‘Messing up Mes’: Some thoughts about ‘It Begins in Darkness’
Flyer for ‘It Begins in Darkness’ (photo from @SekeChim’s Twitter feed)
Just over a week ago I went to see Seke Chimutengwende’s It Begins in Darkness at The Mount Without in Bristol. I wasn’t planning on writing about it, so I didn’t take any notes in a conscious attempt not to try to grasp it as an object of knowledge. I also didn’t have a great view (I’m in the back row below), so this is definitely not a review, but the performance has stayed with me over the last week or so, and I’ve been trying to figure out why…
Maybe one reason for the echoes in my head is that immediately before I went to the show, I’d been listening to Fred Moten and Stefano Harney talking about violence. Moten and Harney want to distinguish between violence and brutality, and one of the ways in which they do this is through the argument that whereas ‘brutality produces individual subjects, violence messes individual subjects up’. Brutality, in other words represents for them the imposition of a rational colonial order on the world, in which individual subjects with interiority come to know it through possession. Violence, by contrast, can mess up that project of imposed, possessive ordering. Moten gives the example of a friend’s description of listening to the blues. ‘That music messes me up’, he said, and Moten lightly corrects him by making ‘me’ plural: ‘violence messes mes up’. This leads Moten to propose that violence could be considered as a condition of ‘gathering and dispersing probabilistic non-entities that appear to emerge into a kind of solidity only to disperse’.
It Begins begins with a few sequences that are quite aptly described by Moten and Harney’s phrase, in which, for example, dancers appear surprised by - and then briefly follow - impulses for various body parts that momentarily disperse their physical forms and gradually disperse them as a group. The group then gathers itself again as the dancers begin to make humming sounds and place hands on each other’s bodies, apparently to locate and experience their resonance. Imagined scenographies also gather and disperse through the piece as when, for example, the dancers - fully lit - move through an apparently dark space, describing the imagined furniture they touch.
All of these processes seem to have their roots in practices of solo improvisation - something I know Chimutengwende does regularly (but I’ve never seen live). There are several extended sequences in this piece, in fact, that seem to be comprised of separate solos isolated in space. Initially, I have to say I wasn’t wild about these sections - as more a performance than a dance person, I tend to latch onto collective spatial and temporal dynamics, rather than the choreographic language of body movements. But as they continued, I was hooked by the attempts to construct what Moten and Harney might have identified as ‘probabilistic non-entities’ in them. In other words, what I found myself watching were individuals struggling to gather their bodies into coherent choreographic forms, to find in movement a kind of solidity that we might recognise as a subject. Sometimes, these attempts never gain coherence, sometimes only fleetingly so, sometimes they really take off - propelling individual dancers through the space. But they always disperse.
Having been so dispersed, the dancers frequently seem to ‘come to’ during the performance - come to themselves, each other, and the audience - as though from a waking sleep, surprised by their surroundings, and seemingly by their own presence too. They look around in silent, surprised contemplation. This sense that the dancers both do and do not constitute entities gives their performances a ghostly quality amidst what the show’s blurb describes as ‘an environment for processing the fear, anger and confusion which arise from the histories of slavery and colonialism that haunt the present’.
In performance, however, that haunting has a double movement. The dancers flee side-to-side across the space at one point, back and forth, and with each iteration the distinction between haunted and haunting becomes more difficult to sustain. They flee and yet - like Milton’s Satan - their flight contains its own impossibility. Their flight becomes the fear, anger and confusion it seeks to escape, and thus in flight they reproduce and cannot help but carry it. Haunted, they haunt.
This compound haunting finds perhaps its most vivid expression in a sequence in which the dancers cycle through wailing, laughing, wailing, laughing and wailing again. In lesser hands this might be a rather trite observation of the shadow of pain that lurks behind any expression of joy for the descendants of colonised and enslaved people, and of course that is part of the effect. This sequence has, however, much greater ontological power than that. The laughter and the wailing unfold from each other, producing an elliptical effect. The very process of subject formation is revealed by it as a contradictory double movement. The subjecthood entailed by each expression of interiority unfolds into the contradiction of an alternative interiority and thus the process of constructing a subject loses its footing. Falling into subjecthood, they simultaneously plummet away from it.
All this has left me thinking about the subject, and particularly about the benign and brutal excess of ease in the terminologies we habitually use to categorise subjects in a post-colonial context. I’m thinking not only about such unavoidably bureaucratic ascriptions as ‘global majority’, but seemingly more plainly descriptive terms that I might casually use to describe the dancers in It Begins - Black British? African American? - and the profoundly contradictory movements they contain and conceal. A political, transnational identity forged not in spite of but out of dehumanisation and violence cannot but jar with membership of the polity of a nation-state produced and reproduced by the violence of bordering. Likewise, allegiance to an imperial power cannot easily be elided with diasporic association with a continent from which the subject was ripped and to which they can never return. The violence of It Begins in Darkness, which echoed through the Mount Without in the sound of a distant, departing train, messed me up because it messes up mes.
Full credits for the show
Dancers: Rhys Dennis, Adrienne Ming, Mayowa Ogunnaike, Rose Sall Sao and Natifah White
Choreography and text: Seke Chimutengwende with the dancers Creative input from Alethia Antonia
Dramaturgy: Charlie Ashwell
Lighting design: Marty Langthorne
Costume design: Annie Pender
Composer: Aisha Orazbayeva
Sound technician: Michael Picknett
Producer: Eve Veglio-Hüner
