Installation performance-paper at The Lowery, Salford (Re:generations Conference) – November 2019
Desire Lines is an on-going live work. Research and develop of Desire Lines is discussed in my monograph Dance, Architecture and Engineering
A Dance to be made: Desire Lines
My reflections on Lingering in Dwelling/Residing in Wandering form as choreography. My choreographic notes for making a piece call Desire lines, about Lingering in Dwelling Residing in Wandering are two poems and a technical performance structure. Choreographically, I think about the aim to create moments where the dancers and audience can wander new perspectives: join the current of one rhythm, then slip into another, experience simultaneous layers that complete each other through their incompleteness.
The technical structure for performance: This creates a performance space that reaches beyond itself to the audience. Four lights one in each corner (two blue two orange, where they spill onto each other they also create purple). Two projectors each attached to its own Isadora programme. When you step into this space your bodily presence creates multiple relationships through shadow, captured image, projected image, physical body. The choreography plays with the layering of relationships. In the centre of the performance space are three small piles of stones.
The poems for choreography development:
Desire Lines 1 (poem to be danced)
My body is an archive of everything I’ve touched, every relationship made. The walls of this city are in my blood as I melt into them. Take my place as unknowable “Black woman in the crowd’.
My body is the archive of “Saartjie on display”, of the astonishing, stranger that crowds the streets. I dissolve into the heat of the city, complexly sweet and invisible as Tate and Lyle’s sugar.
My body is documented by a thousand cameras a day. City vigilance that controls my non-presence that makes sure I appear only where I can be captured.
My body fragments into a million gigabytes and my femininity is made real by the stare of the security guard, visibility in the light of the pixel. I am coded into acknowledgment: data that says my Blackness was there.
(page 74, Dance, Architecture and Engineering)
Desire Lines 2 (poem for dance)
The way we walk through the streets leaks into the future of the cities we construct,
Foretelling the possibilities of who we can move into being.
‘As the city limits’ the walls etch identities –
Belonging becomes entangled with the privilege of Being.
Being becomes entangled with the privilege of Belonging
The poetics of my body is a terrain of muscles, bone, sinew, resistance, and tolerance,
In community with the slices of ‘otherness’ we move through.
Navigations (poem for dance)
And she would make utterances that silently shook the buildings,
changed the sky,
pulled the air into the corners of her world.
Listen, Walk, Disappear.
Magic crisscrossed patterns of diasporic, classed, unspoken vulnerability
her heart beat into histories.
The empty spaces her absents left revealed more than they concealed.
(pages 97 -98, Dance Architecture and Engineering)