Attention is a scarce resource these days, yet live performance relies on the audience’s willingness to offer it – and the artists’ ability to keep us engaged. At the French festival Montpellier Danse, choreographers including Jann Gallois, Héla Fattoumi and Zoé Lakhnati had us wonder about how we approach attention as critics: how does a dance draw us in or put us off? Does dance aim to capture our attention, or choreograph it? Do we choose to give it? These questions gave rise to the following conversation.
MP: During Jann Gallois’ Imminentes, I scribbled on the programme : ‘What keeps a dance alive? What are the forms of attention?’ and I started making two columns, one for what kept my attention alive, the other for what disappointed my expectations. Two elements mainly held me back quite soon after the beginning. First the presence of the six (impressive) dancers, embarked in intricate spirals and torsions, felt a bit ‘too much’ to start with. As if their closeness had to be underlined with a profusion of broad smiles. The choreography in itself was enough to discover this tight group of performers standing together shoulder to shoulder, lifting each other, helping one another to push the movement further, higher. I would have had a better time witnessing the bonds being woven through movement alone, without extra explicit signs of togetherness brandished towards me.
LC: I started thinking about attention, too, during Imminentes, but perhaps for different reasons. Of the works we saw, it struck me as the piece that paid the most attention to the audience’s experience, and the way attention can waver if choreographic construction becomes too repetitive. It didn’t make Gallois’ approach entirely successful – some sections felt “in your face” without much subtlety – but I loved that she spent half an hour patiently building a crescendo out of ever-changing patterns.
MP: The soundtrack quickly suggested that we were on board for a crescendo. It unfolded for a good first part of the piece. That predictability failed to keep my gaze at work. As I wonder why, I circle back to the elements emphasised in this moment: fierce expansion of energy, fabricated closeness. If the elements are pushed too hard in our direction as spectators, I feel like the outcome is already decided for me. My curiosity, my imagination and ability to analyse are reduced, the range I have to receive the work is already very mapped out for me.
LC: It’s interesting how differently we can perceive structure. While the crescendo as a form is fairly predictable, the way Gallois did it involved enough craft – the variation in group shapes and rhythm, the changing paths the six women took onstage – to keep my brain interested, even though I obviously knew it was building towards a climax. I watched William Forsythe in rehearsal with the CCN-Ballet de l’Opéra national du Rhin this spring, and he explained something that stuck with me: you create abstract narrative by changing the pattern at the right time, at the right pace. If a choreographer is smart enough to set, and break, patterns in thoughtful ways, I don’t mind following them on a clearly defined journey. Unpredictability, to me, isn’t necessarily a good sign, because it can mean a lack of cohesion over the evening. What about you?
MP: About unpredictability, I know I have an appetite for dance pieces that keep my attention busy by being riddled with surprises, unexpected choices, beautiful apparitions or carefully unfolding patterns. It can be through a very repetitive or minimalistic way of choreographing, this I completely agree with. Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s Fase comes to my mind for instance, with this work on variations that is mesmerising from beginning to end, each section embroidered from a single motif.
I think what makes me really curious is when a dance is not busy pushing one angle of approach towards spectators, but subtly offers different layers instead. I can quote dance researcher Mathieu Bouvier when he writes about his desire to watch ‘a dance that doesn’t dazzle, but offers something to see’.
It’s about what room we have as spectators to travel within the work, to wander inside the piece with our own gaze and attention. When the dancing bodies are on thresholds, our gaze becomes active: we engage with what is before us, we search, we follow. The gaze itself is in motion, engaged in a choreography of attention that unfolds in response to the work we are watching.
For instance, I was surprised by some parts of Héla Fattoumi’s Twama Paradise, performed with Sondos Belhassen. The very beginning, when both stand with their faces sculpted by the light, singing, was an intriguing apparition. Hearing Héla Fattoumi sing, detailing the similarities between these two women who play a lot on twinship. Then, at different moments, the course of their autobiographical conversation took surprising turns: they engage in a musical-like singing number, they playfully interpret a dancing duet with surging humour. I was surprised and captivated by the fanciful tone running through the piece.
LC: Surprises can be lovely, but they make more sense to me when I can relate them back in some way to the overall arc of the piece. In Montpellier, Zoé Lakhnati’s This is la mort really worked the surprise angle, with her transformation from awkward knight in armour to padded muscle woman to secret agent as she shed layers of costume. Yet I couldn’t see much of a connection between these characters. The programme notes refer to them as heroic figures, but the tone shifts are extreme. Lakhnati also ties them back to the work of art historian Aby Warburg, suggesting that the juxtaposition of unrelated images ‘gives rise to unexpected eruptions of meaning’. Yet when the choices are this haphazard, I feel like the artist hasn’t done their part of the job: I want to feel what connections they made between those images, not have it left entirely up to me as an audience member. As a principle of choreographic construction, juxtaposition has been extremely overused in recent years, and can feel somewhat lazy. Of course we want multilayered work, but the layers should be thought through and built into a piece.
MP: Yes. I completely agree that the work has to do the work and not leave it all open to us. I too pay a lot of attention to craft, in how the layers are thought through, composed, made visible or suggested. It is usually clear very quickly if its elements have been carefully displayed or are still too disparate in composition. While writing and thinking with you about attention, I think I am also preoccupied by another heavy tendency: choreographic gestures that are thrown into our faces, made to impress, point blank, overflowing with virtuoso movements that leave no room to breathe, neither for the dancers nor for us. Such pieces feel driven by an inescapable undercurrent and I found myself frozen many times in front of them, terrified by the authority of the work.
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Perhaps attention is a dance in itself
I want to be before a dance that does not leave me stunned or transfixed, that does not force its meaning or arc upon me with a peremptory tone. I think my advocacy for such pieces comes in reaction to works that embody this kind of harmful aesthetic trend – harmful both for contemporary dance and for what they offer to our already challenged attention span. I would like attention to be considered with care and playfulness, not channelled in a forced direction. I would like dancemakers and performers to take care of our attention, please.
LC: That’s such a lovely thought, and I genuinely believe the audience can tell when artists are aware of that. Attention is definitely earned, but it’s such a delicate balance: as you say, forcing it with tricks, overpowering the audience with an onslaught of high-impact movement is an issue as well. It can feel like the piece is asking us to surrender all distance. Armin Hokmi’s slow-going Bazm (Repertoire) partially had that effect on me: the sheer repetitiveness of it, though deliberate, felt completely deadening, with no room for anything outside the system he had devised. Perhaps attention is a dance in itself, between the artists’ craft and the audience’s desire for both direction and space to breathe. ●
Laura Cappelle and Marie Pons’ trips to Montpellier were supported by Agora, Cité Internationale de la Danse
