In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

29 liDrive," She Said: The Dance of Molisso Fenley Molissa Fenley's choreography bewilders the eye, entices the ear, and challenges both the memory and the intellect. Incessant, everchanging motion, saturated with polymorphous arm gestures, performed to a driving, repetitive, percussive beat, the dances are complex series of tensions between constancy and mutability, structure and disorder, abstraction and imagery, exoticism and familiarity, social and theatrical forms. American dance audiences are accustomed to watching ballets composed oflegible phrases, often matched to equally distinct musical patterns. The traditional modern dance creates a succession of expressive postures and gestures that prompt the spectator to arrange them in a narrative flow or a metaphoric gestalt. The achievement ofpostmodern dance was to isolate an even smaller unit ofperception in dance - to frame the posture, gesture, or movement itselfas the central subject ofthe dance - either by repetition or by complexification. To a choreographer ofFenley's generation (she was born in 1954), the dilemma of how to make dance new is increasingly problematic; her situation is unusual in that she is an American who grew up in another culture. In some sense an outsider to two dance cultures - a white American growing up in Nigeria, Fenley returned to the United States as a young woman who had lived through neither the theatrical nor the social dance traditions of the 1950s and 1960s in the U.S. -she has a certain objectivity about movement styles that seems to free her from conventions. She blends an African sensitivity to ritual dance, in which music, song, movement, and the symbolism of cultural expression are inextricably interwoven, with an acute awareness of her heritage as a modernist, American choreographer. For Fenley, what is singularly American about dance - and what she stresses in her own choreography- is speed, motion, and change, in both an immediate and a historical sense. Fenley was born in Las Vegas but at six moved to Ibadan, Nigeria, where her father worked for the USAID mission ofthe United States State The Drama Review 24/4 (T-88; December 1980). Reprinted with permission ofthe MIT Press. 259 260 Poslmodern Dance Department. She went to intermediate school in Spain, and in 1971 she returned to the United States to study dance at Mills College. Although she never studied Nigerian dance, she remembers the power ofthe experience of watching festivals. You'd see fifty people in a line just moving their heads back and forth for two hours! The colors, the costumes, the makeup were just incredible, and the beat was constant. I think that had a strong effect, not on my choreography, but on my person. I don't think I'm doing a ritual dance. African dance is highly ritualized, and it is narrative. There's a reason for all those people to be out there bopping; someone is going through puberty or whatever. There's a definite psychological or calendrical reason for the dancing. She suspects that her own choreography has been more inspired, stylistically and formally, by the popular Nigerian modern social dance, the Highlife. It's a hip-swinging, finger-snapping thing, extremely sexual, with lots of gyrations. It's all about the hips and genitals, constantly rhythmic, and wonderful to watch. People enjoy themselves when they dance Highlife. Social dancing here has more to do with attitudes than actually getting into the dancing, actually getting inside your body and being involved with your partner and having the sense that there are all these other people gyrating around you. In school in Spain, Fenley took a few lessons in Flamenco dancing, which contributed some arm gestures to her current vocabulary. But, for the most part, her physically active childhood and adolescence were spent without dance instruction. She jogged, played basketball, cut down trees on safaris. She chose dance as her college major, she says, because she had become fascinated by motion. "Even cars passing would interest me. It didn't coalesce as an interest in speed until I started working that way. But I had an interest in the perception of motion in space. I wanted to be involved in it somehow." At Mills, Fenley recalls, "I spent the first two years in a state ofculture shock." She studied Graham and Humphrey technique and learned Louis Horst's methods of composition, including his analyses of preclassic and modern forms. She found Horst's use of strict rules in relation to musical structures useful, and she began to set up her own arbitrary rules as a device...

Share