The act of observation alters the thing observed
Ame Henderson The Company ContactWe are living in a social environment, in cities, where we are constantly overstimulated by advertisement, the people we cross paths with, the responsibilities we have and the repeated gestures that allow us to accomplish the every day routine. One question seems cross my mind periodically: how can we consume and "digest" such an enormous amount of information? People find ways of dealing with the surabundance and saturation at a personal level, some don't feel like they need to. I wonder, however, how we as a collective, a community or a society, address the issue as it feels, at many moments, that there is no projected rest. More objects and goods are created, more ideas are brought forward, and there is no time made to reflect on them.
I can only comment superficially on Manual for Incidence because my theoretical knowledge of performance and dance is very limited. In fact, in the past, I have never felt appealed and touched by contemporary dance. This performance had an unexpected effect on me. I understood Manual for Incidence to address the exact issue of overstimulation, from the perspective of movement. It didn't seek to obliviate meaning through the routine of the repeated gesture - which is a mechanics often used in contemporary art performance - rather it was an attempt to extract meaning from repetition and patterns created elements of familiarity. Where do people go, how do they react to the presence of others, and how does that connect with the reality of just being here and existing with everything else? Performers were running in and out of closed spaces slamming doors, others banging into two facing walls, others yet could be seen from the point of view of a camera hung in a corner within the dance space whose enhanced image was projected on a screen placed on a wall: we, viewers, gradually lose grasp with the real, the meaningful and the meaningless. The performers' actions suddenly feel awkwardly familiar, and we stop focusing on the actual gestures to try and, beyond the bodies in the space, retain the essence of what they might - or might not - be trying to communicate. Manual for Incidence did not create something new, but used the existing in language, life, music, and mundane gestures to conjure it and extend, in a metaphysical sense, time.
But how can movement translate the stretch of time while it is so closely linked to it? Art has the answer to that question. The late Québec poet Claude Gauvreau said "poetry is not useful but it is not useless". In seeing MFI, I felt that certain gestures, put together, could provide this feeling we long for - and usually reach the closest through the use of drugs - the impression that there is more to the exact present moment than can be perceived. Homi Bhabha, in an essay dating back to 1989, introduced the concept of Third Space, to which I refer to explain a feeling of being in-between but not nowhere. Bhabha suggests the Third Space to be a location between two (or more) specific moments, in history for example, of which's crossing is at the basis of the creation of a new event.
Hence, in opening a third space, MFI addressed the possibility to stretch time to understand better the input that is impossible to process in the limited realm of real time (as opposed to art time?). The everyday gestures, here, are used against and across themselves: pop music, crossed paths, known words, predicatble movements, repetition, stimulation and other elements of familiarity that, as a whole and manipulated through art, were a gateway into the unfamiliar - but desirable.