“Repetition, reperformance and looping come to replace the unpredictable, one-off intervention."
(Claire Bishop, 2017, p.2)
As a dancer I used to strive for perfection. Through repetition and constantly being on display, I developed a sort of internal expertise or ‘mirror’, to reach exacting standards of movement, accuracy, bodily virtuosity, and emotional delicacy. My internal mirror led me to make judgments and comparisons: a means of self-objectification to incentivize, control, and change. However, these expectations meant that perfection and my subjectivity could never be reconciled, and unpredictable encounters could never come.What could dance be? I began to question the boundaries between the virtuoso body and the everyday body by exploring performance in the margins of public and institutionalised spaces. By intervening in everyday spaces - educational institutions, public parks, and city streets - the mirror invites unpredictable intersections of everyday performance and its environment.
In the video, the story told through the mirror is diffracted; space and time overlap as the body moves through the cracks. The mirror helps me to explore embodiment and how the ‘rules’ of dance can be subverted to create an inclusive approach towards self-determination, empowerment and expression, beyond the pursuit of perfectionism. Perhaps, the mirror is not an insurmountable loop but a crossroads of rationality and liberation, a space-time cave for containing memory and identity, an aura flash for knowing yourself.
Claire Bishop, 2017. Out of Body, [online] Available at: http://www.skulptur-projekte.de/skulptur-projekte-download/SP17-Out/Out_of_Body_EN.pdf> [Accessed 5 May 2023].