Photo: Snorri Sturluson
The choreographic moment is the spoon on the table that you think of picking up but then you notice first that it has remnants of last night’s dinner on it and you leave it there not because you decide to but because you start thinking about that uncommon sensation at the back of your neck and you put your hand there and with your other hand you pick the glass of water off the table and start drinking and you feel the liquid moving through you in ways that words don’t get at and you feel good and even grateful and while you are drinking, your body is moving in unconscious and subtle ways while you think: soon in the not too distant future, we won’t have any clean water to drink and the CEO of Nestle thinks that having clean water is not a human right and how will we survive when there is no clean water to drink and where will migration happen first in this country, probably California across to the midwest but the east coast too because there will be flooding and with Trump that might come faster and you start to feel your heart beat and you look up and your eyes hit the corner of the room and you see a large bug and you’re not sure what kind of bug it is and then the phone rings, you get up. Your dog barks.
The more and longer I make dances, the less I know what “the choreographic moment” is.
That’s not because I believe the choreographic moment is inherently mysterious, or comes down through some divine inspiration that can’t be named, like Magic, or that the role of the maker is that of a conduit to some other holy force of Nature or Beauty or Truth.
And yet, I want to believe that. I’m a Romantic at the very core but a Romantic who is cobbled by global capitalism. So while I philosophically align myself with Keats’ vision of Negative Capability where the being in of doubts, uncertainties, mysteries without chasing after fact and reason produces not only valuable Art, but also worthwhile citizens of the world, I am living practically within a system that privileges and values the bottom line of product, profit and consumption.
Did I digress, or go off on a tangent?
The choreographic moment isn’t a moment. It’s an act. An action. An act of labor. A labor of love, a labor of absorbing, receiving and giving back. A labor that is working; working for the purpose of working itself; working to hold attention to things that often aren’t attended to. It’s an act of allowance and generosity, an insistence on saying “yes” when everything points to “no.” But it’s also an act of resistance – a force against the absolute, against what you often feel you have no control over.
It’s a contradiction, a conflict, a friction of opposites.
It’s a purposeful purposelessness, an impossible possibility.
The choreographic moment is made up of many, many moments in a string of other moments, hundreds of thousands of nanoseconds of doubt and uncertainty mixed with tenacity and will. In this way, I think this choreographic moment we are trying to define is one of ambiguity and of questioning – questioning one’s self, your values, your belief systems, your history, your ideologies and then facing your fears, your subterranean beasts and cravings, your dormant volcano, your ugly pleasures.
I fundamentally disagree with a philosophy of absolutism or certainty as a way or means of making anything. And I’m not lost to the irony of my conviction in stating it like that! I think it’s important to ask whether I am making a difference. What is the relevance? What is the contribution? The weight of those questions is important to carry, even if the outcome is undecided. Part of the work is to include saying: I don’t know, and going on anyway.
We all know about the future and we know how uncertain it is. For some, the universe is divine order, for others, anarchic chaos.
The choreographic moment is an opportunity to recognize it. This is a reflexive way of saying that when we are in a position of defining a moment, we have an opportunity to be in it, to heighten the itness of that moment but also be in recognition of its precarity by virtue of its fleetingness. In this way, the choreographic moment is an opportunity to reorganize ourselves; to recalibrate our patterns of thought and action; a ways and means of perceiving ourselves and each other in different and other ways than are expected; to have a heightened awareness to our environment so we enact ourselves within and through it mindfully; and a means of experiencing our togetherness as something that is precious and precarious and passionate.
Oftentimes now, I don’t even look for or anticipate the “aha” moment, that moment of inspiration that one is supposed to get when they realize it has come. For me these days, inspiration and creativity are by-products, and not the thing itself. The thing itself is the being in of the thing, which is doing and being in the doing.
As John Cage said: “Inspiration is not a special occasion.” Or as Chuck Close said: “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.” Or as Brian Eno said: “You should stay alert for the moment when a number of things are just ready to collide with one another… The reason to keep working is almost to build a certain mental tone, like people talk about body tone. You have to move quickly when the time comes, and the time might come very infrequently – once or twice a year, or even less.”
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To read Jeanine's artist profile, click here.
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