Both the audience and Goh experience time in Axe Arc Echo. The work is two hours long, but time is also encountered through the soundtrack and the constancy of the choreography. Durational performance creates space for varied forms of audience attention, from periods of intense focus to something more akin to daydreaming. When your thoughts begin to drift, you wonder where Goh travels when she is not visible. We assume she is still there, but what if she continues her journey somewhere else in space and time—turning up in other epochs, other dimensions? This kind of eerie magic feels possible in this place. And then she reappears, emerging from behind a pillar. Or at least her arms do, one on each side, as though she is somehow inside the column, or has become fused with the concrete.

This fleeting image resembles a photograph by Claude Cahun—I Extend My Arms, 1931 or 1932, which similarly captures gesturing arms, extending from within a stone monolith—the artist ‘wearing’ rock. Goh shares with Cahun an interest in evoking a sense of the chthonic, albeit to different ends. Wherever she goes, Goh carries her gestures as symbols that she says, “cross thresholds of lengthening time, space, and meaning…changing what the body itself could be and represent.”³ The absence that lingers after she disappears is reimagined as an otherworldly presence, and embodiment is transformed into a method for communicating with the unknown.

What the choreography is and what it does, remains blurry. What are we looking at, and what are we seeing? What are we missing? There are times when the body and this place, the historical and mythological, all appear to coalesce. When dance is transformed into an image; an image is transformed into dance. However, this is always transient, one element in a more extensive sequence of interconnected movements. As soon as an image materialises, its edges are already dissolving. Looking at these moments later, in documentation, where details are cropped or zoomed in on, the sense of scale and distance is altered and the smallness of Goh’s body in relation to the Tank is lost. It is only in the real-time experience of the performance that you understand how she is able to hold this immense room. More than that, she fills it.

Goh is deeply invested in dance, the medium she works with, and her material, the body in time. As she has in other performances, here, too, Goh is interested in exploring big questions. What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to dance? How did we end up here, in this moment and where are we going afterwards? While Axe Arc Echo manifests this kind of expansive thinking, Goh does not offer easy answers. Instead, she plays with the epic genre, but in a way that is not about conquering something. Goh says this: “is not a journey from one place to another, it’s just a journey in every single moment of how to exist.”⁴ The intensity of the choreography, together with the sound, lighting and venue, all contribute to a sense of enormity. This also emerges from the invitation the work extends to its audience: to spend time, to consider what you are seeing and how it makes you feel.

Axe Arc Echo is concerned with the presencing of time, a durational performance at once vast and finely detailed. While Goh’s choreography resists fixing, stilling, there are occasional moments of pause. When she stops to pull a lighter from her pocket, a flicker of flame materialises briefly in the gloom. As an image, it is stark, tiny, and not visible to all, yet it alters the atmosphere in the room. Only then do you realise just how long Goh has been dancing. The constancy of what she has been doing becomes more visible precisely because she has stopped for a beat. While time, for Goh, must feel quite different, for those of us watching, time is experienced relationally as a kind of entanglement. The performance sticks with those of us who have seen it and, in this way, persists in time.

The work also warps time and communicates with other phenomena, real and imagined. Each element—score, movement, lighting—operates spatially and collectively to conjure images and affects, evoking suspension, expansion and collapse, as well as invisible, more than human forces. Temporal distinctions are undone and reimagined, broken down and remade over and over again. There are moments when it feels like Goh has dropped down into the Underworld for a conversation with Walter Benjamin and Paul Klee’s monoprint Angelus Novus (1920), which he describes as a picture of the angel of history. Klee’s figure appears to move away from something while contemplating it intently, just as Goh does. When she crawls closer to the audience in a slow, stuttering shuffle, staring through us, past us, while dragging her legs behind her. It looks like a glitch, scrubbing back and forth. Progress is stalled, almost reversed, through rewind and fast-forward, somehow both.

Where the angel’s wings are spread, Goh might lean forward with her arms arcing back, one at a time, hands crossing elegantly at the wrists, face upturned. Benjamin describes the angel of history as always having one face turned toward the past: “Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.”⁵ In Axe Arc Echo, Goh also turns her face away, though whether she is looking back at where she was, or towards where she is going, depends on your point of view.

Towards the latter part of the performance, Goh introduces a decisive swing of the arm, like an axe, slicing through the atmosphere. This staunch movement seems to communicate with or intervene in the score. When her arm drops, the sound of falling rubble follows soon after. Is this a break or a breakthrough? Though to where and what remains uncertain.