Email Theo		Introduction: Interview with Meg Fry   Meg Fry is one of my nieces. I feel a particular affinity with Meg for, like me once upon a time, she is a practicing artist (she is a cofounder of De Facto Dance in NYC) who must help raise a child as well as work to help earn a living. And, as with my experience with Herbert Brun, she came under the tutelage (I was wont to say 'spell' and of course it was some of that) of the dancer/thinker Richard Bull. Below is a brief interview I conducted with Meg by email. This is followed by a letter I wrote her after a performance she gave with Bull's dance troupe in Boston. (Note the fact that emphasized words in the letter are underlined: this was a hand-written letter. Nowadays, using the computer, I prefer italics.) Ted: With whom did you study at Wesleyan? Was Bull on the faculty there or did he just come in to give workshops? Meg: I didn't study with Richard at Wesleyan. For a long time he ran a graduate program called "Movement Studies" or something like that as part of the Graduate Liberal Studies Program in the summer. His wife Cynthia taught while I was at Wes but I didn't study with her either, though many of my friends and future dance cohorts did. Ted: When did you hook up with him after graduation? Was he in NYC? Meg: Yes. Richard and Cynthia were running their Loft on Warren Street, where they lived and rehearsed and performed. They'd been directing the Richard Bull Dance Theatre out of their loft since the late 70s. I hooked up with him when several of their dancers left at the same time and they were looking for new blood. George Russell, whose dances I'd been in when I first moved to NYC, was a long-time dancer with RBDT and recommended me to Richard. Ted: When did he die? Meg: July 4, 1998. Ted: Can you succinctly say what you learned from him? Meg: I learned the formal principles of artistic composition from him. I learned that, contrary to the philosophical inheritance most of us work with (in the "western world"), freedom and structure are NOT opposites. I enjoyed the fruits of what continuous study with the same group of people can yield -- a "group mind" where improvisation is both spontaneous and organized. Ted: What is the name of the book on him? Meg: DANCES THAT DESCRIBE THEMSELVES: The Improvised Choreography of Richard Bull by Susan Leigh Foster. Ted: Do you divide your creative life as BB ('Before Bull') and AB? Meg: Definitely. I never analyzed movement and other artistic forms before the way I did after I met him -- no one had ever taught me. Ted: When did you help form De Facto? Do you-guys try to base it on his methods? Meg: We formally organized De Facto in 1994. Yes, we explicitly use his techniques of structured, choreographic improvisation in our work. All of our work is improvised, Bull-style; i.e., people don't think it "looks" improvised. (which ties into the statement about "western culture" above.) Letter to Meg 28 October 1995 Saturday afternoon Dear Meg, It's about time this old hootenanny is writing to you! So many letters and cards you've written to me! (he exclaimed in New York Jewish). I used to be better – in fact, I used to be The Best, outwriting everyone under the proverbial table! Ah yes, I nostalgiate for those moments, eagerly anticipated every single evening (even Christmas, for Christ's sake!), when I would go to the Rosebud (whisper the name softly, please!) and smoke and drink and write! The Call of the Muse? No – t'was the Great God Nicotine! But it worked. Now I'm a good boy and don't do those bad vices any more – and so Teddy Boy's letters have fallen off dramatically. Hell, I might start all over again some day! (I might add, however – and this is a giant "however" – that I'd never have come anywhere near finishing that opera, had I not stopped going out nights! I need the piano and time to write music – and the Rosebud, jukebox blaring "Piano Man", just didn't lend itself to that art. Letters, yes; opera, no. You decide!) Well, anyhow (who the hell invented this word?!), here I am at home, writing to you – having my cake and eating it too (no operas lately though), sipping Constant Comment (thus making for commenting constantly) and thinking about the rain sweeping down the canyons of Manhattan and hoping you're out in it and feeling suitably exhilarated, as I was today (tho' not in Manhattan). I certainly knew that I had to write after your performance at Emerson, Meg. Shall I admit it? I went expecting something good, but not extraordinary. Not because of you – one simply doesn't meet the Extraordinary all that often! No – I expected – what? Well, some version of Graham, perhaps – or the "Graham" we think is Graham; something to hang a label on called "Modern Dance". I expected, oh, a bit of exaggerated posturing, no doubt meant to depict some of the Angst of Modern (or is it now Post-Modern?) (and does that have Angst?!) Society. You see, I was (am? Less so now!) ignorant of this field called Dance and of what has been and is being done. I know some of the clichιs, is all. I was not prepared for what I saw. I did not see one ounce of posturing. I saw manifold and subtle and fluid interactions, people moving against and beside and with one another. I saw – shall I say it? – visual music - a series of motives, constantly shifting, yet coming back in some new guise. And, because the things moving were not automatons but people, there was constantly invoked, above and beyond the movements themselves, the spectre of human interactions, the relationship of people to one another. Was there a story, a programme (as they call it in music)? I don't know – I ceased looking for an overt one, and allowed myself to operate between the musical1 and the affective – human levels. It was wonderful, Meg! I was so smitten, that I afterwards joked about Music itself being "a third-rate art" wherein "one moves a couple of fingers – not one's whole body!" Of course I don't really believe this – a composer searches for the affective layers in music, just as you did in dance. But I'm not just speaking metaphorically about your dance being "Music": I think there is a more general definition of this term, involving ideas of motive and counterpoint and The Affective, which can embrace both Dance and Music-as-sound-events. The other half of how I was smitten, Meg, resides in the improvisatory nature of your work. Shall I confess? I envy you! Yes, I, who come from a classical music background, in which the printed note is sacrosanct. This hasn't been true in every era of so-called classical music – composers like Mozart improvised freely in concert (cadenza, e.g.), and the art of spontaneous improvisation on a theme still exists (tenuously?) in the French school of organ playing. But now for all practical (or impractical) purposes, the field of classical music is ossified, petrified. It is the field par excellence of the anal-compulsive Kapellmeister who throws a tantrum if his choir forgets to make a crescendo! I hate this business of The Sacred Text (my opinion is that written words or music should be springboards for imaginative flights by performers – heretical, this!), and I exist in a netherland: a composer who doesn't correct singers when they alter his texts! But I've always envied the jazz musicians their spontaneous interactions, their building a piece anew each night. Once I was in such a group as yours – the so-called New Verbal Workshop at Illinois. We passed sounds around, and the finely-tuned interactions were exhilarating! I tried (with Doro) to form my own group here in Boston – we had a handful of times together – bliss! But then work and the rest intervened, and it died. Yes, Meg, I praise and envy you! Thank you for giving us so much the other night – to see and to think about. It is such moments that we live to behold! Oh – and it was wonderful seeing you too, as part of all that! Love, Theodolphalous Footnote: 1 Not the literal music sound, tho', that was often intriguing; I speak of the 'music' of your contrapuntal movements.