WRITING & COMMENTS
Duelle- Waiting for Duelle, by Mark Feary
Straddling alongside both walls, as if commuters awaiting the imminent arrival of a train upon a platform, the crowd lies in wait. Click. They anxiously and repetitively consult their wrists as if distrusting of the movement of their timepieces or the electronic digits representing the passing of time. Click. They randomly scan one another, as if waiting for one of the crowd to reveal themselves as something they are not. Click. They fidget and shuffle from side to side as if uncomfortable within their own skin, yet cautiously enough so as not to encroach upon the abyss they have created across the gallery. Click.
After a time, one arrives, and slowly the crowd become transfixed as it approaches. Click. Shifting their weary gazes from one another toward a common cause, united in their collective restlessness. Click
From the other direction, another arrives, perhaps a different model, not entirely dissimilar, yet dissimilar enough to be distinct. Click. Perhaps it is the way it sounds, the way it lurches, the way these lurches develop their own fluidity and in turn become movement. Click.
Duelle represents an enigma of encounters involving the interchangeability of muse and mentor, with individual works repositioned within a collaborative framework that diminishes the specificities within which each individual work was made. By and large, performative acts such as dance performances exist without visual documentation. After the performance concludes, it exists in the memory - both individual and collective - of those involved and those in the audience. They are events recalled rather than recorded. They are contemporary insofar as they engage with a specific time. As such, they are representative of the here and now and it is with such contemporaneity that such performances are recalled. How then does a specific piece age, or rather, what is the slippage between the there and then and the here and now? If the materials remain the same, in its simplest form at least, a body, then how does a piece age in contrast to the form enacting the piece?
Duelle alludes to these considerations of specificity and temporality framework layering another mechanism upon post facto reflection. Through actively engaging photographers within the framing of the performance Duelle positions itself within a specific moment and physical context. Notably, the work is not presented within a traditional performative venue but rather a contemporary art space, and more pointedly, one with an emphasis on photographic practice. In this regard, the gallery is not used to present photographic outcomes, but rather as a site to facilitate photographic process.
Through the recording and documenting of Duelle it is lodged within a specific time, if not readily definable presently, then certainly one that will be distinguishable in future. The time evasiveness of the performance will be belied by the hairstyles and fashions of the audience, tell tale indicators of any time. And this is perhaps the crux of the project, to wrestle the performance from memory and mismemory and to lodge it within a definitive setting - creating a framework that surrounds the performance rather than relying on the memory of what has been performed. This newly documented rendition in turn dissolves the temporal and locational specificities of each previous enactment of the individual performances. This is not an act of replacement, for Duelle and its constituent components are now altogether different undertakings, despite involving exactly the same movements.
Click. No carriage arrives yet everybody is transported to somewhere else.
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TWINSHIPS
The chiming of ancient bells funnels
a collection of bodies up the stairs,disparate organisms
absorbed in their own thoughts already becoming part of the
work that is about to unfold,even as they seat themselves.
Their bodies are still but in their mind's eye they are
still moving,in their imagination placing themselves in the
setting before them-a flickering,crystalline form emanating
light through moonlight.Here we are,the spectators,but we
are not neutral-in our imaginations,we have stepped across
the seam into the space of the performer,and the sound has
led us there.
The dancer-body appears and as the body and its sonic
atmospheres begin their embrace kernels of memory rise and
fall.The forest,the spaces of sleep,sounds from the littoral
zone-evening crickets,snapping twigs,the slow loris
crunching on insect skeletons,the jungle orchestra is
funnelled through,compressed and stretched.
Sheets of sound evoke light,a sacred incandescent ring of
sound that becomes a girdle for the dancer-body,or,a sonic
launching pad for Antonioni's spaceship.
The dancer begins to move with the sinewy twitching of
fingertips,evoking the idea of a ritual associated with the
beginnings of growth.The dancer raises her hands and walks
to form a circle,leaning,twisting,turning,arching,becoming
animal like Balthus' cat,which itself was perhaps more human
than animal.
Or a beetle on its back,warming to the morning sun.
Or attendance to the particularities of an offering,
ritual and invocation being the origin of all dance movement.
Pause.Action is anticipated,rethought,pause again,unfurl
again,look up to the suns rays-again,the sun commands
attention through sound,the body attends like Pasolini's
Medea,whose sun god is heard,and felt, but does not
appear.This is how the Gods lived,and spoke,to their mortal subjects.
But expression also occurs without speech.Maya
Plisetskaya,citing Chekhov,sees plasticity of expression at
its most forceful when few,or no words,are used to express
feeling,the presence of a pause sufficient to indicate that
real tragedy is taking place between the lines,it is there
where innermost feeling resides.
At a certain point we enter a realm of arcadian
violence:The dancer takes side steps,her arms become waving
branches like mutating Daphne,powerless,unlike Medea,before
Apollo.But not so powerless that she cannot articulate her
own process of becoming.The branches shake,then become
totem,they fight back,enclose,unfurl,enclose,dance like a
bird of Paradise on its stamping ground,gather up from the
floor,move away,become totem again,bow down,darkness
falls,bird calls herald twilight and beating and tapping
ushers in the beginning of an urban beat as the starlings
swarm above Rome's Temples.
What awaits as this beat
increases,amplifies,as music rises through organ pipes and
steel drags against stone,the quickening of the sacrificial
blade,the beating of the earths magma under the sleeping
city?Fighter jets swoop and fly away,storm clouds growl then
roll back.Where are we headed?
We are not about to land in Cafe Muller,not about to enter
a state of neutral brutality in contemplation of real life
events.Residing in pain there is also jouissance.Immersed in the
ritual of rebirth, the magic of spring is
re-enacted; movements imitating the emergence of verdure were
thought to induce sympathy from the cosmic being who would
then bring frozen nature back to life.The birds,once outcast
from their country,return;the arcadians sing to the
mountains once more-Omnia vincit Amor,et nos cedamus Amori.
Alexander Pittendrigh October 2010
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ANOTHER REACTION TO ‘TWINSHIPS’
Five detached motifs brought in to a circular realm of otherworldliness.
The evocative drone cast upon a lone vanity chest of mirrors sparks
light into the unkindly darkness.
Fluttering creatures charge the surface.
Treasonous waters ahead, a movement a swing of an arm and opening
of a wing.
The gyrating un-relenting, a string of sonority, a swipe of a brush, a
look into the red eye of dawn.
Undecided cohort, trades the pulsating fame of interloping majors.
Throw it against the closing walls, fall as the try, fluidity only succeeds..
to succumb to the flattening of the torso.
Bounce bounce, kick kick, spin. Stop. Wander. Stop. Light.
Black grind, harmonically flicker.
Vicid, virile fluids, light of cloud, cloud over a victor, a loser pouts.
Themes sounds, strings clatter, the go prevails, a lone beacon splays
in. Movements are a truncated theme, discussions in a lesson.
dig, dug and pile, watch your progress, you can lock yourself in. In.
In ones thickening.
A widening glow, another discussion, a ruling trident.
Trident--ly,
Leaf, stretch and tighten.
Twig, flick and spread.
Bark, pull and reach.
Bite, flash and drip.
Black, dim and humming.
Strings penetrate a nonsense background, you hold the centre.
A centre in the physical, the mental and the vapid.
Train your breath, find your place, wander your distance, own your
travel. Glow in reference to its pilfering nature.
Streams backing up, holding up. Waiting to drop from there peaks.
It peaks and caps of flushed memorium.
Lie back, bend down, take the flutters with you. Your theme is clear
use that keenness, grab ahold of that trait, them, those and move as
fast you can with no speed, suspend your fastest progress, budge in
no way that can disconcert. To be sure, to be in, into, only a singular
A bright map of seemingly endless notes, but a shining penny is all we ever gleen.
Throw your head, collapse your weight, spin your trunk, wait to beg.
Fade toward, undo your flickering spirit and hold your head aloft.
Thicken
your
arm.
Its beauty obtained.
Pluck your string, play your theme my feathered populate.
Wash me.
The only thought of the lone assailant is tangible, you wait there
where coming.
Owen Armour 21st of October 2010
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