1975 – Woman of the Clear Vision

I learned over a long period of time that meaning is wonderful but sometimes it isn’t. We danced the piece about my mother’s death for several years. We would be asked to come to small conferences for hospice workers or gatherings of people concerned about the elderly, and we would do the dance. That way it stayed available well beyond the amount of time that a choreographer of my relative young age might have expected.

The old people in the dance had several moments onstage. They made their first entrance in a kind of improvised social-dance-y way, singing “California, Here I Come” after the piece referenced my mother’s upbringing in San Francisco. Later they had a more lyrical section in unison, which was interrupted by my saying “Now!” as the lights blacked out. In that final scene, I was being my mother, and they were being angels welcoming her, or at least that was my image.

After we had been doing this dance for perhaps five years, Betty Harris, the youngest of the older dancers, who was at that point about sixty-five, said to me, “Well, Liz, today I finally was an angel welcoming your mother to the beyond.”

I smiled and said, “Great, but what were you doing with this scene the rest of the time we have been performing?”

“Counting,” she said.

Moving from the physical to the image and back again. This is another example of hiking the horizontal. For five years Betty entered her role by counting, waiting perhaps for the right time in her life to address the meaning of that particular image. It didn’t make her less of a performer, as she committed herself totally to the moment by the physical and mental means most available to her. But as she grew as a performer and matured as an artist, she was able to enter the material in more than one way, giving her–and perhaps those of us watching her–multiple perspectives in the moment.