Thursday, July 11, 2013

Bee-ginnings


This piece has already begun.


Sometimes when you watch a dance performance, you can have a sense of not knowing when the performers begin to move. They seem to sneak into motion in such a way that you never perceive stillness as the opposite of motion; movement and rest appear as dynamically entangled in one another. In b side's careful simplicity, this is the story we get. Movement gathers force effortlessly, as if beginning always already from the middle.

Is it possible to be in more than one place at once?

Bee says she is hot. That she created this piece in the fall and there was air conditioning. There is no air conditioning in the corner-oriented Sterling space. My hair sucks at the sweat dripping from the base of my skull: I remember when my hair was short. But we are close to her, and she leans into the microphone to speak with us.

I have been thinking about what's underneath us, what's under the surface of the skin?

When Bee presses play, the analog tape recorder make a delicious scrunching sound. Chestnut shells on pavement. The texture of the sound radiates satisfaction when I see her push down on the buttons. Her voice lilts on the recording and I am caught up in it. Glad to hear the questions a second time, I am struck by the possibility of unfolding without a future or a past, into a kind of forgetting (her words, not mine). It seems to me that movement is always, and never, this kind of forgetting. Each footstep orients us to the here-now present of our current bodily situation, but it seems to me that it could only do so out of each preceding footfall, as the momentum of time or memory carried in the body, leans us toward the next. Is that what it means to be all places at once? It seems like the space our body moves through must be held or caught up in this forgetting.

Are forgetting and remembering diametrically opposed to each other? Or, like motion and rest, do they belong to each other intrinsically as counterpart to one another?

More thoughts on this tomorrow.

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