Jane McKernan: Mass Movement

Mass Movement is so much, but so little. A really pleasurable, alive iteration of human desire within structuring political philosophies and physicalities, but the pleasure is over in a second – done, and all that’s left is a sense of congratulation and un-directed positivity that something was done at all, even though the propositions have been left ungrasped.

We are entitled to try to create moments to live in actively, but I feel like in this instance that is not enough. For Mass Movement ends, the lights come up and then the next piece starts. Done, finished. What moment?

Allow me to be very clear: I am frustrated at this piece because it proposes the exploration of political dynamics and ideologies, but embodies these ideas like tourists simply passing through the experience, letting it occur as a navigation around the streets of another city in your home country, familiar but not well known, couched in the comfortable knowledge that very shortly, you’ll just be able to get back on a plane and return to the everyday. 

I feel uncomfortable about ‘fun’: about sensualities, and confrontations with big ideas, that throw themselves away before they’ve really been encountered. What a blast. Those moments leave me going, what is it that you really think?

I think the issue is the control placed upon the improvisational practice that seeks to enrich the work. In McKernan’s piece there is a literal feeling out of a phrase, an ordering principle. But what I need in order to care is a statement, a development of an original proposition. Instead, the performers move by the barest of degrees away from a tight structure, which may act as a broader metaphor, but the exploration fails to offer substantial further information. What is it you really feel?

I only have a history of politics for reference, and the kind of hopeful nothings festival directors like to talk about – open form suggestions that are inherently unrisky and accommodating.  

Doing something would make all the difference. 

Mass Movement was part of the Keir Choreographic Award