The Sacred Something

Alison D’Amato

Form	Themes	Histories	Politics	Philosophies	Experiments
image manifesto community theatre dance instructions prose objects artist statement experiemnt critique speculative magical realism	audience otherness agency holistic language present non-human landscape stillness immersive documentation conceptual ecology place reality attention excess subjectivity possibility impossibility consciousness spectatorship immateriality network choreography movement things somatics improvisation ephemerality kinetics composition dance embodiment space	event arts non-human environment	ecology aesthetics	ontology phenomenology Gilles Deleuze thought experiment ethics epistemology Martin Heidegger materialism actor network theory Bruno Latour Jane Bennett

Imagine yourself in a large, empty room – just four white walls, a ceiling, and a smooth expanse of floor that has been cleared for dancing.

Now let the room dissolve and recognize the cluttered landscape that actually surrounds you.

This landscape offers things up to you – and your body takes its place among them. Rest for a moment. You do not need to make anything appear; so much is already here, and you are not even close to being in control.

Release yourself from being the most important thing in the room; your consciousness will engulf you and make this difficult but remember your consciousness (like your body) is only one thing here.

There is a desire in you to dance or there is not. Stillness is not more important or thoughtful than movement, and if you feel that the things coming from your body are garbage then just go ahead and fill your landscape with junk.

A block of wood with traces of an expanding ring structure. Rusty screws. Vines, palms, pink flowers. Concrete.

Question your own assumptions about “following” things – especially impulses. Impulses-as-things and results-as-things can be totally separate, or they can coexist in a non-hierarchical relationship. Bodily things are felt, imagined, or they are performed. Habits are things living in the body, and it’s fine to release your judgement about them. Self-critical judgements are things in you too, no more or less important than anything else.

Dance only looks more ephemeral than other kinds of objects from a very anthropomorphic perspective on time.

Sinking into the complexity of an imagined bodily interiority (visualizing physical parts and processes) can be overwhelming, but useful. Visualization can also open up pathways into interiorities beyond your body, extending the skin of your physical self.

Notice that your landscape extends vertically as well as horizontally. Notice where things are stacked and resting on each other; you do not have to see this layering to know that it’s there. That includes rock, soil, the soles of your shoes, your body, vines, palms, pink flowers, clouds.

Of course you do not barrel around, crashing into everything. Your body is soft, and you respect its softness. If you get near a rough intransigent surface, you stop the forward motion. Causality is not the most important thing. The relation with the surface is not the most important thing. The event of stopping places you in a situation rich with specificity.

Commit to your own evolution; there is no need to demonstrate being pulled this way and that. Everything around you draws closer and recedes from you at once. Let the things around you be real (and uncontained by your perception), even if new perspectives bring the realness of various things better into focus. Allow things to shed their uses, drop the map that takes you from here to there. Reacting to the environment and things in the environment will happen, though it’s not a goal. You do not need to “make anything” out of anything.

The mind works quickly (even more quickly the deeper it is in self-consciousness), but the body does not have to represent this quickness through movement.

Leave space for frustration; we are not used to letting things be.

The waterfall as composite thing: contour upon contour, a Russian doll. Rock face, spurts of water that distinguish themselves completely one from the other, a tiny succulent growing in the most minute crook of soil. Other, leafier plants, nourished and pummeled by the relentless downward water-motion.

It’s totally fine if no one watching can tell the difference between the thing that you are doing and any other thing!

Know that sequencing will be there but try to release yourself from performing it. Replace the “and then, and then” with a “now, now.”

The environment is flowering, you are flowering. Your body is part of a vast symphony. The hummingbird, the shovel, the motorcycle, all the rest.

This is the body I bring, thing among things. Into the room, blank white page—yet that sort of space is never the case. Just open your eyes: “let the room dissolve and recognize the cluttered landscape.” Once you do it “offers things up to you—and your body takes its place among them.” For D’Amato, the body, that sacred something, shares its being with things. There is no ghost in the machine removed from matter. Consciousness, that thinking thing, and the thoughts it thinks, are all just things.

A world of things. Things are not necessarily objects, for they require no subjects to act on them, to behold them, to think them into significance. In this world of things actions (movement, thought, perception) are also things. We delude ourselves to see them as different in kind than “Rusty screws. Vines, palms, pink flowers. Concrete.” These change too; even monuments change, given world enough and time. Their inertia only appears from the temporal perspective of human actions. Old rocks may regard us all as fleeting instances, mere actions in time. (Whereas insects who live a day may see us all as things, given, immutable.) Every thing is a process; every process is a thing. From where are you looking, acting?

Our temporary presence among other things passes on, dissolves, while resting for a little lifetime of days between things, relating to things. But this too often happens hungrily, imperialistically: driving and collecting things, processing and producing things, consuming and discarding things, representing things, trading things. The world of things can disappear into our economies of desire, burned up in subjective activity. But D’Amato’s dancer, you, can open a gesture that goes the other way: an act of “letting things be”—letting things meet you, and each other, without hierarchy or judgment. Not chaotically; with a kind of care that allows the soft thing of your body to avoid sharp edges, to sediment among things. Like the composite thing of the waterfall: “contour upon contour, a Russian doll. Rock face, spurts of water.” An ecosystem of things. Their interrelation is not dictated first of all by causality or intention. Rather, the “environment is flowering, you are flowering. Your body is part of a vast symphony.”

Then how do things appear? How can they matter in the realm of representation, or be distinguished as foreground? No need. D’Amato invites you—the perceiver, the dancer, the human, the sacred something—into specific, concrete moments of tension and release. A moving toward, a moving away from this thing, and that, and that. No perspective exists outside these things; perspective too is a thing, and meshes with things seen. Grounded in the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty or the choreographic scores of William Forsythe, D’Amato asks us to move into the encounter with the world without taking over or insisting on our presence standing out. Flow, grow, appear, disappear; to whom? Any “whom” is just another thing among things. The body from which any spectator sees is a “composite thing”: flesh, veins, bowels, behaviors, beliefs, bites, bits. The process of seeing is a composite thing too. And the emptiness between things is a thing. Rubbing up against each other (which is also a thing), things thing, and thinking things think about things, which is just their thing.

About the Author

Alison D’Amato

Alison D'Amato is a researcher, choreographer, and performer based in Los Angeles. She is Assistant Professor of Practice at University of Southern California's Kaufman School of Dance, and has also taught dance history, theory and practice at UCLA and CalArts. She holds a PhD from UCLA (Culture and Performance), an MA in Dance Theater Practice from Trinity Laban (London) and a BA in Philosophy from Haverford College. As a practitioner, her work has long been entwined with her academic research. In 2015 she completed a dissertation on contemporary choreographic scores (Mobilizing the Score: Generative Choreographic Structures, 1960-Present). Her dances and scores have been presented in Los Angeles (PAM Residencies, Pieter PASD, The Hammer Museum, HomeLA, and Anatomy Riot), New York (Movement Research, the Tank, AUNTS, Waxworks, Dixon Place, and BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange), San Francisco, Philadelphia, the UK, and Poland. As a performer, she has worked with choreographers such as Rebecca Bruno, Jmy James Kidd, Maria Hassabi, and Simone Forti.

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Book Selections

The Sacred Something

The Sacred Something : Gloss

About the Author

About the Author