Buckling

17.5.10



Buckling- coming out of something melded or burnt into place. Collision with no set point of impact. Not a crash. Pervasiveness. Rinsing through. Affective. A temperature rising through this fusion. This moving through the limits in touching. Temperature increase in the thickness of this wedging down and through one another. Interlocking, than as it takes effect, a heat intensity, a gripping hold as one. Blasting of impact giving way to smoothness- the rippling effect of metal raised in temperature to liquid. Ease of passage. An opening of options. But before the effusion is complete- irreconcilably mixed as one, there is a cooling. – an arching back out, a splintering apart, a buckling.


Torsion of the spine, rebound of a quivering resonance. Harmony and disharmony, symmetry and asymmetry, parallel lying and vertical right angle, gravity and impetus, descent and recoil, attraction and repulsion. These play out in the temperature gages that work through a process of intensification and a lessening off.


Forms manifest and die away in that timed release. Opposites abound as heat and fusion gives way to cooling and separation. Yet these two moves are not procedural- they are enwrapped and evolving out of one another, interpolated, gnoring in and extinguishing one another, minutely over and over again, here and there.

I saw a program about the Blitz. A piece of shrapnel blasted, twisted, contorted, spun around itself, melded and shot apart out from the main body of the projectile form. Embedding itself into the brickwork of a terraced house punching it outwards as it too detonated.

The man holds this piece of dusty shocked shrapnel and holds it up against the smooth surface of a complete missile, glossy and smooth with green paintwork- trying to find the place where it may have fitted. It is guesswork. A hypothetical non-starter. The piece of shrapnel has been forever altered. What it has gone through has constituted it in a different way. Its intimacies and points of contact in the contained intensity of a blast sent its exterior into new forgeries, different paths of action and possibility. It twisted like a living growth in its withering away in the heat and chill of its own detonation. As affected as the building it implanted itself in.


That word -buckling- that piece of shrapnel, dusty and bleached from the heat of a certain moment of detonation. The smell of it, the touch of it- rough smouldering, dry, parched, dusty. This buckling now abstracted from the reactions that made it so. And yet I take that word- the sensations of affect from out of which that word in turn has been exhumed and play it out in the two practices in which I am familiar with at the moment- Contact Dance and Drumming ensembles. It plays out equally in the drama and process of both. It enlivens and brings into a bearing, opposed manifestations of closeness and separation, affinity and rebuff. It works these, according to the workings of a temperature gage, into diverse affects, divergent formations that are time-bound within this process that has its own internal agenda.



To set up the conditions for these temperature gages through speed and refrain, pressure gages and their continual miniscule alteration and the loud-soft, hard-soft temperance that these then imply, pops out all the manifestations of performance like the flip side of a certain season or climatic encounter of wind direction, humidity count, uninhibited light source, cloud coverage. It is the embedded precursor to a weather report. The implications play out, a Shakespearian drama that unfolds from a core set of oppositions. The drama and suspense comes in tweaking those low lying imperceptible circumstances- the temperature gages and forecasting dials that create out of that composition, certain moments of fusing and buckling.


I am working with the image of this buckling- an image wrought from an entirely different scenario- a World War Two missile explosion over Shoreditch, London which, sixty years later, is being dug up by local school children and residents who still remember the vibration of the blast in a park as proof of a moment of devastation- of the transformation of matter into gas, jnto liquid and then into aa reconstituted matter. That interval between the seizure which is an event and the evidence of that event can be used as a creative image that holds and patterns other creative processes- puts them into a sequence of attention, waiting and witnessing as the emergence of disparate states comes to rise.

The dance and the drumming ensemble can evolve out of that process of dramatic fusion and separation- even whilst the medium and the results end up being of a different material. A third or outside metaphor- the buckled piece of steel- can act as an organiser for grasping the shockwaves and speed of such occurrences. It can hold in an extended stillness a configuration whereby moments set apart play into one another through repetition and change and come apart differently on and on over time. It provides a moment for pause and hesitation – even in the midst of an on-going rush of colliding events. It creates a spaciousness of reckoning in and through the run of things.

Can we hold ourselves separately any more? like a piece of shrapnel up against the smooth body of an ideal form- to try and imagine a time before trauma, before relatedness. Aren’t we all inextricably blasted, melded and buckled around one another- dispersed and reconstituted on every lean or intention that gradually takes hold? Isn’t it purely hypothetical to speak of these perfect bodies, before the moment of impact? Yet so much in therapeutic programs tries to return people to this paradise of unity and self-sufficiency. Is it probable, desirable? Is it healthy to seek for that by the use of outside readymade models of desirable attributes? Like the body of a missile that will never be launched and that will never undergo transformation?


People are inextricably altered by the circumstances of their birth, by the circumstances of their parenting, their upbringing, their neighbourhoods. Yet even before this the cellular composition of every aspect of the body is an inextricable alteration of cells meeting, combining and splaying apart. Melding and buckling goes all the way through- at every level of grasping and holding together there is the propensity and inclination towards splitting apart and separation. One can scarcely talk of the one without the other. They are twinned through and through.


The body is the intertwined acting out of these oppositional tendencies. The interrelatedness of people in practices considered to be cultural, educational, therapeutic, political (as the recent coalition government in great Britain has shown) and considered to hold together certain integrities-certain ideals, is only the continuation of this on-going process of mixing up and continual reconstitution. It’s important to trace through the formations that seem in any era to be integral and substantial within an ideal or an ideal form, into this undercurrent of perpetual movement. They are pauses- specific time-related solutions to this traction between redistribution and formal recognition. Individualities continuously are made and unmade through those gages of multiple focus.