Ranjana Dave

A Twitter post I stumble upon asks, “there’s only ONE MONTH left in the decade. what have you accomplished?” There are laundry lists of achievements in 280 characters― degrees acquired, career accomplishments, and romantic conquests. And then there are the flippant ones, defying this call to fill time with their actions. My favourites? 

“Didn’t do any murders.” (to which another user responds ― there’s still time).

“absolutely nothing thank you for asking.”

“Saved 15% on my car insurance.”

“Don’t rush me.”

“I successfully got ten years older.”

And in response to the original poster, the multiple variations of “damn you coming after me for no reason.”

Indulging the voyeuristic impulse that makes me scroll through a list of the things people have done, or more entertainingly, their refusal to do, I am reminded of a former lover. At one point, she became a proponent of online task logs, encouraging me to appreciate their semblance of ordered certainty. The lists made me realise that I have spent a significant part of this decade doing laundry; she pushed me to stop thinking of laundry and scrubbing the inaccessible tract of floor under the washing machine as a waste of time, a life lesson I am thankful for. She made lists of the things she had to do at work, and of the ways in which she wanted to sustain her friendships. I was also on one of her boards― and when we hit our next rough patch, she removed me from the board. I was amused, but mostly awed by the performativity of her gesture, where hitting ‘del’ underscored how there was no longer any shared doing to be done. What have I accomplished in this decade? I have discovered that I am perversely fascinated by the affect that acts of digital estrangement can produce. 

Present Continuous is a celebration of affect in several modes, whether it takes the form of questions about the nature of viewing and embodying and what it means to see or to represent. It is also a space for anxieties and vulnerabilities around intimacy, financial stability and body image. In being all these things, it continues to push the boundaries of ‘writing’ as performative action. This volume features a series of letters, first-person essays (because life is, after all, happening to me, and not to one), journal entries, video and photo essays. At Indent, in framing the journal, we were also drawing on our work within the university space, where our annual symposium discusses the precarity of artistic practice. Reading submissions to the journal, sourced from around the world, leaves me with this: if there is anything we share, it is the feeling of precarity. We’re all struggling, it turns out. What then, would be an apt title to corral this set of works? Present Continuous leaves in its wake many other contenders. There was Uncertain Futures― too generic, too pessimistic. There was Motions for the Future, which was deemed far too scatological. Present Continuous is a reasonable compromise; it suggests the passing of time, but also its elongation; it gestures towards the future, but only inscrutably so. 

What does Present Continuous bring? I have had the opportunity to share a wonderful exchange of letters (OK, e-mails, but they’re still letters) with Chintan Modi and Thulile Gamedze, producing a conversation that delights in meandering through the terrain of our anxieties and uncertainties, reproduced in full, for the chance that they might intrigue you as much they intrigued us. What do we do when we’re seeing dance? Anishaa Tavag argues for the viewer’s claim to being an engaged, involved participant in the act of seeing dance — an experience that isn’t distanced or detached. The spectator yields to the affect of the dance, but this affect also travels in the opposite direction, vesting the dance with the investment of the spectator-participant. “The more we watch, the more we can see,” Anishaa writes. Shabari Rao tells us, “Someone asked me: what’s the difference between stillness and waiting? Waiting is predicated on an imagined future, while stillness is concerned with only the present.” To watch a group of people stand on a rock I happen to know offers me the opportunity to view a moment of stillness as a consolidated canvas of memory. The ‘un’moving bodies, embraced by clothes rippling in the morning breeze, hold for me memories of having to placate toddlers who got competitive about peanut-eating, and posing on that rock with a cousin, at an age where looking at the camera still inspired curiosity and an urge to prod the lens with grubby fingers. Danish Sheikh documents the unfolding of a script he wrote. What happens when the script encompasses his identity as an activist-lawyer, and what changes when the aesthetics of staging begin to be privileged? In phone calls with Sharan Devkar Shankar, I begin to see how he dances with photographs. We discuss what viewers should do first: should they experience his work at a pace he sets, or should we start by allowing them to set their own pace? I do an inept-anxious reordering of photos on the back-end. To know that he wants you to know that this is a single screen video installation, 30 seconds, looped, undoes something inside me. It is a profoundly intimate detail, and it moves me. Yesterday, Claire Vionnet and I tried to share a secret and lie with each other, and agreed that it was almost antithetical to decide what secrets we could share; ‘lying’ was intrinsic to the process of ‘revealing’ a secret. In her essay, Claire talks about exposure as a mode of vulnerability, and thus, a condition for intimacy, rooting her ideas in her experience of contact improvisation. Urvi Vora reflects on what it means to ‘disappear’, and how disappearance is contained in the act of moving. As I edit her essay I listen to the Kingdom of the Shades in La Bayadere, Solor’s very expensive acid trip, in which the entire corps de ballet appears from the mist, one dancer at a time, thumbing their noses at gravity as they lean forward precipitously, making their single-legged descent from the heavens on a steeply-raked ramp. Bernice Lee asks us what it might mean to do folk dance, and what the ‘folk’ might mean for us, in our precarious postcolonial urban lives. She leaves instructions that you can follow to make your own folk dance. I imagine people trying out the exercise as they read her notes, written across the span of a few months. Caries of Capitalism brings statements from four artists in Russia who collaborate on a performance in Moscow, as they contemplate what it means to be a precarious artist. When their roles are reversed, making them employers of other precarious artists, they must negotiate the tensions between the temporary power they hold, and their constant, subliminal precarity. While we look to artists to disrupt dominant narratives, Arundhati Ghosh insists that we should also be asking arts leaders to do the same. Precarious art practices cannot be framed within ‘safe’ policy-making, if they must truly shake things up. Finally, Katie Hejtmanek reflects on body image and the male gaze through her experience of training to compete as an Olympic weightlifter. How is gaze inscribed on her body, and how does being seen shape the way she presents herself? 

As I write this, we are waiting to hear about an artist’s visa status. The specific furniture the tech rider asked for, a table and chair that in name and appearance symbolise Scandinavian minimalism (besides a capitalistic flattening and homogenisation of furniture), has arrived. What have I accomplished in this decade? I have learned that furniture can cross borders, but people cannot.

Ranjana Dave is a dance practitioner based in New Delhi, and she dances, writes, teaches, edits and curates. She is the editor of Present Continuous, the 2019 edition of Indent journal.