A text that investigates itself: Studies on Squats is a research that moves through different text forms, memories, and perspectives. The motionless dance maneuvers through the letters I read, mobilizing my senses as I follow the questions the text asks without saying them. What is movement, what is dance, when both exist independently of each other? Yon Natalie Mik creates a heterogeneous collection of different searching moments, filled with loose fragments of observations and reflections. Nothing in it has not already existed as a memory or a myth. To bring these fragments into a new form as performative poetry – to create a new alphabet for spelling out resistance – is the condensate of many movements whose performativity is being explored. This does not mean wanting to capture them as performances – a contradiction in terms, a desire that produces photos, videos, and sound recordings, but cannot hold on to the ephemeral. Rather than recording visible poses, Studies on Squats explores the potential of walking under the radar of the visible, of the body marked as able and upright, straight. »There is real power in remaining unmarked,« according to performance scholar Peggy Phelan, because it is precisely in being unmarked that the ability to resist the categorization and commodification of dominant systems lies: »Performance’s only life is in the present,« she explains. As a result, memory can never be reproduced as a unit, because, nourished by scenes of individual and social life that disappear and change over time, it is not stable but haunted by the ghosts of the past. Studies on Squats incorporates Phelan’s assumption in that the studies do not attempt to document or archive the act – both the execution and the performance – of a squat. The text works to reveal the slippage of categories when squats become memes and their digital display, their circulation, is measured. The performance thus remains non-reproductive in Phelan’s sense, but the performance of the squat – its re-enactment and the difference that accompanies it – is brought into various forms. It is itself reproduced.
A squat thus becomes more than a specific posture. Through various forms of text, memories, and perspectives, it becomes a strategy for entering into a relationship with something – a resting, an interruption of movement sequences, a potentially immediate transition to standing, turning, or jumping. A body whose ephemerality lies in withdrawing from movement itself, rather than becoming intangible through movement. Studies on Squats, then, asks not only about the resistant body the squat produces, but also about the possibilities of remembering, holding, and passing on that body.
»The definition of performance as that which disappears, which is continually lost in time, is a definition well suited to the concerns of art history and the curatorial pressure to understand performance in the museal context where performance appeared to challenge object status and seemed to refuse the archive its privileged ›savable‹ original.«
Studies on Squats counters the idea of performance as a vanishing moment with a pose that both withstands and stands by. To study it is not to preserve it or make it an object of the past. The text fragments locate the squat within the body and its multiple ways of remembering, thus establishing relationships to different times, places, and people. As Schneider writes, Western historiography hardly recognizes practices of »oral storytelling, live recitation, repeated gesture, and ritual enactment« because they question the status of the original. Instead of referring to a historical document that functions as proof of a particular event, in these practices stories are repeated, movements are practiced and altered. The »original act« is not proven with an object but is passed on and modified. What remains is affect and performance, or in Schneider’s words, »in its performative repetition, a queer kind of evidence.«
Why is this kind of evidence resistant? Its queerness in Schneider’s sense does not lie in the representation of queer identities, but in the queering, interruption, disruption, and reversal of rigid orders. Performative repetition, such as that which occurs in the continuation of the squat, does not create a new presence of a formerly »what was« action, but rather allows the moments in which history was not recorded or archived precisely because it was not straight enough, not capable enough, not visible enough, to come to the fore – they are »the reverberations of the overlooked, the missed, the repressed, the seemingly forgotten.« Just as archives demonstrate their own logic and power over what can and should be archived and under what conditions, bodies can regain power over their histories and memories through certain positions and actions. The squat, in its impossibility to be classified as a historical object, demonstrates precisely this possibility – and the studies that emanate from it, which the text reveals, can continue to exist as spoken words, as a speaking and remembering that can mix with sound and be articulated in different ways. The text thus takes on different forms: poem, analysis, anecdote, list, and protest song.
songs from the navel to the spine
this is a protest
of the body
Consequently, the Studies on Squats are less concerned with history than with time and its relations; the circling of a now in relation to the subject: The now is dependent on the observer. Just as the squat is a physical action, writing and speaking become perceptible as movement and a physical process, as resonance, rhythm, and musicality. In this way, approaches are revealed that appeal to different senses. They are queer in that they approach the squat through affective, non-normative approaches. In Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts, José Esteban Muñoz discusses the status of objects that do not have the ability to be considered »proper ›proof‹.« He suggests considering »queerness as a possibility, a sense of self-knowing, a mode of sociality and relationality.« The relationship of words to postures, of text to movement, of speaking to dancing, fills out this relationality. In the moment of remembrance, the relations can become audible and tangible, can be carried forward and modified. They speak of a past built on certain ways of doing things and a future capable of changing them. The memories fill every inch of my body. I use them to speculate about something urgent: a life more loving and dignified.
It is an expanded notion of choreography that grows in this way, moving through the space with images, photos, and music, unfolding a network of support structures based on the fundamental assumption that any form of ability is only temporary. In the figure of the squat, different generations are remembered, as well as their stories of migration; and the irony and sadness associated with learning and unlearning a squat. The body knowledge associated with the squat is fragile and vulnerable, sick and disabled. It collects the memories that do not come together in a straight line. Its resistance lies precisely in this assembly.
collective resilience
ready to rise
The body that shows itself with Studies on Squats thus incorporates things, spaces, memories, stories, thoughts, and feelings; an always already-connected body that is not an instrument that executes orders, but absorbs actions like a sponge and presses them out of itself again. And in doing so, it begins to set these actions in motion, open to all who want to dance a revolution.
