THE LONG DREAM

by Danny Mckaveney

Photo by Aaron Jack, image of Kaylin Horgan

A woman laughed from the back, having overheard as I directed two familiar faces away from the stanchioned-off side seats. I’m not sure what I said was funny, but I accepted her laughter as signal I had spoken something right. 

“And those seats aren’t exactly blocked off,” I said, waving my arm. “The center aisles just have a better view.”

After my having relayed those following remarks, the woman did not laugh. She overheard from the back, from behind, up the broad steps above where the stanchions did not reach. Seated on the side wing, she peeped from where I had just implied to be a terrible view, with her now warding over a dozen rows of quarantined theatre seats in the dark she faced.

Or maybe she wasn’t listening. Maybe that first haha!—(or was it one, individual HA! . . . I do not recall . . . )—maybe that singular ejaculation had nothing to do with my directions, given from my floor-level, back row aisle-seat in the August Wilson Center. She could have received a funny text, guffawed, and all with no idea I was in the room. At this point, I had forgotten my intention to write about the event, The Pillow Project’s 20th Anniversary Performance, The Long Dream. I am uncertain whether my absent-mindedness improved or sedated my powers of observation, but that is irrelevant. I picked up my book again and read, hidden in the theatre as people packed its seats before the show.

. . .

The Pillow Project is a dance company based in Pittsburgh, founded by Jaka Pearl Porter, a self-rooted artist with many labels: dancer, choreographer, producer, director, composer. Porter is a professor of dance at Point Park University and houses much of her company’s heart at The Space Upstairs, Porter’s laboratory located in Point Breeze. Since 2006, The Space Upstairs has functioned as the project’s experimental haven, a creator-home hosting regular “jazz-happenings,” intimate shows which open conversation between music and dance. These events, titled Second Saturdays, have occurred near monthly since 2007, and the Space Upstairs also hosts many of the troop’s workshops and intensives.

I was a regular at Second Saturdays for a while. I owe to it any vocabulary which I possess for dance. The premise of the event is this: a number of trained dancers, hand-picked by Porter, improvise dance to live music which they have never before heard. Often the dancers do not know the order in which they are to perform, and this formlessness achieves irreplicable results.

I am often challenged by tourists, visiting friends, new habitants to the city, challenged to recommend anything worth doing in the city while they travel or settle. Second Saturdays is always the first event to enter my mind as a serious entry into local culture. Because it is large, first of all. The consciousness is not local, but expansive and unfamiliar—yet wholly built of here, in that word’s multiple dimension.

. . .

The sixth of September marked the opening performance of The Long Dream, a weekend-long run to celebrate the twenty-year life of The Pillow Project. The Long Dream was an homage centered in reflection and net-casting, one which reached both into history and future via extended limbs and mind, and an present-oriented intention. The performance opened with “Zzzz,” the original “project off the pillow” which predates the formal inception of the dance company by seven years, being first performed in 1997, choreographed when Porter was a student at twenty.

Eleven dancers . . . what did they do . . . I feel embarrassed to explicate upon a performance like this, as all art, I believe, stands in as the greatest spokesperson for itself. Yet that stance is a cop-out. Yes, it feels to me now near shameful to bottle, to limit the movement of physical bodies into words, and especially when dance was the intention because it exhibits things words cannot, but I have determined myself in need of writing about this dance. I therefore cannot lean on abstractions in avoidance of description, and now posit only that perhaps my shame will enhance something, tend our attention to what is vital from the night, something of meaning housed uniquely well in language.

A word is a good start, and so it was: play. Play—: not often does one plashing of lips and a sole lulling of tongue summarise a work of art so smoothly to my mind. I can think of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, defined just as appropriately by monosyllable, in that case being fun, but I can summon few other examples of such a one-worded intention well executed. But perhaps more words work, too:

“Zzzz”—: Music quiet for the show start . . . dark . . . Porter slips in from the audience side of the room, rushing aisle-wise toward the front for an intimate seat . . . Brahms enters via the monitors . . . light swell, Porter seated audience side, invisible, watching the . . . eleven dancers standing center stage . . . with floating feet, ten dance to prop one high upon tall-arms . . . eleven or so pairs of limbs holding airborne bedding-pillows . . . a tectonic-plated cushion-mattress supports a held waking-figure . . . though soon drops the once supine, this once-slumbering dancer, and then slowly a launch into flitting cross-stage reverie, little swollen fights of pillow-smacks and theft. . . teasing, dreamland flirts, grand sweep of limbs and wild leaping herds of fantasy-beasts (or softly put, fantasy-creatures, beings . . . ) . . . bounding, bounding, swinging and chase . . . running . . . then spirals, then more, and then soon a grand collapse, where the shining make-up—sheen in light revealed as planted corner-side in eyes of some dazed, laying protagonist—the make-up dazzles . . . the man’s end at stage center, up front, bed-positioned on the dance floor, unable to enter sleep . . . lights fall . . . dark . . . fists pound on hardwood floor . . . his restless heavy breath . . .

As accurate a label as play may be, dance is story. I experience that watching the solos and duets at Second Saturdays. The motion becomes archetypical, primal, and especially so with improvisation, where the stencils for moods and roles within dance become fluid as the dancers’ mind, full nervous-systems formed into a receptivity which seeks to stay open, ready to change with the novel sensations of never-heard music—and the pulsing, thinking-feeling room.

. . .

Somewhere near this point in the show, I recalled I had decided to write about the night. I did not worry myself with it, because why bother. It was dark and the applause was breaking, transforming into an ebb as Porter’s voice washed over the hands’ simmer.

She walked onto the stage from her seat in the front row. The lights . . . I will say they were specific the whole night. I cannot recall many exact ways in which stage was brightened, nor could I finish this piece in time were I to describe them, but I can say someone attentively set them, everything designed to accentuate the show’s intention. Here, on the stage, Porter spoke in the dark as warm lily-pads materialized above in frame of the stage, like humming ideas or in simulation of nebulous stars.

And as Porter spoke under this dim light of scattered, filament-bulb like blooms, a drum set slid into view from stage left. A standing bass walked out, too. It was hard for me to cement any of Porter’s words into active recall, because the presentation of the whole was so sensuous and textured, where one could get lost in any singular element of the night’s fabric, even one’s own breath. But I found myself most swallowed as a dark figure attached the stand to the side-turned bass, watching as an amber wrist flipped and wound the large needle-stand into the bottom of the hulking wooden string instrument, posed near perpendicular to the stage as Porter spoke.

And soon, the two, the bass (after uprighting) and the drums (after planting deep), began to play themselves, puppeting two pairs of strange hands into motion, along with a lone pair of legs, dictating limbs and infinity to move as the instruments themselves spoke out their sound by their own will.

. . .

What follows is the most difficult part of this piece so far, trying to figure how to put Porter’s words into words.

It was jazz. As worn out as a phrase like that could be, this is jazz, the phrase is only faded because it is applied over and again in attempt to be as appropriate and precise as I have just managed here. My only regret for this show is that cigarettes were not cascading from the rafters at this point of the production, where every emancipated adult and child would have freely received a rollie and could flip the filterless end from their hand and through the air, plopping it flush upon a fat and extended lower lip . . . and so the subtle, burning stage lights would prove fire and walk off through the air and aisles and politely inquire upon each one of us seated witnesses, would we like a light?, to which all respond telepathically that indeed, we would love a light, please, give your glow to us, before we puffed along sophisticated to Porter’s words.

It is now Monday, the ninth of September. Every instant from the show has become more and more a caricature, having been swirled around my mouth for the last two and a half days, savoured. I also here write too much, and grow mindful of the length of this work in reference to my own, desired timeline to reach a finish.

I would, however, like to be sincere and as accurate as possible without misattributing anything. Porter gave a heartfelt performance that is difficult to convey. She spoke, communicating the history of the project, the history of herself. She articulated her words with body, and annunciated her physical rhythms with the pulse of uttered sense-sound.

When she first began, she was obviously, to my eye, nervous. She entered the stage from her front-most row, speaking her way up, rising into the dark as a silhouette form and with a wavering, uncertain voice; this was before the instruments were pulled out into sight. She quickly found footing. I don’t know what grounded her, the words with which she sought to communicate or the smooth, quiet confidence which she derived as she entered into sturdy-grounded dance, but I’m not sure there is meaning here in separating movement from the spoken word.

But no, it was words which calmed her, for she did not enter dance until, much after her ascent, the percussion had began to hum and the fat-bellied cello resonate a warmth as did the lights above, light which had only just slowly faded on. She found stasis in her spoken thoughts, and it must have been the gentle gravity of her center which pulled the music out into the theatre.

. . .

Fifteen-or-so minutes later, after much said, we sat in the sound of many things having happened. Porter rounded near the end of this second movement, which shared the show title of “The Long Dream,” and announced: When I came here tonight, I didn’t know what I was going to say; I hadn’t planned a single word.

. . .

Without getting too ahead of myself, there was a third movement of this show. It was great. You will have to take my word for it, but one of the first things I learned attending Second Saturdays was dance’s inability to be replicated outside of the moment. Nothing can record the room as-is, a room which is just as much part of the show as any performer. Cameras fail, mostly, even if they elsewhere excel. Maybe its better to say cameras enter in as their own sort of audience, revolutionizing (in a neutral way, both new pros and cons) the nature of performance, turning it into a different, third thing. This is true of everything done Live!, but it remains that dance and improvisation are best felt in the room.

My words here act like a camera. I accept the relevant strengths and limits, one limit being that I radically change the room by writing about it. Yet I would rather respect its integrity.

The show’s done. It has happened. So has The Long Dream Saturday show from the seventh of September 2024, which I missed. It’s good to reflect, there is a place for that, but the most central tenant of what Porter relayed on Friday’s second movement, and the one of the few which I will relay here, is the value of presense.

The show is again done. It was the Pillow Project poking its being into reality for a moment. But that project is ongoing, and has always been through Porter’s life, as she declared. It will continue to go on, perhaps for another twenty years, or more, or more.

Saturday, September 14th 2024, marks the start of the new season Second Saturdays, will be running monthly until next Summer. They will be running on the second Saturday of each month, and you can buy tickets at the door or online.                                                                                                              .

. . .

Before the show, I ran into John Lambert, another co-director to the show and of the Space Upstairs, who asked me where’d I seat myself. I showed up early and had it up to my selection. He informed me that he’d be sitting front row. I said that I can’t indulge in that, as I am (at about six-foot six) too tall.

“I’d block everybody’s view.”

“You must think about that a lot.”

“I do.”

“I,” he continued, “prefer to sit at the front. To see the faces.”

“Turmoil, Romance & Debauchery in D minor” was the third movement, set to first movement of Sibelius’s violin concerto of the same key. At this point of writing it is the eleventh of September, five day’s after the fact, and I forget much of the details of the show. But halfway back in the theatre, sometime during this movement, I recalled John’s declaration of an hour before. I looked at the dancers’ faces. Forgot about the moment, forgot about the story—only faces. Some of these dancers I had seen perform a dozen times before this night. Some of them I did not recognise. Though—yes—faces—: And the face, as one is held by the arms a dozen (how many?) others, as the end of this third movement showed . . . as all the dancers held the one, up, upon strong arms, contained, safe, protected, and the one was allowed to drift off to sleep before the night’s close.

Danny Mckaveney is a writer and poet living in Pittsburgh.