the fantasy of a line
Or, is the danced life* of writing to bring one’s mind back to the sensations of this body?
At airport security the woman shook out my notebook and I felt a ripple like it was my body. An internal gasp, as in – I’ll show you the soles of my boots but don’t upturn that. A white girl ripple – it wasn’t my body, and it wasn’t a violation on any real scale of possible violations at security. Nothing fell out.
I was on the way to a writing gig at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Luxembourg, where I would be writing for, with, alongside, opposite, to dancers. I intuited that this exercise of writing for or with dancers would be for me about owning up to being a body in space. About this connection, series of connections, between writing and body; how one could be blocked and the other flowing, or vice versa; or worse, how both could be blocked and nothing moving. Within the exercise, everything was moved.
The format of the piece Some Proximity, the second of five of choreographer Adam Linder’s “Services”, goes like this: two dancers and one writer; the writer sticks critical reflections in black Sharpie on A4 card to the walls of the museum, at intervals that correspond to the rhythm of the writing. These reflections should be more or less off-the-cuff, vernacular ideas-in-passing, or ideas that have not yet passed. The texts should respond to the site, the institution, its wider context, and the art on display there, including but not limited to the choreographic piece itself. The dancers (in this instance, Josh Johnson, Justin Kennedy, Robert Malmborg) approach the texts, vocalize and move with them, according to a chosen mode of interpretation, a degree of proximity or distance.**
The style of dance is based on Brooklyn-born, ballet-trained street dancer Storyboard P’s flex, whose fluid footwork is taken from the sidewalk’s energies and dropped into the placidity of the institution. (One day a group of teenage boys with speakers practice steps on MUDAM’s forecourt – I don’t think they make it inside.) Yet Storyboard’s peripatetics may be aligned in one respect with the walks of the writer in the city – gliding from the street with grace.
The contract of Some Proximity calls dancers and writer to invest subjectivity in its processes of moving translation. The proposition to participate in the piece first made me think about in/visibility and my will towards it. Following my response, in another context, to the therapist’s question, in relation to the memory of a seemingly non-dramatic event, which proved to be part of the psychodrama: “And how did that make you feel?” Like I wanted to disappear.
I knew – or know, the feeling re-emerges – that this will for disappearance is dishonest, or at least lacking in courage. That a better pursuit would be this ideal, formulated by Olivia Laing in relation to the life and art of David Wojnarowicz, and which I sensed at times in the movements of the dancers: “That you will be liberated from the prison of the body by the body itself.”
Disconnecting from one’s body can be a survival mechanism in traumatic situations, says the therapist, but it is not advisable, not in the long term. To reveal something like this, and rather than pressing send on an email or instant message or publishing platform, to pass the expression on to someone else to be read in part or in whole, alto voce. With the fast written, the unfinished, something of the guard of performativity should stay down – there is less of the guise of the refinement of style. Then, the impromptu text is reprised by performance, as it is unstuck from the wall, held close or stepped on, rehearsed and repeated for an intense, short-lived duration.
The choreographer says: “Dance is special in that the signifier is never fixed because as soon as it comes into being it has already gone. Theorists talk about choreography’s presence being the life and death of itself in that moment.”
The immediate ignition and fast extinguishing of the words is part of what send sparks through me. Their life and death cancel out my anxieties about accumulation – the vertigo of content online, the too many books in the library. In an interview with the artist Moyra Davey I asked about similar anxieties: the piling up of dusty books versus the slow bleed of words onto the page; and then in relation to her comments about getting through the contents of her family’s stock-piled fridge in the film Fifty Minutes – the standard length of a therapy session. She replied: “I think it has to do with a fantasy of a 1:1 ratio of production/consumption, not wanting to be burdened by waste or excess.” Like the drill of thermodynamics in physics class: energy cannot be created or destroyed, only converted from one form to another.
In Some Proximity, the words are not consumed or swallowed, they are carried and transported; quite literally – when placed beneath sneaker soles and skated on – transformed into gestures. Because the modes of interpretation are many and the glides never the same, neither are the words used up. Gestures, gratefully, can be excessive. The flick, the fall, the finishing flair… During the course of the Service a friend messages: “You crave this kind of ecstatic excess after all.” I remember the message as having been phrased as a question. The words are sent outwards by the dancers’ turns, and something further is revealed.
The revelation of the writer is not the same as the revelation of the dancer. If I feel exposed putting my texts on the wall and leaving them ink wet for others, I can choose to remove my body from the gallery and the view of the public whenever. When it becomes too much to hear them, imperfect blush-making refrains, confrontative subjectivity – I leave. I can go for a walk for ideas, go write elsewhere, while the dancers must stay, inside and observed, for the hours until the final bell rings. Carolee Schneemann: “[For] a dance where dancers can leave the performance… and return… or not return.” Being able to disappear and let my texts stand in for my body feels like a privilege.
But the dance artists have their covert tactics, I think, which are not mine to reveal, for retreating from their (over-)signifying bodies, while keeping on performing. Although this still comes at personal cost, the accumulation of their turns within the institution’s white walls often leading to exhaustion, they teach me something about self-protection, from the side of visibility rather than from the side of hiding.
Bhanu Kapil: “I wanted to write a book that was like lying down.” / Robbie sits and Josh lies down
*William Forsythe via Justin Kennedy: “If you have an inclination towards a danced life, the feedback you receive from motion is perhaps exacerbated.”
**More on writing for Some Proximity by Jonathan P. Watts here