The Sudden starts with a closing night party. By all accounts, it hasn't gone well. The cast of dancers use the audience to put together the final scene - the missing piece of the puzzle...
Nicholas Johnson, dramaturg with Pan Pan Theatre Company, introduces their 'experiment in live direction, authorship and choreography', coming to this year's Dublin Dance Festival.
💦💦 The Sudden 💦 💦
— Pan Pan (@panpantheatre) May 12, 2023
Co-presented with @dublindancefestival
The Sudden is the eureka moment - the answer, the end, the reveal. It's an experiment in live direction, authorship and choreography.
🎥 by Ros Kavanagh
🗓 24+25 May, 7.30pm
📍 @projectarts
🎟 €22/18 #linkinbio pic.twitter.com/isYlDWAHkN
sudden realisation / It occurs to me that I have spent enough time in studios that I now believe in telepathy. Once we start to break down the invisible lines between creative roles, new lines of connection open between creatives: tiny gestures are picked up between dancers and directors, designers and dramaturgs, stage managers and everyone else. As the dancer dances and looks directly into my eyes, I wonder: are they seeing into me, and is this what I want them to do, what I want to see them do? Or are they doing what I want to be able to do? I seem to feel them moving inside my mind, morphing the words. The sharpness of a living body against a field of colour: somehow it never gets old.
sudden change / Dramaturgy for dance is a different animal, it turns out. The conventions for text and theatre don't quite apply, but nor do they completely disappear: we still have lists, labels, phrases, ideas: the 'material.’ We prefer ‘scenario’ over ‘script’ and ‘sequence’ over ‘structure.’ The apps don’t change — group chat and group drives overflow as usual — but what is on them relates mainly to expressive gestures, experiments to be conducted live. The drive seems more a shadow of the thing, more of an echo than usual.
oh long after … sudden flash / Patterns and codes must be established before they can be interrupted. Choreography seems to involve both literal and abstract parameters, and words can only help so much. Movement can only erupt properly after prior stillness, but then stillness is the move that comes after — even though I know this is the only possible logic, it keeps surprising me when it happens.
sudden impact / I get interested in the background state, the thing we think of as non-dance, and start to see it as dance. I read up on the amygdala, adrenaline, anxiety, and the autonomic nervous system. My breathing and heart rate accelerate as the dancers sweat. I watch the audience and think about empathy and emotion regulation. Will champagne and sushi help them play their part?
sudden insight / Sometimes we come into a room where something is happening that we don’t fully understand, but we make a snap decision to enjoy it.
sudden death / In certain athletic competitions, there is a form of victory where the first person to ‘score’ counts as having won the entire contest, no matter how hard each side played, regardless of what virtuosity was on display by the individual players. What makes this a bit like death is that whatever time we thought we had merely stops. It reframes everything around that one moment of achievement – the goal, the touch, the touchdown – but it poses an ethical challenge in which the end suddenly seems to justify the means.
Meditating on sudden death, I have some questions. When dancers dance, who is competing against whom? Are the dancers hoping to win against the audience, or is the audience trying to score a point against the dancers? Are critics sometimes trying to beat artists, while the artists are trying to defeat irrelevance? Are all artists just competing against themselves? Or are all the humans just trying to run up the score against machines and devices, all together in the one room?
all of a sudden / I realise that I have lost count. Or lost ‘the count.’ Or that I can let go of counting altogether.
sudden pang of recognition / That person walks into the room.
Nicholas Johnson is Associate Professor of Drama at Trinity College Dublin and has worked as a dramaturg with Pan Pan since 2015. The Sudden is at Project Arts Centre, Dublin on 24th and 25th May, as part of this year's Dublin Dance Festival - find out more here.
