Ideas move like air, and as unseen forces tend to do, they spill, flow and rarely land easily. As an artist, I attempt to catch them in various ways, but recently Post-its have been the simplest net in which to snag them.
In the two years that I researched, moved and built the 75-minute performance ritual this room is a body, little pieces of information flitted about in my consciousnesses, downloading into my body and leaving me breadcrumbs that I would jot down on the sticky yellow squares. Crumbs of phrases like “I have to remember it won’t always be this way,” “keep going,” and “the tools are not the work” punctuated my creative process, which includes movement, text and storytelling.
For me, the pleasure of creating a work is following these creative carbs into the forest of the project, navigating the meaning as I go.
When I began writing this post-view, I changed my path a couple of times. At first, I framed the article around a conversation I had with a colleague where we were asking ourselves questions like: Where does dance criticism show up now, in this current cultural moment? How do we as artists use performance reviews? As a mirror or currency? Can artists take up space in sectors traditionally structured to critique them, and be included?
Then instead, I attempted to write about all of the theoretical influences that are baked into the body of the work I do, in a sort of conversation with Cynthia Bond Perry’s recent article, but it felt forced and I couldn’t find my way with it. I couldn’t quite land on a point of view that felt relevant and potent.
How could I map out this article, with its 800-word terrain, tracing lines that extend from years of research and practice? How could I shepherd them into an honest shape that could be relatable and familiar yet odd, wonky, queer even?
In The Creative Process, James Baldwin writes: “Perhaps the primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone.” He continues: “He is also enjoined to conquer the great wilderness of himself. The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.” Having recently returned from this great wilderness, with a crumb in hand, I open my palm to you to reveal the approach I have finally landed on.
Report back. Report back about the sensations in the body that seem to integrate meaning and matter, thought and deed. Report back about the space around you expanding to include new possibilities of how to keep going. Report back about the ritual experience of performance, which helps to remember-to-remember what is important.
I don’t view dance as a product. To me, the dancing body is a process that shows up in spaces with more bodies paying attention to it. Human bodies, imaginary bodies, rooms as bodies, it can be any and all. In the moment of exchange between gaze and performance, something happens. It’s magic. It’s a portal. The changing of scenes, the shifting weight in the body, the ever-morphing contexts that unfold as we watch a body perform refracts fragments of life back to us.
Life, with its series of constantly changing transitional realities, dances through us and compels us to move and make and disclose the vast landscapes of our interior to each other.
Which always brings me to this question: Why? Why are we here? Why do we dress up and pretend in front of each other? Why do we gather, time and time again, and participate? According to Baldwin, “to make the world a more human dwelling place.”
The impetus for making this room is a body was always transformation. The transformation from a past body, a body passed away, and towards a future body. A bodily horizon.
In my performance, I experience thought and action as a non-linear, rhizomatic process of flows, breaks and intensities. I experience life in the same way. It’s not fixed. It slips and tilts off of the vertical plane, like a dancing body negotiating gravity.
Dancing bodies experience this; we learn this through the doing of it . . . and then if we are lucky, or rather if we ask for it, we can have opportunities to report back about it, so that maybe some meaning can be gleaned from it.
Why? To offer possible systems of survival, perhaps? A map of how to traverse the terrain of the human condition? To confirm that we are all experiencing our interiorities alone, but that we can bring back stories from the vast forest with hands full of ashes from the roads we’ve blazed?
Because if we don’t do the doing of these things, they live in the thought, the airy idea of it all. And bodies are adept at bringing these thoughts down to earth, grounding them in actions. Performing the manifestation, and allowing it to bring us together.
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Sean Nguyen-Hilton is an Atlanta artist working in movement and performance. He is a co-founder and team member of Fly on a Wall, an arts platform for performance centered practices, and holds an MFA in Dance from Hollins University.
