Caitlin Merrett King on Ayla Dmyterko's 'Dance of the Fated Furies'

A response to ​‘Dance of the Fated Furies’

‘Baby, she’s flying!’ Particles zoom in circular motion and numbers bleep bloop across the screen, the team cheer, ecstatic at the abundant incoming data. Caught in a whipping flurry of debris, they dash through towering corn, into a red barn strewn with hanging sickles and blades. The barn begins to tear apart as they race through a field of sunflowers. They find a nearby pumphouse and harness themselves with leather strapping to a convenient section of plumbing, bracing against the wind as the rafters and walls rip and whirl around them. As the winds charge, their legs fly up into the air, a celestial music crescendos as they stare up into the clear blue sky above them in the eye of the vortex. In this moment, nothing else matters. Not the chase, not the research, not the twister. ​‘You know I think we’ve seen enough.’ Still strapped to the pipe, they kiss passionately.

*

At the centre, the camera on a tripod, legs split in its mirrored reflection. Ayla’s form splits too as she skirts the tripod. First, standing in tendu, one foot pointed, the other firm in third position, then lowering to a bend peering into the lens, back straight and twisted, face blurred. She disappears, subsumed behind a dancer’s body filling the foreground. In Dance of the Fated Furies, the picture is always spooky. It crackles and jolts and is always hazy, not quite focusing on the reflection or the constant movement of the dancers. The melodic rise of the theremin makes my ears prickle. At any moment the camera might fall, knocked by some restless dance studio poltergeist. Returning to the scene of her old dance studio, we’re caught in the middle of Ayla’s own ​“legend trip”; the dancers become some kind of zilch bag, a portal into a darker knowledge.

At the centre of it all… at the start of the talk Ewa Majewska discusses how etymologically ​“cosmic” refers not just to the outer world, or even outer space, but the inner world too. A construction of a holistic, feminist cosmic centre.

There’s something undeniably silly going on here too. I wouldn’t think of Ayla’s work as being necessarily funny though – there’s too much weight here surely: the inarticulacy of war, generational trauma. But, no, it’s a dark and awkward humour that heals. Repetition becomes ridiculous (but with respect) and we are inside the joke of it all. A ritualistic dance, so extracted from its original storytelling purposes. A copy of a copy of a copy gesturing hazily towards the realest incomplete thing. Gleeful and flashing with ribbons, the girls skip like a record. Behind the scenes, the rigorous research, the weight of colonial history, the passionate and rigorous practice in the studio; what Ayla captures here is mood. Not a mood, but the general idea of deep, hanging feeling, rich with ambivalence. You figure it out – let’s go! Anti-spectacle, a poetry of perception, attunement, an embodied focus on a singular action.

*

The pair creep down a dark cobbled lane, the distant underground throb guiding their way. A line cackles and shuffles its way up to the front door before descending, ricocheting down the narrow stairs. With each step, the humidity increases filling the back of their throats with a thick wet smoke. Their feet land, eyes adjust to the scene. The room is packed, lit by a single lamp sitting on the top of a makeshift bar covered with cans of Red Stripe and a petty cash tin. Somewhere, across the room, a band plays in fast harsh strokes, music to take off to. Yelps and shouts pierce through the mass, which jolts as bodies begin to thrust from corner to corner, then along in rhythmic motion. She gets bumped from the side, her waist gives into the direction, a sweaty t‑shirt projecting her into a rapid path forming through the crowd. She lurches again, colliding with someone new. An unstoppable bump, she whirls, collides, whirls, arms lifted high, hands in soft curve. Thump, revolve, throwing her body into the throng.

References

‘Twister’ (1996), Dir. Jan de Bont.

‘Cosmic Commonism, Cosmic Communism, Cosmic Colonialism?’, A discussion with Madina Tlostanova and Ewa Majewska, moderated by Dina Akhmadeeva, Mimosa House (online), 2022.

‘Mood Over Content’, Kristian Vistrup Madsen, Kunstkritikk, 18.10.2024.