Critical Correspondence

Christine Elmo in response to Megan Byrne’s “Ever, Ever”

On Friday, December 17th, 2010, I saw Megan Byrne’s Ever Ever, a duet performed by two women, Jessica Ray and Laurie Berg. The work was part of Dance and Process at The Kitchen on a program curated by Sarah Michelson and shared with Antonio Ramos and Oren Barnoy.

At the start of Ever Ever, the women were dressed in white unitards that had colored dots painted on them by Liliana Dirks-Goodman.

These costumes became apparent when the lights first came up and we saw the women, as they are—two bodies in space. Ray began to move in a way that reminded me of a Merce Cunningham dancer, the addition of the choice in costume accentuated this association. I was a bit wide mouth that Megan would be so outright with a statement that felt like: that’s right, I’m going to play Cunningham right now—and then again, why not? I thought is she really doing this? But the piece unraveled, and I let myself get lost in the structure she had built, and the thoughts about Cunningham left me.

Ray and Berg danced with a beautiful execution of both the technique and with what I am assuming to be, Megan’s direction about performing. Their dancing was interrupted by short, onstage moments of changing costumes, Ray picking up a duffle bag, dancing in duet with Berg with the bag on her shoulder, passing the bag to Berg, Ray leaving the stage, Berg dancing with the bag, opening it, removing its contents and dressing a ladder she had placed in the center of the stage. There, in front of our eyes, Berg created a sculpture with the clothing and ladder. She moved to build.

Without the audience knowing, the sculpture was almost completed, Ray re-entered the space. Now dressed in all black, Ray moved in a way that felt like a decomposed version of the Cunningham movement that she had performed at the beginning of the piece. This new movement was less held, less specific, more difficult to trace with the eye.

Berg left the sculpture and she too changed into all black attire. She joined Ray in movement but at a different place in the stage, in a corner, her back to the audience. It was as at this point that I asked myself what is Megan trying to become? What provoked this question at this moment is still a mystery to me, but for the sake of having a theory—it was at this point in the evolution of the piece that I started to question where the piece was going and what it was trying to do.

What is any dance in an institutionalized proscenium trying to do or become?

I left this piece feeling like Megan is trying to become the next Merce Cunningham? If so, why? To step into the shoes of a great man who gave us rich work, who has moved on and as an attempt to keep his work with us, to try to become him in order to allow his aesthetic to live on? How much of gender is playing into attempt?

These questions are really not about Megan. They are about an ego, one of many that has been infested with the need to adapt to a fearful and faulty institution—not The Kitchen, but institution as a philosophy that gives context to dance at large. Megan’s work has brought up what I feel is a very important question, which is why I am bringing it up.

Over the past year, I have seen so many people giving off this vibe, this vibe of becoming the next. I would be lying if I didn’t say that, shall I call it a desire, of becoming the next has never crossed my mind. But why is that? Why would anyone want to become what has already existed? Is it as I already mentioned, to prolong the life of something that has died? Or is it fill some sort of collective nostalgia for a past where the history of it is mostly stored insides our bodies versus the production of a hardcopy, which exists outside of our bodies—a painting, a drawing, a photograph, a sculpture made of bronze that could live in an institution’s courtyard, whether it be public or private, for thousand of years to come, representing a time that has been left behind because people have moved on? How can dance move on when the body is responsible for storing the work, while at the same time storing the experience of the work? Where does dance move to if we allow it to move beyond from where we are?

Another question is, is this desire to become the next an attempt to reach to the top of the pyramid, a pyramid where Caucasian males hangout on top. Plenty of people don’t strive for this, but plenty of people do and at times I think it is what keeps a portion of this community of dancers and dance makers so insular, so high school. All trying to become the next best because if not, in a society where there is little to no financial compensation for your hours of effort, where there is little to no resources and abilities to keep your work here and archived, how else is one to survive? This is both the beauty and destroyer of what us dancers/dance makers/people-who-experiment-with-making-structures-in-time-and-space-with-movement do.

If we don’t become what has existed, then what do we become? This question is a fear of the institutions that provide the space and minimal commissions, minimal audiences for our art. These institutions fears are what we, artists, inherit and this inheritance is not allowing us to expand our question taking to its greatest ability. What to become is a question because dance only makes an imprint in air, and air is not visible.

We have the option to become the next, to become each other, to become ourselves. In a way, to become the next of what has already existed is a way of becoming ourselves. Dance’s body of work is a collective, and this collective is a self. So to become the next of ourself is a way of becoming ourselves. To become ourself, we at some point have to stop our own growth in order to replicate what already existed, prolonging death.

Dance isn’t what we think it is. It’s not what we’ve been trained to do. It’s not what institutions have plotted it out to be. It is not something that is emerging and that can have emerged. It is something deeper and bigger. Moments from a moment when dance is being danced in front of a live audience can be documented in a story, video recording or photograph. But dance in its truest form is when it is being undone in front of an audience for the first and consequentially, last time. Dance is fluid, just like water, it happens because we can hear it, smell it, feel it, taste it, touch it—of all the senses, we see it last.

Maybe it is not about becoming. Maybe this is about the fact that dance cannot survive in institutions in the ways that these institutions have created foundations for us to survive in.

Become nothing is a way. Just do and what comes is the become that we have not written. To write the become before it becomes is to stop anything or one from becoming.