Word: chassler
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Chassler's style speaks strongly about the dancer relying only on his or her self. She rejects the theatrical possibilities of costuming, lighting and decor, paring down her dance to essential movement and, even further, to the performer's highly-disciplined concentration. Chassler often works with eyes half-closed, sunk deep inside herself, focused on word imagery, the wellspring of her dance...
Here is a radically subjective art, yet through this back door of self-improvement Chassler breaks through to objectivity. She has a gift for turning her insides out--for being so inside herself that she's not herself at all. The thrill of her dance is its transparency...
Lusterman and Norman don't possess Chassler's presence, her power to absorb an audience with each slight twitter. The two perform well in the idiom of Chassler's movement and occasionally hit upon the nexus of subjectivity/objectivity. Yet neither command Chassler's magic...
...Chassler is looking, I sense, for ways to initiate other performers into her vision, so that she can move beyond the solo, the genre she's mastered, and explore the more complex dynamics of groups. She performed for the first time in Boston last spring with two members of her earlier troupe, Tropical Fruit Company. Last fall she gave a solo concert, and now she's trying again, "calling out," seeking to expand her range...
Rather than rely on technical virtuosity, Chassler evolves her own discipline, the technique of making one's self open to one's self. She trains the dancer's body to put itself into a state of attentive neutrality, ready to receive, transform and make concrete mental images--"calling out" or "the body falls up," Chassler's working concept last fall. Like the surrealist's pen taking down words from a will other than the poet's conscious self, the body becomes a perfect channel. She becomes the words themselves...