The materials from which I constructed this text stem from work that, for lack of better words, attempts to trace the invisible. Intereferencias and 8 DAYS are both meetings between contemporary dance and performance practitioners. Despite differences, they share a special function as times and locations where we, performance makers, have the opportunity to re­examine our own practices and contexts with the support of our colleagues. The following ‘outlines’ are themselves partial objects, meant to proffer not the fully formed content required in documenting a time, but rather, points of intersection – where feelings collide with thought. For simplicity’s sake, only given names appear in the text.

La BARN was special. Some feng shuior subtle force that Tedd cultivates pushes you inward like a gravity between people. Or maybe it wasn’t Tedd, maybe it was the curation of the project… the fact it was funded by 10 Gates Dancing, Public Recordings and ourselves… the weather… the lake… maybe it was that some lived in large luxurious tents or that it never rained once the entire time. Or maybe it did rain and now I have forgotten. Whatever it was, it was wonderful.

On one of the last days, we walked together but apart, in silence. Tedd lead us from site to site, each place bringing a different feeling. After walking uphill in the beating sun next to fields of tall grass for what felt quite long, we emerged into the hollows of a shaded meadow dressed softly with the decay of dried lichen and fallen leaves. Changes such as this accumulated to a choreography of emotion and sensation, a show of one for oneself, arranged by our leader who, no doubt, led us by some strange, unknown feeling. We followed in single file, five to ten metres apart, travelling a long line that, from a bird’s eye view, may have resembled ancient rituals of fidelity or sacrifice.

What force was governing the distance between bodies on that walk? Why did I stay far enough away to not see Ame in front of me, yet close enough to not fear finding myself lost? What kept me from establishing a new line?

The question “How do we work together?” Can quickly become “How does one navigate through conflict?”. The Interferencias project is a self-­organized group of roughly twenty-­five performance artists founded in 2009. The group meets regularly in various residency centres around Europe and South America; the primary goal of meetings is to research methods of collaboration. Work shifts from autonomous research to group work, meaning people shift in and out of working on Interferencias. The introduction of new people, however, into this strange performance organization has proved difficult.

In hindsight, now some months after our last encounter, I think the problem was rooted in the basic rhetoric of the group – a desire to be open to possibility and potential. Despite the mandate of being open and accepting of everyone, the project turned in on itself. Tensions and conflict emerged within the group to the point where every idea was met with scrutiny. How can we simply dive into action? So much time was spent on being together and orienting bodies and histories that work stopped completely.

In August 2012, we were in Vienna, hosted in part by the ImpulsTanz festival and WUK, a municipal art centre. At first, we were twenty-­four artists, all of whom were continuing from the previous full group meeting in Mexico in 2010. Since then, many of us had met in smaller groups for book editing or grant writing fiestas and other rather light, spontaneous meetings between friends and colleagues. In Vienna, we were faced with the addition of ten new ‘local’ participants to fulfil our funding agreement with WUK. As these new people began showing up, excitement grew. Who were these new voices and how would our trajectory change as a whole within what had, up until this point, been a self-­motivated political structure?

Que horror. We had resisted naming ourselves as a group. This deliberate ignorance brought forth unforeseen consequences, namely, we neglected to work on establishing a group. The new participants did not share our history of togetherness. It was as though they lacked some unspoken bond that had formed between the other artists over time. Now it is time that seems most important – time together.

Days began a little later due to the living conditions in Vienna. Around noon, after some physical training we would sit together and begin discussing what to do. Amongst thirty-­four people, the conversation was slow, precarious and subject to rapid change. This volatile environment for working was a fertile place for criticality and knowledge production.

One thing I have come to understand: there are things that will be done and things that will not be done, the act of doing is equally important as the act of not doing. In fact these two things, action and non-­action, are two sides of the same coin wherein every act of doing is also an act of not doing and vice versa.

With this in mind, every proposal that occurred during this meeting of thirty-­four performance artists, every action that took place, was enacted through the sacrifice of countless other proposals; actions were laid down in service of something unformed, un­thought and unspoken.

Michael speaks often of his ambivalence towards a preciousness he witnesses in contemporary dance. At one time, he dubbed it one of many tyrannies of the form. When I was under his direction at Dancemakers, this resonated with my young cavalier attitude towards what I understood to be dance. However, I was mistaken. I isolated this preciousness as a purely aesthetic problem failing to see the precious ways in which I was making dance. During my time at Dancemakers, Michael would often quote Anne Bogart in saying, “Hold on tightly. Let go loosely.” I would hear this repeated but never actually integrate it into the methods I used to make work. Instead, it seemed to effect only the way I made choices within work. Since that time, what has revealed itself, while somehow remaining obscure, is not the precarious state established in the word “precious”, but a relationship between thinking, doing and making that entrusts death and decay as equally valuable to growth and living.