Photo by David Gaylord
She Participates in the Looking:
An Analysis of Saint Mary’s College’s MFA Concert, Body Object/Body Subject
June 25-27,2015
By Sarah Chenoweth
Whirs and smacks of running water cut through black. A projection materializes on the scrim upstage. Film of a woman. In a bathroom. The camera is behind her. She is in a flesh colored leotard. She faces two (or more?) mirrors facing one another at something like 90 degrees. She presses her palms to both, giving weight to the glass. Because of the duplicate reflections, she has six (or more?) arms. The camera changes its angle abruptly to a single shot of her face. Carefully, she touches her face. Back to the wider scene. The water’s running. She promptly spirals, stands, curves, twists. We can always see some slice of her, but her face is not always in view. To us, nor to herself. She is fragmented in sight. And she is whole in self.
OBJECT / SUBJECT
Saint Mary’s MFA concert Body Object/Body Subject had me alive in analytical thinking. The show title carries a heavy burden of theoretical query and conceptual interpretation. What is Body Object? Body Subject? How are these states created and/or dissolved? How did each of the pieces in this concert transmit these concepts?
One thing I can’t help but chew on is how ways of seeing and ways of producing sight yield the experience of objectivity or of subjectivity. John Berger’s work entitled Ways of Seeing discusses this notion of object and subject in his study of traditional European nude oil paintings. Berger talks specifically about how the positioning and action of the body in a nude painting usually produce the assumption of a male spectator (not necessarily the painter). The body in the painting is situated and acting for his view, thus he is reminded of his ownership of [her] sexual definition. Berger goes on to describe paintings which break this stance, in which the body in the painting seems to act on its own volition, and/or is recognized by the viewer as existing for her own desires, rather than his.
The underlying issues here of sex and gender politics are not my specific concern in this response to last weekend’s concert. It is, instead, Berger’s examination of the ownership of actions, and the positioning of those actions in relation to the viewer. This helped to shape my present understanding of this puzzling matter. I have come up with working definitions of the two bearings. It is important to note that I don’t regard the object or subject status as a fixed thing. Rather, I offer them as fluid states, almost situations, determined by what is exchanged between parties. I have been situating them along these lines:
Object – shape/outline/externally directed or defined/tool/”costumed”/an “every-man”
State of possession
Subject – self/of personal substance/internally motivated and voiced/independent/self-revealed; state of ownership
However, I found another powerful analysis in Berger’s work. In his discussion, Berger argues a difference between nudity and nakedness. He asserts that “To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself...Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display (Berger, 54).” For the following rationale on these works, I look to this distinction and replace the word “subject” for “naked” and “object” for “nude”:
To be subject is to be oneself. To be object is to be seen by other and yet not recognized for oneself…subjectivity reveals itself. Objectivity is placed on display.
Exactly how these are produced on stage is also considerably irresolute – there is no one formula for staging the object or subject circumstance. Still, it seems to have something to do with how the audience is addressed, something about frontal or non-frontal orientation, and, as mentioned, something about personal ownership of the story.
CHARACTER AS OBJECT or SUBJECT
There is another layer in the concert manifestation of these conditions. When asking where a person was on the object/subject scale, I noticed that it was possible to distinguish between the dancer and their character. In fact, it was important to do so. I could ask: Was the character made object or subject in the staged story? Or I could ask: Was the performer made object or subject in the performance itself? This makes it possible for a performer to be at the will of a choreographer’s needs, yet portray a character as subject in the story on stage.
She’s Unbecoming: a ‘ballet blanc’
Todd Courage presented a metaphysical study on, as he put it “life: an interruption between infinity and infinity.” I was unreservedly absorbed in the work on its own, with or without the evening’s frame of object/subject orientation. It was a meditation on a single human’s place in the greater universe. In his dance, Ildiko Polony was that human and Britney Edens and Byb Bibene were an indifferent doctor and nurse, ushering her through each stage of her development. Courage’s voice, pragmatic and mystifyingly godlike, narrated these stages with multiple allusions to light and cosmic meaning.
In the beginning, we watch Polony’s oversized shadow, on a sheet held up by the medical duo, come into clearer and clearer view as the body moves gradually toward the sheet and away from a flood light behind her. During birth we are “propelled toward a sanctifying light, luminous, incandescent.” After birth, we seek the basics of life, we enjoy curiosity, we experience pain and pleasure, we mature. The piece tours through these stages and fully utilizes the theme of white to decorate the saga: white sheet as birth canal, white medical outfits, white dress over nude leotard, white trash bags to pick up white confetti after a celebrated rite of passage, white hospital bed on which to die. In the end, the placid doctor and nurse sit with vacant expressions as the human (we) stirs obliviously under that sheet, awaiting whatever light lies beyond life.
The piece was both beautifully spiritual and gloomily unsettling. It felt as if we were literally in the cosmos. It had the blank, absurd humor of a Wes Anderson film and the academic brilliance of the deepest philosophic lectures on consciousness. That contrast made the journey, much like our actual existence, both trivial and extraordinary. We were watching all of humanity, distilled into a singular human sample. The use of white underlines this, as it is, by definition, every color reflected back to the eye as a single tone. It is anti-specific. Onstage was a life, not her life. Thus, the character seemed in object state – the picture of a/any person.
Scaling Neutral
Mary Angeline Douvikas’s quartet, handsomely performed by Rachel Garcia, Kelsey Peterson, Annamarie Santos, and Sara Vincent, studied the object/subject field quite differently. Transformed into some timeless battleground, the stage was divided on the diagonal by a fat, wrinkled tube of what looked like paper. A dancer entered on each side of it – one upstage, one down. Not long after, one more dancer stoically filed in behind each.
What ensued was some poised and slow motion standoff – like the rumbling of a volcano deep beneath layers of bedrock. Both sides moved deep and soft in their joints and with complete focus. They were costumed in Grecian-style dresses, dark navy for one “team,” light grey for the other. The groups did not move entirely in unison, but were most certainly united with their partner in movement. These units considered the authoritative boundary, paying it some attention, but they didn’t seem to fear it. I wondered, “Is it the ‘neutral’ ground?” If so, how does that inform the movement around it?
One woman from the downstage entity eventually crossed into the upstage territory. Having established that divide so strongly in both staging and story, I was surprised to see no major shift in energy. Instead, it began a succession of mirrored unison between she and her same-side counterpart. Here, the piece evoked something about what we see or don’t see of ourselves in the “other side.” How does sidedness color our understanding of self?
Both duos continued circling powerfully around the space, eventually completely switching sides, but without any obvious struggle. Though I could not pinpoint the reason why the event was occurring, or even who the sides were, I had a sense that this encounter was epic, perpetual, universal. Like nation-states trading places of power. Or sides of self. Or any polarized groups. It was a highly ritualized transaction. It wasn’t about how they crossed; it simply mattered that they did cross.
Where exactly these pairs lay on the object/subject was unclear to me. Because I perceived no blatant dynamic change after crossing, the dance left me with these questions: What does it mean to set up a boundary that is, in reality, quite crossable? How do we see the “other” across the line? What if we step into their space? Is neutrality a plausible and/or acceptable screen through which to see the other? Is the other rendered object or subject?
Sympathy for a Slacker: Sketch 1 & 2
The show took an energetic turn with Sympathy for a Slacker, a trio under Andrew Merrell’s direction. With Shaunna Vella and Jill Randall, Merrell combined his fresh wit with deep heart.
The piece opened on three characters, incontestably transient. Two stood downstage left, carrying instruments and wearing hats and rolled up jeans - the prototypical, folksy image of young travelers. The third, center-center, in a hoody, hands in pockets, waiting, listening to her popularly extra-large headphones. After a conventional and desperate grasp for optimism: “When the Lord closes a door…,” the musical wanderers left the stage.
The third individual remained, bouncing slightly to the song in her headphones. The performer was costumed like an urban teen, but clearly a non-teenage dancer – marking the character temporally opaque enough to make this story possible for multiple people in multiple places. Merrell wisely allowed her much time for the subsequent solo. She rocked-out harder and harder, even sang along, and then brought that inner experience out to us. She flung wildly upstage to work out some internal kink and then rushed to stand firm and gesture her personhood. These exertions are repeated more than once.
Lou Reed’s “Take a Walk on the Wild Side” accompanies this voyage through herself, and in its lyrics we recognize the efforts of youth to define their moral and experimental limits. But, Randall’s adult-ness reminds us once more that these questions often persist through age and space. Randall thrusts herself into this in-betweenness – a teen in transit through maturation, and/or adult in crisis waiting to get on the bus.
The piece moved on to tell the story of two more people, the traveling singers, stripped of their hats and gear. This altered costume made them, like Randall’s character, multivocal: they could be the same people as before, could be different. We detect a multiplicity of characters possible in a single body. This story, however, has quite a different tone. A tender and schmaltzy relationship gone passionately confused. Again, due time was taken for us to feel the verity of the unraveling. This partnership begins by rolling together on the floor. They are presumably lovers. They rise, dance in harmony at first, and then pass through a push-pull interrogation of one another, undergoing independently fitful responses.
We see finally the complete undoing of Merrell’s character. He ends above Vella’s character, who lay emptied and heavy under his feet. Merrell writhes above her, at first seeming to assert some kind of supremacy – the last one standing. This writhing proclamation quickly knocks him off his own feet into spinning disorientation. He repeats the action, but its source is now some profound question within himself. He watches it take him over, and take him over again, and again.
Abruptly, this chilling scene is sliced through with the jolly familiarity of Julie Andrews trilling, “What will this day be like? I wonder. What will the future be?” from The Sound of Music. Randall has entered with the song, as if she’s Andrews. She is yet another nomad with a hat and suitcase. One we know and mightily love. To some this playful entrance may have seemed incoherent. However, it simultaneously permitted our quick release from the tension in the story, and reminded us not to stay in one place for too long, just like a traveler on a long and volatile road. Just as Merrell’s character is extricating some final, painful discovery, we are whisked back to a moment of day-dreamy questioning.
We see the characters as actual travelers in worldly transit, and also as people stuck in transition toward self-definition. It is this reach toward self-definition that marks the characters on their subject process. We see the thick inner substance of their momentary adventure.
Change of State
First Circle
Bardo Suite
Lifting Away
Mira-Lisa Katz’s Change of State showcased dancers Robin Nasatir and Lisa Bush Finn. The piece progressed through various spatial arrangements and relational portraits.
The dancers first orbit around center stage, arriving there only once to construct a shared shape that makes an imaginary sphere between their four hands. It bulges once or twice, and is surrendered as they recede to either side of the stage. Dignified solos follow. Nasatir’s segment seems defined by her repeated corkscrewing upward, generating a whimsical association to her verticality. Contrarily, Bush Finn’s portion pivots her body in the transverse plane. She rotates wide and stretches low, moving with pliant feet around her own center. Most of the movement in the piece reads as classical Modern, firm and clear-cut. By way of their classically danced groundedness, the characters appeared grounded to their setting, even as it changed.
The piece culminates in a scene forged by a digital image of a forest, enlarged to fit the entire height and width of the stage. The hugeness of the picture made this last location feel almost dreamlike. So big, the trees seemed to float back there above the stage. So real-looking, their presence in the theatre space became surreal and poetic. Nasatir stood tall and rested a tranquil hand on Bush Finn, who sat on a bench downstage left. They repositioned to dance nearby one another as the piece closed, accentuating their reliance on one another in this story.
I wondered if the characters ended up in this fantastical forest because they were after some kind of otherworldly definition. The dancers’ intentness on their movement further implied some great need. All their activities meant something to them, and they meant something to each other. They held space for one another. They touched with sincerity. A lyric in the first section uttered a melodic chant about a collective “fight for life.” With these aspects in mind, I perceived the characters to be on a quest for survival. Not physical survival, as there was no skirmish or fear. Rather, some kind of sacred recognition.
I wondered if these characters had done this before and will do it again. Their allegorical air leads me to see them as somewhere between the object and subject state. They seem figurative versus personal, but they convey great, individualized stake in their endeavor. On the whole, the work read like a cherished mantra.
Augmented
One of the most recognizable examples of the object state is found in our everyday media and ongoing fascination with the fashionable and famous. We continue to be bogged with images of external “perfection” and falsehoods about “beauty” equating happiness. Vanessa Freeman covers this villainous illustration of body as object by telling the story of a young girl seduced by her Barbies into cutting her face. A difficult story to tell, the cast, Amber Gudaitis, Leesha Melson, LaWanda Raines, Chelsea Nicole and Hailey Yaffee, embodied the tale with sincere attention to their given roles.
A speaker, a sagacious and seemingly mythical woman who belongs outside of time, frames the piece. Her scenes are supported by the sound of ocean waves, and she is the voice of wisdom and reason in the dance. She sets the scene by describing the relative value we place on a born body, and how that value is manipulated by obsession with beauty. Alongside her is a dancer depicting a girl yet unchanged by these obnoxious forces, but vulnerable. They follow the events of a different girl, who watches from just off the front of the stage – enamored, like a child watching a magic trick.
A dazzling woman on pointe shoes turns and twists, coaxing the youngster with her exaggerated glamor. Another doll enters, this one in a hot pink tutu. This doll maintains the particular Barbie elbow and jerks her body around from left to right, and next to the winding ballerina. Eventually, they guide the gaping girl onto the stage and offer her a mirror and a knife. She goes to slit her cheek as they pose. The lights fade to our female sage. She asks, “What does beauty mean to you?”
The scene hurts. Like Courage’s representation of a whole category in a single body, this piece asks us to detect all susceptible young females in this girl. Freeman’s intention is clear – to expose an ugly and pervasive custom we carry. Nevertheless, I was unsure what was so convincing about the Barbies or why she made her ultimate decision. We saw more of the dolls than we saw of her evolution. I wonder, what would her personalized story look like?
Even further, can we utilize performance to tell this story in new ways? Can we articulate how one deals with objectification in a way that presents new ownership of body, instead of perpetual images of outside possession? Can our female characters take on more power and individuation in this struggle?
Sunday Best
Similar to Augmented in its focus on image-based social pressures, Sunday Best featured dancer Sarah Overland and choreographer Kelsey Peterson as young female church-goers.
The stage was set with two church pews, facing downstage right. They glowed by a light from the diagonal directly above. The piece opens with a single dancer, in a navy dress. She sits. She fidgets a little. Sits calmly again. Another person enters. Another young woman, skirt and top. She sits in the front pew. They look at each other, uneasily. They fidget – fixing their skirts and adjusting the position of their hands. They look at each other. They amplify the pace and rhythm of their gestural fidgets. This carries them off the pews and into the floor. They never touch one another, making this about their individual experiences. Heaving from pew to floor and back, it seems like turmoil. And it seems directly impelled by their judgment of self, induced by the other’s presence.
We assume the fidgets are the characters’ insecurities, which swell in the company of another female. They never free themselves from it. They’re mired in it. So we are confronted again with the real problem of object-motivated, female-to-female harm. Potentially crucial to the choreographer’s point, they were also equally controlled by it. Both of them appeared to feel inferior to the other. Do we ever consider that someone to whom we compare ourselves may have equally afflicting insecurities?
Their being in a church is strange to me. Is it to say that even in church, a place that offers safety and security, women compare themselves? Is their dance some kind of prayer? Or, is it a satirical play on the common phrase “to wear one’s Sunday best?” Giving in to this tendency is clearly not putting our best foot forward. Either way, the piece illustrated that in these moments, we are solely seeing others and ourselves in object form. It is the attitude of the seeing that creates the condition. Change the way we see, and maybe we can change everyone’s experience.
Staying Found
Staying Found, a contemporary ballet piece, detailed the courting of a male and female to the jazzy, and pleasantly familiar “I Want You to Get Together,” by St Germain. The couple rolls and flirts and flies around the stage in the sinewy bliss of mutual flattery. The woman, Alexandra FitzGibbon, turns, jumps, and stretches a toe over male, Michael Galloway’s shoulder, all with acute timing and full-bodied precision. Galloway comes and goes from her, lifting her into a beautifully coiled perch atop his shoulder one moment and leaning in wide fourth over her in another.
We are sort of allowed to just sit back and enjoy during this piece – upbeat music, nearly flawless dancing, a gratifying romantic episode. Many choreographers make our sheer enjoyment of dance their goal, and I thank goodness for these predominantly “dancey” pieces. However, in this concert, amid so many other experimental and conceptual works, I found it difficult for me to consider the object/subject premise here.
Much of the movement in ballet, even contemporary ballet, seems pre-arranged, not necessarily specific or special to the individuals on stage. Thus, it seems to exist in the object realm. Except, the way the dancers performed told an alluringly believable story of courtship. I trusted that the characters were following their own emotional desires. We do see more subject in FitzGibbon’s role, not because she outperformed Galloway, but simply because the structure of pas de deux allows more insight into the female. The male does more supporting of the female’s emotional story – lifting often, following often, with less featured use of limbs, and less time down stage of the female. While Galloway danced this piece incredibly, and did have a brief solo moment, I wondered what more his story could have told, choreographically. Ultimately, I decided that this lovers’ chase communicated the charms of two self-ruling characters.
AUDIENCE AS SUBJECT
Short Bouquets (excerpts)
Reach
Weathervane
Jill Randall’s pre-show pieces, Reach and Weathervane, unmistakably set in motion the contrast between performer’s object state and performer’s subject state. Set outside in a piney green lawn and brick-lined courtyard, respectively, the two solos began with an invitation to the audience to take photos with their phones. Each soloist, Andrew Merrell and Randall herself, found themselves observed by outstretched screens. Some viewers chose not to use their devices, but the use of them at all dictated the moment.
We watched them. (And watch feels like a more suitable word here that see, phone or not.) We watched them as they stood, dressed for a semi-formal occasion, holding a bouquet. They rotated very slowly, so as to give each audience member an equal chance to take a picture from head-on. Both smiled, a sort of strained, half-smile. This struck me. It seemed like a directed choice, and the smiles insinuated more obligation than genuineness. I couldn’t help but associate it with the ache of being on display.
As an extremely willing participant, I did photo. I framed the bodies and the space to my liking. In those shots, I am the composer. The dancers are fixed in my definition. Then, also as a cooperative participant, I stopped when they asked me to. And more expansive dancing began.
Both solos shared that structure: a slow circling with a forced half-smile, a crowd of phones, then, three bouquets on the ground, fewer phones, and a dance of an burgeoned internal experience. The dancing brought their inners to the fore, breaking through the shells generated in the opening. In this deliberate shift, I immediately sensed that the performers were no longer doing the thing for me. Instead, they were reaching out to something memory-like, about which I was happily uninformed. They arrested themselves in deep twisted lunges, and floated into soft balances via this private impulse.
These pieces illustrated so brilliantly that how we see fosters the object/subject conversation. The use of technology as the viewing vessel complicates my definitions of the object/subject states. It offers only a partial, stagnate depiction of a lived circumstance. So, if I am looking at someone through my phone, are they always in the object condition? Are they always on display? Does giving me some compositional freedom encourage my subject state? Further, if I take a selfie, I am the author of my own exhibited form. So, am I participating in a trend that displaces and minimizes subject? Or, are they for me and my own self-declaration?
From my location during the second solo, Randall never even faced me again after she put down her flowers and I put down my phone. I found her more subject as a result. Her experience hers. And, I became drawn to the three bouquets on the ground and the smell of green summer grass. My experience mine.
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This peculiar piece, choreographed by Leesha Melson, and danced by Kesley Bergstrom, Kelsey Peterson and Melson herself, was fantastically memorable. This is in part because during much of the dance, I was dismissing it as too gimmicky. Three dancers, costumed in black, tight, calculatedly ripped garments, spent the entire dance in a deep, deep second, jerking about the stage. They menacingly crawled and convulsed and coiled their bodies into non-human shapes. Their distorted movement sometimes led them into an intertwined lift. And they’d disperse again, to their corner of the stage, to squirm some more. They looked straight at us often, with piercing and hungry expressions. The ringleader even rolled on her back over the edge of the stage to open her mouth at us in a wide, upside-down gesture of bloodthirstiness.
While captivating, it all seemed unnecessary to me. The piece wasn’t progressing, and I was disconnected from any reason these creatures were here in the first place. I noticed the program note: “fear is the recognition or sudden realization of one’s own vulnerability.” I thought, well, ok, some people are afraid of spiders…
As the piece came to a close, the creatures gained on the edge of the stage like caged animals thrashing to escape. I expected the lights to fade and the quote to go underdeveloped. Instead, the creatures literally leapt, swiftly and agilely, off the stage and on top of the first row of empty house seats. My friend gasped next to me, and I heard a woman behind us murmur involuntary, “oh my god!” Neither the jump, nor the new, uneven terrain of theatre seats diminished their full-bodied gnarling or ferocity. It was shocking and impressive. As they continued on through the house and exited, I felt the back of my neck hairs brace for another potential attack.
The beings were no longer people in a dance representing something scary. They literally became beasts, relentless architects of our vulnerability. Awareness of self washed over me. No longer just a superficial audience member, I was rushed into my live, subject body. I was the target of their devilish intent, yes. But I was in a subject state, as my private emotion was externally manifest and vital to the piece’s meaning. Viewpoint shifted.
10 to 1 is not enough (first section)
10 to 1 is not enough, a duet by LaWanda S. Raines, performed by Raines and Martha Claire Pile, began in the house seats. Raines took a seat right next to me, actually. To a sound score of inner-dialogued questions about the acceptability of various actions in public spaces, the performers danced fully in the small seat and tight space between the rows. Raines expanded to lay flat against my lap. She hopped up to fold and unfold herself in the aisle. She sunk back down into the seat, squatting, smiling big and bright, staring out to the audience, staring right at me. I stared back. I “danced” back, laying my arm over her shoulder and whispering to her.
It felt weird not to engage. She was in “my” space and we both knew it. Everyone knew it. Her nearness activated me as choosing subject. This shifted me one more time from a conventional, indistinct audience member to a necessary, substantive participant. On the other hand, I very strongly understood that I was being watched, a fact insisted on by her proximity. The inescapability of it left me in nervous, default mode, relying on patterned responses I have in public situations – participate, support, encourage. This was concurrently me being me, and me being charged by an overwhelming sense of peripheral attention.
PERFORMER AS SUBJECT
10 to 1 is not enough (last section)
Raines’ piece proceeded to a middle section, on stage, which revolved around an addiction story and systematized methods to overcome self-defeat. The performers came together to execute intricate partner work, and separated to tear numbers off posters while Raines’ stated things like, “forgive oneself, forgive others.” An interview with an addict played while the two performers danced. While his account was potent and worthy of telling, I didn’t connect with him here. He was almost too anonymous, his story only half attended to, detached from the very vivid presence of Raines. It didn’t integrate with her propulsive audience interaction, or her extremely commanding exposition that came next.
The piece resolved with a video projection of her in a shower stall, we assume in her home. She is barely clothed and/or naked, which matters only in its symbolic contribution to the act of disclosure. It is her actions and her monologue that create her subject-ness. She stamps the tile, squats down low, then shoots up to stand, fists pressing hard against the walls – raw and personal. She never looks at the camera. The recoding, which we receive as her innermost thoughts, states her displeasure with a system that relegates her to stereotypes. She testifies that the act of creating dance is her mode of “helping herself” out of those constructs. In this single event, because her actions incontestably come from inside her, we see both her struggle with, and her self-definition beyond, external classifications. This is her self-directed unveiling.
The journey of this piece took Raines from physically very close to me – in the seats, performing total attentiveness toward the onlooker; to physically quite far away – upstage, in a video filmed in another time and space, performing total disregard for the onlooker. Though far in distance, the final impression was extremely “up close” in content. We witness this woman declare herself for own sake.
Reflections of Self
Whirs and smacks of running water cut through black. A projection materializes on the scrim upstage. Film of a woman. In a bathroom. The camera is behind her. She is in a flesh colored leotard. She faces two (or more?) mirrors facing one another. She catches glimpses of herself between her spirals away from the mirrors.
After a little while, minimal lights fade up, downstage left. The woman in the video now stands before us. Tiffany Davis faces two mirrors set on propped-up walls. She echoes her video self. It is a satisfyingly bizarre blend of the real and the fictional. At moments there are seven, or more, of her. At moments the real woman and the copy of the woman are in unison. Other times they are a few seconds off. Sometimes, I focus exclusively on the single neck, spine or hair that is actually present on stage. And I realize, this is really a solo… Yet, it is an ensemble of arms, faces, water sounds, mirrors, arcs, suspensions, discord, and breath.
Mirrors obscure our understanding of the subject state. It is us in that glass, and also just a contour of us. We participate in the looking – we are the viewer and viewed, all in one body. She participates in the looking. This is not to say she presents herself as mere object. Rather, she seems to be revealing herself to herself. It elicits in me the notion of our volatility on this spectrum – we are in constant negotiation of identity and image.
When she does catch sight of herself, her expression is ambiguous. It dwells in mid-discovery, neither accepting nor discontented. It does not matter that her exact emotion and the reason for this occurrence are indistinguishable. She doesn’t have to tell us anything. She never once faces us. Spine, arm, neck, palm. Self.
Reference:
Berger, John. “Ways of Seeing.” In Ways of Seeing, book by John Berger, Sven Blomberg, Chris Fox, Michael Dibb, and Richard Hollis,from the BBC television series with John Berger, 45-64. London: Penguin Books, Ltd. 1972.
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Sarah JG Chenoweth holds an MFA in Dance Performance from the University of Iowa and a BA in English Education from Illinois State University. She is a co-founder of the Mid to West Collective (midtowestdance.org). Sarah teaches dance to all ages and performs with multiple San Francisco Bay Area companies. She writes about improvisation and new dance works.
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