Edges and thresholds – both natural and social –
are described by scientists as the most interesting
places on earth. They’re the places where different
ecosystems meet, places of rich entanglement
and biodiversity. The etymology of the word
threshold is uncertain. It may once have referred
to a space within a household where corn was
threshed. But it now most commonly refers to
the narrow margin between inside and outside,
host and guest. It’s the space we step over, and
so negate, in our arrivals and departures. We tend
not to think of it any more as a space for work, for
inhabiting, for moving within, for thrashing things
out, for being held.
The verb ‘to threshold’ isn’t in our dictionaries,
but in fact we perform the action of thresholding
all the time, whenever we pass, or invite another
to pass, from one place, circumstance or context
to a new one. It’s an action that has real bodily
repercussions, and it’s one we can all become
more skilled at, more aware of, if we think of it as
both an actual form of movement and a metaphor
for new and enabling modes of encounter.
One of the 12 principles of permaculture is to
make use of edges and meeting places, extend
them where possible, and learn to value the
marginal. What might happen if we try to think
of the ‘margin’ of performance – the threshold
between the work and its publics, as the core of
the practice? If the edge becomes central? What
new forms of movement, insight and encounter
are possible when we incorporate the audience
into the making or meaning of the work?
I’m interested in an expanded movement/
performance practice that pays greater attention
to what goes on in the space between. Between
dancer and spectator, individual and institution,
stage and auditorium, between casual and ritual
forms of movement, between one another. Too
often, we settle for a stark and arbitrary division
between the observer and the observed. As
Barbara Ehrenreich points out in her book,
Dancing in the Streets, European and North
American audiences still play a role allocated to us
during the Reformation: a role which demands of
us stillness, separateness, invisibility; a numerical
presence but a kind of bodily absence. It wasn’t
always like this, but this settled witnessing
which accompanies our increasingly distributed,
screen-based, static and synthetic experience of
the world, this somatic obliviousness, is a kind
of extinction of keen embodied knowledge, of
communality as synchrony, felt and experienced
in the incorporation of our individual bodies into
the body of society, body of the world. It’s part
of the extinction of the commons, this spreading
ignorance of how our own and other bodies move
and relate together, share space, make meaning,
articulate. It raises fundamental questions about
representation and participation; the same
questions that stir our engagement, or lack of, in
our embattled democracies.
What happens if we think about performance
thresholds as spaces where audiences too can
move and be moved, can become aware of their
own mobilities and fixities, interdependencies,
participant capacities and prejudices, and also of
the different potential and mobilities of others,
as well as their conspicuous or more subtle
absences?
A threshold is also a level at which one starts
to feel or react to something, and on it we may
experience profound disorientation, our own
bodies unbalanced and unsettled by displacement.
It’s the point at which we recognise our own
responsibility, or, as artist Shelley Sacks puts
it, “ablility-to-respond”; to act with agency on
culture’s threshing floor. (1)
Brazilian choreographer, Lia Rodriguez’s
Pindorama is a dance work created in Rio’s
violently policed Favela da Maré. It’s about the
country’s oppression of its indigenous population
and its poor. On entering the space we’re asked to
remove our shoes. We stand barefoot on a cold,
wet concrete floor among the dancers, who are
naked throughout. We stand looking down on
the performers, our bodies clothed and apart, our
power in our position relative to theirs on the floor.
Perspective matters, and the old Renaissance
static, head-clamped, one-eyed, ethnocentric,
patriarchal, normative vanishing point perspective
no longer suffices. We have to move with and
around one another’s bodies to understand
them, to see them as whole, not as incoherent
or incomplete, not as one-dimensional targets to
line up and shoot down. Sense-ability. Responseability.
Director Louise Lowe and ANU productions’
Laundry (2011) led us into and through the
abandoned Gloucester Street Magdalene laundry
in Dublin, restoring narrative and voice through
intimate choreographies to the silenced lives of
‘fallen’ women forced to labour there until 1995.
We knocked at the heavy wooden door and were
ushered inside one by one. I moved, my hand in
the hand of a performer whose story had been
handed to her by a survivor of that blasted place.
I was moved, beyond words. Laundry ended for
each of us with the gift of a bar of stinking red
carbolic soap. It began on an actual institutional
threshold and ended inside its audiences, in an
antiseptic inhalation that crossed the boundaries
of our bodies, that changed our emotional
chemistry. We became the threshold of the work.
When other stories become part of us, we have to
take responsibility for them. “Bare lives”, says the
poet Fred Moten, “turn out to be bare only insofar
as no attention is paid to them”. (2)
Thresholds are spaces of unlearning too. In
Scottish choreographer Claire Cunningham’s The
Way You Look (at me) Tonight, the audience joins
the performers on stage and Claire moves among,
between and over us, bringing her idiomatic
form of movement and her sensitive attention to
physical space up against our prone bodies, which
become variously obstacles or affordances and
are wordlessly incorporated into her reflections
on the social model of disability. By teaching us
how to be with her, with open, sensing bodies, we
become aware of detail we might otherwise have
missed – the sensitivity of her fingers to the tips of
her crutches ahead of her on the floor, her walking
as a form of ‘reaching’, searching out. Claire’s
articulated and articulate body teaches others
in specific contexts how those contexts can be
reshaped to enable the expressive movement
and presence of all of us, differently, together.
This is her poetic, productive, crip-tic gesture in
the world.
When performance makers ask an audience
to attend, they don’t only mean to turn up. They
mean a-tendre – stretch towards, be present with
all our senses, pay somatic attention. They invite
us to feel and acknowledge the contradictions
in us all: the hypocrisy, the vanishing points of
our perspective, the curiosity, commonality and
variety. Expanding the threshold on which we
meet increases the lines of connection between
people and ideas through improvisation, chance
and adjacency, creating multiple pathways of
thought, influence and action.
Across our cities, these threshold places
– places of encounter and exchange – are
diminishing as actually, or even notionally,
public. Anti-homeless spikes, commercialisation
and privatisation of communing spaces, and
relentless, orchestrated flows of people, traffic and
information reduce our experience of lives lived at
other speeds, lived with less or different liquidity,
mobility, opportunity. Corporate culture would
have us move algorithmically, not rhythmically,
through these spaces. Entelechy Arts in London
performed an act of thresholding as a quietly
disruptive insertion into the social fabric with Bed,
co-created with a group of artists in their 70s and
80s. An elderly woman lies in a bed in the middle
of a Dublin, London or Leeds street. People stop,
confused and concerned. She speaks to them
about loneliness, about our aging population and
its social invisibility, about fragility, resilience,
care. And they speak back; they stop passing by.
The performer in the bed gently encourages this
dialogue. In acts of thresholding the performer
herself becomes what philosopher Ivan Illich calls
a ‘tool of conviviality’, whose aim is to help us
render one another capable in actual encounters.
Edges are tactile, relational and incomplete.
Things there are always becoming. The threshold
is, in a real sense, a queer place, an entangled,
rhythmic, fluid, non-binary place ripe with
possibilities for change, disruption, novelty,
surprising adjacency. It’s a place of resistance
because it’s always unsettled; it has not yet settled
for normative acts, presences and behaviours. The
threshold of land and sea – the intertidal zone or
ecotone – is full of resourceful, flexible, convivial
organisms. It’s a place of opportunity, resilience
and mischief characterised by the openness of its
matter and interactions. Together let’s bring the
vitality and democracy of the ecotone into our all
our forms of invitation, making and meeting.
Info
ruthlit@gmail.com
twitter.com/roolittle
instagram.com/drroolittle
References
1. http://exchange-values.org/category/shelley-sacksssru
2. http://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/undercommons-web.pdf p.48