ChoreoNotes
Time and Feathers

By Letty Bassart

Letty Bassart

I can still hear her, Ms. Perez, my fourth grade summer school gifted teacher, uttering these words: “If you live to be a hundred you will never have those five minutes again.”  Those five minutes, we, the collective fourth grade had spent talking.

In essence the choreographer, the performer, the dancer and the audience offer one another the most sacred of human gifts: time.  As movements, rehearsals, music, concepts, experiences, and intuitions fill the stage, the choreographer slips her hands into the edges of a clock pulling one side over the balcony, another through the wings, one more over our eyes.  She opts to form a bow, a series of bread slices, or an exclamation point.

The shape of this time may be as disenchanting and frayed as a forgotten pink satin ribbon, as fascinating as flying drops of water in a theme park, as exquisite as a delicate chocolate confection, more irritating than stiff lace ruffles, more uneventful then text books in storage, more exasperating than a badly edited Hollywood film, or as thrilling as those moments when we are in sync with the people we love, each possibility touching the next as the dance begins, continues, and ends.

Either way the audience consents to witness, the performer to share.  Therein resides the sacred knot.  Those 40 minutes, that hour, which will never return, have the capacity to transform, diminish, irritate, lengthen, and challenge.  It is only recently that I have begun to apply this phenomenon, this “aha,” to other art forms.

It is this realization that fills me with such gratitude when D-projects’ voracious hip-hoppers leave the audience standing, when visual artist, Tom Scicluna, creates a deliberate and strikingly simple performance with a glass that rests on a glass that still rests on  my consciousness, when visual artist, Laura Luna , creates her arte firme defining her art as her home by creating work that captures height notches, bravery, and the lengths of femininity in an absent shoulder, when visual artist, Frances Trombley, ushers us into Something with an extraordinarily ordinary Welcome mat, when Ilana Reynolds walks into my Flower Chronicles rehearsals with the same unbridled enthusiasm as I have for what it means to be human, when my colleagues at Arts for Learning spend days mounting a student exhibition.