(be)coming entangled together
Katie Vickers
Image from https://buildabroad.org/2016/10/12/mycelium/
This writing is a combination of my personal experience inside of Satelliser: a dance for the gallery in 2016, and of writing excerpts from my own research. What I want to trace is how my own research collides with the work of J N Harrington and how this thinking action of Satelliser creates an eco-system between audience and performer.
Image: Larissa Vanhee. Satelliser in Répétition exhibition, Villa Empain, 2016. Coworkers: Louise Tanoto & Ana Christina Velasquez
A choreographic wonder is a space of relationships.
Dance is a constant negotiation and dialogue of relationships.
Choreography is curated moments about those relationships at hand - a coming together of multiple relations.
Fungal and microbial organisms teach us about how to form relationships - how to be more in union rather than separate - how to break down and decompose the ‘neat’ barriers we hold in our fictions of classifications.
They themselves are shape-shifters, speculation in bodily form, something that is everywhere, a contamination that feeds on us all.
Fungal thinking moves past any binary methods of being, they do not judge, or speak ill, or categorize, or have a singular place of functioning.
They are a ‘yes, and’ kind of organism.
A ‘working with’ organism that can teach us how to be with other forms.
A guidance towards better ethics in sharing and being.
They are slow moving creatures - embodying duration of time.
Blurring our boundaries of sensing and being.
The fungi are a choreographic wonder.
I have been observing - understanding how things connect, metamorphose, and decompose. I observe what’s in front of me: most recently the ebb and flow of postpartum life, a father slipping away to Alzheimer’s, a best friend who almost lost her husband, a prolonged season of precariousness. I read an article recently by Rebecca Solnit where she states: “you can’t always trace it but everything, everyone has a genealogy.”¹ She maps the invisible traces of cause and effect. How the seeds of actions and thoughts germinate in unexpected ways. I begin to take in consideration the things around me in intimate ways. I notice everything from the pollen that flies past me and spreads its spores for miles, to the moments in rehearsal where material emerges seemingly out of nowhere yet remains connected to a long thread of conversations. This kind of attention takes me by the hand and ceaselessly wanders, edging towards borders and limits. A process of mapping the present, a process of seeing entanglements.
I use the word entanglement to describe a continual process of webbing, a multiplicity of directions through thinking and doing. This becomes a methodology - a process of connecting dots, making maps, charting the unexpected pathways that dance and life may lead me through. The web takes something seemingly small and help me understands its cause and effect within a larger picture.
I performed Satelliser in Belgium in 2016. I was new to the work as well as to many of the collaborators. The complexity of the work for me came from simply showing up. Being the observer and observing, an acute practice of giving-receiving-listening. Satelliser creates conversations out of entanglements - things are in motion that we cannot see but at times can feel. A critical thought or memory triggers the collective to get the wheels in motion. Inside of the practice I often wonder how did we arrive here? Collectively, we open up the rabbit hole and climb down its silky tunnel to ask, explore, wander through each other’s experiences. What experiences lead me to this moment? While dancing, what stories and histories does our collective thinking body carry? What borders and limits do we pass through inside of our conversations, of just being together, working? In each passing conversation, we move through each others genealogy. A connective tissue or web begins to build.
Satelliser in Répétition exhibition, Villa Empain, 2016. Coworkers Ana Christina Velasquez & Charlie Ashwell
This collective thought and action inside of Satelliser reminds me of my own research of mushrooms and dance. I was first lured into the fascination of mycelium mushrooms through Emergent Strategy by adrienne marie brown. It was here where I learned the ways in which mycelium understands relationality. brown writes how we can learn from the properties of nature and apply it to our own personal work; for her the work is between emergence and movements for social justice. Words such as interconnectedness, remediation, and detoxification describe the complex movement of mycelium. brown writes how we can use biomimicry as a tool in solving problems, building relationships, and creating thoughtful systems.
“Biomimicry is basically taking a design challenge and then finding an ecosystem that has already solved that challenge, and literally trying to emulate what you learn. There are three types of biomimicry - one is copying form and shape, another is copying a process, like photosynthesis in a leaf, and the third is mimicking at an ecosystem’s level, like building a nature-inspired city.” - Janine Benyus²
Fungi are rhizomorphs. They are threads of embodiment that commingle. Shapeshifters that have no gender. They work within non-hierarchical relationships where intelligence is dispersed throughout the whole emergent organism. Wanderers in nature that create healthy ecosystems by bridging resources between organisms that would otherwise remain separate. Being alongside them through research has taught me to confront my ways of connecting to people, spaces and objects around me. When I zoom out, they provide me with new ways of engaging with how I see and place myself in the world. They teach me what I might want to turn away from as I head toward more multi-directional and rhizomatic experiences. When I zoom in they provide me more information inside of my choreographic curiosities. I am with the fungi learning how to communicate, sense, and feel differently - completely smitten by how they practice entanglement.
Still of the mycelium network from "Fantastic Fungi." Photo courtesy of Moving Art & photo of mycleium by Adobe Stock
For me, Satelliser is a performance that creates an integral practice of fungal thinking and entanglement.
Building an entanglement is a folding and unfolding experience with multiple entities. I call this building a root system. The performers of Satelliser keep within motion inside of conversing, within flexibility, within pathways that curve, within past and future lines, within in-between lines, within a form we can not predict, within the weaving, within the story-telling, within the generation of stories. These entangled threads lead us towards one another and the room at large. I notice the threads of connection between myself and others and the intersection where leaning in towards one another can open up a possibility of communion, of what being together might mean. I search for my own threads to widen my immediate circle and I question while performing - how might dance be a way to transgress the notions of exceptionalism that are woven into the fabric of society? And, how might mycelium networks or other examples in nature help us move past the individual and embrace the collective action?
We need more stories of symbiosis across species, across ways of thinking....
We need the collective - the coalition - the co-working to think otherwise.
When I think this way of the ‘co’, I am indebted to learning how the cycles of nature interweave into my dance practices and political thoughts, connecting my world to the symbiotic world of nature - what I learn from flocks of birds, the interconnectedness of mycelium, or the cooperative work of ants. When I think in this way Satelliser becomes a metaphor of how to live life in communion. A web of connectivity is created through language and movement, formulated on attention and intention. At the heart of Satelliser is learning how to be together, how to keep something alive. Together, the co-workers build an entanglement as a way to create spaces of being-in-common, being-with, making-with.
As Donna Haraway says, “nothing makes itself.”³
The collaborative aspect of this work sets a tone in the space. The audience watches and listens to us in the work of negotiation. As my mentor, Thomas DeFrantz often says, “it matters that we need one another and it matters how we come together to do so.” In this sense, this work together might become a microcosm into how we might want to see the world and place ourselves inside of it.
These are some questions I continue to ask throughout this work and my own research:
what stories and memories are stored in my body?
what stories and metaphors do I use to make sense of the world?
how can fungi help me think more about union rather than stories of separateness?
how can I think of being a decomposing thinker? a decomposing moving body? what does decomposition tell me about the materiality inside of me?
what are the depths of my interiors?
what more?
what more?
what more?
I might now wonder how this thinking extends itself towards the audience during Satelliser. Being entangled is to understand that we are all interconnected in subconscious and conscious ways. And, by we, I mean a we that includes the performers, audience members. A non-homogeneous we, that embraces difference and conflict that is attentive to the politics of care. What I have learned from studying mycelium is to value the unpredictable how of forming relationships. Eco-systems are not just lists of what constitutes a given environment, but the in-between space of how these relationships are organizing, supporting, and thriving alongside one another. An orientation toward a set of relationships of between-ness.
Image: Larissa Vanhee. Satelliser in Répétition exhibition, Villa Empain, 2016. Coworkers: Katja Nyqvist, Alexandrina Hemsley & J N Harrington.
In many ways, Satelliser answers these questions for me: What is happening in the in-between, in the middle of sharing and receiving? What is happening between body and practice?
How does choreography activate that space of in-between relationality? How might that translate between audience and choreography? The performance itself becomes a space of in-between. One can feel the space pause and breath, making room for thoughts to land. Performers and audience are given time to reflect and ponder to the ongoingness of the movement and conversation. Everyone in the space becomes an active agent. The room itself turns into a listening and sensing eco-system. We all become mycelium mushrooms in that way. Sharing and receiving glances, energy, informal and formal looks begin to germinate the space. Satelliser’s strength is revealing our humanness inside of relationality. Like fungi, the collective rather than the individual, are concerned with the well-being of the space. Through out the durational work, a slowed down synchronized pace allows for everyone to sense and feel differently. A symbiosis forms. A mutuality of caring for one another, of tending to the space surfaces. The practice of leaning in and out, like fungi allows for everyone in the room to see more clearly, to choose an orientation alongside others. Together, we create an intimate ecology.
I wonder, what more can entanglement be besides the realization or acknowledgement of interconnectedness? I am not sure, yet, but I have a hunch that performances like Satelliser may bring us closer to finding new meanings. Performances that create circumstances in order to provoke the unexpected - to create a space of something otherwise to surface.
Image: Larissa Vanhee. Satelliser in Répétition exhibition, Villa Empain, 2016. Coworker: Liz Kinoshita.
¹Solnit, R. (2013). The Arc Of Justice and The Long Run
²brown, A. (2017). Emergent strategy. AK Press.
³Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble. Duke University Press.
Image: Albert Quesada
Katie Vickers (she/her)
Katie is an American artist, a graduate of PARTS and The Ohio State University. She has danced for Daniel Linehan (USA), Martin Nachbar (GE), Benjamin Vandewalle (BE), Vera Tussing (GE), Rósa Omarsdóttir (IS), Thierry de May (BE), David Gordon (US), and as a guest artist for the Cullberg Ballet’s ‘Figure a Sea’, by Deborah Hay. Her own work questions the use of the body to find the unfamiliar in the familiar. In 2014, Katie created ‘Slogan for Modern Times’ with Inga Huld Hakonardottir, following that, she created ‘5 Seasons’ (2016) with Benjamin Pohlig. She premiered ‘We Will Have Had Darker Futures’ (2017) with Inga Huld Hakondottir and Rebecka Stillman. These pieces were performed and premiered in the festival Bouge B in deSingel and supported by institutions such as Dommelhof TAKT, Vooruit, School Van Gaasbeek, STUK, wpZimmer, Uferstudios, and Schloss Bröllin.She finished ‘The home of Dance’, a researchproject on rethinking the theatre home (supported by Flanders government). Currently, Katie is receiving her MFA at University of the Arts in Philadelphia.