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As Seen through the Windshield, cont.
© 2007 Wendy Rogers

5/12

Sometimes I can get focused on getting started in a very particular way. For example, I can have a problem with the concentration it takes and the kind of things I do to warm up my body for rehearsal, so that I end up turning into a choreographic idiot. I can't explain it. I've actually been together with my body, getting it going, doing things that turn out to be reliable, things that–knock on wood–have kept me dancing these many years. Yet by the time I've done my warm-up, it's almost as if I can't think of a single movement to do; I can't find a movement in my body and I don't know how to make that transition into making dancing.

Now that I'm in a more isolated place [Riverside, CA] and I don't always have the luxury of having somebody else show up and do my work, I've had to find ways to get started by myself. So I'll talk about one of my strategies that I worked out in the 1990s when I first plunged into working on solos.

What I would do was this: after warming up I'd stand in one spot wherever I was in the room or the space, and just start running in place. And I would run in place for about ten or fifteen minutes and turn, very slowly, 360 degrees. As I ran in place, I would take in everything I possibly could. I would see everything in the space: feel the surface of the floor, hear things, and notice everything that was going on–my body temperature, the room temperature, anything and everything. Usually by the end of that circle I was ready to switch into invention and creativity. One day I was doing my running warm-up transition when, all of a sudden, my arms started moving. As they started moving it was as if I was watching them and my upper body move. This whole event happened; I filled one quadrant of the circle and said, "Wow!" and did it again, and then filled the next quadrant. And then I did it again. It was as if this dance, each quadrant of it, was right there from the start. I didn't try to make it up, I just did it. And that's the dance I call compass. Where the heck did that dance come from? And where was it going?

compass came to me in about 1991, during which I was in the midst of incredible personal upheavals and endings–the end of a marriage, of ten years of working and teaching dance at the University of California at Berkeley as a part-timer, and of living in a house that I loved in the Berkeley Hills, a residence close to where I had grown up, and near my family. This was also the end of my having a dance company. A lot of things were ending in a complex and layered slow-motion emergency.

During this time I was filled with questions about absolutely everything. Some of the questions I was asking myself and a lot of the questions people were asking me–and pieces of advice they offered–were really, quite frankly, economic. "Wendy, you can't keep on doing this. How will you provide for yourself? You can't make a living this way. You know, you could get a nursing degree in two years, and nurses make good money and . . . ." I'd listen and go, Oh, no! Still, I would try on these various suggestions to all areas of my life. I even took one of those job aptitude tests, that didn't have choreographer as a category – I think my result came out: "farmer/musician/teacher/architect." Anyway, my life was in turmoil at the time.

During this period, I was also working on my California Arts Council application for the Wendy Rogers Dance Company. And suddenly, I saw its pages sliding down the wall where I realized I had thrown it. I asked "What!?" and then answered myself, "I can't do this anymore." I couldn't talk about the Wendy Rogers Dance Company. I couldn't tell the Council all about the people that made up ten years of my life. I couldn't claim 10,000 people had seen my work. I had to represent myself so falsely. It wasn't one of those "good, let's think through this and see if it helps me think about my work in a new, wonderful way" moments. It was more sickening than that.