Blog

Ileanna Cheladyn, our very first Scholar-in-Residence, gives us a look into her research and process in part three of her blog series.

DISPATCHES

The season ends.
Everything is a transition; one thing frays and stretches into the next.
Be mindful of the transitions; the inevitable has a habit of sneaking up.

This particular transition pulls me into a new phase, similar but different. Excitingly, I’ll be continuing at The Dance Centre as Scholar-in-Residence, but with my attention more closely tuned to writing the dissertation and sharing some quirky artifacts of research. Aspects of the deep drift of research are asking to be formed.

Even if this role will continue, this season ends. And transitions are as much about being present to their in-between-y textures, as they are about reflection and (re)orientation.

APPROXIMATE REFLECTIONS

Come with me into the studio. Take a peek into a moment.

Once the weather turned towards this glorious green, I started walking to Scotiabank Dance Centre in the mornings. A 55 minute walk got me sweaty and ready by the time I took the elevator up to the 7^th floor. Letting the unforgiving air conditioning do its work, I took my time to arrive – a privilege of long timelines is the potential to revel in the arrival (I wonder whether after 6 months I ever arrived at all). As the chill of the studio air permeated my flushed skin, I would add layer after layer of clothing. Eventually, I’d be swaddled and wiggling around the studio.

It was part of my daily practice to tend to whatever was present that day. A throb of excitement, a cranky sacrum, sleepy vision, feelings yet to have the space to be moved, a curiosity about how the floor might know my warmth.

The studio became an archive of my own shifting states. But it wasn’t my archive. The studio, too, came to foreground its own daily shifts and layered lives. Each corner held a trace of some life lived that I could only speculate about. And every speculation led me to wonder about the eras of aesthetics, economies, and characters that have made their lingering traces throughout the building.

So, I was swaddled and wiggling to some mix or another on my playlist, and I was stoked on a connection I felt between the external rotation of my forearms and the opening of my sternum which gave space for my lungs to more deeply massage my heart. But, ya know, some days, thoughts and moods are sticky and sharp; I just started bawling. Like, full on, full-chested bawling. Snotty, red nosed, there was so much sadness and worry and grief in me that it all had to erupt.

The forearm-sternum-lung-heart connection probably shook something loose, but I also felt the weight of all my colleagues who have expressed disappointment in the state of the arts (and the world). There is creativity and joy, so much is being made and celebrated, and this is held in balance with a notable concern that it’s disappearing before our eyes.

Things feel hard. And this is not a special articulation of that, merely an agreement that things just feel like a lot. My tears were partly my own overwhelm, partly the welling sadness that so many excellent artists talk about leaving dance, and partly a confusion with the ways a practice so filled with magic, connection, creation, experimentation, and adoration can be so heartbreaking.

The phenomena of professionals leaving a field is not unique to the field of dance or the arts; people change paths all the time for any number of reasons. And a devotional practice being heartbreaking is, similarly, in now way revolutionary to name. But I want to gesture to how it’s been one of my favourite – even if complicated – things of this project, of this research: to just be overwhelmed by the thickness of all things life and passion to such a degree that I spent nearly a full three hours alone on the 7^th floor crying.

I think what I’m saying is that I’m amazed by all the ways that dance has been expressed through and in tangents to The Dance Centre. As a job, a hobby, an identity, an appetite, a practice, a puzzle, an art object, a product, a road to freedom, a path to expression, a critique, a way to bring people together, a personal improvement project, a fun playtime adventure, and then some.

MIRRORS LIKE EYES (HELP YOU SEE)

Throughout the last six months, I made some Instagram reels. This was a very new medium for me to distill my research/practice. It was fun to experiment with how my durational predilections encounter the need for speed and quick digestion on social media. Nonetheless, there is something very unsettling about trying to articulate things (things I can rarely articulate to myself) within a few minutes and in a visual format.

It’s weird to notice the attentional code-switching we/I can do; we/I can sit and watch a 60+ minute dance work (that is typically remarkably abstract), and yet Instagram trains us/me to desire 15 seconds or less. This meta context is wild to me: I am obsessed with practices of attention and how people actively tune and attune their attentional capacities, and social media is designed in such a way to hijack intentionality of attention. By making content I am complicit, and consensually so.

Yet, I wonder about these grooves of complicity and how the labour of participation continues to maintain a set of social, cultural, behavioural norms. Intentionally or not. Butler and Bourdieu linger here, too.

When it comes to attention, I can’t help but wonder wander about the charges and currents that push and pull us through our practices.

IT’S JUST A WONKY FUNHOUSE REFLECTION (NOTHING IS OBJECTIVE)

The next big chapter is dissertation writing – another transition, another field to step into.

The orientation I’m noticing as a result of all my hours crying and wiggling in the studio, is towards the field itself. A relational field, the resonant space holding all movement and action.

There are things, experiences, reflections I’m dancing around right now. Like interpersonal drama, group dynamics, threat models, gossip, and yes, complicity, and the ways people un/intentionally labour to maintain a normative experience of community, all while hustling for stability.

This is a kind of field that feels subtle and impactful. There is something to the feeling of being part of something, participating in a local and global aesthetic project, being enskilled in certain physical and relational ways, all while the substrate of this relating feels precarious and fragile; worlds constantly on the brink.

I’ve noticed the silences, the whispers, the glances, the ways that people dextrously move through, with, around one another and towards, away from, and beside different resources. I’m curious about the field that dance artists co-create through the alchemy of their practices. Dancing continues to be moving magic, inventing new worlds, and I’m grateful to keep feeling into it.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

Join Ileanna for Field-Work: a slow dance, part of The Dance Centre’s new Dance Dialogues series of talks where artists and scholars delve into the ideas, practices, and provocations that shape contemporary dance and art-making.

December 3 at 6pm: Details and tickets

Learn more about The Dance Centre’s Choreographic Projects and Partnerships.

Photos: David Cooper; courtesy of the artist