SmArts

September 26 - October 2, 2016

‘To Have To Hold To’ at Crystal Bridges

By Molly Rector

The sign outside the door to Crystal Bridges’ Great Hall simply read “for 60 minutes, the artist requests that her body be held,” and promised a post-performance discussion. I had gone to this performance—a piece by artist Cynthia Post Hunt called “To Have To Hold To”—with four friends, not quite sure what to expect. We were given small sheets of paper with a few questions: what is thus body? whose responsibility is it to take care of this body? how long are you willing to hold this body?

Entering the huge, quiet space (late, as always) we saw a small group of people huddled together in the middle of the room, holding the artist in their arms. Dressed in a nude bodysuit and unmoving, with her eyes shut, she gave the appearance of lifelessness. One person seemed tired and another stepped in. This went on, with audience members stepping in to relieve one another, for a full hour, during which time the artist’s body never touched the ground.

It may sound cheesy, but there was something terribly emotional about this experience, a performance that required no action from the performer but to trust a room of strangers to care for her. And in that process, the audience members had to trust one another, united by the collective goal of keeping the artist’s body lifted, we bonded, read each other’s faces and body language, asked if anyone needed relief, linked arms underneath the body to better stabilize each other’s grips. Always, someone held the artist’s head. We quite literally shared our strength.

This is precisely the thing that I found so moving – the sharing of a burden in a way that made it easier for everyone. Of course, it was a burden that we had chosen, but we had been asked, too, to take it on, and had (by being there) implicitly agreed to take on. In the discussion that followed, the artist told a friend of mine that during a prior performance, people had held her individually for a minute or so at a time. How much weaker they were apart than we were together – that the few (maybe eight) of us together could do for an hour what one person could do for only a few minutes. There’s a lesson in that, I think.

Molly Rector is a staff writer for the Daily Record. Contact her at molly@dailydata.com.