Jim Self and Friends
Studio Performance
A dancer whose choreography has elements of both Graham’s expressionism and Rainer’s objectivity, Jim Self most resembles those Chicago-area visual artists who use the human body to exhibit metaphors of larger physical or social issues. I am thinking, for example, of Phil Berkman’s work in which props—perhaps broken peanut shells or bits of garbage—are strewn about a performance area and then gradually cleared away. Simultaneously, a personal territory is created and a symbolic form built up which maintains the threat of overcrowding. In White on White, Self and “friends” (Duncan Erley, Donna