Being Responsible bzw. Writing About Dancing About:
Trying to Relate from a Dispositional Ethics
By Jorge De Hoyos
15.3.2019 | 2nd-semester essay for MA SODA at HZT
Diagnosing Decision-Making
Paz Rojo, in her 6 February 2019 SODA lecture “Dancing its do,” described the dancing she practices as a researcher and choreographer as “turning its back” to ideas of performance, of spectatorship, of being seen or shaped. She simply stated that in her current practice “dance does not equal choreography.” By emancipating dance from needing to serve a function beyond existing itself or serving itself, she proposes a radical shift in decision-making criteria as it relates to notions of responsibility, of needing to serve a purpose like research for institutional knowledge production or choreography for theater’s economy of attention, both of which she argues can contribute to a neoliberalism which limits the potential of the living body.
In a 7 November 2018 seminar a few months earlier and connected to the same lecture series on decision-making, sound artist Tom Tlalim described how he always struggled with putting structures on sound. Even though as a child he was credited for composing the music to his father’s documentary film, he considered himself more as the “pure sound” and his father as the actual composer who made compositional decisions to shape the music for the film. Tom mentioned how he always found the act of editing, structuring, making cuts an aggressive act, but he says: “it’s where the political starts.” As a politically-engaged artist who often focuses on how sound functions as a violent tool of state control and who also has a long history of performing as a free music improviser, he is aware of the politics of composing, especially in a collaborative context. In collaborations, he could decide “to be directed as pure sound” and “to withdraw the ego,” or he could “resist directorial inputs in order to then have space to come back with a personal offer.”
Later that night in his lecture “Politics of Composition,” he recalled important advice: “Creativity requires elbows.”
He explained: “You need to make that space for something to happen, and that’s a sort of pushing them away for a minute and trying to empty the void so that something can actually happen that’s really creative.” He sometimes actively decides not to make a compositional decision as a way to give space for other creative possibilities.
I mention these two artists because of their decisions to resist a pressure to need to make compositional decisions, a pressure that could easily reinstate pre-given social, aesthetic and political norms which can detract from the experiential or creative potential of their respective mediums. In my own life and art work, I feel a sense of this pressure to need to make good decisions which would then lead to making a good art or research product. I believe that this sense of obligation springs from a notion of moralistic responsibility, moralistic in that it imposes a hierarchical value structure where the ambitions of achieving success and the anxieties of risking failure—perhaps in the eyes of an academic institution, an audience, a funding body, a negative stereotype of the romantic or starving artist, etc.—can violently stunt my body-based, artistic inquiries, ultimately causing such inquiries to conform to safer, already known and accepted aesthetics.
A New Prescription
In the art journal “Frakcija: Curating Performing Arts,” the theater director and founder of the French artistic residency PAF, Jan Ritsema, warns against this numbing effect on art when he distinguishes between curation and programming through the healing terms of curing and prescribing, respectively. The former term he links to curare, the name of a substance taken from a plant used by certain indigenous peoples in hunting to paralyze their prey. He criticizes that contemporary curation practices have mind-numbing and paralyzing effects on society in that curators curate already known aesthetics. He therefore argues in favor of prescribing “the yet undefineable / the what they themselves don’t know yet / the uncurable / the uncuratable / the impossible / the horrible [..] of art that does not look like anything anymore” (2010: 6-7).
In my second semester of the Masters in Solo/ Dance/ Authorship program, out of a need to have space free from such internalized curatorial pressures, I began a practice that has indeed been feeling like an “art that does not look like anything anymore,” and uncomfortably so in the way that I’m confronted by personal doubts of its merit. I refer to this practice as Giving Myself to Dancing. It entails that as I go to the studio to research, I dedicate at least one hour to give myself completely to the act of dancing—dancing in a broad and loose sense of the term but still dancing. The main decision that establishes the practice is that I suspend all agendas of needing the dancing to serve anything other than itself. I do not try to do “good” or “rigorous” movement research; to necessarily be a good dancer; to find material that could be interesting to develop for a performance or presentation; or to even have a specific focus, direction, or quality to my dancing. Of course, I make countless decisions consciously and unconsciously within the dancing moments, but I do not enforce (thus far in this initial phase of its implementation) a strict criteria of decision-making. In fact, I have mostly—by impulse of needing to not put pressure on myself—defaulted to a laissez-faire attitude in regards to what dancing I can consider to be dancing and therefore allowable in that space. I’m trying to give myself, as Tlalim mentioned, “elbow room” to begin unpacking a familiar and ongoing issue: how I internalize moralistic responsibility in my dancing, or how I feel a crippling pressure for my dancing to be about something or to be going somewhere specific. However, with this new strategy to give my dancing more room to move (my laissez-faire approach), I fear that the decision not to make compositional decisions for my practice might invite too much chaos that could sabotage any deeper growth of new creative or insightful potentials.
Examples of dancing (and/or moment-to-moment, laissez faire decisions) as I’ve been Giving Myself to Dancing include: continuing a juicy dance move; practicing a popular dance move like twerking, belly dancing or looking cool in a club; spinning around; not leading a spin with my arm this time; noticing that I’m stuck in my head and unable to make a decision and then deciding to not decide, rather surrendering and reacting to whatever unfolds on its own; taking a deep breath to ground my energy; spending a minute to find music on YouTube; taking a nap; checking out how my muscles might look as I’m video-recording myself; allowing myself to try to dance like a beautiful, lyrical ballet dancer; making weird sounds to relieve stress; being superficial in effort; feeling unmotivated; feeling caffeinated; etc..
Yes, as this practice is new and perhaps still feeling not so rigorously applied, questions and concerns abound regarding the merits of such a practice within an art research program, both institutionally speaking and in the broader sense of my career and life decisions to make dance performance. Writing this essay helps me to analyze my decision to install a practice that suspends a known sort of decision-making, and I hope this analysis can help me deconstruct a notion of moralistic responsibility that continually causes interruptions of doubt, self-judgement and even threatens stasis in my art-making endeavors. Therefore, I want to rethink responsibility through the lens of a dispositional ethics, what Ramsay Burt in “Ungoverning Dance” once describes as “having an awareness and moving in ways that help to see things through” or “making sure that things happen and ensuring that people or things realize their potential” (2017: 172). Following this, I want to continue (both in and beyond the writing of this essay) surveying the why, how and what of decision-making by other artists as a way to develop tools (like language or approaches) for me to continue Giving Myself to Dancing, responsibly, in the sense of an ethical responsivity. Again, a lingering concern in my practice if I am to embody this new ethics is that a certain level of rigor and commitment might still be wanting but that specific criteria might remain elusive and impossible to codify, perhaps even necessarily so.
Taking on Responsibilities
From a moralistic sense of the term, responsibility can be judged based on fixed, pre-given codes of obligation, and the choices and decisions one makes can be held to account by this system—what Emily Beausoleil describes in her article, “Embodying an Ethics of Response-ability,” as “rule-governed behavior” (2015: 2).
A similar pre-ordered reality is described by Marcus Steinweg in his book, “Inconsistencies,” as a reality made up of pre-given choices where Capitalism presents an idea of freedom as the freedom to choose (2017: 65-66). The merits of each choice here are subject to value-judgements based off of established notions of fulfilling pre-defined duties, roles or obligations. However, Steinweg begins to offer an alternative context for a different notion of responsibility when he distinguishes between choices and decisions. He defines a decision as something that “opposes the instituted order through critical openness to its inconsistency and arbitrariness.” He explains that “while the subject stabilizes the given world order with each choice, deciding means importing disorder into it.” He is careful to state that “the ideology-critical element of decision” is that “chaos already belongs to the order of facts as its implicit truth.” Thus far for my practice, the laissez-faire approach matches the openness to inconsistency and arbitrariness that Steinweg lays out. However, I am still unsure if my practice includes this critical criticality, or an ability to appropriately respond to the ensuing chaos.
Beausoleil reflects this chaos when she writes that a traditional idea of responsibility as “’fixed in place’ […] fails to account for the complexity, dynamism and interrelation of identity and encounter” (2015:2). Her formulation of responsibility from a dispositional ethics is therefore built on the pillars of identity and encounter, and the inherent chaos is revealed through the interplay of both. Yes, I admit that I can easily feel lost and confused when I open myself up to dancing—lost and confused as a feeling of chaos. In this admission, the “I” is “identity,” the “open myself up to” or “Giving Myself to” is the encounter, and feeling “lost and confused” is the chaos. In response, though, to feeling lost and confused, Beausoleil moves the dilemma forward as she asserts: “the encounter across social difference must provide the means to acknowledge and appropriately respond to what by definition exceeds one’s terms of knowing and valuing the world [and as such] concerns a sensibility and an art of listening to what appears first as white noise.” Responsibility therefore implies a new way to listen to that which one does not yet know how to hear.
Listening – the Unknown
In the context of Giving Myself to Dancing, I interpret Beausoleil’s “social difference” as the unknown dancing—that dancing which, by nature of its excepted state from a moralistic decision-making regime, appears to me as something different, new and overwhelming that I do not yet understand or know how to understand.
Also, the “white noise” that she describes seems to mirror my experiences of the laissez-faire “just dancing about” that I perceive in my current practice. During the semester, I have often felt a general sense of blur as I dance, perhaps resulting from the fact that I do not make distinctions within my dancing: I do not make decisions to identify, analyze or develop any dancing that appears.
I find the accounts of Robert Wolff in “Original Wisdom” strangely familiar as he describes how he first began a process of encounter with the same sort of “white noise” that comes from not yet knowing.
During the 1950s, he worked as a social psychologist and was hired by the Malaysian Government to find out why a particular group of the aboriginal Sng’oi, who lived deep in the jungle, were unwilling to consider working for the rubber plantation industry of the time. Considerations of advanced climate collapse, colonialism and corporate greed aside, I find that the extremity of the social difference that Wolff was trying to bridge presents a clear example of an initial attempt to acknowledge and respond to that which exceeds one’s current knowledge and value system. In the following excerpt, he recounts an experience of encounter that I find responsible in the terms of a dispositional ethics:
"I told myself that for one day I would set aside any agenda I might have and would just be, as the People seemed just to be.
Immediately I discovered that it was extremely difficult to change my usual behavior. It was very stressful not to have an agenda, not to wake up with a clear idea of what I was going to do that day. I felt lost, adrift, without the security of a schedule, goals and objectives.
The first day I tried this experiment, my mind raced all day. I could not stop thinking: What if—did I forget something—should I do something else—was it time for a meal yet—did I feel tired—maybe I should—what did I feel—what is going on?
In fact, my mind was so busy that at the end of the day I was exhausted, and I realized that if I did have an inner voice I could possibly have heard it over the roaring noise of my mind.
Gradually I learned.
There were days when I floated.
The strange thing was that as soon as I could do that, I no longer heard my mind.
To my surprise I started seeing things in my environment that I had not noticed before. I observed insects; I saw a sunbeam sliding around a tree, brilliantly illuminating a little puddle of muddy water. I smelled things I could not name. I heard tiny rustlings as well as birdsong, a breaking twig "(2001: 121-122).
Through Giving Myself to Dancing, I can relate to many of Wolff’s experiences: feeling uneasy without an agenda; being stuck in the head; but also, when I find myself enraptured by dancing, feeling pleasantly carried along or attentive to new details that I might otherwise miss if I was too “busy.” Both the “roaring noise” in his mind and Beausoleil’s “white noise” reflect my feelings of overwhelm of too many possibilities in the dancing. A sense of moralistic responsibility, here, would try to impose known definitions to navigate me towards safer aesthetics and pre-sanctioned conducts. A simple example of this could be if I began looking in the mirror to improve ballet poses as a response to not knowing what else to do or feeling lost and exhausted from flailing about. On the other hand, a dispositional ethics, I suspect, would encourage me to stay in the “not knowing” longer than feels comfortable. I felt this uncomfortable “staying with”-ness in the seminar of Paz Rojo where we practiced her dancing of extreme presence and response-ability. I also feel this when learning a new skill in front of others or traveling to a foreign country.
Earlier this year I observed a call out to the German and International dance world to not abandon “encounter” out of fear that chaos might weaken or destroy “identity.” On the website of the upcoming Tanzkongress 2019 in Hellerau/Dresden, organized by the choreographer Meg Stuart, are 9 slogans in rotation appearing for about 3 seconds each. One slogan reads: “Chaos is not a problem.” Another reads: “Vulnerability is Power.” And yet another: “Listen. We insist on extreme presence” (www.tanzkongress2019.de). They are offered on the website as, perhaps, working propositions or values, so I reformulate them together here: the invitation to “listen” in “extreme presence” is to take a position of response-ability where “chaos is [therefore] not a problem,” and the “vulnerability [that arises from not knowing] is power.” It is only through commitment and continuity to the encounter—extreme presence—that a new capacity for listening can begin to develop and allow for the cultivation of transformative potential.
Poet C.A. Conrad also arrives to this conclusion when they observe how working in “the factory essentially divorced [his friends and family] from a sense of their essential selves” through “lack of being present” (2014: xi). Conrad, therefore, created “(Soma)tics, ritualized structures where being anything but present was next to impossible.” By creating this space, or focus, Conrad explains that “the many facets of what is around [them] wherever [they are] can come together through a sharper lens [which helps to] reveal the creative viability of everything around.”
I believe that this was my intention to begin Giving Myself to Dancing, though I still feel very vulnerable in not knowing exactly how, yet, to manifest all the potential.
Writing About (/) Dancing About
I never saw the performance piece “Dancing About” by Gob Squad. It premiered at Volksbühne in Berlin in November 2012.
I did however see “Are You With Us?” in 2014 at Hebbel am Ufer II. It was an overnight durational performance in sketch-improv-comedy fashion involving a film-director figure in front of a small group of actors playing out the chance directives and mise-en-scene of the moment. There was a set dramaturgical structure on repeat throughout the night though each scene was new. The roles were always rotating and the characters always transforming. Over the 6 hours of my spectatorship, I was enthralled by the actor’s moment-to-moment composition decisions as they dove into new costumes and music, solved directorial inputs, fought for or hid from attention, all while negotiating their fatigue and concentration levels as the hours went by. I could constantly see the individual person-actor at work. At the same time, innumerable characters appeared and disappeared. I could grasp a unity to and throughout each of the disparate scenarios—constructed realities woven of disunities, alignments, confusions, competing commitments and allowances.
Again, no, I never saw their performance “Dancing About,” but I still want to. Their trailer on YouTube suggests the show to be very funny yet simultaneously very serious.
Having already a sense of how they embody complexity through play and craft, I found the title—as it came to my attention for a re-staging—striking. I could sense the humor in the multiple meanings: one being that they intend to dance about something without being sure of exactly what; and another, that they do not actually know how to dance but will try anyway. I felt somehow accused by this irony. As one who has dedicated the vast majority of their professional life to freelance contemporary dance and performance, a lot of this “dancing about” is something of which I fear I am guilty—especially now that I’m Giving Myself to Dancing without knowing exactly what to make of it.
I turn to Marguerite Duras for validation of these concerns when she writes:
“Writing is the unknown. Before writing one knows nothing of what one is about to write. And in total lucidity.
It’s the unknown in oneself, one’s head, one’s body. Writing is not even a reflection, but a kind of faculty one has, that exists to one side of oneself, parallel to oneself: another person who appears and comes forward, invisible, gifted with thought and anger, and who sometimes, through his own actions, risks losing his life” (Duras, 2011: 44).
The activity itself—whether writing or dancing or Giving Oneself to…, as a self within oneself—is at risk of losing its life…of becoming nothing. Embracing the unknown entails inviting chaos—a chaos of quantity, complexity, nuance, etc. She notes that “there is something suicidal in a writer’s solitude” because the solitude needed to engage the act of writing “is the open door to abandonment” (2011: 20). If I experience the entering into extreme presence as a sort of solitude (i.e. me in the face of Giving Myself to Dancing) then I risk losing myself to chaos.
The question immediately arises: Is the risk worth it?
And an immediate response: It feels necessary…even if the payoff is not immediately tangible.
What feels clear is that any fixed notion of knowing is a limited and static thing, similar to notions of happiness, wealth and security that Capitalism promises in exchange for conformity to neoliberal social rules and values. Knowing is always in a process of transforming, of becoming. Its outcomes cannot be foreseen.
In the trailer to “Dancing About” the text on the screen reads: “We want to be right here, right now | We want to lose ourselves | We need to dance” (Gob Squad, 2017). They need to break free from oppressive structures and energies; to seek an extreme presence in order to connect with the potential of all that is around them; to have a catharsis to birth into new life. They need to give themselves to dancing.
Right now as I am Giving Myself to Writing, the tune of Björk’s song “Violently Happy” begins to sound in my head (1994). She sings about her insatiable desire for love and connection.
At the end of Gob Squad’s trailer, a woman on the microphone admits desperately: “Yes, shit! I have this kind of obsession…”
I’m not sure to where Giving Myself to Dancing will get me. Perhaps to a satisfaction that I am beginning to open up to new possibilities to achieve higher potentials. Maybe this will make me happy, but specifically like in Björk’s song, full of desire: violently happy.
Bibliography
Beausoleil, Emily. (2015). Embodying an Ethics of Response-ability. Borderlands e-journal, [pdf online] Volume 14(2), 2. Available at: http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol14no2_2015/beausoleil_embodying.pdf [Accessed 7 Mar. 2019].
Björk. (1994). Violently Happy. [Online] London: One Little Indian/Elektra Records. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38UrRpYsPjw [Accessed 15 Mar. 2019].
Burt, Ramsay. (2017). Ungoverning Dance: Contemporary European Theatre Dance and the Commons. New York: Oxford University Press, 172.
Conrad, C.A. (2014). Ecodeviance: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness. Seattle, Washington: Wave Books, xi.
Duras, Marguerite (2011). Writing. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 20 & 44.
Gob Squad. (2012). Are You With Us?. [theater performance]. Berlin: Hebbel am Ufer II.
Gob Squad. (2012, restaged in 2013). Dancing About. [dance-theater performance]. Berlin: Volksbühne.
Gob Squad. (2017). Dancing About. [YouTube Show Trailer] Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xipICT3Lsk [Accessed 8 Mar. 2019].
Müller, Ivana. (2019). Choreographing the Imaginary.
Pleyer, Peter. (2017). Cranky Bodies Dance Reset. [dance performance]. Berlin: Sophiensaele.
– Cranky Bodies Dance Reset. (2017). [video recording of performance] Berlin: Walter Bickmann.
– De Hoyos, Jorge. and Connew, Oliver. (2019). Discussing the creation process while watching the video recording of the premiere.
– De Hoyos, Jorge. and Watts, Allistair. (2019). Discussing the creation process in a café after a show.
Ritsema, Jan. (2010). about programmers and curators. Curating Performing Arts— Frakcija: Performing Arts Journal, [pdf online] Volume 1(55), 6-7. Available at: https://monoskop.org/images/a/af/Frakcija_55_Curating_Performing_Arts_2010.pdf [Accessed on 7 Mar. 2019].
Rojo, Paz. (2019). Dancing Its Do.
Steinweg, Marcus. (2017). Inconsistencies. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 65-66.
Tanzkongress2019.de, (2019). Tanzkongress 2019—About. [online] Available at: http://www.tanzkongress2019.de/de/tanzkongress-2019/about [Accessed 21 Feb. 2019].
Tlalim, Tom. (2018). Politics of Composition.
Wolff, Robert. (2001). Original Wisdom: Stories of an Ancient Way of Knowing. Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 121-122.
Trying to Relate from a Dispositional Ethics
By Jorge De Hoyos
15.3.2019 | 2nd-semester essay for MA SODA at HZT
Diagnosing Decision-Making
Paz Rojo, in her 6 February 2019 SODA lecture “Dancing its do,” described the dancing she practices as a researcher and choreographer as “turning its back” to ideas of performance, of spectatorship, of being seen or shaped. She simply stated that in her current practice “dance does not equal choreography.” By emancipating dance from needing to serve a function beyond existing itself or serving itself, she proposes a radical shift in decision-making criteria as it relates to notions of responsibility, of needing to serve a purpose like research for institutional knowledge production or choreography for theater’s economy of attention, both of which she argues can contribute to a neoliberalism which limits the potential of the living body.
In a 7 November 2018 seminar a few months earlier and connected to the same lecture series on decision-making, sound artist Tom Tlalim described how he always struggled with putting structures on sound. Even though as a child he was credited for composing the music to his father’s documentary film, he considered himself more as the “pure sound” and his father as the actual composer who made compositional decisions to shape the music for the film. Tom mentioned how he always found the act of editing, structuring, making cuts an aggressive act, but he says: “it’s where the political starts.” As a politically-engaged artist who often focuses on how sound functions as a violent tool of state control and who also has a long history of performing as a free music improviser, he is aware of the politics of composing, especially in a collaborative context. In collaborations, he could decide “to be directed as pure sound” and “to withdraw the ego,” or he could “resist directorial inputs in order to then have space to come back with a personal offer.”
Later that night in his lecture “Politics of Composition,” he recalled important advice: “Creativity requires elbows.”
He explained: “You need to make that space for something to happen, and that’s a sort of pushing them away for a minute and trying to empty the void so that something can actually happen that’s really creative.” He sometimes actively decides not to make a compositional decision as a way to give space for other creative possibilities.
I mention these two artists because of their decisions to resist a pressure to need to make compositional decisions, a pressure that could easily reinstate pre-given social, aesthetic and political norms which can detract from the experiential or creative potential of their respective mediums. In my own life and art work, I feel a sense of this pressure to need to make good decisions which would then lead to making a good art or research product. I believe that this sense of obligation springs from a notion of moralistic responsibility, moralistic in that it imposes a hierarchical value structure where the ambitions of achieving success and the anxieties of risking failure—perhaps in the eyes of an academic institution, an audience, a funding body, a negative stereotype of the romantic or starving artist, etc.—can violently stunt my body-based, artistic inquiries, ultimately causing such inquiries to conform to safer, already known and accepted aesthetics.
A New Prescription
In the art journal “Frakcija: Curating Performing Arts,” the theater director and founder of the French artistic residency PAF, Jan Ritsema, warns against this numbing effect on art when he distinguishes between curation and programming through the healing terms of curing and prescribing, respectively. The former term he links to curare, the name of a substance taken from a plant used by certain indigenous peoples in hunting to paralyze their prey. He criticizes that contemporary curation practices have mind-numbing and paralyzing effects on society in that curators curate already known aesthetics. He therefore argues in favor of prescribing “the yet undefineable / the what they themselves don’t know yet / the uncurable / the uncuratable / the impossible / the horrible [..] of art that does not look like anything anymore” (2010: 6-7).
In my second semester of the Masters in Solo/ Dance/ Authorship program, out of a need to have space free from such internalized curatorial pressures, I began a practice that has indeed been feeling like an “art that does not look like anything anymore,” and uncomfortably so in the way that I’m confronted by personal doubts of its merit. I refer to this practice as Giving Myself to Dancing. It entails that as I go to the studio to research, I dedicate at least one hour to give myself completely to the act of dancing—dancing in a broad and loose sense of the term but still dancing. The main decision that establishes the practice is that I suspend all agendas of needing the dancing to serve anything other than itself. I do not try to do “good” or “rigorous” movement research; to necessarily be a good dancer; to find material that could be interesting to develop for a performance or presentation; or to even have a specific focus, direction, or quality to my dancing. Of course, I make countless decisions consciously and unconsciously within the dancing moments, but I do not enforce (thus far in this initial phase of its implementation) a strict criteria of decision-making. In fact, I have mostly—by impulse of needing to not put pressure on myself—defaulted to a laissez-faire attitude in regards to what dancing I can consider to be dancing and therefore allowable in that space. I’m trying to give myself, as Tlalim mentioned, “elbow room” to begin unpacking a familiar and ongoing issue: how I internalize moralistic responsibility in my dancing, or how I feel a crippling pressure for my dancing to be about something or to be going somewhere specific. However, with this new strategy to give my dancing more room to move (my laissez-faire approach), I fear that the decision not to make compositional decisions for my practice might invite too much chaos that could sabotage any deeper growth of new creative or insightful potentials.
Examples of dancing (and/or moment-to-moment, laissez faire decisions) as I’ve been Giving Myself to Dancing include: continuing a juicy dance move; practicing a popular dance move like twerking, belly dancing or looking cool in a club; spinning around; not leading a spin with my arm this time; noticing that I’m stuck in my head and unable to make a decision and then deciding to not decide, rather surrendering and reacting to whatever unfolds on its own; taking a deep breath to ground my energy; spending a minute to find music on YouTube; taking a nap; checking out how my muscles might look as I’m video-recording myself; allowing myself to try to dance like a beautiful, lyrical ballet dancer; making weird sounds to relieve stress; being superficial in effort; feeling unmotivated; feeling caffeinated; etc..
Yes, as this practice is new and perhaps still feeling not so rigorously applied, questions and concerns abound regarding the merits of such a practice within an art research program, both institutionally speaking and in the broader sense of my career and life decisions to make dance performance. Writing this essay helps me to analyze my decision to install a practice that suspends a known sort of decision-making, and I hope this analysis can help me deconstruct a notion of moralistic responsibility that continually causes interruptions of doubt, self-judgement and even threatens stasis in my art-making endeavors. Therefore, I want to rethink responsibility through the lens of a dispositional ethics, what Ramsay Burt in “Ungoverning Dance” once describes as “having an awareness and moving in ways that help to see things through” or “making sure that things happen and ensuring that people or things realize their potential” (2017: 172). Following this, I want to continue (both in and beyond the writing of this essay) surveying the why, how and what of decision-making by other artists as a way to develop tools (like language or approaches) for me to continue Giving Myself to Dancing, responsibly, in the sense of an ethical responsivity. Again, a lingering concern in my practice if I am to embody this new ethics is that a certain level of rigor and commitment might still be wanting but that specific criteria might remain elusive and impossible to codify, perhaps even necessarily so.
Taking on Responsibilities
From a moralistic sense of the term, responsibility can be judged based on fixed, pre-given codes of obligation, and the choices and decisions one makes can be held to account by this system—what Emily Beausoleil describes in her article, “Embodying an Ethics of Response-ability,” as “rule-governed behavior” (2015: 2).
A similar pre-ordered reality is described by Marcus Steinweg in his book, “Inconsistencies,” as a reality made up of pre-given choices where Capitalism presents an idea of freedom as the freedom to choose (2017: 65-66). The merits of each choice here are subject to value-judgements based off of established notions of fulfilling pre-defined duties, roles or obligations. However, Steinweg begins to offer an alternative context for a different notion of responsibility when he distinguishes between choices and decisions. He defines a decision as something that “opposes the instituted order through critical openness to its inconsistency and arbitrariness.” He explains that “while the subject stabilizes the given world order with each choice, deciding means importing disorder into it.” He is careful to state that “the ideology-critical element of decision” is that “chaos already belongs to the order of facts as its implicit truth.” Thus far for my practice, the laissez-faire approach matches the openness to inconsistency and arbitrariness that Steinweg lays out. However, I am still unsure if my practice includes this critical criticality, or an ability to appropriately respond to the ensuing chaos.
Beausoleil reflects this chaos when she writes that a traditional idea of responsibility as “’fixed in place’ […] fails to account for the complexity, dynamism and interrelation of identity and encounter” (2015:2). Her formulation of responsibility from a dispositional ethics is therefore built on the pillars of identity and encounter, and the inherent chaos is revealed through the interplay of both. Yes, I admit that I can easily feel lost and confused when I open myself up to dancing—lost and confused as a feeling of chaos. In this admission, the “I” is “identity,” the “open myself up to” or “Giving Myself to” is the encounter, and feeling “lost and confused” is the chaos. In response, though, to feeling lost and confused, Beausoleil moves the dilemma forward as she asserts: “the encounter across social difference must provide the means to acknowledge and appropriately respond to what by definition exceeds one’s terms of knowing and valuing the world [and as such] concerns a sensibility and an art of listening to what appears first as white noise.” Responsibility therefore implies a new way to listen to that which one does not yet know how to hear.
Listening – the Unknown
In the context of Giving Myself to Dancing, I interpret Beausoleil’s “social difference” as the unknown dancing—that dancing which, by nature of its excepted state from a moralistic decision-making regime, appears to me as something different, new and overwhelming that I do not yet understand or know how to understand.
Also, the “white noise” that she describes seems to mirror my experiences of the laissez-faire “just dancing about” that I perceive in my current practice. During the semester, I have often felt a general sense of blur as I dance, perhaps resulting from the fact that I do not make distinctions within my dancing: I do not make decisions to identify, analyze or develop any dancing that appears.
I find the accounts of Robert Wolff in “Original Wisdom” strangely familiar as he describes how he first began a process of encounter with the same sort of “white noise” that comes from not yet knowing.
During the 1950s, he worked as a social psychologist and was hired by the Malaysian Government to find out why a particular group of the aboriginal Sng’oi, who lived deep in the jungle, were unwilling to consider working for the rubber plantation industry of the time. Considerations of advanced climate collapse, colonialism and corporate greed aside, I find that the extremity of the social difference that Wolff was trying to bridge presents a clear example of an initial attempt to acknowledge and respond to that which exceeds one’s current knowledge and value system. In the following excerpt, he recounts an experience of encounter that I find responsible in the terms of a dispositional ethics:
"I told myself that for one day I would set aside any agenda I might have and would just be, as the People seemed just to be.
Immediately I discovered that it was extremely difficult to change my usual behavior. It was very stressful not to have an agenda, not to wake up with a clear idea of what I was going to do that day. I felt lost, adrift, without the security of a schedule, goals and objectives.
The first day I tried this experiment, my mind raced all day. I could not stop thinking: What if—did I forget something—should I do something else—was it time for a meal yet—did I feel tired—maybe I should—what did I feel—what is going on?
In fact, my mind was so busy that at the end of the day I was exhausted, and I realized that if I did have an inner voice I could possibly have heard it over the roaring noise of my mind.
Gradually I learned.
There were days when I floated.
The strange thing was that as soon as I could do that, I no longer heard my mind.
To my surprise I started seeing things in my environment that I had not noticed before. I observed insects; I saw a sunbeam sliding around a tree, brilliantly illuminating a little puddle of muddy water. I smelled things I could not name. I heard tiny rustlings as well as birdsong, a breaking twig "(2001: 121-122).
Through Giving Myself to Dancing, I can relate to many of Wolff’s experiences: feeling uneasy without an agenda; being stuck in the head; but also, when I find myself enraptured by dancing, feeling pleasantly carried along or attentive to new details that I might otherwise miss if I was too “busy.” Both the “roaring noise” in his mind and Beausoleil’s “white noise” reflect my feelings of overwhelm of too many possibilities in the dancing. A sense of moralistic responsibility, here, would try to impose known definitions to navigate me towards safer aesthetics and pre-sanctioned conducts. A simple example of this could be if I began looking in the mirror to improve ballet poses as a response to not knowing what else to do or feeling lost and exhausted from flailing about. On the other hand, a dispositional ethics, I suspect, would encourage me to stay in the “not knowing” longer than feels comfortable. I felt this uncomfortable “staying with”-ness in the seminar of Paz Rojo where we practiced her dancing of extreme presence and response-ability. I also feel this when learning a new skill in front of others or traveling to a foreign country.
Earlier this year I observed a call out to the German and International dance world to not abandon “encounter” out of fear that chaos might weaken or destroy “identity.” On the website of the upcoming Tanzkongress 2019 in Hellerau/Dresden, organized by the choreographer Meg Stuart, are 9 slogans in rotation appearing for about 3 seconds each. One slogan reads: “Chaos is not a problem.” Another reads: “Vulnerability is Power.” And yet another: “Listen. We insist on extreme presence” (www.tanzkongress2019.de). They are offered on the website as, perhaps, working propositions or values, so I reformulate them together here: the invitation to “listen” in “extreme presence” is to take a position of response-ability where “chaos is [therefore] not a problem,” and the “vulnerability [that arises from not knowing] is power.” It is only through commitment and continuity to the encounter—extreme presence—that a new capacity for listening can begin to develop and allow for the cultivation of transformative potential.
Poet C.A. Conrad also arrives to this conclusion when they observe how working in “the factory essentially divorced [his friends and family] from a sense of their essential selves” through “lack of being present” (2014: xi). Conrad, therefore, created “(Soma)tics, ritualized structures where being anything but present was next to impossible.” By creating this space, or focus, Conrad explains that “the many facets of what is around [them] wherever [they are] can come together through a sharper lens [which helps to] reveal the creative viability of everything around.”
I believe that this was my intention to begin Giving Myself to Dancing, though I still feel very vulnerable in not knowing exactly how, yet, to manifest all the potential.
Writing About (/) Dancing About
I never saw the performance piece “Dancing About” by Gob Squad. It premiered at Volksbühne in Berlin in November 2012.
I did however see “Are You With Us?” in 2014 at Hebbel am Ufer II. It was an overnight durational performance in sketch-improv-comedy fashion involving a film-director figure in front of a small group of actors playing out the chance directives and mise-en-scene of the moment. There was a set dramaturgical structure on repeat throughout the night though each scene was new. The roles were always rotating and the characters always transforming. Over the 6 hours of my spectatorship, I was enthralled by the actor’s moment-to-moment composition decisions as they dove into new costumes and music, solved directorial inputs, fought for or hid from attention, all while negotiating their fatigue and concentration levels as the hours went by. I could constantly see the individual person-actor at work. At the same time, innumerable characters appeared and disappeared. I could grasp a unity to and throughout each of the disparate scenarios—constructed realities woven of disunities, alignments, confusions, competing commitments and allowances.
Again, no, I never saw their performance “Dancing About,” but I still want to. Their trailer on YouTube suggests the show to be very funny yet simultaneously very serious.
Having already a sense of how they embody complexity through play and craft, I found the title—as it came to my attention for a re-staging—striking. I could sense the humor in the multiple meanings: one being that they intend to dance about something without being sure of exactly what; and another, that they do not actually know how to dance but will try anyway. I felt somehow accused by this irony. As one who has dedicated the vast majority of their professional life to freelance contemporary dance and performance, a lot of this “dancing about” is something of which I fear I am guilty—especially now that I’m Giving Myself to Dancing without knowing exactly what to make of it.
I turn to Marguerite Duras for validation of these concerns when she writes:
“Writing is the unknown. Before writing one knows nothing of what one is about to write. And in total lucidity.
It’s the unknown in oneself, one’s head, one’s body. Writing is not even a reflection, but a kind of faculty one has, that exists to one side of oneself, parallel to oneself: another person who appears and comes forward, invisible, gifted with thought and anger, and who sometimes, through his own actions, risks losing his life” (Duras, 2011: 44).
The activity itself—whether writing or dancing or Giving Oneself to…, as a self within oneself—is at risk of losing its life…of becoming nothing. Embracing the unknown entails inviting chaos—a chaos of quantity, complexity, nuance, etc. She notes that “there is something suicidal in a writer’s solitude” because the solitude needed to engage the act of writing “is the open door to abandonment” (2011: 20). If I experience the entering into extreme presence as a sort of solitude (i.e. me in the face of Giving Myself to Dancing) then I risk losing myself to chaos.
The question immediately arises: Is the risk worth it?
And an immediate response: It feels necessary…even if the payoff is not immediately tangible.
What feels clear is that any fixed notion of knowing is a limited and static thing, similar to notions of happiness, wealth and security that Capitalism promises in exchange for conformity to neoliberal social rules and values. Knowing is always in a process of transforming, of becoming. Its outcomes cannot be foreseen.
In the trailer to “Dancing About” the text on the screen reads: “We want to be right here, right now | We want to lose ourselves | We need to dance” (Gob Squad, 2017). They need to break free from oppressive structures and energies; to seek an extreme presence in order to connect with the potential of all that is around them; to have a catharsis to birth into new life. They need to give themselves to dancing.
Right now as I am Giving Myself to Writing, the tune of Björk’s song “Violently Happy” begins to sound in my head (1994). She sings about her insatiable desire for love and connection.
At the end of Gob Squad’s trailer, a woman on the microphone admits desperately: “Yes, shit! I have this kind of obsession…”
I’m not sure to where Giving Myself to Dancing will get me. Perhaps to a satisfaction that I am beginning to open up to new possibilities to achieve higher potentials. Maybe this will make me happy, but specifically like in Björk’s song, full of desire: violently happy.
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