Intimacy, Delicacy and Indifference: Ane Lan’s Migrating Birds

Abstract

It’s just a detail. And this would be nearly six years ago now, so I may be misremembering, but I’m thinking about a performer’s hand, the fingers of that hand suspended, ever so still, over the strings of her bass guitar, which I believe at any moment she is about to play. The thing is seen, as it were, in close-up, although the bass-player herself is about twenty yards away from where I am sitting, one of a group of performers positioned at the back of the black box studio stage. Perhaps it was a quiet passage in the performance or I was momentarily distracted, I can’t be sure, but it seems, it feels, that for a moment or so my attention has fallen upon an element of the show that has little enough to ‘do’ in that moment with what is otherwise going on. A moment, an image, a thing, that barely exists outside the attention I give to it, or remember giving to it. It’s a delicate matter. I might say also it’s a matter of delicacy, of tact; or of a certain intimacy at a distance.