Title: When Life Is Silent
A dance film reinterpreting the arc of Mary Wigman’s life, with particular emphasis on her relationship to the dance community of Monte Verità and the area of Ticino, Switzerland.
Cast: Six dancer-artists. Pronoun usage is fluid throughout the score; performers self-identify as she/her, he/him, or they/them.
The movement score is presented in the order of the film’s timeline.
0:00 - 2:08 - Opening theatre solo:
She stands in the centre of the space. Her eyes are closed, and she feels the air pressing down upon her limbs. She raises one arm and timidly gropes, cutting through the invisible space.
As if a light turns on inside her, she opens her eyes. The large, invisible, translucent space opens up before her; shapeless and billowy. Her arm shapes and changes it.
She thrusts forward, and her feet follow: direction established. Then, as if the space itself wants to reach for her, it pushes her backward along a newly created path. Counter-direction: a play of up and down, of backward and forward, a meeting with herself, battling for space within space.
She is still again and gazes at the empty space: the dancer’s kingdom.
2:09 - 6:44
- Dancer moving from bottom of Balladrum forest to Balladrum viewpoint:
The deeper she penetrates the environment, the greater the loneliness that envelops her.
- Additional two dancer’s solos in Balladrum forest:
Like interconnected neurons sending signals in the brain, or fungi transmitting information via electrical impulses across thread-like filaments, they maintain a connection through slightly mysterious processes.
Suddenly, they detach from their involved intricacies to produce a burst of activity. It is a physical thing: explicit and episodic. A cataract of forms, as if a heap of precious stones were poured out. Their movements collapse time and space, localising their dancing in a space of intimacy.
7:00 - 10:21 - White dress solo at Arcegno:
The move is from the passive to the active. In an instant, like a spark igniting, her body is full of expression. Swirling, euphoric movement takes her and keeps ties to an unheard musicality.
Her dance takes place within a complex spherical landscape. Her turns and extensions are set along a horizontal line, and her arms, torso, and legs stretch across space simultaneously. It is an unbounded dance, where her movements mould not only the body, but also it’s external, spatial envelope. Her secret is to dance alone, in such a way that the audience feels itself to be the partner.
She does not remain mostly vertical. Her torso is not fixed in a stacked position above her hips, allowing her to create more exaggerated angles. With bent knees, she manipulates the momentum of her turns and tilts into crescent-shaped backbends. Performed partially or wholly, her backbends evoke the ghost of the arc en cercle, while simultaneously collapsing any distinction between the gesture and its historical narratives.
Spinning becomes a critical movement in her dance. Not clasped to a partner, she is free to sweep her arms gracefully, plunging her into balance-defying leans. The movement of her limbs writes an incandescent language into space.
Her dance is full of delicate nuances and subtleties. Besides huge swings and floating movements, she has very tiny, sensitive movements. She works sometimes just with the fingers, letting them breathe. Her hands display the range of emotions that her hands can convey; a letting go of the past; hands that can laugh happily and express struggle; that become buds and bloom.
In the final section, she moves across space, luring her audience along with her and opening new avenues for them to follow in her wake.
10:33 - 11:44 - Colourful duo in Arcegno:
He is the great stimulator, the moving spirit, the guide who opens the gates to a world she has not dreamed of. He takes her by the hand and leads her into an impenetrable jungle.
11:53 - 14:40 - Solo at Arcegno:
His start is marked by the tumult of a new beginning.
His dance is an antipoem. There are as yet no limits no strict laws to be followed. A free country, a wilderness. Like an explosive power he possesses the space like a whirlwind. The centre alone stands firm.
He has an imperious bearing. A magician, a priest of an unknown religion, the worshipped hero, the lord of a dreamlike and yet ever-so-real kingdom. With dark, impatiently threatening gestures, he is always surrounded by the magnificence of farawayness, and the majesty of silent unfathomabilities which make others bow to them. They are at the mercy of their own stormy improvisations and lightning-quick contradictions. (1, 2)
Time and again, their dancing reveals an enrapturing cycle of dying and arising, moving between form and revelation. He regards nature, with all her impulses towards pleasure and repulsion, as the foundation of his dance.
15:40 - Field Trio in Arcegno:
They self-exile start from where they are.
With utopian urges, they move like spores in the wind; invisible, innumerable, ubiquitous. Their dancing is offered through lens of idealism, and presents a neoromantic view of their environment.
Their search for the natural is, in fact, their first violation of the environment.
Pervasiveness of discord reshapes their very foundation, and they notice the ground sliding beneath them. With one misstep the whole edifice comes crashing down.
The mythical and fabulous relationship with the open snaps. The earth transforms into spiritless matter, something inanimate. Disenchantment, buffering, and spiritual reductionism. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is undone.
To repair the present, they actively root their bodily experience in the ground, as human beings, only without the covering. Their decline provides the basis for their renewal.
18:38 - 20:40 - Love duo at beach:
They find their middle C. This becomes the starting point of their new journey together, and they move as uncoordinatedly as the birds sing in the forest.
There is so much warmth in their actions, as well as the first foreboding signs of change that are destined to come, which is shown through yielding.
From time to time a little mocking smile flits through the gestures as if to say: “Don't take us too seriously, we won't last.” They are only one of the many reflections in the mirror of your life and only glow as long as the sun hits them.
Their dance is a tango, whose features are so far reduced that the remaining effect is a finely organised rhythmic vibration.
Their actions whisper in secret and they throw capers of hand gestures into the air like barely audible words of love. Still air in the heat of summer. Their dance appears to be without end and yet lasts a moment only.
21:47 - 23:52 - Butterfly solo in Balladrum forest:
They are a world apart from everyone else. At a distance, they could be little more than a few colourful butterflies wafting through the landscape without rhyme or reason. They move with a light, swinging step, and their posture and their gestures are infused with a strange charm. (1,2)
23:52 - 24:43 - Jumping duo at Ascona delta:
She starts to jump, and chases the stream of her breath like lightning from her feet upward through the body, until she has reaches the height of her leap and has almost gone beyond it. In these few seconds, she holds her breath, and actually defies all gravity. She becomes a creature of the air and seems to fly or float through space.
At the downcurve only, her breath flows back into her body and returns the dancer to the earth after her short soaring flight.
Aerial joy is freedom. They are off the ground more than on the ground and vie with each other in soaring through the air, basking in the awed astonishment of onlookers.
24:44 - 28:36: Group in Brissago:
They circle each other like moths to a light. A kaleidoscope of confused desires.
Their actions become antiquated before they can ossify. A significant amount of physical contact is required. They are enclosed through touch; either a closed intimate sphere, or with their arms semi-outstretched, and some can’t remember what close is.
Final rapid flurries or swirls around a central point, until, caught in a time warp, their positions symbolize a waltz that has gone on for hours in endless rotation. Partners coiled in each other’s arms whisking around a brimming dance floor.
They appear to be on an island alone in the world.
28:37 - 31:12 - Solo dance in Brissago pool:
His dance displays the body under pressure as it undergoes the process of transformation in three stages; from a porous state of being to pure density, stone, and ultimately dust. His choreography is anchored in his body's spiritual preoccupations with birth, death, and rebirth.
In the first section: He is a being dedicated to water; a being in flux. He dies every moment; and something of his substance is constantly falling away.
In the second section: His dance blazes with visceral sculptures that seem to combine fleshy forms with steely, human-made structures. He breaks and deconstructs his movement into basic shapes and offers them from multiple angles and viewpoints. His actions are focused more on form and structure, than personal or symbolic content.
He dances in exultation, filled with the glorious sensation of his youth and strength, stretching his limbs with rhythmic arm-movements, which his whole body soon takes up. His eyes can be half-closed to the dazzle. His face stares mask-like with an expression of inspired, almost fanatical, gravity.
In the final section: His work is the process of transitioning into a different state of being: the disembodied state. Sunbeams fill him like a honeycomb. His soul is heavy with sunshine and steeped with strength.
In confused silence, he listens with his whole body, suspended in the process of ascending. That last contact with the floor, where his feet are barely touching the ground, is an act of liberation from the material order and its constraints. All is still and silent for this moment of change.
The dance's afterthought pleads that his offerings do not go stillborn.
31:27 - 34:11 - Group at fortress:
Any coherence collapses, and the scene is turned into a mere illusion. An unreal, virtual space opens up behind the surface.
They move in this placeless place. They direct their gaze toward the other and the space around them. Like a mirror, they see themselves reflected there. This process reconstitutes them where they are, granting them visibility through the other.
Some of the performers turn to dust, some clump together (several dancers embodying the same thing), while others migrate further into the environment. As a result, like musical notes recorded as grooves on a record, they are refuged throughout the space.
34:12 - 37:46: Solo at Canyon:
They cross a border. The border is part of them and cuts through them.
The traces of his dance become more and more complex and interconnected, creating a collection of living forces. It is a molecular uprising.
Within their new condition as a minotaur, they step one foot forward into the void, indicating a path to another world. There is nothing heroic in it.
He perceives maze as both physically present and metaphorically sewn into the fabric of the dance. It is an invasive element that seems to challenge and confine him one way or another. Whether a simple swirl or a more elaborate depiction of a medieval labyrinth, it haunts their relationship to space.
The minotaur speaks to the body’s shapeshifting potential. Their face, body and actions cannot yet be considered true. He could be the cow climbing the mountain slopes that hides from human eyes. He could be Frankenstein’s monster carrying a flower and searching for someone to love while all around flee.
His movement makes clear his isolation, as each snapshot of his misunderstood dance wades deeper into the waters of sequestration and abandonment. Merging power and fragility, he depicts a mythical creature’s body desintegrating into darkened scenes.
He discovers a spatial explosion at the the dramaturgical heart of the space. Their composition offers an architecture of atmosphere, a form of ‘felt’ architecture, beneath whose foundations lie classical ruins both animal and vegetal, mineral and chemical substrates that tend to be invisible. His dance creates an energetic blueprint in the space.
The only section which does not include a maze is the epilogue.
37:46 - 41:44 - Trio in smokey beach:
They glance around the space. It’s almost bare, yet somehow it gives the impression of disorder. It isn’t their individual positions that cause this, but their relationhip to each other. Nobody seems to be in the right place.
They have one ear on humanity and one ear on the landscape. Their ears search for sound, but there’s none to be had, except breath. Curious but uninvolved, they demonstrate the difficulty, if not impossibility, for one human being to truly touch another. They remain as artificially faceless, and any harmony is expunged.
With precarious material boundaries, they have a tendency to continue beyond themselves by pouring out the very fine matter of atmosphere. Tracing vanished currents they move in space as hidden forms and seeking forms. As if recounting a sad magic trick, they reveal empty spaces where there had previously been a whole person.
Dreams and reality converge and merge into a fairytale lament of love. They build harmonic castles in the air. Their dance hovers between an ethereal metaphysical realm and the sensuous corporeal world.
Any previous structures collapse, producing bodies that are all flesh and free of constraint. They are a soft, subtle, being something. They give themselves to the pulsing, incalculable fall of blood, which forever seeks to fall to the centre of the earth, or, they could be drilling for oil.
42:06 - 45:00 - Quartet at Waterfall:
It takes them a minute to focus.
Despite their balanced, often symmetrical shaping, they still have a centaur-like, rumbling bass note. They exist for some time within this solemn spatial music of silent temporality, until their actions reveal a connecting link between the moving body and the machine.
Their tamed rhythmic dance pushes emphatically, alluding with growing clarity to the dominant rhythm of machines: breath, speed, deceleration, and unexpected, nervous braking.
Their collective body turns the space like a wheel.
45:00 - 47:53 - Solo at waterfall:
He find his own way into a seemingly dead world and his movement breathes life into the stillness. He’s a product of his environment, engaged in a crystallization process in order to minimize their energetic state. They perform the static and yet simultaneously geometrically dynamic principle that marks the changing of troop formations.
At first, his geometric and dynamic patterns are not clearly observable, although his choreography produces a memorable plan where spaces are generated from the center outwards.
Their dancing gives patterns of life and motion to an otherwise flat form, like folding paper into rhythmic and repetitive sculptures.
- Short Duo: Their collective body turns the space like a wheel.
49:33 - 51:02 - Solo at Ascona Delta:
SShe retreats into isolation. he envelops her environment in a sombre shroud, and views it through a framework that is foreign to her soul.
She is the first big seed. She has weight and her position constitutes a heart. She is sure of her centre, exists in space as pre-happiness: a flower’s dream of the future, while it is still enclosed and tightly folded inside its seed.
Any absence of motion does not prevent time from flowing. From the depths of matter, she grows as an obscure vegetation, germinating from the ribs of romanticism and anarchy. Highlights and depressions, rising and sinking, crystallize into creative rhythms that shape and depend on each other. Pause and collapse serve as transitions.
As a result, it becomes clear that the image is a plant that needs earth and sky: a black flower blooming in matter’s darkness. She already possesses a velvety touch: a formula for perfume.
51:39 - 54:24 - Dark solo in theatre and rock dance:
Quaint carven vampire bats, unseen in curious hollows of the trees, or deadlier serpents coiled at ease round carcasses of unclean birds. The moon has no air. Any light there may be is deadlier than darkness.
Her chest widens and her eyes shine with tears caused by a never experienced pain. Looking for the homes of her origin, her trembling body extends and is lifted in the searching, weaving motions of the dance.
She turns the scene into a sort of imaginary heresy; a counter-world.
Between a remote background plunged into twilight and bright foreground, she finds her corresponding opposite poles. She perceives herself as one of thousands of figures engaged in the wild, desperate dance of life.
Everything seems to fade away while recalling the image of the opening moments of the dance.
54:44 - 57:47 - Rock trio
Three female figures, three ages: the young woman, the mature woman, the old woman. They can move singly, by two, and by three. Their dance weaves at the fabric of time.
The rhythms of their hand gestures tie together life’s thread, weave it, and cut it off. Their faces are timeless. From the centre, she often attaches the others to her vampirishly, establishing a love-hate ambivalence between her and them.
57:57 - 1:00:46 - Kitchen duo:
They create a series of beautiful, secure positions that could last a lifetime.
Their movements are built up from thick, sensuous lines, envisaging female bodies in quiet domestic interiors. In cramped and difficult conditions, they dissect and reassemble the familiar female form. Their positions can often break apart and fill the air with dust. Any sweeping movements are mostly symbolic - less about removing visible dirt than clearing away invisible impurities.
Subordination leaks into all aspects of their dance. One of the ugliest aspects of their dancing is the brutality - they are often burned alive, stoned or beheaded. It’s a tragic repetition.
1:01:04 - 1:02:50 - Neon solo in Fortress:
The language of her poetry comes from the the human heartbeat. Inside she always feels a border and outside it goes on for an infinity.
Her body is a gateway. A dream in stone. Slow, almost incomprehensible movements begin. Condensed and cemented together, they seem full of pathos. She moves with a sense of being misinterpreted, that is particularly sharp. There is no place on this stone that does not see you.
His legendary head, with eyes like ripening fruit. Like he is lit up from a lamp inside, his torso is suffused with brilliance, and his gaze, now turned to low, gleams in all its power. The translucent cascade of his shoulders glisten like a wild beast's fur. His curved breast dazzles, and a smile runs through his placid hips and thighs to a dark centre where procreation flares.
With a light gaze that sweeps across the space, she gathers information from her environment like iron filings to a magnet.
Like a dam waiting to burst, stored-up forces break through. She flies into archaic rituals that are at once regressive, progressive, and rebellious. Her movements are curved and difficult. She chases her body in wide arcs through space as though whipped by winds and throws herself into merciless rhythms.
She encounters herself as woven out of a thousand details and stories. A microworld of embodied plasticity; sculpture, architecture, or computer graphics. With no definite shape or privileged position, truth is revealed from some very odd angles.
1:02:51 - 1:04:38 - Shaking solo in Fortress:
She shakes awake at the dance, trembling twenty-five times a second, and revealing truth 24 times per second. Her shiver suggests a fear that is no longer merely human, but an anthropo-cosmic fear, that echoes the great legend of humankind cast back into long forgotten situations. Her shadow perfectly shows the grey haze that hangs over buried memories.
Her shaking turns into madness. A dizzying frenzy. She moves from a constructed world to a dreamed world. She appears as a spatially multidisciplinary, chaotic, automatic, and technologically imperfect image.
All sensations of anxiety and chaotic conditions of despair - arising from torment, hatred, or fury - grow in this medium of expression. No definite shape or privileged position asserts itself.
1:04:38 - 1:08:12 - Group in Fortress:
The individual is subordinated to the collective. They move into position - an imperfect line - with depth and breadth.
Converging and entwining, they suspend at least one body off the ground.
Suspended in crisis, they surge forward, twisting, falling, and pouring through vertical space. They frequently appear given over to a flight of movement, with spine arched or head thrown back. They are captured in poses signalling definite directions, whether by reaching limb, searching gaze, or orientation of torso and hips, which eventually gives form to one collective definite direction.
1:08:13 - 1:11:02 - War solo in Theatre:
She moves within a perpetual state of simmering discontent, that threatens to tear her dance apart. She notices silence in the space like the silence of a loaded weapon. Spatially, there is an absence of any clear geographical division.
Slowly and stiffly, she begins to cleave the space. Her movement suggests not just mobility, but a single focused direction - length without breadth. Her actions transform the space into an open wound and a site of division.
Her dance moves between these two spaces that are falsely divided from one another. She creates a series of positions that offer a view on the fallen civilizations of the past: not showing how far humanity has come, but as a vision of our destiny, memento mori. Her positions are more famed for their rubble and corpses, than their baroque architecture or dedication to art.
The light breaks and disperses toward all sides, sending an oscillation across the space which sets everything loose. She loses her structural integrity and moves as a perpetual monument to destruction from the air. Fire and dust, gravity and time, architecture and not-architecture. She violates the space, until there is nothing left to conquer but herself.
She moves as a dislocated soul, cradling an uneasy peace. Haunted and haunting, her actions grind time into flour. Listening into herself, her dance becomes a wary tracking down of all that is fading away.
The rituals of her movements reveal themselves, and she enters a sublime ceremony. With unceremonious prayer, her limbs start to speak of sadness. Her dance gains power from its relationship with silence, and she offers as many kinds of silence as there are sounds.
There is nothing left but the mournful gesture of the dance, nothing but utter devotion.
1:12:11 - 1:14:49 - Moving from bottom of Balladrum forest to Balladrum viewpoint. The deeper she penetrates the environment, the greater the loneliness that envelops her.
Credits - turning solo:
She is center stage, noticing silence and stillness. Like the joyous dance of whirling leaves, she starts to turns around herself.
Her turning grows increasingly rapid. She spins around herself, expanding infinitely in a rapid, raging revolution. Higher and higher she stretches towards the tips of her toes: a desire upward toward lightness and light.
As if risen from the ground, she floats in quiet suspense for a short moment. Her whirling motion is communicated to the room and the walls circle around her, becoming more and more blurred.
The spell breaks. She sucks in her own powers, and returns, heavy into the realm which may yield to form. Everything is still swaying. Communion with space is gone.