Colleen Leonardi

Every Day is a Page

1. Agnes Martin, "Wind"; 2 & 3. Beth Tzadik untitled, 1958; 4. Bob Thompson, "Perseus & Andromeda"; 5 & 6. David Norvros, "Untitled No. 2"; 7. Helen Frankenthaler, "Captain's Paradise"; 8. Kenneth Noland, "Shadow on the Earth"; 9. Stanton Macdonald Wright, "California Landscape"; 10. Charles Burchfield, "Midsummer Caprice"; 11. Clarence Holbrook Carter, "Jane Reed and Dara Hunt"; 12. Peter Blume, "Home for Christmas"; 13 - 18. Yasuo Kuniyoshi, "The Swimmer" and "Boy Stealing Fruit"; 19 &20. Elijah Pierce, "Your Life is a Book" - all from The Columbus Museum of Art.  

Portraits, Landscapes & Manet

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We drove for two and a half hours, my Mom and I, across cornfields and snowy hills to Toledo, Ohio to see the  Édouard Manet exhibit at the Toledo Museum of Art (TMA). On the ride up, we questioned why this amazing exhibit is at the TMA, of all places. After its run in Toledo it heads to the Tate in London, and that's it for the U.S. Toledo is the only place to see Manet's luscious, historic paintings. 

So we drove on the one day it wasn't supposed to snow to see something of 19th-century France. 

Was it worth it? Yes! For we'll never see those paintings again. And it is something to stand in front of the original painting. As I looked at each one, I thought, I can see a lot of life in you, and you, and you and you. 

To see paintings later in a book is not to see them. It's to see an idea of them. 

Manet's work is in Toledo because the TMA happens to have a wonderful collection of impressionist paintings, and Manet was the father of impressionism. Why such a grand collection? Because Edward Libbey, the father of Libbey Glass Co. in Toledo, willed his art collection and fortune to the museum when he founded the TMA in 1901. It's a fuzzy history I relay to you here. The point being: Libbey had money and loved art, and that led to the museum in Toledo. 

The museum itself, without the Manet, is an amazing museum. The collection is full, ripe and breathtaking. I was able to take photos of some of the paintings. I share my journey here with you.

As I walked the halls, I found a passage by the painter Gutave Courbet. He said, "To paint a land you have to know it." Perhaps this is why I love going to museums and seeing paintings - to see so many different lands become legible in one place. 

And isn't this multitude of landscape and person the world we know nowadays? Not one location we each call home, but a collection of places, as we root and uproot. Isn't the landscape we come to call ours a patchwork, collected out of a strong desire for identity, a need to become legible ourselves? 

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 (In order: 1. "Entrance to the Grand Canal, Venice" by Paul Signac; 2. "Dish" by Massier"; 3. "Street in Tahiti" by Paul Gauguin; 4. "Wheat Fields" and "House at Auvers" by Vincent Van Gogh; 5. "Landscape at Wargemont" by Pierre-Auguste Renoir; 6. "The Abduction of Europa" by Pierre Bonnard; 7. "La Salle Clarac" by Edouard Vuillard; 8. "Canal in Picardy" by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot; 9. "Maure Court" by Berthe Morisot; 10. "Victoria Dubourg" by Edgar Degas; 11. "A Dutch Road" by Anton Mauve; 12. "Flowers and Fruit" by Henri Fantin-Latour; 13. "David's Studio" by Léon-Mathieu Cochereau; 13. Buddha, unknown; 14. "Torso of Female Deity", Cambodia, 1080-1125; 15. Ganesha, unknown; 17. Laquer Shells for Japanese Shell Box, 1750; 18. "The Bridge, Blackwell's Island" by George Bellows; 19. "Weatherbeaten" by Winslow Homer; 20. "Winter Landscape with Skaters" by Pieter Brueghel the Elder)  

Remembering Remembering: Notes on Bebe Miller's A History

{Angie Hauser and Darrell Jones in one of Lily Skove's films for A History as displayed at the Ohio State University's Urban Arts Space in Tracing History, 2012}

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That moment when Angie and Darrell are nearly wiping their torsos on the table. They're wearing headphones and the tick-tock of a smooth, cool melody plays. I'm feeling the discreet sensation of satisfaction, of Yes, I like how this sections is emerging out from underneath what just happened.

Lily's film is of Angie and Darrell's hands. It plays behind them, towering. Angie and Darrell are gesturing in no particular way. Caught on camera. Somehow their movements sync up with this tick-tock of the music. Amazing. Lily is swiveling from side to side and sometimes up with the camera, I can tell. I can feel her body's movement in the camera's movement. And then the film slows and circles as Angie perches her hands atop her fingertips, closing them all in on each other like when you eat with your hands.

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{Writings about Bebe Miller's past dances from Tracing History at the Ohio State University's Urban Arts Space, 2012}

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Later, Talvin appears on the screen. So tiny in a field of tall grass. It must have been dusk when the film was shot, for the light is descending on a diagonal down the swath of land. I can feel how the sun is high but lowering. What does Talvin say? I can't remember. Surprise? Perhaps. Triggers. Spontaneous dances. I can't remember.

I just remember being near tears, then. He is so small and far away. The way the sun was near set when that film of Talvin was shot. The way he looked to have had his hands in his pockets.

I didn't cry in that moment of watching A History on Saturday, September 29 at the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio. But I did feel crying in my body.

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You have to understand something. I love Bebe. I love Talvin. I love Lily. I love Angie. I love Darrell. I know them, have worked with them. They are my colleagues. This blog post is a somewhat sentimental account of their newest work A History. I trained and studied with Bebe in graduate school. She became my mentor. I went on to work for the company, Bebe Miller Company (BMC), as the adminstrative assistant. I was there when A History began, when it was a baby.

I cannot seperate what I saw from what I've seen from Bebe over the last eight years. There was sentimentality woven into my watching of A History even before I got to the theatre.

Fitting, though, because the work is about asking these questions of: What is history? How do we remember past dances? What are past dances? Where in the body do they live? How do you capture the body of work of a choreographer? What is a body of work?

My body is possessed by past dances. A line recited by Bebe when she shows up on the screen, now in the same meadow that Talvin was in. She says a constellation of things, too. I can't remember what she says. Only the statement: My body is possessed by past dances.

Yes, Bebe. Knowing you knowing this makes so much sense. I feel this way too. Thank you for putting words to it.

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{Notes from Bebe Miller's archives from Tracing History at the Ohio State University's Urban Arts Space, 2012}

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In the Q&A after the show on the night I attended, I remember Talvin saying how one of the things he loves about BMC is how a project always starts with language. A dance company starting a project with language.

I remember when I was in graduate school and Bebe asked me if I'd read... ohhhh, I can't remember it now. A novel by a British author about a day in the life of a man, published in 2007. It was a huge hit of a novel. Anyways, she went on and on about it as we stopped in the hallway of the dance department and leaned up against the wall. We talked about how he captures so brilliantly in language certain states of being in the body and in time, how he creates a particular time sense with language. 

Bebe has always been a mentor to me for this reason, among others. As a dance maker she is not shy with language. She is curious about it, uses it with authority and abandon, plays with it. I remember coming to graduate school and some people saying, Bebe is a little hard to understand when you're talking with her. You'll see.

I did see. And I loved how she talked. I don't think I ever found it difficult. Only curious - an intelligence all of its own in the making.

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But maybe I am too fond of my memories in this moment, Dear Reader. I know you want to maybe know more about A History because maybe you didn't get to see it. Maybe you did. I hope you see it. It tours throughout America starting in January, 2013.

It is a heartbreaking piece. A beautiful piece. A rambling piece. I watched it and couldn't help but feel the ongoing ending of dance making. The snake eating its tail. Angie and Darrell work to remember past dances in the performance. In the desire to remember they re-create. And in the act of re-creating they create.

There is a constant undoingness, things coming undone in an attempt to become done. And then there are a few moments where things arrive and coalesce. Like that fabulous, slippery, swivelly table dance Angie and Darrell do at the end. How they whip and whirl each other on and off the table. All of this after, earlier in the dance, they spent quite a while talking about a piece that happens on a table. It all happens on a table.

So you see, it's like this. It's back and forth and under and over as a dance. It has language and film and music and dancing and an installation and Bebe. And it had a partner of a special exhibit at the Ohio State University's Urban Arts Space called Tracing History where the archives of the Bebe Miller Company were displayed for the public to see and engage with. Old videos of Bebe dancing, old photos of her, notes about individual dances. That's where all of these photos are from.

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What I walked away with is the reality that dancers and dance makers are voracious when it comes to movement and meaning making. The doing of the dancer is also the undoing of the dance. Angie and Darrell were remembering remembering. There is melancholy in this. How spaces where there is light eventually become spaces where there is shadow, darkness. How things turn and in their turning gather meaning.

It strikes me as all so sad and glorious at the same time.

A History also made me think about what it means to rebuild a memory. How there is evidence in neuroscience that shows that remembering past experiences through the limbic system (as opposed to through the pre-frontal cortex, language, rational thinking) can re-create additional memory around the pre-exisiting memory, and, in turn, build new brain tissue around that experience and where it lives in the body.

And with this thought I couldn't help but think about how making dances and dancing is all a heroic effort by the dancer/dance maker to make oneself over, again and again. To accelerate in an elegant way the process of aging. To be hungry for life and also fully aware of it having been lived in the body.

How time is a spiral. And how we are not past when we dance. We are not past when we remember. We are so very present. And oh, how it's our body that makes it so.

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