Rekindling one’s spirit while waiting for the end of the world:
Daisy Sanders’ A Resting Mess

Kaprow defined “A Happening” as “an assemblage of events” mounted in a non-theatrical location, whose “material environments” or settings may be “constructed, [or] taken over directly from what is available [in real life], or altered slightly; just as its activities may be invented or commonplace. A Happening, unlike a stage play, may occur at a supermarket, driving along a highway, under a pile of rags”. Happenings are performed “according to plan”, but do not follow a detailed narrative or list of steps. For Kaprow, the Happening is “art but seems closer to life”.

Sanders staged A Resting Mess in an appropriately low key environment for a Happening, namely the slightly down-at-heel former Customs House in Fremantle/Walyalup. A Resting Mess also functions as an environment to enter and peruse. In between or after performances, audiences are free to wander through the space and consult the collage of comments, instructions and ideas hand drawn on brown paper pasted in cheerful disarray about the walls and throughout the space. Dancers often slumber in corners, and one is invited to join them. It is not as messy—and much less abject—than most of the works by the founders of Arte Provera and Art Brut in the 1960s, but it is no less appealing in its ramshackle beauty.

The action of A Resting Mess takes place amidst stacked piles of colourful, soft and/or bouncy rubbish: paper, cardboard, plastic bottles, scraps of cloth, pillows, blankets, and more. Configurations of this expansive compilation of wastes are built and dissipated throughout. Chaos is cheerfully generated and then seems to defeat our nevertheless upbeat performers. The performance arc is free-flowing though towards the end, nearly everything is scrabbled into a massive central pile, with audience members participating in this newly birthed monster spin. Sanders herself states that the various sequences which:

arise and dissipate begin short and playful, then gradually become more melancholy and extend in their duration across the course of the work. The climax of collecting all the waste in the central pile is the last time the mess is handled, after that we conclude slowly with 2 extended scenes (ensemble song/wailing vocalisation with rocking bodies and the slow rotating dance in front of the mural, which we call ‘standing, turning, resting’). The final moment is an epilogue -where each artist invites an audience member to help them clean up, and waltz with the bags of mess, and eventually toss it. This scene is usually felt and received as a collective balm to return to care, joy, acceptance, togetherness.

Aside from Kaprow and other collaborations between visual artists and dancers of the Judson Church group from 1962 in to the 1970s, the closest precedent to A Resting Mess is Trisha Brown’s Floor of the Forrest (1970), which consisted of two performers who “dress and undress their way through the old clothes attached to the grid while a full-scale rummage sale is conducted beneath them”. Sander’s use of capitalistic detritus to serve as a soft and giving obstruction strongly recalls Brown’s work.

The central structuring principal of A Resting Mess is one of the delicate interplay between what the theorist of ritual, Victor Turner, called “structure and anti-structure”. The production wobbles pleasantly from one scraggly yet broadly consistent scenario to another, ebbing and flowing between extended periods of quiescence during which what, if anything, is to follow hangs in abeyance. The “resting” of the title is repeated within these resets.

After each minor climax has arisen and a particular set of instructions worked through, we come to a happily deflated stop/pause and start again. Is each of these a new genesis, and hence each conclusion a new death? Initially this seems perhaps too dark a reading, but as the sheer number of repeated bodily collapses is staged, various members of the up to eight primary movers seem to often withdraw from performing at all, causing a sense of tragic loss to seep in to the otherwise playful mood.

A Resting Mess also includes crafted choreography, principally led by Sanders. While opened out positions arise and are sometimes held, the movement more often coils around irregular and contradictory shifts in momentum. Towards the end, the principal movers stand, heads thrown back, arms angled out from the body, chests open, fingers and hands spread to embrace whatever is before them. It feels like a pose one might adopt shortly before spinning on one’s axis like a Sufi Dervish. In a quite different, more rhythmically based, almost dancefloor-like scene, Sanders makes a blocky, angular shape, hips dropped, limbs close to right angles or horizontal: a slightly robotoid but energetic movement from side to side and across.

But the choreographic motif which seems to define A Resting Mess is the vortex. Sanders and her colleagues spiral, using one arm to push and pull the body around and down, arcing briefly upwards through the shoulder before curling towards the ground, and then often coiling back up again, lifting and spinning the body. Sometimes the performers break these centrifugal actions to fly out to one side, or slide along the floor and into the messes. But just as often the momentum comes around again in a series of rises and falls, and the dancer moves forward or back, before another spin develops.

These movements are significant in that they exemplify the entropic energy that dominates the larger dramaturgy. In one of several featured acapela songs composed by Felicity Groom, Sanders sings of waking refreshed, to compile out loud a list of “chores that I must get to / things a-running round in my head” which range from mundane tasks such as to “mend my door” and “should I paint my nails red?” through to “sorting out the weather … stopping all the war” and “fixing all the sickness”. The very compilation of this daunting inventory prompts Sanders to think “I might [just] go back to bed”. Elsewhere she ponders “What do we do when the world is on fire?”

Although the production is bursting with ludic pleasures, there is therefore an ever-present sense of melancholy and mourning; of a performance powered by an inertia whose source is both within and without the individual.

At the end of the performance, as I was left looking at all this mess, although it was an elating conclusion, it was also somehow very sad. No matter how naïvely beautiful was Josten Myburgh’s and Pavan Hari’s saxophone whistling, percussion and electronics, these largely low key musical atmospheres could not stave off the impression that this is the performance we attend just before the world ends. The fact that several audiences were positioned seated within the mess itself only heightened this impression. The vortex of the dance and of the spinning mound of rubbish will, sooner or later, defeat us all, send us to sleep, and in all likelihood, suffocate us.

A Resting Mess is therefore a requiem, albeit a joyful one, providing both affects and actions to rekindle our spirit to live, whilst reminding us all that we—and the world we live in—will some day die.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Ausdance WA. Ausdance WA remains neutral and does not endorse any specific viewpoints expressed.