Stonewall: Journey of a man among men

Fairfield choreographer contributes to modern dance program at Aronof

Everybody loves Susan Moser.

 I’ve been writing about her activities at her Tanze Performing Arts Studio in Fairfield for 10 years, and have marveled at her energy and enthusiasm, her unabashed zest for the arts and for life. Her natural joy is contagious; I’ve never met a single person who didn’t say, when her name came up in conversation, “Don’t you just love her?”

 Susan approaches art, especially dance, as a way of understanding, appreciating and celebrating the complicated patterns of life and living. She is bold and daring, fearless about trying something different.

 She currently is involved in the Contemporary Dance Theatre’s “Choreographers Without Companies” annual program. She and other greater Cincinnati dance artists contribute a 15- or 20-minute segment to an evening of modern dance at the Aronoff Center for the Arts.

 In previous years, her segments included unusual elements. One year, she had mothers dancing with their babies to explore and celebrate their maternity. Last year, she had her company dance not to music, but to a reading of the diaries of artist Henri Matisse.

 She liked my stories about her work because, she said, I “got it,” that I not only accurately reported the event, but understood and conveyed the impulses behind it in an insightful way.

 So when she first approached the idea of collaborating on a project, I was eager to participate. She knew I was a musician; perhaps I could play or create some music for her company.

 She called me two months ago to discuss the next “Choreographers Without Companies” program, and I went expecting to discuss musical possibilities.

 She had other ideas. She wanted me to dance.

Definitely not a dancer

Ever since I was a child, my dancing skills have been the subject of great amusement for my friends — and not in a good way.

 I’ve never been comfortable enough with my body to be a good dancer. As a child, I was awkward and skinny, and as an adult I struggle with weight and the self-consciousness that goes along with it. When I try to dance, I stumble and flail. I can keep rhythm playing music, but my legs don’t seem to cooperate when I try to move my body to music. My spine turns as stiff as a broomstick.

 But Susan didn’t seem to care. That’s not what dance is about in her world. There’s a different kind of beauty to movement that goes beyond convention. Having seen my clown show and having heard me perform my songs, she knew that I would not be afraid to enter into this.

 I trust her instincts, so I agreed.

A manly endeavor

Susan wanted to create a dance about being a man.

 She had spent her whole life doing girlish things like theater and dance. Her professional life was concerned with teaching those things, mostly to females.

 But when she had children, she had two sons, so the other side of her life, her home and family, was infused with man and boy things. And she began to discover that it’s tough to be a man in this day and age, that in many ways we (men) have to subvert the impulses and instincts of a thousand generations. In this post-feminist world, our roles and concepts of masculinity have mutated and shifted toward the center.

 Susan wanted a diverse group of men to collaborate with her. There are real dancers involved to do the heavy lifting, including Kevin Bell, the director of the Miami Valley Dance Theatre, and two of her adult students, Johnny Dotson, who also works at Tanze, and Todd Juengling, whom she met while teaching for the Contemporary Dance Theatre. But she also wanted men who weren’t dancers, to provide a different kind of insight. In addition to myself, she recruited actors Dan Britt and Chris Kramer, both familiar faces to local theater audiences. And since some of this was about the rituals and process of becoming a man, she had three boys: Her son Max, a recent Kindergarten graduate; Kevin’s son Martin Roosare, 12, and Clancey Butts, 10, a Tanze student.

 Being a process-oriented artist, Susan had only the barest outline of what she expected this dance to be when I joined the company. She chose the image of a stone wall as central concept for her work, based on a story her husband, attorney Donald Moser, told about building a stone wall with his father, how men bond by creating something through hard physical labor, often in silence.

 And thus we, the dancers, would create something that explored the rituals, trials and tribulations of masculinity. She would choreograph movements we created, to give them structure and shape, our own metaphoric stone wall. I’ve been making theater for 30 years and rehearsals for this were unlike anything I’d ever experienced. Doing plays, we always had a script.

 In these rehearsals, we seemed to talk as much as we danced. Susan would give us cues and starting points and we’d enter into periods of what she calls “authentic movement,” based on our personal histories and she would observe our motion to create a vocabulary of movement with which she wrote the script of our dance. Rehearsals ended with the men sitting in a circle talking about our lives, everything from our childhood memories to our current relationships with women.

The dance

“Stonewall” is performed in three movements.

 “Father Brother Son,” danced to a blues song, explores the relationships between men, especially in regard to generational issues. It is the most story-centered and character-driven section. The middle section, “Progeny,” moves more inward and refers to our heritage — this is where the family photos are revealed — and to our intimate relationships, danced to a piece of avant garde music composed from female sighs and a heartbeat. It is very sensual and reflective, and contains the phrases we created through authentic movement.

 The final section, “Tribe,” is about rituals and rites of passage and is danced to frenetic drumming. It is the most physically demanding of the sections, a nod to our primitive past, evoking campfires and hunting dances, revisiting the ideas of the first section but with exuberance and danger.

A way of self-discovery

I am required to leap, crawl, fall, fight, pray, drum and stand on my head. I have had to become comfortable and intimate with the bodies of other men. We warm up with exercises Susan calls “pushpull,” where we basically wrestle in a noncompetitive way.

 My body has been challenged. Knowing that I would have to perform shirtless, I was determined to drop some extra pounds. I started walking and riding a bike to build some endurance in my legs as well as burn calories.

 Now that I’m facing the end of this journey — this part of it, anyway, that will culminate in this weekend’s performances of “Stonewall” — I feel stronger in many ways, physically, emotionally, intellectually.

 My relationships, I hope, will benefit from the experience. I’ve gained confidence in my body’s capacity for expression and movement.

 I learned new ways of dealing not only with my body, but with my personal landscape, new ways of exploring ideas and issues. As a writer, I’ve always been fascinated by the word and have never had much of a problem expressing myself in that way. But now, I have another way of dealing with my issues and problems: I can dance about it.