Not trusting my memory of our chocka time at Oriente Occidente, I returned to my notebook and found these #unfiltered jottings to share.

Augmenting the footprint of the dance

This was a comment on what dance writing should be doing, shared in a discussion on repositioning critical discourse. I began to wonder if we could encourage engagement with dance criticism online; more modular content that could be interacted with, edited and posted to create an expansive record of an event. After all, this is the instant and informal discourse most social media outlets rely on.

Visiting Oriente Occidente’s Instagram comment section, I was disappointed to be frequently met with no comments at all. Perhaps audiences feel that they can’t ‘publish’ even a micro-opinion into cyberspace. Secretly, I’d have relished a little comment section scuffle; keyboard warriors battling it out over dance productions.

It begs questions: who is allowed to (or wants to) talk about dance, when do they talk, can they interrupt and is there space for reinterpretation, conflict, resolution and chatter? Do more comments mean more conversations, thus a bigger footprint of the dance? An open-ended ramble.

The chair, a dominant vessel, dreamy ethereal, a [body] suspended and static and yet still manoeuvring around a stage

This wonky memo emerged from the world premiere of Sharon Fridman’s Go Figure. The chair, an electric scooter, carries Shmuel Dvir Cohen and Tomer Navot’s statuesque bodies across the stage at a creeping pace, but for the most part is stuck in an eternal loop, circling the dancers. I wanted to make a textual snapshot of this beautiful world in which time moved at the pace of the circling scooter, and where bodies intertwined with bodies, vehicles and objects in a display of balance, care and joyous experimentation.

Research your material

‘You know, you have to really research your material,’ responds Fridman when asked about how such an intimate and fluid relationship was forged between the two performers and the other ‘bodies’ on the stage. At points, the duet emerged as a quartet owing to the complex choreography of weight exchange and contact improvisation between dancers, crutches and the scooter. All choreographers carry out research, but this level of hypnotic familiarity could only be achieved by a full dissection that allowed objects to transcend their original meaning and become life-like. I enjoyed living in this material world.

Confrontation – the perhaps more crucial element of dance in the gallery/museum space

Museums were not made for dance, nor dance for museums, which is precisely why it should be there. When we disrupt what is expected of spaces, we invent a new place of surprise and uncertainty. This is a place of rich conversation on who belongs, how we welcome more people and how we rethink surrounding artworks, breathing a new life into them. The topic of dance in the museum was one of the discussion points of this year’s festival.

A feast fit for the generation of short attention spans

Firmamento from the Barcelona-based dance company La Veronal led by Marcos Morau is a no doubt decadent feast of impeccably cooked ideas and tantalising presentation. As rumours of a generation with a depleting attention span spread, productions like this respond by cramming us with situation after situation to hold our focus, like a real life doomscroll. But sometimes there’s no harm in enduring a certain ennui and sitting with a single dish for a little longer.