“She was filled / with a longing and a hope / by the soft applause of the rain...”
A dance disappears as it is created. But dance after dance after dance leave their marks physically on and in the body of the performer, a living archive of stored body-memory, more accurate and rich than any mode of recording. At the quiet heart of I Have This For You is an 80-year-old dancer, Joanna Noble, who has come out of performing retirement to lend her stunning grace to a radically simple dance score (based on the work of 94-year-old choreographer Anna Halprin). Even as Joanna demonstrates how lithe and athletic an elderly body can be, the simplicity of her movement also shows the immensity of the smallest flick or twist, when executed by muscles that hold 75 years of movement practice. On the pushy, busy margins of I Have This For You, continually trying to name, claim, or frame Joanna, is La Curateuse, a text-and-movement caricature of trendiness and theory in dance and performance (played by creator and choreographer Ara Glenn-Johanson as, in many ways, a parody of herself). La Curateuse looks frantically forward and backward; Joanna remains present. In the amusing Curateuse, the audience will be confronted with the possibilities and limitations of theorizing time in dance; in the rare opportunity to see Joanna in action, audiences will witness – live – the stunning grace of a dancer whose body bears the depth of eight decades of living.
