a lesser evil

“It’s night. You’re asleep, peacefully dreaming. Suddenly the ground begins to tremble. Slowly, the shaking escalates until you are thrown off balance, clinging desperately to any fixture to stay standing. The vibration moves up through your body, constricting your internal organs until it hits your chest and throat, making it impossible to breathe. At exactly the point of suffocation, the floor rips open beneath you, yawning into a gaping dark abyss. Screaming silently, you stumble and fall, skydiving into what looks like a bottomless pit. Then, without warning, your descent is curtailed by a hard surface. At the painful moment of impact, as if in anticipation, you awaken. But there is no relief, because at that precise split second, you experience an intense sound that shocks you to your very core. You look around but see no damage. Jumping out of bed, you run outside. Again you see no damage. What happened? The only thing that is clear is that you won’t be able to get back to sleep because you are still resonating with the encounter.”

Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear

You go and you arrive somewhere. Or not. You watch and you see something. Or not. The place at which you arrive will not exist for long, the things you see seem like a threat. But what connects the concrete place, its time and its duration, is rhythm; a rhythm which constitutes dance, which constitutes fear, a rhythm which constitutes pleasure. In this new performance by BADco. rhythm forms time which carries the dread, a time which ticks away, a time which hammers in. If the contemporary danse macabre is no longer a procession of dead men or a procession of social classes but rather a chain of vibrations, electromagnetic waves and sonic affects, how else would one choreograph it if not as a solo performance?

Our everyday life unfolds according to different temporal cycles like the calendar, daily and lunar cycles, and basic life cycles – somatic or mechanical. Rhythm is the phenomenon that connects place and time and provides a sort of infrastructure for time. Tempo, a momentary choice, duration, frequencies, sequences and rhythm are all mutually conditioning structures of time and every dance performance, which is a limited temporal image of spatial modifications, benefits precisely from the ways it deploys these structures. The work on this performance is thus grounded in our interest in the so-called rhythmanalysis and focused greatly on the experimentation with a set of varied relations which occur between rhythmic patterning, vibrations and frequencies, as well as different ways of measuring time. A dance performance, whether it be artistic, recreational, religious or social is, on the other hand, only one among many tactics of drowning the body into sonic spaces that produce matching affective states – pleasure, irritation or fear. Furthermore, one of the mythological topoi of the discourse on dance is precisely the body’s attempt to reach a state when it is fully immersed in the act of dancing. This concept of a body that is being danced away proposes that we think about the body in dance as a specific type of object in continuity with other material objects, as a particular condensation of matter within a general continuity of movement.

Choreography in this performance is an attempt to neglect the romanticist concept of the body as a generator of movement and focus instead on the body’s ability to mediate but also to resist different series of movements, gazes and vibrations which chain both living and nonliving mediators together by way of conformation, translation, composition etc. And for this reason we needed to focus our attention on the “underground fluxes” of a dance performance; the infrastructure of dance, background rhythms, the rhythm of elementary corporeal functions and their visceral effects.

” In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.”

T.S. Eliot from Four Quartets

“Whether they’re real or imaginary, animate or inanimate, one must form one’s mediators. It’s a series: If you don’t belong to a series, even a completely imaginary one, you’re lost. I need my mediators to express myself, and they’d never express themselves without me: one is always working in a group, even when it doesn’t appear to be the case.”

Gilles Deleuze