Material For Dance

ANDREW MARCUS DISAPPEARANCE

MATERIAL FOR DANCE

Floorspace Studio,1510 Zamia Ave, #101, Boulder, CO

Reservations requested: disappearance.project@gmail.com

Dear Friends

Over four evenings, I will perform certain questions.  Primary among them:

Is Dance possible?

Immediately here, however, I see a difficulty:  Something called Dance is presupposed.  I think we must first ask:

 What is Dance?

As this question, on the face of it, seems equally difficult, let us break it down, so that a field of inquiry may situate.  To do so, we ask:

What is space?
What is time?
What moves?
What is it to be still?

As these questions, or the objects to which they are directed, appear also elusive, we ask further:

What is body?
Whose body?
What is audience?
Who is in the audience?
What is audience doing?

What techniques will I employ in the performance of these questions?  What springs to mind here is a certain lack; of virtuosity, specifically.  Which, in spite of years of training, I never acquired.  So, to state it flatly: I don’t know what techniques to employ.  Perhaps I will be exposed.

 On the title of our evenings then, a reflection is in order.  It may be that our title seems too hopeful, arrogant even.  If received simply, my first and second questions constitute an admission:  I don’t know what Dance is.  And yet, our title states that some material, for a possible Dance -- even if what is danced, in itself, does not rise, in clarity and cohesion, to the level of what might reasonably be quantified as A Dance -- will nonetheless emerge.  So, to be transparent, in truth, I cannot even say that what would potentially be validated (agreed upon, certified) as material for Dance, will be what presents these four evenings, if we spend them together.

Perhaps that’s it.  If there is a technique, it would be… my unknowing.

You are invited.