a dancer dances is a fragment from the musical A Chorus Line. The full line invokes God as well as a demand and a compulsion.

`God, I’m a dance / a dancer dances.’

A Dancer Dances is composed by a set of 16 different elements, of various materials and styles, capable of various identifications and relations. Each is discrete, but in some cases the outer edges might seem fuzzy. A framed drawing is more obviously a discrete thing than a title. A scatter of particles is more vague than a concrete wooden platform. There are also, though, some groupings that seem to relate as in series. The 16 elements for the show derive from 4 general procedures, or 4 general orientations to the production of the show’s subject. There is symbolic manipulation of senseless information data, concrete production of programmed space, the selection of junk elements for abstraction, and a performance-like improvisation with found and ephemeral elements.

Although each element in the show has a production history of its own, and could be used to tell its own little stories of formation, the show itself does not organize them according to the themes of these stories. They are organized by the trial of their displayed incorporation. It’s not a case of going backstage for local stories as in A Chorus Line. That appeal to the stabilizing comfort of individual narratives is not the supplement that sustains the critical void the artist encounters. Things have crossed the velvet curtain to function for an uncertain public. And for this reason, Lyall is committed to having one of the functions of exhibition be the occlusion of each element by the display of incorporation. An exhibition should damage the individual meanings of all its objects in favor of the collective effect of a set and its anonymous presence. One should not recognize the subject that is framed by these objects. The set should simply function. As Lyall says, a dancer dances.

Half of the elements come from existing and unrelated work from the studio-a mini retrospective!-while the others were made especially for this show. Besides this division, half the elements support a symbolic (organizational) subject, while the others support the appearance of a performative subject. One perspective looks backward at patterns that arise in discrete works; yet another attempts to assemble a scenic order for these relations. But all are halved, which is to say there is a hashing (1) of the apple. Each is a half cut by halves, only partially successful in its processes. There are formal relations, color and line, sensuous moments and opacities, appeals to the body and to vistas, domestic moments or consumer displays. There is also the arcanity of thwarted cultural references, dialectics of attention and distraction, and some limited entertainment. And if so, there is also an ephemeral matrix that structures everything—and an object-relation on the verge of coming together, or else collapsing.

The subject of all this is like an audience for a dancer, shifting perspectives and scanning for patterns and references in subtly choreographed movements. This subject moves the viewer’s thought, as well as the eye and the body, through the incompossiblility of its devices, partial scenes and relations. Because this subject is submitted to the alienation/completion of its references, it is not decidable, Lyall always says, between the corporate collection and the landfill. a dancer dances is finally associated with the oscillation implied here. No dancer ever actually dances in a realized musical production. A dancer dancing is just the multiple of everything inapparent in scenic spectacles. A dancer dancing is an eternity lost inside its scenic fragments, a kind of senseless supernumary whose destiny is not-to-be, ...a-d-d-ed.