Things That Insist (in three parts)
by Jacob Wren

1.

Dance doesn’t last.

Then again, dance does last. In our memories. As it’s handed down from one body to the next.

When someone is dancing in a nightclub, where do their movements come from? If someone is sitting on the other side of the club, watching them, how much are they observing?

How does this change when one of these people is sitting in the audience and the other is on stage?

What about on the street, to notice someone walking down the street with a certain kind of special bounce in their step? You’ve never met them, but for some reason you always remember that way they walked.

All of this is far away – and also very close – to a filing cabinet full of documents. Or a hard drive full of motion capture.

Most things are ephemeral, but then there are certain things that insist. (And some of the things that insist are things that can’t be owned.)

2.

What first attracted me to making performances was the fact that it was so ephemeral. You had to be in the moment and, if it was going to happen, it had to happen right fucking now. Yet now I’m basically over that aspect of it.

Artistically I lead a double life: half my life spent writing books, the other half spent performing. And more and more I prefer the books side of my life for the simple reason that books last.

Every once in a while, someone writes to me, saying they just read a book I wrote a very long time ago, and I experience these messages almost like a relief: that there is an object out there in the world, with my name on it, doing the work for me. Doing the work in my place.

Yet something similar does sometimes happen with performance. For example, I’ll add someone on social media and they’ll send me a message saying they saw me perform ten years ago, and they still fondly remember the experience.

Why do I find this version of past works entering into the present somehow less satisfying? The performance version less satisfying than the one involving books. Is it only because it occurs less frequently? 

In 2018, I attempted to partly solve this dilemma by writing a book that recounted twenty years of my performance work. And, in doing so, I made a kind of small discovery: that the descriptions of the performances recounted in the book almost replaced people’s memories of the performances themselves.

The printed version was sharper, clearer and more recent when compared to the vagueness of memory. And yet, of course, there was another way in which memories were more intense, evocative and personal.

Performance is ephemeral, but the performances we remember also exist because we remember them. The very fact we remember them is a testament to their value.

I have never gone to an archive, any sort of archive, to look up a performance I’ve previously seen. I have only ever looked up performances I didn’t see.

In this way, I might intuit that I value the live experience more than I value any recorded account of it. I don’t want to spoil my fading memory of the performance by consulting an archived account of it.

But enough about me.

3.

To let my thoughts become a bit more random. Because it is the sometimes randomness of the archive that allows for true discoveries.

Of course, it is the same question with any kind of archive: what is left out, who is left out, and why? Who is telling the story?

Dance is an art form, and it’s also a community, and it’s also a labour of love, and so many other things as well. The things the fit within an archive and the things that don’t quite fit.

To the best of my knowledge, no one creates a dance thinking: I really hope this dance will someday end up in an archive. But, then again, in a completely different sense maybe they do.

I really hope this text will someday end up in an archive. But, then again, in another way I really don’t.

Things being passed down from generation to generation. How much of that we need. How little we have. And yet some distinctly have more of it than others.

That whiteness is a refusal to know where it comes from before it became whiteness.

We might dance for the future. But I can’t help but feel it is better to dance for the now.

To remember what is most important and forget that which gets in the way. But how to tell the difference?

When all you really want to do is dance.