dear all
a good reply from Jeroen Fabius reached us, mentioning the writings and
critique by Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink on Bishop's and Rancière's theories, and
as I glance at the text – "Nomadic Theatre. Staging Movement and Mobility in
Contemporary Performance" – I see a segment that is titled "fractured
reciprocity" and that gives me pause to think, about what we might have always
assumed the relations to be - in dance or theatre - to our audience, namely
some form of face-to-face, involving exchanges of energies, an ecology of
vibrations and resonance and yet also a paradoxical symmetry/asymmetry,
movement for a perceiving audience who can reciprocate (and mirror the movement
in empathy) or refuse, become entranced, activated to live in the poetics of
the flow of movement. Take up the bodies.
The movement is also sound, and light, and so much more, the tactile kinetics
and the absorptions and refractions and so on.
we lean into it, as I recall Jeannette again and again (her close up metaphor,
we bend forward if we do not have opera glasses). (that's from the other side
of the stage. onstage, do we lean into our audience, do we see them, or are the
lights in our eyes, and there's dark off there. Choreographic objects, when we
all climb into them have different lighting. but i've also stumbled there.
What if the close up becomes something blurry and unreadable (Jaime del Val)?
We have not much talked about affect here, disturbed affect, angry affect,
and audience behavior, how come? and what is broken in the old observational
perspective (overlooking, from static or fixed perspective, if ever it existed,
to the multiperspectival, the moving eyes never standing still, the camera eyes
and the sound object perceptions that can listen deep or reduced or otherwise
without seeing/knowing the instrument), what becomes fractured?
Nibbelink on the first page recalls the collective Rimini Protokoll presenting
"Call Cutta", a mobile phone theatre play. <<In this ambulatory performance, a
single spectator navigates
the streets of Berlin’s Kreuzberg district, guided by a call-centre employee in
Calcutta, India, who provides directions over the phone. The mobile phone
connects the two places
of performance, and interactively engages a single performer and a single
spectator in a conversation about the local particularities at both ends of the
line. Call Cutta is presented
as theatre, it surely can be considered as such – as both the performer and the
spectator are joined in a situation that is distinctively staged – yet it
radically plays with the conventions of theatre.
In Call Cutta, spectators have become mobile; they have left the traditional
seat in the (darkened) auditorium and instead are engaged in an ambulatory
performance.>> .....
[Zunge zeigen, the late Günter Grass once drew.]
and here perhaps a good moment to insert latest writing ("The Layering of
Empires") from Jaime del Val on a performance he did in New York, ambulatory
on the streets......
http://metabody.eu/the-layering-of-empires/
and an amazing trajectory is visualized in this brief blog essay as well, you
will enjoy the images from Loie Fuller to Stelarc.
what is perhaps worth debating, as I asked previously, is whether we can
imagine a posthuman dance of the kind Jaime posits, the "posthuman aboriginal,
postqueer technoshaman, extraterrestrial metabody, lightfooted and
imperceptible," with "indeterminate becomings in the movements". Well, I guess
Jaime just did it.
as I read Jaime's questions of the post-anatomical, Stelarc shows up this
afternoon in London and hands me the new brochure they printed of his AAL:
"Alternate Anatomies Lab" (www.alternate-anatomies.org). We laugh a lot
and talk even more, and I pose questions about the after-anatomies, and he
patiently speaks of 3d printers and ambidextrous arms and alternate operational
systems and multiple agencies.
Now I find myself glancing at my poor arm, the pre-ambidextrous one.
regards
Johannes Birringer
________________________________________
Jeroen Fabius [schreibt]
Monday, April 27,
Dear Johannes
Thank you for mobilising this debate. I am thinking a lot of Brian Massumi's
Thinking-feeling text he wrote already a long while ago, suggesting to start
thinking differently about perception first, and then to think interactivity
through better.
A beautiful and thorough development and critique of Bishop and Ranciere can be
found here: http://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/310682 the dissertation by
Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink. I find it a wonderful delicate filtering and
balancing of a lot of the arguments that have been presented in recent years in
relation to immersion, participation etc
Kind wishes
Jeroen
_______________________________
Van: "Alexandre Achour" <a.achour@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
I will take some time to think and look into the materials that you generously
shared with us.
I will answer shortly
Best
Alexandre
Le 23 avr. 2015 à 19:26, Johannes Birringer <Johannes.Birringer@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
a écrit :
hello all
thanks for your reply, Alexandre, and as long as no one objects, we can carry
on, hoping others will still join.
The notion of expanded choreography (procedural design), and social
choreography is now firmly on the table, I agree. And "participation" is
perhaps also ripe for re-thinking. I would love to dwell, on a practical
level, on "procedures" as design (having just worked all day with my young
digital performance students on preparing their final shows tomorrow), but
also look beyond, yes, the "strictly artistic and aesthetic realm of
dance/performance" although many here on our list perhaps still work in that
older terrain.
On a reflective level, expanding thinking about rule-based systems, or
auto-poietic systems, or artistic realms and then again other realms where we
might work organizationally, disseminatively, allow me to mention briefly
four "readings" I undertook when working on our "metakimosphere" installation
(http://people.brunel.ac.uk/dap/metakimosphere.html). maybe these angles
open up other avenues.
1. asymmetry (mentioned before here). Marije Baalman at STEIM, a member of
the Metabody project ensemble, published some notes in February on "making
participation in
interactive environments relevant"
https://github.com/sensestage/interaction_writings/blob/master/relevant_participation.md
they are interesting for many of us who work with installations and
invitations to others to follow / consider following procedures.
2. Now, historically, I was interested in finding a book by Thomas Dreher,
"Performance Art nach 1945: Aktionstheater und Intermedia" (2001), which
quite acurately notices how observation (static audience observer position)
in the history of art reception was long undermined and changed (he looks at
action art, happenings, and multiperspectivalism and beginnings of
intermedia, way back in the 1950s).
3. Historically now, thinking of expanded choreography, Alexandre, going
further into what you imply, I looked at an article by Jaime del Val (whom
Tommy mentioned last week), where in 2009 he speaks of a "pan"
(panchoreographic) or what perhaps was meant by "social choreography", yet
most interestingly proposes a kind of undoing of the camera, framing, focus,
and anatomy itself: "Undoing Anatomy:
Resisting Global Choreographies in the Capitalism of Affects" (GRAMMA, 17,
265-77). I cite his abstract:
Underlying the imaginaries staged and projected in texts, theater pieces,
video, cinema and publicity there are certain anatomic constructions of
the senses that are the conditions of possibility for those imaginaries. Such
sensory anatomies underlie implicit power mechanisms in late capitalist
societies, which operate at the level of the production of affect and desire
of consumers as well as of the concealment of global violence
through which the economic system operates. I will propose a framework of
analysis of such power operations through the analysis of movement,
and more precisely of what I will call the panchoreographic: a set of
technological devices of global distribution that disseminate discrete,
standard choreographies in bodies, thus contributing to the production and
dissemination of standard affects. Finally, I will show some examples
of the work developed by REVERSO in recent years that aims at the radical
redefinition of the sensory anatomies that underlie media culture
and information society, aiming at the production of a post-anatomical
relational body.
In his work he explores micromovement and microsex/skin palpitations that are
rather wonderful and odd as he of course also tries to disrupt "affective"
registers and procedures, and
the discussion of undoing camera and the surveilled/gendered/disciplined and
procedured body decidedly moves into the political, into issues of violence,
control, power.
4. post-intimate relations, Jaime asks for, and post-anatomical (illegible)
bodies.....!
Easier said than done, but the experiments with such disalignments are
on-going in the Metabody project, and I am sure Yacov and Henry also tried it
in their work with virtual avatars. In a brief note I received from Yoko
Ishiguro today, responding to my telling her of our discussion on
participation here, she says:
Audience participation is a fashionable but thoroughly big issue for
contemporary performances nowadays as Claire Bishop and many others claim. I
myself make one-on-one performances and always have to think about it -my aim
is not to make 'one-on-one performances' but to think about the distance and
the relationship between an audience member and a performer with means of
performance so one-on-one style is just a result.
Talking about audience participation and photos, I have my one-on-one
repertoire that audience member can see my dance performance only through
their photo shootings.
http://ishiguroyoko.info/iroiro/Flashes.html
.
much to ponder once we start to unpack notions of intimacy, affect and
alignment, breaking the camera; what do you think?
respectfully,
Johannes Birringer
________________________________________
[Alexandre Achour schreibt]
.Hello Johannes,
I understand your last comment, I’m not a theoretician myself, but these
paragraphs from Bojana, and Ana’s book help me to think of choreography as a
wider term that doesn’t necessarily limits itself to the design of movement,
they think of choreography as a design of procedures, and in this way
procedures « define actions and attitudes in general, which allows us to
treat them as a logic, a thinking model, an ideological apparatus. » And as
Bojana says, « Unpacking the aforementioned registers of procedurality may
help us understand what choreography means when it is used outside the
strictly artistic and aesthetic realm of dance/performance. » this is how I
understand this term of « expanded » choreography, and that’s why I thought
to bring this in our conversation..
Let me know what you think,
I had difficulties to answer to all the posts, when I have more time, I will
try..
Best wishes to all,
Alexandre Achour
