My battery is pure love
part one
by Lucy Rupert
for D and P, always.
for Badie, David, Edan, Esperanza, Josh, Jovia, June, Patrice, and Yuki, with whom I shared time and space at the Ucross Artist Residency program in April 2023. And for Tawni, who understood the song.
**
I fly through utter blackness. On one of those small planes that seats 50 people, the depth of the blackness is vivid. I am passing through a portal. Who knows what is on the other side?
Well, most of the other people on the plane know. This is their daily commute.
But for me it is flying into a myth.
**
I am nervous.
I am running.
I am obsolete.
I am stumbling.
I am a calculator.
I am a bird watcher.
I am perpetual motion.
I am an elevated heart rate.
I am scared that I am not enough.
I am full of love.
**
I am sitting in the lobby of the hotel waiting for Tawni, the Ucross Artists’ Residency Manager. I am allowing the almost nothing that is happening to be profoundly something. I eat scrambled eggs, toast, and coffee at the complimentary-breakfast nook. The coffee is good.
Last night I flew from Toronto, Ontario to Denver, Colorado, and then from Denver to Sheridan, Wyoming. It was turbulent in and out of Denver, my nerves were wrecked from the anxiousness of flying alone for the first time in years, flying to a place I’ve never been before, flying to a residency program where I would meet 9 strangers – the other artists in my cohort – and flying into a new project when my confidence is at an all-time low. From the Sheridan airport, I crawled into a hotel shuttle, and I hardly remember falling asleep around midnight, holding Fox-on-Tour against my thumping, tired chest.
Fox-on-Tour
Tawni is kindness and openness from our first hello. She drives us towards the Bighorn mountains' foothills, winding and clotted with white-tailed and mule deer. This big-sky country emanates a constant, low-level rumbling. Or tumbling. Or both. Tawni tells me about the wildlife, the snow, the history of the area and of the Ucross ranch. She assures me that all bears in the area are on the other side of the Bighorn mountains. The only thing I am truly afraid of is bears. I have dreams of them climbing tall buildings to get to me.
When we get to Ucross, she takes me on a tour of the grounds: to the main office, where I meet the staff and see the library full of books written by Ucross resident artists; past the cabins for writers, composers, and visual artists, through the art gallery featuring work by contemporary indigenous artists; and then to my workspace. It is the most beautiful studio I’ve seen. It has physical beauty, but also the beauty of no history, no attachments with me. This space doesn’t know that I have left Toronto feeling like a failure, heavy in the arms of so many rejections that I’m not sure I can continue.
In the place where the plains meet the foothills, a wall of windows and a hardwood floor are greeting me, “Hello, what do you want to do?”
Lauren Anderson Dance Studio at Ucross
Later, at dinner with the other resident artists, this welcoming feeling is reinforced. No one here knows how low I’ve been, nor do I know how any of them have struggled. I assume they are all brilliant – and they are – and that they are creating fiercely – which they are. Astonishingly, I don’t feel awkward. I really have flown through a portal. Transformed at an elevation of 4085 feet, I am just Lucy, dancer-choreographer working on a new solo about many things, not the least of which are struggle, loss of self, and a search for a map of the heart.
And robots. It is also about robots.
**
The Ucross vision is a residency experience that offers retreat, reflection, and community, without pressure to be constantly productive. Create as it comes, not necessarily as you planned. Explore the landscape. Pause and daydream.
Usually in the studio, I want to use every second physically. Space and time in studios are expensive and hard to find so I dance up my time. I relegate the thinking, dreaming, wondering, and pausing to when I am running errands, or on the subway, or after the dinner and the dishes and the organizing for the next day have been done. Which means, of course, I rarely do the thinking, dreaming, wondering, and pausing.
At Ucross, the studio is mine 24/7 if I want it. I can warm up for an hour, work for a few hours then take a 2-hour lunch: eat, make notes, walk the grounds of Ucross, birdwatch, and stare at the wild horses from the moment they come into my view until they crest a hill far in the distance and disappear.
I can make myself a midday coffee in the changeroom next to the studio, which has a couch and blankets, a coffeemaker and a view of an abandoned Great-horned owl nest. I can read the research books I brought, the field guides I borrowed from the Ucross library, and I can stare out the window at nothing. I can re-warm up before working through the afternoon into early evening. I can have another cup of coffee while I write my daily notes or stare at the sunset before I head back to the Schoolhouse to have dinner with the other artists.
I was invited to Ucross to develop a new solo work, hopefully the first “full-length” solo work I make. What does “full-length” mean? I’m aiming to make 45 minutes of choreography while here. Will that be full length? How do you know when the work is full? Or over-full?
The starting point for this new work is the evolution of robots from Greek mythology to now. I love research, and I love the erratic places research takes me. I love starting in one place and winding up in a different universe. I thrive on being a moving target. So, when I say I’m going to make a work rooted in research on the evolution of robots, I guarantee you, the resulting work will not be about robots.
I have no specific plans for these 11 days at Ucross, but I have questions.
What is it to be programmed?
What is it to be heartless?
What is it to be used?
**
an automated device that performs
a definition of a robot from Stanford University online, “Robotics: A Brief History”
I love moving, I love dancing. I love rehearsing, I love two-show days. I love the process of warming up. I love piling on layers of clothing and peeling off those layers as the muscles get warm and ready. I am an automated device that performs. I am an Energizer bunny. I’ll just keep dancing until something tells me to stop.
But….
When I was in graduate school at the University of Toronto, History Dept., I presented research on the possible socio-political influences on movement styles of the Bolshoi and the Kirov Ballet dancers in the 1960s. This was not my major field of research, but a side project my thesis advisor had encouraged me to develop. I was a month away from my graduation, I had completed my MA thesis, received a wonderful grade and feedback, I was first on the waitlist for the PhD program and the Chair of the Grad program had already told me it was pretty much a given that the spot would open for me.
This was my first time presenting a paper and I picked this coffee house environment because it was casual, the stakes were low. People slouched in armchairs in the graduate lounge of the history department with Peek Freans Assorted Crème biscuits and percolator coffee. I thought my ideas might be refreshing in a department heavy on post-communist European political analysis. I shared my research, even demonstrating some movements to illustrate the ideas. As soon as I finished one professor asked me,
“Isn’t everything you said irrelevant because dancers are just automatons?”
I had been introduced at this event as a graduate student and a professional dancer, so he knew the full impact of his comment, as did everyone else in the room. He was not trying to start a conversation. He was dismissing me.
One of my favourite professors – who was a hard-core, old-school political historian but liked me because I looked like a painting by one of his favourite Polish artists—stood up and said gruffly, “I don’t think that’s how we want to proceed with discussion.”
Despite his support, there, amidst the Peek Freans, I gave up. I went to see the Chair of the Graduate Program the next day and said “Take me off the PhD wait list. I don’t want to continue.”
I have encountered this attitude many times, personally and professionally: the assumption that since I am a dancer, I cannot also be an intellectual, capable of original thought and action, that I just do as I am told or as I am programmed, that I can count to 8 but no further. And at this moment, all I could see in my graduate school future was more of this same conversation, in different passive-aggressive shades.
I later learned that Insult Professor was pissed about losing some of his graduate advisees to my advisor, the innovative Dr. Thomas Lahusen. By insulting me publicly, he was belittling Dr. Lahusen and his work. Thomas said to me, “Lucy, if you just want to learn, go out and do it your way. We academics spend all our time learning about the world and not being in it. Go out there, learn, explore, make your art. Forget this bullshit.”
Professor Lahusen’s words and his work remain touchstones for me. He valued my unique perspective, encouraged me to develop it through my academic writing and through my art. Just talking with him about life was revelatory. I know I am not an automaton. And if I am an Energizer Bunny, my battery is pure love.
**
sufficiently advanced technology, indistinguishable from magic
definition of a robot by Arthur C. Clarke
**
At lunch break today I walk, and I sit, and I look. When was the last time I was someplace where I could see so far into varying landscapes in all directions? It is not a repeating expanse but a menagerie; things feel close but are not, binocular but not fractal. The details change when you magnify.
At dinner tonight Patrice -- a screenwriter and film director in the artist cohort -- mentions that this expansiveness is playing tricks with her mind. It’s not just the landscape, it is the expansion of time. Patrice doesn’t talk a lot but when she does it is rivetingly and casually profound. I understand what she’s saying. I’m spending nearly 12 hours a day at the studio, but it is not hard to keep working. All I have to do is look out the window: epic, geological, meteorological, shifting seasons and sky. I am eating and giving space. I am filled and surrounded by space. I add time and it becomes a dance.
Choreographic notes:
Not too fast to start.
Take time on tiny foot
Find the right audible undercurrent.
A robot is a way to stay young forever.
No sound at all when trying to speak from the heart.
**
I’ve been called an automaton by some of the most intimate people in my life, as well as by a professor who didn’t know me. Growing up I was seen by my family as shy and emotionally messy. Classmates saw me as erratic and nerdy. My ballet and piano teachers said I was undisciplined and “expressive”. In my perceived artistic emotional-ness I became a container for the joys and the shit of others. However, in that weird sphere of “boyfriends” I was a burbling passionate fantasy with a disappointingly aloof and self-controlled reality. When I have turned out not to be some spontaneous wild woman…well, then I have been called a robot. Heartless. Rigid.
I am super-disciplined. You can’t be a freelance dancer without immense self-discipline. And I take comfort in the idea that chaos is not random but a pattern we can’t yet detect. My mind also flings itself in many directions, my emotions are always at the surface. The metaphor of “my heart on my sleeve” is not enough. I wear my heart as my skin. I feel everything. And sometimes it’s too much. Then, I develop a priority inversion problem: a high priority emotion is superseded by a low priority emotion, clogging the whole system into shutdown.
“Does not compute.”
“Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
“Bleep beep beep boop beep.”
Anything with a sense of its own body, has a sense of itself and it’s not hard to imagine that sense would evolve into a desire to be perceived and treated as more than a container for business, productivity, art or love.
Stephen Colbert once asked Cate Blanchett where she keeps her moral compass. She said, “In my vagina.”
creating at Ucross
**
Why am I making this piece right now?
Because I feel:
DISPOSABLE (well, I am biodegradable)
REPLACEABLE (I am not, nobody is)
OBSOLETE (I am analog, evolving into digital, but I should already be virtual by now)
I feel like a perpetual motion machine. I keep going, I keep changing, but my atmosphere is static. Was I made to be disassembled? Shall I recycle my parts into something more practical? Am I actually a heartless thing?
Am I seriously considering leaving dance? Am I?
Josh talks about the vulnerability of his artistic materials, how by working with film, chemically treating and painting it and reeling it through old projectors, he reveals the degradation of the raw materials as part of the process and the life of his artwork.
This is a life in dance.
**
In case you doubted that I am a bird nerd.
getting ready for lunchtime birding
BIRD SPECIES I’VE SEEN IN WYOMING
Ring-necked pheasant
Says phoebe (LIFE BIRD!)
Common grackle
European starling
Northern flicker
Mourning dove
Eurasian collared dove (LIFE BIRD!)
Bald eagle
Golden eagle
Osprey
Western meadowlark (LIFE BIRD!)
Swainson’s hawk (LIFE BIRD!)
Great-horned owl (heard only)
Great blue heron
Sandhill crane
Black-billed magpie
American robin
Song sparrow
Chickadee
Mallard
American kestrel
Turkey vulture
Belted kingfisher
Common merganser
Wild turkey
Killdeer
Tree swallow
Red-winged black bird
American crow
Wilson’s snipe (LIFE BIRD!)
**
At dinner tonight David speaks about how scary places in parenthood have inspired some of his writing. I can’t imagine being strong enough to do that. I only once included a gesture of P’s in my choreography. I removed it later. Too close to the bone. How can we convince ourselves to be truly and consciously brave with our work? To insert a word or a gesture that is straight from our bones, without what we think is a disguise, knowing it will degrade and fade over time, we give it a kind of double mortality.
**
Choreographic notes:
A robot who can’t vocalize signs up for all the songs on karaoke night
Dance to two rhythms at the same time and as though you have no heart
Evolve from a wooden pigeon to a war machine
post-lunch warm up
Today I make a section I call “sitting skeleton.” Working in this wide-open landscape, I feel obliged to choreograph a moment of stillness and seeing, an evaluation of one’s life. What if I could do it all again? What if I had been bolder when I was younger? What if I had chosen music instead of dance? Would I feel more grounded, more successful?
In the large storage closet of the dance studio is baby grand piano. Every day I open the doors to the closet and stare at the piano. I want to sit down, improvise some delicate melody, sing the songs I’ve written. Between the ages of 16 and 25 I wrote over 200 songs, recorded demos and was a squeak away from a decent recording contract. But I hesitated and the moment was gone. Though I have tried to tell myself I regret it, I don’t think I ever have.
Today, I open the piano closet and dare myself to touch the keys. I play a few awkward chords, then close the lid, close the doors, and do not look at the piano again. When I was 18, I chose dance instead of music and I’ve been choosing it again and again ever since.
Changing that or any other decision I have made along the way would mean an alternate reality, with no P, and no D either. That is more terrifying than bears. A reality without my kid and my partner? Where would I put my love? It would explode inside me, and I would vanish.
So, “sitting skeleton” is a meditation on doing it all over again the same way. Is this déjà vu? A pin-prick glimpse at yourself making the same choices again and again, unsettling and connective, like a flash of a dream.
**
Badie, one of the composers here, is the first artist I have ever talked to who immediately understands my approach to the art-science connection. His compositions are full of voices, human and other, though there are no actual voices in the music. We reach into pianos and string instruments to pull out cries and exclamations that are familiar. Some sounds we understand without dictionaries.
sunset
**
One of the most frightening moments of my life occurred while walking from the Ucross studio back to the Schoolhouse to change out of my sweaty dance clothes and lie down in my bedroom for a few minutes before meeting the other artists for dinner.
I have seen wild turkeys countless times, I’ve frequently been up close and personal with them at Point Pelee National Park. However, I never considered what they do at night. In Wyoming, they alight in trees. They awkwardly hop-flit from branch to branch until high enough to be unreachable by coyotes or wolves.
There is nothing like seeing a 100 foot-tall, leafless tree full of black hunching blobs, silhouetted against the dusk sky while a coyote howls and a great horned owl hoots in the distance and there is not a car on the road, not a person in the fields or on the paths.
not the Wild Turkey tree, I was too freaked out to think of taking that photo
**
Jovia, another composer here, speaks about resonance and reverb as a retelling, a reclaiming of your own story, a call and response in one circuit. I think of Esperanza's stories -- from every art form, every medium, and on almost every continent. She has struggled, outwitted, and defied expectations with great beauty. Her stories strike me as forms of resonance and reverb, they resonate in the air around us and echo back our own struggles and accomplishments.
These intense beautiful conversations each night as we wash and dry the dishes together imprint in my heart like self-assured cats walking through wet cement. I don’t feel swallowed up by my anxiety or dwarfed by the brilliance swirling around me. With these people, I feel confident saying that I don’t always understand my work, that it comes from an intuitive process, that I implicitly trust that my brain, heart and gut speak fluently with one another. Ideas make me a physical person, ideas make me move and keep questioning through movement. My choreography reflects the connection of our bodies to ideas outside ourselves, to an understanding that doesn’t have to be intellectual. There are other ways of knowing.
Someone once called me a delight.
Someone once called me a shapeshifter.
Someone once called me a futuristic war machine.
Someone once called me a freak, a loser, a weirdo, a nerd, an ugly piece of shit.
I will take it and love it.
**
Choreographic notes:
climbing up the walls
brief awkward life
the slow seasons
wooden pigeon
sitting skeleton
neural network
measuring
FAWK
song
These are the sections I’ve made at Ucross. But one tiny thing is missing. I don’t know what it is yet.
**
Yuki is elusive. She is a night owl while I’m part of the dawn chorus. Sometimes Yuki and I cross paths around 6am, as she is returning to the schoolhouse to sleep and I am birdwatching my way over to the dance studio.
Her work is a contrast of precise large panels in colours creating 3-D effects and smaller sketches of vivid precision and dark, erratic clouds. It seems quite fitting: clean and geometric with a tiny, elusive current of disorder.
**
Half-way through my time here, I am dreading the end.
I cry over my lunch. Chef Cindy makes each artist their own lunch, to whatever dietary specifications they have, and drives throughout the grounds of Ucross to deliver them, ensuring everyone has their bagged lunch at their studio door between noon and noon-thirty. I eat Cindy’s granola for breakfast, her sandwiches and fresh cookies for lunch, her voluptuous dinners. The depth of care packed into these meals is unfathomable.
It's not just the food that has me weepy at the half-way point. I am wondering how I can continue with this sense of purpose, structure, and nourishment in my artistic practice when I get home, where I’ve been feeling gray and sinking for the last year.
D says this is not a small thing but it’s also not a big thing. “You don’t have to worry about holding onto it. You have breathed in the air at Ucross, you’ve changed yourself physically. It’s part of you now, so you come home with it.”
He’s right. My molecules are different; I am breathing different air; I have adjusted to the altitude; I have relaxed and been myself around new people; I have gathered different dirt in the soles of my shoes. I have pushed myself and saturated myself in the space, the movement, the landscape, the people. New bacteria are in my microbiome, new synapses are reaching and connecting to each other.
Choreographic notes:
Take the time it takes.
Fall apart back to the start.
Reset the ricochet into the turn.
The measuring in the middle should be as precise as at the beginning.
This creature does not resent being brought into existence.
You can’t self-administer a Turing test.
**
On Sunday I decide to take the afternoon to wander the higher trails into the foothills. Though it is sunny and 15 degrees, there are still clutches of snow in the fields and up the hills. I layer-up, fill my water-bottle, pack an apple and an orange in my bag and make sure my phone is fully charged, for photos and in case a bear comes over the mountain and I need back-up.
A dead coyote is tangled in a barbed wire fence. Sandhill cranes laugh in a nearby field. Mule deer stop eating tufts of dead grass to throw me some cut eye. A Say’s phoebe hops from fence post to fence post guiding me along the road. Black cows are very curious about me as I walk beside their enclosures. They do not recognize me. They do not trust me, not even when I say, “Hey Cow, good afternoon, how are you?” Hundreds of toads are singing. I can’t believe their volume and constancy.
discerning cattle
I climb over the gate which Tawni described in her directions to the best trail to take today. I haven’t climbed a gate or a fence in who knows how long. I climbed the CN Tower stairs three years in a row to raise money for the World Wildlife Fund, and while challenging, it was very civilized. Hopping over this locked gate on cattle ranch in Wyoming feels like a tiny brash and rugged act, even though no one is there to see it.
Except someone did see it. Coming down the hill is bright, blonde woman in tie-dyed sweats and sneakers. It’s Edan, a writer in the artist cohort. She is from LA, she’s cool and quirky and kind and sunny and smart, really smart.
We both have evaded guilt and escaped our workspaces today. Edan talks about the refreshing change in starting a new work here, writing from a first-person perspective, after her last epic novel which was written in third-person from multiple characters’ views. I realize I have never considered the narrative perspective of my choreography, ever. I tell Edan,
“This is blowing my mind. I think I’ve never chosen a narrative perspective before and I think this solo I’m working on has to be first person.”
It’s so obvious, a solo is a first-person story… but is it? When abstraction enters the picture, as is usually the case in contemporary dance, the perspective can get cubist. And, in exploring robots and other “automated devices”, this creature-character I've created has been built not born: can it have a first-person perspective? does it have “personhood”? It feels radical to commit to this decision right now, that the piece is not about me, it is me: an automated device, indistinguishable from magic.
Earlier in our stay Edan and I covered mom-anxiety and guilt, bullying, dance classes, husbands, imposter syndrome, head lamps (you need them to cross the fields between the Schoolhouse and the studios at night). I’ve teared up with her about missing my kid, worrying that my absence will cause him distress as it did when I was away for a month 7 years ago. But right now, on a trail with Edan in the foothills of the Bighorn mountains, under a huge blue sky full of clouds that look like condos for Norse gods, we bask in the sun and part ways, ready to be inspired. Edan goes back to her cabin to write and I climb higher to get a new perspective.
**
From across the room, I expect that, up close, June’s paintings will look airbrushed, perfected as if by a machine. But closer, I see the texture of June’s movement as she painted. Her blacks have undertones, her blues have history, faint fossil records underlie the sharp patterns. She is telling you the story, and telling you the story of how she wrote it.
**
Today is my studio sharing for the other artists and the staff of Ucross. I am nervous in a way that has no name. I decide to show 15 minutes of material, and to share only a little bit about the research inspiration. I am realizing the “robot” thing may create unhelpful expectations.
I have picked 4 sections to share:
Measuring – because it tells the story of how I wrote this story
Neural network – because it is odd
Wooden pigeon – because it is exhausting
Song – because it is the most honest thing I've ever made
Most of the artists and staff are here, sitting along the wall of windows on mats and cushions from the change room, Esperanza and June sit on the piano bench. When I finish, I can tell they all get it. They feel it.
Tawni’s interpretation of the Song section cuts to the core of everything: robots, magic, all of it. Because of her, I think I know what the name of this dance should be.
**
Final day. This morning we will leave the schoolhouse, some of us catching the Sheridan-Denver commuter flight and from there, our unique connecting flights. June and David are driving home, headed in opposite directions. Badie and Josh will stay for one more week.
I packed quickly last night, everything but my computer and my last clean dancewear. I get up at 6am, head over to the studio to have granola and coffee in the beautiful loft of the dance studio, staring out the high windows at the small clumps of deer and a pair of sandhill cranes, like every morning of my stay. I go down into the dance studio.
In the far corner of the studio, a past resident artist taped a fortune cookie message to the mirror: “be not afraid of growing slowly, be afraid only of standing still.”
I add a message for future residents: “leave the gaps (they will surprise you later).”
A gap, as choreographer Denise Fujiwara has taught me, may be a choreographic tool. A gap may be the hole I feel in my heart and in my career right now. A gap may be the space between two realities. A gap may be an artist’s residency in an unfamiliar place where the sky distracts you from who you think you are, the sandhill cranes laugh at your angst, and the open fields provide enough space for you to get out of your own way.
I turn up the heat in the studio, put on some music and dance the deer, the light, the birds, the rising sun, the curve of the foothills, the flight of the phoebes and the osprey, the invisible support of Ucross staff and artists (thank you, thank you), the fear I arrived with and the very different fear with which I am leaving.
Kindness, space, breath, community. Will I ever feel this driven, engaged, open and in love with I’m what doing again? Will I ever feel this supported again? The trick is to remain open-hearted even when the world seems to tell you, “Get mean and small.” But it would be harder to close my heart than to continue into the fray.
**
Choreographic note:
never tell the story directly
Deep thanks to the Ucross Foundation
unattributed quotes from Lost in Space, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars, respectively
my battery is pure love was written from notes, research and reflections written by Lucy April 16-29, 2023
copyright Lucy Rupert, January 2024
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