A white robed young woman glides stealthily, ghost-like, down the stairs of the Chelsea Hotel, the walls a muted white behind her, as the eerie music begins. As the pace of the dance accelerates, the woman begins moving up and down the stairs dangerously, recklessly. Suddenly, she flings herself backward wildly, self-destructively, upon the filigreed railing, leaning out over the void, her head tilted down almost vertically. A tragic beauty, distraught, ready to sacrifice all!
It was only later that choreographer Merle Lister heard the legend of the restless spirit who roams the history-haunted halls of the Chelsea in a long white dress.
This innovative work, titled Dance of the Spirits, was created in 1983 to commemorate the 100th Anniversary of the 1883 founding of the Chelsea. Merle remembers that Stanley had palm trees set up in 
the lobby for the occasion, as well as a stage where residents sang and entertained. Arthur Miller turned out for the occasion, which was hosted by a Irish theater troupe, and a singer named Sandy Toder Dancer performed. And upstairs on the 7th floor, as part of the festivities, the audience members standing, Merle, a pioneer in site-specific performance, “staged” her groundbreaking dance.
The woman in white, in a strong performance, was portrayed by Gina Lior, while the haunting score was composed by Alan Cohen, who also danced. Other dancers included Genevieve Matin, and the young Merle Herself. Camera work was provided by Eric Wolfe. And Merle’s husband, renowned lighting designer Leonard Levine, who sadly passed away a few years back, and whom we all remember fondly, applied his usual visual magic to the lighting.
As a child, Merle Lister was captivated by the National Ballet of Canada, and as a result started choreographing early. By the time she was 14 she had already decided to move to New York—though her parents didn’t get on board with this. As it turned out, however, Merle didn’t wait long, arriving in the city in 1962 at the ripe old age of 23. Merle studied briefly at the Martha Graham School, but soon found that that was not her style. She then gravitated to the avant garde, and began working with the Living Theater.
Though influenced by the work of Jerry Grotowski, whose techniques changed the whole concept of theater, melding, as they did, movement and voice into a total concept, Merle never subscribed to any particular school of dance. Becoming involved in Improv, she sought to use her choreography to assemble the disparate aspects of the dance holistically. In the 60s she worked with Ellen Stewart at La Mama, teaching in the Plexis Troupe, and later collaborated with such figures as Lynn Loredo and Joe Chaikin, as well as with Joel Schick on his Coffee House Chronicles.
In the 70s Merle founded the Merle Lister Dance Company, which performed at Lincoln Center, in Central Park, and at the 92nd Street Y. She also ran her own school, Creative Movement, out of a large loft in Chelsea. And, in a bit of Chelsea Hotel trivia, Merle was friends with Viva, the Warhol superstar, when they both lived at the hotel, and helped her daughter, Gaby Hoffman, rehearse for her role in the popular movie Field of Dreams.
Back in the wild and wooly days of 1983, a desperate junkie might steal whatever he could get his hands on, or a deranged vandal might go on an iconoclastic slashing spree so there was no art displayed on the stairwell walls. It was against this background, both of the ghostly white walls, and of the air of freedom mixed with desperation, of lost souls passing through the Chelsea, that Merle’s composition is set. As Gina Lior thrashes against the railing, a wraith-like Alan Cohen appears, slithering up the stairs: a serpentine elemental spirit, come to snatch the distracted woman in white down to hell? But no, he glides right past her, each dancer in his or her own appointed reality, like us all, partaking of their own individualized reality among the infinite choices possible in the seductive yet damning shadow realm of the Chelsea. A youthful Merle emerges from the east wing of the hotel in flowing blue gown and ghoulish make-up, as spooky voices swell in the background: Queen of the Damned? Or simply the spirit of a frustrated artist or actress, who, unfulfilled, prowls the lonely halls looking for that lost talent or promise she left behind?
The dancers used the available space well, filling all areas: rail, stairs, bare wall, and then swinging doors, spacious halls, window well. The dancers glided by one another, more intimately connected with the surroundings than with one another, spirits who had become, over years and decades of solitary wandering, a part of the hotel themselves, rather than living humans relating to each other. The viewer was transported back in time to an earlier—though timeless--period in the hotel’s history, overwhelmed with a sad and nostalgic poignancy, as the music provided the appropriate atmospheric accompaniment.
The video that I saw was of a dress rehearsal that took place on the 7th floor. For the actual performance, the audience members stood by the elevator and watched the action, but for the rehearsal only the cast and crew were present. At one point during the dance, however, providing a moment of levity, a young boy with long, dark hair steps off the elevator and gets into the picture. But his appearance, while it somehow reinforced the transience and impermanence that was a theme of the dance, also suggested the lasting influence that the art created at the Chelsea, and the lives lived here in pursuit of that work, can have on generations yet to come. -- Ed Hamilton
{Merle is looking for somebody to transfer the video of this remarkable dance to a CD.}
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