So why do today’s troisième âge cohorts keep on, or at least try to, keep on dancing? After all, live performance is a very wearing profession. The needed energy, prowess and bravura often come with a heavy physical price; also, non man dance careers are often truncated by Barbie-related issues. When a dancer continues to perform, it’s more akin to a coal miner staying down the pit than, say, a manager staying on despite re-organization and old-guy buyout. There are a lot of reasons, some more intriguing than others.
In spite of the challenges, Amy Swanson, who began performing in 1975, has chosen to keep dancing. Co-founder (with her late husband, Alain Salmon) of the contemporary dance performance venue Regard du Cygne in Belleville and a long-time all-round facilitator of dance culture, Swanson has variously been a choreographer, performer and teacher in Paris since 1980. She retired from running Regard du Cygne a little better than a year ago.
It turns out that Swanson had been casting even as she was bowing out of her old role – getting asked to cast, actually, as I’ve heard – for a certain number of performance projects. She went with TV director, choreographer and actor Mehdi Kerkouche’s Portrait. Kerkouche was born in 1986.
Portrait, a Netflix-style pop-psy “family portrait” blasts onto the stage with high-energy hip-hop choreography. It has become a live performance hit since its début this past January. Swanson, a life-long “Duncan dancer”, is the piece’s presiding genius, the mother, of Portrait’s contemporary dysfunctional (or functionally dysfunctional) family. Beyond her role in the Portrait narrative, Amy Swanson’s emotionally evocative, fluid, dance performance is in strong contrast with the vigorous break riffs of her challenging and challenged rejetons, kids, grandkids, great grandkids.
Coal miner, indeed! To get to where she is (now looking at performing all over France right into 2024), not only did Swanson have to follow a grueling schedule of getting acquainted with the succeeding generation’s habits and outlook, working on the contemporary dance creation process as well as rehearsals, Swanson’s now been uncomplainingly performing non-stop since Portrait hit the boards.
In some sense, Swanson’s role as presiding genius in Portrait denotes what seems to be her reason for accepting to be where she is.
“Duncan dancing” seems to mean a lot of things to a lot of people, so I can only speak for myself and say that a Duncan dancer – like Duncan herself – in some way links dance with a “human essential” – women, ecology, the sacred. Swanson is certainly committed to all three examples. Given the link, she’d agree that dance performance by definition is a vocation or a calling, not a job you can just do – neither miner nor manager. But I don’t think we should put too fine a point on this – the dance performance “warhorses” of Jean-Christophe Bleton’s Bétes de Scène that I discussed in an earlier essay, surely see dance as their calling, as do many miners and managers, for that matter, without going further than that.
I think Swanson – and along with her many, many dance performers besides – are keeping on keeping on because as herself and as a Duncan dancer, she sees something “true” in dance, sees dance as the primal art. Practicing dance, sticking to dance performance through her own passages of life is an existential imperative, not only for herself as an individual person but for the rest of us.
Indeed, when I sent Swanson a note asking her why she kept dancing, she sent me Adelise Lapier’s commentary on the rare and well-known female stone image found at the Tiritaka site on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast and called the “Old Woman”. Lapier tries to un-mystify portrayals of women in history by applying a tad of Motel of the Mysteriesconsciousness to her analysis. Lapier says that contrary to what one is often led to believe, the Old Woman doesn’t represent an otherworldly “goddess” but a quite ordinary wise woman or sorceress or shaman.
Gentlemen! Lapier says the Old Woman’s perfunctory breasts are just a visual cue, a convention, not a sign of heavenly purpose. The old woman’s broad shoulders and big strong hands, on the other hand, tell us about the role of Old Woman in a traditional society. “This old one no longer has the worries of a woman who is young”, Lapier writes, “She … guides, she holds up the world…”.
Anybody who’s had children knows just exactly the essential work grandmothers do, so there’s no need to perorate on Lapier’s analysis.
When I put it to Swanson that dance now belongs to her in the same way that the makers of the Old Woman believed wisdom or magic power belonged to women in their troisième vie, she wrote, “Especially maybe as a Duncan dancer. I feel it nails what my job is on stage in this piece and what the [feedback] from the audience [has] been.”…
Apart from compliments for her dancing as good as just good dancing, she continues, some talked about “true dance”, not just her theatrical choreographic representation as a motherly representation in Kerkouche’s piece, but saw in her dancing something more: a dancing between worlds. …
“That is exactly what I feel like I’m doing [when I dance),” Swanson says, “Like I’m on a parallel universe… on a bridge permitting me to mingle with the others on the stage or to be ‘out there’”…
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Author: Paul Tracy DANISON
