'Speed is irrelevant if you are going in the wrong direction.’
Mahatma Gandhi

I recently attended an excellent evening of dance performed by NDT2 at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London. (NDT2 is on tour in the UK and Ireland until 7 May.)

NDT2, the junior company of the Nederlands Dans Theatre, comprises international graduates aged between 20 and 26. The young dancers are athletic, disciplined, graceful and cool. They attack their work with fierce energy and unconstrained joy. 

I was particularly struck by a new piece, ‘The Big Crying,’ choreographed by German Marco Goecke. 

19 dancers enact a series of everyday tasks and pastimes in a state of high anxiety. They get up, get dressed, commute and work. They meet, talk, argue and embrace. Their movements are jagged, jerky, juddering. Their mood is frenetic, fractious, fractured. There are occasional outbursts of laughing or screaming. Everything is speeded up.

You sense that these characters have repressed their emotions. Their gestures are somewhat robotic. They are going through the motions, propelled at high velocity by force of habit. And yet they are unable to extract any joy from their activities; incapable of properly connecting with each other. 

The dance is set to the mournful music of Tori Amos - which reinforces the sense of withdrawal and abstraction. 

Goecke created this haunting piece after the death of his father. He appears to be articulating the isolation of grief, the seeming senselessness of carrying on. At its climax a solitary male dancer slows down and adopts a reflective pose. Has he at last found some solace?

'I've been told to speed up my delivery when I perform. But if I lose the stammer, I'm just another slightly amusing accountant.’
Bob Newhart

I read an article in the Times recently about the trend amongst young people to consume life at fast-forward. (‘Why Gen Z are on Speed’, 14 February 2022.) It reported that they are watching their lectures at 1.5x speed. They’re skipping through books, skimming through voice notes, scrolling through films. They’re accelerating past the boring bits, jumping on to the chorus, hopping ahead to the highlights.

Of course we live in an accelerated culture. With increasing distraction and diminishing attention, we all want instant gratification. And we want it now.

It’s easy to dismiss some of these behaviours as juvenile, daft or mentally damaging. You clearly can’t properly appreciate a good book or film at 1.5x speed. Surely life dictates its own natural tempo.

'The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting.'
Milan Kundera, ‘Slowness’

Nonetheless, I do understand the inclination to compress and stretch time to accommodate our changing priorities, needs and desires - and to use technology as an accomplice in achieving this.

I can recall many meetings and presentations where I would have welcomed a fast-forward button. In the world of work, superior time management often separates the leaders from the followers. Saving time creates space and opportunity for more important things. Saving time wins races.

We should perhaps encourage our colleagues to manipulate time; to accelerate through the tactical and marginal tasks, while lingering on the critical creative and strategic questions. We should all endeavour to process at speed and reflect at leisure. Rather than be victims of time, we should make it our ally.

'Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.'
Aldous Huxley


'You're such a pinball, you know it's true.
There's always something you come back running to,
To follow the path of no resistance.
It's just a brief smile crossing your face,
Running speed trials standing in place.'
Elliot Smith, 'Speed Trials’ (S Smith)

No. 359