welter scores
This essay analyzes and evokes the making of a specific dance through descriptions of activation-scores, observance of witnesses in rehearsals, quotes of
artists I am in conversation with, and “performance warnings.”
‘Successful’ mourning involves the loss of self
and its reconfiguration and redistribution.
—Laura U. Marks[1]
I started making welter while recovering from a sudden event causing me to re-evaluate my past and present in order to deliver me to an altered future. I chose to lay low, to slow down, to self-isolate—in order to process the cause and effects of my personal breakdown. Losing momentum felt important.
I did only the minimum required to survive. I went fully into the overwhelming redistribution of pain and sadness in order to reconfigure –I needed to sink, to dive even deeper to locate what I had not yet sensed from within my previous orientation. Acting less on all fronts of my professional and personal life created a space for me to think about the gap between the end of one life phase and the beginning of the next. The distance between phases––charged with potential––became the focus of my attention.
Six months later, quarantined at home during the global epidemic of COVID-19, a sense of slowness, mourning, and fear was omnipresent.
I felt like everything around me joined the course I had already chosen—pausing, reflecting, grieving, mourning, re-thinking, re-
mobilizing. Distancing between friends, family, and strangers was a leveler across society, but as the pandemic stretched on, inequalities stood out even more starkly than before. In order to look back and process these shocks, both personal and social, my desire was to dilate time. I came across these lines by
Seamus Heaney:
He was and will remain a pattern for poets in his
amphibious ability to plunge into the downward
reptilian welter of the individual self and yet raise
himself with whatever knowledge he gained there
out onto the hard edges of the historical present.[2]
The conditions of pandemic and isolation are not new to the human experience, but during my periods of isolation I found myself facing something historically ancient: awareness of the past and present at once. I also felt the embodiment of a potential for a new now.
To bring this concept into the studio, I looked at the space between the actions; as the frequency of movements slowed down, the space occupied by the act of observation thickened with the power of a closer looking. Attention itself became the focus of my attention. As I practiced suspending the reaction, my senses heightened as a result of this kind of inhibition.
My senses heightened as a result of that kind of viewing. This is where I began to generate scores on attunement, the heightening of one’s awareness of their personal phyco-somatic archive, context and possibility of redirection. This kind of listening became a coping mechanism for emotional and physical survival. I didn’t know that this inhibition would unleash an account of desire and its power: the ability to know what the internal need is and to act upon it.
TOOLS
I. Throughout the development of this work, we regularly performed our material live. This served as a way to challenge our ability to witness ourselves under observation.
II. We interviewed each other after each day of work to gain more insight from the work process itself.
III. We filmed our improvisations; editing the videos became an offshoot of the process, looping back and informing the evolution of the work.
SOLO: MEASURING
(Body: as a landscape, an object, a site, a territory)
I. Chloë lies down, remembers the shape and waits. Viscous color surrounds her body, submerging her into the rhythm of slowly blinking: Green. Yellow. Pink. Red. Blue, swallowing the body and passing through her slowly. The proposition here, at the brink of the abyss of possibilities, is “what don’t I do?” [3] What happens when you focus for a long time on the moment between actions? Chloë measures her own attention as it vibrates under the fluctuation of impulses in non-event. What happens when you focus for a long time on the moment between phases? A vacuum that is infinitely full rather than empty. As motion slows down, the journeys through the electrical pathway of her nervous system become more pronounced, mapping the firing of unrealized micro-futures as they pass.
This kind of pause has a heavy quality of body time, matching the viscosity of the color lying around her.
I notice that I am becoming older,
my dance is more tired, my dance has less to impress,
my dance is more whatever and nothing special.
I have been injured / I have been displaced and shaken,
I have been overworked, my body is a trace,
a trace of acceptances, a series of plays,
I play it as it lays.
What does it say?
—Eleanor Bauer [4]
What do the eyes do?
Since the eyes reflect the movement
of our attention, their loud shift becomes
an additional system of measurement
to track the anticipation of change.
What is seen with my eyes closed,
and unseen with my eyes open?
II. Tracing the impulses through this viscous texture of attention gives the audience time to arrive physically. She has been here before, tired, and she will return here again and yet every time she will try to unsee what she has come to know. The fogginess of her focus contains both decay and the charge of potential at the same time. It contains the end of the phase, unsettled rest and anticipation of what's coming next: unstable ground.
The penetrating texture of this kind of observation sustains her focus on the micro-choreographies of the nervous system. It is a research of phenomena as yet unsensed.
When you are saying no to certain things under observation, you are saying yes to others yet to come.
I think that we are doomed to have to look at what we do. And we’re less [doomed] if we can look at it long enough to be able to derive interesting material out of it. So, stand around.
—Steve Paxton[5]
This stillness is a distillation process. When Chloë moves, it is not slow––it is monumental. Cosmically monumental. The surface between gestures thickens as she records the dilation of time with her whole self. The result is a gradual, glacial, shifting landscape. This task-interference is precisely what submerges the body into a highly attentive state-zone-trance of being present. The work is to linger between disappearance and emergence, palpation of closure and opening, to create specificity charged with the moment.
My choice to perform this material requires catastrophic
acts of perception. I associate catastrophic with images of great loss.
The magnitude and reoccurrence of choreographed
behavior that I need to first recognize and then dis-attach from again
and again is a personal loss of tremendous proportion.
—Deborah Hay[6]
Can we simultaneously hold the here and now
of elongation and imbalance, slipping
between the representational and the abstract,
the symbolic and the emotional?
In this liminal space, the structure emerges
from the act of dance-practice itself, modulating
between stillness and listening.
body is multitudinous
body is an archive
body remembers and retains
body is a container of past and future
body is precise
III. Chloë observes the possibilities she actively does not pursue in order to establish a surface for closer, more active viewing. Engaging and paying attention becomes a practice of reduction: to strip the myriad gestural options down to the essential. The practice of “what don’t I do?” becomes the focus. Waiting becomes a tool. Selection becomes a way of moving forward. In this manner, thinking in movement involves real-time decision-making that is embodied, visceral, corporeal, but also ambiguous.
Can this inhibition act swell
with the pleasure of teasing, rather
than the tension of holding a singular image?
Pleasure-Ease-Teasing-
Edging-Delay-
Decay-Trance-Pulse-Tripping
Body-Rhythm-Spell
The query of this deep-sea dive into the composite of impulses and coordinates proposes to transport her toward an altered reality: reality which has a potential to uncensor the body. To relieve the body from the default reaction, conditioned by the expectations and past predictions.
I am bringing attention and charge to a moment that would have
passed without remark.
—Nancy Stark Smith
PERFORMANCE WARNINGS
As soon as one recognizes the feeling/meaning/emotion that fills the container shape, one empties it, so that the shape carries itself without the representation. Leaving or moving in and out of the act of performance, one asks: does the slippage between the representational and the abstract, the symbolic and the emotional, elongate the here and now? welter is a reciprocal adjustment of reality to feeling and feeling to reality.
IN OBSERVANCE[7]
Dani
. . . it’s giving a noun to the verb of worlding, making the interception of impulse an event in itself. . .
Zoe
. . . individuation of a movement is not established by the conventional sense of completion of that movement. .
Dani
. . . and this nothing-dance can run itself, it’s like letting the car idle or letting the sieve that does the sifting have an it-ness of its own. . .
Zoe
. . . rather, the full-bodiness of the dance was created through constant arrivals and constant leavings. . .
Dani
. . . so bittersweet to watch someone practice an active “no” in real time to all that could be; turning down the volume here just lets you hear the thing with ringing clarity. . . .
….end of excerpt….
[1] Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 103.
[2] Seamus Heaney, “On Robert Lowell,” The New York Review of Books 25, no. 1 (1978): page number, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1978/02/09/on-robert-lowell/.
[3] This question was proposed to me by Lisa Nelson a few years ago.
[4] Eleanor Bauer, A lot of moving parts, concept, choreography, text, and performance by Eleanor Bauer (New York, NY: Danspace Project, 2018).
[6] Deborah Hay, No Time to Fly: A Solo Dance Score, text, choreography and performance by Deborah Hay (New York, NY: Saint Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, 2010).
[7] Observations that emerged from the collaborators during the rehearsals of welter.