the philosophy of movement
“…in 1983 Craig Owens detected a similar posture among neo-expressionists, who were also confronted with the contradictory demands to be avant-gardist (“as innovative and original as possible”) and to be conformist (“to conform to established norms and conventions”.)” – Hal Foster, The Return of the Real
30 years later seems like dance/performance art/ live art (whatever you want to call it) is dealing with the same issue
Temporaries
by Ana Dubljevic, Dusan Brocic, Igor Koruga, Jovana Rakic Kiselcic, Ljiljana Tasic, and Marko Milic
14.9.2013
A few thoughts and words about a performance I saw and participated in this past Saturday in Studio 5 at the Uferstudios –
From the program – the performance’s aim is create “a space and ‘community’ to discuss and question problems of the current and potential local dance scene in Belgrade…” Another aim was “to form a temporary communicational community with the spectators”.
After the audience sat down on six little islands of blankets, one of the performers said that one side(or three of the islands) of the audience would play charades and the other side would receive snacks. When someone guessed the word or phrase, he or she was able to select a food item from a nearby cart. The food was also for sale (capitalism, anyone?!?) All fine and good, but she or he was not supposed to share the food with anyone else. The non charade playing side would then select which number from a list of nine cultural-artistic programs most fit the charade word. This process was repeated until each number of the list had been selected. Some of the words/phrases were – United We Stand, Readiness is All, Hospitality, Mediation.
The rules about how to get food from the cart changed slightly after some round. After I guessed the phrase, United We Stand, for example, I had to form a chain with my group to reach the cart which had been wheeled away from our seating area. I took a cake, two plates of sandwiches, and some plastic cups. Before I reached the cart, one of the performers wheeled the cart away even further. A quick and inadequate description of the piece, I know. But I do not want to recall the events for you. You should go see the piece if you can.
This piece, as it is about the conditions in Belgrade, made me, an English speaking American, think about growing up in a non-English speaking communist environment. The gesture used in charades to indicate that the word was English was the thumbs-down gesture. Thumbs down can be read as indicating bad or of little value. The gesture to indicate another language was to point behind one’s self with the thumb. If we are to read the thumbs down as “English is bad”, do we then read the other gesture as “All other languages are backwards or in the past”?
The random allocation of resources, i.e. who gets the food, at the beginning – a simulacrum of the granting process run by cities and governments, maybe?
The rule, which was pretty quickly broken, of not being able to share food with people in your group or between groups was supposed to create some discord and feelings of inequality, I am guessing.
The changing rules of how people are supposed to get food – a vestigial remnant of the shifting governments in the Balkan region, perhaps.
Although in the program it states that the piece “can confront serious and social art issues”, the piece did not really confront me with those topics. I could see how the topics were indicated, but the atmosphere was too comfortable for confronting serious issues. If the seating areas were raised and separated by lights so that audience members would have to traverse through a spatial and light barrier, people might be less likely to break the rules. If we had actually run out of time and not been able to guess the word in one round of charade, I might have felt more of an edge to the piece. If people who did guess the word and got to pick an item from the food cart were moved to a separate area so they would have to cross the stage to share their resource, they might be less likely to share. I wonder how the theater in Belgium will be arranged.
Due to time constraints, I was not able to stay till the end of the performance, so I do not know how it ended.
Three pieces of the Cultural-Artistic Program that I was most drawn to are the choreographed duet that was done once with round loaves of bread and another time with a different song and bananas; the accumulated line of people rocking forward and back. It could have stayed in that line longer, in my opinion; and the simulation of people at the starting line of a foot race.
I wish I could go to Kortrjik to see how the piece develops and how the audience participates.
If we look at the possible square meters that are possible surfaces for a corporeal kinetic performative event, we determine that there is a vast, nigh infinite number of potential spaces on Earth.
If we then compare this number of spaces to the number of spaces that are designated as theaters and are used in “site specific” performances, we see that the second number is vastly smaller, basically statistically insignificant.
Therefore any space we choose is a highly specific choreography.
Therefore every performance is site specific.
Below are quotes from the book Yoga and the Quest for the True Self by Stephen Cope. An interesting read. These quotes stood out for me as they connected to how I define and think about improvised performance. Maybe these thoughts will resonate with you, too.
Pg 12 – After a period of intentional disorganization, the self emerges reorganized
Pg 40 – …for I am an immovable cause that moves all things
Pg 42 – We are already inherently perfect
Pg 53 – The dance that results if the interplay of energy and consciousness or what yogis call lila – the divine play
Pg 62 – Unlike your Christian religion, for example, we don’t believe that the problem is sin, or guilt, or wrongdoing. It’s simply misidentification.
Pg 71 – the text book of immediate experience
Pg 72 – the renunciation of extrinsic sources of satisfaction
Pg 93 – It became alarmingly clear, for may of us, just how much the unconscious sense that “something is wrong” drives our behavior.
Pg 105 – The preoccupying question is no longer, ”What is wrong with this moment?” or “How do I change this reality so that it conforms with my ideals?” but, rather, “What is the nature of this moment-precisely? How can I examine it more deeply?”
Pg 122 – a nonreactive, nonjudgmental, quality of acceptance…the twin pillars of clear seeing and calm abiding
Pg123 – The mind then becomes an instrument for penetrating into the essence of things, for taking possession of, or assimilating, the real…an instrument of knowing that is nonreactive
Pg 135 – the preliminary practices of yoga are almost all about building the calmly abiding self
Pg 156 – The eyes with which we are seen become the eyes through which we see ourselves.
Pg 178 – “choiceless awareness”
Part 4 – The Spontaneous Wisdom of the Body
Pg 209 – yoga – the practice of being present for experience.
Pg 210 – breathe, relax, feel, watch, allow
Pg 214 – As we become absorbed in the witness, we’re free both to participate in and to stand apart from our experience.
Pg 215 – we must allow the process to happen without necessarily understanding it.
Pg 216 – to notice without judgement
Pg 216 – We can learn to live on the magnificient edge where anything can happen
Pg 228 – three important ways – developing the instruments of proprioception (body awareness), restoring conscious control, to the most refined centers of the brain, and penetrating the deep internal body.
Pg 250 – the mental and physical flexibility to track and adapt to the changing demands and input of the environment on a moment-by-moment basis.
Pg 252 – that yogis experiencing dhyana was primarily attentive to, and occasionally absorbed in, the pure perceptual features of the object of their attention
Pg 255 – “The image of a posture arises spontaneously on the mind. You wonder if it might happen. Sometimes it does, following you thoughts; and sometimes it doesn’t. It is completely beyond your volition.”
Pg 262 – When we have these ideas in our heads of “what is supposed to happen” in our bodies, we very often spend time looking for these experiences and feeling badly or inadequate when we don’t have them. In the meantime we miss what is really happening.
Pg 266 – to tune out distracting and irrelevant stimuli
Pg 303 – As Robert Frost said, “ Freedom means moving comfortably in harness”
The third iteration of ***** Hotel will be appearing in a couple weeks, at the GOlive Festival in London.
Sadly only four of the stars will be able to make it. Down 20% from the inaugural performance, but up 33% from the second performance.
I am interested to see how this latest constellation will perform. Again with a live musician, this time a percussionist. The first iteration had a musician who, if my memory serves me, was a bassist who used a kettle drum, a piano and a variety of small hand held instruments. The musician for the second performance is a cellist, Barnaby Tree. What intrigues me is the concept of melding rehearsal with performance. As the members of 5***** Hotel live in four different cities, they are not able to rehearse in the traditional sense. This geographic variation forces the group to rehearse in front of an audience.
When I performed with Nancy S. Smith, in 2008 I think it was, at SFDI, she told me of a rehearsal process with a group of experienced performers. They had agreed upon a score, which during the performance they all abandoned. Granted a score can be abandoned and everything is fine, but then there’s abandoned. Some performers ended up in the audience, some were singing. This is not to say that the performance was “good” or not, but I am relating this anecdote to illustrate the fact that when the lights go up and there’s an audience, plans and people change.
With the group ***** Hotel, because there is no rehearsal, there is no possibility of deviation. Personalities and plans can’t change from the studio time to the stage time. For me, if we are to use the three stages of creation to define an improvisation, this method of performance making is even closer to an improvised performance.
The moments of execution during the GOlive festival will be very close temporally to the moments of experimentation. The exploration stage has already been completed as the personnel, the location, the time of the performance, the costumes, etc., and the concept (open spontaneously composed performance) have already been determined. Looking more closely into the stage of execution, i.e., the performance, what will happen in front of the audience has yet to be determined. So within the execution stage, the three stages of creation as they relate to the performance, will be constantly evolving and informing each other.
To see how that exactly unfolds come to the Lion and Unicorn Theatre on the 26th and the 27th of this month
another version of ***** Hotel appeared in Budapest this past summer at the International Improvisation Festival in Budapest.
as appeared at University College Falmouth in March of 2013. for the video go here