Photo©Benoîte Fanton
For this year’s Nuit Blanche culture and arts festival, I chose a performance venue called Le Générateur. While I was hanging around waiting for another show to start, somebody suggested a visit to an installation-performance called déjà… j’ai habité tous ce mots. The performance was originally scheduled for the local park but the government closed the parks abruptly as a health-emergency measure. I had to go in a doorway and wait at the foot of a stairway for somebody to come get me. There was a low table with beribboned paper scrolls strewn over it; little blue link-light lit the stair risers. After a while, a young woman called, as I learned later, Anne-Sarah Faget, came down, said hi, grabbed a scroll, unrolled it, made a sign for me to follow. As she went up the stairs, she began to read – at first, I didn’t realize it was a poem, by a dead Congolese poet called Sony Labou Tansi, I learned afterwards, who had, as I followed, a resonance of sense-of-Baudelaire. Anticipating Anne-Sarah Faget’s pace was hard – it’s hard to follow anybody – clumsy collision is the stuff of comedy. You have to concentrate, I had to concentrate – how far is right, how near is wrong? I didn’t want, nobody wants, to be left behind.
Then I heard the poem Faget was reading. Sony Labou Tansi says consciousness has destroyed the world and all that is left is that making-dream of ours, a dream like the mist between two mountains at a distance. ‘Though it comes from somebody already beyond the grave, the observation moves me.
Anne-Sarah Faget arrived just before me in a room where scrolls like the one she was reading the poem from hung from the ceiling, like rolls of sticky fly catcher or like room partitions. She handed our scroll to a handsome African-looking fellow – whom I later learned is called Cheriff Bakala – who bade another man rise and me sit. In a warm, smiling baritone, the handsome man read the rest of Sony Labou Tansi’s poem to its finish. After, I helped Bakala hang the scroll from the ceiling, a sticky flycatcher or a space partition, like the rest.
Until moving within what I call Faget and Bakala’s “dance- (performance)”, I had never known what “carried away by words” meant. I do now.
But there’s more sense to dance- (performance) than inhabiting the language one uses. There’s also the fact of movement in dance- (performance), the foundational fact that movement in space is what I feel to be “me” and the foundational fact that the “me” in space is what we mean when we say experience.
Faget and Bakala, and the artist-performers and programmers at Le Générateur and elsewhere, are not the first to recognize the fundamental importance of movement in space in the construction of human experience.
Heraclitus and Aristotle both thought that Life, capital “L”, is the movement in things, in atoms. Contemporary scientists think movement (“vibration”) is in both ordinary and quantum things. Dance – the art of movement – links us to the consciousness that we and ours, all six degrees of us, are movement.
"Dance-nature”, let’s say, marks our difference from stumps of wood or shards of volcanic glass. We experience our relationship with ordinary things as a pas de deux of movement and material, subject and “other”.
As in other innate relationship behavior, there’s a practical element involved in “Dance-nature”. In the same way that “chasing” games practice of one type of basic human relationship, Dance practices shared being: oneself with other humans, oneself and other humans with the world around. And in the same way that chasing-practice enables abstract relationship potentials, Dance-practice enables awareness of the subtle link between personal experience and the Life in ordinary things.
And in the same way that chasing-practice enables abstract relationship behavior, there’s a practical element involved in “Dance-nature”. In the same way that “chasing” games practice of one type of basic human relationship, Dance practices shared being: oneself with other humans, oneself and other humans with the world around. relationship potentials, Dance-practice enables awareness of the subtle link between personal experience and the Life in ordinary things.
After all, while Dance-nature enables us to sense that all the other elements that make up the world around are subjects, like us, Dance-practice enables us to open a dialogue with that subjectivity. Isn’t facing up to the environmental emergency – not just dealing with “rising sea-levels” or “hotter summers” or “deluge rains”– a matter of understanding that our complex interaction with our environment resembles more than anything else our interaction with our infinitely subjective fellow humans?
And, until now, hasn’t dealing with each other mostly meant an ultimately futile effort of trying to overmatch each other with a better tool: club to sword, sword met by shield, castle met by cannon, machine gun met by tank? And so far, the best reply overmatching has generated has been mutually armed destruction. But MAD won’t work with other types of consciousness than human: “Men come and go, but Earth abides”.
Maybe, if we Dance-practice more, in the same way that the chase game suggests new ways of hopping on each other, some new ways of negotiating with each other and the world around will suggest itself.
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