#steve paxton

Nicholas Sciscione, a member of the Stephen Petronio Company, in Steve Paxton’s “Excerpt From Goldberg Variations” at the Joyce Theater.

Hortus Botanicus(w/Frans van Lent)

the feet are tied to the ground, thoughts travel freely

May21st, 2019 - Lisbon.Porto connection (Portugal, 12.00pm - 12.15pm GMT+1)

On Tuesday, May 21, from 12:00 noon to 12:15 PM, Frans van Lent stood motionless and silent in a field in the Jardim Botânico (N 38° 43′ 4.8” W 9° 8′ 52.9”) in Lisbon, facing North, eyes closed.

At the same time Daniel Pinheiro stood motionless and silent in a field in the Jardim Botânico (N 41° 9′ 6.9″ W 8° 38′ 36″) in Porto, facing South, his eyes closed.

text message exchange:
F. “Ready to go! We will meet somewhere half way ;)” (…) “Hi again Daniel, I don’t think I can say I met you. The experience was very sculptural.”

D. “Ready to go too! :) Should we set timers or wait for noon?” - “Will close my eyes at 12” (…) “For me there is something about synchronicity that is not properly about meeting in between but actually some sort of assurance that you were also there. That we both were at the same time, stopping time and making visible the intersections that happen all the time”

…But if you come at just any time, I shall never know at what hour my heart is to be ready to greet you … One must observe the proper rites… “The Little Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Some thoughts (Daniel): Maybe because at that hour the botanical garden in Porto was populated with children playing hide and seek, maybe because the house that is in the garden belonged to the family of Portuguese poet and writer Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, very much known for her children’s books, I couldn’t stop myself of thinking on the episode of the fox and the Little Prince quoted above. As I stood motionless with my eyes closed “facing” Frans, I could feel all my surroundings, and hear all the sounds and while time passed I felt as being part of the landscape, pausing time as everything else around me moved as if I wasn’t there - which led me to think that my presence there in fact changed and altered the state of everything. This affection expanded and the confirmation, minutes before, that Frans was also positioned made me think (again) about trust and (re)assurance that this was a connected action and that we both were, even if not exactly meeting somewhere between, activating a parallel moment - where through stillness we were connecting all that was outside of ourselves. An unnoticed(?) sculptural rite that, although previously agreed upon by both of us, renders visible the possibility of “synchronicity” coined and described by Carl Jung as “temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events”… This possibility of synchronicity is interesting if we observe the public space and patterns of movement and behaviour start to be evident. In this case, Frans and I, placed ourselves within a landscape, transforming it and let it behave around us and it was this behaviour of all the things beyond ourselves that I felt that were connected and part of the same thing.

As time became unknown to me, questions about Frans started to populate my thoughts - as “Are we actually facing each-other?”; “Is Frans surrounded by all this rumour of people as well?”; “What is he feeling, is he feeling the breeze? the sun?” and suddenly I was brought back to my own physical surroundings precisely by the questions I was thinking about Frans.

“Even standing you execute a continual fall” - Steve Paxton

Some thoughts (Frans): At the start I tried to imagine you, but I could only see you in the position you have on our photo.
The best way to describe my situation is in layers. The first layer was my body. The instability that I mentioned and also the breeze of wind on my neck, head and back.The second layer was the roaming around of birds, they must have been quite near, fearless. The third layer was the whistling of birds and the sounds of human feet on the paths around me. The feet stopped often and I imagined the people watching me, I felt a bit exposed. Now and then I heard their muted voices, could not hear what they were saying. The fourth layer was the sound of car horns and engines, not constantly but occasionally. The background of everything was a drone sound of traffic in long distance. Every now and then I heard a plane and I tried to travel with it, to travel to this place halfway. I failed in that. What I now really could imagine was the symmetry of our bodies, if I imagined the facing towards each other. The best description of what I was feeling was an ultimate experience of performing, a sculptural activity in circles around me, I was in the eye of the movements. And this circle of rings had it’s mirrored parallel around you in Porto.

more info also here (in Dutch)