Review: TELLDRILL (Sniffer Dog Performance)
Daniel R Marks | Collingwood Yards, Wurundjeri Country | 12/2022.
Rarely is the question asked: can dogs dance?
Academe has done its best to answer this question for rabbits, but man’s best friend remains woefully underrepresented in the already scant literature on dance ontology. We are no closer to discerning the ultimate, universal truth of the matter — that is, can your beloved Italian Greyhound (Pebbles, Fitzroy North, 3 m.o.) honestly include “trained dancer” in their bio?
Enter Daniel R Marks: an artist and PhD candidate at RMIT researching post-singular methodologies in installation and performance. Marks’ practice is skilfully multi-modal, but the subject of this review is their choreographic work TELLDRILL, with particular attention paid to its extended embodiment, a.k.a. the Sniffer Dog Performance.
In this performance, we creep closer to answering our perennial canine query, if not the much grander question that preoccupies me and others day to day: what is choreography?
Marks (herein DRM) has carefully honed in on this quandary, and their research and practice provide stimulating answers.
We gather on a freezing summer evening for Mega-Phone Mono-Poly at Collingwood Yards. Before the work begins, DRM disseminates gelatinous earpieces to select members of the crowd. These grey, sculptural question marks trace down the wearers’ jaws, past their necks, before hiding under collars. Tuned to an imaginary frequency, we wonder if they are the sniffer dog’s police unit, their crew of handlers.
In the entranceway to the yards, the artist disrobes, casting their blazer to the cobblestone. A pale figure in blue-grey jeans; face framed with a long beard. They adopt a prone plank and tenderly fold their knees towards the ground as their discarded jacket crumples. They step forward with sinewy focus, lycanthropic. Scapulae, revealing themselves under pallid flesh, rise up and bristle like cicada wings—the haunches of an eager sniffer dog beginning the rounds.
In the darkness of the entrance, DRM rests against a golden pillar. They fold their arms above their head like Saint Sebastian; like Yukio Mishima as Saint Sebastian. A canine saint, an icon, and a divertissement into the realm of spirituality and gay mythologies. Questions emerge.
Moving from courtyard to corridor, the veins of DRM’s feet splay and throb like drips of molten pewter—the blood pooling in their head, now red like dawn and a pin-prick away from Athey. They mount a concrete ledge decorated with animated videos and a yellow extension cable. Blue LCD screens dance with silver tongues, waggling and gyrating; ammonite swirls and jellyfish tendrils looping into mycelium wallpaper.
Our dog moves on. Down the stairs, into the cold, and we follow.
Throughout, DRM evokes both the robot dog of Boston Dynamics infamy and the languorous gait of Toy Story’s Slinky. However, to call the vocabulary entirely dog-like would be lazy, given the salamander swirls of their spine: the gap between the muscles of their back — like a sulcus of the brain — spiralling into a cursive swaying of the pelvis.
The choreography is thoughtful and sustained in comparison to the frenzy of a sniffer dog proper, and this allows for a more meditative audience experience. I think back to the resting Saint Sebastian, Saint DRM, and wonder if this is a pilgrimage.
Soles of their feet kissed with dirt, the artist finally climbs a flight of concrete stairs. Revellers, unaware of the dance, look concerned. Kneeling, the sniffer dog abandons their canine tread to let an invisible arrow fly. I imagine them aiming for their own heart somewhere in the past as if to bookend the choreography across time.
TELLDRILL is a work for the tongue-tied: an interjection in a staid conversation, and an intriguing one at that.
DRM belongs to, and is perhaps an exemplar of, what I hazard to call a “movement” in Melbourne’s art and dance scene, such being “new choreography” (N.B. I’m still working on this particular theory, so bear with me).
The new choreography of Melbourne is not of itself new, at least in terms of fine art practice and dance theory, but it is exciting to see more radical attempts at conceptualising choreography here (and by extension across all practices that I and others can now deem dance). This isn’t your grandmother’s dancing, nor your eccentric god-father’s, but something that subverts popular understandings of dance, by way of choreography, while satisfying our need to see ourselves corporeally.
William Forsythe, speaking about Choreographic Objects, has suggested that choreography, as distinct from dance, might act as a kinetic mirror. Looking to the widening field of choreographic practices in fine art, he posits that by generating a facsimile of human embodiment and movement, choreography can provide the viewer with “an unadorned sense of their own physical self-image.”
From this, we can surmise two things about choreography. First, choreography, at least in dance, has long been the art of transforming subjects into media (not objects; a distinction made clear by the relative peculiarity of Forsythe’s non-human dancers and the context of his remarks within fine art). Choreography has concerned itself with turning dancers into dance; artists into paint. Second, and drawing on this, the choreographic art of transformation has traditionally centred on ‘adorning’ the subject as media or stylising it through instruction and action. I am increasingly suspicious of choreography in dance for these reasons.
So, does TELLDRILL suffer from a dancerly choreography, where the subject is lost to the whims of others, or does DRM bypass “old” dance to arrive at new choreography?
In my view, DRM’s extended performance of TELLDRILL elicits the choreographic-object mirror that Forsythe describes, as it removed the stylisation inherent to dance’s subject-becoming-media. This is Schneemann's dance, not Cunningham's dance. DRM embodies the objectification paradigms of performance and body art and therein marries the performed self-object of fine art with the choreographic object that challenges Western theatrical dance hegemony. We enter dance, here, through a rawer sensibility, and the audience becomes reflected — not refracted and reduced, therein.
We see a dog dancing and in this a glimpse of something/someone beyond adornment. A person, a dog, a dance, and none at the expense of the other.
I recognise that, at least in this review, I have adopted an unsympathetic perspective towards dance choreography, but I stand by it. The value of something is revealed in its destruction, and an ontology of things, championed by the likes of Frederick Moten and André Lepecki, could yet filter more into the dance I see in Melbourne. Given that we are no closer to knowing if dogs can dance (let alone what dance entails for humans), the value of cynicism cannot be understated here.
With DRM involved, however, I am convinced we are on the right track. Let every arrow fly. ▮
