Thursday Reports by Marvin Orbach

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Page 6. The. Thursday Report An interview with Iro Tembeck; dancer, choreographer & teacher By Marvin Orbach Iro Tembeck is a Montreal dancer, teacher and choreographer who will be teaching at Loyola next year. She has taught at various universities and professional studios, such as McGill, Concordia, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, and Les Ballets Jazz. She danced with and choreographed for Groupe Nouvelle Aire for a period of five years. She is presently involved with Axis: Dance, a dance umbrella group which she founded in 1977. Tembeck has performed her choreographies across Canada and in the U.S.A. She is one of Montreal's most innovative and exciting choreographers. Marvin Orbach: Initially you were trained as a teacher of classical dance. What made you leave ballet to become a practitioner of modern dance? Iro Tembeck: I was a classical dancer long before I became a classical teacher. I found I was over-emoting in terms of the classical and romantic idiom. When I came to Canada I didn't like the way classical ballet was being taught having come from a Russian ballet background. So I took jazz dancing. In taking jazz I discovered my torso, and the importance the torso had as opposed to the limbs which are mostly used in classical dance. One thing led to another. My first love having been ballet, I went on to jazz and then finally to modern dance which crystallized the best of both techniques — the restraint in classical and the vibrancy of jazz. There seems to be an increasing awareness of modem dance all over Canada. Have Canadians finally accepted modem dace as a distinctive and serious art form ? I really wonder about distinctive and serious, but they have accepted modern dance as being one of the artistic statements. People still tend to think that if you are a modern dancer it’s because you couldn't make it as a ballet dancer. Talented though you may be, there would be more renown for you if you were doing po^nt work in Don Quixote or the Nutcracker. Many theatre students are more interested in performing than they are in reading about their art form. In other words, they are not very libraryoriented. Is this the same with dance students? It's very interesting that you ask this question. This is my own crusade.. I came from an academic background as well as a professional one, and I had to come to terms with my varied interests. And the way I did that was by teaching intellectual subjects in professional studios, and teaching physical things to academic students. This is how I bridged the gap. You founded a new dance group several years ago. What is the raison d'etre of this group? Axis is quite a unique group. It gathers together a nucleus of professional dancers and choreographers who left other dance companies of their own accord because they didn't have enough room to grow. Axis challenges the dancer as a total human being. It tries to demystify dance. What does dance mean for you? Dance is a way of life for me. I've been dancing since I was five, and I really can't conceive of living without dancing. Dance to me is an approach, my way of sharing or partaking of something meaningful with other people. Who are your major influences? As a choreographer I can look back on my pieces and say this was influenced by Graham or this has a definite Wigman expression, or this is romantic and therefore Isadora Duncan, etc. I don't consciously come out and say I will do a dance that is M ary Wigmanish. What would you say to critics who claim that your choreographies are too dramatic and ritualistic and are not in line with what's going on in modern dance today? I think they are right. They are dramatic. They are not plebeian. Unfortunately it's both my strength and my weakness. I think that people, whether they understand them or not, do not remain indifferent to my pieces. They might come and say: "that's enigmatic." But they will not discard them as being trivial. Reviewers have said that your presence on stage is so powerful and pssionate that you overshadow your colleagues. Do you agree with this? I am a very tall person and I'm dark. A blonde Ophelia-like person will have a more sublimated connotation attributed to her movement. My movements are physical and very down-to-earth. Some people thirst for the more sublimated type of dancer who is willowy, wispy, beautifully fragile, and delicate, which I am not. I tried for a long time as a classical dancer to think romantic, when I wasn't it all jelled together when I decided to accept and reveal myself as I was. How much time do you spend rehearsing before you actually mount a choreography for the public? Not too long. It depends how clear my ideas are. I usually know what I'm looking for in terms of blocking, and motivation behind the movement sequences. Sometimes I cannot work alone because I need the manipulation of bodies. What I need is a period of incubation. Is there any cross-pollination of ideas between Canadian and American chore ograp h e rs ? American choreographers are about twenty years ahead of us. They started modern dance around the turn-of-thecentury, and particularly in the nineteen thirties. Modern dance is just about twelve to fourteen years old in Canada. So you can see the discrepancy here. What is the present state of dance criticism in Montreal? The best critics are those who know the material well because they have been on the other side of the fence. Very often this is not the case, not just in Montreal. The critic should feel that he first has to inform the public as to what he is doing, then describe what’s happening, and only thirdly come up with his opinions, being very sure to explain that they are his own opinions and not necessarily those of the public. He should allow the reader to make his own assumptions. What significance does space have for you as a dancer? In dance you try to invade space on many levels — above you, below you, and around you — to give the illusion that you are enormous. Is it true dancers are in better physical shape than most athletes? In certain w ays. It depends which dancer you are talking about. A classical dancer is full of endurance and resiliency, but is unable to jog. The dancer doesn't have the cardiovascular input that the athlete has. On the other hand the athlete doesn't have the long-term endurance the dancer has. The athlete tends to be muscle-bound after an hour and a half of stretch exercises which is what they do in dance. The muscle build-up is Is there any correlation between the tension/relaxation cycle in modem dance, and sexual tension and release? In modern dance very much so. Particularly in Graham's outlook. She found that the seat of movement lay in the pelvis. This goes back to primitive times, when dance was very erotic. In Graham it's pared down, purified and chiselled, but it's still there. In jazz it's obvious, deliberately flagrant. You swing the hips knowing it's sexy, not necessarily sexual or sensual. There's another approach to dance that says that not only is it involved with love, but also self-love, narcissism. M ust good dancers be narcissistic? Not to the point of self-indulgence. There is narcissism, because if you weren't narcissistic, you would't be able to summon enough courage to go up there and show it to the public. That's one level. The other level is: you would not have a love affair with the mirror if you weren't a bit narcissistic. And if you did not look at your reflection you could not correct yourself. So there is an element of narcissism that is basic. If you do not wallow it in, that's fine. If you become self-indulgent. There is no cohesion. Why do modern dancers perform in bare feet? To have more contact with the floor. The floor is really the fourth dimension and has been discovered and thoroughly explored by modern dance. Classical tends to be flighty, sublimated and air-borne. Modern is earth-bound, much more realistic. It gives you better contact, being able to rish being off-centre, off-balance. The element of risk is of utmost importance in modern dance. You seem to be driven to dance. Why? Is it a form of intoxication or escape for you? At some points in my life it has been my safety valve, my release, my method of expression that was the most complete. I do not live for dance, nor do I dance to live. I live through dance. It allows me to come to terms with life and with myself. Marvin Orbach is a reference librarian at the G .P. Vanier Library
f stuof the itions nents T h e T h ursday R eport 5 ■utive $25' s. the m in ■ople yself help “ the ying lishthat bee," te to scan vestill be sing ibers cone, he rsity leeds trary aries only .ome ipec- :k in inier rned this . th e tmtnd- ther inte and le is ains han ecothe ten, amized An interview with Poet Lionel Kearns: Concordia’s Writer-in- Residence Poet Lionel Kearns is this year’s Writer-in-Residence. Marvin Orbach, a Vanier Library reference librarian and a poetry specialist, interviewed Kearns for T he Thursday Report. ‘ West Coast poet Lionel Kearns was educated at the University of British Columbia and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, England. He has been teaching English at Simon Fraser University since 1966. Widely published in literary magazines and anthologies, his work has also been ORBACH: You studied w riting under Earle Birney when you were a student. Did he have a m ajor influence on your poetry? KEARNS:I think so. I also studied Chaucer under Earle Birney. It was one of the best courses that I ever took in my undergraduate years at UBC. And certainly Birney and Chaucer had an influence on my poetry. Briney’s creative w riting workshop that I took was a very open, freewheeling kind of course. W hat I always adm ired in Birney was his flexibility and his openness to new ideas. Perhaps what I learned from him was the idea that poetry is always an experim ent, an opportunity to push at the borders of convention, and to try new things in language. ORBACH: In the early sixties in Vancouver there was a flurry of literary activity centred around the magazine Tish, to which you were one of the original contributors. How did this so-called Tish movement come about? KEARNS: In the late fifties and early sixties there was a kind of literary aw akening all over N orth America. It was the time of the so-called Beat Generation and the San Francisco poetry renaissance. Some of that ferment occurred in Vancouver, and part of it was centred on the cam pus of U.B.C., where Tish originated. It was started by a group of students, George Bowering, Frank Davey, Fred Wall am ong them, who had been active as w riters for several years. It was actually just a little m im eographed poetry sheet that was distributed free. T he editors sent it around the country to people they wanted to read it. It was T ish 's good luck that it occurred at a time in the history'of Canadian literature when there were very few small literary publications (no Canada Council in those days), so it very early gained a readership across the country. Many of its readers responded negatively to the upstart opinions and dogm atic pronouncem ents of the Tish editors, and the argum ents that ensued in the pages of T ish and elsewhere pushed the editors and contributors into sudden literary notoriety which surprised everyone. I had declined to be a Tish editor because I could not agree w ith their ideas about poetry, but I quickly realized w hat a great vehicle Tish translated into other languages. His publications include: P oin tin g (1967); By the L ight of the Silvery M clune (1969); Practicin g up to be H um an (1978); and, Ignoring the Bom b (1982). Kearns is a socially concerned poet who writes about the downtrodden and disadvantaged. Concordia University is indeed fortunate in having Lionel Kearns as its Writer-in-Residence this year. This interview is dedicated to Louis Kearns, born December 1982. was to get one’s poetry before an audience, so I became an early contributor. ORBACH: There have been many critics of the Tish movement. One, Keith R i chardson, has stated that it consisted of a group of Canadian poets, devoted to a school of U.S. poetics, whose aim was to reshape C anadian poetry based on U.S. sensibility and U.S. concerns. How would you answer such a criticism? KEARNS: T he Tish group was very much in sympathy w ith a stream of non-academic w riting that was turning up outside most college literature courses. Before the publication of D onald Allen’s New Am erican Poetry anthology, this material had never been brought together, and was quite difficult to obtain, except in small publications like The Floating Bear, a m im eographed m ag out of New York, or the Evergreen Review, or even Louis Dudek’s Delta that was com ing out of M ontreal. It is true that a lot of th eT ish ites’ attention was on American writers, but R i chardson’s idea that the Tish movement was some kind of anti-C anadian plot is ridiculous. O ur concerns were literary rather than national. In fact, Canadian poets like Souster or Avison or Dudek had been reading Pound and W illiams and Abstractions I have no time no tim e anymore to listen to you In fact I don’t have enough tim e to write my poems , But stop ^here stop and think about what you are saying T im e is not a thing outside of yourself that can be possessed Better then to say you do not have enough o f yourself A nd when yo u ’ve understood tim e you’ll understand love Olson long before Tish appeared on the scene. * I find it a little ironic that the strident attack on Tish by such super-nationalists as Richardson and Matthews has again pushed it into prom inence and given it a place in C anadian literary history that is quite remarkable for a student magazine. ORBACH: You have used the term “Stacked-Verse” to describe your poetry. W ould you elaborate? KEARNS: “Stacked-Verse” was a notational m ethod of puttin g my poems down on the page to preserve the formal rhythm that I thought they had. It was a very eccentric system involving a line runnin g down the page called a “stress axis” , and the line of the poem hung on that line. T he system ajlowed me to preserve the rhythm ic character of the poem as I read it out on various occasions. But it was a very strange thing for the readers to encounter visually, and I quickly learned that people were getting so hung up on the peculiar look of the poem on the page that they couldn’t get through to w hat I was saying. So I very early abandoned that method of laying my poems out. “Stacked-Verse” now remains a kind of literary curiosity. ORBACH: Some of your poems are epigram m atic, while others are prose-like narratives. Have you found that one form suits you better than another? KEARNS: At this point in history, the definition of poetic form is so vague and encom passing that it can include almost anything. A poet is therefore free to choose from an almost infinite variety of possible forms, or to invent totally new forms of literary expression. In this situation one chooses a form that is utterly appropriate for whatever one is saying. ORBACH: W hat in your opinion is a good poem? KEARNS: It’s a poem that is w ritten in such a way as to have a good chance of touching an audience and being m eaningful. A poem has to be available to a potential reader. In my opinion the principle sins of modern lyric poetry are self-indulgent privacy and obscurity. ORBACHfGeorge Bowering has said that you are the only poet he knows who can bring together good hum our and a tough revolutionary sentiment. T h at’s an unusual com bination. Is your hum our natural, or is it contrived and used specifically to help get your message across? KEARNS:i: I think hum our is an essential com ponent of literature, or even of life. I find life itself pretty hum orous, even in a tragic sense. I try to get that into my poems. It’s true that very often I have a message to get across, but at the same time I find it difficult to take myself, or the message, or the world, a hqndrec}» percent seriously. Perhaps my chief weapon in dealing w ith the world is my sense of irony, and perhaps it’s irony that underlies the hum our in my poems. ORBACH: Your signature poem is entitled The Birth o f God. You have said that it is the only perfect poem you have ever written. W ould you explain? KEARNS: I’m very pleased with that poem. It’s the most published poem that I have. As you know it’s made out of a large “zero” -made out of “ones” encom passing a large “one” made out of “zeros”. It’s of course a poster poem, o ra visual poem. It’s a poem in the sense that it’s art made out of language. T h a t’s my definition of literature. T he poem expresses the tension between som ething and nothing. T he large “zero” is the void. T he “one” is the form w ithin the void. “Zero” is death. “O ne” is life. T he interpenetration and interdependence of opposites is an old Vedantic and Buddhist principle. You can also look at the poem from a Freudian point of view, seeing the one as the phallus and the zero as the symbol for the corresponding female organ. W ith the one inside the zero you therefore have the icon of sex. If you think of the one as an individual w ithin the zeroshaped cavity of the womb, then you have the icon of birth. And if you im agine the zero as a coffin containing the individual, you have the icon of death. Sex, birth and death are the three cardinal points on the wheel of existence that we are all pushing uphill. The poem is a kind of m athem atical m andala. It’s perfect in the same way that a sum or an equation is perfect. ORBACH: Have you been influenced in your daily life by Zen Buddhism? KEARNS: At one point in my life I found Zen to be a helpful therapy. It gave me a set See “KEARNS" page 7.
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