There is a farm called Wild Meadows in western Pennsylvania, surrounded by fields, woods, and little else. An old barn built by Quakers has had minor improvements, including a black layer of mylar over the old wood flooring used as a surface allowing dancers to practice. I was there last week as part of a contact improvisation dance workshop, in the company of seventeen others, some with extensive dance backgrounds, many with little or no experience, ranging from 19 years old into their fifties at least.
Late in the week we held one of our practice sessions, learning about the idea of setting scenes and exploring elements of space, shape, time, emotion, movement, and story. We begin entering the barn slowly, one at a time, creating a gesture or movement reflecting some element we find existing in the space. As the space fills, Cyrus, one of the lead organizers and instructor of this exercises enters, begins walking from one dancer to another and breaks out into a joking commentary. He adopts a "southern" accent and begins teasing both the idea of dance as art as well as a culture that stereotypically wouldn't "get" art.
"I don't know Bob. It looks kind of like a bird, but without a head..."
"This one looks like a car lying on it's side."
A dancer begins following him, apparently playing a silent Bob role.
Eventually Cyrus comes to a middle-aged woman named Joe, who lays on her side with one arm raised toward the ceiling, her long dirty blond hair sprayed out on the floor, her face turned toward her raised hand.
"It looks like a plant Bob, a pretty growing plant. Oh, but the plant is dying Bob, slowly dying. It's not going to make it Bob, it's going to die."
Someone calls out "I don't want it to die."
"Everything dies, Bob. Plant, animals, everything."
I am lying near Joe and Cyrus, moving toward them slowly along the ground, and interject. "Even you, Bob."
Cyrus picks this up, "even you have to die Bob, even you."
Dancers piling around Joe and Cyrus and Abby, who is now leaning with her back against Cyrus, her eyes closed, his hands along the side of her head. I approach, point two fingers toward Abby's head in the gesture of a man holding a gun, leaning slightly away.
"I don't want to be Bob" Abby cries, another voice "I don't want to die!"
A dancer runs onto the floor and wildly knocks my hand away, I spiral to the floor as if it is I who have been killed. Chaos ensues, Abby and Cyrus are "buried" in a pile of bodies and thrown shoes, people are yelling jumping, crying out various strange phrases. Aaron's deep voice is yelling "everything is dust. The you are dust, the plants are dust, peas are dust. It comes from dust and it ends in dust."
I am flitting about "I found stardust! Do you want stardust!"
Later "I don't want to die, I want to live forever."
"As what? Never change?"
"I want to be eternal."
Me again, now perched stiffly on a railing "Everything you are is already eternal, the past cannot be undone."
Things slowly grow wilder, then slow down, gradually the dancers remove themselves from the floor until Nichole, standing on the side, calls "end."
After, we discuss the foundation, the way things built, the value or lack to be found in both structure and chaos. Cyrus gives me my lesson by noting that what happened was that I had made a proposal: that we were going to kill Bob, and that the proposal was rejected, rather firmly, by the group. He tells me that it's fine to let such things go, but one can insist by simply repeating the proposal. "It would take us to a very dark place, but sometimes the best dances force us to deal with hard psychological questions." The discussion moves toward analyzing other parts of the dance.
Since then I have been re-considering the nature of emergence, the idea that through the behavior of collected beings can come forth patterns, ideas, a form of "intelligence" comprised of group behavior rather than individual wisdom or knowledge. What would it have been like to see this unfold, if we had as a group had to dance our unique was through the idea of death, and perhaps complicity in causing a death? I wonder what other kinds of things can be, are being, explored and expressed in other creative endeavors without the full planning or awareness of any specific individual? It strikes me that searching out opportunities to understand and participate in emergent exercises holds a certain delicious promise.
I also propose to be aware of the fact that I am going to die. You will too, but rather than try to avoid the issue: I will one day die. No dodging the bullet by wondering about an after-life, or living on through my work. So what of that?
I can't think of anything, except that from the outside it must be similar to reading a book. Beginning, middle, end, and when it's over there are simply no more pages. All I can think to do it make sure I am writing something that I will also enjoy as the sole audience, though it is funny to think of myself as someone wishing to break the fourth wall of reality itself.