BW: In terms of identity-formation through a certain practice, is it important to also situate your-self in ‘I’m preserving something?’ And is that melancholy also part of the devotion?
"First of all let us take Devoutness. When unbalanced, one of its vices is called Fanaticism. Fanaticism (when not a mere expression of ecclesiastical ambition) is only loyalty carried to a convulsive extreme. When an intensely loyal and narrow mind is once grasped by the feeling that a certain superhuman person is worthy of its exclusive devotion, one of the first things that happens is that it idealizes the devotion itself. To adequately realize the merits of the idol gets to be considered the one great merit of the worshiper... and the personal attitude of being his devotee becomes what one might almost call a new and exalted kind of professional specialty within the tribe."
- William James, Varieties of Religious Experience
BW: It seems that the devotion is a complex construction. What are you devoted to? Where exactly is this devotion?
BW: So the devotion has many levels: there is a devotion through a certain kind of dance history, a Merce Cunningham person, and then to the classroom space? You also said that it is something beyond form? Is this all a combination?
Excerpted and edited from a recorded conversation with Brigitte Wilfing
Brigitte Wilfing: What drives you to practice your practice?
BO: Because it’s engaging with an institution that is no longer there, that has changed so dramatically, so it always becomes a reminder. A funeral of a funeral, someone once said. It’s a realization actually, I will never be part of the reality in the video. I connect it to the it-happened-and-then-it’s-gone ideas of live performance. I’m still doing it so it’s not quite gone yet, but this kind of melancholy I think is always present in trying to preserve a dance, or even in watching a dance, you understand it’s already leaving.
BO: Yeah. I didn’t set out to do this, I didn’t really know what I was doing, and so, there’s been a way that I’ve been forming an identity as a preservationist. This kind of melancholy, this wanting to preserve it, and at the same time feeling so excluded from the institution (The Merce Cunningham Trust), from the place (New York City). And I have also been working by myself, going into the studio by myself. Not that the conversations with peers haven’t been fruitful, but it really feels like the work is lonely.
BO: To this feeling, and to transmitting that feeling, distributing it in my body and into space. It can be quite heavy sometimes, it has an affect that in this class has been quite sad; there’s melancholy around it.
BO: William James, the philosopher, talks about devotion as a spiritual virtue. For the devoted, the line of devotion is not linear. You aim your devotion towards the object of devotion but you end up devoted to the devotion itself. You start out one way and end up in a loop that comes back. So it becomes this kind of displacement. That has helped me to think about this practice not as an homage to Merce Cunningham, nor trying to do this class perfectly. If anything, it’s done for the other devotees, the people in the video. So then I see the devotion on many levels as well. It’s not about just doing the class. It’s about taking the feeling of the class, but not approximating the class.
BO: I am a little bored now but… for me there’s something in knowing really well what the material is so that my work is beyond the image or form of the class. On the one hand it really is about the repetition of the class itself, the devotion to this particular class. And on the other hand, I’m not saying this are the best movements or this is most important class, but these are the specific movements I have done and repeated for almost two years now. For me it’s the pleasure in difficulty in trying to achieve them. Pushing against my own boredom, feeling the resistance of the material itself.
BO: I mean it is devotion to dancing, to a particular feeling of dancing. It’s a drive, it comes from a centre. Like the heart or solar plexus place, a kinesthetic feeling. And it arises through this particular class, but it isn’t the only place it happens.
Benny Olk: I think first about devotion. Devotion, which Merce Cunningham wrote of in his 1951 essay Function of a Technique for Dance: “The most essential thing in dance discipline is devotion, the steadfast and willing devotion to the labor that makes the classwork not a gymnastic hour and a half, or at the lowest level, a daily drudgery, but a devotion that allows the classroom discipline to be moments of dancing too.” I am interested in the classroom work of the dancer as the site of this devotion which allows ‘dancing’ to emerge, trying to find out what else might be in the class material.