Dancing in the dark
Dance artist and PhD Candidate at Lancaster University
Ellen Jeffrey talks about her movement practice that takes place outdoors at night, where she moves with and within an unpolluted night-time darkness
Image: Grubbins Wood, Cumbria. Photo: Ellen Jeffrey
One of the first questions to arise out of a practice
of dancing at night is – what is dancing if it isn’t
visible? Of course, this question makes some
problematic assumptions equating movement
with visibility and darkness with invisibility. Night’s
darkness is not a rendering invisible as such, but
rather an obscuring and merging of forms which
requires – and induces – a more-than-visual
perception of the world. As dance scholar André
Lepecki suggests, we assume that by taking
place in the dark, dance simply “stops giving
[us] something to view”. Rather, he continues,
dancing in the dark “opts to give something other
than its habitual image to view and offer[s] the
eye another kind of vision, another substance for
its appearing”. To conceive of movement that
appears in darkness, that relies upon darkness
as a means of manifesting its “substance for
appearing” (1), is effectively to consider the dark
as a condition for visibility; not a reduction of
visibility. Night’s darkness is not simply a lack of
light, a loss of the visible, but rather a condition in
which the visible is present yet actively resisting
the notion of clarity which we so readily associate
with light. If darkness therefore is indeed a
condition for visibility but not a condition for
clarity, then movement which takes place in the
dark has the potential to appear without definition
and without fixture of form.
At night, movement realises in its potential to
become what Erin Manning terms “the seeming”,
a mode of appearance which is “always alive with
the unseen in-between” (2). At night, we know
that this unseen in-between is there: sometimes
we can hear it, or touch it, and the mere possibility
of the existence of that beyond what is visible is
often anticipated with a thrilling mixture of both
curiosity and fear. But there is more to it than
this: to move in the dark is to move with the dark:
to not only actively perceive night’s seemingness
but to become a part of that seeming, to
become perceptible as motion rather than form
– for the motion of the body to be tangible as
lines of force rather than as the spectacle of its
contours (3). This more-than-visual world of the
night blurs the relationship between the seeing
and the seen; to move within darkness (and
perceive movement in darkness) is to unavoidably
engage with what Lepecki terms the “unruly
potentialities of imagination and speculation” (1)
that characterises night-time experience. Night
is a world in which what is visually perceived no
longer equates to clarity and meaning: a world
where the imagination anticipates form rather
than recognises it. At night, movement holds
within itself the potentiality to be beyond-form,
as much as the dark is beyond-vision.
It is unsurprising then, that Lepecki describes
choreographies that take place in the dark as
“timely choreopolitical acts – acts that go beyond
a mere aesthetic play with visual perception, but
that indeed open up, through darkness, and build,
as darkness, a much needed space of potentiality”
(1). This “space of potentiality” affects not just the
movement and choreographies of the dance but
also the concepts and thoughts which inform and
are produced by such dancing: in night’s darkness
lies the potential to move, with both bodies and
thoughts, beyond any graspable coherency in
form or meaning. In other words, at night we can
encounter “a thought freed from the limitations of
what it means to think, and a choreography freed
from the limitations of what it means to make a
dance” (1). This doesn’t necessarily suggest that
by dancing at night, and by dancing-as-thinking
at night, we move forever in the realm of the
incomprehensible; but rather, by moving in/with
the dark we encounter and co-create a “space of
potentiality” in which alternative ways of moving,
and meaning-through-moving can become
manifest, ones which do not adhere to the current
structures and patterns which are produced and
re-produced in spectral and visual realms.
Moving into the dark, moving away from
visibility of form and towards the tangibility of
motion, is certainly an attempt to overthrow preconceived
conditions of visibility and what Jane
Bennett – in paraphrasing Rancière – refers to as
“the regime of the perceptible” (4) that currently
defines what (or who) is perceptible and what
(or who) is not. Such disruption to perception
equates to Manning’s notion of the seeming, which
by its very definition does not require – or ask for
– an illumination, or a translation, or to be “made
clear” as such, in either form or meaning. Instead,
dancing in the dark requires us to “open ourselves
to new possibilities of attunement” (5), to reevaluate
our conditions of visibility: to step out of
the illuminated spectacle of apparent clarity and
towards the obscure unknown of night’s darkness.
A night-time practicing of dance has the
potential for movement that is becoming-with
the dark: movement that is formed and patterned
by the unseen in-between. It therefore becomes
possible to speak of a ‘noctographic practice’ in
which we move not only in or with the dark but
are moved equally by the dark: such a notion
would suggest that movement is not merely
obscured by night’s darkness, but rather is shaped
by and through it. In non-illuminated nightscapes,
we enter into a relational matrix where what
emerges always does so with the potential to
be re-defined, re-formed, and re-patterned. To
consider this is to comprehend the movement of
the dancer in the dark not as a single, solid form
which carves through an environment but instead
as a patterning of potentialities that compose
and de-compose within the temporalities of that
nightscape. We do not need to ask such a practice
to come into the light, to reveal itself to us on our
current terms of visibility – instead, it is a matter
of re-patterning our conditions of encountering:
to step out of the light and into the dark, towards
the unknown, and towards conditions of visibility
which disrupt those usually upheld values of
clarity and illumination. And to accept that whilst
there are structures and movements which
disappear with the light there are many others
which appear – and can only appear – within
the dark. As Lepecki suitably suggests “this
darkness-beyond becomes another name for full
potentiality, and therefore, as we will see, another
name for freedom” (1).
Info
e.l.jeffrey@lancaster.ac.uk
References
1. Lepecki, A. (2016) In the dark, Singularities, London:
Routledge, pp. 55-84
2. Manning, E. & de Zegher, C. (2011) Violin Phase: Anne
Teresa De Keersmaeker, New York: Mercatorfonds
3. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964) Sense and Non-Sense,
Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press
4. Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter, Durham: Duke
University Press
5. Sheets-Johnstone, M. (2009) The Corporeal Turn,
Exeter: Imprint
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Animated: Spring/Summer 2019