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We’re working on a duet, exploring ‘Proximity and Distance’, ideas of absence and presence,

engagement and disengagement. We’re looking at those moments when one is physically present but psychologically absent, or when someone has such a strong desire to be close to the other that they repel them.

If you open up the immersed book and turn to one of the covers, you will find a CD on which is printed the sound composition I created for the performance work that brought this chapter into being. Turn it on and you’ll be listening to two ‘world famous in New Zealand’ New Zealand voices: Kim Hill (radio host) and Michael Hill (jeweller). The Hills. There’s something else too in that title – the sense of an environment that has a strong presence in your vision, while still being relatively far away, the intimate distance of a landscape, of a radio voice, that sense of knowing someone without knowing them.

Mathew Goulish wrote a lecture in the shape of a bridge collapsing (Goulish, 2002). If this chapter had a shape it would be the shape of hills in the far distance, with all the foreground things before those hills included, but with your attention fixed on the hills beyond. There would be a sense that The Hills

overshadow your life although you rarely see them. The incremental way that daily practices create modes of action and reaction. Figure and ground.

Also, the figure and ground of writing, the proximity and distance of this writing as it moves closer to you – with direct address – and further away in attempting to reveal the world of a particular

dance practice. Movement between different modes of address and between different locations in space and time is a central element of the daily writing practice that enables this research. Linguist Roman Jakobsen’s discussion of “shifters” (Jakobsen, 1990) identifies the central role such shifting in address and voice plays in speech, language and literature.

The general meaning of the grammatical form called “shifter” is

characterized by a reference to the given speech event in which the form appears. Thus the past tense is a shifter because it literally designates an event that precedes the given act of speech. (Jakobsen, 1990, p.175)

Shifters are grammatical forms that draw attention to the movement of perspective and location of narrators, by referencing the circumstances of narration, thus drawing a readers’ or listeners’ attention to multiple perspectives on an event. Jackobsen also writes on the way in which forms of writing allow multiple positions in space and time to occur concurrently:

Narrative… time can be unilinear as well as multi-linear, direct as well as reversed, continuous as well as discontinuous … I believe it would be difficult to find another domain, except perhaps for music, where time is experienced with compatible acuity. (Jakobsen, 1990, p. 175)

In creating the narratives that form these thesis chapters the use of shifters enables me to reflect not only on particular rehearsal events, but on the performance of moving those events into writing as I prepare for others to bring their performances of reading into this system of meaning-making. Shifting between times and spaces in the research process allows me to narrate it from a range of critical positions. For example, the switch from first to second person address in the following part of this chapter allows me to examine my practice as if an outside perspective was possible, providing a semblance of distance between critical analysis and studio practice.

She’s currently preoccupied with a choreographic process she had instigated with dancer Brent Harris. After a week’s workshopping the project is now resting, with the

intention she’ll pick it up again when the opportunity arises. In their weeks work, the process evolved to produce the beginnings of a sound composition and a performance score, which she showed to a small audience. To begin their rehearsal process, they experimented with the cultivation of presence and absence. They created a simple pathway down the room, where the closer he came to the audience the more removed his presence, the further from the audience, the closer his presence. They then worked through a writing structure; they wrote up to 500 words on the memory of looking into the distance, and used their two written texts as structuring devices to create a duet

sequence. In performance they worked with how much of the memory of their text they could summon, with the lack of complete control over what they would remember being a key part of the score. They were performing the action of the effort of remembering.

1. Perform the action of the effort of remembering

2. The closer you are to them, the further your attention strays

3. As you move further away from them your desire to be close to them escalates 4. The cultivation of presence

5. The cultivation of absence 6. Durational sites

As she sits here at her kitchen bench, she still hasn’t gotten any kind of grip on how to find a productive language to communicate her ideas. She has enjoyed generating a choreographic process that is unlike any of her previous work, yet the instability in doing so makes articulating directive choices difficult. How to communicate the line of logic she wants the dance to follow, without killing that logic by trying to set movement?

She’s intrigued by the emergence of choices that evolved through the dance making, but in the flood of choices it’s very hard to locate a specific strand or logic that binds the work together. It is like she is under a sea of ideas and she’s too deep to find the surface or the sense. It is like the work has immersed her. She no longer knows which way is up.

Recalling her past works, a sense of familiarity floods in. Perhaps this overwhelming sense of being unable to contain or find sense in the work is a natural condition of the process. She decides that this processual indeterminancy is a state and a condition of her choreographic process that may generate a design logic for formal development.