The essence of what we talked about in soft choreography this week seems to be the relationship a work has with an audience. Therefore as an artist when we create a work we have to ask, ‘what is our responsibility to the audience’? But to further this, what does an audience have a responsibility to bring to the work? And further to that could we consider that every work is only ever half finished before it reaches an audience?

Everyone creates art for a slightly different reason, most of us aspire to have our art be consumed, whether just by friends and family, or by the greater public as we try to make a living from it.

This week we were asked to make a video based on a poem fragment. I immediately identified with the concept of longing in the fragment and sought to create my video based on the feeling that I understood the poem as. But then came the question, how do I do that and still leave room for the audience to be able to shape the work as well? This week that was the most difficult part. Was the video I made expressing my art, while at the same time allowing the audience to be the true creators of the meaning in it?

I knew I wanted to time-lapse a sunset almost immediately. Being locked down in a tiny apartment I knew that I would have to be creative filming anything. Luckily I have an amazing city view. I grappled for a while with just recording myself speaking the lines of the poem over the top, and then let the viewer draw whatever conclusion they wished about what my video was trying to say, and in drawing that conclusion they would be completing their half of my soft choreography artist bargain. I provided the work, they provided the meaning. Just like the poem, which could have so many different meanings that it was up to the reader to decide what it meant to them.

Taking the 30 second time-lapse took just over an hour. I took my notebook out and sat with the sunset, contemplating over the concept of longing, the different ways one can long, and what I thought the essence of the poem was as that was really what I wanted to come across in the video. In the end I had lots of questions, and a bit of poetry.

In editing I still hadn’t decided what audio I wanted to use for the video. I looked at my notes that I had made and decided that I wanted to use my own words to see if I could create the same essence, the same ache that the poem fragment had provided me, to someone else. It would be in that essence that the viewer provided their meaning, worked out what my video was trying to say, completed my thought. The video would be questions and the audience would have to find their own answers. To me that is part of what soft choreography means, conveying feeling and thought and meaning without explicity.

Ingvartsen talks about soft choreography as “[the desire to] arrange conditions for encounters to occur” (Ingvartsen, 2013, para. 4). I’m not really sure what I’ve accomplished with this video, if it does any of the things I want it to do, I’m still toeing the edge of whether it’s even right for the task. But my hope is, when it is watched, it will stir something in the viewer, I don’t know what that is, and it will be different for everyone, but it will be an encounter with a feeling. Hopefully an encounter with the viewers own personal sense of longing, maybe even a memory tied to it. If it does that, then that’s enough.

references: Mette Ingvartsen 2013, 69 Positions – Soft Choreography, Mette Ingvartsen, blog post, viewed 23 July 2020, http://www.metteingvartsen.net/texts_interviews/soft-choreography/