Perhaps there is a difference between communicating something and the communication of something.
Community implies some or other form of membership, an invitation to a more or less vague or concrete form of loyalty. Gathering on the other hand is an open-ended togetherness that is held together for no particular reason. Community proposes an in or out, is concentric in respect of power and secures identity. Gathering has no centrality, power is unstable and temporary, identities flourish but are not secure. Gatherings go with the flow and know neither in or out.
Translated into imagery, one could say that community is and image of something whereas gathering is just an image, whatever image. Community is communicating something to the same extent as gathering is just communication.
Community is supposedly a good thing but one should keep in mind that communities are also monuments, created and correlated to power structures.
Some, even many, argue that dance is an ocular art form. Something you look at, at least primarily. Others, often the same many, think that dance communicates something and if it doesn’t it’s rubbish. But, what about if those people are just a little bit not exactly right? What if dance precisely isn’t something you look at and that doesn’t communicate something? What about if dance is something that you also hear, smell, taste, touch and that reverberates in your body producing forms of kinaesthetic transfer? And that the specificity of dance is that it communicates communication, that it communicates the possibility of communication rather than communicating one or other already possible possibility?
In the olden days, it was great to visit record shops because when pulling up an LP with the greatest hits of, say The Rolling Stones, just looking at the cover, reading the list of songs on the back made me revisit all my experiences with the band, including all the associated experiences that came with the songs. You know, teenage revolt and “Jumping Jack Flash”, dreaming about making out to “Angie”, or driving your first car with “Honky Tonk Women” on the stereo.
Then, when you put on the song it’s always somewhat disappointing because the experience is narrowed in, trapped by The Rolling Stones trying so hard to communicate something.
“They Returned Every Day At The Same Time To The Same Place” is a proposal for a dance that however captured by internet based representation seek to be rigorous with dance’ inherent abstraction - its ability to just communicate – as well as its propensities beyond the ocular.
It does so by an invitation to partake in two parallel forms of accumulation that further activates two modalities of performativity. Over 26 days a series of equally many dances will unfold next to the cumulative accumulation of an abécédaire, reflecting on how dance communicates communication and therefore become a place for the possibility of aimless contemplation.
This proposal forms a conviviality with the work of visual artist Ian Wilson, as well as with the well-known abécédaire, that Claire Parnet conducted with the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze in the late 80s. Although sharing ecologies there is also a tension created in respect of the performativities activated. When Wilson’s work among other things can be seen as a critique of institutions as well as of understandings of commodity, this project addresses presence, the prominence of the ocular and forms of spectatorship. Similarly, when Parnet’s abécédaire forms an intimacy with Deleuze as a person through his philosophical landscape, this proposal consists of a series of reflections where dance operates as a departure point.
“They Returned Every Day At The Same Time To The Same Place” is part of a larger research into relations between dance and ecology. How can dance contribute to transformations of how we as humans, gatherings and communities relate to our intimate and global, even universal environments? This research emphasizes ecology as mentality rather than as defined practices or regulations. It is through a re-distribution of our senses, our mentalities, that is necessary, for us together, to change the path of the planet. Something that can’t emerge through regulation and force, information and command but needs to start through an open-ended communication of desire and hope.