Dance comes from the body, but it starts in the brain—a thought gets the ball rolling. Language comes from the brain, but it is also a very physical act, whether it’s being written, signed, or spoken. We mitigate the physicality of speaking by pausing to think, or listening, or catching our breath. But what would it be like to speak without stopping for many minutes? Jeanine Durning knows. Since 2010, she has performed a solo called “inging,” and she presented it at Abrons Arts Center recently, as part of the “American Realness” series. It was the first time that New York audiences have been able to see this remarkable work.
In the Underground Theatre at Abrons, the bleachers had been stored away, and the room was bare except for a scattering of chairs, two pianos, a large black table, and a small projector placed on the floor. The space is bunkerlike, with concrete walls and a tilted and coffered concrete ceiling. The table bore a stack of paperback books, a laptop, and an assortment of other objects, and the chairs were turned every which way, as though an unruly middle-school class had suddenly vacated the room. As we walked down the stairs, Durning greeted us and told us to sit anywhere we wanted, and chatted briefly and amiably with people she knew. A triptych of images was projected onto the wall behind the table: Durning in three different side-by-side filmed sequences that showed her sitting behind a table and speaking—to herself? to an unseen interlocutor? In all of them, Durning gesticulated, changed her expression, looked straight at the camera, or away, or down. Her voices produced a faint steady thrum, a mini-Babel, as we settled into our seats.
When the last of the few dozen chairs was filled, Durning, dressed in tight blue pants, a brown-and-white striped shirt, a black blazer, and New Balance sneakers, surveyed the room with a genial look, sat down, and said, more or less, “Now that you’re all here, I’ll start,” and then took off. It wasn’t that she spoke quickly; she spoke incessantly. She had turned on a digital camera perched on the stack of books on the table, and on its tiny screen we could see a real-time image of Durning, who sat just a few feet behind the camera and several feet in front of her projected images—an in-between condition that she noted to us. “You’re all here” sparked a commentary on “here,” and the idea that, in some sense, we’re always “here,” which spun off into many other paths, wide and narrow. Sometimes a path became a blind alley, but Durning had set herself the task of non-stop speaking, so she couldn’t pause; if she got stuck, she repeated a word or a phrase (“there is no truth,” “he’s dead,” “who?”) until something freed her, or her brain fed her something else, and she carried on. Five minutes in, a kind of electricity had taken hold in the room.
The title “inging” refers to the ending “-ing,” which we attach to verbs to indicate ongoing actions or states. This seemed a perfect name for what we were seeing: the ongoing action of creating ongoing action. What Durning does in “inging” each time is unscripted, and while associations and memories may have accrued in the few years that she has performed the work, the content and the nature of her verbal wanderings change from performance to performance. Outside influences—what the space is like, who’s in the audience, what kind of day/week/month/year she’s having—shape the work, too. During “inging,” she always made eye contact with us, and even though we weren’t speaking back, she read certain things in us—our receptiveness, our mood—and those things sparked trains of thought and contributed to the original score we were hearing.
But it wasn’t just nonsense babbling. Durning, although she allowed her mind to be flexible, going with the flow of her speaking, was, unconsciously, editing her thoughts—it would be impossible to say everything that occurred to her. And what she had to say was thought-provoking. Phrases leaped out: “knock on the door to yourself”; “I feel my whole body is a mouth—I’m consuming myself”; “you have to stand behind something”; “I do and I be … do be do be do be do … am I a human being or a human doing?” She often made reference to the activity that she was undertaking, and what it was like to be doing it, which brought an immediacy to what was happening. Nothing was rehearsed. We were part of Durning’s present, the first recipients of this speech, the first witnesses to her thoughts. A bond formed; we were getting to know her. When, at one point, she said, “I feel my heart,” and repeated it, her voice caught and she began to cry as she continued on in her self-imposed task. In that moment, we felt it, too.
Humor wove in and out. A mention of her fondness for landscapes made her think of “Downton Abbey,” which caused her to admit that she knew who in the cast would not return for Season 4. She alighted on the name Sandy at one point, and carried it to an unexpected place: from the hurricane to Sandy Hook to … Sandy Duncan, “the disaster that is Sandy Duncan in ‘Peter Pan.’ ” A certain strand led her to adopt a Southern accent. Her being at a table, talking, spun nicely into a Spalding Gray reference. Her own physical processes provided opportunities for tangents, allowing her to comment on her standing up (which she did after half an hour), her swallowing (which was noticeable to us as a slight blip in her speech, and must have got her attention, too), her distraction by what she thought was a sound at the theatre door. We heard the same sound; the fact that Durning commented on it made us feel even more involved. And somehow it made us feel cared for, too. Durning was vigilant—not only about what was going on inside her but about what was taking place there in the room, with us. She was the embodiment of the present.
Durning is a tremendous dancer; a compact woman, she’s like a force of nature, able to consume a lot of space. While “inging” didn’t lend itself to big choreography, it did have movement. Seated, Durning shaped the air with her hands, accentuating her speech the way we do every day, without thinking, but here her gestures had a hieratic quality—not overly stylized, but somehow formal, intentional. At one point, she did indulge in a larger, dancier movement while she was seated: turning to the side, a straightened leg kicked up, and her body and arms reacted. It was over in a moment, but it reminded us how linked speech and movement are. What would “inging” have been like if Durning had sat stock-still, her eyes closed, as she spoke? Very odd, and not nearly as fascinating.
Once she stood up and began moving about the space, Durning kept things minimal, stretching a leg on the grand piano’s closed keyboard, burrowing a leg into the folded-up bleachers, keeping up the talking all the while, bringing in parts of her own life (“As a child, I took piano lessons, but I never practiced”), the act of performing (scolding herself for walking in the beam of the projected images, which played throughout the piece), “Hamlet” (“Is it possible to be and not be at the same time?”). Shakespeare made other appearances: an “Out, damned spot” reference early on prompted a mention of “King Lear,” followed by a quick correction to “Macbeth”; a tantrum near the upright piano (“It’s all about me—me me me me me!”) subsided and left Durning near a wall; “But soft!” she said, and proceeded to clamber up it.
At the other side of the room, near the stairs that led down to where we sat, she picked up the printed program for “inging” and repeated “Oh, oh, oh, oh!,” over and over, sarcastically, as though pretending to be impressed by what she was reading. The “oh”s lengthened into a protracted vocalizing, almost a ululation; Durning’s pleasant speaking voice had become an otherworldly wail. We had seen glimpses of pain throughout the work, but this was different. It was feral. “I feel my heart,” she’d said earlier. But she’d also said, “I don’t have to do this. I chose this” (could what she was doing be called “durninging”?), and after what seemed like a long time her scream softened, and then, abruptly, stopped. I had forgotten what silence was like. I wanted her to speak again, to tell us things about the world, about herself, about us. She just stood there, looking at us, shifting her stance slightly, moving her gaze from face to face. She had been talking non-stop for forty-five minutes.
She looked drained. (There was a half-full bottle of water on the table, but, as she explained, taking a drink from it would have nullified the insistent practice that she’d set up for herself.) Gradually, her breathing slowed. After five minutes, she turned off the camera and the laptop and the projector; remaining on the wall, instead of the triptych, was a big blue square with the words “NO SIGNAL” in one corner. A few more minutes passed, in which we looked at her and she looked at us, a very slight smile on her face, before she walked up the stairs and out of the theatre. With her went an incredible sense of being alive.
Photograph by Ian Douglas
