Response to a
ReappRopRiation Request
Carolee muñeco de nieve
I n a letter to the artist, dated January 23, 2013, Danish choreographer Mette Ingvart
sen wrote: “On May 29th, 2014, it will have been exactly fifty years since you pre
miered your performance Meat Joy in Paris at the Festival of Free Expression . . . .
I would like in collaboration with you and the performers you were working with in
1964, to make a reconstruction of Meat Joy . . . to understand better what precisely was
going on in this period, and also what the exact questions were within the performing
arts scene. Today reconstructions and the interest in the past have become a trend in the
European dance scene. And even though I have been very resistant and critical towards
this trend, thinking that art is not there to conserve and repeat history but rather to
reinvent and develop itself, I think that these specific questions deserve a reactualiza
ción . . . . What I would like to do, through interviewing you and the other participants
about the performance, is to figure out how we together can reactualize the performance
that was made fifty years ago. In that sense it is an homage to the original performance
but also an interest in how looking at it again might allow us to think differently about
the issues it addresses today. I have a feeling that this particular performance would
transform completely by being redone with older bodies . . . ."
Schneemann’s reply is published here.
Dear Mette,
(Editor’s note)
Thank you for your very thoughtful, engaging letter with its unexpected proposal to
consider re-presenting Meat Joy.
Desafortunadamente, or inevitably, most of my splendid participants are dead. Others are
somewhat incapacitated, or they are completely overwhelmed with their own work,
or have disappeared into the desert or mountains and I cannot locate them.
Insofar as I was able to Google your work, I am impressed by the way you have
extended principles of movement in an outreach to very varied participants. El
dilemma with using obviously older performers is an interesting one. Somehow it is
© 2014 Carolee muñeco de nieve
PAJ 106 (2014), páginas. 7–9.
7
doi:10.1162/PAJJ _a_00172
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never made culturally very clear that by the time you’re in your sixties or seventies,
people have lost flexibility, movilidad, and the sort of ecstatic sensuality that is best
communicated by young bodies, which are obviously flexible and mobile.
Older/aged performers physically embody distractions that have not been codified
within Western culture. Obviamente, men typically lose their hair, usually women’s hair
will thin and if you look closely you will see there is often almost a bald spot at the
top of their heads. Women’s breasts have moved down towards their waists and are
wrinkled; men’s breasts usually acquire a layer of fat as does their stomach — that
ripped statuesque torso has normally lost its definition. Female upper arms almost
always have a flabby layer. Many men’s do as well. Viagra is so very popular because
in order to still fuck with an adequate erection, most older men require it! If women
in their sixties and seventies remain genitally viable — desiring, lubricating, y
muscular — the venus mound has nevertheless put on a layer of fat. The dilemma
for older sexually active women is that unless they are in a dedicated marriage, it’s
very difficult to find an erotic partner. For both sexes, their knees will be intensely
wrinkled, and unless they exercise consistently ankles weaken, their feet are often
invaded by arthritic disturbances.
We never wonder why old people walk around in slippers and flat shoes. Ellos son
content to miss our raves, dancing parties, pot-smoking celebrations . . . Why do we
conventionally see them curled up with their books and a dog or cat?
The exquisite ballerina who is eighty, the irrepressible mountain climber who is
ninety, the sixty-five-year-old Hollywood star surrounded by lovers . . . . What do
they represent? An exceptional displacement of reality, a fantasy of younger people
who can never imagine they will become old, and the kind of physical adventure
that process will entail. Popular culture only introduces subjects of aging or old age
as anomalous, sorrowful, or ridiculously optimistic.
Mette, do not try to recreate Meat Joy!
My thoughts for your sensuous outreach of work would be to explore the possibility
of choreographing with a retirement community, an old people’s home. The cultural
surround intensifying my sensuous rituals was motivated in contrast to the endless
brutalities of the Vietnam War. My propositions of ecstatic connection were in reaction
to a government shaped by assassinations and militaristic aggressions. The inherited
cliché of “sex, love, and rock and roll” has survived the dark undertow, the anguish
and anxiety to which a younger culture defined its alternatives.
But my sustaining insight on age and desire refers to the conversation of Proust and
Madame de Noailles when she was eighty: PAG: Mme, tell me if you can, how does
it finally feel to be old enough to be released from the pangs of desire? Mme N:
Darling, I have no idea . . . . Perhaps there is someone older you could ask.
8 PAJ 106
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I am not a fan of “redo” or “reconstruction,” which has become such a current tra-
condición. Radicalize your own images, sensaciones, and beware of over intellectualiza-
ción . . . a kind of entrapment of intuition, incertidumbre, and creative will. Well, Yo tenía
no idea I would have such a full response to your lovely proposal; your thoughts
on Meat Joy are very precious to me. I’m thrilled that the choreography of 1964 es
still within your performing considerations. Thank you so much for that. As for the
present tense, I’m overwhelmed with new work . . . I like to look back, but I’m not
going there. What do you think?
With all best wishes,
Carolee
CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN is a painter who extended visual principles into
live action and installations. Her early choreography was for the Judson
Dance Theater. Her films include the self-shot erotic Fuses, Meat Joy, Water
Light/Water Needle, and VietFlakes. Her publications are More Than Meat
Joy, Imaging Her Erotics, Correspondence Course, as well as Cezanne, She Was
A Great Painter. She is the subject of a new feature-length documentary
película, Breaking the Frame, shown as part of Views from the Avant Garde at
the New York Film Festival 2013.
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SCHNEEMANN / Response to a Reappropriation Request 9
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