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suited from the earlier open plan became a mere echo in the corridors leading to each closed door, while images from the past seeped into new canvases and reliefs. The relationship that had developed between choreography and fine arts of the ’7os underwent a monumental shift with the new generation of the ’Bos. Throughout the ’7os there had been a special empathy between such artists as Vito Acconci, Dan Graham, Robert Morris, and Dennis Oppenheim and many choreographers, including Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, and Lucinda Childs. It manifested itself in conceptual strategies, as well as in an avantgarde ethic that encompassed both work and a way of living. Indeed, so close were the sensibilities that choreography was virtually the practice to conceptual art’s theoretical impulses. Walking down the side of a building (as choreography) or following a casual passerby in the street (as art) were two sides of the same coin. Both stopped the viewer in his or her tracks to ask, Hey - is this art ? or Is this dance 1 .. The radical esthetic implied by these questions

remains a central model of avant-garde art, and the artists involved continue to risk the ramifications of such polemical concerns. The next generation of artists and choreographers has been highly conscious of this inheritance, referring to it while also incorporating motifs and techniques from popular culture - television, movies, and rock’n’ roll - explicity seeking routes back and forth across boundaries of High and Low, This seems to have resulted in work that visibly focuses on the specific traditions of each medium. It is as though the earlier questioning of categories has been replaced by affirmative statements of intent - this is art, and this is dance. From this rich and contradictory mix has emerged a new choreographer for the ’Bos, Melissa Fenley. Currently being considered in the worlds of both avantgarde performance and mainstream modern dance, Fenley has a vision of dance that - with its footnotes to past styles - is of its ownjeriod and suggests further uncharted territory as well. She is seeking new figurative froms. Her work is a rich archaeology of dance, intense with unbridled physicality. Fast-paced and powerful, its starting point is her own body

- its sinewy form and the very mechanisms that move it. The weight of the musculature, and the length and breadth of the' back, the detail of how wrist meets palm at on oblique angle - such is the stuff of which movements are made, their precise dimensions articulating both plan and der ation of the stage space. Fenley believes that the shape of the dancer’s body is the key to an entirely original choreography. With this in mind she has been remodeling her body for years not in dance classes but in a unique training program which she carries out in the mornings at her local gym. Her day begins with an hour of calisthenics of her own devising, a half hour of stationarybicycle riding, and a half hour of training on a Nautilus weight machine. She systematically fine-tunes each body part, creating a powerful weapon that can yield extraordinary dance forms and building a surplus of stamina beyond what she calls- the maintenance level of traditional dance training. When she performs she seems to recharge herself from this reserve to reach impossible levels of momentum and endurance. Thus

each new work is as much a breakthrough in choreographic design as it is in physical construction. Her tightly crafted body is in direct contrast to the mostly untrained bodies of conceptually oriented dancers, and her sheer physical might is the very antithesis to their subtler ways. Dance is motion, states Fenley, who, with Energizer, 1980, created an explosive reaction to the cool geometry of the cerebral ’7os. She finds twodimensional floor plans far too regimented to contain the huge chunks of space consumed by her movement. While she begins with a plan, she allows it to disintegrate gradually as she follows the pulls and weights of a body in motion. This instinctive process results in what Fenley calls an “erratic architecture” of felt volumes. Unlike Childs dancers, hers do not keep an even, measured distance between them, but instead “shave off one another” as they move rapidly through space. Sometimes they create a soft-edged geometry of quadrants, circles, or figure eights as they go, as in Gentle Desire, 1981, a work for three dancers; or she may describe corridors and great planes of space, as in Eureka, 1982, a solo in which Fenley alone was responsible for the

entire spatial volume. This expansive use of space reflects the mix of geographical environments that constitutes Fenley’s spatial memory. Born in Nevada, raised in Nigeria, schooled in Spain and California, Fenly’s sense of physical space is from the outset not a conventional Western one. Hers is a physicality that suggests the kind of pure movement contained in a Tomba dance ceremony, or in the hi-!ife dancing of Nigerian city life. She has a sense of her own body that speaks of growing up African, and a combination of consciousness and sensuality that comes from playing both sides, orthodox techniques and impulsive African rhythms. Fenley’s costumes further remove her dance from that of the previous generation, with its typical pareddown work clothes. Her costumes do not decorate the body so much as provide a window onto her sculpted body forms. They also transform the dancer into what Fenley calls a medium for motion - a participant in a ritual where dancers take on the aura of the ceremonial deities who guard the dance spirit. As to historicist ico-

nography, quite absent from ’7os choreography, Fenley’s compendium of movements coincides with the tendency of her fine-art contemporaries toward the appropriation of images, But her sources are a kind of genetic heritage - movement memories that lie buried in our bodies. Thus even with the momentum of bodies hurtling through space, Fenley’s rich choreography alludes to fleeting fragments of movements excavated from the past - an Egyptian hieroglyph, a Greek warrior’s shield, an Abyssinian frieze, Fenley dances with arms in the air, palms upward as in Indian dance or inward and with elbow crooked as in a Balinese curtsy, with hips that have a Calypso sway while her head nods to a distant samba. It is a dance whose parts are reassuring in their familiarity, though the whole is a provocative mix never seen before. It is this “universality” of recognizable dance motifs, as well as the sheer physicality of the work, that accounts for the equally enthusiastic reception Fenley receives in Tokyo and London, from both avantgarde circles and general dance audiences. With Hemispheres, 1983, which premiered in November as part of the

Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave festival, Fenley’s own past has become the source for a breathtaking work of extraordinary beauty. Signatures from earlier works are reconstituted in combinations so powerful and confident that it seems as though Fenley has suddenly comprehended fully the intentions of her oeuvre so far. If the earliest pieces were, in Fenley’s words, positional - finding a place for arms, heads, and hands, they manifest themselves in Hemispheres as a dissertation on the upper body - a history of head and hand movements, dealing with their symbolic and story-telling capacities as well as their function as pendulums or weights and balances. If her second phase of choreography emphasized rhythmic concerns, with works such as Mix, 1979, being executed in silence to allow the pulse of the dancers’ breathing and the sound of sets of feet on wood to give the dance its momentum - like heartbeats - then Hemispheres is a labyrinth of rhythms and counts, overlapping number systems and unexpected phrasings that conjure up images of huge choruses of drummers crossing back and forth

between forest and hills. If her next concern was speed, with (as she describes it) an interest in the way the eye perceives space when things are speeded up, then Hemispheres, interspersed as it is with slow-motion passages, gives the eye time to absorb the actual spatial connections that are there on stage. This slowingdown also gives the brain time to recall pictures from an image bank of dance, inserting their romance into Fenley’s own body language. Moreover, when the pacing reverts to Fenley’s normal time - breakneck speed - it seems as though the dancers must be cruising in their own slipstream. Referring to the brain, Hemispheres is the reconciliation of opposites present and past (Fenley’s own as well as dance history), analytical and intuitive, classical tradition and third-world custom, stereotypes of male and female movement. Such a reconciliation was imperative for Fenley. Her passion for choreography was stirred by both the ecstatic expressionism of Martha Graham and the ritualistic sensuality of nonWestern dance in general, while she was given license to practice at all by the work of such pioneers of post-

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