on earth (2010)

I had a couple of things on my mind when dancer Brian Lawson approached me about a making a solo for him as part of a graduation year performance at SUNY Purchase Conservatory of Dance. For a decade I had been contemplating translating poetic texts by John Cage as movement scores, and a painting by Anselm Kiefer that I’d seen in an exhibition of his work in Montreal had struck a deep chord – an image of a bare-chested man laying prone on parched earth under a sky smashed with stars. With these influences playing on me, I went into the studio with Brian and Sahara Morimoto – a close collaborator with me then, and a reassuring presence as someone with an intimate knowledge of my process and aesthetic.

I sat in the studio straddling a piano bench with the book MUSICAGE: John Cage muses on Words Art Music open to his Mesostic Text #5, composed by breaking up and rearranging numerous iterations of a quote by his friend, the painter Jasper Johns. I worked through the poem one word at a time, describing each movement I imagined to set the dancers in motion. The opening lines of that text have acted as a compass for me ever since: not A /  life / statement it has to be / a Deliberate / helpless statement… The process with Brian and Sahara was super exciting and I was convinced by the richness and immediacy of the choreography that emerged each day of the highly generative nature of the process.

I chose a brief Cage work for prepared piano as the score – Music for Marcel Duchamp – loving the idea that Duchamp created ready-sculpture from familiar objects, that Cage made poetic texts with a painter’s words, and that I had mined Cage’s poetry and music for a dance.

Brian premiered on earth in the spring of 2010, and Sahara performed it a couple of times over the next few years as well. Ultimately, I included a version of it danced by Sahara, but interrupted by entrances and exits by other dancers, in Piano/Quartet – to Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano – which premiered in 2012, the centenary of John Cage’s birth. 

Photo of Sahara Morimoto by John Lauener

credits

choreography:
Peggy Baker
(commissioned by Brian Lawson)

music:
John Cage (Music for Marcel Duchamp, 1948)

dancer:
Brian Lawson

subsequent performances:
Sahara Morimoto

premiere

2010
SUNY Purchase, NY

subsequent presentation

Toronto
Dance Ontario Dance Weekend
January 21, 2017