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The Rewards of Attention

2023; The MIT Press; Volume: 45; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/pajj_a_00684

1537-9477

Aaron Loux,

Aesthetic Perception and Analysis

Rivulets, a dance by Tere O’Connor, Howard Gilman Performance Space, Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York, NY, December 7–17, 2022.What makes dance an effective art to investigate the nature of consciousness? If the fundamental aspects of conscious experience are space and time, dance operates uniquely in both. Visual art and music isolate and work with only one aspect, whereas theatre and opera translate them both though text or melody. Dance draws attention to the experience of the performer without funneling the response through the language center of the brain. In this way, the experience of watching a dance performance comes closest to that of observing nature. The world exists in movement, and the act of performance allows an audience to observe consciousness in action. This was the central theme of Tere O’Connor’s Rivulets. In the choreographer’s note, O’Connor describes the nature of consciousness as “unruly and fragmentary,” which exists in tension with “an unrealistic organizational mania.” If the dance were to have a theme, it would be “the coexistence of everything.” In Rivulets, he creates a world that operates on its own principles. Its retrogression follows structures of growth, decay, and contagion, rather than a traditional theatrical arc of sustained tension, climax, and resolution. Apart from a thrilling duet near the end, the dance presents multiple converging and diverging streams of action to follow, at times challenging my observational capacity, but offering great rewards as well.Before the dance begins, the space is already cleaved into four parts, each corresponding to the walls of the Howard Gilman Performance Space. This square setup produces in the dance a cardinal, or cartographical, spatial logic. The notions of downstage and upstage are obviated, and instead the four walls become points of orientation. One wall consists of the doors through which the audience and performers enter. The opposite holds the paneled windows through which light floods the studio during the daytime. Both are lined with several pink benches used only by the dancers. The audience sits in graduated rows along the other two walls, facing each other like spectators at a sporting event. O’Connor sits alone in a far corner, in his own chair. As I take my seat and wait for the performance to begin, positioned directly opposite my fellow dancegoers, the organization of the space immediately puts me in a mode of observation. The cheerful pre-show disorder of greetings and bodies squeezing past each other to sit is stilled by the meticulous choreography of the stage crew removing the stanchions and caution tape marking the dancing space.The dance begins with the cast of eight entering in the dark, through the same doors as the audience, some alone, some holding hands. The lights rise on an opening tableau: Tess Dworman and Leslie Cuyjet seated side-by-side on a bench in identical poses, with strands of dancers snaking down from their waists along the floor. They look like queens, and the dancers like the trains of their gowns or rivers on a map. Slowly, they turn their heads, taking in one side of the audience and then the other, immediately afterward absorbed into the group. This tableau establishes them as the central figures of Rivulets.The first dancing occurs as a solo for Mac Twining, who spirals and swerves through the space as the other dancers recline and observe him. Twining dances with an animal curiosity and palpable enjoyment. Occasionally a small, internal smile peeks through, as though he forgets an audience is watching. The dancers line opposing walls and stand facing each other. Emma Judkins walks in looped curlicues, taking in the audience as she passes with cautious curiosity.In these three opening scenes, O’Connor appears to ask the audience to notice how observation feels, and to be aware of the different vectors of observation in a performance: audience onto dancers, dancers onto each other, dancers onto audience. After these components are introduced, the group dancing begins. The dancers join Judkins and each walk their own curved paths, which start large and winding and become tighter and smaller until the whole group surges with bodies just narrowly passing each other. They stand facing the windows in this tight clump, reaching and swiping their arms in movements that echo each other but don’t yet coalesce into unison. The tempo increases and moments of partial unison appear: two dancers executing the same movement of the legs and torso but with different arms. Occasionally, two or three dancers pause and briefly join hands in an arcing motion, returning almost faster than you can blink.As the dancers separate in space, they begin to join in fragmented unison. In twos and threes, they group off to dance together in small teams. The movement curves through space, mirroring the pathways of the walking patterns. The vocabulary is omnivorous, with balletic flicks of the lower legs, a Merce Cunningham-like propulsion into space and up and down the balls of the feet, insouciant arm tosses reminiscent of vogueing, and momentary held poses suggesting classical sculpture. Teams switch and eventually accumulate into full ensemble dancing, which dissolves again into small groups. This oscillation continues throughout the dance, growing into and decaying out of unison. This is occasionally interrupted: a single sissonne ouverte, an exploding jump from two legs onto one, spreads through the group like a virus, as the dancers continue in their groups. The recorded music, composed by O’Connor, ranges widely from piano to choruses to techno, lightly suggests different moods and imposes order, separating one section from the next.In one scene, the dancers line up against facing walls and alternate performing the same step. It begins as a tiny bow and increases in momentum on each attempt into a step, a lunge, and finally a crashing wave of the body. In an extended trio for Jessie Young, Jordan Lloyd, and Wendell Gray, the mood quiets. Again, the dancers at times operate on their own, and then rejoin in unison movement, and their attention noticeably shifts from internal to external in these changes. As a visiting instructor at the University of Illinois, I have taken O’Connor’s ballet class several times. His teaching is infused with humor and goodwill and peppered with helpful imagery. In preparing for a pique turn, where a dancer launches forward onto the ball of one foot and turns on the spot, he suggested imagining you were stepping onto a surface that was already turning. In the final moments of this trio, the dancers dove into slow, suspended turns in arabesque, with the torso pitched forward and one leg reaching straight back. From where I sat, it looked like they were stepping onto turntables.A rare moment of intense drama, like spotting an eagle dive or a lioness in the hunt, occurs near the end in a duet between Cuyjet and Dworman. There they are on a bench again, sitting regally, but without the attendant trains of bodies. They begin to traverse the space together in absolute unison. The movement vocabulary feels infinite and voracious. Nothing seems off limits: at one point they raise their hands like paws, bare their teeth, and hiss. Lying on the floor, legs split forward and back and twisting through the torso, their arms move in astonishingly parallel pathways. An internal rhythm seems to drive them. The music here is an ominous hum with an occasional rattle, like a giant rat scrambling though the air ducts behind the audience. The duet feels like a challenge, with each dancer raising the ante to see if the other can keep up. The charge of their attention to each other is palpable. Dworman maintains this tension in a solo that follows. She is joined by the group in another growth and decay study.Beginning as a soft arching and curving of the spine, the movement intensifies into a full-bodied thrash, and softens again. Dworman’s focus, as her eyes shoot skyward on each arch, is electric. The dancers form two concentric circles, each group performing its own phrase. The effect looks like a swirling, blooming flower. The dance ends in suspended equilibrium: the two teams weave back and forth between each other, first side to side like a pendulum, and then forward and back, pivoting on the outside as the lights slowly dim. O’Connor seems to find here a still point existing within the movement, a possibility of tranquility inside the “unrealistic organizational mania.” To make a dance investigating the nature of consciousness is audacious, to say the least. To succeed is even more impressive. In Rivulets, O’Connor reveals its essence through the act of paying attention, of seeing with the eyes and listening with the ears and the body. As the dancers model an extraordinary capacity to attend to each other, both in chaos and synchrony, they create a momentary freedom—an autonomous unity.