The Gym No. 10: Open gym
Hey there. How’s your 2022? I still feel like I’m just peeking out.
Do you read New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl? I love his effusion and unabashed adoration. He’s humble but he’s not sorry. (Acknowledging here the privilege that has bolstered him to be so.) He has said that he can pinpoint the moment when art saved him from a life of mediocrity and indirection—when a chapel fresco in rural Italy changed his trajectory: “It's as if I died and came back to life a minute later, somebody different.” When I read him, I can see him lobbing all his faculties, weeping, toward the art gods; I can see him on his knees before them.
I don’t have so striking a moment. When I seek to understand the direction of my life, I find it less and less directed at the performance than oriented to the practice. My earliest memory of dance is in the studio. My tights too short, mildly itchy, and quite possibly royal blue. My body organized in anticipation, legs stretched out on the floor before me, new muscles round beneath the tights. I am at once actualized in my body and part of something bigger, in my very own spot among other small children patterned throughout the room, organized in possibility. Our faces turned up toward the teacher like flowers to the sun. Certainly there were windows bearing light, mirrors before us, my name mispronounced. There was no question that we would move, that we would try some things. We would do it together, practicing that mystical balance of sameness and difference, of individual and collective whole.
Twenty years later, as an intern for the local paper in suburban Arvada, Colorado, I interviewed the actor Beth Flynn, who was starring in a nostalgic country music revue. Between rehearsals, she led me down a shrubby hill to a picnic table well behind the Arvada Center theater, and we sat alone under the intense sun for a long time. She smoked and sighed and laid her gravelly voice down for me. The part in the country music revue was not her dream role, but the company offered stability. She had made personal sacrifices. I suppose I told her I’d been a dancer. She said she knew I understood. I remember her presence, the intensity with which she invited me to see her, in media res, inside of trying something. I was awed by this new responsibility she trusted me with: to not break her wholeness as I carried her story forward.
In the subsequent years when I was an arts journalist, I was grateful to be granted a contemplative conversation or a spot in the corner of the studio during rehearsal. Dance rehearsals often have a sense of urgency because the studios are rented and scheduled by the hour. I became efficient at finding moments of experimentation and play. My fixation on those moments sometimes reached the point of distortion, if I let the narrative crescendo toward the performance stall at some point mid-rehearsal. But did you watch Get Back, the new Beatles documentary made with old footage? There’s a moment where Paul pulls the reluctant John momentarily back into their spell, where they sing “Two of Us” in its entirety through their teeth, as though their jaws are wired shut. It’s an endurance competition and a silly game, and it seems to tell the whole story of their relationship (forget every memoir and biography and interview—it’s all right there, even the parts they hadn’t lived yet).
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When I started The Gym, in 2018, there were far fewer newsletters, Substack was in its infancy, and I was was a part-time freelance dance critic trying to understand how my many slivers of work—criticism, journalism, dancing, community engagement, content strategy, user experience design, parenting—might look as a whole. Two regular years and two pandemic ones later, these slivers haven’t organized into a nice pie chart, but they’ve melted together. I’m no longer a working critic, and moreover, I am less certain about what criticism is for. I haven’t taken dance class lately, but I know I can’t not feel like a dancer. I know that human-centered design is to dramaturgy as engagement is to conversation. I go to the theatre less often, but to galleries more (never enough). I read more (never enough). I’m rarely in the studio, and I miss talking to artists. I miss being present for their trying. I understand that the Beatles’ rooftop concert was no more a moment in time than the moment in the recording booth where Yoko quietly passed John half a stick of gum.
Peter Schjeldahl, who was born in 1942, described his small-town Midwestern childhood as devoid of art. So it was clear, when the lightning bolt of the fresco struck him, that he'd crossed a threshold. Today, I think, it’s almost impossible to avoid being surrounded by at least glimpses of art from infancy—if not in more inclusive arts organizations and public-school curricula, then on Instagram and TikTok and in videogames and sneaker design. The studio surrounds us. Thresholds shape-shift.
And yet, sometimes I don’t remember what people’s bodies look like. Many of us have withdrawn into self-protective caves, wary of plans and performances that are made to be broken and canceled. In 2022, what can a tired arts writer be? I’m feeling a bit sick of myself. It feels time to look outward, to act a little more like a journalist and report back from the world, albeit with my fixations, obstructions, and myopia in full view. This year, I’m plodding forward, listening for the moments, looking for rituals new and renewed, being in the practice, trying to be present for more of the trying.
Talk soon,
Jonelle
Cited & related
Festos from January’s Festo Fest at Northern-Southern are online. They range from manifesto to resolution to instructions to mantras. I liked Audrey Molloy's (p. 16) and Igor Siddiqui's (pp. 37-38), but the collection as a whole is a remarkable record of what artists were feeling in January 2022.
Phillipe Petit’s Open Practice is online at the Baryshnikov Arts Center till tomorrow. It’s the latest in the vein of Jerome Bel’s Cedric Andrieux and Veronique Doisneau. If you find it a little slow, like I did, keep it on in the background—there are some gems, like when he talks about rest (around minute 36).
The people on the Emergent Strategy podcast are just so smart! Choreographer Shalewa Mackall shares wisdom on intergenerational learnings, pace, trust, and centering.
Peter Schjeldahl talked with Steve Martin (in 2011) about the life-changing fresco and other visual works.
For now, Get Back is only available with a Disney+ subscription 🙁.
