The dance videos are augmented by a series of stills taken from the videos.
Nothing Really Changes from Christy Walsh on Vimeo.
The Death of a Queen from Christy Walsh on Vimeo.
Semantic Pleasantries from Christy Walsh on Vimeo.
Request (excerpt) from Christy Walsh on Vimeo.
In the Midst from Christy Walsh on Vimeo.
I was sitting in an airport in 2014 when I read an excerpt from JME McTaggart’s essay concerning the reality of time. The last sentence of the excerpt, which proclaims that how we understand time is completely wrong, struck me as the key to the struggle of comprehending reality. McTaggart’s early 20th century essay predates a lot of important advances in physics, but the essence of time continues to be elusive. While better minds than mine address this as a scientific problem, I went on to explore the physics and metaphysics of time through my art.
I had started on this path in previous works, in which I uncovered and reorganized footage from earlier parts of my practice. This footage originated in my days as a student, my time in Greece and Korea, my years traveling around the States, and of course, my experiences in New York, where I have lived for most of my adult life. In the work I use McTaggart’s premise, which is also seen in quantum mechanics, to liberate my response to events – and even the events themselves – from the constraints of their calendar dates. At any given moment I am all that I have been and will be, and the events that comprise my existence are adaptable. One who ceases to live does not cease to exist.
One of the most counter-intuitive aspects of this approach to time is that the future influences the past. An example of this can be found in Purcell’s “Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary”; Mary’s consequence increased not just as a result of the original composition, but of its subsequent use, centuries later, in films like “A Clockwork Orange”. This is why I originally chose to use Purcell’s music as accompaniment for the videos. In addition, his work lends itself to choreography.
The content of the videos concerns the nature of time, but the form is one of multi-layered dance pieces. Each segment describes a combination of choreographies that were created and recorded years apart. Some of the choreography is informed by the locations and costumes in which it is performed; a dancer in an inflexible blue dress emulates a bird on the shores of Virginia Beach, another in a majestic cape stalks through a snowy field in the Catskills. Other pieces are created in response to previous works; Carlos Menchaca performs a dance in a library hallway in San Antonio, Texas and a decade later recreates some of the movements in a studio in New York, I had borrowed some of these performed them in a house in Greece, and the same pair of pants is worn in all three iterations. The pants are one of numerous humorous touches; while the work is rooted in a complicated philosophical conceit, it tries not to take itself too seriously. On the other hand, the effort is earnest, and while there are many unexpected juxtapositions, there is no sarcasm in the irony.