A Letter from Emily Sweeney :
November 20, 2008
Dear Eva, Lisa, and Vicky:
These lines from your blog spoke to me:
—All three of us, Lisa, Vicky and I, have traveled the path from hard to soft. (Eva remembers me at a time when I was closer to hard than soft; she helped me take some of my first steps along that path)—
—Even without language, without having made something composed, there is a complete transmission of personality. The idea that we have to be “clothed” with worthy material is suspect. The three of us agree on this: it's not so much what you do as how you do it.—
—We get into the habit of recording, not only our dancing, but also our talking. Sometimes not much of real importance is said, aside from this building of history, this getting to know each other again, in depth, those small and big details of our lives that make us who we are. (This made me think of entanglement—more on that below.)—
It is unbelievable to me that four months (one-third of one year!) have passed since I watched you moving together in Swarthmore on a July afternoon. My response to the work you are making and the purpose of your making it was immediate and non-lingual, which has made it difficult to approach writing about it. But now that I’ve waited, I am glad I have, because I had my own brush with lineage in October—had a red thread surface on my skin and become instantly visible to another with whom I’d never danced. Forgive me… this will be rambling.
The piece I was working on over the summer when I came to watch you, assembling minutiae, is somewhat related to the Red Thread project because it also explores the notion of interpersonal connection, and how and why such connections exist. I was interested in exploring my movement relationships with dancers with whom I somehow established an instant rapport- thinking about why that might be, and trying to generate videos that captured moments in those relationships. I have been thinking a lot about how we feel inexplicably connected to people (the three of you spoke about your common life experiences, but I feel that your connection might go beyond your life experiences to touch something more deeply physical and elemental).
So, in the piece I surrounded myself with little video capsules of me dancing with those dancers with whom I instantly jived, and then imagined somehow that my experiences with them had become memories only. No specific circumstances surrounding why they might have become solely memories- only that the way for me to reenter those movement spaces was through my memory, and never again through actual physical contact. Then I treated the movement we had created together as though it were a beloved memory: rewinding, slowing down, speeding up, repeating- just trying to massage the phrases really thoroughly over time, getting comfort from the act of evoking these movement-memory spaces in the room. It was meant to be about the act of remembering- about creating a slightly melancholy, occasionally joyful space to linger in memory (evoking precious memories is one of my favorite things to do- a fairly common thing, I suppose, but interesting to consider as a kinesthetic state).The structure of the piece was further informed by my slowly growing knowledge of memory. It is currently thought that when we store memories, they are broken down into various components that are relegated to different areas in the brain. Each time we remember something it is a physical act that requires us to pull disparate elements together, and so to "remember" is really to reconstruct- to pull those elements together again. It is a physical act, and I think a physical sensation, too. I wanted to invite the audience into that memory space with me and have them experience that physical state of remembering as it was happening to me with regards to those women I have loved dancing with.
So, the interesting thing about my experience while watching you (this was particularly true during the duet that Eva and Vicky showed) was that I couldn’t shake the feeling that your common experiences were almost a secondary layer of connection—that your connection to one another was somehow established long before you met—long before you had even had the overlapping life experiences that caused you to meet and feel connected—and that your common experiences were more the result of your connection than the basis for it. I did a little research into entanglement during the creation of my memory piece:
From an interview with Brian Clegg:
Entanglement is a strange feature of quantum physics, the science of the very small. It’s possible to link together two quantum particles – photons of light or atoms, for example – in a special way that makes them effectively two parts of the same entity. You can then separate them as far as you like, and a change in one is instantly reflected in the other. This odd, faster than light link, is a fundamental aspect of quantum science – Erwin Schrödinger, who came up with the name “entanglement” called it “the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics.”
It seemed to me that the three of you might be somehow entangled.
Your showing resonated with me so completely (and it’s already taken four months!). But I couldn’t shake the feeling that the “factual” layers of text you had placed with your phrase material with regards to the dates, places, and events that led your lives to overlap were secondary, and that what was primary was happening regardless of whether I knew of your common experiences. There is definitely some transcendentalist thought happening here—I am a huge Emerson and Whitman fan—and perhaps even thoughts of reincarnation… or of simple physical stew, where you three, and, I would posit, Mariella and I as well, were somehow very close to one another in the primitive pot, and when we find one another now, some very, very deep element in us is touched, and we respond.
This is all very current thought on my part, so as I have new and perhaps more thorough thoughts, I’ll send them along.
Please let me know if any of this resonates with you—I would be very curious.
Much respect,
Emily (see more on Emily at http://www.uwishunu.com/2007/08/15/artist-spotlight-emily-sweeney/)
Dear Eva, Lisa, and Vicky:
These lines from your blog spoke to me:
—All three of us, Lisa, Vicky and I, have traveled the path from hard to soft. (Eva remembers me at a time when I was closer to hard than soft; she helped me take some of my first steps along that path)—
—Even without language, without having made something composed, there is a complete transmission of personality. The idea that we have to be “clothed” with worthy material is suspect. The three of us agree on this: it's not so much what you do as how you do it.—
—We get into the habit of recording, not only our dancing, but also our talking. Sometimes not much of real importance is said, aside from this building of history, this getting to know each other again, in depth, those small and big details of our lives that make us who we are. (This made me think of entanglement—more on that below.)—
It is unbelievable to me that four months (one-third of one year!) have passed since I watched you moving together in Swarthmore on a July afternoon. My response to the work you are making and the purpose of your making it was immediate and non-lingual, which has made it difficult to approach writing about it. But now that I’ve waited, I am glad I have, because I had my own brush with lineage in October—had a red thread surface on my skin and become instantly visible to another with whom I’d never danced. Forgive me… this will be rambling.
The piece I was working on over the summer when I came to watch you, assembling minutiae, is somewhat related to the Red Thread project because it also explores the notion of interpersonal connection, and how and why such connections exist. I was interested in exploring my movement relationships with dancers with whom I somehow established an instant rapport- thinking about why that might be, and trying to generate videos that captured moments in those relationships. I have been thinking a lot about how we feel inexplicably connected to people (the three of you spoke about your common life experiences, but I feel that your connection might go beyond your life experiences to touch something more deeply physical and elemental).
So, in the piece I surrounded myself with little video capsules of me dancing with those dancers with whom I instantly jived, and then imagined somehow that my experiences with them had become memories only. No specific circumstances surrounding why they might have become solely memories- only that the way for me to reenter those movement spaces was through my memory, and never again through actual physical contact. Then I treated the movement we had created together as though it were a beloved memory: rewinding, slowing down, speeding up, repeating- just trying to massage the phrases really thoroughly over time, getting comfort from the act of evoking these movement-memory spaces in the room. It was meant to be about the act of remembering- about creating a slightly melancholy, occasionally joyful space to linger in memory (evoking precious memories is one of my favorite things to do- a fairly common thing, I suppose, but interesting to consider as a kinesthetic state).The structure of the piece was further informed by my slowly growing knowledge of memory. It is currently thought that when we store memories, they are broken down into various components that are relegated to different areas in the brain. Each time we remember something it is a physical act that requires us to pull disparate elements together, and so to "remember" is really to reconstruct- to pull those elements together again. It is a physical act, and I think a physical sensation, too. I wanted to invite the audience into that memory space with me and have them experience that physical state of remembering as it was happening to me with regards to those women I have loved dancing with.
So, the interesting thing about my experience while watching you (this was particularly true during the duet that Eva and Vicky showed) was that I couldn’t shake the feeling that your common experiences were almost a secondary layer of connection—that your connection to one another was somehow established long before you met—long before you had even had the overlapping life experiences that caused you to meet and feel connected—and that your common experiences were more the result of your connection than the basis for it. I did a little research into entanglement during the creation of my memory piece:
From an interview with Brian Clegg:
Entanglement is a strange feature of quantum physics, the science of the very small. It’s possible to link together two quantum particles – photons of light or atoms, for example – in a special way that makes them effectively two parts of the same entity. You can then separate them as far as you like, and a change in one is instantly reflected in the other. This odd, faster than light link, is a fundamental aspect of quantum science – Erwin Schrödinger, who came up with the name “entanglement” called it “the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics.”
It seemed to me that the three of you might be somehow entangled.
Your showing resonated with me so completely (and it’s already taken four months!). But I couldn’t shake the feeling that the “factual” layers of text you had placed with your phrase material with regards to the dates, places, and events that led your lives to overlap were secondary, and that what was primary was happening regardless of whether I knew of your common experiences. There is definitely some transcendentalist thought happening here—I am a huge Emerson and Whitman fan—and perhaps even thoughts of reincarnation… or of simple physical stew, where you three, and, I would posit, Mariella and I as well, were somehow very close to one another in the primitive pot, and when we find one another now, some very, very deep element in us is touched, and we respond.
This is all very current thought on my part, so as I have new and perhaps more thorough thoughts, I’ll send them along.
Please let me know if any of this resonates with you—I would be very curious.
Much respect,
Emily (see more on Emily at http://www.uwishunu.com/2007/08/15/artist-spotlight-emily-sweeney/)
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