HUB

What USE is the dance?
not VALUE… no, it has great value, even the materialists can attest to that.

But what USE? What is to be DONE with the dance?

In some ways, this presupposes that we have not USED other things to get to the dance, that the dance is some tool or just a fragment rather than an end in itself… but then I wonder, is it an end in itself? No, not entirely, or not in the way that sounds out the gate.

The dance, dance, is a form of communication. And communication is an activity involving at least two parties, involving a call and a response, a question and an answer, even if only to say, see, feel, and hear in response, I see you, I feel you. Contact.

I see dances everywhere. The buildings dance. A text dances. An image, another’s voice in conversation, a stranger’s body in the seat next to me, the wax and wane of my correspondent’s letters, my collaborator’s body in time and space… each of these things, often enough, offer up dances when I look upon them, and my own body is compelled to respond, to answer, to make USE of the dance by dancing another, even if just to rephrase the one that came before.

My collaborator tells me this is perhaps a problematic view—in the sense of, it leaves no need of an audience (and aren’t I in the business of making work for an audience?). But I tell him that I do need an audience, I very much need an audience. I TOO need a response. That is, the dance I make, it is also asking, it is also calling out, it is also communicating or trying to, with someone, something outside itself, and in the absence of a response, it falters, loses grip. In silence, I panic and fabricate an overblown response to fill the void. One overblown fabrication leads to my own paranoid response which in turn cycles on and on until I’ve forgotten how it started, I fully believe the fabrication (my own sincerity in responding to it makes it all the more hard to dismiss), and which then leaves me paralyzed.

At this point, both myself and the dance have become useless. So there’s that. That if the dance is not used, then the dance becomes abusive.