These are mostly taken from Stephen Gill's Invisibility series which highlights how "high visibility" vests have become so ubiquitous in cities that they actually render the wearer unremarkable and invisible. I though of these because of a comment Selma made on our last night in Potsdam regarding the scene she and Oliver participated in. She spoke about how the operation of a physical task (pulling the table) in the same space as a unison energetic dance sequence focused her attention on how dance usually reveals or disguises the effort it requires in conjunction with the comparatively passive state of the spectator. She said that she couldn't see the dance sequence itself but what she could perceive was the varying visibilities of labour.
I'm still on my Trio A trip - and Rainer of course was explicitly looking at these issues within her work of the late 60s. She was investigating the difference between 'real' and 'apparent' energy - the actual physical expenditure as opposed to the technical presentation of energy - and how this opened a gap up between spectator and performer in their experience of dance. The requirement to expend some 'real' energy within the scenes we developed presents the opportunity for all concerned to revisit this gap and to refocus the eye not upon the effect of the dance sequence but on its execution, bringing back into visibility the physicality of the work.
