Poetry/Motion

A pair of recent experiences have led me to think about the way in which poetry and dance are parallel arts; both concerned with using the materials of ordinary communication (words, gestures) to craft something extraordinary that goes beyond simple meaning and ventures toward something more elemental or visceral.

First, I was signing my kids up for their various summer camps and activities; one of the options was a dance intensive offered by our local modern dance company. The idea, as I understood it, was that each child would bring in a poem and then work to build a dance around that text. I thought of the sort of poems my children (ages almost 7 and 11) like and got a chuckle envisioning a dance that expresses the following:

The Meehoo with an Exactlywatt
by Shel Silverstein, from the book "A Light in the Attic" (1981)

Knock knock!
Who's there?
Me!
Me who?
That's right!
What's right?
Meehoo!
That's what I want to know!
What's what you want to know?
Me, who?
Yes, exactly!
Exactly what?
Yes, I have an Exactlywatt on a chain!
Exactly what on a chain?
Yes!
Yes what?
No, Exactlywatt!
That's what I want to know!
I told you - Exactlywatt!
Exactly what?
Yes!
Yes what?
Yes, it's with me!
What's with you?
Exactlywatt - that's what's with me.
Me who?
Yes!
Go away!
Knock knock...

That could get pretty crazy, no? But it could also be great theater. So I am hoping that the little one will want to do it (the big one will be at science camp that week).

So then, I go to the campus library to pick up an interlibrary loan book, and while I am there I notice a display of the library's materials relating to May Swenson, an alumna of our fine school, and a noted modernist poet often associated with e.e. cummings, Elizabeth Bishop, and that lot. Her poetry is more sensuous, though, than either of theirs, and she has this open, light feeling for language. Anyway, there were a bunch of broadsheets with her poems, her books, photographs, autograph copies of early drafts, and one of the poems, "How Everything Happens," was displayed on the wall next to a very clever and beautiful book/sculpture that a local artist made in response to its formal properties. 

Now, that would make an interesting point of departure for a choreographer, I thought. Then I remembered seeing a piece by Jodi Melnick called "Business of the Bloom" in a video clip from the Fire Island Dance Festival 2009, and I thought, hey, wasn't it sort of like that, with the water rippling behind and the pulling back and stacking up and my favorite Bach cello solo? And indeed, rewatching it, I think "yes, a little bit like." Then I watched this lovely piece by Danny Tidwell, and thought, hmm, that's also a little bit like Swenson's poem. But in neither case was the resemblance so strong as to be compelling; the "then nothing is happening, then something stacks up..." caesura is there, but not really as a focus. What would a dance look like that really took that shape? And what music would it need or want? I think Melnick is on to something with Bach, with its breathing rhythm.

Mark Morris, of course, has been over all this; his delightful "L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, ed il Moderato," is as much about the poetic text by John Milton as about Handel's music. This mini-documentary on the piece is quite enlightening.  

But it would be fun to experiment with Swenson's poetry -- there is something so terpsichorean about it.