Haunting the house: notes on dance and space
- Matthew Piper
- Nov 14
- 10 min read
Updated: Nov 16
I have long admired dancers for all the usual reasons: their quality of grace, their discipline, their agility and endurance. Dancers, after all, are the athletes of the art world, accustomed to a punishing regime of training, rehearsal, and performance. And all that in service to a uniquely immediate and embodied art form, with the dancer being at once the artist, the instrument, and the medium. I get caught up in the wonder of this.
An aspect of dancers I haven't considered as much is their relationship to space. Others have thought it through: "Dancers are travelers, 'space eaters,'" Susan Sontag wrote in 1983, quoting her lover, the dancer and choreographer Lucinda Childs. "[They use] up a given space in a patterned, comprehensive way. Dancers," she continued, "are always, indefatigably, going somewhere."
Sontag points to something about dance that is so essential it's easily overlooked: dance requires of its practitioners an ability to organize space that is as second nature as their physical conditioning. In this way, dancers are close cousins not only to athletes, but to architects and interior designers. They are all specialists in spatial relationships.
Sontag was writing in the context of Childs' Available Light (1983), a landmark in the history of postmodern dance due in large part to its forward-looking approach to space. Produced in collaboration with architect Frank Gehry and composer John Adams, Available Light was performed on a purpose-built, multi-level stage in an abandoned Los Angeles warehouse that had recently been annexed by the LA Museum of Contemporary Art. It was a hybrid work, blending Childs' classical sense of stage space with her avant-garde embrace of nontraditional performance venues.
Childs is part of a generation of American artists who flung open the doors of their studios to make direct contact with the communities and environments they were part of. (For a notable early work, Street Dance from 1962, she installed her audience in an East Village loft, where they watched through the windows as she and other dancers performed in the populous streetscape below.) Contemporary artists since that time have had to decide whether and to what extent to advance this liberationist movement, with some choosing to carry their torches ever farther from conventional art spaces in order to illuminate the places where life is actually lived.
My friend Biba Bell is such an artist. A Detroit-based dancer and choreographer and a professor of dance at Wayne State University, she rarely makes dances for traditional theatres, whose formulaic spatial boundaries would constrain her productive wanderings and explorations. She prefers to work in the world (in the wild), in unique spaces that she gets to know, enlivens, and, in her words, “complicates” with dance.
I have been eagerly watching Biba complicate various Detroit spaces—backyards, galleries, a vacant building, her apartment, public parks—for the better part of 15 years, and occasionally writing about what I witness. But I had the opportunity to get closer to her process last summer, when she invited me to leave my seat in the audience and perform in Sans Trou Ni Fin ("Without Hole or End"), a new dance she choreographed for two unique spaces in Detroit: a contemporary architect-designed home and an historic Art Deco sound stage.
The experience gave me a deeper appreciation of Biba's kaleidoscopic approach to space, which cannot be summed up as simply site-specific.
Like a good architect, she starts from the site. But for her, the site is a nexus, intersecting with her own ongoing investigations into social and subjective experiences of space, as well as research interests that are far flung from architecture as it is traditionally practiced: the irrational, the theoretical, the metaphysical….
If her dances emerge from particular spaces, they are also designed to liberate themselves from those spaces, to become free and multivalent. To wander down strange and unexpected byways, where they will encounter other ideas, other phenomena, that will morph and expand their meanings.
But first, she starts with the site.
In The House
Sans Trou Ni Fin was originally performed in a new residence in Core City designed by the architecture and design firm Dash Marshall. Called Courtyard House I, it is a personal project for Dash Marshall co-founder Bryan Boyer, who is also a professor of architecture at University of Michigan. It is a "second home in the city" for him and his wife Laura, devoted to work and entertaining.
Bryan and Laura commissioned Biba to create an original performance event for Courtyard House I that would also serve as an opportunity to host their friends, families, and other guests there for the first time. You might say that Sans Trou Ni Fin was a consecration of the space, via live art.
The house is square-shaped, with each room (library, living room, office, bath/sauna, kitchen) organized around a central courtyard. Just a single story, it nevertheless achieves dramatic vertical thrust courtesy of a voluminous light well that projects skyward from the arterial hall between the living room and kitchen.
In the 1920s, the modernist architect and philosopher Le Corbusier coined the concept of the "architectural promenade," the process by which a building ought to reveal itself over a duration of time to a person moving through it. The version of Sans Trou Ni Fin that took place in Courtyard House I was essentially a collective architectural promenade through this extraordinary domestic space, mediated by dance.
Across four performances over two nights, audience members were led in small groups through the house room by room. In each, they were enveloped within an immersive performance vignette that highlighted various aspects of the architecture and design (the windows, the kitchen sink, the shower, the courtyard…) by layering within them Biba's fractured, surreal choreography, as well as the evocative electroacoustic score by composer Joo Won Park, a fellow professor at Wayne State.
Comprised of both prerecorded and live music played throughout the house via a network of interconnected speakers, Joo Won's tender, scintillating score suffused the space through the entirety of each hour-long performance. (The composer subsequently released his soundtrack as an album, which stands beautifully on its own; you can listen to it here.)
In Courtyard House I, the dancers—Biba, Hunter Martin, TaRajee Omar, Elizabeth Schmuhl, Aaron Smith, and Christopher Woolfolk—largely performed among the audience members, pressing close past them, arcing and whirling in electrifying proximity, even crawling, in one especially surprising moment, underneath their chairs.
This intimacy is essential Biba, who seeks a closeness with the audience that might briefly alarm the unfamiliar, but which ultimately asks for nothing more than real presence together in space and time. (If your heart races from the encounter, all the better; now you're one step closer to the dancers, and dancing, as Biba likes to say, is living.)
My role, amid the heat and exertion of the dancers, was considerably cooler. I hosted, greeting guests and orienting them to the place and the performance; I read aloud from a poetic lecture about space and art by the Belgian artist Joëlle Tuerlinckx; I functioned as a kind of stand-in for the audience, coming and going from their company and consciously performing my avidity for the dance and the environment. And I moved (or was moved) in certain "pedestrian" yet dancerly ways: revolving around a table in a task chair, sliding down a wall, being dragged by Chris from one side of the living room to the other across the polished concrete floor.
Almost everything that happened in this first iteration of Sans Trou Ni Fin referred to Courtyard House I, was drawn from or informed by that particular space. We were each assigned to specific rooms, for example, to which our costumes were color coded. Our movements were made in reference or relation to the knives in the kitchen, the art on the walls, the light well, the floor…. We were so tied to the place that during rehearsal, we joked we were ghosts, haunting the house.
This profound site specificity made Sans Trou Ni Fin inseparable, in my mind, from Courtyard House I. The house was an essential part of the dance, as the dance would become an integral part of the house's story, living on in the memories of its inhabitants. It was like a chemical bond—indissoluble. So I was surprised when Biba told us that she had been commissioned to reimagine Sans Trou Ni Fin, and that we would be performing it again, a few months later, in another space entirely.
On the Stage
The second iteration of the dance took place inside Cadieux Stage, an historic sound stage facility in Detroit's East English Village neighborhood. Curated by Justin Snyder, the creative director of New Music Detroit, it was performed on the third and final night of their 18th annual Strange Beautiful Music festival, a showcase for new and avant-garde music.
The exuberantly Art Deco Cadieux Stage was built in 1937 and used for numerous commercial and industrial film and photo shoots over the decades. It has two side by side sound stages, each with a cyclorama, or concave background wall that joins to the floor in a seamless (and somewhat disorienting) curve. We performed in Stage B, the smaller of the two at 40 x 70 feet. Stage A was devoted to two different music performances that took place before and after the dance.
If we haunted the house where Sans Trou Ni Fin was originally conceived, then the house haunted this second iteration. Biba wrote, in the lead-up to it, that "the house will filter as a ghost in the new space at Cadieux Stage." This ghost took residence in the minds and movements of the performers as we mentally recreated the house—the plan, the rooms, the windows and the furniture—while moving through the stark emptiness of the sound stage. (“This is the kitchen,” we had to remind each other, pointing to a nondescript section of white floor. “That is the library.")
This imaginative layer or mental doubling was an essential organizing principle of the dance. It provided a conceptual framework that made its translation from one space to the other possible.
The ghost was also made visible to the audience via a videorecording of the earlier performance projected onto a wall of the sound stage toward the end of the show. The video, produced by Madison Collier, depicted the performance in Courtyard House I in gauzy, dreamlike fashion, with our movements slowly unfolding frame by frame and one moment dissolving into the next. Its effect was heightened by Joo Won's music, which seemed to have more body, and more of a cocooning effect, in the cavernous sound stage.
The video and the music collapsed the distance, in space and time, between the two performances. In a sense, they revealed the memories of the performers to the audience. Here I would like to point to a certain quality of this music of Joo Won's, which seems to refer to the act of remembering. To hear it is to recall—not anything in particular, but an indistinct, glittering something from the past. Some phenomenon or experience that has been attenuated, made distant by time, yet lives on in memory.
This resonant layering is a reminder that Biba doesn't only want her audience and performers to be alive together in the present moment. She also seeks to draw our attention to the secret, subterranean parts of ourselves (the past experiences, the dreams, the desires and emotions) we carry with us into the spaces we inhabit, and which inevitably help to shape those spaces. She believes, along with James Baldwin, that "the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world."
No space, she insists, no matter how artfully designed, is free from the haunting, anarchic influence of human emotions, memories, and social history.
Expanding Space
Sans Trou Ni Fin invited everyone who experienced it to inhabit either (or both) of the places where it transpired with, I suspect, no small amount of wonder and admiration. Such extraordinary environments, such rich reverberations from interior to exterior, spirit to structure. It introduced dozens of people to Courtyard House I and Cadieux Stage, and to an approach to dance that is at once rooted in place and informed by interior states in subtle and mysterious ways.
It also finally soared free of those spaces and their psychosocial hauntings, assuming a transcendent, supernal stance from which more panoramic meanings might be made.
I mentioned before that one of my roles in the dance was to read aloud from Moments d'espace ("Moments of Space") (2011) a poetic meditation about space and art by the Belgian artist Joëlle Tuerlinckx. I did this while rotating in either a chair (in the house) or a stool (on the stage). The readings provided a certain texture; I read in both English and French, and the words themselves had a spatial quality, becoming more or less audible depending on which way I faced at any given moment.
But Tuerlinckx's text was not selected arbitrarily. It is another artwork obsessed with space, and is in fact the source of Biba's curious title: Sans trou ni fin. "It was at this park in Ljubljana," Tuerlinckx writes, "and during a dead hour of the day, that reality appeared to me without a hole or end" (italics mine).
Moments d'espace is an elliptical, aphoristic text (its author describes it as a series of "textimages") that crawls and sprawls its way into diverse corners of thought and experience. It is ultimately a metaphysical interrogation of space—its immanence, its omnipresence, its practical inescapability. In the key passage from which Biba sourced her title, Tuerlinckx posits that it is our shared spatial reality that has neither hole nor end. Theoretical astrophysics aside, we cannot rend space, or peer around it. We can only exist in it together. Make the most of it with the time and materials we have available to us.
The incorporation of these passages helps Sans Trou Ni Fin operate at higher conceptual altitudes, freeing it to drift from the local concerns of the spaces where it took place and the people who gave it shape.
Space, Biba proposes, is all. It is our medium, our substance, our beginning, middle, and end. Space is an ineluctable condition of our earthly existence, and as such, it is worth inhabiting with the awareness, intention, and care of the architect, of the dancer.