Transcripts

MARGARET FARGNOLI: I just fell in love with Meridel's work. And then Meridel saw one particular solo in my repertory. And she fell in love with that. And so we fell in love with each other.

NANCY FUSHAN: Choreographer Margaret Fargnoli.

MARGARET FARGNOLI: I decided at that point that I would really like to do a piece using Meridel's poetry and prose as the musical accompaniment for a dance. And as I got thinking about it, and so on, and so forth, I read everything that she had. And it became very clear to me that the way to do it wasn't just to use the words, but to use Meridel.

NANCY FUSHAN: When Meridel Le Sueur first heard Fargnoli's ideas of having the poet read her own work as an accompaniment to the dance in place of music, Le Sueur had her doubts.

MERIDEL LE SUEUR: Well, I don't think I've ever seen anything with just words and then dance with it, without any other rhythm development. And besides, it could be very sentimental, if you had illustrative movements to words. I didn't like the idea of that. But it's not. It's like the dance is accompanying or a polarity to the words, which I think is wonderful.

NANCY FUSHAN: What the polarity amounts to is dance images, which often relate to Le Sueur's word images, but never concretely describe the writing. For Fargnoli, a way to avoid that temptation to merely illustrate through dance has been to create the dances after selecting just general themes in Le Sueur's writing and not picking up on the poet's every word. In that way, Fargnoli has been able to assemble her own artistic vision of the Midwest experience, just as Meridel Le Sueur has done in her writing.

MARGARET FARGNOLI: The first solo I worked on was for Corn Village, which is a woman and the woman's spirit, in Kansas. And one of the very strong images in the piece, there are two strong images. One is a tremendous love, almost a My Antonia of feeling, of being a young girl in the prairie, and the flowers, and big sky, and so on.

And the other is the anxiety and the sourness of what can happen to a woman who's been there-- and the strange, the duality of living that experience. And that ultimately, you're only saved by your relationship to the land. And it even ends, your life is my life, and your death is mine also. And that's the sanity factor. So the image was that I played with right off the bat was a woman standing very cross-legged and tight and fiddling the top of her shirt.

You've seen in nursing homes, sometimes women are very distractedly gone. And out of that came a movement that released and freed her. And then I built rhythm phrases that had an integrity of their own. Each of these dances could be done without any poetry at all. And they would create their own music.

NANCY FUSHAN: Putting words and movement together in these final days of rehearsal has revealed some wonderful moments when poetry and dance coincide, enriching both art forms. It's an enrichment which both Le Sueur and Fargnoli believe will affect their future work. In fact, the two artists have become advocates for such artistic collaboration.

MERIDEL LE SUEUR: If every writer had to write for a dance, we wouldn't have the stupid, unrhythmical writing that we very often have now. You can't even read it out loud, you'll suffocate. Because there's no place to breathe in it. If they had to write for dancers, it would be quite different. They would have to be rhythmical. They would have to have stops. And they would have to learn to breathe. And it would be quite different.

MARGARET FARGNOLI: To do something like a second position, which a number of people will know what that is. To do that and understand that it means something, to be able to say the word loam to yourself as you do second position, is to give that second position a life it ought to have, instead of it being just a thing.

And unfortunately, the pyrotechnics that the dance has evolved into has lost its roots. Learning to speak, which is, of course, related, as Meridel said, to learning to write, learning to sing, it's all hinged in the magic of your mind and in the imagination, and given anyone's particular gift, will find its outlet.

NANCY FUSHAN: Choreographer Margaret Fargnoli, along with writer Meridel Le Sueur. I'm Nancy Fushan.