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The Stage and Why It Matters
- Wesleyan University Press
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| 135 The Stage and Why It Matters The auditorium was dark, the dancers were onstage, the tech crew was at work. Everyone was working, but there were still a few moments to go until we would be all together. The lighting designer was testing yet again a look for a particular moment; I was sitting back observing some small detail as the dancers rehearsed. The sound designer was listening carefully to one piece of music over and over. My daughter, Anna, then about four years old, turned to me and whispered, “Mom, are you causing all of this to happen?” In a way I was. But the much larger frame she was experiencing was the enticing magnitude of the theater. I love the exhilaration of dancing in a shipyard , the warmth of moving in a worship service, the healing comfort of a hospital corridor filled with laughter and swaying bodies. As much as those unconventional places for dancing speak to me and to my art form, the theater also compels with its intensity of purpose, its capacity to demand a unique standard of excellence, and its ability to bring so many disparate people to work together under enormous odds, with low pay and no guarantee of success . The theater is a wonder. I am not sure that the challenge it poses to us as artists is due to the space itself or to its other contextualizing aspects: the fact that people pay to see you, that money has been spent on production, that a critic may appear and praise or damn months of work. I don’t know if we have simply internalized thousands of years of festivals, happenings, stories, and mystery. But I know that when I am part of an audience that has gathered in a theater-whether it is for my own piece or someone else’s-as the lights come down, the curtain goes up, the music begins or some signal starts the action, I feel it in my bones, my muscle, my brain. It is this amazing confluence of time, focus, people, and the creativity they have chosen to share for a few hours that makes me nervous about the virtual world. I love the dexterity of the computer, the speed of the Internet, the fantastic unleashing of innovation we now experience as commonplace. But I for one cannot imagine a world without the profound and at times inexpressible experience of being onstage in front of a group of people who have given up minutes of their life to see what you have to say, people who have decided to 136 | Where Is the Dance Happening? throw themselves into another world that we have created in order to bring themselves to some new understanding. It is amazing to me that they are willing to submit to discomfort, tears, and the risk of laughing out loud in a dark room at what no one else thinks it is funny. It doesn’t matter if they are teachers , stay-at-home parents, farmers, politicians, or soldiers. They come and sit to join in creating a mutually defined space for the sheer sake of having an experience. . . . . The theaters themselves give us an impression. We walk into an empty auditorium, and right away feel a sense of the place. It might be grand and pretentious or modern and curious. It might be cold and new with sight lines that looked promising in an architect’s picture but not in a performing artist’s body. Or maybe the place is warm-old and pretty or warm-old and shabby. The crews that come with the theater are just as varied. When they are good, it is a stupendous thing. When they are bad-and it has nothing to do with the distinctions between professional and amateur-the obstacle can be insurmountable . I like it best when the crews are problem solvers. The show improves, the backstage chatter and work ethic go into high gear. The extreme endeavor visible in the behind-the-scenes choreography is an awesome sight to see. . . . . A few winters ago I was asked to speak at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. My host put me up in a hotel not far away, and although I had a few days of other work in the city before the night of my talk, I wandered by the theater every day. I went inside and sat in the lobby and just stared. When my time came to go...