Adventures In Duration III

In November last year, I danced for two hours, then wrote about it. I danced for four hours, then wrote about it. I danced for eight hours… but I never wrote about it.

I think this is because I had little to say. Dancing for so long exhausted me mentally and physically. When I finished at 5pm, I said to those watching that it felt “like five hours of dancing and then three hours of torture”¹. To be clear, I don’t regret the attempt, but it’s not one I am likely to repeat. I think what lies behind that statement is something that broke that day - not my interest in improvisation, but something about the way that I engage with an idea while dancing.

Knowing that my target was eight hours, I gave myself a lot of leeway. As discussed in previous articles, my only rule was to always be moving. This meant that I was more inclined to neglect ideas before use, to abandon them in use, to let them stagnate in a holding pattern rather than evolve. The goal was, especially as the day went on, more about maintenance than creativity. Which was fine for a day, but sometimes I worry that mentality - that shift in priorities - has made its way into much of my dancing, especially solo dancing in studios. In the scheme of my dancing, eight hours does not seem long enough to retrain my brain in a consequential way, but they were very significant hours for my nervous system; indeed, for all my systems. Given all this, my focus today will be on my audience for the Eight Hour Dance - their experience, my experience, and the interface between the two.

I danced alone in the beautiful FLING studio in Bega, on Djiringanj land. The dance was live-streamed publicly on YouTube. Viewers also had access to a playlist of the tracks that I was using for the day, though they were on shuffle and for copyright reasons the sound from the studio was muted. Audience members could leave comments and many did, often dropping in and out throughout the day.

Many of the comments relate to practical questions or technical difficulties from the audience:

9:00 Mark Macdougall Are you able to indicate when to start the playlist so it’s synced?

12:03 Jacqui Maida Uh oh has other people’s stopped or is it just me?

There were, of course, messages of support. I couldn’t see them at the time, but they made lovely reading that evening, and a year later.

9:25 Carlie Shaw THIS IS AMAZING GO REUBEN WOOHOO

1:15 Mark Macdougall Checking in, go Reuben. Still going!

4:03 Jonathan Sinatra 7hrs down

Many other comments wondered or speculated about what activity I may have been partaking in. Between my small size in a stationary frame, the absence of sound, and the mysteries inherent in movement improvisation, the material of my dance was not immediately accessible, especially to my non-dancing viewers.

9:29 Jonathan Sinatra Is it one dance or a collection of different dances?

11:47 Jonathan Sinatra A “contact high” as an alert state “every part of me feels very alive - turned on, awake, present, ready, both comfortable”

1:03 Jonathan Sinatra For me, at this moment, you are in a carnival in Venice

And there was a communal gallows humour about the ridiculous odyssey we found ourselves on:

1:14 Alice Atkinson oop did I just see a double step to the left amongst the one step forward one step left pattern??? What an exciting plot twist!!!

4:54 Jett Archer The 24 hour news cycle has ruined us. You simply do not have to entertain us for this amount of hours on end

It was a funny kind of dialogue separated by the day; I greeted them as I set the space, they commentated throughout the entire day, and then I addressed them at the end. I suppose this made it a sort of monologue for eight hours before it resumed being a dialogue after 5:00pm. Perhaps it was a multi-logue, if you will, between the different witnesses in my audience. There were viewers that surprised me with their presence, and YouTube informs me that dozens more visited silently throughout the day.

This raises the question of what my relationship to the audience was, and the inverse question of what the audience’s relationship to me was.

My relationship to the audience was almost imaginary. During the hours of my dancing, I knew that they could be there, that someone likely was there, but not who or how many or how they were watching. It was Schrödinger’s audience. It was an odd grey zone between the live feedback of improvising before an audience and dancing alone in the studio. I was doing neither because I was doing both. I had the accountability of being watched without the buzz of feeling their responses. I had the freedom of being alone without the torpor it can create.

Each audience member’s relationship to me was their own to choose or discover. Perhaps part of the appeal was being there for a significant moment in my practice, or seeing the material change over time as they visited throughout the day. But it was a comment from my mum that has got me thinking the most one year later:

1:41 Jude Di Manno Loving my gorgeous Reuben through this incredible, committed feat. Really been thinking about the 9 to 5 and capitalism, etc.

Turning to the first great theoriser of capitalism, Marx says that anything which is consumed for utility by people is a “use-value”². Furthermore, “a use-value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because human labour in the abstract has been embodied or materialised in it”³ and its value is equal to the amount of that labour. In this way improvised dance is a sliver of a niche within a sector - entertainment - that already has a tenuous relationship between labour and utility. Did the above services I rendered to my witnesses equal the value of my eight-hours’ labour? My audience also paid with their attention to view the dancing… does this mean we exchanged for a sum total of nothing, each spending our labouring power to create no additional use-value?

“A thing can be a use-value, without creating value”⁴. Which leaves me asking if the inverse is true; can a thing create value without being a use-value?

¹Macdougall Di Manno R, 2024, archival, 8:15:33

²  Marx K, 2018, ed. Griffith H, The Communist Manifesto & Selected Writings, Pan Macmillan, The Smithson, 6 Briset Street London, page 140

³  Marx K, 2018, ed. Griffith H, The Communist Manifesto & Selected Writings, Pan Macmillan, The Smithson, 6 Briset Street London, page 143

⁴  Marx K, 2018, ed. Griffith H, The Communist Manifesto & Selected Writings, Pan Macmillan, The Smithson, 6 Briset Street London, page 146