For the evocation of this piece, a solo dancer wedged herself underneath the dashboard of a vehicle whose roof had caved in from the impact of a fallen concrete pillar. Assorted heaps of wreckage had piled up and obscured the outside of the vehicle, making discovery by hypothetical rescue workers close to impossible. Through a small peephole bored into the wreckage wall for the benefit of viewers, the dancer’s actions could be observed. The cosmetic effects were shockingly tactile and convincing. She was pinned under a horrific tangle of metal and brittle plastic that had once functioned as the driver’s seat frame. Both her legs were broken. The sharpest point of the roof had pierced her side just over the kidney, and although the gash appeared to have missed the organ she still bled steadily, if not profusely. She was lying face up. Her arms were folded and wedged against her chest, and she could not risk jerking them free for fear of impaling her torso more severely against the roof blade. The only lighting would come from the LCD display panel of her cellular phone, once she succeeded in extracting the instrument from her front jacket pocket. Without full use of her hands, this turned into an excruciating ordeal lasting 3 1/2 hours, during which time the dancer (disaster victim) kept up her spirits by humming highlights from the pop oeuvre of Madonna, commencing with “Borderline” and progressing all the way to the medley riff from the celebrity’s latest TV commercial for The Gap. The dancer accompanied this audible triumph of the will with a series of skillful muscular contractions originating from the pit of her stomach. Rhythmic and concentrated, these convulsions rippled upward to her chest, which compressed and expanded with sufficient profoundity to dislodge the small plastic phone, millimeter by millimeter, from the pocket flap enclosing it. Now and then succumbing to exhaustion, she snatched periods of rest, halted her humming and heaving, and lay gasping in a dark silence eerily devoid of any era-defining Top 40 melodies. Blood from her puncture wound continued to trickle. Then she renewed her energies, her voice grasped on to a few notes from the Materialism period, and progress was resumed. At last, the phone was transported to her hands. This marked the beginning of the major expressive movement, which focussed almost exclusively on the triangle of tension between the phone, the cavity of the wrecked vehicle, and the dancer’s fingers. Illuminated by the soft glow of the battery-operated phone, relatively free to move in the hollow space adjacent to her neck, the dancer’s fingers enacted the first real soliloquy of the new millenium. For 35 minutes these appendages simply wriggled in the air. Studious interpretations surrounded this event. Was it a warm-up exercise? The symbolic articulation of vital body sores in a vaccuum? Or merely an exploratory survival technique, like the undulations of long, fleshy tentacles on some grotesque deep-sea creature in quest of food and/or oxygen? Speculations abounded, but all were subsequently dispelled by the performance itself. The waving of the phalanges proved to be a strictly mechanical strategy engineered to provoke small draughts of air and minor wind currents toward the end of rotating the phone out of its breach-birth orientation and into ready state—to wit, with the mouthpiece closest to chin and jaw, and with the readout on the LCD display window just barely visible (but turned right side up!) to the dancer’s strained, downcast eyes. Ardently, flutteringly, the fingers touched down on the numeric keypad. They traced the rubbery edges of the buttons, achieving familiarity with the shape and design. Each button was illuminated, and emitted a unique note of the whole tone scale when depressed. A percussive, sylvan music (1), evocative of a pagan glen or leafy utopian whimsy of Edwardian Anglo-American proportions, punctuated the silence as numbers were invoked. Fingertips grew tender, paused delicately on the surface of each button before spelling out the signal—typically, the triple-digit urgency of the emergency distress call, or the intimate speed-dial of the undeniable Loved One. Huddled en masse around the peephole, the audience grew solemn and awaited a response to this climactic moment. But the emergency appeal was to be answered by a quality far stronger and more immoveable than disappointment. Tragically, the cellular network was overwhelmed by an unusually heavy volume of calls, and the dancer’s connection could not be completed as dialed. A courteous pre-recorded message explained the situation and suggested calling again later. This message (or the opening registers of this message) was heard repeatedly as the network continued to be flooded by the heavier-than-normal volume and the dancer attempted transmission of her call again and again. Throughout this distended, anti-climactic climax of the performance, which spanned approximately 32 hours (as delimited by the energy-giving powers of the slender, wafer-shaped battery installed in the back of the handheld phone), the dancer pioneered a micro-choreography of tapping; it was the first and most profoundly repetitive tap dance to be performed solely by the first and second joint segments of the left-hand fingers, with occasional assistance from the thumb and a debt of gratitude owed to the wrist, which strained itself to the verge of breaking, in an effort to extend the reach of the hand to the farmost keys. Many aspects familiar to enthusiasts of the American tap dance were adapted to the much smaller scale of this choreography: the Brush (fingertip lightly caressing the surface of an illuminated button in forward-glancing motion), the Shuffle (several fingers brushing forth and pulling back on as many buttons in a quick and syncopated fashion), the Stamp (a pronounced lifting and re-placement of a flattened finger joint onto a new number key, accompanied by the weighty pressure on and activation of this number key) as opposed to the Stomp (the same emphatic repositioning of the flattened finger joint without depression of the number key), and the Paddle (a downward push with the heel of the hand, followed quickly by a springboard tap by one or more fingers). The dancer executed each of these moves several thousands of times, in varying orders and combinations, over the course of her pleas. But improvisation was not the goal of this performance. Nor were there any chipper challengers vying for a comparative flourish or two on the miniature floor of the rubberized keypad. The solitude of the dancer was consummate and philosophic. The solitude of the dancer matched the solitude of the parking lot after it had been abandoned by the industrial noise of progressive developments and marked for death. Her suffering devastated us with the precision of a surgical strike. Like the bleeding resistance movement of an imperialist technocracy, she struggled to summon the forces of digital engineering toward a bid for survival and additionally, if time and circumstance permitted, toward a general dismantling of the infrastructure that had been transformed into an interlocking grave for its citizens. But even the avant-garde could not revive revolution under such conditions. Unexamined old-school radicalism had become the new conservatism, while the old conservatism had fashioned a new ideology for flexing its bruised superpower. Meanwhile, the failure of information technology to sustain a pure stream of communication, free from interference and mechanical malfunction, became sorely evident throughout the dancer’s 32-hour ordeal. The break-up of the signal line— attributable first to overburdened traffic, then to a powerful and disabling static, and finally to a draining of battery strength that only contributed to the muffling, obfuscatory effect of the auditory fuzz— demonstrated that what the dancer (disaster victim) suffered from was not (as once thought) the desolate and uncompromising removal from the world at-large; was not the presumed absence of but rather the unprincipled excess of ambience, i.e., that gauzy, atmospheric backdrop of collective distraction and white noise that impeded all efforts to secure voice contact with a savior. Like a glass monument once glittering, now shattered, the performance fell away in shards and was replaced, grain by grain, with figurative particles of dust and grit. The empty spaces between the dancer, her phone, and her wreckage were being excavated and filled in with ambience. Thus did her movements of self-preservation approach the sublime abstraction of art. She continued to perform. Her fingertips continued to tap against the keys with a rapidly increasing eloquence. When battery levels dropped to the critical point and dimmed the backlighting of the phone readout display, our window onto the scene was abruptly plunged into darkness. Yet the projective medium of sound persisted to the very end. The lilting tune of the alphanumeric keys presented itself to our hearing, which had grown remarkably keen from the exercise of perceiving tones whose volume was being degraded, decibel by decibel, over time. On occasion, this transparent music was accompanied by wistful groans and sighs from the dancer, interspersed with bouts of gaspy and increasingly belaboured breathing. Her guttural expostulations— always syncopated and always in time with the offbeats of the tap routine that we knew to be in progress but could not observe— approximated a revival, or reconsideration, of private folk music, whose primal element was understood to be endurance. She rapped and tapped, and wheezed and grunted, and her self-originated noise took on the woodsy timbre of an untrained innocent knocking on the face of a guitar or from inside the walls of a coffin. Nevertheless, she somehow prevailed in the grim pursuit of her own endgame. Her very ability to endure this ordeal was unendurable to us. A warble, or clotted dribble of viscous, throaty liquid could be detected from time to time above the whispery tones of tapping and breathing. By the 29th hour we had entered a stage of exalted anticipation, listening for the onset of silence, which we believed would signal the apotheosis of the performance itself in its lush entirety, both temporal and timeless, as an obsessive repetition that would ultimately cross the boundary into unrepeatable continuity. We leaned forward on the tired haunches of our collective Third World squat and were overcome by a tremulous excitement. But mystical expectation ultimately gave way to mundane patience, and from then on to a tedium of protracted sympathy, as the long-awaited moment continued in its failure to arrive, and our attentiveness began to fade. Thus it was in the midst of a more-than-usual bleary-eyed boredom that all sound from inside the wreckage puckered into a pause and then, just as quietly, ceased. The realization trickled slowly through the audience mass, but our astonishment (and even, in a few cases, exhilaration) at what we had originally conceived to be an otherworldly, larger-than-life experience was soon replaced by emptiness. The subsequent striking of the set was similarly anticlimactic, yet worthy of note. Some of us lunged foward to attack the wreckage in a spasm of violence designed to rip apart and destroy, piece by fucking piece, the final resting place of the dancer’s alter ego in situ. Others of us wept and waited in solemn queues (while still observing the burial-plot lines of individual parking stalls) to give the dancer hugs as she was extracted from her post, hungry and shivering and too weary for words. But a few of us turned away and shuddered in a corner with eyes cast dreadfully to the ground, simply because we had witnessed— in the space of cosmic time elapsed between the onslaught of disaster and the reinstatement of the parking lot— the living performer (2) become a thing.

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1. Although we had prepared an ambient soundtrack to complement the performance, we chose not to unveil it, and took the purist route of relying solely on sounds generated by the dancer or her handset. We hoped that the effects would challenge our assumptions about the range of audibility associated with stillness, i.e., the conventional parked position.
2. Albeit, in retrospect, it would have been far better and more commensurate of the consciousness at hand to have used the projection of an animated puppet rather than a live dancer in the set. Then the shell of the body would have been presumed— as in those genres of uncanny feature films and hypersentimentalized serial dramas derived from a uniquely Asiatic sensibility, in which individual introspection requires a collective and highly public look backwards (through the use of repeated flashbacks and hesitant dialogue inching bit by bit behind the mask of shame) into generations enclosed by regret and longing, and in which the unlikely modality of cartoon illustration, which would seem to belie dramatic seriousness, is in fact utilized as a means of animating the de-personalized moment, or the moment of noisy stillness, where incomprehensible and traumatic events have finally spread (in close-up) over the entire plane of the face, and where the resulting national countenance, devoid of any Western conventions of emotionality or expressiveness, is assumed by an amoral hero figure who, having survived one too many atrocities and touched too nakedly the dead skin of a historical experience so totalizing and annihilating as to have become a justification for unknown, unborn existences, is compelled to retreat deeper into the frame and (through not a raising but a fixed lowering of the hands) to cover his/her face— then the shell of the body would have been presumed, and informed resistance to the popular accusation that cinema has robbed art audiences of the exercise (commonsensically enjoyed by readers of, say, the 19th century Russian realist novel) of endowing a scene with pictorial imagination and supplying sympathetic characters with a priori subjectivity, would have been avenged.