Watcher: I loved seeing you. So many people I talked to loved you.
Dogs of Devotion:Thanks for telling me.
Watcher: I’m sorry I didn’t come see you in rehearsal.
Dogs of Devotion: Why are you sorry now?
Watcher: Writing this, I wish I knew a bit more about how you got made. A little extra knowledge
would be nice to share with the Ravel readers.
Dogs of Devotion: What would extra knowledge be?
Watcher: Knowledge a stranger walking in off the street who didn’t know the artists and their
process wouldn’t have access to – how did the piece get made? what accidents were allowed to
accumulate gravity over time until they became structural? Knowledge about who a dancer loved to
imitate that week, or how the choreographer dances. What did the dancers think of the singer?
What did the singer forget? How did the lights feel from onstage? What troubles did each person
bring to the studio with them? What did the performers lose during the piece? What did the
choreographer give up?
Dogs of Devotion: How do you know what a stranger doesn’t know?
Watcher: I don’t. The stranger is imaginary. I make them up and then try to imagine what they
would see.
Dogs of Devotion: It sounds like you’re keeping them from knowing. You’re assuming you know
what they wouldn’t know and you’re not asking them what they do know. Why are you doing that?
Watcher: To be objective.
Dogs of Devotion: Why?
Watcher: An object can be picked up and turned around and looked at from several angles and then
put down and walked away from. And then you can go into a new space and share whatever you
observed in the previous space with someone who wasn’t there. They can understand the thing you
looked at in a similar way to how you’ve understood it.
Dogs of Devotion: You’re keeping their knowledge secret from yourself and estranging them from
what they might have felt, or guessed, or imagined. What if you didn’t want to put me down and
walk away? What if you wanted to keep me with you, somehow, even though I’m not yours?
Watcher: That is what I want. I want you to stay with me, somehow. I’d have to merge with you.
Hard to do when you’re just a watcher. You know about that problem. You were made to be seen,
not held.
Dogs of Devotion: Yes. I’m a theater piece. But I’m the product of an ongoing practice. That’s how I
become myself.
Watcher: Are you done?
Dogs of Devotion: Not exactly done, no. I can become myself over and over, differently.
Watcher: Watching objectively is a little distracting: trying to imagine what you have been trying to
become as you are becoming something else right there in front of me, in shared time. Clinton
Stringer ⁽¹⁾ says he watches dances with the assumption that they are perfect and everything about
them is exactly as it should be. I find that useful. More like looking at a being.
Dogs of Devotion: I’m a being. I might be more than one being, actually.
Watcher: Watching a dance that I know well as if it’s perfect, I can still see mistakes or changes
because they just show-up in relation to what I saw before. If I don’t know the work, I can see what’s
happening clearly, as it’s happening, but I miss what’s changing from performance to performance
and like I said, I don’t know how you got made, really. I have ideas, but it’s not exactly insight.
Dogs of Devotion: That’s okay. Just tell me what you saw on Friday.
Watcher: In the first section time was the weather and you rained polyrhythm. I love Weld – the
walls and nooks of it, and you touched them all. Eventually, a voice bloomed out of the rain, but it
took its time to arrive. Subtle timing and sometimes funny. There was a time-code, or grammar,
made of rhythms, shifts of focus, turning corners, and one too few chairs. Footfalls at different
speeds, in shared time. Actions with endpoints that kept moving. Is the action done already? When
did it become its own twin task? How long is it taking?
Then you killed it ⁽²⁾.
Dogs of Devotion: It was time.
Watcher: It was gruesome. Tragic to see the dancers leave one by one, ascending the staircase to
the dressing room they had come from. Inevitable but unpredictable, like death, to misquote
Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion’s Cheap Lecture ⁽³⁾.
Dogs of Devotion: Time was up.
Watcher: Ulrika Berg has a particular relation to nothingness and time. ⁽⁴⁾ If Ulrika answers the
question what are you doing? with ‘nothing’, she’s being precise. Watching her adaptation of a
Deborah Hay solo (quite a while ago, now), I remember thinking her precision included
unfathomability, which is a difficult balancing act between being exactly here and not exactly now,
or vice versa. I’m not sure which aspect she undoes. She has a lot of subtle texture shifts in her
dancing. A clear surface, and you never know when it’s going to change.
Dogs of Devotion: What’s valuable about fathomability in time?
Watcher: Maybe nothing. In you, I see Ulrika’s fathomlessness as a correction to my sense of time.
I’d been mistaking time for having depth. But what if time is not deep? What if it’s wide?
Dogs of Devotion: Time can fall. It can seep and disperse.
Watcher: That’s how I saw her dancing you that evening – in time’s slip. The night I was there, Ulrika
was in time with you, and Hana was accompanying you. Hana had a sense of aside: alert and
compassionate. Taking care of things that I might not be able to see but were clearly important to
the situation.
Dogs of Devotion: Hana Lee Erdman has fun. She’s very serious and it’s very fun.
Watcher: In other contexts, I’ve heard her pair wonderment and companionship ⁽⁵⁾. I had to laugh
aloud on Friday when Hana finally asked what are you doing? – I thought, oh no, the relationship-
talk is coming. Hana, as your beloved, is clearly addressing you, Dogs of Devotion. When my beloved
asks me what I am doing it can mean they don’t understand how I’m spending my time. Or that they
have another proposal for how I might-should spend my time. Or that they genuinely cannot
imagine what in the world I am doing.
Dogs of Devotion: It’s a difficult question to answer without being tempted to justify your existence.
It takes a lot of practice.
Watcher: Hana asks the question so transparently that if you were to start trying to justify your
existence, it would be on you to stop doing that. You would need to explain why you were justifying
your existence – a can of worms.
Dogs of Devotion: Hana doesn’t doubt.
Watcher: She’s not doubting you. I think she probably has some doubt sometimes. I find a lot of
continuity in her dancing. There’s wonder, but no hesitation. I can follow the movement she passes
through.
Dogs of Devotion: She’s not in doubt. She’s in the seams between now and here or then and there.
Or she’s in the seams between different whens, or with-nesses.
Watcher: I see those seams in Louise Dahl’s ⁽⁶⁾ dancing. A couple of years ago I had a studio
conversation ⁽⁷⁾ with Louise about her experiences of control as a dancer at Cullberg. At the time,
Louise said she experiences control as predictive – a little reach into the future. Institutional control
might take the form of a schedule, an agenda, a plan, an itinerary, but for Louise, skillfulness in her
dancing is one of the ways a sense of the future gets expressed. Skill (or technique) is often
associated with past-practices, with maintaining traditions of legibility and recognition. I was really
struck when she said this because it gives skill a different relation to the future.
Dogs of Devotion: Something like: From here I pretty much know/feel how I will step up onto my
other leg from t/here as long as nothing particularly unexpected happens between these very closely
knit nows….
Watcher: She’s a seer. Louise refreshes control as she goes. Not seamlessly, not hiding anything, but
not negotiating either. How is very closely linked to what and to now. This moment is what it is now.
And then again. And now again. Humor builds quickly and fades fast too. References flicker and
disappear. Always welcome when they reappear, in Louise’s dancing references are not not the
point, but also not the point.
Other dancers handle the skill and future-connection differently. Cynthia Loemij 8 rides momentum
to the hilt and that momentum contains its own control of the near future. She is demonically
precise. Michael (Mika) Pomero ⁽⁹⁾ loves the landing – the coordination of time with space and other
dancers at the end of a movement. What happens in between is on the wild side. I remember
dancing with Jodi Melnick ⁽¹⁰⁾ this way also. The feeling is of a time next to a time next to a time,
rejuvenating itself in motion. Dancing with Jodi felt like her fascia was extending out of her body and
into the room. Also a bit demonic.
Dogs of Devotion: Time also travels, from space to space. From person to person. From time to time.
Watcher: Lydia Östberg Diakité and BamBam Frost 11 talk about time travel:
Lydia: … I honestly do not think I would want to travel in time.
BamBam: I do not want to travel to stay, maybe fun to travel and visit. Go to old kitschy
events, dance a little in a jazz club during the Harlem Renaissance (without in any way
glorifying the time in which it occurred).
Lydia: I think you travel in time and do it all the time, if you stop and look at the journey you
are already making and have made. Okay, but if I were to travel in time, it’s because I want
to have a long career. To be able to stay in the world as an artist. To be able to develop an
artistry over a whole life and not burn out in a day, a month, a year... so that’s traveling in
time, being time.
BamBam: Staying in the world as an artist, that’s what I want too.
Dogs of Devotion: It’s about time.
Watcher: I would like to see you again.
Dogs of Devotion: I’m very busy.
Watcher: I’d like to talk about Jeanine with you. And about Tian and Winbow.
Dogs of Devotion: Another time.
Watcher: …and about dogs.
Dogs of Devotion: I’d like that too.
Watcher: …and about devotion.
Dogs of Devotion: Yes, but now I have to go.
Watcher: Okay.
Dogs of Devotion: It’s temporary.
Watcher: Thanks.
Dogs of Devotion: I’m not leaving. I’m just going.
Watcher: Great.

An imaginary conversation between Dogs of Devotion and a Watcher
By Chrysa Parkinson

It’s About Time

1 Clinton Stringer bio Clinton_Stringer_Bio

2 ‘Killing it’ in theater and music practitioners’ slang means to have done something so well that it cannot be repeated or
immitated. In Dogs of Devotion, the performers are also breaking character (corpsing) by speaking about what they are (or
are not) doing while they are (or are not) doing it, which launches the end of the piece.

3 Jonathan Burrows/Matteo Fargion CheapLectureBurrowsFargion.

4 Excerpt from Pavle Heidler interview with Ulrika: ‘Over time, the nothingness became something.’ ULRIKA

5 Excerpt from a Moderna Dansteatern Interview with Hana: I’m just so curious about how it (a performance) came into
existence and the web of relations that was spun to produce the thing. Hana_Erdman_MDT_Interview

6 Excerpt from Louise’s bio: Louise Dahl is a Swedish artist working within the field of dance and choreography. Within an
expanded notion of dance, she researches the relationship between thought, motion and energy. Her work is characterized
by a technical approach to the body from which she explores the physical manifestation of invisible and metaphysical
realities. Louise_Dahl_CCAP_Bio

7 Studio Conversations description StudioConversationsSKH

8 Cynthia dancing: Cynthia_DrummingSolo Cynthia’s bio Cynthia_Loemij_Bio_2019

9 Mika Dancing: MichaelPomeroTheSong This a Rosas piece, with sound artist Anna Veronica Janssens, and dancers Mikael Marklund and Alexander Williams. It’s not the best example of the wildness Mika moves through time in, but it shows his precision, and the weighty softness, I think. Mika’s Bio: Michael_Pomero_Bio_2019

10 Jodi Dancing: JodiMelnickJonKinzelDancing Excerpt from a 2022 interview with Jodi: ‘Dance is where I locate continuum.’ JodiMelnickInterview

11 dancersdancingdancerly publication of dance portraits, edited by Ninos Josef and Paloma Madrid

Chrysa is a dancer from the West coast of the North American Continent, living and working in Northern Europe since 2005. She comes from concert dance traditions of spectacle and experimentation. Her focus is on the performer’s experience.