Stranger Now : Social horizons in Jen Rosenblit’s Conducting oceans.
Intimates, strangers and acquaintances.
These are the three sets of people that individuals have within their social horizons, says
sociologist Doug Morgan. ‘Friends, partners and family are intimates. With them, we share and
exchange intimate knowledge about ourselves, feel emotionally close, and share physical
affection.” I add animals to this list. “At the other end of the spectrum are strangers, of whom we
know, and with whom we share, very little. Between these extremes are acquaintances, people
we know a bit about and with whom we share a little.’
These social placements, although a little simple (1) , run into an interesting plot when considering
the neighbour - a social role that shifts on this social horizon. Traditionally people who live near
eachother, neighbours may have friendly intimate relations or simply share (and maintain) a similar
proximity, border, particular time-paths and resources. To remain more of a stranger then a
neighbour is possible, maybe even desirable, but due to shared conditions (gentrification, a
relocated bus stop) you would think there has to be some sense of reciprocity, just by existing, of
a common fate - the affect of which is felt unequally.
Acquaintance-ship and ‘unequal fate’ is used as a performance strategy from the very beginning
of Conducting oceans. Barefoot in a loose black top and shorts Jen enters the foyer where the
audience are drinking cava and eating chips and addresses a few different people. “Can you hold
this for a sec?” It’s a rolled up carpet made of fresh smelling lawn, grass and dirt. “I got it from an
old lady in Uppsala, she makes them herself. Take it inside and have a seat.”
Once inside Kottispektionen’s smaller warehouse performance space this initial request to hold
and place objects becomes one way to launch into more detailed relations with the assembled
‘neighbourhood’. It is also the start of a subtle, haptic weaving of the body of audience - both as
individual and collective - into the temporal and poetic aspects of building and disassembling
worlds made not only from particular objects (2) but through metaphor, image, story, presence and
dance.
Jen invites a small group of audience seated on chairs to re-arrange and ‘make an installation’,
ending with two people seated together, sharing a layer of lawn on their laps, holding them in
place. Two people next to me rise to join Jen, who is lying on top of mound of sand in the centre.
“Come play with me. Like children. It can be as high pressure or as low pressure as you like.” As
they dig into the sand with their fingers Jen tells a story, adopting the tone of a non-sensical urban
planner. A potential future landscape is laid out for us, all hinging on the question of who is
allowed in and who is kept out.
From my memory (writing this now and even directly after the performance, I cannot seem to
remember any of text verbatim, only able to retain some of the poetic imagery when I close my
eyes) the underlying political bent seems to swing from one end of the spectrum to other, always
with a sense of trade. If you want space for the trans community (always), you’re going to need
more territory, more surveillance, bigger tech systems. If you want to own a cow, you’re going to
want to break the news softly, especially to the new people, to the old people, to people unseen
for a long time. That last example comes from my affected memory. But this one I remember: “If
you want the children to come, you’re going to need to get more cars.” And so on.
The ‘we’ of the audience that is created in this moment is simultaneously called into question.
‘We’ (Wee?) are a giant body taking up most of the perimeter around the performance and also
floating around in the air, through language. Both real and fictive, replaceable and unique, the
individual and collective Wee is formed through particular homing strategies used to maintain it.
I’ll call this site a body-home.
A body-home refers to all activities at the body and its environment. Skin dripping, hair escaping,
memory in clouds, emotional splatter, saliva spray, crossed legs or not, buttoned clothing and
placement, recreation, socialising. The interactions may be positive (‘Here, you take this seat’) or
negative (‘Your big head is blocking the view’, ‘Stop taking loud pictures on your phone’ or
‘Please stop coughing.’)
As we become more or less geographically available to each other, what are the limits of this real/
fictive body-home of the audience? What sort of neighbours are we, exactly? And let’s not get it
twisted : if turning neighbours into acquaintances into intimates is driven by wanting to ‘be a
community’, koombayaa-style, is this even wanted? ‘As if being a nation or a community ever
worked to everyone’s advantage,’ (Conducting oceans program note) when being connected only
really works for some and not others, who have never been recognised in the first place?
There are many examples where smoothing the bridge between audience and performer body-
homes take over as the core element of an art work. Enter: participatory performance, interactive
installations, or ‘Why-don’t-you-get-up-and-dance-too?!.’ Often aiming for an illuminating,
pleasant and relatively frictionless experience of togetherness, a large portion of these types of
works can be born less from protest or actual shared existence and the sticky mess that entails
than from ticking a box on a funding application, a direct result from the trickle-down effect of
government cuts to basic social services (community centres, childcare) and public resources
(libraries, parks), which artists are then expected to replicate or replace.
What I am curious about here are the more subtle magical tactics, tools and experiments in this
body-home bridging - maybe it’s more of a pooling - in performance craft. Wobbling, trembling,
seemingly delicate, highly sophisticated mechanisms. In Jen’s case, it’s a sonar-like presence and
attention; and affective, rhythmic language that buoys and blends ‘real’ and fictive spaces. I tried
to think of other tactic examples in recent performance work: an invitation to attend naked, along
with the performers, in Balletlab and Brooke Stamp’s
And All Return to Nature / TOMORROW;
the incessant hypnotic character apparatus and found-footage editing in Ryan Trecartin’s video
CENTRE JENNY; autotuning as an interstitial fluid maker at a
Morgan Jay show.
One thing for sure is that Jen does not physically test or weaponise the body-home of the
audience as the older works of say American artist,
Ann Liv Young, might. For one improvised
hour, Jen keeps the physical borders clean and invites placement, activity, focus, play, structure
and authority, under which a deep manifestation of the unruly and tools for ’deconstruction,
subversion and imagination’ (3) occur. And from this, I would argue, perhaps new (impossible)
embodiments, amongst and throughout our temporary body-home clouds.
There’s also trickery. Jen dances on a diagonal from the speakers, lassoing arms to a staccato
beat, sweeping port de bras to re-set and re-attempt. Jen lying back naked on a blue strip of vinyl
covered in lube, chest heaving and lower legs rubbing gently, paddle, slippery, against the blue.
Drifting in a narrow passage, knee-spinning and puffed, then with no struggle, eventually making
it to the central sand-pile and beaches there, face down, coughing sometimes.
Are you sick? I asked afterwards. “I was coughing because I wanted people to lean in. I wanted them to be drawn in somehow, to care more.”
Jen is able to address and include our body-homes, knock on our door and ask to be invited in.
Or perhaps it is us, the audience, who have always been knocking on the door of the
performance, without realising it, thinking no-one is home, and at the last second before we step
off the flesh door-mat, when we turn away to go down the stairs, Jen opens the door, lights on
behind and the smell of a wild dinner. “Come in, “ with a wink, ”I was expecting you. Now can you
put this ocean over there?”
Referenced Text:
‘Prehistoric Perspectives on “Others” and “Strangers” 2020, by Anna Belfer-Cohen and Erella
Hovers.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6985552/
‘The Anatomy of Neighbour Relations’ 2022, by Hannu Ruonavaara
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351720648_The_Anatomy_of_Neighbour_Relations
“Uses of the Erotic” for Teaching Queer Studies, 2012, by Nikki Young.
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493888
(2) To overcome the social perception of ‘othering’ and ‘strangers’ between different kinship groups in pre-history (3.3 million years ago) there was the help of cultural ‘tool kits’ - specific meaningful objects that smoothed potentially hostile interaction. It makes me think of a workshop I did of Jen’s in 2018 at Danscentrum in the city. We worked with selecting a collection of objects, narrowing down one to three that seemed to fit together somehow and working with them in an extended group improvisation. The triangulation of objects had particular uses, materiality and kinesis. Like as you wave them around or break them apart, metaphorical potential and magical properties become available.