Backbone > Lucid Dreaming

Dancing in the Dark
By Beth Elaine Wilson

In the days following 9/11, Catskills-based artist Eeo Stubblefield was in California, working with a group of people at Anna Halprin’s Sea Ranch Collective. Halprin has pioneered a unique, healing approach to movement and dance, and has attracted a number of followers (including Stubblefield) who have explored this rich territory both personally and aesthetically in innumerable ways over the years. A collective shudder passed through the group at Halprin’s retreat when the World Trade Center came down, and most of the group assembled there spent the following days working out their fear and their grief using Halprin’s methods. Stubblefield found herself sitting on the beach, methodically scooping a hole in the sand with her hand, taking care not to allow any grains to tumble back in, then rolling a few feet down the beach and repeating the whole process. She was soon joined by others at the ranch, forming a row of people all reproducing this quiet, rhythmic, meditative action.

While the atmosphere at Sea Ranch was very conducive for this improvised activity, Stubblefield found herself criticized for her obsessive need to watch the nonstop television reportage of the disaster. “Why subject yourself to all that?” she was asked. “We don’t want to hear all of that horrible stuff.” And so she found herself huddled up close to the only TV in the place, the sound turned almost all the way down, throwing a cloth shroud over herself and the television so as not to disturb the others. And she could not peel herself away from the spectacle, the incessantly repeated images of planes crashing into the buildings, and their subsequent collapse. For her, it was as necessary as breathing to immerse herself in these images, to feel her way through the darkness and the despair that they captured.

In her recent book Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag makes the argument that simple exposure to graphic photographs of the carnage and destruction wrought by war is not the way to provoke pacifism in the viewer; to the contrary, over-exposure to such images can create a sort of callousness toward their content, invoking exactly the opposite reaction, desensitizing the viewer rather than arousing empathy for the victims of violence.

Yet there is no determining the absolute meaning of a particular image. Photography is a notable case in this respect. Despite the tremendous amount of visual information a photograph can impart, the sheer level of detail it can report in a single moment, I can still have only partial access to its subject unless I have a descriptive caption to tell me when and/or where it was taken, along with the identity of any people in it, and so on. Believing a photograph is perhaps the most frequently committed act of faith in the modern world today.

But perhaps we’ve been thinking about pictures in the wrong way all this time. Instead of thinking of meaning as something inherent in the image—composition x points to content y—maybe the meaning of any given picture is the result of its context, a complex situation, a set of relationships that in and of itself is non-visual. Perhaps the correct point of linguistic comparison for the image is the letter in a word, or the word in a sentence. The letter “f” doesn’t create the meaning of the word “form” all by itself—it’s dependent on the sequence of sounds that follows it as well, which is why “form” is different from “from.” And individual words are then given specific application only within the sentences that contextualize them, adding another layer of potential new meaning.

Fast forward to the recent, still unresolved war on Iraq. Stubblefield found herself once again immersed in images and information that she found difficult to bear, and just as difficult to tear herself away from. She found that the American news media wasn’t presenting the whole story; surfing the Internet at night (after putting her granddaughter to bed), she found accounts of the carnage in Iraq from sources around the world, and began downloading hundreds of gruesome images of civilian casualties that never made it to the American public. She learned that the use of depleted uranium ammunition during the 1991 Gulf War has led to enormous numbers of birth defects in Iraq, and found photographs of the resulting deformed children. Just as she had related in a horrified, visceral way with the devastation of 9/11 through the media, so she connected with the Iraqis under fire by the US military.

She began thinking about how to make art out of this experience. Stubblefield’s process is fundamentally grounded in the body. “I never score a feeling, I only score motion,” she says. Out of these movements and actions, however, inevitably arise many powerful emotions. For her performances, she begins with a rough script of movements and ritualized activity for groups of her volunteer performers. As this issue goes to press, Stubblefield is in the heated final planning stages of a major production that will have taken place near the end of August, her most overtly political work to date. (She is collaborating with freelance journalist and activist Helene Vosters to maintain the political edge.) Haunted by the Iraqi dead and injured, she has organized the two-day performance ritual “These Are Our Deaths,” involving an ensemble of 27 performers, many of whom are flying in from places as far flung as England and California especially for the piece.

At the center of the piece is a process of community building among the participants, who are to create crude dolls out of sticks and grass, covered with a square of silk—on which has been screened one of 300 different graphic images from the Iraq war, drawn from Stubblefield’s dark cache of downloads. The dolls are then to be carried on stretchers from Phoenicia to Woodstock, where the dead will be acknowledged in a wake, the details of which are still being planned. (One of the exasperating—and wonderful—features of Stubblefield’s work is that it is open to change and suggestion up to the 11th hour. She works with an open process that calls for the active input of all of her performers, refining their suggestions to both pare down to and enrich the core of the piece.)

Frustrated by being told repeatedly that the subject matter of this piece was too controversial, with too many negative political repercussions, Stubblefield has spent a tremendous amount of time finding public locations for this event. The very fact that she’s encountered such resistance says much about the very necessity for the work in the first place. Its message—“These Are Our Deaths”—rings with a double-meaning. We all share in the tragedy that is Iraq today; by the same token, these deaths have happened in our (American) name. The gap in meaning between the two is big enough to drive a truck through. Artists like Stubblefield should be commended for opening up this territory, and asking us to think thoughts and work our way through feelings to grow toward a deeper understanding of our identities in this mess.

Stubblefield will be documenting the piece in photographs to be exhibited later—viewing them will not be exactly the same as participating in the event firsthand, but the performance is so organized around striking images (the dolls, the shrouded performers) that the photos should capture a vivid piece of the performance. Placed in context by that live experience, these images will then ask to be understood in that charged, open, emotional context. The issues that both the performance and the resulting images present may be dark and difficult to take, but we shrink away from them only at our own peril in the long run.