I am invited by Selma and Sofiane Ouissi to participate in an early iteration of their work on the minor gesture. This iteration involves standing in front of a life-size video of an interviewee. We are asked to replicate her gestures, in real-time. There are 12 of us and we stand in three rows.
I am in the back, moving not only in relation to the video, but also to the other participants. No matter how hard I try, I cannot completely exclude the twitches of my neighbour in response to the woman we are all watching and moving-with.
My movements are off, my gestures always a little too late. I am moved by the awareness that my body cannot conform to the gestures of the woman I watch, who is smaller. My arms don’t move the way her arms do.
I find myself disoriented often. Which gestures? Her face? Her arms? Her legs? I notice the man in front of me moving his hands. I had been concerned with the expression in her eyes. I respond to his movement, an echo of an echo.
What I don’t know is that others are watching us move in a closed room behind us. They don’t see the woman. But unlike us, they do hear her voice. They hear her in tandem with our movements. They hear our gestures.
This 27 minute experience moves me deeply. What emerges from it is the feeling of the gestural. In the end, it is apparent that a gesture is never mimicked. Moving is to be moved. Yes, initially, we do move in a representation of her movements. But soon, without ever hearing the narrative, we begin to feel it, to be moved by it. A rhythm installs itself that allows the creation of a variation. We perceive the minor gesture as it begins to move in the field of relation. We feel the minor gesture less as a determined quantity than as a capacity for variation, alive with potential. This potential moves us, affecting not the form of the gesture, but its force.
This is also felt by those who listen to her, but watch us. They are moved not by a represented or mediated movement. They are moved by movement’s force, by its quality. They feel the concern in the movement. They speak of being moved by an ineffable quality felt in the expression of our attention to the gesture. They feel the impossibility of replication not as a detriment but as an intensification of what cannot quite be said, but can be gestured.
Selma and Sofiane Ouissi are sensitive listeners. Their choreographic work on the gesture is a practice of moving-with. By drawing the gesture out, and creating a taxonomy of the gesture, their work is deeply concerned not with delimiting the gesture but by activating the potential that cuts across it. Theirs is a taxonomy of the inner variation of the gesture’s potential for expression. This intensive share of gestural expression cannot be drawn or performed. It exists in the between, in the infra of participation where move-with and are moved-by an experience still in the forming. The minor gesture punctuates this more-than of expression, making felt that which exceeds the saying.
ERIN MANNING
GANT, JUNE 2016