Stephen Pelton Dance Company Preview
and a white light in the back of my mind to guide me
June 5-8, 2008
Dance Mission Theater, San Francisco
The season is named for Pelton’s newest work, inspired by the poetry of Anglo-Irish writer Louis MacNeice. Set to a score by Gavin Bryars, this dark and meditative work will be performed twice each evening—as a solo and again as a group piece. These two different versions of a single meditation quietly ask how one might reconcile the tyranny of humanity with the progress of time and the body.
The season also includes revivals of Not Here, choreographed to Radiohead for Nol Simonse in 2003, and one of Christy Funsch’s own dances, Solo for Somebody. For Tuesday, created in 2006 in collaboration with playwright-in-residence Brian Thorstenson, the company will be joined by guest dancers Erin Mei-Ling Stuart and Private Freeman. The evening concludes with an excerpt from next season’s Citizen Hill, performed to live string music by Ravel.
I attended a rehearsal of Pelton’s new pieces, “Tuesday”, and “and a white light in the back of my mind to guide me” along with Frank Roth, who scurried around in his socks, taking photos. Although one of the dancers was missing that night, “Tuesday”, which is about a group of friends faced with the sudden death of one of their members was, more than other group pieces by Pelton, more theatrical than dancey, clearly a character-driven, text-based dance. Playwright-in-residence Brian Thorstenson sat next to me at the run-through, and between calling-out to the dancer/actors a reminder about new pages of material, and supplying the lines belonging to the missing performer, leaned-over to whisper about the genesis of the piece.
“I’m here to fit into Stephen’s process,” he said. “We started out with bits and pieces of scenes. The interesting thing for me was to learn how to write for dancers.”
“Stephen had a soundtrack, 3 songs with no text, and three songs with text. The story came out in the rehearsals. We decided to make it about a day in the park, friends in the park. My best friend died unexpectedly three years ago, and I guess I began writing about that. “
“Stephen brings in poems, they create movement phrases to it. Most of the piece is dance. This is about words inside a dance, not a narrative imposed.”
The “Porousness of a dead person”
Dancers backs to audience
Ghosts
Or missing people
“don’t let me down”
“I’m under your spell”
“I wish you weren’t transparent”
Silliness, love and loss
Real narrative thrust
Great depiction of the goofiness of friends together
Not so serious
Next, Pelton asked Christy Funsch to run an excerpt from
“and a white light in the back of my mind to guide me” which bookends the first act. Pelton will offer two different versions of the same dance, one as a solo, then as a group piece.
Orchestral music, emotional
Woman on chair
Minimal movement
Emotion is palpable
Doesn’t shy away from depicting feelings
The beauty of emotional content
S’s choice of music is always that of someone who loves songs
He seems to have achieved a certain wisdom after 20 years
It’s apparent in the use of minimal “danciness” and more exploration of human qualities, still depicted through the language of the body
It’s like the spaces between the movements count,
White space
There was a chance to chat with Stephen after the rehearsal:
The poet was writing around the time of WWII. It was the internal rhyme of the poem
Meditation
There is so much space in my piece for a viewer to go to a lot of different places
The word that stuck in my mind was
Mind
Christy and Nol create most of the raw material, I shape it. I’m bored with what I come up with. They both create incredibly beautiful material, and they’re prolific.
I give a stanza of the poem and each one comes back with 4-5 minutes of material.
I didn’t want to ask the dancers to be anyone but themselves. None had ever acted.
It was a “what if”
My friend Eli died seven years ago, and then Brian’s friend died suddenly. We tried to not make it about that, but somehow it worked its way into the scene in the park.
I am not yet born; O hear me.
Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the
club-footed ghoul come near me.
I am not yet born, console me.
I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,
With strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,
On black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.
I am not yet born; provide me
With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk
to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light
in the back of my mind to guide me.
I am not yet born; forgive me
For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words
When they speak me, my thoughts when they think me,
My treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
my life when they murder by means of my
hands, my death when they live me.
I am not yet born; rehearse me
In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when
old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains
frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white
waves call me to folly and the desert calls
me to doom and the beggar refuses
my gift and my children curse me.
I am not yet born; O hear me,
Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God
Come near me.
I am not yet born; O fill me
with strength against those who would freeze my
humanity, would dragoon me inao a lethal automaton,
would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with
one race, a thing, and against all those
Who would dissipate my entirety, would
blow me like thistledown hither and
thither or hither and thither
like water held in the
hands would spill me.
Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.
Otherwise kill me.
