For me, dancing pretty much boils down to 3 things:
Everything is changing
Reality is unstable, impermanent, and interconnected
Pay attention.*
If there is a defining feature of my work, it is this. To pay attention to the given circumstances, phenomena or ideas that constitute the conditions in which dancing is taking place. This is an emergent notion of choreography, rather than a repetition of given forms and ideals. A means rather than an end. Dancing is thus an embodied vehicle to investigate and usurp presupposed notions of self and other, of subjectivity as such. Doing this begins with cultivating curiosity, affirming present experience as it appears, and persevering in the act of suspending that which has already been ratified. Suspension, as I’ve come to understand it, is the state where the maximum of attention to what is simply there is summoned. Suspension is the diametrical opposite of positing, posturing or positioning.
In this capacity, a line of communication is initiated with material previously unavailable or always already forgotten - corporeal, relational, and political.
That this act be witnessed, performed, and that these materials come to the fore is key insofar as it is a public reminder of what we increasingly have come to disregard. That human being resembles more closely a coming and going, a continuity of discontinuity, than a fixed and stable constant. And that the creative act is a consequence of direct engagement with this procedure of change.
And so, my work is a continual attempt to articulate and actualize this fundamental point.
I use the medium of movement to do so and listen in for the choreographic structures that unfold.
- Tilman O’Donnell (2019)
* (Inspired by Jane Hirshfield)