Can I Let You Fall?

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Notes

1 Performance Symposium, Auckland University, New Zealand, 2011. Chris Braddock presented a paper ‘Laresa Kosloff and the Force of the Name’ (2011) in which he discussed animism and magical thinking with reference to Laresa Kosloff and her artwork Cast (2011). This paper was published as ‘The spirit of language in things: Laresa Kosloff’ (Braddock 2013).

2 Meltdown was performed as part of Rosemary Lee's Square Dances at Dance Umbrella in 2011 and again in 2012. See Dance Umbrella/ Rosie Lea website, http:// danceumbrella.co.uk/ rosemary-lee-2

3 An interest that began as a study of the aesthetics of beauty in dance from the upward linearity of ballet to the somatic grounded body of new dance (Claid 2006); a shift from modernist fast linear flow to slowed down fragmented stillness of post-modernist conceptual performance (Lepecki 2005); to maps of assemblage, rhizome and becoming that contradict verticality of deep-rooted history (Deleuze and Guattari 1980); to a performance of gender and a falling/failing into queer gender (Claid 2006).

4 Bourriaud's book Relational Aesthetics (2002) considers contemporary arts practices through a lens of the inter-human, hands-on encounter. ‘As part of a “relationist” theory of art, intersubjectivity does not only represent the social setting for the reception of art, which is its “environment”, its “field” (Bourdieu), but also becomes the quintessence of artistic practice’ (Bourriaud 2002: 22).

5 See also Frank Staemmler: ‘[Y]ou cannot not interpret … . The minute you perceive or understand something, you perceive or understand it as something; that is, you relate it to a category, you distinguish it from something else’ (2009: 74).

6 With thanks to Kuldip Singh Barmi, for participating in this task. His words were recorded while he was falling. Given the length of this paper, his critical reflection is not included here.

7 In this way Buber and Levinas differ in their practice of intersubjective relations. Buber's practice of face-to-face encounter is equal, between you and me, reversible and interactive. Williams (1996) describes Levinas' critique of Western civilization's demand for totalization and Sameness saying that Levinas' notion of an ethical self-in-relation ‘inverts the hierarchy implicit in what he refers to as the “egological”: the ontic imperialism and ethnocentrism of the narcissistic self/other binary, within which the ego-self is demarcated psychologically and corporeally in terms of proper (ty), capital and ontology’ (Williams 1996: 27). Williams calls on Levinas' ethics to philosophically underpin the practice of contact improvisation.

8 To fail draws from the Latin fallere - to beguile, elude, pass; from the Sanskrit sphal - to tremble; from Anglo- Saxon feallen - to fall; and from German fallan - to fall (Skeat 1893).

9 For Volonsky, uprightness denotes honesty:

10 I am reminded of intersubjective tensions in the relational roles of witness and mover in Authentic Movement practices, which ‘brings one to an exquisite place between will and surrender. Paradoxically, the two unite: beauty and/ or chaos, clarity and/or darkness converge into one dance’ (Plevin 2007: 105).

11 It is historical trauma of the Jewish holocaust that urges Levinas to emphasize the ethics of face-to-face encounter: ‘[A]t the outset I hardly care what the other is with respect to me, that is his own business; for me, he is above all the one I am responsible for’ (Levinas, 1982: 103).

12 Four ‘ultimate concerns’ of existential psychology: ‘death, freedom, isolation and meaninglessness’ (Yalom 1931: 80).

13 Perhaps there is a parallel here with Heidegger's existential authenticity described by Large as: ‘Not … actualizing this or that possibility, rather it is facing the nothingness which is at the heart of your existence as nothing and holding fast to it.’ (Large 2008: 73) Heidegger describes inauthenticity is fallenness

14 See also existential psychologists/ psychotherapists: Yalom (1931), (2008), Spinelli (2005), (2007), and Deurzan & Arnold-Baker (2005).

15 Camus (2005).

16 Text message April 2012, personal communication. Nigel Charnock died on 1 August 2012. http:// www.nigelcharnock.co.uk