, I
might have catalyzed a deeper conversation about how we were also “using”
R e s e a rc h 77
the Haitian footage as our own research material. We could have talked both
about the distortions in the material we had seen and our own potential to
distort it further.
No matter what I might have done with this information back in 1997, I
would never have been able or disposed to share it from a didactic position. But
in my fearing and avoiding that didactic role, and buying into the attractive ideal
that the bodies and minds in the room were to be the sole source of research
information, I also avoided doing the sort of corollary research that would have
allowed me to ask better questions. And better questions can also be an engine
for research, and a source of inspiration. This is the crux of how “outside”
research figures in the rehearsal room—is it research to better instruct, or to
better inquire? The latter is far preferable.
It is tempting to borrow the phrase from Deren’s preface above and define
research, when performed in the best possible spirit, as the process of discovering
“the logics of a reality which forces one to recognize its integrity, and abandon
one’s manipulations.” Indeed, the first part of that formulation works marvel-
ously. Research, whether it is gathered inside or outside of the rehearsal room,
whether it collates existing information or creates new and unfamiliar informa-
tion, is at its best a process for recognizing integrity. Research speaks back to
the finders with authority and demands to be taken into account. However the
second part of Deren’s formulation—“abandon one’s manipulations”—is
impossible. Perhaps in any context, but certainly in an art-making context,
we manipulate what we find. Even the simple act of framing—of saying “look
here”—is a manipulation. Thus the ideal we can hope for, in the second part of
that formulation, is that our research might push us to consider deeply the ethical
dilemmas inherent in our manipulations, and to adjust accordingly.
Co m e h o m e Ch a r l e y P atto n a nd
E m b r a c i n g t h e E m b o d i ed A rchive
The 2004 performance of Patton was the chronological endpoint of a lengthy

and involved working process, some of which Ralph undertook privately, some
collaboratively. That multifaceted process contains a contrasting example to
the previous one, a moment where more corollary research would not have
been desirable. In this instance, using the bodies inside the rehearsal room as the
primary archive for searching and exploration was entirely appropriate to the
task at hand.
The “buck dance,” as it was danced in disparate and racially charged
contexts across centuries in the American South, served as a major thread in
the movement investigations for Patton. When Ralph traveled across Alabama
78 R e s e a rc h
and Mississippi on a private research trip, accompanied only by his daughter,

videographer Chelsea Lemon-Fetzer, he repeatedly performed “Living Room
Dances,” using an imagined buck dance. These occurred in the living rooms of
the oldest surviving relatives of blues musicians, where Ralph presented a
small-scale solo dance to a recording of a track by the musician in question. For
these solos Ralph employed an imagined buck dance, an invented version he
based on murky personal and cultural memories. “The buck” (as Ralph and
the Patton collaborators called it) has a checkered past, turning up as a more or
less homegrown plantation dance, danced by and for African Americans . . . or
as a caricature of black cultural forms, danced by white and black minstrel
performers pandering to a white audience’s received image of blackness . . . or
as a complex rhythmic step that served as a serious historical predecessor to
American tap dance.32 But Ralph did not care to try and untangle all these
different historical threads; he was interested precisely in the tangle, as refracted
through his own imperfect memory. It was correspondingly clear that any
dramaturgical research I might offer should explore that tangle without at-
tempting to resolve it.
As soon as Ralph and I started talking about his interest in the buck dance
(which he had already explored once during the years of his company, in a
1991 solo called Folkdance), I did some external research on the topic. I located
a documentary film about the buck dance and brought it into the rehearsal
room. Talking Feet: Solo Southern Dance: Flatfoot, Buck and Tap is a 1987 film by Mike
Seeger that captures solo rhythmic dancing in the southern mountain regions—
West Virginia, Kentucky, Virginia, and North Carolina—by a variety of skilled
dancers both black and white. Ralph showed the performers the video, and
they discussed the feel of contrasting renditions. But then the research source
disappeared from the room—no one hovered over the monitor, remote in
hand, trying to copy a step or capture a feeling. Instead Ralph asked them to
forget that source material for anything other than a generalized buck dance
ethos, and instead to “find their own bucks.”33 To borrow Joseph Roach’s
words on the relationship of performance and memory, Ralph was asking the
cast to use this fraught dance step “as both quotation and invention, an improvi-
sation on borrowed themes, with claims on the future as well as the past.”34
The buck dance thus became the cast’s tool for exploring received notions and
cultural memories—those subjective provinces where past collides with present,
history with fiction.
Thus any further research into the historical buck dance form—what it
could have looked like over the years, who danced it when, in what contexts it
had appeared—while potentially fascinating, would have been irrelevant, even
counterproductive. The vital research in this process was into the individual
R e s e a rc h 79
notions of the buck dance as manifested by the cast, using their imperfect
memories as the functional archive. With the subjective memory of the cast
thus defined as the site of research, the best possible archive was always inside
the room. Yet larger cultural, political, and social contexts were not screened
out by this process—this was not the model of the modernist rehearsal room as
a laboratory of pure form. Rather it was the refraction of those contexts
through memory that located our archive firmly within the performers’ mental
space. My parallel research process was in exploring how to watch, name, and
reflect back into conversation the material that was emerging from their dancing
bodies.
Other moments in the long Patton working process exemplified a productive
balance between research in the first register, as a collection of preexisting
materials brought into a rehearsal room, and research in the second register, as
new or unfamiliar materials generated inside that room through experimenta-
tion. I remember working long hours with Okwui Okpokwasili and James
Hannaham, reviewing video of a bucolic early scene from Tarkovsky’s Mirror,
which we three translated from its rural context in Russia to another rural
context in the US South. As a translation, the work involved balancing respect
for the integrity of the outside source with research to discover what new infor-
mation arose from our interaction with it. (The scene as a scene never tran-
scended, remaining too awkward to outlast that workshop, though one small
moment endured.) A more lasting translation of external research was found in
Bruce Nauman’s Wall/Floor Positions, an early piece of video art from 1968. In
this grainy black-and-white document, Nauman trains his camera on the joining
line of a white wall and gray floor and then falls into frame. He holds his weight
up on hands and feet and shifts position approximately once every five seconds,
usually with the decisive gesture of a single limb, as if he were playing an arcane
version of Twister with a game board set on right-angle surfaces. All the collabo-
rators, myself included, threw themselves through contortions inspired by what
we understood of Nauman’s physical logic.
Here the revelation of our research was that simply by transferring the
actions of Nauman’s white body on to a collection of (majority) black bodies, the
nature of the piece shifted. Quickly there arose an alarming image of the body
as chattel, being put through difficult paces, instead of the body as “neutral,”
with the freedom to explore contortions as pure form. And yet the performers
were able to explore the same variety within abstract form that Nauman
had—that reading was present too, just in tension with the other. The tension
then became a key research discovery, one with which we sought to imbue the
entire performance. And the basic visual image discovered from the Nauman
research—a group of black performers, isolated from each other and set against
80 R e s e a rc h
a stark white wall and floor—evolved into Patton’s overarching set concept.
Here a piece of external research catalyzed an idea quite distinct from its source,
but which would not have been found without it. The Nauman video discovery
is a prototypical example of a moment when research became inspiration—an
elusive, desirable shift that I now address more thoroughly in the next section.
H o w Ca n Yo u . . . ? a n d
t he D a n c e b e t w e e n R e s e a rc h a n d I nspira tio n
The research we collected and created as part of the process of How Can You . . . ?
provides a final set of anecdotal examples, this time to think about how exter-
nal research brought to a working process may or may not become inspiration,
how internal research conducted within the process may be supported, and
how the products of research may create a new archive for exploration.
The variety of manifestations research may take in a performance context
is easily apparent when I look over my notebooks from two years of work on
How Can You . . . ? This was the epitome of research as a democratized function;
different members of the collaborative group took on a wide variety of research
projects, of varying types. Research projects were sometimes assigned by
Ralph, but just as often they were born from an individual collaborator’s initia-
tive in pursuing a line of thought or desire. We all had our own research that
fed into the larger shared conversation, and the ways we brought those projects
into the conversation matched our particular alchemical roles therein. I kept tabs
on all the disparate research projects, though with varying degrees of detail, as
some were exquisitely private.
In keeping tabs, and in noting the provisional, sometimes shifting, terms of
our conversations, I aimed thereby to assemble a new archive of information
for further research—whether that might be research by our own group just
one month into the future, or by some other artist or scholar in years to come.
Dramaturg Talvin Wilks and I have, in public conversation, dubbed this sort of
collection the “active archive.”35 The active archive is one that, like the frag-
ments it houses, “looks forward as well as back.”36 In the active archive, materials
assembled are not inert artifacts, of interest only to historians wishing to un-
cover the past, but rather active tools to potentially fold and refold back into
current process, unlocking future potential. Wilks and I posited the curation of
the active archive as a crucial element of the dramaturg’s work within a democ-
ratized research process.
For How Can You . . . ? I remember spearheading three traditional sorts of
research projects. I hunted down versions of the tales of Bre’er Rabbit and the Tar
Patch and The Hare in the Moon and compiled and condensed, with liberal editing,
R e s e a rc h 81
our ideal versions. I explored the audience-less performances that Thomas

Richards led in Pontadera, Italy. And I searched for sociological and anthropo-
logical writings on crying, tears, and mourning. Each of these tacks fed very
differently into the larger ecology of the working process.
The research into the two tales I performed on direct assignment—Ralph
already knew that the contrast between these two stories of a rabbit, one a
model of wily survival in the African American tradition and the other a model
of generous self-sacrifice in the Buddhist tradition, would be a point of inspiration
for the piece. He imagined these two animals as the same character in two very
different guises. My task here was relatively straightforward—to find the versions
of the story that best spoke to this inspiration as I understood it, and edit them
down for distribution, first to our cast, and later to audiences as the sole program
note. Ralph had already identified the field of inspiration through his own
research process; my job was to support, clarify, and build on it.
Ralph also knew, from early on, the middle section of How Can You . . . ?, a
twenty-minute structured improvisation with six dancers moving furiously at
top velocity, was to be considered a performance with no shape, no form, no
style, that could not even be seen. As explained in the previous chapter, he was
outright rejecting the idea that it would be made for presentation—distant tour
dates notwithstanding—and asking his collaborators to proceed from that
premise. I wanted to think more about this concept of a performance without
an audience, and so I initiated outside research on other manifestations of the
idea, landing for a while on the audience-less performance work of Thomas
Richards at the Workcenter in Pontadera, Italy. American performer Richards
collaborated with physical theater innovator Jerzy Grotowski and then took
over the research when Grotowski died in 1999. The work Richards has pursued
with his group now for decades was the development of a highly specific perform
ance ritual that existed for the performers; outside viewers were allowed occa-
sionally but only on special request, and often as part of an exchange where
those viewers would also share their own performance research. The existence
of this work intrigued me, and my reading and viewing (I managed to attend a
screening of then rarely seen documentary footage) fed me as a collaborator,
giving me a sense of a shared context for our explorations.
This particular line of research, however, remained my own private tack. It
never became a point of inspiration, or kindled further thinking, for the larger
group. There could be several reasons why not, but the most interesting one, I
think, has to do with the concept of translation. When outside research fuels a
corresponding research process within the rehearsal room, it is because it poses
an interesting problem of translation—how can the integrity of this information,
strange to us, demand a translation into something that respects the rigor of the
82 R e s e a rc h
source and simultaneously becomes something new or surprising? The Richards

material never suggested that kind of translation because it was too close to the
matter at hand. It was a contemporary performance experiment, from an analo-
gous culture and time period. If someone in our group had spent time working
with Richards’s group, and brought that information in to the room as direct,
embodied experience, it would have inevitably informed our task. But short of
that, it was not going to feed our work, because it offered no enticing distance,
only the sensation of being a little too close. In other words, instead of the
possibility of translation, it offered only the possibility of quotation or, worse,
plagiarism. We could not translate it into another language because it was
already so close to our own.
The third line of research I initiated in response to my knowing Ralph’s
foundations for this piece. There was nothing subtle about these foundations—
it was a piece built out of acute, all-consuming mourning. Ralph had spent the
years after Patton by the side of Tree dancer Asako Takami, by then his romantic
partner, as she was diagnosed with cancer, sought treatment, gradually got
worse, and passed away. Ralph had put much of his artistic practice on hold
during those years, or rather transformed it into a caretaking practice. After
Asako’s death in November 2007, a return to artistic practice seemed hollow,
impossible. Yet an invitation in 2008 by Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Joe
Melillo to do something, anything, on stage suddenly felt to Ralph, the lover of
impossible tasks, like the right sort of challenge. So he assembled his cast and
collaborators, the same group that had created and performed 2004’s Patton,
the piece before his world had shifted. He seemed like a different man as we
began workshop rehearsals. The cast understood they were being asked to
perform as Ralph’s surrogates in mourning.
It sounds terribly dry to state it outright, the worst sort of academic displace-
ment of emotion, but I set myself the task of researching mourning. I looked at
anthropological reports of mourning rituals in a wide variety of cultural contexts,
including a valuable account of female wailing in a Bedouin community. I
discovered a great book titled Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears. I
found a collection of haiku, Japanese Death Poems. And, most intriguing of all,
I located a fairly detailed first-person account from a professional mourner
in China, describing the ins and outs of his lifelong job.37 And gradually, the
assembled stack of these materials became anything but dry—became, in their
mass, very moving to me. They were a chronicle of human attempts to master
the unmasterable, to acknowledge and bear loss. I handed these materials over
to Ralph and Okwui, who were assembling a duet built from private rituals of
mourning, as well as keywords taken from the two rabbit stories I had edited
earlier. Okwui was also working on the impossible task Ralph had assigned
R e s e a rc h 83
Figure 10. Okwui Okpokwasili during How Can You Stay . . . ? This is a still from a video taken from
backstage, thus this view of her crying was never seen by the live audience, who only saw her back.
Ralph later screened the video as part of the 2014 piece Scaffold Room. (Still from video by Shoko
Letton, courtesy of Ralph Lemon)
her—to cry for eight minutes straight, really cry, without pretending, after the
twenty-minute section of furious movement and before the final duet section.38
The work on the crying section and the duet section was intensely private.
Ralph and Okwui scheduled their own, separate studio time and did not include
the rest of us—at least not in the initial stages; later on we served as the first
witnesses to the results. So I did not observe the process of my gathered research
turning into inspiration, though I was informed that it had. Okwui in particular
shared her thoughts on how the account of the professional mourner and other
public mourning rituals sparked a shift in her thinking about the crying task,
“in that they made me think of what is theatrical but still not untrue about
[crying as a] public display.” 39 In other words, these accounts unlocked a
manner of thinking whereby she would not be concerned that the public nature
of her tears would impugn their genuineness, because crying served a purpose
as public ritual. The research “solidified the sense of ‘crying’ as a practice.”40
The professional mourner also wrote about crying as a form of song, which
then inspired Okwui to create a playlist of songs in which she felt she could hear
that connection, and to which she listened right before she had to go on stage and
“cry, really cry” for eight minutes. In this instance research became inspiration
by supplying Okwui with the sense of a particular context or community in
84 R e s e a rc h
Figure 11. Okwui Okpokwasili in Untitled (2008), as performed at the Museum of Modern Art.
(© 2011 Yi-Chun Wu / The Museum of Modern Art)
which her actions would belong. It had that “motivating strangeness” in that it
offered unfamiliar perspectives on why and how we mourn. It is also a great
example of research material that was not particularly physical in nature leading
the performer to explore a very physical response.
Meanwhile, Okwui initiated her own parallel research task, using the rest
of the collaborators as her archive. She interviewed us all individually about
our most painful life events, collecting private traumas that ran the gamut from
teenage heartbreaks to cruel injustice to violent loss of life. She compiled those
stories, woven together with documentation of all-too-frequent atrocities from
the national and international news, into a closely guarded “crying book.” The
book was to be read only by her, and only in the moments preceding a perform
ance. I talked to her about it, but I never saw inside it—except once in 2011,
when she read it in public in the atrium at the Museum of Modern Art, before
a duet performance with Ralph.
The mourning research also became my own inspiration, fueling the manner
with which I embraced the physical research on fury, mourning, and duration
I was joining in the more collaborative group workshops. In the work for this
section of the piece, “Wall/Hole,” the most important research was, just as
with Patton’s buck dance, primarily located inside the rehearsal room. As I
R e s e a rc h 85
described in more detail in the previous chapter, the cast experimented one at
a time with improvised movement at a high velocity that courted formless-
ness, using multiple keywords, among them “fury,” to provisionally name the
turbulence they sought. This time I participated bodily in the internal research,
taking my turn moving furiously in the center of our circle, and joined in wit-
nessing others’ attempts and putting language to what we had—or had not—
experienced. The fury research initially proceeded on a subtractive basis—
anything the group could name, we would ask the mover to avoid the next time
through. Thus each physical attempt became the collective’s research material
for our next attempts, as we slowly built an experimental language as a tool to
exclude what might be easily recognizable. We also understood our movement
experiments within the much vaster, fractured context suggested by Ralph’s
vivid testimony of mourning and my research on mourning. In this example
strands of research internal and external to the rehearsal room were intricately
interwoven, supporting and feeding off each other, blurring any clear distinction.
Performers also took on physical research projects of their own devising,
parallel to the group work. Darrell Jones began wearing a heart-rate monitor to
track how, in the exhausting twenty-minute full-throttle improvisation, his
physical signs of exertion might correspond with moments of aesthetic or affec-
tive transformation. Since Ralph was attempting to disrupt anything he could
recognize as distinct or repeatable, Darrell countered, almost subversively, with
a research project all his own, scientific in its quantification of exactly that which
Ralph could not see or recognize. In other words, Darrell used his research to
assert control over the only domain that still belonged to him alone.41 Gesel
Mason did not wear a monitor in rehearsal, but she began spending her down
time in the gym, creating her own research project by running on a treadmill
and tracking her heart rate as she ran in funny-looking, destabilizing positions,
such as sternum up to the ceiling.42
Thus the full range of How Can You . . . ? research projects were only some-
times assigned by Ralph, only sometimes owned by the dramaturg, and only
sometimes undertaken as a collective. And the full collection of all this research
went into our “active archive,” slowly assembling from materials generated by
the rehearsal process. I had curated some sort of active archive as early as
1997’s Geography, when I had transcribed the deliberations of the rehearsal room
and the potential fault lines therein, in order to better fold that process back
into the performance product. Now with How Can You . . . ?, there was even
more disparate material to collect and curate, even more to fold back in.
For instance, I kept careful notes of our fury experiments, particularly the
prompting keywords we used and discarded in turn, and the various approaches
by which we structured our improvisations. These records became useful to the
86 R e s e a rc h
group in the moment—when one avenue of investigation dried up, I could

consult the archive to offer the potential of an old road not taken, or make a
comparison to a previous impasse and analogize a possible solution. This archive
was also my key source when I came to write out the score of the improvisation,
together with my interviews with the dancers, which drew on their own note-
books. Then those interviews and my resulting score joined the active archive
as well.
I’m emphasizing thus far what was written and recorded, but the simple
truth is that the dramaturg, in serving as a witness to the production process,
shapes his or her own memory as archival—I did not always need to consult
my notebook to offer a useful detail of a past experiment, and some of the best
connections were made with material that had never been written down. I also
do not want to claim that in serving as both archival scribe and memory archive
the dramaturg is doing something that no one else does. As should be clear,
many of the dancers kept detailed journals of their work on the piece, selected
parts of which they shared with me, and all certainly had intricate memories of
their own physical experiments. Ralph may not have written as much as I did
while in the rehearsal room, but his own notebooks and e-mails from between
rehearsals were copious. And certainly the many rehearsal videotapes, kept by
Ralph, were part of this growing collection of information. Thus in building up
the new active archive of process, the dramaturgical function is dispersed
among the collective, just as the archive itself is not located in any one place,
existing virtually in recorded and unrecorded form (words, images, bodies,
memories . . .). Yet the dramaturg’s own skills and preoccupations as a re-
searcher leads her to take an active and usefully particular role in this unruly
archive’s creation and maintenance. It may still be in need of an attentive,
critically thinking curator, who cross-references, makes connections, explores
seeming contradictions.
It’s clear that this active archive is a heterogeneous collection, including
many documents that fit right in with the logic of the conventional archive—
artifacts in writing, video files, documents that remain self-similar—the bones,
not the flesh, as Schneider would have it.43 But the thing that makes these
particular bones more interesting is how they are used. They are not taken as
the last word in the history of a rehearsal room, but are rather as a collection of
potential tools, poised to activate or reactivate the flesh and memories we also
hold within our larger, unruly, active archive. The archival authority of these
documents is tempered by the fact that the performing bodies in the room can
take them up or discard them at will.
We might be working on an improvisational movement score, and one
performer might say she remembers doing something else, something more
R e s e a rc h 87
interesting to her, in an improvisation three months ago, but can’t quite remem-
ber what it was. I might say let me look in my notes to see what you said about
what you were doing that day; or we might decide to consult a video file if there
is one. When we find whatever little fragment of a larger conversation I managed
to transcribe, or whatever blurry image of the sought-for moment landed just
at the edge of the video frame, the performer might feel pleasantly surprised,
inspired, and might want to work from that artifact. But just as likely she might
say, “Nope, that’s not it.” Or, she might say, “That’s not it; however, it does
remind me of something else I was thinking when I said that,” or “That’s not it,
but actually I am intrigued by the movement I was doing in that moment right
after . . .” And so it continues, this use of the active archive not as authority as
much as trigger, as a source of new collected research that once again may or
may not find passage from the first to the second register.
The collection of artifacts we build up over a working process, often a long
process with time for some useful forgetting, becomes a collection of ways we
the collaborators might re-present ourselves to ourselves, we might say we even
research ourselves. We discover ourselves as somehow fragmentary, or strange,
to ourselves. And the point of the active archive is not to replicate past experi-
ments, but to call forth and explore new acts of performance, new possibilities,
within and from the bodies in the room.
The question of research for a dramaturg, or anyone thinking dramaturgically,

also implies the question of framing. A researcher frames materials for con-
sideration, whether they are found outside or inside the rehearsal room. The
work involves locating a point of focus, drawing an edge, suggesting what might
be included within that line, and saying “look here” to the other collaborators.
It is an invitation to pay attention to the frame’s contents, an invitation that can
always be accepted or refused. As I move into the next chapter, which grapples
with the question of audience, I note that this basic gesture shifts only slightly.
Next I look at how the dramaturg thinks about the framing of materials, and
the invitational “look here,” for viewers instead of collaborators.
3
Audience
A common description of the dramaturg is that she is the work’s first audi-
ence. As a participant-observer in the rehearsal room, she is often the first to
sit in that charged spot where the audience will later go. A choreographer or
director will sit there too, of course, but the common understanding is that
their greater emotional or proprietary entanglement prevents them from occu-
pying that spot in quite the same way. From the dramaturg’s chronological
“first” often extends the idea that she operates as an “advocate” for the full
range of observers (nonparticipant, or less-participant) that will follow in time.
This idea of dramaturg as advocate for the audience has been much refuted
and defended, used and abused. As first mentioned in the introduction, I wish
to stake out a nuanced position in relation to this concept, neither entirely
discarding nor entirely embracing it. Ultimately it is most useful, I argue, when
engaged as a fruitfully impossible task. One cannot really advocate for an un-
known, irreducibly diverse, impromptu future collective. But, understanding
the importance of the eventual audience, whose presence defines the space and
time of performance, one attempts this advocacy. And then thinks better of it.
And then attempts once again. And refrains once again. Thus the task’s vexed
impossibility—extending from both its inadvisability and necessity—is part of
what propels the dramaturg into motion. She may be part of every rehearsal
for a month to understand the terms of the production from within, then dis-
appear for another month in order to acquire a set of eyes and ears that are
usefully different from the other collaborators on her return. Oscillating back
and forth from positions inside and outside the working process, she tries in
that flurry to remember, forget, and then re-remember the conjured presence
of absent spectators.
Ralph Lemon has always had a particularly ambivalent relationship to
those spectators, as first projected and imagined, then later encountered in the
moment of performance. The idea that his life’s work exists only insofar as it
can be put on display makes him uneasy, even as he has simultaneously thrived
as a performer. Early in his career one journalist captured this tension by titling
88
A u d i e n ce 89
her Ralph Lemon profile “Private Man in the Public Arena,”1 and that charac-
terization shows no signs of becoming less apt. In the period I have worked
with him the question of what materials he should share with a larger, quasi-
anonymous group, and on what terms, versus what materials should remain
private to a rehearsal room or a research trip, has arisen again and again.
The image of Miles Davis turning his back on the audience recurs in
Ralph’s rehearsal rooms as creative fodder. In the 1950s Davis began turning
away from the audience while performing, and for this gesture multiple explana-
tions arose, among them: he wanted to better concentrate on the music, he
wanted to give direction to the band, or he wanted to resist the image of black
performer as pandering entertainer to majority-white audiences.2 These are
not mutually exclusive. When fans gave Davis grief for ignoring them, Davis
wondered pointedly why no one complained when a (white) orchestral con-
ductor kept his back turned. Why should the expectations for a black performer
be any different? Ralph’s attraction to the history and mythology of the Davis
turn makes clear that the context of racialized viewing permeates this tension
between privacy and display. The tension resonates with W. E. B. Du Bois’s
notion of double consciousness, where the African American subject remains
hyperaware of the disjunction between how he sees himself ( private) and how
the majority-white world sees him ( public). It is further embellished by a long
history of expectations specific to the stage. It stems from awareness of the long
history of majority-white audiences watching black Americans dance and sing,
and those performers’ concomitant strategies for evading a reductive gaze.
Of course, insofar as I played “first audience” to the work, I also played
“first white audience.” Though I had no interest in propagating the worst sorts
of white expectations for how a black performer should or could appear on
stage, I inevitably watched from within my own skin and my own cultural
context. Thus Ralph’s and my conversations about audience always held some
degree of resonance within this register—examined or not—even when racial-
ized viewing was not our overtly stated topic.
Ralph’s artistic lineage in American postmodern dance also threads
through his ambivalence toward audience. The postmodernists’ own turn
away from audience, roughly a decade after Davis’s turn, was famously marked
by Yvonne Rainer’s “NO to spectacle.” It is also echoed in the Steve Paxton
material quoted previously, where Paxton contended that by staking out a
research branch of the larger discipline of dance, he would inevitably offer
material that was not yet legible to an audience. His understanding of his work
as research meant that legibility was not his concern. And yet neither of these
postmodern dance heroes ever eschewed putting their work in front of audiences
entirely; for them as with Davis, the audience remains important, even if its
90 Audience
role becomes less straightforward. Deborah Hay, another founding postmodern-

ist and a particular hero of Ralph’s, made a nuanced distinction. She developed
elaborate scores for dances as physical meditations that were not at all designed
for how they would appear to an audience, but in which she nevertheless in-
structed the performer to “invite being seen.”3 That sense of invitation, and the
generosity it implies, returns later in this chapter.
Not only is Ralph’s relationship to the idea of audience complex, but his
understanding of who his audience is and in what frame he might encounter
them is in flux. During the years I have been working with him, his models for
making and presenting work have shifted. He disbanded his eponymous
company with its annual appearances and created smaller paraperformances
in parallel with major proscenium events. He has experimented with visual art
and film installations, durational performances, and live performance within
gallery spaces.
One result of this heady mix of multifactorial ambivalence and moving tar-
gets is that I have thought more about “questions of audience,” and in more
different ways, than I might have if I had collaborated with another artist. It
also means that I have found myself taking on that “audience advocate” role
more than I might have with another artist, even as I increasingly recognize the
difficulties of that position and learn, over the years, my own brand of ambiva-
lence. My thinking about my own relationship to eventual audiences, and my
relationship to Ralph when discussing audience, has led me along a complex
path. In the pages that follow I trace that path, first laying some theoretical
groundwork for the dramaturg’s particular relationship to audience, coupled
with some current thinking on spectatorship. I then move into the rehearsal
room to expose some of the dramaturgical conversations during the periods
when Patton and How Can You . . . ? moved from private research to public stage.
Advocate for the Audience?
If it is performance, then one assumes there is to be an audience, and so some

thinking about audience does not seem out of place. But where is it stated that
advocacy is required? The concept of advocacy implies that one must be familiar
with the desires of whomever one represents. So: what does the audience want ?
This question is both as revelatory (in what it tells us about the circumstances
under which it is posed) and as preposterous (to actually set about answering)
as Freud’s parallel query about women almost a century ago. And the answer,
as with Freud’s, might ultimately hinge on problematic generalizations and
evasive desire. It is also worth wondering if the audience itself knows what it
wants? Or might there be something to present them with that they, not knowing
A u d i e n ce 91
what they wanted in advance, will nevertheless find desirable? And what sort
of pleasure, what sort of desire, with what level of complexity, is at stake? Can
being made uncomfortable or disoriented also be an object of the audience’s
desire?
The literature about dramaturgy in a traditional theater context, where
work usually departs from a preexisting script, contains many descriptions of
audience advocacy, or passages that otherwise privilege the dramaturg’s special
concern with the “question of audience.” (Notably, there “advocate for the
text” and “advocate for the playwright” are also mentioned as contrasting job
descriptions, leading to a potential conflict of interest for the dramaturg-as-
proponent). Anne Cattaneo, the dramaturg for Lincoln Center Theater from
the late 1980s to the present, includes within her recounting of various drama-
turgical functions the idea that “a dramaturg can anticipate audience response.”4
Setting aside for a moment the question of what special skills or perspective
might put the dramaturg in a position to anticipate the audience, one should
note that this facet of the job description is bolstered within the theater context
by the fact that many theater dramaturgs, such as Cattaneo, work within an
institutional structure, where they bear some responsibility for audience out-
reach and development on an institutional level over the long term—not only
shepherding individual productions toward an audience, but undertaking
season planning, devising supplemental events to build audience interest in
that season, and interfacing with public relations departments. But as discussed
in the introduction, American dance dramaturgs do not seem to be employed
as constant fixtures within institutional structures. Rather, even when funded
by institutional structures that encourage their presence, they attach primarily
to artists and projects rather than institutions. Thus while this sort of labor in
extended audience development may linger as an association with the word
“dramaturg” for those who first encountered it in the world of residential
theaters, it has not yet substantially informed the dance dramaturg’s labor.5
This does not mean that dance dramaturgs do not think about audience.
Heidi Gilpin, writing in 1997 to describe dance dramaturgy via her work with
William Forsythe, claims a particularly strong concern for audience within a
dance context. She explains that “the question of audience is a significant one
for the dramaturgy of movement in performance,”6 going on to explain her
finding that very often members of an audience possess starkly different areas
of expertise. She claims that movement performance—at least of the sort
Forsythe was generating while in collaboration with her—has a particular
tendency to land in front of highly diverse audiences, with, for instance, some
members who understand movement vocabularies, some who understand
philosophy and cultural studies, some who know film theory, but few who are
92 Audience
familiar with all the languages and thought processes potentially relevant to the
work. This lack of a more or less unified audience response does not make Gilpin
abandon all considerations of that response as futile, but rather has her redouble
her efforts to consider them and rise to the complexity of the task. Arguing not
entirely convincingly that “this situation is unique to movement performance,”
she states that there is no polestar for locating meaning, nothing like the central-
ized text in dramatic theater that tends to organize “interpretational strategies,”
and thus no way for a group of diverse observers to constellate around a common
response.7 Accordingly, instead of a recognizable organizational principle,
Forsythe’s audience was presented with diverse vocabularies in “text, image,
movement, sound,” and diverse “disciplinary perspectives—none of which
play a hierarchical central role.”8
Rather than discussing a situation unique to movement performance, Gilpin
seems to be characterizing any sort of performance after the postdramatic turn
that Hans-Thies Lehmann has described and theorized. Performances that
have decentralized the role of a dramatic text now proliferate in the theater
world as well, without necessarily using copious movement. Three years prior
to Gilpin’s writing, dramaturg Marianne Van Kerkhoven made this connection,
coining the phrase “new dramaturgies” to refer to dramaturgical work on any
performance with a “process-oriented method of working” (whether under-
stood within a context of dance, theater, or both), where “the meaning, the
intentions, the form and the substance of the play arise during the working
process” instead of from a more centralized source.9
Gilpin sums up the kind of dramaturgy she feels this work demands as fol-
lows: “The task of the dramaturg in this context is to confront the effervescent
necessities of performing the multivalent and simultaneously make it resonate
for audiences as a new form of perception.”10 Of interest here are the phrases
“necessities of performing the multivalent”—implying that material that creates
meaning so variously is demanding for its performers as well as its observers—
and “make it resonate for audiences as a new form of perception.” Gilpin sees
her job as assisting audience members to experience something with which
they are not entirely familiar and helping them experience their absence of
familiarity as an opportunity for the “new,” instead of a lack of effectiveness
within more familiar terms. Her labor is to build bridges between what is recog-
nizable and what is not yet recognizable.
The idea of shifting terms of viewership arises in Van Kerkhoven’s descrip-
tion of “new dramaturgies” as well: “The new dramaturgy is also looking for
a new relationship with its audience: this theatre wants its audience to share
in the multiple points of view, or at least alienate it from its ‘normal’ way of
viewing.”11 Gilpin may emphasize the forging of new perceptions, and Van
A u d i e n ce 93
Kerkhoven may land on the avoidance of the norm, but whether expressed
positively or negatively, they both figure the dramaturg as someone who attends
to how audience perception might shift and encourages the same. Both hope
their spectatorship will lead to strategies for “making the multivalent resonate”
in a new way for that future collective. Van Kerkhoven, elsewhere in the same
publication, affirms the idea that the dramaturg is the work’s “first spectator.”12
Thus her dramaturg may watch as that early representative—or “advocate,”
we might hesitantly say—for the many who will come after her. The larger
audience may not be able to articulate what it wants in advance, but the presump-
tion is that they will have valued their experience with new forms of perception,
in retrospect. And so, according to Gilpin and Kerkhoven, the dramaturg-as-
advocate argues for, and works to construct the opportunities for, an audience’s
discovery of novel forms and modes of perception, of nonnormative viewing
experiences.
In a 2009 public conversation between choreographer William Forsythe
and philosopher Alva Noë, the two similarly put forward the triggering of novel
forms of perception as a goal of constructing a performance for an audience,
but also as a fundamental problem. Noë, the philosopher-in-residence at the
Forsythe Company, a role that arguably overlaps with some portion of the
dramaturgical role, began by asserting that “a choreographer is in the business
of making experience and of giving us opportunities to do phenomenology—to
catch ourselves in the act of experiencing.”13 Having raised the issue of audience
perception to primary importance in the value and meaning of a dance, he
added that perception is based on acquired skills: for example, we need to have
learned what a glass is first before we can see the glass sitting on the table and
pick it up. And thus perception must always be based on what an audience
member already knows, already recognizes. As Noë put it: “everything that we
see is relative to what we expect to see, or what we know, what we think we’re
going to see. And if that’s true, then it means we can never see anything new.
So how do we ever perceive the new, how do we ever perceive the novel? We
probably all in this room would like to think, ‘well, of course, we do have new
experiences,’ but do we? . . . You can only see that which you have the skills to
reach.”14
Forsythe took up the challenge by describing an improvised solo by one of
his dancers that was somehow always the same and always different, every time
she performed it. The implication was that he perceived what was “new” each
time in relation to what was the same. Both men agreed that new forms of
perception were possible, and desirable, but arose in mysterious fashion, since
a phenomenon that was entirely new would also be entirely imperceptible. An
audience would simply lack the skill to perceive it. The reader will recognize a
94 Audience
similarity with Steve Paxton’s claim that a research branch of an art form must
generate material so new as to be “indecipherable.” The only difference seems
to be Paxton’s confidence that material falling entirely outside of a preexisting
language could still be presented and perceived—for him, the perceptual skill
would follow later, regardless of how unfamiliar the work. Forsythe and Noë
agreed that an artwork might enjoin audience members to shift their manner of
watching and develop a new perceptual skill, but they argued that to be experi-
enced, the new could only occur within a context of familiarity.
In a work published three years after this public conversation, Noë expanded
these ideas by glossing a quotation: “Schubert is said to have claimed: ‘It is easy
to write a good song. You choose a melody that everybody recognizes but that
no one has ever heard before.’ He understands the basic fact that we can only
expand our experiential repertoire piecemeal, by nudging forward holding
hands with what is familiar.”15 These are the problematics of novelty, where
the experience of the new is only possible insofar as it arrives in relation to a
familiar language, an old tune. And thus this “piecemeal nudging forward” is
the shape of the advocacy Gilpin and Van Kerkhoven have suggested for the
dramaturg. It requires a constant negotiation between the languages they expect
their audiences to speak already and the experiences that fall outside those
languages, and for which they may not even have language themselves. Here I
am using “language” to refer not just to textual language, but all manner of
codes by which one perceives, organizes, and understands experience.
In Gilpin’s earlier description of this dramaturgical labor, the word that would
jump out to critics of audience advocacy is the “make” in “make the multivalent
resonate.” How could a dramaturg be in a position to make something resonate
for a collective, especially one whose radical diversity of perceptual systems
Gilpin vaunts? Is resonance even the kind of phenomenon that can be made,
manipulated, or assured? Bojana Cvejić, who has served as a dramaturg with
choreographer Xavier Le Roy, among others, articulates this critique clearly in
her essay “The Ignorant Dramaturg”:
[Some argue that] the special duty of the dramaturg’s critical eye is to go-
between the choreographer and the audience, so as to mediate and make
sure that communication works on both sides. But this turns dramaturgy
into a pedagogy, where dramaturg puts herself in the priestly or masterly
position of the one who knows better, who can predict what the audience
members see, think, feel, like or dislike. We, makers and theorists alike, are
all obsessing far too much about spectatorship, instead of wisely relaxing,
A u d i e n ce 95
as Jacques Rancière wrote in “The Emancipated Spectator,” and trusting

that spectators are more active and smart than we allow ourselves to
admit. My position would be to fiercely object to stultification of this kind,
the patronizing presupposition that audiences will not understand if they
aren’t properly—dramaturgically—guided.16
Cvejić’s point is well taken, and it is worthwhile to look directly at the work by
Rancière she is using. His essay “The Emancipated Spectator” came from a
keynote address delivered at a European performance conference in 2004. The
talk was well received, became a spur for further thought, was subsequently
published in ArtForum in 2007, and then as the title essay in a collection of essays.
It drew a connection between the concept of the ignorant schoolmaster, from
Rancière’s earlier book of the same name, to questions of spectatorship. Cvejić’s
ignorant dramaturg thus models herself on Rancière’s ignorant schoolmaster.
The ignorant schoolmaster was first a historical figure: nineteenth-century
educator Joseph Jacotot. Jacotot asserted that a schoolmaster could teach effec-
tively without knowing anything of his subject matter, if only he allowed for the
student’s inherent ability to learn and opened up the conditions for that process
to operate. Jacotot opposed the concept of education as transaction, whereby
the instructor possesses a discrete quantity of knowledge and must transfer it
intact to the student, who is, by the terms of this arrangement, bereft of knowl-
edge until the transaction occurs. Thereby, what that teaching process teaches
the student above all else is the fact of her own endlessly renewable ignorance.
Jacotot, and Rancière after him, call this relationship one of “stultification.”
They seek instead “intellectual emancipation” for the student, foregrounding
instead her endlessly renewable ability to learn on her own terms, as long as
simply given the material with which to engage. His ignorant schoolmaster
“does not teach his pupils his knowledge, but orders them to venture into the
forest of things and signs, to say what they have seen and what they think of
what they have seen, to verify it and have it verified.”17
In “The Emancipated Spectator,” Rancière analogizes this pedagogical
context to a performance context. He asks if artists and theorists, overly con-
cerned with the transmission of a feeling or idea from stage to spectator, are not
creating a similar stultification, based on a one-to-one correspondence between
message sent and impression received. That concept of equality of message to
impression, he notes, is founded on the presupposition of a corresponding in-
equality in the status of artists (as those in the know, who are active) and audience
(as those poor passive ignoramuses). Instead, Rancière proposes, “Emancipation
begins when we challenge the opposition between viewing and acting . . . The
spectator also acts, like the pupil or scholar. She observes, selects, compares,
96 Audience
interprets. She links what she sees to a host of other things that she has seen
on other stages, in other kinds of place. She composes her own poem with the
elements of the poem before her. She participates in the performance by re-
fashioning it in her own way.”18
Rancière, instead of feeding artists’ concerns about how they are going to
“activate” their audiences, lets them see that these audiences are active all the
time, observing and drawing their own linkages between what they already
know and what they do not yet know. What audience members would say they
had learned about the performance might not always be something the artist
would be flattered to hear, but they are nevertheless always composing meaning;
they do not need the special concern of a dramaturg (or a choreographer, or
anyone) to be prodded into that activity. Rancière’s version of reader-response
theory emphasizes the heterogeneity of meanings found by disparate audience
members encountering the same work. It is most vital in how richly it evokes the
spectator as an active agent, composing, constructing, and “refashioning” the
performance, based in large part on individual past experiences.
However, it is not entirely clear whether Rancière is being prescriptive (of
the kind of performance he would like to encourage) or descriptive (of the way
all performance works) in championing the emancipated spectator. If the latter,
what would he make of a magic show? In that performance mode many audi-
ence members willingly submit to a condition of not-knowing because they know
it will provoke enjoyment—they get pleasure from their temporary, circum-
scribed position as “ignoramuses.” A subtler example would be found in any
moment where a performing artist is playing with the edge of a presentational
frame, with what can and cannot be seen from the spectator’s position. Very
few audience members would run out of their seats to challenge the composition
of that frame, even though they are ultimately free to do so. Or, what about a
piece of comedy? There each spectator might compose her own work with the
elements of the work before her, but if that self-made work does not elicit a
premeditated common effect (laughter) from a large enough percentage of the
audience, the genre has not fulfilled its promise. This last example makes clear
that not only has Rancière not accounted for the ways in which a spectator
may desire to be directed by the work, but also for the fact that we rarely en-
counter performance as isolated individuals.
Part of what the audience is perceiving, when they roam creatively through
the proffered “forest of signs,” is a collection of codes or triggers, alluding to
systems by which they have watched past performances. Using this collection,
they jury-rig themselves a new system for how they suspect this particular
performance might be best appreciated. They then make choices to play their
part within those constituent codes and within the larger group energy of the
A u d i e n ce 97
other audience members around them. Or they make choices to resist the
same. But either way, audience members do not just interpret discrete events;
they interpret which of many larger strategies of interpretation they might
deploy. And among those preexisting strategies, all assembled based on the
individual’s previous experiences, there are some codes of performance that do
not operate by emancipating the spectator entirely, that still depend on a power
differential between artist and audience.
So even though we might describe all spectators as ultimately emancipated
(assuming they live in a country where, when they exit the theater, they are
entitled to their own opinion of what just happened), we could still talk about
moments when audience members choose to submit—with pleasure, or dis-
comfort, or a complex pleasure-from-discomfort—to the proposition that they
do not know something that the artist does. When they pursue the idea that
there is a secret for them to ferret out, or an illusion to which they may be held
sway. Or when they encounter a moment of collective energy (laughter, ecstasy,
horror) in which they will be willingly swept up. Truly free spectators can also
make the free choice to temporarily revoke aspects of their freedom, and that
goes into the mix as well.
Rancière would not agree that these variable and familiar codes of looking,
or anything else the spectator perceives and interprets, travel from the artist to
the spectator. Rather, he would place them in a third, neutral location—the
work itself. As he explains: “between the ignorant schoolmaster and the eman-
cipated novice there is always a third thing—a book or some other piece of
writing—alien to both and to which they can refer to verify in common what
the pupil has seen, what she says about it and what she thinks of it. The same
applies to performance. It is not the transmission of the artist’s knowledge or
inspiration to the spectator. It is the third thing that is owned by no one, whose
meaning is owned by no one, but which subsists between them, excluding any
uniform transmission, any identity of cause and effect.”19
Again, this is a useful image insofar as it decouples intention from interpre-
tation and locates all the potential triggers for meaning within the work of art—
much as Barthes did when he declared the death of the author.20 But there is a
slippage in the analogy that reveals what it cannot account for. The book that
lies between Rancière’s ignorant schoolmaster and emancipated novice, within
this analogy, is “alien to both.” The work lying between the artist-collaborators
and the spectators is, in fact, not at all alien to one group. To call the artwork
“alien to both” is to elide months or years of labor and decision making. The
work never fully belongs to the artist-collaborators; even in the rehearsal room
the work of art has a measure of self-sufficiency (as evidenced by a collaborator’s
familiar anthropomorphic query, “but what does the work want?”) The work is
98 Audience
then offered up to the performance context, in an act of generosity that trans-

mutes it, in a moment of presence, to something truly “owned by no one.” But
if the subject here is dramaturgy, then the subject is also the working process—
the considerable time and labor that exists before that moment when an uneasy
part ownership is fully renounced. That working process is rife with decision
making. And that decision making, in remaining aware of the eventual presence
of an audience in order to create the very conditions of performance, cannot
remain completely unconcerned with what an audience might or might not
perceive. It might postpone, resist, compartmentalize, or transmute its con-
sideration of audience—strategies that can be artistically useful—but it cannot,
ultimately, avoid it entirely.
Perhaps Rancière’s conceptual framework can be adjusted if we return to
his image of emancipated subjects “ventur[ing] into the forest of things and
signs, to say what they have seen and what they think of what they have seen.”
Performance is not a one-to-one transmission of message or feeling from artist
to spectator, but it is an offering up of a “forest of signs” that has been fashioned,
often slowly over time, additively and subtractively, in acts of generation and
acts of framing, until the moment of performance. The artists may not be able
to guide the spectator’s passage through that forest—some might not want to
even if they could—but they do construct and frame the forest in such a way
that, they hope, it offers a rich field for exploration. And to the extent they
share a cultural context with their eventual spectators (an “interpretive commu-
nity,” in Stanley Fish’s terms21), they are aware of at least some of the potential
codes that could be perceived within the work—fragments of a journey that
could be picked up or discarded. The artists throw out breadcrumbs, knowing
all the while that they do not trace one true path, but rather a range of potential
options they know of, as well as another range they do not.
André Lepecki, in the past dramaturg for Meg Stuart, among others, spoke
eloquently of the dilemma of audience at a public conversation about dance
dramaturgy in 1999:
The question of making art readable for an audience is really a compli-

cated one. To polemicize we could evoke people like Walter Benjamin
who said that art is never made for the public, and that the power of art is
precisely because it’s not made for the audience and therefore the ques-
tions of interpretation or explanation are problematized. For the people I
work with, Francisco [Camacho], Meg [Stuart] and Vera [ Mantero], the
audience is an invisible ghost. It’s always there and we always keep coming
back to asking ourselves is this clear, how might that be interpreted, etc.?
The problem is that we are all displaced, so that the audience, the people
are absolutely vague to us.22
A u d i e n ce 99
Lepecki alludes to the essay “The Task of the Translator,” in which Ben-
jamin offers the salvo: “No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the
beholder, no symphony for the listener.”23 Benjamin does this to build an argu-
ment that the “essential quality” of a work of art “is not statement or the im-
parting of information.” From there he concludes that this “transmitting
function” should not be the primary concern of translations, either. (A thought
in harmony with Rancière’s rejection of performance as a transmission from
stage to auditorium.) In the sentence prior to the one cited above, Benjamin
had offered: “Art . . . posits man’s physical and spiritual existence, but in none
of its works is it concerned with his response.” It is within the motion of that
sentence, between man’s “existence” and man’s “response,” that the question
of audience gets nuanced and interesting. For Benjamin, the audience, seen as
a subset of humanity, must exist in some place and time, and the fact of its exis-
tence is indeed a condition of the work. Yet he declares any particular audience’s
reception as irrelevant in determining the work’s nature or interpretation. The
work of art must be directed to them, may even require them to perceive it in
such a way that a response is inevitable, but the specifics of that response are
irrelevant.
Note above that Lepecki, after evoking Benjamin as a polemicizing extreme,
immediately turns from the mystery of interpretation toward process, toward
the work that precedes any interpretive moment. He testifies that, nevertheless,
within his familiar working process the audience is somehow still “always
there,” albeit in eerie and amorphous fashion. I love Lepecki’s image of audience
members as “invisible ghost[s]”—it describes a phenomenon I recognize.
These ghosts are the ghosts of the future, not the past—although in many of
the working situations with Ralph we invited the ghosts of the past into the
rehearsal room too. The artists may try to conjure these audience-ghosts, to
divine who they may be and how they may react, but they are inevitably dis-
placed from them. The conjuring task is both necessary, because the audience’s
future perceptions will create the performance as performance, and impossible,
because of their diversity and present incorporality.
I propose an addition to Lepecki’s image of the audience as an invisible
ghost. It seems to me that in the moment of spectatorship, the art-makers also
become ghosts to the audience. The haunting is thus mutual and works both
backward and forward in time. The emancipated spectator “composes her
own poem with the elements of the poem before her,” constructing her own
meaning from the performance. And though constructing that meaning has
nothing to do with receiving a direct transmission from the artists, the spectator
also, side by side with that meaning, conjures the ghosts of the artists, in order
to muse on what performance choices might have been made and why. I am
100 A u d i e n ce
arguing that intention is still present, but only insofar as rendered in spectral
form. The spectator, perceiving the work, knows that she is perceiving a man-
made product; the “physical and spiritual existence” of an artist or group of
artists is constitutive of the work. However she is also “inevitably displaced”
from those makers. This despite the fact that an artist’s dancing body may be
right in front of her. It is not the artist-as-performer being conjured—for in that
moment of presence the work belongs to no one—but the artist-as-maker.
Thus though artists’ intent does not drive the meaning of the work, the conjured
ghost of intention does hover side-by-side with the meaning as constructed,
without a clear or necessary connection to it. The spectator then compares this
conjured ghost of the artists’ meaning with the meaning she has constructed for
herself. Her noticing how those two converge or diverge within her own imagina-
tion is one of the many activities in which she engages, as she “observes, selects,
compares, interprets,” venturing forth into the “forest of things and signs.”24
Ultimately I am arguing that the dramaturg, or anyone participating in the
dramaturgical thinking, cannot not think about audience and still be engaged in
the task of constructing a performance. That said, it is certainly possible, and
often quite useful, to defer or transmute this type of thinking. In the anecdotal
examples of the rehearsal room to follow, I share moments where the question
of audience, and how the performance would or would not be made with their
ghosts in mind, came into relief.
Inside and outside the Rehearsal Room
During the period in which I have worked with him, Ralph’s ambivalence
about audience has manifested itself in at least two contrasting ways. More often
he has claimed the right to turn away from audience, literally or metaphorically.
He might share only hints of his thought process, performing mysteriously
allusive words or gestures. Or, as he did in Geography, he might take West African
dance, an art form often considered spectacular by American audiences, and
manipulate it such that the transactional exchange of virtuosic display for
hearty applause was disrupted, nearly impossible. The rehearsal room for
Geography was the first place the Miles Davis image came up. When in an early
meeting he wanted to explain to his West African collaborators why he was
asking them to alter their usual inclusive, presentational attitude toward the
audience, he told them the story of Davis’s turn. The turn of the back, away
from frontal presentation, was a turn to resist the essentializing gaze.
On the other hand, there were a few moments in his career where Ralph
leapt into the contract of performance for spectatorial consumption. Notably
these rare moments occurred in sharply pointed allusion to exactly that
A u d i e n ce 101
threatening image of black man as pandering showman, positioned frontally on

the minstrel stage. They happened in solo form: in a 1991 work titled Folkdance—
Solo, in a solo taken in the middle of Tree, and one at the end of Patton. In all these
passages Ralph faced the audience center stage and explored his own imagina-
tion and conjured memories of “the buck dance”—a step with a checkered past
in African American history, first a creative Africanist adaptation within a plan-
tation environment, later a precursor to the innovations of tap dance, but also
strongly associated with the cruel caricature of blackness in minstrelsy. In these
painful flights of dancing it was as if Ralph, bristling at an implied critique of his
privacy and poetic indirection, had responded to his audience: “if a full display is
what you want, I will show you just how ugly it can get.”
As we began work on what would become Patton, Ralph ramped up his
longstanding questions about how, why, and on what terms his life’s work was
made for presentation to viewers. Though he had never lived in the South
himself, his mother and paternal grandparents had grown up there, and he
certainly understood that location as the “Ground Zero of black American
history.”25 It was as if, by returning “home” in the third section of the Trilogy,
back to a cultural context more familiar than Africa or Asia, Ralph was also
reaching to the roots of his unease. As an initial gesture, he emphatically re-
defined the work of art as the research process. This had already been true for
Geography and Tree but would be even more true for Patton. As long as we could we
avoided the idea, in the face of countervailing economic realities, that Patton was
driven teleologically, toward any sort of “opening night” presentation in front
of a large audience. Instead we began by focusing on a parade of smaller para-
performances, all of which challenged familiar notions of audience—some with
no audience at all, some with smaller and markedly less anonymous audiences.
In the pages ahead I share some of the early dramaturgical discussions
about those paraperformances, which reinvented and deferred the question of
audience. I trace how those conversations morphed as we moved toward the
proscenium stage work, with growing concerns about what words would or
would not be spoken aloud in front of our larger, more anonymous audiences. I
then characterize the evolution of Ralph’s and my discussions through the
following piece, How Can You . . . ?, where by contrast the biggest discussion
about audience revolved around its twenty-minute flight of unruly, improvisa-
tional movement. That piece, I argue, further pursued some of the concerns of
Patton but paradoxically found a more peaceful resolution in the midst of the
enduring tension between presentation and privacy, spectacle and ritual, all
within a fraught context of raw mourning. The shift was, in part, an engagement
with self-sacrifice and extreme generosity. In landing on generosity as a concept
and a stance, which is where I feel I have left off in both my work with Ralph
102 A u d i e n ce
and my thinking about performance generally, I end the chapter with an evolu-
tion of the more theoretical concerns articulated in the first portion of this
chapter.
Come home Charley Patton and Audience Deferred
Ralph’s Patton work began in 2000 with the first of several years of periodic
research trips to the American South, most undertaken alone or in the company
of his daughter and videographer, Chelsea Lemon Fetzer. In one instance, a
trip to Sapelo, a sea island off the coast of Georgia, three performers (David,
Djédjé, and Goulei) and I came along as well. Yet that was the exception, for
the majority of Ralph’s early research trips were private.
Of course, all of Ralph’s early research trips across the years of the Trilogy
were undertaken alone, for financial reasons as much as artistic ones. No grant
or producing institution was going to cover airfare to West Africa, China, Bali,
Japan, or India for a large team of collaborators, especially when the terms of
the production, and the final composition of the team, were not yet settled. But
for Patton, the privacy of Ralph’s research trips seemed less to do with funding
realities and more to do with a pointed predilection. To the extent that the trips
were a “return home,” their privacy followed naturally. But also: the para
performances, as small, self-sufficient events, often offered as ritualized gestures
at sites of past violence, required privacy to challenge the categories of audience
and stage as previously understood. This included removing the usual internal
audience from within the team of collaborators. I knew about his research work
through our parallel e-mail conversations—either updates sent from the road
or reports soon after the fact. I was still an internal audience of sorts, but my
witnessing was mediated by a careful distance. In the moment, Ralph was
alone, or with family: audience-free. At least that was the illusion being built.
An e-mail to me directly after one of the first trips exclaimed: “Basically,
four weeks where . . . there was no real audience, at least not an easy one. I will
never have any idea what any of it meant to someone else. Now it becomes
interesting.”26 I understood this last comment as an augury of the creative juice
of our project. What would be the result if the conditions of performance were
pushed so far that they almost disappeared? What would be the engagement
with this particular southern material under those antispectacular conditions?
One series of private paraperformances took place in the bus stations of the
1961 Freedom Bus rides, where Ralph executed minimal actions in carefully
chosen spots. There was no audience in situ; the performances were purposefully
pitched to remain unnoticed by passers-by. He stood and slowly turned down
an open hall, or sat on a bench and twisted his hair, or changed his shoes, or
A u d i e n ce 103
exited the building with his wrists casually crossed behind his back. His small
tasks were intended to open up a conversation with the narrative of what had
once happened there—for instance, the last action above occurred in a bus
station where the riders were arrested—but without “disturb[ing] the current-
day ecology” of the space. They were enacted as rituals, with the universe as
witness. And yet daughter Chelsea’s video camera lens was also present, and
through that portal, the possibility of larger, future audiences. Several years
later, evincing his usual ambivalence about display, Ralph wrote to me, “If I
had had the (perverse) courage, I wouldn’t have videotaped any of those events.
[ Yet] that’s quite easy to say now, given that it’s all documented and therefore
provocative.”27
In another series he called the “Living Room dances,” he tracked down the
closest living ancestor to a blues musician he’d been listening to and then offered
to dance in their living room, to a track by the musician in question. His steps
were improvisations off an imagined reconstruction of a “buck dance.” As he
explained it, “I would dance in these small living rooms, and for the three
minutes of the song, there’d be this complete union of audience and performer
that I’ve never experienced in any other performance situation. . . . I walked
out of Mrs. Kent’s [daughter of Memphis Blues pioneer Frank Stokes] living
room thinking, I can quit now. It was the most perfect thing I’ve ever done in
my life.”28 Some of these dances were also documented, after a fashion, for
Chelsea centered the camera on the singular audience, not her father. The
footage usually allows only glimpses of his moving body at the edge of the frame
or flashing across a living room mirror, while the audience member taps her
foot or slightly smiles in the middle of the frame.
Why were these dances “perfect”? We spent hours discussing that. The
intimate settings turned the act of public performance into a much simpler one
of communicative flow between a singular dancer and a singular audience. As
Ralph put it, “I’m finding that those dances, that relationship, is more fulfilling
than anything I’ve ever done in front of an audience of 1000 people.”29 But the
intimacy of the numbers was not the half of it. The communicative flow was
also between the mythologized idea of the blues, the revered history, and the
ordinary yet endearing presence of those relatives. In other words, it was not
just that the audience was small, it was also who they were. The dance was born
from an interaction with an individual, their specificity understood in terms of
geography, architecture, music, race, and family. The collision of the historical
recorded track, its grander mythology, the ordinariness of the homes, and the
concrete if invisible genetic link brought the dance into being. It would not have
existed otherwise. The anonymous projection screen offered by a darkened
auditorium was replaced by one notable face in a living room, looking back.
104 A u d i e n ce
Figure 12. Helen Kent, daughter of Frank Stokes (“the King of Memphis Blues”), and Ralph
Lemon, 2001. (Still from a video by Chelsea Lemon Fetzer, courtesy of Ralph Lemon)
Our early dramaturgical conversations were full of wondering out loud how
we might one day “make [these] essentially private experiences theatrical.”30 It
was helpful that the stage incarnation of Patton was conveniently far in the
future, because in those early days the answer was not obvious, and it needed
to stay not-obvious in order for something fruitful to evolve. In another e-mail
to me, Ralph declared, “now I’m seriously fucked-up over how to get back on a
stage. ‘Cause ‘off stage’ where dancing was relevant and where it was not was
so wildly clear.”31 Indeed, when traveling across the South to charged historical
locations, he had not always felt the need to do something recognizable as
dance. It had felt right to dance in living rooms, and in one empty bus station.
But at lynching sites in numerous locations, all he’d been able to do was stand
there, feeling incongruous and inadequate to the weight of a completely invisible
but affectively charged history. This absence of a response became, paradoxi-
cally, perhaps the most evocative dance of all. Other impromptu rituals re-
sponding to history had involved simply walking (over the Edmond Pettis
Bridge, wearing overalls and carrying old LPs), or setting up small found-object
art installations in southern motel rooms with prestamped postcards instructing
A u d i e n ce 105
his audience, the cleaning staff, to mail him their response (only one person
did). In my responses to Ralph, I could only suggest that when he landed in
front of large anonymous audiences, one day in the distant future, perhaps the
best response would be something that let that audience into the difficulty of his
current questions. Beyond that, I was waiting too.
An excerpt from my notes of our 2002 Sapelo Island research trip—my
scribbled record of an exercise that Ralph assigned to himself, David Thomson,
Djédjé Djédjé Gervais, and Goulei Tchépoho32—reveals how the consideration
of audience was never absent, but rather strategically positioned. Choosing for
each performer a specific location on the island, he asked them to follow four
distinct instructions:
1. Go to the spot and reflect on its history and how it relates to your own
history.
2. Mark the space reverentially with a ritual of your own devising—do this
only for yourself.
3. Only when #2 is complete, think about how to document that ritual.
4. Only when #3 is complete, think about how to share that documentation
with others.33
This careful separation and ordering of instructions well encapsulates

how we were thinking about audience during this early research period. The
numbered steps evince both the importance and the difficulty of postponing
consideration of outside audience. The difference between step 1 and step 2
kept the individual’s contemplation of unknowable history as the carefully
protected seed of any subsequent action, and the following acts of ritual, docu-
mentation, and presentation were similarly isolated. Audience makes a decisive
entrance, but is kept at bay until step 4.
However, in our repeated discussions about Ralph’s renunciation of “audi-
ence” in his encounter with the history and mythology of the American South,
we were admittedly building another sort of mythology ourselves. For not only
was the entire undertaking supported financially by the promise of future ticket
sales in large venues, but even in these early days Ralph was regularly going in
front of small, informal workshop audiences—relatively intimate, but still larger,
and quasi-anonymous—and sharing his research. These workshops were con-
ditions of residencies within various sponsoring institutions. They funded the
work, and beyond that, they assured that the question of anonymous audiences
within a dance and performance context could not be endlessly deferred, but
must already, even if reluctantly, be experimented within. In the early years of
the Patton process, starting in March 2001 for two and a half years, Ralph did
106 A u d i e n ce
twenty-three separate workshop showings in front of small- to medium-sized

audiences, sharing, with varying degrees of directness or mystery, selected
documentation of his travels.34
The first of Ralph’s informal workshop showings I witnessed as an audience
member was at Wesleyan University in October of 2001. (That month we were
all still a little numb from being in NYC during September of that year, but I
nevertheless got myself into a car and duly drove up to Connecticut to see what
Ralph would show). Afterward, as was my familiar practice, I sent him copious
notes over e-mail. Some were moment-to-moment reactions to what I had
been viewing, with the hypothesis of “what if ” this had been a production and
I were a sample audience member. Some were more ruminative associations,
relating to the longer process still ahead of us. A short excerpt follows, a section
where I was thinking hard about the relationship between Ralph’s fascinations
with history and privacy, and the audiences in front of which he would eventually
land. I was reacting to his decision to share the documentation of some of his
private performance rituals in a lecture-demonstration (lec-dem) format, sitting
at a table, shuffling through his notes and videotapes, and speaking directly to
an audience, as himself. First he would narrate the bare facts of his research
trip and the civil rights history he had traveled to engage, and then he would
dim the lights and hit “play,” allowing the audience to do the work of connecting
his oft-mysterious video actions with the minimal story they’d just been told.
My reaction:
I love love love the figure of Ralph at his table with his materials, shuffling
through things both physically and mentally. You, Ralph, your presence
as the mind thinking about all this—retain that! I know you think that’s
incidental, part of the lec-dem format, but actually it was one of the most
powerful things about the evening, and I think keeping that would be a
great opportunity for you to break the assumptions of theater that you
want to break. The Ralph Lemon character is the man at the table, the
man with the impertinent questions, the man who breaks the hush. Isn’t
being present as yourself, unmediated, a way to make sure the work stays
grounded, and yet to some extent, isn’t this a character too, who can be
manipulated to powerful effect? . . .
Your solo dancing is great stuff too. What about a piece that is basically
structured around you at the table and then getting up and doing these
solos? That could be the heart of it, right there. Talk about keeping it
simple . . . sure you could have guests too, like David Letterman does (ha!),
but the center of it all could be you at the table. . . .
I think I might have more to say about the idea of keeping Ralph-at-
the-table-with-his-research present in the final production—that’s the
A u d i e n ce 107
idea I’m really fired up on now—but better to bring that out in discussion,
than in email.35
Ralph-at-the-table was solving the problem of how to let the anonymous

audience in to this private material with simplicity and directness. If there was
something they needed to understand, he would just say it. And if it was better
to let the dancing do the talking, he would stand up and share that. Ralph-at-the-
table could confess difficulties instead of pretending to have answers, and might
also be a useful artifice as well, not entirely to be trusted. I went on, on this and
other subjects—the notes were copious. Ralph responded in part (referencing
Ann Rosenthal, his longtime producer/manager):
KP, whew!
. . . The “Letterman Negro” is certainly someone I’ve been thinking
about. But, boy, does that complicate working with others. I am thinking
about a group.
So you think a piece based around my refining a sincere “show and
tell” is a good idea or a GREAT idea?
Ann mentioned to me how frustrated she is with the distinctions I
create between my more personal, honest, vulnerable ravings in lec-dems
and my colder controlled formally staged performance works, ie at BAM,
etcetera. She obviously prefers the former.36
Ralph and I continued to chat about creatively repurposing the “show and
tell” mode of audience interaction, even as he continued to play with it as a
soloist at a range of far-flung US locations. The conversation continued, on
e-mail when in different locations and in meetings over tea when both of us were
in New York. As Ralph took another solo trip down south and we all took the
aforementioned group trip to Sapelo Island, the issues and questions remained
largely the same. The conversation took a major shift, however, in the run-up to
the first larger-scale workshop at the Walker Arts Center in the summer of 2002.
Ralph sent me a bunch of his writing in advance of the workshop, and I
wrote him back that I was struck by how much the earlier research materials
seemed to have gone underground, replaced by broader themes such as “love.”
I worried aloud that “we might be backing off from a lot of the specific flavors
of the research work so far, by casting so wide that the focus disappears,” and I
added:
I’m not sure where “love” came in, and if it’s a red herring. I thought the
American South and the shaky concept of “home” were our points of
108 A u d i e n ce
connection. I get a physical sense of starting to swim in all this material.

Since it’s a workshop I know this is all permitted, and we can cast wide and
just see what happens, so perhaps my feelings are premature. But I do feel
obliged to tell you my gut.37
He responded:
I can tell you this now, after 12 informal research events last year, I’m
now not at all interested in putting any “direct” black southern bluesy
Americaness on stage. I did it. And ultimately, it proved to be a productive
failure. So yeah, I’m moving onward from what’s come before, BUT OF
COURSE ALSO NOT.
That would be impossible. I will practically live in Mississippi for the
next two plus years.38
I understood quickly that our work for the next year or two was going to
live within that contradiction—moving onward from the approach to the
material and audience that Ralph had tried before, “but of course also not.”
Renouncing the southern bluesy flavor, “but of course also not.” But I did not
yet understand what it actually meant to sit in that contradiction. The first
Walker workshop began with Ralph announcing the shift to the entire group
(Bebe Miller, Djédjé Djédjé Gervais, David Thomson, and Chelsea Lemon
Fetzer). At this moment the connection between his shift in material and his
relationship to audience became apparent. He explained: “Until recently I was
going in front of people and being completely direct and honest and straight
about the materials, content, history. I laid it all out, and I was embarrassed every
time. Lots of audiences liked that, but it didn’t feel right to me . . . Ultimately
there’s something that feels dishonest to the material in all that naked honesty.
Now I’ve gone back to layering things again.”39
How could naked honesty feel dishonest? Perhaps because such directness
did not evoke the habitual indirection required to live a life under adverse
circumstances, the kind of circumstances that Ralph was researching as he
combed the history and mythology of black people in the American South. As
the ethnographer and performance scholar Dwight Conquergood has put it,
people in vulnerable social positions “do not have the privilege of explicitness,
the luxury of transparency, the presumptive norm of clear and direct commu-
nication . . . that the privileged classes take for granted.”40 James Baldwin—a
Patton hero whose cartoon portrait Ralph would draw repeatedly as part of the
research process—put a slightly different spin on the idea, emphasizing indirec-
tion not as an absence of privilege but as a wellspring of creative resistance.
Baldwin once explained black vernacular by pointing out that if he were in
A u d i e n ce 109
immediate danger from a white man standing right behind him, his brother or
sister would have to convey this fact to him “with a speed, and in a language
that the white man could not possibly understand.”41 Ralph was trying to engage
the history of a people exposed to random acts of racial violence, who managed
nevertheless to preserve a measure of dignity. Coded, indirect expression was,
and still is, a means to avoid the violence Patton was trying to address. Those in
the know will understand what you are talking about, and those who are not
will mercifully miss the point. Thus the idea of direct versus indirect expression
was racially loaded and also begged the question: what audience were we talking
about, every time we talked about “the” audience?
The reader will likely begin to recognize a connection between my discussion
of audience here and my earlier one concerning text. Questions of audience
and questions of text grew increasingly intertwined within the Patton rehearsal
process. Ralph and I initially connected speaking directly to the audience,
breaking the fourth wall and using words, with “being completely direct and
honest and straight” to that audience. As I narrated earlier, eventually this
association broke down, when the group explored ways in which words could
be playful and unreliable in how they signify. For the moment, it just seems
important to underline the extent to which we assumed that this “direct” rela-
tionship to audience, the sort where we could be confident that contextual
information would be conveyed over the metaphorical footlights, would deploy
the use of spoken text.
The work of the first Walker workshop began with short improvisational
challenges for the performers. Ralph and I would generate potential “assign-
ments” that had to be fulfilled, however the performer thought best, within a
time frame (usually ten minutes). Other performers were allowed to join and
intercede after a few minutes had elapsed. Watching and responding to what I
saw, I would select a surprise musical track to layer on after another few minutes,
from Ralph’s collection of CDs (everything from scratchy old “race music”
tracks by forgotten black artists to 1970s appropriations by white bands of the
same—his collection told the very American tale of both creative proliferation
and unseemly theft). Chelsea videotaped them all, building our active archive
of possibilities.
On my suggestion, many of our first improv assignments were designed
to get the performers to play around with different relationships to audience.
Since one of the main issues on the table was the question of translating material
created with little or no audience into a more conventional artist/audience
relationship, I figured it might be interesting to be as ungentle as possible about
that relationship. We brainstormed a list of relationships we deemed “taboo” in
the contemporary dance world and selected a handful to try out. We’d force
110 A u d i e n ce
ourselves to confront whatever we thought was the worst possible danger.42 We

came up with such instructions as: “Get sad on stage, without irony and with
context,” or “Make people laugh,” or “Tell a story with no words,” or “Be as
presentational as possible.” I remember Chelsea and me assigning the taboos
to the performers based on what we thought would provide the most interesting
challenge, and we agreed to deal Ralph “Be as presentational as possible.”
Watching him attempt to fulfill that instruction, against all his usual instincts,
inadvertently fulfilled “Make people laugh” as well.
Those two charges—presentation and laughter—with their concerns for
the location and disposition of the audience, endured throughout the work-
shop, interweaving with other ingredients already on the table. Ralph had also
asked the performers to expressly grapple with the topic of race. I remember
offering up this pair of prompts: “Demonstrate, in as few words as possible, the
way in which race is lived in the USA is absurd” and “Demonstrate, in as few
words as possible, the way in which race is lived in the USA is meaningful.”43 A
performer was allowed to choose one assignment, or the other, or shift between.
The tension between absurdity and meaning served us very well with our subject
matter, all those two weeks long, and assured that our mode of operation felt
both playful and weighty at once.
The public showing at the end of the two-week Walker workshop manifested
both Ralph’s desire to stop being so “direct and honest” with audiences and
our experimentation with modes of performance that remained presentational.
As narrated previously in chapter 1, this showing marked the moment when
the concept of the “unreliable narrator” first entered the group’s working vo-
cabulary. When the spectators entered the auditorium, Ralph, whose face
had been clearly visible in the publicity for the event, was seen stretching at
the side of the stage. But when the performance began, it was David Thomson
who approached the microphone and opened with, “Hello, I’m Ralph Lemon.”
He welcomed our guests and explained the themes and obsessions of our past
two weeks’ work. He dealt directly with the audience in a way that Ralph could
no longer stomach, but he did it as Ralph. David was perfectly reliable in
how he narrated the workshop—the single source of his unreliability was his
self-identification.
This showing, in which Ralph attempted to dodge his own author function
by setting up David as a decoy, was also one in which he, performing as not-
Ralph, paradoxically experimented with self-exposure. He got on the mic to
tell an autobiographical childhood story—something he had never previously
attempted onstage. He narrated a confrontation that ended with his drunk
teenage self escaping a brokered fistfight with a much larger white bully, running
out the side door of a church party into a Minneapolis snowstorm and all the
A u d i e n ce 111
way home.44 (The story was particularly poignant in being narrated on the
stage of the Walker Art Center, only a short drive from its setting.) The anti-
climactic escape was revealed in the last few sentences, subverting expectations
for a race-based redemptive triumph. Those final lines delivered, not-Ralph
walked a few steps upstage and lay flat on the floor. Looking up at a surveillance
camera mounted directly overhead for a purpose until then obscure, he pulled
down his pants and exposed himself. “Not as big as you thought, eh?” No one
in our collaborative group knew in advance that Ralph had planned this gesture;
he surprised his internal audience as well as the one sitting out in the auditorium.
He had instructed the tech crew to place the monitor displaying the overhead
camera’s view very far stage left, where it had already been showing live-feed of
the stage since the top of the evening. Everyone in the audience knew exactly
where to look if they wanted a glimpse. However they could not do that without
a conspicuous turn of the head, implicating themselves and making a spectacle
out of their own act of voyeurship. Ralph had pushed his own discomfort with
a show-and-tell imperative to an extreme. He had managed to turn that dis-
comfort on the audience members as well, choreographing for them a move-
ment that outed them as ones-who-want-to-look. As if to say to them (and to
me, also sitting out there in that auditorium): “if ‘Be as presentational as pos-
sible’ is what you really want, that’s what you’ll really get.”
This was not a performance gesture that interested Ralph enough to keep
him investigating or repeating it throughout the Patton process. It seemed
enough to do it once; the point was made. But it was certainly a telling artifact
of his concerns about the relationship to an audience, particularly a majority-
white audience, at this moment in time. Even though he surprised the group
with it, it had not exactly come out of left field. Notably, the phallic had already
been a part of the group’s discussions over the previous two weeks. It became
our subject especially as concerned historical lynchings as figurative or literal
castrations of black men. Djédjé had improvised a solo dance with a live micro-
phone tucked into the front of his pants; later he made a simple solo about
lynchings using that same microphone cord. Then over the weekend between
our two weeks the group had traveled north to Duluth to pay homage at the
site of an infamous “spectacle lynching,” the only recorded such event in
Ralph’s home state.45 The three young men who died horribly there—Elias
Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie—lost their lives to a mob over a
highly dubious charge of the rape of a white woman. Thus the resonances of
this ghastly spectacle for a majority-white audience, and the long history of white
obsession with the black man’s phallus as both a threat and spur to violence,
were also lurking behind Ralph’s gesture of display. In that moment—“Not as
big as you thought, eh?”—he cast himself as Elias, Elmer, and Issac, and his
112 A u d i e n ce
audience as the lynch mob. He both evoked and undermined the phallic threat
that had spurred the violence. A mob takes force from the many who watch
and support the acts of a few. In a mob there is no such thing as “just watching.”
Thus this gesture was not only about Ralph’s exploring his discomfort with
performance as self-exposure, but also the specter of violence inherent in the
position of the audience.
At the same time, Ralph’s discomfort with the show-and-tell mode revealed
his unease with a complex web of associations, assumptions, and imperatives
that lie between African American artists and an essentialized notion of “black-
ness.” As our process went on, I increasingly recognized this as a key reason why
his concerns about audience seemed to be coming to a head with this production,
where he had assigned himself the task of confronting the considerable history
and mythology of the racialized American South, our articulated “ground
zero.” To repeat a quotation from an e-mail that he’d sent me early on in the
process: “my ambivalence MUST become a house, acknowledged and offered
as an interesting place to visit.”46 In other words, the goal would be for him to
maintain his deeply ambivalent feelings about the way race is read and repre-
sented in America as a subject of, rather than an obstacle to, his investigations
of racialized territory. Ambivalence would become a dwelling, offered to an
audience to wander through.
Darby English’s recent work on the expectations an audience brings to an
artwork that they locate in “black representational space” offers an excellent
tool to tease out some of the triggers for, and implications of, Ralph’s ambiva-
lence.47 As English puts it: “black artists’ work . . . is almost uniformly general-
ized, endlessly summoned to prove its representativeness (or defend its lack of
same), and contracted to show-and-tell on behalf of an abstract and unchanging
‘culture of origin.’”48 In assigning himself considerable research within this
“ground zero” of black historical culture, and encountering everywhere the
mythology of that history and the history of that mythology, Ralph was intent
not to emerge with a performance work that represented his discoveries as solid
evidence of “an abstract and unchanging culture of origin.” He had no interest
in peddling a reified blackness as a commodity; he wanted to explore the un-
reliability and difficulty of the material. But of course the decision of how the
work would be read was not his own; as English points out, viewers are deeply
complicit, through their habits, in reading work by black artists as a demonstra-
tion of preexisting tropes of blackness.
Into this picture enter Ralph’s and my conversations about the possibility
of preserving that “show-and-tell” workshop mode in an eventual proscenium
performance. Within the echo of English’s words it is little wonder that the
proposition of a demonstrative attitude toward audience would feel uneasy and
A u d i e n ce 113
threatening. A black artist’s show-and-tell of southern research materials—

what Ralph had pegged as “‘direct’ black southern bluesy Americaness”—
could so easily be pigeonholed into existing tropes of representation, “on behalf
of an abstract and unchanging culture of origin,” with little chance for escape.
So why go ahead and meekly supply the audience with exactly the materials it
needed to do that confining work? Did my dramaturgical notes, exhorting
Ralph to continue to explore the lec-dem mode in relation to his research
materials, offer exactly that threat? Perhaps the violence of the audience, no
longer as overt and deadly as that of a lynch mob, was still echoed in the violence
of being read against restrictive tropes of blackness, being expected to match
preconceptions of what a black artist does and does not, should and should not
do? Getting cast as a rapist and lynched for it is obviously a much graver matter
than getting cast as a “black artist” and pigeonholed for it, but there is one
point of similarity: in both instances the audience reads only what it wants to
read, sees only what it has been trained to see. Suddenly the emancipation of the
spectator from the tyranny of the artist’s intentions seems a lot less urgent than
the emancipation of the artist from the tyranny of the spectator’s preconceptions.
And yet, I also wondered: was the lec-dem really the problem? What exactly
had Ralph been demonstrating so effectively in those early showings? He had not
just put forward the researched ingredients of a powerful and deeply mytholo-
gized black southern history (lynchings, the blues, civil rights struggles)—or at
least not without also including his own complex, charged yet ambivalent
engagement with that material. For instance, he would show an audience a video
of his minimal ritual actions at sites connected with Emmett Till’s murder and,
after narrating the basics of that painful history, bluntly confess to the audience
that he had had absolutely no idea what he should be doing at the sites—and,
in fact, that he’d found the gorgeous weather and birds singing completely
incongruous with the history and ghosts he’d traveled to confront. In this way
his demonstrative mode could just as easily unmake a facile reading of “au-
thentic” black history; it did not need to play into it—or at least, that was my
evolving position in our conversation.
Ralph was excited to explore the possibilities of the unreliable narrator; he
was perhaps less convinced than I was that the demonstrative mode, and the
character of “Ralph” whether played by him or someone else, should remain.
But at this point in the process, from that first Walker workshop on, we were
exploring the tensions and fissures that could open up in the demonstrative mode
through contradiction, humor, absurdity, lies, and unreliability. I imagined
that Ralph’s show-and-tell, in becoming less sincere, might become more discur-
sive, more playful, and, in the last analysis, more revealing in the ways it did not
reveal.
114 A u d i e n ce
Our work with the unreliable narrator accordingly exploded, in a process I

already touched upon in chapter 1. Ralph exhorted Okwui, David, and James
to provide him confessional stories that did not have to be true, but that he
must believe were true. He also gave them a list of elements they were required
to incorporate—classical music, a drum, a gun collection—further guaranteeing
the narrative would veer away from sincere self-exposure. Okwui recalled,
“We started telling these stories, and they became quite funny. Not because it’s
funny to be called a ‘nigger,’ but because most of the time it’s ridiculous.” 49
The structure of Ralph’s request allowed the performers to locate a liberating
sense of play within a confessional mode of theater, a mode usually dependent
on sober sincerity. What’s more, it allowed them, by means of that play, to dodge
the threat, real or projected, of being pigeonholed by an audience reading in
light of a preexisting, race-based script. As Okwui put it, “We were trying to
complicate the sense of a ‘black story.’ Or the sense of a story that one would be
told in these circumstances. What you would expect to be told is not necessarily
what you get . . . it involved a setting up of expectations in the room that were
somehow undermined or complicated or deepened.”50
What does it mean to “complicate the sense of a ‘black story’”? In perform
ance circumstances, and especially in front of mixed-race audiences, when
narratives with a black protagonist are recounted, what do those audiences
usually expect? Perhaps a clear moral, perhaps a political directive, since racial
issues in America cannot help but be moralized and politicized. But without
in any way denying the moral or political dimensions of race, the plan was to
capture the way in which experiences do not always fit neatly into the categories
we have waiting for them in advance. Rather we hoped the stories would throw
the burden of evaluation—moral, political, and otherwise—on their audiences.
Earlier I discussed the lengths to which Okwui and I went to shape her un-
reliable coming-of-age tale, part-true and part-invention, of the first time she
was called “nigger.” We worked together outside the main rehearsal room to
set an improvisational structure and experiment with various modes of direct
address, imagining her relationship to those ghosts of a future audience. It is
worth briefly recounting the story’s setup again—it began in a racially mixed
classroom in the 1970s Bronx, with a white art instructor who liked to play the
African djembe for her students as they worked on their projects. Young Okwui
says she would rather hear a piece of classical music than the djembe, which she
finds overbearing. A white classmate reacts with incredulity, her race-based
expectations subverted. She attempts to name Okwui back into her place. The
tale was different every time, but here is a partial transcript of the very first time
Okwui told it in rehearsal (as such it is the shortest version, before we added its
many embellishments):
A u d i e n ce 115
She said “What?”

I said, “I want to hear Verdi.”
And she said, “Yeah, whatever nigger.”
And I looked at her and I said, “What? Don’t call me that.”
And she said, “Nigger.”
And I said, “Call me that again and I’m gonna slap you in the face.”
And she said, “Nigger.”
So I slapped her across the face, and I said, “You’re the nigger.”
She said, “Nigger.”
And I said slap, “You’re the nigger.”
“Nigger.”
Slap. “You’re the nigger.”
“Nigger.”
Slap. “You’re the nigger.”
Now her face is beet red, her freckles make her redder, and tears are
streaming down her face. And Ms. Hirsh stops drumming and she rushes
over to us and she says, “Girls, what is going on here?”
And I said, “Lily is calling me a nigger.”
She looks at Lily and she says, “Lily—!”
So Lily interrupts, “But she was calling me a nigger.”
And then Ms. Hirsh looks at me and says,
“Well, Okwui, Lily can’t be a nigger.”51
The story ended crisply on that note, with the teacher oh-so-helpfully clarifying
the proper use of the slur.
I have already examined Okwui’s playful use of language in this tale—how
she kept the text improvisational in performance, and how a slew of details
were added or changed to “infect” this tale with elements from elsewhere in the
show, thereby creating a web of associations, and accordingly hints that this
might not be an entirely reliable mode of address. Now, as part of my discussion
of audience, I would like to focus on the ingredient of humor. For anything
crafted as funny cannot avoid keeping its audience, and the potential for a
given audience response, in mind.
The narrative was plenty bitter as well as funny; the sought-for humor
was not just for humor’s sake. I was convinced a certain kind of laughter
would emerge as a telling side effect of our having successfully disarmed audi-
ence expectations and exposed the patent absurdities of the narrated situa-
tion (again, as Okwui put it: “not because it’s funny to be called a ‘nigger,’ but
because most of the time it’s ridiculous.”) So, for instance, when Ralph asked
us to figure out how to insert a slightly doctored quote by James Baldwin into
the story, we placed it in the mouth of the djembe-playing white art teacher,
lecturing about cultural ownership to her young mostly black charges. Then
116 A u d i e n ce
we immediately undercut the grandiosity of her tone with the reality of her
audience:
before [my art teacher] would start playing the djembe she would say this
thing, she would say “Respect the Experience: the question of who has
ownership over history, or memory, or spirit, or music is unanswerable, so
Respect the Experience, that’s as good as it gets.” [ pause] So now, we’re in
the fourth grade, you know, at the time, and so . . . [Okwui trails off, looking
quizzically upwards at an authority figure; audience chuckles]52
Then later we referred back to the quote, giving Okwui’s character a moment
of angry triumph via Baldwin. After the repeated epithets and slaps were
traded, she continued as below:
Finally my art teacher stops playing the djembe [audience laughter] and she
comes over to us and she says “girls, what on earth is going on here, have
some compassion for each other please!” And I was like, “fuck compassion,
remember Respect the Experience? Well I’m feeling my experience!”
[audience laughter, some applause] But . . . but, that’s not what I actually said.
[more laughter] What I did say was “Lily is calling me a nigger.”53
The audience laughter noted in these two quotations was telling, though in
different ways. The first two laughs came at the expense of the white art teacher
and what she represents—her self-importance in imparting cultural under-
standing to her charges, and the fact that the student conflict finally achieves
what young Okwui had wanted all along, which was just for her to stop banging
on that damn drum. The next laugh came as the teacher’s grand exhortation
returned with a twist, pulled into service for young Okwui’s self-respect, also at
the teacher’s expense. But the final laugh in the excerpt above sprang from
something a little different. Here we undercut the expected narrative of racial
uplift with the more mundane and likely outcome for a fourth-grade girl—yes, in
fact, she would make a relatively banal appeal to her teacher’s authority instead
of articulating the value of her own experience in a more adult fashion. The
laugh was of recognition, at the difference between what one wants to have
said, on retrospect, and what one actually said—the familiar sensation of wanting
to soar high but falling a little flat. This metaphorical pratfall was one small
means by which the expectations of a “black story”—expectations of a display
of “authentic blackness” within a narrative of egregious discrimination and
redemptive triumph—could be “somehow undermined or complicated or
deepened.”54 Just as they were in Ralph’s earlier autobiographical story, which
built toward a heroic confrontation with a white bully and ended not in a
dramatic showdown but in a much more familiar avoidance of conflict.
A u d i e n ce 117
The final line of Okwui’s story, in which the teacher clarifies use of the slur,
was arguably the “punch line,” but I was not terribly interested in whether it
produced uproarious laughter. Its real punch lay elsewhere. When it finally
landed in front of audiences it turned into a fascinating litmus test. In the mo-
ment after Okwui pronounced the teacher’s words “Lily can’t be a nigger,” we
heard some gentle, immediate laughter—what seemed like a mild laughter of
recognition from those who had suspected what was coming. Then we heard
other immediate laughter cut short, as those who had laughed right away by
instinct suddenly realized what they were laughing at and clammed up. Some-
times there was a pause, with a few gasps or uncomfortable titters to follow, as
the full impact of teacher’s words sunk in. It is impossible to verify this now, but
at the time Okwui and the rest of the cast discussed their impression that the
reactions were dividing based on the race and experiences of the viewers—
black audience members more likely to find the teacher’s response familiar; white
audience members more likely to be caught off guard. (In the DVD recording
that endures as a record of one performance, some of this syncopated laughter
is apparent.) In performance, this was a moment rife with the possibility of
what Susan Manning has called “cross-viewing”55—where audience members
from different cultural positions may watch each other watching differently, or
in this case, hear each other laughing differently, thus opening up the possibility
of perceiving a social position different from their own. This moment also
made clear that when the act of spectatorship is theorized as a sole audience
member’s encounter with the work of art, an important dimension is lost. The
individual does not only have his or her encounter with the work, but also with
and within the audience collective.
In developing this moment in the rehearsal room, we had had no idea of
the exact audience responses at stake. Our consideration of the ghosts of our
future audience was not the sort that had us shaping, or even anticipating, this
particular staggered reaction. But we did have the consideration to shape this
moment as a punchline, to place it within the conventions and cadences that
allowed it to be heard according to those expectations, and to understand that
the incongruity that marked it as humorous was also a deeper incongruity
that pointed to both the meaning and the absurdity of learning what it meant
to be a black subject in the United States.
As we worked this story in the rehearsal room, another consideration of
audience expectations emerged, this one less connected to humor. Ralph several
times came close to stopping our work with this story. Precisely because it was
so overt in its use of the classic racial epithet, he hesitated to use it—perhaps it
would never manage to dodge audience expectations enough. The ending did
provide some kind of twist—as the supposedly enlightened teacher turned out
118 A u d i e n ce
Figure 13. Okwui Okpokwasili, Katherine Profeta, and Ralph Lemon, at work on Okwui’s
storytelling for Patton. (Dan Merlo)
to be a more insidious racist than the student who first hurled the slur—but per-
haps the N-word was still a bit too predictable an ingredient in a coming-of-age
narrative about race. It was certainly both humorous and bitter—a disarming
combination—and Okwui told it engagingly. Ralph struggled for a while, de-
ciding whether or not to continue working with it. In his journal he wrote: “I
wonder what the story would be like without the word ‘nigger.’ Would lose its
rhythm for sure.”56
That thought was the key. Ralph finally decided we would keep the story if
we could figure out how to omit the word “nigger” while somehow preserving
both the power and rhythm of the tale. His first solution was to ask Djédjé
Djédjé Gervais to hit a pair of cymbals next to a microphone at Okwui’s every
mention of “nigger.” The audience would be denied the chance to hear that
word, which was offensive to Ralph in two ways—in part because of its violent
history and in part because of its cliché. But after much rehearsal, Djédjé,
perhaps because English was not his first language, was unable to hit the cymbals
at the right moment, always either preceding or echoing the word he meant to
mask. I pointed out to Ralph that he was the person with the most honest
impulse to keep the word from reaching the audience’s ears, thus he should be
the one wielding the cymbals. The cast agreed. Ralph, resistant at first, finally
took on the role. And so in the eventual stage rendition Ralph stood upstage
A u d i e n ce 119
Figure 14. Okwui Okpokwasili and Ralph Lemon, in rehearsal. (Dan Merlo)
during Okwui’s tale, playing an earnest character in a red velvet suit jacket,
cymbals in hand, with the goal of wiping every last “N-word” from the audible
record. Of course, the audience could easily tell what word Okwui was spitting
out repeatedly, and so Ralph’s attempt to mask that perception was valiant but
futile. He was keenly aware of the absurdity of his task; that absurdity gave him
the extra twist he had been looking for all along. The harshly clanging cymbals
served as a twin metaphor, both for the effect that word can have on those at
whom it is hurled, and for the intensity with which Ralph’s character wanted to
obliterate it from the record.
Butting Heads
Tension over audience came to a head between Ralph and me near the end of
the Patton process. It began when I arrived at the Krannert Center in Urbana in
spring 2004 to view the first incarnations of the work on a proscenium stage.
The cast had already been there for a few weeks before I showed up. This was
the sort of threshold moment where I relished being in a slightly different mind-
set than the rest of the group, as I morphed from outsider back to insider. I was
well familiar with the ongoing conversation from all the e-mails and workshops
of the previous years, but I was usefully ignorant of the detailed technical
120 A u d i e n ce
questions that had determined how the work would land, for the first time, in
this larger and more formal space.
My notes to Ralph after my first viewing recount many isolated moments I
adored, but also an overall unease. The intimacy and playful directness I had
enjoyed in earlier lec-dem showings had disappeared, swallowed up in the
larger proscenium space and the poetic layerings. And that less intimate, less
direct mode of audience interaction opened up many moments in which my
imagined ghost-audience would be missing too many connections that had, at
least once, been so important to us. For instance, Ralph spoke some scientific
text I had found him, describing “boneyards”—collections of dead trees in
shallow brackish water—and intercut that live reading with a video of him
wading waist-deep in an actual southern “boneyard” as he read a short story
aloud. In the notes I lamented that the audience would not have quite enough
information to discover the connection between that scientific text and that
video image if he did not give them just a little more leg up: “Right now seems
more like a random juxtaposition, and thus I suspect after a while the audience
just stops listening.”57 Or another example: I appreciated the unsettling beauty
of a piece of group choreography based on keywords from lynching sites, but I
knew that part of what moved me was my knowledge of the source. I wondered
if the audience had the context to read it as anything more than beautiful
abstract movement, and would it be OK with him if that was all they saw? If
not, was there a way to reveal a little more of the context? Or: I remembered
fondly a moment in a past lec-dem workshop where Ralph had addressed the
audience directly, polling them as to whether they thought various covers by
white musical artists of black musical artists’ work were “danceable” or not—a
racially charged inquiry. Couldn’t we find a way to retain that sort of disarming
rupture of the fourth wall? Ralph later summarized my reaction as: “Katherine
likes what was. The smaller, more intimate event versions, with more me being
more intimate and honest (unreliably). And now it’s a lot about the giant space
of the theater.”58 Indeed, at that moment my first impulse was to try and counter
the distancing environment of the Krannert mainstage, instead of embracing
it as our new given. In an earlier version of his journal writing that he shared
with me but never published, he also appended to the above, “So there’s a great
fight.”59 A fight over our relationship to that long-deferred audience, those
imaginary ghosts, now bearing down upon us.
On the other hand I shared my love for the increasing interweaving of the
different stories and episodic moments of the piece—by means of a process we
called “webbing” or “infecting.” In this way a character or physical detail in-
cluded in one section would be introduced in another, or several different
names would become just one. Thus our disparate ingredients were melded
A u d i e n ce 121
and reduced, the way a cook makes a good sauce. I felt this process was crucial
for audience reception, since these signals would encourage those future ghosts
to imagine the disparate elements of our show as connected, even if we were
not always conveying exactly why. In response to that mystery they might do
the mental work of making those connections as real for themselves as they
were already for Ralph. I wrote to Ralph: “In general, I’m loving the idea of all
these threads connecting otherwise separate incidents and stories, and wanting
to find ways to push that a little more.”60
After the Krannert Ralph departed for a solo residency in Bellagio, Italy,
where he would finish writing the script for the show. He articulated for himself
the impossible goal of producing “The Great Unwritten Black American Epic,
Excerpted”—not just unwritten until that moment, but always unwritten and
incomplete, no matter what characters would land on his page. One of his aims
was to increase the “webbing” in the piece, and he did. He and I winged e-mails
back and forth, sometimes several in a day, as he sat at his private wooden desk
with a small window overlooking Lake Como and consolidated his writing
about a completely different geography. Many of our e-mails were about the
script—for example, his request for me to take a stab at translating a new passage
into the same approximation of southern black vernacular used in “A Summer
Tragedy,” the Arna Bontemps short story he’d woven throughout.61 Or a discus-
sion I triggered about whether this script could be said to have “a spine”—a
structural metaphor I choose quite consciously for its anatomical flexibility—
and if so whether that spine was something like “a journey toward what might
be home.”62 But parallel to this round of correspondence another tension
erupted between us, over program notes for the opening production at the
Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM)—which were my major dramaturgical
writing task, parallel to Ralph’s labor over the script.
Wr i t i n g t o t h e A u d ience
Program notes are an awkward genre, always. Their audience is exactly “the”
audience—or at least the subset of the audience that uses its captive, idle time
before the start of a performance to flip through a program. On the one hand,
program notes represent an opportunity to help shape the frame of mind with
which any given audience member approaches the work, and who would not
want to take advantage of that brief window of opportunity? On the other
hand, program notes are a temporal hiccup, a presentation before the presenta-
tion, veering dangerously close to an attempt to usurp the event—an attempt
that can only fail, and lamely. At their worst program notes destroy the sponta-
neity of the audience response they had meant to foster. And they always seem
122 A u d i e n ce
to be due to the printer far earlier than they should, when the performance
event is nowhere near done declaring itself. Marianne Van Kerkhoven described
the task well back in 1994: “By means of his/her writing about a production,
the dramaturg smoothes the way towards its public airing. Whatever he/she
writes must be ‘correct’; it must describe the work in an evident and organic
way and lend a guiding hand on its way to its life in society, a life which often
has a destructive effect on its meaning.”63
Preparing to craft this “guiding hand,” I sent Ralph an e-mail full of
questions. Mostly I asked about how he now saw the shape or progression of
the years of research work, and their role now in the event we were preparing
for the proscenium stage. He wrote back, copiously. And then I took those
thoughts, added my own conjured image of an audience member seated before
the lights go down, and tried to write a short essay addressed to that imagined
person. At this time Ralph had rejected any “obvious” display of his research
materials on stage as reductive. And we all understood Patton as a much larger
art process that included a proscenium show, instead of a process leading up to
a proscenium goal. That was always clear in how we talked about the work
day-to-day. But I still thought it was important that an audience be allowed to
share some of the understanding the collaborators had—that the stage work
had accrued through the very complex, sometimes ambivalent, and always
charged reaction to years of southern research.
In my first draft of the program notes I listed the early research trips Ralph
had taken: to trace the Freedom Bus rides, to visit lynching sites, to perform
living room dances for relatives of blues musicians, to interview his own southern
relatives. I made it seem that I was building up to a conclusion that the prosce-
nium show was a culmination of all these years of research. And then I started a
new paragraph, with a single sentence in it: “Come home Charley Patton is not the
culmination of all this research.” The third paragraph began: “Come home Charley
Patton is, rather, one of many manifestations of a much larger process.” In my
first draft, that sentence continued: “through which Lemon is doggedly investi-
gating what it means to be a black American artist, in this moment in the year
2004, fully acknowledging and yet striving to transcend his myriad and some-
times ambivalent reactions to the accumulated history of three centuries previ-
ous.” (The final version of that sentence, after seven drafts, was smoother but
not terribly different.)
My proffered first draft caused a muffled explosion between Ralph and
me—always polite, but unmistakably tense. He did not appreciate my leading
by listing major research materials, even if my plan was to stage a reversal and
subvert the expected understanding of that list. He simply did not want that
A u d i e n ce 123
material out there in a literal fashion, countering, “It is not interesting enough,
to me. Too familiar.”64 In one of our heated e-mails back and forth, I asked
him, perhaps pretending a little more naïveté than I actually felt:
How would you characterize the forces that are making it wrong for these
things to be said out loud? Is it pain? Is it fear of clichés? Is it that a single
word is never sufficient for that kind of event? I don’t know if any of those
suggested answers are actually right . . . What is it for you?65
He responded:
Hmm, I think that none of these questions, nor the actual words, “nigger,”
“lynching,” “Africa,” “black,” “white,” etcetera, says enough of what is at
stake here, for me. As my language wallows in this miasma, I feel for a
discussion beyond the words . . . So, I blank the more loaded ones out. An
immediate and deeply felt solution . . . that happens to be quite freeing.
Something like that.
This of course goes back to the “responsibility” question . . .”freeing”
and then what?66
The freedom Ralph referred to seemed clear to me—a freedom from the au-
dience’s tyranny, real or projected. He expected they would want him to use
these vocabulary words to represent “blackness” in some sort of comprehensive
way, for their easy consumption. The responsibility, on the other hand, I under-
stood as a responsibility to the actual historical victims of violence, and the
previous generations who had struggled to advance the cause of equality, or
simply managed to live their lives with dignity under adverse circumstances,
with what Ralph called “shaky elegance.”67 For this material was still about
Ralph’s reaction—yes, a singular, noncomprehensive reaction—to the history
and mythology of how generations of black people had lived in the United
States. Thus Ralph’s question—“freeing” and then what?—was very real to
me. As I struggled to create some kind of program notes, I asked myself how
I could be free of that vocabulary and still let the audience know about all the
good souls woven through his research and the stakes of their lives. Did I even
need to “let the audience know” in this way—was that the proper outcome of
that responsibility? I noted the ambivalent tension in Ralph’s response—was he
telling me that those words offered an audience too much (in being “loaded”)?
Or not enough (for not saying “enough of what is at stake here”)? I knew that if
I asked him that question the answer would be “both.” His ambivalence seemed
to be impeding his ability to shape this performance for an audience who did
not already know all he knew, but in fact the ambivalence was the crux of what
124 A u d i e n ce
Figure 15. In rehearsal for Patton: Okwui Okpokwasili, Katherine Profeta, David Thomson, and
Ralph Lemon. (Dan Merlo)
he most wanted to share with them. I remembered that early e-mail: “my am-
bivalence MUST become a house, acknowledged and offered as an interesting
place to visit.”68
Our wrangling over program notes did not occur in a vacuum, of course. It
was happening more or less simultaneously with our discussions about whether
and how the word “nigger” would be bleeped out of Okwui’s storytelling, and
also ran parallel to our discussions about how much the information about
historical lynchings, which had triggered Ralph’s private countermemorial
gestures and fed onstage material for the performers, would be apparent to an
outside audience. And it was not an ongoing discussion between just Ralph and
me—the performers, and Chelsea, and the production staff were all enmeshed
as well.
The performers were particularly concerned that the choreography de-
veloped from keywords about lynchings, which they felt deeply as a response to
that historical atrocity, be displayed in a context that could communicate to an
audience a hint of what they were responding to. That was our “responsibility.”
How would we make sure our engagement with this material honored its
gravity? Wouldn’t it be fundamentally wrong to derive from this solemn content
a performance that looked like nothing more than “a compelling little movement
study”? At the same time they trusted Ralph and well understood the artistic
A u d i e n ce 125
impulses that made any sort of simplistic show-and-tell untenable and equally
irresponsible to the research.
This was perhaps my most unequivocal period of audience advocacy. The
performers and Chelsea were often my allies when I argued for just a bit more
explicit disclosure. However, I (and I think they as well) did not really want to
“win” that argument plain and simple. What I wanted instead was to somehow
use the pressure between these positions to forge a third alternative, to discover
another solution that would satisfy both the imperative to share with an audience
and the imperative not to fall into the easy categorization of familiar terms.
This is important within any scenario where one hopes to pose questions and
provoke thoughts that do not fall easily in to the categories we already have
waiting for them—to enable Gilpin’s “new form of perception”69—but it is
particularly important in a scenario of racially charged viewing, where the
stakes for avoiding the ‘tried and true’ seem even higher.
To this day I think the tension is ultimately unresolvable, and in fact the
most one should hope for is that its difficulty be productive instead of paralyzing.
But as I have described in chapter 1, insofar as there was a partial resolution
to be found, it arrived when we rediscovered an earlier piece of inspiration in
the concept of the countermemorial, a work of art as a site of telling absence.
Viewers complete the act of memory in their own heads; the countermemorial
does not do that work for them. These works do not communicate directly,
through all-too-familiar statements about past trauma, but still shape very
carefully what they are not saying, in order to create a provocative negative
space that will spur the audience’s involvement. In this model—aligned with
the “negative space use of language” I referred to earlier—the act of not-saying
is carefully shaped for an audience as much as any overt statement might be,
but differently. Thereby it spurs a gesture that may not be recognized as direct
communication to an audience but is still, within another register, profoundly
communicative. One might say that instead of operating as a statement, it
operates as a request.
Eventually my program notes went forward, in almost the same shape as I
had first contrived them, though with some key adjustments of phrasing to
avoid triggers to the worst sorts of cliché. I do not know if Ralph just gave up
that fight because there were bigger fish to fry onstage, or if he actually changed
his mind. Perhaps my attempts at exposing some of the larger Patton process
in this way were defended by other members of the production staff. But I
still do not know, to this day, if they were really the kind of program notes this
production needed. Perhaps the best thing one could say about them was that
they were the kind of program notes that people who like program notes
needed.
126 A u d i e n ce
Benediction
The final moments of the proscenium version of Patton fell to James Baldwin.
His likeness operated as a Buddha hovering over the evening’s events: Ralph
had selected one of his cartoon sketches of his hero, extracted selected remarks
from old Baldwin audio interviews, and had the still image computer-animated
to pronounce those remarks from a projection screen high above the stage. In
this way Baldwin, back from the dead, intoned the following as the show’s
benediction: “It involves another sense, one more difficult to articulate. But
that sense has something to do with the presence of Africa. Even though it’s a
very unreadable presence, it’s a real one. Real in a way it was not for me when
I was young and old. Or even as it was not real, let’s say, fifteen, twenty years
ago. Something is beginning to happen in the Western world and everybody,
in one way or another, is feeling this. In short, the center, that presumed to be
the center of the earth has shifted, and the definition of man has shifted with it.
[ pause] Does that make sense to you?”
Initially Ralph had experimented with removing the reference to Africa
from the above, but I argued that without that thought the excerpt dissolved,
already unmoored from its larger context, and he soon agreed. Already the
referent for the initial “it” was unclear, unless it referred to the entire evening’s
production, which of course it now did. So “Africa” was allowed to enter ex-
plicitly into the performance in the very last moments, named as a presence
both “unreadable” and “real,” which felt right. (Djédjé Djédjé Gervais, the
African-born dancer who had worked with Ralph since Geography, had of course
been there all along.) And it seemed fitting that at the close of this passage,
difficult to parse and nevertheless evocative, Ralph decided to keep in Baldwin’s
final query, “Does that make sense to you?” He could easily have cut it, since
there was a long pause in the recording just prior. It stayed, and with it the
acknowledgment that this material had finally been presented to a large, quasi-
anonymous audience, and that audience was indeed out there, somewhere,
reading and responding.
How Can You . . . ?, Audience Denied, and

the Act of Generosity
I saw, and still see, How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere? as
an unintentional coda to the Geography Trilogy—paradoxically expressing both a
continuity and an rupture with those three works, most of all in relation to Patton.
Unsurprisingly, it shares with that piece a loaded set of concerns about how
one might “invite being seen,” as Hay would put it, by an outside audience. For
A u d i e n ce 127
Patton our questions of audience had begun by radically questioning form, loca-
tion, and venue but had resolved primarily into questions of what might be
spoken aloud to a more or less traditional audience, in what terms and on what
terms. With How Can You . . . ?, although there were still major textual ingredients
to the piece, our most insistent questions about audience concerned that
twenty-minute flight of silent, unruly, furious movement.
A u d i e n c e De n i ed
As mentioned in previous chapters, this section of the work—titled “Wall/

Hole” as a nod to a Buddhist perspective of solid walls as illusions—was con-
ceived as a structured improvisation with no shape, no form, and no style, which
would thus, at least in theory, be invisible to an outside audience. Ralph asked
his collaborators to proceed from the premise that the dance would be impos-
sible to watch, not made for presentation. This request sprung in large part from
the new context of acute mourning—after the rupture of Asako’s death, the idea
of coherently presentational behavior in front of an audience seemed more dis-
tasteful than ever. Yet Joe Melillo’s 2008 invitation to do something, anything,
for BAM offered a tantalizingly impossible task, and a chance for Ralph to
answer grief by hurling himself into work. Again, as with Patton, the premise that
the piece would not and could not have a traditional relationship to audience was
in tension with the simple fact of how its labor was supported, economically—
by grants and presenting institutions that needed the future revenue generated
by placing a work of art in front of a proscenium audience, all sitting in num-
bered seats assigned to them by purchased tickets. Yet once again, the question
of what that eventual performance would be was downplayed and strenuously
deferred.
Our point of departure was the three-minute section titled “Ecstasy” from
the end of Patton. “Ecstasy” itself had already been a throwback to even earlier
fascinations, as its construction had hearkened back to the failed experiments
with trance in Geography and Tree. The work on “Ecstasy” began with the Patton
group screening the video of Maya Deren’s Divine Horsemen, as had the Geography
group years before, and discussing the physical effects of possession. This time,
since this was primarily a group of American dancers, Ralph felt no fear that
the cast would fall into an actual trance, given they had no cultural context for
the practice.70 He supplied them with a collection of keywords or phrases in-
spired by the research into past lynching violence—for example, “falling not
up or down,” “on fire,” “suspended,” and “body broken.” One such phrase,
the last on the list, hinted at a possible transcendence of the atrocities through
agency and reanimation: “Take your body apart and put it back together.”
128 A u d i e n ce
Indeed, the performers worked hard to locate a measure of communal joy, of

ecstasy, in the midst of the terror. We asked the cast to improvise based on
these keywords and the idea of trance, encouraging the feeling of a ritual that
might connect the present-day self to elusive, conjured ancestors. Eventually
the improvisations were refined, and I wrote them into a score, even though
the movement on moment-to-moment basis remained unruly and difficult to
categorize. Ralph wanted them to be “dancing outside of the body” and was
concerned that they remain “more lost than found” throughout.71 Their full-
throttle, disorienting movements were in part an expression of solidarity with a
violent history and in part an attempt to break through, furiously, to the present
moment and beyond. In continual motion, they traveled toward a highly un-
certain but potentially ecstatic future.
Now fast-forward to 2008, on the other side of Asako’s passing. Ralph
remained fascinated by this three-minute escape from reliable choreographic
form, wishing that, somehow, he had succeeded in pushing it even further. It
seemed to have anticipated the feelings that would grow more urgent after her
death. He was in no shape to embrace the comfortable beauty of known dance
forms, so he returned to the work of “Ecstasy.” He asked the performers if they
wouldn’t mind pushing the three minutes to twenty, as long as they could do so
without injury. And, most importantly for the consideration of audience here,
he explained that it would be a “dance that disappears,” with “no form” and
“no style.”72
At first blush this was a more radical rejection of audience than that proposed
by Patton. We would not only be deferring consideration of the viewer or re
imagining it in new configurations. We would be declaring it irrelevant. Cer-
tainly making a dance that disappears and cannot be seen was an impossible
task—the dance reflected light and was expressed through recognizably human
forms. But the proposition that it could disappear was nevertheless provocative.
The earliest rehearsals operated on a subtractive basis. Each dancer would
improvise alone, at a chosen high speed so that the body was moving faster than
the mind could think, and would try to access a zone of “no style.” Immediately
afterward we would gather and try to describe what we had, nevertheless,
seen—especially any moments that had seemed to fall into a recognizable style
or pattern. The performer would immediately go at it again, trying to avoid all
that had just been spoken aloud. Insofar as I was operating dramaturgically as
the work’s “first audience”—and, in fact, we all were serving that role for each
other—I was trying to use that position to erase that position. I was trying to
use the dramaturg’s powers of description to render those powers impotent or
irrelevant. If I believed in my role as the “advocate for the audience,” I must
now be trying to make myself disappear as well.
A u d i e n ce 129
Indeed, to the extent that the dramaturg would be recognized as the figure
standing outside, I did disappear, absorbed into the collective. I joined the cast
and Ralph in all manner of exercises designed to experience uncomfortable
duration, or loss of form, or both together. We all moved as fast as we possibly
could within a small area. We repeated a single action for two hours. Later, the
ante was upped to twelve hours. In those rehearsal room moments, for perhaps
the first time, there were long stretches where no one stood outside; everyone in
the room was inside the experience. I understood that I was not going to be
asked to speak about our experiments without knowing how it felt to embody it.
No one would want to hear me describe what it looked like to an outsider if the
stated challenge of the experiment was that the work should become unwatch-
able. I brought in ideas for how we could expand Ralph’s experiments—a
model for the use of natural imagery borrowed from the butoh-fu of Japanese
Butoh.73 An idea of how moment-to-moment side coaching might work. And
then we all tried them out together, observing each other and speaking about
what we saw, acting as what Dwight Conquergood would call “co-performative
witnesses.”74 In the dramaturg’s oscillation between inside and outside, I was as
far inside as I have ever been.
Which is why I was caught off guard almost a year later, after watching a
showing of this twenty-minute passage at the Walker Art Center, soon after it
had first manifested as a loosely scored sequence with plenty of improvisational
freefall, to have Ralph turn to me and say, “So, Katherine, what does it look
like? Will an audience stay with it?” All of a sudden those invisible ghosts, the
future watchers, flooded back into the room, and I was supposed to speak for
them. True, I had not been inside the experiments for a while at that point, I
had already been watching it from outside. Ralph had been too. But I was
taken aback, to be asked to pronounce an opinion on something that, up until
that point, we had declared irrelevant. We did know this work would land in
front of an audience eventually, so I guess I should have seen it coming.
I answered, figuring out what I thought only as the words came out of my
mouth. Yes, I thought much of the audience would stay with it, at least an
important subset. We’d lose some people to its difficulty, to be sure—“Wall/
Hole” had none of the compositional markers that allowed an audience to retain
an afterimage of the choreographic present as it slipped into the choreographic
past, and very few familiar cues for “reading” dance. It operated like quicksilver.
But many would recognize the performers’ intensity and investment in the
event and be drawn to that. The difference for me, compared to other pieces
we had made, was now I felt there was absolutely no saying what a given audi-
ence member’s experience would be. We could not do much to reliably shape
their passage through this experience. We could only lead them up to a bridge
130 A u d i e n ce
and try to optimize their ability to cross over. On the other side, each audience
member was going to experience something different, more thoroughly diverse
than before. And so we should not worry about crafting what that audience
experience could be; we should just keep our eye on the rigor and nuance of the
experience for the performers. It was that rigor and nuance that would gain
audience trust and help construct the bridge. To this day I believe to the extent
that this section of the work was successful, that is how it operated.
Ralph agreed with this estimation. And indeed, it seemed that there was a
moment for the audiences of “Wall/Hole” where they would have to make a
decision to stay with the work or not, once more familiar strategies and codes of
viewing had proven unfruitful. As he later put it, that was “a point where a
witness stops watching, can’t see the material thing anymore.” 75 And what
might happen after that? “At some point the audience stops seeing the form of
it, or what they project they should be seeing, and they start to witness something
else, which becomes very individual.”76 The eventual reviewers supported our
idea of how the work might be viewed, over and against our initial conception
of that viewing as an impossibility. Instead of devoting extensive passages to
quasi-objective visual description, they reflected on their own journey through
the experience. One enthusiastic commentator described a work that was ini-
tially “hard to pay attention to,” as it was somehow both “exhilarating and
tedious” at the same time and eventually provided an opportunity to find oneself
“in an essentialized position to have to deal with the moment.”77
Thus we were doing our best to emancipate our spectators, fully within
Rancière’s model. This was not a predictable or repeatable experience for either
performers or audience, and even two people watching side by side on the same
night built up vastly different emotional reactions to, and conceptions of, what
they had witnessed.78 Of course, this is always true of any performance, and
thus perhaps just a difference of degree, not kind. But here we had made some-
thing that offered little to no options for how to watch it if one was not willing to
do as Rancière’s emancipated spectator does, and “compose [one’s] own poem
with the elements of the poem before [one].” There was relatively little in the
way of a code of viewing, or familiar sense of a transaction, to hold on to; there
was only the spectator’s surrender to the wash of furious motion, and (for those
who stayed with it) an active and highly individual construction of meaning
from that disorienting experience.
And yet I do still bristle against the overconfident extremity of Rancière’s
position, because even in this situation, which fit his ideal so well, and where
more than ever before the cast’s sense of performing-to-be-seen had been re-
nounced, we inevitably did construct something with an audience in mind. We
still constructed that bridge into the highly individualized experience—the
frame that allowed a viewer to trust us and enter into the less predictable or
A u d i e n ce 131
verifiable elements of the evening. On the most basic level, the experience fell
within the inherited conditions and framing codes that encourage a certain
kind of viewing—quiet, concentrated, from dark seats pointed toward a lit
stage space. It was from within that frame that we asked our audience to spectate
the unspectacular—inevitably, we only challenged that code of viewing from
within. It was also placed within the frame of Ralph’s “Sunshine Room” mono-
logue, a collection of words that preceded it directly, and (as discussed in chapter
1) offered a contextual field of play. After that, there were myriad small decisions
made in the rehearsal room that framed the work in one way or another—
scheduled entrances and exits, many planned modulations in speed or type of
interaction to maximize the chance of catching a variety of improvisational
moments along a scored progression. A form was constructed for an audience,
if only in an attempt to capture within it an experience, perhaps an illusion, of
nonform. And lastly, as alluded to above, I believe that our attention to the
rigor and specificity of the performer’s experience was not just for the perform-
er’s own benefit. It was the condition of a gift, allowing an audience to perceive
something in our attempts worthy of their trust and continued attention.
Ge n e ro s i t y
Rancière’s concept of the emancipated spectator is extremely useful for avoiding

a transactional understanding of performance (artist has idea A in mind; audi-
ence member pays for a ticket, sees show, and the performance is successful to
the extent that audience member leaves the theater with idea A in mind). That
concept is indeed stultifying, as he would put it. But in substituting a model
where artist and spectator perceive the same performance event in separate
and possibly even radically different ways, Rancière cannot quite account for
the ways in which something may still pass from artist to audience—the ways in
which performance operates as an act of generosity.
One of our main pieces of research for How Can You . . . ? was a Buddhist
folk tale, first recorded in the Indian Jatakas, titled The Hare in the Moon. In the
story, the hare—who also happens to be an early incarnation of the future
Buddha—meets a monk who begs for food. Having nothing to give him but
grass, the hare tells him to build a fire, and offers up his body as the meal. The
fire built, the hare “throw[s] his whole body into the jaws of his generosity,”79
to burn in an ultimate act of self-sacrifice. The fire, however, burns cold and
does not even singe a bit of the hare’s fur. He survives, his image forever placed
on the side of the moon to commemorate his selflessness.
This story (notably in tension with a contrasting piece of research, a tale of
the wily and self-preserving Br’er Rabbit) was part of our conversation from
early on. Ralph repeatedly pulled out the quoted phrase above—“throw your
132 A u d i e n ce
whole body into the jaws of your generosity” as a key phrase and an exhortation,
as the dancers continued the grueling work on “Wall/Hole.” The performers
thus always understood the energy, stamina, and commitment required by the
piece as stemming from an act of total generosity and self-sacrifice.
To what or whom they were offering up their bodies was surely in flux,
moment to moment. It might have been Ralph, to the extent that they served
as his surrogates in mourning. It could also have been Asako directly, as her
too short, exemplary life had intersected meaningfully with most of our own
lives. It was certainly each other, as each performer witnessed and buoyed up
the others’ passages through the grueling ritual. Those ghosts of past southern
violence were also among the recipients, given that Patton’s Ecstasy choreography
had been carried forward as the seed for this investigation—they were still
haunting us. And perhaps the gift was felt broadly, offered up to the universe
itself. But whatever images the dancers cycled through, the fact remained this
improvisation was also offered up to the ghosts of the audience—those audiences
who would create, sanctify, and electrify the space of performance by their
presence. Audiences, of the future and then eventually the present, were not
the sole targets of the generosity, but they were certainly among them. Here I
am making a subtle but important distinction between performing-to-be-seen,
which the dancers were avoiding, and inviting-being-seen (to return to Hay’s
term), which they embraced. The former places the performer’s focus on what
might be perceived by the external audience. The latter is not concerned with
what exactly might be seen, but rather engages the generous act of invitation.
George Bataille wrote provocatively about the nature of gift and sacrifice,
building off of Marcel Mauss’s anthropological writing on gift economy, and
his thinking is useful here. For Bataille, the gift is a moment of pure excess, pure
expenditure outside of any system of reciprocal transactions. In writing about
the immolating human sacrifices of the Aztec Indians—not unlike the immo-
lating self-sacrifice of our Buddhist hare—Bataille notes that the sacrificial victim
is “torn away from the order of things” and, in so being, “radiates intimacy,
anguish, the profundity of living beings.”80 Key here for Bataille is the notion of
excess in relation to “the order of things,” which he understands in large part as
the order of a transactional economy. A gift takes place in a moment of pure
excess, for it is an expenditure outside quantification, outside the rules of market
exchange, with no expectation of a measured reciprocal action.
Bataille’s thinking is in harmony with the writings of Lewis Hyde, who
seems not to have been aware of Bataille’s work but also credits Mauss as a
source. Hyde also emphasizes the way in which a gift by definition stands out-
side a transactional economy, and the primary force of his book The Gift is to
explicate the creative work of art-making, and the passage of art from artist to
A u d i e n ce 133
audience, as inherent to the logic of gift and anathema to the logic of commodity
exchange. Ralph had first discovered the tale of the hare in the moon in Jorge
Luis Borges’s Book of Imaginary Beings, but not long after that he found it ex-
panded the pages of Hyde’s book. Hyde’s was the version he passed on to the
cast and me. In context Hyde uses the hare in the moon as an example of the
type of story in which a god becomes incarnate and then makes the sacrificial
gift of that flesh to mortal man, in order to forge a spiritual bond. For Hyde’s
American audience the most obvious example of this type is the Christ story,
but Hyde narrates the hare’s story as a Buddhist correlative.81
If the act of performance can be understood as a moment of sacrificial
gift—which it certainly was in the performances of “Wall/Hole,” both when
the cast served as their own witnesses and when it was offered up to an external
audience—then Bataille and Hyde help clarify how one might avoid the stulti-
fying transactional thinking that Rancière warns against, without completely
discarding the idea that a less quantifiable something still passes between artists
and audience, and that the artists might care deeply about the framing, and the
generosity, of the performative gesture as offered up to audience perception.
In our conversations near the end of the How Can You . . . ? working process,
Ralph admitted that for perhaps the first time in his career he was doing his
utmost to influence the experience of his audience. Ironically, after first having
rejected the visible, choreographic forms as a standard of evaluation, and
trained with the performers for long hours to develop a detailed inner standard
for their unruly improvisations, but at the same time not having been able to
entirely reject eventual outside viewers, he ended up thinking more carefully
about audience than he ever had before. He might even, he laughingly confessed,
be “trying to manipulate” them.82 But if so, it was not an attempt to manipulate
them within a form as much as an attempt to manipulate them out of form, to
usher them into a meditative and highly individual zone that would remain
beyond choreographic and dramaturgical control. I agreed with him; that was
what our work had been. We discovered that our goal was not to frustrate audi-
ence members by presenting them with a dance that had already disappeared—
for where was the generosity in that? Instead we were trying to share with them
the experience of witnessing something as it disappeared—be that a dance, a
person, or a moment.
Throughout the Geography Trilogy, I had been the one who repeatedly
prodded us to consider how a work might be experienced by an audience
member seeing it for the first time. That was my familiar role, but during the
working process for How Can You . . . ? there were odd moments like this where
Ralph and I surprised each other, swapping our more habitual roles in relation
to those ghosts of the future audience and each other. Moments where I
A u d i e n ce 135
advocated for ignoring the eventual audience, over and against his requests of
me to watch from their position. Moments when he wanted to think even more
than I did about how we could frame an experience for an audience, to put
them in the most receptive mood. Even though neither of us went so far as to
think we could direct an audience’s experience entirely, Ralph was intent on
flinging open all portals that might increase their chances of experiencing a
“state of grace” on the far side of all the furious mourning. This reversal was
not permanent—in plenty of conversations since then our more familiar
stances have recurred. But within the process of making How Can You . . . ? there
was a respite, a calm, that countered the sparring we had had around the no-
tion of audience in Patton.
I noticed later that “Sunshine Room”—the twenty-minute monologue
with video that began How Can You . . . ?—operated within the mode I had so
loved in early incarnations (and missed in late incarnations) of Patton, which
had then been such a source of wrangling between us. In “Sunshine Room,”
Ralph was in lec-dem mode. He sat calmly before moving images on a projec-
tion screen, shuffled through his papers, and narrated his preoccupations of the
previous years, both personal and artistic, in a fashion both direct and unreli-
able. In this way he exposed the context of Asako’s passing—but still took much
artistic license to expose it on his own terms, connecting it to the grandeur and
sadness of the film Solaris, Tarkovsky’s epic sci-fi love story, and his work with
centenarian Walter Carter in Mississippi. He even exposed some footage of
“Wall/Hole” being generated in the rehearsal room and wove some elegant
lies into all the sincere exposition. This was exactly the relationship to audi-
ence, direct but yet not quite, that I had loved before. I did not think of it as
winning an argument that I had lost earlier; I just knew I liked it and was glad it
began our show, upending audience expectations of how a “dance” piece
should begin, and setting a tone and a field of play for the dancing that was still
to come.
When it came time to write the program notes, there was similarly no tension
this time around. We both agreed easily that the explanatory, introductory
mode would not do, especially since “Sunshine Room” supplied a taste of that
mode within the body of the work itself. In fact, since the days of Patton I have
not written any program notes in that familiar, awkward style and do not know
Figure 16 (top left ). “Wall/Hole” section of How Can You . . . ? David Thomson, Gesel Mason, and
Darrell Jones. (Dan Merlo)
Figure 17 (bottom left ). “Wall/Hole” section of How Can You . . . ? Darrell Jones, David Thomson,
Omagbitse Omagbemi, Gesel Mason. ( Jim Findlay)
136 A u d i e n ce
Figure 18. Ralph Lemon in the “Sunshine Room” section of How Can You . . . ?, before an image of
Hari, the ghost-wife in Solaris. ( Jim Findlay)
if I will return to it, since it is always so doomed. Never say never—I do some-
times enjoy impossible tasks, so maybe I shall once again. For How Can You . . . ?
I offered, and Ralph easily agreed, that our two inspirational short stories
would serve as the only program note, edited down within an inch of their lives
to fit the space. Br’er Rabbit, the unreliable southern hare of African American
folklore who uses his wiles to save his life, and the Hare in the Moon, the
Buddhist rabbit who willingly sacrifices his life, sat uneasily side by side, a
trickster and a saint, offering themselves to any curious audience members not
as explanation, but as a further field of exploration. I felt none of my previous
impulse to “take care” of the audience members and lead them gently up to the
experience of the work to come, for I understood the terms of this work such
that any impulse to shepherd them to the threshold would only protect them
from their own interaction with the event.
Ca t a l y s i s
Ralph has his own narrative of our relationship, one facet of which appears
in his published art journal on Come home Charley Patton. Here he narrates an
imagined scenario—it never happened, not like this, but in another register I
recognize it as something that happened over and over:
A u d i e n ce 137
I imagine walking on stage, into a spotlight, holding a trumpet, my

grandfather’s trumpet . . .
I begin by saying this: To dance about a place you have to . . .
And then I turn my back to the audience, ask a stagehand for a micro-
phone and stand, and now amplified, continue (with little sense of humor).
Will it be useful talking about what’s about to happen, or might we
leave it to the wordless thought process of the body, my body? I ask. . . .
I began with dance as biological physical theater, the theater of my
body forming language. I now reside in my dance as a terrifically broad
question of existence or a series of questions of existence. These impossible
questions become my practice.
And then Katherine . . . Katherine as Mattie, as Mamie Till-Mobley,
as Memphis Minnie, as Mrs. Helen Kent, as Frank Stokes, as Mississippi
Fred Mcdowell, as one-hundred-year-old Walter Carter, as Bruce Nauman,
as James Baldwin . . . planted, stands and calls out from the audience,
“Questions? What are these impossible questions? Maybe you can’t answer
them, but do you have to obscure them? What would happen if you
stopped right there where you are, turned around to face us, started over
and articulated them in detail? Would that be so bad?”
That would be awful, I think to myself, pretending to be a little shocked
that Katherine has interrupted me. No, I say, I won’t stop, I can’t stop and
I won’t turn around; it is my passion. (And now I begin to raise my voice.)
And in defense of my passions, I obscure. I obscure because my real life is
spirited, yes, but also sloppy and mundane. I obscure from you most of
what I eat, sleep, and shit . . . I share and show only what I find possible to
construct, think, imagine, (mask?) outside of the prosaic dailyness of my
existence. I share and show a bunch of deliberately different questions to
the audiences outside of my own private thinking and questioning. These
public questions, questions developed because of an audience, are questions
I can direct, and articulate, fictively. . . .
So maybe before there are questions, any questions, there is only
discursive thinking. Life, unpackaged, unpresentable. Voiceless. And by
obscuring I’m allowed to have a voice . . .
The audience applauds.
Now, may I continue? I say, quite moved by this response.
“Yes, please, go on, I’d like to hear the rest,” Katherine, she, he, they
say.83
Note that Ralph, holding a trumpet, turns his back to the audience—pure
Miles Davis. Note also that when he turns around he asks for a microphone—
he is still aware that the audience is there, and wants to be heard by them, but
he also wants to claim the right to obscure the frontal view. And note that I yell
out from that same audience. This position is familiar to me both literally and
138 A u d i e n ce
Figure 19. Author in rehearsal for Patton. (Dan Merlo)
figuratively—by now I have spent days of my life sitting in empty auditoriums,

doing my thinking from where the audience, those invisible ghosts, would go. I
sit to represent other potential audiences, as I do in Ralph’s image. Racially it
gets complex, since in this passage Ralph imagines my white face standing in
for a long list of mostly black faces, my back-talking voice speaking ( presum-
ably) for theirs. Am I doing them any justice, or just usurping?
What I yell out in this fantasy scenario is an actual quote from an actual
e-mail I once wrote Ralph. In response he does not do what I suggested he
do—of course not. But in answering me, a third thing is catalyzed, which ends
up surprising and moving him, and me, and really all of us sitting out there in
the dark. It’s a fantasy, but a good one.
4
Movement
I n this chapter I examine what the dance dramaturg adds to the larger dis-
course on dramaturgy: the art of attending to movement. This investigation
implies a dialogue with the first chapter on text, touching on some of the same
ground, yet from a very different angle. In the first chapter I examined text
within movement-based performance, exploring how movement and language
signify when placed in juxtaposition. Here I consider how movement signifies
when it is considered on its own terms, and how the dramaturg thinks about
that signification. Yet language, as is its wont, will always keep sneaking back in
the door—as the primary medium for rehearsal room discussions, not to
mention the only medium for this book. This dynamic, the sneaking-back-in, is
familiar to anyone having worked on a “pure movement” dance production,
wherein words are often insufficient, always inevitable, and sometimes invalu-
able to the task at hand.
I have repeatedly argued for an understanding of the dramaturg’s activity
as one of continuous motion—between roles, points of view, physical locations.
To Van Kerkhoven’s dictum “If I stand still, I understand nothing,”1 we can
add Maaike Bleeker’s reminder that dramaturgy, as a mode of looking, must be
predicated not on a stable decoding of signs but rather on thinking itself as
movement, which necessarily shifts and evolves.2 In other words, movement
does not just enable understanding; it describes the very activity of under-
standing. Understanding travels from here to there, slowly (dawning) or quickly
(in a flash), branching more connections along the way. Yet although there
is much that could be gleaned from considering the congruency of the object
and the activity of thought, this chapter focuses primarily on the object—the
human body set loose in motion, in some fashion framed or recognized as dance.
In relation to this subject, my repeated question must be applied: how does
the dramaturg act and think? When considering the human body in motion,
what kind of thinking tends to arise from the dramaturg’s similarly mobile
position?
139
140 Movement
Perceiving Motion
Students or colleagues without much experience in the dance world, who

suddenly find themselves collaborating on a movement-based project, some-
times approach me, concerned that their perceptual and conceptual skills will
not be up to the task and looking for an efficient boost. What stumps them is
simply how to see the moving body. It just will not stay still, and as it slips by,
they feel they do not know what they “should” be noticing. My first response in
these instances is just to reassure them, stating that anyone with a body already
has all the basic equipment required to watch a dance. I ask them to notice and
validate the perceiving and thinking they have likely already been doing in
response to the work, perhaps without labeling it as such. Although repeated
viewings of dance unquestionably boost movement literacy, such literacy can
only build upon this initial faith in the act of viewing.
After all, this is what we do all the time: we watch people and things go by
and perceive what we can of them, on the fly. We already know how to watch
something that will not stay still and derive meaning from it. We do it every
day. It can only be the ways in which performed movement does not resemble
everyday life passing that give neophyte dance dramaturgs pause. The markers
of “dance,” the framing and setting of this performed movement apart from
the rest of the world, are what cause problems.
And so after my first blanket statement of reassurance, asking them to
notice and validate what they are already perceiving, I offer that they can also
explore methods for increasing the range and nuance of perception. For instance,
familiarity with movement vocabularies might help them expand the number
of things they notice as they watch movement performance, and from that
expansion, the facility with which thoughts about that movement arise. Here I
am thinking of vocabularies that are not strictly textual or physical but rather
occur at the intersection of those two realms. These are the sort best taught
experientially, through performing an action and saying a word together. And
so I suggest the student or colleague look into what such vocabularies have to
offer, if they wish to increase movement literacy and expand their existing
range. Not without warning, however, that such vocabularies can cut both
ways, and restrict as well as expand understanding.
Most basic are vocabularies of anatomy. Of course, anatomy does not
actually describe movement. Fixed in words, the body seems static, as if laid out
upon an examining table. But anatomical vocabulary does describe biological
structures that have evolved over the ages to enable movement, that have
movement’s potential inherent within their design. Thus saying the word
“knee” already suggests an ability to move the body’s level up or down, to
Movement 141
absorb the shock of changes in speed, and to propel the body forward or
backward. Dancers from different times and cultural locations have developed
particular vocabularies to notice anatomy, and what they have decided to
name reflects priorities within their particular system of movement. Contempo-
rary European American movement, for instance, has largely adopted the
vocabulary of medicalized anatomy of the same place and time, and has drilled
down to quite a fine level of detail. For instance, in the dance classes I took in the
1990s, an in-depth attention to the skeletal system connected with the frequent
exhortation to students to work “close to the bone.” An awareness of anatomical
differentiation and how it plays out in motion might allow the dramaturg to,
for instance, distinguish a body’s fall to the side as initiated from the rib cage, or
the trochanter, or the top of the skull. Perception expands—where there was
one possible fall, there are now three.
What the dramaturg does with this observation, however, is a separate
question. Is it a distinction without much difference, or does the larger context
for that fall render the distinction significant? That has to be asked. Also: what
other aspects of the fall might this distinction pull focus from? And further: if
the performers have made that distinction significant for themselves, is it always
useful to the dramaturg? The dramaturg would do well to learn the vocabulary
of anatomy but then place it at arm’s length, not embracing every moment of
the performance as explained in those terms, but rather oscillating between
that view and the view of an eventual audience member. After all, fine anatomi-
cal distinctions can be made relevant to every single movement as experienced
by the mover but will less frequently rise to the fore as significant from the audi-
ence’s perspective.
Where anatomical terminology concerns a body with potential for move-
ment, other vocabularies set out to describe and analyze the features of move-
ment itself. Part of my toolkit when I began working as a dance dramaturg
was a basic understanding of the vocabulary developed by Rudolf Laban and
furthered by followers such as Irmgard Bartenieff. Laban Movement Analysis,
which first flowered in twentieth-century Europe and continues to this day,
encourages the viewer to regard a sequence of movement through a variety of
prisms. Foremost it is organized by the four interrelated categories of Body
(how movement is organized or initiated within the body), Effort (characterizing
the dynamics or intention of the movement), Shape (the way the body both
takes on and changes shape during the course of the given movement), and
Space (how that movement relates to both the immediate space around the
body and the larger space beyond that). A full discussion of this finely wrought
system is far beyond the scope of this chapter, but it is worth noting that the
Effort category in particular has been used often in theater schools, serving
142 Movement
Euro-American actors, and not just dancers, training to use and understand
their bodies. By dividing Effort into four subcategories and proposing a con-
tinuum between a binary pair of terms for each one, Laban created a way to
name and notice a range of different motion dynamics and the intentions they
might imply. Use of Weight could range from strong to light, Space from direct
to indirect, Time from sudden to sustained, and Flow from bound to free, and
the combinations of these variables could spawn an even larger, if finite, number
of possibilities.
Even without understanding how all the components of Laban’s system
interrelate, it is fairly easy to see how this vocabulary might expand the range of
perception. If, when faced with a flurry of motion, one does not know what to
notice, or where to begin, grabbing hold of a Laban term and using it to interro-
gate the experience can provide a point of entry. How are these performers
using the space around them? Are their dynamics sudden, or sustained, or
alternating between both? If sudden, do they feel more like a Punch or a Flick
or a Slash? Answering those inquiries, the motion of thought springs to life.
The usefulness of the vocabulary is in how it generates initiating questions.
At the same time, it is easy to see how it might limit a range of possible
perception, insofar as this sort of movement analysis claims universality, claims
to have catalogued all possible options. Eventually one comes up against the
limits of the taxonomical system—what it cannot include, what it inescapably
prioritizes. Writing in 1997 about the then relatively new project of cultural
studies in dance, Jane C. Desmond offered that Laban’s system could offer useful
analytic tools to perform close readings of dance across cultural locations, yet
she cautioned that it was always most relevant to the movement in its own time,
place, and context. She concluded that though such systems were useful, ulti-
mately “no one system will be sufficient.”3 Similarly, to that putative student or
colleague wanting to work on movement-based performance for the first time,
I suggest both some basic familiarity with Laban-based movement analysis and
a healthy dose of skepticism as well.
I easily encountered both the usefulness and the limitations of my anatomi-
cal and movement-analysis vocabularies in the Geography rehearsal room. For
instance, they helped me begin to think about the differences I was seeing be-
tween the stances and styles of West African movement (Ivoirean and Guinean)
from Djédjé, Angelo, James, Nai, and Moussa, and American postmodern 4
dance from Ralph and Carlos (as well as Carlos’s capoeira-inflected house
dancing, which was a third system with some similarities to both). I did not
consciously decide “now I shall apply these vocabularies,” but they had been a
part of my training up until that point and so inevitably informed what I was
disposed to notice and how I articulated it to myself.
Movement 143
I started by noticing the stances out of which both groups initiated move-
ment. Before I began work on Geography I would have said: “African dance
moves lower to the ground, with bended knee, and the New York postmodern
sort is more elevated and extended.” That was easy enough, and not entirely
untrue, but watching these performers over and over allowed me to observe
more finely and move beyond generalizations. The West African dance I saw
was not just “down low” altogether, but rather seemed to organize the body
split in half at the waist, with the lower half putting weight down into the
ground but the upper half reaching up and out, extending to the heavens.
Ralph’s body, on the other hand, often did pull up out of the ground in its
entirety, resisting instead of emphasizing gravity, particularly in the springy
circular jumps that were in those years a hallmark. Yet when it released into a
stronger use of weight, it released in its entirely. Or, on the occasions when it
also split at the waist, it was the upper half that preferred to give in to gravity,
not the lower. Meanwhile, the West African dancers had a much stronger use
of rhythm within a weighted lower body—that seemed obvious even before I
began, but as the days went by I had the full complexity of those rhythms better
impressed upon me. And the West Africans had a more prominent sense of
symmetry in motion, where a movement made on the right side of the body
was often repeated with the same move on the left, or at least balanced out by a
similar move. Ralph and Carlos almost pathologically refused symmetry or
repetition, always “changing it up.”
What made these observations more than academic was how they allowed
me to see when and how we might be hitting a productive hybridity, once we
had discovered the recursive translation and collage exercises that generated
the majority of the movement material in Geography. The process was not a
smooth one. After spending the first days of the initial workshop proposing
movements off his own body, Ralph still found the performers’ proffered trans-
lations of his movement unrewarding to watch. It quickly became clear that
this was not a way to build an interesting hybrid language—it was only a way to
make our guests feel that all their existing syntax and fluency was irrelevant to
the task. Soon Ralph brought in a new approach. He watched the West African
dancers improvise, offered them a movement passage where he was trying (and
failing) to move like them, and then asked them to try (and inevitably fail) to
copy his copy. This recursive translation process became key, as the West African
dancers’ failure to approximate Ralph’s movement, built as it was on top of
Ralph’s failure to approximate West African movement, turned out to be a
much more interesting sort of failure. Gradually the group built a new move-
ment vocabulary that certainly resembled the dancing at which our West African
guests excelled, and made use of their hard-won aptitude, but was nevertheless
144 Movement
Figure 20. Geography. From left to right : Zaoli “Tapé” Mabo on drums, Carlos Funn, Djédjé Djédjé
Gervais, Kouakou “Angelo” Yao, Didier “James” Akpa, Moussa Diabate, Nai Zou. (© T Charles
Erickson)
in dialogue with, and informed by, another set of dynamics and shapes that
were more familiar to Ralph’s body. A shared language grew out of a basic
social impulse for mimicry, crucially allowed to work in both directions, its
imperfections building something a little bit new for all involved.
When Ralph imitated his guests’ dancing, and then asked them to imitate
his imitation, movement vocabularies provided me some tools to break down
and think about the outcome. Some recursive translations were more immedi-
ately interesting than others. Some seemed to create a productive clash, as
familiar and unfamiliar modes jostled against each other; others generated only
an ungainly self-consciousness. How could we increase the former sort? It seemed
that if Ralph initiated the exercise by moving as close as he was able to his guests’
base of support (ankles and knees flexed, low to the ground) and attempted
some variety of rhythmical translation (though he could never offer them any-
thing like a confident copy of West African rhythms), then dancers like Djédjé
and James could interpret his interpretation in a way that remained sufficiently
within their core competencies to avoid a full-on ungainliness. Translating his
imperfect translation might take them off their strengths in other ways—pushing
them into a sequencing dynamic instead of an explosive simultaneity of move-
ment, blocking an impulse for symmetry. Their body assumptions had to shift
in response to his task, but as long as Ralph engaged them with a translation
that left them most of their base, they seemed inspired by the challenge, rather
than completely awkward or inexpert. Djédjé and James, for their part, offered
Movement 145
Figure 21. Didier “James” Akpa and Djédjé Djédjé Gervais in “Endurance” section of Geography, in
front of Nari Ward’s bottle curtain. (© T Charles Erickson)
Ralph translations of his movement that clarified and extended the new,
asymmetrical rhythms he had been groping toward, awkwardly. It was as if
they were restating what he had not quite known how to say, giving his halting
words a syntax. The experiments also pushed them into upper-body dynamics
that looked not quite like his or theirs, but mystifyingly neither.
Slowly, as the cast repeated and discussed these sorts of experiments, we
were able to speculate, “if we play primarily with these and these recognizable
factors, we will increase our chances of seeing something we don’t recognize.”
And I had a language to reflect back to Ralph what I thought was going on, to
enter a dialogue about how to encourage the kinds of moves that seemed fruitful
within our established terms, as well as to ask questions about the assumptions
we were making along the way. One assumption we named and discussed—
that Ralph would always ask his collaborators to remove repetition and symme-
try from their dancing—eventually flipped on its head near the end of the piece.
In the final month of work, as he crafted the last section, Ralph asked James
and Djédjé if they would each choose a very short, symmetrical step and repeat
it for eight minutes straight. This section, dubbed “Endurance” (said with a
French accent, no matter who was speaking), functioned as a choreographic
146 Movement
return of the repressed. It was clear that our ability to name and discuss what
had been omitted had catalyzed the moment when it rushed back in.
At the same time, it was fairly easy to hit up against the limits of the vocabu-
laries I used to describe and discuss bodies in motion. By keeping up a dialogue
with the dancers (something for which I benefited from being able to speak
French more than I benefited from any movement vocabularies), I exposed
myself to what those vocabularies could not capture, and tried to train myself
away from formulaic understandings. In particular, I noticed that my own
brand of movement analysis was entirely inadequate to the task of apprehending
rhythmic complexity in movement. Perhaps a musician’s vocabulary would
have been more fitted to the task, but unless that musician knew West African
dance, she or he would not have been able to account for how those rhythms
took up residence in the moving body, and did so differently in different ana-
tomical locations. The performers were obviously the best arbiters of how this
subject could be discussed, and among them the drummers were often better
than the dancers in analyzing how rhythm and movement intersected. Often,
when rehearsal ground to a halt to discuss the intricacies of a particular passage
of dancing, drummers Tapé and Goulei came to the fore. They would sing the
rhythm as a sentence, understanding it more grammatically than mathemati-
cally, as they demonstrated how the body could participate in that song and
grammar.
My vocabularies were also of little use in understanding our guests’ motiva-
tions for movement. Laban’s Effort actions help disclose and articulate the
“hows” of one’s moving and are supposed to point toward intention, but they
do not go so far as to really uncover the “whys.” Yet the “whys” were the first
thing the West Africans wanted to talk about, whenever they initiated a discus-
sion on the contrasts between their dancing and Ralph’s. They found Ralph’s
way of dancing to be, as Djédjé put it, “exclusively physical,” without the spiritual
component they found familiar and essential to their work. (Certainly some
West African dances were more spiritual than others, but even the most secular,
everyday dances, such as the ones with which we were working, were performed
with a sense of spiritual connection and intention.) They also found Ralph’s
dance isolating, valorizing the individual over the collective. The complex
rhythms that I lacked the vocabulary to adequately describe were one part of
what made West African dance a communal endeavor, as the rhythm offered a
sense of something larger in which all could participate. Our guests’ comments
quickly pinpointed the blind spots of my existing vocabularies for understanding
movement. Both my anatomical language and Laban-inspired movement
analysis broke down the moving body on an overwhelmingly formal basis,
without mentioning much of a “why” for moving, and were biased toward
considering the body in isolation, one anatomy at a time.5
Movement 147
So to the colleague or student working on a movement-based performance

for the first time, I recommend, but then just as quickly qualify, the kind of
vocabularies I have mentioned thus far. In so doing I ultimately fall back on my
first statement: if you have a body of your own, you already have the basic
equipment required to perceive bodies in motion. Basic, and ultimately most
important. In landing there, I implicitly land on the concept of “kinesthetic
empathy.” This is the idea that human beings, perceiving other bodies in motion,
inevitably feel a connection and respond through conjuring what it would be
like to execute that motion. In other words, as a viewer, my perception of a
moving body cannot be usefully separated from my imagining, or attempted
imagining, of what it might be like for my body to move that way. The way
I perceive and understand movement is all wrapped up in experiencing it
vicariously—and this process remains in effect even if my body has zero training
and I am watching a trained virtuoso. Or so the argument goes, for matters are
never quite so simple.
Susan Leigh Foster has recently elaborated the concept of kinesthetic empa-
thy at length, looking at it as a historically specific concept that has shifted over
time, in terms of its associated science, aesthetics, and politics.6 She tracks how
American Modern dance critic John Martin put forward a theory of dance’s
contagion, whereby the viewer “caught” the sensation of the dance in his or her
own body and, from there, could directly access whatever emotion the choreog-
rapher had used as a source for the dance. In Martin’s view movement—besides
being perfectly contagious—was also the perfect conductor for emotive states
and perfectly universal. Everyone could catch it, equally, and would access the
same seed emotion. Indeed Martin’s universalist confidence seems a fine
Modernist sibling to Laban’s universalist confidence.
Fast-forward to the 1990s, when neuroscientists introduced the concept of
the mirror neuron to the world, to the excitement of performance scholars
seeking tools to theorize audience reception. The name “mirror neuron” seems
to ratify Martin’s belief that kinesthetic empathy operates regularly, and with
the near-perfect transmission that a mirror’s reflection implies. Indeed, experi-
ments by Alain Berthoz and others have shown that when subjects watch a
body in motion, neurons associated with their bodies performing that same
motion are firing silently in the brain, in resonance.7 And yet, there is an impor-
tant difference from Martin’s hypothesis regarding the power of dance. For as
Foster clarifies, the kinesthetic empathy created via mirror neurons can only go
so far. It attaches only to physical behavior, and not further to the rich emotions
or associations we might derive from that behavior. Those ingredients remain
specific to the individual’s cultural knowledge and past experience.
What’s more, other experiments have demonstrated that the degree of
stimulation of the mirror neurons varies depending on the subject’s familiarity
148 Movement
with the system of movement observed. In a fascinating study with obvious

resonances for the intercultural rehearsal rooms of the Geography Trilogy, practi-
tioners of ballet and capoeira had the activity of their mirror neurons measured
while they observed dancers of their own form and the contrasting form.8
When they viewed movement within the form in which they had been trained,
their neural activity was significantly higher. This does not mean that there was
no kinesthetic empathy with an unfamiliar form, but that kinesthetic empathy
clearly increases with a shared base of body-knowledge, found in a shared
cultural practice. As Foster puts it, “disciplining of the body produces a distinc-
tive kinesthetic sense of the body, and it is this experience of the body, its move-
ment, and its location that, in turn, sets the limits and conditions within which
an empathetic connection to another can emerge.”9
Thus although the fact of having a body may be enough to grant some
kinesthetic empathy and encourage a viewer to perceive movement more fully,
potential dance dramaturgs are right to wonder if there is something else they
could do to increase perceptual range. Current science suggests one action:
attempt to put the movement of that particular discipline into your own body.
Especially if the dance in question is outside of one’s cultural parameters, but
even if it is not, take a dance class in the relevant form, or many classes. Ask a
performer to teach a passage. These sorts of gestures are not answers in and of
themselves, but they could be the first steps in a much longer process. At the
very least, they allow for an important dose of humility, and better questions.
No match for cultural immersion and years of training, they can nevertheless
catalyze new empathies, new perceptual possibilities.
In terms of understanding intention or emotion behind movement, one
part of the answer is to ask (easy to say, but not always so easy to do) and listen
(harder still). Ask a performer to explain what they feel, or what they intend,
when they move as they do. The answer to “why dance?” is offered both by the
larger cultural system in which a dance originates and by the individual dancers
through whom it thrives. As discussed in chapter 2, the performers constitute
the embodied archive; in many instances the research that needs to be done is
close at hand, with them.
How Movement Means
Thus far I have addressed what might amplify the dramaturg’s ability to perceive
the body in motion and looked at the vocabularies that aided me in attending
to anatomy, stance, and dynamics—as well as the very real limits of these
vocabularies. But I have not yet fully addressed how the dance makes meaning
in a given performance context. If understanding a vocabulary that differentiates
Movement 149
movement, trusting the kinesthetic empathy one has and taking steps to increase
it, can both grow the range and nuance of what is perceived in motion, what
then moves the dramaturg from expanding perceptions to questioning how
significance arises? After we perceive the body in motion, or inquire after what
we cannot perceive, how do we understand how potential meanings begin to
layer one on top of another or shift from moment to moment? These types of
questions are more relational—instead of just attending to the dancer’s physical
stance, overarching dynamics, or larger purpose, we attend to the way one
moment of the dance, or one aspect of its execution, relates to another. We
move beyond the building blocks of vocabulary, and the frame of context and
intention, and start to ask questions about a grammar, or syntax, of motion.
The concern becomes not just what we perceive, but how we relate one percep-
tion to another. We attend to meaning constructed in motion across, between,
or through different impressions. And of course to all these questions of how
movement makes meaning there must always be appended: makes meaning to
whom?
Here I am purposefully not asking what the dance means, but rather asking
how. The “how” is what the dramaturg attends to by observing, imagining, and
conjuring the various articulated structures, contrasts, references and modes of
performance that might come to the fore as the viewer perceives bodies in
motion. If what the eventual spectator can perceive is contingent on her training
and experience, exactly what meaning she builds from those perceptions will
be even more contingent. Variability in meaning is in all cases true, but espe-
cially true in my own contemporary American performance context, which
actively encourages and invites those emancipated spectators to build their
own meanings in relation to the work. The West African dancers of Geography
and the Odissi dancers of Tree would not have spoken about how their dance
made meaning in quite the same way. Nevertheless, working as a dramaturg
within my own cultural context, I attempted to identify the structures-over-
time to which a wide range of different viewers would most likely attach their
variable meanings, and tried to account for cultural difference within that
range. By concentrating on the “how” and not the “what,” my observations
and imaginings had a much better shot at relevance.
Susan Leigh Foster, in her 1986 work Reading Dancing, broke down the
“how” in how movement makes meaning with a detailed semiological analysis.
Even within her narrowly defined focus—the twentieth-century American
concert dance tradition—she found a wide variety of answers. She treated four
bodies of choreographic work from one overarching cultural milieu as each
constituting a “discrete cultural system”10 and acknowledged that broadening
her view outside of the American concert-dance context in which she was
150 Movement
physically trained would necessarily have expanded her range of answers

manyfold. My ruminations are in harmony with Foster’s structural approach,
but without embracing her level of systematic detail. I also attempt again to
notice what this formalism, my twentieth-century American inheritance, leaves
out.
Defining “literacy” in dance, Foster asserts that “only the viewer who retains
visual, aural and kinesthetic impressions of the dance as it unfolds in time can
compare succeeding moments of the dance, noticing similarities, variations,
and contrasts and comprehending larger patterns . . . and finally the dance as a
whole.”11 In this passage Foster seems confident that once passing impressions
have been retained, plucked from the flow of time and filed in memory for
comparison, then the viewer will hold the key to parsing movement’s flow. In
this model, memory takes the temporal and renders it spatial; memory allows
the viewer to hold different moments next to each other for a side-by-side
compare-and-contrast. This characterization seems familiar yet unsettling, for
isn’t apprehending movement also about reckoning with that quotient that
escapes us? Nevertheless, I do recognize a basic skill here. Literacy in dance
does correspond to an increase in the number of perceptions of the dance the
viewer can hold in memory, as they pass by on the fly. And understanding the
relational nature of a dance will inevitably require assembling a collection of
impressions to relate. However, I want to hold on to this image of dance literacy
and return to it later, when I suggest that it is a model for reading dance the
dramaturg might want to both learn and unlearn.
I turn now to the rehearsal rooms of Tree to unfold my thinking. Remem-
bering the activities in those rooms gives me ample opportunity to think about
how different cultural systems of movement offer contrasting answers to the
“how” of how movement makes meaning. On top of that, Tree’s juxtaposition
of more than one system of movement within a single (American, early twenty-
first century, proscenium) frame created another level of movement between
disparate forms, and thus yet another “how” for this dramaturg to interrogate.
On the first day of a summer 1999 workshop, early on in the process, work
began with just Ralph, David, Asako, and me. Other collaborators were to arrive
within a few days. This was my first introduction to both David, a NYC post-
modern dancer Ralph had known for years, and Asako, the Japanese Odissi
dancer whom Ralph had asked to join us after she’d come as a visitor to a
previous workshop.12 They warmed up quietly on the proscenium stage, the
backstage doors of which had been flung open to an uncharacteristically mild
summer breeze. Ralph, for his part, had just returned from a research trip to Bali
and confessed he was still feeling half there. He called us to order by suggesting
each performer attempt an extended solo, in whatever style of movement he or
Movement 151
she was currently investigating. Thus he and David would improvise in turn,
and Asako, who explained she did not want to improvise, would present a
dance from the Odissi repertoire.
Before coming to this workshop I had done some preliminary research into
Odissi, as best I could through some videos at the New York Public Library for
the Performing Arts. I knew in very general terms what it looked like, and I
knew it was vaunted as a dance form built from temple sculpture. One docu-
mentary had intoned, “dance is body sculpture, sculpture is frozen dance.”13 I
was interested to see what would happen when this movement form, which
seemed to so valorize the dancer’s arrival in set poses, was seen against Ralph’s
movement, which increasingly valorized momentum and flow over any sort of
held shape. In the margins of my notebook, I had drawn a little diagram,
imagining what these two forms plus Djédjé’s West African dance might be in
juxtaposition. I had Odissi and postmodern dance (at least Ralph’s sort) sharing
a feeling of sustained calm, while West African dance felt sudden and explosive.
I had West African dance and Odissi sharing a rhythmic stepping with weight
down into the ground, while postmodern dance skimmed and glided across.
And I had West African dance and postmodern dance sharing a love of energetic
flow, while Odissi seemed to prefer the bound control of a carefully chosen
shape. This balanced diagram was, of course, yet to be tested by the reality of
rehearsals, which would render its congruences and contrasts much less tidy.
But it was an example of my starting to grapple with the differences in movement
I might perceive, without at all yet grappling with how those differences might
make meaning, or how these artists might fulfill or debunk my expectations.
The second grappling began on that summer day. Ralph stood to share his
solo improvisation first. He explained that he was fascinated by the Balinese
dance he had just seen on his travels, which had a similar level of precision to
Odissi, as well as a similar expressive use of hands and eyes. He explained that
he did not want to study another cultural form unless he could study it for a
really long time, but he was willing to let another form shake him up, and felt
it was OK to play with what he thought it was suggesting. And with that he
launched into his dance. Immediately I saw him riding a tension between a
sense of physical precision he had witnessed in Bali and an older love of aban-
don arriving in swoops and sweeps. He found very particular, small, and re-
strained shapes emphasizing his hands and eyes—not at all Balinese dance,
and not claiming to be, but somehow rhyming with it. Then, once these small
shapes were established, he immediately broke them with an aggressive move-
ment on a much larger scale. Repeated explosions went off, showcasing Ralph
as creator and destroyer, a dancer with impatience and a generative sense of
unease.
152 Movement
How did this movement make meaning? Taken by itself without other
context, it signified by presenting a clear and productive tension between two
modes, onto which a viewer might project all manner of oppositions. For the
moment I was content to read it, within the context of Ralph’s recent trip, as
the tension between absorbing and resisting influences from outside one’s
comfort zone, played out in repeated iterations. The clarity of that tension
offered the loudest “how” of this movement’s syntax; “what” it meant still
depended on the associations the viewer would bring to it. Would another
viewer, without my inside information on Ralph’s trip, be able to read the
precise work with hands and eyes as signs of another cultural influence? Or
would she just fold it in to an understanding of how Ralph’s movement syntax
made meaning within his own culture, valorizing a relentless exploration across
different anatomic possibilities?
David was next. This was the first time I saw him dance, first of many times
to follow. I was expecting something similar to Ralph’s postmodern mode, just
without the Balinese influence. Instead, he offered us another stark contrast,
between a collection of pedestrian movements exploring the space and selected
flights of buttery postmodern movement. This was still a collision, but a different
sort. David executed the pedestrian movements with a performance quality
that felt representational, causing this viewer to think “hey, there is a charac-
ter up there exploring the space, who is he?” When he inspected the ropes that
led up to the flies, sat down on the edge of the stage, he was not just a “neutral
doer” distilling everyday actions out of context; rather, he was conjuring a con-
text for those everyday actions. And that context was decidedly psychological—
there was a person up there with desires and intentions, who might or might
not be the same person as David. Meanwhile, when he exploded into loping,
sequenced postmodern movement, he seemed, like Ralph, to be valorizing the
flow of the anatomically articulate body in an act of presentation more than
representation.
Because we regularly read everyday actions to discern intentions in daily
life, it was easy enough to do it here too. The representational aspect of the
pedestrian actions, and the concomitant invitation to read a psychological
state, was the “how” of one-half of his movement’s signification. The “what”
still depended on how eagerly the viewer took up the invitation and who the
viewer decided that character was. Not to mention how the viewer might read
David’s other mode, with its more full-bodied, non-everyday postmodern
dancing, or the passage moving between the two modes. For instance, when he
shifted from one to the other, was that the character’s decision to dance, or
David’s decision to leave the character behind?
Movement 153
Asako performed last. She had already explained her reluctance to engage
in any sort of improvisation. (In fact, it went beyond reluctance—when Ralph
later asked her to try, just try, she stood frozen on the stage, unable to move.)
Unlike Ralph and David, she felt she could only perform the steps she had
learned from years of careful study. “If I change something, then I feel like I
cannot find the energy of the form,” she explained.14 She could locate a sense
of freedom in her dancing too, but only within the form, not by breaking it.
This meant the kind of hybrid experimentation in which the Geography dancers
had participated would not be an option here. And with that, she tightly laced
her ankle bells, hit ‘play’ on her recorded accompaniment, and began. She
showed us a Moksha, which means “release” or “spiritual liberation,” the type
of piece that traditionally concludes an Odissi concert.
It was quite different to see Odissi live instead of on the grainy NYPL docu-
mentaries, which had offered me many still images of dancers in sculptural
poses and fewer clips of the dance in motion. I leaned in to see what I thought
of the nature of the movement between the poses. How was this a dance in-
stead of a series of stills? Although the poses gave the dance its structure, the
flights between the poses created its sense of awe, especially when, as charac-
teristic of a Moksha, the poses came faster and faster near the end. Asako titrated
momentum so that it was always the right amount, not too much nor too little,
to land her exactly at pose A, then B, then C in the correct timing, her stepping
rhythms matching the drums to a tee. Her dance was extremely presentational
insofar as every gesture seemed beautifully proffered, saying “here, this is for
you.” And what was on offer did not seem easy. The poses, many based on
Odissi’s hallmark Tribhanga posture, where the body makes three extreme lateral
bends, looked difficult to integrate as a postural norm. That impression was
confirmed for me several days later when I asked Asako to try and teach me a
few basics.
Something else was going on too, something I could not quite put my finger
on, but I wondered if it had to do with Asako’s background as a Japanese
woman performing an Indian form. Her nondance training on how to inhabit
her body occurred fully within Japanese culture until her mid-twenties. Only
then did she discover Odissi, soon thereafter leaving home to study it intensively
in Orissa. So although her kinesthetic sense of the dance had been formed in an
Indian cultural context, it was layered over a more basic kinesthetic sense of
her body, long developed in a Japanese cultural context. Jane C. Desmond has
noted that precisely such clashes are worthy of study, as they require us to think
about how the trained dancing body relates to “norms of nondance bodily
expression.”15 As I watched Asako I tried to capture what I was sensing in my
Figure 22. Asako Takami in Tribhanga pose, wearing traditional Odissi costume. (Bob Giles)
Movement 155
notebook, using too many question marks to signal how awkward the pronounce-
ment felt: “feels like she is performing a Japanese tea ceremony with the poses
of Odissi????”16 For Asako, every passage between sculptural poses was rendered
as full and important as the arrival; she filled all interstitial moments with ex-
treme care and precision. The static positions were all India, but in the manner
she passed between them—in those micro-moments of escape—something
about her Japanese body-knowledge glimmered through. And she never
seemed to break a sweat, figuratively, though literally she always did. Years
later, at her memorial service, a fellow Odissi dancer eulogized her unique
movement quality as an inimitable combination of “softness and steel.”17
How did Asako’s dancing make meaning? Obviously my viewing of her
solo occurred across a greater cultural divide than did my viewing of Ralph’s or
David’s. My answer to how any dance made meaning would always be culturally
specific, no matter which dance, but looking at Odissi I was acutely aware that
there were people for whom this dance signified differently. That awareness
became part of what I apprehended. Foremost, I knew enough to know that
many of the mudras (hand gestures) operated as a code, a sign language, and
that their meanings were amplified by corresponding eye gestures and body
postures. Thus within the dance’s presentational mode, there was also a complex
mode of representation at work. The Moksha does not convey a full narrative
story as some other Odissi dances do, but nevertheless Asako’s mudras had
possible textual translations. My research had also let me know that within
India only a subset of the population can translate the meanings of these mudras;
the larger group cannot. Thus Odissi, by requiring a high level of literacy to
understand its representational depth, tends to create different strata of appre-
ciation, even within its home culture. In the closest layer, the “how” of making
meaning occurs through a complex translation of movement into story and
textual description. In more distant layers, the viewer might perceive that such
a complex syntax was at work, but not possess the ability to get inside that
system—intuiting the existence of a closer layer without receiving access to it.
Meanwhile the dance’s sense of presentation throughout (Asako’s eyes and
frontal stance seeming to subtitle each deliberate gesture with the phrase “for
you”)—and its rhythmic patterns (which in the Moksha slowly and patiently
built in speed and complexity) were also key to how this dance made meaning.
The presentational aspect might lead a viewer to feel that her own reaction to
the dance was important, thereby creating a mystifying tension in those instances
where she did not have full access to the choreography’s code—wait, is this
dance for me, or rather not at all for me? (A little more inquiry would reveal
that the dance was indeed meant as an offering, but to the gods more than to a
human audience, so the latter conclusion was more accurate.) Meanwhile
156 Movement
Asako’s rhythms all iterated to completion, never breaking before they were
finished, implying a patience and a coherence that the syntax of Ralph’s solo
did not offer.
After viewing all three solos in isolation, Ralph and David began improvising
a series of experimental duets alongside Asako’s Mokshas and Pallavis (a Pallavi is
another nonnarrative Odissi dance, often translated as “elaboration,” that also
gets more complex and faster as it continues). We watched them, videotaped
them for later watching, and discussed them at length between each attempt.
My speculations (both private and shared) turned from how these three offerings
made meaning in isolation to how they might make meaning in juxtaposition—
noting that Ralph’s and David’s offerings had each already contained a sense
of juxtaposition, and that juxtaposition itself was part of Ralph’s cultural tool-
box. Now two performers shared the stage space, as well as sharing Asako’s
recorded accompaniment. The sense of motion compounded—not only was
there a single body moving in space, but there was also the movement of the
viewer moving across and between two bodies, across and between two or
more systems of signification.
When Asako and David shared the stage, he frequently resorted to his
pedestrian improvisations. Sometimes he became an everyday character who
was mutely encountering an Odissi dancer for the first time, and thus a surro-
gate, perhaps, for American audience members. Asako made eye contact with
David periodically, but otherwise this juxtaposition framed him as an active
observer and her as a constant observed, even though she was physically moving
even more than him. At other points he explored the space, physically close to
her dance but lost in his own world. In those instances the baseline of his every-
day movement range rendered her expanded and highly particular movement
range all the more extraordinary, and meaning arose through how his actions
framed and amplified hers.
When Ralph and Asako tried sharing the stage, she similarly proceeded
through an intricate Moksha or Pallavi, beginning to end. Ralph, having left the
Balinese-inspired movement behind, alternated between large, swooping move-
ments traveling quickly across the stage and small moments of stasis or miniscule
shifts in weight. Even his small moments, however, did not feel pedestrian; they
seemed like a postmodern dancer’s body exploring slight differences in stance,
meditatively, with an internal focus. His dance, moment to moment, conveyed
a sense of testing exploration; Asako’s dance, moment to moment, conveyed a
fulfillment of her form, each gesture invested to the utmost. When Ralph’s
movement got too large or impatient, he pulled focus too thoroughly from
Asako; when he stayed small for a long time, he disappeared and the reverse
occurred. But in the midzone it seemed like a fruitful dialogue across two very
Movement 157
different languages. One movement system was devoted, intricate, and out-
wardly focused; the other was restless, internally focused, and shifted like the
weather.
We watched the experiments live, then sat to watch some of the videos.
And then all four of us discussed. I remember a clear disagreement between
Ralph and me. After watching his own attempts, he declared, “This duet idea
has a short life if it’s just about movement; it needs some of the drama David
was layering on.” I countered: “I think it has a short life if it’s just about a pedes-
trian dramatic relationship. In that situation Asako just becomes the constant,
as David reacts to her—that’s not such a great basis for a dialogue.”18 We went
back and forth, hashing out moments on the video that seemed to offer a path
forward. We wanted some ideas for how a collaboration between Ralph or
David’s mode and Asako’s mode could make meaning in a way that seemed
promising, taking into account the baseline given that Asako’s choreography
could not be altered. We searched for the “how” that would confer a hint of the
way forward.
Ralph eventually concluded, “It’s not a duet. Perhaps Asako has a number
of partners that come and go. A pedestrian dramatic person who’s there the
whole time, and a physical, postmodern mover who comes and goes.” And
with one important alteration, this decision was where we ended up, about a
year later. Ralph took his conclusion that day in the workshop and multiplied it
by two. Asako was joined by Mano, the male Odissi dancer from Orissa, and the
two of them performed a Pallavi duet; this danced relationship was juxtaposed
with a pedestrian dramatic relationship staged in parallel by David and Wen
Hui. Then both were refracted into flights of traveling postmodern choreog-
raphy that Ralph devised, which blew another pair, Cheng-Chieh and Yeko,
across the stage in intermittent bursts. Because there were eventually three
pairs instead of three soloists, the section made meaning as a relationship re-
fracted through three different lenses, rather than a relationship of strangeness
and unfamiliarity between three individuals. This “Pallavi” section, as we called
it, continually tested my understanding of how movement made meaning. As I
looked across it, modes of signification shifted continually, those shifts then
layering on another sort of motion.
As we watched the various improvisations that became Tree’s “Pallavi” sec-
tion and discussed which avenues felt compelling, we were looking for how this
could make meaning, not what it meant. In looking for our hint of a way forward,
we looked for an idea of where meaning could take up residence, through which
relationships between which moving parts, rather than looking for a meaning
fully formed. A large part of the dramaturg’s job, watching a movement passage
evolve, is to help locate the syntactical relationships where meaning will likely
158 Movement
form—without necessarily being sure what that meaning could be—and seek
to accentuate them. The dramaturg wants to recognize a certain richness
across the body or bodies in motion, whether it be the richness of many intricate
steps or the richness of utter stillness. The perception of that richness is subjective
of course, for subjective perception is all that is ever on offer. The dramaturg
seeks to apprehend a richness of the “how” that holds potential for even more,
and to reflect this observation back in dialogue with the choreographer.
Deskilling and Disassembly
My discussion of how the dance dramaturg might extend her perception of

movement took place on primarily structural grounds, based on using textual/
physical vocabularies as tools to interrogate what is in front of her. My discussion
of how movement begins to make meaning, as the viewer tracks relationships
between disparate perceptions, was also primarily structural. Foster’s description
of dance literacy, in particular, focuses on what factors of the dance the observer
can fix in memory in order to then perceive the structural relationships between
them. However in my work with Ralph of late, increasingly the task of attending
to a moving body and wondering how it might accrue meaning involves some-
thing a little different—viewing not to discern structures within motion, but
rather to see motion revealing structure in the process of falling apart. Given
that dramaturgy is so often discussed as attending to the coherence of structure,
this dramaturgy of disassembly offers a provocative and telling challenge.
In other words, my task involves viewing a dance that may not want to
give the viewer a perceivable structure on which to hang her interpretive hat,
but may instead be trying its utmost to disintegrate structure. This impulse in
Ralph’s work can be traced back all the way to a foundational image for the
Geography Trilogy. When in 1995 he dissolved the Ralph Lemon Dance Company
and its body of work, he sent his supporters a mailing announcing a new project-
based approach to making work and shared the following journal entry: “I
imagine the body having the choice to come apart at all of its skeletal connec-
tions bringing flesh, muscle and blood along with the separation. And then
coming back together again. That would make me happy.”19 This was Ralph’s
dream of sparagmos, or ritual dismemberment, with the body (and by extension,
body of work) coming apart at its joints, anatomy disassembled. The path of
our fifteen years of exploration can be read as the elaboration of the potential,
both disturbing and generative, held in that image, and has implications not
just for Ralph’s sense of choreography but my sense of dramaturgy.
Ralph’s attraction to the disintegration of body and movement structure
can also be read in light of the current discourse, most common in the visual
arts, around “deskilling.” Deskilling entered arts vocabulary in the wake of
Movement 159
Duchamp and the readymade, referring to a rejection of a previously gained

artistic competence, in order to shift priorities and reveal the values that virtuos-
ity obscures. Ralph’s work in the Geography Trilogy was certainly a deskilling of
his postmodern, release-based movement competencies. (American postmodern
movement can in some instances be characterized as already deskilled, most
particularly in the early days of the Judson Dance theater, but the movement
techniques that Ralph developed in 1985–1995 with his dance company par-
took of the new, release-based virtuosity that reentered the postmodern dance
of that period.) Initially he staged the deskilling of his technique through its
clash with the very different set of priorities and competencies of West African
dance. This approach to intercultural collaboration as a strategy for physical
disassembly—in which collaborators from other cultures were also invited to
disassemble their own expertise and did so to variable extents—continued
through Tree. Patton was not as actively intercultural, though Djédjé’s continued
presence did further that thread. But Patton’s play with the faulty processes of
memory and translation, and in particular its final three-minute “Ecstasy” im-
provisation, further enacted a deskilling and falling apart.
Deskilling and disassembly reached their most complete expression in How
Can You . . . ?, particularly the work for “Wall/Hole,” the twenty-minute furious
movement passage. I have previously covered “Wall/Hole” both in light of the
relationship it enacted between language and movement (chapter 1) and the
way it initially denied the presence of the audience (chapter 3). Indeed, the way
that movement was generated, through keywords that it consumed and dis-
carded in turn, and the ways it attempted to deny spectatorship are part and
parcel of how it continually fell apart. But there was more to it than that. The
ways in which “Wall/Hole” fell apart also evoke Gabriele Brandstetter’s notion
of defiguration in the work of William Forsythe, where the figure defigured is
understood in two main ways: the figure as the dancer’s body, and the figure as
a coherent snippet of choreography, taken from the archaic designation of
short passages of a ballet as figures. Also implied is the sense of figure versus
ground, where figure describes a locus for perception, corporeal or not. Brand-
stetter observes Forsythe dismantling all three of these figures. He deforms the
ballet body in “screwings, twistings, and multiple initiation centers,” creating a
“network of interfering systems.” The choreography, if the word still applies, is
disjunctive and stuttering, with a “grammar of discontinuity” that frustrates
any attempt to read a smooth line of development. And the viewer knows not
where to look, is bereft of the cues that would prioritize the field of vision, left to
“search for another way of seeing.”20
Ralph’s cast did not have such a pronounced ballet code to dismantle, nor
did they adopt the sort of anti-choreographic improvisational technology that
Forsythe has developed over many years. We approached this task from a
160 Movement
much rawer place, and quite purposefully so. Yet the analogy to Brandstetter’s
defiguration endures. In “Wall/Hole,” those same three overlapping figures—
the body, the choreography, and the focus of attention—would, it was fervently
hoped, disintegrate and disappear, no longer available to a viewer’s perception
or interpretation.
On the first day of the first workshop for How Can You . . . ?, Ralph
gathered the cast of Patton together and sat us down on the Marley floor of the
BAM attic space. He explained where he was, four years since we had last worked
together on Patton, and less than a year after Asako, his romantic partner since
the end of Tree, had passed away after several years of increasingly difficult
cancer treatment. “The body, and energy, and what happens on a chemical
level, not a conceptual level, is all I want to think about now . . .”21 He broke
off, tearing up. And then he warned us that he would be crying periodically,
and we should just let that be part of the work, for he wanted it to be a part. From
that first day we were poised to embrace and include the sense of breaking down.
He continued: “How do we dance beyond what we know? We’ll go back
to ‘Ecstasy’ as a beginning . . . now how long can we make it? There’s no time
limit now. One of the first things I wrote about ‘Ecstasy’ was that I wanted to
look at anti-choreography. This is the same thing I’ve been working on for a
long time, but now there’s no other distraction. Now there’s nothing else . . .”22
Thus in this work the dancers would begin to understand themselves as
surrogates for Ralph, breaking down in mourning, and even for Asako, whose
body had, in fact, broken down. But at the same time they were not-yet-Asako,
because in locating that deskilled, chemical body without conceptual structure
they would feel the body in unruly life, as of yet still in motion. Poignantly, they
were set to memorialize the loss of her unique motion, which had been so
exquisitely precise and formed, in a furious blur that was anything but.
Our work began with exercises of great duration, trying to break the body
down with repetitive actions over a long period of time. Concurrently, the
dancers tried to recuperate and re-create the three-minute “Ecstasy” improvisa-
tion that had concluded Patton. Once they had it, Ralph asked them to try it
under the influence—a drunk and stoned dance, which was mostly of use only as
group ritual and internal marker, a fleeting experience for later sense-memory.
And we took turns moving as fast as we could, faster than the brain could think,
in a manner we hoped had no style. “Use a rigorous no style” was the full in-
struction. As soon as the mover recognized something that could be labeled a
style, they were to change tack. I tried it too, and it was a maddeningly impos-
sible task, but one that surely kept me in motion.
I witnessed all this from both inside and outside the experiments, wondering
how exactly one might dramaturg a work that was predicated on an escape
from hallmarks of dramaturgical structure. I tried to hone my perceptions not
Figure 23 (left ). Asako Takami in Tree. (© T Charles Erickson)
Figure 24 (top right ). Gesel Mason and David Thomson in

rehearsal for How Can You . . . ? (© antoine tempé)
Figure 25 (bottom right ). Omagbitse Omagbemi and Darrell

Jones in rehearsal for How Can You . . . ? (© antoine tempé)
162 Movement
toward what I would recognize, but toward that which I would not recognize. I
watched, hoping to watch watching break down. I had used something re-
sembling this perceptual approach with Ralph’s work before; I was used to
scanning the work not for what I could recognize but what I could not yet
recognize. However, this work required a whole new level of renunciation.
This time I was not looking for novelty—something not yet perceivable that
would an instant later be perceived as new. I was looking for lacunae, holes in
my perception, the barest trace of evidence that there was something there I
had not perceived at all.
Over and over again, we sat to discuss what was working, what else might
work, and how even to know what “working” would be. As mentioned in
chapter 1 on text, words were absolutely essential insofar as they articulated a
negative space, the space into which words could not proceed, but perhaps the
movement could go. My bringing in the butoh-fu vocabulary from Japanese
Butoh was one such attempt. Darrell Jones, Okwui Okpokwasili, and I had all
previously trained to varying degrees with performer Min Tanaka in Japan,
learning an approach to movement similarly enamored of formlessness.23 We
divided our group into pairs, one partner feeding image words into the other’s
ear. By asking the mover to place the images in disparate areas of the body at
the same time, and asking the side coach to keep them raining down unpredict-
ably, the mover’s sense of mastery and body coherence was usefully lost. This
worked for a while, but eventually we moved on, finding it still too much of a
known system. The side coaching remained, though. As Darrell put it, “I need
other people to break my body down, I can’t do it just by myself.”24
Other suggestions came in reaction to new cast member Omagbitse
Omagbemi’s plaint that she did not always know what her style habits were, so
how could she know how to avoid them? I imagined a depatterning exercise,
whereby each performer would improvise one by one, and the others would
respond by naming all the stylistic habits they had just seen. Then, wanting to
offer the performers a “yes” in the moment instead of always a “no,” I offered
that we should all brainstorm a contrasting style for each style on the list—for
example, instead of “head/tail connection” we would suggest “lateral bends,”
instead of “athletic” we would offer “frail,” for someone who tended to shift
between modes with a quick regular rhythm we would say “stay in or stay out.”
Our new depatterning exercises were really repatterning exercises, and thus
once again only useful up to a point, but they were good tools to break down
familiar form. With one known pattern creating interference for another,
perhaps we would eventually uncover an unwatchable turbulence, and perhaps
the dancers and the dance would eventually “disappear,” as Ralph repeatedly
wished out loud.
Figures 26–28. Darrell Jones. (Top and bottom images by Dan Merlo; middle image by Jim
Findlay)
164 Movement
Meanwhile other exercises Ralph offered during the same period turned
away from physical form entirely. Instead they led the dancers to access emo-
tional or spiritual states that only seemed to arise in response to repetition over
a long duration, or high velocity motion, or both together. Commenting on one
of the latter forays Gesel Mason noted: “In the process of finding this ritual, of
getting to this state, we lose the rules every time.”25 Ralph exhorted the dancers,
“you are furiously trying to find something, and that thing keeps shifting—this
makes your work heroic.”26 Likewise I kept losing any sense of rules for wit-
nessing and experiencing, and whatever I might think I wanted to find kept
shifting. My work was nowhere near as heroic, or exhausting, as the performers
who were repeatedly putting their bodies on the line, but I participated in the
same feeling of reaching, grasping, and feeling air slip through my fingers. To
convey how frustration or resignation need not be the result, the cast made
frequent reference to a quote from Camus (supplied to us by Darrell’s father,
an emeritus professor in religion and African American studies): “One must
imagine Sisyphus happy.”27 I kept that in mind as well.
In the midst of all this high-velocity exploration Ralph was adamant that
no one get hurt, but he understood the risk was real. (Omagbitse was initially
cast as the sixth dancer as a hedge against injuries, since we felt the experiment
could not work with fewer than five; of course, soon after she was incorporated,
the experiment morphed such that it could not work with fewer than six.) As
Ralph asked the group early on: “How can we do this? You want to forget all
your training, but of course you don’t want to get hurt . . . How do you become
a beginner again and at the same time move with a fearlessness and an ambition
that has all to do with your body intelligence, which is all about your training?”28
The performers’ indelible and finely trained awareness of their bodies ulti-
mately rendered their attempts to escape all form far different than, say, a
group of untrained pedestrians asked to perform under the same conditions.
Not just safer (and indeed, no one got seriously hurt), but experientially and
perceptually different. In the midst of their deskilling there was always an ele-
ment of what Clare Bishop calls “re-skilling,” where a rejected knowledge is
still perceptible.29 Ultimately the interest was less in the not-knowing and more
in the trying-not-to-know; the dancers flailed and churned on top of a well-
honed kinesthetic sense, which raised the stakes. Before the breakdown, there
was something complex and hard-won to break, and that complexity was still
visible in the process of its breaking down.
Ultimately I was not trying to attend to a body already disappeared; I was
trying to attend to a body disappearing. And so in witnessing the defiguration of
the figure—the dancer, the choreography, the focus—I was witnessing what
structure might reveal through its falling apart. In more familiar contexts,
Movement 165
Figure 29. Darrell Jones, Omagbitse Omagbemi, Gesel Mason, David Thomson, and Djédjé
Djédjé Gervais. (Dan Merlo)
movement makes meaning by pulling threads through time—constructing

structure over time continually relates a now to a then, and anticipates a yet-
to-come. This is the dance literacy that Foster describes, where memory cre-
ates the structures that enable comparison. But when this sort of structure
breaks down, we make meaning only in the fleeting now, without such clear
threads of temporal connection. We see, or do not see, in a discrete moment.
Like subatomic particles accelerated and smashed in a collider, the dance is
set in motion to disintegrate, in hopes that the disintegration reveals, in a telling
flash.
This twenty-minute flight of constant movement forced its audiences—first
its dramaturg within the rehearsal room, next its workshop audiences, then its
even larger ones—to shift to another mode of watching movement. If we did
not, we would suffer the fate of boredom or exasperation, which is absolutely
the risk the work pushed up against. From the earliest workshop showings, it
was clear that this work could not shy away from that effect in order to have
any shot at reaching its full potential. Instead, it must barrel through and past
it. Feedback from audiences indicated that many people hit a point of frustra-
tion, taking quite personally Ralph’s resistance to creating a legible structure.
Some even walked out when they realized the work was not going to relent.
166 Movement
Others made a choice to stay and engage the work on less familiar terms. As
quoted in the previous chapter, one blogger, calling “Wall/Hole” the “formless
dance” section, commented, “it’s hard to pay attention to this movement,”
finding it strangely both “exhilarating and tedious.”30 The reward was always
on the other side of that frustration, in discovering what André Lepecki has
called “a new regime of attention.”31 Lepecki used that phrase in discussing the
effect of stillness in the work of Jerome Bel, while the How Can You . . . ? cast was
rather propelled into constant motion. In both instances, however, if a dynamic
shift occurred, it was located not so much inside the work as in the space between
the viewer and the work.
Performed movement challenges its viewer by making use of elaborate
and detailed systems, regarding which we must seize the confidence that grants
literacy and train the literacy that grants confidence. We attend to a body in
motion and watch it play with and against culturally marked codes of body-
knowledge and codes of representation. The body inhabits one, or another, or
several in succession. We also attend to a body in motion and watch it play with
and against the forces that will eventually master it: gravity, inertia, time. It
resists, or it succumbs, or both in succession. Yet performed movement also
challenges us because no matter how literate we get, it makes us confront how
much slips through our fingers, and how fleeting and partial our understandings
of life in motion must be, all the time, every day. “Wall/Hole,” in deskilling its
performers and asking them to impossibly avoid form, brought that slippery,
partial, and elusive aspect to the fore.
“Wall/Hole” also deskilled me as a dramaturg. In many ways How Can
You . . . ?, the larger piece, still had plenty of hallmarks of structure—in the inter-
play of its three distinct sections, in the fact that the whorl of movement in
“Wall/Hole” played out within the residue left by the film talk, in the later
appearance of a ghostly (projected) dog as a spirit guide. But once we were inside
the full fury of that twenty-minute section, I had to surrender my previously
established competencies. And it reiterated for me that the most urgent aspect
of the dramaturg’s job—her own source of motion—is to continually deskill
and reskill her own faculties of perception, and to avoid carrying forward the
competencies gained by a previous project, or even a previous moment, as a
prescriptive blueprint for the next.
In the midst of this paean to deskilling and disassembly it is also important
to state that not all processes of disassembly are equally compelling to experience
or view—that part of the collaborative labor of the choreographer, dramaturg,
and cast is discerning how and when, in the motion of things falling apart,
something of interest is still revealed. This habit of discernment, alive to the
Movement 167
moment, is where the reskilling comes in. In other words, the discerning of the
moment and the movement before me is where I try to deskill previous codes
and competencies, all of them learned from perception of earlier works. Never-
theless, in the midst of that attempt, I am still ineluctably informed by my past
experience, by my repeated habit of trying to discern.
5
Interculturalism
T his chapter explores the role of cultural affiliation in the dramaturg’s function
and her understanding of that function within the intercultural rehearsal room.
The dramaturg and other collaborators come to the process with a mix of iden-
tities and cultural alignments, under which broad heading I include alignments
based on race, gender, religion, class, ethnicity, politics, and geographical loca-
tion. These may be expressed in ways conscious and unconscious, visible and
invisible, performed by subjects or imposed upon them. And all these factors
inevitably contribute to the larger ecology of the working process. Taking note
of the dramaturg’s own cultural affiliations—her embodied and particularized
presence in the room—is another crucial way to counter the supposedly neutral,
objective stance of the dramaturg as a disembodied “outside eye.” How the
dramaturg manifests affiliations, performs her identity, or even just takes up
space will inevitably affect what goes on in that room, in ways large, small,
positive, negative, or indeterminate. This is true for any rehearsal room but
was particularly germane to the rehearsal rooms of Geography and Tree, which
were expressly built as experiments in intercultural collaboration.
In this chapter I share my understanding of the dramaturg’s role in identi-
fying the promises and pitfalls of intercultural collaboration, ideally to maximize
the former and minimize the latter. After making clear my own cultural and
racial identity within the context of Ralph’s rehearsal rooms, I begin by briefly
exploring the charged concept of hybridity, which was a recurrent fascination
for Ralph and thus, I argue, of foundational importance in all those rooms.
Next I examine the work of critical thinkers who helped me develop my notion
of what was at stake in intercultural performance collaborations: primarily
Rustom Bharucha, Dwight Conquergood, Jacqueline Lo and Helen Gilbert,
and Ric Knowles. This leads me into a consideration of translation and the
“target audience,” concepts with both utility and limitations when it comes to
understanding intercultural work. Lastly, in line with the dramaturg’s wish to
maximize promise and minimize pitfalls, I provide a checklist of sorts, offering
eight focal points for particular attention, which may be useful to anyone
168
I n te rc u l tu ra l i s m 169
interested in submitting an intercultural working process to an “ethical

checkup.” As there seems to be a rise in culturally hybrid projects of late, as
well as a rise in the awareness of the cultural hybridity that has already existed
in creative projects, this list seems increasingly pertinent.
Understanding cultural affiliations is always important to understanding
any collaborative dynamic, but in my case, seeing as my work with Ralph began
and continued around a project defined from the outset as intercultural, cultural
affiliations immediately informed my thinking. In unfolding that thinking now,
I acknowledge that I cannot divorce my discussion from the contexts within
which I performed dramaturgical work. In other words, I am always departing
from the dramaturgical work of a white woman from an American (specifically
East Coast, mostly New York) performing arts and academic culture. I am
always talking about my long-term work with a black American male choreog-
rapher, who was raised in the Midwest but has long been part of the New York
dance and performance scene. The particularity of that relationship then lands
in the context of collaborations, defined and described as “intercultural” from
the outset, with African, Asian, and African American performers, male and
female, from disparate cultural and geographic locations. To that add a larger
circle of nonperforming collaborators, such as composers and designers: male,
female, white, black, Asian, but almost all of these American. My place within
this particular web of affiliations and the relationships between its branches
informs the range and character of my thoughts.
Ralph’s concerns as an artist during the period of our collaboration once
again offer a fruitful site for considering how my subject—here questions of
culture and identity—might both shape the dance dramaturg’s work and pro-
vide a rich field for her attention. Until he disbanded it in 1995, Ralph’s dance
company had been almost entirely composed of white American dancers. This
had garnered him the reductive reputation, against which he chafed, of being
“that black choreographer with the white company.” In fact, there were key
exceptions to this characterization over the years, and the fact that they were
elided is worth noting for what it reveals about how observers read bodies
onstage.1 Meanwhile, there were many moments throughout the decade 1985–
1995 in which Ralph had choreographed his own dancing body onto the stage,
an exception made even more charged by the tendency of a choreographer
to take occasional but featured roles. Perhaps then the designation “white
company” was deployed less as a description of the racial makeup of all the
individuals on stage, and more as a description of the work’s abstract, nonrepre-
sentational movement values and apparent lack of racialized subject matter.
Ralph’s work was dubbed “white” insofar as he was attempting to claim an
invisibility for race that white artists had habitually claimed for centuries. Such
170 I n te rcu l tu ra l i s m
neutrality was not possible, but it should have been no more impossible for him
than for a white artist.
After disbanding that company, Ralph designed the Geography Trilogy as an
intercultural collaboration that would explicitly acknowledge race, culture, and
religion, if not necessarily in the manner his critics envisioned. When he traveled
to Africa, Asia, and the American South, he chose his locations largely to con-
front preconceptions of self, with regard to his race and culture (as an African
American, a city dweller, and a performing artist) and spirituality (which tilted
toward Zen Buddhism). He choreographed a career shift predicated on an
inquiry into identity, shaping it as an autobiographical consideration paradoxi-
cally initiated by cultural exchange. The entire shift was designed to direct more
attention to the potent yet not entirely reliable allegiances of culture and race.
What is to be noticed in the fact that I, a white American female dramaturg,
arrived on the scene precisely at the moment Ralph had dismissed his previous
collaborators, many of them white and/or female, to work with a group of all-
male performers of African descent? There are plenty of ways to downplay it as
coincidence—for instance, one could argue that I was assigned to the project
by my school, that Ralph did not choose me, and that from my end I was eager
to throw myself into the collaboration more because Ralph represented the
opportunity for dance work within a theater context than because of any pre-
existing affinity with intercultural experimentation. But the fact remains that the
collaboration took root and grew from that departure point, and the particular
cultural/racial/gender dynamic at play cannot be factored out of that growth.
Not only did I represent a common demographic among Ralph’s previous
collaborators, but I also represented a common demographic in his previous
audiences and, more specifically, the audience of dance critics most likely to
write about him. Thus part of our fledgling dynamic, unexamined at the time,
may have been my potential alignment with the past, and particularly past
standards of evaluation. One way of looking at the situation, then, is that my
identity, in very broad strokes, offered the opportunity for Ralph to open up a
dialogue between where he had come from and where he was trying to go. And
yet I also offered a difference to Ralph himself, based on race and gender
particularly. My difference from Ralph could be seen as crucial to that aspect
of the dramaturg’s role identified by Isabelle Ginot as serving as “some kind of
other” to the choreographer.2 It might be an instance of that generative distance
that spurs dialogue, the sort that Maaike Bleeker spoke about as “the difference
that allows an encounter to take place.”3 Both perspectives were in play, of
course. I offered a difference, and yet a very familiar sort of difference, as op-
posed to the much more arresting new cultural difference operating between
Ralph and his invited performer-collaborators.
Hybridity
Our collaboration and conversation also took place against the backdrop of a
particular set of fascinations, defined by Ralph in advance and continually
renewed and updated. A primary one was his fascination with racial and cultural
hybridity; he was deeply attracted to any flashes of recognition that the categories
we were exploring were unstable, fluid, or porous. Hybridity is a deeply charged
concept in cultural and postcolonial theory, beyond the scope of this chapter to
fully excavate. Suffice it to say that it is unclear whether it offers evidence of
resistance against power structures—as a delicious ambiguity when those struc-
tures would prefer firm categorization—or evidence of those same structures’
dominance, with admixture understood as an inevitable byproduct of one
cultural form asserting its might over another. Ultimately the term allows both
senses, paradoxically even both at once. For the purposes of this chapter, let me
just signal that the fascination with hybridity in Ralph’s rehearsal rooms was
not despite, but rather because of the concept’s difficult nature. This is particularly
true because these were rehearsal rooms for physical practice, attuned to where
hybridity had written itself into lived, corporeal experience. Thus no matter
how difficult hybridity might be to parse, it was still impossible to avoid. One
body inhabiting and moving within multiple cultural systems inevitably implied
a surfeit of questions, stories, debates.
In Geography Ralph’s fascination manifested itself most simply in his fostering
of moments of fluidity and passage between American and West African move-
ment styles. It also informed his decision to put the cast in Western-style linen
business suits for the first half of the evening performance. In Tree it was behind
his casting of a Japanese performer who had mastered the Indian Odissi dance
form (Asako) and an African American dancer who was a daughter of recent
African immigrants and had studied and loved Balinese dance (Yeko). And in
Patton it inspired a wave of rehearsal room exercises where the all-black cast
was asked to isolate bits of allegedly white cultural heritage and “black-ify”4
them through elaborating their own connection to the material—acknowledging
American culture as hybrid culture and yet staging a turnabout of the more
familiar direction of appropriation. Ralph’s examinations of racial and cultural
allegiances always hit up against how our conceptions of identity are at once
deeply meaningful and deeply inadequate, and instances of hybridity served
well to underline both stances.
In his poetic journal writing on the first work of the trilogy, Geography, Ralph
took a moment to dwell, in what resembles a fever-dream, on an image of
himself “lying at the bottom of the ocean.” The dream occurs after he has
just flown across the ocean to Africa, on his second-ever trip to that continent,
hoping to locate a conversation and a collaboration with African performers.

The ocean, then, figures the daunting gulf between himself and his potential
collaborators, between disparate cultural positions. It is also the center of the
Middle Passage that once took black bodies as chattel from Africa to the Ameri-
cas, as well as the endpoint for those who did not survive the journey and were
thrown overboard. As the midpoint on Ralph’s reverse diasporic journey back
to an alleged “source,” this artistic journey risked, in much safer metaphorical
terms, the same fate. This is made clear later in the same entry when he conjures
the image of his plane from Africa to America plunging through the air toward
a watery grave. Several sections of this passage begin with the refrain “I am
lying at the bottom of the ocean.” One of them continues: “In these seconds I
have no body, only the personality of my heart, only the neurosis of my heart-
beat. Other bodies swim by and eat bits of me. I watch with horror the pieces
collapsing, waterlogged. What happened to the blood?”5
In this oneiric imagery Ralph watches the fluid of the ocean dissolving his
body’s sure structure. Other bodies consume his body, making it part of their
own. The ocean is the solvent that engulfs and dissolves, within which clear
boundaries disappear. And blood—that other salty fluid to which we attach
allegiances of race and culture—is nowhere to be found.
In her thinking on Geography, Barbara Browning makes a key connection
between Ralph’s attraction to hybridity and his attraction to risk. As long as
cultural and corporeal boundaries are permeable, she argues, hybrids will
proliferate, though not without consequence. These images of horror at self-
dissolution at the bottom of the sea are the poetic manifestation of this risk and
consequence. Browning reads Ralph’s bottom-of-the-sea imagery as the inevi-
table flip side of a more generative vision of hybridity, finding both necessarily
contained within his artistic project. In encouraging flow between artistic forms
and cultures, she concludes, he was engaging “the fluidity which performances
make possible . . . simultaneously dangerous and full of possibility.”6 Fluidity
may generate, but it may also drown or dissolve. Both potential outcomes are
always in play.
I analyzed Ralph’s earlier fantasy of sparagmos, the violent disassembly of
the body, in chapter 4 as part of my discussion of the disintegration of choreo-
graphic structure. Now that earlier image, joined by the image of the dissolving
body on the ocean floor, takes on relevance in a slightly different register, to the
disassembly or dissolution of cultural forms. The structure of anatomy serves as
both metaphor and metonym for the structures of choreography and culture
that write themselves into that anatomy. When the body falls apart, so do those
structures. Easier said than done, since a complete breakdown is not survivable,
and structure can bear so much valuable meaning. That is perhaps why, in his
1995 image, Ralph figured the body coming apart at its skeletal connections
“and then coming back together again.”7 He took care to stipulate that the
body dispersed would later reassemble. Not, however, without being altered
by the experience. In that alteration I locate the sense of creative possibility
within the violence.
The work of the Geography Trilogy was to explore the body’s identity and to
disturb it, both at the same time. Ralph’s focus on hybridity and disassembly up
front was an important signal to the priorities of the work throughout. And so
the dramaturgy of the Trilogy evolved as a disorienting combination of careful
respect and risky disrespect for defined forms—corporeal, choreographic, and
cultural, with each of these implicated in the other two. Once again, as discussed
in the previous chapter, the dramaturgy of disassembly, of attending to the
breakdown of structure instead of its coherence, was of great importance. How-
ever when operating in cultural terms, a complete breakdown was never the
goal—not even the impossible goal. Rather the interplay between the real value
and meaning of culturally based structures, and their inevitably concomitant
challenges and breakdown, was our focal point.
As one of the few white faces in the room, occasionally asked to join perform
ance improvisations that made me exquisitely conscious of my difference, I
found that the attention paid to hybridity helped me, at times, claim a place in
that room. And yet so many histories of racial and cultural hybridity are impos-
sible to celebrate, woven as they are throughout with theft and violence. The
Patton working process in particular considered many difficult moments based
on race, and the legacy of racial violence inflicted on black bodies. Thus although
the dramaturg needs to claim a space of hybridity, and discover how to both
excavate and imagine the self as multiple, that space is not easy and is often
painfully charged. What’s more, dramaturgs must have the humility to acknowl-
edge that “excavating and imagining the self as multiple” is one more important
yet impossible task, and acknowledge the limits of understanding.
Interculturalism:
Acknowledging the Critiques, Locating the Promise
A few days before Ralph and I first met, I pored over the written proposal he
had presented to Yale in March 1996 when he was first seeking their financial,
creative, and logistical support. At that point still planning to work with Haitian
as well as West African collaborators, Ralph expressed his intentions as follows:
In this project I will explore a relationship between the postmodern formal

concerns of my more recent dancemaking and the performance and
dancing of traditional Haitian and West African dance and theater. (The
terms ‘traditional,’ ‘Haitian,’ and ‘West African’ are presented here very
generally and only represent a starting point in my search for specificity.)
Basically I will create a work of theater, dance, and music that intersects
the performance boundaries of multiple and very different worlds. I will
also explore the perceptions of racial and cultural identities, and how an
identity is translated, divided, subsumed and empowered by another
culturally foreign and directive aesthetic.
As an African American removed from any obvious African culture by
many generations, I find in this project an opportunity to spiral to some
commonality—an intersection of my life and work with that of a subjec-
tively perceived ( perhaps romanticized) original source experience of
African dancing and performing. In concept, these foreign artists bring to
my modernism an almost inscrutable sense of purpose, a mysterious insight
into the tradition of Pan-African dance and theater. I hope to break down
these myths in my own aesthetic to find a language that brings this working
group to a place that is not romanticized or overtly exotic but that is genuine
and new in its form. I then can offer a useful connected point of view from
the nonlinear passage of a tradition that has traveled from Africa to Haiti
to my art culture.
I will direct this work in deference to the traditions of these African and
Haitian performers. These performers will bring an unfamiliar process to
my world, thereby challenging and demanding change of my self-imposed
and limited physical language. And I will bring to their world an American
formalism that respectfully manipulates their traditional environment to a
new form of performance. We will workshop our sensibilities to find a
voice that creates a new language, one that heightens and disguises the
apparent bond of color of skin and the obvious fact that we all dance and
speak.8
This text provided my first entrée into the project. At that point I had little
to no experience with intercultural work. The closest I had come was taking
dance classes in the mid-1990s with American choreographer Ronald K.
Brown, whose movement approach offered a syncretic blend of American
postmodern and house dancing with West African dance, the latter ingredient
garnered on Brown’s own collaborative research trips to West Africa.9 But in
that scenario I had just been one of many striving American dance students
attempting to get Brown’s already-blended movement style to soak into my
own body; I had never participated in the process, or helped to define the
priorities, of an intercultural collaboration.
I assumed that Ralph’s text described the process and goal I should “advo-
cate” for as his dramaturg. His uses of the terms “postmodern,” “modernism,”
and “tradition” were soon to be challenged by the realities of the collaborative

process, but his text already signaled a degree of caution. It warned against the
pitfalls of understanding our seven guests as vehicles for a romanticized, exoti-
cized Africa and asserted the priorities of deference and respect within the daily
work. Though he described the Pan-African dancing of the collaborators as
“inscrutable” and “mysterious” to him, he also argued that this mystery was
part of a mythology he needed to break down. Instead of stating that he would
explore racial and cultural identity, he took one step back to explore “perceptions
of racial and cultural identity.” And the parade of verbs in a phrase like “how
an identity is translated, divided, subsumed and empowered by another” let
me know Ralph was sensitive to, and wondering about, a wide range of possible
collaborative power dynamics.
Ralph’s text evinced at least a partial awareness of the critiques of intercul-
tural performance practice that had sprung up in the 1980s and 1990s, in re-
sponse to the proliferation of intercultural experiments in the second half of the
twentieth century. I inherited his caution, but I was even less aware of these
critiques than he was, and entered the process with more naïveté than anything
else. My minimal preparation was a basic literacy in cultural studies in an
American context, with a smaller dose of postcolonial studies in an international
context. I had not yet read the damning assessments Rustom Bharucha made
of intercultural experiments spearheaded by white European or American
artists, particularly of Peter Brook’s 1985 production of The Mahabharata. I had
not read Dwight Conquergood’s compelling discussion of the ethical pitfalls and
opportunities of undertaking “performance as a way of knowing and deeply
sensing the other.”10 But both of these discussions later became very important
to me in understanding what was at stake during my work on the Trilogy.
Had I read Rustom Bharucha’s work back in 1997, I would have better
understood how easy it was for experiments spearheaded by artists and institu-
tions in “the West,” intending to collaborate with artists from somewhere in
“the Rest,” to be clumsy or disrespectful in their execution. Although Bharucha
decried Brook in particular for his insensitive appropriation of Indian cultural
material, his thinking applies equally well to any intercultural experiments
wherein the power relationships born of colonialism still linger—which,
given the enduring aftereffects of colonialism globally, are in plentiful supply.
Bharucha laments the deracinating move of taking cultural material out of its
home context in a once-colonized culture, where it holds complex meaning for
those who have created and fostered it, and monetizing it through presentation
to foreign audiences. He explains how those new audiences have little under-
standing of what they are looking at beyond an exoticizing enjoyment of differ-
ence. And he critiques most “Western” intercultural artists as demonstrating
inadequate understanding of, or respect for, the contexts that provide them
their creative fodder.
Ralph’s foundational text certainly laid out the groundwork for a collabo-
ration founded on deference and respect, but as Bharucha’s critique makes
clear, the potential errors may well be systemic, rather than due to conscious
individual intent. What’s more, the context to which one insufficiently attends
is not just the home context that provides meaning to the collaborators’ cultural
material, but also the larger political and economic context framing the entire
exchange. Bharucha questions whether, against the background of uneven
power relationships, the very concept of cultural exchange has any meaning. In
looking at Ralph’s plans for Geography it is clear the power was going to be un-
evenly distributed—Ralph the American was the one writing the proposal, de-
fining the time, place, and manner of work, and offering money and travel
opportunities to a group of West African dancers not used to much of either.
He planned to work collaboratively, but he was undeniably the boss, bringing
these performers to his turf in exchange for the ability to work with their talents
and cultural material. About this scenario Bharucha had this to say: “as much as
one would like to accept the seeming openness of Euro-American intercultural-
ists to other cultures, the larger economic and political domination of the West
has clearly constrained, if not negated the possibilities of a genuine exchange.”11
John Russell Brown, building off Bharucha’s work and similarly critical of
the possibility of exchange, says “[it] cannot work equitably in two directions
between two very different societies and theatres. . . . At best it may be called
borrowing, but often it would be better described as pillage by force of superior
finance and organization.”12 In other words, the very concept of intercultural
collaboration, and the choice of that label, are generated solely on the politically
dominant side of the equation. And Bharucha stresses that the assumption that
all the world’s people are equally free to manipulate their own cultural material
and select new material by which to be influenced is consummate European
American naïveté, “rooted in an unexamined affluence and a mindless euphoria
of pluralism.”13
Had I done this reading back in 1997, I might have been better prepared
to help mitigate the ethical pitfalls of the project I was tasked to support. But
mitigation would have been the best-case scenario. I might have done more to
examine our affluence and been more mindful of our “euphoria of pluralism,”
but I would still have been unable to avoid the fact that I was an American
working for an American artist, with the might of a wealthy American institution
standing behind and catalyzing our work. I would have felt keenly the limits to
how much I could respond to Bharucha’s critique and still remain within the
project.
As we began the first days of the Geography workshop, I noted carefully how
Ralph made sure to explain to the West African performers his plans for the
working process and to delineate both the extent and the limits of their collabora
tive participation. Even without yet having done extensive reading in intercul-
tural performance theory, it was obvious to me how important it was to have
full disclosure and consent among all participants, regarding not just the concept
for a final performance product but also the planned method of daily work. In
describing his concept for the work, Ralph drew our attention to contrasting
reasons for dancing in his New York dance world with its formalist concerns
and his guests’ West African dance world with its greater spiritual component.
He explained that it was not just the what but also the why of dance he wanted
to explore. And that he hoped the collision of the group’s different reasons and
styles would be a productive one, in the generation of brand-new forms and
new ideas about what kind of dancing they were all capable of doing. That
said, he warned that although this work would proceed as a collaboration and
could not function without their input and feedback, he was ultimately the
choreographer of the project and would be directing the experiments. He
wanted to know how open they were to experimentation on these terms, and
how willing to devise hybrid forms and ideas.14
I watched the cast as Ralph’s explanations were translated into French, to
discern as best I could if they had understood, and if their words of consent,
which followed easily, were well informed and genuine. Although the dancers
were all previously aware of Ralph’s general concept, most of Ralph’s conversa-
tions in Côte d’Ivoire were, for reasons of cultural decorum, conducted with
the artistic directors of their two dance companies. Thus the first day of the
workshop offered the first opportunity for the group to speak together, at length,
about the working process.
Dancer Djédjé Djédjé Gervais took a leadership role and spoke at length
in response. He had clearly thought the most about the issues in advance. He
defined African dance as consisting of three circles: a secular circle, where
everyone may dance; a circle where only initiates may dance (he implied that
all the dancers in the group had attained that level); and a third circle, making
use of masks and ritual objects, which is the most sacred of all. The third circle,
where the dancer is closest to the gods, would be off-limits for a project such as
Ralph was describing, but the other two could easily be used. The other dancers
nodded in agreement.
This sort of clarity, at the outset of a collaboratative process that still re-
mained mysterious in its particulars, was reassuring to everyone in the room.
There were boundaries, and some things would remain sacred, but on the near
side of those boundaries an exciting experiment would take place. And yet, it
was important not to take this gesture of consent as a permanent imprimatur

for all experiments that might follow. It would have to be continually renewed
throughout the process. For instance, the difficulties that arose later around
Ralph’s proposition of the dance that was to be “like trance but not trance” (as
described in chapter 2) required a reinvestigation of exactly the boundaries that
Djédjé had described.
At the end of that first meeting the performers seemed well informed,
consenting, and curious about the impact these experiments would have on
their own practices as dancers and musicians. However, to return to the ethical
challenges posed by Bharucha, it is hard to deny that within the logic of his
arguments, the performers’ individual acceptance of the terms of Ralph’s col-
laborative proposition were not enough to rescue Geography, and later Tree, from
the accusation of cultural chauvinism and disrespect, because the performers
were not in a great position to consider not accepting the terms. Bharucha would
have us attend to the impact of financial matters on the gesture of consent and
would argue that the disparity between what a given sum meant to Ralph and
what it meant to members of his cast was too great. Nor could the permission
granted by this particular group of performers be extrapolated to imply that a
larger West African community (and later with Tree, Chinese and Indian com-
munities) would approve of the experimental nature of the work upon which
we were embarking. Those communities surely had a stake too in the cultural
material that was to be manipulated.
For critics such as Bharucha and Brown, it would have been impossible to
redeem the work in Geography and Tree, or any sort of intercultural collaboration
in which the creator figure(s) and the production muscle hail from a culture
with a political or economic advantage. For instance, Bharucha (notably a
theater practitioner who does not argue in a purely theoretical zone) comes out
in favor of only those intercultural experiments that are generated and guided
by “non-Western” artists and producers, or at the very least occur on their home
turf, optimized for non-Western audiences. Geography and Tree, by Ralph’s own
definitions, could never be that.
This is why the work of Dwight Conquergood, as well as the collaborative
writing of Jacqueline Lo and Helen Gilbert, became so important to me in
understanding a way forward. If I was not going to renounce completely my
participation in a collaboration built on top of deep-seated historical inequities—
an action, it must be noted, that if adopted across the board would consign Euro-
American centers of production to subsidize only displays of monoculturalism—
then I needed to better conceive of the ethics of dramaturgical collaboration
across uneven sites of power. In a globalized world where multiple cultures,
none in perfect equity, are increasingly and inevitably brought into contact,
this sort of thinking continues to be urgent. European American financial and

political muscle rests upon historical abuse and provides opportunities for further
abuse, as power always does, but it also provides opportunities to make things
happen, to create something where there was not anything before. I thought it
worth considering whether artists from less affluent and less historically em-
powered cultures should not still be invited to the table, as co-beneficiaries of
that power. If—and this was an important if—all the collaborators could be
aware and diligent regarding what might constitute an ethical collaboration
under unequal circumstances.
Conquergood and also Lo and Gilbert solidified conclusions I had already
groped my way toward, and better prepared me for later intercultural work.
Conquergood, in his 1985 essay “Performing as a Moral Act,” wrote eloquently
and with great personal investment about the ethical opportunities and pitfalls
of undertaking “performance as a way of knowing and deeply sensing the
other.”15 He makes clear that “good will and an open heart are not enough.”16
(And in that phrase he pretty squarely defines the extent of my own toolbox at
the start.)
There is an assumption, both in Conquergood’s writing and now at stake in
my own, that the readers of these cautionary words align primarily with a Euro-
American cultural context. One could, and should, imagine a slightly different
sort of text addressed primarily to those who enter collaborations from less
politically powerful positions, for it would be another sort of ethical error to
assume that they need not also grapple with the full complexity of the issues.
While I hope that my discussion of intercultural performance in this chapter is
broad enough to be of interest to all manner of readers and artistic collaborators,
it would be foolish to claim that it is not more pitched to those for whom the
dangers of collaboration are, at least primarily, a misuse of inherited power.
And yet, in this discussion, part of what also needs to be avoided is a too-facile
binary between power and absence of power, or between “West” and “rest.”
Any truly ethical discussion must, by definition, attend to the fine-grained com-
plexity of a given interaction.
Conquergood’s work defines four categories of ethical pitfalls whenever
any subject entertains an exchange with “the other” through performance,
which he labels mnemonically “The Custodian’s Rip-Off,” “The Enthusiast’s
Infatuation,” “The Curator’s Exhibitionism,” and “The Skeptic’s Cop-Out.”
He schematizes these pitfalls in a matrix, as four locations associated with the
far ends of an x/y axis, where “the vertical axis is the tensive counter-pull
between Identity and Difference, the horizontal axis between Detachment and
Commitment.”17 Conquergood associates these pitfalls with an unexamined
combination of any two possible binary extremes. The four locations then
surround an ethical sweet spot, a necessarily less clearly defined middle ground,
which he calls true “Dialogic Performance.” The visual certitude of his mapping
on an x/y axis may be suspect, but the discussion this schema enables remains
invaluable. For Conquergood the first three pitfalls are lamentable, but he
reserves his strongest condemnation for the fourth, “The Skeptic’s Cop-out.”
In that stance one concludes that it is best not to engage cultural materials that
are not exactly parallel to one’s own identity profile, whether that profile be
typed by race, culture, gender, nationality, sexual orientation, or any other cate-
gory in familiar usage. He finds this stance the most ethically problematic
because the other three at least represent some measure of engagement and
have the possibility, if not always the probability, of drifting toward the center
of his map and entering the more complex zone of “Dialogic Performance.” If,
however, a nihilistic refusal to risk an intercultural dialogue wins the day, nothing
else is possible. All that remains is a dead end and a lack of understanding.
“Dialogic Performance” appeals as an ethical goal. Certainly my gut instincts
from the start of the Geography process were that copious dialogue, in both
speech and movement, would be essential to the ethical, aesthetic, and political
values of the project. I was certainly not alone in that conclusion, but I was in a
good position to get into the fray and help further the collective conversation.
Since I had decided early on to transcribe many of the group’s rehearsal room
discussions in my dramaturgical notebook, I was able to feed those dialogues
into later conversations. These archival notes, and the feedback process through
which I reviewed them with Ralph and sometimes shared them with the cast,
were one of the instruments through which the piece aspired to and worked its
way toward Conquergood’s dialogic ideal. Ralph and I also used them to discuss
potential blind spots, imagining ways to take up a conversation on a later date
with more complexity or understanding. And we brainstormed ways to expose
the rehearsal room’s dialogic process within the final product of the proscenium
stage performance, refusing to “hide the work” of the collaboration and rather
attempting to make that very work its subject matter.
Beyond the general responsibility of dramaturgical thinking to the project’s
overlapping moral, political, and aesthetic implications, the special relationship
of the dramaturgical to the dialogic is worthy of note. Indeed the dramaturg is
often closely linked to the activity of asking questions; the aim of these questions
is not to inspire terse monosyllabic replies but rather to catalyze an extended
dialogue. Bleeker’s “difference that allows an encounter to take place,”18 initially
referring to the dramaturg/choreographer relationship, can be expanded to
encompass dramaturgical encounters and dialogue between any participants
within the rehearsal process. Dramaturgical thinking thus catalyzes and attends
to dialogue across and through difference, and thus is in an excellent position
to understand the values of, and encourage, a dialogic performance. The dia-
logues in question might occur between a dramaturg and any other collaborator,
or any two other collaborators, or any larger group. To be truly constitutive of
dialogic performance, in fact, they should be multiple and interwoven.
The association of the dramaturg with the dialogic suggests that the drama-
turg’s role can only enhance the promise of interculturalism, but there are
other associations that align it in a more troubling fashion with its pitfalls. Ric
Knowles’s valuable 2011 piece, “Calling Off the Border Patrol: Intercultural
Dramaturgy in Toronto,” explicitly addresses dramaturgical praxis in the con-
text of intercultural performance and examines these associations carefully.
Knowles’s piece is both a conversation with previous theories of interculturalism
in performance and an auto-ethnography of his own role, as a white male
dramaturg, in Canadian intercultural theater projects instigated by “artists
from minoritarian cultures seeking to make interventions into Western theatrical
practice.”19 His work is primarily as a dramaturg for new play development.
Thus one strand of his thinking concerns the Western-trained dramaturg’s ten-
dency, whether overt or subliminal, to helpfully impose Aristotelian dramatic
principles on an emerging text when the artist(s) may be attempting, instead, to
find another structural principle derived from another cultural source. Although
Aristotle is less relevant to the field of movement dramaturgy, the larger phenom-
enon of which this error is part, where the dramaturg functions as an allegedly
“neutral” tool attempting to assure only “readability” for a presumed target
audience (and thus nonneutrally applying the cultural principles of that audience
to do so), remains entirely relevant to movement dramaturgy.
I return to Knowles momentarily, but first the question of the “target
audience”—a specific variant of the thorny questions of audience articulated in
chapter 3—needs contextualizing. Not surprisingly, many discussions of the
value of intercultural performance experimentation ultimately turn on the
question of who will be viewing the results. Who makes the meaning? Who in-
terprets, evaluates, and applauds (or not) when it is all over? In a 1992 volume,
French scholar Patrice Pavis called this group of viewers the “target culture,”
the cultural group for whom the performance is crafted.20 He offered the now-
infamous “hourglass model” to illustrate how cultural material flowing from
the “source culture” (assumed to be non-Western) would be transmuted through
the application of a particular mise-en-scène (the narrow neck of the hourglass)
and then flow out to the target audience (assumed to be located in “the West”).
Bharucha, while calling some of Pavis’s analyses of theatrical interculturalism
“sophisticated,” vehemently challenges the hourglass model. Having previously
decried how Western artists have ignored potential audiences within the cultures
from which their intercultural collaborators were cherry-picked, Bharucha
clearly disagrees with the assumption that a target can be properly conceived of
within a single, homogeneous, usually Western culture. He also analyzes the
hourglass as “just too neat a construction,” restricting the possibility of dialogue
with its image of contained flow and “rul[ing] out the possibilities of doubts,
ruptures, blockages or interruptions.” As he concludes, “this implies a one-way
traffic, totally contradicting the larger modalities of exchange which Pavis
himself upholds.”21
Jacqueline Lo and Helen Gilbert also take issue with the hourglass model,
noting how it “ultimately reduces intercultural exchange to an alimentary
process,”22 digesting the material supplied from the performers outside the target
culture for easy absorption by the target. But instead of rejecting Pavis’s hour-
glass model completely, Lo and Gilbert revise it. They propose a “template for
an intercultural practice that encourages more mutuality and an attempted
representation of the mutuality that has already existed at some level, even if it
has been limited.”23 Lo and Gilbert refashion Pavis’s model such that both
cultural groups could be thought of as source cultures, and the effective “target
culture” located anywhere on a continuum between those two sources. This
puts the “target” in an unfixed position, left fluid and open to shifts. As they put
it: “This fluidity not only foregrounds the dialogic nature of intercultural ex-
change but also takes into account the possibility of power disparity in the
partnership. . . . Even if the target culture is aligned with one of the source
cultures, both partners still undergo a similar process of filtration and hybridiza-
tion, however differently experienced. Positioned at the tension between source
cultures, intercultural exchange is characterized both by gain and loss, attraction
and disavowal.”24
Lo and Gilbert’s intervention, while still restricting the image to a continuum
between two poles, usefully introduces movement, tension, and a way to under-
stand how intercultural negotiations can be at once mutual and unequal, pro-
ductive and fraught. It is not difficult to extend their image to a web of locations
from more than two source cultures, as our rehearsal room for Tree exemplified,
with a target that travels along multiple lines of tensile connection. In fact, the end
of their essay, which speaks of “the rhizomatic potential of interculturalism—
its ability to make multiple connections and disconnections between cultural
spaces,”25 implies exactly that extension of their image.
Knowles, on the other hand, implicitly dismisses Lo and Gilbert’s reformu-
lation. He instead critiques the entire concept of target audience, whether or
not it is conceptualized as a moving target. He finds the terminology too
thoroughly suffused with a semiotic understanding of intercultural perform
ance, which “follow[s] a communications theory model of encoding and de-
coding.”26 In other words, it suggests that a source is placing raw meaning into
the performance, and those responsible for the mise-en-scène are tasked with
decoding that meaning, translating it into a language their target will under-
stand, making use of their theatrical toolbox (with its inevitable distortions).
Knowles particularly mistrusts the role of the dramaturg in all this, given the
dramaturg’s traditional association with assuring legibility for an audience. In
the semiotic model of intercultural performance the dramaturgical function
operates to assure that the target audience ends up with an understandable
product—even if in the process of getting there it wreaks violence on the integrity
of precisely that which an audience might hope to understand.
The semiotic model does not work for Knowles, for at least three reasons.
First there is the assumption of a single “target” within an audience that may
well be culturally heterogeneous—a deficit that Lo and Gilbert also attempted
to repair. Next, there is this model’s narrow focus on the aesthetic language of
the stage product, rather than the larger, material processes of the work’s making
and reception. Lastly, there is the particular kind of translation theory this model
tilts toward, where the otherness of a source is fully digested and dissolved (as it
passes through the thin alimentary canal of Pavis’s hourglass) to produce the
end product. Knowles is concerned with the role that the dramaturg, or anyone
sharing the dramaturgical function, might play in winnowing down experimen-
tation to that which occurs comfortably within a perceived “target” group’s
already “recognizable and ‘readable’ structures and frames.”27 This is a concern
applicable to any sort of experimental work, but a particularly acute one with
intercultural work, since the structures and frames of legibility are precisely
what are in play as cultural contexts shift.
As I began work on Geography, I did not consciously conceive of what we
were doing in terms of sources and targets. It was easy to ignore this framework
at the outset of a relatively long process, designed to leave time and space for
exploration. Instead, insofar as the initial workshop had any conscious concern
with semiotics, it was in forging a brand-new movement language that could be
shared and comprehended by a heterogeneous “target”—defined simply as the
collection of individuals within our rehearsal room. Thus this motley assemblage
of collaborators became both source and target, an artificial community that
would try to forge a new, mutual language—if not from spoken words then
from physical actions. In devising our target from the collection of people in the
room, in working through physical recursive-translation and collage exercises,
we were implicitly working within Lo and Gilbert’s model of intercultural
exchange. Such exercises were designed to create a hybrid way of moving that
no one in the room had quite seen before, and that would be some combination
of familiar and strange to everyone, though the particularities of that combina-
tion would vary by individual.
In saying that we did not begin our work by thinking about source cultures
and target cultures, I am not suggesting that as I watched these movement
experiments my gaze was neutral or objective, somehow impossibly outside of
my cultural location. Inevitably, I watched as my self. I brought my own cultur-
ally generated proclivities and assumptions about what might and might not be
interesting to watch, and fed them back into our process through my feedback,
given both to Ralph privately and to the group more publicly. Thus to the extent
that I operated as a trial audience member in the room, I inevitably stood in for
some future “target.” We never consciously conceptualized a target audience,
much less used that term. But it would be folly to suggest that the subset of our
collaborative community found more frequently at the edges of the rehearsal
room—Ralph, the poet Tracie, myself and Peter (the other dramaturg), the
designers, the stage managers, all Americans—did not silently propose a target
of some sort, and this is Knowles’s concern. We did so through our presence,
through our feedback, and through the resemblance we had, unstated but ob-
vious, to the cultural context within which the performance would eventually
be displayed. The target we offered may have been heterogeneous, but it was
without question culturally narrower than the full population within that room.
Knowles’s refutation of the semiotic model for intercultural performance is
an absolutely crucial intervention, when taken as an exhortation to avoid taking
on such a project with the simplistic intent of making another culture legible to
one’s own. Surely the Geography process would not have been as fruitful as it was
had we not first attempted to postpone the idea that we were building a perform
ance language for anyone besides the people in the room. Nevertheless it is
impossible to assert that the group’s understanding of who is doing the viewing
and reacting in the rehearsal room, and the perceived connection between
those people and the people who will be viewing and reacting to an eventual
formal performance, do not already, silently, propose a “target” and inform the
range of work that can occur. This is true in any instance; an intercultural
collaboration only heightens this fact.
And so I cannot completely discard the shorthand concept of “target culture”
as Knowles does, as long as it is used descriptively, not prescriptively, and with
an understanding of its limits. Its danger is in implying that everything that is
made for the stage should pander to the existing knowledge of a target group.
But its useful purpose is simply to acknowledge inevitable difference. It describes
a situation where there will be significant cultural contrasts between some or all
of the performers on a stage and those individuals that will sit in the audience, a
difference striking enough not to be outweighed by the heterogeneity that also
exists within both groups. It describes a noticeable gap across which meaning
will be made. If, for instance, Geography had been able to tour across West
Africa—a reciprocal gesture that Ralph’s producers attempted to arrange

but were unable to pull off—the performers would have surely felt the shift of
performing for a different “target” and felt vividly how the same performance
made meaning differently in another cultural context.
Of course the closer one gets to a presentation to an outside audience, the
more difficult it becomes not to consciously think of that audience as some kind
of “target.” The audience increasingly haunts the rehearsal room as a collection
of invisible ghosts. And so as the months went on, I inevitably began to think
that way. The more I valued our rehearsal room discoveries, the more I began
to wonder how they would eventually be perceived and received by people
outside that room.
Nowhere was the relevance of source versus target more obvious than in
the decisions around how and what the West African performers might speak
on stage. I return to an earlier anecdote on text and language, first described in
chapter 1, to explore it in a slightly different register. It is not surprising that
issues of cultural difference emerged most clearly in relief when the issue was,
simply, language. Our discussions on this issue were all built upon the assump-
tion that our performers would not be mute but would speak across a cultural
and linguistic gulf to their audience. Nested inside that assumption was the
assumption that their speaking could reveal their literal and figurative voice in
the intercultural proceedings—the spoken word was desired not only for com-
munication of content, but as evidence of process and context. Believing that
they would have to speak at least sometimes in English in order to communicate
to an English-speaking target audience, Tracie Morris valiantly attempted to
write English text for the dancers that would somehow both make sense coming
out of their mouths and convey her themes of cultural connection and dis-
connection across the African diaspora. All this thinking, all straightforward-
seeming in the moment, provided the path that led us to that one rehearsal
room snapshot of the colonial schoolroom.
Balking at that unintended image and its implications, the group concluded
that no matter how much we might think we wanted to use spoken text to convey
a range of content, it did not become the Francophone African performers’
responsibility to convey it in English to an English-speaking “target.” And thus
in the final stage performance, there were several moments where our West
African performers spoke in diverse African languages (Susu, Bété, Baule,
Malinke, Guéré) and French, including an extended structured improvisation
where they were asked to debate a set topic. Only at the final moment of the
piece did a West African performer speak English. Brooklyn-based expatriate
dancer Moussa Diabate, already in his daily life shifting between the tongues of
Susu, French, and English, narrated a story in his accented English. He described
doing an ordinary errand, being hit on the head from the back, and waking up
in a strange land. Not only were the events he narrated disorienting, but his
English was disorienting for our audience to decipher. To end the piece with
his spoken narrative was a choice not to land on an easily comprehensible or
digestible story—it was neither possible nor desirable to coach him into a trans-
parent American English. In that moment, the distance between Moussa’s lived
experience and the majority of his audience’s, a distance audible in his voice,
was an essential part of the point.
Clearly I cannot entirely refute the relevance of thinking in terms of sources
and targets in an intercultural rehearsal room, and neither, it seems, can
Knowles. For all his well-placed skepticism about this terminology, he does still
resolve his own discussion of intercultural dramaturgy on a communications
theory note—discussing dramaturgy as an act of translation. Translation, as a
metaphor for the process of developing an intercultural collaboration, unavoid-
ably still implies source language and target language. Knowles does not get rid
of source and target entirely but rather shifts the nature and priorities of the act
of translation. Knowles’s dramaturg-as-translator relinquishes the idea that her
job is to make things legible for the target group, if legible means digestible
within existing frames of reference. Instead, the dramaturg must enable the
audience to apprehend something strange to them, and not entirely digestible.
Within this ideal, audience members apprehend what they do not know, instead
of interpreting according to what they already know. This understanding of
dramaturgy-as-translation dovetails with my earlier explication, in chapter 3,
of the dramaturg’s work within the problematics of novelty. The dramaturg
grants that the experience of the new is only possible insofar as it arrives in rela-
tion to the familiar, but nevertheless attempts to make, and enable others to
make, that vertiginous leap from familiar to unfamiliar. The only distinction
added here is that what may appear as new to one cultural group—labeled,
with all caveats intact, the “target”—is decidedly not so new to another cultural
group. The leap happens the moment one cultural system apprehends another
in its incongruity, without resolving it within its own frames.
Knowles’s intentions are aligned with the definition of translation as articu-
lated in “The Task of the Translator.” In that essay Walter Benjamin upended
the prevalent understanding of what a translation could or should be, asserting
that “a translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must
lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s mode of signification.”28 For
Benjamin, the translator should not conceive of meaning as a constant, to be
rendered transparently by one linguistic structure or another. Rather, the
translator purposefully exposes alternate modes of signification. He cites Rudolf
Pannwitz: “The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in
which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be

powerfully affected by the foreign tongue.”29 In encouraging the foundational
structure of the target language to be shaken by the source, Benjamin shifts the
translator’s focus. Instead of simply conveying what source texts mean, the
translator should expose how they mean. Benjamin’s provocation is intercultural
dramaturgy’s imperative.
Knowles concludes his discussion with a case study. He describes his realiza-
tion that one of his dramaturgical jobs was “to help translate . . . the principles
of art, culture and cosmology” associated with the Kuna culture of current-day
Panama and Colombia “into the (Western, theatrical) dramaturgical pillars of
the work.”30 Although it might seem that the “communications theory”
Knowles earlier derides is still implicit in this description of this dramaturgical
task, it is clear that his intent lies with the translation of Benjamin. For in de-
scribing his act of translation, he does not describe an impulse to explain to a
non-Kuna audience how the Kuna art and culture of his collaborators function.
Instead, he wishes to help embed some of the structural assumptions of Kuna
culture into the structural underpinnings of the new theater work. For instance,
he describes how a Kuna cosmological preoccupation with multiples of four
and eight needed to supplant his own “naturalized Western instinct for triplets”31
as a principle of dramaturgical structure. Here dramaturgy the noun, under-
stood as the structural skeleton of a work, dovetails nicely with dramaturgy the
verb, understood as the task of the dramaturg-as-translator, insofar as that task
is to effect the reverberation of one type of structure across another. Knowles
is decidedly against intercultural dramaturgy as “privileging readability for
Western target cultures,”32 but he does hope that Western audiences are “ex-
posed to and invited to inhabit ways of living and being”33 that are not familiar
to them. In that distinction lies all the difference.
Eight Points of Focus
In my introduction I spoke of wanting this volume to focus not on who the

dramaturg is, but on what she or he might think about. This shift in focus seems
particularly relevant in this chapter, where the experience of being in the midst
of an intercultural performance project generates a banquet’s worth of food for
thought. From my work in Ralph’s rehearsal rooms since 1997, coupled with
reading on interculturalism that began in parallel with that work and continues
to this day, I have developed a collection of eight points of focus, arranged into
eight subsections that follow, to consider when seeking an “ethical checkup” on
ongoing collaborative, intercultural work. I do not argue that performing such
a “checkup” is the dramaturg’s job in particular; almost by definition, the
ethics of intercultural work should be the concern of every person involved. I

would, however, suggest that the dramaturg is in an excellent position, in motion
as she steps inside and outside of the rehearsal room, moving from the boundary
to the center, theory to practice, and back again, to keep an eye on this particular
ball. I am also making a foundational assumption that it is possible and desir-
able to stake out an ethical means of collaboration even across uneven sites of
power, to do work through, with, and against historical and structural inequities
instead of seeking to neutralize them entirely before any work can occur.
1 . Di s c l o s u re a n d Co n s ent
Because the intercultural playing field is never level, it is important that

work begins with a full disclosure of the terms of the production, including the
founding assumptions of all collaborators, insofar as they are conscious of
them. Once work has begun in this way, such disclosures may also need to be
repeated, as circumstances change, new assumptions are made, or subliminal
ones are made conscious. Canadian dramaturg Brian Quirt explains his role in
this disclosure process: “what you want to bring to the table is your subjective
self, and what you want your collaborators to understand is the nature of the
subjectivity.”34 Knowles, parsing Quirt’s words, explains, “these conversations
tend to expose everyone’s preferences or assumptions, and they lay the ground
for the process as a set of negotiations across cultural and other differences.”35
From the gesture of full disclosure then follows, if warranted, the gesture of
informed consent. But these terms threaten to portray the situation as unbear-
ably legalistic—none of these disclosures and consents are fixed, signed into a
binding contract that cannot be later rescinded. Instead, they are in flux, always
subject to review, reversal, or reiteration, though not without consequence.
During the process of Tree, the cast spent the better part of a day carefully
learning a song taught to them by Mr. Wang, from the shamanistic tradition
within his Yi culture. After the long day’s work, as we left the studio, Mr. Wang
decided that the cast should never sing this in a performance because it would
attract spirits. This sort of shift is fair play. Also during Tree, discussions with
Odissi dancer Manoranjan Pradhan about the extent to which he and Asako
Takami’s Pallavi dance could be edited and juxtaposed with other kinds of
dancing were ongoing, leading almost all the way up to the premiere. In the
end, the decisions passed muster with Mano and everyone else in the cast, but
that does not mean that all the members of the larger Odissi dance community,
some of whom were in Tree’s audiences, approved of the choices—some did
not, and Mano and Asako felt acutely the fallout afterward.36 Consent should
not be presumed to operate on a broader than individual level, and the real
risks to the individual of striking out on new ground need to be acknowledged.
2. Motives
Above all else what needs careful examination and disclosure are one’s own
motives for entering the intercultural collaboration, including what assumptions
are being made about what the other members of the collaboration represent
within the conversation. As a dramaturg for Geography and Tree, my motives
were not identical to Ralph’s, but overlapped significantly, insofar as I felt my
job was to support his concept for the conversation.
This is an opportune moment to revisit Conquergood and his ethical pit-
falls, which spring from potential shortcomings in one’s motives for engaging
an intercultural experiment (setting aside his fourth, which is rather a refusal
to engage). Consider “The Enthusiast’s Infatuation,” stemming from what
Conquergood calls the “quicksand belief ” that “aren’t all people really just
alike?”37 On this error he quotes Frederic Jameson, who cautions that perhaps
in the midst of our sensation of understanding “we have never really left home
at all, . . . our feeling of Verstehen is little better than mere psychological projection,
[ . . . and] we have somehow failed to touch the strangeness and the resistance
of a reality genuinely different from our own.”38 Bharucha echoes, arguing
problems arise “when the Other is not another but the projection of one’s
ego.”39 At first blush this seems the easiest of the three pitfalls to avoid: haven’t
most artists taking on intercultural projects been drawn to them in order to
grapple with difference in one way or another? However, once sensitized to
look for such moments of projection, one finds them everywhere, inevitably.
They can sneak up on even the most mindful collaborators as a convenient
escape from difficulty.
In the case of Geography, this pitfall was suggested from the outset, in Ralph’s
founding assumption that this would be a work conceptually founded on his
own race, culture, and religion. Ralph disclosed boldly to his collaborators on
the first day that the work would be an “autobiography,”40 that he intended
them to serve to some extent as “mirrors of [his] black self.”41 This statement
was understandable within the long tradition of African Americans looking
toward Africa to confirm or disprove notions of blackness, but it still had an
alarming dimension insofar as it implied the collaborators were there as mere
instruments for the exploration of Ralph’s identity. It assumed their equivalence
with Ralph and, through the transitive property, with each other. Mitigating
Ralph’s initial egocentric projection, however, was his even stronger desire to
be thrown off balance by his collaborators, to listen to their feedback and have
his initial assumptions disproven. He was usually quite happy to be proven
wrong, and that particular pleasure saved us from the worst of this pitfall. In
Conquergood’s terms, the flawed motive for engagement was redeemed as it
moved toward the dialogic.
Another of Conquergood’s pitfalls, “The Curator’s Exhibitionism,” describes
the error in which, on the contrary, difference is clearly acknowledged but then
turned into a static curio for inspection in a museum showcase. The invited
collaborators are asked to display their strangeness and, in taking on that value,
are romantically cast into the role of authentic anthropological artifacts. They
demonstrate a way of life that has been lost or is soon to be lost, instead of
acting as members of a continuing tradition grappling with its own narrative of
past, present, and future. Ultimately, this gesture reflects back once again on
the egocentrism of the viewers. As Lo and Gilbert warn us, in this context “the
sign of the ‘authentic’ can easily become a fetishized commodity that grounds
the legitimacy of other cultures ‘not in their practice but in our desire.’”42 In
other words, the collection and framing of cultural material as “authentic”
curiosities has more to do with the needs of the viewers than it does with the
needs of the viewed.
In Geography’s day-to-day work, it was difficult sometimes to avoid falling
into the assumption that the Americans were in the rehearsal room to represent
innovation, and the Africans were there to represent a static tradition. I viewed
from within my own tradition and thus could easily be blind to it as tradition; I
strove for innovation and thus was fine-tuned to perceive its possibility, even as
I repeated myself. But, in fact, as was soon made clear to me in the daily work,
the tension between innovation and tradition was already fully present within
contemporary urban West Africa. The performers did not need any of Ralph’s
input to experience it. Ralph might have been offering some specific new infor-
mation about a type of physical work of which they were capable, but he did not
introduce to them the idea of novelty, hybridity, or the combining of disparate
influences within a single performance moment. The Ivoirean guests were all
from urban Abidjan in the 1990s, informed by the aesthetics of their pan-African
dance companies and the everyday mixings of pop culture, radio, and TV. All
around them people argued about old ways versus new ways, and compromises
were made that were uniquely African compromises. Once after spending
several days with Djédjé cutting, pasting, and collaging steps from a Pygmy
dance, Ralph thought to ask Djédjé where he had learned the dance. Djédjé
was not from a Pygmy ethnicity, but somehow Ralph and I both expected a
story of traveling deep into the bush to learn from an “authentic” source. Instead,
Djédjé replied matter-of-factly, he had learned it “à la télévision.” His dance
company had done a piece about the Pygmies, and they had all watched a
documentary together. “Perfect!” Ralph exclaimed, once again quite happy to
be wrong.
Ralph was from the outset exquisitely sensitive to the potential pitfall of
showcasing his dancers as “authentic” artifacts of some exotic tradition. He
was determined not to feed into the mythological vision of Africa to which he
assumed his target audience would be vulnerable. Primarily for that reason, for
example, the dancers wore linen business suits during the first half of the produc-
tion, and long flowing gowns during the second—neither costume attaching to
an American preconception of “Africa.” Still, we understood on what a razor’s
edge he was walking. He and I often debated where to draw the line in any of a
number of small decisions playing out the tension between “authentic” West
African culture as potentially stereotyped by our eventual audience and West
African culture as embodied and experienced by the African performers. As
Ralph later shared in an interview: “It was important to me that [the cast
members] were not wearing kente cloth, or fabric with obvious African marks.
And then it got scary. The question became ‘What’s theirs?’ Or ‘What am I
leaving them?’ . . . ‘Be careful,’ I thought, ‘because you can go too far with this.
You could completely strip them, so they’re your dolls.’”43
The goal was to avoid too many elements that would key into an American
mythological vision of Africa while leaving in enough elements that were impor-
tant to the dancers’ own self-understanding—all the while remaining painfully
aware of the overlap between those two categories. The dancers were invited in
to this decision-making process and understood our concerns intellectually, but
they did not share Ralph’s experiences with American audiences, so they did
not fundamentally share the same level of concern. In a decision such as, for
instance, whether the djembe drums would be left as usual or whether sculptor
Nari Ward would alter them by “wrapping” them, the performers simply de-
ferred to Ralph, not finding much of importance to them at stake.
Three years later in Tree the chemistry of one collaborative relationship
made the pitfall of showcasing another culture as an artifact of otherness even
more difficult to avoid. I say this with reference to two performers—Mr. Wang
and Mr. Li. They were from the minority Yi culture and lived in an acutely
rural area of Mainland China; their cultural difference from the context in
which they found themselves rehearsing and performing was the greatest of
the entire Trilogy. Oddly, but perhaps not coincidently, they were the only
performers we consistently referred to in a formal manner, by their family
name. It was certainly not a coincidence that they were the two performers
with whom the Americans had the most difficulty conversing, as their Yunnan
dialect needed to be first translated into Mandarin and then into English, and
the response back again in the opposite direction. Mr. Wang and Mr. Li were
the only performers Ralph ever successfully invited to join a cast who had little
experience of an urban, cosmopolitan culture—arguably a deeper cultural
affinity than any marked by a particular language. When they sang or played
their instruments on an American stage, it was above all an act of reframing.
After months of rehearsal it still did not seem fruitful to do much more, with a
few exceptions, than invite them to do what they already knew within a new
context. That stark disjunction between their practices and their context effec-
tively built the clear box of their museum display. I am not suggesting they
were not consenting to this arrangement, though the issue comes up below, in
relation to the question of advocacy. I am suggesting that the acute degree of
cultural difference, as well as the limited amount of time available to build a
functional dialogue across that difference, reduced the options for what asking
them to step on American stages could look and sound like.
I mention Conquergood’s first pitfall last because I find it the most difficult
to grapple with. He associates “The Custodian’s Rip-off ” with plagiarism and
theft, which sounds so consummately unethical that it should be easy enough to
avoid—until one considers he has fixed the label on anyone who enters a col-
laboration with the motive of “finding some good performance material.”44
Suddenly it seems impossible to avoid, as long as our discussion remains within
a performing arts context. What artist, initiating a collaboration, doesn’t hope
to discover some “good performance material?” How one defines “good” is, of
course, open to discussion, and much of the political and ethical weight of the
collaboration hinges on what assumptions might be nested within that one
word. But I nevertheless find it impossible to consider these collaborations
separate from my evaluation of the “performance material” that might be
eventually generated from them.
Ralph wanted to be thrown off base by these collaborative encounters. To
some extent he decided to work with performers from another cultural context
the way that Merce Cunningham decided to work with chance operations—in
order to surrender the creative process to elements out of his control. In wishing
to be contradicted, schooled, and figuratively torn apart by his collaborators,
Ralph was certainly not acting with the kind of imperious remove we usually
associate with plagiarism and theft. And yet, he had explicitly conceived these
intercultural experiments as a response to a dead end in his previous artistic
practice. He hoped that his collaborators would help him revitalize his art, help
him find new reasons for dancing. In that his motives, and by extension mine,
did fit all too well into the old colonialist model, whereby raw materials taken
from the colonies rejuvenate the tired imperial culture—whether it be coffee
and sugar lending their stimulant effect to European cities or African masks
inspiring the “birth” of Picasso’s modernist genius. In assisting him in this project
every day, was I just assisting in the continuation of this longstanding tradition
of plunder?
Perhaps the answer is simply yes. It is impossible to argue that Ralph’s
artistic career was not affected for the better by the choice to work interculturally
in the years 1996–2000 and, to a lesser degree, up until the present. It is impos-
sible to argue that my own dramaturgical career is not indebted to these same
exchanges, as well. And so if wanting to deepen one’s own body of work through
the encounter with the “other” disqualifies one from having ethically sound
motives, the project does not pass muster—end of story.
One potential mitigation of this unpleasant scenario lies with the partners
to the collaboration. In the Picasso scenario they remain anonymous and gain
nothing. Was that true in Geography and Tree? Or were these collaborations con-
ducted in such a way that the rest of the cast was also made stronger, revitalized,
transformed by the experience? Even though the performers were not the insti-
gators of the experiment, did they manage to use Ralph as much as he used
them? What was the nature of their involvement in the collaborative process,
and did the experience serve any of their artistic needs?
The engine for the collaboration was the potential for discovery, and the
collaboration was put into motion and supported by people who inevitably
gauged the value of that discovery in relation to their own artistic practice up
until that moment. Although the entire group’s shared quest for mutual under-
standing was important, a shared goal alone was not enough to counterbalance
the instigating artist’s interest in finding “good performance material”—even if
“good” could be defined simply as “based on mutual understanding.” The only
thing that could make this motive less problematic was the self-interest of the
other members of the exchange—for matters to truly even out, there had to be
a dose of self-interest on all sides. Notably, Rustom Bharucha, who has as keen
an eye as anyone for noting when collaboration is only pillage in another guise,
identifies mutual gain as a redemptive factor in intercultural work. As he puts
it, “the real challenge is to maintain the reciprocity of the dynamic. In exploring
ourselves through another culture, we must ask what that particular culture
receives from our intervention.”45 And so to understand the moral weight of our
own motives, we must attend as best we can to the motives of our collaborators
as well.
We can certainly ask our collaborators, directly, what they feel like they are
gaining from the process. And I did—but I did not want to rely just on those
transcribed responses. After all, as Bharucha has also pointed out, there are
financial incentives to taking part in a collaboration that might disincline any-
one from complaining too much. And so I combined direct conversations with
silent observation, looking for signs of creative investment and contribution on

all sides. For the most part, I found them. In the midst of the recursive translation
exercises of Geography, for instance, the full group was always animated and
engaged, debating how to best resolve the challenges, making full use of the
collective kinesthetic intelligence, and triumphing when a tricky collaged step
was finally mastered. The Geography dancers were often exhilarated by the
challenges and spoke about how their repertoire was being expanded, even
how they might use this expansion in work of their own or to increase their role
in dance companies back home. Throughout the rehearsal process both the
Americans and the Africans were pushed to confront new ideas and break out
of unquestioned physical habits. Indeed, the level of physical challenge was the
most reciprocal of all.
I also noticed, however, that one performer was often more frustrated than
others. Frustration may be just a normal byproduct of a tricky work process, or
may bespeak a more concerning imbalance or unfairness in the intercultural
collaboration. It is not always easy, or even possible, to tell when the former
crosses over into the latter. How much frustration is too much, and when
should we think of it as culturally based as opposed to culturally neutral, if
nothing in this equation can, in fact, be culturally neutral? Moussa Diabate
seemed to have more difficulty with the recursive translation exercises than the
other dancers. First we wondered if this was just a contrast of personality or
inclination. Yet he was the only Guinean dancer in a group of otherwise Ivoirean
dancers. The ingredients in the recursive translation exercise, drawn as they
were from the larger group’s improvisations, were already one step culturally
further from him, even before they were sent through Ralph’s interpretive filter
and back to the group. We quickly realized that an African/American con-
trast was not the only cultural distinction worth noting, and that the Guinean/
Ivoirean contrast was affecting our group dynamic as well. After some discussion,
Ralph mitigated the tension by working with Moussa separately on two solo
sections, giving him a chance to shine on his own terms. Yet within the larger
group sections I always felt a measure of his frustration remaining.46
Questioning one’s own and one’s collaborators’ motives for an intercultural
project, if done thoroughly, is not likely to produce neat, unproblematic answers.
Conquergood’s ethical pitfalls give us models for what the “other” in a collabora-
tion might represent—a mirror to erase difference, a museum exhibit to reify
it, or an appealing wellspring of ideas, “new” in one’s own cultural context, to
be pilfered. If we are truly honest with ourselves, one or more of these will not
be strange to us. Attending to the invited collaborators’ motives, one might find
financial considerations outweigh all else, or that the performers are doggedly
continuing on because they think they “should,” because they have already
consented, instead of finding inspiration to renew their interest and their consent.
The question is, what then? Is the presence of these unseemly motives stark
enough that the project simply cannot be redeemed by more attentive work
and dialogue? If so, perhaps the project should be dropped. Or does one hope
to mitigate them by attending to reciprocity over and against an uneven playing
field? Is there hope to move the project toward Conquergood’s ideal of a dialogic
performance, where all participants play an active role in crafting an experience,
onstage and off, that is both meaningful and useful for all concerned?
It is tempting to set out some sort of formula to offer moral purity to the
dramaturg seeking intercultural collaboration. However, if there were such a
formula, I would not trust it. All I can really suggest is: pay attention. It behooves
the dramaturg to pay attention, listen, and be open to surprise. Dialogue, which
by definition does not follow a formula, can only happen when there is observa-
tion, inquiry, and new information coming in as well as going out. And dialogue,
as Conquergood puts it plainly, is the only way in which potentially problematic
motives for engagement can drift toward an ethical ideal. All of the consider-
ations listed here are essentially prompts for the dramaturg to support that
overarching goal.
3 . Ti m e
Dialogic performance should describe a quality of the performance that an

eventual audience sees, but as the preceding two sections make clear, the only
way a dialogic performance product can come into being is through a dialogic
process. And such a process requires time, the time needed for true dialogue to
develop. To work well, intercultural collaborations require more time, a lot of
it, else dialogue will always feel foreshortened. Rehearsals will proceed more
slowly than hoped. Translating the spoken word through interpreters doubles the
amount of time required to say anything, and the task is not always performed
optimally, requiring yet more time to notice that fact and mop up the misunder-
standings that result. Dialogue might also occur most fruitfully when time is
given outside of a formal rehearsal period, when people are less guarded, more
relaxed, and have the time to process their thoughts over a shared meal. Collabo-
rators do need privacy and escape, but the group needs to encounter each other
informally too, and allotting the optimal amount of time to each mode is a
tricky task. This is a short point, but a crucial one—dramaturgs in intercultural
work end up thinking a lot about time. They may be in a position to advocate
for more of it, or argue for a more mindful allocation of the time one does have.
4 . A d v o c a c y
When thinking about the ethics of an intercultural collaboration, advocacy

matters. The dramaturg, sometimes put forward as an advocate for the eventual
audience, may in this context, and particularly in early stages, feel more acutely
a need to advocate for the collaborators, especially those who may have traveled
far outside of their comfort zone to join this process. Again, this is not exclusively
the dramaturg’s role; the concern rightfully belongs to everyone. But the drama-
turg may feel in an excellent position to take it on in any given moment. If the
dramaturg belongs, as I did, to the culture hosting the intercultural process, it
seems natural to behave with the ethics born from etiquette and to advocate for
what one’s guests need to feel comfortable and respected within the working
process. Useful dialogue does not take place until basic needs are assured.
This may take many forms, and the examples can be deceptively banal.
The dramaturg may, in the midst of an inspired and fast-paced discussion in
multiple languages, be the one who steps back to take in the larger picture and
notices one collaborator standing to the side because his or her interpreter is
still on coffee break. Or be the one who can leave the rehearsal room to go
argue that unintended problems with hotel accommodations need to be solved
today instead of tomorrow, because they are not separate from the artistic
process, but rather are eroding good will crucial to it. Or be the one who asks
the dancers one extra time, just to be sure, that they do not mind performing
grueling repetitive choreography for eight minutes straight—that they are not
just saying yes because they have traveled all this way and feel that they should,
but they actually feel engaged by the challenge. This basic impulse to “take
care” of one’s guests is essential and seems unassailable, even if that impulse
then dovetails nicely with the dramaturg’s role as coded stereotypically female,
as brought up in the introduction.
Without wishing to counter the basic importance of this hosting impulse, I
share one instance from Tree where its unassailability was put to the test. It
involved one of the trickiest episodes that arose in all rehearsal rooms of the
Trilogy, ethically speaking. A combination of previous factors were all at work,
not only the matter of acting as a “good host,” but also questions of the meaning
of consent and the motives for inviting a contrasting cultural presence on stage.
When Ralph took his initial research trips across Asia, his journals were rife
with observations of basic similarities and differences in skin color, and he drew
many of his observations in distant cultures into contrast and comparison with
his own experience of race as a black American. For instance, he observed the
rural farmers in China’s Yunnan province and wrote, “many are as brown as
me. Stunning darkness.”47 Later he mused about a correlation between dark
skin and punishing labor. When, months later, farmer-musician Mr. Li traveled
miles from Yunnan to join Ralph in a San Francisco rehearsal room and sat
down to sing to the accompaniment of his san xian—a plucked musical instru-
ment whose name literally means “three strings”—Ralph was immediately
struck by an overlapping analogy. The sound triggered the image of “an old
black man in the South,”48 sitting and playing a banjo, singing the blues. And
indeed, the san xian as played by Mr. Li did sound uncannily like a banjo to
American ears.
Ralph began performing workshop solos to Mr. Li’s san xian, imagining
himself dancing as “an old black man” to this rural Yi tune. Later he began
thinking of ways to push the cross-cultural analogy even further. He began
entertaining the idea of asking Mr. Li and Mr. Wang to wear the makeup of
blackface minstrels on stage during his solo, for he fully realized that his hearing
of the American “Old South” in Mr. Li’s music was an artificial, mythologizing
gesture, imposing his own context upon theirs. He suspected that the makeup
would make blatant not just the comparison he was hearing but also how
wrong it was—highlighting and making a point of the artificiality of the imposi-
tion. Immediately he and I began discussing how the two musicians, who were
working out of a very different tradition, had little understanding of the reso-
nances of blackface in America. His proposed gesture was thus clearly for an
American target audience, a gesture in which our Chinese guests could not
intuitively share.
The first matter at hand was to bring Mr. Li and Mr. Wang in on Ralph’s
thinking. We gathered together the two men and the requisite interpreters,
including dancer Wen Hui, who was the best at speaking and understanding
Yunnan dialect. Ralph showed the group photographs of early minstrels and
blackface performers, first describing at length the racist context for that tradi-
tion, so ingrained in American theater history. I recorded the rest of the inter-
action in my rehearsal room notebook as follows:
Ralph explains: “I want you to know that in this work there are racial
issues. . . . When Mr. Li sings and plays, and I dance, I think of you two as
these old black men in America, singing the blues. I want to dance to your
music. We did it in [workshops in] San Francisco and Austin. But [this
time] I want to make sure the audience is seeing what I’m seeing. I want to
make reference to black men, but to the stereotype of black men, and have
those men be playing Chinese music. It may be too strong, but I wonder if
you would try it.”
Ralph then turns to the interpreter: “Do they understand? The idea is
risky, it’s racist . . .” She attempts to explain further, in Mandarin, and
Wen Hui helps by glossing in Yunnan dialect.
Eventually Mr. Wang and Mr. Li reply simply: It’s OK. They have
no questions to ask, which makes all of the Americans in the room a little
uncomfortable.49
Within a few days the necessary makeup was purchased, and the blackface
episode was tried out in the rehearsal room. Immediately afterward a consider-
able subset of Ralph’s collaborators, myself included, felt an urgent need to ask
him questions. We all wanted to open up a dialogue about what exactly he was
doing—a clear instance of a dramaturgical function dispersed across a larger
collaborative group. As Ralph remembered it in his published journal: “Cheng-
Chieh, Katherine, Wen Hui, Carlos, David and Anita [i.e., performer, drama-
turg, three more performers, costume designer] corner and force me to explain
what it is I’m trying to say with the blackface abstraction. Six variations of
friendly outrage. I tell them that I could maybe answer their questions in 30 days.
In the meantime, I’ll dance, while Wang and Li wear blackface, while Li plays
the san xian, which all of us now call the banjo.”50
Despite our dramaturgical grilling, Ralph resisted any implication that he
should have immediate answers to these questions. Instead, he wanted to come
to an understanding by dancing the troublesome image he had constructed.
And meanwhile, as we all continued to wonder, Ralph continued his efforts to
make sure Mr. Wang and Mr. Li understood what they were taking part in. He
brought more documentation of the American minstrel past into the rehearsal
room and invited the two men to dinner off-hours, where (through an interpreter
or two) they discussed analogous racial stereotyping in a Chinese context. He
kept looking for ways to make them his partners instead of his subjects in this
gesture he had devised. Ultimately it was difficult for the American collaborators
to verify how much this communication had succeeded, or to even understand
what would constitute success. Ralph ended up concluding that even though
Mr. Wang and Mr. Li understood on a literal level, they did not have the cultural
context to fundamentally understand, or perhaps more important, really care
about what he found important. As he put it: “They just look at me curiously,
flat. I feel embarrassed, foolish, for bringing this issue to the process. But I’ll do
it again, and again. My American exaggeration.”51
What might be the ethical balance sheet for this performance moment,
which did make it all the way onto the proscenium stage? For the American
target audience, in being recognizably problematic it was also provocative, and
thus valuable—it stirred consternation, argument, reflection on the bizarre
symmetries and embarrassing limits arising from any doomed project of cul-
tural comparison. Ralph had heard the Mississippi Delta in the Yi music. As he
later explained, in feeling aware of the limits of that connection, he decided to
Figure 30. Mr. Li in performance. (© T Charles Erickson)
“exaggerate my thinking and make it shameful because I don’t really know

China or the Mississippi Delta.” The exaggeration, the shamefulness, and the
wrongness were the expressive point. The transgressive nature of the moment
was part of what made it desirable to put onstage—but this conclusion lands, of
course, securely within Ralph’s home cultural environment.
As applies to Mr. Wang and Mr. Li’s position, on the other hand, the balance
sheet was less knowable to this American dramaturg, as well as other collabora-
tors. For some members of the production, Taiwanese and American dancer
Cheng-Chieh Yu prime among them, the blackface episode remained trouble-
some. When I interviewed her after the Tree tour had concluded, she explained:
“[ They] had no real idea about the significance of putting on blackface, even
though Ralph tried to explain the history behind it. The issues were too far
from their understanding. Their unawareness made me uncomfortable. . . .

Wang and Li were willing to do pretty much anything Ralph asked them to do,
so the whole responsibility was on Ralph.”52
How to discuss and decide, when moments of transgression are attempted
within an intercultural performance experiment, whether an idea crosses a line
that should not be crossed? What is really at stake, and who gets to say what
should or should not go forward? Who has the power to grant permission, and
who has the responsibility to decide whether that permission is sufficient? Key
in this particular discussion in Tree were Mr. Wang and Mr. Li’s understanding
and consent. If they were partners in the gesture, it was felt, then all was well—
the transgression would be entirely located within the performance, not within
the collaboration. But if they were not fully consenting because they were not
fully informed, what then? What was the nature of being informed, anyhow?
Was it enough that the relevant cultural history had been literally explained
and translated for them? In their seeming “not caring” about the context of
American blackface, should we have read an insufficient understanding, and
thus not real consent? Or in their “not caring” should we have read their per-
fectly reasonable understanding that these issues were not their own, and that
they would personally not have to deal with any serious consequences from their
onstage gesture, for they would soon return to their farm village in Yunnan
with an interesting experience under their belts and turn their attention to a
host of completely different priorities and concerns?
Although this episode implies many more questions than just the question
of advocacy for one’s guests, I will land on that question as a location where the
issue might finally reside. In the attention a host shows to a guest, in the regard
shown for the “other’s” welfare when invited onto unfamiliar ground, how
does one draw the line between appropriate concern and patronizing solicitude?
In fearing that Mr. Wang and Mr. Li’s very direct words, “It’s OK,” did not
actually constitute consent, were we responsibly advocating for our guests’
well-being or just ignoring what they were telling us? Maybe we were just being
self-centered Americans all over again, insisting they should care more pro-
foundly about our context when they were telling us quite clearly no, they did
not. When does the host’s concern for guests become just another means of
imposing beliefs?
I did attempt to interview Mr. Wang about his retrospective views on the
collaboration. This “interview” was conducted after he had returned home,
over forwarded e-mails and an intermediary’s phone call, so through more
than one stage of imperfect translation, just as our dialogue in rehearsal rooms
had been. I asked him if anything had shifted for him since working on Tree,
what he thought in retrospect of the time he spent in the United States, and
whether he thought Ralph had been adequately respectful of his music and his
culture. He replied that the work in the United States had given him enough
money to build himself a new home. He also said that our work had been one
of the rare times he had been able to earn money from his music, instead of
from carpentry or other physical labor, and he hoped for more times like that.
He was glad that Ralph had liked his music, and yes, he thought Ralph had
been respectful of his culture. He would be happy to work with him again. And
that was about all it seemed important to him to relay to an inquiring drama-
turg from very far away. Of course, it was not clear what was making it through
the filters standing between us, either. The man who contacted Mr. Wang for
me and posed my questions ended his e-mailed summary of Wang’s answers
with the following words: “Interview with Wang was not so easy. I tried to find
something useful from a lot of words about life is hard, need money. But I believe
he is a very honest person as a farmer in such a poor village of China who I
understand.”53
The nature of Mr. Wang’s last communiqué, arriving as it did through the
filter of what the interviewer/translator had found “useful” and manifesting
above all the stark contrast between our contexts and material resources, was
very familiar. It encapsulated well how I often felt about the experience of
collaborating with him. Often his words as reported seemed direct, easy to
understand. Yet the situation was not direct or easy at all, because so much was
not available for communication. And the exercise of my imagining what would
be said between us, if the means for communication were somehow further
developed, was still ultimately an exercise of imposing my cultural context and
frames of understanding on his.
5. Risk
Intercultural collaborations represent some manner of risk to all involved. By

definition, they are a departure from a comfort zone, and the results can be
risky in a number of registers—gambling with the chance of embarrassment,
frustration, disruption of lives, disapproval from those in one’s own cultural
community, not to mention physical risk when attempting to use the body in
unfamiliar ways for which it has not had extensive training. The dramaturg
likely recognizes this; he or she would not be involved in such a project if he
or she fundamentally believed it was better to play things safe. The other col-
laborators likely recognize this; it was probably obvious in the initial invitation
to collaborate, and part of what intrigued them. If not, it should at least have
been obvious after the disclosures of the first days of rehearsal. And the insti-
gator or instigators of the project, those who fill the role of director and/or
choreographer, likely believe that the most interesting dialogue and discoveries
will be located on the far side of some sort of discomfort, and try purposefully to
guide the ship in that direction. All that is easy enough to agree with in the
abstract, but how do these choices to take risk become manifest? Which dis-
comforts do we propose? Which do we decide to steer toward instead of away
from?
Even in a rehearsal room founded on the idea that risk is an essential creative
tool, the person or people giving directions are more likely to give instructions
that place the other collaborators at risk, rather than themselves. This is not
surprising, as it is true in any sort of rehearsal room, not just an intercultural
one—the director’s chair is usually more protected than the rest of the room
from the moment-to-moment vicissitudes of experimentation. However, in the
intercultural rehearsal room, if the director is coming from one cultural context
and the majority of the performers from another, this inequity becomes more
significant, because one culture is clearly risking more.
In my introduction I mentioned moments when I felt my job as dramaturg
was to gently encourage (or laughingly shove) Ralph toward the space of risk.
That said, I must acknowledge that Ralph, more than anyone else with whom I
have worked, has a propensity to put himself in that space without any help.
But even he did not always follow through. I have already cited one instance
during the Geography process, where Ralph was trying to explain how he wanted
the performers to try an extended movement improvisation that would, impos-
sibly, be both “like trance” and “not like trance,” and I asked him, in front of
the cast, whether he could stand up and demonstrate what he meant from his
own body. Another such instance came when he had directed the two Geography
drummers in a physical sequence where one threw rocks at another, sending
them smack against a plywood wall as the target sidled out of the way, seem-
ingly just in time. One day the drummer who stood against the wall was out
sick and so Ralph took his place, flinching as the rocks started to fly. As soon as
we had completed this run through, I began advocating for the idea that Ralph
should stay in that role, and eventually he agreed. His willingness to put himself
in the hot seat and cast himself in a physically dangerous role seemed to me like
an important gesture to make, both to the cast behind the scenes and to the
eventual audience.
The dramaturg, as aligned but usefully different from the director/choreog-
rapher, is in an excellent position to take on this gadfly role. In an intercultural
collaboration, the dramaturg may be instrumental in providing the ethical
checkup of whether the director’s position is too protected from the risk he or
she places on the performers, particularly the performers from contrasting
cultural positions. But the question remains: who then pushes the dramaturg
toward risk? Does the dramaturg still remain overly comfortable and un-
implicated, sitting placidly on the sidelines with notebook and pencil, while all
the rest of the room takes chances?
I can think of plenty of rehearsal room occasions when I put down the pencil
and stepped into the space of some risk—joined in a group improvisation, led a
warm-up, took on a durational experiment, revealed a personal story. But I
cannot think of many instances where I did so without an invitation, or a shove.
Most often that invite or shove came from Ralph, sometimes from other
members of the cast. And thus this may be another fine example of a dispersed
dramaturgical role—as with research, it is a function that the dramaturg in
particular may perform for the choreographer, but that the collaborators also
perform for each other. Likewise, the ability to graciously receive such a shove
toward the space of risk, and not just dish them out, should be distributed as
well.
6 . I n t e rc o r p o re a l Wo rk
If forging a dialogic performance is trickiest whenever issues of spoken language

come into play, it is perhaps most exciting when the performers are sharing,
questioning, and interweaving knowledge about the languages of the body.
Although the codes for how the dancing body should appear are vastly different
across cultures, with vastly different assumptions and implications, it is never-
theless possible to initiate a sense of common ground around the fact that every-
one is fluent in some form of physical expression. There is an overarching if
generalized feeling of simpatico, a sense of belonging to a shared subset of the
larger population. This connection can provide the initial fuel to a collaboration.
The collaboration quickly becomes less comfortable, however, if assumptions
about how the body is used are truly up for revaluation.
In her afterword to Ralph’s book Geography: Art/Race/Exile, Ann Daly de-
scribes the choreographic working processes we employed, including the re-
cursive physical translations, and concludes, “at the end of these extended
exchanges, the dancers remained themselves, only turned inside out.”54 That
is to say, to Daly’s American eyes, Ralph’s intercultural work was successful
because his choreography had not altered the fundamental way his collaborators
inhabited their bodies, but had altered the patterns of their movement to such
an extent that she could view their dance idiom from a new perspective. My
conversations with the dancers made it clear that this tension between recogni-
tion and strangeness was also legible from their side of the cultural equation.
Perhaps it would be fair to say that Ralph had left the Africans the “words” of
their dance vocabulary, but asked them to radically change the syntax of the
sentences formed by those words. Parsing exactly what remained the same and
what was made different in this collaborative recasting of West African and
American movement is an ultimately impossible task. However, the verifiable
point is that in the passages of manipulated choreography, both viewers and
participants experienced some of both ingredients—similarity to, and difference
from, more familiar modes of contemporary West African and American
dance. And though Ralph put himself on stage less frequently than his collabo-
rators, he as well—for instance, in his dance solo to African drum—had visibly
allowed the months of collaboration to unsettle his technical foundations and
physical syntax. As Daly put it, he “had so incorporated the eruptive energy of
his collaborators that in his central solo he actually managed to implode—
without destroying—his own loping, looping movement.”55
The cast’s nitty-gritty experiments with physical technique were the most
interesting, and arguably most radical, aspect of Geography’s intercultural project.
Patrice Pavis would concur, finding “inter-corporeal work”—“in which an
actor confronts his/her technique and professional identity with those of the
others”56—the optimal path to a viable intercultural exchange. For by offering
up the basic comportment of the physical self to influence by another, the very
foundations of one’s cultural understanding are thrown into relief.
Setting aside his discounted “hourglass model,” Pavis has incisive observa-
tions to offer on the potentials of intercultural exchange. He argues that “the
greater [intercultural performance’s] concern with the exchange of corporeal
techniques, the more political and historical it becomes.” 57 In other words,
because the physical body and its techniques are never abstract, but rather
ineluctably located within a historical moment and a cultural/political system,
any confrontation between two or more physical techniques has unavoidable
historical and political resonances. As performers examine and challenge
physical techniques they may have taken for granted, they cannot help but also
interrogate the larger cultural contexts for those techniques and the relation-
ships that exist between cultural contexts. Lo and Gilbert expand upon this idea,
asserting that the body is “equally subject to multiple inscriptions, producing
an unstable signifier rather than a totalized identity. It is a site of convergence
for contesting discourses.”58 Thus intense collaborative work at this “site of
convergence” may be the best antidote to the synthesizing ahistorical, apolitical,
or universalist illusions that intercultural work can sometimes foster.
I can verify that the political and historical implications of intercorporeal
exchange were often felt in Geography and Tree’s rehearsal rooms. Frequently
work on a tricky flight of dancing would spawn yet one more involved cast
discussion about the dancers’ reasons for dancing, the tensions between indi-
vidual and group, the notion of “freedom,” the residues of colonialism, or the
connections between dance and spirituality. These topics bubbled up easily
from just below the surface of the daily work, because they were so often implicit
in the reasons for which one moved this way instead of that. As dramaturg, I
felt that my job was to acknowledge the power of effective intercorporeal ex-
change, recognize when we were in the midst of that sort of work, figure out
how to support that mode and keep us in the midst of it as long as possible, and
document the impassioned dialogues, awkward tensions, and periodic epipha-
nies that extended from the time we spent there. These moments of productive,
but irreducibly difficult physical toil seemed like the holy grail, the reason we
were all in the room together.
Pavis points out one danger, however. He states: “the impact of this develop-
ment will remain rather modest if it only involves those few actors and directors
who accept this corporeal-cultural check-up. . . . A dead end or a pocket of resist
ance? Evidently it all depends on what kind of culture the theatre produces in
its wake.”59 Thus it is possible for intercorporeal work to be radical on a radically
small scale. If the knowledge gained in the rehearsal room is not effectively dis-
seminated, the collaboration will have been very meaningful for a very small
number of people. Its impact could easily be limited to the owners of the bodies
in question. And thus the dance dramaturg, spending her time thinking about
intercorporeal exchange, still eventually shifts back to that old question of audi-
ence. How might other bodies, beyond those bodies in the room, feel the rever-
berations of this physical work? Could simply demonstrating the results ever be
enough?
7 . P ro c e s s i n t o P roduct
One response to that question is to demonstrate more than just results. This
relates to my gut feeling that the dialogues, tensions, and provisional solutions
of our process, all of which I was attempting to archive in my notebook, were
always going to be more interesting than any scene we might stage inside a
proscenium frame. It likewise relates to Ralph’s decision to publish his artists’
journals on the Trilogy’s process and to publicly define the Trilogy not as a col-
lection of three proscenium stage events but as the larger constellation of
performance events, research events, visual art installations, journal writing, cast
interviews, and the unruly work that wove them all together. By a simple act
of public redefinition—declaring that the larger process and all its many by-
products were, collectively, the product—Ralph did much to shift thinking,
within the rehearsal room, among his presenters, and among his long-term
audiences.
Yet it nevertheless cannot be denied that the economics supporting all this
process dictated that the largest number of people experiencing the work would
be experiencing whatever part we put forward on the proscenium stage. So
beyond the simple act of redefinition, it remained important to think about

how whatever did land on that stage might reveal the larger process of its own
making.
This penchant for staging some aspect of the work’s own making is echoed
in much of the literature on interculturalism in performance. For instance, Lo
and Gilbert write about how the difficulties of intercultural exchange would
ideally result in a staged event that echoes that difficulty. As they explain: “The
exchange process is often marked by tension and incommensurablilty. While
there is a general desire to maintain equitable power relations between partners,
the aim is not to produce a harmonious experience of theatre-making but
rather to explore the fullness of cultural exchange in all its contradictions and
convergences for all parties. The theatre product may similarly resist forced
synthesis, revealing instead both the positive and negative aspects of the
encounter.”60
When “resist[ing] forced synthesis” comes to the fore as an ideal in both
process and product, the artists seek to include the charged process of the
work’s creation within whatever product may be presented, and not smooth
it away. Lo and Gilbert later imagine and valorize a “self-reflexive theatre”
where “the hybridizing of cultural fragments would be far from seamless,” and
difference would not be “naturalized.”61 Within this ideal, the work of creating
the presentation becomes, in large part, the work of figuring out how to show
one’s work. Now, it is impossible to deny that the showing of seams easily be-
comes a fictionalization of “seams,” near-impossible to extract the role of artistic
choice from even a decision to “show one’s work.” As long as there is a literal or
figurative proscenium frame somewhere, there will be lies of omission, if not
also commission. Yet an important shift is still made once the tensions and
intricacies of the work’s production are reframed as its subject matter.
In terms of Geography and Tree, this shift manifested first of all in a desire to
have the stage space feel something like the rehearsal space. Granted, installation
artist Nari Ward and lighting designers Stan Pressner (Geography) and Steven
Strawbridge (Tree) brought to the stage sculptural objects and visual atmospher-
ics that the rehearsal room never had. Yet their basic consideration of the space
as non-illusory raw space, exposed to the fire walls, and the near-constant
presence of the cast peopling that space as active witnesses to each other’s actions
(particularly acute for Geography, where the entire group seldom left full audience
view) signaled that we were treating the stage as a room defined foremost by the
group of people that inhabited it and viewed one another. The stage mirrored
the conditions for the experiment, rather than modeling a result.
How else might one bring process to product, besides simple visual cues?
Another solution, as narrated previously in chapter 1, was to expose the
language, or rather languages, of the rehearsal room. Geography’s tire-talk section

brought the aural texture of the dancers’ actual rehearsal room debates into the
performance, through a structured improvisation (orchestrated by Tracie
Morris, after her more direct authorship fell away). The work we did on this
important episode, eventually set at the center of the evening, was a process of
loosening Ralph’s and Tracie’s artistic control and handing it over to the cast.
They used whatever languages they liked to conduct the debate. In performance,
Ralph lingered at the edges of the fray, head cocked, listening, and seeing how
much he could understand. As with many of our rehearsal room debates, the
answer was “not much,” and he had to settle for being informed of the outcome.
In Tree we began the process assuming that the real problem of rehearsal
room translation—which in this work was compounded, as at least six different
languages were regularly used by our cast members62—was not just our condi-
tion for work but also our subject matter. Thus began the battery of experimen-
tal games I described in the earlier chapter, all proposed around acts of transla-
tion. They never contained memorized text, but rather admitted a good deal of
improvisatory variation from one run to the next. In that way the onstage mani-
festations of translation would remain impulsive, unpredictable, and, in being
so, more accurate to the rehearsal room.
In the manifestation of this work that continued through to the proscenium
performances, revealing process within product, Cheng-Chieh translated over-
heard snippets of a conversation between Wen Hui and Mr. Wang. Her efforts
were partial, as the conversation was conducted in both a Mandarin she could
understand and a Yunnan dialect she could not. Once she had rendered these
fragmented bits into English, David took them on as improvisational triggers.
He translated them once more by fashioning around them a story, delivered in
English across the fourth wall, new every night. About halfway into David’s
tale, Djédjé began interrupting him in French. Acknowledging the interruption,
David had to switch between French and English, all the while attempting to
keep his story straight. As a last straw, Wen Hui began also asking David ques-
tions in Mandarin-inflected English, until he overloaded and stopped speaking
altogether. The sudden silence propelled David and Djédjé into a pared-down
physical translation exercise—meeting upstage center, they took turns walking
straight downstage and up again, each one following the other with their best
impersonation of the other’s gait and carriage. This simple physical translation—
the assumptions of your body as rendered by mine—offered a respite, if tempo-
rary, in the reign of vocal confusion.
We liked the potential of this episode to expose how understanding and co-
herence was fragile, built up from fragmented glimpses of imperfect information
and then easily broken down into fragments once more. The daily problems of
interruptions and multiple points of focus, of on-the-spot interpretation as an

inevitable game of telephone, were all captured in the basic mechanics of this
game. Ralph and I worked to best reveal these themes through adjusting the
score, trying our best to avoid over-orchestrating.
I remember well one day standing with Ralph in the audience, with David
and Cheng-Chieh sitting on the storyteller’s bench downstage, struggling to
articulate what internal rules might guide David’s translation of Cheng-Chieh’s
already-translated fragments into narrative. Ralph and I disagreed on some
minor point, and we hashed it out in front of the assembled performers. This
was not our habitual mode of working. I remember for a fleeting moment
convincing myself, “This is good, Ralph and I are modeling exactly the process
we want this episode to capture, the unruly back and forth of communication.”
Until David, impatient, spoke up: “Why don’t you two just figure out what you
want and let us know what it is when you know?”63 The value of revealing the
tensions and difficulties of process does, of course, have a practical limit.
8. Surprise
If one of the promises of intercultural work is the opportunity for first collabora-
tors and then spectators to be able to step outside of their usual frames of refer-
ence, then it follows that when something valuable happens in rehearsal, it may
well emerge as a surprise. Discoveries that eventually feel right, in other words
both ethically and aesthetically sound, often make their appearance as the
moments that do not go according to plan. These moments may even undo
days of hard work. Collaborators, dramaturg included, must be attuned to this
possibility, so they will be ready to pursue any promise held within the surprise,
instead of dwelling sadly in the wreckage of their “Plan A.” This applies to the
simple act of dialogue, too. For a performance to be truly dialogic, it must be
built on conversations that require real listening, to hear the moments that
upend assumptions, surprise one or all interlocutors, and redirect focus.
This is not to say that the only challenge of intercultural work is the ability
to recognize the potential in moments of surprise, wherein the day’s “Plan A”
is upended. To be sure, a greater challenge is found in days upon days where
nothing at all surprising happens, where the same set of problems are hashed
and rehashed, over and over. At that point the dramaturg may be silently
begging, “I promise, I PROMISE, that if only something surprising would
happen, I will make sure I know how to recognize its potential!”
And yet: easier said than done. What to make of that surprising moment,
once it occurs, can be challenging. The moment when Ralph’s Geography cast
suddenly upended his plans for investigating movement that would be “like
trance but not trance” was immensely instructive to the non-African collabora-
tors on a personal level, but what did it indicate in terms of a way forward?
Should the group continue to investigate some more acceptable “translation”
of Ralph’s initial idea, or should we drop this train of thought entirely? It took
about thirteen more years, and three more pieces, to answer that question
fully—and Djédjé Djédjé Gervais was the only original Geography cast member,
Ralph aside, who was still around to help answer it.
On the other hand, some moments of surprise immediately declare them-
selves as valuable. One day Ralph, warming up in the Tree rehearsal room,
turned on an old Robert Johnson blues track. Mr. Li, usually silent, suddenly
felt like singing along, in his best approximation of Johnson’s voice but with no
access to his language. The potential of this surprise rang out crystal clear.
There was no contest; all agreed: this would be the final moment of the piece,
hauntingly conveying both understanding and misunderstanding across a
cultural gulf. Mr. Li would continue to sing with Johnson night after night.
Points of Departure
I have recounted how I stumbled into years of intercultural performance work,

without looking for such a project at first. I have shared critical thinking from
theorists who formed the underpinnings of how I began to understand the
challenges of the work I was doing—Bharucha, Conquergood, Lo and Gilbert,
and Knowles—as well as the practical experiences I accrued in parallel to that
reading. I have looked at the contested concept of a “target audience” and
have come out cautiously in favor of its relevance, though only when employed
descriptively to describe an inevitable difference across which meaning is
made, instead of prescriptively to define a desired goal. And I have finished
by expanding upon a list of eight points of focus—Disclosure and Consent,
Motives, Time, Advocacy, Risk, Intercorporeal work, Process into Product, and
Surprise—to attend to when thinking about the ethics of an intercultural col-
laboration. These eight points of focus can by no means account for all facets of
such a collaboration. They are simply eight ways of looking at an intercultural
collaboration that should allow the most important ethical issues, as well as the
political and aesthetic issues with which they are always entangled, to come to
the fore. In that sense, they are tools more than descriptors and offer points of
departure rather than of conclusion.
Postface
To render the moving body in words
Is this arrogance or masochism?
Ann Daly
The form is like a baited trap, to which the spiritual process

responds spontaneously and against which it struggles.
Jerzy Grotowski
I t was a long journey up to the point where I had something to write a book
about, and then another journey through the actual writing of it. Along the
way on both journeys I’ve often had to confront the twinned necessity and
impossibility of doing what Daly refers to above—rendering the moving body in
words, spoken or written. Why this task should be more fraught than rendering
anything in words, I’m not sure. Words can err and lie about anything at all.
But perhaps it is a matter of how our understanding of bodies, of our own and
others’, is written into our neurological fibers—wiring laid down prelinguisti-
cally. As a child I always danced when I couldn’t find any words for what I was
experiencing. So maybe rendering the moving body in words feels particularly
wrong because it flies in the face of that early sensation, that early absence.
At the same time, as an adult who loves the play and the potential of words,
I’m apt to think that if the words aren’t doing the experience justice, it’s only
that the right alchemical combination has not yet been found. Both the Zen
koan and the Russian novel evoke much more than the sum of their parts.
Words and their glorious excess have provided inspiration for many a dance;
the process reverses as well, with words providing evidence of how a dance
inspired.
If I’m lucky, the collection of words in this book provide a little evidence of
how all the movement artists with whom I’ve had the privilege to work—much
210
Postface 211
thanks to Ralph’s keen casting choices—have inspired me. My job has been to
watch them, really really watch them, listen to them, and once in a while join
them. Along the way I think about all they do and all they might yet do. I can’t
count the number of times I’ve been stunned by their flights, unimaginable
until the moment just after, when the fact of them still hangs in the air: wow, did
you see that? Not all of these were virtuosic, either. Some were the smallest flight
of the smallest gesture, only placed just so. A whistle and a glance across a large
empty stage.
It makes sense that as an archivist of the rehearsal room—one of the many
hats I’ve suggested the dramaturg may put on—I am in a position to chronicle
activities within these protected spaces. After all, I have amassed notebooks,
videos, e-mails, interviews. But what sort of protection should these rehearsal
spaces still be afforded? In offering a dramaturg’s participant-observer narrative,
have I crossed any lines? I’ve tried to stay sensitive to this concern throughout,
mentally weighing my level of disclosure against a performer’s previous degree
of disclosure in public forums, onstage or off. But inevitably I’m aware that my
rehearsal room narratives are different from the narratives that any other col-
laborators, Ralph and others, might provide. And so the potential disagreement
might not be over exactly what incidents to disclose, but rather how to disclose
them, in what register, with what sense of importance and what point of view.
Am I an unreliable narrator? Absolutely. But I certainly know now, after
years of working with Ralph, that the unreliable narrator tells another sort of
truth. Insofar as my project has been to unfold how a dance dramaturg may act
and think, these narratives will have fulfilled their potential, in ways that I am
aware of and others that I am not. It should be clear by now that there were
always many other actions and many other thoughts in these rooms, and I
hope that my narrative, while most accurate to my own actions and thoughts,
has left the reader space to conjure many of the others.
To finish, I’ll share an e-mail conversation between Ralph and me on the

subject of this book, dance and movement dramaturgy. I had just come back
from a panel at Movement Research Studies Project, discussing “Dramaturgy
as Practice/Dramaturgy in Practice.” Ralph wrote to ask how it went. I told
him it went great and explained that I had tried out a new metaphor for the
dramaturgical role:
kp: With the caveat that I know so incredibly little about team sports, I
offered that I’d heard about a position in football, allegedly called
212 Postface
the “free safety,” and if you play that position you are not assigned
to cover a particular area or player. Rather, you must watch the ball
as it is snapped and be sharp in going quickly to wherever you
discern the play needs you to be. And thus you have the ability to
always be where you are needed. But we have to note, this also
means you could always be where you are NOT needed. It depends
on how well you can fulfill the job.
rl: Nice analogy. But then dance-making is not really like a football
game. Because in football the rules and patterns are so laid out that
discerning where a play is going is much more predictable. Unless
we’re talking about maneuvering through a “game” without a
determined end-zone?
I think your dramaturgy, in keeping with the sports analogy,
might also be about trying to figure out the ever-evolving “rules”
of a work? And discerning where the ultimate end-zone resides.
That said, is there a “winning” in this thinking?
kp: No, I don’t think there is a pre-determined end-zone . . . It feels
like playing a game where the rules are under construction as
you go along. And, to be even more precise, there are at least two
sets of rules under construction, with an interesting and significant
overlap. There are the rules of how to proceed in the making
Figure 31. At work in 2014. (MANCC / Courtesy of Ralph Lemon)

Postface 213
process, and there are the rules of what will go on in the deferred,
heightened performance moment and frame. Some rules we all
agree to implicitly (as in for instance: Ralph is going to be the final
arbiter of what goes and what stays, insofar as he can control that,
which is not entirely; or: we are going to do most of our work in
these rooms at these times). Other rules are completely up for grabs
in every given moment.
But I do like game metaphors because I think they get at the
alchemic balance between structure and freeplay that you need
to make performance magic happen. The unexpected occurring
within a container of options . . .
And how do you “win” this game, what are you playing for
anyhow? Nothing so predictable as a touchdown . . . I would
offer you are playing for moments of excess, of generosity, where
what happens exceeds the sense of a measured transaction between
performer and audience or performer and maker, and catches us
all off guard . . . so an elusive, moving target, one that you can not
fix in your sights.
You set up a structure to hopefully catch a moment that will
exceed that structure . . . I always end up drifting back towards that
Grotowski quote, “form is a baited trap,” which suits me quite well.
rl: You should just put this in your book . . .
kp: Look at you dramaturging me!
rl: That’s also part of the game, at its best, isn’t it?1
Acknowledgments
My thanks go foremost to Ralph Lemon, for his capacious and generous spirit,
and his seemingly inexhaustible impulse to make valuable, challenging work.
Obviously this book would not exist without him. Massive thanks as well to all
the many collaborators on the projects described here, with whom I’ve had the
pleasure and privilege to work. I’m particularly thankful to the performers,
some of whom came long distances to be in our little rooms, and all of whom
were putting their bodies on the line, believing in what we were doing. And
much thanks to Ann Rosenthal, Cathy Zimmerman, and all the staff at MAPP,
who first put in so much hard work to make these collaborations happen, and
later were happy to throw open their archives when it was time for a retro-
spective glance.
Since writing just doesn’t happen without time and space of one’s own, I
shall raise high up the list of thanks everyone whose diligent and attentive child
care allowed me that time and space. Marixa Alvarez, Kathy Cardy, Susan
Profeta, Ellen Bodow, Elana Bodow, Annette Storckman, Elyssa Mactas,
Sarah Novotny, and still others who filled in. Your labor is part of the labor of
this book, and the fact that you did it with such love makes it even better.
For instrumental guidance at the inception of this project, great thanks to
Susan Manning and Ann Cooper Albright—your feedback did so much to
shape what this book is today. For reading so many early drafts so carefully,
responding so wisely, and thus getting the whole train moving, I can’t thank
Clare Croft enough. Advice from Tommy DeFrantz, as well as discussion and
cowriting on a related project, was similarly invaluable and invigorating. Sarah
Davies Cordova did such marvelous, generous work combing through the
chapters with me—I’m so grateful for her belief in the project, her clear-sighted
feedback, and her willingness to respond quickly to an e-mail and make a
problem disappear. I thank the SDHS editorial board as well for their feedback
and steady support, which was of immense reassurance. In later stages Kathy
Chetkovich was a brilliant collaborator, helping me see the forest for the
215
216 A c kn o wl e d g m e n ts
trees—thank you. Much appreciation goes to the photographers who worked

to dig up old images, especially Dan Merlo and T Charles Erickson. Lynda Paul
materialized in the eleventh hour and calmly provided decisive help on the bib-
liography. And thank you Raphael Kadushin, Amber Rose, Sheila McMahon,
and everyone I worked with at the University of Wisconsin Press for your in-
sight, patience, and high standards.
I’m also grateful to the many generous readers and interlocutors along the
way: Rebecca Rossen, who matched keen feedback with sage advice; Annie
Dorsen, ready to download a file and offer an insightful and needed reaction
with a moment’s notice; Talvin Wilks, intrepid partner in crime; and Okwui
Okpokwasili, always willing to check against her own memory-archive and
extend the thinking further. Thanks also to Kate Elswit, Pil Hansen, Ariel
Osterweis, Becca Rugg, Kimberly Jannarone, James Hannaham, Ian McCarthy,
Alexandra Beller, and Sara Jane Bailes, for lending their minds in disparate
ways at crucial junctures. And then there’s the group of excellent fellow drama-
turgs I consulted, looking for both specific details and general community, and
who were always so unselfish with their time and thoughts: Amy Jensen, Susan
Mar Landau, Anne Davison, Emily Reilly.
Abundant thanks to so many formative teachers, mentors, and advisers,
some who instructed me for just a week and others for years, but all who left an
indelible impression, including Owen Snyder, Janet Hicks, Ruth Clark, James
Truitte, Judith Jamison, David Gordon, Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman,
Ronald Jones, Michael Roemer, Julie Taymor, Elliot Goldenthal, Michael
Curry, Elinor Fuchs, Marc Robinson, James Leverett, Mark Bly, Catherine
Sheehy, Gordon Rogoff, and Erika Munk. Together they represent a thoroughly
multidisciplinary wisdom, and what of it I’ve been able to glean is at the core of
my dramaturgical sensibility. I similarly thank John Collins and the whole ERS
gang—especially in those formative years of the Loft, Lodge and Casa—for
establishing what good collaboration feels like, and setting the bar for possible
outcomes very high. And Philip Bither gets my special thanks for his formidable
support of work by both ERS and Ralph Lemon, and for being such a reliable
source of wisdom and good conversation.
I appreciate the institutional support generously given by the Yale School
of Drama for the completion of my dissertation, which then fed into the develop-
ment of this book. Immense thanks for the crucial assistance of Charles Repole,
then chair of the Department of Drama, Theatre and Dance at Queens Col-
lege, CUNY, in securing me the semester’s leave I needed to make this book
whole—it was probably hard to pull off, but he never let on. I thank the rest of
the department for their continued backing in ways small and large, and for
A c kn o wl e d g m e nts 217
collegial conversation that continues to expand the possibilities of the field—

thank you, Ira Hauptman, Harry Feiner, Susan Einhorn, Yin-Mei Critchell,
Meghan Healey, Edisa Weeks, Claudia Feldstein, Richard Move, Jeffrey
Greenberg, Gillian Lipton, and Hannah Schwadron. Important counsel and
moral support, as well as the financial assistance to develop some of this material
in conference presentations, was offered by Deans Tamara Evans and William
McClure; both did so much to make me feel welcome within my institution.
Talks, panels, and presentations that were formative in developing the
material in this book were hosted by the Society of Dance Historians and
Scholars ( particularly the 2011 conference on dance dramaturgy), Movement
Research Studies Project (thanks to Amanda Loulaki and Susan Mar Landau),
Performance Studies International, Dance Theater Workshop, the Mellon
Foundation, and the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts (thank you,
Mike Ross, Terri Ciofalo, and Tammey Kikta). Thanks as well to Mark
Franko, Sherril Dodds, and Molly Shanahan for the invaluable opportunity,
late in the process, to share a chapter at the Temple University Dance Studies
Colloquium and thereby refine it—your incisive comments and your kind
hospitality were greatly appreciated.
Thanks to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, New
York University’s Bobst Library, and the Yale University Sterling and Drama
Libraries for their impressive, well-cared-for resources and their spaces designed
for contemplation, as well as to the Spring Lake gang for their mostly quiet cabin
in the woods. I also thank the fine establishments of Espresso 77, Vineapple,
Joe, and 2 Alices Coffee Lounge for renting me the time and space to write for
the low price of a coffee, plus maybe a sandwich. And Ellen and Warren Bodow
for saying yes, many times over, to the use of the writing hotel, apartment 34L.
I have a debt I can never repay to my parents, Susan and Fred Profeta,
for raising me to be curious, fostering a love of learning, and supporting me
through almost all of my crazy ideas, even during those stubborn, unapprecia-
tive years. Brother Tim was also part of that curiosity and learning, an early
collaborator in all sorts of endeavors. Nina and Veronica Bodow have been so
darn patient, sharing their mom with this book, and I thank them now for what
they may not fully understand until later. Last but not least, boundless thanks
to Steve Bodow, for small line edits and grand understanding and everything,
everything, in between.
Appendix
Geography (1997)
Performers
Didier “James” Akpa (Côte d’Ivoire)*

Moussa Diabate (Guinea and United States)
Carlos Funn (United States)
Djédjé Djédjé Gervais (Côte d’Ivoire)
Ralph Lemon (United States)
Zaoli “Tapé” Mabo (Côte d’Ivoire)
Goulei Tchépoho (Côte d’Ivoire)
Kouakou “Angelo” Yao (Côte d’Ivoire)
Nai Zou (Côte d’Ivoire)
Selected Collaborators
Conception, Choreography, and Direction: Ralph Lemon (United States)

Text: Tracie Morris (United States)
Lighting: Stan Pressner (United States)
Visual Art (Set): Nari Ward ( Jamaica and United States)
Sound Scores: Francisco López (Spain) and Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal
Kid (United States)
Sound Design: Rob Gorton (United Stated)
Costumes: Liz Prince (United States)
Dramaturgy: Peter Novak (United States) and Katherine Profeta (United States)
Stage Management: Jenny Friend (United States)
Interpreter / Company Manager: Orida Boukhezer-Diabate
Process Timeline (Highlights)
November 1995 Ralph travels to Haiti

August 1996 Ralph travels to West Africa, to Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire
* The country after a person’s name in the pieces Geography and Tree reflects what nation that performer
called “home” during the period the piece was made.
219
220 Appendix
March 1997 Ralph travels to Côte d’Ivoire again

May–June 1997 First workshop at Yale
August–October 1997 Second workshop, at Arts Awareness and Brooklyn Academy
of Music, leading into rehearsals at Yale
October 28 1997 Premiere at Yale Repertory Theater (New Haven)
November–December 1997 Tour to Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Duke University
(Durham), University of Texas (Austin), and Brooklyn Academy of Music (New
York)
Tree (2000)
Performers
Bijaya Barik (India)

Carlos Funn (United States)
Djédjé Djédjé Gervais (Côte d’Ivoire)
Yeko Ladzekpo-Cole (United States)
Ralph Lemon (United States)
Li Wen Yi (China)
Manoranjan Pradhan (India)
Asako Takami ( Japan)
David Thomson (United States)
Wang Liliang (China)
Wen Hui (China)
Cheng-Chieh Yu (Taiwan and United States)
Selected Collaborators
Choreography and Direction: Ralph Lemon (United States)

Sound score: James Lo (United States)
Set / Visual Design: Nari Ward ( Jamaica and United States)
Costumes: Anita Yavich (United States)
Lighting: Steven Strawbridge (United States)
Dramaturgy and Text Arrangement: Katherine Profeta (United States)
Stage Management: Terri Ciofalo (United States)
Sound Design: David Budries (United States)
Performers Who Participated in the Process
but Not the Final Proscenium Piece
Minh Tran (Vietnam and United States)

Pehoula Zerehoulé (Côte d’Ivoire)
February 1998 Ralph travels to Northern India

February–March 1998 Residency and solo showing of India research at Columbia
University’s Miller Theater
August–October 1998 Ralph travels to China, Hong Kong, southern India, and
Japan
May 1999 Research performance at the Asia Society, New York
Appendix 221
February 1999 First residency workshop, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
July 1999 Ralph travels to Bali
August 1999 Second residency workshop, at Yale
September–October 1999 Ralph travels to China
October 1999 Solo residency workshop at CalArts
February 2000 Third residency workshop, at University of Texas at Austin
March–April 2000 Workshop into rehearsal period at Yale
April 20, 2000 Premiere at Yale Repertory Theater (New Haven)
September–October 2000 Touring to University of Texas (Austin), Walker Art
Center (Minneapolis), Krannert Center for the Performing Arts (Urbana), Yerba
Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), Brooklyn Academy of Music (New
York). One-week residency after Austin at Arizona State University’s Gammage
Theater.
Come home Charley Patton (2004)
Performers
*
Djédjé Djédjé Gervais
Darrell Jones
Ralph Lemon
Gesel Mason
Okwui Okpokwasili
David Thomson
Selected Other Collaborators
Direction, Choreography, and Visual Design: Ralph Lemon

Associate Scenic Design: R. Eric Stone
Trip Ladder: Nari Ward
Lighting: Roderick Murray
Video: Mike Taylor
Soundscore: Christian Marclay
Dramaturgy: Katherine Profeta
Sound: Lucas Indelicato
Costume: Anne C. de Velder
Documentary Video: Chelsea Lemon Fetzer and Ralph Lemon
Stage Management: Jason Pierson
Performers Who Participated in the Process
but Not the Final Proscenium Piece
James Hannaham
Bebe Miller
Miko Doi Smith
* For the pieces Come home Charley Patton and How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere?, Djédjé
Djédjé Gervais, Goulei Tchépoho, and Kouakou “Angelo” Yao would be annotated “United States and Côte
d’Ivoire” but all other names would be “United States.”
222 Appendix
Goulei Tchépoho
Kouakou “Angelo” Yao
February 2001 Ralph travels to Sapelo Island, Georgia

May 2001 Ralph travels across the South with daughter Chelsea
August–October 2001 Residency workshops at Virginia Commonwealth University
and Wesleyan with Djédjé Djédjé Gervais, Kouakou “Angelo” Yao, and Goulei
Tchépoho (VCU only)
November 2001 Ralph travels across South with Chelsea
December 2001–January 2002 Group research trip and residency on Sapelo Island,
Georgia
March 2002 Solo residency at UCLA
July 2002 First group workshop residency at Walker Art Center
August 2002 Ralph travels across South with Chelsea
September 2002 Solo residency at Princeton
November 2002 Ralph travels across South with Chelsea
January 2003 Residency with David Thomson at MOCA, Chicago
February 2003 Second group workshop residency at Walker Art Center
April–May 2003 Group workshop residency at The Kitchen
May–June 2003 Group workshop residency at House of World Cultures, Berlin
December 2003 Ralph revisits Sapelo Island, Georgia
February 2004 Group workshop residency at African American Cultural Center in
Pittsburgh
March–April 2004 Group workshop residency at Krannert Center for the Performing
Arts, Urbana, with work-in-progress performance
June 2004 Group workshop residency at Brooklyn Academy of Music
August–September 2004 Two weeks of rehearsals at Brooklyn Academy of Music
leading into final production residency at Krannert Center
September 21 2004 Premiere at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts (Urbana)
October 2004 Touring to Texas International Theatrical Arts Society (Dallas) and
Brooklyn Academy of Music (New York)
March 2005 Touring to Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Walker Art Center
(Minneapolis), African American Cultural Center (Pittsburgh), and New Jersey
Performing Arts Center (Newark)
How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere?
(2010)
Performers
Djédjé Djédjé Gervais

Darrell Jones
Ralph Lemon
Gesel Mason
Okwui Okpokwasili
Omagbitse Omagbemi
David Thomson
Appendix 223
Additional Performers on Video
Walter Carter
Edna Carter
Selected Other Collaborators
Conception and Direction: Ralph Lemon

Lighting: Roderick Murray
Video Design: Jim Findlay
Film Editing: Mike Taylor
Dramaturgy: Katherine Profeta
Costume Design: Anne C. de Velder
Stage Management: Kate Danziger
February–March 2008 Ralph and Okwui travel to Little Yazoo City, MS with videog-
rapher Luke Schantz to work with Walter and Edna Carter
August 2008 Initial group workshop residency at Brooklyn Academy of Music
September–October 2008 Workshop for Ralph and Okwui, including one-night duet
performance, Untitled, at Danspace (New York) on October 16th
January 2009 Group workshop at Brooklyn Academy of Music
July 2009 Group workshop residency at Walker Art Center
March–April 2010 Group workshop residency at Maggie Allesee National Center for
Choreography (Tallahassee)
September 2010 Production residency at Krannert Center (Urbana)
September 10, 2010 Premiere at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts (Urbana)
October–December 2010 Tour to Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Yerba Buena
Center for the Arts (San Francisco), Brooklyn Academy of Music (New York), Duke
Performances (Durham), Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (Los Angeles),
On the Boards (Seattle)
January 2011 Untitled (2008) duet reperformed by Okwui and Ralph as part of On Line:
Drawing through the Twentieth Century exhibition at Museum of Modern Art (New
York)
Notes
Preface
1. I leave this number imprecise because I was engaged in what I would now call
dramaturgical work before I knew to call it that. Most particularly, during 1991–1996 I
worked as an assistant to the theater director Julie Taymor, for whom I performed pre-
production visual and textual research, script editing, and translation work. To con-
tinue the theme of approaching a single performance event from multiple directions, I
also worked as a puppeteer/dancer in several of her shows over the same time period.
2. The pieces of Ralph Lemon’s on which the author worked are listed in the Appen-
dix, along with collaborator lists and selected timelines of the production processes.
3. See Jennifer Dunning, “When Disbanding Is the Only Logical Step,” New York
Times, August 6, 1995; and Christopher Reardon, “When Dance Companies Dissolve,”
Christian Science Monitor, September 28, 1995, for two different perspectives on why Ralph
dissolved his company and what larger trends played into that act. Dunning emphasizes
the scarcity of arts funding in the mid-1990s, while Reardon emphasizes the role of
artistic choice in a decision to metamorphose.
4. In the initial proposals Ralph also suggested that there would be Haitian collabo-
rators; he had contacts in mind from an earlier trip to Haiti. Unfortunately, because of
difficulties with communication and logistics, the Haitian artists were not able to par-
ticipate. It became clear that they would not join the group approximately six months
before the first workshop.
5. Excerpts from Ralph Lemon’s 1996 proposal as reprinted in Ralph Lemon,
Geography: Art/Race/Exile (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New
England, 2000), 22.
6. The values and structure of a dramaturgy education at the Yale School of
Drama have been discussed at length elsewhere—see Art Borreca, “Dramaturging New
Play Dramaturgy: The Yale and Iowa Ideals,” 56–69, and Mark Bly, “Bristling With
Multiple Possibilities,” 48–55, both in Dramaturgy in American Theater: A Source Book, ed.
Susan S. Jonas, Geoffrey S. Proehl, and Michael Lupu (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth
Cengage, 1997). By the time I arrived, the YSD’s Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism
department was more attentive to the collaborative process than its characterization in
Borreca’s essay. My training was much closer to Bly’s characterization, as Bly was one
of my instructors.
7. Peter Novak, now a professor of theater at University of San Francisco, was
then a fellow dramaturgy student at YSD. He and I had both lobbied the faculty to be
225
226 No te s to P a g e s x i v – 3
assigned to Ralph’s production as the student dramaturg; Peter because of his interest
in postcolonial studies, I because of my interest in dance theater experimentation. The
faculty wisely resolved the potential conflict by assigning us both to the production.
During the course of the project, Peter worked slightly more often with Tracie Morris,
the poet/playwright, and I worked slightly more often with Ralph and the dancers, but
we often worked in tandem.
8. This notebook, and the notebooks of the longer workshop and rehearsal process
that followed, were the raw materials that appeared, in a vastly edited form, in the chapter
I wrote titled “Geography at Yale Repertory Theatre,” to be found in The Production
Notebooks, vol. 2, ed. Mark Bly (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2001).
9. My own experience with this phenomenon includes participation in Maaike
Bleeker, Katherine Profeta, and Robert Steijn, “The Art of Questioning: On Dance
Dramaturgy” ( panel, part of the Dance Unwrapped series, Dance Theatre Workshop,
New York, May 15, 2006); Ralph Lemon and Katherine Profeta, “Inner Workings of
the Dramaturgical Process” (workshop and public discussion, Chicago Dancemakers
Forum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, April 29, 2006); Thomas F. DeFrantz,
Katherine Profeta, and Talvin Wilks, “Dramaturgical Reports from the Field: DeFrantz/
Byrd, Profeta/Lemon, Wilks/Miller” (roundtable discussion, annual conference of the
Society of Dance Historians and Scholars, Dance Dramaturgy: Catalyst, Perspective & Memory,
Toronto, June 23–26, 2011); a Mellon Foundation convening on Dance Development
Centers with a half-day session on the subject of dance dramaturgy (New York, December
2011); a 2013 two-part Movement Research Studies Project panel called “Dramaturgy
as Practice/Dramaturgy in Practice” (conceived by Amanda Loulaki and Susan Mar
Landau, New York, May 5 and October 1, 2013); and a Dramaturgy in Dance residency
at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, Urbana (with Talvin Wilks, April 9–11,
2014). In addition, existing literature on dance dramaturgy mentions the following
events as key parts of the evolving discourse (note that none of them took place in the
United States though some concerned American dramaturgs and artists who work in
Europe): dramaturgical “Conversations on Choreography” in Amsterdam and Barcelona
in 1999; dramaturgy seminars at ImpulzTanzWien in 2007; the “European Dramaturgy
in the 21st Century” conference in Frankfurt am Main, 2007; “The Witness as Drama-
turg” seminar in the UK in 2008.
10. Van Kerkhoven has done much to advance the notion that dramaturgy may be
conceived of as “movement itself.” She characterizes it thus in Marianne Van Kerkhoven,
“European Dramaturgy in the 21st Century: A Constant Movement,” Performance Research
14, no. 3 (2009): 7, where she also mentions that she first put forward this idea in a
German-language essay she wrote back in 1988. When I first read her writing on drama-
turgy as motion in 2009, her thoughts seemed in immediate harmony with my experi-
ences working as a dramaturg, as well as with the ideas I was formulating about the nature
of the function.
Introduction
1. I will not take time to delve into the issue of whether the word, in English, is
spelled “dramaturg” or “dramaturge,” except to note here that that is a battle of minimal
importance, save for the way it feels like a symptom of a larger indeterminacy, and that
it is still being played out in various institutions and handbooks of usage. For instance,
No te s to P a g e s 4 –7 227
the Yale School of Drama trains “dramaturgs” and the New York Public Theater might
hire them, but when they type out their CVs in Microsoft Word or work on a production
reviewed by the New York Times they are autocorrected to “dramaturges.” In this volume
I use “dramaturg” for two reasons: because that is the spelling under which I was
trained, and because that decreases the potential for confusion with the French word for
playwright (dramaturge).
2. Joel Schechter, “In the Beginning There Was Lessing . . . Then Brecht, Müller,
and Other Dramaturgs,” in Dramaturgy in American Theater: A Source Book, ed. Susan Jonas,
Geoffrey Proehl, and Michael Lupu (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage, 1997), 17–18.
3. Ibid., 19.
4. Excellent and thorough treatment of Brecht as architect of a new form of drama-
turgy is offered in the Brecht chapter of Mary Luckhurst, Dramaturgy: A Revolution in the
Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Mary Luckhurst, “Revolu-
tionising Theatre: Brecht’s Reinvention of the Dramaturg,” in The Cambridge Companion
to Brecht, 2nd ed., ed. Peter Thomson and Glendyr Sacks (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), 193–208.
5. In the body of the text this misspelling, thaëter, is subsequently explained—the
Philosopher wishes to use theater’s mimesis for brand-new purposes, and when warned
by the Dramaturg that this would no longer be theater, he proposes that it could simply
be called “thaëter” instead (at which comment, the stage directions inform us, “all
laugh,” but the joke sticks). See Bertolt Brecht, The Messingkauf Dialogues, 2nd ed., trans.
and ed. John Willett (London: Methuen Drama, 2002) 7.
6. Ibid., x.
7. Ibid., 1.
8. Erwin Piscator, Das Politische Theater, rev. Felix Gasbarra (Hamburg: Rowohlt,
1963), 139, as translated by Mary Luckhurst and quoted in her Dramaturgy, 125–26.
9. The politics of these relationships, which often included sexual as well as creative
relations and were long interpreted according to the pattern of male collaborator as artist
and female collaborator as helpmate, has been a subject of great discussion elsewhere.
See, for instance, Paula Hanssen, Elizabeth Hauptmann: Brecht’s Silent Collaborator (New
York: Peter Lang, 1995); John Fuegi, “The Zelda Syndrome: Brecht and Elizabeth
Hauptman,” in The Cambridge Companion to Brecht, 1st ed., ed. Peter Thomson and Glendyr
Sacks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 104–116 (this article was deleted
from the 2nd edition), which he later expanded into his highly controversial Brecht and
Company: Sex, Politics, and the Making of Modern Drama (New York: Grove Press, 1994); and
Monika Krause, “Practicing Authorship: The Case of Brecht’s Plays,” in Practicing
Culture, ed. Craig Calhoun and Richard Sennett (London: Routledge, 2007), 215–228.
Fuegi is adamant in portraying Brecht as a ruthless sexist, purposefully exploiting female
labor and seizing the sole glory; Krause is more measured in showing how Brecht profited
from the arrangement, but she ultimately places most of her blame on the ways in which
the institution of authorship, and the structures that surround it, cannot account for
collaborative production. The topic of Brecht and his collaborators returns at the end of
this introduction as I discuss gendered associations with the dramaturg’s role.
10. Myriam Van Imschoot, “Anxious Dramaturgy,” Women & Performance: A Journal
of Feminist Theory 13, no. 2 (2003): 66n6.
11. Many sources cite Hoghe’s years as dramaturg with Bausch as 1980–1990,
including his own website, but this does not seem to be strictly accurate; a survey of
228 No te s to P a g e s 7 – 1 2
credits for productions during this period shows that he was first credited with “drama-
turgy” on Keuschheitslegende (Legend of Chastity), which premiered in December 1979. The
first production thereafter not to include his name was Palermo Palermo, which premiered
in December 1989.
12. Susan Manning, in Debbie Shapiro, “Dancing around Dramaturgy: An Explo-
ration,” Thinking Dance, January 30, 2012, http://www.thinkingdance.net/articles/2012
/01/30/Dancing-Around-Dramaturgy-an-exploration.
13. Marianne Van Kerkhoven, “Focus Raimund Hoghe,” trans. Gregory Ball
(Brussels: Kaaitheater, September/October 2002), http://www.raimundhoghe.com/en
/focus_en.html. Quotes from Hoghe’s journal were left in German in the source docu-
ment and are translated here by Scott Shepherd and myself.
14. André Lepecki, “Dance without Distance,” Ballet International/Tanz Aktuell 2
(2001): 30.
15. Ibid. (Lepecki’s characterization.)
16. Ibid.
17. Bly, “Bristling,” 49.
18. Bojana Cvejić, “The Ignorant Dramaturg,” Maska 16, nos. 131–132 (2010): 40–53,
http://sarma.be/docs/2864.
19. André Lepecki, “Dramaturging: A Quasi-objective Gaze on Anti-memory
(1992–98),” in Are We Here Yet?, ed. Jeroen Peeters (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2010), 64.
20. Marianne Van Kerkhoven, “Introduction,” Theaterscrift, no. 5–6 (1994): 18.
21. Marianne Van Kerkhoven, “Looking without Pencil in the Hand,” Theaterscrift,
no. 5–6 (1994): 146, emphasis in original.
22. Lepecki, “Dramaturging,” 65.
23. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (Abingdon:
Routledge, 2006); and Elinor Fuchs, The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theater after
Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).
24. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 23–24.
25. Ibid., 96.
26. Kimberly Jannarone’s book Artaud and His Doubles (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2010) extricates Artaud’s legacy as it has been interpreted in experi-
mental theater since the 1960s from the writings of the man himself, within his own
historical context. The difference is striking. A full discussion of this is beyond my scope,
but I do want to note that I am describing the image of the ecstatic Artaud as he has
been interpreted from 1960 onward, and not the reactionary nihilist that Jannarone
exhumes.
27. All quotes from Antonin Artaud are taken from Antonin Artaud, Theater and Its
Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 84, 95, 99.
28. Janez Jansa, “From Dramaturgy to Dramaturgical: Self-Interview,” Maska 16,
nos. 131–132 (2010): 54–61, http://sarma.be/docs/2871. See also Pirkko Husemann,
“When the Dramaturg Becomes Obsolete, the Dramaturgical Remains Important,”
Performance Research 14, no. 3 (2009): 52–53.
29. Alexis Soloski offers a good brief introduction to contemporary NYC theater
companies using some version of the “devised theater” working process, including ERS,
as well as to the full range of processes that can be placed under this same umbrella, in
her article “The Group Theater,” Village Voice, January 5, 2011. I should also mention
that the term “devised theater,” though often useful as a descriptive tool, is currently (in
2015) looked at askance by most members of ERS. The danger is that the word signals a
No te s to P a g e s 1 3 –19 229
faddish adoption of this approach, as well as a calcification of something that was origi-
nally meant to be flexible.
30. Hildegard De Vuyst, in Scott deLahunta, ed., “Dance Dramaturgy: Speculations
and Reflections,” Dance Theatre Journal 16, no. 1 (2000): 23.
31. Stephen Jay Gould, “Full of Hot Air,” Natural History 98, no. 10 (1989): 28–38, as
quoted in Bly, “Bristling,” 53.
32. Here I refer to the lawsuits brought by theater dramaturg Lynn M. Thomson
against the estate of Jonathan Larson, the creator of the musical Rent. She sought a
percentage of royalties for her work developing the hit musical with Larson, asserting
coauthorship in order to assert her legal rights. Presumably if Larson had not died un-
expectedly the night his show opened, Thomson might have been able to renegotiate her
fee to include royalties under the title dramaturg, without having to make an argument
in terms of authorship, as “author” is a term with legal valence and “dramaturg” is not.
She lost the coauthorship suit, but as the judge allowed she had indeed contributed
some copyrightable material, she sued again to remove her contributions from the
script. The second suit was settled out of court, with Thomson granted a dramaturg
credit and an undisclosed sum. See Jesse McKinley, “Family of ‘Rent’ Creator Settles
Suit over Authorship,” New York Times, September 10, 1998.
33. See preface, note 10.
34. Cvejić, “Ignorant Dramaturg.”
35. Ralph Lemon, Come home Charley Patton (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University
Press, 2013), 190.
36. Ric Knowles, “Calling Off the Border Patrol: Intercultural Dramaturgy in
Toronto,” in Performance in the Borderlands, ed. Ramón Rivera-Servera and Harvey Young
(Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 170.
37. Lepecki, in deLahunta, “Dance Dramaturgy,” 24.
38. See, for instance, Synne Behrndt’s discussion of the “outside eye” in Synne
Behrndt, “Dance, Dramaturgy and Dramaturgical Thinking,” Contemporary Theatre Review
20, no. 2 (2010): 192–193. André Lepecki undertakes the most thorough dissection of this
figure when he compares it to Descartes’s examination of eyes taken from corpses, “as if
perception was a detachable function independent from the rest of the body, mind, soul
and passion.” Lepecki, in deLahunta, “Dance Dramaturgy,” 25.
39. Van Kerkhoven, “European Dramaturgy,” 7. Van Kerkhoven leaves this
phrase in the original German; my translation is used here. She reports first using the
phrase as the title to an essay on dramaturgy she wrote in 1988. She also writes that she
borrowed the phrase from Hans-Magnus Enzensberger; her citation to Enzensberger is
to a publication not published until 2006. See Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, Ach Europa!
Wahrnehmungen aus sieben Ländern (Frankfurt am Main: Surhkamp Verlag, 2006).
40. Katherine Profeta, unpublished rehearsal notebook, 1997. Later published in
Profeta, “Geography at Yale,” 232.
41. Maaike Bleeker, “Dramaturgy as a Mode of Looking,” Women & Performance: A
Journal of Feminist Theory 13, no. 2 (2003): 163.
42. Ibid.
43. Jacob Zimmer, “Friendship Is No Day Job—and Other Thoughts of a Resident
Dance Dramaturg,” Canadian Theatre Review, no. 155 (Summer 2013): 19.
44. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), viii. As quoted by
Bleeker, “Dramaturgy,” 171.
230 No te s to P a g e s 2 0 – 3 8
45. Charlan Jeanne Nemeth, “Lab and Research Narrative,” accessed August 16,
2012, http://psychology.berkeley.edu/people/charlan-jeanne-nemeth.
46. See note 9.
47. Cindy Brizzell and André Lepecki, “Introduction: The Labor of the Question
Is the (Feminist) Question of Dramaturgy,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist
Theory 13, no. 2 (2003): 15.
48. Ibid.
50. Ibid.
51. Brizzell and Lepecki, “Introduction,” 16.
52. The recent mass-market book Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in
Creative Pairs by Joshua Wolf Shenk (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014) does
a great job of debunking the myth of the solo artistic genius as the wellspring of creativity.
Shenk aggregates much recent research in the social sciences to argue for the relational
foundation of creativity—an argument greatly relevant to the dramaturgical function.
Chapter 1. Text and Language
1. Bojana Bauer, “Enfolding of the Aesthetic Experience: Dramaturgical Practice

in Contemporary Dance” ( proceedings, Society of Dance Historians and Scholars, 34th
Annual Conference, Dance Dramaturgy: Catalyst, Perspective & Memory, June 2011), 13.
2. André Lepecki, in deLahunta, “Dance Dramaturgy,” 22.
3. Deborah Hay, quoted in Ann Daly and Angela Rodgers, When Writing Becomes
Gesture (Austin, TX: Wollemi Pine Press, 2004), n.p.
4. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 20.
5. Crossing the Line, “Crossing the Line 2010: About the Festival,” http://www.fiaf
.org/crossingtheline/2010/2010-ctl-about.shtml.
6. New York Live Arts, “About New York Live Arts,” accessed August 21, 2012,
http://www.newyorklivearts.org/about/about.php/.
7. Tim Etchells, Certain Fragments: Contemporary Performance and Forced Entertainment
(London: Routledge, 1999), 23.
8. Profeta, unpublished rehearsal notebook, October 1997, also quoted in Profeta,
“Geography at Yale,” 270.
9. Ralph Lemon, e-mail message to Katherine Profeta, February 13, 2000.
10. Ralph Lemon, e-mail message to Katherine Profeta, winter 1999–2000 (exact
date lost).
11. Profeta, unpublished rehearsal notebook, August 1999.
12. Zerehoulé did not appear in the final Tree performance, unlike the other per-
formers mentioned in this paragraph. For details on why Ralph decided not to cast her,
see his letter to her reproduced in Ralph Lemon, Tree: Belief/Culture/Balance (Middletown,
CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 179.
13. Ralph Lemon, as quoted in Profeta, unpublished rehearsal notebook, February
2000.
14. Katherine Profeta, e-mail message to Ralph Lemon, April 4, 1998.
15. Lemon, Tree, 184.
16. Andrew Robinson, Earth Shock: Climate, Complexity and the Forces of Nature (London:
Thames and Hudson, 1993), 53.
No te s to P a g e s 4 2 –54 231
17. I remember Ralph using the phrase “Ground Zero” repeatedly throughout the
entire Patton process, but it is documented in print in Camille LeFevre, “Black History
Inspires Dance,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, March 11, 2005.
18. Ralph Lemon, e-mail message to Katherine Profeta, July 7, 2001.
19. Ralph Lemon, “Talking Dance” (lecture-demonstration, University of Minne-
sota, Minneapolis, March 9, 2005). As recorded in Profeta, unpublished rehearsal
notebook.
20. James Hannaham is a novelist and performer who did not appear in Patton’s
final concert stage performance but was instrumental in many of the workshops; he left
the cast in order to attend graduate school in creative writing. The group’s interest in
techniques of narrative fiction predated his arrival in the cast but was certainly further
fueled by it.
21. As Okwui Okpokwasili recalled his words. Okwui Okpokwasili, interview with
author, October 24, 2005.
22. Ibid.
23. Ralph Lemon, talk-back after workshop showing, House of World Cultures,
Berlin, June 10, 2003 (video recording; my transcription).
24. Young’s work on the countermonument can be found in James Young, The
Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1993); James Young, “Germany’s Memorial Question: Memory, Counter-
Memory, and the End of the Monument,” South Atlantic Quarterly 96, no. 4 (1997): 853–
891; and James Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and
Architecture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000).
25. William Forsythe, Synchronous Objects (spoken commentary to online video,
2009), http://synchronousobjects.osu.edu.
26. Manfred Jahn, “Cognitive Narratology,” in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative
Theory, ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan (London: Routledge,
2005), 67.
27. Peggy Phelan, “Shards of a History of Performance Art: Pollack and Namuth
through a Glass, Darkly,” in A Companion to Narrative Theory, ed. James Phelan and Peter
J. Rabinowitz (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 500.
28. Gertrude Stein, “Composition as Explanation,” in Selected Writings of Gertrude
Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 517–518.
29. My translations of the terms designated in a code-cracking libretto, the sort
customarily distributed before a performance, interpreting the geometrical figures for Le
Ballet de Monsieur de Vendosme (1610). The historical sketches of these figures are offered as
an illustration in both Mark Franko, Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993), 18; and Susan Leigh Foster, Reading Dancing: Bodies and
Subjects in Contemporary American Dance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 108.
30. Franko, Dance as Text, 31.
31. Ibid., 5.
32. Ibid., 5–6.
33. Ibid., 25.
34. Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 30.
35. Roland Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” in
Image/Music/Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 79.
232 No te s to P a g e s 5 4 – 6 4
36. Barthes, Image/Music/Text, 94.

37. Katherine Profeta, e-mail message to Ralph Lemon, April 2, 2000. Also reprinted
in Lemon, Tree, 210.
38. The characterization of representations or codes of identity in narrative terms,
as “backstories,” is mine; the remainder of these two sentences is based on Ann Cooper
Albright, Choreographing Difference: The Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance (Middletown,
CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1997). Albright speaks of “cultural discourses” in tension
with the dancing body; I am taking a further step to say these discourses imply narratives.
39. Susan Leigh Foster, “Dance and Narrative,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative
Theory, ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan (London: Routledge,
2008), 95–96.
40. The term “postmodern” as used to describe Ralph’s dancing, and for that matter
the dancing of his New York contemporaries in the early 2000s, is deeply flawed, as its
referent shifts so much depending on decade and context. I continue to use it here
because it was, nevertheless, the word we used in rehearsal rooms at that time. However,
as Ralph puts it, “even then we always had invisible quotes around it” (Ralph Lemon,
conversation with Katherine Profeta, July 21, 2014).
41. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 383.
42. Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (New York:
Pantheon, 2010; New York: Vintage Books, 2012), 216. Page reference is to the 2012
edition.
43. Ibid., 215, 216.
44. Gertrude Stein, “Plays,” in Last Operas and Plays (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1995), xxix.
45. Ibid., xlvi.
Chapter 2. Research
1. Gilpin, in deLahunta, “Dance Dramaturgy,” 22.

2. Ibid.
3. My translation of the entry for “Rechercher” in Le Trésor de la Langue Francaise
Informatisé, from the website of the Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales,
http://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/rechercher.
4. Okwui Okpokwasili, e-mail message to Katherine Profeta, March 24, 2013.
5. Effective coverage of many of the facets of this discussion can be located in
Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt, eds., Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Inquiry
(London: I. B. Tauris, 2007); Hazel Smith and Roger T. Dean, eds., Practice-Led Research,
Research-Led Practice in the Creative Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010);
and Janneke Wesseling, ed., See It Again, Say It Again: The Artist as Researcher (Amsterdam:
Valiz, 2011).
6. Hazel Smith and Roger T. Dean, Practice-Led Research, 1, 9.
7. Burt Supree, “Keep Movin’ On,” Village Voice, December 18, 1984.
8. From the 1980 Statement of Purpose, dating from Movement Research’s in-
corporation in that year. As quoted in “Movement Research Timeline,” part of the
Movement Research Strategic Plan, FY08–FY10, http://www.movementresearch.org/aboutus
/MR%20Strategic%20Plan-FNL.pdf.
No te s to P a g e s 6 4 –70 233
9. Cynthia Novack, in her influential history of Contact Improvisation, reports

that Magnesium was understood as a key point of origin by Contact improvisers them-
selves. At the same time, she offers a variety of cultural origins for the form and notes
that throughout the 1960s both dance and theater groups—such as Grand Union, San
Francisco Dancer’s Workshop, The Performance Group, and The Living Theater—
were all experimenting with “weight and improvisation.” See Cynthia J. Novack, Shar-
ing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1990). See especially chapter 2, “Contact Improvisation’s Origins and Influences,”
and 61n26.
10. Steve Paxton, “The Studies Project” (transcript with Bill T. Jones and Mary
Overlie from a public conversation that took place December 4, 1983), Contact Quarterly
9, no. 3 (1984): 30–37.
11. William Forsythe and Alva Noë, “Live from the New York Public Library:
William Forsythe and Alva Noë” (transcript of conversation, October 9, 2009), 6,
http://www.nypl.org/sites/default/files/events/live_2009_10_09_forsythe_noe_
transcript.pdf.
12. Kate Elswit, in her “Petrified? Some Thoughts on Practical Research and
Dance Historiography” (Performance Research 13, no. 1 [2008]: 61–69), offers an important
counter to the narrative that the idea of artistic practice as research suddenly emerged
in the 1960s and 1970s. Examining how the early twentieth-century work of Valeska
Gert and Oskar Schlemmer could also be thought of as research, she laments the ten-
dency of the artistic processes of the more distant past to fade from sight, or rather
harden into the artistic products housed in the archive. While such earlier instances of
practice as research certainly exist (and need more attention), it is nevertheless fair to say
that there was an uptick of awareness and thinking about artistic practice as a form of
research in Euro-American performance culture of the 1960s and 1970s.
13. Lepecki, “Dance without Distance,” 30.
14. André Lepecki, “The Body as Archive: Will to Re-enact and the Afterlives of
Dances,” Dance Research Journal 42, no. 2 (Winter 2010): 44.
15. Rebecca Schneider, “Archives Performance Remains,” Performance Research 6,
no. 2 (2001): 103.
16. Bertolt Brecht, Briefe, vol. 1, ed. Günter Glaeser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1981), 603–604, as translated and quoted in Luckhurst, Dramaturgy, 135–136.
17. See introduction, note 9.
18. For further information on the specificities of that training, see Luckhurst,
Dramaturgy, 128–138.
19. Bly, “Bristling,” 50. Bly’s essay, the first version of which was given as an oral
address in 1994, described the definition of a casebook’s contents as part of describing
his instruction at the Yale Drama School; I was the recipient of that instruction starting
in 1996, and thus this published description is familiar to me, identical as far as I can
remember to what I was told in class.
20. Gilpin, in deLahunta, “Dance Dramaturgy,” 22.
21. Bly, “Bristling,” 50.
22. Etchells, “Certain Fragments,” 51.
23. William Tronzo, introduction to The Fragment: An Incomplete History (Los Angeles:
Getty Research Institute, 2009), 1, 4.
24. Jansa, “From Dramaturgy to Dramaturgical.”
234 No te s to P a g e s 7 3 – 9 1
25. As quoted in Lemon, Geography, 22.

26. This and other quotations from this episode are from Profeta, unpublished
rehearsal notebook, June 1997. Also quoted in Profeta, “Geography at Yale,” 230–231.
27. Karen McCarthy Brown, “Vodou,” in African Folklore: An Encyclopedia, ed. Philip
Peek and Kwesi Yankah (New York: Routledge, 2004), 498.
28. Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (New York: Thames and
Hudson, 1953; New Paltz, NY: McPherson, 1983), 5, 7.
29. Katherine Profeta, unpublished rehearsal notebook, June 1997.
30. Deren, Divine Horsemen, 5–6.
31. The one exception was a two-minute clip that was shown in the 1950s on a
program called CBS Odyssey (CBS television), for which Deren gave careful editing in-
structions. See Moira Sullivan, An Anagram of the Ideas of Filmmaker Maya Deren: Creative
Work in Motion Pictures (Stockholm: Department of Cinema Studies, Stockholm University,
1997), 285–286.
32. For fuller coverage, see Katherine Profeta, “Ralph Lemon and the Buck
Dance,” Movement Research Performance Journal 33 (2008): n.p.
33. Gesel Mason, interview with author, October 17, 2005.
34. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1996), 33.
35. Katherine Profeta and Talvin Wilks ( public conversation, Dramaturgy in
Dance residency, Krannert Center for the Arts, Urbana, IL, April 9–11, 2014).
36. Ibid.
37. The four sources mentioned are as follows: Lila Abu-Lughod, “Islam and the
Gendered Discourses of Death,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 25, no. 2 (1993);
Tom Lutz, Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears (New York: W. W. Norton,
1999); Yoel Hoffmann, ed., Japanese Death Poems: Written by Zen Monks and Haiku Poets on
the Verge of Death (Boston: Charles E. Tuttle, 1986); Yiwu Liao, The Corpse Walker: Real-Life
Stories, China from the Bottom Up, trans. Wen Huang (New York: Pantheon Books, 2008).
38. Okwui’s initial instructions were to cry for five minutes straight. Later in the
development process Ralph slowly increased the duration such that by the time she was
crying on the stage, it was for eight minutes.
39. Okwui Okpokwasili, e-mail message to Katherine Profeta, March 23, 2013.
40. Ibid.
41. Darrell Jones, e-mail message to Katherine Profeta, October 30, 2010.
42. Gesel Mason, e-mail message to Katherine Profeta, October 30, 2010.
43. Schneider, “Archives,” 102.
Chapter 3. Audience
1. Iris Fanger, “Ralph Lemon: Private Man in the Public Arena,” Dance Magazine,
August 1991, 38–42.
2. A fuller discussion of Miles Davis’s relationship to the audience, his gesture of
turning his back, and the ways in which his gesture was received can be found in John
Szwed, So What: The Life of Miles Davis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), particularly
190–192.
3. As described by Ann Daly, quoting Deborah Hay, in Ann Daly, Critical Gestures:
Writings on Dance and Culture (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 34, 40.
4. Anne Cattaneo, “Dramaturgy: An Overview,” in Jonas et al., Dramaturgy, 10.
No te s to P a g e s 9 1 – 108 235
5. One notable exception is found in Jacob Zimmer’s description of his three years
as a resident dance dramaturg for the Canadian company Dancemakers. There his job
did include longer-term thinking about the audience(s) of an entire season, on top of the
more usual project-based focus on the audience for a single work. See Zimmer, “Friend-
ship,” 19.
6. Heidi Gilpin, “Shaping Critical Spaces: Issues in the Dramaturgy of Movement
Performance,” in Jonas et al., Dramaturgy, 85.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Van Kerkhoven, “Introduction,” 22.
10. Gilpin, “Shaping Critical Spaces,” 87.
11. Van Kerkhoven, “Introduction,” 22.
12. Van Kerkhoven, “Looking without Pencil,” 142.
13. Alva Noë, in Forsythe and Noë, “Live from the New York Public Library,” 6.
14. Ibid., 12, 28. Note that the published transcript says “schools” where clearly
“skills” was the word spoken—author was present at the live event, and her notebook
supports that determination.
15. Alva Noë, Varieties of Presence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 80.
17. Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliot (London:
Verso, 2009) 11.
18. Ibid., 13.
19. Ibid., 15.
20. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image/Music/Text.
21. See Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
22. Lepecki, in deLahunta, “Dance Dramaturgy,” 24.
23. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry
Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 69.
24. Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 13, 11.
25. See chapter 1, note 17.
27. Ralph Lemon, e-mail message to Katherine Profeta, February 15, 2005.
28. Ralph Lemon, as quoted in Gia Kourlas, “Fall Preview: Southern Exposure,”
Time Out New York, September 9–16, 2004.
29. Profeta, unpublished rehearsal notebook, July 2002.
30. Ibid.
31. Ralph Lemon, e-mail message to Katherine Profeta, December 10, 2001.
32. David and Djédjé were part of the eventual cast of Patton. Goulei, the Ivoirian
djembe drummer who had been part of Geography (the first part) but not Tree (the second),
was included in some parts of the larger Patton experience but not in the cast of the
proscenium production.
33. Profeta, unpublished rehearsal notebook, December 2001–January 2002.
35. Katherine Profeta, e-mail message to Ralph Lemon, October 28, 2001.
36. Ralph Lemon, e-mail message to Katherine Profeta, October 29, 2001.
37. Katherine Profeta, e-mail message to Ralph Lemon, June 26, 2002.
38. Ralph Lemon, e-mail message to Katherine Profeta, June 26, 2002.
236 No te s to P a g e s 1 0 8 – 1 20
39. Profeta, unpublished rehearsal notebook, July 2002.

40. Dwight Conquergood, “Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Re-
search,” in The Performance Studies Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Harry Bial (New York: Routledge,
2007), 370.
41. James Baldwin, “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?,”
New York Times, July 29, 1979.
42. For this approach I was drawing on my years of work with Elevator Repair
Service. With ERS our strategy, when faced with a new project, had often been to ask,
“What would we never do?” brainstorm some answers, and then set off trying to do one of
the things on that list. This is not to suggest that all the items on that list would offer pro-
ductive confrontations with taboos—some of them would just be awful no matter what.
43. In 2000 the New York Times ran a fifteen-part series of long-form articles under
the heading “How Race Is Lived in America.” The paperback of the collected series
was published just before this workshop, and I brought it in as part of our research
materials. See Joseph Leylveld, ed., How Race Is Lived in America: Pulling Together, Pulling
Apart (New York: Times Books/Henry Holt, 2001).
44. This story is printed, with some important variations from the way it was told
on the Walker stage (and adding a coda), in the first pages of Lemon, Come home Charley
Patton, 1–2.
45. In 2000, Ralph viewed the gallery show “Witness: Photographs of Lynchings
from the Collection of James Allen and John Littlefield” (organized by Andrew Roth,
Roth Horowitz Gallery, New York. January 13–February 12, 2000). Subsequently, during
the Patton rehearsal process, we often kept the book Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography
in America, by James Allen (Santa Fe: Twin Palms, 2000), in the rehearsal room. These
photos, which staged the grisly aftermath of a lynching for reproduction on postcards,
extended the reach of lynching’s spectacle, to audiences (white) who lived anywhere
served by the postal system.
47. Darby English, How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2007). The term “black representational space” is introduced on page 9 and
developed in the introduction and first chapter, through page 70.
48. Ibid., 7.
49. Okwui Okpokwasili, interview with author, October 24, 2005.
50. Ibid.
51. Okwui Okpokwasili. This first version of the tale is published in Ralph Lemon,
Come home Charley Patton, 174. I have quoted that version, except, to avoid confusion, I
have changed the names to reflect the names we used in the proscenium stage perform
ances. (In Okwui’s very first improvisation the composer was Bach not Verdi, and the
classmate’s name was Dawn not Lily.)
52. One stage version, my transcription from the October 26, 2004, BAM perform
ance of Come home Charley Patton. Ralph Lemon, Come home Charley Patton, DVD (New
York: Cross Performance, 2004).
53. Ibid.
54. Okwui Okpokwasili, interview with author, October 24, 2005.
55. Susan Manning, Modern Dance, Negro Dance: Race in Motion (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 2004), xvi, 143.
56. Ralph Lemon, untitled and unpublished manuscript, 2003 (Microsoft Word file).
57. Profeta, unpublished rehearsal notebook, April 2004.
No te s to P a g e s 1 2 0–131 237
58. Lemon, Come home Charley Patton, 191.

59. Ralph Lemon, untitled and unpublished manuscript, October 15, 2005 (Micro-
soft Word file).
60. Profeta, unpublished rehearsal notebook, April 2004.
61. Arna Bontemps, “A Summer Tragedy,” in The Old South: “A Summer Tragedy”
and Other Stories of the Thirties (New York: Dodd and Mead, 1973), 135–148.
62. Ralph recounts a version of these e-mail conversations in Lemon, Come home
Charley Patton, 191. However, taking poetic license, he transposes them to an in-person
exchange and triangulates the conversation, putting some of my e-mailed words in
performer David Thomson’s mouth.
63. Van Kerkhoven, “Looking,” 144.
65. Katherine Profeta, e-mail message to Ralph Lemon, July 20, 2004.
67. From a list of keywords for an improvisation, shared with me as unpublished
journal notes, and subsequently published in Lemon, Come home Charley Patton, 190.
69. Gilpin, “Shaping Critical Spaces,” 87.
70. Djédjé Djédjé Gervais was the notable exception here. But Ralph and he had
developed such a shared vocabulary over the decade since Geography that Djédjé felt he
was now able to supply Ralph with the physical abandon he sought, without risking an
impact in his own spiritual practice. However, the idea that this research would be
“safe” with contemporary American dancers was not entirely borne out—Gesel Mason,
one night during a long rehearsal, experienced slipping into an altered state she could
not quite extract herself from on her own.
71. Profeta, unpublished rehearsal notebook, June 2004.
72. Profeta, unpublished rehearsal notebooks, 2008–2010.
73. Butoh-fu are image-bearing words used in the antitradition of Japanese Butoh,
first developed by dancer Tatsumi Hijikata and passed on to his mentees. They are
frequently taken from the natural world and usually evoke forces beyond human control.
See, for instance, Nanako Kurihara, “Hijikata Tatsumi: The Words of Butoh,” The
Drama Review 44, no. 1 (2000): 10–28. Kurihara there translates the term butoh-fu as
“butoh notation.”
74. Conquergood, “Performance Studies,” 373.
75. Ralph Lemon, e-mail message to Katherine Profeta, June 1, 2010.
76. Ralph Lemon, as quoted in Jesse Leaneagh, “Mapping Out Ralph Lemon’s
New Performance Project,” The Green Room Blog, Walker Art Center, August 26, 2010,
http://blogs.walkerart.org/performingarts/2010/08/26/mapping-out-ralph-lemons-
new-performance-project/.
77. Chris Vitiello, “Ralph Lemon: The First Night,” The Thread: Duke Performances’
Blog, November 7, 2010, http://thethread.dukeperformances.duke.edu/2010/11/ralph
lemon-the-first-night/.
78. For this statement I am relying on my own experience of watching the show on its
opening night at BAM, next to two first-time viewers, and the conversations that ensued.
79. As retold in Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World (New
York: Vintage Books, 2007), 75–77. For his version of the Jataka story Hyde cites Henry
Clarke Warren, Buddhism in Translations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1909), 274–279.
238 No te s to P a g e s 1 3 2 – 1 46
80. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, vol. 1, trans.
Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 59.
81. Hyde, The Gift, 75.
83. Lemon, Come home Charley Patton, 206–207.
Chapter 4. Movement
1. Van Kerkhoven, “European Dramaturgy,” 7. See also introduction, note 39.

2. Bleeker, “Dramaturgy,” especially 163–164, 171–172.
3. Jane C. Desmond, “Embodying Difference: Issues in Dance and Cultural
Studies,” in Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance, ed. Jane C. Desmond (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 50.
5. This statement seems odd given that Laban was deeply involved with the
creation of movement choirs (Bewegungschöre) and other group dance events. Indeed,
John Hodgson and Valerie Preston-Dunlop have made clear that “there was never a
point in his whole life when Laban did not associate dance with the community” (43).
Yet in the basic Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) training I received in the 1990s,
forms of analysis that would help recognize and interpret the relational or communitarian
aspects of human movement were strangely absent. The lack of emphasis is borne out in
the LMA literature. For instance, in an appendix to Vera Maletic’s book on Laban’s
teaching, a ten-page chart of “British Applications of Laban’s Concepts” does include
“group feeling” and “group formation” but puts them last on the very last page, almost
as an afterthought (213). Historically speaking, the evacuation of substantial coverage of
relational, community strands in Laban’s thinking might be accounted for by under-
standing the way in which Laban’s particular sense of community feeling was so easily
co-opted by (or, depending on one’s perspective, intertwined from the outset with) the
Nazis’ emerging preoccupation with racial community. Thus it may have been much
easier to edit out this communitarian aspect of Laban’s work than to acknowledge its
entanglement with disturbing systems of thought.
That said, even in the midst of his work on dance as constructive of community,
Laban made statements that prioritized consideration of the individual over the group.
Not only that, but these same statements expose a bias that is particularly concerning in
light of my attempts to use his system of analysis to view African dance. In his autobiog-
raphy A Life for Dance: Reminiscences, trans. and ann. Lisa Ullmann (1935; London:
MacDonald and Evans, 1975), Laban shares an account of his travels to America. He
finds that his American collaborators were unable to produce “any kind of individual
expressive gesture” (134), even as they could dance with great communal feeling. The
literal race of these dancers is not specified, but the chapter subsection is titled “Along
the Mississippi,” and Laban a page previously had explained how he found African
Americans inherently unable to create an innovative dancing culture. These American
dancers were presumably participating in the Africanist dancing he had just summarily
derided, and their lack of innovation, for Laban, was tied to their group aesthetic. For
Laban, the most profound choreographic meaning was seemingly located in the emer-
gence of what he could recognize as individual expression, as articulated above and
against a group. The group might have great importance, but only as a platform for the
No te s to P a g e s 1 4 7–161 239
individual. About America he wondered, “does this strange continent only produce
mass souls, no individual ones?” (134). Laban was only able to perceive how America’s
Africanist dance practices were lacking, as he measured them against his ideal individual/
group relationship. He doesn’t seem to have used his observations of this dancing to
expand his thinking on the varieties of group experience or, for that matter, the varieties
of individual expression.
6. Susan Leigh Foster did this in 2008, in “Movement’s Contagion: The Kines-
thetic Impact of Performance,” in The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies, ed.
Tracy C. Davis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 46–59. Subsequently
she developed that essay, as well as several others with implications for the concept of
kinesthetic empathy, into Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance (London: Rout-
ledge, 2011).
7. Alain Berthoz, The Brain’s Sense of Movement, Perspectives in Cognitive Neuroscience,
trans. Giselle Weiss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). As cited in
Foster, “Movement’s Contagion” and Choreographing Empathy.
8. B. Calvo-Merino, D. E. Glaser, J. Grèzes, R. E. Passingham, and P. Haggard,
“Action Observation and Acquired Motor Skills: An fMRI Study with Expert Dancers,”
Cerebral Cortex 15 (2005): 1243–1249. As cited in Foster, Choreographing Empathy, 168.
9. Foster, Choreographing Empathy, 13.
10. Foster, Reading Dancing, 236n2. The four choreographic projects she analyzes
and differentiates are from four iconic twentieth-century American dance artists:
Deborah Hay, George Balanchine, Martha Graham, and Merce Cunningham.
11. Foster, Reading Dancing, 58.
13. Uday Shankar Pani, Nritya Bharati, video recording, researched and prepared
by Nalanda Dance Research Centre (Bombay, India: National Film Development
Corp., 1993).
14. Profeta, unpublished rehearsal notebook, Tree, August 1999.
15. Desmond, “Embodying Difference,” 29.
16. Profeta, unpublished rehearsal notebook, Tree, August 1999.
17. Speaker (unknown to author), Unitarian Church of All Souls, New York,
November 11, 2007.
18. All quotes here and in the rest of this anecdote are from author’s unpublished
rehearsal notebook, Tree, August 1999.
19. Ralph Lemon, “Cross Performance” (printed brochure), n.d., probably 1995.
20. Gabriele Brandstetter, “Defigurative Choreography: From Marcel Duchamp
to William Forsythe,” trans. Marta Ulvaeus, The Drama Review 42, no. 4 (1998): 37–55.
21. Profeta, unpublished rehearsal notebook, How Can You . . . ?, August 2008.
22. Ibid.
23. When I studied with him at his Body Weather Farm over the summer of 1994,
Min Tanaka refused the label “Butoh” for his work. However, his training, his perform
ance quality, and his use of the language triggers often called butoh-fu by others puts him
clearly in the lineage of his teacher Tatsumi Hijikata. Hijikata first developed the use of
butoh-fu as activating words and coined the term Ankoku Butoh (dance of darkness). How-
ever Tanaka’s rejection of the label “Butoh” is completely understandable, given that
the impulse behind both Hijikata and Tanaka’s work has always been anti-form, anti-
tradition. The use of the word to define a tradition flies in the face of that crucial aspect.
240 No te s to P a g e s 1 6 1 – 1 76
24. Profeta, unpublished rehearsal notebook, How Can You . . . ?, 2010.
25. Ibid.
27. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955; New York: Vintage International, 1991), 123. Darrell
Jones’s father, who supplied us the Camus text, was Dr. William R. Jones, an emeritus
professor of religion and African American studies at Florida State University. He visited
our rehearsals while the group was in residence at MANCC (Maggie Allesee National
Center for Choreography) at Florida State University.
29. Claire Bishop, “Unhappy Days in the Art World? De-skilling Theater, Re-
skilling Performance,” Brooklyn Rail, December 2011/January 2012, http://www.brooklyn
rail.org/2011/12/.
30. Vitiello, “Ralph Lemon.”
31. André Lepecki, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement (London:
Routledge, 2006), 63.
Chapter 5. Interculturalism
1. There were a few years, underreported in the press coverage that emphasized
the company’s enduring whiteness, where the company had included African American
dancers (Cliff Williams in 1984–1985, and Brian Dawbin in 1995)—perhaps they had
been assigned that logically problematic category, “the exception that proves the rule”?
The Asian American dancer Alissa Hsu was also a member in 1993–1995. Still, it remains
true that in the years 1986–1992 all members except Ralph were white.
2. Isabelle Ginot, in deLahunta, “Dance Dramaturgy,” 23.
3. Bleeker, “Dramaturgy,” 163.
4. James Hannaham jokingly paraphrased Ralph’s instructions by coining this
verb. Ralph then used James’s joke to further describe the task. He is on the record
doing so at the audience talk-back after the showing at the second Walker workshop (my
transcription from showing videotape). Ralph Lemon, video recording of workshop,
Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis, February 14, 2003.
5. Lemon, Geography, 53.
6. Barbara Browning, “Fluid Bodies: Ralph Lemon’s Geography” (unpublished
manuscript of invited talk, “Internationalizing New Work in Performance” Ford
Foundation, Los Angeles, June 2001). Manuscript shared courtesy of its author.
7. Lemon, “Cross Performance.”
8. Ralph’s proposal, as reprinted in Lemon, Geography, 21–22.
9. I later learned that at least one of the Geography dancers, Didier “James” Akpa,
was among the group that had worked with Brown in Abidjan. Thus though we did not
know it at first, we shared a common point of reference when it came to imagining
possible interactions between select West African and American dance styles.
10. Dwight Conquergood, “Performing as a Moral Act: Ethical Dimensions of the
Ethnography of Performance,” in Cultural Struggles: Performance, Ethnography, Praxis, ed.
E. Patrick Johnson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 69. First published
in Literature in Performance 5, no. 2 (April 1985).
11. Rustom Bharucha, Theater and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture
(London: Routledge, 1993), 2.
No te s to P a g e s 1 7 6–193 241
12. John Russell Brown, “Theatrical Pillage in Asia: Redirecting the Intercultural
Traffic,” New Theatre Quarterly 14, no. 53 (1998): 12.
13. Rustom Bharucha, “Somebody’s Other: Disorientations in the Cultural Politics
of Our Times,” in The Intercultural Performance Reader, ed. Patrice Pavis (London: Routledge,
1996), 207.
14. These and future characterizations of the Geography rehearsal room are taken
from author’s notebooks, 1997–1998.
15. Conquergood, “Performing as a Moral Act,” 69.
16. Ibid., 70.
17. Ibid.
18. Bleeker, “Dramaturgy,” 163.
19. Knowles, “Calling Off the Border Control,” 163.
20. Patrice Pavis, Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, trans. Loren Kruger (London:
Routledge, 1992), 4.
21. Bharucha, Theater and the World, 241–242.
22. Jacqueline Lo and Helen Gilbert, “Towards a Topography of Cross-Cultural
Theater Praxis,” The Drama Review 46, no. 3 (2002): 43.
23. Ibid., 44.
24. Ibid., 44–45.
25. Ibid., 47.
26. Knowles, “Calling Off the Border Control,” 164.
27. Ibid., 163.
28. Benjamin, “Task of the Translator,” 78.
29. Ibid., 81.
30. Knowles, “Calling Off the Border Control,” 173–174.
31. Ibid., 174.
32. Ibid., 177.
33. Ibid., 176.
34. Brian Quirt, in Knowles, “Calling Off the Border Patrol,” 171.
35. Knowles, “Calling Off the Border Patrol,” 171.
36. This incident, where Mano and Asako’s guru in India disapproved of how
the performance was described to him by an unknown informant, was followed by
an extended period of estrangement, and is described in more detail in Lemon, Tree,
257–258.
38. Frederic Jameson, “Marxism and Historicism,” New Literary History 11, no. 1
(1979): 43. As quoted in Conquergood, “Performing as a Moral Act,” 72.
39. Bharucha, Theater and the World, 28.
40. Profeta, unpublished rehearsal notebook, 1997.
41. Lemon, quoted by Ann Daly in afterword to Lemon, Geography, 192.
42. Lo and Gilbert, “Towards a Topography,” 46. Portion in internal quotes is
their citation of Gareth Griffiths, “The Myth of Authenticity: Representation, Dis-
course and Social Practice,” in De-scribing Empire: Post-colonialism and Textuality, ed. Chris
Tiffin and Alan Lawson (London: Routledge, 1994), 82.
43. Ralph Lemon, as quoted by Daly in “Conversations about Race in the Language
of Dance,” New York Times, December 7, 1997.
45. Bharucha, Theater and the World, 155.
242 No te s to P a g e s 1 9 4 – 2 13
46. Frustrations and tensions like this one are essential to pushing limits in a rehearsal
space, and so my point is not to say that they should be absent, but to question when
they should be accepted versus when they should be understood as symptoms of a larger
concern, particularly in an intercultural situation. However, this anecdote also brings
up another question: when should such frustrations remain within the protected space
of the rehearsal room, and when can they be shared with a larger audience? In this case
I am sharing an anecdote that I have previously shared in print—Profeta, “Geography
at Yale”—and that I have heard Ralph mention in public forums, so I am not breaking
any new ground. I also don’t suspect that Moussa Diabate would contest this characteriza-
tion of events or mind its mention, but I am unable to contact him to verify that, and I
recognize the question of whether this should be shared as a legitimate one.
47. Lemon, Tree, 48.
48. Profeta, unpublished rehearsal notebook, August 1999.
49. Profeta, unpublished rehearsal notebook, March 2000.
50. Lemon, Tree, 205–206.
51. Ibid., 212.
52. Cheng-Chieh Yu, interviewed by author, excerpted and published in Lemon,
Tree, 264.
53. Wu Wengua, e-mail message to Katherine Profeta, July 4, 2003.
54. Daly, afterword, 196.
55. Ibid.
56. Patrice Pavis, “Introduction: Towards a Theory of Interculturalism in the
Theatre?,” in The Intercultural Performance Reader, ed. Patrice Pavis (London: Routledge,
1996), 15.
57. Ibid.
58. Lo and Gilbert, “Towards a Topography,” 47.
59. Pavis, “Introduction,” 15.
60. Lo and Gilbert, “Towards a Topography,” 39.
61. Ibid., 48.
62. Djédjé spoke French, Bété, and some English. David spoke English and some
French. Wen Hui spoke Mandarin, Yunnan dialect, and some English. Cheng-Chieh
spoke Mandarin and English. Mr. Wang spoke Yunnan dialect and some Mandarin.
Mr Li spoke Yunnan dialect. Carlos spoke English. Mano and Bijaya spoke Oriya,
Hindi, and some English. Asako spoke Japanese, English, and some Oriya. Ralph spoke
English. Yeko spoke English.
63. Quote is from memory of an episode that both David Thomson and I still
remember and laugh about to this day, fifteen years later.
Postface
1. Ralph Lemon and Katherine Profeta, from e-mails exchanged May 15, 2013.
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Panels and Talks
Anspaugh, Vanessa, Annie Dorsen, Susan Mar Landau, Katherine Profeta, David
Thomson, Talvin Wilks. “Dramaturgy as Practice/Dramaturgy in Practice, Part 2.”
Panel discussion, Movement Research Studies Project. Conceived by Amanda
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Dance Dramaturgy.” Panel, part of Dance Unwrapped series at Dance Theatre Work-
shop, New York, May 15, 2006.
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from the Field: DeFrantz/Byrd, Profeta/Lemon, Wilks/Miller.” Roundtable dis-
cussion at the annual conference of the Society of Dance Historians and Scholars,
Dance Dramaturgy: Catalyst, Perspective & Memory, Toronto, June 23–26, 2011.
DeFrantz, Thomas F., Susan Mar Landau, André Lepecki, and Katherine Profeta.
“Dramaturgy as Practice/Dramaturgy in Practice, Part 1.” Roundtable discussion,
Movement Research Studies Project. Conceived by Amanda Loulaki and Susan
Mar Landau. New York, May 5, 2013.
Lemon, Ralph. “Talking Dance.” Lecture-demonstration. University of Minnesota,
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Workshop and public discussion. Chicago Dancemakers Forum and the Museum
of Contemporary Art, April 29, 2006.
Profeta, Katherine, and Talvin Wilks. Public conversation. Dramaturgy in Dance resi-
dency, Krannert Center for the Arts, Urbana IL, April 9–11, 2014.
Index
Illustrations are indicated by “fig.” and the figure number following a page number.
“RL” denotes Ralph Lemon; “KP” denotes Katherine Profeta.
African American culture and history: and the rituals at sites of historical violence in the,
African diaspora, xiv, 30, 46, 75, 126, 172, 48, 102–104, 112; RL on, 42–43, 46, 48,
174, 185, 189; blackface performance in, 102–104, 106–109, 122, 222. See also Patton;
78, 101, 197–200; black vernacular in, race; racism
108–109, 121, 123; Br’er Rabbit and the Tar Anspaugh, Vanessa, 10
Patch, 80–81, 131–132, 136; “buck dance” “Anxious Dramaturgy” (Van Imschoot), 11, 19
in, 77–79, 84, 101, 103; civil rights move- archive: active archive, 80, 85–87, 109; drama-
ment in, 102, 113, 122; Laban on dance turg as archivist, xiv–xv, 34, 68–69, 75,
culture of, 238n5; lynchings in, 46–49, 47, 80, 85–86, 180, 211; embodied, 66–67,
104, 111, 120, 124, 125, 127–128, 236n45; 73–80, 85–86, 148; of RL, 86
“Mississippi/Duluth” (Patton) reflecting, Aristotelian theater, 53, 54, 181
40–41, 46–49, 47fig.7; private rituals at Artaud, Antonin, 11, 228n26
sites of historical violence in, 48, 102–104, audience: audience-less performances, 81, 83,
104–105, 112; racial stereotypes in, 19, 44– 85, 101–105, 127; dramaturg as, 88, 89, 93,
45, 77–80, 84, 101, 110–119, 123–124, 196– 128, 137–138, 184, 208; dramaturg as advo-
200. See also American South cate for, 15, 46–48, 88, 90–95, 124–125,
African dance. See West African dance 128, 129, 135–136, 137–138, 186–187,
African diaspora, xiv, 30, 46, 75, 126, 172, 174, 235n5; as emancipated spectators, 58,
185, 189 95–98, 130–131, 149; How Can You . . . ?
Africanist dance, Laban on, 238n5 received by, 131–135; as invisible ghost,
Akpa, Didier “James,” xiii, xvfig.1, 33fig.3, 72, 15–16, 99–100, 132, 138, 185; to move-
144fig.20, 145fig.21, 219, 240n9; in Geog- ment performance, 48, 52, 91–92, 147,
raphy, xvfig.1, 73; movement analysis of, 149–150, 165–166; as participants in the
142; on trance-like performance, 73, 74; performance, 111–112, 147; performers’
translations of RL’s movements by, communication with, 11, 30–32, 90, 109–
144–146 110, 129, 131–133, 165–166; program notes
Albright, Ann Cooper, 56, 232n38 for, 81, 122–125, 135–136; race in viewing
American South: “buck dance” in, 77–79, 84, experience of, 89, 111–112, 115–119, 117,
101, 103; cultural analogies with, 197; 181, 191, 234n2, 236n45; as recipients of
lynchings, 47, 104, 111, 120, 125, 127–128, generosity, 90, 131–132; RL’s ambiva-
236n45; mythology of, 105, 108, 113; private lence toward, 43, 89, 90, 100, 103, 108,
251
252 Index
audience (continued ) 27–29, 172, 173, 283; formlessness, 162,

112, 120, 123–124, 137; for spectacle lynch- 239n23; high-velocity exploration, 40,
ings, 46, 47, 49, 111, 236n45; spectatorship 81, 85, 128–129, 164–166; injuries to, 164;
of, 40, 58–60, 65, 92–100, 130–131, 149, kinesthetic empathy, 147–149, 150, 153,
165–166; as target, 168, 181–187, 191, 197, 239n6; in narrative, 53–54, 56–58, 57fig.9;
198, 209; West African culture stereo- racialization of, 111–112, 197–200; sparagmos
typed by, 190–191; at workshop presenta- (ritual dismemberment), 158, 172; as text-
tions, 81, 105–106 less, 53–54; Tribhanga pose, 153, 154fig.22;
authorship, 6, 14, 21, 67, 207, 227n9, 229n32 in West African dance, 142–143, 144, 146.
See also movement
backstories in performance, 56, 57–58, 232n38 Body (Laban Movement Analysis), 141
Baldwin, James, 44, 108–110, 115, 116, 126, 137 Body Weather Farm, 239n23
Balinese dance, 151, 152, 156, 171 Bontemps, Arna, 121
Les Ballets C de la B, 9 Borges, Jorge Luis, 133
Barik, Bijaya, 37, 39fig.4, 220 Boukhezer-Diabate, Orida, xv, 219
Bartenieff, Irmgard, 141 Brandstetter, Gabriele, 159, 160
Barthes, Roland, 54, 97 breaking down, 160, 162, 164
Bataille, George, 132–133 Brecht, Bertolt, 5–6, 20, 24, 67, 227n9
Bauer, Bojana, 25 Br’er Rabbit and the Tar Patch, 80–81, 131–132, 136
Bausch, Pina, 7–10, 11, 24, 28, 32, 65–66, 70 Brizzell, Cynthia, 20, 21
Bel, Jerome, 166 Brook, Peter, 175
Bellagio, Italy, 121 Brown, John Russell, 176, 178
Benjamin, Walter, 98–99, 186, 187 Brown, Karen McCarthy, 75
Berlau, Ruth, 6, 20 Brown, Ronald K., 174
Berlin Ensemble, 6, 68 Browning, Barbara, 172
Berthoz, Alain, 147 “buck dance,” 77–79, 84, 101
Bharucha, Rustom, 168, 175–176, 178, 180–181, Buddhism, 36, 40, 80–81, 127, 131–132, 133, 136
189, 193, 209 Budries, David, 220
Bishop, Claire, 164 bus station, paraperformance at, 102–103
blackface performance, 78, 101, 197–200 butoh-fu, 129, 162, 237n73, 239n23
blackness, 109–110, 112, 113, 121, 123, 171, 189, Byrd, Donald, 10
196, 197
black vernacular, 108–109, 121, 123 Cage, John, 7
Bleeker, Maaike, 19, 139, 170, 180, 226n9 Camus, Albert, 164
Bluebeard—While Listening to a Taped Recording of capoeira, 142, 148
Bela Bartok’s “Duke Bluebeard’s Castle” Carter, Edna, 223
(Bausch), 8 Carter, Walter, 40–41, 41fig.6, 49, 135, 137, 223
Bly, Mark, 9, 13–15 casebook, production, 68–69
bodies: anatomy of, 14, 25, 26, 140–144, 146, Cattaneo, Anne, 91
155, 238n5; as archives, 66–67, 73–80, 77, Ciofalo, Terri, 220
85–86, 148; backstories as legible from, civil rights movement, 102, 113, 122
56, 57–58, 232n38; breaking down, 160, Clayton, Elias, 111
162, 164, 172–173; as chattel, 79–80, 172; Come home Charley Patton. See Patton
cultural body knowledge, 142–143, 153, Comfort, Jane, 10
154–155; defiguration of, 159, 160; de community in dance, 146, 238n5
skilling of, 158–160, 164, 166–167; dream computer games, 58
of dissolving bodies, 172; fluidity, 11–14, confessional mode of theater, 114
Index 253
Conquergood, Dwight, 108, 129, 168, 175, 178– of, 28, 40, 50, 81, 83, 85, 101, 127, 164, 166;
180, 189–190, 195 on trance-like performance, 17, 73–74,
contact improvisation, 39, 56, 64–65, 233n9 202. See also audience; intercultural col-
continuous present, 53, 59 laboration and performance; movement;
costuming, 46, 171, 191 performers
countermemorials, 48–49, 124, 125, 231n24 Danziger, Kate, 223
Crossing the Line festival, 29 Davis, Miles, 89, 100, 137, 234n2
crying, 47, 82–84, 160 Davison, Anne, 10
Cunningham, Merce, 7, 192 defiguration, 159, 160
“Curator’s Exhibitionism” (Conquergood), DeFrantz, Thomas F., 10, 226n9
179, 190 de Keersmaeker, Anna Teresa, 9, 10
“Custodian’s Rip-Off ” (Conquergood), 179, 192 Deleuze, Gilles, 19
Cveji ć, Bojana, 9, 15, 21, 95 Deren, Maya, 73, 74, 75–76, 127
Descartes, René, 229n38
Daly, Ann, 201, 203, 204, 210 deskilling, 158–160, 164, 166–167
Damasio, Antonio, 58–59 Desmond, Jane C., 142, 153
dance and movement dramaturgy: in American de Velder, Anne C., 221, 223
context, 10–11; audience response con- De Vuyst, Hildegard, 9, 13
sidered in, 58, 91–92, 181; considerations Diabate, Moussa, xiii, 33fig.3, 72, 144fig.20,
of gender in, 22; defining the role of the 185–186, 194, 219, 242n46
dramaturg in, xvfig.1, 3–9, 67, 211–213; Diaghilev, Sergei, 7
emergence of, xvi, 6–11, 19, 24, 28, 65– dialogic process, 121, 177–178, 179–181, 182,
66, 70, 226n9; institutional dramaturgy, 186, 191–192, 194, 195, 208
18, 19, 91, 235n5; making meaning in, Divine Horsemen (Deren), 73, 74, 75–77, 127
148–149; outside perceptions of, 16; post Dorfman, David, 10
dramatic theater, 10–11; use of language dramaturg: as advocate for audience, 14, 15,
in, 25–27, 45; vocabulary of, 140–141. See 46–48, 88, 90–95, 120, 124–125, 128, 129,
also dramaturg; dramaturgy; movement 133, 135, 136, 137–138, 186–187, 235n5; as
Dancemakers, 235n5 advocate for the collaborators, 188, 196–
dancers: backstories of, 56, 57–58, 232n38; on 201; allocations of time, 195; as archivist,
breaking down, 160; communication with xiv, xiv–xv, 34, 68–69, 75, 80, 85–86, 180,
audience, 11, 30–32, 90, 109–110, 129, 211; as catalyst, xvi, 14–15, 16, 67, 70, 71,
131–133, 165–166; costuming of, 171, 191; 136–138, 146, 180; challenges of interper-
deskilling, 158–160, 164, 166–167; Divine sonal relationships, 17–18, 19; as dancer,
Horsemen (Deren) viewed by, 73, 74, 75–77, xiii, 12, 40, 85, 129, 174, 228n29; defining
127; ethical aspects of collaboration, 175– the role of, xvfig.1, 3–9, 12–17, 67, 211–
181, 192–194, 197–199, 211; generosity of, 213; deskilling, 166–167; and the dialogic,
131–132; high-velocity exploration, 40, 81, 180–181; disappearance of, 128–129; as
85, 101, 128–129, 164–166; improvisa- editor, 6, 14, 18, 28, 34–42, 80–81, 120–
tional challenges for, 105, 109–110, 160; 121; on effective intercorporeal exchange,
kinesthetic empathy of, 147–149, 150, 153, 204–205; on ethical aspects of collabora-
239n6; making a dance on, xii–xiii; moti- tion, 175–181, 187–199, 211; financial sup-
vation of, 146–147; perspectives on inter- port for, 18, 229n32; as first audience, 88,
cultural work, 203; preparatory work by, 89, 93, 128, 137–138, 184, 208; as free
160–164; questioning of/by, 8–9, 15, 24, safety, 212; as friend, 9, 14, 19, 21; as gad-
65–66, 180, 197–198, 204–205, 209; spon- fly, xvi, 14, 17, 20, 26–27, 31, 126, 137–138,
taneous vocal expressions of, 30; stamina 202; gender consciousness of, xiii, 6,
254 Index
dramaturg (continued ) drumming, 146, 202

20–22, 170, 173, 181, 227n9; historical Du Bois, W. E. B., 89
background of, 4–8, 6–10, 24, 28, 65–66, Duchamp, Marcel, 159
70, 227n5; as host, 196; image of the igno- Duluth, Minnesota, 46, 47, 49, 111
rant dramaturg, 95; improvisations docu- Dunham, Katharine, 75
mented by, 50–51, 86–87; inside eye/out-
side eye perceptions of, 14, 16–17, 168, “Ecstasy” (Patton), 40, 127, 160
229n38; institutional roles of, 18, 19, 91, Effort (Laban Movement Analysis), 141–142,
235n5; as judge, 18; movements observed 146
by, 15, 26–27, 29, 40, 50–51, 75, 86–87, Elkins, Doug, 10
128–129, 142–147, 157–158, 160–162; notes Elswit, Kate, 233n12
of, xiv, xvfig.1, 8, 34, 36, 55–56, 75, 85–87, “The Emancipated Spectator” (Rancière), 95–
105, 106–107, 120, 126, 180, 197, 203, 205, 98, 130, 131
226n8; on paraperformance, 101–105, emancipated spectators, 58, 95–98, 130–131,
124; postdramatic theater aesthetics, 10– 149
11, 18; program notes written by, 25, 81, emotional expression, 44–45, 47, 82–85, 110,
121–125, 135–136; as questioner, 8–9, 14– 114–118, 127, 132, 135, 160, 164, 234n38
15, 17, 25–26, 32, 34, 68, 77, 142, 180; “Endurance” (Geography), 145–146, 145fig.21
racial consciousness of, xiii, 46, 138, 169, English, Darby, 112–113
170, 173, 181; as researcher, 5, 6, 14, 22, 37, “Enthusiast’s Infatuation” (Conquergood), 179,
61–62, 63, 67–69, 67–71, 75, 77–79, 80–87, 189
120, 151; risk assessment by, 202–203; role ERS (Elevator Repair Service), xiii, 12, 32, 70,
in workshops, 106–108, 160–162; stereo- 228n29, 236n42
types of, 24–25; as translator, 5, 6, 27, 31, Etchells, Tim, 29, 69–70
61, 67, 79, 109, 121, 183, 186–187, 225n1; ethical dilemmas in performance, 31–32, 72–74,
as witness, 14, 16, 18, 27, 28, 83, 85, 86, 76–77, 175–181, 191–194, 197–200, 209,
102, 106, 129–130, 160, 164, 226n9, 211
229n38; work expressed as motion, 15–17, Evers, Medgar, slaying of, 46–47
20, 23, 71, 88, 139, 188, 226n10
the Dramaturg (Messingkauf Dialogues [ Brecht]), failure, 30–31, 36–37, 72–74, 108, 127, 143–144,
5, 6–7, 227n5 237n70
dramaturgy: authorship in, 6, 14, 21, 67, 207, Ferver, Jack, 10
227n9, 229n32; dance dramaturgy, 6–10, Fetzer, Chelsea Lemon, 78, 102, 103, 108, 109,
16, 19, 24, 26–27, 28, 65–66, 70; defining, 124–125, 221, 222
xvfig.1, 3–9, 67, 211–213; democratization Fiadeiro, João, 9
of, 11–13, 70–71, 80–81, 105, 198, 203; of film/video visuals, 83fig.10, 104fig.12; buck
disassembly, xi, 31, 158–159, 158–160, dance in, 78; of countermemorial actions,
164–167, 173; documentation of move- 49; Divine Horsemen (Deren), 73, 74, 75–77,
ment in, 50–51, 86–87; gender conscious- 127; in How Can You . . . ?, 28; of “Living
ness in, xiii, 21–22, 170, 173; institutional Room dances” (Patton), 103; Mirror (Tar-
models of, 18, 19, 91, 235n5; new drama- kovsky), 79; of private performance rituals,
turgy, 9, 18, 62, 92–93; observation in, 106, 113; race in, 79–80; of RL reading in
xiv, xvfig.1, 8, 34, 36, 55–56, 68–69, 85– southern boneyard, 120; “Sunshine
87, 105, 106–107, 120, 126, 180, 197, 203, Room” (How Can You . . . ? ), 28, 39, 40,
205, 226n8; redundancy in, 12–13, 17; 131, 135–136
work expressed as motion, 15–17, 20, 23, financial support, 18, 102, 178
71, 88, 139, 188, 226n10 Findlay, Jim, 223
Index 255
Fish, Stanley, 98 See also Geography Trilogy; intercultural

Flow (Effort [Laban Movement Analysis]), 142 collaboration and performance; Patton;
fluidity, 11–14, 27–29, 172, 173, 283 Tree; West African dance
Folkdance—Solo, 78, 101 Geography: Art/Race/Exile (Lemon), 203
Forced Entertainment, 69–70 Geography Trilogy: audience experience of, 133–
formlessness, 162, 239n23 135; dramaturgy of, 173; foundations of,
Forsythe, William, 9, 10, 52, 61, 65, 91–94, 159– 158, 159, 170; journals on, 171–172, 205;
160. See also Gilpin, Heidi reflections on home culture in, 46; spoken
Foster, Susan Leigh, 56, 147–148, 149, 158, 165, word in, 27, 29–35, 40, 42, 73–74, 185–
239n6 186, 207. See also Geography; Patton; Tree
fragments, 69–70, 80, 87, 98, 206, 207 geometrical ballets, 53–54
framing, 33–34, 62, 63, 77, 87, 96, 98, 130–131, Gert, Valeska, 233n12
133, 192, 206 Gervais, Djédjé Djédjé, xiii, 33fig.3, 39fig.4,
Frankfurt Ballet, 9 41fig.5, 118, 145fig.21, 165fig.29, 219, 220,
Franko, Mark, 53–54 221, 222, 235n32, 242n62; on African dance,
Freedom Bus rides (1961), 102, 122 177, 190–191; assignment on Sapelo Island,
Freud, Sigmund, 90 102, 105; collaborations with RL, 31, 56–
Friend, Jenny, xviifig.2, 219 57, 57fig.9, 126, 209; dance movements
Fuchs, Elinor, 10, 53 translated by, 144–146, 207; interruptions
Fuegi, John, 227n9 by, in Tree, 56; in “Mississippi/Duluth”
Funn, Carlos, xiii, 17, 33, 33fig.3, 39fig.4, 72, 74, (Patton), 46; movement analysis of, 142;
142, 143, 144fig.20, 198, 219, 220, 242n62 solo about lynching, 111; trance-like
movement in Geography, 72, 237n70; at
gender consciousness, xiii, 6, 20–22, 170, 173, Walker workshop, 108; workshop for How
181, 227n9 Can You . . . ?, 51fig.8
generosity, 90, 98, 101–102, 126, 131–133, 213 gestures: Laban on expressive gesture, 238n5;
Genette, Gérard, 54 Moksha dance, 153, 155, 156; mudras (hand
Geography, xvfig.1, xviifig.2, 144fig.20, 145fig.21, gestures), 155; in paraperformances, 102–
219–220; African culture, 30; criticism 105, 124; in response to keywords, 46–47;
of, 178; deployment of words in, 27, 29– of self-exposure, 102–105, 111–112; semiot-
30, 32, 33–34; dramaturgical process for, ics, 53, 96–97, 98, 182–184; Tribhanga pose,
xiv, xiv–xv, xvfig.1, xviifig.2, 17, 27–28, 153, 154fig.22; in West African dance,
142–143; “Endurance” section, 145–146, 142–143, 144, 146. See also movement
145fig.21; limits of embodied archive in, the gift (term), 132, 133
73–74; movement vocabularies in, 143– Gilbert, Helen, 168, 178, 182–183, 190, 204,
144, 203–204; Oresteia as basis of, 27, 28, 206
30, 31, 32; recursive movement transla- Gilpin, Heidi, 9, 10–11, 61, 63, 69, 90–94, 125
tions in, 27, 143–144, 183, 194, 203; as re- Ginot, Isabelle, 19, 139, 170
flection of RL’s black identity, 189–190; Gorton, Rob, 219
RL as performer in, 16–17, 56–57, 57fig.9; Gould, Steven Jay, 13
RL’s proposal for, xiii, 27, 158, 173–174, Grand Union, 233n9
225n4; spoken-word poetry for, 27, 29–35, Grotowski, Jerzy, 28, 65, 81, 210, 213
42, 73–74; staging of, 206; target audience Guattari, Félix, 19
for, 184–185; tension between innovation
and tradition in, 190–191; “Tire Talk” Haiti, 73–76, 127, 173, 174, 219
section, 31, 32–33, 207; trance-like move- Hamburg National Theatre, 4
ments in, 17, 72–76, 177, 202, 208–209. Hannaham, James, 44, 79, 114, 221, 231n20
256 Index
Hare in the Moon (Buddhist folk tale), 80–81, 131– 101, 197–200; with butoh-fu, 129, 162,
132, 133, 136 237n73, 239n23; deskilling in, 158–159;
Hauptmann, Elisabeth, 6, 20, 68, 227n9 dialogic process in, 177–178, 180–181, 182,
Hay, Deborah, 27, 90, 126, 132 186, 194; ethical dilemmas in, 31–32, 72–
Headlong Dance Theater, 10 74, 175–181, 191–194, 197–200, 209; hour-
heart-rate monitors, 85 glass model (Pavis) in, 181–183, 204;
high-velocity exploration, 40, 81, 85, 128–129, hybridity in, xiv, 143–144, 153, 168, 169,
164–166 170–172, 173, 182, 183, 190–191, 204–205,
Hijikata, Tatsumi, 237n73, 239n23 206; intercorporeal work in, xiv, 204–205;
Hoghe, Raimund, 7–9, 24, 227n11 motives for, 189–195; with Odissi dance,
Hoheisel, Horst, 48–49 149, 150–151, 153, 155–157, 171, 188; physi-
Holocaust countermemorials, 48–49 cal disassembly in, 159; spoken word in,
hourglass model (Pavis), 181–183, 204 27, 29–35, 40, 42, 73–74, 185–186, 207;
house dancing, 142, 174 surprising moments in, 208–209; tensions
How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go in, 17, 19–20, 29, 46, 73–75, 119–120, 190–
Anywhere?, 161fig.24, 161fig.25, 222–223; 191, 194, 198; translation in, 30–31, 34–35,
audience reception of, 101, 131–135; Br’er 177, 186–187, 194, 197, 207, 209; Yi culture
Rabbit and the Tar Patch, 80–81, 131–132, in, 188, 191, 197–199, 209. See also Geogra-
136; crying in, 82–84, 234n38; deskilling, phy; Tree; West African dance
158–160, 164, 166–167; disassembly, 159; interdisciplinary work, xii, 11, 18, 28–29, 53,
film visuals in, 28; folktales in, 80–81, 131– 91–92
132, 133, 136; Hare in the Moon (Buddhist
folk tale ), 80–81, 131–132, 133, 136; his- Jackson, Elmer, 111
torical background of, 160; improvisa- Jacotot, Joseph, 95
tional dance in, 40, 81, 101; performers’ Jahn, Manfred, 52
generosity, 131–133; personal text in, 37; Jameson, Frederic, 189
research projects for, 80–87; “Sunshine Jannarone, Kimberly, 228n26
Room” monologue, 28, 39, 40, 131, 135– Johnson, Robert, 209
136; Walter Carter, in, 40–41, 41fig.6, 135, Jones, Bill T., 64–65
223. See also “Wall/Hole” Jones, Darrell, 41fig.5, 163figs.26–28, 165fig.29,
humor, 45, 96–97, 110, 113, 114, 115–117 221, 222; Camus quote from father, 164,
hybridity, xiv, 143–144, 153, 168, 169, 170–172, 240n27; in “Mississippi/Duluth” (Patton),
173, 182, 183, 190–191, 204–205, 206 46, 47fig.7; as research collaborator, 85;
Hyde, Lewis, 132–133 training in Japan, 162; workshop for How
Can You . . . ?, 51fig.8, 161fig.25
“The Ignorant Dramaturg” (Cveji ć), 94–95 Judson Dance Theater, xii, 11, 27, 64, 159
the ignorant schoolmaster, 95, 97
Indelicato, Lucas, 221 Kent, Helen, 103, 104fig.12, 137
the individual, Laban on, 238n5 keywords: derived from lynchings, 46, 47, 120,
infecting, 120–121 124, 125, 127–128; “generosity” as, 131–
intercorporeal work, xiv, 204–205 132; movement generated through, 46–
intercultural collaboration and performance: 47, 50–51, 53, 85, 127–128, 159; negative
anatomical vocabulary of, 14, 25, 26, 140– space, 46–51; on race, 44, 45, 114–119,
144, 146, 155, 238n5; authenticity, 171, 123, 124; sources of, 50–51, 82
190–191; with Balinese dance, 151, 152, kinesthetic empathy, 147–149, 150, 153, 239n6
156, 171; blackface performance in, 78, Knowles, Ric, 15, 181, 182–183, 184, 186–188
Index 257
Krannert Center (Urbana), 119–120, 121, 223 movement structure, 158–160; dissolution
Krause, Monika, 227n9 of dance company, 158, 159; documen-
Kuna culture, 187 tary films of, 73; dreams of, 171–172; duet
with Djédjé Djédjé Gervais in Tree, 56–57,
Laban, Rudolf, 141, 142, 238n5 57fig.9; experiment in self-exposure, 110–
Laban Movement Analysis (LMA), 141–142, 111; foundational text on collaboration,
146, 238n5 174–175, 176; on generosity, 131–132; on
Laboratory Theatre, 65 hybridity, 171, 172, 173–174; on intercul-
Ladzekpo-Cole, Yeko, 39fig.4, 157, 171, 220, tural performance, 174–175, 191–194; key-
242n62 words assigned to performers, 46, 47, 50;
Landau, Susan Mar, 10, 226n9 KP’s introduction to, xiii–xiv, 173–176;
language: backstage behavior revealed in, 32, lec-dem (lecture-demonstration), 106, 107,
33–34; black vernacular, 108–109, 121, 113, 120, 135; making the word “nigger”
123; embodied language, 25–28, 151–156; inaudible, 118–119; mourning for Asako
lynching as monument of, 46, 48, 49; neg- Takami, 28, 40, 82, 85, 127, 132, 135, 160;
ative space, use of, 46–51, 162; poses in movement improvisations of, 143, 145–
ballet as, 53; reductive power of, 25–27, 146, 151–158, 156; natural disasters in
45; in the rehearsal room, 25–26, 31, 207; works of, 37–38; paraperformances of, 90,
in “Sunshine Room” (How Can You . . . ?), 102–105, 124; poems used by, 30; post-
28; as verb, 26. See also gesture; keywords; modern dance of, xii–xiii, 56–57, 89, 151,
movement; text; translation; vocabulary 156, 157, 159, 173–174, 232n40; as private
Larson, Jonathan, 229n32 man, 28, 48, 88–89, 101, 137; on program
lec-dem (lecture-demonstration), 106, 107, 113, notes, 122–124; racial identity of dancers
120, 135 in company of, 169, 240n1; racial stereo-
Lehmann, Hans-Thies, 10, 28, 53, 92 types explored by, 19, 44–45, 77–80,
Lemon, Ralph (RL) , xviifig.2, 39fig.4, 51fig.8, 84, 101, 110–119, 123–124, 196–200; risk
104fig.12, 124fig.15, 219, 220, 221, 222, assumed by, 17, 175, 189–190, 197–200,
223, 242n62; African American identity 202–203; screening of Maya Deren’s Divine
of, 30, 43, 110, 116, 122, 170, 174, 189; Horsemen, 73, 74, 75–76, 127; solo per
ambivalence of, 43, 89, 100, 103, 112, 120, formances of, 17, 39, 151, 197, 202, 204; on
123–124; archives of, 86; audience rela- spectatorship, 88–89; “Sunshine Room”
tions of, 40, 43, 89–90, 100, 101–105, 103, monologue of, 28, 39, 40, 131, 135–136;
111–112, 120, 123–124, 133; challenges of trance-like performance proposed by, 17,
cross-cultural analogies, 30–31, 197–199; 73–74, 202; travels of, 35, 36–37, 42, 151–
collaborations of, 40–41, 73, 84fig.11, 223; 152, 171–172, 196–197, 219–221, 222, 223;
on collaborators as sources of new per as unreliable narrator, 43–44, 113–114;
formance material, 192–193; company Walter Carter’s collaboration with, 40–
disbanded by, xii, 90, 169–170, 225n3; 41, 41fig.6, 135, 223
criticism of his dance by West Africans, Lemon–Profeta collaboration: on audience re-
146; cultural clashes with performers, 73– ception, 49–50, 106–119, 121, 129–130,
74; dance company of, xii, 90, 158, 169– 133; beginning of, xiii, xiii–xvi, 12, 173–
170, 188, 225n1, 225n3; as dancer, 17, 39, 176; destabilization of Lemon in per
56–57, 57fig.9, 101, 118–119, 137, 202, 204, formance, 17; on development of Patton,
223; on defining dramaturgy, 15, 211–213; 119–120, 136–137; disagreements within,
development of movement vocabularies, 26, 46–49, 119–120, 121–124, 135, 157, 208;
143–146; disintegration of body and discussions of authenticity in, 190–192; on
258 Index
Lemon–Profeta collaboration (continued ) Lubin-Levy, Joshua, 10

the dramaturgical role, 211–213; and ethi- lynchings, 46–49, 104, 111, 120, 124–125, 127–
cal dilemmas in performance, 31–32, 72– 128, 236n45
74, 76–77, 175, 191–194, 197–200, 209; on
experimental movements, 40, 157; gender Mabo, Zaoli “Tapé,” xiii, 144fig.20, 146, 219
consciousness in, xiii, 6, 20–22, 170, 173, Magnesium (Paxton), 64, 233n9
227n9; KP and RL’s discussion of, 211– The Mahabharata (Brook), 175
213; KP as gadfly in, xvi, 17, 31, 137–138, Maletic, Vera, 238n5
202; language discussed in, 26; “Missis- MANCC (Maggie Allesee National Center for
sippi/Duluth” (Patton) production, 46–49; Choreography), 28, 51, 212, 240n27
notes of, xiv, xvfig.1, 36, 55–56, 85–87, Manning, Susan, 10
105, 106–108, 126, 180, 197, 203, 205, Mantero, Vera, 9, 98
226n8; on paraperformances, 101–105, Marclay, Christian, 221
124; personal text in How Can You . . . ?, Martin, John, 147
37; private performance rituals, 106–108; Mason, Gesel, 41fig.5, 161fig.24, 165fig.29, 221,
on program notes, 81, 122–124, 135–136; 222; altered state experienced by, 237n70;
questioning in, 8–9, 14–15, 32, 34, 77, 137, on high-velocity exploration, 164; in
180; racial consciousness in, xiii, 46, 138, “Mississippi/Duluth” (Patton), 46; as re-
169, 170, 173; research projects in, 37–38, search collaborator, 85; workshop for
76–81, 120; trance-like performance in, How Can You . . . ?, 51fig.8
17, 73–74, 209, 237n70; translation of Mauss, Marcel, 132
black vernacular, 121 McDowell, Mississippi Fred, 137
Lepecki, André: on the audience, 15–16, 98–99, McGhie, Isaac, 111
99–100, 166; on Bausch’s questioning her Melillo, Joe, 82, 127
dancers, 65; body as archive, 66; Cynthia memory, 48–49, 55, 58–60, 78–79, 86–87, 102–
Brizzell, 20–21; growing awareness of role 104, 150, 158
as dramaturg, 9; image of dramaturg, 21; Memphis Minnie, 137
on language in the rehearsal room, 26; on Messingkauf Dialogues (Brecht), 4–7
the outside eye, 229n38 Miller, Bebe, 10, 108, 221
Le Roy, Xavier, 94 Miller, Paul D. (aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 4–5, 14, 24 Kid), 219
literacy in dance, 150, 158 Miller Theater, 35
“Living Room dances” (Patton), 103, 122 minstrelsy. See blackface performance
The Living Theater, 233n9 Mirror (Tarkovsky), 79
Li Wen Yi (Mr. Li), 39fig.4, 199fig.30, 220; mirror neurons, 147–148
blackface performances of, 197–200; and mise-en-scène, 181, 183
the challenges of cultural difference, 191– “Mississippi/Duluth” (Patton), 40–41, 46–49,
192, 197–198; singing with Robert Johnson 47fig.7
blues track, 209; travel visas secured for, mitarbeiterin (female collaborators), 6, 20, 67–68,
34; Yunnan dialect spoken by, 242n62 227n9
LMA (Laban Movement Analysis), 141–142, “Modified Mercali Earthquake Intensity Scale,”
146, 238n5 38
Lo, Jacqueline, 168, 178, 182–183, 190, 204, 206 Moksha dance (Odissi dance), 153, 155, 156
Lo, James, 35, 220 Monk, Meredith, 10
López, Francisco, 219 monologue, 28, 39, 40, 131, 135–136
Lord, Mark, 10 Morris, Tracie, 27, 184, 185, 219; African culture
Lotus choreography (Tree), 55 in works of, 29–30; collaboration with
Index 259
Peter Novak, 225n7; on dancers’ vocal new dramaturgy, 9, 18, 62, 92–93
expressions, 30, 31; English text written New York Live Arts (formerly Dance Theater
by, 185; Geography’s “Tire Talk” section, Workshop), 29
31–32, 207; on the meaning of trance, 73– Noë, Alva, 65, 93–94
74; spoken poetry of, 31, 35, 42, 207 Novak, Cynthia, 233n9
motivating strangeness, 67, 70, 84 Novak, Peter, xiii, 27, 30, 184, 219, 225n7
mourning, 28, 40, 82–85, 127, 131–132, 135, 160 novelty, 15–16, 63, 65, 92–94, 125, 143–145, 162,
movement: contact improvisation in, 39, 56, 183, 186, 190, 194
64–65, 233n9; depatterning exercises,
162; deskilling, 158–160, 164, 166–167; dis- Odissi dance, 149, 150–151, 153, 155–157, 171,
integration of, 158–160, 165; dramaturg’s 188
observations on, 15, 26–27, 29, 40, 50–51, Okpokwasili, Okwui, 47fig.7, 51fig.8, 83fig.10,
75, 86–87, 128–129, 142–147, 157–158, 118fig.13, 119fig.14, 124fig.15, 221, 222,
160–162; dramaturg’s work expressed as, 223; crying in How Can You . . . ?, 83–84,
15–17, 20, 23, 71, 88, 139, 188, 226n10; 234n38; in “Mississippi/Duluth” (Patton),
emotional aspects of, 147; everyday actions, 46–47, 49; narrative of, 44–45, 114–119;
140, 146, 152; fluidity, 11–14, 27–29, 172, preparation for Patton, 79; training in
173, 283; formlessness in, 162, 239n23; Japan, 162; in Untitled (2008), 84fig.11, 223;
furious movement in “Wall/Hole,” 28, workshop for How Can You . . . ?, 51
40, 42, 50, 81, 83, 85, 101, 127, 160, 164, Omagbemi, Omagbitse, 41fig.5, 51fig.8, 162,
166; at high velocity, 40, 81, 85, 129, 159– 161fig.25, 164, 165fig.29
160, 164–166; hybridity, 143–144, 153; in- open-source model for composition, 70–71
vestigations of, 149–150, 151, 152, 155–156; Open Theater, 9, 70
keywords for, 40, 46–47, 162; kinesthetic Oresteia (Aeschylus), 27, 28, 30, 31, 32
empathy, 147–149, 150, 153, 239n6; Laban
Movement Analysis (LMA), 141–142, 146, Pallavi dance (Odissi dance), 156, 157, 188
238n5; in paraperformance at bus station, Pannwitz, Rudolf, 186–187
102–103; pedestrian movements, 152, 157; paraperformances, 90, 101–105, 124
recursive movement translations, 27, 143– Patton, 17, 124fig.15, 136–137, 221–222; Africa
144, 150–151, 183, 194, 203; rhythm, xv, referenced in, 126; American racial history,
30, 45, 78, 143–146, 151, 153, 155, 162; 42–43; audience for, 101; autobiographical
scientific aspects of, 147–148, 239n6; still- material in, 43; “buck dance,” 77–79, 84,
ness, 158, 166; vocabularies of, 26, 35, 101; connection with audience, 106–109;
46–49, 52, 53, 54–56, 59, 140, 142–147, development of, 101; dramaturg’s criti-
162, 203–204, 238n5 cisms of, 119–120; “Ecstasy,” 40, 127, 160;
movement choirs (Bewegungschöre), 238n5 imagined scenario in, 136–138; James
Movement Research, 64 Baldwin’s image in, 126; “Living Room
mudras (hand gestures), 155 dances,” 103, 122; “Mississippi/Duluth,”
Murray, Roderick, 221, 223 40–41, 46–49, 47fig.7; program notes for,
mythology, 105, 108, 113 122. See also Geography; Geography Trilogy;
Tree
narrative, 22, 27, 51–60, 114–116, 231n20, Pavis, Patrice, 181–183, 204, 205
232n38 Paxton, Steve, 64–65, 89, 94, 233n9
Nauman, Bruce, 79–80, 137 The Performance Group, 233n9
negative space, 46–51, 125, 162 performers: buck dance, 78–79; communica-
Nemeth, Charlan Jeanne, 19–20 tion with audience, 11, 30–32, 90, 109–110,
neuroscience, 147 129, 131–133, 165–166; consent among,
260 Index
performers (continued ) contrast with, 149, 150–151, 153, 155–157,

177–178, 188–189, 191; cultural clashes 171, 188; of RL, xii, 56–57, 89, 151, 156,
with, 73–74; dancers’ understanding of 157, 159, 173–174, 232n40; West African
American racial stereotypes, 197–200; dance in contrast with, 56–57, 142, 143,
deskilling, 158–160, 164, 166–167; in devel- 151, 159, 174
opment of movement vocabularies, 140, Pradhan, Manoranjan, 37, 39fig.4, 157, 188,
144–146, 203–204, 238n5; directions to, 220
32–33; Divine Horsemen (Deren) viewed by, Pressner, Stan, 206, 219
73, 74, 75–77, 127; ethical aspects of col- Prince, Liz, 219
laboration, 168, 175–181, 192–194, 197– privacy, 28, 48, 88–89, 101–105, 106–108, 137,
199, 211; frustrations of, xv, 194, 242n46; 234n2
generosity, 131–132; improvisational chal- Production Casebook, 68–69
lenges for, 105, 109–110, 160; interdisci- Profeta, Katherine (KP), xvfig.1, xviifig.2,
plinary work of, 28; interviews with, 50; 124fig.15, 138fig.19, 219, 220, 221, 223; as
kinesthetic empathy of, 147–149, 150, 153, dancer, xiii, 12, 40, 85, 129, 225n1,
239n6; languages of, 32, 207; Lemon’s de- 228n29; on defining dramaturgy, 211–213;
stabilization of, 17; memory and perform gender consciousness of, xiii, 170, 173;
ance, 78–79; motivation of, 146–147; as interview with Mr. Wang on his retro-
mourners, 83–85, 131–132; natural disas- spective views of collaboration, 200–201;
ters experienced by, 37–38; questioning introduction to RL, xiii–xiv, 173–176; on
of/by, 8–9, 15, 24, 65–66, 180, 197–198, narrative of Okwui Okpokwasili, 44–45,
204–205, 209; racialized view of, 89, 169; 114–119; notes of, xiv,, xvfig.136, 55–56,
research projects of, 83–85, 130–131; re- 75, 85–87, 105, 106–108, 126, 180, 197,
sponses to keywords, 46, 47, 50; sense of 203, 205, 226n8; racial consciousness of,
performing-to-be-seen, 130; sound poems xiii, 46, 138, 169, 170, 173; reactions to
delivered by, 33; stamina of, 28, 40, 50, RL’s workshops, 55–56, 106–108, 157,
81, 83, 85, 101, 127, 164, 166; on trance- 160–162; research projects of, 37–38, 76–
like exercise, 17, 73–74, 202, 237n70; as 81, 82–86, 102, 120. See also dramaturg;
unreliable storytellers, 44–45. See also Lemon–Profeta collaboration
audience; intercultural collaboration and program notes, 25, 81, 121–124, 135–136
performance; movement
“Performing as a Moral Act” (Conquergood), questioning, 8–9, 15, 24, 34, 65–66, 77, 142, 180,
179 197–198, 204–205, 209
Phelan, Peggy, 52–53, 59 Quirt, Brian, 188
the Philosopher (Messingkauf Dialogues [Brecht]),
5, 227n5 race: audience’s viewing experience of, 89, 111–
philosophers-in-residence, 93 112, 115–119, 181, 191, 234n2, 236n45;
Picasso, Pablo, 193 blackface performance, 78, 101, 197–200;
Piscator, Erwin, 6, 67 black vernacular, 108–109, 121, 123; cul-
Platel, Alain, 9, 13 tural representations of, 108–109, 115–
Pontadera, Italy, 81, 82 116, 197–199; double consciousness (Du
possession, physical effects of, 73–74, 127, Bois), 89; in film, 79–80; hybridity, xiv,
237n70 143–144, 153, 168, 169, 170–172, 173,
postdramatic theater, 10–11, 28, 53, 62, 70, 92 182, 183, 190–191, 204–205, 206; stereo-
postmodern dance: the audience and, 89–90; types of, 19, 44–45, 77–80, 84, 101, 110–
deskilling, 158–159; movement in, 56–57, 119, 123–124, 196–200. See also blackness;
142, 143, 151, 152, 156, 157; Odissi dance in whiteness
Index 261
racism: blackface performance, 78, 101, 197– Roach, Joseph, 78

200; lynching as expression of, 46–49, Rosenthal, Ann, 107
104, 111, 120, 124–125, 127–128, 236n45;
Okwui Okpokwasili’s narrative on, 44– San Francisco Dancer’s Workshop, 233n9
45, 114–119; and the slaying of Medgar Sapelo Island, 102, 105, 107, 222
Evers, 46–47; vocabulary of, 44, 45, 114– Scaffold Room, 83
115, 116, 117, 118–119, 123, 124 Schantz, Luke, 223
Rainer, Yvonne, xii, 9, 89 Schechter, Joel, 4
Ralph-at-the-table, 106–107 Schlemmer, Oskar, 233n12
Ralph Lemon Dance Company, xii, 90, 158, Schneider, Rebecca, 66–67, 86
169, 188, 225n1 Seeger, Mike, 78
Rancière, Jacques, 95–96, 130, 131, 133 semiotics, 53, 96–97, 98, 182–184
reader-response theory, 96 Shape (Laban Movement Analysis), 141
Reichsdramaturg, 7 Shenk, Joshua Wolf, 230n52
research: in the American South, 48, 77–78, show-and-tell workshop, 112–113
102–104; archive, 66–67, 72–75, 78–79, “Skeptic’s Cop-Out” (Conquergood), 179, 180
80–81, 84–87, 180; artistic practice as, Smith, Miko Doi, 221
64–65, 233n12; on audience interaction, soft narrative understanding, 52, 54–56, 59–60
106–107; of Brecht’s female collaborators, Solaris (Tarkovsky), 135, 136fig.18
6, 20, 67–68, 227n9; on “buck dance,” solo artistic genius, 21, 230n52
77–79, 84, 103; collation, 62–63, 66, 71, Soloski, Alexis, 228n29
79; creation, 63, 70–71, 79; on crying, 82– Space (Laban Movement Analysis), 141–142
84; definitions of, 62–64, 71; democrati- sparagmos (ritual dismemberment), 158, 172
zation of, 80–81, 105; ethical aspects of, spectacle, 7, 46, 47, 49, 89, 101, 111, 236n45
76–78, 187–199; financing of, 102; folk- “spectacle lynchings,” 46, 47, 49, 111, 236n45
tales in, 80–81, 131–132, 133, 136; fury ex- spectators. See audience
periments, 40, 85, 164, 166; as generative spoken-word poets, 27, 29–30
act, 65–66; as inspiration, 63, 67, 69–70, Steffin, Margarethe, 20
71, 74, 76, 80–81, 83–84; keywords in, Stein, Gertrude, 53, 59
40, 46–47; manifestations research, 80; stillness, 158, 166
on mourning, 82–85; notekeeping, xiv, Stokes, Frank, 103, 104fig.12, 137
xvfig.1, 36, 55–56, 85–87, 105, 106–108, Stone, R. Eric, 221
126, 180, 197, 203, 205, 226n8; on perform storytelling, 44–45, 58–59, 114–116, 114–117
ance without an audience, 81; physical Strawbridge, Steven, 206, 220
research projects, 85; Production Case- Stuart, Meg, 9, 98
book, 68–69; program notes reflecting, “A Summer Tragedy” (Bontemps), 121
122; racial tension in, 79–80; RL’s travels “Sunshine Room” (How Can You . . . ? ), 28, 39,
for, 35–37, 42, 102–105, 151–152, 171–172, 40, 131, 135–136
196–197, 219–220, 222–223; on trance-like Supree, Burt, 64
movement in Geography, 72–75; workshop surveillance cameras, 111
presentations, 105–106
rhythm, xv, 30, 45, 78, 143–146, 151, 153, 155, taboo relationships, 109–110, 236n42
162 Takami, Asako, 39fig.4, 154fig.22, 161fig.23,
Richards, Thomas, 81–82 220, 242n62; duet with Ralph Lemon,
risk, 72–76, 79–80, 172, 175–177, 189–190, 196– 156–157; mourning for, 28, 40, 82, 85, 127,
200, 201–203 132, 135, 160; movement improvisations
rituals, 48, 81–82, 102–104, 105, 112, 158, 172 with, 38, 153, 156, 160; as Odissi dancer,
262 Index
Takami, Asako (continued ) research, 79; in intercultural collabora-

155, 156, 157, 171, 188; reading exercise of, tion, 30–31, 177, 186–187, 194, 197, 209; of
34; Tribhanga pose, 153, 154fig.22 southern black vernacular, 121; of trance,
Talking Feet: Solo Southern Dance: Flatfoot, Buck and 73–74; Walter Benjamin on, 99
Tap (Seeger), 78 Tree, 39fig.4, 57fig.9, 161fig.23, 220–221; ABA
Tanaka, Min, 162, 239n23 structures in, 55–56; accusations of cul-
Tanztheater. See Bausch, Pina tural chauvinism in, 178; blackface per-
target audience, 168, 181–187, 191, 197, 198, 209 formance in, 197–200; delivery of infor-
Tarkovsky, Andrei, 79, 135 mation to an audience, 35, 37–38; ethical
“The Task of the Translator” (Benjamin), 99 dilemmas in, 178, 188, 197–200; intercul-
Taylor, Mike, 221, 223 tural collaborations, 34, 159, 171, 182–188,
Taymor, Julie, 225n1 191–193, 207; juxtaposition of move-
Tchépoho, Goulei, xiii, xviifig.2, 33fig.3, 102, ments, 150–151; Odissi dance in, 149, 156,
105, 146, 219, 222 157, 171, 188; process timeline, 220–221;
text: decentralized role of dramatic text in RL as performer in, 16–17; staging of, 37–
theater, 92; decoding of, 53, 231n29; in 38, 206; travel experiences reflected in,
narrative, 22, 27, 51–60, 114–116, 231n20, 35, 36–37. See also Geography; Geography
232n38; performers’ engagement with, Trilogy; intercultural collaboration and
24, 27, 29–30, 32–35, 47, 109–110; per- performance; Patton
sonal experiences reflected in, 36–37; sci- Tree: Belief/Culture/Balance (Lemon), 37
entific texts, 37–38, 120; the textless body, Tribhanga pose (Odissi dance), 153, 154fig.22
53–54; without movement, 41–42; word- Tronzo, William, 69
lessness, 29, 52, 58–59. See also keywords;
language; vocabulary Under the Radar festival, 29
Thomson, David, 39fig.4, 41fig.5, 51fig.8, the unreliable narrator, 43, 44, 45, 110, 113–114,
124fig.15, 161fig.24, 165fig.29, 220, 221, 136, 211. See also Br’er Rabbit and the Tar
222, 242n62; on blackface performance, Patch
198; duet with RL, 38–39; language as Untitled (2008), 84fig.11, 223
improvisational trigger, 207, 208; in
“Mississippi/Duluth” (Patton), 46, 47fig.7; Van Imschoot, Myriam, 6, 11–12, 19
movement experiments of, 38–39, 105, Van Kerkhoven, Marianne, xvii, 7–9, 16, 92–
152, 156; narrative in Tree, 56; research on 93, 122, 139, 229n39
Sapelo Island, 102, 105; as RL in Patton, video. See film/video visuals
43, 110; unreliable storytelling by, 44, 110, vocabulary: anatomy, 14, 25, 26, 140–144, 146,
114 155, 238n5; of blackness, 109–110, 121,
Thomson, Lynn M., 229n32 123; butoh-fu, 129, 162, 237n73, 239n23; on
Till, Emmett, 47, 113 how the dance makes meaning, 148–158;
Till-Mobley, Mamie, 137 Laban Movement Analysis (LMA), 141–
Time (Effort [Laban Movement Analysis]), 142 142, 146, 238n5; of movement, 26, 140,
“Tire Talk” (Geography), 31, 32–33, 207 144–146, 151, 203–204, 238n5; of racism,
Tran, Minh, 220 44, 45, 114–115, 116, 117, 118–119, 123, 124;
trance, 72–77, 127–128, 178, 202, 208–209, the word “language” as a verb, 26
237n70 Vodou, 73, 75
translation: challenges of, 186–187, 191–192,
197–198; of dance movements, 27, 143– Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), 28, 43, 107–
144, 144–146, 183, 194, 203, 207; exercises 108, 109–110, 220, 221
in, 30, 34–35, 42, 81–82, 207; of external Wall/Floor Positions (Nauman), 79–80
Index 263
“Wall/Hole,” 41fig.5; audience experience of, consciousness, xiii, 46, 138, 169, 170, 173,
129–132, 135, 165–166; Buddhist references 181; in encounters with racism, 43, 45, 49,
in, 127; conversations with performers, 108–109, 110, 114–115, 116; in intercultural
50; dance disappears in, 128; defiguration, encounters, 15, 30; of RL’s dance com-
159, 160; deskilling, 158–160, 164, 166–167; pany, 169, 240n1; set against blackness,
disassembly, 159; “Ecstasy” (Patton) as 79–80, 138, 171
source for, 40, 127, 160; furious move- Wilks, Talvin, 10, 80, 226n9
ment in, 28, 40, 42, 50, 81, 83, 85, 101, 127, Wilson, Reggie, 10
160, 164, 166; research for, 28, 85; staging Wooster Group, 9, 70
of, 42 Workcenter (Pontadera, Italy), 81, 82
Wang Liliang (Mr. Wang), 39fig.4, 220; black- workshops, 51fig.8, 223; audience at, 81, 105–
face performances of, 197–200; and the 106, 109–110; dramaturg’s role in, xiv–xv,
challenges of cultural difference, 188, 191– 27, 28, 74–76, 84–85, 106–108, 160–162;
192, 197–198; on his collaboration with improvisational challenges, 27, 73–74, 105,
RL, 200–201; travel visas secured for, 34 109–110, 150–152, 160, 177; movement
Ward, Nari, xviifig.2, 32, 38, 56, 145fig.21, 191, vocabularies in, 143–144; performers’
206, 219, 220, 221 consent for, 177–178; show-and-tell work-
webbing, 120–121 shop, 112–113; text-driven experiments at,
Weight (Effort [Laban Movement Analysis]), 142 30–31, 34–38; venues for, 28, 43, 51, 107–
Wen Hui, 39fig.4, 56, 157, 197, 198, 207, 220, 108, 109–110, 212, 222, 240n27; at Walker
242n62 Art Center (Minneapolis), 28, 43, 107–
West African dance: American dance com- 108, 109–110, 220, 221
pared with, 56–57, 142–144, 146, 151, 171,
174, 203–204; the body in, 142–143, 144, Yale Repertory Theater (YRT), xiii–xvi
146; as communal effort, 146, 238n5; Yale School of Drama (YSD), xiii
cultural authenticity in, 171, 190–191; Yao, Kouakou “Angelo,” xiii, xviifig.2, 32,
language and cultural difference, 30–33, 33fig.3, 72, 144fig.20, 219, 222
177–178, 185–186; movement in, 27, 142– Yavich, Anita, 198, 220
146, 151; Odissi dance compared with, Yi culture, 188, 191, 197–199, 209
151; postmodern dance in contrast with, Young, James, 49, 231n24
56–57, 142, 143, 151, 159, 174; RL’s rela- YRT (Yale Repertory Theater), xiii–xvi
tionship with, 31, 56–57, 57fig.9, 126, 175– Yu, Cheng-Chieh, 37, 38, 39fig.4, 56, 157, 198,
178, 190–191, 203–204, 209; spirituality in, 199, 207, 208, 220, 242n62
73–74, 146; trance phenomena and, 17,
72–77, 178, 237n70; vocabulary of, 143– Zerehoulé, Pehoula, 34, 220
144, 204–205. See also Geography Zimmer, Jacob, 19, 235n5
whiteness: in audience encounters, 78, 89, 111, Zou, Nai, xiii, 32, 33fig.3, 72, 142, 144fig.20,
117, 120, 236n45; in dramaturg’s racial 219
S o c i e t y o f D a n c e H i s t o ry S c h o l a r s
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Dramaturgy in Motion

SDHS Ed­i­to­rial Board

Sher­ril Dodds, Tem­ple Uni­ver­sity

The University of Wisconsin Press

3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden

Printed in the United States of America

This book may be available in a digital edition

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Profeta, Katherine, author.

Introduction: Where Did This Dramaturg

1 Text and Language 24

Figure 23. Asako Takami in Tree 161

tailoring it to the skills and idiosyncrasies of a particular group, as she or he is

L et us begin with the word. “Dramaturgy” came first—“dramaturg” is what

as an inheritance from a German word, is decidedly not the playwright.

structure toward one who participates actively in a questioning process, “depart-

In an American context (and it should be obvious from the above that by

Dispersal, Redundancy, Fluidity

I recognize something about active collaboration that gains momentum with

communicating something already recognizable. Of course, as ghosts are

In her “Anxious Dramaturgy,” Myriam Van Imschoot wrote critically

and fitness of proposals generated by group problem solving.45 This form of

Gender, Literal and Figurative

thread of authorship. To that activity of weaving, cast in its most self-abnegating

gender will similarly cease to provide an attractive metaphor for understanding

outsource that task). The dramaturg scribbling in a rehearsal notebook, archiving

the performance, even if that authenticity was inevitably a theatrically framed

Words as a Field for Movement

Ralph asked me to be at the showing and share my reactions. We had

I could not imagine how Ralph’s particular journal material, spoken

experience in India in words, while in movement I was willing to grant that he

Figure 6. Walter Carter. (Courtesy of Ralph Lemon)

The furious, uncapturable movement of the “Wall/Hole” section may

Words Moving and Dancing

I thought of the advent of this mode as a moment when movement and

Words Creating a Negative Space

During Patton, disagreements between Ralph and me were more uncomfortable

(referring to the decision of Evers’s widow to preserve their home exactly as it

choreography once again. When “Mississippi/Duluth” came back around for

I cannot conclude a chapter on the potential roles of language in movement-

familiar narrative we previously learned through words) or it is waiting to

a narrative, the ontological quality of performance rests on its ephemeral

dramatic cause-and-effect (B added to A catalyzes C), ABA, I imagined, was

he takes care to clarify is a “wordless narrative.”43 For Damasio, the creation of

I n Europe in 1999 a group of dance dramaturgs and writer/researchers held

on research as an increasingly potent metaphor or model for artistic practice

Research: Definition, Metaphor, Model

by every “messy and eruptive reappearance,” the performing body generates,

The Dramaturg and Research: Perfect Together?

second. In Hauptmann’s case, she fully participated in the second, inspired to

This collection of material would then be copied, three-hole punched, and

The Problematics of Research

studio as a protected inside space, an experimental laboratory kept sterile from

G eog r a p h y a n d t h e L i m i t s o f t h e E mbo died A rchive

This example concerns the brief, ultimately discontinued investigation into

In my enactment of the role of dramaturg, I used the cast as an archive of

The 2004 performance of Patton was the chronological endpoint of a lengthy

and Mississippi on a private research trip, accompanied only by his daughter,

our ideal versions. I explored the audience-less performances that Thomas

source and simultaneously becomes something new or surprising? The Richards

group in the moment—when one avenue of investigation dried up, I could

The question of research for a dramaturg, or anyone thinking dramaturgically,

role becomes less straightforward. Deborah Hay, another founding postmodern-

SDHS Editorial Board

Sherril Dodds, Temple University