Sources, by Flowcus
The stage of OBA Theater at the Amsterdam Oosterdok was covered in whiteness when the curtains were lifted. This is the stage set for “Sources” choreographed by artist Bruce Chiefare from Flowcus for the last night of the ‘Theatre Forever’ series programme in the 2022 Summer Dance Forever in Amsterdam. The rectangularity of the ground reminds me of the canvas from ancient drawings of past dynasties. In the next forty minutes, the dancers would use their bodies as the ephemeral paintbrush, weaving the life of a tree and its roots into the whiteness, a life of drifting roots and uncertain growings.
Sources has its prequel in Influences 2.0, produced in 2019. ‘We had the ambition to make urban dance flourish through the prism of the art of bonsai (Japanese art translating to “tree in a pot”),’ says the artist statement on the festival’s promotion website. I remembered growing up surrounded by these artworks of nature in the gardens of literati back in Suzhou. The Chinese correspondent of the word, penjing translates differently, though. Pot (Pen) Landscape (Jing). The pot as the structure holding up a landscape, a miniature of the nature-nurture collage. The pot entails the artificiality of this view — the way a tree grows in a pot is guided deliberately by the human force to tailor to a particular aesthetic taste. But the pot also forms the landscape, its shape and contour echoes and delimits the shape of the tree to become. To have something flourish from the prism of bonsai, therefore, enunciates a tension in itself. It nourishes the dance from the inborn constraints determined by the place in which it begins its life, bounded by what forms its ground.
Three years later, forty-minutes dance Sources inherits this intimacy to the ground through the endless fallings of movement. When the lights are on, we saw the bodies of three dancers interlocked with each other lying on the floor, each one’s foot on the other’s shoulder. Slowly and sequentially, they moved rightwards, with each foot exerting a force on each shoulder to pass the act along. When the third dancer finished the act, they stood up, lie down to the other direction, and moved backwards again. The accompanying sound created a series of breakage and glitches, like broken machines trying desperate to run against its rustiness. It was a surprising choice given the gesture of growing that often connotes the romantic imaginary of elasticity and smoothness. Is the clumsy music pinning the implicit violence exerted on the bonsai? Or is it gesture towards the yet-to-come falling of the bodies and their bondings?
At some point, the rhythmic and orderly movement began to dissolve and transform into a series of entanglement. The body parts of Chiefare and his co-dancers Marbouk Gouicem and Naoko Tozawa were like magnets — but in the reverse sense: their point of contact was also the point of departure and collapse. The holes and gaps in their existing entanglement is their anchor towards forming a new composition. What I find moving about this series of transformation is, again, its clumsy touch and fuzzy bodily trace. When the dancers use the hollow spaces of their bodies to get over and get through each other, the stretches and steps do not come through seamlessly — the bodies seem to be ‘testing on’ each other, nervously asking how much one can carry for another’s transformation, and how to channel it by changing one’s own body form. Transitioning is not easy. The linkage between the two gestural expressions that precede and follow is the culmination of strength and tension. Each must learn to carve their own way through this borderland, relying on others as their compass and landscape.
Visualizing the moment of transition reminds me of two works of art that observe this intermediary gesture in two other medial languages. The first is the motif of argonauts in the writing of Maggie Nelson. Nelson was thinking of Barthes’ writing on the subject who utters the same line ‘I love you’ again and again. They are like ‘the Argonaut renewing his ship during its voyage without changing its name.’ Nelson takes it up and twists Barthes’ observation. Her focus is not on what remains, but what renews in every utterance: ‘Just as the Argo’s parts may be replaced over time but the boat is still called the Argo, whenever the lover utters the phrase “I love you,” its meaning must be renewed by each use.’ The dance between the remaining and the renewed delineates a poetics of growing without a necessary teleology. There is no specific end that the growing must extend itself to, but it struggles nonetheless to burst through the composition that constitutes it. Watching the performance, accordingly, is a meditative experience of empathizing with each entanglement. We feel a sense of heaviness in the movement, an unease in the endless transitioning. They do not take up the negative connotation of pain or suffering though. The unease is also the wilding, the heaviness the texture of growth.
The second work that comes up in my mind is the casts from Berlinde De Bruyckere’s 2011 exhibition at Hauser &Wirth New York ‘Into One-Another to P.P.P.’ For each cast, Bruyckere freezes the movement of professional dancers into sculptural form, ‘lock[ing] the torsos and limbs of two figures in such a way that it is impossible to determine whether they are struggling to break apart or clinging to one another’s life force in a last effort against an inevitable and all too mortal future.’ While many moments in Sources communicate a similar visceral unease, with the dancers’ limbs twisted over each other uncomfortably, they eventually lead to the a leash, a falling, a failure as much as a form of emancipation.
I love this element of falling in the performance. The flowing gravity to the ground feels animating and assuring. According to Chiefare, the prototype of the choreograph is the phenomenon of walking palms, or stilt trees: ‘[t]his tree really feeds my imagination; it happens to fall while having the ability, when lying on the ground, to emit roots at the points of contact, and therefore to move horizontally until it finds favorable soil and to grow back vertically.’ As the dancers’ movement increasingly stretch outwards, their bodies begin to spread over the entire stage, usually a duo juxtaposed with a solo body that orientates the growth. Occasionally, when a transition cannot be succeeded, the dancers move back to their previous composition, and try again through another route. The impasse of holding eventually released into a quick swing of the body parts, and falling onto the ground. Like the stilt trees, the traces of such shared movement are not to be found, at least visually. The white background seems to evidence this inevitable amnesia. ‘The functioning of these trees, their need to move to a better place, finds an echo today in the world in which we operate. Beyond a news influencing our material to come, it will also be a question of what we leave behind…’
As beholders of the tree and the dance, our amazement at their life force cannot but negotiate the power of constant self-erasure. In writing the review, the more I tried to concretize my description of the falling movements (for they are truly experientially sublime), the more I realized a similar impossibility in my recalling. The movements faded away and transgressed its form so fast. As time passes, what lingers is a silhouette of changing entanglement, together with the oscillating feeling between alertness and relief.
The one choreographic moment that is magically imprinted in my mind’s eye is when the three dancers stand facing the side of the stage, staring into the whiteness. A random link in my head of the same ending scene in the Cherry Orchard at this year’s Holland Festival by Tiago Rodrigues. And this is how the performance ends, their upper body bowing downwards as if performing a ritual, sinking for the first time, together, into the ground. The dancers’ bodies in straight line, no longer curved and entwined. Does this stand for a state of transcendence, or a greeting of their eventual demise?
‘There is something of the order of non-completion, of renewal that gives us a glimpse of potential to be grasped. I would like to bring some restlessness (or “violence”?) of nature to work!’ says Chiefare. I like the word restlessness — for the rhythm and wholesomeness contained in the gesture. The feeling of continuous growth and living with forgetfulness. The violence only intrudes in the post-performance: when the host introduces the second dance, the technical staff came up the stage, tearing up the white cloth on the ground into pieces, the sound of the breaking threads echoing in the performance hall. The landscape of the pot is revealed and destroyed at the same time. Amidst its stony materiality, the landscape is vulnerable to the spell of the ephemeral, the spell of time in the dreamy theatre.
