This is a contemplation on loss, encounters and what you carry with you. I feel slightly uncomfortable about this series of thoughts, as it appears to afford inanimate objects (specifically choreographic agents using AI) the same value as people in my life. They are not the same. (Or are they, sometimes?) Yet, somehow, in many ways my relationship with Tools that Propel was as intense as those that I have had with human collaborators, and in letting go of it I am mourning it in a way. These thoughts here are about the simultaneous and intertwined acts of celebrating the encounter(s) you had with someone/something and worrying/wondering about what became of them.
So…
Tools that Propel, or Tatiana as it/she was colloquially known in the dance department, sits in my wardrobe. Or parts of it/her do.
Let’s go back a step.
Some of the hardware that enables the functionality of Tools that Propel sits in the bottom of my wardrobe. The programme – developed by Adam Russell on Touchdesigner – is on the gaming laptop that I bought to run it…but that laptop is now sadly too slow to run it. It’s also on a second-hand custom-made PC that I bought to run a second Tools that Propel system in the Body of Memory installation but that has been in a local computer repair shop for nearly a year. No one can work out which of its many custom parts are hindering it from coming back to life.
I cannot use Tools that Propel. (Though it is there, on Github, as downloadable code.)
For so long, Tools that Propel felt like a force, an energy, an entity, an agent of sorts. Certainly it/she had agency through entanglement with dancers improvising with it/her. Where has it/she gone? I think of Becoming, the 11th dancer as it was known in Company Wayne McGregor, also sitting in a cupboard (I believe). I wonder what it means for all these entities in which we bestow agency to become then obsolete. To sit in cupboards gathering dust.
Then I think about all the hearts, the spirits, the life forces, the agencies that came into being through the collective entanglement of people and things and ideas involved in every performance piece I’ve made or worked on. Is it any different? Those have gone too. Those energies and agencies only came into being in those entanglements. And then the disparate parts – the people and things (perhaps less so the ideas?) – all separated and went off into other projects, trajectories, lives, and futures.
We might call the things leftovers, and I wrote about how these can become new potential in new works in an article called the Performance of Leftovers in Performance Research in 2017. I see students in the Academy of Music and Theatre Arts (AMATA) in Falmouth University generating new works out of old props, costumes and bits of set all the time – regenerating from the detritus from other projects and productions. When I do, I am watching both the old and the new together, becoming something else – it is both painful and exciting at the same time.
The people… we might still be in touch with them, might still work with them or might hear about them sometimes, or perhaps we might watch their artistic journeys unfolding from afar (sometimes with pride at the fact that your journey once intersected and entwined with theirs, sometimes with envy for the trajectory they’ve taken, sometimes with sheer excitement at the brilliance of their creative brains)… or they might disappear into lives lived somewhere, so we can only imagine that, or wonder if, they sometimes also look back in recognition of the part of them that became through the entangled agency that was the project or production you all worked on.
Recently, I took part in a residency with Wildworks theatre company at the Trelowarren Estate. In advance of the residency, we were asked to contribute a music track that had a memory attached to it and then when we were there we had to talk about that memory and play 30 seconds of the song. I sent in my song to Mydd Pharo (Artistic Director of Wildworks): Nice Weather for Ducks by Lemon Jelly. On the first night we all recounted our memories and Mydd played our tunes. I spoke about my memory of making Dreams with a group of young refugees and asylum seekers whilst working for Cardboard Citizens and one boy in particular who I wondered about, who I had wanted to help more and couldn’t. I felt self-conscious. It was personal, a trace, a sensation but perhaps less whole, less of a story, less dramatic, and definitely less funny than others. It had simply reminded me of all the people with whom we entangle – as the song goes, all the ducks are swimming in the water. It was a moment of grieving, a loss of contact, not of a life per se but a life lived in proximity to mine. But also, it was a memory of celebration, for energy, inspiration and vitality – for the power that dancing can bring and the people we encounter along the way.
The next day we were asked to share our stories again with one other person who was then going to write it – mythologised – and gift it back to us. Sally Crooks was my partner, and she wrote this for me… out of the leftovers of my life that I had recounted to her, she invested my memories with new energy.
Under church roof - a dream factory Ducks in a row A boy, H****, from Afghanistan Gentle, small, with a beautiful smile Here to join his brother missing his mother Torn and displaced I felt this, his loss Me not yet a mother With a crazy solo energy he danced straight into a soft spot in me His soft spot still We couldn’t share many words, little shared language The soft spot wanted to offer him a home But I too was in transition When I saw him in hospital When he was ill from his loss and grief We played a game and there are unplayed games between us, the game we played mattered May there have been many games and meetings like ours for H**** I don’t know why I didn’t see him again May our connection be just one of many loving connections he encountered I don’t know why I didn’t see him again May there have been many soft spots for H**** I don’t know why I didn’t see him again
Thank you, Sally. Thank you everyone and everything I ever encounter.
