Words by Phoebe Beckett Chingono. This article is part of our REWRITE series with Chisenhale Dance Space’s Artist Community.
This text is a reflection on the choreographic work IV by SERAFINE1369. In SERAFINE1369’s own words:
“This is about finding space and trying to be free; trying to move towards ourselves and one another, to co-exist without the feeling of taking or giving away too much…
…We invite you into this intimacy, acknowledging our entanglement, working to welcome ourselves into this place, this space, this time (and the multiple times it conjures), with ourselves, with each other, with our bodies and with yours. Body, is also the corporeal manifestation of many things, the meeting of many systems.
I preface this with seriousness, only to make space for other things. A dance is also a play, of choices, of sensations, of movement and transformation.”
To situate the position from which my (Phoebe) observations are made, I write as an ethnographer and twice an audience member. This positioning seeks to expand performance beyond the domain of art criticism and its presumed object, instead approaching it as a social act with historical reality. Choreography, in particular, becomes a real-time diagramming of the improvisational performance of social structures – “performance” and “non-performance” understood as discursive relations not formal identities.
“It is now 8:30pm.”
How little appeared to happen, and yet how much was achieved. A mere intensification of what was already there–energy in its fullest extent. What remains is proof that the force yielded by the body is the same force behind all matter.
We cannot believe they move like that, despite living in the world as we do. Our awe for the dancers is immense because they refuse to lean on what is real and fixed.
Yet they dance in connection with experiences of struggle. They confirm our fears: we labour even in dreams, defenseless against exaction. If the performance remains within reality, then what, exactly, have they fought for?
—
“It is now 7:30pm.”
This is the score: each minute, the dancers choose stillness or movement for the next.
The score renders time pliable, formless. Segmented, contained–thingified units spaced along a timeline.
In English, count nouns–countable, graspable aggregates–contrast with mass nouns, which stretch homogeneously and unbounded: cups of water, bars of butter, blocks of wood. Hours, minutes, seconds of time. The grammar of things and abstractions.
But to say these conceptualisations of time emerge from language alone is a kind of “black box.”
How do dancers in the black box theatre show that these structures manifest in practice? Obligatory routine. Habit. Clocks, GPS devices, the wage form–the very posture of the body towards futurity.
The score operates as explicit rule, the embodied experience of structured duration, and a mediation of time itself.
—
“It is now 7:44pm.”
A ripple through their spine. Arms snap to right angles, fists low, controlled. A foot dashes behind, tracing an invisible arc. Their body elongates, spine taut from head to toe. The whip of their head carves the air–spin, triple pirouette, release. Feet glide, faster now. Arms coil like ropes, a veil descends over them. A sudden kick, a sharp snap inward. A leap, driven by some unknown impulse. The body shudders.
Each action proves one or none of these things: the dancer is a machine, a machine operator, or a machine without an operator. Biologists might say. Receptors and effectors, linked by sensory organs and a nervous system.
But did their will leave them free?
Spontaneous action, originating within the one who acts. Contingent action, faced with the possibility of courses untaken. Control. Self-awareness. A discrete self.
Contracts demand authorship of one’s acts. Do we enter contracts with a “self”? Do we inhabit two selves–present and future–alternately in command?
To possess is also to be possessed. Property and spirit. Occupied body. Spoken-through person.
Reactive humans. Habituating humans. Automata. Animal-machine.
Perhaps “self” is an experience, a quality of mind. Call this immediacy. Bodies, at best, provide a shifting foundation.
—
“It is now 8:24pm.”
Raw expressions of vitality. Attempts to make each moment new. Discrete. Cellular. Every minute has its target, is an attempt.
These were not outward expressions. We were made privy to internal landscapes.
They did not arrive together nor did they depart. Separated by a dark stretch.
What moved one did not necessarily move the other and never in the same way.
Producing a counter current.
Constant trial, breaking off, then driven back into orbit.
—
“7:31pm.”–hands flat to the floor. Crouching. Looking away, past the right shoulder. “7:32pm”–walking to a far point stage-right–linear transit, preordained. Arms forming a cross.
“7:33pm”–hopping swiftly backward, vibratory steps skimming the floor. Arms float above the head. Still. Head tilts back, eyes scan the ceiling’s blank expanse.
“7:36pm”–arms propel the body forward, momentum caught in a breathless intake. Walking off, throwing it off. Hands cup the chest, holding something weightless.
“7:37pm”–rolling to rest in different states of lying down. Different states of readiness.
“7:39pm”–almost like it never was.
We live it out, from our seats, as anonymous members of the audience.
Will the atmosphere shift? Do we like it? Do we not? It is not the performance that is tested but expectation. Each movement presses against passivity. Where are we going? We ask, critics in our seats, unmoving. The dancer’s still–yet still in motion. Now comes the need to measure it all. The countdown’s steady tendency toward collapse delivers us into revelatory realisations of disaster and catastrophe.
Outside fires rip through places.
Inside rain sounds soothing, unnaturally even, man-made and constant. The creak of infrastructure under pressure. Imagined steel. Flashes. Variable poses. Neon-lit columns. A pause to think.
—
“It is now 8:29pm.”
A dismembered voice. A presence asserted.
Called forth, in advance of the oblique mass. To receive a signal. Divine sanction.
After the toils of civilisation–churches, monasteries, factories, universities, railway stations, Einstein’s gravity, the clock’s diagram of movement as the movement of its parts, pendulums, gears–time emerges at last from its ritual constraints. It no longer depends on events–the rising moon or setting sun. It is now a countable thing. A thing possessed.
And yet, as they move through stillness, they remind us:
time does not move. We do.
Header image by Cecilia Diaz Betz.