Liminal Matter: fences

Liminal Matter: fences
photographs by terri warpinski
poems by laura winter
Despite fences
how can
they stop
our dust
from blowing
where it wants
to go
we all
breathe
each
other
Agua con leche
Denied by fences
in darkness
they pummel
a stampede
runs to it
all night
thunk
thunk
tha-thunk
bait light of dawn
washed clean
the bandit fence
stands
such minor dents
clouds of families –
ghost white crosses –
marking each spot
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ocotillo
corrals
a herd of
milk
jugs
safely detained in
coach whips and
flaming swords
waiting for coyote
nine
by almost nine pounds
how far
will you travel
until the weight of
an empty allotment
takes you afield
?
Torn by fences
toasted road
no where
but not
forsaken
a child’s
wide
breach
freshly mended
wires grinning
with clean teeth
ready to barb
the next hide
high desert journal
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DANCING
MONTANA
by amy ragsdal e
As it turned out those four outsiders were impressed by many of
the same things that impress locals: by the vastness of the space, the
power and importance of water, the ability of people who might not
choose to be friends in bigger places to get along because they have
to in their small town, to save the rivers from arsenic, the wheat crop
from drought, their identity as Native Americans from assimilation.
“It’s that feeling out here that your relationship to the land is so
private, yet it’s so huge,” Jane Comfort said. “You have so much space
around you.” Then imagining a duet appropriate to Montana spaces
she mused, “... instead of a duet where people are politely close to
each other it might be a duet where people would be really, really
far away.” After visiting the Madison buffalo jump and Garnet Ghost
Town, Ms. Comfort observed, “It’s (the presence of spirits) all around
us. All these souls buried. … The people who left are really here in
some incredibly powerful, spiritual way.”
“I have never really done a piece that is based on a site,” John Jasperse admitted. “It has a lot to do with space and density and rhythm
and the feel of things. This environment attracts a certain kind of
person, but even within that there’s an enormous amount of diversity that can’t just be ignored or pushed aside in the same kind of
way that it can be in an environment with a lot more people. So in
some way you’re forced to confront that other. You’re forced to confront the wind, cuz it’s there and it’s not goin’ away. And I think that
something about that maybe teaches us something about how we
are connected; like how we’re connected to the wind and how we’re
connected to that person who says that stuff we just can’t stand and
is never going to change.”
‘Part III: the Rocky Mountain Front – Angel Feet’ by Lar Lubovitch. Photo: Neil Chaput
In 2004, I began thinking about dancing Montana.
Sixteen years earlier I’d moved to Missoula, Montana from New
York City, where I’d been performing with small modern dance companies. In Missoula, as head of the Dance Program at the University
of Montana, I found not everyone related to modern dance the way I
did, or the way a New York dance audience had. “I don’t get it,” was a
common response at our university showcases.
Granted some kinds of dance may be easier to understand than
others. Modern dance is as varied as the individuals who make it.
Individual expression was its founding premise. Modern choreographers unabashedly borrow from other dance styles, from the movement of “ordinary” people on the street, mechanical objects, nature
– in short anything that moves – and reshape it into their own. As a
result, the movement may be soft, sharp, geometric, organic, rightside up, upside down, in the air, on the floor, and it may be about
movement for its own sake or about a subject outside of dance all
together.
‘Part I: The Boulder Batholith’ by Jane Comfort. Photo: Terry Cyr
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We’re a society used to linear narratives delivered in words and
pictures. We’re given a lot of information, a lot of detail, not too many
blanks left to fill. In modern dance there can be a lot of blanks. This
may be a strength in terms of interest – it invites the audience into
a partnership – but a weakness for audience accessibility. Many
Americans are unfamiliar with watching and interpreting dance
and lacking confidence in their own interpretations they want more
guidelines.
When I created my own dance company, Headwaters Dance Co., in
2004, I decided I wanted my audiences to “get it,” or at least get something. I wanted to find a hook to lure them into the world of dance.
My solution was to commission dances about something they could
relate to, about Montana itself, its great diversity of landscape and
culture. I imagined a “movement anthology” of the state and commissioned four pieces about four different parts of the state from
four guest choreographers over the course of four years. Each choreographer was sent books, fiction and nonfiction, about their particular area in preparation for a week-long visit. They each arrived at the
closest airport, where I handed them car keys, a map and an itinerary
and waved goodbye. On the itinerary were people to call along the
way: Blackfeet and environmental activists, fourth-generation ranchers, city officials, an artist who sculpts wheat. Each choreographer
had a task: to create a 20-minute dance based on their impressions in
collaboration with a Montana-based composer. “The Montana Suite”
was born.
In 2005, Jane Comfort, the first of the four choreographers, was
sent off to immerse herself in the crazy jutting rocks of the Boulder
Batholith, the mines of Butte and the history of political corruption
in Helena. In 2006, John Jasperse arrived to drive the windblown
straightaway of the Hi-Line. In 2007, Lar Lubovitch came to the Rocky
Mountain Front to experience the dramatic drop of mountains to
plains, 104 degree heat at the Augusta rodeo and the cool relief of
river canyons. And finally, the last, Donna Uchizono, came in 2008, arriving in Billings to crisscross the far eastern corner of Montana, from
Miles City to Glendive, Forsyth to Birney, taking in the land of coal
trains and natural gas, drought and the Crow. I intentionally chose
choreographers used to a very different environment, outsiders.
All four came from New York City.
True to modern dance, the approaches and solutions to dancing
a landscape were as varied as the choreographers themselves. For
Jane, we morphed from people into nature into animals and back
into people. We danced a crazily dissonant jig, melted into the floor
to roll as water, fell weightily onto our shoulders and all fours, buffalos stampeding, and ended up dutiful miners crawling, carrying
our measly dollars on our backs, handing over our hard-earned cash
to the man in the black suit, that out-of-state owner. Charles Nichols
composed a sound track, part music part found sounds, that starts
with a manic violin, trickles into running water, clinks into ice in
whiskey glasses, rises into the intermittent chirp of a bird over the
sustained croon of a soprano voice at which point two women at
opposite corners of the stage send “smoke signals” in evanescent
gestures. They speak each other’s language, but it make take days
to get the message. Jane’s assignment included lots of human history. By the end of the piece, as dancers, we felt we’d lived it. Through
the speed of the dance we felt the boom times and as the movement
slowed to a crawl we felt the bust. It seemed natural that we should
evaporate into the old black and white photograph projected behind
us of the long-ago residents of Garnet Ghost Town.
John’s dance was mostly about a place devoid of people, the great,
flat empty. Or was it? At first, he said, he thought the land was totally
flat, but then he realized if you look at the contours of the wheat, it
actually rolls.
“Pretend you’re a bed sheet” he said in rehearsal, “and there’s a
mouse running underneath.”
We all laid down spread eagle, hands and feet pinned to the studio
floor, and tried to send a ripple through our bodies: from a lifted
shoulder, to an upper rib, a lower rib. In the end, this turned into a
floor dance performed prone, which rolled in slow motion: bodies on
their backs, knees pulling across, dragging hips then the whole spine,
rotating sequentially until the dancers slid onto their stomachs;
hands and feet threading underneath the body to roll it onto one
side, pelvises rising, sinking, a foot poking up, disappearing under
the other shin. We wore old-fashioned dresses gathered and puffing
out at the waist, made out of Cellophane, polymer and tissue paper; a
costume inspired by the work of Bobbi Tilton, a Missoula artist. They
jutted stiffly, a bell with a pair of legs its ringer, as we rolled on the
floor.
“They look like tumbleweed,” audience members said.
>
‘Part IV: the Southeastern corner – 100 Miles from Forsyth’
by Donna Uchizono. Photo: Amanda Opitz
Thinking about his trip Lar Lubovitch said, “My journey into the
Rockies has been to discover acts of water. The idea that water has
been what’s made Montana possible, and all other life as well, but
specifically here, life in Montana. All migrations follow the paths of
water and settlements follow the positions of water. Without water,
man would cease to exist. We are water .... Water is the center of life ...
spiritually you’re connected to it. I think Montana is spiritually connected to water.”
Donna Uchizono was also thinking about water. “There’re these
two kinds of lifelines that seem to be very important to this area of
southeastern Montana: the river and the railroad. They can serve as a
metaphor for so many things. Obviously the ranchers and the farmers ... completely depend on the water. So I had this image of these
copper bowls full of water ... and it would be the women in the company wringing out these wet shirts and actually putting on these wet
shirts. It’s not super comfortable. I think that the life here that I’ve
seen so far it’s harsh, it’s not super comfortable, but it’s comfortable in
terms of the beauty.”
‘Part II: the Hi-Line’ by John Jasperse. Photo: Terry Cyr
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