The Geometry Remains
On making a work that undoes itself
The room is lit. Not stage-lit — not the performer in brightness and the audience in darkness, which is how theater ordinarily works, the division between watcher and watched maintained by the most basic technical means. The lights are full and even, as if in a brightly lit room where something is about to happen but hasn’t started yet. The audience can see each other. They can see the floor, where strips of off-white drafting tape trace lines that intersect at angles — not a complete grid but fragments of one, certain intersections highlighted, others left unmarked. The tape is functional — and in this context suggests the kind you might use to mark a stage for rehearsal — yet here it doubles as drawing, the geometry rendered in the humblest possible material. At these intersections, sculptural objects stand: four-sided modular forms of either raw balsa wood or white cardboard, assembled into varying heights — some a foot or two, others reaching nearly seven feet. The balsa absorbs light; the cardboard reflects it. They stand like sentinels in a field whose logic is felt before it is understood.
The room looks like a space being prepared for something. It looks, in fact, like the moment before a performance rather than the performance itself.
The lights fade to black, a quiet, chordal music slowly becomes audible. The lights brighten, a dancer enters — Jude Markey-Smith. Before he moves, he takes his pulse. He counts the beats, notes the number. This simple act — the self measuring itself — establishes the tempo of everything that follows. The music, performed live, changes when he takes his pulse, signaling that it is somehow connected to his heartbeat’s pace. His movement begins in this inner rhythm: the body’s own time, the private metronome.
But as he crosses the measured space, the geometry begins to act on him. The sculptural nodes — placed at intersections calculated according to the Golden Mean — exert a subtle pull. His tempo shifts as he nears or leaves them. The audience is not told any of this. The proportional logic governing the field is never explained, never announced — it is an active yet fundamentally mysterious substrate, palpable in its effect on the dancer’s movement but withdrawn into the modest markings on the floor. Its presence is felt. Its source is not disclosed. The body that began as self-contained is gradually drawn into relation with a field it didn’t produce. The geometry was there before he arrived. It will be there after he leaves. He is moving through something older than his pulse, and the music — following rather than leading — breathes through his evolving rhythm.
Midway through, he pauses. Takes his pulse again. Then begins to reposition some of the sculptural elements, each new configuration reshaping the web of forces around him. The field changes. The dance changes. The music changes. None of them is in charge.
The lights fade. The dancer exits. The second movement begins in darkness.
The sculptural objects now serve as surfaces for projected light. From the ground, a projector casts an ascending diagonal beam through the sculptural field — the light fracturing as it passes through and around the balsa and cardboard forms, their different surfaces absorbing and reflecting unevenly. At the back of the stage, a screen catches fragments of the projection: shadows of the sculptures, fractured light from the projector, an additional dimension layered behind the field.
Lili Maya’s visuals are uncanny in the precise sense — familiar enough to pull at recognition, strange enough to refuse it. Within the shifting abstractions and fields of color are traces of archival footage, processed until their origin is liminal: a viewer might sense something recognizable — a moving body, a gesture, a glimpse of something human — without being able to confirm it. The feeling of the familiar emerges without the act of explicit recognition. The sound deepens, surrounding the audience in an immersive, interior atmosphere.
The audience, now in darkness, becomes aware of their own inner seeing. Something that might be memory flickers across the sculptural surfaces — or might be light, or might be the mind’s own tendency to find the human in the abstract. The imagery refuses pure subjectivity: what we call inner life is built from the residues of the world, from the memory of the living cosmos refracted through media, thought, and history.
The room has turned inside out. The brightly lit field of the first movement — where the body moved through proportion and the audience witnessed it — has become a darkened interior where the audience is alone with their own awareness, and the sculptures have become not screens, but both absorbing and reflecting surfaces for something that is neither entirely outer nor entirely inner.
The video fades. The room becomes dark. The sound continues for a few moments — the last resonance of the interior field, sustained after the images have withdrawn. Then a twilight light rises. The audience becomes visible again — to each other, to themselves — after the darkness of the second movement. But the quality of visibility has changed. The bright, even light of the first movement is gone. What replaces it is softer, more intimate, as if the darkness has altered the terms of seeing. The dancer reenters.
The sculptural objects stand as they were left — no longer projection surfaces, simply themselves again, balsa and cardboard in the quiet light. Moving slowly, Jude begins to reposition some of the objects once more — not to correct the geometry but to listen to it, to restore alignment through care and responsiveness. The live sound follows each adjustment, expanding and contracting like breath. What the second movement explored through image and interiority, the dancer now seems to integrate through the body — as if the previous dimensions are co-present in his movement, transposed from light and sound into physical gesture.
The lighting gradually extends beyond the stage, softly illuminating the audience. The distinction between viewer and performer dissolves into shared twilight. There is no longer a clear boundary between the space of performance and the space of watching. Everyone is in the same light.
Facing the audience, the dancer slows to stillness. He takes one long, audible breath — in through the nose, out through the mouth — in sync with the final tones of the music.
Then, stepping calmly off the taped geometry, he crosses the boundary that once measured him and walks into the same light that now includes everyone present.
The geometry remains, faint and golden, then the light fades to darkness as the sound continues, slowly fading to silence.
The performance ended. No one left.
For ninety minutes after the piece concluded, the audience remained in the theater. They stood. They walked through the sculptural field — the same field the dancer had crossed — stepping carefully among the balsa and cardboard forms, crouching near the tape lines, photographing the objects and photographing themselves near the objects. They were inhabiting the geometry. The space the dancer had opened, the audience was now occupying on their own terms, without instruction, without a program note to tell them what they were looking at or what it meant.
What struck us was the range of how they engaged. Immediately after the performance, a group of audience members came up to the sound and video booth where Lili and I had been creating the music and visuals live, excitedly asking how the piece was made — detailed technical questions about the projection, the sound, the sculptural materials, the relationship between the elements. Throughout the evening, Lili and Jude continued to field questions about the creation of the work itself — its structure, its process, its methods. At the same time, other conversations were unfolding that had nothing to do with technique. People talked about what the piece had brought up in them. Personal things: a memory, a philosophical stance, a recollection from another part of their life.
It was the mix of responses — the technical curiosity and the personal disclosure coexisting in the same room, often in the same person — that told us the most about the depth of the engagement. A piece that provokes only technical questions has been admired. A piece that provokes only personal reflection may have been felt but not registered as craft. Both arriving together — the desire to understand how something was made and the need to articulate what it had stirred — indicated that the audience had experienced the work as both constructed and alive, both measurable and unmeasurable.
But what also struck us was how many people simply stayed without asking anything at all. They wanted to remain on site with others, in the shared space where the experience had happened, as if the proximity to the field and to each other sustained something that would dissipate if they left. This made a deep impression on all of us.
We had provided no paper program. No wall text. No written explanation. The invitation described the piece in a single sentence: a textured, 60-minute performance that unfolds across three distinct sections, set within a field of sculpture, dance, live video, and sound. That was all. The decision was deliberate: a printed program would have been a monument to closing. We wanted the experience to remain in the register of encounter — open, unframed, without instructions.
Three people approached Jude afterward and, after congratulating him on the work, one, smiling, asked, “But what was that?” He described the parallelism of the piece — the three artists working together yet in parallel, each developing material independently — and mentioned Cage and Cunningham as reference points for the method of collaboration. One of the group offered a single word of classification as an answer to her friend’s question: “Dada.”
The irony was not lost on us. The first essay I published on this Substack traced the precise differences between Duchamp, Cage, and Cunningham — how a prank became a method and a method became a dance. And here, in the lobby after a performance that had held an entire room in shared attention for over an hour, the mention of Cage’s name triggered an instant categorical reflex: avant-garde, therefore Dada, therefore understood. The very operation the piece had spent sixty minutes gently suspending — the impulse to classify, to place what has been encountered inside a category so that it can be managed — reasserted itself in the time it took to speak a single word.
The impulse is natural. It is, I would say, the default condition. And the piece was designed, gently, to make that impulse visible without satisfying it.
The work took many months to develop. Lili and I have worked together for years as Studio Maya+Rouvelle. We met Jude at a residency/festival on Governors Island in the summer of 2024, recognized a shared sensibility, and began talking about a possible collaboration.
The first public version was presented outdoors in Brescia, Italy, in August 2025 — only the first movement, with live music and dance but without the sculptural elements, the floor geometry, or the projections. What existed was the temporal form: Jude taking his pulse, establishing a tempo, moving through the space at the related rhythm. The geometry was implied but not demarcated. The sculpture was structurally absent — an element we had been discussing but had not yet realized.
The people who ran the residency — Giulia and Davide — invited friends to see the showing. Afterward they told Jude: “We’re not sure what this was, but it was the most authentic thing we’ve seen in a long time.” They invited us to return and perform the piece in full whenever we were ready.
Back in New York, we continued developing. The sculptural elements and the floor geometry emerged. We refined the completed first movement and organized a showing at PAGEANT, an intimate venue in Brooklyn ideally suited to a work-in-progress. What we presented there was the first movement as it now existed — with sculpture, tape geometry, and a sitting audience in close proximity to the field.
PAGEANT revealed something Brescia couldn’t. In Brescia, the audience was small, seated outdoors, and the relationship between viewers and performer was entirely informal. At PAGEANT, a seated audience in an enclosed space participated in the performance in ways we hadn’t anticipated — their stillness, their attention, their physical proximity to the sculptural field became part of the field’s energy. We could feel how the audience’s presence acted on the dancer and the dancer’s presence acted on them. This was directly related to what Jude would later describe as co-presence — the experience of being simultaneously inside one’s own practice and inside a shared space with others.
The showing also disclosed something about the music. I realized that the structure I had composed — through which I was improvising live — didn’t seem sufficiently allusive for substantial development across two additional movements. I had written a twenty-minute piece that felt complete. It closed at the end of the first movement when what was needed was a sustained opening. What I wanted was a dyad I came to think of as the unexpected inevitable: sound that surprised — that heightened the listener’s attention through juxtaposition and uncanny combination — and that then, through its development within the composition, produced a sense of inevitability, as if the surprise had been latent in the material all along. I rewrote most of the music, keeping only small fragments from the earlier studies, building a palette that could sustain three movements without resolving prematurely.
What emerged from Brescia and PAGEANT together was the recognition that the first movement, while compelling, opened a door — and that sustaining the opening would require additional movements that revealed different, implicit dimensions within the first. We began to think of the piece as a sculpture — but not a three-dimensional object to be viewed from different angles by physically walking around it. Rather, a form that needed to be rotated in space and time so that the audience could see all of its dimensions. The work would turn itself, presenting its cosmological face, then its psychological face, then its phenomenological face — each one a dimension of the same structure, disclosed from a different angle.
The three of us developed our respective elements primarily in private, while communicating regularly about the larger conceptual and structural foundations of the work. Jude built his choreography from his pulse and a stopwatch, creating a temporal field within which he danced. Lili developed her sculptural objects — based on thin rectangular modules with slots for joining, into four-sided modular forms of either balsa wood or white cardboard, identical in inner dimension but ranging from one to seven feet in height, their different materials absorbing and reflecting light in subtly different ways — and positioned them according to PHI-based measurements of each performance space. The off-white drafting tape, a low-tack paper tape used by architects to securely fasten blueprints, vellum, or drawing paper to a drawing board or a table she used to mark the floor was deliberately chosen: functional and liminal, the kind of tape that alludes to floor tape often seen on the floor of a working theater, but at the same time isn’t; here repurposed as drawing. Within the geometry, several of the taped lines ran parallel to each other — a quiet formal echo of the parallelism that governed the collaboration itself.
The improvisation extended into the installation of the work. We had never been in the theater at MITU580 prior to the morning of the performance. Lili needed to respond to the specific dimensions and qualities of the space on the spot — improvising the tape drawing, the resulting placement of the sculptural objects, the position of the projector, and where she would control the live video from, all in real time. This site-conditionedness — the refusal to predetermine the installation and the willingness to let the space itself participate in the work’s formation — has become a hallmark of how we work together. The structure was rigorous. Its realization was responsive.
Her video projections were developed along the same principle that guided all of us — the uncanny as method: archival footage processed until its recognizability became liminal, woven into abstract fields of color and light so that the familiar might surface in the viewer’s awareness without the confirmation of explicit recognition. She did not disclose the archival sources. The point was not to identify the imagery but to feel the pull of something almost known. I composed the music using serial techniques within a hybrid texture of sound art and formal composition — instrumental samples electronically hybridized so that the palette of sounds occupied a space between the recognizable and the uncanny, organized by pitch and rhythm but refusing to resolve into either pure electronic abstraction or conventional musical form. Each of us was working within a rigorous structure that included variability — room for the work to respond to the specific conditions of each performance, each space, each night.
What held these three private practices together was not a shared plan but a shared discipline — a voluntary restraint that each of us practiced independently and that permeated the formation of the piece at every level. Each artist knew more than they disclosed. I knew the serial structure of the music; the audience heard sound, not method. Lili knew the PHI measurements and the archival sources; the audience saw light and form, not geometry or citation. Jude knew his pulse rate and the energy map of the intersections; the audience saw a body moving through a field, drawn by forces they could feel but not name. The private rigor was not hidden out of secrecy. It was held in reserve — the way a musician holds back from playing every note they know, the way a structure sustains a building without being visible from the street. The tension between what each of us carried privately and what appeared publicly was not a problem the work needed to solve. It was the generative force that opened the piece as a shared world and sustained that opening for as long as we were all — artists and audience — inside it together. The restraint was what made the encounter possible. If we had explained everything — if the Golden Mean had been announced, if the serial structure had been made audible as system, if the archival sources had been identified — the work would have become an illustration of its own method. The audience would have recognized rather than encountered. The opening would have closed.
Jude described what the restraint made possible from the performer's side: he felt simultaneously inside his own space — the pulse, the tempo, the energy map of the intersections — and in that space with the audience. He could see them clearly in the shared light. Their presence was not an abstraction. It was an additional dimension of the performance — a co-presence that was both personal and shared, intimate and public, his own and not his own. The discipline of not explaining, not narrating, not performing for the audience had created the conditions under which performing with them became possible.
This method of working — parallel development, shared substrate, independent realization — echoes what I described in an earlier essay about Cage and Cunningham’s collaboration. But the relationship here is different. Cage and Cunningham’s work was, in Cunningham’s word, “essentially a non-relationship” — two autonomous elements sharing time and space without coordination. About Thresholds is not non-relational. The elements share a substrate — the Golden Mean, the pulse, the temporal form — without coordinating their surfaces. The parallelism produces co-presence rather than indifference. The moments of intersection are not coincidental. They emerge from within the materials because the materials share a common ground, even though no one dictated how that ground would manifest in dance, in sound, or in light.
The piece is called About Thresholds: Of the Measurable and the Unmeasurable. The subtitle names what the work holds together without resolving.
The measurable: the Golden Mean, the pulse rate, the PHI-based grid, the serial pitch organization, the timed sections, the modular dimensions of the sculptural objects. Every element of the piece was built from measurement — precise, calculated, repeatable. The geometry on the floor could be reconstructed in any space. The serial structure of the music could be notated. The sculptural objects were modular, reproducible, positioned according to the same proportional logic that governed the tape on the floor. The choreography was timed to a heartbeat that could be counted.
The unmeasurable: what appeared in the room when all of these measured elements were set in motion together. The quality of attention that shifted when the dancer’s pulse established a tempo and the geometry began to act on his body. The interior field that opened when the lights went down and the projections shimmered across the balsa surfaces. The shared twilight when the audience became visible to each other and to the performer. The breath. The ninety minutes afterward when no one left and everyone walked through the field as if it still held something.
None of this was designed. All of it was made possible by what was designed. The measurable was the ground. The unmeasurable was what appeared from it. The structure did not produce the encounter — it created the conditions under which encounter became possible. And then the structure withdrew, the way the geometry remained on the floor after the dancer stepped off it: present, faint, golden, no longer active, a trace of the conditions under which something had happened that the conditions alone could not explain.
This is what I have been trying to understand for most of my life — from the childhood encounter with a ceramic sculpture that oscillated between the familiar and the strange, through the circuits that refused to produce the sounds I designed and produced something more alive instead, through the autonomous objects that completed themselves in a stranger’s bag in Berlin. The measurable and the unmeasurable are not opposed. They require each other. The formal precision is not the enemy of the encounter. It is its condition. And the encounter — the meaning that appears, briefly, in the space between bodies in shared light — is what gives the precision its life.
The geometry remains. The light fades. The sound continues, then silence. The audience walks through the field.
Something happened here. It is already withdrawing.
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