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Followable Dancing: Mary Overlie and David Gordon
- Wesleyan University Press
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| 21 Followable Dancing: Mary Overlie and David Gordon Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City SoHo Weekly News, March 4, 1976 The unison between David Gordon and Valda Setterfield that I describe in the second half of this review floors me anew. In a way, it was the foundation for the next thirty-six years of their work together, though they haven’t actually danced with each other all that time. Their onstage partnership is very different now—his dancing ability has faded as his playwriting talents have risen; her dancing and speaking onstage have gotten even more burnished over time. But the two are still profoundly in tune with each other. In David’s new work, The Beginning of the End of the . . . (2012), he sits on a platform reading from his brilliant, fractured, maddeningly self-questioning script (drawn partly from Pirandello) while she anchors the show with her dependably charismatic aura. Her British composure complements his scruffy New York self, just as her still-lithe dancer elegance complements his sedentary, writing-plays-in-his-mind stubbornness. That synergy has been the backbone of his work since they were married in 1960. In a time when everyone is trying to do/be everything, a dance that is concise and quiet and eloquently constructed is something to be savored. I saw two such gems on the Whitney series: a delicate, entrancing solo by Mary Overlie and a brilliant duet by David Gordon. On entering the space, Mary Overlie had an intentness that immediately brought a rowdy audience to a stunned silence. The poignant blend of authority and vulnerability in her face and the look of her beige-covered body will stay with me for some time. The twenty-minute dance was called Small Dance and she danced small, directing our attention to the quavering of her hand, or the sudden sinking of her chest. Shimmers gently shot through her body. Stillness was drawn out until it finally burst into motion. The flurry of motion was not really a contrast to the stillness because, like the yin-yang symbol, her motion had stillness within it and her stillness had motion. Overlie was hovering on the edge of something. I kept thinking of a hummingbird and I kept my eyes glued. In the program notes, Overlie calls the piece “a three-way conversation between the body of the dancer, the mind of the dancer, and the audience.” Because she has this idea, and because she has an excellent sense of composition (i.e., where she’s coming from and where she’s going), the dancing was followable in a way that I found enormously satisfying. The kind of 22 | Through the Eyes of a Dancer followable that good fiction has, or beautiful music, or a stimulating conversation —it makes me want to know, makes me care what the next word, the next note will be. In dance I rarely see this quality, but I am hungry for it, so when it happens twice in one week, it is positively exhilarating. The second time was watching David Gordon and Valda Setterfield. I have recently been loving watching unison (Trisha Brown’s Locus hooked me)* and there’s no more visually striking, in-sync pair than Gordon and Setterfield. Even when a teeter and fall is built into the steps, they land at precisely the same moment and with precisely the same sense of weight. It’s breathtaking. In Times Four (work in progress) the two perform a brief traveling phrase in unison in all four primary directions before they begin a different phrase. So each time they return to front, you know that a new step is coming. But they slip into it so slyly that it’s there before you know it and then you’re grateful for the chance to see it three more times. Sitting on the side, I saw David Gordon and Valda Setterfield in Times Four: breathtaking unison. (Courtesy Dance Magazine Archives) * Trisha Brown’s Locus (1975) is the pure-movement quartet that Trisha and the other three company members practiced every day as I was warming up before we all worked on a new piece.The first part was in unison, and I grew dependent on getting my daily dose of watching the fluid, measured, idiosyncratic phrases in the quiet sanctity of her studio. [54.159.186.146] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:50 GMT) The Seventies | 23 them do each phrase next to each...