A Glossary for Trajal Harrell’s the collection

Chalk Circle

Each of the pieces features a perfect circle drawn in chalk, a subtle leitmotif that threads through the works. Sometimes the work is contained within the circle (as in Arena), sometimes the circle is but part of a larger setting (Five Friends in Five Acts).

I have two associations with such circles. The first, most literal one (perhaps too literal) is Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle. In that play, the circle is used to test parentage in the manner of King Solomon. Grusha and the Governor’s wife both claim the child Michael. The child is placed in the circle, and both women are invited to pull for him. The real mother will not risk harming the child, of course. In Brecht, the chalk circle is the setting for a test of love.

The second association is of magic, the circles of ritual magic. A circle can be drawn in the dirt, or drawn in chalk, flour, salt – things of whiteness. These circles separate the realm of the sacred from the realm of the profane. Sometimes it is a gateway, or a portal: something is called down inside the circle, or something is operative within its sphere. Sometimes the circle is for protection. There is a barrier that certain spirits or forces cannot cross. It can be both things at once, of course: a gateway and a protection.

Ghosts

There’s a weird overlap of asceticism/austerity and hallucinatory joy in Cunningham’s work. Butoh maybe is more an overlap of austerity and deep expression, which could falsely read as pain.

States, Altered

Arena is a work for two dancers, and their relationship is beautifully complicated. They complement one another, they vie with one another, they reflect one another, they honor (and maybe dishonor) one another. I don’t mean this in a narrative sense, necessarily, though it does have an arc. At any rate, it all takes place on and in the chalk circle. At the outset, they walk the chalk outline. When they pace this line, they are strident and controlled. There is purpose, but also perhaps a sense of constriction, like the need to stay on the line is limiting or oppressive. Once they’re in the circle, vulnerable, butoh-ish bodies appear. When the dancers enter the circle, there’s a sense of being in an altered state. And there is a real freedom to this, but also a greater sense of danger or discomfort or brokenness. But also pleasure or release. I think it’s not totally clear which is the mode of greater freedom or embodied agency.

I saw this too in the two modes in which the red and white ribbons appear in Five Friends in Five Acts, though in this case, the differences aren’t quite so stark. Early in the piece, Trajal Harrell and Perle Palombe play a sort of serious game, laying red and white ribbons (one color each) across a chalk circle. It is exacting and considered and not without a degree of fun. But it is a careful, measured fun. Then, after all the ribbons are laid and the two have taken a moment to appreciate their artistry, Trajal and Perle gather the ribbons and drape themselves in them. A different embodiment surfaces – slumped and loose and a bit unsteady. The two drag and drop their ribbons with less intention – or with a different, more indiscernible intention (which is to say that, when it comes to altered states, it’s perhaps a mistake to confuse an unrecognized intention with having none). Both modes of ribbon work are beautiful, but they are markedly different.

Strength

Education in Tambourines or The Celebration of the Girl Child as an exercise in gathering strength. Recently I watched another piece by Trajal in close proximity with Martha Graham’s Lamentation, and it made me think of how Trajal’s “concert dance” pieces on piano benches feel like laments. Laments are compositional principles: structuring time, space and affect to make grief tangible through ritualized mourning, repetitive structure, musicality and embodied performance. Since the Sumerian city laments, ca. 2000 BC, lamentations were not individual, but collective, political and theological acts.

Sweep

Education in Tambourines or The Celebration of the Girl Child also sparked dance history associations for me, but the work that came to mind was Doris Humphry’s The Shakers. Humphrey’s work is also sparse and features a strong leader in a dress. (Mother Ann Lee was the leader of the Shakers, a nineteenth-century American sect famous most for their abstinence and carpentry, but also notable for their dancing.) Both works, as I see them, feature a sense of ecclesiastic enclosure and charismatic instruction. Both “feel” Puritan and sparse. But The Shakers is a sharp, angular work, almost frenetic in its movement but reined in by an overriding sense of geometry – geometry in the body and also between bodies. Education in Tambourines or The Celebration of the Girl Child, on the other hand, contains gestures of controlled quiet (looks, nods) and these luscious, sweeping gestures. One hand caresses the other. One arm makes a viscous sweep around the body. Other bodies repeat this soft sweep. There’s a softness to this asceticism that I adore.

Weakness

There are many cracking gestures happening, gestures that fail to flourish or to come to themselves.

In Five Friends in Five Acts, Songhay Toldon – for me – was John Cage: cutting time into segments by calling the acts and playing music. He sat behind a kitchen table with some bottles, reminding me of the video recording of How To Pass, Fall, Kick, and Run from Holland Festival 1970, where John Cage drinks champagne while reading stories that make up the music for Cunningham’s choreography. A long time ago, I read in an interview that Cunningham kept nothing in his studio fridge but an apple and a beer, as food for the day. I always wondered whether this was just a faulty German translation and actually meant root beer, but the image of a slightly boozed-up 1960s stayed in my head.

Was it right to match the dancers in Trajal Harrell’s piece with the artists in the exhibition referenced in the title (Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns, Merce Cunningham and John Cage)? I also wondered whether the sensemaking I was attempting while watching the performance was the proper approach. It wouldn’t add up – five friends, but three dancers. Who would Trajal Harrell and Perle Palombe be?

My sense-making approach is “items of the everyday”. Next to the champagne bottle on the table sits another drink, and the table is covered with pages of The New York Times. Trajal and Perle perform drunken runway walks with fake food items – fruits and mini bottles of alcohol. They meticulously place these objects in space, in the way that inebriated folks can meticulously place anything – as if trying to make sense of the everyday through a play with patterns and forms.

Alcoholic beverages are only everyday items when you drink every day. The (so-called Western) past – I’m thinking of the 1950s and 1960s – was a drunken era. How much more, then, if one drank to maneuver a hostile environment? And even more so if one was part of the radical avant-garde.