We have come together… to make one thing, not enduring—
for what endures? —but seen by many eyes simultaneously.

— “In Preparation for Disappearances to Come” program note, quoted from Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves”

I walked into PICA’s dimly lit black box theater to a floor strewn with colorful clothes in a large oval pattern. A piece of bark in the corner stood upright beneath a suspended metal container on a small platform. Side lighting caught details of the fabric; beads, lace, and bright cotton tones, while humming, cacophonous music began to crescendo as three figures entered the space, standing in the center of the stage.

Thus began Linda Austin Dance’s In Preparation for Disappearances to Come, February 6-8 at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. The work featured Linda Austin, who has been creating group and solo works for more than 40 years, performing in collaboration with dance makers Allie Hankins and Danielle Ross, live music by Chris Cochrane on guitar and Kevin Bud Jones on electronics, and lighting design by Jeff Forbes.

The stage was dark as the soundscape began to layer, aiding in an illusion that the performers were violently swaying and vibrating for a prolonged time where they stood — bringing to mind Steve Paxton’s concept of the “small dance.” The music cut out and a blue-bright light filled the stage.

The performers became clearly visible for the first time, wearing white, blue, green, and gray dappled tie-dye denim and linen or cotton tops. They began to recite, in three separate grammatical tenses, a recollection of a theater production’s first moments — the audience’s first hint that the evening would be more than meets the eye.

Abruptly, the dancers broke away from their places and knelt on the floor, creating pathways in the spread-out clothes. The fabric formation morphed, slowly, from a Pangaea-like map to an outline of riverways; the development of separate continents taking place as Austin, Hankins, and Ross crawled and folded garments across the ground.

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Gradually, the three stood around these new clothing masses and danced the perimeter, arms circling in front of them. As the music changed, Ross was the first to lay atop the clothes. She was then joined by Austin. By the time Hankins met them, they were already rolling in and dragging the clothes to make large piles. We had entered their world now, and the door had shut firmly behind us.

“Here’s something for you all to just forget,” the dancers said in unison. “Here’s something else,” added Austin, jumping on a pile of clothing and rolling a great distance. While the audience erupted in chuckles, some found a more serious tone to this moment — which speaks to the tongue-in-cheek, subtle sense of humor that Austin and Hankins typically share in their works.

“Was it meant to be funny?”, one sometimes hears an audience member ask. Comedy, and sometimes tragedy, Austin and her collaborators seem to suggest, are in the eye of the beholder — and humor always emerges in Austin’s work with impeccable timing. The gently curated line between dark and light, which is often blurred, extends to the soft distinctions between funny and sober, and earnest and sarcastic, which add layers of emotion and intellect to the work.

Reality and the boundaries of performance are also at play, distorted as the three performers stood in a triangular spacing, facing the audience. A recording plays, which says, “This is for real.” The dancers gesture, slap their sides, and move their arms. “From the top?” Hankins asks. “From the top,” replied the others.

They waved, stepped, and stood. They moved broadly and effortlessly while speaking to each other about the form of the piece — how it ends or how a certain movement appears sculptural — looking as though to parse the work out in real time from the stage. They paused, repeated, revised, and returned until the musicians stood to join them in the repeating verbalizations.

The genius of repetition is at play here, along with the examination of the foundation of reality — in versus out of the studio; in versus out of materiality. The performers laugh, initiating laughter from the audience. The performers sigh, and the audience quiets. A phone recording rings and Austin yells for it to stop. It does, and the trio resets once more.

Throughout the work, the satisfying vocalizations and dialogue continue. “Good that we’re sensing each other for now, maybe?” asked Hankins. “Should we watch it?” returned Ross. “The moment that you choose can be something you just extend,” said Austin as she scooted across the floor on her knee. They danced alone, they paused, they reclined, and they moved in unison, chanting “…please forget this…” as the music journeyed from hurried to calm.

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While the dancers moved, their shapes were clean and low to the ground; controlled and crisp, featuring occasional breaks in pathways with sailing legs, slicing arms, crab-walking, curving sudden jumps, expertly silent falls, and a striking penché from Hankins against a theater pillar.

Pairing their choreography with their breaths, they danced in tune with each other, glancing toward and away from the viewer. Their utilization of physical volume met face to face with Forbes’ playful use of light, and their creation of mirror images illuminated the moments of gesture versus whole body expanse — altogether playing with the reality of what feels possible in a black box theater setting.

Eventually, Austin walked to the bark resting underneath the container. Ross followed as Austin handed a piece to Hankins. The musicians joined once more, each with a curved piece of tree bark, and held them like masks in front of their faces.

They sang, “Sometime in 2032 … you will remember me and you … what we do …” They moved the bark to their heads like hats and balanced it as they walked. The image is simple and beautiful. When the music shifted again to a quick metallic tune with a downbeat, the dancers broke into simultaneous solos. At one point, the bark pieces became sleeves. Later, Austin swung the wooden stand of the bark around and around. She placed the bark on her leg, tapping her head down towards it repeatedly as she stood. There is a fantasy at this point of the work, met with memory and undertoned by grief.

“So at this point, I have an ask …” says Austin to the audience, acknowledging us directly for the first time. She proceeds to tell the audience that she wants us to use the next portion of the dance in a work of our own someday, and asks us to remake it — whether a move, portion, or interpretation — to the best of our ability. It could be a few years from now, she told us, or ideally, once she is gone. I couldn’t help but smile wide. While it is usually hard to tell whether Austin is being casually straightforward when she addresses her audiences, or whether it could all part of some captivating Lynchian character bit, I scribbled down each move in her phrase as well as I could; to keep for future use and remake one day to the best of my ability.

The idea of being forgotten to time is nothing new for dance and other fleeting performing arts forms. The impermanence of what is created has likely permeated the minds of artists at least once as they push into the professional realm. “What’s the point?” is often a thought of consideration for those spending their life training, rehearsing, and creating, only to perform their works to a live audience for a run of a few nights, or weekends if they’re lucky. This work then typically falls into the depth of a repertory catalog or is recorded on video to be stored and archived.

The fleeting notion of dance, an art form whose profession is seldom rewarded with fame, fortune, or glory, can be disheartening. There is no physical product to manufacture and sell, no concrete object that can be displayed and marveled at. In In Preparation for Disappearances to Come, Austin and collaborators address this head-on. She looks at the viewer and offers a point to it all — to be remembered in some way.

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Hankins and Ross stepped downstage of Austin as she repeated her solo, beginning with the swinging of her arm while letting out a loud, melodic yawp. Ross began to describe, out loud, a performance she created at the now-defunct Headwaters Theatre (in case we don’t remember it). Hankins mirrored Ross in telling about Like a Sun That Pours Forth Light but Never Warmth, (which I do remember), a work referencing Vaslav Njinsky that took place at the also now-defunct Conduit in 2014. Hankins described a night where an inconvenient and humorous incident nearly derailed the performance. Their stories met in the middle, colliding as Hankins sang an iteration of an opera song from the original show. Meanwhile, Austin persisted in her repetition, beginning and ending each new set of her solo with the word “now.”

The music picked up again and Austin and Hankins began to push the clothing piles while Ross performed a solo. This pushing dissolved into the three sitting on the floor, tying the arms and legs of the clothes together to create one long fabric rope.

Here we reveled in the simplicity of task and the euphoria of directness. In unison, they sang, “I don’t know why you are here with me, what the heck is this thing we are doing? How will you feel when we are gone?” and “Is this a stage, is this really a dance?”, Austin remarking that the latter are questions her mother would ask. She gestured to the metallic container suspended over the pieces of bark, which had gone mostly forgotten until this point, and said her mother was there.

“She would get such a kick knowing she was here…,” she said, receiving more chuckles from some of the audience, and heartfelt smiles from others. The work had come full circle, from the fleeting importance of the work we make to the honoring of spirit through remembering. The cycle is continuous, and in the important work of In Preparations for Disappearances to Come, we are urged that this cycle must be examined and acknowledged, and that it, in itself, must have meaning.

Austin pulled on the long clothes rope, leading it away from the center of the stage as Hankins and Ross continued to tie into the darkness.