The unlikely dance

I did some charcoal pictures to try and work out what is this practice of making space that we are all up to in different ways. Just putting it down in writing like that makes it sound very rushed- very tight and the nature of that urgency seems to preclude space. How to make space or experience it as a come-uppance even as figures from time to time plough down a plumb-line that would enter right through your chest if one didn't jump to one side or the other on a busy street. Can this challenge-this driving and relentless forging forward actually prompt and spill us into more space not less? What does it mean not to confront but to engage within the wider field of spaciousness? To feel this as a driving force or lever and to actually use the compression as a way to circulate so that the distraction or being put out of sorts, sends attention into a cascade of channels; perceptual, energetic, physical  and feeling, where there is actually more space not less but space as it is lived or utilized as a sending out- sending through or absorbing into. So it could be then that the limit factor as it is reached becomes the point of torsion or bounce out of which an extension to another area rolls out. This could be the lived body from moment to moment redistributing and inter-meshing through environment, growing limbs, extensions or idea protrusions; auditory encounters with far-off trace elements of a sound as it reverberates through the city; the downstairs thump of a door from the flat below closing from one area to another that you yourself have never passed through. But these imaginings- the light filaments rinsing through bare trees, cascading off  the window panes that at just that instant become reflective; taking on the golden hue of the sinking sun, and even the memory brought up so suddenly of a child playing in the rubble outside of a house which this time round is deserted with only the loose bricks and piles of sand acting as a trigger for this play of life that has now moved on. As I pass through the streets, some filled with people hurrying against the light which is on its way out and some empty with not a figure in sight as far as the eye can see, then a sudden emergence as a car roars down the center of the road and disappears at the far end, it's red rear light trailing in my perceptual field even when the event is over, I let my breath come and go. Why is this breath so conditional on outside influences, at times cordoned as if in a tight enclosure at other times spreading and filiating like tendrils that pass through my nose, around my body, and out through my mouth in a swift soundless whistle that is spreading and dancing with all the other silently whistling lips. Bodies; bodies that do not stay still. Bodies that intimate a gesture towards or a gesture away from where these two possibilities wrap and spiral around one another in ever more complex patterns. That is the dance. But only when it stays with the immediacy of what is indeterminate. An embrace or a quiet moment of reflection  and the still moments between  these varying levels of leverage and spin that generate yet still more moments between them. They are made out of  the mutual hesitancy and the going into again and again of these possibilities of encounter and in the end the touch is intimated out of these various tendencies that are inverted, extended or abruptly curtailed before they reach into any particular manifestation. And the touch becomes effortless, invited in even as it is re-configuring around a different space of invitation,  leaping between one embrace and another that never becomes air-tight; is always in the process of breaking apart again. This was the one dance I was drawn to watching amidst the swirling of bodies that seemed to become passing shadows against a blinding light. As I lay there letting the sun hit directly on my face so that the moving bodies almost cancelled one another out like the burn-out of an after-image where the body is still lingering in space even as it is beginning to drop away I felt I was almost dreaming.

So to return to the pictures; the pictures of the dance that were drawn before the dance even took place. How could that happen? It happened because the pictures were not a representation of the dance. They were not an episodic narrative of the moves made, the configurations built up, the postures and gestures that struck first to one pose and then to another pose. The pictures just made themselves by this abrupt forwarding into contact;  the contact of a piece of charcoal across a piece of paper that was mediated between the one extreme of grinding the stick into the paper until it crumbled to dust and the other extreme of suspending the weight of the stick just above the paper so that no mark at all would be made. Between the two was this skidding, diving, swerving line interjected and interrupted by other lines to create junctions or nodal points out of which other extensions of circulation could begin to journey.  This went on until it was done; the patterning through the patterning building up textures that carried the semblance of a form with a certain gravitational tendency. So touch or contact began to become manifest in this way on this flat and oblivious surface of paper. Something in the feeling sensation and built-up memories of my own body informed me of a given rule that I would not have come to in this way outside of the drawing; The rule was that where contact leans into contact through the experience of the body as stoppage or containment, this is off-set as a sense of spaciousness in another non-localized area; in the dissipation and widening of attentional gaze or as the physical extension and freeing up of weight in a limb or in the chest or the head. So that the weight-bearing point pools and intensifies and this offers up the possibility of greater distribution as a circulation that may spiral out to the extremities of bodies and indeed beyond these bodies into the space held by the architecture of the room and then even beyond this into the light patterns radiating off from the trees out the window; the lines of the roofs and even beyond this to the dissipated sounds of the borough and the city circulated in the air-currents of countless breaths driving countless moves played out in the inter-changes that are not witnessed but are a given and in a sense are dramatized through this one dance in this one place at this one time.

And somehow through all these filiated moves the outline of the child rocking and stabilizing on a swing at the center of a room begins to take shape on the paper as the very last picture that I draw because it is the last piece of paper that I own. It arrives there as the dance arrives there; not my dance- but the dance that stays with me in the bits and pieces that I witness or encounter first hand- at the Saturday Dance Jam that afternoon- so that the dance is this patch-work of dances and the bits that are able to fix and be brought up again as aspects of one another prompted into life all over again when I am back on the street. But the picture of the child arrived on the piece of paper BEFORE I went to the dance and before I arrived back on to the street after the dance. It is from a time that was not really in my mind when I put the charcoal to the paper earlier that morning. And the picture is not even of a dance; it is a singular child on a singular swing, spinning and turning this way and that way, pausing and  re-circulating as my hand catches and re-spins the swing and the child sets her position deep into the mat of the swing bearing down through her hips and sit-bones in order to stay upright, and whispering with her whistling breath-like voice going:  "LA, LA, LA" and then waiting for my reply. So the dance was really there even though I had absented myself from the charcoal picture. The cut-out border of the paper does not delimit the end of the contact so that in fact the dance occurs at the boundary of  its own representation. It is the heart to heart drawing of the child- before and beyond my consciousness of it- which then bleeds into the dancing later in the day in which there is no curtailing of the field to size. The tilting ground of the dance like the tilting base of the swing can not be absolutely stopped; and the child finds herself not through herself- which is an impossible abstraction- but through her contact with the unreliable nature of the swing and through the at times rather clumsy interactions between myself and her which nevertheless keep manifesting. This is not picture perfect. The function is  never to be completed-never to be tidied away. For it is always in its aspect of becoming, beyond closure. This open interval is how we experience one another and it is how we might experience ourselves through what is always an excess of ourselves.

It is on the street that my final dance occurs- that is the one with the old man; a Hassidic Jew who is leaning heavily on his stick as he walks so that his left  leg- perhaps the injured or painful one- is practically floating over the pavement and it is the right leg acting in parallel to the heavy stick that bares the full force of the contact, tunneling into the ground and sending the man's weights and attention heavily downwards through his joint anchorage. His wide brimmed hat nearly precludes all views of his face but then just as we pass something lightens in his face and I am drawn into the  brief animation between his eye-brows and his lips that does not involve eyes; neither his nor mine at all. It is more the slight staccato step, heavy one side and light on the other and the contact of the palm of his hand wrapped around the top of the stick, taking on its shape, that regulates my breath with his for an instant and in the next moment, as we have already passed one another, my breath comes very lightly and freely and I sense the beauty of the setting sun as if my vision had somehow widened and been flung open as something very exacting but non-locate-able. It is the quiet hesitancy of a movement that is looking back at itself as if in suspension whilst the movement carries on that actually defies the closure of that movement and sends it escalating beyond anything that could be grasped. And it is the heaviness and awkwardness of  the man's lumbering step that has brought the possibility of this lightness- a lightness that is the transparency of a feeling that does not exploit that feeling. Each and every contact that we experience; this plummeting downwards into containment and closure, is simultaneously the propulsion into a wider field when it is let go of and allowed to unfold. That is the dance that makes "one" out of "two"- even when the "two" will never meet as such and no words will pass between. This can not foreclose a space that is always there and that always does pass between points whether these points appear as impossibly distant or impossible close.  Strangers pass without a word whilst knowing one another and holding that connection with care.
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*Pictures can be seen here: wwwmovements.blogspot.co.uk