Considering ...

considering seeing,  considering doing,  or feeling...

considering dancing again...

life versus liveness

Looking at the ways in which the critical discourse has shifted from a
focus on “liveness” to one on “life.” What, we ask, can theatre and
performance studies scholars learn from a critical inquiry into
biopolitics in order to examine the ways in which “life” seems to have
become the main currency of contemporary politics?





Performance and (Bio)politics: From Liveness to Life

the Viewpoint technique

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viewpoints
Anne Bogart

stealing Acconci and Gray

‘I am the agent of an action and at the same time, the receiver of the action, “I” initiate an action that ends up in “me”. (Acconci, V, 1979)

Stolen from Eszter Salamon and Bojana Cvejic interview - 6M1L project

on composition techniques-

''Performers had to compose with the memory of precise sensations - composing means writing a score while moving, this was a technique, demanding intensive concentration on the present. The performers were composing with their sensations and imagination and they got lost each of them had a strategy of how to go back to it.''

''Thinking arises from the impossibility of thought. Thought arises from the impossibility of thinking.''

Representing the Human Paper Abstract

Bodies in Motion: working through plurality

This collaborative paper aims to address questions regarding the notion of plurality as experienced in the performer body. Through practice and writing we attempt to account for such a body, and address wider questions regarding the body and identity in performance.

As professional performance-makers working independently through practice-as-research (in a doctoral context at Middlesex University) we have undertaken an on-going collaboration based on our mutual concern for the process of embodying our research. This article aims to frame certain tendencies, which occur when working with others in the studio. The set of conditions for this on-going project has provided a good terrain to break down some of the mechanisms of performance making, and therefore allowed us to illuminate some aspects of contemporary performance making.

Drawing on philosophical approach to performance making including William James‘ Radical Empiricism, we discuss in detail our shared practice, and attempt to find strategies that will allow us to examine the shifting tension between our sense of the monadic ‘I’ and the idea of the distributed self that Brian Rotman describes in Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being (2008). 

Paul Rabinow

''Collaboration means investigating new forms of work that redistribute individual and collective contributions''

Procedural Architecture*

Graine de Kumquat - Amagatsu

Station debout sur la frange entre terre et mer
Devant, deployé à perte de vue, l'horizon
par -dessous, un grouillement de poissons
Qui depuis les fonds fixent des yeux la surface des eaux
leurs innonbrables coeurs font du tapage,
tantot a l'unisson, en un immense battement, tantot en ordre disperse
et sans fin cela recommence,
Jusqu'a ce qu'une espece entiere emerge
et grimpe sur le continent
se mette a respirer, a deployer des mains et des jambes,
a marcher a se redresser,
Images remanentes qui se superposent
les unes aux autres,
pour s'unir tout a la fin, la, derniere soi.
Devant soi, derriere soi.
Quelqu'un regarde dans son dos celui qui
regarde la mer. Ouis quelqu'un d'autre regarde ce quelqu'un dans son
dos...
L'impression de se tenir en un point
d'un cercle immense.
On croit pouvoir boucler la boucle en
s'avancant, resolument, vers la mer.

Une ombre tremble sous la paupieres.
Les yeux s'ouvrent lentement.
Partout devant, le vaste ciel bleu.

Je m'etais evanoui.

A la pointe du cap, le phare, une large
plage de sable, la cloche du toscin.
Le soleil brille, d'une lumiere violente.

Reverie a l'instant de la chute.

Tenebres au coeur de mon reve.

La nausée vient.
au reste la soiree avait ete chaude, impo-
ssible de dormir, yeux ecarquilles
face aux tenebres, comme si j'avais pose
une question horrible.

Ete

UShio Amagatsu - dialogue avec la gravité
2000

Framing

''Today I will begin by copying'' Italo Calvino 

 
This post could also be called 'Stolen Frames'
It is an ongoing and accumulative list of frames that I come across during my research.
Here, I am recognising the use of stealing as a strategy to practice a 'creative research and assembly' (Brian Saner - 1996:71-74 in Small Acts of Repairs, p.60)
I have identified my own voice in italics.

What is coming in to body - how the body impact on the outside in a constant inter-change 
Accumulation from letting go 
Rocking out of it from the periphery back into the centre - 'Widening the field' 
Oregami- Complexity of forms - details of the quality and association
Writing from the movement of the breath ( feeling it in the body) 
Miranda Tufnell ( Workshop SD 07/04/11) 


Signifying is coding
Communication is about decoding a language