Source: Abiel Locke
March 7, 2017
People have attempted to explain feelings for centuries, probably millennia. Poets can manage. Singers can come closer. But I believe it is the dancers who express it best.
Creeping cautiously into the darkness of a shipping container, I was unsure of what this performance was meant to be. All I knew of it was I had met the man who made the sound.
I’m not sure knowing more could have prepared me for the richness of these three hours.
Legs delicately crossed, I could feel my body responding to the brief moments already spent in the space. My eyes strained to adjust to the lack of lighting and I could hear the shuddering heavy breaths of the women as they shook and pulled their beings across the room. Spectators entered and left. Some only able to experience it for a brief moment, uninterested in seeing or unable to grasp the weight of what was being performed.
I did not know how long I would stay, but I believe it was solidified that I would be present for all of it when a young girl came in with her mother, (she could not have been older than three). She quietly watched the women move, cautiously allowing herself to be in the charged place and gently reaching out to brush a body of the quivering art.
It is an improvised piece. Cues and tasks are given and completed but ultimately the three hours are a creation of feelings and interaction with those brave enough to be in the middle of it.
Colors slowly lit up the room revealing five dancers fully immersed in each moment. Feeling each moment. Dressed in white, their garments hung from their limbs in a casual tattered manner which screamed of deliberation. To explain their movements would be simply incorrect. I cannot say they shoved themselves across the floor without touching on the mindful destructions of personal space bubbles. I will not talk of how they took our hands and invited them to dance without desperately trying to help you understand the erasure of boundaries within the art world.
The air hung heavy with the weight of sweat, discomfort, perfect understanding, deep emotion, and intense temperature. Those of us willing to stay longer than five minutes felt ourselves invited into the piece. We stretched our bodies along the wall, eyes slowly following the dancers, breaking only for those who entered with the intention of being the new center.
The metamorphosis of the pile of white clothing punctuated the passing time. Beginning in one corner, it morphed and grew around the women. It scattered across the room, draped itself over us, hemmed us in, became our pillows, and connected us. The emotional and timeless hours drew to a close as each individual found themselves joining the dancers in their task of turning the pile into a web spanning from wall to wall. Methodically and yet without conscious goals, we passed shirts onto others and lengthened the strands until we ducked and wove in and out of our own piece of art.
One by one, we left.
It was the one space I have been where my mind simply decided this was all there was. It played with the idea that there was nothing beyond the room. Outside that curtain there was nothing. No beings. No ideas or systems. No other way of life. No world.
Just:
Felt Room.
