‘Tout fait’: Bergson, time, and choreographic being-made

‘Tout fait’: Bergson, time, and choreographic being-made

A mixed mode presentation, incorporating performative elements, will explore the relationship between Bergsonian thought and the readymade – or tout fait – with a focus on the impact of technology on contemporary perceptions of time. The implications of such impacts for collaborative choreographic practices will be considered.

Presented at the College of Arts Association Centenary Annual Conference

24 February 2012, Los Angeles, USA

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). 

Rhizome- ''We have grass in our head''

The term rhizome is introduced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari 

to descr ibe the way we are thinking. In biology a rhizome is a n 

under ground system of br anches that form roots and leaf y shoot, just 

beneath and just above the ground. The rhizome is dif ferent from the 

old metaphor of the ‘tree of knowledge’, with its unique original r o ot 

and branches that bif urcate in binary splittings. Rhizomatic th ink ing

allows for the combination of heterogeneous elements that form a 

network that you can enter at any point. Like grass, it grows in b e - 

tween things. Although many people think in arborescent (and hie r - 

archical) structures, Deleuze states that we have grass in our heads. See 

A Thousand P lateaus (1992: 3-25). 

Quoted from  

Patricia Pisters 

Siobhan Davies Studios Feb 28th 2012

Rhythmic Trialogue

Noyale Colin, Florence Peake & JJ Wheeler

At the edge of perception, rhythm marks time. It cuts, flows or disrupts – and creates relationship. Using improvisational structures, two dance artists and a musician create a web of relations with each other, with spectators and with time and space.

Rhythmic trialogue

I am trying to organise my thoughts by the present attempt to articulate what I think I am doing with this project.

1. it is an experiment with rhythm as the main focus of composition
2. It is a collaboration between mediums and people
3. It is the preparation of a public presentation

What have we got:
Rhythm divided in opposite categories:

Voluntary and unvoluntary movement

Heart beat, breath .... nervous system, digestive system, arterial pulse
Natural and mechanical

Quality of perception of  R
Vibration - resonance -
Quality of performance of R
dynamics ( texture) - tempo

Composition
tension and release
anticipation and dissociation

Movement style:
pedestrian
Animal
Vegetal

Scenography ideas:
Bike lights
Video projection of Florence
Clay

PAF Thematic

Thematic: Presence - Transformation - Memory - Time -

Question: Is the moment of transformation what creates presence?

Rhythm

Ordered variation of changes,

Not only changes that come but also changes that belong,

Variation of pulse and rest,

J Dewey

overlapping experience

How could the practice of allowing other/others experience to overlap be develop?
Who can we make thoughts spill?
How can we make memories spill?
Is the sharing of memories lead to new memories/ event/ experience of the past memories?

1- pattern of data (materials, text, movements, sounds...) created by event to create more events
2- map thinking about other things
3 -- Over -layering sensations/ perception ( Deborah Hay method)
4 - the interest of geographic/ cultural / differences
5 - How do we overlap internal time for the performer? (how do we use  body/ brain memory in performance)?

Open Studios

''From here,

 you are looking at your own weight''

PAF - residency

Day 1 -

Presence - Transformation -Time -Memory

Prelimanary discussion


To Set-up a situation of event for working together in the studio -

•  A series of exercises (each contribute) -
• A list of moment of absence (each contribute)

To record the account of what is going -on - How do we document?

Overarching key notions

Proprioception:
Exposing dance inside the body

Transformation in performance - 2 phases - part of the performers' self exist in the body of the audience
A moment of transformation - a moment of becoming
Self as action

Attention - attunement - relation
Creating invisible threads

Form & formlessness = training

The inhuman performer: What is it that is not you but that is not someone else?
Performer imagination - transformation  / Viewer imagination - transformation


Arriving - becoming present-

Moving out of the head, to a landscape of feeling, memory, impulse and dream ....

''reading Deleuze as a dream book - as a challenge of the notion of grasping'' Susan

Practicing exercises:
4''33 Cage  - focus out
Small dance Paxton - focus in
Blind walk - out
Pairing with percentage - giving / supporting - 80/50/20
Embodied reading - Forti Newspapper

Practical 1
Memory Gestures improvisation: Directed gestures/actions using images - not through imagination but through being (feeling versus thinking)  Here connection with being and the deleuzian notion of actualisation - virtual technology.

Practical 2
Butho Fu Improvisation:
1 place
1 figure
1 oject
1 environment
1 landsacape
1 verbe
1 sensory information

Butho fu *1

Endless dark corridor,
Sunlight coming through each lonely rooms
Steps echoing from an old time, don't leave any traces in the creaking planks
Turn left, right, get lost in the corner,
In the fire brace, she is waiting for our eyes to find her nails padding the featherless peacock
Through the hole in the wall the helicopter dance with the eagles

Instructions/tacks

1. follow invisible threads
2. jump back into a picture
3. dance 3 min like your father
4. carry forward and let go
5. think about something boring and make it interesting

Sensation composition from improvisation - A score-

Remembering traces of gestures

As soon as you find variation, you change the sensation

Alter the intensity of the sensation

Come back to neutral

Remember the sensation, feel it but don't do

Apply the sensation to of the gesture to another gesture ( the next one)

Go back to the other gesture

Transform and merge the other 2 gestures

Use the other gestures to break form the pattern of repetition

Reflection and comments
We can't quantify sensation, they are only quality


Day 2

Suggestions:

• Going back to 5 gestures
• going back to butho fu
• doing a durational improvisation - something we witness evolving for 30 min
• partnering sensation - impulse (eye contact -duo)

Reflection and comment

Active viewing= action

Observing what are the threshold when the observer start to interrupt/interfere with the action going on

Le tragique et Lyotard

Le tragique, dit le philosophe Lyotard, ''c'est que nous sommes nes a notre insu''
quand s'eveille notre conscience d'etre vivant tout est joue, il est deja trop tard
Elizabeth De Fontenay

Paul Rabinow

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

Triangle by Lisa Nelson

For any number of players

To officially start the game someone calls out loud, ZERO. The players can be anywhere they like in the space. Moving is optional.

After a time (or very quickly) someone calls out loud, ONE. At this call each player must to look to another player and you must never loose sight of the person you have chosen to look at. You need to see this person the whole time but it can also be just a part the body that you see. There is no need to exchange gazes or that the same two people must look at each other. (But this is possible). Moving is necessary only to allow you to keep seeing this person.

After a time (or very quickly) someone calls out loud, TWO. At this call each player keeps seeing the first person they have chosen and adds another. Again you only need to see part of the body of the people you have chosen and there is no need to exchange gazes. But you must be able to see the two people you have chosen at the same time - all the time. To look at one person and then the other is not correct. You must never loose sight of the people you have chosen to look at. You may have to move to keep seeing these two people.

See http://tuningscoreslog.wordpress.com

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

Peckham's train station dance

Yvonne Rainer in Peckham's street dance

still in the clouds...!

 knowledge is in progress, always changing, interplaying between conscious and unconscious knowledge

ideas

Automatic collaboration following a set structure, one time encounter.
exchange of practice / food

Title

''Open source''

Cet essai étant désormais disponible en livre et sur internet en plusieurs langues, la métaphore de l'opposition cathédrale/bazar peut se retrouver désormais dans des champs éloignés des logiciels, par exemple en musique7 et se rapproche d'une dichotomie entre une approche excessivement organisée et inflexible (cathédrale) et une approche apparemment désorganisée et hautement flexible (bazar)
wikipedia