Extreme Subjectivities (2018)

Created and performed by Kristina Johnstone, Thalia Laric and Tossie van Tonder

6 April and 5 September, Cape Town: Theatre Arts Admin Collective

14 September, Johannesburg: The Nunnery, Wits University

Desire – I want, I like, I love – became a mechanism for moving and the dance was guided by an awareness of the body’s sensations rather than form, theme, or narrative. We covered our heads and faces in white clay that functions chronometrically as it dries and cracks over the duration of the dance to produce a white powder that falls off our bodies and onto our clothes and the floor. The movement progression is slow, drawing the witness’ attention to the dancer’s act of perceiving change in the body. The dance resists reading as archetypal figures and beginnings of narratives disappear as soon as they appear. The movement or image only means as long as it lasts. When you watch the dance as witness, or I imagine, as spectator, the archetypes shift depending on where you are in the room. Extreme Subjectivities is not characterised by an absence of signs, but rather by the accumulation of innumerable, momentary signs and images. Despite the dance’s drastically slow movement progression, the images occur in quick successive flashes, challenging the degree to which recognition can take place. The linearity of time is ruptured through these shifting archetypes and dropped narratives. The dance is overfull.

Some notes on time. The movement progression is drastically slow. There is a disjucture between my perception of time when I am in the dance and when I am witnessing. My perception of movement as it takes up time, and space, is altered too. What feels like massive weight shifts in the body is in fact microscopic movement.

The audience are placed around the dance in a tight square. We realised after the first performances that we should try to only light the dance and not the audience. It is the kind of dance you need to see in private.

The epic quality of the performance photographs contrasts with my memory of how my body felt in the performance. The clay is cold and wet, the dance is slow and doesn’t do much to warm my body. There’s the wetness of someone chewing my leg as I reach my fingers into someone else’s mouth. Looking at an eye ball up close. Spit dripping onto my neck. Hands clutching.