AFTER THE DANCING.

On Saturday night we did the first run of a new thing that we’ve made that’s called WHY THEY ARE DANCING, AND WHO THEY ARE DANCING FOR at Festival INMEDIACIONES in Pamplona (which is co-coordinated by Laida and Jean Marc from the fantastic Hierba Roja, who you really should see, if you ever get the chance). And it’s a very simple show: we take turns dancing, with what energy we have but in no particular way, not well, and there is on headphones a 13 minute looping soundtrack, a monologue with music, a commentary if you like, that the audience can listen to on headphones whilst they watch us, dancing. We did about 5 hours between us and now, three days later, with muscles recovered, we pick through the pieces, and some of the pieces look like this:

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ONE INTERESTING THING WAS: the fact that so few people felt able to make eye contact; like, before they came to sit and watch, when milling around or watching other stuff in nearby spaces, glancing over, they would be happy to look, smile, laugh, but as soon as they were sitting in front of us and listening there was something different. Perhaps something to do with the text and music; perhaps something in the arrangement, like by sitting there they were entered into the playing space itself, exposed suddenly; perhaps even something in the way in which the arrangement – one sitting, watching, the other dancing – referenced other similar (and more illicit) arrangements, some sort of embarrassment or awkwardness by association. In any case, there became something interesting in this, like with no contact it became a performance of two people sharing a separation, both differently alone, isolated but sort of in reference to each other perhaps, in reference to each others aloneness. Something nice in that distant closeness.

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ANOTHER PERHAPS RELATED INTERESTING THING: was the impossibility, whilst performing, of knowing how the spectator was understanding what you were doing – with the text they heard a 13 minute loop that contradicts itself throughout you could never know what it was that they were seeing in you at any particular moment. I love this as an idea and possibility. Good moments of people laughing at I don’t know what  (and I don’t even remember there being anything particularly funny in the text), and a couple of moments of people crying, for reasons that nobody will ever know, not even us there with them. Something precious in that perhaps, and something that will belong only ever to that particular person who saw or understood that thing in that moment that nobody else will ever see.

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ONE GOOD MOMENT WAS: late on in, I’m about half an hour into my second shift (meaning we’re about 3 and a half hours into the performance) there’s a moment where another performance has spilled out into our space, right next to us, and I’m there still dancing but now watching also out of the corner of my eye this other performance (I figure I’m allowed that), and then my audience is now sometimes twisting in her chair to watch some of this other performance too but still listening to our audio, which would probably have worked somehow, and the lights are strobing and then I’m listening to LCD Soundsystem and that line comes and is: “we can’t have parties like in Spain where they go all night…”, and I think (tired and a bit delirious by this point) “That’s what I’M doing! I AM at a party in Spain that looks like it will go all night!”. And it’s a pretty blunt and stupid thought but the moment is still good.

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ANOTHER MOMENT WAS: a period of about 20 minutes wherein iara, already well into her second hour up there, is making desperate gestures to me that she’s ready to stop and swap over but watching I’m mistaking all that for just some interesting dancing, some new moves, so I’m leaving her up there all this time still going, me leaving to see other stuff, coming back and watching more dancing which is actually all this frantic gesturing. Some concerned spectators are coming up to me and asking if surely she’s had enough now but me laughing I’m saying no, she just keeps going, she doesn’t want to stop. Finally the penny drops.

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AND ANYWAY: here is a little bit of video from the show; the sound and text are taken from the track which the audience hear through the headphones:

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