There’s nothing in the world like the feeling of being in the studio, working along, and whammo! Something starts to take off, to go wowowowow, juice up. But it doesn’t happen right at the get-go, and it doesn’t happen all the time; and it doesn’t happen from working yourself into a tizzy of wanting it, or from anything to do with how you feel or what you plan. It comes along when it comes along. In the meantime, you have to be in there trying a bit of this and a bit of that, and staying with all those semi-moments—all those ho-hum kind of moments—trying something else and doing it over and maybe like this, and working—but also waiting. You have to keep yourself available, keep the work available, and work up to those whammo! times; then, with them; also, after them; till the next; till the whole thing takes off and tells you it’s done, it is.
You have to spend time:
Placing the foot somewhere, tossing an arm, shifting the balance, shifting a limb, adding a curl, a tic, teasing out the answers to how fast, how tense, and what next, when to join, exit, or pause; watching and allowing the mind to roam, and consider, and take inventory, to hum with decision, next, change, pause, repeat, test, test; feeling the heart beat with the possibilities, feeling the internal eye on the alert, senses tuned in to the seconds of this, that, here, or maybe there.
With the alerted senses operating, finding each moment, holding the moment until it is perceived, keeping the accumulation of moments until something is happening, something starts to kick in, the dance begins to squeak a little interest at you.
To tingle with a “perhaps we have here,” the beginning perception of its budding personality, and regarding it with modesty (always modesty), taking a back seat so it can reveal itself to you. All the while coaxing another decision and another moment, searching and sniffing, getting acquainted. With state of mind heightened, alert, watchful, respectful, sitting on the edge of its seat.
All the while, perceiving it, perceiving the “just-this-ness”—context-less, floating, ill-attached, and ill-defined. It’s not a well-lit activity; decisions happen in the semi-darkness, so don’t burden these bits with the responsibility of the grand idea. Letting them accumulate, be tentative, fascinatingly partial, let them stay open to a little bit of another feeling—ooh, aah, just right.
And staying there; allowing your involvement in the hints of meanings and communications to be what holds you. Staying—with nerves of steel—in that poorly lit place. Not in spite of its lack of light, or any other lack, but for its own singular reality, its own singular engagement, the minuteness of it, the curiosity in it, the buzz of your attention, the small communications of the choices. Staying, not to put up with it as a necessary tedium—a bore on the way to the good stuff—but with the alchemy of turning fear into thrill, finding right there in the hum and tingle of those choices talking, right there in that immediacy, finding right there the reason for and passion of making.
The great thing is that the minutiae of where you are, are not only plenty but where the action is. Those small, unattached bits are jewels. The trick is the frame of mind that allows for their perception—it’s not patience, it’s attention. Acknowledge the enormity of your task by not taking on everything in every moment. All the lusciousness, all the sense and sensibility of the final performed dance—let that goal go for now. Let it go in order to reach it.
But, of course, I lie a little bit. A dance is more than a collection of greatest hits.
Parts of a dance get next to each other and act on each other; they combine to communicate something else/more/different from what they do on their own. They and their cumulative sense do something to you. Dance does, acts, affects. Part of how it does, acts, affects, is how we act on it—the perceiving changing the thing perceived. We invade it by watching, bringing all of our selves to it.
When you watch a 15- or whatever-minute section of a dance, it leaves you somewhere; emotionally and psychologically, you are in a particular state. There are things, then, that could reiterate that state, interrupt it, mock it, transcend it. If you find just the right next thing, it can feel exquisitely right. Not because it is the most fabulous little piece of movement you have ever made but because of how it interacts with where the previous movements have left you. And they have left you there because of their nature. The state is unclassifiable—not as reduced as expectant or happy or soft but something more subtle and multiplicitous. The next thing has the power to affect because of the affect of the previous thing. Sequence is a cooker, an alchemy.
The job is to get the distance required to perceive, to divorce things from whatever initially informed them or made them—the mood that accompanied, the instructions that were followed, the notebook notes. Tune in to its it-ness: squint, fast-forward video in your mind’s eye, tune into the dance’s hum, watch the eventfulness, the rhythm, the sweep, the “what happens.” Look, wait, watch, try, and retry until you recognize that you have something right—that you have something, in the words of a student, “the way you never knew you wished things always were” (Anneke Hansen). You have to find it, not make it happen. And you find it by making: making and waiting, making things that are and are not close, by reading, listening, tasting, and humming that “what it is-ness.” Try, try, try, and trust that which is operating—that part of yourself that is waiting for that sureness, that yes! of recognition.
[Excerpt from Dailiness, published in Choreographic Encounters by the Institute for Choreography and Dance (Cork, Ireland), 2003.]
