maura nguyễn donohue is the Writer-in-Residence for Platform 2021: The Dream of the Audience and Platform 2022: The Dream of the Audience (Part II). Her reflections on the Platform 2022 performances and events will be posted, accumulatively here, in Issue 14 of the Danspace Project Online Journal. Her reflections on Platform 2021 can be found in the Online Journal Issue 12 and in the Platform 2021-2022 catalogue.

In this essay, donohue reflects on her role as a witness, in conversation with Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener’s Platform 2022 premiere, RETROFIT: a new age, their words both in print and spoken and their improvisational practice, Desire Lines.

This essay is offered in both audio and text. Read or listen below.

Whether Elusian, Druidic or Đao Mau there is no theology nor membership requirement, there is a belief in the lands we inhabit. Part of this essay was written while sitting on someone else’s dock on the solstice on 100 Acre Cove of the Wampanoag Trail named after the almost entirely eradicated “People of the First Light,” the welcomers to the settler colonists of Plymouth Rock. I watched the Strawberry Moon rise in the other direction a week ago. I’m doubling up live-in care for my elderly father with a broken hip, Parkinson’s and dementia and dog-sitting for their neighbor. Fortunately, the dog sitting includes dock sitting and I’ve been salty on the skin during some versions of this text. I’ve also wept from overwhelm, dashed into a nearby forest for a brief off-duty stint and just today, in one last pass-through, raged at continued efforts to steal our bodily sovereignty. 

if you can’t see the small

you won’t know what the dirt is screaming

one grief at a time

that the whales are singing

warning songs

that there is a shudder in all of life now

a premonition:

change everything

for everything is changing

-adrienne maree brown, if you can’t see the small

martyr (n.)

“one who bears testimony to faith,” especially “one who willingly suffers death rather than surrender his or her religious faith,” specifically “one of the Christians who in former times were put to death because they would not renounce their beliefs,” late Old English martyr, from Late Latin martyr… in Christian use “martyr,” literally “witness.”

This Greek word is sometimes said to be related to mermera “care, trouble,” from mermairein “be anxious or thoughtful,” …source also of Sanskrit smarati “remember,” Latin memor “mindful”), however Beekes has phonetic objections to this and suggests it is rather a loan-word from Pre-Greek. For sense shift from abstract “testimony” to “a witness,” compare French témoin “witness” from Latin testimonium; English witness (n.) “one who testifies,” originally “testimony.” [1]

Witness, Testify, Judge, Jury. Wandering the Etymology Online Dictionary for a history of how the word witness had been ascribed to judicial law proceedings, I caught the late 14th-century Christian use of it as a literal translation of the Greek martyrs, “one who bears testimony to faith” aaaaaaaand… the word martyr has a relationship with mermera “care, trouble”and Sanskrit smarati “remember.” As the unofficial Danspace Project Platform archivist [2], I can remember over and over that the soul of the Platform curatorial ethos is grown out of care, and as such it is charged with keeping the faith for artist, audience and adjudicant alike—that art is essential to our sentience and regeneration. I can remember that Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble populated my writing about last year’s Platform. So, let us pray for more troubling.

In the Japanese aesthetic concept of wabi-sabi 侘寂 it is in our ability to appreciate the natural imperfections, impermanence and incompleteness of existence that one can find oneself, 1) without a self and 2) at one with the natural order. For many on this side of the globe, this sensibility can be grown in direct contact with the non-human-built world. For some, it might take shinrin-yoku 森林浴 or forest bathing, to tune into how to be an ‘impartial’ witness to the true laws of an always changing world. As Rashaun Mitchell writes in “It Takes a Long Time,” his contribution to the Platform 2022 catalogue: A bird of prey swoops low along the creek and lands on the branch in front of me. The creek ripples between us. I think, if I look too pointedly in its direction, I might spook this hunter. I turn my face away, eyes askance. A dance of stillness takes place. What is incidental looking? 

To witness incidentally, without judgment, as acts of faith, care, and remembering has been this Platform’s siren call. Platform 2022: The Dream of the Audience (Part II) was not only to return to a live, in-person viewership, it was also  to find each other again in a world of forces larger than one human being. In “An excerpt from Instruction Manual from Scratch,” Silas Riener writes about how the trees around his and Rashaun’s house tell stories with their bodies – evidence of what has happened to them. Blight, windstorm, battle… 

For over a decade, I have been witness to a human, my father, whose fibers have grown chaotic from blight and battle. Parkinson’s disease leaves evidence of his exposure to chemical warfare (Agent Orange) through involuntary tremors. More recently, dementia crept in like an insidious windstorm, clearing out branches in his brain. And, most recently, a broken hip wracked the trunk of a once great tree. I think about the built world that aligned itself with straight lines when it could have remained in the wabi-sabi of imperfections, of knotted limbs and wide, curving entrances, sloping and spacious enough for all of us to move through. 

In wabi-sabi, it is easy to remain integrated after injury or decay. In fact, the art of mending broken pottery by highlighting the cracks, known as kintsugi, is one of the most common examples of this aesthetic. To reclaim and repair, rather than replace, to celebrate the cracks and rust, rather than camouflage, to mend rather than dispose of one another is to sit together upon a longer continuum. I often have to be reminded of this amidst the panic of our collective finitude. There is only so much time. But, rather than sit in the forever new, the soundbite, the 140 characters, the 300-word abstract, Danspace Platforms have often been the portal to a subtler time stream—to long-form presentations, conversations with fluid time containers and the exquisite grace of restoration and evolving artistic processes.

So I entered the space of Rashaun + Silas’s RETROFIT: a new age, dropped my many bags full of reclaimed plastic bags (for a residency at LMCC’s Art Center), into Senior House Manager, Jordan Morley’s, caring hands and then dropped my tired ol’ butt down on a riser. As I sprawled out my legs, leaned sideways onto another riser, and tried to settle my shaky nervous system down, I realized I was pretty rusty at audiencing. Buuuuuut… I was so grateful that I wasn’t required to stay still or in a chair. To be rusty, weathered, worn is to have been around and accepting of the changes coming. To be in St. Mark’s again was to be re-learning how to watch a dance performance again and how to reclaim and repair the endangered practice of sharing space.

During the Platform opening event, Conversations Without Walls: The Dream of The Artist, as shared in the Video Postcard #1, Rashaun stated I completely stopped dancing. I lost any interest in dancing and making sort of, I don’t know, [an] existential crisis there. …, I felt like I was dancing for the wind for the sun for the birds. It sounds a little bit cheesy. But they became my audience. In this rusty imperfect state, I felt myself observing with the delight that I, as Platform Writer-in-Residence, an official Platform witness, could just practice observing incidentally. Things were happening, will happen, have happened. I could be there for some of it, like the wind. Like the wind moving through a flock of birds perched next to me while the sun sat three risers up and to the right. I could be within a fleeting ecosystem of observable changes.

Rashaun and Silas have developed an improvisational process called Desire Lines. Growing from trails in nature and landscape architecture, it offers shifting and emergent models for coexistence, assimilation, and rebellion. Our choices create a world built of its own desires, a provisional utopia constantly making and unmaking itself. In the catalogue, Rashaun shared a lived experience that grew its way into the choreographic thinking that developed with Silas for RETROFIT: a new age, a four-hour performance installation: On any given day I pick things up and put them over there. Stacks and piles. Big and small. I let them accumulate one at a time… I sit and watch others pick things up and put them over there, witness bodies and materials in front of, energies around, and thoughts inside me, accumulate. 

I learn to watch again.  

Along with Rashaun and Silas, dancers, Morgan Amirah Burns, Savannah Gaillard, Jennifer Gonzalez, Eleanor Hullihan, Cori Kresge, and Mina Nishimura build and dismantle, construct and deconstruct inside Kathy Kaufman’s lighting design. There is the individual, there is the collective, there is the occasional impossibility of balance in our current Newtonian agreement of physics… there is utility and transcendence, the mundane and mysterious, there’s a fail, there’s a joke, a step, a stool, a statuesque perch. There is an assemblage of many small parts on behalf of a holistic and integrated world view, built within many lines of desire.

if you can’t see the small

you will keep leaping from built thing

to built thing

begging the sky to rain only on you

you’ll become a tyrant,

reaching, shuffling the cards until you see only your own vision

massive

but no one else can see it, 

-adrienne maree brown, if you can’t see the small

I often imagined a Platform experience as like making it to the town square of the village life that I’m living, on the massively overburdened Lenape island of Manahatta, or a pop-up boutique from a visiting craftsperson with desirable wares. 10 years ago, I described an encounter with David Zambrano’s “Soul Project,” from the inaugural Platform curated by Ralph Lemon, I Get Lost, as like visiting an open market in SE Asia, but especially since the Ishmael Houston-Jones and Will Rawls curated, Platform 2016: Lost and Found and the Eiko Otake, Judy Hussie-Taylor, and Lydia Bell curated, A Body in Places, it’s often to a Danspace Project Platform events where I find myself coming to be in congregation. As audience, writer or conversant, I am one who joins others to be in collective prayer, not to a dogmatic deity, but to worship the prayer of possibility, to whisper our humanity into the ecosystem as a tiny, “small is all” blossom of faith. 

if you can’t see the small

you miss the whole miracle

it is all moments nearly missed, private,

impossible to perform, or

perfectly acted, context and all

moments of faith hit the surface and change it

shivering us open

to love

to our ridiculous longings

-adrienne maree brown, if you can’t see the small

But prayers, despite their common form as an insistent and urgently gasped-in-desperation plea, take time to accumulate into manifestation, like Rashaun’s piles, like the many impermanent structures the ensemble grew together. The prayer that is directed energy towards better conditions cannot be rushed. So, I come to pray, to worship. But, not in idolatry. Nor in a mystical sectarianism. I’m no martyr, in the dominant sense of the word. But, as the etymology above suggests I do bear testimony to my faith in dance. I come to witness, care, trouble, remember. I’m here in the faithful belief that we will be, become, and be becoming in these spaces. It is through our many lines of desire that we accumulate the many covenants of resistance to the onslaught of tyranny in our larger world.