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In this essay, Nora Raine Thompson asks epic questions alongside their reflections on a shared evening between Jade Manns and Glenn Potter-Takata that premiered at Danspace Project in December, 2024. 

Read and/or listen. 

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I am in St. Mark’s Church, again.[1] A place where “some still worship,” as is invoked in the land and site acknowledgment that precedes every show at Danspace Project. These dances, created by Jade Manns and Glenn Potter-Takata, seem to ask us about the bounds and shapes of worship, or, as defined by my macbook’s dictionary, “formal expressions of reverence.” Manns and Potter-Takata approach enormity (Kingdom) and mystery (Immateriality) of the sublime (Supreme) distinctively, but the two works make sense side by side, with the performers in each piece sharing a kind of unshakeable precision and focus. This dense carefulness is a fitting aesthetic for the cosmic questions these pieces generate for me: What if everything is God? What if emptiness is full of everything? 

Storybook of Everything

In Jade Manns’ Kingdom, five performers seem to chart, or rather, dance, a kind of evolutionary history of everything, at first tidy and eventually more agitated and layered. Four dancers (Kalliope Piersol, Owen Prum, Noa Rui-Piin Weiss, and Zo Williams), donning striking monochromatic, very human, costumes (by Kate Williams) emulate non-human animal shapes and movements over and over. They dance barefoot, backed by a soundscape (by Derek Baron) of cooing birds and rumbling earth, slipping from one gleaming sculptural configuration to the next. Hands become antlers, arms become flapping wings, leaps make feet into hooves. Faces remain stoic as bodies engage in an effort of becoming. Yet each pose seems to invoke a depiction of an animal more than an animal itself. I am reminded of cave paintings, museum dioramas, textbook illustrations, nature documentaries: instances where animals’ unique shapes and behaviors are highlighted with intention and clarity; moments when animals are represented, framed, and put into direct relation with our human gaze. Such an association is generated through the storybook quality of the choreography and the inevitability of a human audience. 

The fifth performer (Isa Spector), is another watcher, who ambles through and around and above the dancing menagerie with an interested yet nonchalant attentiveness to the action. I notice Spector for the first time, shod in black sneakers, as they sit down across from the audience on a carpeted riser, mirroring us. This is the same moment, I think, that I notice the sound of pen on paper. The human has entered, the gaze has entered, the word has entered. The dramaturg (Spector is credited as dramaturg as well as performer in the program) has entered. 

The dancers don’t pay any attention to Spector, or the audience, for that matter. This fourth wall is thick. The performers’ insulation seems to amplify this sense of a highly choreographed vision of Nature. We are witnessing the unfolding of a story, crafted precisely, attempting, perhaps, to portray the exquisiteness of the many modes of Nature, the mutability of its substance, from some imagined outside. And while dancers work their bodies into pristine and genuine becomings, they are watched.

I am referring to capital “N” Nature here and “modes” and “substances” because these are terms used by 17^th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza in his Ethics, which I know served as a textual backdrop for Manns’ choreographic process. Spinoza was famously excommunicated from the Jewish community for arguing against a transcendent Judeo-Christian God who created a world out of free will, separate from himself. Instead, with a set of philosophical propositions that can arguably be summed up with a simple phrase–“God, or Nature”[2]–Spinoza insisted that “throughout all of Nature there is only one substance, and it is God. In other words, God is Nature.”[3] Spinoza, then, especially as interpreted by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, whose reading I am most familiar with, represents a worldview where there is no outside, no transcendent godly position from which to gaze. As Deleuze puts it in his paraphrasing of Spinoza, “an animal, a thing, is never separable from its relations with the world. The interior is only a selected exterior and the exterior, a projected interior.”[4]

With Spinoza in mind, one could interpret Spector’s character, their measured walking, sitting, standing apart, as a firm symbol of the outside, of the God apart from Nature, or the human defining the animal. But this understanding began to break down for me when Spector crossed through center stage, folding that fourth wall into itself, then further disintegrated as they broke into a run somewhere in the latter half of the dance. As Spector rushed around the balcony, they were suddenly unable to hold their gaze steadily on the dancers, who had begun engaging in tactile, entangled duets that bring to my mind images of human combat, human romance, human conflict. They pushed and pulled at each other in pairs, eye contact amidst the four seeming to provoke moves to separate and switch partners. This is when I realized that the cooing of birds had transformed (the transition in the sound score imperceptible to me) into the babbling of a baby. My gaze couldn’t rest in one spot and I could feel my eyes moving in their sockets, darting, my own story of the dance shifting as I became aware, again, of my body in a shape of its own as an audience member. This is when delineations between human and animal kingdoms blurred, just slightly. Watching no longer constituted a binary opposite for dancing. Dramaturgy and performance collapsed. 

This is the rich tension contained in Kingdom. It recounts a history of fictional divisions and binary practices of making sense of the world, while also subtly challenging its audience to see the folly in such an approach. 

The dance ends amidst what sounds like a single stream of water falling steadily into a vessel, and a single figure remaining on stage. Piersol, whose wiggling toes had mimicked the dexterity of a monkey’s foot throughout the piece, sits slumped near the audience. She glances around casually and itches her chest with an open hand, the tips of her fingers flicking off some invisible irritant. This is a movement we’ve seen before in the dance, its organic appearance complicated by its exact repetition.

Kingdom does not facilely proclaim, “everything is everything!” as I have done before in my notes on Spinozan philosophy. Rather, this dance seems to attempt to actually demonstrate the strangeness of this truth, where Nature is an ape brushing an insect away and also Nature is a human doing the dance of an ape and also Nature is me watching. 

Shapes of Nothing

Immaterial Supreme begins with Glenn Potter-Takata laying tucked underneath a swath of semi-translucent plastic, a few contact mics taped atop it. His small movements are amplified by the ripples of the plastic and the echoes of the mics picking up sounds of folding, wrinkling, bending, sounds that remind of wind getting caught in an earphone. Eventually, he rises to a standing position, his sunglasses staring out at us, through the veil. He blows. Air pushes the plastic out and away from his face, a subtle response from the material that nonetheless feels like a kind of commencement for a dance that will ask us to pay attention to what might seem like nothing.   

Nothing, like air. The stuff between stuff that we often brush off as space or absence. But air is not nothing. Not only is it a substance and vector capable of violence (think industrial pollution, think COVID, think wildfire smoke), but it also can carry a kind of symbolic weightiness. In the world of this dance, air activates and initiates. After Potter-Takata emerges from under the plastic sheet, he gasps, sucking air, which seems to call in musician Chris Ryan Williams, also in sunglasses, who in turn pushes air through a horn, which in turn seems to move Potter-Takata into a dance. As Jean-Thomas Tremblay describes in their Breathing Aesthetics, while artistic engagement with breathing and air cannot “disentangle it from its status as evidence of vulnerability to violence or neglect,” it can “produce a breath that exceeds this status,” acting as “more than an index of crises” and thus “a resource for living through them.”[5] In thinking with Tremblay, I wonder how experiencing breath as resource exceeding its own status as vector mirrors the other mission I sense in this dance: experiencing emptiness as resource exceeding its perceived status as nothingness. 

The movements contained in this dance–as performed by both Potter-Takata and Kimiko Tanabe, who enters later with a determinedly slow shuffle that explodes into a wrestling match with the plastic sheet–are rife with detailed gestures and micromovements. Eyelids widening and forearm skin twitching appear as tiny responses to invisible, maybe airborne, inputs. As Potter-Takata glides slowly across the floor, he seems to be moving into movements as if they were waiting for him in that zone of atmosphere–unfurling fingers and tensing shoulders as if that is the only form available in this particular patch of emptiness. As Tanabe juts her chin into the space before the rest of her body, she seems to catch a breeze that forces her leg into a precariously loose swing. Perhaps this is a marker of butoh technique in Potter-Takata’s work. But I became convinced watching them that the air of the church was thick with affective states (shock, consternation, amusement), ready to become visible and embodied with the right kind of delicate attention. This sense was heightened by Williams’ richly layered sonic landscape, whose looping and lurching melody seemed to feel into itself slowly, like walking into a cloud and then learning that you are a cloud. Perhaps the performers were making their bodies empty in order to be filled up by that dense air, to be moved and to be made sound, and perhaps this is the mode by which to understand, according to Potter-Takata’s recounting of a Buddhist teaching, that “emptiness has no form, but it is form.”[6] 

In what feels like the final act of the piece, emptiness as air congeals into form again, this time in giant white balloons, which are filled with air by a dead-pan, ear-muffed Tanabe, who cocks her head and stares out at the audience as she grips the nozzle of the industrial inflator. After tying them off, she sets each balloon, three in total, out on the floor as Potter-Takata keeps dancing among them, seemingly indifferent to the new form space has taken around him, even as the orbs wobble with a graceful slowness. Tanabe and Williams join Potter-Takata in roaming around the enormous balls of nothing (not nothing, air), Williams carrying bells that tinkle until he sets them on the floor, one by one, Tanabe locomoting around the space with a new kind of urgency. Finally, Williams places a hand on a balloon, pushes down, and, with some delight, I think, releases, launching it off the ground. It rises easily and reaches a shocking height, above the balcony level, before descending. He continues initiating balloons into the air, while Tanabe and Potter-Takata raise their hands up to keep the orbs aloft, passing one back and forth a few times before letting it float again to the ground. Despite their lightness, the balloons’ largeness provokes some anxiety–could this taut mass of air break a light or knock over the soundboard? Could this tightly contained form of emptiness disrupt, destroy? This sense of risk creates a tiny thrill for me as a witness. I am increasingly enthralled by the physics (and adjoining philosophies) of gasses and solids and their interactions, in balloon and human form alike. 

As the dance fades away, light dying out, sound dissolving into quiet, I am strangely wistful, thinking, oh, to be both light and huge, oh, to go lightly and still make change. This might be the resource available in such an embodiment of emptiness–a reminder of the mattering of what is seemingly immaterial, certainly impermanent. A mattering, nonetheless.  

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I am often delighted by split bills. Two dances meet. They are juxtaposed through curatorial care but the impact of their union remains unknown until it unfolds before an audience. There is a chance procedure at play, amplifying the indeterminate potentials of each work. The pieces remain separated by time— a moment of darkness, a pause for spectators to stretch their legs–but they overlap in the boundless terrain of watchers’ imagination. Maybe some audience members can hold them apart, but at least for this writer, I can’t keep their motifs from mingling promiscuously, even as I divide this essay neatly with headings, sections.  Writing of Immaterial Supreme, I can’t help but see Spector peering over the balcony, watching an orb rise to eye level. Writing of Kingdom, I can’t help but see a balloon falling gently from above, a pocket of air acting as dramaturg. Writing of both, I can’t help but let their themes intermix, noticing that if emptiness is full of everything and everything is God, there is good reason to worship emptiness, good reason to revere the varied substance of everything, good reason to dance as a practice of worship.