“Thought lags behind itself. It can never catch up with its own beginnings.”
—Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual

Sigmund Freud believed that the discontinuity between experience and memory was the fundamental essence of our concept of time. The temporal space required to write events into whatever biotechnical data storage device we call recollection, Freud believed, is what constitutes duration.

Movement in space is intrinsic to the notion of time as well. Time either moves — forward, backward, in spirals, looping back on itself — or stands still. The only time, however, that time ceases moving is at the moment of death, which lasts forever. A lifetime is a quantifiable duration. Deathtime is eternity.

Time and movement, then, are linked in a perpetual dance, neither leading nor following but hinging inextricably upon one another. This intimate space-time relationship is revealed in Dana Gingras’s most recent choreographic work, entitled Coil, a one-woman performance that foregrounds repetitive and ever-subtler gestures that trouble the definition of dance and the notion of what witnessing a body in motion can do.

Coils conceal potential energy, they compress and absorb shocks, and they give three-dimensional form to the abstract concept of cycles in time. Thematically, Coil is certainly about repetition and difference. But it is also about temporality, spontaneity, and belief in absence of reason.

For lengthy intervals throughout the 50-minute performance, the dance artist Caroline Gravel undulates in cyclical motion, arms swinging like a pendulum out of balance, each revolution incrementally different, manipulating the spectator’s sense of duration in space. Gravel’s controlled motions periodically erupt in radical and transformative gesticulations in which she touches herself obsessively, embracing her torso, snatching at her limbs, distorting her face, braiding her waist-length hair.

To stand still, to look without touching, is a condition of what we might consider tactful public behaviour. And yet, the tendency to want to participate is inherent in dance. Dance is usually a social, tactile artform. But to have arisen and partaken in the spectacle would have certainly meant calling attention to oneself. This is the paradox of tact — the impetus for tact-ility and the social requirement to stand still, to play dead to a living performer.

Movement and touch are as interwoven as are time and memory. Gravel’s self-touch stands in for our unprompted participatory desires, to make contact with each other, and with ourselves. That Gravel paws and claws at her own body in absence of another figure represents the subject feeling her way through a senseless world, in search of connection, understanding, recognition.

Dance may be the most abstract of all artforms, inviting diverse and wild interpretations from the viewer. There is undoubtedly profound meaning implied in Gingras’s choreography, the organization of movement, which is also the occupation of time, like a group of protestors might occupy public space.

On the surface, Gravel’s arrhythmic motions speak for themselves — of anxiety, and impatience, and ultimately, of desire for touch. Still, Coil resists a literal reading and instead forces spectators to confront our own defective proprioception, the ways in which we misinterpret the world through broken movement and on a fractured timeline.

Coil is about what to do when we are both free to do anything and condemned to repeat ad infinitum under earthly constraints — political, technological, physical. It is about what must be done when there is seemingly nothing that can be done.

At times, Gravel simply jumps up and down as if attempting to defy gravity, or in hopes that time itself will freeze her motion in mid-air. And yet, time marches on. The effect is hilarious: we know very well that each time Gravel will fall back to the ground. But we want her to float. We want to believe that this most rational law will miraculously be suspended.

In the Apostle John’s Biblical account of Jesus’s resurrection, the Messiah after having arisen from the dead instructs Mary Magdalene: “Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father.” In this command, a politics of touch emerges that blesses those who have not seen, not touched, and still have faith. Faith, like dance, authorizes abstraction. In faith, thought retakes the race to its own beginnings, collapsing the original lag and disobeying time itself. In faith as in dance, time, if only momentarily, is allowed to stand still, and we can make contact tactfully.

Freud was an atheist. But he did see value in the successive ordering of chaos. “Everything new must have its roots in what was before,” he wrote in Moses and Monotheism. Myth and legend served a purpose for Freud — they permitted the reconciliation of abstraction, the mastery of the unknown, and the defiance of logical odds. Jesus was miraculous not because he was the son of God but because he represented man’s search for common emotional and intellectual values.

Dance can give form to our collective search for meaning. Its existence is evidence of extralinguistic intelligence, the body as a repository for knowledge, a technology for the storage of memory. Observing a dancer in motion is a kind of contactless delivery for vital information, a parable for the virtual.

The philosopher Brian Massumi argues that the most elementary unit of thought is a “complex duration before it is a discrete perception or cognition.” Dance trips the switch on perception consciousness, eliminating the impression of a lag between the event and its filing away into memory. “Thought hallucinates that it coincides with itself,” says Massumi. “All awareness emerges from a nonconscious thought-o-genic lapse indistinguishable from movements of matter.”

Organic matter in motion perceives time in different scales and rhythms than human experience. Caroline Gravel’s ability to run backwards, to stop and start, to stand still, cheats both time and death. Coil, then, is nothing short of a time machine, disrupting its continuous flow by tricking our proprioceptive systems into perceiving the discontinuity of experience and memory.

It comes in an inkling, consciousness spontaneously perceiving itself, time you can’t touch.◼︎

_{Cover image: Caroline Gravel performs in Dana Gingras’s Coil. Photographed by Yannick Grandmont.}