We are each other, empathic, carried on it.
As an artist I work within collaborative relationships to realise choreographic projects. I’ve been working since about 2010 and create performances and installations for public spaces, galleries, screens and more. My background is in dance, psychology and visual arts and the work I do references those connections, especially around illusions, play, pattern, attention, learning and the relations between movement and perception. My collaborators and I, often develop ways of working anew for each project, and I have recently started to think of my projects like a homeschool to develop new skills and actually to understand how to work with each new set of relationships: people, space, audience, materials, context… I feel that I am often extending into areas of working where there is a steep learning curve, and this culture of professional development within my projects is maybe at the centre of my desire to keep working as an artist. The year of pandemic living (surviving) and working (surviving) has also – and obviously – highlighted a lot about how work is organised and valued. As we come up to International Women’s Day (which is also one year since my work was last performed live) I’ve been reflecting on the sorts of working environments I am most interested in supporting where I have power to choose or be part of shaping a culture.
In the last years two of my projects have been developed with intergenerational and international teams of female-identifying and non-binary people, people with differing relationships to femme identities. These two projects – Screensaver Series and Satelliser: a dance for the gallery – foreground and explore the dynamics within majority female-led processes.
Screensaver Series (2018) is a hypnotic dance and sound installation inspired by the obsolete screen-saving programs of early computing, properties of sensory architecture and therapeutic spaces. 5 dancers move in symmetry, connected through constantly changing touch to create morphing images and patterns like a kaleidoscope or moving Rorschach test with a soundscape generated live by Jamie Forth. Performances last about 40 minutes during which time the audiences in live spaces can move around to see the patterns created from the front or see how it all works by viewing from different angles. An idea in the work is how in dance training we are generally taught to hide the effort it takes to produce the image, the performance, whatever it is. In fact, I guess that is what most kinds of practice are aimed toward: mastery. In contrast, I was interested in thinking with this double act of what is made visible (beautiful dancing!) and the operations that make that possible which could also be a way to think about the usually gendered labours and emotional labours of maintaining, caring, cleaning up, picking up, anticipating and appeasing. Thematics of camouflage and code-switching also run through the work informed by some nascent thinking I was doing around 2015 about my own ASD diagnosis whilst first developing screen-saver dances. In these ways the work also references coding projects where multiple perspectives are simultaneously active and directly connected e.g., the background structures and instructions that create a usable interface (like with a website).
I’ve been touring the Screensaver Series since 2018 collaborating with a team of dancers. Through the process of rehearsing and performing this work we have honed our capacities to respond to the changing physicalities within the group as the dance happens differently in each iteration because of who is there, including the feedback we feel from the audiences. The work is very intimate and premised on trust and communication. As multiple dancers in the group journey through pregnancies and parenthood these patterns of support and listening are heightened, as well as the resonance of the life cycle images within the work: flying, getting born, nestle, huddle, settle, testing, scorpion and fireworks… how caregivers regulate the infant, extending their reflexes through touch.
Satelliser: a dance for the gallery (2016/22) is a durational performance work for an intergenerational group of women which was due to be performed in 2020. In this work the collaborating artists are co-workers who cooperate to maintain conversations whilst dancing over the course of a day or several days. The work was born out of interest in the feedback loops being performers and visitors seeing each other, and the kinds of work which can be mastered and leave enough energy to develop a social space around the work; where gossip, disagreeing and mutual learning can happen through exposure to winding conversations.
The work involves the layered, negotiated, communal and ongoing activities of holding space through dancing and conversation. Gendered labour is practiced, reinforced, made visible through simultaneity of tasks: responsibility for keeping the dance and conversation alive, the space oriented and doing all this without effort and fatigue. Or with effort which still has resource to be available to each other, and to the visitors.
– Shannon Stewart, 2018
The underlying pattern of the work is a spiral in the sense that coworkers and visitors can join and leave at any time, and the work of maintaining the conversation is done by people of all ages, with differing levels of investment in and familiarity with my intentions for the work. I had planned to develop this work in 2020 but instead my coworking team and I met online for discursive sessions as we went through multiple states and stages of lockdown across the 5 time zones that we ended up working in. The coworkers involved in the project differently navigated scales of upheaval, dislocation, political turmoil and changing personal circumstances including political resistance in Hong Kong, care homework in Sweden, pregnancy in Belgium, being stranded in New York City, solo parenting, career changes, self-isolation, continent moves, loss of work and mutual aid efforts everywhere. It was a challenging and ever-changing context to develop a work and the processes of being regularly together in conversation over 2020 have both amplified and challenged what I imagined this work might be and do.
Interesting things also happened as we talked through the months. People who had never met each other became intimates through sharing experiences across our differences. We developed craft practices alongside our conversations, tethering the talking to repetitive doings in the place of the dancing planned: Amaara wove baskets in Melbourne, Else embroidered in Malmö, I drew in Brixton. In November 2020 we shared our process in a 7 hour durational conversation broadcast over YouTube moving through periods of activity and rest as we talked about many things including: how to manage inherited objects you may not want, having arguments with teenagers in cars, being a twin and how to age with that, English politeness as ways of establishing debts, taking up space in different cultures, crafting as an activist practice, toxic positivity, virtual community, group dynamics in womens’ groups, the price of petrol, how protest is kept alive for generations, getting life out into the world one breath at a time.
Through both Satelliser and Screensaver, my collaborators and I model practices founded in listening and ceding space for others; for acting in accordance with a sensitivity for the edges of the group at each moment, for our shifting roles in supporting wellbeing, which is maybe to say that it feels like an ecology of sorts. I write ecology here and immediately another word also comes to mind. Economy. In a dialogue of physical touches, we can understand very immediately, and bodily, that whatever is touched touches back and through that relationship a lot of information is available about the needs within a relationship. Resistance, sliding, holding, letting go and always that leaving asks for staying, asks for staying somewhere else. In dancing the Screensaver Series we are attuned to the way that touch asks for support or a little momentum to help a shift in position, when a shift in weight is an invitation for flying or asks for a more comfortable configuration. Something similar happens through the discursive space of Satelliser, but its operations are closer to the everyday potential for being in relationships within a broader community. I learn a lot from these practices of moving and speaking together including challenge, support, commitment, familiarity and openness which also cycles through reckoning with our different lived experiences along intersectional lines: racism, ableism, ageism, classism, nationalism… and how these dialogue differently in different global contexts.
In sustaining these working practices over time with many people, I have been challenged around how to be in leadership with what I offer and invite in the changing circumstances. I think the learning that I want to reflect further on is in an image of circulation that goes through both works, and particularly that there is no “away” into which to throw our affect and not expect it to cycle back to meet us again through the complex interrelations of our social, political, natural cycles and systems. I want to believe that I am available for change through the acts that make up living, and that admission must contain the understanding that I will often have a lot to learn. I want to practice leadership, which is accountable without the defensiveness of rigidity, but which is in movement.
– Janine Harrington
