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Kenneth King: Being Dancing Beings
- Wesleyan University Press
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Kenneth King: Being Dancing Beings T SEEMS THAT Kenneth King sees life as an enormous puzzle, a set of interlocking mysteries that provides endless discovery and systematic contemplation . One of the parts of the puzzle is dancing, an activity that continually presents clues to be tracked down, information to be further analyzed and investigated. As in a set of Russian dolls, inside dancing are more puzzles, with more infinitely interlocking secrets. King's use of dance is expressive. He combines dancing with mise en scene, film, characters, machines, words (both spoken and written), lighting, and costume, creating a chain of signals and symbols to convey metaphoric meaning. Through dancing, embedded in a total theatrical experience, the human body becomes both a key to knowledge about the body, space, and time, and also reveals itself as yet another term in the riddle. The metaphors King makes are dense, fragmented, offering no clear single meaning. Because he approaches his subjects obliquely — using so many disguises, secret codes, and simultaneous messages in a variety of media, it's often hard to say exactly what the dances are about. Yet when you look at his work as a whole, it seems to be poetically setting forth a statement on the bewildering impossibility of finding a resolution to the quest for certain knowledge. Like Meredith Monk, King returns dance to symbolism and expressionism, but a kind of expressionism that could only have come about in a post-modern context. A second-generation Judson choreographer (he began giving performances in New York in 1964, while still in college at Antioch), King was always conscious of, even analytical about, principles and techniques gleaned from other choreographers, as well as from film makers, Happening artists, Kenneth King in Space City. Photograph © Lois Greenfield, 1980. I philosophers, visual artists, and cultural theorists. Repetition, the everyday objects used by pop artists, the commonplace movements Yvonne Rainer, Lucinda Childs, and others used as analogues to found objects, the static imgery of the new American cinema, the indeterminate structures of Happenings , a McLuhanesque fascinationwith technology and computer information theory, a cool, deadpan performance presence, all were used not to undercut expression, as the original Judson group might use them, but to expand it. In the '60s King saw the objective presence of the post-modern performer as important because objectivity eliminated point of view. It functioned even more effectively when combined with the immediate visual experience of material objects in the dance. But once point of view and stress and emotion were removed, a dance could still have content, King pointed out, since this reductive method itself commented existentially on the human condition. He used Sartre's Nausea as an example. As Sartre used "objeds-in-themselves," the functional "movement-as-movement," he wrote, "transconnects the performer to and with the environment."1 For King the new dance, pared down to its essentials, was now ready to operate as an "arena of transacting techniques " where a synthetic form of dance-theater, transcending a set of already shattered boundaries between the arts, was the only means — a mixed means — for rendering ideas and experiences of mid-twentieth-century life.2 King's earliest pieces, heavily influenced by the acausal, nonpurposive structures of Happenings, and the banal subject matter of pop art, were static forms with hot content. The New York Times dance critic Allen Hughes, who had already lived through the shocks and excesses of Judson, called King's cup/saucer/two dancers/radio (1964) "a rather startling work,"3 perhaps because the two dancers wore underwear, or perhaps because all the elements in the title were considered equally important by King, a principle announced on tape during the dance. In six preset sections, whose order and transitions were determined spontaneously before each performance, King — wearing undershorts and a black tie — and Phoebe Neville— dressed in brassiere, girdle, curlers, and toe shoes — performed repetitive sequences of movements . Neville marched across the floor on pointe, King repeatedly put his hand on his crotch, and both spilled colored solutions from coffee cups all over themselves. It was a vision of suburbia as action painting. Jill Johnston, writing in the Village Voice, referred to the characters, with their deadpan gazes, as "middle class mummies," suggesting that the toe shoes symbolized 170 TERPSICHORE INSNEAKERS [34.227.191.136] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 18:27 GMT) the suburban housewife's secret fantasy identification with ballerinas and movie stars, and that the male character had "a lustful mind...