DON'T WORRY ABOUT THE NOISE -- my battery is pure love part 3
DON’T WORRY ABOUT THE NOISE
(written by Lucy Rupert)
This is an essay in 9 parts for the 9 episodes that make up my solo dance ‘heartless’ which premiered in October 2023. The choreography for this piece started as a meditation on the history and mythology of robots, but burrowed its way into many other personal and cosmic places. (See my first two essays on the project “my battery is pure love” and “babelfish”). What follows is an account of my experience inside the 9 sections of ‘heartless’ during its opening night performance, tangled noisily with memories and sensations, past and future.
1.
My ears grow rabbit-shaped, listening for the sound of rain, the audio cue that begins ‘heartless’. I realize that the audience, even in stillness, emanates a gentle rumble-buzz. I can’t hear my cue to start.
But I part the black curtain at stage left and walk on with all the composure I can muster at opening night. I’ve missed the sound cue, but that’s ok.
The beginning is an ice breaker. I walk fully downstage towards the audience, I can’t see them, but I am close. I can hear their still bodies, I can hear my own rustling body. Like being in Beranek’s Box, the echoless room: as ears adjust, the person inside the box begins to hear the sound of their own circulatory and nervous systems. A stage is similarly an altered sensory state.
By the time I reach the edge of the stage, too close to the audience for comfort, it’s too late, I can’t turn back, or shy away. I call this section “measuring”, and it sums up the project in a way I didn’t realize until the final performance of this premiere run. It is the measure of a career, a life, my worth. There are so many systems through which to measure:
Bums in seats
Decibels of applause
The minutes it takes me to leave the dressing room after finishing the performance
The words used by audience members to describe their experiences
The pain in my lower back
How deeply I sleep afterwards, what do I dream about, do I dream at all
Measuring qualities is tough work, especially when these qualities are embedded in the self. You can practice “no self’, you can embrace the idea that ‘self’ is illusory, but the fact remains, everywhere you go, there you are.
Few of these measures translate to numbers; they are more like names for groups of animals: a murder of crows, a raft of otters, a skulk of foxes, a shrewdness of apes, a coalition of cheetahs, a conspiracy of lemurs.
I conceived “heartless” as a project to push myself into new places, discover some new possibility for myself as a performer, physically, emotionally, artistically. These constant attempts to escape myself are routes to expanding the possibilities of who “Lucy” is and will be, maybe even expanding the possibilities of who “Lucy” was.
Along the road of making ‘heartless’ -- with many challenges and roadblocks-- I became focused on the quantitative measurements: the minutes, the budgets, the hours. But like a skulk of foxes the artistry kept dreaming, underground in a warm den, storing up energy I didn’t know I had.
I was consciously aware that this production could break me, that I might leave dance after closing night, heart-broken because I couldn’t fill the theatre, because people didn’t like it or because it’s just too hard to keep doing this. How could I possibly measure small audience numbers against their vivid responses? How can I measure generosity of strangers against absence of loved ones? How can you measure the afterglow: what lingers with audiences days or years later, what changes in my own cells?
I think the “measuring” section at the start of ‘heartless’ was meant to teach me this: You can measure distance, viscosity, the out-ness of your belly button, and how close your fingers can get to your eyes before you blink, but that data cannot be collapsed into 0s and 1s.
2.
The second section of ‘heartless’ I call “the slow seasons”. It is a reinterpretation of a solo I made in 2020 embodying geological time. In the context of a work about robots, it becomes the imbuement of life into an empty vessel. It is the longest section of ‘heartless’, the most “dancey” in some ways, and the most direct interpretation of the music. All things that, as a contemporary choreographer and dancer these days, I am not supposed to do. Don’t dance to the music, don’t use form, don’t repeat. But to me it is the building of the robot, the emphasis on its mechanisms and parts, embodying the inputs, without access to an origin.
A friend said to me after one show “I’ve never before enjoyed a show so much that was not at all my aesthetic”. I understood what they meant but it weighed heavily on me in the days that followed. What is an aesthetic? I no longer have a target for what a piece might look like, or what apparent qualities it might or should have. That is not to say I create thoughtlessly, only that I don’t care about the concept of aesthetic. What is the aesthetic of “heartless” that this friend found completely not the aesthetic that he creates in, but still enjoyable?
I don’t know because I didn’t approach making it with any specific formal thoughts. I picked images and phrases from my research and spontaneously responded to them, shaped them into repeatable phrases and actions. I made 9 episodes, deliberately unconnected. I deliberately inhabited and absorbed each episode’s soundtrack. I responded to light and sound and the information flowing through the floor into my feet, upwards, from the air entering my pores towards the centre of the body. And also, I pointed my toes. I kicked a leg in the air. I spun.
Mikhail Baryshnikov said “When a body moves, it’s the most revealing thing. Dance for me a minute and I’ll tell you who you are.”
Since who we are is a moving target, I will leave this problem of aesthetic by the wayside. I will keep dancing, minute by minute. Tell me who I am.
3.
The third section is ‘neural network’ and it is an interpretation of a simple neural network: 2:4:1, repeat. When I first created it -- as part of homework through Denise Fujiwara’s Solo Lab -- I thought I had made something really bad. But then I couldn’t shake it. I tried to change it, reverse it, leave it out in the cold. But it kept coming back in. I can’t explain it.
4.
And then part 4, an improvised section mocking TS Eliot’s pretentious reciting of his own poetry. I am really making fun of myself. It’s a good trick in long solo to remind yourself that you are neither awful nor a god. An artist is a worker with a third eye. Eliot’s weird fake accent reminds me to take my art form seriously, but not myself. I really enjoy this section because I can wiggle out any mounting tension, satisfy desires to kick my leg, point my toes, spin. It is 3.5 minutes of multiple layers of translation at once. My body tries to translate Eliot’s voice, electronic music, a slow-leak drone, the lightning of my nervous system, and random shuffling of beautiful coloured light. As these colours disappear, I find a broken bird, which in turn breaks my body.
5.
The attempts to recover from the broken body (section 5) are not sophisticated and none of them work. I slip in my own sweat in this section, and I definitely drooled on the floor and myself in at least one performance. But if you aren’t ok with being ugly or awkward on stage, you probably shouldn’t go on stage. Ugly and awkward are subjective – someone is always there to think the worst of you. And as a middled-aged woman, I am repulsive to society in many ways beyond my control.
Here, at the halfway mark of ‘heartless’ I am so exhausted and sweaty and determined I can’t even consider how the audience is receiving me. I’ve got to just keep going or I won’t make it. This is an addictive state for me. Throughout my life as a dancer “work harder” has been my response to self-doubt, to exhaustion, and to rejection. This is the origin of the Energizer Bunny identity I have drawn for myself. I will just keep going. This part of ‘heartless’ is about burnout, and I didn’t know it until I reached this point in front of an audience.
This addiction to go-go-go and do-do-do is probably why I enjoy reflecting on the universe, how the stars formed, what the cosmic microwave background reveals. I’ll run to the end of time, through the cosmos just to avoid acknowledging burnout, disappointment, and the kind of loss that leaves no bodies.
“The foundation from which we transform the experience of burnout is always the realization that we have been measuring all the wrong things in all the wrong ways and that we have for too long, mis-measured our sense of self in the same way; that we have allowed the shallow rewards of false goals or false people to mesmerize, bedazzle and entrain us: to hide from us an ancient and abiding human dynamic — that we belong to something greater and even better for us than the realm of the measured.” David Whyte, Consolations II
6.
In my mom’s journal from the last couple of years of her life, she expressed a concern that I really wanted to “be somebody”. She meant that derogatorily. She thought I wanted to be famous and glamourous and important. I wonder what she saw in me that made her think this: Because I liked Wonder Woman? Because I obsessively watched the TV show Fame? Because I painted and sang and danced and wrote and wanted to perform and share my work? That’s not wanting to be famous, that’s just being an artist. You have to put yourself out there, you have to believe, even subconsciously, that you have something worth saying. I have never wanted to be famous. I have never seriously thought about what that would be.
My approach to being seen has always been aloof. I can’t look at you while you’re looking at me. This is section 6 of ‘heartless’, my favourite section of whole piece, because I just sink into the music, and I hide my face from the audience the whole time. It’s called ‘brief awkward life’ and as well as being the robot creature, I am embodying every awkward moment in my life I can remember, and there are many……many…..
It makes me sad that I somehow gave my mother the impression I was fame-hungry. I am sad that that probably made her worry about me in ways she didn’t need to. Her thought that I had a desire for notoriety as some crucial part of my personality couldn’t be further from the truth. At 15, the age I was when she died, I did want to be seen, but I lacked the ability to really connect with more than a handful of people. Like the environment of “brief awkward life”, the space around me was always empty. I was always shouting into a vacuum because that was less frightening than a megaphone.
7.
And here we are in section 7, the one that seems easy, but is the hardest of the whole 45 minutes. Now, in this simple section “sitting skeleton”, I have to let love in. I have to let love in.
Before every performance in 2024, I have listened to the same song, usually singing along. This song gives me everything I need to perform.
“If I make it to the stage, I’ll show you what it means to be spared.” (Florence and the Machine, Morning Elvis)
There are people I loved deeply no longer with me. Dancers I have danced with, my parents gone before I was really an adult, mentors, inspirations, beloved birdwatcher friends. A very dear friend died with terrifying surprise in April this year. No rhyme or reason for why I am here, and they are not. It’s my responsibility to keep going. With all the love that I can carry.
“But the process of living is continuous, it possesses continuity because it is an everlasting renewed process of acting upon the environment and being acted upon by it together with the institution of relations between what is done and what is undergone.” John Dewey, Art as Experience p 108.
Around the time I had P, I started to understand a drive in myself to move, to dance for those who can’t. Being pregnant of course made me think about my mom and wonder what she could tell me, the things I didn’t know to ask her, about being a mom, being a woman, being strong.
Somewhere in my pregnant dancing I realized I am stubborn about my dancing and about being a dancer. I want to do what my mother couldn’t: life choices, big movement, self-expression. This intensified in 2021 when I reached the same age my mother was when she died. Everything now is new territory compared to her life. My mother, at one point, had wanted to be an actress, by all accounts she was really quite good. But her mother controlled her every life decision up to marrying my father and beyond. My grandmother did not see art as a proper life.
Because my mother was disfigured by her long illness, and unable to follow the artistic path she had once craved, I am stubborn about my dancing: using my body and making art in one act. I will do it for her. I will do it for Helen, for Anne-Marie, for Troy, for Tedd, for Phil, for Patrick, for Paul, for Stacey.
“If I make to the stage, I’ll show you what it means to be spared.”
8.
Once you let the love in – whether in a personal relationship or as part of a performance – you must face the worst of yourself. Challenge that love: oh yeah you love me, but also I did this heinous thing, I had this horrible thought, I’m selfish, I’m greedy, I’m a mess, I’m terrible.
Things get ugly for a while when you let yourself love and be loved.
And that is ‘heartless’ section 8. The war machine. The body built to destroy – itself, its world, its ideals.
Gabriel Cropley, my amazing lighting designer named this section “the apocalypse” which is probably accurate. But I call it “wooden pigeon”, a nod to the first ancient robotic creation and how since then we have used and abused our creativity in creating more and more dehumanizing tools of destruction.
9.
Section 9 of ‘heartless’ is simply called “song”.
It is also my favourite. Exposed, breathless, music-less, empty and still not knowing if heartlessness is a metaphor or a reality.
What I learned in the making of, the performance of, and the aftermath of ‘heartless’ is the importance of love. Double down on love. It’s substantial but not a substance, it’s real until it is false. And then it will be replenished. #mybatteryispurelove is my hashtag and my lifeblood as well. I will keep peering into the distance of the universe with a love of science and mystery. I will not take more than I give. I will not worry about the noise.
DON’T WORRY ABOUT THE NOISE.
I found this written in my ‘heartless’ notebook from the last days before the premiere performance. I think it was a note I left for my kid.
But now the noise is all the measures, the missteps, the losses and miscalculations, the sweat and drool, the mistakes, the letdowns and blowups, the pointed toes and invisible bodies. You can’t generate this noise without love, without loving your communities, your audiences, your surroundings. That is why we make art. Not to be famous or revolutionary, but to contribute to the possibilities for connection, belonging and invitation.
We will never measure the smallest aspect of “matter”, “flow” or “universe”. Our sight and understanding of it will keep dividing until all relativity becomes unfathomable, until zombies, simulation, gods or monsters are all no longer useful containers for reality. And the singularity that put everything in motion, that made us and every heartless or heartful thing here, is the closest definition of love we will ever see.
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