Ten Huts. Jill Sigman
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we might compare the huts to altars. What makes an altar an altar is not only its form or the symbolism of its objects but the organic working of these objects in space and the physical interactions they engender. An altar, when effective, entails a kind of choreography, and the repeated motions and actions of that choreography are an important part of what it is.
I am a choreographer. For me, creating this web of actions and relationships is choreography. First, I am choreographing the materials that I find, gathering them from different places, bringing them together in a precise nonentropic way, and later guiding them back out into the world on different paths to potentially different futures. A large dance. Second, I am choreographing the movement of my own (and sometimes other trained) bodies—developing the movement palettes that arise through my work researching and building each hut and dancing at its site. Finally, and most importantly, I am choreographing experience—the experience of people who visit the hut in all different capacities.
For years I have experimented with ways to combine my dance practice with social practice (more typical in the visual arts) in which the public’s actions and experiences complete the identity of the work. The idea that we have to choose between these two ways of working has always felt like a false dichotomy. If we look at the history of ritual we find a history of examples involving trained officiants often with particular physical skills (sometimes called shamans or priests) and a participatory public. In fact, these two complementary components are fully in dialogue and equally necessary to the success of a ritual. Ritual practice needs both skill and participation.
Performing at Hut #10.
DANIEL PERALES
But what do the huts have to do with ritual? Ritual reconnects us—to place, objects, the natural world, each other. It turns our attention, reminds us of things that are important, even when we have forgotten that they are important. It helps us rewire lost connections culturally, like a stroke patient relearning neural pathways. It is a time out of time, a chance to refocus through simple but salient actions.
The huts might remind us of some very basic things like what we throw away, how long we’ve had it (one hut included fancy plastic spoons that were used at a reception—each spoon had been used to serve one bite of food), where our food comes from, what happens to a plastic bottle when we don’t see it any more, or what is our wish for our home or neighborhood. Beyond that, we might also remember (re-member in a very physical way through watching dance, crawling through the door, eating) our connections to the beginnings of agriculture, property, real estate, architecture, to the ideas of food and nature and home. At the performances of I set off to seek my fortune and I got a little lost and then I remembered what you said at Hut #5, I typed definitions of these key words on my laptop in the hut and performed physical tasks related to them. I was interested in the questions: What provides shelter? What makes this feel like home? What is my connection to the food I eat? How is power inevitably involved in the concept of property? How does ownership create a perceived sense of needing to protect what we own? What happened when we went from commons to private property? I chose to address these questions physically through my performance.
The term “reality” first appeared in the English language in 1550, originally a legal term in the sense of “fixed property.”
But ritual is more than just an intellectual exercise, a list of stats about non-biodegradable products or facts about the way that real estate is related to reality. With ritual, we remember to feel, and perhaps we also feel to remember. There are many different scholarly accounts of ritual and its function. But at bottom, we strive for a moment of realness, a time out of time when things do not seem the way they do in ordinary life, when we are charged, present, connected.
RITUAL ∙ A ritual is a set of actions, performed mainly for their symbolic value. A ritual may be performed on specific occasions, or at the discretion of individuals or communities. Rituals include not only the worship rites of organized religions and cults, but also rites of passage of certain societies, atonement and purification rites, dedication ceremonies, coronations and presidential inaugurations, marriages and funerals, sports events, Halloween parties, and Christmas shopping.
Performing in TILL at Hut #7.
ERIC BREITBART
At Hut #7, I performed TILL, a two-hour movement ritual in which I circled the hut relentlessly, tilling the metaphorical soil of the space (a hospital turned homeless shelter turned arts center with a fraught history and a creepy vibe). I felt like a divining rod, using my movement to reveal a kind of murky energetic history of the space, to aerate that toxic history and make room for something new to grow. The circling was grueling and grotesque, morphing and monotonous. People sat and stood on all sides of the basement and watched me sweat in the summer heat. When the circling wound down with my crawling on the cement floor, I led the audience out to the adjacent abandoned lot, a stretch of weedy broken cement which functioned as a moat between the current day men’s homeless shelter and a newish luxury condo. I slowly walked the perimeter of the lot, carrying a light attached to a long stick. Musicians played percussion on glass vessels from different corners of the lot. And to my great shock, the audience followed me closely, processing around the site at a snail’s pace, watched by curious faces from the shelter fence and the luxury balconies on either side. Together we reclaimed this abandoned non-place as a place—a place where we all were, hot and breathing together in the New York City summer dark. Body, movement, reality, fragility—people connecting to each other by witnessing the human condition together. Shared presence.
This kind of experience of shared presence can lead down an array of unmarked roads: to compassion, to a recognition of our own embodiment, to a sense of connectedness to others. For me, choreographing is the skill of creating opportunities for these experiences, either through the movement (or stillness or exhaustion or pathos) of my own body, or through the movement and assemblage of objects, or through the interactions of social processes like serving tea or preparing food. The huts provide a space for this shared presence. With this opening we can be reminded of the things we need to remember. We can refocus.
Performing at Hut #5.
LINDSAY COMSTOCK
At Hut #5, I was standing at the top of a ladder, holding an old car antenna and one of the “packages” I had made that I called The Sheep (remember the remains of ZsaZsaLand?). I stood for a long time, without moving or lowering my arm. It was simultaneously a feat of physical endurance, an internal focusing, and a way of being connected to the viewers in a space that had the hut at its epicenter. I remember distinctly the feeling of standing on that ladder, of being an antenna, and of a palpable connection to the people there. After the three-hour performance, I spoke with a young man who had volunteered to run the bar. I didn’t know him; he had seen my call for volunteers online. He told me that during that part of the piece he found himself overwhelmed by emotion and had the urge to cry. I could feel that charge when I was performing. But there’s a point where words fail to describe exactly what is happening, where live performance is ineffable. And that is in part why I do it. And that is why it is like ritual.
There is a cool wind that has pervaded some regions of postmodern performance where irony has been equated with intelligence and distance seen as a measure of professionalism. The fear of wearing one’s heart on one’s sleeve. In her op-ed “How to Live Without Irony” in the New York Times, Christy Wampole writes about irony as a pervasive cultural phenomenon, one that offers the safety of noncommitment. “To live ironically is to hide in public…. Somehow, directness has become unbearable to us.”6
Irony and ritual cannot coexist. You cannot be laughing at and trying to mend the world. (I mean, you can laugh as you try to mend the world, but that’s different.) You cannot be detached and also engaged. Lately, we have been mostly detached. As Wampole