Part II from Notes on Solo Improvisation
*Actions & Imprints
Given enough time, I inevitably return to the subject matter
of Abstract Expressionism and its inherent connection to body, movement,
improvisation and motion’s elusive ability to be documented. Action painting (Abstract
Expressionism) becomes a function for choreographic thought. Specifically, with
regards to Time, the means through which we perceive our actions in the present
and the ways we can revisit those moments of action in the past through
documentation. Jackson Pollock in particular opened up a new way of seeing the
body in motion, a preserved performance of unconscious decision-making, gestural
movement and rhythm. Dance is ephemeral. It asks of us to remain in-the-moment
with it – that’s the true gift of live performance - but how we document
choreographic information after the fact is elusive. Video and written notation are key tools for remembering dance, but rarely does the feeling of dance and its
direct force of physicality and sensual play translate through video documentation or Labanotation. Painting does this much better.
My mind wanders to images of fossilized footprints, a hand
print left on a cave wall, the foundation of an ancient dwelling peering up
through soil, human artifacts whose physical materials cover the spectrum from
stone to wood to the new ephemera of digital media.
The painters accumulated brush strokes, dabs, jabs, pouring,
scraping, slapping, piling, cutting, and smearing of paint on a surface,
becomes a type of imprint or cast that acts as the document of that persons thoughts
and body for that period of time, much the way fossil records do. The painting
captures; position and location to the surface, anatomic regions of gestural movement
and timing, the type and size of tool used to transfer the paint onto its
surface, whether they were left or right handed, emotion, pressure, friction
and weight applied the surface, or pulled away from it, how much time occurred
between marks, the change of color or medium, questions thoughts and interests all
suspended at the surface in fields of hardened liquid pigment. A Body gesture’s
entire arch of motion is captured from initiation to follow-through (a brush
loaded with new paint leaves a more prominent mark and then thins out as is it
leaving more of its content on the surface). We can see when concentration is
sharp or wanes, we can see the shape of thoughts as they emerge and fade in the
pendulum between conscious and unconscious decisions. As visible as physical
gesture, we can see where the beginning of one idea emerges and how it resolves
naturally or is intersected and re-directed in mid-gesture by a new
counterpointed trajectory. The painting holds a history of choices and is the
record of its own creation, a tactile documentation - ‘liquid thought’ as James
Elkin mentions in his book What Painting Is.
Dance is ‘motion thought.’
