As a contribution to the MFA Creative Writing Program’s Experiments in Dissonance symposium 2020, Sam Creely and Pia Sazani's DanceNotes Chaplet Series offered an excerpt from our second issue, Yuxin Zhao’s Three Forms of Exhaustion, which served as the starting point for a chain of interpretation and iteration: the Dance-Notation-Chain. Recordings of danced and spoken notation were handed off, each iteration acting as both record of what came before and instruction for the next interpreter.

Often notation is considered outside (around, ancillary to) the performance event. We developed the Dance-Notation-Chain as a way to think about the role of notation as a tension drawn between script and document. What is the state of being, simultaneously, the conditions of possibility, and the results of those conditions? If movement is a grammar, how might performance facilitate a double occupation of the imperative and the indicative?

The first dancer, Jess Goldschmidt, composed a solo in response to Three Forms of Exhaustion, and this score was handed down the chain of dancers and notators. While the following sequence reflects the order in which the exchanges originally occurred, any recording may be played alongside any other recording — that is, any link in the chain can be understood as both record of, and instruction for, any other link.

Yuxin Zhao text

Jess Goldschmidt video

Meg Whiteford audio

Lisa Sanaye Dring video

Teo Rivera-Dundas audio

Hannah Rubin video

Annie Render audio

Char Simpson video

Natalia Lassalle-Morillo audio

J F K Randhawa video

The first triad from the DanceNotes Chaplet Series will be available Fall 2021:

No. 1 Throat Draw Come Out With It by Sam Creely and Pia Sazani

No. 2 Three Forms of Exhaustion by Yuxin Zhao

No. 3 What Happens If We Take Our Time? by Gabrielle Civil

For the Experiments in Dissonance Symposium 2020, writer Maryam Kazeem and visual artist Zina Saro-Wiwa had a wide-ranging conversation about 'African time' as an alternative temporality that not only creates but demands new ways of negotiating with archives, as well interrogates the concept of "archive" itself.

Drawing its title from a poem by Shirley Kim-Ryu, Opulence, Be My Eyes began as a conversation between Kim-Ryu and Jen D'Mello about bacteria, fermentation, thresholds, and death's regenerative capacity. The pandemic that occurred a few months later required them to revisit their thoughts and feelings about death and possibility. The ways in which they experienced how inextricably linked we are to other living beings from day-to-day was changing drastically. Unable to continue being in close proximity to others, they began conjuring memories of our loved ones’ presence and invoking memories of touch, or the smell of blooming trees and wildflowers. We grieve and continue to grieve--a process resembling anaerobic digestion—where microorganisms break down material in the absence of oxygen. We feel loss on many levels as life breaks down in and around us. What has presented itself as a result of this loss, though, is a stark reminder of just how sensual everyday life is.

They describe their proces further: "With this hyper-awareness of the absence of touch, we began sending sounds to one another in an attempt to move one another on a molecular level. We might call this experiment in communication psychic; sounds vibrate and resonate, inviting a wide array of reactions that occur in ways that cannot be explained in full. This piece is our attempt to join the larger process of anaerobic fermentation that is occurring by cultivating our own; a process that allows us to offer sounds that enable us to move and be moved by each other. This piece is an invitation to listen differently—to feel ultrasonics; sounds that are far beyond our physical capacity to hear—to taste color. It is a pathway to a rich world comprised of spectral music, specters, sensuality and wildness. It is our attempt to enable the phenomena of resonance with infinite splendor."