Dancing with eyes closed; fragments

Fragments- a splintering that was never constituted of a whole. Not  a vase moved on from its original form- the accident detailed in the bits and pieces strewn across the hard and brittle floor. But rather the fragments that are fragmenting out of their own misplaced utility that never knew of a directive apart from this rupture. An interruption that is a bouncing out of discrete outcomes locked onto a provinciality that then cannot turn corners; cannot loop loops or even side-step a fragment of a hairs breadth without falling off the edge of the world. These worlds are tight affairs and unlikely to persist outside of consecrated meters and plans that are always stricken down in the process of  living. We are doubling up against our counter-parts- against the other that would invade and even destroy our neat ways. This is a scuppering of all reason- a cutting up of the story-line- the identity shot through and through burnt out of all recognition- a smoldering mass that has become object- a carbonated intensity turned to powder on the touch. In life flesh meets flesh, and with a degree more resistance bone meets bone. What to do with this limit? These briefings that are not on the agenda but outside of which we would be blind. We don't remember our blindness because we are patterned into habitual recurrences that bring up the world in all its exuberance and flowering as if it were experienced that way for all time by all beings. Passages. Passages of our movement- trajectories that are a kind of stretching reach- like a yawn, pushing out from an uncoiling center that is provoked into this brief excess by the cool surface of the ground upon which it stretches and flays. This undulation has a rhythmic pulsing that doubles  or revokes on each brief curtailment. We can not slip through the floor so we rise and fall out of it, charged into a space which only becomes manifest through these brief rebuttals and counter directives.

When we meet one another, there is such a thing as blind-sight where the end-point of a gesture or tendency is the point of seeing and this seeing is only felt in the inflection of a joint, a muscle, the brief holding of the breath and out of this there comes a flipping open that is making space in every turn. Dimensionality is a consequence of these slight slurs and re-directives that act like reminders of our partiality and double and redouble at the borderline of this consecrated realm as it is taken out of itself into and beyond this line only as the enactment of surfaces upon surfaces. These then are the splinters- the fragmenting that is not alluding to any prior period or possible state of unity but is a multiplying and evolving out of the very points of curtailment. These become markers- brief turning points in which a sprouting multi-directionality can erupt like a virus onto and out of any intensity of existence. It alters before it is known as one identity in one place and so all that there is is this alterity- like a nodal sneeze of filaments carried on the breath in  pockets of liquid that are so fine that they only translate into liquid as they crash and are stopped mid-flight by another. These trajectories carry bodies too, perspiration dripping from the flesh so that we are literally swept up with  things, undulating and turning before it would be possible to determine and analyse the gloved hand that meets the ball in flight and imploding out of being a catching hand, it is carried into the wave of the ball's motion. Bodies carry one another in a similar way;  in flight, waiting for the moment to rupture that flight by a sudden vertigo or an angled rolling like a ball point pen that can go one way and then turn around its own center to reverse the line. Impact is mediated in this stoppage and going on, so that there is never any point of absolute stasis or absolute advancement; simply these shifts in intensity as degrees of near neutral compression through touch and the vacuumed counter movement- almost like a spasm- of a flourishing that is this running space as body. Absence and presence not as polar exclusion zones but as relative fixtures that turn and transform around each other. These small tilts and perturbations of a mid-line or a set trajectory are not diversions or loss of attention to an incentivized goal- they are the very possibility of movement as life- of the interpolation of space and matter in a constant inhibition and advancement of one to another to another, tunneling through one another, lent up against one another in a provocation that is also a soothing drone.

Techniques are never learnt- they explode out of their own stoppage- not an emotion but an unstoppable wave in its interplay with the every day objects that it cradles and crashes-  moving houses, putting household belongings such as sinks, cups and dresses in the branches of trees; maiming, killing, saving and pervading with the same tender endurance that is the play of affects simply giving rise to and laying to rest one another; the turbulence that indicates a deep settlement as in life and as in death.
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*This piece was written after a contact Dance improvisation Class with Charlie Morrisey at Moving Arts Base, in which we attuned to one another's movements by having first one dancer and then both dancers in a pair move with their eyes closed. However it was the dancer with their eyes closed who first led or "directed" the dance, until as the dance progressed the roles of receptivity and passivity become totally melded, pulsing on remote shards of contact; turning on a living dimensionality. When we then opened our eyes and streamed freely through the space the movements seemed to pulse and warp with the patterns already experienced in the former intimate dance and we seemed to make contact with other dancers not by looking or anticipating an approach but through feeling the pulse of these stoppages on the cusp of one another and the turning points and brief directives that these allowed. In this way limit and limitlessness began to turn on one another and so undo one another and the seeming givenness of these states came under question as they percolated and transformed creating a mixed identity that would be fraudulent like a severed hand at any point of exaggerated stoppage. Affect or responsiveness became the only possibility in this meeting- both the hard and the soft burgeoning out of one another.