(Written in 2023)
“You know that game where you ask someone 50 questions about themselves and then you fall in love? Boom! Well, this is like that.”
That’s Felix Ruckert talking. His cast is sitting in a circle, and we giggle. Some scoff in disbelief, or maybe that’s just me. I wonder if he is serious with his treatise on ‘love’. I wonder about the people who have fallen in love with him. Is it that simple? A calculated sequence of questions or movements, or questions and then hip movements and then Boom! It’s love. Is it really that easy? Can it be that codified? Are we hole-y humans with our hungry hearts that fucking predictable?
I am attending rehearsals of Ruckert’s dance piece entitled The Ring. I’m here because the subject matter fascinates me and I’m interested in how the piece is put together – the backstage nitty-gritty. Plus, how on earth do you physically and psychologically prepare a group of dancers to offer up choreographed affection and communion and physical proximity with total strangers? Because that is what the piece is about – the choreography of intimacy. Amongst strangers. The theory would go that there is a set of moves, a way of talking, a location, a permission, a circumstance that combine to brew a potent concoction which triggers some form of intimacy.
The Ring is performed in a circle, hence the innovative name, where audience members sit on chairs facing outwards, observed by the rest of the crowd, and dancers circumnavigate, interacting with each person in turn. It began as an investigation of desire, Ruckert and his dancers back in 1999 deconstructing and reconstituting gestures of intimacy to see what effect that would have on audiences who sign a waiver and take a seat and enlist themselves for not so much a dance piece but an experience. The moves are reminiscent of a proposal (hence the clever name’s double entendre): bending on one knee, taking someone’s hand, offering your own, interlacing fingers like they’re never going to let you go, then they do, and move straight on to the next. …OK, maybe not the most idealistic of proposals but you get the jist.
The cast is a mish-mash, something that you wouldn’t necessarily expect from a dance troupe. There are young professional dancers of course, but there are pensioners and enthusiasts and wayward wandering waifs spending 5 days in a black-floored Berlin studio to learn the steps. Mostly, the rehearsals are exactly what you’d expect:
“Right foot out, and turn the heel, now sliiiiiiiide on through and da! Turned out! Not turned in. See this? The heel is out,” Felix explains, and most of us flounder back and forth a little while, trying to make our legs and ankle joints do something they are not accustomed much to do.
But then there are the other parts we practise. The parts that make me sweat.
It’s the second day of rehearsals and I’m drenched. We all are, and it’s July so we would be forgiven our perspirations, but I ask myself if it’s really the heat that’s making us drip, or the vulnerability. I’ve just whispered in someone’s ear. That’s the start of the piece: I whisper sweet nothings so close to someone’s ear that they can feel my breath on their neck. I whisper words I wanted to hear as a child. I whisper like I would whisper to a lover or to a dear, dear friend:
“You’re amazing. I’m so glad you’re here. You are my favourite. There’s nowhere else you should be – you’re exactly where you need to be and I get to see you and that makes me so happy.”
I do it over and over to person after person so the words I’m dragging up that transmit solace and seduction and support come from somewhere so deep down inside of me that it feels very raw. I don’t have the time to fake it. It makes me blush. It makes me sweat.
And then there is the dance. I take someone’s hand on my open palm, and slide it feather-light all along my forearm. It makes me tingle. I love it. It’s a strangely silky area of skin and it instantly sparks memories – a lover kissing me on the inside of my wrist, and how it made me clench, and how I thought “Mmmm, fuck,” and how I was surprised at how turned on I got in public. And here I am, dragging some poor fellow cast-member’s fingertips over my sensitive bits and pretending I don’t tremble when I do it.
That’s the choreography.
I attend the final performance – a veritable marathon lasting over 3 hours where the whole sequence is run 6 times from start to finish, touching and entertaining 6 different groups of brave, desperate souls who come to feast on The Ring’s delights. No longer is it ‘just’ an exploration of love and affection – now for the dancers, it’s an endurance test. And that brings with it an interesting fragility which I observe because now I am playing patron – I’m sitting in The Ring.
A woman kneels down in front of me. She looks me in the eyes. She takes my hand and keeps looking at me whilst she slides it over her forearm (you know I like that part), and then she looks away. She moves behind me, playing with my arms, sliding close from one side to the other, and then pulling at me like she’s drawing me to her. It’s confusing. I’ve got all these feelings. And they remind me of something. And then I wonder, what is that thing in the first place? I try to focus on the performance. Normally I would objectify what I see on stage. Dissect her with my eyes or allow that crass and unapologetic observation of the performer with the kind of open gaze that I don’t even permit myself to use on public transport. That baby gaze. That ‘what the fuck is that’ gaze. And she’s performing, and she’s beautiful and I want to just watch her move, but I have so much access to her, so much of her attention, that any objectification I might achieve is thwarted by the closeness and the care. I’m caught in what I can only describe as a 60-second romance and I wonder if it’s written on my face.
Next a guy comes and puts my hand on his head. His hair is so soft. I want to run my fingers through it. He stays and lets my hand relax until I feel it melting all the way around his skull. His exposure and availability evokes something in me, something that is so hard to describe. And before I bring it into conscious, coherent thought, he stands with a jolt and flicks his whole head back and he is gone. And it hurts a little.
The only experience I have which compares in any way with how it felt to sit in The Ring involves a drinking game. Sitting around a fire with an English poet and an old French traveller, we told old tales of every love we’d ever had, and raised a toast to each. That was the game. Not the most inventive I’ll admit, but by the end of the night, we were dizzy with nostalgia and potential and arousal and regret, and we were unforgivably drunk. Sitting in The Ring felt a little like that – a capricious and heart-wrenching carousel of nearly-love-stories that left me feeling woozy and unsure. I’m sure this doesn’t work the same for everyone. Perhaps you’re the kind of person who wouldn’t get drunk; you’ve loved one person your whole life. You’re married to them even. You don’t know anyone French. Fair enough. And not all intimacy is alike. There is a clear, apparent difference between a simulation and the real thing, I tell myself. What’s more, when it comes to feeling ‘love’, there must be a chasm between the devotional love of a human who knows my eye colour and my father’s favourite pastime and what I sound like when I cum, and one who’s touching me because they’re paid to do so and it’s in the script.
…There must be, I guess.
Maybe I am just the type of sucker that’s coronally susceptible to heated, seated romance and pretty promises, and the piece purports itself to be a “reflection on contact and closeness, seduction and declaration of love, simulation and authenticity, on the unpredictability but also the mechanics of emotions”, so maybe I’m not that crazy after all. Maybe it just does exactly what it says on the tin. Proximity, permission, caresses, the rush of oxytocin when someone lays their head on your heart, all conducted by a dizzying whirligig of willing, giving, careful dancers. ‘Love’ may well be an exaggeration, but The Ring succeeds in eliciting emotions in the most latin-root-meaning-of-the-word, because these things move me (emotion (n): Lat. emovere “move out, remove, agitate”), and by the looks of those who stagger off the chairs after their turn is done, it moves them too.
What it makes me think is: do I have a choreography? Are the things I do to express closeness a pattern on repeat? The way I touch and hug and brush his hair aside, the way I arch my back in bed, the words I use to communicate my heart. Maybe these are a choreography that I have performed with equal and exacting geometry across each one of my relationships.
And that I can feel even a fraction of that way towards an almost stranger, what does that tell me about my assumptions about love and sex and intimacy? I presume I can only have those things with particular people: I have a type. And yet, here I am, with a German old aged pensioner and a French burlesque dancer and a guy whose name I don’t know, and they plant kisses on my hands with such a care and such a calm that I am forced to question my preconceptions about who I will let close and why.
I wonder how it felt for the dancers.
“I could do this every day,” one tells me just after the show. “I could do this every day, for hours, for the rest of my life. I love it. I love the intimacy.”
Another said:
“I never want to do it again. I’m over it. I’m done. It was enough – to give that much. It’s a lot. I want a beer.”