I got lucky, once, when teaching a Literature class about point-of-view. My friend Mark Friedlander had made an art installation which showed what I was struggling to tell.
I took my class to the gallery and invited them to engage with Mark’s work. It was plywood, like a packing case, about two meters high and a meter square. On two sides were tiny holes. If you walked up and put your eye to a hole, you saw into a miniature white corridor illuminated from above. It was like looking into the start of a labyrinth; your imagination was invited into the possibilities of a space where your physical body couldn’t go.
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| Mark Friedlander |
You can see some later iterations of Mark’s work here.
It strikes me now that Mark’s box was a lot like the way I think about poetry: it was a space for the viewer/reader to make meaning. Many meanings were possible but all were bounded by Mark’s manipulation of the space - his crafting of the materials and his manipulation of the light source.
Tonight I have been thinking again about Mark’s art as I try to find a way to describe a dance performance I have just seen. The performance was called Impulse and it was extraordinary.
Unique in my experience, this was a “site specific” work, which meant that the performance wasn’t on a stage. Instead, the ticket gave directions to the stage door of Singapore’s Esplanade Theatre with clear instructions that if you were late, you wouldn’t be admitted.
At 7:00 pm sharp, I found myself backstage in the greenroom with 30 other audience members. After an initial safety briefing - “we’ll be moving around a lot, be careful - when you sit or stand for each scene, stay inside the taped areas otherwise you might get hurt by the dancers” - we were led through to the first performance space, a loading bay where we were asked to sit on the ground in the small space designed to be occupied by an off-loading truck.
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| Da:ns Festival |
Load industrial music. Drum beats and sounds like assembly-line machinery. Dancers in blacks and greys and khaki. High energy. Running and jumping off walls. An intimate space with concrete and echoes. But a beginning that was powerfully confronting as a female dancer had her head bounced in slow motion against a wall and then held by her male companion against a railing. And the two of them froze for an uncomfortably long time so that the audience started taking furtive looks around to see if something was meant to be happening somewhere else. When the tension was broken by the four other dancers re-entering the space, the energy kept building. The raw intimacy of the dancing was accentuated by droplets of dancer-sweat hitting my face.
Clearly quite a performance. From the loading bay we moved to an industrial lift for the second movement and then to a workshop and finally a basement corridor between warehoused props.
It was in the workshop space that I started thinking about "framing" and Mark’s artwork. Ordinarily the workshop we were in builds the props which frame the dancers but tonight it became a frame itself. The choreography made extensive use of the fixtures in the space with the dancers plunging over and under tables, sliding on saw-benches and climbing on prop-boxes. The music and choreography was again pulsing and industrial with machine noises and movements that made me think about things being made. Things being shaped and controlled.
I’m struggling to find the words to describe the power and the point, but I think that may be part of the point; dance like music is its own language and not usefully reduced to the banality of words.
As I sat to try to write about it, I found instead that a poem was forming about my ambivalent relationship with cameras. Like Mark’s box, the camera takes the endless possibilities of the world and sucks them through a lens into a box. The world is framed and so often this seems banal. An Eichmann-like repetition of an unreflective act.
What I value about art - poetry, sculpture, dance and photography - is its capacity to reframe our experience - its capacity to invite a different view shaped to unsettle us from what is familiar. Tonight’s dance performance will keep me searching for words for a long time to come.
You can read the poem I wrote here.
