Word: chassler
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Dates: during 1976-1976
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...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...
...larger forms of Chassler's work take on qualities similar to its characteristics of movement. Energy is parcelled out into long stretches, each followed by short rests during which the dancer returns to a state of neutral energy, gathering again the threads of the sustaining image. The work is extremely linear, a soliloquy, like the prose poem Chassler recites...
...long lines of Chassler's dance move with a consistently high level of energy, except for the pauses, this intensity never lessens. Although an ending is signaled by a slight falling-off from the high pitch. It's this constant flow of energy which gives Chassler's dance its characteristic quality-- the looseness, the spontaniety, the feel of the everyday almost to the point of banality...
...ESSAY titled "An Analysis of Trio A," Yvonne Rainier, an avant-garde choreographer of the early sixties, points out ways in which recent dance resembles minimalist sculpture, the latter an art "simple, clear, direct, and immediate" in the words of one critic. Rainier almost could be referring specifically to Chassler's language: indeterminate structure decided at the time of performance; neutral performance, the dancer rejecting character and pose; task-like rather than dance-like activity; phrasing in terms of consistent levels of energy. Whether Chassler consciously follows the avant-garde tradition described by Rainier, I don't know...