Something Is Being Done To You
Spectacle as transmission, in ๐ต๐๐๐ฆ & ๐๐๐ข๐.
Dance doesnโt want your attention. It wants your body.
Like a drug, my experiences have changed me. Sometimes beyond my consent.
And yeah ~ Iโve been gone, but Iโm back, Iโm here.
ใฏใใๅ ๆฐใงใ.
Performance turns out to be signal through flesh; the thing that passes between bodies in space.
โฆ
In London, a friend introduced me to a secretive Reiki practitioner; not my usual flavour of woo, but I was intrigued. She works from a space in a converted stable, and unlike most practitioners, right after her explanation of generally working hands-off, she laid me down and cradled me intimately at the neck.
With her fingertips on my pulse, brushing the jugular, I drifted.
Afterwards, she told me about the images she had seen; red cardinals circling, and she asked about my love of dance.
You should dance more, she said.
โฆ
Thereโs a point where the head meets the spineโฆ when it releases, something opens. This knowledge is a kind of magic; when I discovered it, I became obsessed with its secrets.
My own body knew things I had never been taught to access.
As a start, thereโs a limitlessness when your awareness is allowed to roam. Sometimes itโs easy to feel bound within a body, instead of allowing your awareness to roam. That openness can go far beyond your own limits.
Your body knows instinctively when youโve walked into a room where people have just had a fight, or been fucking; you can sense the danger in a crowd before anything happens, or a friend who is trying to contain a delightful secret.
We know things before we know them, in our bodies. And that sensitivity can be trained.
So when I watched English National Balletโs presentation of Crystal Piteโs Body & Soul (part I), I felt its drug-like impact.
Something in the glitch orchestral score, the rippling waves of dancers, the poetically robotic French voice repeating droit gauche droit gauche ~ encore ~
My nervous system was jailbroken; not with a message that I should be in awe of a spectacle, but that I was part of it, that I was experiencing it in my body from their bodies.
I found myself in a kind of involuntary participation. A sense that I was being made more alive by witnessing this; call it what you like ~ mirror neurons, endogenous chemicals, nervous system entrainment, pattern contagion ~ my attention was so precise the moment became sacred.
They danced; I danced.
โฆ
Human connection is not just one of witnessing but one of transference.
The real power of live performance art is that the audience is not passive. If you allow yourself to be sensitive to what is truly taking place, it is not representation but transmission. A temporary merging of systems. Moving within the shared attention space of a captive group, these artists dysregulate something; pull your body into states it would not otherwise access.
This isnโt about watching; something is being done to you.
Their entire being pulls your body into states it would not otherwise access; not metaphorically ~ chemically.
Art is an event in the body.
ULTRA was born because there wasnโt any good writing about post-AI art; now everyone is doing it. But most art writing is still about what it means, rather than what it does to you.
This next phase is about encounters. The body, and where that viscerality meets technology.
Art as something that alters you.
When you encounter the art you love, are you still just thinking about it, or experiencing it?
Are you watching dance, or are you dancing?
Do you dance. Did you once.
When did you stop.
You should dance more.
.
.
.
โArt is an event in the bodyโ: YES! And like you Iโm interested in what art does to you (rather than what it means). You might also like to know that for the last Tasting Color dinner, I invited a dance performer to interpret the color Orange. Adding a performance aspect really enhanced the sensory experience.