Adventures In Duration II

What if to endure is to repeat?

This was, perhaps, my take-away from today’s four hour dance. I was noticing the repetition of old pathways and textures, both from previous improvisations and from earlier in the day. One particular motif featured twice in the first part of the dance - rolling upward from my back to sit with both feet almost touching and both hands not quite holding my ankles - and reappeared hours later.

I was also thinking about those living in extreme poverty or in prison, whose days are necessarily clones of each other, an endless recursion of the same meals, labour, tasks, and anxieties. In the context of the week we have just had, I was thinking about endurance being required in the face of a second Trump presidency, especially for the women of the United States and the world, who now face a repetition of that man’s rapacious egotism.

I also thought about it more broadly in terms of artistic practice. I recalled Rachael Coulson (who was working with FLING Company during my second week in Bega) talking often about the discipline of repetition in dance training. I hope Rach will not mind me sharing that she acknowledged “sometimes I’m like: cbf [can’t be fucked]” but gets herself to class anyway¹. It strikes me that this is a different form of endurance to our traditional association with that word, which might entail something running a marathon or climbing Everest. The ongoing rigour of artistic practice may reach less urgent peaks of difficulty, yet I submit that it costs a great deal in the long term. (I hope that any potential athletes who have stumbled onto this document will forgive me for what I’m sure are gross oversights about the training involved in their professions.)

The four hour dance

I once again took notes as I danced, but perhaps the best way to transmit my experience to you this week is by a simple recounting of the shape of my experience.

For the first 70 minutes or so, I was sustained by my first energetic arc. This is not to say that my attention did not waver or that I was completely absorbed by the dancing; on the contrary, the majority of my movement consisted of variations on walking, simple rhythmic repetitions, and occasional bursts of more sustained or representational movement. I almost cried while performing a series of falls in response to Cat’s in the Cradle, and one extended performative section developed from a generic magic show into something quite directly referential, imitating Kathryn Hahn’s performance in Agatha All Along. Similarly to last week, the media that I am consuming and the activities that I am undertaking seemed to have an immediate influence on my dancing. As silence descended at the 68-minute mark, I thought “that was a nice dance”.

From 1:10 to 2:30 I was sustained by my second thoughts. ‘Second thought’ is often used by improvisors to describe the ignoring of first impulse, a tool to escape habit or find new ideas. Here, I am using the plural ‘second thoughts’ to describe the period after my body and attention had sated their first series of interests. This effect that duration has on how we measure individual units of stuff reminds me of my podcast co-host Jett - they listened to one new music album every day in 2023, and one of the most remarkable effects was that their minimum unit of measurement changed from a song to an album². I wonder if this project will bring about a similar development in the way that I perceive movement ideas.

From 2:30 to 3:25 my attention turned to completing the task. I was extra mindful of the ways that I was saving or expending energy, and I ate some food. Repetition featured strongly again, including one section in which I took a repeated series of steps (alternating between four and five) across two foam mats that I had earlier placed in the space.

The final 35 minutes were torturous, an elongated wait for the final siren during which every song elicited a groan and each movement exhausted itself after its first instance.

Power sources

Overall, my awareness of the total duration once again affected my dancing. Today, I noticed myself ‘saving’ particular modalities, staving off some of my favourite scores and textures until I needed fresh ideas later in the dance. Al Wunder calls these reliable scores that often arise “power sources”:

To develop structure and form, students must acknowledge, value, and evolve their own personal power sources […] a power source is what you like, enjoy, gives you pleasure, turns you on, excites you, a thing that you do easily, something you do unconsciously and frequently, a pattern of physical behaviour, your personal philosophies, personality traits, anything that empowers you.³

For me, today, I purposefully avoided sitting, lying down, or utilising any floor-work for more than an hour. My love of rolling and sweeping across the floor was probably the first power source that I identified improvising as an adult and it always yields something of interest for me. In a long duration improvisation - when there is no chance to recharge by not dancing - saving these power sources to be plugged in when one is at a loss is proving invaluable.

Today my regular collaborator Jacqui Maida watched the four hour dance. They chose to write in response to the dancing for 60 minutes, commencing at the beginning of the second hour. Jacqui’s highly perceptive writing picked up on the exact moment of my first stuck-ness, and my solution:

You [lay] down on the floor at [1:11], and I was surprised to realise it was the first time your body had poured itself down flat. It looked to me like a milestone - a reward - or a dessert you had being saving.⁴

I will leave you with a final observation (though this article does not claim to record every significant thought I had over four hours). The two components of the rule that I use to hold my dancing (that there must alway be movement of attentive stillness) seem to play off each other very well. When my attention lapses, I am usually in a long durational movement or repetitive patters, and likewise when my body reaches stillness it is often because I am deep in thought or listening. There was only one brief moment today that I caught my thoughts drifting at the same time as my body was in repose against a pole in the studio.

Next week I hope to dance for eight hours.

¹ Coulson R, October 2024, informal conversation

² Archer J & Macdougall Di Manno R, 2023, StinishedIt podcast, Episode 11 - Fleabag and X-2: X-Men United (with Oliver Anderson), timecode 13:56 - 14:27, https://open.spotify.com/episode/6W45hqAB4IDorRJH9WRZ2s?si=6dea5deae6de47d0

³ Wunder A, 2009, The Wonder of Improvisation, Wunder Publishers, Ascot Victoria, page 125

⁴ Maida J, 2024, personal correspondence, page 1