Contact makes each other possible
J N Harrington
Image: Roswitha Chesher. Screensaver Series. Performers: Vanessa Abreu, Iris Chan, J N Harrington, Stephanie McMann, Louise Tanoto, Elisa Vassena.
Contact makes each other possible. We are each other, empathic, carried on it.
There are no aways to throw something out and not expect it to come cycling back.
Similar themes preoccupy me, recur or manifest across all my projects: time, ordering time, mesmerisation, inactivity and rest; illusion and disorientation; expectation and confirmation; metonymic relations between images; operations, infrastructure and discourse; conversation and encounter as index or inventory; how things appear and how they work: fronts and insides; when to foreground or camouflage labour within material choices.
This text is an updated version of an essay commissioned by Make It in Brixton, March 2021.
Image: UNFRIENDING (2021) film still. J N Harrington. Dancers: Emma Pocq, Ella Hollapa, Jule Niekamp, Daniela Carler. Videography: Genevieve Reeves
As an artist I work within collaborative relationships to realise choreographic projects. I’ve been working since about 2010 and create performances and installations for public spaces, galleries, screens and more. With a background in dance, psychology and visual arts, the work I do references those connections, especially around illusions, play, pattern, attention, learning and the relations between movement and perception. My collaborators and I often develop ways of working differently for each project, and I have recently started to think of my projects like a homeschool to develop new skills and actually to understand how to work with each new set of relationships: people, space, audience, materials, context…I often feel like I am extending into areas of working where there is a steep learning curve or a kind of oblique— or at least sideways— development that goes together with a deepening of my understanding of what I do by doing it. This also feels to be a culture of professional development running through my work, and that is maybe at the centre of my desire to keep working as an artist. It means I am afforded the opportunity to learn and grow as a person with the development of my work and, I think too, that I’m not fixed in expectation about how the next work or project will look.
The years of pandemic living (surviving) and working (surviving) have also – and obviously – highlighted a lot about how work is organised and valued. My instinct at the beginning was to share a small accumulation from the last 10 years of working and split it between whoever in my projects said they could benefit from it. Whilst it is an ongoing project of balance, I mostly feel safer and better when I can share what I have with others. It’s also hard to challenge a scarcity mindset when living with precarious working conditions and without the safety net of inherited wealth etc. but it’s an ongoing project I’m nurturing within myself. There is probably a basic psychology there which hopes for something asymmetrically reciprocal when I am in need, but it’s not my conscious motivation. Living through the recent mutual aid efforts and reckoning with the violent inequality deepened by the pandemic just reaffirms my sense of my own and others’ vulnerability in isolation and material interconnectedness. It also struck me that the more one has —the more distance it is possible to create between oneself and others- the more one might be able to believe in separateness or exceptionality. I became interested in the metaphor of the mortgage as a way to think about interrelations of debt, capital, promises, individual desire for separation, continuation, community, leverage, entitlement and bitterness. As I came to understand a bit more about what many other art workers seem to have in terms of material security, I felt challenged to reconcile activities in the domains of art and life where these seem to embody quite different values: the messaging and the place from which the message is sent.
As many of us freelance “independent” artists became increasingly distressed about cancelled work, living costs and the silence of government on our protections, I felt more and more uncomfortable hearing from middle class people with mortgages on furlough worrying about their situation. This is the distraction-equation of oppression olympics which would have me look to colleagues with seemingly better problems— or slightly better problems- to have than my own in order to not look to a bigger picture. Like many I’m sure, I fell in and out of that toxic trap. I sometimes felt frustrated by my own choice to build the career I have (rather than do …what? something legibly useful according to the people in power?). I had to remind myself that there are many ways to work, to know, to organise and seek coalition and that to put myself and my work down was another trap. Instead I wanted to get humble about what any one person could do, and specifically about what I can and do do within the communities I am in. This felt like working against a sort of catastrophising and fragile mindset which might otherwise see me sink into despondence and seek self-soothing rather than try to stay with the difficulty of being a human citizen worker in 2020/21 and try to do what I could as best I could, even with intermittent energy and limited know-how.
A friend of mine who shares some similarities in background to me, often remarks that he experiences more generosity from people who grew up knowing what a bit of help can mean. I think it’s partly a difference between accepting flow and flux compared to an assumption of accumulation. I usually bristle when media-types lazily use the word “choreographic” in the news cycle to describe movement in general, but maybe they have a complex unspoken cosmology in which some god is co-authoring the “dance” of, for example, boats and birds. However, I think that in the case of considering resource distribution, choreographic thinking can help because of its concern for shifting patterns, roles, styles and lineage, embodiment, discrete steps, vocabularies and score-based choices, time, change, performance, re-performance and of course the passing down of histories and materials with all the inheritances that includes. What I am really trying to say is that I think we can understand a lot about what individual people need through considering how bodies interact at small and larger scales physically, and that literally moving/ dancing with people in the work I do helps with an embodiment of my politics and vice versa.
Before any friends there are only chances. But a pattern is set in motion by water, by warmth, by touch. By the people closest to us. Have you thought about that? About simply falling into motion.
Everyone makes mistakes. With a friend you might stand a chance.
UNFRIENDING (2021)
In a recent commissioned work I made with yr. 3 students at London Contemporary Dance School (assisted by Elisa Vassena) I tried to put into practice an idea related to this thinking in a section of the work, UNFRIENDING, named landlording. Previous to landlording, the four dancers have spent about 20 minutes arranging and re-composing patterns across the stage floor with long strips of bright green fabric. This section, which we called a-semic writing, was all about negotiating and co-building generative blueprints. The rules were that a new pattern would be suggested by one person placing a fabric strip in the space which could be done in a number of ways, at different speeds and with different levels of intentionality and investment. The second and third choices made by the 2nd and 3rd dancers in response were then what really laid the foundation for the visible understanding of what was important about that first imprint. If the fabric was thrown and landed in a circle, the second dancer' might have emulated the throw with the fabric landing as a long line, or she might have chosen to pay attention to the circularity of the first imprint and arranged her fabric in some different circular or curved form. The third choice always confirmed or reinforced the mutual direction of the 1st and 2nd. Here I think there is an embodiment of potential for processing information and choosing a response rather than a reaction which automatically matches what has just been offered. I think the work in life (at least for me) is to practice this so that the interval of time it takes to respond can be reduced, or (in my case of slower processing) one can share with another that there will be a moment of pause. In my body of experience in communication this is an opposite to a domino style of relating where each person keeps laying down more and more content related to what the other has offered and doesn’t take pause to ask a question or allow something less expected to unfold from within what is already there.
The final iteration of this score always ended with a composition of tightly wound toilet-roll shaped fabrics (for the pandemic!) in the centre of the space. The dancers then retreated to the edges of the stage before rushing in to transform the collectively built toilet-roll image into a competitive game of building their own spaces whilst dismantling others’. The game worked like this: the players’ goal was to create a more-or-less circular periphery for themselves somewhere in the space by joining strips of fabric together in a closed shape. Each player could only handle one fabric strip at a time and any strip not being held by the player was available to be taken by any other Each player could choose whether they took fabric from the centre pile or from others’ constructions. The spaces being built could be closed at any time from the inside sealing that player within and ending their participation. As expected, the dancers tended towards competition rather than cooperating to each receive 4 of the 16 fabrics available, which made for a more dynamic scene and some kind of illustration of accumulation and loss via their various tactics. Often there would be a critical moment where one person might have 6 fabric strips but in an attempt for the 7th they would lose several and end up with just one.
Images: J N Harrington. UNFRIENDING rehearsal with dancers: Ella Holappa, Jule Niekamp, Daniela Carler & Emma Pocq and landlording score drawing by Janine.
Landlording is a small system, but in the course of UNFRIENDING it does its job to physicalise a set of relational possibilities with fixed resources and individualist goals. I think part of art making can be about finding languages to draw attention to dynamics and experiences at these different scales. In the case of this score, it was more about sharing a way of approaching thinking/working with the young professional dancers than it was about them later performing something to transform the audience’s perspectives. For me there has always been a lot to learn in the practice of dancing and making with dance, and sometimes that translates into making something that resonates with an audience. Whilst resources are visibly finite in the landlording score, there are places in my practice where enactments of cooperation and collaboration according to need and desire play out in generative ways.
SCREENSAVER SERIES (2018)
I recognise that everything I have at this point in my life is traceable through networks of care, resource-sharing and support offered by others and that in this sense my soloing through life as an artist is deeply entwined with the histories of many other people. This is, in many ways, how I am thinking about what is made and the labour conditions through which we organise ourselves and others. Artist and performer Scottee’s radio programme Taxi Drivers on radio 4¹ unfolds a commentary on various practices established between artists and the people who make work with and for them, adding material to the (surely debunked!) myth of the lone genius creator. It’s wild how prevalent this artist-genius conception still is, when in practice work is frequently much more collaborative than crediting would suggest. I used to work with an artist who showed no public record of the artists who embodied and brought the work to life. I understood this according to his logics, but it felt particularly perverse when dancing a solo work in a gallery in the midst of an art fair. Image-labour-embodiment-naming-extraction-explanation- money- reputation-gratitude -ego- precarity.
I think it’s beneficial for the development of the field of dance and choreography– and for the plurality of voices making in those fields – to acknowledge that sometimes the person given credit for authoring a choreographic work isn’t leading the development of dance material or isn’t the master of the works embodiment; that without shame, there are simply many intelligences and their manifestations in collaboration to bring work into being.There are many ways to work and many roles being fulfilled by collaborating artists, as well as differences in what the role of the choreographer or dancer is in any given project. In my practice I acknowledge that I am taking different roles in each work, and that the responsibilities and interests of my collaborators are always different. It is the combination of our skills and experience which makes the work happen: we are not each other and we need each other.
In the last years, two of my projects have been developed with quite large intergenerational and international teams of female-identifying and non-binary people, people with differing relationships to femme identities. These two projects – Screensaver Series and Satelliser: a dance for the gallery – foreground and explore the dynamics within majority female-led processes.
Screensaver Series (2018) is a hypnotic dance and sound installation inspired by the obsolete screen-saving programs of early computing, properties of sensory architecture and therapeutic spaces. 5 dancers move in symmetry, connected through constantly changing touch to create morphing images and patterns like a kaleidoscope or moving Rorschach test with a soundscape generated live by Jamie Forth. Performances last about 40 minutes during which time the audiences in live spaces can move around to see the patterns created from the front or see how it all works by viewing from different angles. An idea in the work is how in dance training we are generally taught to hide the effort it takes to produce the image, the performance, whatever it is. In fact, I guess that is what most kinds of practice are aimed toward: mastery. In contrast, I was interested in thinking with this double act of what is made visible (beautiful dancing!) and the operations that make that possible which could also be a way to think about the usually gendered labours and emotional labours of maintaining, caring, cleaning up, picking up, anticipating and appeasing. Thematics of camouflage and code-switching also run through the work informed by some nascent thinking I was doing around 2015 about my own ASD diagnosis whilst first developing screen-saver dances. In these ways the work also references coding projects where multiple perspectives are simultaneously active and directly connected e.g., the background structures and instructions that create a usable interface (like with a website).
I’ve been touring the Screensaver Series since 2018 collaborating with a team of dancers: Elisa Vassena, Vanessa Abreu, Stella Papi, Iris Yi Po Chan, Louise Tanoto, Stephanie McMann, Rosalie Bell, Rosamond Martin. Through the process of rehearsing and performing this work we have honed our capacities to respond to the changing physicalities within the group as the dance happens differently in each iteration because of who is there, including the feedback we feel from the audiences. The work is very intimate and premised on trust and communication. As multiple dancers in the group journey through pregnancies and parenthood these patterns of support and listening are heightened, as well as the resonance of the life cycle images within the work:
flying, getting born, nestle, huddle, settle, testing, scorpion and fireworks… how caregivers regulate the infant, extending their reflexes through touch.
Image: Roswitha Chesher. Screensaver Series. Performers: J N Harrington & Stephanie McMann.
Satelliser: a dance for the gallery (2016/22)
Satelliser is a durational performance work for an intergenerational group of co-working artists which was due to be performed in 2020. Co-workers cooperate to maintain conversations whilst dancing over the course of a day or several days. The work was born out of interest in the feedback loops between performers and visitors seeing each other, and the kinds of work which can be mastered and leave enough energy to develop a social space around the work; where gossip, disagreeing and mutual learning can happen through exposure to winding conversations.
The work involves the layered, negotiated, communal and ongoing activities of holding space through dancing and conversation. Gendered labour is practiced, reinforced, made visible through simultaneity of tasks: responsibility for keeping the dance and conversation alive, the space oriented and doing all this without effort and fatigue. Or with effort which still has resource to be available to each other, and to the visitors.
– Shannon Stewart, 2018
The underlying pattern of the work is a spiral in the sense that coworkers and visitors can join and leave at any time, and the work of maintaining the conversation is done by people of all ages, with differing levels of investment in and familiarity with my intentions for the work. I had planned to develop this work in 2020 but instead my co-working team and I met online for discursive sessions as we went through multiple states and stages of lockdown across the 5 time zones that we ended up working in. The coworkers involved in the project differently navigated scales of upheaval, dislocation, political turmoil and changing personal circumstances including political resistance in Hong Kong, care homework in Sweden, pregnancy in Belgium, being stranded in New York City, solo parenting, career changes, self-isolation, continent moves, loss of work and mutual aid efforts everywhere. It was a challenging and ever-changing context to develop a work and the processes of being regularly together in conversation over 2020 have both amplified and challenged what I imagined this work might be and do.
Image: Roswitha Chesher. Screensaver Series. Performers: Vanessa Abreu, Iris Chan, J N Harrington, Stephanie McMann, Louise Tanoto, Elisa Vassena.
Interesting things also happened as we talked through the months. People who had never met each other became intimates through sharing experiences across our differences. We developed craft practices alongside our conversations, tethering the talking to repetitive doings in the place of the dancing planned: Amaara wove baskets in Melbourne, Else embroidered in Malmö, I drew in Brixton. In November 2020 we shared our process in a 7 hour durational conversation broadcast over YouTube moving through periods of activity and rest as we talked about many things including: how to manage inherited objects you may not want, having arguments with teenagers in cars, being a twin and how to age with that, English politeness as ways of establishing debts, taking up space in different cultures, crafting as an activist practice, toxic positivity, virtual community, group dynamics in womens’ groups, the price of petrol, how protest is kept alive for generations, getting life out into the world one breath at a time.
Image: Roswitha Chesher. Screensaver Series. Performers: J N Harrington & Louise Tanoto.
Through both Satelliser and Screensaver, my collaborators and I practise practices founded in listening and ceding space for others; for acting in accordance with a sensitivity for the edges of the group at each moment, for our shifting roles in supporting wellbeing, which is maybe to say that it feels like an ecology of sorts. I write ecology here and immediately another word also comes to mind. Economy. In a dialogue of physical touches, we can understand very immediately, and bodily, that whatever is touched touches back and through that relationship a lot of information is available about the needs within a relationship.
Resistance, sliding, holding, letting go and always that leaving asks for staying, asks for staying somewhere else.
In dancing the Screensaver Series we are attuned to the way that touch asks for support or a little momentum to help a shift in position, when a shift in weight is an invitation for flying or asks for a more comfortable configuration. Something similar happens through the discursive space of Satelliser, but its operations are closer to the everyday potential for being in relationships within a broader community. I learn a lot from these practices of moving and speaking together including challenge, support, commitment, familiarity and openness which also cycles through reckoning with our different lived experiences along intersectional lines: racism, ableism, ageism, classism, nationalism… and how these dialogue differently in different global contexts. In sustaining these working practices over time with many people, I have been challenged around how to be in leadership with what I offer and invite in the changing circumstances.
An image of circulation goes through UNFRIENDING, Screensaver Series and Satelliser , particularly that there is no “away” into which to throw our affect and not expect it to cycle back to meet us again through the complex interrelations of our social, political, natural cycles and systems. I think it was Renee Sills in one of her Embodied Astrology² podcasts (probably in 2016 or 17) who first articulated the image for this that I had been feeling in my body: a sense that there isn’t an outside out there, anywhere; that it matters to each of us that other people suffer because we live in a shared world where that suffering is also manifest in things that hurt each of us. I’m over-simplifying the point a lot here, but: SYSTEMS, circulation…Imagine what dignity and possibility could be afforded to all of us by wage justice, housing justice, reproductive justice, racial justice.
Image: J N Harrington. aways (2021). Collage for storage for future sunsets costume, commission for Scottish Dance Theatre.
I hope that I am available for change and will continue to be through the acts that make up living, and I know that must be premised on the understanding that I have a lot to learn. I keep learning through my work with the people who agree to be on that journey with me, and those who are alongside, parallel and in other relations. More than anything the lessons of my work are around the kind of leadership I strive to practice, which is accountable without the defensiveness of rigidity, which is in movement.
¹https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0013tfk Scottee’s Taxi Drivers
² Embodied Astrology. Renee Sills.https://www.embodiedastrology.com/
This essay has been developed from an earlier commission published by Make It In Brixton, March 2021.
Image: Christa Holka
J N Harrington (she/her)
J N Harrington is an artist whose work includes writing, dance & choreography, drawing, video, installation, costume and space design. She works mainly in gallery and non-stage spaces where her work prioritises explorations around access, play, agency, confrontation by times/scales beyond the human, neuroqueer experiences of information processing: mishearing, equational-images, listening, ways of tethering attention in movement... Her recent works include Screensaver Series (2018), storage for future sunsets (2021, Scottish Dance Theatre & V&A Dundee), good luck dinosaur (2020) , believe/ been video essay (2020), UNFRIENDING (2021), never closer to midnight (2019) and leading the Satelliser project.
Harrington’s educational background is in visual arts, psychology and dance. As a performer she has worked within museum and gallery contexts across Europe. She is a board member of Chisenhale Dance Space in London and was involved with Engagement Arts Belgium 2017/18. She works to support other artists with access through grant-writing, and mentors around neurodiversity in dance.