A Kool Tribute to a Dance Partner
By Timothy Small
(07/28/2009) When Robert Wilson, the avant-garde theater
 Timothy Small
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artist, learned that a longtime friend and collaborator, Suzushi Hanayagi, the Japanese choreographer and dancer, had fallen into poor health, he wanted to pay homage to her with a performance in her honor.
Mr. Wilson, who collaborated with Ms. Hanayagi on over 15 productions, starting with “The Civil Wars: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down,” an opera, in 1984, had recently lost touch with the dancer, who influenced his ideas about movement, language, and gesture on stage.
He traveled to Osaka, Japan, where he found Ms. Hanayagi living in a special-care facility and suffering from Alzheimer’s. Confined mostly to a wheelchair, she could barely speak or move.
But on his final day of visiting her, Mr. Wilson stuck out his hand and started to gesture. Ms. Hanayagi started to mimic his gestures, and soon the two were working together. When it was time for Mr. Wilson to go, Ms. Hanayagi leaned in and said, “I am dancing in my mind.”
The moment was captured on video by Richard Rutkowski, a cinematographer whom Mr. Wilson had invited on his journey to create portraits of Ms. Hanayagi. It is symbolic not only of their collaboration over the years, but of Mr. Wilson’s newest work, “Kool — Dancing in My Mind.”
“Bob knew that the basic structure of the stage work would be the imagery of her face, hands, and feet,” Mr. Rutkowski said on Saturday in East Hampton, where he grew up. “But we didn’t know what physical or mental condition she would be in and how much communication or ‘dancing’ would happen.”
“Kool — Dancing in My Mind” premiered in April at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City and will be performed at Guild Hall in East Hampton on Aug. 8 and Aug. 9. In it, dancers perform in front of Mr. Rutkowski’s portraits of Ms. Hanayagi, which are projected onto a large screen.
“We use the back wall of the stage both as a recipient of lighting, because Bob is very famous for his beautiful lighting and the washes of color, and also sometimes no color, on the back wall, and sometimes that lighting is dimmed, or eliminated, and it becomes a screen of projection,” Mr. Rutkowski said. “It’s structured in a very architectural way.”
Overseen by Mr. Wilson, the dances are choreographed by Carla Blank and Jonah Bokaer. They honor the movements and ideas of Ms. Hanayagi, and in some cases are actual recreations of her work. In addition to Mr. Rutkowski’s footage, archival material of Ms. Hanayagi, much of which is taken from Howard Brookner’s 1987 film, “Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars,” is also used during the performance.
The dances and projections are “combined in such a way that by the end of the evening, you feel like the spirit of Suzushi and the spirit of her training has come across through these younger performers,” Mr. Rutkowski said.
Out of the performance and the process of making it, Mr. Rutkowski (who shot the original Voom HD Networks high-definition portraits at the stages in East Hampton near the airport, and went on to shoot several more in Los Angeles, including the infamous shot of Brad Pitt that made the cover of Vanity Fair) was able to put together a half-hour documentary for French television.
The piece is similar in its “abstractions and departures from traditional narrative” to an earlier film, “Sunshine Superman,” Mr. Rutkowski made about Christopher Knowles, a withdrawn, autistic child who grew to become a prominent artist and performer while working with Mr. Wilson in the ’70s and ’80s.
“Knowing that I had made that film about Chris, which he had liked very much, Bob knew that I was capable of working in a way that would bring out something interesting about Suzushi, and also that I had the objectivity to sit back and look at Bob and Suzushi’s relationship from an outside point of view,” Mr. Rutkowski said.
Mr. Rutkowski, who has a house in Water Mill but lives in New York City and Los Angeles, has worked as director of photography or second-unit cameraman on movies such as “Homework,” which won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2004 Slamdance Film Festival, Roman Polanski’s “The Ghost,” Wes Craven’s “25-8,” Darren Aronofsky’s “Requiem for a Dream,” and Joel Schumacher’s “The Number 23.” He also did special-effect shots and inserts for “Iron Man” and “Iron Man II.”
Mr. Rutkowski graduated from East Hampton High School in 1984. He then attended Harvard University, where he started making 16-millimeter movies. He worked with a documentary filmmaker, Ross McElwee, who
 Richard Rutkowski
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was very open to the types of filmmaking that were not his own, Mr. Rutkowski said, and let him do what he wanted.
While he was at Harvard, Mr. Rutkowski also met Mr. Wilson, “at first as an actor,” he said. “And then, during a rehearsal, he asked me if I would be able to help him with an architectural project.”
Mr. Rutkowski started working with Mr. Wilson at nights trying to make an architectural model for an art installation. Nights turned into summers, and summers turned into vacations, and soon he was working as Mr. Wilson’s full-time assistant. “I was just in his world for about five years,” Mr. Rutkowski said.
One of the jobs Mr. Wilson asked his assistant to do was to find him a small place where he could do some drawing at night and have some people over for dinner. “Just a modest house he wanted,” Mr. Rutkowski recalled. “It was the late 1980s and there was a bit of a real estate boom going on, and every house that we showed him didn’t seem to be the right house.”
Mr. Rutkowski knew of a laboratory in Water Mill that had been a Western Union research laboratory in the 1940s and 1950s, and had apparently been a center for spies, according to Mr. Rutkowski, “a center for the O.S.S., the precursor to the C.I.A.”
“The center had fallen into disrepair and had become sort of a derelict haunted house of the neighborhood,” he said. It was 500 yards from Mr. Rutkowski’s house, and in 1992 Mr. Wilson turned it into the Watermill Center.
Returning to the John Drew Theater is a unique homecoming for Mr. Rutkowski. It is the first theater he performed in, and he has not seen it since before it was restored.
Mr. Rutkowski said he was proud to work on “Kool,” as he remembered Ms. Hanayagi from when she would visit Mr. Wilson in Cambridge, Mass. “I liked her very much,” he said. “She was one of Bob’s collaborators who you could talk to and you could have a long conversation with about the arts and her way of working. She was always very kind and interesting.”
“What I think is most interesting in it is that it’s coming very straight from Bob Wilson’s heart,” he said. “It’s very much from his impulse to do something in tribute to Suzushi, who he greatly admired.”
If there is a particular accomplishment in the film, “it’s that that comes across without seeming too sentimental, and you understand that he cared a great deal for her, but what you also come to understand is why,” Mr. Rutkowski said.
“You can see what drew the two of them together and why he worked so repeatedly with her, and why he took her skills and language and gesture onstage and made it somewhat his own over the last 20 years.”