Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods Maybe Forever
Posted by: Seth Nehil
A clear emotional narrative flows under its abstract surface. Letters are written to a distant reader. Words are addressed to an absent listener. We are witnessing an emptiness which is the hole that is left behind.
In Stuart’s vocabulary, dance movement crystallizes out of everyday movement. Standing, walking, looking, holding. Not just everyday movement as dance movement, but dance as everyday movement. We are asked to become committed to committed movement, slight gestures, silence, half-sentences.
Maybe Forever is like one of those mood albums – the Cat Power album that we only put on while watching raindrops slide down a grey window. That Nico album where every song is a dirge, grinding away at some black feeling. There are albums we listen to as salve for a wounded heart. The pain can become self-indulgent, almost delicious. The feeling is unified, single, relentless. It’s fully committed to being itself.
A piece like this doesn’t work to accommodate varieties of attention. It waits, offering itself, asking the observer to fall in, give in. It asks us to notice very small things, to watch patiently, to share an obsession. Under the weight of this patience, I could sometimes hear a restless audience. A lengthy solo, in complete silence, as chairs squeak and hands fidget. This piece demands attention, it requires a focus which could match the sharpened edge of emotional intensity. Or not. Some spent the entire performance in tears, while others used the opportunity to poke at their iPhones. It’s the only performance where I’ve ever heard boos. Maybe Forever doesn’t contain the spectacular set pieces of her other dances. It strips the stage almost bare. The shift of a large projected photograph from sepia to full-color becomes a powerful dramatic moment.
Meg Stuart’s movement is not overstated. It doesn’t use “dancy” dance as a contrast to ordinary gestures, but rather allows a slippage between the two, a confusion that could create awareness through the fall of a hand. In her improvisation workshop, Stuart talked about the difference between “allowing” movement to happen and “doing” it – and then demonstrated the difference, which is a subtle energetic looseness, a connectedness between molecules. The experience and mastery of Stuart’s movement is in the coexistence of allowing and doing (in that Maybe Forever is choreography, not improvisation). Her choreography is an allowing which is in full control, which knows where it’s going. This is dance as pre-thought and post-thought, simultaneously.
Maybe Forever is about the way we take those generic sentences that are in the language and make them our own through personal, subjective use. “I’ve never been happier.” “You’re the only one for me.” In use, given phrases become fragmented, left unfinished, tinged with hand gestures and inflection. Sentimental songs become attached to memories, made our own.
