Tethering the Ephemeral: Angela Goh’s Body Loss as precedent for the acquisition of dance

Somewhere there is a Siren.

Beginning with the utterance of a single note, 

she listens for the return of her own voice. 

She responds with the same note again, 

and again, echoing into an endless chorus, 

a swarm, a sea, a body. Her voices 

fill the room with an ethereal presence, 

escaping into the world, untethered. 

Back on the ground, the body. 

Her mouth, now fixed open in an ‘O’, 

unsettles and sheds away at the human. 

It becomes a gaping opening, 

a channel, a hole, through which some

thing might creep in, or out. 

Inside and outside are no longer contained.¹

The moment Body Loss begins, time slips and space shifts. Choreographer-performer Anegla Goh has the audience beheld by her presence: at once, she is a black hole disappearing into infinity and a beaming particle of light. A single note escapes her mouth; repeated until swelled into an omnipresent hum by a looping device. This disembodied siren song endures across the performance, drawing the audience into a collective body. Her mouth, suspended open, lulls the audience under a spell to follow her around the museum: flowing past artworks, streaming through stairways, pooling into unnoticed nooks. Folding into Goh’s slow, iterative transformation of space, time, body and site, the audience is drawn into the dance.

To materialise such confluences, Goh’s choreography requires performative and perceptual dexterity. Skills in charging the mundane with virtuosity and distilling the transcendental into precise gestures. In this way, Body Loss is emblematic of the unique affordances of dance as a medium, setting a precedent as the first dance work to be collected by a museum in the so-called-Australia.[2]

Earlier this year, Body Loss was acquired into the University of Melbourne's art collection. Through an iterative and extended process, the methods for preservation and reproduction of this work are currently being explored by the collection’s staff in collaboration with Goh. With no local — and limited international — precedents for such processes, this is a pivotal development in the fields of dance and museum practice.

The acquisition is occurring at a time of vibrant and salient discourse surrounding the proliferation of contemporary and experimental dance into broader arts contexts. Internationally, performative and live arts have been a factor in galleries and museums redefining their core principles. Intervening conventions with the idea of a living, embodied archive that broadens concepts of collecting and museology; bringing new possibilities for exhibitions that are live and evolving, and curation viewed as a choreographic process. Body Loss can be read as an allegory or conjuring of this. Goh adapts the work to each location and interacts directly with both the surrounding architecture and exhibition. Traversing and scaling the space, extruding and mutating the boundaries of both her body and the site.

Such convergences of dance and visual arts began to crystallise into common practice within the local arts scene over the last few years. Despite this, the embodied knowledge, labour and lexicon of dance artists are often overlooked and underrepresented within gallery and museum contexts. Along with specialised knowledge and skills that are, for the most part, unique from other modalities: modes of understanding that are embodied, tacit and phenomenological, acquired through somatic experience and inter-corporeal exchange.

Marking a turn towards centring embodied knowledge is the recently completed research project Precarious Movements: Choreography and the Museum, a partnership between local choreographer Shelley Lasica, the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA), the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), Tate UK and the University of New South Wales (UNSW). Uniquely for a project of this scale, it is focussed on institutions that historically centre visual arts and ‘puts [dance] artists and creative practice at the centre of its inquiry, engaging their knowledge and experience as primary research’.^[3]

Body Loss is well-positioned to form a precedent for acquisition praxis that centres the more experiential, relational and experimental aspects of dance; elements that are in danger of being overlooked or even precluded by visual arts agents. As noted by Alice Heyward, many dance works acquired internationally are not performed by their choreographers. This leads to the knowledge and contributions of performer-collaborators being dealt with in degrees of unproductive separation and hierarchy to the choreographer’s perspective.^[4] Uniquely, Goh is the choreographer, designer and performer of Body Loss, meaning she can speak to all aspects of the work’s development and performance. In that sense, the performer’s experience and choreographer’s vision are inextricably entangled.

The imperative of this correlation is advocated for by Alice Chauchat:

Choreography frames, composes and in-forms the dancer’s actions, but dance exceeds those actions. Dance is an expression, and it is not the same as its medium, the dancer. Dance and dancer are autonomous, although dance only appears when the dancer dances. Dancing, then, is the relationship at work between the dancer and the dance.^[5]

Similarly, in an artist notebook from a 2018 research project investigating the affordances of dance, I had previously reflected:

Dancing can be understood as an experience of encounter:

with sensation, attention and perceptuality;
with other bodies, beings and places;
with time, space and relations;
with material, intentions and choreography;
with inquiries, ideas and understandings;
with presence, phenomena and plurality;
with self, other and communion.^[6]

However the acquisition process for Body Loss unfolds, the phenomenological aspects of its choreography must be recorded. Its performance, like Goh’s other work, requires knowledge of using precise embodied presence to inhabit movements, sensitivities and timing. The experience of being inside the work must be attended to in a way that’s inseparable from the choreographic thinking and materials that tend to overshadow the more elusive (and I argue quintessential) aspects of dance.

Body Loss also forms an interesting acquisition precedent as it is site and audience-responsive. Thus, it requires a coalescing of performative and choreographic decision making. With the possibility of other dancers going on to perform the work, Goh will need to outline and hand over a decision-making process pertaining to the relation between the choreography and the architectural assets and cultural context of the site.

How to articulate and archive Body Loss presents an interesting challenge as it will require much more than traditional documentations, forms of instructional text, recorded interviews and audio-visual documentations. This elusive nature of choreographic material (which gives it a recalcitrant edge, contributing to its allure) is precisely the biggest challenge for acquisition; it’s difficult to represent dance and record its likeness through other means. It will require research on how to, as Eleanor Bauer puts it, ‘eff the ineffable’^[7].

Dance artist and archiver, Arabella Frahn-Starkie, speaks to the slipperiness of recording choreographic material here:

To document each step in the creation process could be to super glue a go-pro to one’s head and obsessively write down daydreams that elude your consciousness the moment you try to nail them down.^[8]

Might this slipperiness be part of how dance thinks? Eleanor Bauer’s doctorate research project chore | graphy examines the complex relationship between dance and thought, proposing that dance acts as a unique mode of thinking that organises and synthesises somatic experiences. She explores the challenges and potential of translating dance into language, highlighting how specific language use can shape and enhance the understanding and practice of dance. She proposes that vagueness, incongruity and iteration are productive elements of dance instruction, emphasising the generative interplay between dance and language. ^[9]

Even with more expanded forms of dances, this conundrum remains beyond the moving human body; for example, my writing and theory practices which I consider as choreographic endeavours. However expanded, a lived or phantom form of motion and affective relationality is central to a dance work and its activation. Unlike objects, choreographies exist in a continuous and evolving dialogue with time through repetition, iteration, inhabitation and transmission.

This praxis is articulated by the dancer and choreographer, Caroline Meadin:

Sometimes when I’m learning a piece of choreography from a teacher, peer or choreographer in the studio, I will look very closely at them as I do it - this gives me one set of information. Then, I will look just to the side or above them, and this adds another set of information - somehow dynamically fuller yet less specific. And then I try it by myself, without a model, using only recall. I will go back and forth through these modes. So it isn’t necessarily through direct copying, but through being ‘in relation to’ that you can gather the most knowledge. In the explorative act of ‘doing’ with others, we consult and create our archives.^[10]

The methods of translation to be developed during Goh’s acquisition process will be a critical moment in the ever-unfolding definition of what dance is today. Her choreography conjures a space where knowing has to take place through the body. Simple movements are enveloped and transformed, through corporeal permutations, into vast landscapes of enquiry. Drawing the audience into a realm of situated, somatic encounters, unique to dance praxis. A space that goes beyond ‘using’ the body to create theatrical representation or as a host for individual experience. Instead, Body Loss requires a complex embodiment from both performer and audience. Necessitating simultaneous states of being-in, being-with and being-beyond the body. Allowing audiences to be kinaesthetically transformed through the dance, as well as experience how dance can transform that which lies beyond — yet is tethered to — the body.

Goh’s dancing of Body Loss, is rooted in detailed presencing and precise inhabitations of seemingly-simple motions that transcend gestures into beacons of otherworldly potential. Elevating the ordinary into simulacrums of present reality and transmogrifying body-time-space. Thus, I suggest that Body Loss is an allegory for what dance does. It brings things into fluid relations and allows for a conjuring of the transcendental, transformational, recalcitrant and uncanny.

Caitlin Dear is an interdisciplinary artist and discursive practitioner with special interests in collectivity, ecosomatics and perceptual experience. Coming from a dance background, Caitlin employs choreographic thinking and embodied approaches across the diverse tendrils of their practice. They create sensorially and intellectually engaging experiences, whether it be an experimental talk, action in a gallery, performance in a theatre or outdoor engagement in a public setting. Caitlin is an Artistic Director at BLINDSIDE, runs two public programs hosted at Dancehouse, and has presented work at numerous theatres, galleries and festivals across Naarm and Stockholm.

Supported by Creative Victoria, City of Melbourne and City of Yarra. Edited by Sofia Sid Akhmed (Skobeleva).

1. ^[1] A poeticised version of the artist statement for Body Loss. Written by Caitlin Dear from the copy on Goh’s website https://angela-goh.com/works/body-loss/ (accessed on 07/06/24).
2. ^[2] Buxton Contemporary, Body Loss (Media release, 17/05/2024).
3. ^[3] University of New South Wales, Precarious Movements: Choreography & the Museum, https://www.unsw.edu.au/arts-design-architecture/our-schools/arts-media/our-research/our-projects/precarious-movements-choreography-museum (accessed 07/06/24).
4. ^[4] Alice Heyward, ‘Vital Trade’ in Erin Brannigan, Pip Wallis, Hanah Mathews and Louise Lawson with Amita Kirpalani (eds.) Precarious Movements: Choreography and the Museum, National Gallery of Victoria, 2024, pp. 24-27.
5. ^[5] Alice Chauchat, ‘Generative Fictions, or How Dance May Teach Us Ethics’ in Danjel Andersson, Mette Edvardsen and Mårten Spdngberg (eds.) Post-Dance, MDT Moderna Dansteatern, 2017, p. 29.
6. ^[6] Caitlin Dear, artist notebook, 2018.
7. ^[7] Eleanor Bauer, choreo | graphy, doctoral research project at Stockholm University of the Arts, Department of Dance, Juliet Mapp and Chryssa Parkinson (supervisors), 2022.
8. ^[8] Arabella Frahn-Starkie, ‘Introduction’ in On Pictures & Ghosts, self-published, 2022, p. 4.
9. ^[9] Eleanor Bauer, choreo | graphy, doctoral research project at Stockholm University of the Arts, Department of Dance, Juliet Mapp and Chryssa Parkinson (supervisors), 2022.
10. ^[10] Caroline Meaden, “The Main Thing” in On Pictures & Ghosts, Arabella Frahn-Starkie (Ed.), 2022, p. 17.