Sarah Chase, Human Kinetic Calculator

I’ve always thought that dance could make itself more useful. You know, like apple peelers and mechanical engineering. Most choreography these days is a lot of arms and legs waving around for nothing. That’s why they put dancers on empty stages: so they won’t get in anybody’s way. Imagine my delight, then, seeing Sarah Chase at the Dance Centre’s recent Dance In Vancouver festival. Chase has developed a system by which she can pluck your Chinese astrological animal and corresponding element from the 60-year zodiac cycle by dancing from 1936 or so, up to your birth year. Finally, dance that does something! Chase generates her choreographic equations through a type of exercise known as cross patterning. Cross patterning refers to movement that intentionally challenges both hemispheres of the brain simultaneously. You are likely familiar with the difficulty of patting your head at the same time as rubbing your belly. This is like that, times ten. In the case of the Chinese zodiac calculator, each of the 12 animals is represented by a gesture on Chase’s left arm, and each of the five elements is a position on her right. Then she does them both, at the same time. Since 12×5 = 60, no animal will be paired with the same element for 60 years–or 60 counts in Chase’s choreography. Chase’s Dance In Vancouver performance–her first on a Vancouver stage since moving back to B.C. after 22 years in Toronto––was an excerpt from a work in progress entitled Number Theory, to be performed with two other women at next year’s Montreal Danse. Chase now lives on Hornby Island, and attributes her recent obsession with math, in part, to the natural pull of her new surroundings. “I started by renting studio space, renting the community hall, and then my desire to rent the hall just kind of petered away.” She began to dance on the Island’s abundant stretches of beach. “I thought, wouldn’t it be great if you could calculate the tides choreographically? Which you could, if you haven’t figured that out. But I thought, ‘Well I better do something a little simpler first.’ That’s when I started doing the Chinese astrology calculator. Once I could do that, I thought, ‘What’s the next step of this?’ The latest thing I’m doing is an 11 on one side, a 13 on the other, and a seven in the legs. 11×13 x 7 is 1001. It takes an hour to go through the whole variation.” Practicing on the beach, Chase says, “I’d be concentrating so hard and I’d think, ‘Oh it doesn’t matter, anyone who walks by will think I’m doing Tai Chi,’ and that’s what happens, nobody looks at me. Until one day I was in the middle of doing it and I finally look up and there is this old Chinese man looking at me going, ‘What the hell are you doing?’” Her movements may not be as slow as Tai Chi, but they have a similar methodical quality. As Chase puts it, “You need to have a really relaxed way of keeping focused with moving, and at the same time keeping your intent with speaking.” That’s right, speaking. On top of the kinetic brain tease, Chase tells stories. In fact, it was her desire to speak while dancing that got her into cross patterning in the first place. “I’m always really interested in [people’s] internal lives, and their biographies, their life stories,” Chase says. “I started to embark on this whole solo career where I was talking and moving at the same time. I was touring all over Europe at very high stakes festivals, and I realized that my traditional dance warmup wasn’t actually preparing me for the coordination I needed. I started to do some basic cross patterning things I’d been taught over the years, and I found it really helpful. I’d do better.” “There’s so much that hasn’t been researched and explored in terms of motion and how that affects the brain, and how that effects memory and emotion,” says Chase. “When I’m doing a workshop I’ll get someone to set up a movement loop and then I’ll say, ‘Okay now start speaking through that loop.’ Often they’ll say, ‘Oh no I can’t.’ But they can, and when they start to speak through it, all this amazing stuff comes up. They become suddenly eloquent when they weren’t eloquent before.” On stage, Chase’s layering of movement, story and even singing, suggest a kind of folk mnemonic practice, like the rhyme schemes built into epic poems. And indeed, Chase avoids scripting her performances. “I know the stories I want to tell, but I try to speak them in my own words in the moment on stage.” Memory and rhythm work on the audience as well as the performer: “People are really talented narrative watchers,” says Chase. “When you’re talking about a doorway and you’re making a certain movement, a person watching will instantly think that that’s a doorway. Maybe a couple minutes later you’ll repeat the same movement, but speaking about a waterfall, and all of a sudden the person will completely identify that movement with a waterfall. [The movement] can become layered with emotional context [through the narrative], so that by the end of the performance you can be doing the most simple movement but for the audience, and for the mover, it’s so loaded.” When so many of the traditional functions of memory are administered by technologies—everything from the phone numbers in our cell phones to the photographs in our cameras—and frankly, with the ubiquity of the calculator, why tell simple stories about people, or do math with your body? “I think to have the possibility to slow people down and to simplify—when someone gives me that experience I feel so much clearer. I feel it to be a bit of a gift. I think the theatre is becoming this really—in some ways it’s a magical thing going on in this day and age, because it’s the one place now where you’re expected to turn off your cell phone, and you turn off the lights, and you’re all together doing this focused concentrated thing together for a period of time.” So perhaps this is why we put dancers alone on the stage: not so they’ll stay out of the way of our busy productivity, but so they’ll clear a little space for us. As Chase says, “I just think so much intense pleasure can come from that.”