Performed at the Wexner Center for the Arts Nov 17-19, 2022.
I couldn't stop moving in my seat the whole time. The movements are fast, complex, rhythmic, powerful, human. It feels like the dancers are training to survive the apocalypse, training to be able to care for those who cannot do these superhuman tasks. I see care everywhere, in the way they encourage each other, the way their bodies collaborate in the moment, support and push against each other at the right times for propulsion, compression, tension, or momentum. The way Jensei shouts "I see you!" when another dancer is killing it out on stage. They smile, groan, grimace and shout from the effort. Sweat flies every which way, tracing the waves of energy breaking out of their bodies as they move. I went back to see the piece again the next night and I could have watched it every night for a month. I would have seen new moments, registered different pathways and trains of attention. With Abby's work I often don't consciously "see" the choreography, I am completely taken in by the energy and electricity in the air around bodies, through bodies.
This kind of relationship to audience feels different. A new culture of performance (at least in the western concert dance context) is born in the space. There is a permeability, a vicariousness, in the way we engage energetically and vocally with the performers. We shout their names. Even if you don't know the dancers going into it, they shout to each other and soon you can start to discern who is who and attach a name and a subjectivity to each performer. We go from audience to witness, holding them in our here-ness. We showed up for them and they showed up for us. My experience of the western concert dance model has been that the audience in some way must validate the performance, that the judgement of the audience defines the success of a piece, the gaze of the viewer giving a reason for the performance, defining the importance of what is viewed. Abby's work turns this self-conscious, external relationship on its head. If I were to perform in Abby's work, I would not be nervous in the same way. I would be nervous about exhaustion, about the struggle of effort, about whether I could do it, but I would not be anxious to impress, to please, or "perform" in the way I have felt in some instances in the past. Here, performance is a space to feel something together. To perform as yourself, to be feeling how you are feeling, to show it on your face, to be fully in the experience. There is something metabolized through the force of bodies and it feels to me like it needs to happen whether we are there or not, and yet our presence facilitates the happening. I'd like to think we help those dancers through the labor of the piece with our encouragement, our investment, our empathetic presences.