Writing about music is like dancing about architecture, or so the saying goes. Regardless of the intended point about music criticism, this maxim always seemed blithely naive about the nature of both dance and architecture, two forms that actually have a lot in common. Both are mediums of space, movement, shape, and scale. Both are designed around the human body. And as a performer who has worked extensively in site-specific work, I can assure you, dancing about architecture is not the absurdity it’s made out to be. For this reason, ARCADE expanding their content to include performance writing makes a lot of sense. When you’re invested in an art form, it has the tendency to expand and become everything—I see dance everywhere I go, and I’m sure this phenomena is true for artists of all stripes. It’s this expansiveness I hope to bring as ARCADE’s new performance editor. I’ve been dancing professionally in Seattle for 15 years, and writing about local performance for nearly as long. It is a joy to bring a performance perspective to a publication that is also thinking expansively about art in Seattle, and I’m thrilled to start with an interview with Tibetan-American dance artist Sonam Tshedzom Tingkhye on her once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work with the household name in performance art, Marina Abramović, and creating a new work for the Rubin Museum.

No phones, no clocks, no talking, no reading, no eating. These are the conditions of Marina Abramović’s Cleaning the House program. Developed over 40 years of teaching, the five day workshop is a “complete internal reset” to prepare artists for durational performance. This fall, Seattle native Sonam Tshedzom Tingkhye was hand picked by Marina Abramović and the Rubin Museum to attend the workshop in preparation to present a new work at the museum of Himalayan art, inspired by a piece in their collection.

Despite being born and raised in Seattle, Tshedzom’s Tibetan heritage was a huge part of her upbringing. Her father escaped Chinese occupation in 1959, eventually resettling in Seattle along with several relatives in the Greenwood neighborhood where they attended Sakya monastery. Tshedzom grew up taking Tibetan language, music, and dance classes, as well as dancing at the renowned Creative Dance Center. Eventually she attended Boston Conservatory at Berklee for dance. Tshedzom says when it comes to her work, “Buddhist themes and Tibetan culture definitely find its way in. Sometimes I don't always plan it. It just happens naturally.”

Based on her previous work, Tshedzom was invited to apply for the Rubin exhibition Reimagine: Himalayan Art Now, the performance aspect of which was a collaboration with the Marina Abramović Institute. Once Tshedzom’s proposal was accepted, she worked virtually with Abramović to refine her ideas before traveling to upstate New York for the workshop. Staying in an outfitted barn on Abramović’s extensive property, facilitator Billy Zhao woke her each morning, and after she bathed in a creek off the Hudson river, would give her the next set of instructions. “He would explain the rules, usually pretty simple, and he would leave and then come back at the end. So we never knew how long something was going to be.”

The exercises, the participants found out later, lasted anywhere from one to six hours. They included The Mutual Gaze as made famous by Abramović’s The Artist is Present at MOMA, as well as separating rice from lentils, exploring the property by looking only in a hand mirror, staring at colored canvases, and walking in slow motion. Being lost in time and task brought Tshedzom into several transcendent experiences. During her slow motion walk she remembers thinking “Wow, I am moving at the speed of the trees growing and the leaves falling. I felt very attuned with the sounds, the bugs...we were in the middle of nature. I felt like I was moving at the speed of everything. I thought, Why can't life always be like this?”

In another exercise, she opened and closed a door as day turned into night. “I started playing with this idea of who I'm opening the door for. Who am I seeing come in and who's leaving...And I saw a vision of my grandparents, who have both passed away, and that was really moving for me.”

The tasks could be physically and mentally challenging. Sustained by only honey and herbal tea for four days, “our bodies felt so heavy,” recalls Tshedzom, “but I personally felt like the fasting made sense when we did all these slow motion things, because I could only move slow.”

The most stressful task happened to be the only timed exercise. “We had to write our name once, keeping the pen on the paper for one hour...my hand has the muscle memory of it, but when I write that slow, I'm like, Oh my God, am I writing it correctly? The whole thing wasn't a test, but I had to undo that way of thinking.”

Undoing, as it turns out, ties literally into Tshedzom’s work for the Rubin. She stretched 108 strings across the two-story lobby of the museum, and over the course of eight days—48 hours of performing—Tshedzom untied them. Per(sever)e drew inspiration from a 19th century painting of Machig Labdrön, surrounded by dancing dākinīs. Tshedzom was drawn to the work because it depicted a female deity figure. “And she’s dancing, she’s doing this very wrathful ritual.”

Machig Labdrön (born 1055) was a founder of the Tibetan Buddhist lineage of Chöd, Tshedzom explains, which involves a practice of severing your sense of self and ego. “Practitioners go to charnel grounds, caves, areas that invoke fear, and visualize severing their limbs and offering them to feed these demons, then eventually dancing on the demons.”

Tshedzom didn’t want to re-create this ritual through any sort of literal depiction, but the idea of severing manifested the 108 strings. “I thought about how these strings represent attachment to myself.” As for an area that invokes fear, performing such a challenging work in a museum lobby “is kind of scary. This is my charnel ground in this moment. Over the eight day performance, I'm releasing my attachment to myself. Severing my sense of self.”

Being in front of an audience, Tshedzom grappled with the pressure to entertain and to prove herself. “Some people were like, well, is she going to dance? Feeling that jolt in my self. And then, calming and being like, No, I'm standing still. This is me existing. Me being is the performance.” While this left some viewers baffled, some museum patrons stayed with her for hours, feeling the energy exchange between Tshedzom and her witnesses that was a driving force in the performance.

As a dancer, Tshedzom is used to approaching performance from a very structured, choreographed place, so doing an entirely improvised work on such a large scale was a huge leap into the unknown. She prepared several scores (sets of directives that guide improvisation) based on the five elements depicted in an illustrated Kalachakra Cosmology from the museum’s collection. “In the beginning, I was pulling more from the scores, but as those days went on, I just became very still and very slow and just worked on the task of untying these strings.” The Cleaning the House workshop, Tshedzom explained, had shown her the value of stillness, of doing nothing. “I thought of some of the things that Marina said...it’s more about the process unfolding versus the product of it. And the artists themselves and their body being the art versus what the body is doing.”

What happened when Tshedzom finally untied the last string?

“I cried….It was so beautiful. I had this whole crowd of people standing around me, I untied the last string, and I looked up and just all these released strings surrounding the space...I felt really proud of myself, honestly. I didn't think I was able to do something like this.”

After 20 years of showing Himalayan art in New York City, Tshedzom’s work was one of the very last to be shown before the Rubin’s physical space closed on Oct 6. Per(sever)e may have been about Tshedzom releasing attachment to self, but it also seems an apropos closing ritual as the museum begins a new chapter. Transitioning to a model of traveling exhibitions, participatory experiences, and a digital platform, they seek “new possibilities for how museums might reach, engage, and serve the public worldwide.”

As for Tshedzom, she’s not leaving choreography behind, but the experience of this piece opened up new possibilities for her own practice. She plans to make more installation performance art “because of the way it moved me, and seeing how people were moved as well. Doing less can be very impactful.”