Poetry in motion Dance Salad bows to Carolyn Carlson
Nancy Henderek thought the U.S. would have a female president when she planned a “year of the woman” theme for her 2017 Dance Salad Festival. The election provided a different result, but the idea for her festival theme stuck — and perhaps acquired a more urgent tone after this winter’s women’s marches around the world.
Female choreographers have had no better luck shattering the glass ceiling than female politicians and corporate leaders. Of course, there are a few icons — Martha Graham, Pina Bausch, Twyla Tharp, Trisha Brown.
Henderek has included female dancemakers on her programs for 25 years, but she searches the globe for them. This year, three of the seven featured choreographers are women: Finland’s Susanna Leinonen, the Paris-based Indian classical dancer Shantala Shivalingappa and, most significantly, Carolyn Carlson, the focus of several pre-festival events.
Soulful Paris Opéra Ballet star Marie-Agnès Gillot will perform an abbreviated adaptation of Carlson’s “My Dialogue With Rothko” on Monday at the Menil Collection. A film of Carlson’s stunning 2005 “Inanna,” which explores the essence of being female, screens Wednesday during the Choreographers’ Forum at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Gillot performs again Thursday, with better lighting, on the festival’s opening-night ticketed program, and the weekend brings Yutaka Nakata and Chinatsu Kosakatani in Carlson’s yin-and-yang duet “Li.”
This brief crash course only hints at Carlson’s legendary output.
A California native, she starred with the shapeshifting New York company of Alwin Nikolais in the late 1960s. Although she still refers to him as “my master,” she found her own voice as a choreographer in Europe in the early 1970s.
During five nomadic decades there, Carlson has created more than 100 works for major companies and stages. She has been a resident choreographer for Paris Opéra Ballet and artistic director of several other European companies, including Venice’s Teatro Danza la Fenice and Sweden’s Cullberg Ballet. And she has the distinction of being the only artistic director for a dance section of the Venice Biennale, a post she held from 1999 to 2002.
Henderson, who focuses on choreographers she thinks are under-known in the U.S., has admired Carlson’s work for years. She had hoped to present Carlson last year but said the artist’s company “couldn’t even begin to plan a trip to Houston” after losing friends during the November 2015 terrorist attack at Paris’ Bataclan Theatre, where it often performs.
Carlson does not call her work choreography, preferring the phrase “visual poetry” because her dances spring from ideas and images she writes and draws.
This approach goes back to her days with Nikolais: Writing down his concepts led her to haiku and poetry. She also absorbed Eastern philosophy, especially Buddhism, liking its emphasis on nature, connection and compassion. Carlson learned to draw spontaneously with ink, in sync with her breathing, in a Zen meditation class — a technique that became key to her work.
“Amazing, the outcome without judgment, to witness our breath of ink on paper … . The joy of making spontaneous gestures with no idea in mind, only the act of doing,” Carlson said. “With calligraphy, I leave a trace on paper, and when I dance, I leave a trace in space. The gesture has to be precise. It’s like I split the space.”
She writes and draws what she cannot dance, and she dances what she cannot write or draw.
The visual poetry approach also distances her from the long tradition of narrative dance, opening the door to more abstract expression.
“It’s more a question of ambience, a kind of subliminal meaning,” she said.
She formed her namesake company in 2014, but a number of Carlson’s best-known works have been long solos for herself. Now in her 70s, she continues to perform excerpts of a few of them, including parts of “My Dialogue With Rothko” and “Immersion,” which is based on water.
Carlson has worked with Gillot for years and entrusted her Rothko solo to the Paris Opéra Ballet star partly because it is based on hands — “the hands that paint” — and Carlson loves the “quality of gestures” revealed through Gillot’s long arms and hands.
Gillot previously represented Carlson at the 2009 Dance Salad Festival, in a solo from the landmark “Signes.”
“She also has a very interesting face … this very lyrical character, with a luminous charisma and also that mystic aura,” Carlson said. She wants the dancer to evoke Rothko’s “simplicity and purity but also madness.”
The original solo was commissioned by the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris’ modern-art museum, which invited Carlson to create a short dance and a one-page poem related to a piece of art in its collection.
Carlson chose an untitled Mark Rothko canvas known as “Black, Red, Black Over Red.”
“It’s a painting that surrounds you, yearning for meditation’s infinity, a perceptive feeling. A diving into the fullness of the moment,” she said. “No interpretation needed. He used absolutely no words, which I like: What you see is what you get.”
Words, however, came flowing to Carlson. She wrote not one but 47 pages, and the solo built from that text is about 90 minutes long. The unique Houston version for Gillot, “Black Over Red (My Dialogue With Rothko)” is shorter.
Carlson doesn’t see Rothko’s work as pessimistic. She loves his black drawings because they suggest “the most important and essential matter of the universe, its luminous darkness.”
She keeps the poetry flowing in classes, too, coaxing protégées to “stay between heaven and earth,” “reach out to the horizon, to infinity” and to envision their arms as wings.
Any dancer who has trained with a virtuoso knows these sensibilities, but the coaching often involves more mundane language based on formal ballet positions.
Metaphoric inspiration “changes the total quality and mentality of the dancers,” Carlson said. “It’s not just about the technique but about the intention you give to your gesture. It’s my way of working with poetry and ideas … I’m a visual artist!”