The Philippine Online Chronicles

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Concern is never exempt of malicious intent. It is only politeness that prevents us from openly admitting that most, if not all, of our actions are tinged with malicious intent and ulterior motives that prick open the excess of imagination, proposals that hint at drifting along the uncertain potential of future or suggestions of continuity.

For what point is it to enact something if not for the sheer pleasure of rapture? If not satisfying the desire to destabilize the secure liminal of habit and the ordinary? If not to reassert the site of play where work has now taken over? If not to resuscitate those ghosts who hunt us in sleep or flirt with our plans for tomorrow? If not to alienate us and lure us back into the excruciating reality of the domestic? If not breaching the crude unconscious gnawing under our feet? If not to salute those that have gone before us and inspired us? If not to create more tender anomalous cracks on the wall that divide us? If not remind us of the pleasure of distance? If not absolving us of the guilt of not trying hard enough? If not make spectators out of us?

 

The undeniable fear of watching typically springs from the insecurity of "not knowing." And nowhere is this more pronounced than in the space of a performance where artifice instantaneously takes over – the performers playing their part and the audience indulging the situation.  Yet while there is nothing at all alienating about dance (in fact it is the most simple to understand and appreciate, what with it its fool-proof formula of abstraction and metonymic codification, or mimetic representations or even appeal to affect), the compulsion to mystify what is already obvious remains. Because surely by now, we must have all sold into the idea that nothing is ever what it seems it is. Not in theater, not onstage, not in dance nor in real life.  There is that popular dictum among creators: “never give it all away” as if the goal were to pile up layer upon layer of metaphor, the farther away from the original the better. As if it has become this game of hide and seek among makers to keep meaning intact behind appearance or even create double-meanings out of things, as if singular meaning were not hard enough to handle. Even as a dance-maker myself, I’ve never really understood this tendency for abstraction and multiple representations. When did simplicity ever cease to be anything but brilliant? If a performance is to create sites of communication and connectivity, why is the easiest way to communicate always the least one taken?

What if it were precisely this appearance – of meaning behind every gesture, pulsation and prostration of the body, even occasional negotiation of weight between two dancers – which we are failing to notice? In fact, the real performance is the constructive event taking place between performers and spectators, the action onstage merely a mediator of this experience.

So yes, there is more work in watching than doing because it is precisely where the spectator sits that the completed performance takes place – where the dance and its significations, affects and message are distributed and contested.  The pleasure of watching is not so much being awed by the spectacle of pliable bodies, graceful and eloquent movements, nor in being moved to tears, or disgusted and/or stimulated by obscenity, but is in the act itself. The pleasure of watching is in watching your self watch/ing. And once this admission is overcome can watching be less a frightful experience of discriminating good over bad (not that this is any less entertaining) but one which engages and constructs our imagination.  One that allows us to take bolder risks and say like Janez Jansa (Emil Hrvatin): “just because you don’t understand anything doesn’t mean you cannot have an opinion of it.”

* photo: Jerome Bel's Pichet "Klunchun and Myself"