it doesn't go without saying (& other gossips)

The feeling that something is being passed on even before it has been passed on.

it doesn't go without saying (& other gossips) is a project by Alix Eynaudi and Elizabeth Ward, together with dancer Ray Scheinecker, that fabulates on the legacy of US postmodern dance — specifically through the work and stories of choreographer and videographer Cathy Weis. Her voice runs throughout the piece in stories, interviews and gossip, where the anecdote becomes a way of sensing l'air du temps: what it held, what it let fall. The piece unfolds as a series of intimate tributes, in the movement, in the sound, the lights, and in the clothing.

The studio never quite leaves the stage. Something ferments in the retelling — slipping between devotion and decoration, between what was practiced and what is performed, between the body that learned and the body that remembers. Not a reconstruction. Not a recovery of something lost. A turbulence, still working.

Each of the three performers carries a different distance from Cathy's work. Elizabeth has been close for three decades — a student, yes, but also someone who has lived with her, helped her move houses, danced for her, conversed with her across a long friendship. Alix came to this history as a European dancer, through the people who carried it across an ocean — learning from those who had learned from Cathy, amongst others — the chain long enough that something is always already being reinterpreted, remade. Ray arrives from a different generation and a different formation entirely — Austrian, urban dance, clownery — and brings with her a resonance with Cathy's work that is less about lineage than about something more oblique, more bodily, harder to name. Three distances. Three intimacies.

Cathy's stories, images, and recordings traveled from New York to Vienna — and it was through that retelling that the piece found its shape: Paul Kotal's sound design and composition, a clothing collection by Isabelle Edi somewhere between the Addams Family and the supposed neutrality of jeans, t-shirt, and sports shoes, and a light design by Lukas Kötz — a set designer, here working with light alone.

We never dance alone.
For Cathy Weis, with love.