2010 / silence, stillness and listening

Singing to use the waiting is a performance in process, reflecting on the possibility of dancing different times at once and experiencing time as space. How can the audience be invited into this space of time, as a stillness in which anything can take place?

The title of the piece Singing to use the waiting derives from an essay about the poetry of Jorie Graham and Emily Dickinson, by Thomas Gardner. It comes from a line in one of Emily Dickinson’s poems, in which stillness is approached as a kind of waiting. In this ‘waiting’ anything could happen. I see it as a moment of suspension and tension, an exciting magic moment, also of expectation; all can collapse, be lost and fall apart, or aliveness thrives through precise and accurate events.

I wonder these days if perhaps what I really am doing is working on a piece about the wish to live with(in) stillness and to experience stillness everywhere and always – and to see what may cause ‘disturbances’ of stillness, but more than that, how time and again I/we handle sound, movement, seems to disturb silence, and sometimes stillness.

I mostly use the words silence as in: no sound, and stillness being underneath all actions and sound, while this is all happening. Stillness is always present. Silence as space of time. Stillness as spacious attention. Stillness as spaciousness.

So, a lot of my practise is in listening. i listen to sounds, i listen to timing of sounds, i listen to music, i listen to timing of words spoken, i listen to how people speak, i listen to what is not said, i listen to the gaps between words, to the space of time between one sentence and the next, i listen to movement, i listen to breathing, i listen to the timing of a sound finishing, to the resonance and the space of time after the resonance has ended, i listen to the ships passing my house, when they enter my awareness and when they are gone, i listen to my own thoughts and listen to the moment i don’t listen to them anymore, so i can get on with (other) things, i listen to the stillness in a busy city like Athens or Amsterdam on Saturday afternoon, i listen to my neighbour stamping her feet, but more to when she is not stamping her feet, i listen to the ducks, i listen to the space around sounds and actions,  i listen to what i listen, i listen to the dance when i am dancing and whether i listen in in time, in action, in sequence, or in stillness…