A Sit

“I now tread back a bit further into the past. In April 2015, I was in Paris viewing the Eric Duyckaerts exhibition Terpsichore. In the film Notation (2015) set up in the hallway, Duyckaerts was slowly explaining something. However, I did not understand a word of French and began to gradually lose my focus. Suddenly, I noticed the relationship between Duyckaerts’ head and the blackboard stand behind him. The tip of his head was uncannily parallel to the stand’s horizon, just barely maintaining contact. It was almost unsettling to watch. As satisfying as it was when his head was perfectly aligned with the stand, I was greatly anxious that his head would soon drift away from the stand. When the gap widened enough, I found a sense of relief but also a perverse sense of frustration. The anxiety and frustration continued even after I returned home. I grew uneasy and curious that I may have missed something about the relationship between “the forms I saw” and the “words I could not hear.” I thus began to investigate further about Terpsichore, Notation, and Duyckaerts. While the anxiety that drove me was uncomfortable, it was also titillating. The investigation and the feeling of tension only subsided when I paid homage to Notation in my work titled A Sit (2015).”

“A Sit (2015) captures the choreographer Lyon Eun Kwon sitting on a chair and “marking” a dance. While the dance is perfectly enacted in the mind of the choreographer, what becomes visually manifest are the movements that lie peripheral to the dance, more specifically, the traces of habits deeply embedded in the body while rehearsing and the kinesthetic responses that occur instantaneously and unconsciously. One dance is divided into two layers, producing two completely different movements simultaneously. I assumed that between the two layers, the peripheral movements—visible as imperfections on the choreographer’s body, constituted the final stage of this dance. And the perfect dance that is taking place in her mind was choreographed from the very beginning, based on the premise that it would be performed only by its marking, or in other words, on the premise that it would never be danced for real.”