Process Blog 4: February 15, 2015

Coming into representation. Mental Flickering. The Presence of the Body.

The improvisation score is now Inside and Outside, the internal eye and the external eye, oscillating between noticing the movements and noticing the images projected through the movements.

Tableaus that are arrivals. Am I trying to get 'to' a preconceived tableau, or am I just noticing when I happen to arrive at one? Accident or incident?

Awareness of projections, and awareness of representations and the implications of appearances…

I’m trying to generate words from a movement score using my mouth and vocal chords. I also try this with my face. I’m following sensations, letting them come into representation, either visually (with my face), or linguistically (with my mouth and vocal chords). This is an attempt to navigate via movement, and to let it carry me into the familiar, into context, or something I recognize from my mental archive. A simultaneous awareness of inside and outside.

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#1

Notice the axes. 

As you notice them, rotate around them, allowing movement to expand or contract in scale, degree, or distance.

Follow your attention, and try to notice your movements as they happen ‘to you’.

Plant, pivot, plant, pivot.

Dig down, build up, rotate under, dial across.

At the same time, become aware of your outer shapes.

What shapes are you making? What do they look like, or appear to be representing?

Peruse your image bank.

Whenever you arrive at a position that you think communicates something iconic, archetypal, or pedestrian, then pause.

During the pause, think about this state/place/picture. Does it have a name? Does it have qualities?

Continue.

#2

Notice your face.

Does it match your feelings?

Notice the sensations of your face, and following these sensations like a continuous unfolding. 

Like a pen dragging itself along paper without lifting. Holding its breath.

Stay continuous, try not to jump or skip over facial pathways.

What do you think your face is communicating?

Are there micro moments where a trajectory of communication feels clear to you?

Perhaps it matches your feelings.

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Other questions/observations:

What does the loss of the image do? At the end of the video, does the viewer project onto the black screen?

I’m working with shadows and perspectives against the wall. I love these. I’m going to follow this more in-depth. They are disorienting, and splinter the body and dance movements that happen between the moments of contact with the wall. It looks like I’m hanging at one point, and my hands are crustaceans.

Post New York I’m thinking about the present absence/an ontology of loss, shadows, and the formless form. Conversely, I’ve also been thinking about representation and its subtleties (both indexical and iconic) that are tied into this process of bringing consciousness to my inner world, and the implications of the content that comes through. Taking responsibility for what it looks like I'm doing... The words have inescapable meaning too. The body is constantly communicating. In moving forward, how can the choreographic structure I apply to this process bring more specificity to designing these subtleties? And what about materials, or corporeal 'materials'? How fleeting and untouched, or unedited, can they be? Thinking about Wabi-sabi, immateriality and emptiness, trace, imperfection, impermanence, transience…

lines of disappearance

the difference between imagined reality and perceived reality:

visualize a clear line through space, from a clear point of origin.

a heatball, an inch and a half at most.

imagine heatball, travelling along vector.

wait. 

it is vivid/ it is impossible.

wait. 

this is the only preparation.

wait. 

then thrust.

the body organizes itself (TRAining).

it is never the way we imagined. never.

the gap the leap the gap the leap.

the imagined gap and the felt leap.

the felt gap and the imagined leap.

song: an impossible unison duet with piano. bionic piano solo.

AS, A. Grant, and J. Male

Utopian Pizza, December 7th, 2014 at HUB 14

A free showing. An open house. RESERRRRCH that needs you.

Julia Male, Alicia Grant, and Andrea Spaziani, with input from the beautiful minds of Jen Hum, Brendan Jensen, Christopher Willes, Coman Poon, and Kaitlin Standeven. 

Sunday, December 7th, Hub 14, 6-7pm, $0

Epic Title Menu:

Towards the blur: thrusting from vague points of leadership.

Utopian consciousness: duets with projected creature selves.

Persons that ascribe: complicity in the production of difference.

Pizza dreams: the possibility of inhabiting the body differently.

AS, A. Grant, and J. Male

Studio Advisor Meeting #2 - Nov 20, 2014

Notes from conversation with Laura Gonzalez:

Cue the dramaturge. She wants to call it ‘The Possibility of Inhabiting the Body Differently’ or ‘Complicity in the Production of Difference’. What is difference? And how does difference affect the way one inhabits the body?

References: Jerome Bell/ Disabled Theatre, Company of wolves, Kristin Link later

There is now a methodology, and it’s rolling. I enter the space, a space, (any space?) and capture my voice/inner movements. I speak to implicit collaborators and viewers, I guide ghost dancers through a meditation on exiting and re-existing, I project a performance, and I allow my voice, my state, and the affect of the meditation to be revealed by my voice. Noticing aural difference.

Q: Is there a way to push this vocal work more? Consider the voice as movement, as dancing, as another part of the body. The words are not necessarily as interesting as the affected sounds. HOW the sounds are made provides a source, a blurry source, or a felt source. How can I push sounds rather than embody WORDS (the voice in the body, not the voice in the brain). How can I transgress the parallel lines between the voice, the body, and the image. Silence supports the voice as well.

Voice References: Dv8, Josette Bushell-Mingo: deaf theatre company

Note: Clear content gives collaborators drive and a sense of urgency: the same kind that dancers working for Dave St. Pierre possess. How does he do it? Sensing his impermanence? Urgency...

THE CONTENT. Find a way to identify this as clearly as possible. This will help me articulate my position and my questions to the audience. Cue the dramaturge. Clean my research.

Difference... its production, its emergence, the way it appeals to something we already possess.

The danger of not knowing what we don't know. Thrusting the subconscious through the skin and taking a look at it.

The video, audio, and performance complete each other. They have proximity. They are all projections. The video is fascinating, and could be used as OUR projections (the performers). The video as a way to ACTUALLY project our body. Consider how EDITING is also choreography.

In NYC:

A video, a performance, a sound meditation for ghost dancers. GET lots of headphones.

Things I learned from the December 7 showing:

- The arc as it was attempted, followed the gaze: travelling from inward, peripheral, and onto another body/organism as a projection medium/ strange mirror

- How to talk to an audience is critical as to the feedback I might find useful

- We (3 dancers) tried projecting onto each other – ‘an impossible duet’ of purposefully thrusting the subconscious outward, onto another person (strange mirrors). This section seemed to resonate most.

- We are enough. There doesn’t need to be linear instruction/ interpretation delivered in the audio, but I will want to make our different choices apparent: the audio, and the movements of the dancing bodies

- There is only one voice, but is it important to know it’s mine? What Happens to this voice is important

- Hearing my effort stimulates the viewer’s imagination

- How to increase ‘difference’: one of the artists has a headset with differently TIMED instructions. We see a delay. We see the same activity happen at different times, and also done differently. Can tracking this delay become difficult/unpredictable? (look up The Nature Theatre of Oklahoma piece in office cubicles)

Process Blog 3: November 15, 2014

Exiting, Re-Existing

Going into the dark with eyes open. Forging spaces for roaming: other ways of inhabiting the body and experiencing the imagination. Rebecca Solnit’s ‘Field Guide to Getting Lost’ is instigating…

The work is sitting in the experience of it: in action, in doing, in thinking about doing. The work is alive through the senses and their imagined capacities. Its state is one of ‘noticing yourself noticing’. The work produces the imaginary, and the audio scores offer little containers, hooks, or anchors, to rest on, or leap off from.

It’s important to me to share the work’s hypnotic capacity. It is a landscape that delivers the present through lost-ness: movement as sail, body as ship, wind as chance, improvisation, and invitation.

The relationship between perception and projection is still on my mind. Is there a way of initiating the audience, to let them experience perception, and/or notice projection before watching a performance of this work?

Some details:

My attempts at writing scores became too ‘of’ language/ instructional, as if separate from the movement they were meant to inspire. I found that in order to stay connected to the movement (so that it’s all dancing really) I needed to start by capturing audio recordings from within the process, from how I would guide the process in real time, and then allow written scores to emerge from there.

The recordings are made alone in the studio, with a microphone, and an implicit audience and implicit collaborators. I let myself sink into the activity – I think you can hear it in my voice – there’s a shift after the first few awkward minutes. A combination of self-talk, utterances, sounds from body movement, and guiding words for collaborators come out. These meditations are becoming the fabric of the work, both informing its inner landscape and overarching construction.

I re-made the Exiting/Re-Existing meditation, allowing myself to respond to characteristics of the room, and letting nonsensical stuff, thoughts, or stories come out. There are also specific references to times/dates/locations of the recording.

Here’s the full version:

For two consecutive days after making it, I had two groups of artists come in and try them out. The artists were generous, and stayed with the 90-minute meditation fully. Some things that came out:

1)   Discrepancies between details heard and actions experienced (ex/ when the audio references a leaf on the floor, one might be looking at an electrical socket instead). The slipperiness of language and identifiers was exciting to experience.

2)   The picture the audio guide animates within the space is lively to watch, even in the absence of a performing body. I think this is because there is enough detail presented aurally to follow the ‘ghost’ performer throughout the space, and imagine her path as she might have made the sounds contained in the audio. This kind of listening, leading to projected images, is interesting regarding how the senses operate collaboratively.

3)   It’s fun to wonder how the movement sounds were made. The suggestion of virtuosity is as potent, if not more, than live action. How can I push this? The suggestion of virtuosity…

4)   We, in the dance, are all doing the same thing, but HOW we chose to do it becomes fascinating to watch. Having access to the dancer’s instructions (via the audio material) makes this possible.

What if the audio scores are a way to demarcate the performance space, or qualify it as ‘site specific’? For example, a day or two before a performance occurs, I’d produce an audio meditation recording in situ. There could be references to characteristics of the space, its history, its previous function, its architecture, etc. included. It could be a past documentation of ‘noticing and interacting with characteristics of a space’ that is used to accompany a present performance about ‘noticing and interacting with characteristics of the mind’. Pixelated moments of noticing details that brings our constantly changing methods for noticing to our attention. Bringing strangeness to the familiar, or perhaps ‘initiating’ the audience to also notice what they’re noticing.

The scores function to activate the imagination, and project it onto the present time, space, or other people for strange encounters. What is unresolved for me is how far to take this projection. Does it imply a paranoid ‘otherness’ in how we (myself, the collaborators, the audience) look at each other, and does this gaze beget the production of more difference, or distance? But then again, can we ever really see or know another person, or does this work challenge the assumption that we can? I don’t want the work to create MORE difference between people, but maybe we can produce difference of another KIND – extreme difference as animated by the fictional – in order to bring us closer together: closer through a deepened understanding of how we are complicit in the PRODUCTION of difference.

The next few weeks are dedicated to churning out a trio, and a method for approaching this juicy problem. So far there’s lots of body snatching and swapping perceptive roles (between people, and within our own senses). Making strange mirrors, or the line of disappearance. I think the disappearance of identity is located here: in not knowing whether you’re in your own body, or you’re in the body inside the strange mirror.

There is an overarching score coming together, and I’ll use it to construct the bones of the trio. I put together a video (below) linking the improvised movement sections with the audio score. The score functions to explain the dancer’s internal monologue, but also maintains instructions for collaborators, and tips into the public realm (on a walk with my imaginary creature while holding a shared meditative activity).

I have a public showing coming up on November 22nd, and I’m considering how the performance environment and sequences of events might serve to initiate, invite, suggest, or guide the viewer towards these liminal territories. I’ll ask them. (I once saw a piece where the performer recited a poem about his divorce in the venue hallway, then handed out chocolates, and walked the audience across the stage before finding their seats – ‘Crotch’ by Keith Hennessey). I think there should be some kind of initiating activity like this. Perhaps the Peripheral Conversations score?

Next steps:

1) BETTER sound, MORE sound! My binaural mics haven’t arrived in the mail yet, so I’ll redo relevant audio recordings when I get them. I’m inviting a composer to help me out as well.

2) Think about how the video might serve the performance, and how the performance might serve the video. It think they need to be together, to enhance each other. To make visible an imagination that IS PRODUCING; to use the video to capture the view FROM the imaginary, as if my imagined counter-self could hold the camera. My projection is the Videographer. The video content follows the logic of this strange Videographer. Blurred subjectivity, blurred authorship.

3) Do the dance with others, make different interpretations visible, and make my experience less central. Also, I might ask collaborators to participate in leading the meditation, or record their own self-talk.

4) Think about extended applications outside the dance/performance, but still generated from the dance/performance. So far: Scores for Nightmares, and Peripheral Conversations (will be attempted November 22).

Here are a few more audio scores:

Crit Group C - my response

Crit group response: Oct 31, 2014

There were some common references within the feedback from my crit group that will be useful in moving forward with my project.

The general impression of the videos was that they are sketches, and with more development could stand alone as work, but could perhaps be interesting in combination with live performance. This relates to my goal: empathic change through shared kinesthetic engagement, and its implication of the live body in presence/performing for the audience. The majority responded to the close up shots as being more succinct in transmitting the dancer’s perspective and physical reality (as opposed to the shots with the space included). In regard to distorting/ disorienting this reality, using multiple camera angles to capture the same movement was proposed. I tried this in one of the split screen moments in the video, and I’d like to go deeper with this approach.

The audio was difficult to follow, perhaps because of the low sound quality. I’m addressing this by way of binaural mics, and perhaps I can attach them to various parts of the body, capturing the inner soundscape of the dance. Margaret brought up the dancer’s self-talk – there’s something about this idea that interests me. There’s a whole dialogue going on inside my head as I’m moving. It’s a kind of unintelligible dialogue between me and my body that I’d like to try to catapult OUT, and I’ll have to use my imagination to do it, which is the very thing I want to access: the HOW of producing imagination.

Ana brought up use of humour – a quality that emerges subtly in my work, and something she noticed over the residency in Berlin. In relation to disorientation, the disarming potential of humour could be utilized in relationship to my audience. I’ve always been inspired by clown, so perhaps a refresher in clown technique, and explicitly bringing it into the work could be both stimulating and helpful in creating the perceptive interruptions I’m looking for.

The fissures of sound, video image, and movement, are a through line that the group reflected back to me. In the meditation score Exiting/Re-existing, an activity of re-imagining the body plays into these notions of reconstruction, or a re-conceptualized body made of up strange composite parts. I might take this approach in considering how to merge all of these elements, and to address where the work lives. Perhaps it’s a collection of sound, live movement, text, and video. Perhaps they could have some kind of performative interplay that brings the audience into this strange visceral place that I’ve been experiencing in the making of the work.

Marion brought up a question about the Peripheral Conversation score, and how it might play out in a large group context. She asked if it was about telepathy, and it got me thinking about the important distinction between method and result. I’m not interested in what’s on the page, or any kind of accuracy in the content of the conversation that two people in this experiment might share. However, it’s the impossibility of accuracy, the feeling of telepathy but the factual differences, that I find interesting. But why? I think this relates back to projection. In engaging in a silent conversation, another mode of communication between bodies emerges. The signifiers could play into varying differences of meaning, depending on all kinds of factors. What is revealed through the process of ‘doing’ this activity is that one can only respond to an interpretation of what he/she projects ONTO the other person. There is no doubt a shared energy, but its emergence into language is a productive force of the participant onto his/her self. It isn’t accurate by any means, and is a vast territory for misinterpretation, and perhaps the formation of difference and prejudice, or assumptions based on cultural physical signifiers.

Lastly, Amy had some interesting questions in regard to improvisation: Do you consciously prepare? What ritual like elements are present (if any) in the way you enter an improvised moment? Can you tell when it’s working? Does it ever not work? These questions got me thinking about how to collaborate with others, how to specify my process, and how to guide others to access to my process. I don’t ask myself these questions because I’m working intuitively. There’s no need, because I’m accessing something I’m very comfortable accessing. But what are the terms, the words, the language of guiding someone else into these strange perceptual places with me? How can this language be extremely accessible? Maybe I’ll write a list of words/topics to avoid, and then build around that. We can’t ever mention Foucault, that might be at the top of the list. What else? 

Crit Group C - Oct 24, 2014

Hi KAMMALA,

Here are links to my proposal and process blogs one and two. However, only reference them if you feel you need to.

The coles notes: I’m dismantling the choreographic process to explore its expanded applications, starting with the inner experiences of the body, and taking them into social choreography. Goal = empathic change through shared kinesthetic engagement

I’m making a solo performance with extended splinter projects.

I haven’t left the studio yet, but have gotten close to the door.

So I’ve been making text and audio scores, improvised movement, guided meditations, and lots of videos from both the perspective of the dancer, and surveillance style shots reflective of me watching myself (in the spirit of meditation, self-examination, and documentation). I’m thinking about how sensuous experience can become the material for this project.

The work is situated in both the inner landscape of the dancer, and the media used to share her inner landscape. The goal is not to transmit the content of this landscape, but share its productive force: not to transmit the content of my dreams, but guide the viewer to PRODUCE her own dreams. How? I believe that starting from the body, or LOCATING perception, and then DISORIENTING this perception, is what makes for provisional scaffolding, or a state in which new ideas necessarily come to be. In this way, the performance event can become a situation where we (audience and performers) generate knowledge together. So, enter chaos, weird states, non-spaces, and a ‘utopian consciousness’ that makes us dream-up impossible alternatives to societal pathologies. The utopian production of alternatives that are so slippery we can’t remember their details. The production of hope, towards an indeterminate ‘what’.

In terms of my physical practice, I’ve been out-sourcing my choices/actions to what I consider ‘peripheral’ influences. In this way, the dances are ‘exorcised’ from the subconscious. These peripheral activities have taken shape as tasks/ scores/ritual practices whereby the more I focus on the activity, the less I’m able to orient myself within it (aka getting lost).

Here are a few examples:

                    1) Peripheral Sensation: Thrusting from vague points of leadership

2)   Peripheral Conversation score

Two participants are handed a pen and paper. They are asked to engage in a silent conversation, and write down responses to the other person on his/her paper. This paper may be kept private or shared. Agree on this beforehand.

Observations:

a) It can be turned into an interview, whereby one person only asks questions, and the other only answers. Then switch roles.

b) The linearity of language becomes skewed through writing. Writing becomes differently coherent as it soaks up body information.

c) Is it ethically problematic to have this conversation with unknowing participants? (I tried it on the way home on the streetcar. It felt a bit too invasive, but I liked wondering what my interviewees were doing, where they might be going, what their hopes for the future might be. Maybe this last question is the one that really matters)

d) This exercise is perhaps a response to one’s projection of him/herself onto the other, and a response to collectively experienced events within the conversation space. Common themes emerge however, so there may be some synchronicity going on as we read into each other's vibe.

3) I compiled a video with audio from a guided meditation I made. I’m playing a bit with locating and disorienting perception by positioning the camera from within the dance, splitting the right and left eye, and what I call ‘the line of disappearance’: what is lost between the eyes, or the camera frames, or the audio segments for example.

Questions/thoughts:

1) The videos were only documentation until now, but I’m starting to think the work is living within them. Did the videos transmit any kind of physical response for you? Would a live performance be more satisfying?

2) Any thoughts on how to transfer this material outside the studio, on working with collaborators, or public proposals? I’m going to try Peripheral Conversations for a large group, in a park or some other public space. I'm also coming up with a score for nightmares (step one is to eat pizza before bed). 

3) Any thoughts on how to capture the inner perspective of the dancer? I’ve just rented a GoPro camera, and binaural microphones, and I’m thinking about where to place the camera

4) OR IGNORE THE ABOVE QUESTIONS AND DO THIS: If you want to try out a score, here’s the audio for a meditation on re-imagining the body, or try the Peripheral Conversation score above. They take time, only do them if you’re interested, and I’d love to know about your experience.

Studio Advisor Meeting #1 - Oct 16, 2014

Laura Gonzalez and I had a chat over tea. The goods:

Things to consider:

- Documentation (are these sketches that could become something else? Or are they documentation, implying they ARE already something else)

- The placement of the camera

- Guiding movement through visualization

- ASMR and ‘inner sounds’

Questions:

- Where does my work lie? Maybe I don’t know yet. I think it lies in the BODY. It’s still inside my own body. But the camera is a serious participant. Am I thinking visual material?

- What happens when there’s failure and the score is impossible? Text power.

- Can you really share reading?

- When and how are we aware?

- How do we dream?

Epiphanies:

- Re: awareness of our own inner body: attempt to ‘locate instinct’ and then rotate it by a few degrees. Disorient in order to re-orient towards something unpredictable or impossible. Re-orientation as a productive/generative strategy.

- “I only know I know nothing”: as an experiment, put myself in the position of not knowing. How do I locate knowledge when I don’t already have it? A strategy to better understand how I might lead others. Try drumming. (I’m also attending a La Pocha Nostra workshop next week. It will be all kinds of not knowing.)

- Get into a strange zone (also good audition tip) to find what I have to give

- I don’t want to share the content of my dreams, but instigate the production of dreams (re: pizza for nightmares). When collaborating, people may ask ‘tell me how I should dream/ is this right?’

References:

- Martin Arnold (re: editing as dancing)

- La Ribot

- Llamame Mariachi (re: camera as appendage)

- Joseph Quimby (re: music compositions from sounds of dancers bodies) https://vimeo.com/77819157

- Bill Viola (re: ASMR and inner sounds, underwater for example)

- Paul Taylor’s Esplanade (re: running for a bus/integrating pedestrian movement) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHkciz_yYYI

- Do It: exhibitions curated by different people, all instruction based and other artists fulfill the activities http://doit2013.org/

- Two Impossible Films http://marklewisstudio.com/films/

- Yvonne Rainer’s writing on pedestrian movement (learn a lot about dancing by watching someone run for a bus) re: my interest in watching the physicality of a conversation

- Jerome Bell and Dv8 (re: disabilities)

- A book recommended by Chris Danowski: What we see when we read – about the experience of reading (phenomenology) includes maps, diagrams, etc – to look at how we read as an expanded thing – can you really share reading?

- Theatre of the Oppressed, Suzuki (re: scores and physical training)

To Do

- Read more scores. Try doing scores by others, and try writing my own

- Consider what I want to get out of the winter residency (performance, when/how to share my work and what kind of feedback would be useful to me)

- Re-read my proposal and give it an edit. It is becoming more specific (!)

Process Blog 2: October 15, 2014

Continue Discontinue/ Trying to leave the room and enter the collective

It feels as though I'm sinking deeper into the subtleties of this practice, and it’s becoming more personal. The closest I've come to escaping the room has been through imaginary portals, and the construction of another self as I can see it reflected on every surface I look at, or look through, including other people. A soft projection metaphor. What I imagine my other self to be is shapeless, shifting, and ungraspable. What is useful to me is not trying to inscribe this entity, or define its qualities, but engage in whatever might exist beyond its qualities. Vibe, magic, affect, sense. What is useful to me is developing a methodology that produces imagination; that stimulates phantasy-making. A space that produces alternatives when activated by human engagement. A space of utopian consciousness, that has nothing to do with reacting to the world as we know it, or anything anthropocentric, but to sensing the world as we can’t know it. By mining the gaps in our perceptive faculties, we might glimpse an impossible periphery. A focal point that disappears as soon as we focus on it. Something at an immeasurable distance, much too close to see. This is not a fictional body, or the body re-constructed, this is a dis-engagement of the senses towards an unfamiliar body, an unfamiliar worldview that doesn’t pan out to see more, but turns in on itself, implodes, and remembers the body as the first site of resistance, the first site of communication, and as a fully inhabited, painfully empathetic space that can’t escape its own authenticity.

What to do with this body, these limbs, this brain, a left and right eye? How can a territory of sensuous experience become material? How can this material be accessed by all participants in the performance engagement? Start with a safe space, a located space, the familiar, the calm, the centre. Start with self-perception exercises/modes/methods that reveal the self to the self, and then dial outwards. Start with a solo, and let its striations reach outwards to the collective. Allow platforms for future collective engagement emerge from the solo practice.

This is not an escape, but an expedition into lines of disappearance, of duality, of motion sickness, of forgetting language, memory, trauma, ability, and ambition. It is total present, and the more present it becomes, the less ‘present’ has any conventional meaning.

Peripheral Conversations (bypassing language, entering projection) aka Listening

Two participants are handed a pen and paper.

They are instructed to have a silent conversation, and write down responses to the other person on his/her paper.

This paper may be kept private or shared. Agree on this beforehand.

From Peripheral Conversations, Oct. 3, 2014

Observations:

1) It can be turned into an interview, whereby one person only asks questions, and the other only answers. Then switch roles.

2) The linearity of language becomes skewed through writing. Writing becomes differently coherent as it soaks up body information.

3) Is it ethically problematic to have this conversation with unknowing participants? (I tried it on the way home on the streetcar. It felt a bit too invasive, but I liked wondering what my interviewees were doing, where they might be going, what their hopes for the future might be. Maybe this last question is the one that really matters)

4) This exercise is perhaps a response to one’s projection of him/herself onto the other, and a response to collectively experienced events within the conversation space. Common themes emerge however, so there may be some synchronicity going on as we read into each other's vibe.

From Discrepancies Between Left and Right (aka The Line of Disappearance) Sept. 18, 2014

Stare at an object.

One that’s no wider than the distance between your eyes.

Focus your eyes on that object.

Approach the object until your focus becomes blurry, wide, and split.

Slowly reach your hand behind the object, until your fingers appear on the other side.

Notice parts of your hand disappear, while the whole sensation of your hand remains.

From Peripheral Mapping, Oct. 8, 2014

Enter any physical space, indoors or outdoors.

Look at an object in the space.

Focus on that object.

Slowly allow our focus to soften and widen.

Select something in your peripheral vision and move towards it.

Focus on this new something as you gain proximity.

Stop moving when your focus becomes clear.

Repeat until you feel like you understand the space.

Draw a map from memory.

From Exiting/Re-Existing Movement Meditation, Oct. 10, 2014

From Walking on the Ceiling (outsourcing sensation through the virtual) Sept. 17, 2014

Locate a mirror bigger than the size of both your feet.

Hold the mirror in front of you, reflective side up, and peer into it.

Angle the mirror so you can see the ceiling, but not see a reflection of your own face.

Slowly walk around the room. Be cautious on stairs.

From Prefixes as Navigation

Is it possible to start with conceptualizing a change, or a modification, before whatever action it is attempting to modify can be identified?

A dance/body proposal:

Generate a list of prefixes using any means available (memory, internet)

Engage in cathartic improvised movement of any kind, keeping in mind one of the prefixes from your list. 

(You may use music, alcohol, heavy breathing, shaking, youtube, or any other influence that might help initiate cathartic movement.)

Allow this prefix to inform your movement.

As you move, keep an external eye on yourself.

As soon as you can identify an action, give it a name, and write it beside the prefix from your list.

Continue exploring the shades of this action, and its modification.

Pick a new prefix and continue.

See video clip examples:

(04:52 Pivot/Trans:pivot)

(07:30 Continue/ Dis:continue)

(09:25 Plant/ Re:plant)

Other prefixes that have emerged:

Thrust/ Sub:thrust

Magnetize/ Anti:magnetize

Symetricize/ Inter:symetricize

Throw/ Pre:throw

Pause/ Semi:pause

Whirl/ Un:whirl

Spcify/ Un:specify

Try/ De:try

Post/Trans:post

Video Trial, October 15, 2014

A collection of movement ideas, set to audio excerpts from Exiting/Re:existing

Movement explorations include: using the camera to capture the dancer’s perspective and her peripheral vision, the line of disappearance, interrupting habitual perception, stillness as accident, thrusting from vague points of leadership, prefixes, surveillance/projection/the eye, and rough ideas on presenting some of these ideas using video.

Guidance Committee Meeting #1 - Sept 21, 2014

with Angeliki Avgitidou and Laura Gonzalez

Upon discussion, the word ‘Utopia’ to describe my direction was questioned due to its political connotations, and how it perhaps doesn’t come across as convincing enough. However, other characteristics surrounding my interest in this word seem to be more effective points of entry: non-space, evading representation, perception and liminality, and catalyzing events to which I cannot control the outcome. I’m interested in generating a landscape where I lead collaborators towards something unknowable, towards rifts within, and the production of, imagination: Utopia as ‘non-place’, not necessarily ‘good-place’, which could open up to any possibility, any flows that come from perceptive, or perspective, shifts.

I’m thinking about how these shifts could become a methodology, and/or how sensuous experiences could become the material of this work. I’m still mostly working alone, and I also put out an open call to collaborators, to which Laura and Angeliki gave me good feedback. Some questions I’m still tackling are: Is this endeavor personal or collective? If collective, how do I plan to lead the group? (remembering that when collaborators respond to an open call, they’re looking for something too) and perhaps I might consider a committed group of collaborators.

In response to the archival video and text score I provided before the meeting, Laura questioned how these elements might be integrated. This also made me return to Angeliki’s question surrounding documentation, and how the documentation of my process could become its own form. She also pointed out that I might be careful with departures into other media, and make sure that what I do is useful for me in deepening my own practice. Whatever I end of producing through this exploratory process (video, text, sound, performance), I want to make sure that it is still in some way ‘dancing’, or comes from this place of shared sensuous experiences framed by choreography.

Process Blog 1: Sept 19, 2014

Over the last 2 weeks, I’ve been working on ‘Invisible Mediums of Persuasion’: the inner landscape that provokes movement and stimulates a point of departure. Following my interest in chance procedures and indeterminacy, I’ve become excited about utopias, or non-places, and the prospect of navigating towards unknowable, or unattainable outcomes, spaces, configurations, etc. I’m thinking about how the moving body, the performance arena, and possible splinter projects in other media (film, sculpture), can become utopian proposals. I’m thinking that utopia is the umbrella under which a multitude of forms/disciplines/media can co-exist via some kind of proximity. I think this perspective will help me make something other than performances.

The impossibility of constructing utopia is affecting how I’m considering collaboration. I just sent an open invitation to a group of fellow artists (of various media) to show up whenever they feel like it. The only instructions are to participate in some way (watching is also participating), and to share any kind of documentation/ archive they might capture during the rehearsal. I’m working on a series of instructions and questions that serve as points of departure to activate an open, improvised terrain to collaborate within. These instructions are to be interpreted by whoever shows up at the studio, and any interpretation is valid. I’m looking forward to seeing how this goes.

The score I arrived at today is a 2-hour meditation that combines some of the practices I’ve been developing in ‘peripheral aesthetics’: improvising with peripheral vision, sound, and sensation. In each instance, the doer’s focus is simultaneously transfixed on an activity, while cues for that activity become muddier and harder to grasp. It’s as if a deepened engagement in the activity makes it more difficult to orient yourself within the activity, diluting perspectives of the body and making space for an imaginary, ‘utopian’ body.

I’ve not perfected the wording, but here’s the score so far:

1)  Emptying the body

a. Using slow, continuous movement, peel your skin off onto the floor

b. Free of your skin, whip all of your body fluids, organs, and tissues onto the walls and ceiling

c. Free of all liquids, hold challenging positions that fatigue the muscles. Sense their fibers break off and crumble into dust piles around the room

d. Only bones, stand and maintain a stacked position. See your body spread around the room, walls, floor and ceiling. As soon as your skeleton becomes unfixed, collapse to the floor

2) Configure a new Utopian body

a. Keeping the eyes closed, start to move across the room

b. Invent new eyes, new distensions and forms of the body, imagine reproductive systems, sensations, locomotion, etc

c. Make a dance of opening and closing the gaze, wherever your new utopian eyes are, and construct a picture of the room.

d. (at this point there is only open exploration, as language no longer exists as formerly understood)

3) Return

a. Using your hands, slap the body on the right and left sides

b. Alternating constantly, move from the hips down the legs, up the sides, the arms, and the head

c. Stop the feel the reverberations, and use this sensation to bring you back into your body in the room

d. Open your eyes and see your Utopian body in front of you. It is everywhere you look, opposite to your gaze

e. Dance a duet with your fellow creature. Follow its thrusts, and wiggles. Use peripheral vision to see the whole creature as well as your own body.

Here are a few videos. The first is thrusting from foreign, physical points of leadership, and the second is a duet between my imaginary utopian body/creature and me.

There’s something about outsourcing my experiences to a task, or to the imagination, that is helping me break away from the patterns, sequencing, and perspectives that are so ingrained. I’m excited to go deeper, and also try some of these ideas with a larger group.

thrusting from foreign points of origin

duet with my utopian other

HUB 14 Studio Schedule - Fall 2014

Here's my studio schedule for the next 4 months.

I will consider the studio an open house, and guests are invited to participate, watch, or hangout at any time. Everyone is welcome, no dance experience required. Photos and video are permitted, but only if you send me copies.

All rehearsals will take place at Hub 14 and the surrounding neighbourhood. Rehearsals marked * will take place at IGAC's studio at Artscape Youngplace.

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*sept 9: 9am-12pm

sept 11: 3:30-6:30pm

sept 12: 3:30-6:30pm

*sept 16: 9am-12pm

*sept 17: 3-6pm

sept 18: 12-4pm

sept 19: 10am-1pm

*sept 23: 9am-12pm

*sept 24: 3-6pm

oct 1: 4-7pm

oct 2: 1-4pm

oct 3: 3-6pm

oct 8: 3-6pm

oct 9: 12-3pm

oct 10: 3-6pm

oct 15: 3-6pm 

oct 16: 1-4pm

oct 17: 1-4pm 

oct 23: 12-3pm (showing 1)

nov 5: 3-6pm 

nov 6: 10am-1pm

nov 7: 10am-1pm

nov 12: 3-6pm

nov 13: 10am-1pm

nov 14: 10am-1pm

nov 19: 3-6pm

nov 20: 10am-1pm

nov 21: 10am-1pm

nov 22: 6-9pm (showing 2)

dec 3: 3:30-7:30 pm

dec 4: 3:30- 7:30pm

dec 5: 3:30-7:30pm

dec 6: 5-9pm (showing 3)

MCP501 Proposal Year 1

01 Adaptive Presence: expanded applications of choreographic structures.

02 Andrea Spaziani, and a fluctuating cast of volunteer performers in Toronto, Canada at Hub 14 (www.hub14.org)

03 Laura Gonzalez (studio), Angeliki Avgitidou (research)

03.A  Please check off all areas that relate to your work:

Creative Fiction and Experimental Non-fiction (in relationship to the body), Language/Image, Mediation, Liminality, Performance Activism, Other or additionally: Control/ Agency, Chance, Networks, Ritual and Transformation, Anatomy and Astronomy

04 Description of proposed project or body of work – practical element

By dismantling the choreographic process, I will investigate expanded applications, new possibilities for interconnectivity, and the potential spaces in which dance can exist. I will develop a series of improvisational scores that reference shared experiences of the body, and investigate ‘how’ to navigate these experiences in order to build a foundation for the co-production of meaning.

I will collaborate with a fluctuating cast of participants (not necessarily dance practitioners) and deconstruct four choreographic elements: visible and invisible mediums of persuasion, the performance environment, and the aftermath (that which follows rifts in perception). I will craft ‘discoverable’ dances that move towards entropy, and necessarily towards the production of provisional strategies. This is where I believe new kinds of knowledge can be uncovered.

In studio, dramaturgical materials will be used to generate neutral, choreographic directives as entry points for action, and setting-up protocols for interacting with the space, the body, other people, and the imagination (instructions/language, meditations, simulacra, fictional abilities of the body, expanded uses of the senses, proximities, number systems, healing, etc). Throughout, I will surrender aspects of my artistic control over to the process, and allow the process to determine its own content, tipping towards an aesthetic of chaos, the peripheral, and the inarticulate.

Examples of daily studio proposals:

- Durational video improvisation: ‘Soft body, hard surface’ - have a different physical encounter with a chair every day for 365 days

- Physical improvisation: send and receive messages using the body as both projector and receiver

- Physical improvisation: take on the physical sensation of whatever is in your visual field. Transfer that sensation to a part of your body. Continue until sight and sensation are indiscernible.

- Use found objects to create a habitat for constructive rest. Count the found objects, and repeat a movement ‘x’ number of times 

05 Description of project report or thesis – written element

Academic and practical research will include ‘how’ to collaborate with an ensemble, philosophical and practical approaches to navigation, and site-specific and social choreography. This research will address expanded applications of choreographic structures, ‘how’ affect and meaning can be co-produced collectively, and ‘how’ choreographic structures can lead towards emancipatory expressions.

The choreographic process will be used as a prototype for a deepened understanding of human interrelationships, and how structures that organize movements (city planning, landscapes, architecture) can give insight into the resulting activities of social ‘bodies’ (political, cultural).

At the heart of this investigation is my desire to expose the limitless possibilities for being, when the borders of ability, physical and social segregation, and repressive control can be transgressed, if even for a moment. I want to make art that pushes the experiences of the body towards an end point (perhaps into the fictional realm), and towards empathic change through kinesthetic engagement.

06 Anticipated results, e.g. documentation, performance, script, intervention, website, exhibition, book, journal

Anticipated results: a performance, written documentation of research journals and interviews, archival and/or performance videos, photos, and drawings. Documentation of feedback from participants will also be documented.

I intend for this material to eventually culminate in a cohesive text/ body of writing.

07 Initial bibliography for written element

1) Banes, S (ed.) & Lepecki, L (ed.). (2007) The Senses in Performance. New York: Routledge.

2) Bishop, C (ed.). (2006) Participation: Documents in Contemporary Art. Cambridge: MIT Press.

3) Burrows, J. (2010) The Choreographer’s Handbook. New York: Routledge.

4) Butler, J. (2005). Giving an Account to Oneself. Fordham University Press.

5) Cage, J. (1973) Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press.

6) Clough, PT & Halley, J. (2007) The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham: Duke University Press.

7) Forsythe, W. (2010) Improvisation Technologies: A Tool for the Analytical Eye. Hatje Cantz.

8) Garcia, T. (2014) Form and Object: A Treatise on Things, trans. MA Ohn & J Cogburn. Edinburgh: University Press.

9) Hewitt, A. (2005) Social Choreography: ideology as performance in dance and everyday movement. Durham: Duke University Press.

10) Highwater, J. (1978) Dance: Rituals of Experience (3rd ed). New York: Oxford University Press.

11) Holmes, B. (2009) Escape the Overcode: Activist Art in the Control Society. (web) http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2009/01/19/book-materials/

12) Iverson, M. (ed.). (2010) Chance: Documents of Contemporary Art. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

13) de Keersmaeker, AT & Cvejic, B. (2012) A Choreographer’s Score: Fase, Rosas danst Rosas, Elena’s Aria, Bartok. Mercatorfonds.

14) Larson, LB (ed.). (2014) Networks: Documents of Contemporary Art. Cambridge: MIT Press.

15) Lepecki, A. (2006) Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement. New York: Routledge.

16) Martin, R. (1998) Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics. Durham: Duke University Press.

17) Negarestani, R. (2008) Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials. Re.Press.

18) Osho. (2004) Meditation: The First and Last Freedom. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.

19) Phelan, P. (1993) Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. New York: Routledge.

20) Rainer, Y. (2006) Feelings are Facts: A Life. Cambridge: MIT Press.

21) Rethorst, S. (2012) A Choreographic Mind: Autobodygraphical Writings. Helsinki: Edita Prima Ltd.

22) Spangberg, M. (2011) Spangbergianism. Gargzdai: Print It.

23) Stuart, M. (2011) Are We Here Yet?. Presses Du Reel.

24) Zizek, S. (2014) Event: Philosophy in Transit. UK: Penguin.

Other References:

John Britton, Self with Others http://ensemblephysicaltheatre.wordpress.com/duende/

Arakawa and Gins, conceptual architecture http://www.reversibledestiny.org/making-dying-illegal-architecture-against-death-original-to-the-21st-century/

Margie Gillis, dance and mediation http://www.learninglandscapes.ca/component/content/article/31

http://www.journals.elsevier.com/emotion-space-and-society

Gomez Pina, Guillermo. Exercises for Rebel Artists

08 Research statement – hypothesis or question you pose

The choreographic process can be used as a prototype for a deepened understanding of human interrelationships, the activities of social bodies, and how to produce empathic change through shared kinesthetic engagements.

09 Formulate entire project in 2-3 meaningful sentences.

The choreographic process will be used as a prototype for a deepened understanding of human interrelationships, and how structures that organize movements can give insight into the resulting activities of social ‘bodies’. At the heart of this investigation is my desire to expose the limitless possibilities for being, when the borders of ability, physical and social segregation, and repressive control can be transgressed, if even for a moment. I want to make art that pushes the experiences of the body towards an end point (perhaps into the fictional realm), and towards empathic change through kinesthetic engagement.