WHAT FRANCES ALENIKOFF ISN'T TELLING - Movement Research

WHAT FRANCES ALENIKOFF ISN'T
TELLING
(Part 1: IN MRPJ#39)
...Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
Dylan Thomas
Arriving for a rehearsal at Eden's Expressway at 537 Broadway in Soho
on a Saturday afternoon in February, 1997, I bypass the claustrophobically slow
elevator and head up the four flights of stairs. In addition to being a spacious
dance studio, Eden's Expressway has been a loft performance venue since the
1970s. The metal bolt door is ajar, but I knock anyway. COME IN.
Upon entering, I'm stopped in my tracks. Suspended upside down on an
airborne trapeze swinging by ropes with her legs in a virtual 180-degree split,
auburn hair dangling, body wrapped in thick elastic exercise bands, she is
stretching her muscles by torquing limbs and joints. No, it's not Auntie Mame,
but our own indefatigable Frances Alenikoff! OH, HELLO DEAR, COME IN,
I'M JUST WARMING UP.
Then seventy-six, she's one woman who relishes confessing her age for the
knock-out surprise and consternation it inevitably provokes, as she enjoys defying
expectation at the beginning of her revered solo, Re-Membering by blithely

delivering, to great effect, her signature flash—an unabashed shoulder-high thrust
kick.
We were collaborating on a duet, www.alenikoffking.com, that we
previewed the following month at Movement Research's Monday Night series at
Judson Church, and premiered a few weeks after that at Dance Theater
Workshop's 30 th Anniversary Founder's Celebration. Both organizations grew out
of the expansive 1960s ferment, a time of boundary-crossing and merging of arts
forms. Mixed-means was on the cusp of becoming multimedia, and dance and
theater suddenly seemed inseparable, the watershed decade before performance
art.
DTW was founded by Jeff Duncan, and at his last birthday party, in 1988,
Frances was irresistibly riveting seated on a sofa flanked by its two other cofounders,
choreographers Jack Moore and Art Bauman. A connection was made
between us and we’ve been fast friends ever since.
Frances’ past is legendary and details spill out around the edges of our
rehearsals, talks, and phone marathons. Like many artists, she had a difficult
childhood, with a demanding father and an enviably beautiful fashion model
mother who appeared in movies, then later taught yoga, moved to California,
became a spiritualist, and knew Aldous Huxley.
During the 1940s, Frances began studying Afro-Haitian dance on
scholarship at the Katherine Dunham School with celebrated dancers such as
Syvilla Fort (an amazing woman, also one of my first teachers, for whom John
Cage wrote the first piece for prepared piano).

Frances was championed and befriended by Doris Humphrey and Anna
Sokolow during the 1950s for her chant dancing and independent quest.
Josephine Baker, an elemental erotic phenomenon and gorgeous world-famous
African-American performance sensation, hired Frances to choreograph for the
Josephine Baker Show on Broadway in 1964.
Frances was produced by Joseph Papp at the Public Theater, and
confessed how dance writer Walter Sorell "tricked" her into becoming a dance
writer for Dance News. She met Martha Graham in the dressing room during a
cross country train trip when she was seventeen, and combed Graham’s hair and
conversed with her for an entire day as Graham confided conflicts she had with
“Miss Ruth”—Ruth St. Denis, another legend.
Later Frances toured extensively with her multimedia concerts. She has
taught, performed, and choreographed as far away as Hong Kong and Alaska, and
was pulled into dancing in an ecstatic Vodoun ceremony in Haiti while on a group
tour organized by Jacques d'Amboise, to the consternation of the tour guides and
the delight of the natives. She danced in the Temple of Isis in Luxor on an
Egyptian tour with Jean Houston's Mystery School.
In June 1993, I saw Frances in a Mabou Mines studio production at PS
122 in a play about poet Audre Lorde called Blood Summer Rituals, written and
directed by Bill Wright. Frances played Lorde's charmingly authoritarian teacher,
a Mother Superior, cloaked in an austere black habit.
Instead of Frances the dancer, here was a distinctive actress with an
uncanny presence and a perfectly modulated, dynamic stage voice—eloquent,

vibrant, and commanding. She has always been an intuitive performer with spunk
and gusto. When I grilled her about what kind of training delivered up that voice,
she confessed to not having had any.
Well, not quite. An inveterate and captivating conversationalist, Frances
brings several arts to the dance. Her voice is the key to her physicality, primarily
through chant song, a primordially sprung vocalese that transforms lyrics into an
abstract sonic mosaic that elides syntax or any specifiable language. As it gathers
harmonic momentum, it mushrooms into a nameless deep song. “The voice
energizes the resiliency of the dancing body.”
Her staccato cadences of rubato overtones carry multiple emotive
registers—joy, pathos, and mystery—while they capture the aural roots of
different ethnic sources. She modulates and embellishes her transitions with
deliquescent nasal resonances that twang and oscillate, unmistakably Oriental if
not in fact Japanese.
Her singing rides etheric currents whose surging rhythms erupt in
explosive body movements that recall an Ur sprechen, glossolalia, or primeval
patois. The vocables mix the frequencies of phonematic shards coincidental to
any number of unfamiliar or lost tongues.
The vocal spool activated by her breathing condenses and compresses a
steady-state concatenation of kinetically textured transformations that move
rapidly and mercurially through her body, mirroring the mysterious orders of
nature's realms—elementals, sprites, spirits, archetypes, ancestors, and mythic
beings.

A trigger moment illustrating that mastery occurred at the beginning of
our duet, during her delivery of a poetically-laced monologue that evoked the
fiery shamanic ceremonies of yore. In a split-second metamorphosis, she was
forcefully transformed, as paroxysms of chanting initiated fluidly hieratic gestures
and a flurry of fierce dramatic arm and leg movements that carried the dance
through another threshold—to the ancestral whose mahamudras hold the keys to
the mysteries.
* * *
Frances recently turned ninety-one, an event that augurs options for future
generations. For years, I'd been researching material that informs dancers how to
handle time and age—no small matter. And for decades she has been turning age
on its head, subverting its preconceptions, making it an adventure. Younger
dancers are struck by the fact that Frances is one of the few dance artists who has
reinvented her art, her body, and her past, by transforming her lifetime’s
experiences.
At an Avant-Garde Arama performance at PS 122 in November, 1996,
before a largely young, hip East Village crowd, she made being seventy-six a
thrilling challenge as she worked the audience, dancing to hoots, howls, and
whistles, licking her fingers with enticing bravura, flicking her tongue
seductively, staring them down, laughing, slapping her thighs, daring and cajoling
them with chutzpah simpatico to challenge their giddy, in-your-face excitement.
One irrevocable source for her is the mythic and shamanistic—movement
becomes a summoning, or incantation. Dance is ultimately mythical because it

delivers up a disembodied ethos transparent to temporality, connecting it with
spiritual realms. Plato's parable of the cave attempts to penetrate the mysterious
source of our represented world, but perhaps only the Buddhists have answered
the comparable question of how sound and voice originated—they were emitted
from the void behind the vortex of creation.
While in Spain years ago, Frances visited the gypsies in the caves of
Sacramonte, and was enticed by their passionate Flamencan musicians to sing and
dance with them, and exuberantly won over even the most reticent. In her body,
sound, movement, word, and image cohere as an inextricable matrix that informs
and systemically transforms the synergy of artistic process.
She and I have discussed how dancers can create their own mudras,
magical gestures that can effect spiritual transformations and healing. The supple
iconic positions of the fingers activate and intercept hyperdimensional vectors that
release and stimulate the bioenergetic meridians surrounding the body, and can
catalyze its magnetic and fluidic alignments.
Magical, too, is how dance inhabits other realms. Gestures are agents of
passage and metamorphosis. They precede childhood speech and manifest as
prescient signs. When teaching dance composition, I focus on how gestures are
the keys to implement and develop phrasing. Frances and I have enjoyed long
conversations about the importance and compositional role improvisation plays in
the development of dancer and dance.
For Frances, movement embodies ritual ciphers that connect all forms and
practices, evidencing how kinesis transmits an undertext of ephemeral inscriptions

iding on the currents and motor flexions of body impulses. The eye has to be
primed to tune into perceiving their subtle intervals and dialectical
transferences—between the visible and invisible, known and unknown, and self
and other. At one especially memorable performance of Re-Membering, a
matinee on a snowy wintry afternoon presented by The Field at Musical Theater
on Lafayette Street in 1995, Frances was particularly attuned to the mystery of
performance.
As she lay on her side on the floor performing a section, about an injured
one-winged bird she found on the beach and nurtured, she sinuously ambulated
her limbs with a quicksilvery motivity. The movements suggested swimming, but
the image took on an unusual eidetic otherness—the intrauterine passage between
realms and convulsive peristalsis of the birthing channel.
Frances and I continually mull over the complicated phenomenon of the
mimetic, and how it operates while watching how a dance's intricate
configurations unfold—how the virtual projection of images and qualities spring
out of its plasticity and makes it deliver up the numinous. The mimetic is closely
linked with the mnemonic, because memory resides as much in the muscles as in
the brain.
Unlike the literary arts or mime itself, the kinetics of movement exceed
what is simply represented or symbolized as its semblances become fluid, liquid,
and transparent. Movement entrains but surpasses the symbolic because its
changing shapes reorder reality and unreality simultaneously. Dancing rides on
semiotic currents and elicits images with multiple registers and gradients.

From one of Frances’ Performance columns in Craft Horizons: "But don't
be misled by the term. Improvised dances are not usually just sessions of letting it
all hang out. Most have a scaffolding which reflects the choreographer's goals
and preoccupations and is fleshed out in performance by the dancers'
temperaments and skills, combined with the specifics and urgencies of the
performing situation. Methods are as varied as the people probing them..."
For the dancer, the challenge of improvisation is to find ways to
strengthen the connectivity of motor impulses and flexibility that control the
coordination of spatial patterning necessary for interacting seamlessly with other
bodies. For the choreographer, improvisation tests the limits of how the
parameters of technique and composition can be deployed, the cohesion of
structures generated with the radar necessary to engineer and test the qualities and
tensities in performance.
Improvisation supplies a hermetic key too: how to be both inside and
outside the compositional process at the same time. Being a choreographer
involves a curious dialectic of being embodied within the animating structures of
a work, while simultaneously being outside of it to be able to see, conceive, and
steer its development.
* * *
The idea that your walk contains the kinetic gestalt and cipher of your
entire motor repertory is so patently obvious that dancers take it for granted, but
what's taken for granted opens up when investigated and deconstructed. Before
we began one of our work sessions, I reminded Frances about her unique walk,

especially its smooth sharp breezy distinctiveness punctuated by the bob and
bounce of her hair, and I provoked her to use it in a dance. She looked at me with
game bemusement.
So all we did during our free form session was explore structural
possibilities by walking—next to, behind, in front of, and around one another,
sometimes very rapidly, sometimes gesturing while scurrying harriedly, cantering
whimsically or fitfully between continuous and discontinuous synchronizations to
keep up with or intercept one another.
Sometimes we talked or laughed, riding or eliding impulses to gun the
gain of the other's stride. Vocally we kept tripping the kinetic gears—movement,
too, contains tropisms—by tricking the intervals between starting, stopping, and
changing directions, and while also intercepting the delays created by quick
changes. We turned and veered unexpectedly as we realigned the play between
our gazes, gestures, and body facings, surprising one another as if we were on
automatic pilot testing while mirroring the other's responses—almost before they
happened.
Even when we swerved off on tangents, we tried to monitor all the
gradients of our double sets of reflexes to jump-start the uptake of kinetic
continuity without breaking attention or taking time to check ourselves in the
mirror. We used motion itself to gauge micro-intervals and coordinate the subtle
layers of motor flexions contained within our irregular and sometimes fitful
patterns in transit.
* * *

Frances Alenikoff is also an accomplished writer whose dancing depends
on a reciprocal dialoguing with her own and others' bodies to track and trace the
intersections of systemic nuances. Her verbal skills are part of her articulatory
prowess, and hone her choreographic mettle. For years she wrote about and
reviewed dance in Dance News and Craft Horizons, kept extensive journals, and
often incorporated texts and poetic monologues in her multimedia dances.
Her dynamically evocative texts have an inimitable poetic knack for
upbeat, lyrically incandescent non sequiturs laced with snappy plays of rhythm,
hypnotic alliteration, and entendre. She is able to reconfigure and recontextualize
the spoken modules from pieces such as Polyphrenic Bag Lady, Spider Woman,
or Courtesan into new sharply defined dramatic vignettes by re-collaging their
lines.
She was commissioned by the Tribeca Performing Arts Center to perform
a new solo tentatively entitled Sometimes ("Sometimes I think I'm a polyphrenic
bag lady, a collector of shards to fashion mosaics...") in October, 2000. Her
polyphrenia though is the oceanic passion of a hungry collector who embraces a
plurivalency that subsumes a diversity of interests, images, and processes.
The way her body’s somatic impulses burst, break through, and interrupt
one another through movement, voice, and song build synchronistic confluences
that mirror a tacit body language by utilizing the interstices to zap attention and
theatrical continuity. She gathers up impulses as if they’re uniquely attuned
digital sensors to expose intersecting vectors that give her performing physicality
a high-alert readiness and casual charisma.

She dreamed of Demeter as a trespassed field targeted as fair prey
for the stalking...
Swinging between river and light,
she focused the lens to clear her sight.
Spying the crystal in the lucent night,
Flamingo fawn born into dawn.
She dreamed she licked fallow fodder into flaming flowers,
impassioned blooms that blossomed after hours,
transforming snake haunted jungles into bountiful bowers.
She dreamed, she dreamed and dreaming, she dreamed
that the thorns, themselves, sprouted lush flowers.
If she listened quietly she could hear the sonata
of the cerebral cortex, ringing harmonies with the medulla oblongata...
As I mentioned before, Frances is as much an actress as a dancer.
Theatrical smarts inform her every move. Sustained speaking while moving
necessitates a different kind of breathing than dancing, but when both processes
happen simultaneously, it’s a double challenge. Voice production is centered in
the throat and solar plexus to require outward projection; dancing, though,
involves an inward ‘under-breathing’ to secure enough oxygen for rigorously
deploying the muscles in sustained motion.
To speak and dance at the same time is taxing and involves utilizing the
intervals to create an effortless delivery. Because dance is performative, its tacit
dramatic element is challenged from moment-to-moment. Dancers who
understand movement’s theatrical potential have the ability to let kinetic impulses
continue their transit through the spine and into the head, that in turn generate
emotive registers that are reflected throughout the entire instrument.
So watching Frances work over an audience on opening nights,
masterfully concealing the effort and activating voice and body simultaneously, is

always a surprise. She climbs atop a boxed platform one minute, then hits the
floor and continues on her back and side all while moving, speaking or singing—
quite an accomplishment! Even though time impinges on technique, age opens
and fortifies being.
And her poetic narrative, performed in highly distilled discrete sequences,
functions discontinuously in performance. Her modes of mimetic variation
transcend literality and linear development, the way a telephone line vibrates with
several conversations at once. When we congratulate her after the performance,
she reminds us that there will be many more octogenarians like her, but I remind
her, not for a while, and hey, lucky us, we're talking to one now!
* * *
I initially posed the issue of age with Frances after reading Simone de
Beauvoir's Coming of Age (the French title is, forthrightly, Old Age; Sophocles
didn't write Oedipus Rex until he was 89—that got a laugh out of her). De
Beauvoir: "...and it is this old age that makes it clear that everything has to be
reconsidered, recast from the beginning. That is why the whole problem is so
carefully passed over in silence; and that is why this silence has to be shattered."
What is more mysterious than time passed and passing is perceiving its
modes of fleeting inevitability. It resembles the mnemonic recollection of the
world that your parents or grandparents inhabited, remote and hazily recollected
through faded photographs obscured by blurs and watermarks, or like the tinny
recording of an old radio program overlaid with crackling static. Stud Terkels's
similarly titled book, Coming of Age, is also inspiring and mind-blowing, a

collection of older Americans sharing their unique, wide-ranging lifetime
experiences.
Dancers, on the other hand, are trained and programmed for disposability.
Ballet companies often mandate retirement by forty. At that age, modern dancers
are often just hitting their stride. Dance teachers restrict themselves to technique,
not to the larger and longer-ranged physical challenges, and there is little
literature on the subject. How muscles, skeleton, and system change with each
decade, and how to reinforce the body against time's assault, is still a littleexplored
no-man's land.
Frances insists the first secret is: You have to find your own dance. In
2000, Movement Research's Performance Journal focused on the topic of age and
cited the fact that the body begins aging by thirty-five. Thirty-five? HA!
Thrilled, she consented to write something, and we held out for her secrets.
Everyone wants to know how she does it.
As she drafted sections of The Double Helix of Re-Membering, she'd read
me tantalizing excerpts over the phone that zinged with poetic fervor, and
prodded me for feedbacks and suggestions. Her words were lyrical, rhapsodic,
and inspirational. But as the short-fuse deadline approached in the midst of a
busy spring preempted by performances and deadlines, she was forced to abridge
her original intention.
She says she needs three more lives to do all the things she's already
committed to do in this one, so someone else has to tackle the job! We laugh
about the motto pinned over her desk: God put me on earth to accomplish a

certain number of things. Right now I'm so far behind I'll never die. Over which
desk, I ask—New York or East Hampton? Both!
Kenneth King is the author of Writing in Motion: Body—Language—Technology
(Wesleyan University Press, 2003). His essay, War & The Sex Goddess: The Iraq
War Meets Anna Nicole Smith, appeared in the Winter issue of The Rio Grande
Review. Other recent essays have appeared in Hotel Amerika, /nor (New Ohio
Review), and The Gay & Lesbian Review/Worldwide.