07/26/2026
Can brushing your hair, drinking coffee in bed, or simply pausing become choreography? I went down a postmodern dance rabbit hole this week looking for an answer.
After seeing Faye Driscoll’s Weathering at Jacob’s Pillow last week, I began thinking about how choreographers use familiar, even banal, movements to make the body onstage feel recognizably human. A folded hand, a shifted posture, a passing touch: we know these gestures because we perform them ourselves. Driscoll’s earlier work explores this connection too, at times inviting audience members to find or repeat movements themselves.
The use of everyday movement in dance isn’t new. In the 1960s, artists associated with Judson Dance Theater (including Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, and David Gordon) brought walking, sitting, kneeling, and other task-like actions into their work. Movement did not have to be virtuosic or theatrical; an ordinary gesture could become the dance itself.
Another resonant example appears in Pina Bausch’s For the Children of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. In an extraordinarily tender solo performed by Lutz Förster also at Jacob’s Pillow, gestures such as touching the face, folding the hands, and shifting posture become charged with memory and feeling.
Melanie Bilenker’s hair drawings perform a related transformation. In works such as Quiet Time, Coffee in Bed, and Dresser Drawer, she isolates private, easily overlooked moments and reconstructs them one strand at a time. Like choreography, her work removes an ordinary gesture from the flow of daily life, frames it, and gives us time to notice it.
Bilenker adds another layer: the image is made with hair, a physical trace of the body that performed the original action. Dance holds a gesture briefly in motion; Bilenker translates it into a still image - an intimate moment preserved just before it disappears.
Images are all works by Melanie Bilenker (drawings are made of hair) except for the second image, a still from Faye Driscoll's Weathering. Melanie Bilenker Hancock Faye Driscoll Pina Bausch Foundation Jacob's Pillow
