How to do the dancing audience

A big room. Walls painted black. Music, a heavy beat. People are loosely ushered into the space. Among the crowd, talking and laughter. Some people are already dancing, while others look rather misplaced. Four monumental scaffolding structures with neon tubes rise above us. Then the doors close and a performer starts making her way through the crowd. We hear a voice, almost singing, maybe a strange children’s song, talking about our hands, our feet, our hair and our blood. And that everything and everybody, as if it were a promise or a vision, will soon be dancing.

Flesh

Over the past fifteen years, I have been able to follow Mette Ingvartsen’s work closely and have also, full disclosure, worked as a dancer in one of her previous group pieces, The Artificial Nature Project (2012). Ingvartsen’s oeuvre, and I don’t use that word lightly, is the result of a prolific and consistent research into the notion of expanded choreography. To people who might not know Ingvartsen and her work, I would dare to describe her as one of the first of a generation of conceptual choreographers who successfully brought theory ‘into the flesh’. Earlier works have addressed topics such as sexuality, action movies, natural disaster and posthumanism, just to name a few. Subjects seem to come and go, others linger around for longer and get explored in a series of works; often in a combination of a solo, a lecture performance, an installation or a group piece.

In the same way, The Dancing Public appears to be a continuation of All Around (2019), a trance-like dance solo accompanied by live drums, and 69 positions (2014) where a tour through the archive of sexual performances explores and problematizes the proximity between audience and performer. In The Dancing Public, this aspect of guidance is strongly present as Ingvartsen seems to embody an amalgam of the figure of the ‘crowd warmer’ (or ambianceuse), the pop star, the medium and the priestess. In a space designed to resemble a club or a rave, we see Ingvartsen hopping from one stage to another, using both text and movement to introduce us to the history and phenomenon of dancing manias (also referred as choreomania, dance plague, dance epidemic…). At times this creates interesting moments of friction where you might find yourself moving along to the beat while also listening to stories from Mediaeval times about people, mostly women, taking to the streets and occupying public spaces with their convulsing movements and jerking bodies. Later, similar juxtapositions happen when references are made to medical examinations of ‘hysteric’ women or the dance marathons that evolved into life threatening entertainment events in the USA during the Great Depression.

MacGuffin

What does it mean for a body to respond to crisis by evoking extreme forms of dance that might potentially lead to punishment, insanity, or even one’s death? It’s a heavy question ‘to dance with’ – exciting and depressing at the same time. One that surely leads to interesting explorations in terms of discourse, but also sets Dancing Public up for a great challenge. At times it feels like the piece could use some amping up so that it could break through the hierarchy that is created between us and the solo-performer. Other times, the choreography almost wants to do too much at once, as if music, text, dance and light are all too eager, competing with one another to create the biggest effect. This makes for a spectacle that we surely can relate to, and we cheer when Ingvartsen climbs high up the rig throwing her torso down exactly at the same time as a light cue, but it also risks remaining on the surface, or even becoming somewhat flat. Especially with the dance manias so fresh in mind; it makes the head wobble.

Then again, maybe I am on the wrong track, looking for depth and guts where there is none. In an aftertalk some years ago, I remember Ingvartsen talking about the ‘MacGuffin’ in relation to her work. A MacGuffin is a device often used in films, designating a plot element that will trigger the attention and desire of the characters – as well as that of the audience –, but has no real relevance in itself. And so, maybe (maybe) the distance toward these pieces of history, both in text and movement, is precisely intended to make us look elsewhere – away from the performer and the theatrical effects, and towards the bigger picture of the choreographic proposal.

In and off the audience

This brings me to the audience.Throughout Dancing Public I noticed how I, again and again, negotiated my position as a person in and as a member of the audience. As in, how to be an audience member? This might sound obvious, but let’s consider it for a moment. How do you find a place in an open setting that could also be a club? How do you engage with the performer, especially when she looks for contact or approaches you? How do you relate to the others in space? How, in turn, do they relate to one and another? And so on.

This is not the first time I see a performance in an open space. I also don’t suffer (anymore) from not knowing how to behave in large groups, post-COVID 19. But somehow The Dancing Public made me fascinated by, and feel closer to, my fellow audience members while at the same time being surprised by my own, dorky attempts at trying to behave like a ‘good’ audience member, to then in turn, rebel and try to be a ‘not good’ one. As if wanting to both support the efforts made by the performer, while at the same time disobeying the order of the choreography and our role as participants in it.

What does it mean to be (a) ‘public’? Surely, the theatre is not the town square, but it is an extension of the public space, and so the negotiations continue. Just before the end of The Dancing Public, the techno is turned up, the lights go down and the audience becomes a shade. And for a few moments, it feels like we actually could be in a club. And yes, at this point, I am dancing. Full on. With other people. Doing our job as an audience. Doing the best we can.

(Published March 14th 2022)