photo of dancers Attiyya Fortune and Rachel Halmrast taken by Gretchen Laborwit
“How did they not lose themselves? How was it possible to break apart again? It was as though two containers of water had been poured together, then separated--each molecule returned to its original container.” - Octavia Butler, Adulthood Rites
In July of 2019, I attended New York University’s annual Encuentro, a hemispheric convening on performance and politics. In my working group we looked at Manuela Zechner’s article, A Politics of Network-Families?, which asked “what can we make of our shared lives and militancy in the context of a system that cultivates short-term, unsustainable ways of relating and acting?” (Zechner 2013). Zechner outlines how neoliberal epistemologies ushered in the current era of crisis, one that is marked by “a destruction-subsumption of space, time, resourcesand energies” (Zechner 2013). For Zechner, this has drastically altered ecologies of care, pushing us toward the neoliberal ‘network’ model that “encourages self-interested ways of relating that run counter to long term attentiveness or commitment” (Zechner 2013). Zechner’s argument served as a catalyst for this project and was critical to my process.
What does it feel like to continually come to? What does it feel like when time is scarce, fragmented, expensive? How do you come to anyways? Do you? What does it feel like to be lonely? How do we avoid one another? When do you want to show up? Are you lonely? Who is supporting you? Who are you supporting? Do you want to be
here? Are you tired?
Inspired by feminist theorists including Jasbir Puar, Judith Butler, Doreen Massey, and Manuela Zechner, and drawing on the work of Keith Hennessey, this project explored how dance, and contact improvisation in particular, create a unique context for exploring negotiation by placing bodies relating in space in an intentional view of the spect-actors eye. The methodological potentiality of contact improvisation and bodies colliding in space, creates a container in which we are able to explore the very real political negotiation of bodies and their respective histories.
Borrowing from Michelle Ellsworth, this work explored every encounter as a translation. These collisions function as translations and Nagar argues that we must enter them hungry. She asks, “What might it take to reimagine translation as a dynamic, multidirectional process of ethical and politically aware mediation among otherwise impermeable local diversities—a process that always hungers for new political possibilities that we may never have imagined before” (Nagar 2019).
What happens when we enter every interaction with the hunger of translating? This is not to neutralize or flatten the work of translating-- some translations are more difficult and come with higher stakes--but what could be produced if we treated relating with the intensity of translation? What could we become if we approached each other with a desire to hear? What if we engaged each other actively within the body? nothing really convincingly settles the separation pushed the abstraction inherent to dance to encourage us to meet it with a hunger for translation. Utilizing improvisation to create the scores allowed for a dynamic uncertainty that pushed the dancers to engage in the active, embodied,negotiation of relating and translating with one another. These conditions produced a context for constructing new realities and new ways of relating; both for the dancers, and the audience.
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