Where the Stress Falls by Susan Sontag

Author:Susan Sontag
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-08-30T16:00:00+00:00

PRESENCE/ABSENCE. Dance, most present, incarnate of arts, is used by Childs in the service of an aesthetic of absence. This principle was first acknowledged in a Dadaist way, in the notion of the blank, the gap—as in the unpainted painting that is conjured up by discussing its absence, or the drawing that is illustrated by its erasure. Thus, the third section of Geranium, a monologue in which Childs announces: “This is supposed to be the third section, but there really is no third section, so it might be best to refer to the third section as a gap”—and goes on to discuss ideas for the third section, one of which is a glass enclosure that would contain a performer. (It was constructed, and could skim about the stage, in the last piece of Childs’s first period, Vehicle—presented in 1966 in the series “Nine Evenings: Theater and Engineering”: the dancer is inside a mobile Plexiglas box.) Many of the early solos are exercises in absence. Street Dance begins with Childs disappearing into the elevator after pushing the button of the tape recorder. (She reappears below on the street.) In Carnation (1964), Childs does a vanishing act under a white sheet. In her very first piece, Pastime, Childs assumes various poses inside a stretchable blue jersey bag. What starts as a Dadaist performance is eventually raised to a positive principle: a mysticism of space. The dancers are disembodied, dematerialized. The Duchampian whimsicality of non- or anti-appearance is replaced by the Mallarméan idea of beauty as a tribute to the ineffable, to absence.

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