a performance dialogue

Thursday, December 6, 2007

Infinity Dances

I've been thinking about your provocation Dorothy regarding infinities in other forms. I took this question to Rose and we came up with revolutions, spinning and a maze. It was interesting to compare two different modes of turning. For Rose, with a classical ballet organisation of space, the pirouette and the fouette are about 'flipping' front to back, back to front, whilst keeping a sense of frontality using 'spotting' (keeping your eyes looking to the front until the last moment and swinging them around again). Interestingly, a New Zealander, Rowena Jackson holds the world record for 152 consecutive fouettes. In performing Odette or Odeile the expectation is 32 fouettes. My own experience of revolutions is in spinning within the post-tanztheatre version of this which is a kind of ecstatic turning, taking your gaze around with you until the world swings into horizontal bands of fluid colour, losing the solidity of forms to become liquescent matter, keeping the momentum of spinning going and sustaining it for as long as possible whilst feet step a constant pattern. Perhaps this distinction - between a classical and a contemporary version of revolutions - can be compared to turning the page or leafing through the book, between wakefulness and dreaming. Borges: "Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that dreaming and wakefulness are the pages of single book, and that to read them in order is to live, and to leaf through them at random to dream." Merging these modes of turning as a way to explore infinity we came up with a skimming turn that travels the perimeter of a triangle and resolves itself in infinite steps in a maze like pattern. The idea is that this material is constant and continuous, the turning suspending a sense of vertical and temporal divisions.

1 comment:

kate said...

"Mathematics is logical to be sure, each conclusion is drawn from previously derived statements. Yet the whole of it, the real piece of art, is not linear; worse than that, its perception should be instantaneous."
This seems to echo the idea of the leafing through a book rather than turning one page after another?
Made me think of Whirling Dervish too...