Adventures In Duration I
“But there never seems to be enough time/To do the things you want to do once you find them”
The above lyric played today as I was about 27 minutes into my two-hour dance. It seemed to describe a lamentation that I hear - and utter - so often; a cry of despair at the lack of time for practice and art-making. It feels especially acute in the world of contemporary dance, where artists feel like they only discover what interests them deeply as our bodies stop growing stronger. More broadly, this malaise appears as a symptom of capitalism, though I suspect that this is an easy assignment of blame. The ideal of an ancient society in which citizens made art and lay in the sun discussing ideas is, I believe, a fiction. Prior to the industrial revolution life expectancy was much lower and 80% of the population spent their time working in agriculture.¹ Wherever philosophy and art did exist, that spaciousness was built on slave labour. No, let us assume that every generation before us has also laboured hard, squandered much of their free time on frivolities, and worked assiduously with what hours were left to make art and contribute to the living culture of their friends and family.
These thoughts passed through my mind in the time it took for Jim Croce’s now somewhat cliché ballad to play out.
I am currently fortunate to have a dancing space available to me - as part of my work with FLING, the studio is open whenever classes are not running. I have resolved to use this time and space for a project that has long lingered on my mind: an eight hour dance. While hardly original (just this July I attended 8/8/8 Rest by Harriet Gillies, Marcus McKenzie and friends, an overnight durational rumination), it is nevertheless not something I have ever done. At the beginning of this year, the eight hour dance was a goal I set for myself - at one point I was imagining it as a durational participatory event called something like Turn Up, Clock On, Drop In, and that it would comment quite explicitly on capitalism. Like countless other projects, it slowly faded from reality as the year took shape. However, I have a desire to revive it, with more of an emphasis on research, performed either in isolation or via livestream.
Today’s two hour dance was a test; a gauge of my body and mind, a stress-test of some technology, and a data gathering exercise on what needs to be done to set up the dancing.
I danced with a mixture of sound and silence that I set up before beginning movement. The only score was to remain in the dance, through a combination of constant movement or attentive stillness. I took a series of hurried notes as I moved and I will attempt to recreate the thoughts that led to them below:
Things come back
This banal observation occurred to be because old scores and habits reoccurred as I’m sure you, dear reader, could have told me well in advance. The only addendum that may be worth sharing with you is that I found that the textures I have embodied most recently were the most prominent to arise from my subconscious body. I have been doing a lot of teaching and training recently, and the higher tone, clarity of shape, and repetition which characterises those activities arose in my dancing today.
Songs may save me (activated space)
Music is not usually prominent in my practice (my university graduation piece, where much of my interest in this way of working began, was a 45 minute improvised solo in silence). Sound, I relearned today, activates the space and takes the pressure off the dancer as the sole agent in the room. Incidentally, audience can perform a similar function. Even the slight possibility that someone may enter the space - always a possibility in a shared studio - lowers the difficulty of staying invested (regrettably, it also has an effect on what the dancing looks like but this is perhaps unavoidable).
Mental dance
I was surprised by how much knowing the overall duration set the pace of my dancing. I did not get sweaty until at least half an hour in, and my most deeply physical dancing happened with between 40 and 10 minutes remaining.
Extremes (+Paxton why not)
This is a reference to a quote from Steve Paxton, reflecting on his early choreographic experiences in the Judson Church group:
The work that I did there was first of all to flush out all my ‘why-nots,’ to go through my ‘why-not’ circles as far as I could until getting bored with the question.²
My initial reflection was that many artists are interested in extremes. Later today I am going to see the new film Here, which promises to be set entirely in one location throughout all of history. Here is directed by Robert Zemeckis - an artist who has always been interested in the possibilities afforded by emerging technologies. Often, his experiments are far more consequential than the artworks he makes with them. This got me thinking that some artists like Zemeckis or Wes Anderson become more formally extremist as their careers develop, whereas others - including Paxton - instead move away from the specific commitment of their early works, instead adding nuance and moderation.
It occurred to me later that this fascination with and commitment to extremes is probably a concern much more prevalent in postmodernist art. Martha Graham and Pina Bausch, for example, seem to have been more interested in making the best work or the clearest expression of an emotion rather than the maximal pursuit of a task.
Duration, chance, and minimalism strike me as the most pervasive elements that artists pursue to extremes. Considering these elements, the artists who come to mind are the early proponents of postmodernism (now often greeted with eye-rolls by post-postmodern or metamodern artists): Merce Cunningham, Marcel Duchamp, or Tehching Hsieh. In dance specifically, I think we see more use of duration and chance, perhaps because it is difficult to sell tickets to a minimalist dance show, or because there is some deep-rooted aversion to the lack of labour involved in, say, a one-minute dance. Even so, in styles like butoh we can see minimalism rear its head.
Improvisation is the method by which we teach ourselves new things
Again, this fairly simple idea seemed profound in the moment. I have thought and spoken many times in the past about my passion for improvisation, especially its utility as an alternative to teaching structures that stifle creativity and its powerful pathways to new experiences. The distinction that I drew specifically today was between on one hand codified techniques, which we can use to teach others new things and to teach ourselves old things; and on the other hand improvisation techniques, which are the only ways to independently discover something. Of course, there’s no need for one to come at the cost of the other, and I believe that the most rewarding practices draw from a ratio of both.
Next week I shall dance for four hours.
¹Hatcher, J & Bailey, M (2001), Modelling the Middle Ages: The History and Theory of England’s Economic Development, 2 Population and resources, Oxford University Press, pages 21-65, doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199244119.003.0002
²Banes S, 1993, Democracy’s body: Judson Dance Theatre, 1962 - 1964, UMI Research Press, Michigan, page 9
