(I Want) To Be Held

the setting:

This work is a multidisciplinary collaboration with Julian Day, commissioned for the Chelsea Music Festival at HighLineNine. Julian conceived of the installation and music, to which I choreographed and performed a “movement response”.

the story:

In conceiving the movement, I studied the installation’s architecture and text, both in its visual/physical presentation and meaning. The installation was a physical, “real-time” partner with which to interact, along with psychogenic extensions of the semantics of the LED signs’ text (meta-partnering with thoughts and memories it provoked). I first improvised, identifying thematic gestures my body was instinctively drawn to in my trial reactions to the installation. I used those as “pinpoints” in the ambient sonic shifts, as they lack direct cues. In choreographing, I find it most moving to accentuate internal strength, vulnerability, fragility...subtleties of everyday life, interweaving movements non-dancers make. Universal yet personal quotidian actions that are subtle and typically overlooked, but make up the composition of human life. I use my training to sharpen these subtle actions that often get away with being blurry, which I prominently feature in this work.

Applying my own life to everything aforementioned, there is more to this story than meets the eye and ear (and frame), navigating a work partnership that took place post-personal one. I oscillated between becoming one with the physicality of the signs’ text - i.e. a limb moving at its fixed, programmed speed scrolling by - and embodying the meaning of the text, softening the rigidity and crossing over to a more human, romanticized side; roboticism vs. realness, hardness vs. humanness. I begin and end in the same pose with only my head’s position in contrast, thinking about how quickly moments transition to memory, and how one’s physical body can revisit the same place, yet be internally transformed between the time prior and present. Though the music ended up being the sole audio, the raw footage includes feedback from my collaborator in real time, i.e. what they liked, or a suggestion to hold something, or to keep going in a take. I executed certain movements in threes; progressing through different levels, resetting and moving forward, to reach an endpoint. It’s all about pushes and pulls, with the two emotional bookends being backward reaches (a recurring improvisatory movement) as if some gravitational, magnetic force is pulling me toward something, and then the pushes away, my body catapulting in another direction. In a way, this piece has shades of the mad scene of Giselle. As I say in my program note for the sound of space between us:

Based on the LED signs’ intimacy-driven text, the private and personal automatically interlaced with the public and performative, being in a gallery and for a film. A collage of 5 slightly different takes, my choreography embodied traces of emotions, moments and gestures resurrected from memories, using what I had before me: signs, text, wires I used as “lifelines”, and my collaborator standing just out of frame. There was no shield between me and an anonymous audience; only us and a camerawoman, with my raw corporeal voice as a lens into the past, letting my body go, exposing every vulnerability I had. Though physically a solo, it was a trio with these other forces at play, constantly shifting between past and present, with me in a sort of middle; dancing with the ghost of what was in a body that endured the reality of what became. What happened, what I accepted, and my body as an artifact of both.

I chose the excerpt “sixteen” from Julian’s 24 hour-long soundscapes project, “Elastic Ambience”, responding to our sense of time metamorphosing during COVID.