intuition

awareness - fluidity - action

This is an approach to activate intuition modeled on release dance technique.

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)

How performance thinks - symposium April 13-14

Three topics that dominated the discourse: Justice / Careness / Enigma

How Performance Thinks
An international, two-day conference co-organized by
the PSi Performance and Philosophy working group
and Kingston University’s practice.research.unit

April 13th-14th 2012

The London Studio Centre, London
Online registration: http://howperformancethinks.eventbrite.com/
£42 waged / £22 unwaged for the 2 days
[NB. No one day rate is available]

With plenary speakers:

Vida Midgelow
Joe Kelleher
and
Freddie Rokem

A work-in-progress showing of a new performance by

Every House Has a Door
(Lin Hixson, Matthew Goulish, Bryan Saner, Stephen Fiehn, and Tim Kinsella)

And presentations by:

Stephen Bottoms / Jennifer Duffy / Thomas Richards / Simon Jones / Tender Buttons Theatre Company / Joana Craveiro / Broderick Chow / Esa Kirkkopelto / Theron Schmidt / Julie Solovyeva / Tero Nauha / Stefanie Sachsenmaier / Kelina Gotman / Josefine Wikstrom / Augusto Corrieri / Moritz Gansen and Elisabeth Schilling / Charlie Saffrey / Katja Hillevara / Jessica Walker / Joa Hug / Bernadette Anzengruber / Stefanie Husel / Elena Cologni / Rosanna Irvine / Shaun May / Peter Boenisch / Rebecca Hillman / Joao Florencio / Nik Wakefield / Gabriella Calchi-Novati / Alice Lagaay / Franziska Schroeder / Shimon Levy / Simon Bowes / Helmar Schramm / Mark Greenwood / Michelle Graves / Sophia New and Siegmar Zacharias / David Levin / Rebecca Groves / Noyale Colin


Notes to come....

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS - On Collaboration SYMPOSIUM 4 May 2012, Middlesex University, Trent Park

The Performing Arts Department at Middlesex University will be hosting a
one-day symposium on collaboration in performance practice, with a
specific focus on the notions of 'memory', 'place' and 'time'
in performance-making. The event will take place on 4 May 2012 at Trent
Park Campus, North London, and will mark a farewell to the location
before the department will relocate to Hendon Campus in summer 2012.
The call for contributions is open to practitioners, academics and PhD
students wishing to present research papers, discussion panels or short
demonstrations of instances of relevant performance practice in the form
of lecture demonstrations and practice demonstrations.
The symposium specifically focuses on collaborative practice in
performance-making and the issues of 'memory', 'place' and
'time'. Questions of interest include, but are not limited to the
following:

•       What forms or modes of collaboration can be identified in
performance-making?  In what ways is 'the collaborative' at stake in
solo performance-making? •       How do compositional techniques
operate in solo and collaborative modes of performance? •       How can
collaboration be theorised?
•       How is personal or collective memory negotiated in
collaborative contexts? •       In what ways can technology impact on
collaboration?
•       How are 'place' and 'time' integral to
performance-making processes? •       How do performers draw upon and
conceive of memory in performance-making? •       How is collaborative
practice taught in HE? What models of practice to we offer and what are
the continued values we identify in teaching collaborative
performance-making?

In order to apply to contribute to the symposium, please send a 250-300
word abstract and a short outline of the nature of your proposed
contribution to s.sachsenmaier@mdx.ac.uk and noyalecolin@yahoo.co.uk.
Please also attach a short biography. Deadline 21 March 2012. All
contributors will be notified by end of March. Location details of Trent
Park campus: http://www.mdx.ac.uk/aboutus/Location/trent-park/index.aspx
Further details of the symposium will be announced soon.

Best wishes,

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.''

Process-relational theory Adrian J Ivakhiv paper

This post is a sign to my attempt at understanding the idea of non human or post human turn which are so far away from my reality.
Is virtual as present as actual?


Process-Relational Theory and the Eco-Ontological Turn:
Clearing the Ground Between Whitehead, Deleuze, and Harman
Calls for a nonhuman or posthuman “turn” can be taken as echoing a call for an “ecological turn” that environmental thinkers have made for decades. Precursors to an “ecological ontology” and/or an “ecological epistemology” can be found in the work of Bateson, Maturana and Varela, Gibson, Ingold, and others. More recently, philosophers influenced by Deleuze and Guattari (such as Stengers, Delanda, Protevi, and Berressem) have taken up these calls for an eco- or geo-philosophy.
This paper argues that in this task of developing an ecophilosophy, there is value in recognizing a “process-relational” tradition as running in parallel to subtantialist, materialist, idealist, and dualist philosophies over the centuries. Such a tradition, while loosely construed and somewhat artificial, unites philosophers as disparate as Heraclitus, Chuang Tzu, and Nagarjuna with Peirce, Whitehead, Hartshorne, Simondon, Deleuze, and Stengers.
The bulk of the paper responds to Graham Harman’s recent critique of process-relational approaches. Harman argues that process-relational thinkers have already had their day and have failed to account for the stabilities and inner depths of objects that make up a (posthuman) world.
Adrian J Ivakhiv

‘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