Photo by Anne Tetzlaff Choreographer: Florence Peake Performers:
Lizzy Lequesne, Eve Stainton and Katye Coe
Being SDD’s first
Torchlight Artist is giving me an opportunity to think about dancing in a different way. My Torchlight
time is focused on investigating two themes, Surrender and Afterwards,
which are my anchors but not necessarily linked.
Dancing does something that makes me
more attuned to others and to my own sense of sentience. There has been a lot
of talk of empathy and awareness in recent years. I go further. I want to bring
attention to the deeply felt histories and unspoken knowing that attentive and
skilled dancers have. It is important and urgent today.
These feelings are not exclusive to
dancers. I like to imagine that all beings share these things deep down. These
senses are often buried because we don’t necessarily use them so often in the
every day. Maybe this is to do with the way that we are encouraged to make
sense of everything, maybe it is because we no longer pay attention to
intuition or to gut feelings. Our attention is split between so many different
things all of the time. I believe that there are huge benefits to giving a
different value to these intuitive or gutsy intelligences and that we are
missing out by not doing so.
Performing dancing is also always
relational … in relationship to. And in a world where the individual experience
is being given such enormous emphasis, performing dancing is an important
resistance corps because it is always an enacting with.
Surrender is something I experience
when performing dancing – it is necessary to enter into the world of others, of
the choreographer and the other performers I am working among. It is an act of
great generosity. It comes from a place of quiet choice where agency is given
space to materialise. It has nothing to do with submission in my experience.
But there is for sure a letting go that is necessary.
And the afterwards … what dancers and
others go through following a dance performance is complex and full of feeling
and thought. My experience and in speaking to others, is that this afterwards
is often experience alone and not given a place where it can be discussed and
shared. I would like to change this.
None of this is about knowing. And it
isn’t about answering questions or proving a point. I’m not interested in those
things because if I go towards knowing then I go towards something fixed or
finished. The kind of experience that I’m pointing at doesn’t answer questions
or tick boxes. It does something else.
I found this quote earlier this week
and it moves me and makes me remember why this is so important. I re-found this
quote today and it is quite simply YES.
They are some words by Rosemary
Butcher that were published in London Dance, about Gill Clarke shortly after
Gill’s death in 2011. They were two amazing change makers who taught me so much
about dancing and dancing practice.
“Gill’s passionate belief was that
the dance practice she and her colleagues are involved in, has strongly
embedded ethical values that are fundamental and timely; readiness, openness,
curiosity, embracing individual enquiry, working co-operatively to find
solutions, creating situations where learning can happen, embracing
uncertainty, ambiguity and specificity, and “tuning” ones “skills of
attention”. What better approach to our time and place.”
So perhaps what I am learning, and
what I would like to shine this light on, is that the intelligence that dancers
apply in their work, could bring vitality to many other situations outside of
the world of performing dancing. In torchlight events I am inviting people to
contribute who attend to situations where this kind of information or these
kinds of intelligences are also visible. People like midwives and those who
care for people at the end of life.
I also intend to bring alliances to
things that each and every one of us experience. Falling asleep, orgasm, grief
…
let’s see.
