{"id":172312,"date":"2021-04-04T17:25:47","date_gmt":"2021-04-04T08:25:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/?p=172312"},"modified":"2021-04-04T17:25:47","modified_gmt":"2021-04-04T08:25:47","slug":"softly-bending-hand-pointing-to-the-ground","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/art\/softly-bending-hand-pointing-to-the-ground\/","title":{"rendered":"Softly. Bending. Hand Pointing to the Ground"},"content":{"rendered":"

Softly. Bending. Hand Pointing to the Ground<\/h3>\r\n

\u201c[The score] is kind of like a tranquilizer, like taking a quaalude, maybe...\u201d<\/p>\r\n

Melinda Wilson, a former ballet dancer, muses to Chicago-based artist Cherrie Yu<\/a>. The pair are listening to an audio translation of Yvonne Rainer\u2019s famous Trio A<\/a>, a solo dance where Rainer performed choreography without musical backing and features a seamless flow of everyday movements like toe tapping, walking, and kneeling. The audio translation comes from Melinda\u2019s longtime friend and percussion musician Joyce Linsey, who happened to be Melinda\u2019s accompanist for many years. Joyce describes the movements of Rainer\u2019s Trio A:<\/p>\r\n

\"Softly around\/ softly around, forward\/ bending\/ arms\/ spherically\/ as she turns, and sways\/ she continues to roll in circle\/ her arms\/ skipping...\"<\/em><\/p>\r\n\r\n

\"adf-web-magazine-cherrie-yu-trio-a-translation\"<\/a>

Image Credit: Cherrie Yu, Trio A: A Translation Project still, 2021. Image courtesy of the artist.<\/p><\/div>\r\n\r\n

The audio is actually four separate tracks overlaid: three of Joyce describing Rainer\u2019s choreography, and a fourth of her playing percussion instrument while watching Trio A. Joyce\u2019s voice reverbs, echoing over itself, overlapping, folding in\u2014like dropping a pebble in a small koi pond and watching the ripple vibrate across the surface of the water until it meets the edge and turns back, meeting itself head on. Or, as Melinda described it, the audio is like a tranquilizer. The three voices and percussion track are overwhelming, yet Joyce\u2019s voice is languid and elastic, stretching time out so that the audio feels both rapid and slow moving. Cherrie and Melinda listen to the score three times. They are beginning to choreograph a segment for Yu\u2019s Trio: A Translation Project<\/em><\/a>, a continuation of an earlier project that Yu started in 2020. Each time Cherrie plays the audio, they both listen and note down different phrases that stand out.<\/p>\r\n

\u201cHmm. I\u2019m not really sure where to begin.\u201d Cherrie says. She is contemplative and serious, a characteristic heightened by her closely cropped hairstyle and tendency to pause deliberately between thoughts.<\/p>\r\n

The pair are choreographing over Zoom, a challenging constraint that neither seems particularly perturbed nor stifled by. I\u2019m grateful because it allows me to linger as a fly on the wall, swaddled in an afghan on my bed as I hurriedly scribble notes, even though I\u2019m surreptitiously recording their conversation on my phone as well. I spend the majority of the time attempting to describe Melinda\u2019s movements. They start the rehearsal with a warmup. Cherri tasked Melinda with an assignment to identify three movements from her week that she could demonstrate. She performs two of the movements. The first one she demonstrates is a cross-legged position where she rests her shoulder on her knee and her chin on the inside of her wrist. She explains that she watched a dance student assume this position during class. The second movement she acts out is of someone crossing the street and looking over their shoulder. Cherrie gently chastises Melinda, explaining that she was hoping that the movements she brought would be ones that she herself acted out and not someone else\u2019s, Cherrie suggests, \u201cthey could be something as small as getting out of bed or the way you hold up your arm to brush your teeth.\u201d<\/p>\r\n

Melinda laughs and sheepishly adds, \u201cIt\u2019s hard as a dancer because so many people have molded me!\u201d<\/p>\r\n

I laugh and anxiously glance to make sure that my audio is still muted. As an amateur dancer with some training in modern and contemporary, I find her comment quite humorous. Dancers are quite literally taught to suppress their own idiosyncratic styles of movement in order to master the forms and techniques of their chosen dance style, repeating positions and poses until they\u2019re muscle memory. Now, Cherrie is doing the reverse, attempting to prod Melinda towards a more primal understanding of her movements, stripping back her formal training in order to identify more task-oriented, unrefined movement.<\/p>\r\n

\u201cOkay, I don\u2019t think it\u2019s helpful to improvise out of nowhere. I think it might be helpful to go back to some of the segments you shared with me during the warmup,\u201d Cherrie says, deciding on a course of action. Melinda begins moving, arching her back in a feline-like position before tossing her right arm over her shoulder and gently tapping herself on the back with her fingertips. She buckles her upstage leg and pivots to face her laptop. She moves closer to the camera.<\/p>\r\n

Melinda describes the feeling of the movement sequence. I notice that she pauses frequently, often punctuating her statements with a question: \u201cHow do I say this?\u201d She contemplates before responding, yet she\u2019s jovial and unpretentious in her explanations, often laughing in a high-pitched way, quietly trailing off at the end. Haw, haw, haw... She has high-arched eyebrows, a pleasant, broad smile, and a dramatic smokey eye that\u2019s noticeable even through the grain of the webcam. The pair decide to slow down, focusing their attention to each movement as a single unit.<\/p>\r\n

Cherrie later emails me a 2014 essay by Yvonne Rainer titled \u201cThe Aging Body in Dance,\u201d explaining that the essay was illuminating during the rehearsal process because all of the performers for Trio A: A Translation Project turned out to be over forty, and all of them people with children. The dancers include Melinda; Tony Rodriguez, a retired Chicago firefighter; and Cherrie\u2019s own mother. She adds, \u201cI didn\u2019t plan for this, it [just] came to be this way. I think it comes through in their writing, sometimes in very different ways\u2014how they perceive the change in their bodies, and how they relate to their children in a physical way.\u201d<\/p>\r\n

In her essay, Rainer writes, \u201cIn these recent dances I have given myself roles other than that of a dancer. Mainly through the reading of texts (authored by others), I variously enact a carnival barker, a historian, a social critic, a political analyst, master of ceremonies, and narrator of my brother\u2019s cognitive decline. My preferred mode of self-presentation is \u201cexistence.\u201d I love to exist on stage. I no longer \u201cdance.\u201d<\/p>\r\n

This ethos, a rejection of typified forms of dance and performance, emerges full-fledged in Cherrie\u2019s work. The range of performers, largely individuals with no formal dance background, prioritizes raw, unaffected movement. Except in Cherrie\u2019s project, text is used in a multitude of ways. First, Rainer\u2019s original dance is translated into a written score, which Cherrie and the performer use as material to choreograph new movements. Second, Cherrie has each performer write in response to various prompts during rehearsal. These texts later become a voiceover for the filmed segments ofTrio A: A Translation Project<\/em>. <\/span><\/p>\r\n

Cherrie asks Melinda to \u201cdescribe an instance where you felt apathetic.\u201d Melinda laughs and coyly asks, \u201cThis won\u2019t be shared with anyone else, right?\u201d I feel a moment of secondhand shame and embarrassment while sitting quietly and taking my notes. Of course, I can\u2019t see what Melinda writes. She doesn\u2019t read it aloud. She sends it later to Cherrie, but the question feels revealing, intensely intimate because it makes me reckon with my own fallibility as a person. I feel a sudden sympathy for Melinda as I watch her intently write about this moment of personal failure.<\/p>\r\n

I think about repetition, about Anne Carson\u2019s poetry chapbook The Albertine Workout where she discusses Samuel Beckett\u2019s writing on habit, the banality of existence and bodily pleasure, specifically his descriptions of protagonist Murphy sitting from Beckett\u2019s novel of the same name: \u201cThe sensation of the seat of a chair coming together with his dropping posteriors at last was so delicious that he rose at once and repeated the sit, lingeringly and with intense concentration. Murphy did not so often meet with these tendernesses that he could afford to treat them so casually. The second sit, however, was a great disappointment.\u201d The sensation diminishes with repetition. This is not the case in Cherrie\u2019s practice. Through repetition, her performers\u2019 movements in Trio A: A Translation Project<\/em>\u00a0become more joyful, more abundant, teeming with potential.<\/p>\r\n

The brilliance of Yu\u2019s practice is her intentional pursuit of the banal, of the mundane movements of our everyday, mining them to find these moments of bodily repetition, refining them until we start to understand the bountiful abundance of our bodies, of our daily movement, unearthing something simple and yet unmistakably profound. While Yu\u2019s practice is clearly rooted in dance, Trio: A Translation<\/em> presents and grapples with something much more universal: existence itself.<\/p>\r\n

\r\n
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Softly. Bending. Hand Pointing to the Ground \u201c[The score] is kind of like a tranquilizer, like taking a quaalu […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":172311,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"\"Softly. Bending. Hand Pointing to the Ground\"\r\n#MelindaWilson #balletdancer #CherrieYu #TrioA","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[6],"tags":[54,64,195],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/adf-web-magazine-cherrie-yu-trio-a-translation.png","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172312"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172312"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172312\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/172311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}