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The Wings

2024; The MIT Press; Volume: 46; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/pajj_a_00692

1537-9477

Susan Howe, Emily Coates,

Diversity and Impact of Dance

Susan Howe's collection of poems That This won the Bollingen Prize in 2011. In 2017, she received the Robert Frost Award for distinguished lifetime achievement in American poetry. Her earlier critical study, My Emily Dickinson, was reissued in 2007 with an introduction by Eliot Weinberger. She has made five albums in collaboration with the musician and composer David Grubbs: Thiefth (2005), Souls of the Labadie Tract (2007), Frolic Architecture (2011), WOODSLIPPERCOUNTERCLATTER (2015), and most recently Concordance (2021), all released on the Blue Chopsticks label. Over the last decade, The Quarry (2015), her book of selected essays, and a new collection of poems, Debths (2017), were published; the latter won the Griffith Award for Poetry in Canada in 2018. Last year, her collection of poems Concordance was published by New Directions.Emily Coates has performed with New York City Ballet, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Twyla Tharp, and Yvonne Rainer. Her choreographic projects have been commissioned and presented by the Baryshnikov Arts Center, Guggenheim Works & Process, Quick Center for the Arts, Hopkins Center for the Arts, Wadsworth Atheneum, University of Chicago, and Danspace Project (NYT Critic's Pick 2017, NYT Fall Dance to Watch 2018), and Performa (NYT Best Dance 2019, with Yvonne Rainer), and in Hard Return at Neuberger Museum. She is Professor in the Practice and Director of Dance Studies at Yale, where she created the dance studies curriculum. She co-authored Physics and Dance (2019) with physicist Sarah Demers, and co-edited Remembering a Dance: Parts of Some Sextets, 1965/2019 with Yvonne Rainer (2023).This conversation took place in Guilford, CT on August 2, 2023.■COATES: Susan, I'd love to talk with you about how you work with archives and your transformations of archival fragments into poetry. I am captivated by your craft, as I have begun to incorporate archival research into my performance projects. This process feels like it holds the future of my work because it marries different aspects of who I am. Your work sets such a formidable, generative example of slipping between modes. Though we create in different disciplines—poetry for you, live performance for me—I see overlap, which is why I want to ask you all sorts of questions about how you do what you do.HOWE: I look upon you as a classically trained ballet dancer with the New York City Ballet, who has worked closely with other dancers and choreographers, and now you're working across disciplines with physicists, theatre artists, and visual artists, as you step out into your own innovative choreographic productions.COATES: Thank you for recognizing that. It has taken me time to find a way of creating that synthesizes all these parts of myself and feels true to me.HOWE: The space that you cover in your discipline and your work is extremely wide. As a performer, you're the real thing. And now you're also working with archives. My poetry and essays also involve, in some sense, going backstage—because an archive is, in its way, a hidden theatrical space behind history's curtain.COATES: I love that. And the question is what those histories give us. What it gives you, what it gives me.HOWE: We're both drawn to inhabiting dual—even triple—identities. In a play, the script holds the characters one must search for and cling to; one clings to words on the page, on a piece of paper. But when you're dancing, you're inhabiting both your own body and a character's body and spirit. That's one thing I found interesting about Jennifer Homans's biography of George Balanchine: the way Mr. B. required of his dancers both strict precision in terms of counting and repetition as well as gymnastic leaps of faith. What are the different ways dancers and choreographers feel about inhabiting roles?COATES: I think a dancer either has the talent to inhabit or does not. You can teach technique, but no one can teach you how to live inside of the music, the poetic gesture, the role. You must find that for yourself. For me, living within my art form involves believing yet questioning. Since I was a child, dancing has always been a medium I can question through.I come from the Balanchine tradition, and I can work with music when I choreograph. But because I love words, I have become interested in using archival language as the music that gives rhythm and form to my choreography.My first introduction to your work was Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives, in which you masterfully describe the theatrical force of inhabiting archival voices. How would you describe the migration of archival voices into your poetic craft?HOWE: Sometimes I think of my work as documentary poetry. Early on I wrote a book called My Emily Dickinson. While doing this, I became obsessed, among other things, with her own reading practices, as well as the complicated editorial history of her manuscripts. At the time, during the 1970s and 80s, her work was locked away in archives only accessible to a privileged few. Now, due to technological developments, these visual and verbal performances on paper are available to a much larger audience. I can't imagine teaching her work today without referring to this now-digitized evidence.After I wrote the Dickinson book, my editor, along with the philosopher Stanley Cavell, asked me to write a piece about poetry and documentary for an anthology they were working on called Beyond Document: Essays on Nonfiction Film. But the documentaries about poets that I knew, PBS things and the like, were so dull. Then a graduate student of mine introduced me to the work of the French documentary filmmaker Chris Marker, who had been a poet before he began making films. This opened a whole new world for me. The wonderful Carpenter Center at Harvard has a vast film archive, and I was able to get whatever video cassettes I asked for. This was unlike my experience at Houghton with Dickinson's manuscript, to put it mildly. But Dickinson's papers themselves weren't so different from Marker's films. Both rely heavily on montage.Documents draw me to certain people and events, as they did to filmmakers such as Dziga Vertov, Chris Marker, or Andrei Tarkovsky, who are all interested in the question of time and history. They all found their way into my essay, "Sorting Facts," which ended up being the size of a small book. This is what I found so exciting about the way you use sources in your own work. Your piece We starts in the Dartmouth College observatory (a beautifully designed nineteenth-century structure) with very specific documents, such as Ebenezer Adams Jr.'s weather reports from the 1820s. And as it goes on, you begin to move through Cosmic Dance, Lincoln Kirstein, yourself, Isamu Noguchi, and finally an astronaut who describes floating in outer space.COATES: Yes, it's a collage of sources. Those weather reports came from the Dartmouth observatory's archives. Delicately handwritten, disintegrating at the edges. I transcribed Noguchi's letters in Ruth Page's papers at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and stumbled upon an original copy of Kirstein's 1935 book in Yale's Sterling Memorial Library.HOWE: Who is this Ebenezer Adams, Jr. who made the lists? His names alone pull me in, because they're biblical and hark back to early American histories in New England. And this is a performance piece. You use an actor . . .COATES: Derek Lucci, a luminous actor and an ideal collaborator for this work, because he can be both inside and outside of a voice at once—inhabiting it, while commenting on it.HOWE: Derek. Ebenezer in the flesh. He performed it beautifully, adding a note of sadness to the list-making. For you, the performer inhabits the character.COATES: The character, yes. Absolutely. But also, something else: the missing flesh, the spirit, its tempos.HOWE: That's the way I see the figures whose documents I explore in archives.COATES: There's always a person that you want to know more about?HOWE: There's a person, yes, but the person you imagine is never the person you think they are. Homans emphasizes in her biography that Mr. B. didn't want his spirit frozen in a name. You can't freeze a spirit.COATES: You can see the internal workings of their imagination in the records they've left. And as you write in My Emily Dickinson, you can intuit the ways the poet absorbs her environment and influences.HOWE: After writing My Emily Dickinson I became fascinated with the editorial problems involved in bringing her later work, often written on scraps, to an audience. Anything I did in relation to her could be a violation of privacy. I have no idea. But those marks and line breaks, all the slashes, they're not just dashes. The crosses, the lists of variants—they're percussive.COATES: Yes, they're a rhythm.HOWE: And they're also a performance, in a way.COATES: You say you would be drawn to know more about Ebenezer Adams, Jr., the young man who created the weather records. I was more drawn to his daily list: "Cloudy, cloudy, rainy, fair, fair, stormy . . ." We used that rhythm to ground the opening scene. Ain Gordon, my wonderful director and dramaturg on the piece, also works with archives in his own playwriting. I've learned a lot from his wisdom. We talk about what I am drawn to in the archives, and why. When to adhere to facts, when to take imaginative leaps. Where does the research end—when do I have what I need—is always a question for me.HOWE: "Cloudy, cloudy, rainy, fair, cloudy, stormy . . ."—that's such an excellent beginning. Not sure why, but it works. That's what a good poem does. It just works. And lives in time. Then to have We end with an astronaut floating, literally, in space—it was a brilliant conclusion.Could you talk about the way you use Lincoln Kirstein in this same piece? Without him there wouldn't be a New York City Ballet, and clearly his book Dance interests you, because it becomes a part of We.COATES: Ah yes, Lincoln Kirstein . . . I encountered him first in the flesh. He would slip into the studio and watch my ballet classes at the School of American Ballet. He died a few years after I joined the company. So I have that sense of his actual body, which I think helps when you then start searching through an author's book from 1935 to see what he had to say about ancient Egyptian dance and astronomy. But I have yet to find his sources for the Egyptian Dance of the Stars . . . so much for facts and their verification. Another good example of the question, When does the research end?In Spontaneous Particulars, you write: "Each collected object or manuscript is a pre-articulate empty theater where thought may surprise itself at the instant of seeing where thought may hear itself see." I love the complexities in this quote. Your work is profoundly theatrical. What were your early influences?HOWE: My mother has always been a huge influence on me, even after her death, and on my ear in particular. She was born in Ireland in 1905, shortly before the Irish Rebellion. As a child in Dublin, she performed in a play directed by William Butler Yeats, and for many years following she was an actor and playwright at the Gate Theatre, which was run by the legendary Hilton Edwards and Michéal Mac Liammóir. In 1935, she left for America because staying in Dublin in those days was a hopeless situation for a clever unmarried professional woman.At the Gate, she was trained in traditional repertory theatre. She believed in theatre and in cinema. In the years of the Easter Rising, the Civil War, Ireland was young and "free." Then came the ascendancy of "holy Catholic" Ireland with censorship of the arts, so she sailed away. She loved wit and intricate wordplay and labored for years adapting and producing Finnegan's Wake for the theatre.I owe her a tremendous amount. But my big mistake was going to the Gate Theatre at age eighteen instead of going to college. I followed her home in a sense. Only this was not Dublin circa 1920; this was 1956 when Dublin was basically in a state of decay. The arts were still censored by the Church. Even so, Dublin was enchanted, as anyone listening to the song "On Raglan Road," based on Patrick Kavanagh's poem, will sense. I loved it in all its shabbiness, its humor, its sadness. There was a wonder we don't have here. But I came back after a year because I was American and couldn't or wouldn't change my voice. I went to the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York, which was run by Sanford Meisner when Method acting was in its heyday. Improvisation wasn't for me. Method acting has produced brilliant actors and films, but I wasn't cut out for a professional career. I lacked the necessary courage. I loved research and scholarship—there I do have courage. So it was a mistake not to go to college.COATES: You certainly haven't suffered for that!HOWE: Actually, I have. I felt, and still do, that I'm in exile. I'm not Irish; I'm not American. Always in-between. At the NYCB school you had fellow students, so there was a kind of companionship.COATES: Yes, I was surrounded by other young ballet dancers on a similar path. But it's true, neither of us went to college in any kind of conventional way. My undergraduate degree took me thirteen years, and for eleven of those years I was dancing full time at New York City Ballet, then touring with Misha Baryshnikov and Twyla Tharp. I eventually transferred to Yale and finished my bachelor's degree at age thirty-two, and then one of my professors, Joseph Roach, hired me to begin teaching at Yale and building a dance curriculum.HOWE: What was it like to tour with Baryshnikov? How different was Twyla Tharp? When you came to Yale, to build a dance curriculum, how did you go about doing it?COATES: NYCB had been my first dancing home. I was in a group of young dancers who worked closely with Jerome Robbins, an experience which is deeply embedded in my dancing DNA. When he died, I needed to see the world beyond NYCB. Misha, Twyla, and Yvonne Rainer were artists and intellectuals, seamlessly. Through them, I discovered that dance could be used to explore. I got tired of moving, though—I needed just to sit and think a while. Moving to New Haven to finish my degree at Yale was a physical relief. I would sit for hours in Sterling Memorial Library, relishing the stillness.I am moved by your love of libraries—your attention to Sterling Library and Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, which runs through your books. I have always felt those spaces were creatively generative. It was pure delight to discover you thought so too, and to see their central place in your poetic practice.HOWE: William Carlos Williams has a passage about the public library in Paterson that is perfect: "For there is a wind or ghost of wind / in all books echoing the life / there."COATES: It's so intimate, isn't it?HOWE: It is intimate.COATES: And what are the ethics of that intimacy given they did not know you would come along and find them later?HOWE: For me, there's always a worry about the ethics of originality and quotation. Then again, as Emerson says, "All writing is quotation"—and he should know. Ebenezer laboriously writing his lists is also using a kind of quotation, and you are quoting Ebenezer. This brings me to Charles Ives, a composer whose music itself is a kind of quotation. He also wrote a series of essays about Emerson, Thoreau, the Alcotts, etc. And Balanchine quotes him! You said to me that Balanchine's ballet Ivesiana obsesses you, and you sent me a clip.COATES: For reasons I can't fully explain, I'm obsessed with that ballet. It premiered in 1954, and the film I sent you was made in 1964 in Montreal, for Canadian television, if you can believe it.HOWE: One of the four pieces in Ivesiana is his magnificent "The Unanswered Question." It's so haunting.COATES: One of the reasons I'm drawn to this ballet is because when I moved to New York to study at the School of American Ballet, I lived with Allegra Kent, the ballerina for whom Balanchine created "The Unanswered Question." She needed the money and rented out her spare room to SAB students. I quickly realized: this is no ordinary human being. Even at eight o'clock in the morning, in her kitchen, she was a creature of the theatre. It gave me an immediate appreciation for the intense theatricality that Balanchine cultivated in the ballerinas he adored, articulated through the language of ballet.HOWE: They all had to have perfumes . . .COATES: Yes, and he chose them for them! Photos of Allegra dancing, or bowing with Balanchine, lined her apartment. There I was at age sixteen, witnessing this history very directly. I wanted to enter it, but it had disappeared.HOWE: I mean, it's wonderful that your parents sent you, that you went there. At nineteen I was just flung into Method acting, and quite honestly, improvisations, which in a way involved throwing scripts completely aside. I never was so frightened and lonely in my life.COATES: Living with Allegra was lonely, too.HOWE: Was Balanchine dead by the time you went?COATES: Yes, I missed Balanchine by five years. His spirit was still there.HOWE: What Ivesiana captures for me—particularly "Central Park in the Dark"—is the feeling I get sometimes when I'm wandering alone in library stacks. Certain books and groups of books on shelves become spirits rising. The section "The Unanswered Question," given its haunted title and the beauty of the music, carries the piece into a holy sphere.COATES: Allegra never touches down. She remains perpetually aloft.HOWE: "The Unanswered Question"—what a title! It's so open. It reminds me of Gertrude Stein's last words to Alice B. Toklas when she was dying. When she asked Alice, "What is the answer?" and received no reply, she said: "In that case, what is the question?"COATES: Allegra's dancing is just that.HOWE: A poet tries to make a word sound in all its detail, syllables, shapes, even the smallest phonemes. The very title, "The Unanswered Question," to me, is eternal. Words are all we have to hang on to.COATES: I learn from your poetry that the word is the word, but it's also much more than the word. The language becomes more than itself by what you do with it. And in your cut-ups, you started to move words around. As a dancer, I greatly appreciate that physicality. You needed to put a little muscle into composing these histories.HOWE: In We, you bring your own body into the work, your own voice on the microphone. This is what Balanchine sort of said you couldn't do. But you do.COATES: You mean, speak.HOWE: And that's new.COATES: I learned about speaking from twenty-four years of performing with Yvonne Rainer. I wrote the essay "Yvonne Rainer's Archive" while researching in her papers at the Getty Research Institute. I could track her voice in formation—in the drafts, transcriptions, copying. Certain and assured, yet always searching. Speaking while dancing helps me do something completely different with my Balanchine background. No other former NYCB dancer-turned-choreographer is interested in speaking so much, and using the language hidden in archives!HOWE: That's where I think you're a radical. While also being classically trained—both of us have in common this lure of using our disciplines to inhabit other voices and places.COATES: How are you both inside and outside of your poems? How do you gain perspective? How do you know they're right?HOWE: Often I feel while writing that I'm taking dictation. There's something cosmic about it. Because who is doing the dictating? Who are you taking it from? You think you found a book, but perhaps the book finds you. It comes down to chance and coincidence. Chance as discipline. Genius is the ability to catch a shaft of light and to use it.COATES: And you get excited about creating something new with it. There are multiple bodies in the handwriting. The text is a body and there's a body stitched together or sewn or bound into the materials.HOWE: I like the way you say, "stitched together." Even the word bound contains multiple meanings. Bound in chains or bound for glory. Dickinson has a stanza in a poem that reads, "Till then — dreaming I am sewing / Fetch the seam I missed — / Closer — so I — at my sleeping — / Still surmise I stitch —[.]" The same poem that contains the lines: "Tucks — of dainty interspersion — / Like a dotted Dot —[.]" A dotted dot! This is chance and coincidence. Daring and discipline. It's perfect.COATES: Are there some bodies you've encountered that have suggested to you, leave me alone?HOWE: Didn't Balanchine himself feel that his dances were bound up in his body and specific dancers' bodies he had chosen for particular dances? As for Emily Dickinson, I often feel her saying "Uh-oh." "No." "Back off."COATES: Wow. Because of the private way her poetry was developed?HOWE: Well, no, because she's private and she's fierce. But I mean, again, it's sort of, like, it's the ear and the eye in one flash.COATES: How did you gain the confidence to go into a voice like Emily Dickinson's that may be saying, "Leave me alone," and to say, "No, I can say something here?"HOWE: I didn't think that when I started working on it. I simply had a passion for her writing and how and where it came from: the history of the place she lived in, the scope of her reading. I wanted to know where her voice came from. I deeply believe in a poetry of place. Had I not written that book, I would not have gotten the job at SUNY Buffalo. But I had no intention when writing that book of getting a job in academia. It was a rabbit hole I entered because I was a poet. You could say it was luck.COATES: Yes, I also came into academia late and abruptly.HOWE: The leap—I was terrified. Mainly the issue being, Did I make a terrible scholarly mistake? This was a PhD program. I was teaching graduate seminars, not workshops. I had to be on my toes without toe shoes. At the same time, a seminar is a sort of performance piece. In my case, it required a lot of props. Teaching bound me to archival research in a new way.The English department at Buffalo was eccentric and welcoming. The people in my field that I thought knew more—and did know more—than I did. They weren't mean. They weren't rejecting. They thought I had something interesting to contribute. Teaching graduate students keeps you in touch with the young. The university was good for my work.COATES: I feel the same. When I started teaching at Yale, I felt this intense pressure to know something, anything! I knew dance, but the university did not. I was in the position of having to advocate for dance as a form of knowledge. But I also used dance to learn more about other disciplines, especially histories of science, literature, art, and, of course, dance. I moved from being an interpreter to being a creator after becoming affiliated with the university. I use that research to ground my storytelling.What I admire in your work, and I've said this to you: you're not messing around. You know the historical context. You know the literature. And you decide to do with it exactly what you want and need to do with it for your art.HOWE: The problem is I'm an autodidact. I love the search and that's part of my prose and poetry.COATES: And then you take flight. You describe poetry as liberty, as liberation, as happiness.HOWE: Well, you make connections. You need the ability to grasp coincidence and chance at once. Charles Peirce has an essay collection called Chance, Love, and Logic. Love and logic. I love that combination. Bound and bound. Love is that sense that you've made a leap and a connection. But then I wonder, who or what dictates that connection. That's why I'm so interested in Chris Marker's work, or Tarkovsky's use of documentary footage in Mirror, or this piece of yours, We.COATES: Yes, connecting things that might not be obviously related, until one connects them. My piece ends with Derek reading a text by the astronaut Michael Collins, describing his first spacewalk, while I do a duet with Emmanuèle Phuon. What's that got to do with Ebenezer Adams Jr., except I see them as related.HOWE: And then, it works. Or not.COATES: Yes.HOWE: You have to enter into that territory where it might not work. You have to know the moment. Sometimes when I'm working on one of my word collages, and run it through the copier, there is something I think I'd better add or change. But then I sometimes find I have killed what was beautiful. The flame.COATES: And that's how you teach yourself?HOWE: The flame can't be taught. It's instinct. Of course, there is the rest of the production of the book as well. When you're working on a production, you depend on all these other people. Well, I do too. For me, there is my editor at New Directions, Barbara Epler, and Leslie Miller, who prints my cut-ups. I've also collaborated with the composer and musician David Grubbs. All of this work is collaborative, which is nice, because to be a pioneer is lonely. You're always changing.COATES: That's what I aspire to, to never stop pushing my own frontiers as an artist. I see this in your work, Yvonne's work, Joan Jonas's work—I visited her in Nova Scotia this past summer, with my daughter, to dance in her new project. We had a magical time, filming on beaches, her porch at sunset, in her fairy woods. I learned Joan is a very old friend of yours from art school, which somehow made a lot of sense.HOWE: Yes! Joan takes many artistic leaps, like you. What is your next project?COATES: It's hard to articulate the leap while I'm in the process of leaping. I want to deepen my tools for storytelling, which is drawing me toward theatre, in its capacity to handle language. I want to create saturated images, tone poems in performance, mixing movement and words. My new project will gather up archival bits of Balanchine, mingled with other histories and turned into something new.I see leaps throughout your work. You talk about this in My Emily Dickinson: she had an eye toward immortality, a prescient awareness of it. She was always moving her own horizon line.HOWE: So many people say, "Oh, this person's work is just like Emily Dickinson." You hear that in every review of any female poet. And nobody's like her. They can't be like her. Balanchine knew nobody could ever be like him. But I think, as an old person at the edge, finally, it doesn't matter. It does not. You think it matters when you're young, and even middle-aged. But it doesn't. I'm a Calvinist on this issue: either you're chosen or you're not.COATES: What does matter?HOWE: The work matters. It does. But you can't . . . I don't know what matters. God matters. Or is there a . . . I don't know what matters.COATES: Love matters.HOWE: Love matters. There you go. Love matters. That's what matters. You're so right.COATES: In all respects.HOWE: And books matter. I notice fewer and fewer books in the libraries. They're removing the books now. I realize how much I love books. Entering the stacks is like entering a forest, and now so many trees are in danger.COATES: You always go into the stacks. I go into the stacks. And just thinking about being the one wanderer there. I mean, when I was looking at Ebenezer Adams Jr.'s weather diaries, I felt so close to this person who lived nearly two hundred years before me.HOWE: There's the echo, there's the same sense to me looking at Ivesiana, at the film clip you sent me of Allegra Kent dancing in Balanchine's "The Unanswered Question," and the other dancers in "Central Park in the Dark." That they're spirits rising from books.COATES: I thought of you when I was at the New York City Ballet seventy-fifth anniversary opening night performance. Two hundred and fifty alumni were in the house. After the curtain fell on the last ballet, we rose silently in the darkness and exited en masse, only to reappear on the stage. Allegra was in the front center stage and did a little dance with her cane. Collectively, we were a living archive of Balanchine's body.In My Emily Dickinson you write: "My voice formed from my life belongs to no one else. What I put into words is no longer my possession, possibility has opened. The future will forget, erase, or recollect, and deconstruct every poem. There is a mystic separation between poetic vision and ordinary living. The conditions for poetry rest outside each life, but in miraculous indifference to worldly chronology." This describes both your subject and you, the artist.HOWE: I was young and very alone when I wrote this book. Less than a year ago, when I read the book aloud for Audible, I found sentences where I thought, "God, did I write that sentence? It still works." This is a book from an innocent person. I couldn't have written this with experience, after academia.COATES: You say you had no audience. So you could write anything?HOWE: I was free. But I couldn't have written The Birth-mark had I not been a part of the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo. This book was freedom in a different way. Bound and free.COATES: Have we covered everything?HOWE: Take a raspberry.COATES: I'll take a raspberry.HOWE: Or two.