Perspective in Motion

Jackie B

One of my first classes involved creating rapid connecting poses with a partner in silence. We lay on the ground, lifted our legs, kneeled. We also created connected poses as a class, similar to the folded, repetitive shapes of paper chains. This form of interpretive dance relied on a combination of impulse, trust and perceptiveness. Our minds were connected to our eyes, arms, hands, and legs.

In a similar vein, Deborah Hay’s work, Fire, introduces a deconstructed display of passion bursting from the confines of time and space. The body is simply a vessel for emotion, crackling with the fuel of a spaceship taking off into the starry sky. As the audience, her performance feels deeply personal and borderline voyeuristic. The silence is only ruptured by the movement of her feet, her breathing, and occasional snippets of words and auditory noises. She is the Buddhist of her body, showcasing physical transcendence while still remaining on Earth.

In one of his mixed media films, Ralph Lemon displays an inebriated group dance, where all the tension and structure of the dance room has been removed. Unlike Deborah’s performance, it is informal and collective, the group clearly experiencing an array of emotions and concentration, resulting in a writhing and furtive dance of connection and disconnection. Some cower in corners at times, others separate and interact with each other. It’s an abstracted depiction of the interactions one would see at a party. In another dance, two partners engage in an oblique tango, showcasing the intensity of love and passion. All of these dances explore the innermost aspects of humanity, what emotions construct dance and performance, and how that connects to daily interactions and life experiences. The audience is an observer interpreting but also connected with the performers, feeling what they feel, reflecting on what those feelings mean to them. An audience’s discomfort could be based on the fear of emotional vulnerability or the memories associated with the emotions the performance brought up.

To me, it’s not about whether a performance is good or bad, but instead about whether or not it makes something within me stir. As a result, I wanted to create an artistic depiction of this connection between the audience, performer, and the self. I drew four figures in different poses that are clearly engaging in some sort of dance or embodied movement. I then created cutouts of different shapes: fire, an amalgamation of the sun and moon, a hand, and an eye.

My inspiration for these cut outs came from an exhibit I saw at the Visual Arts Center about perception. The artist had two pieces: the Cyanometer Postcard with a gradation of blue emerging from a hole in the center, and the Perfect Sunsets Postcard with a gradation of pink emerging from a hole in the center. These cards were hung on the walls, and the viewer was allowed to take them home. The idea was to view the sky through the hole, note the time, date, and color of the sky on the back, and send the postcard to a loved one. The piece is an intimate way to allow loved ones to view a small piece of life through our own eyes and to let them know that while we were experiencing a singular moment in time, we were also thinking of them. The work displays a moment of collision between time, space and memory.

I decided to view my drawings of movement through these cutouts in various directions. A figure that was once reaching towards the sky was now falling from the heavens. The fire represents passion and emotion, the eye represents visual experience, the sun and moon represents the passage of time, and the hand represents physical touch and engagement with the world.

When engaging in meditative embodied movement, we can experience a distinction between these separate mechanisms. When I was engaging in embodied movement, if I had my eyes closed, I would focus on the way the ground felt beneath my feet, the way wind felt on my face, and the movement of my arms. If I had my eyes open, I would focus on the way my world would shift in perspective depending on where I moved. If I was listening to music, I would focus on the colors and lyrics and the memories the song would pull from me. Thus, in these physical engagements, time became fluid depending on my spectrum of focus and sensation. Due to memory, the world around us can be cut, folded, pasted, and colored in ways that construct our inner selves and our actions. Like paper, it is fragile, malleable, and easily ignited. The chemical reaction of ignition is permanent and decaying, just like the concept of the cycle of life and death.