Constellations of Thought (As It Fades)

Takeuchi, R. (2019), Constellations (As It Fades) [glow in the dark yarn, LED light]. QUT Frank Moran Gallery, QLD, Australia.

Light, passing time, memory, loss and rebirth - what makes up the galaxy of your mind? I began the solo development process creating movement material from personal memory and by taking inspiration from the simplicity of Nature - the entangled branches and spider cobwebs, in particular. I wanted to draw on these different lines of ideas, considering them as constellations of human emotions, consciousness and experience. The resultant sculptural, performance installation has become a somatic contemplation for me and I hope to explore the potential for this sensitivity to be shared with the viewer. 

In Constellations of Thought (As It Fades) I’m combining an installation using glow-in-the-dark yarn and lighting with my solo practice that I’ve been developing with dance practitioner Kay Armstrong. I have been very interested in working with light and ephemeral works that are constantly in flux - all of these materials as metaphors for time and space. I wanted to play with the idea of refractions of light – how lighting changes and impacts what one can see. I wanted to activate primal senses through darkness and examine what it means to see small residues of the body in darkness.  

In the documentation of this webbed sculpture I’ve been thinking about wrapping, moving and reacting. How can the spectators navigate the space? When the spectators negotiate the space, I’m anticipating the space being dark - the spectators will have to map the space for themselves.

The work has been influenced by artists such as Tomas Saraceno, Ken Yonetani, Marina Abramovic and Ryoji Akita with Forsythe.

My primary questions in assembling my new performance installation work are:

• How can choreographic play enliven agency?  

• How do you facilitate someone's agency through a process of decontamination and entering a work?  

• What does it mean to move through the threshold between passive spectatorship into enlivened and performative spectatorship? What is it to go into this space? To pass through the threshold?

• When disrupting the expectation of a ‘critique situation’, does it alienate the viewer's experience, or add a layer of curiosity?  

See pictures below for process shots of installation documentation:

The images above are documentation of my choreographic journal documenting the process of development under Kay Armstrong which took place over three weeks.

The Sublime: a 'dreamt-of shadow'

Jacques Lacan begins one of his seminars on the Unconscious and Repetition (1981) by recalling an interrupted seminar a year earlier in which he developed the theme of anxiety. To nostalgia he dedicates the following poem by Louis Aragon, from Fou d’Elsa, entitled Contre-chant:

In vain your image comes to meet me
And does not enter me where I am who only shows it

Turning towards me you can find
On the wall of my gaze only your dreamt-of shadow.

I am that wretch comparable with mirrors
That can reflect but cannot see
Like them my eye is empty and like them inhabited

By your absence which makes them blind.

Aragon’s poem, and Lacan’s positioning of it within the domains of nostalgia, anxiety, repetition, and the unconscious, speak to the particularities of performance, and offer us material significant for the reading of performance, toward a reading of moving bodies.

What this poem calls forth is an acknowledgment of the disappearance of the body which performance insistently makes manifest: the impossibility of ever really seeing—actually perceiving—movement (Gilpin, 1996, p. 110). What does it mean to perceive movement? What can we really see? What can we really hear? 

Perhaps what makes movement so compelling is that it is compiled of ‘dreamt-of shadows’ — fleeting moments of absent images.

It's like an earthquake deep under the sea. In an unseen world, a place where light doesn't reach, in the realm of the unconscious. In other words, a major transformation is taking place. It reaches the surface, where it sets off a series of reactions and eventually takes form where we can see it with our own eyes... The best ideas are thoughts that appear, unbidden, from out of the dark (Murakami, 2018, p. 203).  

Meditation, the eternity of the universe and the sublime are ideas that I reflect on in my practice. In aesthetics, the sublime is the quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual, or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement, or imitation.  

Ideas that I have been musing on…

• Practices of austerity to reach enlightenment and to arrive at a realm beyond life and death.  

• Passing shadows, living beings as mere shadows crossing paths 

• Shifting boundaries between reality and unreality 

• Lux in tenebris (light in darkness) --> subjects emerging from darkness, lighting conventions and dramatic impressions 

• Darkness, light and stillness  

• Depth and clarity of sound 

• Displacement

• Glimpses 

• Intermingling 

• Deformation

• Distortions

References:

Gilpin, H. (1996). Lifelessness in movement, or how do the dead move? Tracing Displacement and Disappearance In Susan Leigh Foster (Eds.) Corporealities : dancing, knowledge, culture, and power (pp. 54-71). London: Routledge. 

Translation as cited in Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1981), 17, from Section I: The Unconscious and Repetition: “The Freudian Unconscious and Ours.”

Murakami, H. (2018). Killing Commendatore. London:  Penguin Random House.