Lines Almost Spoken

SPECTATORS ENTER the gym and head for the cluster of audience seated on the east bleachers, prompting Boston choreographer Deborah Chassler to holler, "Could some of you move to the other side? The room will tip over if you all sit there."

Chassler almost believes the room could tip--and her dance proves it. She makes space do her bidding, commanding that it melt away and free the dancer to spin illusions of total ease and spontaniety. This looseness fingerprints her new work, "Calling Out," which Chassler performed this past Sunday with companions Alice Lusterman and Barbara Norman at the Cambridge YMCA.

The first section of the piece takes off from a series of six action words. The group rehearses the actions/ideas suggested by the verbs beforehand, yet doesn't decide on order of performance until the concert begins. Sunday Chassler arranged the series: "run, roll, fall, lean, catch, hold."

Next is a brief section titled "long lines falling into turning spinning" and then three solos. Chassler and Lusterman recite prose poems as they solo, while Norman ends the concert with a terse movement statement.

Chassler's style speaks strongly about the dancer relying only on his or her self. She rejects the theatrical possibilities of costuming, lighting and decor, paring down her dance to essential movement and, even further, to the performer's highly-disciplined concentration. Chassler often works with eyes half-closed, sunk deep inside herself, focused on word imagery, the wellspring of her dance.

Here is a radically subjective art, yet through this back door of self-improvement Chassler breaks through to objectivity. She has a gift for turning her insides out--for being so inside herself that she's not herself at all. The thrill of her dance is its transparency.

Lusterman and Norman don't possess Chassler's presence, her power to absorb an audience with each slight twitter. The two perform well in the idiom of Chassler's movement and occasionally hit upon the nexus of subjectivity/objectivity. Yet neither command Chassler's magic.

Chassler is looking, I sense, for ways to initiate other performers into her vision, so that she can move beyond the solo, the genre she's mastered, and explore the more complex dynamics of groups. She performed for the first time in Boston last spring with two members of her earlier troupe, Tropical Fruit Company. Last fall she gave a solo concert, and now she's trying again, "calling out," seeking to expand her range.

Rather than rely on technical virtuosity, Chassler evolves her own discipline, the technique of making one's self open to one's self. She trains the dancer's body to put itself into a state of attentive neutrality, ready to receive, transform and make concrete mental images--"calling out" or "the body falls up," Chassler's working concept last fall. Like the surrealist's pen taking down words from a will other than the poet's conscious self, the body becomes a perfect channel. She becomes the words themselves.

The larger forms of Chassler's work take on qualities similar to its characteristics of movement. Energy is parcelled out into long stretches, each followed by short rests during which the dancer returns to a state of neutral energy, gathering again the threads of the sustaining image. The work is extremely linear, a soliloquy, like the prose poem Chassler recites:

I wish I were a word...I dream ...I were a word...I could be a color...I could be a name...I could be a somebody else...I dream...that I am a plant hanging still...in space...I dream that I saw...your face...I call...your name...I forget...I forgot...I forget

The long lines of Chassler's dance move with a consistently high level of energy, except for the pauses, this intensity never lessens. Although an ending is signaled by a slight falling-off from the high pitch. It's this constant flow of energy which gives Chassler's dance its characteristic quality-- the looseness, the spontaniety, the feel of the everyday almost to the point of banality.

IN AN ESSAY titled "An Analysis of Trio A," Yvonne Rainier, an avant-garde choreographer of the early sixties, points out ways in which recent dance resembles minimalist sculpture, the latter an art "simple, clear, direct, and immediate" in the words of one critic. Rainier almost could be referring specifically to Chassler's language: indeterminate structure decided at the time of performance; neutral performance, the dancer rejecting character and pose; task-like rather than dance-like activity; phrasing in terms of consistent levels of energy. Whether Chassler consciously follows the avant-garde tradition described by Rainier, I don't know, but she certainly couldn't dance as she does without the ground-breaking work Rainier and other "minimalist" choreographers pioneered.

Like the minimalist sculptors, Chassler's a reductionist, calculating how much she can cut away and still call her work dance. It's almost a game, playful and mischievous, simple and literal. Chassler runs, tumbles, turns; what more simple movement is there? The first section of "Calling Out" requires the dancers to give up their weight to one another: what more literal approach to group improvisation can be imagined?

And yet the guts of Chassler's work aren't simple or literal at all--neither formal exploration for its own sake nor defiant nose-thumbing for its. Does "romantic minimalism" make any sense of a literal approach and non-literal content? How Chassler dances is nothing except straight-forward; what she dances is everything but.

At one point in her solo she bounds around the room holding her closely-cupped hands tight to her side. She has a secret hidden there. Chassler dances close to her private self without consciously externalizing her self. She tells us little, speaking so softly that we thrill to hear.