Dancing with the Hands

Daniel Barbiero
March 2016

Image of Micah Trapp by Roman Sehling

The second movement of the dance begins. Two dancers, a man and a woman, drop to the floor and begin to interact with a miscellany of small objects arranged on the marley before them: Found objects, everyday things of various types, unusual objects collected over the years—all objects that had some kind of meaning for their possessors. While the other members of the ensemble continue to move in front of and around them, dancers Shaun English and Micah Trapp pick up, put down, rearrange and otherwise manipulate these things. They do so with a vague air of preoccupation, their attention focused on the things they examine and turn over slowly in their hands, finally putting them down as carefully or as haphazardly as the mood requires.

The name of the piece is “Fossil,” a work by The Nancy Havlik Dance Performance Group. The dance, a semi-improvised piece in which inanimate objects play a significant part, was about the things we collect over time and the meanings they acquire for us.

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Look again at the dancers’ hands as they pick up an object, turn it over and then place it back on the marley. At one level this is all that is happening on stage—a dancer is manipulating an object. The movement is natural and self-aware at one and the same time, but the awareness is centered in the body—specifically in the hands and their assured movements. With their hands the dancers project themselves into the surrounding space, organizing it into a situation, a site of given material limits and possibilities in which to act purposefully.

As they do so, they convey a sense of meaning. This is manifested physically–meaning is externalized in the gesture, carried and conveyed in the sweep of the hand, the pivot of the wrist, the opening and closing of the fingers as they interact with something of mass, with a certain center of gravity, softness or hardness of surface, rigidity or limpness, etc. In essence, the way things are handled is a form of intentionality, a primary or originary form of being directed toward or being about things, as encoded in and communicated by the positions and movements of the body.

This way of being directed toward or about is disclosed by the body’s comportment in relation to whatever it is being directed toward. This comportment in turn is permeated by a mood or psychological mode. Think of the adverbs that can be used to describe the body’s movement—“rapidly,” “sluggishly,” “hastily,” “thoughtfully,” “absently”—all of these tell us something of the movement’s psychological grounding, of its being enacted in the context of a mood. The movements of the dancers’ hands in Fossil can be described as: thoughtful, reflective, absorbed—adverbs conveying the affective side of someone engaged in evaluating the psychological weight of things.

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What then of the objects? Given their mixed provenance, the objects are an imperfect network of signification, a miscellany of signs. Some are related to others, some relate to no objects but themselves, but all mean something to someone. A collection of objects brought by one dancer is interconnected by virtue of the relationships of meaning established by that person over time; another person’s collection will have its own internal relationships unconnected to any other collection. A relationship of mutual exclusion, that is, until their meeting on the floor and their incorporation into the movements of the dancers’ hands. Some of these things are colored by memory, others embody it. The fossils for which the piece was named, collected by Shaun, quite literally embody memory—they are the material signs of vanished organisms.

To the extent that these objects are memory-laden, they carry a twofold layer of meaning. The original encounter with them in the past gave them significance in relation to whatever it was they were needed for at the time; this remembered significance is a kind of foundational meaning for them. And yet the current project—the dance in which they play an important if silent part—brings them forward into the present which imbues them with a significance overlaying their original significance. Or they may have no original significance. Consider the dancer handling an object to which she has no historical connection. By virtue of engaging with it in the dance she imbues it with meaning for herself now, in her praxis as solicited by the unfolding performance. Another meaning comes to the object from the present, and from a person who shares no past with it.

And it really is the dancer’s meaning. The individual movements making up this portion of Fossil were improvised within the general idea of the piece. Each movement thus represents the dancer’s decision taking place within the broader framework of the choreographer’s general directions. Consequently, the dancers’ choices reflect their own individual ways of being among things and of manifesting these things’ meanings. Through their individual choices the dancers reveal the underlying meaning of Fossil—that the world is known to us not only through thought and perception, but through action and affect.

That the significance of objects is manifested by the way we comport ourselves toward them is encoded into the expressions we use to describe the way we can handle them: Indifferently, absent-mindedly, carefully, gingerly, reverently—any of a number of adverbs will do. When the dancers pick up the objects they place them carefully in stacks, in clusters, in a line. They turn them over in their hands thoughtfully. Or handle them negligently.

One of the more subtle turns in the piece is the differential treatment these objects elicit. For example, Micah handles the fossils with care, but not the miscellany of other objects scattered on the floor around her. These different objects solicit different comportments based on the weight or extent of meaning that they have—based, that is, on their intuited value. As Micah’s movement shows, significance is a matter of degrees; some objects carry more affective weight than others, some are virtually weightless.

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Movement is an embodied form of intentionality, of which dance is a special case. In an everyday context, movement refers through the body to the world around it in a manner that, for all practical purposes, is non-representational and in fact is prior to what we would recognize as being representational.  In the context of dance, though, movement acquires a representational function and in doing so refers to a meaning beyond itself. This opens it up to the question of what it is about, a question that ordinarily wouldn’t arise in relation to a movement observed in an everyday context. But in dance, the intentional function of movement becomes explicit and explicitly separable from the physical motion in a way that it normally wouldn’t in everyday life. In a sense, through dance movement becomes conscious of itself as meaningful; it takes on the representational function of being about something in the sense of carrying a meaning to be conveyed through an aesthetically charged medium.

Thus dance is not only the body in its mobility, it is the image of the body in its mobility. It is both movement and the representation of movement all at once. It is simultaneously a first-order phenomenon consisting in the originary mobility of a body defining itself and the world around it, and a second order phenomenon in which that originary mobility becomes an image of itself—a representation of itself–even as it is itself.  At one and the same time we are aware of watching the moving body as itself and of watching that same body as the image of its own movement, as the embodied idea of movement.

As Shaun and Micah pick these things up, turn them over in their hands and then put them down again, their hands’ movements thus function as gestures of first and second order. The first order is the actual movement of the body organizing its space in real time, that is to say the push of these hands against this open space or these objects. The second order is abstracted from the first, transposing it from the plane of movement per se to the plane of movement represented. We go, in other words, from the originary signification of the body as it projects itself into the world to the representation of that projection. The second order is parasitic on and assumes the first order; in a sense, it brings the first order movement to self-awareness.

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From the second-order perspective, when we watch the dancers handling objects we are watching a process of evaluation, of meaning explicitly given and taken, and held up to view. The fact of the performance acts as a framework or boundary marking the demarcation between simply picking up and manipulating an object and representing the picking up and manipulating of an object. The representational capacity of the movement arises in the gap between the everyday conveyance of meaning and the recreation of that conveyance in the context of a performance. Here manipulation refers to itself, intends itself as both the starting point and the endpoint of action or gesture.

This second-order representation of movement is, for lack of a better term, expressive: It pushes to the foreground the affective aspect or mood through which the objects’ significances are disclosed. Thus what the movement in Fossil ultimately is about—what it is meant to capture or reproduce–is the way a person projects out into the world and in fact is out into the world, as a giver of meaning colored with affect. The mood that saturates Fossil is a composite of memory and loss. This is a mood facilitated by a certain withdrawal from the present, a withdrawal into the objects as they’re handled and explored for their meanings. The dancers signal this mood through the movement of their hands but also in their facial expressions as configured in a certain distraction or apparent disengagement with the present moment—the past being a screen shrouding the present and blurring its edges with the superimposed figures of things remembered.

The world is a network of significances, a quasi-geological formation whose strata are the things and their meanings that we and others have put there. In representing the network of significances these things embody, Fossil is the world in microcosm.