Through the Eyes of a Dancer: Selected Writings

Exporting SoHo

32 | Exporting SoHo SoHo Weekly News, December 30, 1976 Looking back on this moment of European presenters’ fascination with the American avant-garde, I realize that it’s gone the opposite direction recently: American presenters are now rushing to import the latest European artists. And I think that’s partly because of the seeds sown in Europe by American artists during this very period I talk about below. An interesting aside: After I brought this story to the sWn, the publisher, or maybe the designer, lifted the distinctive logo of the word “SoHo” from the Akademie der Künste poster and used it for their new banner. It stuck until the paper folded in 1982. This fall SoHo performers were being exported by the dozens to European hotbeds of new culture. Or maybe I should say hotbeds of Americana. The various European festivals, which sponsor a staggering number of events every year, this time decided to go heavy on American arts, particularly New York, and particularly SoHo. And conveniently so, because it coincided with our Bicentennial year, which has been an excuse for some European governments to ingratiate themselves with us by offering Bicentennial “gifts.” We who live or work in SoHo may not think of SoHo performances as particularly American. They don’t seem particularly anything to us, since they draw from a broad spectrum of forms and standards. Some of the performing we see around here is serious, some is light-headed, some is dizzying. Some is powerful, some is pale. Some is intentionally absurd and some is unwittingly absurd. Perhaps the one common denominator is a certain irreverence , a relish for the unexpected. I see it as the wish (or the will) to challenge existing definitions of performance. It is this rebelliousness, whether you think of it as naive defiance or as the pioneer spirit, that makes SoHo distinctly American. As a member of the Trisha Brown Dance Company, I traveled and performed in several of the festivals.Two of the more extensive operations were the Berliner Festwochen, featuring a six-week exhibit called “Downtown Manhattan : SoHo,” and the Steirischer Herbst in Graz, Austria, which sported a New Dance series. A third was smaller than these two: Geneva’s West Broadway Festival. I observed audience response not only to Trisha Brown’s work, but also to other groups. Audience reaction was definitely, well, definitely ambivalent . The Seventies | 33 Indifference has been the usual response in cities unfamiliar with American contemporary performers. A writer named Linda Zamponi told me that when Merce Cunningham first performed in Vienna, “People didn’t say it was beautiful. They didn’t even say it was interesting. They said, “It’s nothing .” And in France they said their teenagers could dance better than Twyla Tharp’s company. Now, however, there is a conscientious effort to surmount that indifference . At an afternoon lecture-demonstration of Kei Takei’s Moving Earth company, a Viennese balletomane stubbornly insisted it wasn’t dance. That same evening, she attended a concert of Trisha Brown’s, was puzzled at first, but by intermission, beamed to her neighbors, “It’s fascinating, enchanting.” Tina Girouard, who was invited to show work and perform at the West Broadway Festival, called the Geneva audience “enthusiastic but reserved.” At her performance, people were packed like sardines at the back of a small room. She heard them making a commotion over not being able to see.They wanted to see. The German and French are not so polite. Some beer drinkers in a late night crowd in Berlin hooted and giggled at Joan Jonas, a performance and video artist. And in a concert I was in, a few students started clapping midRoof Piece (1971) by Trisha Brown. This photograph, taken in 1973, was used by several European festivals to represent SoHo in their posters. (© Babette Mangolte) 34 | Through the Eyes of a Dancer way through one dance like they wanted it to be over.Others loudlydefended the artistry, and at intermission the two contingents nearly came to blows. Each performer or group builds up his/her/its audience over the years, city by city. The composer Philip Glass has made fifteen trips to Europe in the last five years, far more than the number of times he’s toured the United States. His work has been called everything from genius to utter bore by European critics, but now he attracts a hearty, with...