“Not one sound fears the silence that extinguishes it. And no silence exists that is not pregnant with sound.”
- John Cage
Surrender has been it for me this February.
2025 looks to be an important year of movement for my artistic practice on account of my entering into the sharing phase of a big project that has been 3 years in the making.
So, I started off the year ready to get moving and quickly realised that I was fighting a losing battle. I have been repeatedly sick, was snowed into my house for about a week, then there were the storms and overall I’d say that my communications have been exceptionally slow.
I have caught myself fighting the slowness and stillness by saying to myself (and to god); “But I am on a schedule and I need “X” to happen by “Y” date. That hasn’t gotten me anywhere (it never does), so I’ve been slowly surrendering to the pace of the work.
In my experience my artworks have their own rhythms that I have little or no control over in the practical sense. It is my job to listen and respond when the moment for movement occurs and in the meantime to cultivate my ability to be in the pause.
It reminds me of skipping games as a child where you have to wait for the right moment to jump into the ropes otherwise you’ll get all tangled and tripped up.
It reminds me of a movement practice that I was involved in last year where we (the dancers) would stand/sit/lie still and wait for an impulse to arise in our bodies before moving. Often I would hit this “dead-zone” where I would feel nothing but the impossibility of movement. The dead-zone could be unnerving at times and the waiting could feel endless. But eventually and inevitably something subtle would change and motion would commence once more.
The trick is to see the opportunity in the waiting, to find peace in the silence and integration in the stillness. But this requires a surrender; we must lay down our to-do lists and schedules and learn to be OK hanging out in the not-knowing.
There are moments when I can clearly see that whilst my artworks do have their own rhythm and flow, it is inextricably linked to the rhythms of my inner world (as within so without).
When I recognise this, the unwelcome pause can become a welcome opportunity for me to ask; what needs to resolve / shift / change in me in order for the flow to resume? And so I continue a different aspect of the work; the underground, root-system, foundational aspect that so often gets ignored in favour of the upward-thrusting, public-facing, outcome-driven element.
Maybe the most challenging work isn’t holding the stillness but rather holding ourselves in the stillness. The pause can be frightening and frustrating if we choose to see it from a victim’s perspective (why is nothing working for me? why are opportunities not coming? etc.) but if we choose another way of relating to the pause by really embracing and living in the pause then it can be spacious, liberating and generative.
What happens in the silence and stillness when we truly embrace it is its own kind of magic that (if handled correctly) can ultimately deepen our process.
“When is a pause just a pause, and when does it become another material?” - Johnathan Burrows A Choreographer’s Handbook.