Choice

Performers cannot control how they are perceived. They cannot necessarily control who is performing. They can, however, include perception, their own and others’, as a material to work with in relation to filling out how they are comprehended and what aspects of their constitution are included in this perception. Sometimes you have to tell someone, you’re mistaken, I’m not who you think I am. Other times you have to just let people make their assumptions. What other people think matters, but it doesn’t necessarily swallow you whole. How I’m identified is a by-product of my work, with varying degrees of toxicity and usefulness.

The materialization of perception in relationship is different from the production of identity.

Some artists work is about creating identity. Mine has not been. Being identified with a genre or a community is a by-product for me. Although I admit to being proud of being part of the experimental dance community. For many years my identity card stated that I was a “permanent stranger,” which felt close to right.

Liminal Brussels.

How few times dancers stop doing the choreography on stage, at least on purpose, is remarkable. What holds them there? Even when it hurts, even when something goes very wrong…. Dancers choose their context, choose to follow its conventions even if those are new conventions that have arisen only from this particular set of agreements and have no recognizable cultural value (not pretty, not smart, not selling anything…). How do these choices get made? How are they sustained? What are dancers following through on?

Part of my work as a free-lance performer is to choose in relation to where I find myself working, and with whom, what aspects of my background and training and what aspects of the social and aesthetic regime I find myself comprehended by to use in constituting each new role I create. This is where I notice Experiential Authorship most vividly – choosing from my experience what materials to constitute this role with and experiencing the results of that choice through my body.

This choosing is both an intuitive and learned process of selecting from my knowledge and experience to border how my constitution is comprehended. I do this in order to focus myself on the perceptual matters at hand. What’s going on here, in this room, with these people? What can I contribute to the situation? As the performer I’m foregrounded but the background is my focus – even when there is not yet a background to prioritize. In experimental processes there can, at times, be no practice in place – we’re looking for the background in order to prioritize it. In these cases the bordering of my constitution needs to be highly plastic in order to allow room for a practice to emerge.

In order to generate this plasticity in a border, I need to have choices in how I approach a task. This choice making is not just a question of doing something well. It’s possible to  perform things very well without having a choice. Once. Maybe twice. Three times would be pushing your luck.

Choice is a question of sustainability. Every iteration of a movement demands sensitivity to the happenstance of live conditions. Fluency in the current moment demands micro-adjustments in that moment. If I have several approaches as a performer, I am more likely to be more specific in how I see, how I touch, what I listen to, how I communicate to colleagues. Not knowing what to do next is also a necessary aspect of experimentation. Learning new skills of perception (a new way of orienting spatially, for example) is in itself disorienting. The experience of disorientation creates a lag, or slackness, between the demands of the moment and my response. That lag-time is where conventions and norms fall into question, and where another response might emerge.

Scale

My sense of scale needed to expand in order for me to engage with the work I was doing in large European stages as opposed to the smaller-scale of the New York City stages I performed on. Proximity and temporality are affected by scale, as is front – the imagined perceiver, and facing – the action taken to meet front. Projection is a scale-quest modulated by both technical and aesthetic concerns. The performer needs to fine-tune their sense of proportion to every space they encounter in order to inhabit it as a place with its own social mores and aesthetic presence. Clearly, there is no absolute right or wrong in calibrating scale, projecting presence or enacting place-ness, but there is a specificity to the scale of any performance space that the performer can feel, from inside their role, and is responsible to. Scale leaves a trace on the performer’s sense of self, a liminal animate with more or less relevance, more or less thing-ly need to be gathered around, depending on the conditions the performer finds themselves in.

Direction

My sense of direction has always been strong, but not sharp, not accurate. I have a clear, demanding feeling of what direction to take, but I’ve learned from experience that I will often be wrong and end up somewhere else entirely if I don’t pay attention to other people’s directions, or a map can help too. I need to take direction from others. Accept it. Include it.

My sense of direction is an aggregate, an assembly of influences – persons, diagrams, the compass, the cube, the clock face, the spiral…. Under specific choreographic conditions I animate the most appropriate sense-maker(s), suspending the others. I handle direction and it acts upon me, giving access to precision and coordination with the choreographic/aesthetic regime I’m part of. This sense of direction becomes a liminal animate, temporary and concrete, a thing to gather my senses around.

Time

I have a feeling for time, but it tends to synthesize with a visual sense. I see the felt time and linger there, watching it, like a cat at a mouse hole, a painter in dim light, a train-spotter. I tend to slow down. In order to keep up, I’ve learned to chop my long, shady phrases into small, bright increments. Minimizing has become as much a habit as my more inherent physical tendency to extend. I do this in order to be in-time with others’ time. It’s not natural to me. It might be organic but it’s definitely a synthesis of influence and desire that creates a sense-making I have honed – another liminal animate, sometimes latent, sometimes present.

I learned to notice my habits because I had to change them in order to coordinate my experience with the work I had (the privilege) to do. Habits do not go away. They submerge. The result is complexity and partialness. Only some aspects of me are visible in any one situation, no matter how much history and pleasure in other ways of being and doing support the current moment.

Collaborative, aggregate, manifold? Performance processes diffract experience: pushing it through prismatic lenses and leaving a clear mark in an absence, a partiality, sense of thing, something thing-ly but not a whole, stand-alone object. What is here-now is not all of me although I am also here-now.

The awareness I develop of how I’m seen, how I’m heard and how I’m felt has a direct relation to how I see, how I listen, how I touch. But there is always a gap. There is always an unknowable space between my experience and how I’m experienced by another. I am not what I seem to be, and I am not-not what I seem to be. The gap manifests in partialness, which then manifests in thing-liness. The ice berg’s tip emerges from the water, glinting, treacherous, maybe habitable, and becomes something other than its latent whole. The gap generates materializations that are both part of me, in that I fully experience them through my body and separate from me in that they are fragmentary consolidations of time, space and relationships specific to a certain role. These perceptual materials find their value in relation and withdraw when those relations are gone. They remain as remains, materials that matter less, if at all but are nonetheless material.

The possibility to choose how I respond to a task is related to the possibility to choose what I am responsible for.  This is why we need training as performers. Not to become better performers, necessarily, but to become more responsible performers, more responsible for ourselves and to others, in the moment and over time. More able to respond.

Here I’ll use another anecdote to consider responsibility.

Go to…

Audio Recording

20 Dancers