Remy Charlip spoke directly to the child in us. Tenderness and
joy was the message.
Somewhere in high school I discovered his books. Maybe it
was because of his affiliation with the Cunningham Company and teaching at
Sarah Lawrence College (I had friends who studied Creative Dramatics with him).
The books felt intoxicating; a liberation for mind and heart. In Thirteen he gave us hypertext before it
had been invented. On each page there’s one drawing from each of thirteen visual
stories that progress through the book. You can regard one page, you can follow
one story start to finish (the falling leaf, the sinking ship), you can linger
on the detail and luminosity of his water colors. What in the line and
rendering of recognizable things made them so magical?
I often think about the relationship of ‘what’ to ‘how’ in performance.
Materials are one thing, the way they are enacted another. The latter
determines how we read the materials. I have the idea that the state of mind of
the person doing the thing translates into how we experience it. A person with
a desire to offer us the richness of the world around us, and the knowledge of
our own preciousness somehow translates that into line and color and sequence. Or
dances. We feel it.
The drawings from Remy’s Air
Mail Dances provide a visual record of sequences he asked dancers to
create, full of loopy, delicious interactions. Two or more people twine and twirl,
curving buoyantly, joyfully. One version
of a dance like this was shot on video from above with dancers on a bed, sheets
and all.
It was in Remy’s work that I first saw Eva Karczag. He revealed
the exquisite animal she is through a device allowing us to observe her body
mechanics: she crawled across the upstage of the old Dance Theater Workshop with
rubber balls beneath each of her hands and feet. To progress forward, she
kicked or rolled a ball forward and placed hand or foot down to stop it, a foot
or so ahead each time. Funny. Slow. Elegant.
That was Remy. He was a guest teacher in the Netherlands
where I got to know him beyond page and stage. That was where I sensed a darker
side too. While I can’t swear it’s so, my sense is of him is as a wounded
healer. He venerated the body and became a transformative teacher of Alexander
technique. He venerated creativity and creation.
Thank you, Remy. You remain here with us, encouraging our
wilder flights of imagination, our reveling in our senses and our care for each
other.
