Eve Gong
Memory of This Land, 2024
Filmed by: Kuan Ya Wu
Music by: Eve Gong (Sampling from Dissolution Grip by KMRU)

 

 

 

 

 

 

---

Movement is life! 

 

I left some friends on the dunes of Ocean Beach a few weekends back, running down to the water to touch the cold pacific. I turned around and saw the fog grey sky and the tiny blurs of my loved ones way back behind me. Although I stayed very still, they moved me, running around with their dogs, between dune grass – little happy shivering dots. Moving is life, a friend Pilar recently said to me. All things, all around us, are buzzing at the frequency of these tiny dots, all of the time–even if imperceptible to us. 

This past year, I’ve become close with texts that document the late Marin-based modern dancer Anna Halprin’s dance processes. In her collected writings Moving Toward Life, she says, of the impact and possibilities of movement, “We are interested in avoiding the predictability of cause and effect.”1 Sometimes, more often of late, seemingly immovable sets of forces issue in brutality and destruction as if it were prewritten. Particularly in the midst of the war on Palestine. Our interfaces of communication oversaturate our daily intake receptors. Masses of people are locked into place, movement foreclosed, or forcibly and cyclically shepherded – it seems like scripture, contained, impenetrable. An oppressive force is no movement at all. Anna reminds me that movement, counter to this, is haptic, unknowable, always in the present. It is something we can valuate – which is to say that in the collisions of body and space and time we realize something that we couldn’t see or feel before- we reveal hidden myths. We can assess that, learn from it, surprise ourselves, and touch others.

In contrast to devastation, and following this thought, I don’t believe the present is in Chaos. Chaos begins. Chaos is a possibility. As the ancients knew and still teach us today, gods are not flat ideas. Chaos contains all that could be and from Chaos comes Eros (love) and Gaia (Earth), also Tartarus (sterile darkness) and Nyx (night). Predetermination, not feeling as though one has control over their narrative, this might be the affect of now, which by contrast has order – too much of it. Donna Haraway, in Staying with the Trouble, tasks us with movement, through an encouragement to stir up trouble, to be troublesome “critters,” in the face of devastation.2 It is necessary to move, to jitter, to be more chaotic when we feel displeasure with our lives. 

Last week Nico, Adam, and I painted the gallery. We started, like dancers, with huge rolling sticks making stripes of the walls with primer in long swift motions that left my shoulders sore the next day. The floors became white, the sticky black of the back gallery returned to meet its siblings, all sections of the space, uniform. As I was cutting corners with white paint on a section by the front door, I realized the surface I was covering was entirely dust. I forwent wiping off such a small plot of the space (sorry Nico!) and went over it, trapping these particles into the gallery. I wondered if that froze them in time, and if we were sealing off past sets of movements to set the stage for the next. 

Our forthcoming exhibition will be entirely performance based with Jasmine Zhang. Last time we spoke with each other, Jasmine was coming back, or going to, an acupuncturist in the East Bay. I saw an acupuncturist when I lived in New York, during a time I was experiencing some odd health symptoms. At my first session, my practitioner, having scanned my body, and examining my tongue diagnosed a serious lack of movement – a “stuckness.” A dear friend of mine later that month asked me when the last time I experienced wonder during my daily life was, as he was worried it was gone for him. The cost of everything seemed to rise around my friends and I then, we went out less, we settled into positions that got us by, we were wondering if age was settling in, making us “realists” whatever that means. This time feels predetermined, looking back.

Since meeting Nico back in October, I’ve not only felt a dissolution of some of that stuckness, but also noticed a loosening of it in others around me. My friend has found wonder again, I experience and witness spontaneous conversations more often, people seem to be exploring mountains and beaches, building things again and playing with toys, old inns and saloons that nearly predate the state become sets for theatrics yet again, pop music is the moment. It is all a bit more chaotic. Season two of Climate Control will have even more movement to it. It will be haptic, surely sometimes a bit clumsy as things roll in and out of each other, colliding in space and time with nothing but the possibility of what might happen after, and what we might learn from that.

–Emily 

 

1.  Moving Toward Life: Five Decades of Transformational Dance, Anna Halprin, ed. Rachel Kaplan. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press of New England, 1995, 14.
2. Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble. Duke University Press, 1.