Photo by Chris Vitiello
Justin Tornow
Sometimes a rehearsal is just talking.
Dancer and choreographer Justin Tornow has started her month-long residency with The Commons at Carolina Performing Arts, based at CURRENT Artspace + Studio. She’s creating a project entitled Performance as a Responsive Practice. At the end of May, the project will be performed, but it’s hard to say what it will look like. That is going to be partly up to you.
At our first meeting, Tornow and I sat on the CURRENT studio floor for a few hours, talking about her vision of “engagement.” This term is used a lot across arts programming and grant applications. If a work boasts an “audience engagement” component—if, for example, audience members write on Post-it Notes and stick them to a public wall, or shout words that are interpreted as prompts by the performers—then arts administrators may better justify funding the work in the name of cultural-impact metrics. Your tax dollars at work.
Certainly, these kinds of performances can be meaningful experiences for audiences, but Tornow is looking for models that offer more substantial engagement, and she’s as interested in the performers’ engagement as she is in that of the audience. As we talked about these models, I jotted down some keywords that Tornow used: “approachable,” “clear,” “un-academic,” “smart,” “welcoming,” “permitted.” We talked about how, for audiences and artists alike, a performance is a part of life, not a hiatus or an escape from it. Rather than making a piece with some slots in which the audience acts in a specific way, Tornow is interested in creating, as she says, “a space in which nothing is wrong.”
Tornow’s work has been opening into this constellation of keywords for years. Over that time, she has assembled an interdisciplinary cast of collaborators and gravitated toward making compositions and performances based on rules and chance procedures. For instance, the lines and shapes in a Heather Gordon painting might be used as a guideline for a dancer’s movement across the floor, or movement phrases might be put in consecutive order by rolling dice instead of making choices. But, for an audience member, a rules-based performance can fail to meet some of Tornow’s current criteria (“welcoming,” “permitted,” maybe even “approachable”). Performances based on chance operations, like rolling dice, can likewise miss these marks (“clear,” and often, “smart”).
A lifelong study of choreographer Merce Cunningham’s work (Tornow was a 2018–19 Cunningham Dance Research Fellow with the New York Public Library) has led her from using chance and rules to happenings and scores—all modalities employed by Cunningham. For Tornow, a happening (based on the typically nonlinear, multi-arts performance events first developed by artists such as Cunningham in the 1950s and '60s) is that space in which no action is wrong. Likewise, a performance score provides structure and direction for both audience and performers without the obey/disobey didacticism of a rule or the randomness of chance.
This all might sound technical or academic, but Tornow’s committed to keeping that in the rehearsal space. You won’t need skills or talent to be a part of her happening. You’ll come; you’ll be presented with some written score or scores; if you choose to, you’ll interpret them in some form of action in the space. You get to be who you are and do whatever the score suggests to you, including nothing. If you stay true to this, you can’t do it wrong. Creating a place and time for this “responsive practice” is Tornow’s alternative to a flat idea of “engagement.” Is this what you want? Or maybe even what you need?
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