Only This Time

I have recently been working with and for British choreographer and dance artist Freddie Opoku-Addaie on a piece that lands somewhere in the outer realms of dance, near the border of performance and the hinterlands of sculpture. The solo work became Show of Hands and was performed with Opoku-Addaie’s collection of twenty-two carved wooden hands sculptures. It was a work driven by biography and in particular by his history as a footballer. The language of the soccer field became a tool for looking at an existential space with the performer set against the clock and the empty space, dodging and diving through a shifting set of tasks until the final whistle. So to speak.

We devised this together, myself on the outside and Freddie in the middle. We made it up. A made-up-ness became much of what the piece was about: improvisation in the face of oppositions, social, political, psychological. The thin air it came out of, in other words, was a draft that blew through the piece.

Looking back at these pages a few weeks after launching this work in the Dance Umbrella festival in London would be the last thing I would normally do. In fact, doing so makes me realize that I may not have looked back at these notes at all. Perhaps I would have once before structuring the piece. The graphite on paper is the evidence of a kind of fixing process. I’m acting out ideas in the page with the gesture of a pencil—a process that becomes a fixative just as the nap of the page fixes the slippery carbon of graphite. I don’t need to look back because I have fixed it in my mind. The marks are often a pretty clear pegboard on which to pin devised moments to use later, but they also seem to be rehearsals of concept, mapping the poles of opposing ideas. I have worked out a code for the language of the use of microphones and live delay that survives into the final work. The page is a voice I can talk this out with, a gently nagging voice reminding that the whole thing has to fit into an impossibly small space of eight meters, and the “Hey,” a weaving folk dance move, makes several appearances in the final work—at first as a braiding, then again as a strangling entanglement. He weaves. He weaves again, only this time . . .

The piece is made of these binaries, self-similar material that transforms as it recycles. Repetitions indicate destinations. A quality of the final work is that it is being made up as it goes along—an idea that mostly belies careful preparation. The clutter of incidental ideas that is littered over pages and pages of my notebook where traces of motion, rhythms, and words share space with shopping lists and wiring diagrams, ends up as an enumerated running order. There is a pleasure in this fixing and seeming tidying. The running order is a ladder of something finally climbable, do-able. It is more carefully written.

Show of Hands marks a return, after a break of many years, to the process of performance-making. It reminds me of the caverns of risk, sweaty nights of worry and deadlines somehow a hundred times more deadly than the opening of an installation. A sheaf of pages is the record of a chunk of life lived during this process, and this leads to the thought that what you end up with is deeply bound into when you make it. Live arts seem to make vivid the fact that a project is actually fueled by pages of your biography: it can only happen in that time and place and with those people. The final act of dashing and diving through the running order before a live audience unlocks the moments of its devising. Looking back at this so soon after completion I realize that, at a certain level, a work is scrapbook of its process, and the final page an index to a slice of life that can uniquely produce this work.

Only this...