We begin slowly, almost casually.

Regulating into a deep time sense found mutually between internally located and communally discerned times / timings / tempos.

Slowly the dance emerges, blooming.

We are “moving at the speed of trust.”

Eventually some of the dancers drift to the edge of the room and become watchers, then enter again.

This process cycles like a fountain; dancing to watching to dancing.

Again, and again.

The watchers are part of the dance too.

They are forming a boundary that is at once part of the inside and part of the outside of the dance.

Perhaps the action of watching is itself moving, conductive, as in carrying something between the inner and outer fields of the performance.

Foucault writes “after all, isn’t the body of the dancer precisely a body dilated along an entire space that is both interior and exterior to it?” 

Dilated as in open, or “dials between which there is a slippage.” 

A body dilating is like an aperture widening.

It implies the negotiation of a sense of scale.

The wideness illuminates the possibility for an edge, or/of, a hole.

It has a form, a structure.

It enacts a temporal threshold upon the ‘here.’ 

“The body is here…” and in the here it is widening. 

​

a performance that is like a held out hand-

​

To be a body, alongside other bodies, precisely dilated along an entire space, requires an intense quality of attention to be held.

A held at-tension through which, if either body fails to hold on or hold out, the structure of the container collapses.

Bodies in love with the practice understand this, and this quality of attention comprises the boundary of the opening, the hole, the leak in the container of the performance.

​

a performance is a container failing to do its job. it's failing to enforce the rules of the boundary. things are getting in and getting out.

​

Through this quality of attention we enter, watching as carrying. This is how we dance, with the act of the holding generating the architecture of the entryway or point, the leak.

We are edging on the boundary of the opening, the threshold between states.

Dancing while watching, watching while dancing.

​

Yoshimasu describes the metaphysical standpoint of the poet as one of “positional openness.”
Here the body of the poet and that of the dancer can be considered the same or similar as they are both creating passages.

The position of the poet-dancer is open but not empty and not infinite.

​

To open this boundary or to be dancing in the open boundary or to be a body which comprises the opening in a boundary is a dangerous position, necessarily precarious. 

The dance generates a structure of mutual precarity between dancer and dancer, and dancer and watcher. 

We are watching an image that is emerging from the inside.

And the watching itself is assembling into its own form, its own emergent image. 

​

To open oneself into the dance, to be being danced with, to watch while dancing and to dance while being watched is to expose oneself to the mutual consensual risk of performance.

The watcher can't know what they will be exposed to, and the dancer can't know how the watcher will react to what is exposed.

Dancers and watchers are risking both damaging and being damaged. 

​

In the Undercommons, Moten and Harney say of the opening that “it is unconditional – the door swings open for refuge even though it may let in state agents and destruction.”

Performance opens a space wide to critique and punishment, and has the potential to expose information that might come back to bite us in the ass, or expose information that caught in the act of biting, biting the ass of the state we are critiquing.

Performance can be a leaky container and also a leak in a container, a leak as a critique. 

​

"It takes two to make a thing go riiight... It takes two to make it outta sight..."

​

Here I'm going to say: I think a performance requires at least two. But on this front I'm willing to be swayed, and also dig into the nitty gritty of what constitutes a one and a two, which makes me think of a two step, which is always performed by one and always performed by more than one.

But let's say it takes at least two.

Two points of mutually held attention to build the container, the container which already has a leak.

The container of/for performance is built and held in the counterpoint between these two/x differing and oscillating points.

​

In the preface to The Order of Things Foucault introduces the concept of heterotopia, in which things are not good or bad but merely ‘different’. The ways of relating inside of a heterotopia are also different, and the difference of this relation also makes the points of difference different. 

 

So there are two or more distinct points of difference between which the architecture of the attention is arching/aching. At-tension. The points of the emanation of the attention must be different, for the performance to happen and by virtue of the fact that you and I will never be able to take up the same space at the same time. The difference is exciting, absolutely necessary, and dynamic, shifting, our locations shift, because they want to and by necessity, the draw of time and the draw of each other changes our locality whether or not we move. 

“Allow yourself to be shifted.”

These lines of connection between us grow more and less strong, hotter and cooler, we get closer and farther apart.

This difference makes the architecture of the mutually held tension possible, and provides through the tension (between the points of difference) a state of relaxation, a contrapposto.

This difference, being different from one another and in an architecture of difference, makes for the possibility of a new economy of attention and information exchange, in which things are added and subtracted from the field without the expectation or possibility of a return. 

A dancefloor is a heterotopia.

​