An essay on a study in a Spanish wicker field

 “Between Alarm and Offering”: The Liminal Ritual of an Instant Performance in a Wicker Field near Cuenca, Spain

Gemini + Chat GPT + I.M.

A single performer stands shirtless under a cold, isolated spotlight, framed by towering conical structures woven from reed and time. These forms—part haystack, part hut, part sculpture—anchor a landscape that is both ancient and improvised. In this field, beneath a night sky thick with absence, the performer begins to move.

https://youtu.be/fov2MigusSI?si=GW3OkvoHMI_im12W

What unfolds over the course of seventeen timed minutes is not merely dance. It is not simply gesture. It is ritual: precise, expressive, unrepeatable. The body becomes a site of memory, of resistance, of invocation. And just as it seems the piece might collapse into stillness or transcend into resolution, an electronic alarm pierces the scene—mechanical, shrill, inhuman. The performance ends not in repose, but in rupture. But this is no accident: the alarm is planned. This is an instant performance, and its conclusion has been decided from the start

Site, Material, and the Liminal

Set in the wicker fields near Cuenca, Spain the work is inseparable from its environment. The earth underfoot, the tall, rustling grasses, and the carefully constructed stooks are not background—they are collaborators. Here, the landscape is not passive setting but active dramaturgy. The place is at once pastoral and ritualized, marked by both human labor and spiritual residue.

This echoes Victor Turner’s concept of the liminal: a threshold state where conventional structures dissolve and something new becomes possible. The performer exists in such a state—caught between earth and sky, past and present, nature and artifice. Turner spoke of liminality as the space of potential transformation, and this performance dwells in that zone entirely. It is neither rehearsal nor spectacle. It is ritus, in the truest anthropological sense: structured, embodied, and meant to provoke change—not in narrative, but in perception.

Structure: From Struggle to Supplication

The choreography is sequenced into clear phases. It begins with agitation and search—dynamic spirals, thrusts, and stances of effort. The performer traverses the space between the stooks like a soul moving through unseen thresholds. This is not dance in pursuit of beauty; it is movement as need, gesture as language.

The physicality intensifies in the next phase, where repetitive, forceful stomps echo both agrarian labor and shamanistic ritual. Arms flare outward; the body slams into the earth; dust rises like memory. These actions—half work, half prayer—feel ancestral, evoking land-tied cultures that once relied on dance not for performance but for harvest, healing, survival.

Then, a shift: the body folds, kneels, offers. Arms extend skyward, palms up in a posture of surrender and plea. The stills provided from this section are striking—particularly the image where fingers reach up like rootless stalks or tongues of flame, trembling in silhouette. The performer becomes conduit, channeling something both deeply internal and vast.

Contemplation and the Refusal of Resolution

What follows is not climax but withdrawal. Movements become inward, self-reflective. The dancer turns away from the viewer, exposing the back in a gesture that feels radical in its vulnerability and quiet defiance. The final moments before the alarm are saturated with stillness—not passive, but charged. This refusal to resolve through spectacle signals a maturity of choreographic voice: an understanding that stillness can be as potent as motion, that absence is part of the vocabulary.

Then comes the alarm.

It is mechanical, cold, repetitive. In every sense it violates the world the dance has built. But this, too, is the point. The alarm, far from being an afterthought or interference, is embedded as structural device. It collapses the liminal. It reasserts modernity’s timeline. It is a violence we are meant to feel.

This final act of interruption returns us to Turner once more—specifically to the idea that rituals not only create liminality but also mark its inevitable conclusion. No ritual remains open forever. The dancer’s journey, like all such rites, ends not in transcendence but in reentry. The alarm is that moment of reentry—jarring, dissonant, and unceremoniously modern.

The Politics of Duration and Instantaneity

What makes this work singular is its commitment to time as form. The fact that the piece is meticulously timed to end at 17 minutes speaks to an aesthetic of intentional constraint. It is instant not in the sense of improvisation alone, but in its immediacy, its refusal to linger. The alarm acts as an external structure—not unlike the metronome or clock tower—but here, it is antagonistic. It represents the inescapability of external control over sacred or personal time.

This places the performance in dialogue with environmental crisis, cultural erosion, and the modern condition. The Cuenca fields, once sites of communal harvest and woven craft, now witness a dance that mourns their passing. The alarm, like climate sirens or emergency broadcasts, disrupts communion. It says: even here, your ritual cannot be uninterrupted. Even this body—bare, grounded, and reaching—cannot escape the system’s noise.

Conclusion: A Body Offered and Interrupted

This performance is not about answers. It is about holding the question open until it is taken away. It is about being present in a field of memory, in a body of history, and still moving—still asking. Through a tightly composed arc of five phases, we witness transformation: struggle, ritual, offering, contemplation, and then rupture.

The alarm does not break the piece—it completes it. Like the crack in a bell, it makes the resonance possible.

In the end, this is performance as invocation: rooted in place, structured by time, interrupted by design. The work inhabits the space between lament and liturgy, presence and erasure, alarm and offering. And in that tension, it becomes unforgettable.