to humanity and to the great beauty and ugliness that convene into humanity. We worked very slowly on the reconstruction of the solo, and it meant going over it and over different aspects of it, but what became a catalyst, really, was the bench: what the bench represented to me and to Martha; it restored these inquiries such as home, where you’re with your family, or it represented the grave, your sons, your husband, your home. It represented the idea of being in battle because there is one point where we crawl and look up at it and it’s as though you are crawling to try to hide in the middle of war. It goes back and forth like spokes on a wheel, emerging from and to, back to the bench. In working with Martha, I really started thinking about how the bench could represent a draw back to that comfort place and it helped things to emerge in the studio in a very different way than if we had not had had the set. This was a constant: the fact that we had a bench and what that might represent. As you saw, Martha did a piece, Lamentation, with the bench. It was a very different use of the bench and a very different kind of bench, which is why the Ernestine Stodelle talks about Lamentation and I mentioned it, too, in that Lamentation had an experimental idea of confining the body in the stretching fabric in order to find a real grasp of physicality and that Deep Song was a breaking of the fabric and explored what the body would then say. For Martha, Lamentation wasn’t just about experimenting with the costume, but also about delving deeply into the self, how she would be able to move physically in a way. It was also very sculptural in the way that the design of the fabric became apparent to us as viewers, and what it expressed to us as well. And then with Deep Song, those counter tensions came out without that resistance to the fabric, so that they were a resistance to space. If you look at the structure of Deep Song, there is a defining element and that is the bench. Going back to that bench, maybe going out, moving on it, on the runs and things like that, and always coming back to that confining element and then breaking away from it. So all these images of being in the trenches and moving into the trench

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