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III. The Eighties
- Wesleyan University Press
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iii The Eighties The eighties was my busiest decade so there was less time to write. I think I got more gigs as a choreographer because my work became more defined. I had a voice, and it was part of the zeitgeist. I was one of the downtown, “postmodern” choreographers; we were each working to unearth our own, like-no-one-else’s movement. And it seemed like SoHo was the center of the dance world, the center of the postJudson explosion of new ways to approach choreography. I felt I had found a style of movement that spliced smooth, turbulent, fluid, spiky, odd, classical, silly, all into one continuous flow. When Michael Kirby at the Drama Review invited me to write about my process (“Containing Differences in Time”) for his Choreography Issue, he also included Sally Silvers, Stephen Petronio, Stephanie Skura, and Yoshiko Chuma— all of whom, I note ruefully and admiringly, are still making dances today. I was officially on the dance faculty at Bennington until 1984. I loved teaching, but I used to joke that an instructor’s schedule should be not a sabbatical every seven years, but five years on and five years off. For composition class, I liked dreaming up assignments that might unlock students’ creativity—which is why I agreed to review a book on teaching choreography (The Intimate Act of Choreography) for Dance Research Journal in 1985. Another reason was that Sally Banes asked me to. She had just become editor of this scholarly journal. Sally and I had edited each other’s work at the SoHo News in the seventies. This period was also one of big changes in my personal life. I’d had a disastrous breakup with sculptor Don Judd (whom I had met at one of Trisha Brown’s galas) that plunged me into a yearlong depression. I forcibly pulled myself together to create new work for my concert at the Kitchen in January 1986. One James E. Siegel came to that concert. After a rocky beginning (or rather re-beginning, since we had met briefly a decade earlier), we eventually fell in love, had a relatively short engagement, and tied the knot in January ’87. Shortly after Jim and I got married, I had an experience that made me realize how fortunate I was. I was just leaving an appointment on the third floor of a medical building affiliated with Roosevelt Hospital. I had been given good news: I could go ahead and try to get pregnant. A borderline ovarian tumor the year before had been surgically removed, and I had to wait a year to get the “all clear” before planning a family. I mean, I was forty; it was now or never. I was smiling from ear to ear and felt a new bounce in my step. In my excitement I took an elevator going up instead of down. The doors opened on the eighth floor, and there I saw Arnie Zane, a fellow choreographer who had aiDs, crying at a desk with a telephone. He had just been informed that the chemo wasn’t working—a death knell for sure. I quickly quelled my own happiness to offer Arnie support. What could I do? I was just told I could give life, and he was just told he would lose his. We hugged, he cried on my shoulder, we left the building together. It was heartbreaking to hear him say, “I know I complain a lot, but I love this life and I don’t want to die.” (A short version of this account appears in “Living with aiDs,” in Section V.) A few months later, I was at a tech rehearsal at P.s. 122 for the memorial service for dance writer Barry Laine, also an aiDs casualty. I was to perform a duet that Barry had liked, and Arnie was to give a spoken tribute. Arnie and I were sitting next to each other, waiting, as performers do during a tech rehearsal. Again, it was another cross-fade of my happiness and his despair, and I now [3.89.163.156] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 10:09 GMT) see that I was insensitive. “Arnie,” I blurted out, “I’m two months pregnant!” I was a teensy bit proud that I could still perform in my condition. He just said, “You must have a lot of hope.” I did and I do, and my son was born in 1988. I cherished my time...