Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory
Vol. 3, No. 1 #5 1986

Shadow to Frame, by Wendy Morris,
Dance Theater Workshop, New York City, August 1985.

At the beginning of Wendy Morris’ full-evening work, Shadow to Frame, she sits with the audience, watching seven monitors that span the front of the stage. In a section entitled "The Wee Wendy Bang Bang Show," the monitors blare out a montage of violent comics and television chase scenes from Saturday morning TV for children. Edited in with these scenes are taped fragments of Morris’ dancing—like the television characters, she executes a slow-motion fall, runs toward a wall at full speed, or sharply twists to the side as if being blown away. Then the "live" Morris leaves the audience and enters the frame of the stage. She joins video artist James Byrne at the back of the performing area, behind the monitors. He tapes her live performance relaying the image onto the screens up front. Although the monitors block full view of the performers, they also provide close-ups or alternate perspectives of Morris that otherwise would be unavailable.

Morris and Byrne reveal the videotaped image at the moment of its construction.
Photo by Tom Brazil

On screen we see just a detail of Morris’ hand, then her entire body as she lies on her back upside down, dangling her feet from what seems to be the ceiling. Onstage, she is actually lying on the floor wiggling her legs in the air. The disparity between the live and video performer forces a continual shift of perception between the two. Oddly enough, the video image, often is more compelling. Morris’ theme, stated in the program as a search for the nature of immortality, registers as a question: Which is more alive—the performer in front of us or her media image?

Morris and Byrne reveal the videotaped image at the moment of its construction. By doing so, they foreground the traditional relationship of the voyeuristic male cameraman to his female "subject." As Byrne follows Morris with the camera, he does a dance of his own, fluidly changing levels or abruptly shifting the camera from one side of her body to the other. Considering the previous violent cartoons, he either could be "shooting" her or immortalizing her by putting his perception of her on screen. At one point, Morris dances hanging off his arm, but since Byrne does not include his own body in the frame, the monitors register no hint of the off-screen interaction. Yet because the audience views the entire process, the piece provokes thoughts about what kinds of activities bring us the completed images that we see.

Near the end of the scene, Morris walks around to the front to take a look at the screen. Perhaps she is wondering how her framed image relates to her subjective experience of the event. She returns to her dancing area pointing her finger like a gun, and then launches into a series of karate-style moves. It is hard to tell whether she is commenting on the previous violence or mindlessly appropriating it.

In the second section of the program, "River Sticks," Byrne is not visible. We see only the results of his camerawork, a sequence of tapes that shows Morris in various environments during different seasons. The program notes indicate:

The piece began by videotaping an improvisation in the studio. James told stories of interactions he’s had with death, and Wendy responded by moving and interacting with a set of objects. They continued taping the improvisation over a year in different locations with the same objects. Wendy edited the material together and relearned the improvised movement off the video monitor.

Although the creative process included Byrne’s stories about death, the resultant work focuses entirely on Morris’ movement.

On video, Morris slides her boots through snow, submerges herself in a swiftly flowing river in wintertime, or manipulates objects such as metal bowls, a whisk, several long sticks, or planting tools. Onstage, Morris replicates some of the same actions, balancing with a walking stick on her journey across a set of overturned metal mixing bowls, just as her video double attempts to find footing across a river in rubber boots. On video she thrusts sticks into the snow; onstage she places them ritualistically around her in a semi-circle. The sensitivity of Byrne’s camerawork reveals Morris intently interacting with her environment. Perhaps the fact that Morris edited the sequence adds to the sense that she is the subject rather than the object of these tapes.

The tension between the screen image and the live one is jarring. Again the screen image

is richer, more sensual, more vibrant. Onstage, the objects and movements seem subdued echoes of a living presence that is immortalized on the screen. The live performer is the artifact of the taped sequences, rather than the other way around. At one point Morris huddles onstage like a fearful child, gathering all the objects on her lap—cherished remnants of another existence? In her simultaneous screen image, she has the greater freedom: gazing onto expansive summer fields, she stands in the doorway of a country house.

In the third section, "An Unveiling," another doorway appears, this time created onstage by scrims and shafts of light that silhouette Morris in a luminous rectangular frame. Photographer Dorit Cypis projects a world of image and fantasy onto the scrims, through a sequence of photographic collages that overlay scenes of nature and animals with sexualized images of women from advertising. Nested within this context are family snapshots of Morris as a child, an adolescent, or a budding young dancer. Before the scene began, Cypis was visible setting up the projectors—the illusion created by the photographic world is contradicted by the casual revelation of its sources, grating theatrical "suspension of disbelief" against an awareness of constructed fantasy. Morris walks through the "doorway" into the world behind the scrims as a confrontation—with fantasy, with her own identity, with death. Her body becomes visible only as a shadow.

The shadow of her arm traces over the photo of a dove’s back. She waves her hand across a man’s face and the image changes into a woman. As the male eyes become female, the optical effect of the crossfade is a wink. To the side, a photo shows the small child Wendy, innocently facing the world of make-believe to be initiated. The second unexpected wink of the evening serves as a reminder that this is all a masquerade.Cypis’ fantasy world, like the opening cartoons, is humorous but also terrifying. One of the prominent photos is what at first appears to be a tiger screaming. A later close-up reveals that it is only a cat. The image resonates with Morris’ scream, in a photo that frames the opening and closing of "An Unveiling." This scream seems to be in protest of her threatened selfhood, of her manipulation from tiger to cat, or from powerful human being to a tamed creature cultivated by a world of oppressive images.

Throughout Shadow to Frame, Morris deals with the issues of her own representation. She enters the realm of fantasy, manipulates its imagery, and re-emerges. In the final section of the piece, "Framing the Shadow," she is alone on an empty stage for the first time. She dances meditatively, sensing her internal state more than the space around her. She quietly articulates the joints of her arms or legs to recordings of women speaking about their recoveries from breast cancer. Morris’ response to these women’s encounters with possible death and transformation of their bodies through illness is to turn her attention to her own subjective experience, rather than to the visual form of her body in its external presentation. She seems to be searching for a world of images inside her that when explored might have potential for healing—and perhaps eventually for a new form of representation more expressive of the sensations she finds.

Morris’ journey across the mythological "River Styx"—between mortality and immortality, between constructed fantasy and constructed "reality," and between the human being and her portrayal in art—provokes the questions about the female subject. Is she enlivened or destroyed in her representation? Does the spectator see the woman in action, or the way she is fabricated and immortalized? Is her image the shadow—or the frame—of her aliveness?