The MAIN THING
A chorus of Belles, arranged in a semicircle, defiantly pressing toward the centre. Their arms crossed in front of their faces and chests, slightly curled, defensive hands, eyes downcast. They are an army: encroaching, but protecting themselves; and then turning back and walking away. These moments of protection and guard – multiplied and amplified.
I think of what this gesture means.
In a childlike way she says,
Don’t try to look at us.
We are coming for you and yet you can’t really see us.
Knowing
Belle’s images, as I see it, are trying to cleave apart the moment-to-moment of moving – to draw us as close as she can to the non-moment. She presents an image that shows . . . something . . . not really gratifying, and certainly uncertain. She has chosen to ‘call the shot’ on a blurry or uncomposed transition, so that we ask, ‘Where is she going? Where has she been?’ Belle seems to dare us to apprehend our own inconsistency, instability, fickleness, even: ‘Stop pretending to know yourself’.
Working with dance, with unfixed matter, with the ever-changing body, makes me wonder if I’m obsessed with seeking out the thing I can’t know or control. In making dance, we are creating gaps, openings for unforeseen impulses and submerged forces to cross a threshold. Perhaps so we can release – just a little bit – the human compulsion to know ourselves at every moment, to affix meaning to action. In breaking down a new dance in order to learn it, we consider all the pieces; Where is my head? Where is my thigh? My hand? My chest? My knee? My rib? What are they seeing in me? But then, when we actually do it, we can’t possibly know.
Ghosting
Dance highlights our own inconsistencies and shadows, appearing and disappearing as it does, and this rhetoric of ‘ghostliness’ or ‘ephemerality’ is present throughout academic literature on dance. The trope is tinged with both lamentation and celebration, giving the subject a vague air of mysticism; ‘She can’t be captured!’
As somebody who dances, I don’t feel like a ghost when I do it, and when I watch others, they don’t look like ghosts. So there’s something that chafes about this type of language. Perhaps it’s the implication that dance, and by extension, dancers, are somehow less ‘real’ than other things. The word also conjures something uncomfortable. If you’re haunted you feel uneasy about something. And ghosts are doomed to a realm of in-between, just hanging around somewhere waiting for someone to notice them occasionally. Is this dance?
Dances tend to lodge in my mind and body in some form, or non-form. Are they so different from other events that have happened in my life and then don’t re-happen, like special holidays and birthday parties? I hope to remember them, but still have to repeatedly reconstruct them in recall.
Bojana Cvejic writes that dancers and dance-makers ought to be more forthcoming about their processes – that the form suffers from a lack of self-reflective writing that would “illuminate choreography as an authorial poietic.” 1
I’m not sure if she’s right. But maybe calling dance ‘ghostly’ doesn’t compel us to consult its authorial poietic where it does exist.
Disappearing
With the problem of the disappearing dance, and even, paradoxically, of so much of the technology that we’ve used to record it, we refer to ‘living archives’, where dance knowledge, housed within people, is transmitted through relationships.
.The people who dance do not disappear, but they sometimes retire prematurely.
When I started studying speech pathology recently, a few esteemed older dance artists said to me, ‘I wish I had studied something else too’ or ‘I wish I had started studying earlier’ – and I thought, but where would I be if you were not here, now? If your work had not happened, would mine?
I think about age and disappearance – or, as one friend calls it, no longer emerging but ‘submerging’. I wonder how much of dance’s perceived resistance to posterity is attributable, or at least, analogous to, an eagerness to retire older dance artists. The ‘short career’ – often declared inevitabile in this profession, is a convenient dismissal that would strike us as wholly irrational in any other art form because it holds no justification for such a loss of expertise. The capitalistic forces that have shaped our consumption of dance imagery over time – privileging youth and beauty while fetishising the dance that makes us marvel at otherworldly athleticism (maybe this is also related to the aforementioned ghostly mysticism) – have perhaps shaped a collective consciousness of what dancing is, and what kinds of dances/dancers are worthy of being photographed and remembered.
Submerging
Maybe there is something powerful in submerging – in dipping below the surface.
‘Come with me . . . or don’t.’
It’s an invitation to commune, for she has stopped proclaiming and demonstrating. She is instead carrying - multivalent resonances of knowledge that have been exquisitely clarified through and across time.
Relating
Belle describes the relationship between herself – the dancer – and the photographer, documenting her movements. In the container of this relationship, they enact a passing back and forth of control, each making space for the other to perceive the dance, interpret the signals, and plot the moments (or non-moments) in a way that makes sense to them. ‘Go!’ she says – a communication, a manifestation, a new relationship.
She is making something happen behind her, in front of us. A shadow that she communes with, spinning into fabric, into matter. An obsession with something we can barely see – this version of herself has captured her attention for an entire page. A page of Belles, scratching and greeting one another with a soft excitement. Hands become fists.
Looking back at past versions of ourselves, our predilections are sometimes perplexing. Watching video documentation of my past work, I think:
What did I think I was making, think I was doing, at the time? What did I decide was important about this arrangement, this mode of performing, these particular materials placed end-to-end and the relationships between them? Even if I had reasoned it out then, would I agree with myself now? And, were I to re-perform it, what is the main thing I would want the piece to communicate? What would I prioritise now? And if that has changed over time, what were the events that led to the change? What has remained the same? Can I trace the points in time and note the correlations, the relationships, between all these pieces of information?
Being while dancing
In dancing, we dance with, alongside, after and before each other. And after ourselves, and before ourselves. And we repeat and repeat and we do and we do and it changes and changes and changes…. This painstaking but illuminating process that dancers undertake is a micro-version of how we transmit and share knowledges with one another in the field. Sometimes when I’m learning a piece of choreography from a teacher, peer or choreographer in the studio, I will look very closely at them as I do it – this gives me one set of information. Then, I will look just to the side or above them, and this adds another set of information - somehow dynamically fuller yet less specific. And then I try it by myself, without a model, using only recall. I will go back and forth through these modes. So it isn’t necessarily through direct copying, but through being in relation to, that you can gather the most knowledge. In the explorative act of ‘doing’ with others, we consult and create our archives.
Doing
“For if choreography knows something, it is that an archive does not store: it acts.” 2
When I was part of the National Gallery of Australia’s Merce Cunningham Residency four years ago (a partnership with the Merce Cunningham Trust), I found myself learning – steps, directions, timings – that dancers from the Cunningham Company had done in the past. It was all very plainly delivered – there was little elaboration or direction about the how or why of doing things, beyond the principles of the technique itself. I didn’t watch videos of the dances/dancers; it was taught in the moment by the repertory stager. But there was great care taken – great attention given to how much was said or divulged, and in what way. Whatever was not said felt deliberate, as though one needed to be careful of imposing too much of the past onto the present, or too much of one person onto another. I suspect this was typical of Merce himself. Not one for exposition, he was more interested in the ‘doing’. As the famous quote goes, “The only way to do it is to do it” 3. And while this could be construed as secretive, it is also an allowance – a provision of space – for future dancers who come to the work with the body they are in and the background that they have – which is enough.
So we did it, and in that particular way that dancers have of just getting on with things, found ourselves trusting in the scaffolding of the raw material. In the same way, the stager trusted us to bring about new potentials, to enliven the instruction. Nobody cared that I could not perfect a high side tilt, because there was implicit acknowledgement that what was being transferred or transported through time was not replication but possibility. It was about trusting, jumping, landing and wobbling – clichéd as that sounds. Just as in dancing, where you reach a point where you have to give up the notion that you can fully understand or completely control an outcome, Merce wanted his material to grow, break apart, expand, contract and change in perpetuity. His expertise was in structuring and framing doing, thereby allowing us to see the person, right there, in front of us, dealing with things – dealing with the doing – unfettered by a dramaturgical blueprint.
Learning
“When corporeally archived, dance “does not disappear into the past but zooms into the all-encompassing field of the possible defined by the indetermination of the body.” 4
Cunningham’s solo work, Loops, has never been danced by any other dancer. Paul Kaiser writes that Merce wanted to keep this solo his “little secret” 5, and that it was “not teachable” 6. Kaiser observed that the timing of Loops was uncommonly intricate, detailed, and decidedly different from any of the material Cunningham made on other dancers. In explaining why this was so, Merce had remarked, “Everyone’s rhythm is different.” 7
I have been learning back my own improvised material from a video – trying to acquaint myself with my rhythm. To begin, I let my body absorb the shape of it – as though I were a blob, a bit like Belle’s technicolour green squiggle. Then, I analyse it closely, picking out details that I missed the first, second, third and fourth time, and integrating them; the process is a bit like ‘making marks’ in life drawing. Then I try to do it without the video, identifying the cues I need to remember in order to access the impulses to execute the rhythm. In this cyclical process, “I could feel it getting closer to the feeling of improvising; It began to feel new again despite being entirely known.” - Belle 8
I think about transferring this onto other dancers – teaching it, as it were. Knowing that it will look different – be different – I consider, What is the main thing I want them to grasp? What are we going to care about most in this instance, and how will I go about instilling that care in others? I know they will have to apply their own unique sense-making strategies to the inhabitation of the material, and that their rhythms and ‘secrets’ will collide with mine. In fact, this may be the aspect of transposing myself onto other dancers that I enjoy the most.
I like this process of journeying toward one another that dancers do; knowing they can never reach the other person, but setting out nonetheless. As a choreographer, I have asked dancers to learn my improvised material from a video, and then teach it back to me, as they see it. I am drawn to somehow enforcing a separation of myself from my own history or body. Like the way Merce used dice or computer programs to disrupt the “instincts and habits of the warm socialised human body” 9, I try to step away from myself, and approach the ‘material’ as an abstracted entity, mediated by people.
Perhaps choreographers are less interested in getting dancers to move like them than even they know. Because why would we set our movement on other people, unless we are seeking difference? An autonomous ‘someone’ to be in relation to, so we can perceive ourselves more completely.
Imaging
“I would rather go with you to a place where you look at what it’s doing, not what it is . . .The main thing is to use your eyes, is to allow your eyes to tell you what it’s doing.” 10
Sometimes I watch performances taking place and think, Am I seeing pictures strung together? Was this made so that photos could be taken of it? With images saturating the fabric of our everyday lives, it can be difficult to know when and how to attribute meaning to them.
A friend who danced in companies in the 90s and 2000s laments the lack of documentation of her career: “Where did it go?” she says. “It is probably somewhere….” It possibly is somewhere – housed in different places – but she doesn’t really know how to begin re-claiming it.
Having ‘emerged’ 15 years ago into an arts industry with an unshakeable and enduring emphasis on the ‘new’, I feel similarly, though for different reasons. An abundance of imagery and video media has proliferated, though it is disseminated haphazardly, fragmentarily, sometimes in a way I have not chosen. These mediated selves can make me feel a bit less real - like a ghost, I guess.
In the past I have been anxious to remount or tour works that I’ve made and liked, because I didn’t want to just let them go. I wonder if I should simply get over it – maybe artmaking should always be about nobly striving to put something better or different into the world. But the individualist, ‘Independent Artist’ condition provokes a certain frantic, rogue defensiveness – an urge to grab every shred of evidence, knowing there is no reliable custodianship waiting at the end. So we update our little websites as though this would fix the legacy anxiety – defining what we are about, once and for all.
Holding
When Gregory Lorenzutti, a local dancer and dance photographer, held an exhibition of images from past works at Dancehouse in 2015, I came away with a palpable sense of relief – as though we were all going to be ok. It was probably a bit sentimental, but at the time it was the closest I had come to knowing that my dancing work was a valuable and indelible part of collective history; that it was held and housed somewhere – even though I couldn’t see it all the time. And, by extension, my conception of myself as an agent and a member of a community, was verified.
The grounding moment of seeing and being seen by others, all in the same room, given due space and time, was striking. I tried to pay attention to the sensation of safety and belonging; to remember it, and grasp why it felt so important.
Placing
A fresh Belle, with shorter hair, enters with a pragmatic air. Her heel touches down, to push off the blocks. But this Belle is a wanderer, following some other command. She makes her way toward us – nose-led, as though sniffing down a stream, necessarily making steps through discrete aisles, head swivelling. A minstrel from another time.
I think my feeling as I walked through the aisles of Gregory’s exhibition was trying to tell me something else. Far from issuing proof of my significance and legacy, it was actually providing relief in the knowledge that I am less important than I thought – that there are all these people right here all around us, and we are not alone.
Last year, with colleague and friend Will McBride, I pitched a project to the State Library about dance legacies and living archival processes; a curatorial panel would invite a dance artist and two assistants to work full-time in the library for two weeks at a time, and any person – public, professional, artist or scholar – could pass through and attend live working sessions. The dance artist could engage with, share and archive their practice in any way that befitted their work and their priorities. The program would run for a year - or for as long as it possibly could.
So, what’s the distinction between holding and keeping? Showing and proving? Images reflect the meaning that we give them. And they assume their function so readily – zooming back and forth between documentation and promotion. In asking what can be saved, salvaged, re-made or re-visited, it is difficult to know where to start, because perceptions of value are different for everyone, and constantly changing. We need a place to go to contextualise the stuff.
Authoring
Belle scribbles. Her deft hand passes over the image of her dance, deciding when, and whether, to inscribe or annotate. A nostalgic ‘wicked witch of the west’ green flickers about her form, highlighting her movements. On the screen she wriggles, invested in her knee, while her calm stealthy self sits in shadow, choosing, deliberating. Masterfully and incisively swiping at herself, she authors our new view.
In “What if this were an archive?”11 Maaike Bleeker describes how we can’t separate the ‘known’ object in an archive from the way in which it is known. For instance, were we to look back at a past event through an archive, we would construct a kind of narrative or understanding by drawing connections between discrete bits of media – images, text, audio etc. So, the logic through which we choose to know the thing, is inseparable from the thing itself.
What we need, perhaps more than remounts and tours of past works, is intimate connections to one another, so that we can join the dots – not just linearly, through history, but contemporaneously. What if our websites contained attributions and links to others – tributes to everything else that formed us, works that are imbued in our own, people who reside in our own cells? Would we be less anxious, knowing that we were perpetually held in this web? Maybe we need to physically gather to just tell stories and share photos sometimes. In caring for the future/past, we could build a collective, multivalent, regenerative memory. Other people are the main thing.
Bojana Cvejić, “A Choreographer’s Score: Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker,” in Transmission in Motion: The Technologizing of Dance, ed. Maaike Bleeker (Oxfordshire: Taylor & Francis, 2016), 54.
André Lepecki, “The Body As an Archive: Will to Re-Enact and the Afterlives of Dances,” Dance Research Journal 42, 2 (2010) 38, URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23266897.
Merce speaking to camera, Merce Cunningham Trust, "MERCE CUNNINGHAM "THE ONLY WAY TO DO IT IS TO DO IT," August 2015, youtube video, 00:19, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOQ9lg3Gn1M&ab_channel=MerceCunninghamTrust.
Lepecki, “The Body As an Archive,” 34
Paul Kaiser, “Not Fade Away: Thoughts on preserving Cunningham's Loops," in Transmission in Motion, ed. Maaike Bleeker (Oxfordshire: Taylor & Francis, 2016), 16-31.
Kaiser, "Not Fade Away," 22
Kaiser, "Not Fade Away," 22.
A. Frahn-Starkie, ‘Looking Back, Thinking Forward: Interrogating Tensions Between Dance and its Documentation and Archiving," Melbourne University, (2021)
Kaiser, "Not Fade Away," 20.
Dianne Mize (describing how to paint fog), “Quick Tip 133 - Painting in a Fog,” October 2017, youtube video, 13.44, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ukY_IK8gfw
Maaike Bleeker, “What if this were an archive?: Abstraction, enactment and human implicatedness” in Transmission in Motion : The Technologizing of Dance,
ed. Maaike Bleeker (Taylor & Francis Group, 2016)