alexissteeves

ALEXIS STEEVES is a dance artist based between New York City and Stockholm. Steeves pursues ongoing research in live solo and collaborative performance praxis. Her questions emerge from substrata of long-term, interdisciplinary dialogues and the relational ethics and emergent practices within which they co-create and sometimes rest. Most often these methods proliferate in shared studio practices, experimental performance and pedagogical formulations. Steeves’ is deeply informed by her exchange with Rosalind Crisp (AUS, EU), and work with the NYC based performance collective HAM (high art moment).Her work as a choreographer and teacher is nourished by 18 years as a licensed, therapeutic bodywork practitioner (LMT, SI). She earned an MFA in Choreography in the New Performative Practices program at the Stockholm University of the Arts as a scholarship recipient and
holds a BA from Bard College (USA). Her artistic work has been presented in Estonia, Germany, Spain, Sweden, the USA and UK. She has taught contemporary dance, performance and composition at the Tallinn University (TLU), Fine5 Dance Theater, Noore
Tantsu Festival (NoTaFe), Bard High School Early College and Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX). Since 2003 Steeves has worked as a licensed and certified massage therapist and, from 2013, specializes in Structural Integration (ATSI, manual fascial work of Ida Rolf).

Oda Brekke's performance, dead dead document, offers ample choices in space and time. Its
companion publication, It Absorbs - On Dance as a Porous Art Object, holds a tighter line
while expanding context. Taking the invitations of each - discursively and spatially - I respond
here as a reader, an audience participant and a written correspondent. In the LEFT column I’ve
bolded the seven sections from It Absorbs and chosen a quote from each. In the RIGHT column
are reflections flowing from my experience of the performance while sometimes glancing back at
the text. I imagine my associations as footnotes in a sea of many others’ - filling up the work and emptying it again over and over.

“I propose a porous dance, one that has space for something other than itself.”

I sit close to the sound so that I can feel
more inside. There are two figures sitting in
the room when we enter. The space is
accumulating tensions of stillness: Cageian
silence, being seen, looking at, tiny
self-conscious movements of audienceship,
the tender, internal smile of the
choreographer. The looping sound
hypnotizes me. It is 15:15 on Sunday, an
excellent time to sit quietly. Luxuriously,
nothing happens. Except that we arrive and
that is already a lot. There are a lot of
choices. Where to sit, and how. Two rooms,
one for reading, one where something is
happening. Performativity is invoked, if not
quite performance. A proposition is at hand.
A document. There is a book. There is an
essay. They have formed each other.
Suddenly, a dancer shifts to a new position.
And another. Their attentions become the
metronym of our own. I am hypnotized and
hypnotizing - part of the program, I shift too.
The longer I look, the closer the floor rises
up to meet the surfaces of my body, the
more intimate I become with the weight of
my limbs and the postures of the others in
the room. Like Alice in Wonderland, my
body grows to meet the walls. Amplification
is at work by dint of reduction. What the
sound and movement of the performance
resists is subtly, noticeably filled in by its
witnesses and larger environment. The
building itself, an elevator, a conversation, a
sigh, a scuff on the floor, babies’ babbles,
comings and goings. Another proposition:
when excess escapes, traces remain and
choices inscribe a record. Porosity is the
dance of inside / outside in negotiation,
almost always asymmetrical. Is this the
relation of the dance and the document?

“A porous dance absorbs, but it isn’t
adaptable. It has the real risk of falling
apart.”

One dance mat
No shoes
Two people / figures / performers / dancers
Countless postures
One artist drawing
Life drawing
Nine people looking
Two babies
One sound loop
Eight seconds of sound
Six clicks
Three hours
(How many years?)
Two rooms
One library
One reader in the performance room
Two friends in the reading room
A growing number of readers on the dance mat
An equal and inverse number of people
walking into the reading room one at a time
(How many steps?)
Thirteen pencils
Forty-three A4s
Twelve pencil shavings
Eleven lists
One hole-puncher
(How many holes?)

“The interior of the studio is a contract. It has tools for transformation and the
potential there is endless.”

When I enter the public library in the city
where I grew up, I know I am in the real city.
My mother parked around the corner in a
cobblestoned alley in the secret spot that
tourists don’t know about. The building's
facade stands out - 80s concrete and glass
in a sea of turn-of-the-century red brick. The
entryway immediately and eclectically
signals the sanctuary to come; marble floor,
corinthian columns, a quiet trickling fountain
where a woman sits looking down in
contemplation. I am shocked by her bare
breasts, but her exposure feels protected by
the dim lighting and the warm breeze of
ventilated air being sucked out to the salted,
freezing Congress street. Was she also a
mermaid thawing her blood on land? The
children’s section is underground and you
must descend in the elevator unless there is
an emergency. There is a large stuffed
moose - (was it real?) - and many
fantastical stuffed animals in a reading
corner. And, gloriously, more rows of books
than I can confidently count. I am pleased
that this section(for children, for me) feels
as labyrinthine and serious as the floors
above– the levels that house mysterious
and terrifying card catalogs, microfiche,
computers, adult content. The librarians
teach us everything we need to know about
the library, most importantly, that it is ours.
They are committed to helping us because
we are card-carrying members. We can
choose ANY! book we want. Up to TEN!
books at a time. My library is a 15 minute
walk from the dance studios where I will
spend most of my time for the next 12 years
of growing up but it is the first studio where
I am the curator. Where I write the syllabus.
Where I am likely to find something unusual,
unexpected, not intended for me. Where I
am free to roam, undirected, susceptible to
cross-contamination of histories and ideas.

“The invitation to partake in a performance as an audience member, and to be nothing but an observer, to enter a room without the responsibility of managing it and performing
content is crucial if the work should open up for critical thinking.”

Speculative list of values at work:

Visible:

Language

Less is more

Difference

Material

Movement

Observation

The page

Duration

Scores

“Over the last few years, the discursive
programs in dance and choreography
contexts have been occupied with the yet to come, the potential future. If we seriously care about the contextualization of dance and its production of discourse, a relevant question to ask ourselves is whether this projection is a resource for audiences, makers, works and practices?”

There is an artist sketching the performance
I attend. The first time the dancers shift their
postures from seated to otherwise, the
painting Christina’s World appears in my
mind’s eye, vivid and strong. This happens
often when I am watching dance or
performing it myself.

In the painting, Christina’s image claims the
foreground of a vast field where she is
sitting, twisting, and reaching in a posture
that projects effort. Her effort and gaze are
aimed at a house in the distance, in
opposition to her legs, seemingly at rest
behind her. There is no denying the
movement of her figure. However, it is
neither beautiful nor violent, she is neither
reclining, tending, or overtly distressed and
our expectations of a “woman’s
representation in landscape” are plunged
into ambivalence. It's unsettling and
exciting.

Christina Olson was born with a condition
that left her immobilized below the waist and
with coordination difficulties in her hands
and tongue. She lived on a rural farm in
Maine with her brother, often traversing
large land areas and buildings by crawling.
The painter of her world, Andrew Wyeth,
met her through his wife and came to paint
her, her brother, and their lives in over 300
works over the next thirty years. He only
ever painted one other location, his
hometown, in the first years of his efforts.
Befriending the Olsons, Wyeth established
his studio in one of their barns.

Christina’s looking back is a looking toward.
She looks where she has been and where
she is going simultaneously. Toward her
home, the site of an artistic practice, a
struggle, a friendship, the time of a life.

“We looked at mundane situations in our lives, we searched in public spaces close to
us and in the culture we consume for things cut off and left behind.

We used Kristeva’s text to derive figures that might generate a specific relation to dance and its by-products. Through the text, we could think about the dance as leaving something of itself behind, something that is separate from us as performers, but something that might also disturb a standardised means of categorization and
cause ambivalence.

Another figure is the pore. The noun ‘pore’ refers to a small opening and can be traced back to the Greek words ‘poros’; literally a way, a passage, and ‘poro’; a journey. From Old English the verb pore means to gaze intently, to look with steady attention. This meaning can also be traced to the Old Norse word ‘spyrja’, a precursor to today’s
Norwegian word for trace, ‘spor’.”

I count thirteen discrete social greetings
from across the room or within an embrace. Hushed and expressive. They are
lip-synched across a distance or whispered
in proximity or brought into contact. Mini
performances of polite invisibility or
respectful interruption. A displacement of
the use of the space. Meeting purposefully,
by surprise, to squeeze a baby’s cheek or
check in with a friend. Interactions that
appear as foreign to the task at hand
provide the freest currency of mobilizing its
potentials. The loosening, activating
movement of other people’s bodies and
tongues. A rupture of attention and intention that moves between rooms, conversations, and memory. Dry, wet, uncanny, abject or other: when and where do the gestures between us begin and end?

“- dance depends on other materials
through which it can inscribe itself
and live on.”

After a year nearly alone in the studio, I am
preparing for a major surgery that will open
my abdomen. I have two more days to
dance before the date and I feel, for the first time in my life, that I am at the end of
movement. The question arises, what moves at the end of movement?

Score of the Stone Figure:
- Move as slowly and steadily as
possible
- Unhold any and all unnecessary
effort
- When stillness arrives, stay with it-
- Empty out completely without losing
the shape
- Allow the outside image to solidify in
your perception and your
imagination
- Find the emotion that corresponds,
or comes from this form
- Saturate the form with that emotion
- Allow this to slowly alter the tone of
your body
- Notice when the tone prompts
weight to shift again and continue
- Find stillness / form / emotion /
movement as many times as it takes
for a dance to appear
- Follow that dance to the end

When I arrive in Stockholm two years later it is notable how many nude stone women are to be found throughout the city. They are usually looking down. I labor to get behind the angle of their gaze and take a photo; it is almost always a patch of gravel or dirt, rarely the sky or the eye level of their observers. I collect these photos of the
gazes of stone women.