UPRIGHTNESS

Uprightness seems to be an idea more than an actual body disposition that one aims for and more or less strikes on in the right way. It is more an idea of itself as a form of address or a facing towards or outwards from out of an on-going capacity of invigoration- a kind of forwarding or a sense of putting forward an approach which then becomes the body upright- exposed on the edge of itself- as a relational interface. It’s a precursor to something as yet unfinished and moves onwards out of this sense of filling in that is what it means to face another. That is not read in any particular kind of gait although it may be represented in the manner of a gait as a kind of snap-shot of all that this facing or putting oneself forward entails. Yet in reality it is not the body itself – the fact of the ligaments in a certain line with one another that composes this idea. Or only at least after the event- as a kind of depository of the idea of receptivity. The address is a compulsion that cannot be clicked into any single form. So then how could it represent the figure of an upright body? It is worked up out of many cuts and falls, -half-hearted attempts and refusals- only knows itself through this all manner of bombardment that it plows through.


What is a rebuttal? An invitation to work through a re-orientated manner of address. A pause, back-thread or counter-indication that complicates and busies the business of closing a gap. This interlude is the space for exemplification. A clarity tweaking the threads of infinite uncertainty. - a tightening and loosening and the difference between what those two states of relative torsion come to mean.


A sick person- a topsy-turvy person. An old man. The figure on the side of the pavement staring aimlessly, looking like any moment the pavement will offer up a solution to their perplexity and pull them down. Will they fall? Will they sway? Totter on the verge of something? Stutter? Look away? I approach this figure carrying whilst two plastic dustbins on the back of my bike, swerving up and down the ramps of the uneven paving stones- from road to walkway and back off again. She is standing on the pathway but I feel no sense of wobbling with this precarious load. A gap is opened up in a smile that stretches and sags her cheeks in a double movement that pulls in on one another. I curve around her and she bends slightly so that un-touching we orientate conscientiously.


Later further up on the road, a man is walking barrel- chested and yet from a great distance I feel him occupying the entire pavement even though the interlude between us, in times of how long it would take for us to be level- is several seconds away. The slippery surfaces of the bins inside one another and precariously balanced between seat and handlebars, swivels and nearly pulls me down with it. However an idea of uprightness prevails and by forging ahead rather than stopping and waiting for the momentum of the fall to catch in I managed to gather back through and continue this slow monotonous surge ahead, treading one step at a time, keeping with that stepping because I cannot afford to be anywhere else at all. The man stares through me and I walk through the stare so that the hardness of the eyes is not at all matched by the mutual concession at the last moment of the bodies. This is not body advantage. It is the idea of uprightness and facing even whilst not looking with the eyes and nearly falling with the body. The body is the least of our worries. It gathers or not- falls and re-groups like the ecology of particles that it is. It is the idea- the form of address that coheres or does not.


As I am writing this I look out my window and a small boy on a bike with a large girl propped up on the back holding on to his shoulders rolls down the centre of the street. They are both looking ahead into the near middle space, just past where they are, into the area they are entering but have yet to reach. It is changing. It is here and here and here. They are forwarding into the near distance, making it there’s. There is a sense of them smiling. The smile is one. Not of him or of her but both together- somewhere between them. Flickering. It keeps them balanced though all the odds point to a dramatic fall. That fall never exactly arrives yet in the slur and zigzag neither is it entirely ruled out.

There are as many different types of uprightness as there are practices that each in their own way break opens the possibility of that uprightness. In Contact Dance Improvisation, uprightness is the refrain or the middle space that one enters just beyond the body falling and swaying, collapsing and reconstituting on the mutual prop and aid of other bodies equally falling beyond any sense of absolute stability. In that sense Contact Dance teases out and extends the notion of what that uprightness is all about. For it is never absolutely established in the body composure so that it is taken completely into the sense of an idea- a way of addressing- a notion held on to and carried through from one slant to the next- a kind of slur between what is actually seen- a mediation and exchange that lasts fractionally in the suspense and in the continued momentum between one impulse and another. This staggering of phrases is the only sense of arrival and yet as soon as it is reached and executed it is over and already falling out of itself, swooning beyond any capacity for sustained exposure. Rather it is the idea that lasts. The sense of a continued value in each new recounting of this mystery of movements that come up against one another into coherence- a brief pause- a moving through into a centre gage even whilst there is this reckless hit and miss going on. An ordered lucidity that emerges through it all and is carried by the volition of every angle that comes into play.