Holley goes lightly

Could you talk about Nearly Ninety, which is what you’re dancing in New York?
Yeah. If I wasn’t told that I was not going to continue with the company, I would know it after Merce finished the dance. [Laughs] Actually, that’s usually the way it happens in the company. That’s how the dancers learn that the trajectory has completed itself. I’ve been on the lookout for that. I was cast in a major reconstruction six months ago, and it was something that I absolutely relished; it was the Second Hand role that Carolyn Brown did. I went back to ballet to get some of the momentum behind the movements they had back then and just had a lovely time performing it. I think that threw me off the trail of Merce’s thinking that he wasn’t going to utilize me anymore.

In the newer piece, I’m involved in certain short, intense sections and then basically my involvement stops. And for me, actually, that process was wonderful because I was seeing the company in a way that I could step back and evaluate it without myself in the mixture. I had a few weeks of that, where I wasn’t seeing that this was an end that was negative—I was seeing, Oh, this is the role I have to play now and maybe it will allow me to open my eyes more, to not just see my own working in the system but to see the system. We don’t get to do that in this company. We all have such difficult tasks that we need to work on with each other and ourselves and to sit in the front even is rarely done if you’re in a piece. It’s almost against our tradition. But I’ve been able to see things from the front a little bit now and it’s been very valuable. I think that performing this piece at BAM and in Madrid is going to be a journey for me, psychologically: of being a spectator, being an appreciator and also feeling privileged that I am involved.

Why? Because you can see so clearly?
Well, just because I know what it has taken each of us. I was thinking this today: For every step we do onstage, we have to do two during the rehearsal day off. Merce never allows us onstage unless we’ve already run the program. So we’re all capable of 200 percent of what the audience sees, and I think if I can get ten steps in a Merce dance, it’s pretty special. [Laughs] And even though, for me, I have so enjoyed these challenges that seem absolutely impossible, I’ve never lost sight of the fact that if you just appear you get to consider yourself having done a job very well.

Would you talk about Loose Time? That’s a part you’re famous for.
Yeah. The minute and 20 seconds that changed my life. [Laughs] It was funny because I saw the film of it for the first time on Mondays with Merce, and it was so difficult to watch that because I had a torn peroneal tendon when that was shot. I just was like, Oh God is that the version that’s out there now? I knew it was too slow and I knew that I couldn’t jump as well as I needed to, but when the film project was going, I felt like if Merce didn’t mind then I didn’t mind. It’s funny because the presenter [in Paris] for the Biennale requested that I do that solo every night and I am having such a blast with it!

Seeing that film actually helped me to reboot. Merce has not given me technical corrections for that solo. And we don’t face the mirror anymore. I haven’t faced the mirror in about seven years, so I literally do not have that mind’s eye that a lot of dancers do from working with a mirror and working with someone who is providing the kind of specific corrections that a lot of dancers get. So when I saw the film, I thought, Okay, I can do this and that, and I’ve enjoyed working on it this time around.

What corrections does Cunningham give you?
This is one of his genius traits if you ask me. He’s able to speak in terms of what exists and not in terms of what does not exist. He rarely will say, “Don’t do this.” And when you’re training in dance, that’s what you hear all the time. He will say, “Do this, or do this,” and when we first come to the studio, we almost want to clarify: “You mean don’t do this and do this instead?” But that kind of conversation just doesn’t even happen. Not at all. Even if you start a sentence like that, it’s a waste of everybody’s time. Because you’re always concentrating on what is it, not what is it not.

For me, on Loose Time, he once told me, “Look up.” And of course I thought I was looking up! I guess I wasn’t. Or it seems to me that the word that comes up most when he is correcting is about clarity. He will ask is, “Is it clear?” It’s almost like a Socratic dialogue and if it’s not clear, you ask a question and he’ll answer it in the affirmative on some level, and if it’s still not clear you ask another question. But I have to say, let’s not confuse this: The time spent on that sort of thing is very limited. And questions are not the name of the game. Activity and doing the dance is 95 percent of our focus. We run the dances and we run sections—we run things. And we’ll spend five or ten minutes on the corrections, if there are any. So much of it is related to time. Merce refers to the clock to kind of be that diagnosis of what’s awry if there is something awry.

Do you like that way of working?
I feel like it makes you excel, hopefully, at self-correction because there is so little conversation about how to do something. It’s just more about what is being done, so as the dancer, if you’re interested in the dynamic or quality of something, you have to research that in your own time. I feel that I have become a very good coach for myself, realizing the limitation of that without the mirror, realizing that at the end of the day I’m exhausted but also realizing that I have to get that information for myself. If I need help, I can ask for it from other dancers.

In an extreme case I will ask Merce about a problem that I haven’t been able to solve, and he will make a recommendation. Any company is an organism that functions together and we all have different opinions and thousands of inclinations, and if we had the opportunity to voice one a day it would be less productive. I think that more often than not doing something solves the problem and when it doesn’t, we learn something that was essential. It wasn’t that we learned what someone feels like doing that day: We learned something that was essential to the choreography that had to be addressed.

Coming from grad school where everything was spoken—there were so many words in the dance studio, from the students and myself or the professors. I feel like we talked so much more than we needed to talk, and I have learned so much just by doing. And even though it can be frustrating and you are used to processing information in that way and you miss it, what it achieves in the company in terms of our physical intelligence with each other is really extraordinary.