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tl;dr: (What isn't there)

Of late I've been into gaps, both they themselves and the things that make them. Or leave them, depending on how you look at it. Here's the latest to catch my attention – or rather, the two bodies that shape it.

One: Tere O'Connor swears that he could “buy movement from eBay” and still make dances that do what he wants to do – which is to say, very little. He isn't, of course, trying to make dances that “do nothing.” He just wants very much to efface himself from the choreographic process, to cut himself out of the picture. Developing a recognizable choreographic style is something he wants to avoid. But, the inevitability of trademarkable qualities aside – use of text, structural poetics, even a vaguely consistent movement sensibility – O'Connor's wanting to dodge the bullet seems like a misguided attempt at achieving neutrality. If we're generous, we could evaluate his goal in a “semantic” sense. That's to say, no one movement “means” anything more or less special than another. (He's certainly no Graham.) Yet choosing to make no choice, were that truly possible, is still a decision with aesthetic implications. It allows for an infinitely wide range of movement possibilities, true, but it's also (to me) a pointed move in favor of the prosaic. He'll allow himself to access classical and modern stockpiles if the situation allows. But like his literary soulmates, the New York School poets, holding formal language and devices at arm's length are less a shot at full inclusion, and more a protective measure on behalf of the ordinary. Like Affirmative Action, it takes corrective measures in the interest of equality (or neutrality), borne of the realization that the latter cannot happen without the active pressure of the former.

Two: Jen Rosenbilt works hard to ward off meaning too. She scrapes it off the moment it begins to accumulate on the surface of her dances. (That's something she talks about in this interview.) But where O'Connor acts like a traffic guard, making meaning stand still while he lets the flow of information pass unhindered, Rosenblit extends her austerity to the choices she makes on a semantic level. This isn't to suggest she's a “minimalist” (in the Ellsworth-Kelly-not-Sol-Lewitt sense) – she's not on a trek to Degree Zero – but it's rare to see anything even approaching a “dance phrase” emerge. She, unlike O'Connor, seems to believe that isolated movements contain just as much communicative potential as movements in sequence. So, in a spare mode of organization which avoids both O'Connor's varied flow and (refreshingly!) the now-hackneyed hysterical repetition made famous by Pina Bausch, the single gesture holds sway. Her movement vocabulary also evades the pull of “dancerly” vocabulary far more than does O'Connor's.

The gap: how is the formation of meaning affected in a shift from the first case to the second? In an O'Connor piece there's enough information to allow a viewer to formulate figurative scenarios. And he encourages that; he advocates an evocative approach to interpretation. But I don't feel Rosenblit's work could give an evocative approach much momentum. Their sparsity is akin to the language of a child just learning how to speak – all monosyllables – but her dances even lack the silent, implied grammar of a toddler's blunt speech. How are the two experiences different? And, most importantly, how do “body issues” figure into each setup? Some argue they matter more in Rosenblit's case. Does a dance vocabulary equalize O'Connor's performers in a way they don't Rosenblit's? People seem to make much less of a deal about O'Connor performance mainstay Hilary Clark – immediately recognizable both for her fierce performance quality and her unorthodox body type – than they do Rosenblit. But that could be the result of a number of factors: Rosenblit's a relative newcomer, Rosenblit's a choreographer (and hence privy to creative information Clark isn't), and so on. What does Rosenblit do in peeling away layers where O'Connor would build them up?

A third position helps fill out the contours of the situation. John Jasperse (who's earned his fair share of appreciation in these parts) makes work which stands more firmly in the “dancerly” realm. His movement sensibility is decidedly non-pedestrian; as a result his dances rarely ever look like anything other than dance. That may prompt us to close the book on his case, but we keep it open because of that choice's implications for meaning and how it is formed. Rosenblit and O'Connor, for all their differences, both keep their dances alive with the hum of differences woven tightly into one another. A spry dance phrase may follow boisterous singing about rocks falling on women's heads; ponderous walking patterns may give way to one or two ballet steps before turning into a loafing dinosaur run off stage. But what they knit together, Jasperse leaves untangled. Everything that could be said to be “inside” the dance (read: the movement itself and only the movement) butts up against everything outside of it. Here you'll find few words or gestures, but the space in which the movement occurs is asserted firmly -- even unto risk of overwhelming the movement. It's at work in the physical spaces Jasperse chooses, but it extends to the concepts which inform his pieces. In recent ventures he's taken on nothing less than geology (Canyon), truth (Truth, Revised Histories, Wishful Thinking, and Flat-Out Lies), capitalist attitudes toward waste (Misuse liable to prosecution), and geography (Madison as I imagine it). These titles alone might mark a man whose reach exceeds his grasp. Come on, could a dance really mean anything like that?!

Well, no, I don't think one could. But that's the key to the whole enterprise! Jasperse pits his choreography against external references in precarious ways. It's as if he defies his referents to confront – and even destroy – the movement he creates, like a kid building a sandcastle with the hope that it survives for centuries. He makes no bones about it, though, because he takes care to preserve the scale of his concepts (or at least, semblances of them) in his décor and sound design. Consider his piece California, choreographed in 2006.

Jasperse/Bepler Work sample - Commissioning Music USA 2012 - CALIFORNIA excerpts from John Jasperse on Vimeo.

California's movement vocabulary is unmistakably “dancerly,” at some points even balletic. On its own it hardly suggests anything even vaguely Californian. The same could flippantly be said about the visual and sonic aspects of the piece too, but their scale – which fill out BAM's stage more adequately than the movement could hope to alone – take up a good deal of the slack in conveying Bigness. Yet even with the feeling of scale in tow, I still view the dance feeling something amiss. Where's California? However little actual experience I've had of the place, I know things about it that aren't showing up in this dance. Where are the palms trees and dry heat and ocean? Isn't this piece betraying much of what I know about its subject?

A gesture or a word may be incapable of communicating meaning perfectly, but even when it's denied a context that can tap its capacity for meaning to a significant degree, something still hovers faintly about it. No one owns the contraction like Graham; yet, whenever I see and do contractions in any environment which isn't that carved out by a Graham piece, I still can't help but think of her and laugh a little. What does a contraction, or any other word or gesture, drag along with it? Maybe it's the feel of that context in which it's so often found. Or maybe it's a sense of blankness. Like a mirror, maybe that blankness throws attention back on the viewer, reminding him that it's no more than what-it-is-in-that-moment. But we already know what it's like either to “know” or “not know” what something means. Belief and doubt are old news. What's happening now is that murky feeling: “what?” Evocation – rather than “definite” meaning, or total lack of it – is what makes some pieces thrilling to watch. It's what makes California so arresting. It's an active demonstration of significance falling apart at the seams. The holes left by the conceptual convergences (or lack thereof) in Jasperse's pieces are meant for us to stand in and fill ourselves, if at all possible. And I'd bet he's betting on our failure to complete that task.

Which brings me back to the question raised earlier: need something refer to something else in order to mean? A big reason abstraction resists meaning is the fact that it “speaks for itself”; what's seen is its own end and justification. Serenade is a wonderful abstract ballet all on its own; but when the lone girl breaks through the still corps in a rush, or when she falls to the ground pursued by a boy with arms wrapped around a girl who blocks his eyes with her hands, why is my interest suddenly piqued in a way it wasn't before? Suddenly geometry and musicality are not my concerns; I start to feel myself straining to put together the pieces of Balanchine's puzzle. Except I'm fooling myself, because it isn't a puzzle. Things just happen because they can. I can't help it, though – meaning is something I crave, something I seek. I feel teased by the ballet. By no fault of its own I pursue it, hoping to find it out. It isn't actually asking to be figured out. In fact, it's carrying on contently in the path laid out for it. It's not just far away enough to escape my grasp, rather, I'm just close enough to clutch at it repeatedly and still miss. The desire I feel toward it is unrequited...and that's exactly what makes it so pleasurable to experience.

But to return to O'Connor and Rosenblit. Coming back up from the depths sounded in Jasperse's work, we encounter one big obstacle: who's dancing. Dancerly vocabulary has a way of neutralizing the bodies of those who execute it, which is one reason Jasperse's dances seem so empty. O'Connor and Rosenblit's dancers, on the other hand, aren't easily effaced. O'Connor makes concerted efforts to manipulate portrayals of gender – skirt-wearing cowboys, men prancing and squealing like hysterical models, and women wilting and swooning are in no short supply. Rosenblit pushes past reference into redefinition (playing “queer” to O'Connor's more rigid “gay,” one could say); there's the occasional marked reference to extant gender roles, but a work like In Mouth presents people who are simply people – as simply as could happen now, that is – moving, dressing, and partnering themselves as each moment of the dance requires.

What “means” in her pieces can't be skimmed from the surface, since even the bodies of her and her dancer(s) often elude reference to anything external to the piece. Where Jasperse's pieces are gaps between content and reference, her pieces are themselves the gaps. We're still lead on a chase to understand, but since the knowledge we bring to the piece is more or less invalidated we're left completely at the mercy of Rosenblit's pieces. It's no surprise that In Mouth engendered a strange sense of empathy in me when I watched it. Here is a piece that neither gives in to nor ironizes prejudices. Rather, it flies beneath their radar, working on its own terms...and my only hope of making it through the experience intact lies in surrendering to those terms.

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