I am slowly pacing forth into talking about a transformative week I had in Hamburg, which made the accumulation of past seven years legible for myself for the first time. But I can’t help delaying the pleasure and taking byways that will make it even more meaningful–for the personal narrative but also dramaturgically.
There are (at least) six ATDK moments that fold into this.
First pleat: It is 2013 June. ATDK comes to Istanbul and wants to go to Taksim Square in person to see the occupation. We think she is totally badass to do that, especially given that other big names in show business are cancelling their Istanbul gigs. “Luckily” she coincides with a beautiful moment in which people throw carnations; she stays there until about an hour before the show, Rosas Danst Rosas. She later interwove this episode to her thoughts on walking/dancing: “Les philosophies orientales considèrent communément que pensée profonde et mouvement sont incompatibles. Néanmoins, dans certaines pratiques bouddhistes, il est possible de méditer en étant mobile. Je pense que My walking is my dancing est une manière d’être en mouvement dans la ville. Je me souviens encore des images du mouvement de protestation à Istanbul où les manifestants se tenaient debout, silencieusement, sur la Place Taksim. Leur geste était moins un geste d’opposition qu’un geste de questionnement.” [The eastern philosophies usually consider deep contemplation as incompatible with movement. However, in certain buddhist practices, it is possible to meditate while being mobile. I think that My walking is my dancing is a manner of being in movement in the city. I remember the images of the protest movement in Istanbul, where the demonstrators were standing, silently, on the Taksim Square. Their gesture was less about opposition than one of questioning.] Before Rosas Danst Rosas ends, people begin checking their phones, leaving the salon, and of course it is not at all about their impatience with serialist abstractions. The police attacks again and everybody is worried, the immediate urge is just to go there, with or without their friends’ at risk in Taksim. So much for buddhism.
Second pleat: It is 2011 September, Istanbul. I have watched this choreography from 30 years ago, Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich, many times on video, but now it is live and the baroness herself dancing it. What is most beautiful is the mistakes she is making with a grin, or the pacing directions she is giving to Tale Dolven without needing to hide it. I begin to watch for those moments. Each night it feels like I am seeing it for the first time. And it is still very rad. The simplicity of it requires so much calculation and discipline that it would be nauseating with anybody else but not with her, not with that joyful and rebellious music. I am about the age she composed it, and I make a wish to have one hundredth of such perceptivity and serious investment in play and tenderness in whatever I might end up doing.
Third pleat: It is the Fall of 2017, Andy and I are seeing A Love Supreme at New York Live Arts. From the first moment I begin to cry with joy. I don’t even remember the choreography anymore. I don’t think I looked at it in that way, “choreography,” the design-logic that is very strong and almost like a brand for ATDK. My being turns to fluid, and the movement directly manifests the beauty of moving. The dancer/dancing is the dance, here, as the saying goes.
Fourth pleat: It is the Fall of 2013. I am seeing Cesena & En Atendant at BAM. I am not sure of the order, I am not sure of what I am seeing, but it has nothing to do with the choreographies. I remember going to a park nearby, hugging a tree–as we did in Taksim– and crying–as I had been doing so much of lately. I remember taking in the beauty of light descending into darkness with my aching eyes. It soothes my still-shaking body after the good cry. I remember loving the weird vocalizations of the dancers, wanting to join. Whatever imaginary medieval times this is, I want in. The audience is really agitated, many leave, someone shouts “We can’t see anything, turn on the lights.” I have my first cultural orientation right there and then: Americans can’t endure the possibility of impenetrable.
Fifth pleat: It is October 2016, Vortex Temporum at BAM. I am almost late to it, and perhaps a bit too lazy or tired to take myself out to the subway. But when I get there, it immediately feels like getting a gift out of nowhere. I feel a deep arousal in my inner organs; the dynamism of the motions, the holding and violent releasing of muscles do something to mine. I see the connections with the sacred geometries of Cesena & En Atendant. I hear Grisey’s music for the first time, and the piano revolving and turning around is a beautiful surprise. The interlacing circles of humans and instruments, the internal rotation of energy, squeezing in. The darkness descending again, which to my mind stands in for the glamorous sinking of an Empire. My eyes gets fixated on Boštjan Antončič, perhaps I recognize him as the only agent who goes against that implosion. The piece imprints the going off of so many bombs and boats that year.
Sixth pleat: 15 February 2020. I am at the outer right edge of the second balcony of Skirball. It is the worst and best place to be. I can stand up whenever I feel like–and whenever I do so, I feel the urge to move with whatever group choreography is happening down under. Yet I am not capable of giving in to it completely, I am thinking of the Hamburg trip I will take the next day. In order to focus, I am making an effort to internally talk to myself about what I see, describe and annotate it: “…of course it is Bach & Beautiful, but I can’t internally relate to the celebrations of European culture anymore… not out of my heart… but wait, I see a tenuousness here… there, when he stops and stares in the void… she is falling… losing balance… OK, we are still living in the same universe, ATDK and I… good good good… tenuous… tender… fallible falterable fatiguable bodies are the same as the ones that fly high… it is possible to stumble over the tapes with which she marks the geometric perfection and I am waiting for it, for the irruption of real… there is pleasure in watching someone spin, simply a childlike pleasure… I suppose the motor switches and accelerations that spinning requires is strong enough to leave its memory in the brain and it makes you re-live it by seeing it… not like a symmetrical perfect circle but more like a screw or helix, with volume…” It is another pleasure to watch Boštjan, as always. He is always panting, moving all in, nothing is saved or spared. I connect with his totally-not-occidental sense of rhythm and, for lack of a better term, animalistic way of finding oneself in movement, as much as I know that it shines forth from pure technique. His sense of nuance is so deep that he carves space like a lacework with the smallest gesture of his shoulder. When he first appears, I guess at the fourth movement, I get blurry-eyed–is it the three spotlights causing this illusion or does his monstrous way of expanding over the floor really defy the speed of perception–is he turning to vapor down in front of me? ATDK herself must have a special spot for him, since their duet is the only one that she really plays, enjoys, and let herself enter into the tenuousness she creates for others; full of lifts and changes of balance, close contact of contrasting bodies betraying sensuality and reliance. The work as a whole disrupts the music-movement relationship that one might ordinarily expect from modernist dance, and sometimes adds droplets of movement idioms from other disciplines and traditions, all of which carry Bach to an ecumenical point. But I can’t let go of the feeling “I’ve seen her do this before, there must be more.”
I was to return to this three days later.
Eylül Fidan Akıncı 