Response 49 - Last Dance
Dear Alan,
Thanks for your task and the opportunity for one last dance for our big project.
A couple of weeks back you gave a talk about our project at The Ohio State University and I wanted to respond to an issue that was flagged up by your audience in the Q&A. As a result of how you presented the project, some controversy arose about the ‘genderedness’ of our collaboration. Partly this was due to you acknowledging that you had prepared the presentation mostly on your own without much input from me.* Also, you had chosen to share tasks and responses with the audience that could be seen as representing me mainly as a body and yourself as a more ‘conceptual creator’. From my understanding, this generated some scepticism in your audience. I want to address this issue in this response with the hope to round off our project on a more balanced note.
As you instructed, I danced to your audio score and vocalised my activity as I was moving. Below you can find a poetic version of the voicing which became the second soundtrack for the film I made (see further down).
As mentioned above I wanted to avoid placing my body at the centre of this task, and to try and reverse our roles. I enjoyed the dialogue the film created between your body, the soundtrack you constructed from my audio track and my voiceover. The film is not going anywhere and has no climax. It bends the rule of ‘no repetition’ as it reuses clips and movements similarly to how your ‘Feel like I’m Fighting’ soundtrack repeats certain phrases.
It is my last dance trying to condense – into a 4-minute experience – aspects of the many discussions and chats we have had over the course of the past year about process and product, about equality and hierarchies, about gender and roles, about performativity and everyday life, about body and mind, about parameters and practice...
*This was the case, but was based on a decision made by the two of us due to lack of time.