19 August 1993

Attention: Chris Newman

Dear Sir:

I am taking this opportunity to commend my first dance teacher, Dr. Jill Flanders Crosby, for inspiring me to move towards unity in mind and body.

Because of my experience over the several years since that first class with Jill, I know now that if it were not for her initial encouragement, I would have surely abandoned the course that has brought me to a much better state of being than the desperation I was feeling before I started moving.

It is my great pleasure to know Jill. I am very proud of her. She is a fine example of an ideal teacher. She has persevered where most would have given up long ago, especially in the area of her own education. I seldom meet a professional academic who can suspend judgement long enough to learn anew. Indeed, I have profound respect for a teacher who also learns how to teach from his or her own students.

As evidence of Jill's influence on the course of my life, I am enclosing something I wrote shortly after taking her class, some photographs taken of me demonstrating a Luigi style combination at a Carnegie Hall studio, and copies of photos from my latest Lincoln Center performance with Linda Diamond Company earlier this year.

Sincerely,

Pooh Kaye’s Punkmodern Object Relations

Manhattan, December 1984

Now that postmodern dance adherents are becoming more and more concerned with communication and theatricality, the assaults on intelligence devised by dancer/choreographer Pooh Kaye for her Eccentric Motions company deserve a special term within the nomenclature. Perhaps Punkmodern dance would be most appropriate. Some people just prefer to call it absurd or ridiculous. Nevertheless, at least in my untrained opinion, Ms. Kaye conducts legitimate experiments that have their redeeming qualities.

Accompanied by the composer John Zorn and Musicians, the Eccentric Motions put on quite a free show at Cooper Union, proceeding with two videos: "Sticks on the Move" in collaboration with Elizabeth Ross Wingate, and, "In the House of Floating Paper." The videos provided us with an unusual variety of bizarre object relations, a fascinating if not aesthetic experience for the layman as well as for the experienced psychoanalyst.

In the video "Sticks on the Move", the objects were "movie stars". However, they were not your usual sex objects. Rather, they were peculiar, uniformly oblong motion picture personalities; to wit: several four-foot long four-by-four boards! Instead of being moved by carpenters, people were weirdly moved by the boards, as those wooden performers slid and tumbled, skidded and hopped madly down the avenues of the city.

And in the video "In the House of the Floating Paper," a dancer rode around on a typewriter, another dancer was wheeling around on a swivel chair, somewhere in a deserted office building abundantly decorated with graffiti. The typewriter spewed forth colored papers, which then moved about the floor with a cast of dancers who appeared to be blown about with the colorful trash according to some law at once both natural and unnatural. After all that traipsing around with what appeared to be colored newspapers, I was unable to recall what the dancers looked like, but the objects were unforgettable because of the manner in which they were presented.

In both videos, the human beings defied the laws of gravity as well as the law of good taste.

Yes, youth is rebellious! Pooh Kaye came on stage then with her company of young dancers and blew us away with "Wild Fields", a work commissioned (1984) by the American Dance Festival. The movements were unpredictable, absurd, outrageous, and beautiful. Sometimes the poses taken were so extremely amusing that a toddler in the audience laughed uproariously. Serious critics kept their giggles and their consternation to themselves, for dancing is a serious business: there is no humor in the heaven of fine art, at least not for them.

Be that as it may, "Wild Fields" is a carefully choreographed sort of anarchy not entirely devoid of meaning. Its dynamic images evoke definite emotional responses. On the whole, I was mindful of a disorderly finding of order, of wild insects, weeds, and people exploring their fields of action and finding therein the limits of freedom. During the subsequent intermission, I found myself sketching out some directions and drawing stick-figures representative of the positions and movements I had seen the dancers perform. The whole thing seemed to be a sort of goofy ballet.

Following the intermission, we were treated to an awfully nerve-wracking, mind-splitting, unmusical concert by John Zorn and company, the same being interpreted by the dancers in "The Return of Doctor Chaos: An Improvisation System for Dancers." The dancers, each in turn and all out once, found some kinetic clamor coincidental to an ear-shattering racket, which would undoubtedly be banned from Times Square as hazardous to the health of New Yorkers!

Despite the din and commotion, my mind began to wander aimlessly. I was burned out. Then I considered how that feeling of indifference and boredom was identical to the feeling I had experienced while watching carefully contrived ballets; that is, before I learned the ballet vocabulary by performing it myself, and hence became intrigued by it; of course, some ballets are wonderful exceptions, where technique is not even noticed. Yes, both extremes, organization and disorganization, can exhaust the innocent observer. Without contrasts, since our perceptions are based on differences, our attention span is too short to span the redundancies.

Yes, I thought, we can pretend to enjoy something when we are bored with it. We can clap loudly to break the monotony, to acknowledge that we recognize something familiar, to agree that we know a work of art when we see it! Or, alternatively, we can stop pretending, start analyzing the challenges, even the monotonous meaningless ones. As my attention drifted back to "Dr. Chaos", I realized that his antics were also therapeutic, that, in the sheer demonstrative madness of his patients there is a wealth of ideas.

At that point, the musicians announced they would perform one more number for us. Most everyone got up and left in a hurry. A few of us lingered for awhile. For what, we were not certain.'

Pooh Kaye, in 1984 I longed to see you ripen. Where are you now?

2005 Reflection: Pooh Kaye's choreography had its sensational merits in gut feelings, but its chaotic flip-flopping around was not very handsome or pretty, nor did it communicate anything in particular; rather, it seemed to simulate a hysterical, narcissistic return to the womb. It seemed as if the rebellious dancers, feeling homeless in their alienated individuation, were struggling to leave the house forever, unaware that the process of rebellion was returning them to the house they were rebelling against. Indeed, rebels, like snails, carry that house around on their backs, but they think it is a new house, a house of freedom, when they withdraw into it at another location. But the good they flee to has its origin in the evil avoided. Their attempts to leave the orderly house behind collapses into hysterical antics. Finally, In order to overcome the dread of incest implied by the mission, the individual human is bound to return to the horrible scene of the alienating crime, where he fell into time and space as an individual.