LETTER FROM ALEXANDRA:
TIME

“How did it get so late so soon?”

(Dr. Seuss)

Time is a bodily experience. Moving inside mortal bodies, feeling the tension of the known ending, but the unknown quantity of how long til we get there, we push forward, beating out our lives and our art to the metronome of duration. We use time to mark success, failure, boredom, excitement, change, stasis, stillness, motion, past, future, life, and death. Though we might classify these things as binaries, I believe the term binary allows us to miss the real material: the continuum of experience between them. A continuum between two fixed points (birth and death), like the elastic of a bow, necessitates tension. The existence of both birth and death is inherently tense, and yet we can attend to the tension to greater or lesser degrees. Certainly (hopefully), we spend time unconcerned consciously with mortality. And, likewise, we probably spend time thinking about our end, and feeling both the pull and resistance to the end of our time. How much tension we apply to the cord between beginning and end, or now and later, can be made visible by the body’s response to Time.

Time is inherently connected to the nervous system. Fight, flight, and freeze are all time-based. Survival is, of course, time-based. Death is often about a micro choice in time: to look up from your phone one second before the car hits you, to duck from the flying object hurtling towards you. When we watch animals relate, particularly in mortal/fatal encounters, we can read the attendance to time brightly on their bodies. We see, in the slow, intentional stalking of prey, the freighted hesitation of an animal in danger, the lightning swipe of a clawed paw, time made visible as the clearest narrative component. So when we are talking about “stakes,” are we, at the center of that, talking about time in some form? Can there be high stakes without attention to the passage of time, without responding to the idea of the future?

Intuition and decision-making are ideally partners. While we can certainly make a decision through analysis alone, the awareness of our instinct (present sensing) and intuition (past and future sensing), allows for decisions to be somatic. In the intersectionality between Laban Movement Analysis, Non-Verbal Communication (NVC), and Jungian States of Mind, Time affines with the action of Deciding, and the state of Intuiting. Imagine the moment of hesitation before saying something vulnerable, the quick punch of an attack, the bodily listening we do as we are making a high-stakes decision.

Time is watching the clock, watching bodies, counting breaths. Time, for me, is about both sensation and observation. Time is both a fact and a fantasy. It is a construction. Its creation was an attempt to answer the unanswerable question: why are we here, and for how long? The construction of time seems to be a system for convincing ourselves that we “know” and in knowing, have control.

Most of what we talk about when we discuss time in art is the relationship between constructed (“objective”) time and our experience of  (“subjective”) time. Every moment has a history and a future. Yet every moment is the only thing that actually exists. The past and future are fantasies, and yet the present is constantly shedding itself into memory, and jettisoning itself into future. How much we attend to the tension between past and present, or present and future, changes our perception of not only time, but space, meaning, relationships, and environment.

Time is both a verb and a noun. It both requires our action to exist (“to time something”), and is completely unconcerned with us (“the passage of time”). Time is both momentary (“this time…”) and infinite (“throughout time…”). These dualities create tension. We invented the idea of time, so it would be easy to imagine we could decide to ignore it. Yet we run almost every beat of our lives, and much of our storytelling, to ideas about early or late, fast or slow, long or short, beginning or end. We have constructed an adherence to Time, and yet we often don’t attend to it fully unless the situation involves danger, passion, mortality… How we attend to durational time is one of the most personal expressions we have, and yet the universality of time cannot be denied.

When we consciously release our concern about the passage of time, we get art forms (I believe Butoh is one of them) that transcend this particular construction, and may remind us of an inner animality that is timeless. Alternately, when we very deeply attune to the conduit of Time as a route for meaning, we are often able to tap into our immediacy, and so, our humanity. So consciously pushing against Time, or passionately relating to it, may land us in a similar location. It is when we take Time for granted that our art often suffers. When we forget to hold the reins of durational time, the tension of mortality, the unknown, and all of its attendant emotions, dissipates. When we take the audience’s time for granted, or let our assumptions about time dictate its use, we slacken the tension derives by noticing time. Although it is only one response to this tension, I am reminded fiercely of the end of Dylan Thomas’ plea:

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.

(Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night)

Am I saying that attending to time is always about attending to death? No. But it’s in there. Time is mathematics, but it is also poetry. It is science, and the untouchable primal instinct at once. We can frame Time through ideas like Tempo, Duration, Repetition, Meter, Beat, Rhythm, Pulse, Flow, Speed, but at the heart of Time are the ineffable: survival, mortality, desire.

 

Suggested exercise:

Slow Walk: spend 15 minutes walking a single block. If you are doing this in cold weather, obviously bundle up! Try to be carrying little to nothing in terms of bags if possible. Do not wear headphones. If you have the social interest, do this in a populated place so you can experience the friction of your time signature against that of “regularly” moving people. But doing it just for the anatomical information is also illuminating.

Improvisation: moving alone or with others, use tempo as your main vehicle for exploration. Attempt to avoid the interstitial tempo of “medium” and move ONLY very quickly, very slowly, or existing inside hesitation or sustainment.

 

PRAXISPACE SCORE #2: TIME

Throughout this score, use TIME in a crystalline manner. Each temporal choice you make is driven by attention to time, including a conscious decision to ignore time.

1. Use accumulation to create. After you have finished making, take out ALL repetition.

2. Decide very consciously to use repetition once, based on a deep craving.

 

3. Use tempo and duration to define the relationships either between performers or performers and the audience. Tempo and duration are the vehicles for meaning, almost like a code. It almost doesn’t matter what they do. What is the tool for communication is when they do it and how in relation to Time.

4. Think of three unspoken rules around time and performance and break two and adhere to one diligently.

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