Critical Correspondence

MR Festival 2009: Reflections on Private Dancing: Muck of Myself

by Clare Byrne
MR Festival Spring 2009: Roll Call

I liked the suggested reading for RollCall – The Gift by Lewis Hyde. The book compares our current economy of scarcity, where the wealthy hoard their profits by removing them from currency, with a gift economy in which wealth is systematically shared, re-gifted. The gifts themselves accrue power and intention as they are passed around; they create a shifting web of relationships. I find this model heartfelt and artful. Hyde focuses on several poets whose work and word imaging is grabbing me these days. Here’s a quote by Allen Ginsberg:

“The parts that embarrass you the most are usually the most interesting poetically, are usually the most naked of all, the rawest, the goofiest, the strangest and most eccentric and at the same time, most representative, most universal…The cure for that is to write things down which you will not publish…It means abandoning being a poet, abandoning your careerism…really abandoning, giving up as hopeless…and just settling down in the muck of your own mind.”

sacred dancer

temple dancer

dedicated body

whore

clairvoyant, seer, soothsayer, medium, diviner

my body to be used, over and over

my sensation for channelling

my actions read as fortunes

my body, a transaction of intentions, messages traveling through

my body for resolution or conflict

my body as fetish-object, held in hand

2005: I’d almost exhausted my ritual of making one big dance a year. The work was perfectly itself – but the external process, all the stuff around the making of the dance – was depleting money and energy. I was running out, in the hole, had a sense the world might crash in some way; had to find ways to continue my dancing with or without the world’s assistance or attention. “Oil Crash Dances,” I thought I’d make.

Also needed to find ways to practice conducting intention, a daily practice. Not necessarily my intentions, but those that moved in waves or absorption through me. Tuning to vibrations.

I started with the idea of choreographing a short dance each day with a certain frame of time. I ended up with daily improvisations where I’d sit still for the first five minutes until my alarm went off, then move for the next three minutes. Seemed important that the stillness was longer than the movement. Over the next months it grew – a need to reclaim and release my body, to be wholly selfish and selfless, to protect my body movement from any trace of “getting somewhere.” This impulse to dance privately, and to dance as a survival tactic, in a world I imagined falling apart – this germinated the Weekly Rites.

I now set up a camera, tape for an uninterrupted thirty minutes to an hour, then select a small section to place online. There it goes to work. The movements I do not post, do not film – that are unseen and in some way wholly seen – do the most work, I sense, not only for myself but things outside me. The unseen feeds the seen, the same in reverse. As seer I occupy the middle; I’m a prism or a reflector. This is the intermediary role temple dancers – prostitutes – prophets play.

The online venue (http://www.clarebyrneweeklyrites.blogspot.com/) fills a need. It is a place to show up to perform, with the audience already invited. I know the Internet – we are all already participating in it – this temple of commerce, communication, titillation. It’s a huge forum, a trading-place, a web of secrets and divulgences. I get the Internet’s power, though I’m trying to figure out why it’s here. I feel dis-ease and scant affinity for it. I’m not a proponent of screen dance particularly, though I like my camera better than the Internet. All in all, it is a useful reflector, just as the Internet is a useful place to string my beads, just as my body is a useful medium for channeling intention. There is a correlation between the movement of intention through me and the movement of light through the camera, that captures some of me and my environment, retains it, and begins its own process of work. The Internet acts a huge seedbed, a sowing ground for images.

I imagine the Internet could benefit from my slow moving, my old-fashioned stillness, my doing less. I am happy to place my work here if only for that reason, to create pauses, to cool tension. Watching images embeds them deeper into me. Collective watching of images embeds them, for better or worse, in the collective conscious.

The closer I am to the camera, the more hits I get. The more skin I show, the more hits I get. This makes sense – I like to sit close when I watch dance. I feel it more. My viewer is close up to the intention-coursing-through-my-body, usually caught by camera in natural light, a circumstance that seems increasingly significant. They are right there with the intention, the spirit of it.

An object of art is alive, so I think of it as live dance. It is growing, embedding, whether it is attended to or not, or physically manifested or not. Seeing image and making meaning from it – particularly through a frame – is a practice as old as we are. And with iPods and iPhones, images are not only being watched through windows, they are being watched in hand-held devices, a very old function of channeling through sacred objects, wands, fetishes. The power of the transaction is increased by that physical touch. For me, this passing around, this sharing of image, carries a strong sense of gift giving, though with it a terrifying sense of intimacy – in divulging myself to one other person at a time. It is embarrassing stuff.