The Brooklyn Rail

Over winter, my mother was having the windows redone. Sometimes, when I was reading or eating, I saw the painters: a father-and-son pair scaffolding outside a nearby window in the same white coveralls. One day, my mother saunters over to where I am slowly elongating, petting our dog at the bottom of the stairs, and, almost coyly, begins talking. There is so much to do, she says. My mother speaks in a kind of code, inventories of nouns that well up with her unspoken messages. She begins recounting all the things still to be done, what she’ll call getting the house in order. We’ve only really just started working on the house, she says. I listen quietly, nodding, wondering how it could be possible we’ve only just started working on the house, when I feel I could think of my life there as endless seasons of deterioration and repair.

The house, it seems, can never really be ordered, I think. The house rejects completion and remains—even if just in inconspicuous corners—unruly, animal. It is, rather, an ideal, or fantasy, one is forever approaching, discovered in the activity of its ordering and disordering, accumulation and dispersal, its coming together and apart. The house is, in other words, and as many have heard walking through the door of a neighbor for the first time, a “work-in-progress.”

I ask my mother, still standing close, looking as if she has something to tell me: will the house ever get done? She looks at me for a moment and says in an almost spritely way of the lady-next-door, Barbara’s done. I’m surprised, slightly delighted. What does Barbara do now that she is done? I ask. Again, my mother pauses, then says, almost cheerfully, I don’t know what she does. I have no idea.

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I think of the house like a body: not as a noun, a stable state, but as an ongoing activity toward itself. As writer and curator Legacy Russell writes in a revision to Simone de Beauvoir’s classic line: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a body.” A body, she contends over the course of Glitch Feminism, is not a contained and completed object of use, born finished.¹ The body, instead, is a restless, interrelational process of becoming that refuses to be settled. French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, known for his theory of individuation, states clearly, “the being becomes insofar as it is,”² meaning being is a process of change, impossible to contain within the grips of a supposedly complete definition.

Like the house, the body is uncovered over the course of its becoming, the activity of its coming together and apart over time. It is not a noun, but a verb: a process of bodying in the continuous exchange and encounter among others. Countering the widespread formulation of the body as a separate, bordered entity, theorist Erin Manning proposes a porous, plural body that phases through temporary constellations of cohesion and discontinuity. She writes: “A body is always more than one: it is a processual field of relation.”³

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A few days after returning to New York, I present the early stages of “The Field, part 1” alongside my collaborators, Leah Fournier and Amelia Heintzelman as part of the Movement Research at the Judson Church series. I wondered again about the incomplete—this stable of work-in-progress showings that percolate across the field of experimental dance and performance in New York: Judson, DraftWork at Danspace, Open Studios at the Center for Performance Research, Works & Process at the Guggenheim, among others. What does it mean to perform the provisional?

The three of us had begun meeting in the fall of last year, coming together to wonder about what was, or could be, going on. We resisted the urgency to determine what it was we were making, what we were doing there together. Rather than prop up a premise for working, a kind of stage on which a beginning would already be implied, we opened our attention to the dynamic of our unfolding relations. Rather than strive to bring the work together, we practiced attuning to the rhythm of resonance and dissonance between us, tracking a multiplicitous motion through, or rather, as that “processual field of relation” Manning talks about. Entering the studio, we moved through drifting configurations of our respective roles, silently tuning to each other’s presences and shapeshifting through invented characters—the rustler, the outlaw, the disillusioned lover—vying for ownership over the field.

I think of the work as a body: not an object but a durational activity of affective recalibration. That is, the work is not a finalized result of a preceding process, but this very process of coming into being. As Simondon writes, “[being] is not an isolated consequence deposited on the edge of becoming but this very operation as it is undergoing completion.”⁴ Like the house and the body, the work, I propose, is an ongoing dialectical movement that tracks an unfolding of form’s coming together and apart and resists the deadening effect of fixing form into completion. In other words, the work is its progress, a rhythmed elaboration of in-formation, re-formation, and de-formation.

The work’s “failure to arrive,” to be forever in-progress, is significant as an expression of an aesthetic of queer errantry. Caribbean poet and scholar, Édouard Glissant, conceived of the term “errantry” in his book, Poetics of Relation, as a sacred wandering that counters the dominant Western system of “settling” life and a totalitarian impulse to fix identity. For Glissant, the errant’s roaming, digressive, detouring way of becoming through an expansive network of relations models an antidote to Western totalitarianism.⁵ Intellectually and aesthetically, errantry looks like a resistance to fixing meaning, and, instead, a reinvestment in the wandering course of its being over time. The errant work is unsettled. It does not reach or re-enact a final cohesive form, but articulates a movement through and between forms in the process of becoming. As Manning writes, “form is fugitive.”⁶ It remains alive in its run from those who seek to apprehend it, the run toward new ways of being.

Dance has a particular capacity for articulating this motion that resists, or reconfigures, a logic of arrival. As a live, embodied, durational medium, it is especially suited to articulate this dynamic movement through becoming. As bodies collect and disperse, moving through new relational possibilities, we watch an evolution of form that is always ephemeral, leading into the next. Dance makes visible a progress of bodying that is undocumentable, which lives only in its present unfolding.

How do work-in-progress showings across the city foster this transience? These shows offer a moment of punctuation in a work’s development for artists to share, reflect, and exchange without the stakes, or length, of the “finished” project. Still, the grammar of the “show” largely reanimates, almost inevitably I think, a logic of containment in proposing the bordered, culminating “event,” even if it is only up to a point. So it’s difficult even for those shows that purport to champion the unfinished to not, without intending to, overlay a framework of finality. Especially as opportunities to show work seems to become scarcer, raising the stakes of any opportunity for public visibility, how might it be possible to more fully enable or honor an ethic of incompletion in this model?

1. Legacy Russel, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (New York: Verso Books, 2020), “Introduction.”
2. Gilbert Simondon, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), p. 4.
3. Erin Manning, Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013), p. 17.
4. Gilbert Simondon, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), p. 4.
5. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), “Errantry, Exile.”
6. Erin Manning, Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013), p. 78.