For someone who likes to fly by the seat of his pants, Bob Eisen is awfully businesslike during rehearsal. Watching his five dancers walk, crawl, and hurtle through their paces, he looks and sounds grim. He calls out to Dan Prindle that he’s not drawing out a pause in his crawl long enough, and runs down to the stage to demonstrate on his hands and knees. “You lose a little stillness,” Eisen complains. “I’m trying to make a picture here.”
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Prindle, a longtime Eisen dancer, is the focus of a lot of complaints and corrections. In fact the atmosphere at the Dance Center of Columbia College, where Eisen is rehearsing his show just two weeks before opening night, seems pretty tense. That could have something to do with the fact that Eisen makes and has performed his dances mostly at Link’s Hall (which he’s managed since 1978), and the Dance Center stage is a much less cozy place. The unsmiling dancers seem disconnected, and the absence of music creates a hovering stillness. Yet when Eisen joins the dance–he’s the sixth performer in this new piece–and another dancer accidentally runs into him, he murmurs a gentle reassurance. And he tells me later, in his abrupt manner, that he wouldn’t trade Prindle for anyone in the world: “What he brings to a group of people is irreplaceable. I like everybody I got now.”
Like other seasoned choreographers, Eisen is steeped in the frustrations of dance as an art form: it doesn’t exist unless it’s performed, yet the costs of performing are so large and the audience for dance is so small that performances are often few and far between. “I said long ago that I was gonna try not to do a weekend performance and call it a day,” Eisen remarks. “And yet that’s basically what I’m doing with this [new piece]. What was nice about Route 142 was that the piece grew–pieces develop as you keep doing them. Milwaukee on Friday night, Madison Saturday, Minneapolis Sunday, Fargo on Wednesday, Omaha Friday and Saturday.
“I have a great deal of respect for the craft of making a dance. I’ve been doing aikido for 14 years, and I still consider myself a beginner. I feel the same way about being a choreographer. How do you put together a dance and make it interesting? The hell with what it means. Just make it interesting.”
