GoodMove

A Dance For The Newest Age (the triangle piece) was motivated by my desire to focus on dance alone and isolate it from other modes of human expression that I usually employ alongside dance in my work, mainly language and song. My use of more "theatrical" means often hedges towards humor and irony, which makes people question the sincerity of my work despite the fact that it is always for me completely sincere. Whatever medium or mode of expression, I firmly believe that humor is a possible product of serious thought. Yet it is not only being open to humor that facilitates irony. Reference, or the act of putting anything between quotation marks, also makes irony possible. Probably for generational reasons, I find it difficult to escape reference or recognition, which make movements point towards other things than themselves. This is useful to avoid a navel-gazing, implosive, hermetic or smugly self-satisfied dance that only says "look at my body and what it can do." I am interested in the body and what it can do but more as a question than a statement. What is the body? What can it do? What concepts are imminent to the body and what it can do? In that sense, I am interested in the possibility of people recognizing the world, themselves, ideas in dance, even having reflections on dance while watching dance, but with this piece especially (because I have already done this before) I am not interested in using the recognition of dance styles or genres in a way that relies on a shared education to communicate with the audience, because this promotes the isolation of dance and its history in a way makes the not dance-educated audience feel like they don't get it. One of my goals from the start was also to make a piece that "my neighbor's mother would understand as a dance and would feel permitted to co-create its meaning". So when I say I wanted to focus on dance alone, it doesn't mean that I wanted to cut dance off from the world. Quite the opposite: I wanted to make something so rooted in dance that it would be able to speak through dance about other things, without any other mediation.

I welcome and encourage different readings and processes of recognition in this dance, to allow a dance-in-itself to speak about other things than itself. What I want to avoid is directing those readings in away that forces the dance to broadcast or demonstrate fixed meanings. As if in a game of charades, the use of explicit units of recognizable actions makes dance function more like language, as a string of signifiers. I think that dance and the moving body have a sense of their own that functions through another spatio-temporal logic than the semiotic, and I wanted to go further into that. So I put aside all other ways of materializing my ideas onstage, mainly the linguistic and theatrical ones, to figure out what ideas, concepts, or issues are inherent to and shareable through my interest in dance. This does not mean that I excluded discourse from the process, definitely not, but rather that I want the product (the dance) to be able stand alone without the necessity of this discourse for its explanation, which is why there is no descriptive text in the program, for instance, just the sheet music to the songs in the performance.

Of course the desire to put dance alone begs the question of what is dance alone, with which I pretty quickly landed on a huge paradox. I realized that my experience of dancing, making dances, and watching dance is a very inclusive one, in that I do not experience dance as alone, but rather as a way of coordinating and incorporating many levels of experience and thought, sense and sensation. I employ so many different registers of intelligence and sense-making at once as a dancer, choreographer, or viewer of dance, from the social to the cultural to the affective to the personal to the mathematical and formal to the emotional and psychological and so forth. Therefore, my first definition of dance as such became one of inclusion, maximalism, multiplicity, totality, or as I came to call it "everythingness". We worked on various ways to make oneself sensitive to, responsive to, or expressive of a surplus of information through dancing. That's when I coined the slogan "everything comes!" as the antithesis to "anything goes" - in that I wanted to be eagerly, actively inclusive of a wide range of modes of meaning production, embodying them with a certain hunger, rather than passively or permissively accepting whatever materializes from the possible at any moment.

While the starting point and final product of this piece are dance, the dance-based points of departure for research also quickly spread into political, philosophical or scientific paradigms. The first dramaturgical mapping of the piece was a chart I drew in a colored spectrum of 9 sections, (each a color of the rainbow followed by white and black) which I was connecting the ideologies represented in various moments of dance history to the ideologies present in different moments of world history to various states of matter to body systems and practices to artistic genres to geometrical shapes or forms, to philosophies, to ways of looking at the world in three parts, to musical ideas, to prophecies and science fiction fantasies and finally to chakras, as a body-based map of this spectrum in color. This organization of ideas was about connecting concepts through their common characteristics, or form, free from their placement on a timeline. This possible rearrangement of ideas and events dislocates the present as a continuum of the past and a precedent to the future. My experience of the present tense is so heavily loaded with past, present, and future constantly colliding, being a citizen of the globalized information age. In a time obsessed with apocalypse; in a decade when "change" is at the tip of everyone's tongue and seems to have become a constant of its own (from climate to politics and not withstanding the metaphors between the two); when the whole world is entangled in a network of wars rooted deep in history while posing tangible and immediate threats and effects on the future, my personal experience of the present tense places me in a crossroads of so many psychological spaces and concerns at once, connected not only to various physical spaces and locations, but also to various temporalities.

My reason for looking at my experience of the present tense as a human being in the world at large came from the very basic fact of dance as an ephemeral medium. Dance practitioners often complain about dance as something that has no permanence, is difficult to archive or preserve, is constantly disappearing into the past, and therefore battles with relevance next to art forms that are more easily documented. Rather than mourning the constant disappearance of dance, or being melancholic about it as a form of constant death, I thought rather to take the vitalist approach and celebrate the very importance of dance as being so much about present tense, so much about an action happening right here, right now which is not a limitation, but an opening. When I look at my experience of here/now as a human being in the world, and how complex and networked that is, and when I see dance as an opportunity for connection to "everythingness", I don't feel stuck in dance as a closure to the present tense, disappearing with each fleeting instant. I take my interest in the potential of the dancing body as a site of coordination of a surplus of ideas and interpretations and look for ways also to make it a site of coordination of a surplus of times and places.

In a lecture by Giorgio Agamben called What is the Contemporary? he defines the true contemporary as someone with asynchronicity, or dislocation in time, and dare I paraphrase, the ability to distance oneself from one's own time and see it immediately with the same distance as one regards history or the future. Thus the contemporary is able to hypothesize, critique, propose or disrupt the current condition. I was inspired by this definition of contemporary in my question not only of what is dance, but how to do something contemporary with it. In order to escape the simplicity of recognition that would lock me into historical references, I tried at least conceptually, through the spectral idea-map, to connect our actions to other ideas and phenomena in whatever field of study that bears structural similarity to the dance idea at hand. In this way, the idea becomes a form that is translatable to other ideas, and the form becomes an expression of all those possible ideas. Hence the possibility of meaning in forms that is multi-facted and flexible, non-abstract but very different from reference or overly determined goals of recognition.

MM: You've written about postmodernism, New Age, and how the piece was related to the triptych: science, politics and philosophy. These are large concepts, in what way when creating this piece did your choreographic dance methods relate to those principles?

EB: While the triangle provided the kind of self-evidentiality in space that became the unquestionable law of the piece, and we play it out with full devotion and seriousness, it is only possible because we accept it as a temporary law for the purposes of A Dance for the Newest Age (the triangle piece). Even if I do not practice triangle-worship in my daily life, this shape as the law of this dance is not at all arbitrary and is very much related to questions about our current condition as people with a fragmented sense of truth. One reason for the equilateral triangle is purely symbolic - it is a shape that diagrams the simultaneous division and unification of three main realms of truth-production identified by Bruno Latour in a book called We Have Never Been Modern. Bruno Latour explains that the advent of Modernity was a revolutionary separation of the scientific, objective realm from which we derive facts about nature; the political, social realm in which we inter-subjectively discuss and decide how to organize ourselves and create laws to abide by; and the religious, spiritual realm in which we ascribe to omniscient or transcendent beliefs. Latour questions and dismantles this separation, as well as the consequent hybrids that it produced thereafter, and points out their paradoxical mutual collaboration in reifying one another as well as the separation from our pre-modern ancestors that all of this implies. Before Modernity no single culture had experienced such a division between these different facets of being human in the world. At least in our anthropological analysis, pre-modern civilizations were marked by a more unified perspective that integrated nature, culture, and god within the same logics. Nowadays, because the discourses of these three realms have been so partitioned into different disciplines, the hybrids that come after either take the form of mutual validation in the instance of the interdisciplinary fetishism we see in various conferences, panels, or curatorial missions, or they involve bizarre leaps of faith and monstrous combinations of ideologies, as in the case of New Age, which is precisely what interests me about it. New Age is an attempt to put back together these three realms in the midst of the further-fragmented context of postmodernism from which New Age arose, with an emphasis on re-constituting the spiritual as a possibility for those postmodern individuals who did not belong to a religion, or if they were born into one, felt detached from the fixed identity and traditions implied by organized religion. It also addressed this very crisis of belonging or community at a peak of individualism - paradoxically based completely on personal self-realization and self-help at the same time as promoting one-world and universalism and harmony between all living creatures. New Age wanted to solve all the problems at once. New Age also interests me as an asynchronous philosophy (if one can even call it philosophy), in that a New Ager can speak of the early Egyptians, Pythagoras, Quantum Mechanics, Chakras, Aliens, and the future all in the same breath with no hesitation whatsoever. New Age borrows from new scientific discourses, ancient cultures and practices, various world religions, political visionaries, and more to create an amalgamated cocktail of beliefs and the facts with which they are upheld. I find it at once absurd, fascinating, humorous and beautiful - the New Age was the postmodern attempt to reunify a broken world with a broken sense of truth. And so while my interest in rethinking history, rethinking ways of being together, and coordinating a vast array of information can be New Agey, I'm not really New Age either, perhaps because I have that paradoxical distance mentioned above. So New Age becomes a key moment in time, like Modernity and the pre-modern, that I use as a lens through which to connect my artistic interests and understand them as related to certain ideologies, whether I subscribe to them or not, with humor, analysis, and pleasure. But not irony!

The equilateral triangle, with three sides and three divisive axes of symmetry, is at once a unification and a division. The shape allows for circulation between three obvious perspectives and pushes them up against each other in the same solid mass. So the triangle is a symbol of pre-modern unification, Modern division, and New Age recombination simultaneously. If we look at pre-modern civilizations, we can also see that the importance of form played a great role in their construction of their over-arching world-views. For the Greeks, Geometry joined the heavens and the earth and was manifest throughout their architecture, their politics, and their artwork, none of which was not also within the purview of their religious beliefs, and mathematics was a source of truth because of its expression and evidence on so many levels. Or take the Native Americans, for example the Hopis, whose world-view was integrated by a circle with four directions, expressed in the architecture of their kivas, their understanding of the seasons, the four cardinal directions, four races of people, four elements, and so on. What is interesting to see in Modern times is that form lost its value as symbol or diagram, and we most commonly associate purely formal things with a state of absolute abstraction. Where form used to be a very loaded container for meanings, after our Modern separation into separate realms of truth production, and the advent of the High Modern in art, forms in a sense lost their meaning. In A Dance for the Newest Age (the triangle piece) I am interested in truly embodying materiality of Modernism while critiquing the separatist world-view of Modernity. I want to resist the irreverance of postmodernism, welcoming meanings and interpretations including the symbolic, and look for ways to make sense of a fragmented reality in a way that is not making fun of it, but rather embodying it. Taking up the body as the site for coordination of all these influences to capture a contemporary experience of dislocation in time, the forms that we create in our integration of all these logics are fully infused with importance, deliberateness, and meaning. In that sense, the formalism as well as the expressionism, the collaboration as well as the individuation, are all ways that the choreography is a direct translation of these "large" concepts.

MM: The belly of the piece seemed to be the group section where the dancers depicted a 6-pointed star. Visually it was driven by symmetry and the spatial relationships combined with partnering work were well supported by the technique of you and your cast. Juxtaposed with the improvisation in the piece why did you feel it important to work with such a highly technical medium in this section?

EB: From the start of making this piece, I wanted to work in a very formal way. I was interested in the straightforwardness of formal dance, how it offers a situation in which to look at dance alone, to get immersed in the complexity of the dancing body itself, because it provides a certain rigidity of framework or movement language that allows the movement to adopt an air of self-evidentiality. Living in the age of post-everything, I find nothing is self-evident. There is no field of study capable of producing facts that go unquestioned by another field of study or way of understanding. Part of this has to do with the modern separation between three main realms of truth production, which I will get to later, but the resulting condition is that everything is questionable in terms of its history, context, and which ideologies have constructed its truth. In other words, every truth is temporary, and only true within the accepted conditions set up as "givens". Of course these ideas of correlationism, constructivism, or relativism are not even themselves possible transcendent truths, in that they are challenged and challengeable, often by their own discourse. As a philosophically influenced artist, no matter how many tools or skills I have acquired in dance and choreography to make a perfectly beautiful and tidy formal piece, I could not just do it. I could not deal with formal interests without questioning that urge historically and contextually.

In my inquiry of what this formalist urge was about, I identified my interest to work on dance-as-such as a Modernist agenda. It is modern in the sense of separatist (dance alone presumes that dance can be cut from other contexts and frames), but also Modern in the sense of art history, in which the importance of the form and material of the art itself gained a certain autonomy of meaning. Modernism was hand in hand with the fact that artists were free from obligation to their previous benefactors of the ruling class or the church, so they no longer had to depict images with royal, political, or evangelist agendas behind them. They turned to nature, landscapes, still lives, self portriats, nudes of whores, the working class, then pushing the limits of abstraction until the figures disappeared from the painting all together and eventually the medium itself became the message. Continuing with this grossly over-simplified fast forward through the early 20th century, High Modernism heralded the absolute zero-degree of meaning, a totally abstract field of non-representational material, pure sensory experience, immediate and opaque, just a shape or an object and nothing more. Wondering if such abstraction is even possible in dance, I started to question if dance has ever been truly (High) Modern: looking at what we called Modern dance, Martha Graham, Isadora Duncan, and Mary Wigman, to name the most commonly cited, we see that what was called Modern dance was actually more Romantic in its values, or essentialist. Martha thought about dance as the truest form of self-expression, quoting her psychologist father in saying "movement never lies". Isadora Duncan referred to the solar plexus as the prime source of movement; the center of the body and of connection with oneself, one's will, one's physical intuition and expression. Mary Wigman was expressionist through and through, and these three women are our main examples of Modern Dance. What we see is that Modern dance was not about zero-degree materiality and not about abstraction, but really about expressing the essence of the human. These artists were making narrative, allegorical, and mythological pieces, in which portraiture, story, and emotional expression were the goals of the dancing. This would never be present in a High-Modern definition of Art or Architecture, for example. I realized that the more Modernist agendas were most alive in what were actually referred to as post-modern choreographies and techniques, as in the work of Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, or Merce Cunningham. These artists were dealing with methods of generating and composing movement material based on very systematic and anatomical orientations of what the body can do, concerned more with the movements themselves than their meanings, and avoiding representation. But Trisha Brown herself pointed out the impossibility of abstraction of the body, because it was always a human. So in a sense, any definition of dance-as-such must take into account the human's motivation for dancing. One such motivation that endures through all cultures and moments in history is the social: people dance to be together without having to say anything. Although in many social dances, especially ones used for special occasions, (and I even exclude rituals), the interactions have certain meanings or purposes, social dancing does not intend to represent anything else than the dancing itself, and it does so without denying the human and without any attempt at abstraction.

The part of the piece to which you refer is the "Kinetic Court Dance", in which social-dance-like interactions and patterns (derived from court dancing and square dancing, namely) are combined with a kinetic cause-and-effect movement vocabulary. This way of interacting physically and personally was chosen because it is highly formal, in the sense that social dances are traditionally highly patterned in order to facilitate and organize the meetings between the people dancing, thus efficiently satisfying their motivation for dancing, and a cause-effect kind of release dancing has a certain "self-evidentiality" about the passivity, gravity, swing, and momentum according to the body's "natural" way of moving. This makes for a kind of zero-degree dance which is not willed by self-expression but rather motivated simply by a will to dance. And the combination of these two ingredients (the social and the release), by means of this odd combination of vocabularies, is an attempt to make a dance which is kind of a-historical and non-refferential -- we don't quote existing dances but rather derive principles and tools from them -- so that we are not particularly identified as belonging to a specific single culture, but something like a "pure dance" culture, that exists in some space-time not necessarily located or singular or even real. The ritualistic aspect of this highly formal situation is also an intentional connotation, in the sense that for the purposes of this piece we perform our belonging to an imagined culture that is devoted to forms, devoted to dance, sees the world through this practice, and sees this practice as the world.

MM: The composition of the piece was structurally diverse with dynamically contrasting sections. In some sections the 6 of you were creating geometric patterns and shapes and in others improvising. What lead you to that varied format and how do you feel one informed the other?

EB: In my mind, the array of modes of choreography or composition employed in A Dance for the Newest Age (the triangle piece) belong to a longer list of ways of being together, which is a different way of categorizing that includes but is not limited to the use of geometry and improvisation. We could say that the geometrically-driven sections are an instance of organization or overall design from above/outside the individuals, and the more improvisationally-driven sections are instances of organization or overall design emerging from within the individuals in relation to each other and the score, structure, circumstances or rule(s).

The last section, which is the most non-illustrative of the geometrical pattern of the choreography, the most individuated between us, and the most facially/vocally expressive and personal, is based on a spectral division of the body and a spectrally organized score wherein each performer is on their own mission to realize a wide range of possible ways of being, moving, and vocalizing within the course of their 13 paths in that 21-24 minutes. Although we include each other and the audience within the purview of our gaze and perception of the scene, it is the least "unified" that we are throughout the whole piece. In this section we strive for "everythingness" via a multiplication of the possibilities within each individual as well as between the individuals, aiming for maximum differentiation in order to develop a very sprawling and expanding scene of collected images, rather than looking for unification as a harmonious container for everything, which is what the formal sections are more about. It's perhaps an instance of including versus controlling, which is a dichotomy of terms that I picked up from Chrysa Parkinson.

Formal simplification is a means by which to reach all-encompassing models based more on controlling. As with most platitudes, belief systems, theories of everything, or attempts at all-encompassing world-views, there is always some kind of principle, crux, paradigm, model, or form that it all boils down to, that is placed around/on top of everything, or that everything is seen through. The friction between attempting to encompass everything via unification versus the attempt to encompass everything via diversification and individuation was the major compositional tension in the piece between the more formal parts of the piece and the more improvised sections. The formal or more geometric sections became the explicit expression of us being unified under or within a particular system, building it, crafting it, and supporting it, which portrays a very different kind of people sociopolitically speaking than the more disparate and individualistic last section. I do think about these sections also in terms of historical metaphor, in the sense that the geometric togetherness from the social-dance-like section of interweaving symmetries to the slower and more sculptural forms created in the "tensegrity" section thereafter, both rigidly symmetrical, are about external ideals that we commit to of togetherness via harmony, sameness, consensus and organization from above/outside. The more task or rule-based sections involving more improvisation are driven from individual choices in negotiation with each other through more or less binding contingencies, depending on the section.

While working with choreographer Xavier Le Roy on low pieces, I was introduced to the notion of "dissensus," the opposite of consensus. It is a term coined by philosopher Jacques Ranciere to express what is for him pure politics - a process of being together that is not static, not based in agreement nor disagreement, but the very act of confrontation, defined by highly differentiated individuals working together without having to "consent" to anything larger than what their individual collective effort makes possible (if I understand correctly). This concept intrigued me as a pertinent model of being together in our contemporary condition of a hyper-individualized, fragmented culture and the failure of most current governmental models to satisfy and accurately represent their disparate populations. In the more improvised sections, I think about this idea of dissensus, though I wonder if we achieve anything like it according to Ranciere. I'm not making dances to preach about politics, it's just one of the lenses through which I understand choreography as organization between bodies, and the one I'm left with after this piece is finished, as people seem to ask often "but who are these people and what are they doing? (like, is this a ritual or what?)" about this piece which is a non-abstract question from a very non-abstract way of looking at a piece which wanted to be so abstract!

So to return to your question about formalism and improvisation, In this piece and in general I am interested possible hybrids (or tribrids!) of artistic methods. I could attribute this to my obsession with the very nature of dance and choreography in performance as a paradoxical tension between subject-hood and object-hood, which we also worked on a lot in this piece. On the one hand, a dancer can have a desire to produce legible images for a viewer, to serve a greater structure or image beyond one's personal experience of dance, at the service of the spectator's perception, and even in a sense to self-objectify oneself towards the audience's readership. On the other hand, the human subject dancing is an actively calculating network of sensations, expressions, and affects that relates to the viewer as a fellow human and is seen as such, and furthermore, is visible and observable on many non-abstract levels: personally, psychologically, emotionally, culturally, as belonging to a certain handful of demographic identifications. So when I set out to make a "pure" dance piece, the main condition upon which I based my definition of dance-as-such for this piece was the very impurity of dance itself, as a constant inclusion, activation, and mobilization of all these parts of being human: the social, the physical, the emotional, the psychological, the affective, the anatomical, the personal, the material, the cultural, the political and etcetera. It follows that the composition of the dance is one that tries to capture this impurity and these kinds of paradoxes.

MM: How did you direct your dancers in the section where the group performed improvised movement around the perimeter of the triangle, in the section you refer to as "Cloud"? You wrote about the "use of shared imagery", is this something you applied in this section?

EB: The "cloud" section is an instance of unification more from internal organization and case-by-case choices, and shared imagery. It is improvised and supported by the effort of each of the individuals to create one mass, or cloud, free from a predetermined exact form or composition. The rules in the cloud section are in fact pretty simple. The distance from your body parts to any other person's should stay in a range of about 15-30 centimeters with no touching, you try to be interwoven within the group and several people at once, We use different body orientations so that the overall picture is not of six people standing or six people facing the same direction, but a mass of bodies and limbs that is not about the individual bodies being organized according to their own infrastructure but rather according to the connections within the group between bodies. Working with the idea that we create a cloud, we reached a number of qualitative guidelines about shape, speed, and dynamics. Based on the nature of vapor or other gasses, the quality comes completely from imagery, working on little studies of trying to emulate what a cloud would do in a gust of wind, how gaseous substances react to disturbance, different kinds of clouds, how images appear and disappear in a cloud, etc. We developed a shared language by collective imagination and practice. Not every aspect or possibility we have worked on happens every time we do the cloud, and some of them even contradict each other, but we share an idea of cloud that gives us a set of conditions in which we are constantly negotiating with and trying to support what is actually happening to see which possibilities can be realized together at each moment, to steer the image towards cloud-hood. This creates an actively calculating and flexible unity of people, whose form of togetherness is in constant adaptation to each individual's movements, each movement itself is in a sense only a matter of reaction to some other movement, and yet every movement is also a trigger for a new movement. When I watch it sometimes I see more a sea anemone, or seaweed than a cloud, but this is fine, because what is important is not whether or not everyone sees a cloud but that we are engaged the sensitivity between people, that it makes a particular kind of togetherness.

The cloud depicts yet another kind of people than the "solid" we build in the beginning in which we also constitute a single mass of bodies, but one that is highly constructed and composed for maximum density and symmetry as based on crystaline structures. In this beginning section, the choreography is again image based, in a 12-minute transformation as one-body-mass from a solid to liquid to gas. Starting from an interest here to be pure matter, and the three-part-division of matter into solid, liquid and gas, I later became aware of the cultural theory metaphors that speak about modernity as solid and the contemporary condition as gaseous. Trying to be pure matter is a gesture of self-objectification, which is one possible defining aspect of what dance-as-such onstage, as a visually experienced artwork rather than as a social practice, in which the performer consciously abstracts his/her individuality or personality in the name of a form or image s/he wants to create. Ignoring the human anatomically and personally in our image of what we are doing is one way to take a stab at that. Yet even though we are trying to act/behave/think as pure matter rather than as people, (an impossibility of course) the range of images we create for others is huge. In that section alone I have heard that people see the crumbling of civilization, an opening flower, melting in reverse, a mass suicide, a slow-motion orgi cult, classical sculpture, mannerist painting, people doing body-mind-centering, all because we are of course humans, engaged in a particular and common but non-transparent activity. In general I am interested in this kind of opacity for the purposes of this piece. You do not need to know what we know to make sense of the piece, and often what we are doing between us is not what you see. I want you as a spectator to feel welcomed to make your own sense of the piece, to indulge in your own fantasy, analysis, narrative, thought of what the piece is. Starting with this self-objectification at the start of the piece is a way of welcoming you to do that, establishing that contract at the start of the piece. Making the beginning slow also gives you time to establish your recognition of, imagination about, or projection upon each arrangement of bodies. The opacity of the piece is in a sense another means of achieving or welcoming as many possible meanings from a dance alone, and another way to create an "everythingness" by means of divergence.

MM: There was a mixed response about the audience being so close to the stage and the performers. Certain sections were very shape oriented and could have been interesting to see from afar, or above. As a choreographer, why did you feel the intimate in the round -- or "in the triangle" -- as it were, setting better informed the piece?

EB: Where the choreography between bodies is a hard formal structure we are all complicit in, sitting close to it instead of above it allows one see the performers engaged in negotiation and labor in order to fulfill this shared ideal, so that the structure itself is never visible alone. The shapes and forms, however "purely formal" or abstract are thence impossible to see as such, because a viewer cannot-not also see the human working to make them possible, with all of his/her "imperfections" and asymmetries, trembling muscles, sweat, constant choices in relationship to the task at hand, or even mistakes. All of this individual, subjective softening of the hard structure is visible when seated so close. Of course the ideal place to see the "hardness" of these more geometrically-driven sections is from above, as in a Busby Berkeley film, and so my choice is also a way of implicating them within the subjective construction of the piece. Nobody, of the audience nor performers, has an "overview" - each person's perspective is unique, with a different distortion of the aerial symmetry they can only imagine exists. This his taps into the whole question of philosophy and religion of how and if the individual has access to reality, what perspective is objective, and how we collectively construct the idea of an objective perspective outside ourselves. In another way, the whole work of politics is also to define, install and maintain such objective or ideal structures of organization to which the individual answers in her daily individual choices, the laws that govern our behavior together, our organization between bodies. And finally, science is the third realm that attempts to get the Busby Berkeley perspective. With our use of telescopes and satellites, microscopes and all other instruments, we try to physically extend and objectify our limited subjective perception of reality, in order to create facts, shared images and understandings of the world around us, or images of the world as a whole, to make visible what is invisible to the naked eye in order to created a sense of reality that is not shaken by belief or opinion or personal experience. I wanted the opposite, an artwork that resists these attempts at truth, and counteracts the ritualistic smell of truth or belief in what we are doing, so placing the audience really in the shape, on the stage, in the space, is another way of underlining the subjective human experience of the work.