performance response

I saw a performance recently. A dance performance. It was an improvisation on specific themes, themes that had been researched over a year-long process of preparation for a series of improvisational performances. I was asked to lead one of the post-show discussions. A friend of mine had seen the show the weekend before and wrote an exhaustive report on the experience. This was intended to assist me in my position as discussion leader on the following weekend. What follows is my attempt to return the favor as she was curious how the show had changed.

As I sat watching the performance it occurred to me that I wanted to do a creative response to it. I thought I should get what audience was left at the end of the post-show discussion out of their seats and onto the stage and have them perform for 10 seconds a movement they liked or remembered or to perform for 10 seconds a movement in response to her performance. I thought it would be nice to reflect back what we saw and for Molly to see the audience perform. I knew it would need exactly the right conditions though and so I didn’t go through with it. I felt the conditions weren’t right. The discussion went long and we were being asked to wrap up quickly.

Molly came out before the show and made a kind of introduction. In her introduction, which I think was a bit different than her introduction on the first weekend (source: Molly herself), she said something like:

We are very close here and I can see all of you and you can see me sweating up here. It might make you feel self-conscious if you want to look at your program or shift in your seat. Don’t worry I will not interpret your actions.

This focussed our awareness of the situation. Not only did she come out with her towel and her water but then she started speaking directly to us and then she indicated explicitly our situation in relation to each other. Her specfic words fore fronted our situation whereas we might have taken it for granted.

Later, between sections of her show, she cleaned up a spot of sweat on the floor saying: I’m going to clean up a spot where there’s a lot of sweat. Our closeness, her use of breath and the changing of expression like cloud shadows across her face all contributed to the feeling that she was creating an experience for all of us to have together. This has a different effect than another kind of plan, a plan to tell us something we don’t know, for example, or a plan to dazzle us, or to transport. There was no transportation. And I felt the performance was delivered with humility (this may, in part, be because she felt her first weekend didn’t go so well—or maybe it was explicitly her intention). I mentioned something about this in the post-show discussion referring to the beginning in which she had begun speaking to us very softly. She said her entrance had been different the weekend before, when she had entered with a much grander attitude. This simplicity and humility was something that she aimed for the night I saw the show and I felt glad that I mentioned it and the effect I thought it had on how we saw her show. It caused us to read in a very close and personal way.

At a certain point she was making a move that seemed to link the tip of her toe with the tip of her fingers I thought: She’s a puppet of herself.

She came to some slow sections in which her slowness seemed to indicate she was approaching something or that there was something impending. It felt like a liminal place, a threshold from which she could take off in an unexpected direction. It was creating a possibility of change.

During the discussion one woman said to Molly:

There was a point when you leaned against the wall when everything came together. The wall was not supporting you, you were supporting the wall.

I didn’t have that same feeling but I knew the point she was talking about. What strikes me here is that someone was feeling so connected to the performance that these kinds of notions were spontaneously constructed in the mind.

I thought about a number of things. I thought maybe it’s interesting to look very specifically at what an improvisation is for the audience. One aspect of this experience is connected to the quality of not-yet-happened that live performance has over film. In improvisation it is even more so since the terrain has not been set over and over again in repetitions meant to learn the material by heart. But also it made me think and feel: isn’t everyone a writer, isn’t everyone an actor, isn’t everyone a dancer, isn’t everyone a waitress, isn’t everyone the sheriff, isn’t everyone the garbage collector?

It guess I’m saying I experienced a leveling of the playing field. And instead of the fancy virtuoso performing for the humbled masses we were a group of people who agreed to sit and watch and listen and experience (give our attention to) what one of us created in the room in front of us. And I think performance like this is what I strive for and what I enjoy when I see it. Often in cases where this kind of dynamic is in place, the experience is enjoyable even if the performance is not so good. It is similar to when you see family or friends perform. It is enjoyable and the quality of the performance is a separate issue. We need more and more of what binds people together and makes them feel like friends and family. [During World War II American Secretary of War Harry Stimson, who had been to Kyoto a couple of times and couldn’t bear thought of destroying it and the people and culture there he personally admired, argued to take it off the list of bombing targets. He hadn’t been to Nagasaki. We never really want to bomb our friends.] In every little experience in our immediate environment there is an analog in the big world. If we can do our small work well and set the kind of example we want to see in the larger world, we are doing something toward a better global community.

Um, I think that’s what I had to say about it.