It is amazing to watch choreography fracture outwards

 

Someone asked me today: when you dance, do you feel yourself dancing or do you feel the group? Do you feel your individuality or do you feel together?

 

I thought for a minute. It was a surprisingly difficult question. At first I wanted to say I felt nothing – there is a certain trance-like state about dancing, at least when it works. In the best moments, I am not a brain with a body – my brain is my body, and the thinking is already movement.

 

But who is thinking? Is it the choreographer, is it the dancer, is it an energy we make together, something about all of us moving in a room, in a space, through each other’s air?

 

When we are still building the material, Matthew will teach us a dance the way a dance class is run, everyone in lines, learning the steps, everyone together because they are the same – even though we are not. When we do the same thing it is nonetheless not the same. Sometimes I remember to look in the mirror, or watch the others when we split into groups. Everyone wears the movement differently. I am usually surprised. It is like a word variably pronounced, everyone making new possibilities out of the letters. But movement is more slippery than words, and if you stretch these vowels the meaning changes in shades. On the other hand, sometimes we all say the same thing another way. It is about what has already passed through our bodies, what has been left behind. It is about meaning that sticks to gestures, like words are the sum of the sentences we have heard them in.

 

But if this is an attempt at unity that is obstinately diverse, what is interesting about working with Matthew is that he manages to create the opposite. When we move from making material to creating the piece, he breaks apart the lines. He breaks apart the steps. Matthew fractures his choreography, distributes what was on one body onto many, sometimes many at once. While in the lines we were together because we were the same, now we are together because the dance, that of a single body (many single bodies), somehow still remains one. We are running the same narrative in different times. We each take a piece of the line, and make it our own. And hand it off, speak to each other, finish each other’s sentences. Even as when we dance as a collective we are nonetheless individuals, here individuality is rendered collective. We have our own moment to tell – but our bodies share the burden – and the joy – of something larger, a communal tale: a whole now many parts, that does not cease to be a whole. 

–LBT