Introduction. What is it all for? Purpose vs. Use
from A Letter in Which a Dance is Made in Correspondence
a book in draft form, download full pdf
He writes:
Just now, standing in front of the large windows that separate the city from my desk, I watched a child run up and down a set of stairs. It was a chance encounter between my sudden glance and his joyous, irreverent activity. Neither of us expected for me to be watching, and from my perspective on the third floor, no one aside from myself was watching. As he broke from his mother (she continued down the sidewalk pushing what I can only assume was a sibling in large stroller) the men working on the church across the street continued their labor, making and remaking the architecture which holds not just the images of god, but our images, and the images of our dead, but I watched him move, bounce really, from one step to the other, and then a turn and a tumbling descent. As I watched I began to ask myself: Of what use was this action? and for what purpose?
Purpose comes naturally. It is the experience of the movement that motivates the body. The sheer joy of acquiring physical knowledge, that unknown that is only articulated through waving limbs and bouncing frames. This is the reason for moving after all, for the invention of the dance. The universal language, the occupation of time and space, in other words the nature of performance, the heart of it. Why we move? because it articulates that which is sensed but unnameable, that which is known non-consciously, the felt, the spirit. Why run up a set of stairs and down the other side? I’d just have to show you.
Use is harder. Much harder. What we do with this newly acquired information remains to be seen. This is the real work. To take that which we now known to be, as we have breathed it into life from having moved it so, this is the work. That which requires practice. While I can not tell you what we will do, even while I may suggest upon meeting a use for our insights, I can say that we will work and that through that work we will arrive at a use for the thing. A use that we will have made together.
She…
Later:
What USE is the dance?
not VALUE… no, it has great value, even the materialists can attest to that.
But what USE? What is to be DONE with the dance?
In some ways, this presupposes that we have not USED other things to get to the dance, that the dance is some tool or just a fragment rather than an end in itself… but then I wonder, is it an end in itself? No, not entirely, or not in the way that sounds out the gate.
The dance, dance, is a form of communication. And communication is an activity involving at least two parties, involving a call and a response, a question and an answer, even if only to say, see, feel, and hear in response, I see you, I feel you. Contact.
I see dances everywhere. The buildings dance. A text dances. An image, another’s voice in conversation, a stranger’s body in the seat next to me, the wax and wane of my correspondent’s letters, my collaborator’s body in time and space… each of these things, often enough, offer up dances when I look upon them, and my own body is compelled to respond, to answer, to make USE of the dance by dancing another, even if just to rephrase the one that came before.
My collaborator tells me this is perhaps a problematic view—in the sense of, it leaves no need of an audience (and aren’t I in the business of making work for an audience?). But I tell him that I do need an audience, I very much need an audience. I TOO need a response. That is, the dance I make, it is also asking, it is also calling out, it is also communicating or trying to, with someone, something outside itself, and in the absence of a response, it falters, loses grip. In silence, I panic and fabricate an overblown response to fill the void. One overblown fabrication leads to my own paranoid response which in turn cycles on and on until I’ve forgotten how it started. I fully believe the fabrication (my own sincerity in responding to it makes it all the more hard to dismiss), and thus it then leaves me paralyzed.
At this point, both myself and the dance will have become useless. So there’s that. That if the dance is not used, then the dance forgets what it was there for/made for in the first place.
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