"Broadcast” is a compelling and highly distinctive contemporary dance work, notable for the precision of its theatrical imagination and the subtlety of its choreographic thinking. Even in showing form, the work demonstrates a rare capacity to generate thought through movement, image, rhythm and atmosphere. Its spare domestic world – at once intimate, disquieting and psychologically charged – gives rise to a rich field of associations around melancholy, agency and ethical life. Caroline Meaden’s performance is finely calibrated: inhibited, detailed, precarious and inwardly intense, yet never merely expressive. What is most impressive is the work’s ability to hold opposing states in suspension – action and paralysis, self-        preservation and surrender, domestic familiarity and uncanny estrangement – without reducing them to simple resolution. Broadcast already has the force of a fully imagined theatrical proposition and offers clear potential for further development into a rigorous, affecting and formally sophisticated performance work." - Andrew Fuhrmann

A response to Caroline Meanden’s Broadcast – showing at WXYZ Studio 02-04-2026

This showing was compelling both in the moment of the performance and as an event to think with afterwards. It has a fascinating though often muted affective intensity and showcases a number of interesting formal devices, but I think it also does something that is quite rare for contemporary dance: it generates its own thought-forms. What I mean is that the rhythms and images and movement textures become relational, like patterns that the mind follows into the contemplation of larger questions. Questions that – for me, at least – have an intriguing moral dimension.

This may have something to do with the fact that the work is unfinished. What we saw had the feeling of a study or an atelier piece. And the sketch, of course, leaves room for the spectator’s fancy. There is still white space around the drawing. The spectator is not asked merely to interpret the image, but to complete it, to test the possible directions of its becoming. (Someone told me recently that they enjoy watching ballet dancers marking their parts, imagining for themselves what the movement might become.) A marked movement can be more capacious. It retains within itself the ghost of alternatives.

And yet Broadcast doesn’t feel provisional in that weaker sense. It has the force of a proper performance. Its substance was not diminished by its openness or the rapidity of its composition. And it has its own distinct theatricality, which is inseparable from its fascination.

So what am I saying? I’m saying that as the performance progressed, I was drawn into a series of reflections on the way we live now, or try to live now, in this increasingly imperfect world. The work seemed to begin from the specifics of an emotional milieu – artfully and feelingly created through the choreography and the treatment of the space – and then to open onto something like an ethical puzzle: how should we act in the world as it is now? What course should we choose in the face of so much that is compromised and degrading? Should we work to preserve ourselves or should we give ourselves to others?

A space that is already occupied

I think the fact that arrived a little late influenced this impression. By the time I arrived, the scene was already set, the performance already underway. In a sense, I was thrust into the world of the performance. I had to work out where I was after the fact; the world of the piece had not been ceremonially opened for me. It was already inhabited. Or, thinking of the scattered mess of crumbs, I might say it was already soiled. It was not an empty theatrical space waiting to be animated. It was an occupied world.

Immediately the question became: how do I find a place in this world into which I have been thrown? Lucy Guerin observed, after the showing, that your initial treatment of the space – with the crumbs – made her anxious because it made the space tricky to navigate. I understand that response. But for me the anxiety was less simply spatial than existential. The space was difficult to navigate because it was already lived in. It had the density of prior use. It contained traces, impediments, signs of habitation, signs perhaps of neglect.

The objects mattered in this regard. The mattress, the crumbs, the chair, the imaginary table: they were recognisable, domestic, even banal, but placed into strange network of relations. Crumbs in the bed, or near the bed, produce a faintly repellent intimacy. The domestic becomes not comforting but compromised. So, even though the studio space is only sparsely set, the image-world of the performance feels enclosed, cramped, interior.

And because I arrived late, the first thing I saw was your figure downstage with your back to the audience. This worked well as a starting point: the body turned away seemed to begin from a position of refusal, or at least of non-disclosure. It was not a frontal address. It did not offer itself cleanly to view. You were there, but closed off, placed all the way to stage left, already caught in the structure of open symbols: the mattress, the crumbs, the chair.

My initial impression of the movement: inhibited, stilted, perhaps anxious, yet highly detailed. I kept thinking of the phrase ‘worrying the air’. The hands did not simply move through space; they seemed to navigate some invisible labyrinth. Again, I got the sense that the space was not the vacancy it appeared but a place already crowded with intensities that had to be negotiated. The empty space in Broadcast was not in fact empty. It was already occupied. The dancer’s task was not expansion, not possession of the stage, not the heroic eating up of all that space. It was closer to the problem of finding a passage through something obstructed.

This smaller, fussy, detailed movement was contrasted with more open but still awkward poses, as if held on the edge of a step. Off-centre, precarious, held without being secure. Yet I am not sure contrast is the right word, because the doubleness did not present itself as simple irony. The tiny busy work and the more composed, studied poses belonged to the same world. In neither was there any true moment of expansion. In one case, the body seeks a way through an overcrowded field; in the other, it tries to hold space in a room that does not easily yield it. The held poses did not resolve the anxious detail but rather concentrated it.

The first and perhaps most significant spatial event is the travelling backwards upstage along that frail diagonal into the upstage-right corner. It is a weak vector, almost a line of disappearance, often suggestive of collapse. Here it felt like the natural transposition of the movement quality: an anxious withdrawal into the least forgiving zone of the room. The black curtain deepened that corner into a kind of theatrical black hole. The body remained turned away from us, already distant, already at the edge of visibility and relation. When you paused there, in the corner, as if to recuperate or take shelter, awkwardly poised and almost overbalancing, the moment became unexpectedly dramatic. If the body fell there, one felt, it might not return. It might pass beyond the event horizon of the performance.

Performing melancholic domesticity

From there, the creeping along the back wall shifted the atmosphere again. It was dreamlike and faintly sinister. It recalled, for me, an image from Lucy Guerin’s Sweet Dreams, one of her very earliest works, in which three women creep along the back wall in shadow. Here, too, the movement did not quite come back to us. It moved sidelong, remaining in a zone of partial withdrawal.

This drew attention to the paintings along the back wall. At that distance, the paintings remained indistinct: an armchair, leaking bodies, domestic forms perhaps dissolving into psychic matter. Because we could not quite see them, they produced curiosity. They became not simply images on a wall but images painted on the mind’s eye, part of a theatre of inward projection.

(The placement of the paintings also helped articulate the space almost as a triptych, dividing the room while also sealing it. A gesture toward the structuring of the space.)

As I already said, the mattress and chair create the impression of a domestic scene, albeit the relations between these objects are held in ambiguity. But domesticity is not only evoked scenographicly. I wondered also whether there was a corporeal domesticity in the dancing: a way of using weight that was neither grounded nor elevated, but held between. The body trying to find a between heaven and earth. But the home, the domus, the resting place, slides away as the body discovers that it is not, in fact, a place of security.

There is a streak of darkness in the performance that is not easy to pin down. It does not come from outward pathos, nor from any strongly expressive tendency in the choreography. It is not declared. It accumulates. The inwardness of the movement contributes to it: the bundled line, the clutched épaulement, the hesitating quality that seems always to be resisting invisible forces. There is a flinch in the work, but not a melodramatic one. The huge room is available; the body might leap, might turn out, might take command. It does not. That refusal, or incapacity, is part of the strangeness but also the melancholy.

This is not a theatricalised melancholy or performative melancholy. It is inward, and in that sense perhaps selfcritical. It seems alert to the contemporary temptation to perform one’s life, to externalise the inward climate of one’s emotions, to convert private disquiet into a public style. Broadcast doesn’t exactly resist that; but does it, perhaps, cautiously? With an element of selfawareness. Its darkness is not exhibitionistic. Feeling is muted but not extinguished. It is twice reflected. The movement often seems incomplete, as if it has been interrupted before it can become expressive in any conventional sense.

Of course, this mood was also shaped by the time and light of the performance: the afternoon light, the dying of the day, the melancholy of a studio at twilight. Such things are contingent, I know, but dance is made of contingencies. Light, temperature, the social atmosphere of a showing, the fatigue or alertness of bodies in a room – these are not external to the work’s reception. In this case they seemed to agree with the performance, to lend it a further layer of crepuscular feeling.

(The section with the jacket, advancing toward the audience, could be understood as an attempt to boss yourself free of this lassitude – I’m not I’m not sure whether it is successful. Is there’s something brittle about that interlude? You are assuming a role. Business-like, yes, but only like business. It is business as performance, not action itself. The jacket becomes a costume of agency. It is funny and futile, but also true to life. This is often how we try to escape paralysis: we put on the jacket, adopt the tempo, mime competence.)

Not Drowning, Wavering

You said, in the discussion, that you started by trying to capture a certain way that you were with the world at a certain time last year. I think something of that lingers in the piece. It is a psychological space, but not only psychological. Quite early in the work I found myself moving into a train of thought closely twined with and coloured by the mood described above. I began to wonder whether the work was concerned not only with an aesthetics of melancholy, but with an ethics of melancholy.

That is, the work seemed to ask how one should be as much as how one is. How can one live in a space – let us call it a world – that is already soiled, decayed, occupied in ways that are disquieting or melancholy? How can one make good choices – choices that truly express the self – in such a crumby world? The crumbs matter here because they are comic, abject and moral all at once. They are small signs of appetite, neglect, use, residue. They point toward a world in which action is always belated. Someone has already eaten. Someone has already left the mess. The ethical subject arrives late: we have to deal with the mess created by those who came before.

The detail that most caught my eye, and that I found most productive to think about, was the little softening in the body: the vacillations, as I began to call them. These came as interruptions to the quick detail, blurring the harder edges of the movement. A quiver, a vibration, a sudden heaviness. You called it, I think, a kind of sogginess, which is a good word for it: the dry line becomes damp; the crisp detail absorbs weight. I also thought of it as an oscillatory beating, because it did seem to possess a pulse, a wobble-rhythm. The variations on this were beautifully modulated in the larger context of the performance, suggesting an alternative rhythm within the work.

When I saw Broadcast, I happened to be reading Vladimir Jankélévitch’s The Paradox of Morality. It is an older book, but only recently translated, and the conjunction felt meaningful in that slightly suspicious but irresistible way such coincidences sometimes do. For Jankélévitch, the ethical subject is caught in an unstable passage between two impossible extremes: love without being and being without love. Pure love, if it gives itself to others without reserve, risks dissolving the very subject who loves. You just evaporate as a person. But being, if it thickens into self-preservation, egoity or self-interest, compromises the purity of love. You become completely closed off from others. The moral problem is not solved by choosing one pole over the other. It is lived as an oscillation, in which the subject must somehow preserve enough being to love, while giving enough of itself so that love doesn’t collapse back into egoism.

I don’t want to impose this schema too crudely on your work. But it offered me a way to think about the oscillations in Broadcast as the trembling between self-preservation and self-neglect. Jankélévitch writes of the ethical subject navigating a narrow strait between contradictory demands, at times producing a “terrifying trembling in place”, a vibration that is also the beating of a tender heart. That image seemed uncannily close to the softening in the choreography. The body does not choose between stillness and action, or between withdrawal and assertion. It trembles at the point where choice has become difficult.

In that wavering, I imagined an attempt to present opposing responses to being in a world experienced as repugnant – morally, politically, perhaps even sensually. On one side, the busy work of self-preservation: the detailed fussing, the worry of limbs, the attempt to maintain agency through small acts of negotiation. On the other, the paralysis of giving up on the self: the held pose, the retreat into the corner, the almost-fall into the blackness beyond relation. The softening gestures seemed to offer neither synthesis nor solution, but a third rhythm. They allowed the contradiction to be felt as rhythm rather than stated as theme.

I wonder whether this wavering between possibilities is something you recognise in what you are trying to do? It might be worth exploring more as the work develops, not necessarily by making it more explicit, but by allowing that alternative rhythm to infect other parts of the work: the handling of objects, the costume shift, the imagined furniture, the spatial trajectories. The strongest parts of Broadcast already seem to occur where the choreography allows opposing tendencies to coexist without resolving them.

Andrew Fuhrmann
24/05/2026