40 Years Passing By In (A) “HEARTBEAT”- Christopher Janney

    Trained as an architect and a jazz musician (drummer, percussionist), I have always been interested to combine these two disciplines. Sometimes I try to make architecture more like music as in my large interactive light/sound installations in public buildings (“Harmonic Convergence”- Miami International Airport; “REACH: New York”- MTA 34th St. subway platform.) Other times, I try to make music more like architecture, more physical, more visual (“HeartBeat”; “Sonic Shadow.”)

When we perform “HeartBeat:LMU” on 3.1.25, it will have been 40+ years since I began this exploration. Below, I have written some of the highlights. I have also asked some of the great performers I have worked with over the years to contribute their reflections.

The impetus begins in 1979 when my Father died of a heart attack. He was a loving Dad, a great social dancer and had a serious wit. He used to tell me, “Chances are that problem-solving solution, that light at the end of the tunnel, is an on-rushing locomotive.”

   While I wasn’t consciously thinking creating a piece in his memory, the “light” was there in my mind. At the time, I was a Research Artist at M.I.T.’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies. I had created a number of touring sound installations, including “SoundStair: Rome”- a temporary installation on the Spanish Steps in Rome. (See the architecture energy pulling on me?)

    In 1981, back in Cambridge, MA, I started playing my drums daily in my studio, both for relaxation and deep thinking. It dawned on me that everyone has a “drum” inside their body. Around the same time, I was reading Fritjof Capra’s “Tao of Physics,” a most illuminating exploration between Eastern philosophy and modern physics. In the book he talked about Shiva, the goddess of dance and destruction-

     In classical Indian culture, dance is a demanding physical discipline. Dance prepares      the mind for spiritual leaps: the dancer enters a trance, the dancer and the dance become one, reenacting the union of the individual soul with the transcendent divine.

As if that wasn’t enough to create the inspiration, I then read-

   In Shiva’s upper right hand, he holds a small drum, known as a damaru, with which he beats out the rhythm of his dance. In his upper left hand he holds a small flame, signifying the powers of both destruction and creation.

     There were the drums! To me, this was about the “drum of time;” the fact that everything on the physical plane is moving, vibrating and therefore has its own “drum.”

In a transcendent state, using a metaphorical flame, there is no drum, no time, no physical plane; one has transcended.

With MIT as my resource, I set about to find the engineers to help me build the telemetry device and reveal the heartbeat, the “hidden music,” that is inside our bodies.

Once I had a working prototype of the machine, I had to the find the ”right” dancer.

I always had conceived it as solo dancer with accompanying musicians. I had worked with dancers in Boston and New York on other projects. At the time, none of them struck me as the right performer.

    Around that time, I ran into a childhood friend in New York, Jed Wheeler. It turned out he was now composer Philip Glass’s manager and very much in touch with the New York “downtown” scene. I told him about my heartbeat concept, not thinking that he might have solution; just old friends catching up. Below are his reflections of what happened next….

JED WHEELER- Producer- For nearly five decades, Jedediah Wheeler has been a champion of dance, music, theater, opera, performance, and circus artists who are deemed too avant-garde to be accepted by the performing arts mainstream.

Known as producer of multi-disciplinary works for world-class venues such as BAM’s NEXT Wave festival, his eye for “the new” helped to emancipate New York’s downtown performance scene.

The Beat Goes On-

A notion that becomes an idea that becomes a performance is the stuff of the American avant-garde.  Within each one of us is a rhythm machine.  

     At the heart (excuse me) of a really good idea must be a fearless imagination.  Maybe it is Christopher Janney’s early fascination with John Cage that set him loose from conventional wisdom.  Or might that bravery be rooted in a visual jazz improvisation sensibility?  For a new idea to hold on, it needs to embrace layers of meaning without being self-conscious.  Naivete is at the heart of true inspiration.

     “Heartbeat” is that “are you kidding me” idea that remains a present-day marvel.

You have got to have heart! When Chris contacted me about “Heartbeat”, he asked if I knew of a dancer who combined physical dynamism with performance elegance.  Sticking electrocardiogram nodes on a dancer’s torso and processing a heartbeat in real time through a computer had a natural right to be added to a burgeoning electronic music canon.  But Chris’s inspiration needed a practitioner.

     Chris had heard I was working with Philip Glass and had toured the groundbreaking “Dance” by Glass, Lucinda Childs and Sol Lewitt. But it was my experience with the electronic compositions of Alvin Lucier that gave me positive context for “Heartbeat”.

     In a heartbeat, I recommended the dancer/choreographer Sara Rudner. Known as an inventive artist of her own making, Sara was socked in with the post-moderns Trisha Brown and David Gordon, but relevantly was also the signature muse of the whiplash choreographer Twyla Tharp.  Stamina, speed, physical prowess came effortlessly to her.

Plus, Sara is of a huge heart!

     What pride I take in having introduced Sara and Chris. Two warm hearts with devilish minds that made a performance work for all time answering my benchmark question: would you believe?

Sara came up to my MIT studio a few times and stayed for a few days. We’d work for a few hours, the go swimming in one of the MIT pools, eat lunch and then back in the studio.

I recall the first time I put the heartbeat monitor on her, she stood still, closed her eyes and took a few minutes to absorb what she was experiencing. Then she started to dance. It seemed to me, she had one arm moving in 4/4, her hips in ¾, a knee in 2/4. She was this polyrhythmic machine working out over the steadily pounding sound of her amplified beating heart.  After about 5 minutes, I said, “Wow, That’s’ really great.” She stopped, open her eyes and said, “Look, I’m just warming up.” No more words from me for the rest of the afternoon.

In her own words———–.

SARA RUDNER, dancer/choreographer/teacher; BA: Barnard College, MFA: Bennington College. Director of Dance Sarah Lawrence College. Participant in the development and performance of Twyla Tharp’s modern dance repertory; choreographer of a series of contemporary dance marathons; the Sara Rudner Performance Ensemble. Recipient of Guggenheim Fellowship; NEA grantee; NYS Council on Arts grantee, Dance Magazine award. Collaborator with Wendy Rogers, Dana Reitz, Jennifer Tipton, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Christopher Janney.

HEARTBEAT MEMORIES—

I had the great professional, and personal, fortune to meet Christopher Janney at a turning point of my life courtesy of Jed Wheeler, my then manager at Performing Art Services.  Christopher proposed two projects to me, one that required spatial accuracy to create sound, and the other an improvisational, rhythmic conversation with the beat of my heart, or rather the electrical impulse in my heart.  My intuitive preference for “HeartBeat” defined a direction my dancing would take.  It was 1983.    

     The first time I encountered the apparatus/technology was in a studio at MIT in Cambridge Mass.  Luckily, Christopher was wearing it when I first entered the space, and I could see that he was still alive even though the sound dropped out – if that had happened while I was wearing it, I might have doubted my existence.  Once I was hooked up, and while Christopher was adjusting whatever he had to adjust, I danced to my heart’s content with no aesthetic restriction or purpose – it was heaven.

     I was still working with Twyla Tharp at that time.  She was creating the particularly detailed and fiendishly challenging dance, “Fait Accompli,” that would be my final participation and contribution to her work.  “HeartBeat” was the all-important segue to the world of solo polyrhythmic response to sound/music/words in an improvisational mode that was to become the wellspring of my dancing life.  I count every experience I have had with “HeartBeat” a treasure.  

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Mikhail Nikolayevich Baryshnikov (Russian, born January 27, 1948) is a Latvian and American dancer, choreographer, and actor.[1] He was the preeminent male classical ballet dancer of the 1970s and 1980s. He subsequently became a noted dance director.[2] From 1990 to 2002, Baryshnikov was artistic director of the White Oak Dance Project.

In 2005, he launched the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York.

     Sara and I performed the piece on and off until 1990. Then, we both moved on to other projects. Around 1997, Sara called and said Mikhail Baryshnikov was interested in the piece and was I interested. I replied, ”How about tomorrow?” We three met in a studio at Lincoln Center. I first put the telemetry device on Sara. She danced for a few minutes so he could see and hear what it really looked and sounded like. I then put it on him. He danced for about 5 minutes, stopped, and said, “We cannot show this to Greg Hines. He will steal it.” Many Misha stories, but below is one of his most poignant reflections on the piece——-

    “It’s sort of a duet, or duel, with your mind and your body. It’s a very self-indulgent kind of moment, a moment of vanity. At the same time, there are deep thoughts about your mortality. It’s kind of amazing.”

I always conceived of “HeartBeat” to have dancers and musicians. Like John Coltrane’s relationship to the saxophone or Herbie Hancock’s relationship to the piano, this “heartbeat” technology is my instrument. I have played with so many different performers. But, probably the one musician I have worked with the most is Stan Strickland. I have been known to say, he is “my brother from another mother.”

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STAN STRICKLAND (MA Lesley University- Expressive Arts Therapy) is a singer, saxophonist, flutist, actor having performed extensively throughout the United States, Europe, New Zealand and the former Soviet Union. Collaborators include the Boston Pops, the Village People, Aretha Franklin, Yusef Lateef, Pharoah Sanders among others.  He is an associate professor of voice at Berklee College of Music and executive co-director of Express Yourself, a multi-cultural arts agency that serves mentally ill youth through the Department of Mental Health.

     Christopher Janney is a visionary and a maestro of artistic manifestation. In other words, he makes things happen. Our collaboration expands some thirty odd years and includes many of the highlights of my performance career. I’ve had the joy and honor of performing “Heartbeat” both as a saxophonist, dancer to my own heartbeat and as a singer accompanying other performers.

       A few highlight performances include: Jordan Hall, Boston with beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti; Lincoln Center; The Kennedy Center; Disney Institute ,FL; and Queen Elisabeth Hall, London.  It's been a blast! And we’re still at it!!

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MAYURI———-