How to cut down time - a dance video

I am not here...yet
If you are waiting time can grow, it grows into a grey giant made from rubber which presses down in every space available. It fills everything, your eye sockets, your ears, nose, and mouth. It wanders under your armpits and snuggles around your skin. Little by little it encases you in a soft but unyielding mass of boring time. You may drown of a temporal interloop. The waiting grey is not silent, it also fills your senses with white noise till nothing can reach you anymore. The waiting time will grow until there is no future or past. Time is collapsed in itself. There is only now.



You must cut it down, the now. You must fragment the time into smaller and smaller intervals, so that in front of you, millions of tiny time slots unfurl. They are no longer grey. These slots are dark with a red ember glowing inside. Ready to be filled. Now start to do something: Move, jump, kick, turn, repeat. Every action will structure time. You will lend the grey rhythm, order, and duration. You will leave the endless now and change it into a linear concept of time. But outside the now is only so much time left.

This video is developed out of a dance improvisation I made during waiting. I sat in the reception area of a community centre, waiting for my husband to finish his work. It was dark outside and inside, I could here distant noises of cars and saw people passing the big glass door, but nobody noticed me. I had no light, no music, nothing to read or do, so I started to move. The glass front of the building with its red glow of the street lamps was a stage-like display case for my dance. I cut down the waiting time into intervals of jumps and turns. I conquered timelessness through rhythm. I sequenced the now.