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[3] improvisations by Simone Forti and Pooh Kaye Second Annual Festival of Women improvisers, Kraine gallery, new York City, october 10, 1987. Blood on the Saddle. Choreographed by Jennifer Monson in collaboration with Zeena Parkins. Danspace, new York City, november 7, 1987. Active Graphics II and Tangled Graphics. Choreographed by Pooh Kaye. Performed by Eccentric Motions. The Kitchen, new York City, December 5, 1987. Women and Performance 4, no. 1, 1988/1989. There is a finish on most dancing these days. highly aerobic, polished, and preened, bodies flash across the stage and then are gone—finished. Watching this kind of spectacle may be visually exciting to some, but it rarely moves me. What did move me last fall and winter was a handful of performances by a three-generation lineage of dancer/choreographers. There is something powerful and sensuous about the open, raw physicality of Simone Forti, Pooh Kaye, and Jennifer Monson. historically, these women share a branch on the family tree of postmodern dance. Pooh Kaye studied with Simone Forti from 1973 to 1978, and Jennifer Monson danced with Pooh Kaye for two years. While they now work separately as soloists, or in collaboration with others, these women’s work continues to be linked by a commitment to improvisation as a movement source. By allowing for non-technique-oriented movement, improvisation celebrates an idiosyncratic investigation of dancing possibilities. Although their movement personalities are radically distinct, Kaye, Forti, and Monson are all skilled at the wit, risk taking, and playfulness that are central to improvising. recently, Simone Forti has been performing a series of solo improvisations called News Animations. Forti is known for her movement studies of animals in the zoo, as well as for her devotion to exploring the forms and structures that appear in nature: plants, rocks, the weather. her teaching seeks to develop an awareness of individual bodily sensations within the changing landscape of movement. This internal attention often gives her dancing an absorbing deliberateness. Usually when i watch Forti, i feel as if i am right next to her, listening to the physical forces that guide her dancing. 28 performance writings on the evening she shared with Kaye and Deidre Murray (a musician) during the second annual Festival of Women improvisers, Forti’s approach seemed a little less holy, less Eastern. She entered the performing space in darkness, her pathway erratically lit by the flashlight dangling from her waist. As the lights brightened, she stood among piles of newspapers, engaged in a slightly sardonic verbal monologue about the news. She used her body as a topographical map on which to act out the Persian gulf crisis (the subtext of which was ironically sexual), as she accumulated a momentum of language and gesture that hinted at the crazed underside of world events: “Cause they suck the oil out. They suck the oil out of the ground. They suck it out and then they make it into fertilizers and into pesticides and they just spread it back over the top . . . Pump it and pump it up and pump it up.” it is a fine line that Forti balances; reaching out to the edge to find the place where behavior becomes manic, and then recycling that source. Whether she is dealing with personal or political material, Forti is interested in evolving a relationship between dancing and the culture as a whole. And who knows, maybe it will catch on—maybe one day we will turn on the news and find her there. During the second half of this evening of women improvisers, Kaye joined Forti and Peter van riper (a musician). The fact that they have rarely worked together since 1978 seemed to color Kaye’s and Forti’s dancing with a peculiar mixture of wariness and curiosity. Tentative about renewing this dancing relationship, they retreated into their own private games for a while. But soon their fingers and noses became antennae that they used to sniff and prod one another. As they pushed and pulled their movements into frank expressions of affection and combativeness, Forti and Kaye rekindled a connectedness that led their dance to an exhilarating end. Jennifer Monson’s concert—a collaboration with Zeena Parkins at St. Mark’s Danspace—was provocatively titled Blood on the Saddle. The audience entered through the performing space, in which a line of nine people, shrouded in white sheets, slowly turned from facing backward to forward. “Who are they?” i asked, trying to connect their draped costumes to the Arabic...

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