11 minute read
The Writing on the Wall
by Kristen Lewis, JD.
Scribe and Chora: Graphia listen to the audience experience at Dance In Vancouver 2021
This article consists of a description of two related audience-engagement projects deployed during Dance In Vancouver (DIV) 2021, along with photos I took of audience experience statements scribed in chalk on the walls of Scotiabank Dance Centre. Rather than assigning a traditional narrative to these images, I present them as is, without commentary save references to the names of the artists and the shows that inspired them. Further, programme notes, summaries of the shows’ concepts, and such are deliberately omitted from my account here. I mean no disrespect to the artists or to the processes they use to describe their work. Instead, my account of Scribe and Chora: Graphia seeks to be faithful to the spirit of these works, which seek to foreground audience experience as authoritative sources on what a performance “means.” This article therefore approaches the act of show-signification from a different, perhaps disorienting angle–one in which ways that show land audiences are given primary voice. A thousand other narratives could be told other than the ones that surface in these images about the beautiful, generous, provocative work that assembled under the banner of DIV 2021 and IndigeDIV 2021. But these are the stories I gathered; the writing I wrote on the walls after listening to what the anonymous Yous that comprised the audience had to say.
Chora: Graphia and Scribe, installed in Scotiabank Dance Centre Lobby, November 25-29, 2021.
Disorientation and the Loss of Experience
In the wake of World War I, Walter Benjamin bemoaned the loss of the storyteller, a role he reasoned requires access to something trauma takes from people—the capacity for experience. For Benjamin, experience, as distinct from mere information about the world, requires an embodied connection to the sensory texture of existence, a connection that sudden change severs. When experience disappears, we are left with mere information, third-hand rumours about the world that filter through the numbed-out haze of our disorientation. He wrote:
This observation that “nothing remained unchanged but the clouds above” could be a commentary about the era of COVID-19 and all the changes, affective and practical, it has wrought. “These times” have been nothing if not profoundly disorienting— a truism so obvious it feels embarrassing to mention. This is true for just about every human on earth, but the brand of disorientation for those of us who work in live performance has been its own strange, strange animal.
When I thought about what it would mean to gather for DIV in late 2021, the first time the Biennial has occurred since the ‘beforetimes,’ I knew that disorientation would be a necessary part of the equation. (This is not to press the point of COVID-19 exceptionalism too much; the reality is that many, both human and non-humans, have lived with profound disorientation and manifold apocalypses long before COVID-19 united the world under the banner of a single crisis-narrative.) The wonderful curators for DIV 2021 and IndigeDIV 2021 (Angela Conquet from Melbourne, Australia, and Michelle Olson and Starr Muranko from Vancouver) were sensitive to the realities of this disorientation. (As were most of us, as evidenced in the title of artistscholar P. Megan Andrews’ installation, The Disorientation Project.) Rather than trying to recreate a pre-COVID-19 version of what live dance ought to be, they worked to create an event that celebrated and embraced the changes “these times” have wrought. In the closing lines of their beautiful curatorial statement, they wrote:
Scribe anonymous audience experience statement, from Participant #001. From Zahra Shahab, Al-Fattah: When I bow, I see the Opening (Work in Process). November 25, 2021. Text: “People generate heat, are a hearth. I feel like I’ve been returned to the hearth.” Kristen Lewis scribing text while listening to Making Ceremony, a Digital DIV conversation hosted by Michelle Olson with Tasha Faye Evans, Jeannette Kotowich, and Lee Su-Feh.
In my talks on zoom with Angela Conquet in the months and weeks leading up to DIV 2021 and in the reflections that followed these talks, I worked to imagine ways of engaging audiences that would resonate with this invitation to gather in a posture of openness to deep listening. I wanted my audience engagement work to be attuned to the peculiarities of “this moment in time” and to what it might be “whispering to us all.” I hypothesized that a choreographed method of attuning to the experience of audience members could call attention to the threads of emergent meaning that connect us, through and past and as the disorientations that the COVID-19 times have wrought.
From these talks with Angela and my meditations on what it takes to recover the capacity to listen to the tones of embodied experience amid the ruins of profound disorientation, a simple concept was born— that I would ask audience members, after the shows, to speak to their experience, by writing something down on a simple old school index card, expressing a bit of what the shows stirred in them. These old index cards would be reminiscent of analogue archival processes, including the ones Walter Benjamin himself used, long ago, to catalogue an enormous collection of quotations that together resonated in ways that speak to the vastness of experience lost with the march of ‘progress’ and official accounts of “history” (in his monumental unfinished work The Arcades Project). I was conceiving of these audience experience statements as an alternate form of accounting for the “history” of a performance, a kind of counter-narrative that would foreground the “reverberations” of audience members’ experiences as authoritative sources on what a performance means. I wondered if this form of attention to audience experience might indicate something of the myriad andcomplex ways that a show lives on throughand past the artists who author it, complicatingin fruitful ways our ideas of what a show is,where it lives, and who or what authors it.
The coming together of Chora: Graphia and Scribe
Chora: Graphia audience experience statements, gathered on index cards and displayed in the lobby of Scotiabank Dance Centre. From P. Megan Andrews, Disorientation Project, viewed on November 24, 2021. Text: “A Strange Calm is Found.” (Text displayed above audience experience statements gathered from The Biting School’s Orangutang.)
Often invisibly, as hidden weavers of the space itself, these reverberations of meaning not only articulate but also shape the space that births both artist and audience—or so I suspected. I reasoned that paying attention to these reverberations-through-and-as-space might expose a little bit of the “connective tissues” that bind all of us, human and not, who were in some way connected to DIV 2021. I proposed a project titled Chora: Graphia, inspired by the roots of the English word “choreography” in the Greek words Chora and Graphia. Chora is a word with a complex history; it means at once space and in-between-ness, and has strong associations with the womb as generative space. Graphia means both writing and drawing and has associations with writingas-carving. I wanted a project that would tend to the writing that the generative space of DIV 2021 was carving in time—and conversely, that would imagine writing as a form of carving new kinds of spaces.
As it turned out, my preoccupation with audience experience as an entry-point into the question of the life and afterlife of a work of art—its experience as opposed to an official narrative coming from either artist or expert of what it means—dovetailed well with the work of the acclaimed Melbourne-based performance artist and curator Leisa Shelton-Campbell, who Angela had invited to deploy a work at DIV 2021 called Scribe. Scribe describes itself as a “live writing project within festival and event contexts in which artist Scribes capture the experience of members of the public to create the democratic document of the festival.” It has appeared in high-profile international dance and live arts festival contexts around the world, seeking to reorient the concept of authority over what a work means in the experience of audience members—thus democratizing the process by which a work acquires meaning.
After it became clear, for COVID-19 related reasons, that Leisa and the Melbourne teamcould not travel to Vancouver, Angela asked if I would be willing to act as an assistant to the project—the boots on the ground charged with the task of asking audience members, after select shows, to speak to the Melbourne artists on the phone. The Melbourne team would listen to audience members on the phone and, as in past iterations of the work, take careful notes. They would then send extracts of these notes back to me; my work would be to transcribe them in physical form on the staircase walls and mirrors of the Scotiabank Dance Centre lobby. DIV 2021 was the first time that Scribe took on this long-distance format; committed resolutely to liveness, Leisa was at first hesitant about whether this adaptation would work. With Angela’s encouragement and The Dance Centre’s support, we decided to go ahead with the project. I was fortunate to have an assistant on the ground to assist with this project, Vancouver-based dance artist Avery Smith whose able contributions and keen, deeply articulate sense of the continuities between dance and writing helped the project immensely.
Thus Scribe and Chora: Graphia deployed together, around this shared commitment to listening attentively and democratically to how DIV 2021 was coming alive in the audiences who beheld its shows. The results were incredible beyond what any of us could have predicted. Audiences spoke generously and with incredibly sensitive articulation; a testament to the power of the presenting artists’ work, to the depth of the capacity, in this city, to experience performance deeply, through and across the multiple disorientations these last two years have wrought. After so much time apart, we felt the preciousness of live performance in a new way.
It was so good to be together.
The words of the audience members lived on after the show, for a time on the walls of Scotiabank Dance Centre—and now, as photos that remember the writing after it has been erased, the walls returned to other uses. These words are a reminder that dance has the unique ability to return us, even through the awkward and only-ever partial medium of language, to the ground of our shared being and to our belonging (however provisional and precarious). Beyond and behind these words are living bodies, assemblages of sensation, hope, fear, desire—as I was too, my tired hands writing in chalk on the walls of the lobby, marveling at the simple power of people gathering together, as we have done for eons, to watch how humans struggle to make meaning out of and through chaos— how we fight against the pull of numbness to experience, as artists and as audiences, our lives in time.
A permanent record of all the notes taken by Scribe is now filed in the archives of The Dance Centre and will be available, in keeping with the democratic ethos of Scribe, for anyone to reference down the road.
Scribe anonymous Audience Experience Statement from Participant #008. From: Kelly McInnes, Blue Space and Mahaila Patterson-O'Brien, Mid-Light: A Translucent Memory. November 26, 2021. Text: “Suddenly I’m thinking about the ocean, about mothers, mother earth, a tearing apart and everything so wet.” With Scribe and Chora: Graphia collaborator Avery Smith.
Kristen Lewis, JD is a transdisciplinary researcher, writer, dance/performance artist, and movement educator. In all of these overlapping and intersecting roles, she is interested in how the beauty and intimacy of embodied, land-based approaches to movement and storytelling can open up information-saturated Human Persons to something of the experience we lose when we forget our emotional, sensory, animal selves and neglect the wider circle of relations that ground us in the places that hold us and make us. She is the artistic director of Gull Cry Dance, and is completing her LLM (Master of Laws) at the Osgoode Hall Law School.
