Calling out to Others

Daniel Barbiero
June 2016

“Hey!”  Calling out to Others on Open Ground

We see it so often we no longer seem to notice it. People walking, sitting, standing, running in public spaces, each with his or her own preoccupations and concerns, being with one another without actually being with one another in any substantive sense. But this is only one way in which encounters with others play out.

Being with others is a complex, multivalent situation presenting many different possible modes of interaction. These range from the utterly impersonal experience of concrete anonymity to the encounter in which we see and grasp another person as a world containing its own possibilities, meanings, patterns of responses, etc. arising within a horizon of a particular past, a history of choices made and refused, of habits and dispositions.

We are outside of ourselves in a world of other people—other people who in their grasp of us, as manifested in their responses to us, make known to us what we are. Through others we connect to ourselves and grasp ourselves as what we are. We know ourselves, the world and others through what is, for lack of a better expression, the emotional coloration in terms of which our environment and the things and people within it present themselves to us. Our own way of being in the world is embodied in our physical comportment; through postures, movement, facial expressions, and the like, we convey our excitement, indifference, apprehension, surprise, delight, etc. as we project ourselves outward into the world. And it is through this that the other person knows us.

Because it is our bodily comportment that signifies something fundamental about our attitudes toward the situations and people around us, dance is an effective vehicle for telling, by showing, of the different and changing modes of attunement to one another that we experience in common spaces. That there are various ways of encountering each other that are always open to us is the perfect theme to be explored by contemporary dance. It is a significant theme animating choreographer Daniel McCusker’s “Hey!”, starting with the title: “Hey!” is a shout to get someone’s attention, a calling out for acknowledgment from another person.

***

Four women are on an otherwise empty stage: Dancers Alison Ball, Leah Bergmann, Crissy Liu and Wanda Strukus. They stand still in facing pairs, at opposite corners of the stage diagonal to each other. Presently one of each pair begins dancing while her partner remains standing impassively; before long each pair engages in a mirror dance, each imitating the moves of the other.

There is a relationship here of mimesis, of external gestures imitated motion-for-motion. Mimesis is a matter of outward phenomena, of parallel actions synchronized in effect but not converging in fact. During this section each dancer’s movement comes to her from outside of herself, from the dancer whose movements she mimics. What is individual or peculiar to each participant is subsumed in the mimetic relationship; it doesn’t matter who initiates the sequence of motions, the entire matter of initiative seems to be put out of play. There is only the parallelism, the matching of movement for movement. The mimetic relationship doesn’t involve projecting one’s own states onto the other participant; it is all a matter of externality, of outward imitation. Thus the relationship here rests on a paradox—it is purely exterior yet exquisitely coordinated, a relationship of non-relationship. This mimetic relationship holds as the two pairs move up- and downstage in opposite directions, until they stop at the edges across from where they began.

The mimetic relationship is an inherently unstable one, and soon breaks. Crissy and Alison face each other until Alison walks away, leaving Crissy seated alone onstage. All four lie down and turn in unison, and then move independently, occasionally exchanging fleeting glances. They walk sometimes in parallel, sometimes in different directions, but make no eye contact.

The relationship among the dancers has moved to a level somewhat more complex than the parallelism of mimesis, but just as paradoxical. To take a metaphor from grammar, we can describe it as paratactical rather than syntactic: Free-standingly adjacent rather than ordered through an operation of necessary connection or regular internal logic. They are in proximity without being integrated, together without being together, their grouping the seemingly chance result of uncoordinated individual choices. Even when turning in unison they remain—as they did in the first section—parallel and unconverging.

This may be in part a function of the site of their encounter. “Hey!” takes place, at least implicitly, in a public space. A public space is a kind of open ground traversed by strangers, by people with no prior connection to each other and who may or may not establish a connection while coincidentally occupying the same space. Meeting strangers in a public space is meeting by coincidence rather than design—an accidental, purely contingent event that, seen through the lens of its contingency, is entirely gratuitous, like the random collisions of billiard balls set in motion and bouncing off of each other.

***

The women’s comportments embody a multifaceted mélange of attitudes coloring their actions and reactions. Fundamentally, each to each is a vague object on the periphery of perception. Their interaction could be described as consisting in gambits refused–if any had been offered to begin with. In their stances, in their movements, these women related to each other in what might be termed a mode of juxtaposition—that is, of occupying a common space in disconnection.

The dancers’ juxtaposition embodies an indifference that presents other people as those in whom and in whose projects we feel we have no stake. People to whom we are unobligated. What they are doing or attempting to achieve is of no moment to us; we are neither moved to cooperate nor to compete. When present to us through indifference, people and things take on a meaning of not mattering, are overlooked rather than looked at, exist at the periphery of our own immediate concerns and praxes. Peripherality is the basic way we encounter people and things when our attunement to them is one of indifference. Their presence is wrapped in a neutrality that leaves us alone and allows us not to take note of it.

When we ourselves are encountered through the indifference of others, we apprehend ourselves as not seen. This is something of the reverse of the situation described in Sartre’s virtuoso account of the look that turns one into an object for another. When confronted—or rather, non-confronted—by the indifference of others, rather than an alienation of oneself under the objectifying gaze, there is instead a disappearance of oneself into the invisibility brought on by an absence of acknowledgment. One seems to flee from oneself to disappear into…nothing. And this is a form of alienation of oneself from oneself, a short-circuiting of the sense one has of oneself as mattering, if only as another being to be acknowledged in the most basic form possible.  Alienation from oneself arises here in the grasp of oneself as not-being-there, as reflected back through the perceived indifference of others. Through it, we take on the conditional nonexistence of anonymity.

In truth, the possibility of being anonymous was already there at the beginning, implicit in the imitative relationship of mimesis. There, each dancer was lost in the generalized structure of imitation, existing ostensibly only as a set of external motions indistinguishable from those of her partner. But the move from the loss of oneself in the mimetic relationship to the self-alienation brought on by the indifference of others is the descent into a deeper, more complete anonymity–one of invisibility and virtual nonbeing. This sounds like the description of an extreme state but in fact isn’t; this kind of anonymity is in reality a basic way of being in public, perhaps the most basic way.

The dancers enact this complex of attitudes and meanings bodily, in their stances and trajectories. They stand or move parallel to one another, seeming to stay just at the edges of each other’s perception, thus capturing in quite a literal way the relationship of indifference and peripherality.

***

As they move, the women occasionally shout “Hey!”, presumably to get the attention of the others. And why not? Indifference is not always a relationship of mutual, if tacit agreement; one person in this (non)relationship may in fact attempt to get the attention of the other(s). When this happens, the relationship becomes one of frustration confronting indifference: the frustration of a person attempting to make contact with the indifferent other.

Frustration marks a significant change in comportment toward the totality that is the synthesis of people and setting, taken together, as that totality impinges on us. It is a change from a comparatively simple alienation to a more complex, double alienation. In frustration that which one ordinarily would accept as an unremarkable condition—the self-alienation into the anonymity of the public space—now becomes a point of resistance, a resented condition and therefore an obstacle to be overcome. More than that, it is a contingent fact to be transcended.

At various points, the dancers attempt to break down the barrier anonymity throws up between them and as they do, we can get some idea of why this transition from mutual indifference to frustration might arise. Frustration arises from the thwarted desire to be encountered in any capacity. It inheres in the collision of opaque objects no longer willing to be opaque, or to be objects for that matter. It is the rejection of mutual incomprehension and its replacement with the wish to transcend indifference toward an encounter of commensurable worlds–each of us being a world in the sense of containing a bundle of concerns, interests, desires, dispositions, preoccupations, etc.

***

The four dancers break and run, stop and walk; they lie down on the floor, accumulating one by one, each stepping over the others in turn before lying down herself.

When the dancers fall to the floor one by one, each leaping over those already on the floor before joining them there, we see this ambiguity played out. Is the body lying curled up on its side a blockage to be surmounted? Or something else, something like a springboard compelling or allowing the leaper to cover in one jump more ground than she ordinarily would? In other words, an instrumentality or kind of equipment ready at hand for her to use in obtaining the imagined future situation she transcends—quite literally leaps–toward.

As a mode of being with others, instrumentality occupies an ambiguous position between confrontation and collaboration. The other person apprehended as instrumental to our own praxis may be an obstacle to be overcome and bent toward our own ends—a disturbance in our field which we can somehow let carry us toward where we were going to begin with—or a component of the means available to us in our praxis. 

***

Gradually, though there is a move from an apprehension of others simply as means, to a deeper-reaching interaction–from instrumentality to mutuality.  Alison and Crissy engage in a duet and the others begin to interact: Clustering together, reaching out to each other, touching, throwing an arm around another’s waist, embracing, forming pairs and groupings—in short, sharing one integrated space rather than four juxtaposed, isolated spaces. Crissy smiles at Alison as the four move in sympathy with each other as they engage in supportive motions and to all appearances act in light of a shared end.

There is in these movements the embodiment of a mutual attunement in which each understands the other as an agent imparting and absorbing meaning on the way to an open, because uncertain, future. We can see it in the redirection of the body’s trajectory, a reorientation of the gaze toward, e.g., a mutually apprehended object just out of the audience’s field of vision, and above all in the physical contact informed by an attitude of care (handling the other body gently, “lending a hand” etc.). The end result is a reorganization of the space they occupy in common, from the open ground of the public to the closed, if potentially permeable, intimacy of the private.

To move to this stage of attunement from the one just past is to shift perspective and to apprehend the other person as neither obstruction nor instrumentality (the being of an object upon which we act but that does not act upon us beyond offering the unthinking resistance of the real) but rather as an agent, a giver of meaning moving inevitably toward a future the outcome of which isn’t given in advance and in the service of which he or she must act. A self-conscious being for whom his or her being is potentially in question, to use the existentialist formula.

To be acknowledged as…and beyond this to be understood. At its simplest, to have it acknowledged that the things that matter to us do in fact matter, if only to us. To have our capacity to have concerns, to be concerned with the world and our place in it, acknowledged. Beyond this, to have the things that matter to us matter to someone else, to whatever extent that is possible. No complete confluence can be expected, given our different histories, temperaments, dispositions, fundamental outlooks, etc., but some confluence is possible, at least to the point where we can become a focus of concern rather than a (non)object of indifference. To have what matters to us matter to someone else is perhaps the ideal mode of being with others—an encounter of commensurate, though not identical, worlds of meaning.

***

This moment, though, doesn’t last. The dancers’ concord briefly becomes conflict, and their unity dissolves. At the conclusion of the dance, the four fall back into a relationship of imitation, moving along parallel lines, executing the same phrases as they move along the edge of the stage, each back within the opaque sphere of her own world. This change is a reminder that attunement is a field in flux, subject to changes as forces internal and external to us change singly or in combination. Just as their bearing toward each other can shift from indifference to instrumentality to the reciprocal recognition of mutuality, so it can—and apparently does—shift again, this time back to a relationship of juxtaposition and mutual indifference. The stage again becomes the simulacrum of a public space, traversed by anonymous beings who—for a brief time at least—understood one another.