Making and Unmaking: Part Four

Back to the dance in the dance studio set up through the refrain of Nancy Stark Smiths’ “Tuning Score”. At the beginning I felt clumsy and un-integrated in the dance. It was as if a common wind to carry the motion between us all was missing- at least in my experience. There were separately executed “moves” that worked or did not work. However through the actual process something begun to occur. In the playing with speed and the various points of suspension like a kind of intermeshing between falling and rising, turning one way and another the dance begun to shape itself.

We simply fitted in or playfully resisted this emergent pattern that nobody authored but everybody knew. In amongst this there was one particular dance that I had which seemed to make itself so that whether in close contact or dancing apart one state seemed to generate the other like a thrusting inwards and a spiraling outwards so that the contact could be touched back in and brought to bear as a leverage within a far wider patterning- something we pulsated in and out of. There was this flying calibrated stillness- a sending back in at the very moment of letting go- a wind-re-wind that became through the doing, an emotioning. It as embroiled in everything that happened and our avoidance of certain other possibilities rather than with any sense that emotion could stand outside of that momentum. It became an accumulated affect- a threshold of significance where something unexpected caught in and emerged. That’s when the dance started doing itself and we simply fell into place or at times resisted that place while simultaneously holding it there. It became a kind of joke –a humoring that allowed for depth of feeling without that disappearing down the fire escape.

Leaving that patterning can be awkward and Nancy Clark Smith even has written in to the score this feeling of disorientation and hesitancy after the intensity of partnering where there is a period of dis-coordination after extreme fluency- like the yolk of an egg spinning on disruptedly after a spinning egg has been stilled. That may be a time of vertigo, of forgetting and of emotional anxiousness. So a period of extreme integration can be followed- sometimes must he followed- with disintegration- clumsiness and mismatch. There is a sense of going back down- deeply into the miniscule arrangements of a composition- to feel out and sense the split second timings of doing and undoing that cohered in the dance at a certain and unique speed and set of circumstances. The same impulses may play out later as fears, euphoria, and physical, verbal or sensory slurs- where the light comes too brightly, or sounds overwhelm or movements are rushed and then halted. When divorced from the physical split-second coordinated movements that have generated the energetic spark that figures them out each second they explode into countless shards of possibility that can never be acted on exactly in the same way and so crowd in. Here in this storage or archive is the possibility for increased sensitivity that can be converted into language or action, or emotional depth… or overload. In that sense autism is perhaps intimately connected up with knowledge seeing, questioning, ideas, curiosity. It is one phase of a pattern. It may be dangerous to simply wash out the sensitivity. It may be better to use it. To convert it and move it on in a cycle of learning.



The next day after the dance, sitting at home, I have an intense awareness of the filaments of dust in my flat. Tiny specs that can be individually calibrated on the surface of furniture and on the floor. I am seized with a –probably- obsessive need to do some house-cleaning which I enter into with fervor as a new solitary dance revving up because it has to go that way. Yet it is summoned out of events far beyond itself. In that way the house-work eventually gets done in spite of myself.



P.S Today no planes are landing in British air-space because of a volcanic eruption in Iceland, the wind direction over the British Isles and the strong possibility of cloud ash in British air-space particularly between the hours of 11hrs and 19hrs on 15.4.10 which could jam up the engines of planes. The lingering affect of this incident will probably last for days.