David Earle: An Man Behind, Of, and Before His Time

On the occasion of the 2nd printing of David Earle's A Handbook for Ecstatic Survival

His Time

I want to share some thoughts upon the second printing of David Earle’s A Handbook for Ecstatic Survival (source of the quotations below). I’m always honoured to say it was House of ShAkE’s debut publication in 2017.

And I’ve had this title for ages, so I’ glad to have the chance to use it. It was inspired by the way David’s choreography always breathes with fresh life, always feels so direct and relevant, even though it’s not necessarily “the latest thing”.

“I had feared that our sincerity was going to seem out of date”, he writes of an engagement at La Roche d’Hys, an arts centre in an old farmhouse northern Burgundy,

but, again, we were far from the major centres with dance audiences, and the works we took to appease dance-world politics were unnecessary. It was clear that the people who came to see us dance were hungry for content – for feeling. I think generally, in these times, in the maelstrom of meaningless imagery and information, people are starved for significance […]. In Burgundy, we saw cattle farmers my age wiping away tears. (59)

The fact that his medium is dance is not irrelevant to this mix of timeliness and timelessness. As much as the art form may change, it depends entirely on our bodily reality – on our being these physical beings. David seeks to stay true to that reality and its untranslatable gifts. As he says, “I come from a tradition that believes that something of significance can be said through dance, and only through dance” (60).

Modern and Post- and Beyond All That

David capitalizes the word Time in his writing – along with Life and Love. This says that some things are truly more important than others, even sacred. It’s an anachronistic convention meant to resist the demythologized language of our disenchanted modernity, where everything is profane and equal.

His artistic mentors, however, like José Limon and the genre-defining Martha Graham, were Modern Dance – to use the standard dance history designation. And in 1968, he and Peter Randazzo and Patricia Beatty, who had been studying and performing in New York, founded the Toronto Dance Theatre (TDT) – the country’s most iconically Modern company.

From its 19^th-century beginnings, Modernism was entranced by ideas of the anarchic and the archaic, with all the scandalous liberation those suggested. (Baudelaire, with his Flowers of Evil, was an early prophet, and Jean Genet’s paeans to homoerotic criminality, like Our Lady of the Flowers, made him its later saint.) But it was also characterized by a certain loftiness, an affirmation of effort, even elitism. Think of the Existentialists, Joyce’s Ulysses, the poetry of Eliot. In the case of TDT, this spirit expressed itself in the exuberant greatness of its dancers. With their flowing hair and fluid sexualities, they were the enfants terribles of the Canadian dance world, but with their rigorous discipline and artistic range, they were its most distinguished Modern avatars.

David’s choreography is in many ways Classical, too. Not in the balletic sense, whose uniformity Modern Dance rejected. And not because of classic or religious themes, which Modernism always did appropriate for its own purposes. It is, rather, “classical” in its complex yet ultimately harmonious unity of music and movement. This leads to a direct and visceral satisfaction, a profound feeling of resolution, and it’s one reason he reaches such diverse audiences. It is hardly surprising that J.S. Bach is, as David writes, not only his most frequent musical source but “a Love. […] I know no more danceable music … even the darkest texts flow like a river of light in Bach’s hands” (86).  

David never opposed the abstraction, dissonance, or minimalism associated with later artistic movements. He and his cohorts witnessed the most radical 1960s New York experiments, including the rebellious slouchers and pedestrian movers of what was originally called Post-Modern dance (before it became simply postmodern and then got swallowed up by the generically contemporary “Contemporary”). One of my own pivotal experiences was seeing a PBS documentary that included David Gordon’s The Matter, which had people stacking boxes and others just walking across the stage one by one. (I later saw Baryshnikov’s White Oak Company reconstruction, with Mikhail himself stacking the boxes.)

As a young punk in the late 1970s coming from theatre and turned off by much of it, I responded to this genre’s Dada sense of humour, to its light touch with heavy subjects, and to its informality, like using games and task structures to make dances. Anyone still doing “old-fashioned Modern Dance” was automatically my aesthetic opponent. Myth? Done with that. Passion? Overrated. Beauty? Seen it.

I’m much older now. My own need for that kind of work was satisfied, and artistically its time is over. Alienation and irony, coolness and distance had their moment. Even with Modernism’s transvaluation of ugliness and the great equalization project of postmodernity, we remain drawn to the beauty of form, moved by other bodies in motion, and touched by the emotional pulse of music. And without music, for David, there is no dance. (Not dismissing its artistic merits, David simply doesn’t consider a lot of the work that got me into dance, dance.) He writes:

Moving with the music – the surrender to the repeated division of Time … That is what “dance” will be tonight in every club around the world – and certainly is how it began. It has been said that walking in time to your heartbeat is the first dance. Most every parent I meet, knowing my association with the art form, tells me immediately that their children – and, note this, most often their sons – can’t be stopped from dancing if any music is playing at home. Even at 78, I feel it as a force that demands control of me. (56)

Twelve Years, Twelve Hours

In 2006, I was to work on a team with David as part of Bill Coleman’s massive, site-specific, community-based Grasslands: Where Heaven Meets Earth, in rural Saskatchewan. David and I had hit it off the first time we met, around 1994 when Bill was a TDT company member, but we’d never managed to reconnect. Whenever we saw each other over the next twelve years, it was “Yes, we must go for a beer again!” I was looking forward to having some time with him at last.

This was around the same time as I’d been hired to design my first book, which by pure chance was Michele Green’s David Earle: A Choreographic Biography, a catalogue of his entire oeuvre until that point. In preparation for both, I thought I’d better familiarize myself more with his work. My youthful prejudice had long faded, but I’d still only seen a few of his pieces. (Our initial connection had really just been personal.)

I had an old VHS copy of a film by Mose Mossanen of David’s Sacra Conversazione. The production is problematic, as I later learned, because it includes visual elements the choreographer never approved. And not only was it a poor-quality recording of a TV program in the first place, the tape was old and Mozart’s sublime Requiem, which I’d never heard before, kept speeding up and slowly down. It was awful. But even through all that, it struck me as different than any dance I’d seen before.

Maybe I was open to it by 2006, but Sacra Conversazione achieved something I never expected or even sought, and I was in awe: the physical realization of music – as if seeing music as dance. I later read David’s words, which perfectly capture the experience: “[…] I believe that by adding a visual counterpart I can enable the audience to hear the music for the first time as if they were hearing it a third time. That is: to actually hear it” (58).

A characteristic David twist: that it takes hearing music “a third time […] to actually hear it”. This feels right to me. It articulates a small and surprising truth. And as a goal, it allows him as choreographer to inhabit the music, not unlike the way a dancer inhabits the choreographer’s movements: they make them their own. David makes the music his own by appropriating it for his own expression, but somehow thereby allows it to shine all the more.

This is precisely opposite to the direction Modern Dance took with Merce Cunningham and composer John Cage, which lead to the Post-Modern: the complete separation of sound and movement. They famously often didn’t combine their contributions until the performance itself, incorporating an element of pure chance (which they also used in the creation of their works). David Earle is resolutely not Post-Modern, in that anti-Modern sense. But he is postmodern in its most constructive sense as openness to anything: unfettered by dogma, free to draw from all of history, unwilling to stereotype “high” and “low” art or their respective audiences.

I call the present The Rush To Nowhere. But we do not need to settle for the meagre offerings of the visible Now – three thousand years of human expression is at our fingertips. (36)

The Grasslands event took a week to prepare on site, and David and I barely had a moment together. He and Michael English would often retire before the socializing started, and when we were working, there was no time to catch up. Was this the start of another twelve-year distance?

But as return arrangements were being made, I noticed we were to travel from Val Marie to Regina in different vehicles, and I jumped on the chance to switch. We ended up spending nearly twelve hours (long drives, long waits) getting back Toronto, and we didn’t stop talking. We still haven’t, despite the recurring distances between us. The closeness is sure.

Love, Eros, Nakedness

These words must be mentioned here. I couldn’t write about David without them. Even “A Handbook For Ecstatic Survival” was a title he repurposed from an old journal entry, originally intended for an “erotic novel”. For David, the notion of ecstasy transcends the erotic, but he certainly embraces it. In another characteristic twist, he recounts how, “In Japan, I saw a poster inside a temple that said sex without Love is a sin – so I’ve tried to Love everyone with whom I’ve shared myself” (44). Yet he also refuses to disconnect Eros from the spiritual, body from soul: “If the Cross was extended in both directions, it would meet on the other side of a sphere. I’ve always imagined a sculpture showing that – with an ecstatic woman and an ecstatic man at each crossing” (21). (Does such a sculpture exist anywhere? How could it not?)

His statements never quite go where you think they will – and this agile footwork is what keeps his dance alive and his writing vital. Let me share a longer quote. It again takes a trip through different registers and ends up somewhere much deeper than expected, from a little sex joke to the gritty reality of being a dancer to the truth of art itself.

I had also considered an autobiography entitled I’ve Been Naked in Public Washrooms All My Life – sadly, a fact … as there are no men’s change rooms in most of the studios I’ve visited to teach. “The men’s washroom is just down the hall” – and so, within the gaze of men in suits and ties, I stand as God made me. It seems futile to even say, “I’m a dancer.” It would frighten them away, I’m sure. I’m sharing this with you because I could easily broaden the title to I’ve Been Naked in Public All My Life. The artist is always exposed, the psyche laid bare for all to see. (9)

The goal of Eros is nothing less than Love, and nakedness is required.

Life Cycles

Have you read the lives of artists? Are you aware of the price of having to mine for truth? The hazard? The labour for the small glint of something of value? (97)

Our era affords us many easy ways out. We can barely imagine the heights of eros and love anymore because, like everything else they’ve been downgraded to lower-case. And the nakedness required by the work of truth-mining is too often degraded into self-exposure, a parade of the ego in imperious finery. Yet David upholds the notion that only great efforts lead to great rewards: “The ones who will amount to something will be grateful to have demands placed on them” (65).

He shared this combination of a passionate appetite for life and exacting creative standards with Peter Randazzo, one of the co-founders of TDT, who died on February 2 of this year and to whom the second edition of the Handbook is dedicated. (Patricia Beatty passed in 2020.) I had the privilege to spend time with Peter when he travelled with David, Michael and I in Europe a few years ago, including a visit with my aunt in Freiburg. It was quite the ride! And he was quite the presence. I’m touched that he was so supportive of my own efforts. (Our mutual friend, Gilles Goyette, who’d been living with me these last four years, died on February 25. He, too, knew the hazard and the labour David speaks of – see his work at House of ShAkE. Although we didn’t use many words, David and I kept in constant contact while facing these parallel losses.)

The integration of passion and technique is also integral to David’s teaching. I tried to take part in a class once, for about 15 minutes, but it started out past anywhere I’d reached in my few years of training. (He sometimes works with non-dancers, too – I should have joined that group.) But I’ve watched many times and witnessed “the difference in the people from when they entered the studio, the light in their faces when they leave” (70). The younger as well as the more mature dancers are challenged not just by the demands on the body but by the range of feeling David’s approach elicits. “In my class, I offer movement poems (no exercises)”, he writes (73).

The class is structured like a Life cycle, beginning on the ground in an embryonic position, breathing consciously, gradually opening the instrument. Then standing work. The final third of the class is moving through space. (70)

How quaint this might seem to a jaded, post-narrative mentality, how predictably human. But take a human body through it, under the loving yet scrupulous gaze of a master pedagogue, and something changes. Martha Graham in particular, subject of many of the book’s anecdotes and reflections, taught David that these depths can be reached through disciplined movement practice rooted in the body’s essential nature: the pulse of life, contraction and expansion, the breath, the spine and solar plexus, dropping into the ground and reaching toward the sky. This forms a foundation he has consistently honoured, wherever his further explorations have gone.

When I was teaching the second time at NYU, I was called up on the carpet for not teaching pure Graham technique. My response ended my association there. I said, “I’m teaching dance. I’m teaching everything I’ve ever learned that makes the body stronger, more open, and more true – and I don’t know why the rest of you aren’t doing the same. (72)

Our Time

It’s not coincidental that David loves handwriting, “a token and affirmation of individuality and character” (24). The anonymity and conformity of modern society were frequent targets of Modernist criticism, and against those dangers – now much further advanced – he continues to protest. For David, “Character is everything – there is nothing else to distinguish one Life from another” (98). Character is what gets forged through the labour and the hazard.

And like dance, handwriting affirms the existence of the human body. Love of handwriting was something David shared with our late friend Gilles, and that gave me a concrete image for a unifying House of ShAkE theme: the relation of our physical existence with the meta-physical, of the creaturely with the humanly meaningful. (Along with Gilles’ Super Vox, a 160-page poem written in the tiniest script, Bill Coleman’s book on dance and boxing, in development, is a clear example.)

We are not yet post-human. Nevertheless, as the poet Charles Olson wrote in 1965, ours is a time “when forces as large as centuries battle”. (FYI: Olson was the first to consistently use the term “post-modern”.) So, are we ancient or modern or something else? Perhaps post-contemporary, as David half-jokes? Surely “after now” would just mean we were getting ahead of ourselves.

David can capture the enduring sense of things in very few words, so his notion of “ecstatic survival” resonates with an ageless sort of wisdom. About emotional realities: “Acts of surrender – how they refresh the soul!” (55) About the cost of dedication: “I try to tell the truth, because nothing else seems as interesting. For many, it’s too interesting” (28). And there are little slaps of illumination, reminding us not to take things for granted: “You would have to be determined not to be in awe of existing” (30).

Current issues, too, get a twist: “Every gender is a drag” (50). To me, this wraps it up so neatly. It recognizes genuine diversity, admits the creative artifice of it all, and pokes fun at the self-limiting superficiality of the very category. And our collective life today? “When the citizens dislike each other before they’ve even met, we can be certain that their culture has failed them” (92). Sadly, it seems we have (been) failed.

In another disquieting aphorism, he writes: “Theodor Adorno said that there can be no more poetry after Auschwitz, but Paul Celan proved him wrong. The tragedy may be that there is no one to hear it” (95). I think that’s one of the most disturbingly accurate assessments of our time. Can our old ears still work? Can our old bodies still feel?

Clearly, I myself believe it’s a good thing to be behind, of, and before one’s time. It frees us not to worry about fitting in. To what should one conform? The alternative, instead, is to honour the irregularities of our character, to risk writing in one’s own hand.

Further, to be merely of one’s time is not to be truly present, because now is when the past lives itself out and the future writes itself into being.

I feel that immortality is our responsibility. (22)

CODA: David has an Instagram identity, Ecstatic Survivalists. The determination expressed in that little reworking of the phrase! It’s both modest (there’s nothing more pragmatic than survival) and extravagant (perhaps ecstasy is necessary to life, after all).