FUSE#2

SCOPE#3
There Is Speficifisfety
- The Work As Scribed Text.
by Lee Mun Wai
Some questions I posed to myself during rehearsals include:
What are the ways of acknowledging the other bodies?
How many relations can I handle?
What is the nature of each relation?
How am I gazing?
How am I being gazed at?
What is moving the body?
What am I acknowledging?
When do shifts happen?
What happens when a shift happens?
How long does it take for a thing to become something else?
The answering of these questions then becomes the doing of the dance.
The answering then becomes the performance.
One thing that was mentioned a lot in our rehearsals was the idea of
a mode of inhabiting and a mode of achievement. These modes
were modes of performance and they could be treated as opposite
ends of the spectrum that Ren Xin and I were modulating ourselves
within. A large part of what I have described above – about learning
how to listen, navigate and negotiate – exists closer to the “mode of
inhabiting” end of the spectrum. That is not to say that the “mode of
achievement” end is not important. We soon realised that the work
would tend to meander unendingly and uninterestingly if we only
parked ourselves on the end closer to “mode of inhabiting”. Perhaps
it might then be of interest to unpack the idea of what constitutes as
“uninteresting”. What did it mean to say that a part of our dance was
uninteresting? Uninteresting to whom? To us? To the audience? And
by subsequently trying to negotiate these uninteresting parts, what
kinds of pressures could we have been acquiescing to? Were we
giving in too easily to a kind of conventional mode of watching? What
alternative strategies did we have to get around these uninteresting
parts? Could one of the strategies have been staying steadfast in
this uninteresting part, to resist the want to get rid of it as soon as it
appeared, in order for something to organically appear later on?
Occupying either end of the spectrum was not useful to the work.
Instead, we were modulating appropriately within the spectrum
throughout the work, understanding that at some points, it would be
necessary for certain situations to peak, and at others it was
imperative to dissolve something that had been going on for some
time even though it felt like it had some relevance. Indeed, the
knowledge of how and when to employ these strategies of
negotiation were honed during our rehearsals.
I see you see her see them see us see me.
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