REDRAWING THE MAP

DANCE

3 July

Recently landed: Redrawing the Map

Gracia’s written response to Week One of the Keir Choreographic Award, especially for Fjord Review.

Desolate. Exuberant. What do we do now? We dance, of course. From a callout in November, 2021, eight applicants were selected to develop a work of up to 20-minutes in a five-month period (February to June) in 2022, for the fifth edition of the biennial Keir Choreographic Award (KCA). The eight commissioned works included Alan Schacher and WeiZen Ho, Tra Mi Dinh, Alice Will Caroline, and Jenni Large, in Week One at Dancehouse, Melbourne. With Lucky Lartey, Rebecca Jensen, Joshua Pether, and Raghav Handa to follow in Week Two, at the culmination of which, the $50,000 prize will be awarded by the judges and a $10,000 Peoples Choice Award. (Watch this space!)

Betwixt and between the “refracted and dissolving visual fields,”[i] dance is a way to enter the body and also a way to leave it behind. A way to observe the inner and the outer worlds. In the (projection of) static interference, Alan Schacher and WeiZen Ho stand, and the clarity of their twin forms dims as they ‘become’ a part of the moving texture of white noise. Signal disturbed, a threshold crossed, when they next walk towards the audience, their bodies are illuminations, altered. They’re inhabiting a changing state where light wriggles and sound thrums upon and within their forms. They’re accompanied by versions of themselves on the screen behind them, the “multiplying body” (of the second half of this work’s title, Evaporative Body / Multiplying Body maybe), a shimmering aura. With video artist Fausto Brusamolino and noise artist Hirofumi Uchino, there is a sense that “the body extends beyond their skin and into the places they inhabit.”[ii] I thought I saw the moonlit ocean at night, and perhaps I did.

And so begins KCA. And then it ends. And ends again. With The ___, an observation of the “duality and complexity of endings in a duet caught between harsh and slippery edges” in which Trà Mi Dinh and Claire Leske alternate “through shifting scenes that challenge the finality of “endings” and what it means for something to come to a close.”[iii] Rain abated, mist settled, a soft fuzzy peach light grew into a warmer red, and flooded the stage, like a setting sun, and in the moment asked: “Maybe we can invent something; I’d like a new way of experiencing the world.”[iv] The dancer, like the poet, as the universal observer. Me, in the audience, like the gamer, enjoying the non-linear puzzle of multiple endings, only for Dinh to unleash Leplace’s Demon: the present state of the universe is the effect of its past and the cause of its future,[v] and ‘ring-a-ring-o’-roses, we all fall down. The end.

[i] Alan Schacher and WeiZen Ho, Evaporative Body / Multiplying Body, choreographers’ notes, Keir Choreographic Award, Dancehouse, program, 2022.

[ii] Tra Mi Dinh, The ___, choreographer’s notes, Keir Choreographic Award, Dancehouse, 2022.

[iii] Jay Hopler, “Out of These Wounds, the Moon Will Rise”, Green Squall (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 15, https://doi.org/10.12987/9780300129649-012, accessed 24th June, 2022.

[iv] Pierre-Simon Leplace’s “Leplace’s Demon” introduction to A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (Essai philosophique sur les probabilités), 1814.

[v] Alan Schacher and WeiZen Ho, “What Persists: A Critical Path Social Choreographic Research 2022,” https://www.weizenho.com/collaborations-residencies#/what-persists/, accessed 24th June, 2022