Subtitled Light: On Dance and Description
Thinking through language, movement, accessibility, and darkness in response to Morgan Thorson’s Untitled Night.
By Emily Gastineau
You're standing on a sphere. Fewer than half the stars in the sky are visible to you from where you are, on a frozen lake surrounded by trees—the cosmos forming a bowl beneath you. And of all the stars in your field of vision, only a fraction of those will reach you. There's what you see, and then what you know is there, and then what you don’t know—which goes far beyond that.
Look into the spaces between the stars. Look for what you can't see. How do you know what is there? Did someone tell you? Can you look it up?
Now look at the dancers as they move together. Focus on the spaces in between them. What is happening in the empty space? What is moving them?
You could get factual. The air is really material: it holds moisture; it holds planes up. When two dancers move in unison, there is some kind of force extended between them, a thickness or a tension that holds them together. They move as siblings, in pattern, in pairing. They are the same if you squint your eyes, but not if you really look at them. You can feel it but you can't prove it.
Untitled Night is a dance work by Morgan Thorson and collaborators that will happen twice on the same night, beholden to the following elements: two days after the full moon, January, Minnesota, climate catastrophe. This is a work for the deep night, where the patterns of the cosmos imprint the dance. Instead of the dance floor, we have the snow on a rolling surface. Instead of the lighting grid, we have the constellations. Instead of curtains enclosing the stage, we have trees that frame the choreography of moving bodies overhead, and many points of light forming a chorus.
At a rehearsal I visited in November, the dancers begin with orienting to the space. It’s both practical and ideological: they remind themselves of the trip hazards, while grounding themselves in place. Histories overlap here. They are dancing outside but they still reference the corners of the rehearsal room; feet on grass and snow remember the wood floor. The displacement that happened here, continues to happen here, is mostly erased from the landscape—but we can voice it, or consciously bring it into the frame. As a dance practice, the ensemble locates the exits. It seems the emergency is not so conceptual anymore.
Always, the environment asserts itself. The dance is intended to take place on the frozen lake at Silverwood Park, but Thorson tells me there have to be backup plans. Maybe it will be so warm there is no ice to stand on, maybe it will be so cold that our bodies will need additional protection. The place determines what we need in it: warm layers, hydration, a surface to keep the precipitation off. We find we can navigate the conditions better together. Here, borrow these extra snow pants. When you can’t make out the sign in the distance, I will read it to you.
At night, just outside the city, it’s not so much that there is no light, but that each source of light becomes louder. Eyes will seek out illumination. There is the moon, the stars, reflection off the snow, ambient light from the streets and the neighborhood, plus the elements brought in for the performance by designer Nao Nagai. And in this low-light scenario, one of the fundamental assumptions becomes apparent: in dance, in art, in culture, we expect to see.
Visuality is central to western culture, and it is political to frame light as a symbol of knowledge. In the Enlightenment model, illumination is understanding, objective truth, certainty of what is really there. The material world simply exists and you, the probing light, set out to discover it. The flip side is the colonial metaphor, the denigration of darkness and all its associations. Andre Lepecki writes of this imaginary that “light as a metaphor for knowledge and freedom actually does not clarify anything, nor does it free anyone; it mostly obfuscates and entraps. Mostly, it whitewashes the world." (1) More recently, darkness has been reclaimed as aesthetic strategy, political resistance, and a way to short-circuit this order of knowledge and value. Some call for the right to opacity, the right to remain unknowable, illegible to the dominant system. Siting this dance in the dark throws off the typical order and the directive towards illumination as clarity. Siting this dance in the dark suggests that we might look otherwise.
With the dance happening in the dark, can we turn to language provide understanding? Untitled Night includes audio descriptions by multimedia artist and composer Jay Afrisando. Audio description is typically an accessibility feature, used to convey visual information to individuals who are blind or have low vision. In the conditions of this work, even sighted individuals find themselves in a low-light scenario, and the artists have included description not only as an accommodation, but also as a way to think more broadly about communication, image, and meaning. Here the audio descriptions are spoken live by the dancers, stitched throughout the composition of the space. This is an important departure because, conventionally, they would appear outside the diegetic space, a voiceover that is separate from the artwork. Rather than an omniscient presence, the interpretation is embedded, or rather, implicated.
When I attended rehearsal, I snuck some photos. I won’t show you but I’ll ask you to imagine:
— A group of dancers forms a circle in a field at dusk.
— A circle of people wearing snow gear gather in the woods beneath night sky.
— Diverse group in multicolored clothing stands in field with leafless trees.
— Light fills night sky while group of people gathers.
— Four people wearing blue, yellow, and red stand at far edge of field, with line of trees and cloudy sky above them.
— Circle of people in the woods at dusk.
— Dancers in the woods with night sky.
Are these the same event? Are these descriptions by different people of the same event? Is it the same person describing an event that’s repeating, a little differently each time? Who are these people? What time is it and why are we here?
Making meaning with movement and language at the same time is already complex. Eyes move as quickly as scanning the area for danger, but spoken language takes longer. Out of all the possible visual material, how do we choose what to focus on? Do we select what is most important, or do we make it important by choosing it? In dance, should we describe the people and what they are doing? What about the constellations or the audience or the wind? Within the whole realm of possible action, how can we begin to convey what is happening?
We might start with some evocative verbs, the most active body parts, points in space. You might argue that, for maximum comprehension and agency, you should convey as directly and clearly as possible, taking care to minimize your own bias, so that the receiver can form their own interpretations. Describe the various features of the space one by one, the bodies, their clothing, their actions. But you could also argue that this mode expresses a western ideology, categorizing and isolating and mapping with a so-called objective lens. As Cree scholar Shawn Wilson writes, "So analysis from a western perspective breaks everything down to look at it. So you are breaking it down into its smallest pieces and then looking at those small pieces. And if we are saying that an Indigenous methodology includes all of these relationships, if you are breaking things down into their smallest pieces, you are destroying all of the relationships around it.” (2)
How much is lost behind the veneer of so-called objective language? There is nuance, cohesion, true and intuitive dimension. Choreographer and dancer Alice Sheppard, whose company Kinetic Light has done extensive work with audio description, encapsulates the dilemma this way: “A description of something, no matter how beautiful, is a displaced encounter.” Kinetic Light developed an app called Audimance that includes multiple versions of audio description, “so we are able to actually communicate, in poetic and dramatic ways, not just what is happening, but the inner and emotional core of what is happening.” (3) What might that sound like?
The descriptions I heard in rehearsal included some language in a descriptive mode, as well as some text that departed into another realm. I hesitate to call it “poetic” because that might convey a kind of embellishment—and in fact, the most evocative dance language is extremely economical. Dancers develop language in the rehearsal process, including names for specific moves or sections or methods. You have to give a name to the unnameable, just so you know what each other is talking about. The words come out of the body, but they also have to be quick. Labels get picked up and passed around until everyone knows exactly where to go and what to do when you say it. Metaphor cuts right to the heart of the matter. For example, from my rehearsal notes:
— After mineral we’re going to be out of lights already
— We said I would do the other string theory
— It’s during sparkle and it’s after they have established togetherness
— Should we start an evolution of intent for sound check?
— Let's do a little north south east west
— Are we saying this is at end of constellation right now, or are we saying this is at evolution of intent, or are we saying we don't know?
Sometimes, however, the act of defining something can make it strange. A definition is a flash point. A statement is never an ending. We thought that winter looked like this, and now winter means something else. How can we tell who is a dancer? Pin down the meaning, and the wings will start beating as the meaning wants to fly away. Time passes and subjectivity persists. The idea becomes concretized and we want to push back. As soon as I name what I think I see, you will offer a rephrase. Or if everyone in the audience wrote down what they saw, no two descriptions would be the same. The definition necessarily creates an outside: whatever is excluded from the category, whatever is outside the frame. Included in the language is all the stars we can’t see.
I am also writing into an in-between space, because I visited rehearsals two months before the premiere—since then, the writing and the performance have continued on parallel tracks, alongside but not touching. While viewing the work in process, I remembered reading about a performance by Collective Actions Group that took place in the deep Russian winter, meant to escape the Soviet censors. An audience was asked to gather in a remote field and watch for something to appear in the distance. The artists were interested in the “‘zone of indistinguishability’: the moment when one can tell that something is happening but the figures are too far away for one to clarify who they are and what exactly is taking place.” (4) What is this space of unknowing? What might be possible here?
Language can be a big sign, all lit up in the distance. It can show you the way and get you where you need to go expediently. But language can also meander or misdirect. Language can illuminate and language can also obscure. Clarity might not be what you think it is. Does description provide access? Does translation mean we arrive at the same understanding? What do we know and how do we know it?
The dancers of Untitled Night practice locating the exits. We as viewers could also attempt to locate the exits—as a language practice, as an unknowing practice. In a related performance by the same Russian artists, ten people were asked to gather in a snowy clearing and walk away from each other in separate directions, vanishing into the woods. Does each word contain an escape hatch? All this talking, how does it point us somewhere else? Are we saying this is at end of constellation right now, or are we saying this is at evolution of intent, or are we saying we don't know?
Related events at The Great Northern:
Morgan Thorson’s Untitled Night is a dance event on Silver Lake on January 27 that draws inspiration from night skies.
More information and tickets at thegreatnorthernfestival.com.
(1) André Lepecki, Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance (New York: Routledge, 2016): 57.
(2) Shawn Wilson, Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods (Halifax and Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2008): 119.
(3) Margaret Fuhrer, “‘Access as an Ethic’: Giving Dance Myriad Points of Entry,” New York Times, August 17, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/17/arts/dance/kinetic-light-disability-arts-access.html.
(4) Claire Bishop, “Zones of Indistinguishability: Collective Actions Group and Participatory Art,” e-flux #29, November 2011, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/29/68116/zones-of-indistinguishability-collective-actions-group-and-participatory-art/.
Photo: Zoe Prinds-Flash.
Emily Gastineau is a choreographer, writer, performer, and editor. Her recent work focuses on the generic—activating questions on value, feeling, authorship, and audience, and how to wade through the mess of existing culture. She is rooted in the Minneapolis dance community, has shared work nationally and internationally, and studied at DAS Choreography, Amsterdam University of the Arts. She engages with language within her choreographic practice, via writing on dance and as an editor, most recently at Mn Artists, a publication of the Walker Art Center. Emily is committed to collaboration and collective structures, formerly with the performance duo Fire Drill, and currently as a Co-Artistic Director of Red Eye, a performance space in South Minneapolis. www.emilygastineau.com