A Choreographic Mind: Autobiographical Writings by Susan Rethorst (review)

As a strategy for soothing her insomnia, choreographer Susan Rethorst imagines all of her friends scattered throughout New York City lying in their beds. She calculates which cardinal direction their heads are pointed as they rest on pillows. She relates the sleepers to the city’s grid and her own bed. This placement of people in space, the mapping of bodies in relation to streets and rivers and one another, is an example of her choreographic mind.

Rethorst’s slim volume, A Choreographic Mind: Autobiographical Writings, is lush with observation. Not a how-to book (although she provides an appendix of generative exercises) nor a dissection of what-is-dance, A Choreographic Mind is an immersion into the experience of making dances, the doing of it, penned by a practitioner passionately interested in the potentiality of questions (“I am embracing ‘not knowing’”) and one who flicks away stubborn answers as road-blocking nuisances.

Written in an accessible manner with a lovable, quirky vocabulary, Rethorst takes us back to her childhood. She recalls the pleasure she felt during her mother’s weekly route down supermarket aisles. Rethorst noted how products were grouped together, how the vegetables had a different emotional resonance than the men in red-smeared aprons working behind the butcher counter. She relays how her early traumas, separation from family members, and a changing home dynamic drove her to become a very quiet, almost non-speaking child, and how through this silence she became an acute observer of her physical environment, a witness of “emotional affect.”

We all have choreographic instincts, as when we make a mad dash across a busy intersection against the light and are miraculously not run over. We all feel the connection between our bodies, our everyday physical tasks, and our emotions: after her dog died, Rethorst could not separate the action of unlocking her apartment door from the expectation of being happily pawed by her pet. These are examples of what Rethorst calls “the body’s mind,” a mind every bit as intelligent and necessary as our intellect, but one we tend to undervalue. “Our reliance on words and the status of language overrule our body’s mind.”

Advocating for the practice of doing, the dailiness of work, Rethorst unfurls a road taken through her landscape of interiority in the studio. “Searching for the just-right.” “Teasing out the bit-by-bits.” She explores how to keep language from invading, interfering, shutting down, or prematurely narrowing the process. She captains an investigation into an expansive approach to mind-ness.

Rethorst writes against dance as something to be deciphered. A dance is not a symbol to be decoded. Instead, she looks for dances with multiplicities “in which images and phenomena communicate directions of thoughts, particles of knowings, that by virtue of being the minutia below the mind’s horizon, below language’s radar, feel infinite.” Providing a gentle pushback against the trendy current of over-theorized, academic saturation in the arts, Rethorst is disturbed at the hypothesis-and-research based approach to dance-making: “it signals a subtle privileging of articulated thought over the body’s mind. . . . It stops the conversation with your dance.”

How will Rethorst’s experiences read to a younger generation of dance-makers so heavily invested in academic stamps of approval? Young choreographers now practice in a world in which the arts are held to corporate professionalization standards. Artists are now highly skilled at explaining themselves with language. They are extremely adept at writing polished artist statements and program notes and creating a marketable presence on social media. They live in a contemporary climate of skyrocketing real estate markets making studio space unaffordable. Even Rethorst tells of how she lost her live-in studio. In response to her lack of funds and space, she began rehearsing in her now much smaller apartment living room, a limitation that became the basis of her 2006 work, 208 East Broadway.

A Choreographic Mind encourages...