Performance revealed: movement, un-narrative and the silent beginnings of Imagination [by Tracy Danison]

“The important thing is to move.”

– Resident of Kiev explaining why he took his girls skating despite ongoing missile strikes, National Public Radio (USA), 1 January 2024

I saw The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes by the Australia troupe Back to Back at Théâtre de la Bastille a few weeks back.

Seeing Shadow at Bastille is part of a larger project of mine.

Bastille came into new management after 25 years in 2023 (Quantum foam washes over Théâtre de la Bastille: waiting on g-2 results). New broom sweeps clean, as they say, so I think this is a good time to follow Bastille’s theatrical program and through it, try to clarify what I mean by “performance” as opposed to “dance” or “play”.

I already think, along with many others, that there’s a “movement art”. From my experience, “performance” is a variation around movement art. When I say “movement art” or “performance”, I mean a live, in-person, essentially creative, public activity. Creative movement activity is tightly associated with visual and, to a lesser extent, sound and other outside and interpersonal stimulation.

I use “Dance (capital D)” to reference movement art; the “capital D” because I am inclined to think Dance is the first art, the Art from which the others stem.

Stemmed from Dance, I use “performance” as shorthand for at least three activities: “performance art”, performance around visual(ized) material; “performance theater”, performance stemming out from theatrical tradition; “dance performance”, stemming out from dance tradition… that is, from every form and genre called “dance”, from Louis XIV ballets de cours to Fabrice Ramalingom’s Frérocité (“Brotherly Ferocity”), set to premier at the end of January 2024.

 

I believe that for most creators, (contemporary) performance has its origins in the “open interpretations” of modern and contemporary visual art. I don’t think, for instance, that the currently active and excellent theater performance creator Nathalie Béasse is alone to have begun as a sculptor (Psst! Are you listening, “New York Times” Letters page? Playwright Nathalie Béasse wins “Beyond Words Values” award. It’s a big deal). Also, for instance, the visual artist Yves Klein and those around him early wind up associating their material (visual) art production with the performance around it.

An affirmation of the notion of movement as the first art and a clear idea of “performance” and its utility to and effects on me and on others gets me nearer to succeeding, at least in my own mind, a confluence of art and science, a better knowledge for achieving better quality art, better health – especially psychic health – and a better understanding of my existential situation.

What is the nature of live, in-person movement? Why is so craved and so feared?

Then there are contemporary questions: Is on-line interaction really “interaction”? For instance, much “psychotherapy” is now being offered by video link – how is therapy changed when in-person “interaction” is reprocessed and re-made by a technology based on a phenomenon known to independently affect consciousness? How much of psychotherapy is actually physical presence and interaction. How much is talk? Is on-line psychotherapy still psychotherapy?

Most of all, however, I believe from my life experience that the experience of live, In-person Dance in any form is a key to empowering transformation, “changing the narrative”.

 

 

Most research money in science is spent cracking open stuff to see what’s inside, but what matters for the stuff itself (and, being essentially stuff caught up in stuff myself, for myself) is the choreography of it all, that is, the movements and arrangements of said stuff in space. Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy rightly observes that any savage can dance. He does not note that the bright ones among them become the world’s choreographers, arranging stuff to do everything from dance performance to fly death-ray equipment up to the moon. I expect he was too hot and bothered by the subtle perfume of Lizzie Bennet and her light-steppin’ wriggle.

For personal reasons, I have a long-standing interest in movement, in the choreographies of psychic well-being. Performance nous is already fairly common in social and individual psychic healing. I’m thinking of “healing” as ranging from “people-friendly” architectures or methods for de-confliction or dance therapy and, especially, of such integrated, explicitly choreographic, approaches to better living as those developed by the late Laura Sheleen, her companions and supporters: movement in space, time and place within masks, myth and ritual.

I think of the choreography behind performance as “un-narrative” (as I also do for Dance). The un-narrative in performance, I think, addresses the “Imagination (capital I)”, the origin point of a body’s perception – how they, a body or person, construct the world around, how the world around is constructed, how the world around constructs “itself”.

Many, maybe even most, creator-choreographers s currently – I’m thinking here of remarks made by the excellent Elizabeth Saint Jalmes, associate artist at Le Générateur, the place to experience performance in Paris – believe that performance works because it enables multiple stories or story multiples. Realizing multiplicity, so to say, makes it possible to liberate creators, performers and spectators alike from what are too often unique and imposed perceptions.

 

God knows, there’s nothing wrong with liberation of perceptions, but as with so many other theories, there’s an assumption in this “multiplicity theory” that there is always some story somewhere, that the world itself is a narrative: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God”.

My experience tells me that “beginning” is separate from “Word”; Imagination – silent in the void – is the moment before the Big Bang. “Imagination” is what it might have been for Keats if Mary Shelley had come up with quantum mechanics rather than Frankenstein. Substitute that unrealizable realized Cat in Schrodinger’s box for Keats’ “Truth” or, come to think of it, Keats’ “Beauty”, too, and a body has got a sense of what Imagination is for me.

Thought of as That Cat, in a choreography it is the deliberately long moment before the performance begins, representing Imagination as space before it becomes place. Poets Keats or Shelley might have called it “the space where the pen and eye wait suspended”.

I tend to describe the invocation of Imagination in a choreography as sensibility: the sensibility discovered when a body exclaims Da sein! There is the thing!

For dance performance, I call this sensibility being there with.

Since I can only think and analyze performance (or theater) as a spectator, that is, from the effect a performance has on me, I have no idea if performance creators know whether they are reaching into narrative or un-narrative or are even aware that the two experiences are possible. If they mostly did, I think my personal and critical experience of performance of every type and theater would be a lot less uneven.  

So, here’s to Dance, performance, un-narrative, Imagination, the pursuit of knowledge, healing, change and ever finer art.

______

Gérald Foltête is a multi-media artist working in Paris since 2008.

Foltête writes that his artistic vision fluctuates between “the two infinites”, which I take to be the moment of Imagination seen from either the beginning or the end of a narrative. With a background in the audio-visual field and music, Foltête brings together drawing, sculpture, text and music to express his concerns with human nature, free will, justice, human rights and dignity. He cites the visual artist and architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser: “Dreaming alone is nothing but a dream. Dreaming together is the beginning of reality.” Click above to visit his site or contact: Tel : +33 (0)6 47 34 68 97, studio@geraldfoltete.com

       

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