I’m here watching Chair in Kungsholmen Library 26th of October 2014 at 12.00 after a morning of cleaning because of sliver worms in the hallway. Missing something well here we are.

Repetition is a tool so familiar yet still miss understood. What do we mean when we say something repeats. The dance was repeated six times or was it six version of the show shown at different time. The film has been played 337 times, repeated 337 times but not seen the same 337 times as that would need for conditions of the viewer to be the same. But yes if repetition can be isolated from its context like the tree falling in the woods its repeats.

But where is the repeat starting and finishing. Repeat a day. Repeat the passing through the hallway. Repeat a fall. Repeat the movement and reverse and repeat again or but yet we see it. We understand process.

The long repetitions are hard to understand as singular things, they pass like history passes. But the small looped movement in see understood and becomes apart of a language it is understand as a thing and a single, like the ticking of the clock it is understood.

When we stand in front of a painting it is done complete ready for consumption ready to be used applied to the viewers options ideas and life. But the performance continues one must wait before passing judgment before using it as it is not whole complete. This incompleteness is one of my difficulties with dance its hard to watch. Yet other performative long duration art pieces are not in the same way. And here i proposal it has to do with what is demonstrated with these two different types of repetitions. Where performance art would most often be the long repetition and paintings etc the short.

The chair is perhaps one of the shortest repetition of a art object. It is unquestionably finished, as in it is a chair and even when questioned, played with we still managing to hold onto is completeness.

Where as these bodies they are not they are difficult hard to pin down, We think we know but really we don’t know, even when still, standing, holding a single form, they allude conclusion.

It’s a circus in there.

Thank you

Work by David Gordon
Performed by David Gordon and Valda Setterfield
Recorded in performance on September 30, 1978

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This is apart of a series of Reformulation* writings of and around choreography, posting once a week ever sSunday If you have comments you can leave then on my facebookwww.facebook.com/thepersoncalledpeter or my wordpress stillpeter.wordpress.com . Kindness and Sweetness PETER

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