Rope Dance Translations (1974)

Extract of programme

« For the past three years, I’ve been trying to define and refine my own dance – the act of turning. Turning seems to me an interesting dance form because it is, or can be, continuous without stopping points. The spinal axis is the main actor. The basic movements are extremely simple. They engage the whole body in connected movement.
All movement is generated by walking in place around oneself, something like taking a walk without knowing where one is going […].
I let myself get caught up in the spinning impulse (a moment quite naturally and quite often in different types of dance) and extended it. Spinning for a long time becomes an amazing sensitizing medium. Spatio-temporal relationships and normal audio-visual perceptions are altered. 360° sight, balance.
Auditory concentration. Listen with the whole body […]. The most interesting thing is to dance very fast or very slowly. And the transition from one to the other […].
Restructuring the experience of time (measuring movement). Moving time. Memory time. Emotional time. Objective time […]. Planetary movement. Flying. Falling. Hurricane. The eye of the same storm […].
I link the abstraction of bodily functions to chakras/wheels of force/energy centers. I think the act of turning also refers to these centers. It is also linked, like all dances, to the state of mind between wake and sleep / life and dream / the conscious and the unconscious. »
Andy De Groat, as part of L’art vivant, n°40 (June 1973), quoted in the programme “Une histoire post-moderne”, Angers-Nantes Opéra (2022)