Silent Dance for Two Lovers
Anastasia Chaguidouline

Score
This is a dance for lovers. Dance without words using a ladder. Use the outermost gaps of the ladder.

Caution: Danger of slipping and hurting oneself, up to the point of breaking the neck. Refrain from dancing unless you feel trust one in the other. Refrain from dancing unless you have enough control over your body. Refrain from dancing unless you like danger. The dance requires practicing and continuous eye contact.

Description
The first dancer lifts the ladder and places the head of the second dancer in between the outermost gap. The second dancer gets hold of the ladder and together they place it over the first dancers head in the outmost gap on the other side. The dancers hold the ladder firmly with their hands, press their neck against the metal and slowly start rotating looking each other in the eyes.

The ladder acts as a connecting agent. The ladder is bonding and danger alike.

They keep direct and uninterrupted eye contact for the duration of the dance. They rotate faster and faster until they feel that they can’t go faster.

The ladder ties them together, gives momentum to the rotation. The dance is a relationship, it is a balancing act of trust between two people, with all the risks involved.

They keep their pace for some moments, before slowly starting to decrease their pace again, eventually coming to a gentle still. They are standing face to face again.

Adhering to Maurice Blanchot’s interpretation of the community of lovers, Blanchot, who reading Bataille is stating that „love is prior to all relation of community in the truth of absolute difference“, here the two dancers represent a core community of two. The dance is their acting out of trust and the risk that is connected with intimacy and trust relationships between human beings.