The Space Where You Dream & I Live; oblivion | Reflections: Jordan Baylon

For me, the potency of dance is its rootedness in a holistic, integrated body - that includes the mind and all of its tricks, conceits, flights of fancy, its lies, its truths, and therefore all possibilities for human experience. In our current context of dissociated, disembodied consciousness floating through broadband it is nothing short of healing and miraculous then to see (re: viscerally feel) the image of an idea generated, manipulated and sustained by a dancer’s pinky-toe. I’ll come back to this.

Su Lin Tseng is a great example of this because of the radical candour - and I do mean radical in the sense of “to the root” - she brings to every aspect of her personal self and practice (both as a performer and choreographer). Like all good trips to the zoo, The Space Where You Dream & I Live is an interrogation of freedom and confinement, which includes how we navigate categories like animal, human and in this case woman, and how the body is the clearing house for all of this. The performers - Brandon Maturino, Marynia Fekecz, Julie Funk - yearn through the tension of these ideas, billowing with whimsy and then settling into the gravity of the body in turns. There is one moment in particular where there is very little perceptible movement aside from ripples across the shoulders of a hulking beast seeming both pinned down by a pillar of light and rooted to the earth like the stump of a redwood - this is the powerful dream of the body in the cage and the cage of the body.

I have to borrow Pam Tzeng’s phrase to start talking about Mari Osanai and another body-dream that is her piece oblivion: “falling through darkness.” I immediately have the impulse to summon the dark gale of ankoku butoh, and remark that oblivion seems to evoke its dusky, plaintive, elegiac qualities (Ohno?) rather than the existential thresher (Hijikata?). Even that seems trite when I am enveloped in the energy field Osanai radiates, because this is maybe the first time I get to feel like I am in the land of the dead witnessing the haunt of a ghost; witnessing what I assume is a human body shirk its ties to the living by means of a puppet proxy. This is not bunraku or other types of shadow puppet play where the puppet is invested with substance and life and we are being asked to forget the very real human body anchoring the performance. Indeed there are times when Osanai’s own ruddy brown wrists, hands and fingers, and ankles, feet and toes are singing with activation and lively intention while extending un-anatomically from an otherwise undifferentiated shadow mass of torso and limbs tangled with a frail white puppet body, a shadow-mass that has now become completely permeable to the intangible. I am transfixed by this scene that has the gravity of a black hole, I look at that pinky toe and I find that my own body vibrates at many frequencies, and can encompass both its own physical reality and all of the possibilities for transcendence. This is dance.

Jordan Baylon (he/him/they/siya) is an 2nd gen FilipinX artist, critic, FilipinX futurist and kapwa community builder whose work gnaws at the intersection of queer identity, race, colonialism, food culture, magic and the occult. He has recently concluded nearly a decade as the lead program officer for Calgary Arts Development, designing and implementing granting programs meant to serve artists and arts organizations and now works independently along with equity-seeking and social justice communities. Over the past several years, he has also developed a focus in this work around equity, diversity and inclusion, and Truth and Reconciliation here on Turtle Island and in Mohkinstsis and the Treaty 7 region specifically, exploring what it means for the arts to connect everyone in a community through a fair and equalized sense of belonging and shared authority. His favourite thing is to sit down with diverse and interesting people to learn about their ideas and what they care most about.