Rosemary Lee’s Passage notebook, photograph by Rosemary Lee

Niki Pollard: Watching choreographers at work either as one of their dancers or as an observer-researcher, it has seemed to me that for some to lay hands on a notebook and know it will be used for the new piece is a first moment of magic, of ritual, in how they work. If the magic is acknowledged only shyly or the consecration knowingly trivial, still the piece is beginning. A notebook that feels ‘right’ to the choreographer may seem to augur well, lightly performing a transformation; a possible, hypothesised piece takes on the status of definite article. [1]

The notebook may persist as wryly quasi-magical in rehearsals for a choreographer who, as Lee does, creates work using movement devised by dancers in response to her tasks and images. Ideas noted there can, especially in early rehearsals, offer up a perceptual anchor, reassuringly fixed, onto the dance activity which by contrast may, in Lee’s words, appear ‘fragile’ and ‘ungraspable’ in terms of knowing how it has emerged and whether it can be reproduced.

But this conjecture of a choreographer’s experience restrictively anticipates my argument and leaves much unsaid of how a choreographer might work first on page and then with dancers. What is happening when Lee muses, delves, thinks, sees or imagines an as yet unmade dance? Each verb entails a differently nuanced object. Can I be more specific as to the forms taken by the starting points of Lee’s choreography and their relation to any notebook record or to a time when they are worked on with performers? What may be understood in research terms of those impressions, preoccupations, ambitions, influences that prompt Lee to make a new work - her ideas and images as they are often described, or to use a still more unfashionable and subjectivist idealisation, her inspiration?

Tempting as it is for a researcher to enquire directly of a choreographer’s ‘ideas and images’ I want to hesitate over the imprecision to a research register of this frequent phrase and instead delve into how a choreographer may make a start on a piece in her notebook, and bring it into configuration with another start, that of beginning collaborative work with performers. Reading Lee’s notebook, then, this paper seeks to elaborate something of the perceptual, affective and cognitive modes of experience which, combined with external pragmatic facts of commissioning, budgets, staging and so forth, mark for a choreographer the cusp of a new work. [2]

A choreographer might challenge this proposal as typically scholarly over-attention to things textual at the expense of all other dimensions of choreographing. (And at the very least, what may be true of one choreographer cannot be said of another). In rehearsal, it could be pointed out, notebooks – and first ideas noted there, perhaps – tend to be put aside, the choreographer ‘going with’ what is happening in the present moment. Accordingly, it might be argued that a notebook is peripheral to the core collaborative activities of dance-making, and reveals only a misleading fraction of how some choreographers work. The anxiety of the choreographer who has mislaid her notebook suggests, however, that there is more to the question than meets the eye.

An early page from Rosemary Lee’s first Passage notebook

What has happened then, when Lee writes early in a new notebook, “a quiet duet – with a sharp fierce or antler wandering and watching”?

Guardedly, I could say that this entry likely indicates something of how Lee imagined the piece that was to become Passage. For the present, I will pass over arguments in aesthetics concerning the fallacy of knowing an artist’s intention or the futility of interpreting a work according to what the artist may or may not have had in mind at the times of making (or in the months before rehearsals began, as is the case with this notebook of Lee). Without claiming that the substance of a choreographer’s ‘intention’ can be known, however, I will hope to say something about the form of her points of departure. [3]

To return then to Lee’s writing of “a quiet duet – with a sharp fierce or antler wandering and watching”, despite the fragmentary appearance of a description, my sense is that this writing does not operate descriptively for her dance-making. What is at stake, I believe, is not whether Lee sets tasks or movement shapes to create material that someone else would agree met a description already to be found in her notebook. From conversations with Lee, my impression is that certain phrases in her notebook can have a talismanic function for her, poetically evoking her imagining of Passage, what she has at other times called, in an alternative metaphor, the ‘taste’ of a piece. That is, the notebook may indeed work a quasi-magic when Lee, reading back in her notebook, considers what is being created with and by the dancers. The phrase “A quiet duet – with a sharp fierce or antler wandering and watching” can as a more than thematic image conjure up some part of a nexus of sensations, dispositions, habits, intuitions and memories by which she anticipates Passage. [4]

One way to consider this nexus might be to trace the many creative concerns that Lee has commented are encapsulated by this early notebook entry. As Lee described in a published conversation (Lee et al 2002), these include extremes of strength and fragility in an image of stags with antlers interlocked; dancing possessed by an animal’s raw energy in a shamanistic connection of animal and human; the authority and intensity of children; an image of a child stalking adults; a relationship of tenderness; forward-pushing, combatant energies; and an elemental sensing and alertness to environment. For each of these concerns, Lee could elaborate a multi-sensory and generative significance and history to her creative practice.

‘A shamanistic connection of animal and human’: Omari Carter leading Eddie Nixon in Passage. Photograph by Pau Ros		‘The authority and intensity of children’: Samantha Hayden White lifted by Rem Lee and Matilda Leyser in Passage. Photograph by Pau Ros
‘A tender duet’: Eddie Nixon and Henrietta Hale in Passage. Photograph by Pau Ros		‘An elemental sensing’: Henrietta Hale reaching out from a group of women in Passage. Photograph by Pau Ros

Pisanello, The Vision of Saint Eustace (c.1455), National Gallery, London. Rosemary Lee talks of her personal association of this antler image in the ResCen Passage website

I might borrow a phrase from researcher Susan Melrose and say that in ‘a quiet duet…’ Lee has put into words[5] a “recognisable-not-yet-seen”(2002), that is to say that she will know that moment – if it comes – as surely as if she has seen it before[6]. Not that she need have her notebook wording explicitly in mind, but rather that she will recognise its anticipative ‘taste’ of the piece, its compressed potential in some pattern of dance that she can take up compositionally, be it but one dancer’s tiny and inadvertent, though to Lee, apposite, gesture. Likely as not, however, she will not register her recognition in any specific visual detail rather, in more gestalt terms, she will sense that a dancer, by responding to a task, is suddenly ‘embodying’ a ‘quality’, a ‘state of being’ that she anticipated[7]. The dancer’s pattern will likely not resemble, in conventional representational terms, the notebook idea but for Lee they will in some way coincide. Melrose, writing of the precariously future-facing orientation of a choreographer, might add that Lee may not be sure her idea is one at all until the event of performance (2003). Lee, by contrast, may be certain about the ‘idea’ prior to performance – the dancer has discovered a quality she sought – but be anxious as to whether they can re-find it in time-constraints and different tensions of performance.

Something Roland Barthes wrote of discourse may help with my thought that Lee will anticipate a performance moment without it being for all that one she has visualised: “A figure is established if at least someone can say: ‘That’s so true! I recognise that scene of language’” (1977). If with the ‘quiet duet’ she was partly thinking of an image of courtship, then it might be possible to say that Lee will recognise the ‘quiet duet’ not as representing courtship in the sense of a dramatic scene emerging in the play of two dancers, but by how she prompts them to practise in dance courtship’s forms and figures. For example, in one rehearsal I seem to glimpse (by the workings of what Melrose might term hypotyposis) an un-deliberated pattern of a love relation in the engrossed engagement by two dancers in a counterbalancing task that Lee has set. The moment is transient but in the atmosphere of attentive sensibility Lee created for the task, I feel I am recognising an archetypal figure of love. [8]

While no photograph exists of this relation of counterbalance in Passage, this photograph of Eddie Nixon and Henrietta Hale, shows a different ‘figure of love’ in Passage. Photograph by Pau Ros

I have been suggesting that what Lee writes in her notebook is not so much a visual impression to stage, but something talismanic which condenses, in one configuration, the many and still malleable possibilities of her creative concerns. Trying to discuss how Lee can come up with such a talisman, I have veered instead to the question of how the notebook inflects her studio practice. To begin to be more precise then about the first question of how Lee can anticipate aspects of a work yet to be made, I might take up Melrose’s suggestion, reading Eco, Deleuze and ultimately Kant, that choreographers use multiple and unseen schematic measures when working collaboratively with dancers. Eco has cited a definition of schemata as “forms of expectation and anticipation that orient the selection of elements from the stimulating field” (Eco 1997). Adapting Eco’s account, Melrose writes of artists’ multidimensional schemata; tools of complex practices, developed from past experience, organising present sensory data and generating anticipation of the future (Melrose 2002) (attention to these schemata should not however overshadow the complex professional interactions of choreographers, dancers, audiences, design and production teams by which dances are created).

By this model, Lee makes ‘sense’ of what is happening in her choreographic practice according to organised patterns of expectation and judgement built up over her professional life. This schematic organisation will inflect how she deals with situations requiring, for example, aesthetic or relational judgment and also provides characteristic patterns of activity such as of how she typically attracts a dancer’s attention, turns aside to think or signals the end of an improvisation. A choreographer may be only partially attuned to this schematic level of her cognitive organisation, feeling some decisions as coming intuitively ‘from nowhere’ even if aware logically that she can make them on the basis by rapidly calculating against the perceptual measures she has developed through professional experience.

Accordingly, I might also expect Lee’s notebook to hint at some of these schemata, her forms of anticipation for the things and events likely to trigger her into taking them up choreographically. If in writing of ‘a quiet duet…’ for example, she may partly have in mind an image of antlers interlocked[9] then what is brought to bear could be her finely-detailed and dynamic schematic measure of qualities of forward-pushing energy and extremes of strength and vulnerability.

An antlers image from a previous work by Rosemary Lee, Three Studies in Courtship, 1997, created for Transitions Dance Company. Photograph by Chris Nash

Although this multidimensional schematic content – this figure in Barthes’ terms – is not mentioned as such in her notebook, my sense is that it underlies other entries. For example, later in her notebook, the word ‘display’ appears in a list of tasks from her previous workshops and pieces, which she plans to re-use with the Passage cast for the particular qualities of movement that from experience she knows each task will generate[10]. In ‘display’, the dancers move suddenly into extreme poses of ritual threat and display as if, for example, peacocks, stag beetles or ruff lizards.

Male stag beetles fighting. Photograph by Dr. Ross E. Hutchins (1912-1983), the Mississippi Entomological Museum

Watching ‘display’ in rehearsal, I could imagine that these extreme and intense stances, facing down a possible predator or rival, were generating qualities that Lee might sense as schematically similar to those that interest her in the image of fighting stags with antlers interlocked. All the same, if what she writes in her notebook does provide a schematic outline for a sought dance moment, Lee cannot anyway describe in detail what she is looking for because she cannot know, in advance, what a particular cast of dancers may offer her[11], which will either expand or differently inflect her sense of what she is looking for. [12]

Fighting stags. Photograph by Neil McIntyre www.neilmcintyre.com		‘Eddie Nixon in a ‘display’ shape that a child, Omari Carter, has wrapped himself around. Video grab from Passage workshop footage, filmed by Peter Anderson.

In research terms, schemata are more typically discussed in cognitive psychology as a model for how we understand and remember situations that are repetitive or routine – that is, which are quite unlike the experience of innovative creative practices, of trying to interrupt what has become habitual. Researcher Karin Knorr Cetina (2001) has in fact critiqued current social science thinking for tending to conceive of practices only in terms of “customary or routinized ways of behaving” as “recurrent processes governed by specifiable schemata of preferences and prescriptions.” On this count it may be wrong-headed to bring forward schemata to discuss how a choreographer can record in her notebook features of a dance not yet created – that is anticipating something outside of all her existing schematic patterns of perceptual anticipation.

Fortunately for this paper, Eco has himself taken up this question albeit in the broader form, “[h]ow can we anticipate what we have not yet sensibly intuited?” He recounts a story of how Marco Polo, on seeing a rhino for the first time, decided in the same breath that he saw a unicorn but that this unicorn required a modification in the established zoological criteria. Like Marco Polo, Lee has not seen her unicorn although she may well know its schematic possibilities. When she worked, say, ‘display’ previously she did not have a ‘taste’, a category of Passage within which the potential generated by the dancers could be named and belong. Its schematic mapping of, for example, extreme strength or a forward-pushing energy, may be a recurrent concern for her; still, at the beginning of a new piece, her sense will always be partial and schematic[13]. Only as that new cast of dancers respond in rehearsal will something specific arise that can be ‘sensibly intuited’ by Lee and so taken up choreographically (even as it likely causes her to modify – as the rhino did – her sense of what she sought).

Developing an alternative to accounts of practice as governed by routinized schemata, Knorr-Cetina has written of the objects of knowledge in a research process as epistemic objects that “appear to have the capacity to unfold indefinitely” and are “as much defined by what they are not (but will, at some point have become) than by what they are”. This description is unexpectedly similar to the kind of understanding of choreographic starting points that I am arriving at through Eco’s anecdote. Unlike Eco, however, Knorr-Cetina’s epistemic objects are not restricted to cognitive schemata, but may have multiple, partial instantiations. A choreographic idea might exist variously as an unfolding epistemic object imagined by Lee, sketched or written in a notebook, danced by a performer, observed in rehearsal – and so on, through to a moment in a professional dance production.

This might be an opportune moment to leave aside Eco’s enquiry. Knorr-Cetina’s account seems more sympathetic to the situations of dance-making not only by its temporal sophistication but by what she goes on to write of the importance of a researcher’s affective relationship to research objects – which could include likely a choreographer’s notebook. This paper will however remain with Eco’s line of thought for how it can reveal a rarely-discussed but finely processing and adjudging character of choreographing.

Still considering schematic recognition then, Eco wrote that:
[T]he subject can have all the possible sensations of whiteness or hardness, but the moment he predicates whiteness or hardness, he has already entered the categorical. (Eco, 2000)

This alertness of Eco for the categorical provides a new perspective on my earlier question of what has happened when Lee writes in her notebook of “a quiet duet…” (wariness is called for by his textual lexicon in this discussion of mixed-mode choreographic practices). Written in her notebook Lee’s imagining takes on a second categorical form by which she can discriminate and accrue her perceptions of rehearsals. The overlap of schematic concerns I sensed between ‘a quiet duet…’ and the ‘display’ task may mark one such category that predicates fleeting sensations of fragility, strength and grace clustered around Lee’s perception of stags with antlers interlocked[14]. Glimpsed within the notebook, this multidimensional schematic category is still nascent and unfilled, difficult to word.

I suggested at the start of this paper that what Lee writes in a notebook before rehearsals begin may provide a perceptual anchor between her imagined ‘taste’ of a piece and the overwhelming density and particularity of dancer responses and activity in early rehearsals. For a choreographer it is probably only too apparent – in a way both daunting and exciting – that one’s notebook ideas rarely find direct equivalence in any staging of the dancers’ activity. A notebook must seem at times an inadequate tool, offering scant half-sketches of possible, malleable and interrelated categories by which to sift the myriad events of rehearsal.

‘First ideas’ then are far from intentions, if by this we have in mind a blueprint for composition, a one to one correspondence of intention to realisation. Lee commented, for example, that the ‘display’ task did not trigger in the Passage dancers all the qualitative sensations that she had planned for. By experiment, she found that another task, ‘hand-stuck,’ would trigger the missing qualities of her ‘intention’.

This example highlights Lee’s practices of detailed weighing-up and modulation between present perception and the anticipated. Eco comments of Marco Polo’s experience that while judgement is “the faculty of thinking of the particular as part of the general […] if only the particular is given and the general must be sought for, judgement is reflective”. Our everyday expectation may be that an artist’s notebook reveals artistic intentions; this enquiry reveals rather that what is crucial is the complex to-and-fro of reflexive and determining judgement at every stage of a choreographer’s process. [15]

In rehearsals, Lee’s decisions may appear to everyone present to take place completely within a field of action, the perceptual judgements underlying her decisions unregistered. Most recent accounts of performance-making too will rarely mark the artists’ cognitive practices of reasoning, planning and judgement. To probe Lee’s notebook though is to seek to bring to light her categorising and finely discriminating work of choreography. A choreographer’s notebook may reveal, then, not chimerical intentions but perceptual judgements.

A photograph taken by Rosemary Lee during a site visit for Passage. Reproduced as the Home page of the ResCen Passage website.