Ilona Lodewijckx on the M-resident: dancer and artist Judith Van Oeckel

Dancing without a body

“I find it nerve-wracking to talk about my work,” says Judith Van Oeckel as I step into her studio. “I’m afraid I’ll say something that’s not true.” This sounds like something I might say myself. As if you could misinterpret your own work and life, and truth is something you can miss, like missing a train, a turning, an opportunity. Truth is elastic, I say. Let’s talk about what is true today, here in the M-studio at Cas-Co, with the afternoon light sitting between us on the sofa like a third body.

I had prepared a list of questions, but I never got round to fishing them out. There’s no need. Everything we want to talk about, everything that matters, is already here. Framed on the shelf is a document: AGREEMENT OF ORIGINAL TRANSFER OF MOVEMENTS / MICRO-CHOREOGRAPHIES. It’s an official sales contract, part of ‘All She Wants To Do Is Dance,’ the performance Judith gave at Playground 2023 in M. With this document, Judith offers specific movements for sale, and makes a contractual commitment never to perform them publicly again. The sold item is described in detail: I stand upright with my arms by my sides. My heels touch, and my toes point outwards. I bend my knees, and my left foot slides to the side…

Hanging on the wall are 3D renders of a dancing body. The result of a motion capture scan of a choreography that Judith immortalized in this way. Seen from various angles, the movements form abstract, blotchy shapes, like something living on the seabed or, fittingly enough, in the depths of the body itself.

Lying on the desk are two 3D-printed sculptures of those same abstracted forms. Here, the shapes of the body have reclaimed their own body, and become objects – both tangible and enduring. Whether by chance or design, they are reminiscent of spinal columns: that which supports the body and is also supported by the body; that which makes movement possible; and that which is both strength and vulnerability, both structure and breaking point.

Everywhere in this space, you find the abstraction of movement, of dance, of the body. Cross-sections, silhouettes, sculptures, documents, legal clauses, clusters of code. Figures in wood, Plexiglas, and 3D-printed mesh . Attempts to render the intangible tangible, to slow down the fleeting, and to preserve the ephemeral. She tells me that in her dreams, she makes them in sand. Fragile as the body itself. Or in marble, in bronze: heavy, costly materials that outlive the body. Feverishly, she continues to search for new forms, new frameworks, and new grammars of movement.

Judith’s quest burns with urgency, and for good reason. In 2020, following a respiratory infection, she began to suffer from chronic migraines. She had been trained and educated as a dancer, had worked her entire life towards that single goal, and had shaped and trained her body into an instrument of precision and expression. But suddenly, she was forced to confront the reality that she would not be able to participate in the dance world as she had envisioned. And as a dancer, if you cannot rely on your body – the mutable, unfathomable body with its own laws and limits – what do you have left?

“I am still a dancer,” Judith says. “My body is my primary instrument. But because I cannot always rely on it, I was obliged to search for new vessels for my movements. Ways of giving weight to those gestures, of making them solid, of preserving them for later, for the days when my body does not cooperate.”

This is what Judith is seeking: a way to keep on dancing. To dance without a body, if need be. In ‘Illness as Metaphor’, Susan Sontag wrote: “Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”

Judith Van Oeckel did not choose her realm: no one is afforded that luxury. Her work is neither a denial of illness, nor a quest for healing. The movements she sells and the sculptures she creates are ways to keep moving between the two realms. To belong fully to neither, and yet exist in both.

Here in the studio, with the afternoon light between us, I look at that 3D-printed spine on her desk. Strength and fragility in a single shape, both supported and supporting. Perhaps that is what Judith’s work teaches us: that it is possible to dance in all the realms of life, in whatever form it may take.