[on FIELDINGS]
March 24, 2008
Displacing
Footwork: We are scratching the material of a normal pedestrian walk. Displacing the landing of a step to just-before or just-after in Time. The feet stutter. The mind is skipping and tripping over itself. Marching on the beat has been de-regulated into polyrhythmic play. We are not going anywhere, we are going with.
Temporal Landing Sites
Displacing the step is to land the foot in Time. When this activity becomes relational rather than an individual independent choice, it then seems as if the landing site approaches me, rather than me approaching it. I thought I had control over the articulation of my legs and feet; however, once a rhythm between us is established, my coordination is being disrupted and I land differently than I had intended.
Walking
An activity, to satisfy our need for activities.
Chair Field
A temporal being together.
Participation
The fieldings research process has brought about different forms of material within a similar interest of investigation. We take this opportunity to experiment as we present certain situations to a theater audience. To leave the work unfinished is a desire for the open-endedness of the performances in relation to each other, and in relation to the participation of the visitor. We are asking ourselves how much the presentation of an art product, any type of art product, creates a detour around the proposition that participation in the event and our mutual coming together could be the only content of the work. This is an empty spectacle, where emptiness is simultaneously over-full. How much product do we need. We are experimenting with degrees.
displacing: togetherness, how?
March 13, 2008Making the last art project (fieldings) seemed to provide a transitional space. Bringing up quite a lot of questions, one of them: what can art do, right now, right here? I must say I am dissatisfied with working in the structures of governmental funding, established theaters and last but not least, the art market. As I have mentioned before, I am not interested to produce products. I value process and an aesthetic of the unfinished. I do not wish to deliver that which I am being expected to deliver. What excites me about art making, and movement or dance in particular, is indeterminacy. It is also a certain type of freedom to navigate: one’s movements through space (in the widest sense), movement of thought, how to keep becoming new, how to explore the not yet known capacities of this body. I have started to wonder if not the most important thing of art-sharing would be our coming together: intensifying the vibrations of togetherness. To what degree is the art product at all needed, other than to circulate on the market and provide variety for the programmer-consumer? Of course, certain art produces discourse and thought, discussion and change. But it seems to me as if the current format of performance art presentation (the structures that are supposed to make us be able to earn an income, which in most cases is probably far from reality) is not suited for an actual encounter between audience and performer, maker and visitor – or can we just call them all together participants? I am encountering too much economics, and politics. I think for creative social togetherness we need other frames. We need something more wild, unpredictable, disjunct from the expected, displaced. I suddenly have the need to stop, take a break, take a distanced look and rethink. I certainly have the wish to not depend on having to earn my money with art, to be be able to exit those provided structures. The structures don’t interest me. What interests me is play, space and time to make things, create things, encounter things (each other) and also destroy things again. Non-functional in the sense of economic production, functional in the sense of creating a potential other. Making space for other. Thinking and acting otherwise. Which patterns do I commit to by continuing to work the way I have? It’s really time to change gear. There are so many things in life that excite me and that do not fit into the frame of the professional artist. Do I actually like to go to the theater myself? No I don’t… Don’t I much more enjoy watching somebody’s work in process in the studio, somebody playing in the park, somebody dancing on the street, people getting wild at a party? People hanging out on the sofa discussing philosophy? So what could be alternative situations and occasions for those encounters (thought-movement provoking) to occur? It’s an open question 
new work
November 7, 2007There is a new rehearsal process in sight.
I would like to consider the possibility for this to be my last piece. Not because I have a crisis, but simply for it to be most productive. To allow for an openess that makes everything possible. No fear, no expectations, no product pressure. If in the eyes of some others the product will fail, fine, in my eyes there is no product. There are only momentary actualizations of process as materiality that will be shared in the form of performances. It all moves on. If in the words of some newspaper critics this product is the worst nonsense, fine, I could care less. I am quite bored by this criticality that operates within the moral judgements of good and bad – not offering anything of its own other than political power games.
Let’s just say “this is the last piece we will ever make” and then set out for a full on party. I refuse to tell anyone how it will look. Because there is no look to it. I want to commit to the risk of really not knowing what the hell is going to happen. I want to really take the freedom to research unstable territory. I trust that there is enough background of thought and practice, enough concepts to feed in. There is no lack of interests. Never a lack of that, with one exception: the lack of interest to deliver a sellable market product. If any programmer wanted to shop on that art market, I will be invisible. If nobody wants to give me any more money for any more work after this, that is really fine. There are plenty of interesting things to do in life.
I think I am quite looking forward to it.
teaching at PAF
November 7, 2007I was teaching a workshop on choreography at PAF (performing arts forum, see link under blogroll) in October. At first it seemed a rather ridiculous thing to do: teach choreography. So I got rid of the tacky work and was left with ’structures for movement’. Better. That basically allows for everything: thinking, discussing, moving relations, composing, playing, cooking, eating, drifting through new environments, getting to know each other, also dancing, also observing the dance of space. There is of course an endless list to it.
What struck me was that it is all more or less the same process as making work. There needs to be a very subtle balance between guiding and going along, feeding in and listening, driving and letting go. One can make a plan, one or many. It is not bad to make plans, simply to arrive to a certain clarity with one’s material. But then the plan probably needs to get dropped, according to the environment one enters. A new plan emerges with the new situation, with it and through it. The new plan becomes the movements in relation to others and to new environments. Everything equally becomes part of the plan. And the plan keeps adjusting from minute to minute.
Dropping the plan seems to be one of the most valuable practices in life.
Certainly, teaching is composing.
Teaching is learning is teaching is living.
Yes it’s really not so bad. Not at all.
So now, how do we approach making and performing as learning-teaching-composing-sharing-living?
my room at PAF
TILT
June 12, 2007\ tilted body \ tilted ground \
stand / tilt / fall
walk / tilt / fall
jump / tilt / fall
run on tilted ground / fall
turn on tilted ground / fall
tilt on tilted ground / fall fall
meeting with I.
May 13, 2007The other day I met with I. and we talked about art making and slaving to earn money… He said that he had the feeling there needed to be an obsessive activity of repetition, doing your thing again and again, building a cult from yourself, making yourself into an object, fetishizing yourself. He said, work has no value in this system, only objects have value, so you need to become the object yourself (rather than working a lot).
I could follow all his thoughts but I realized that I had no interest in this issue, and I could probably never make myself be motivated to fetishize myself in order to make money on it, I would already get bored at the thought of it. I was wondering what I wanted to be spending my time on, making money or moving on. Of course, making money seems to be an issue that does always reappear and that certainly does get in the way and require degrees of slaving. But I am not quite willing to spend time on market value production in relation to the work or myself, neither on building an image. Since occupation is rather to move through the image and keep things changing… if the concern would become market value, that would just be such a poor limit factor…
Then I had another thought on obsession: that I would rather like to let go of it, obsession didn’t seem the right word or attitude. I wanted to better call it concern. If I would bring concern towards things, then I could still be insisting, repeating, not obsessively, but just be observing difference, allowing for an openess towards new situations.
So after my meeting with I. I basically felt as ignorant as before, not knowing how to escape the slaving for money or struggles to earn it, also not willing to spend much of my energy on finding creative ways how to operate through capitalist means at an intelligent level. We might need to talk more, or just drop the issue and keep going with the work (that has no value and does not sell), which seems to be my tendency.
SLope research
May 8, 2007SLope is a movement research currently taking place in the studio. We are working with the tilted body/shifted ground, falling situations and vestibular (inner ear) disorientations, reorientations. In June this research will be moved to the real sloped location (a big sandy dune on the island Terschelling) to create a site specific outdoor work for Oerol Festival (16.-23.6.2007).
slope
noun
1. a surface of which one end or side is at a higher level than another; a rising or falling surface
2. difference in level or sideways position between the two ends of a thing
3. a part of the side of a hill or mountain
verb
4. (of a surface or line) be inclined from a horizontal or vertical line; slant up or down
adjective
5. (sloping) a sloping floor
6. (sloped)
Blindspot loop 18.4.2007
May 8, 2007Score for 4 blindfolded breakdancers at the Springdance Festival opening night, Utrecht, truck parking garage of the theater.
All photographs by Michael Hart – many thanks.
stripper dance
February 16, 2007Strip the music. Strip the set. Strip the lights. Strip the meaning. Strip all baroque decorations. Strip from all messages. Strip body from habbits. Strip audience from codes.
Offer open potential. Multiple meanings to arise out of various points of view. Collective event as a coming together. Collective body as a coexistence of multiplicities. Make relations perceptible. That’s all.
beautiful objects
January 23, 2007After thought of having performed in the gallery space:
It seems hard to resist the fact that everything, no matter how ugly, accidental, ironical or meaningless becomes beautiful when placed into the white cube. And everything becomes object. So: beautiful object, art object. The spider, the chair or the body. It is in fact disgusting. What becomes narrative in the theater, becomes art object in the gallery. The problem has more or less stayed the same. Only the codes are defined somewhat differently, but the difference is minor.
animal life
January 20, 2007Today I set up the exhibition rooms at de Appel. All of the collected wood furniture from the street is stored in the blog-room. Some chairs are pretty rotten. Beetles are falling out of them. At least 20 beetles fell out of one chair and died within a day. I added a little cart with wood and it is called the Beuys corner. No butter though. Some ants have also appeared, and a big spider. The spider had a black cross on the back. She crawled up the wall and rested in the highest corner. She is very visible on the white walls. I wonder what she will do now and how long she will stay.
Thoughts on performance for de Appel
January 14, 2007The Wood is the Bones
(thunder and lightning hit the deer)
RUPTURE IN SPACE .
My interest in the disjunctive relation.
In the past I have tried to perform dance as relational movement, shifting the interval between us, together. Between us as performers and between us performers and audience.
This time I have ruptured that relation. A translocal movement research: two dance artists, both in different cities, communicating only via email and documenting that dialogue in a webblog. Me giving movement tasks to the other. The other reporting back to me with image and text. Both gathering short video clips of research and tasks. Everything done on location. Every time a different site.
This I call RPTRNSPC Rupture in Space. The translocal relation. Disjunctive, disrupted, sometimes intersecting, coinciding in virtual space, moments of actualization.
MOVEMENTS OF WORK.
As we both meet in the same city to prepare a performance for de Appel, I wonder how to keep the disjunctive relation, rupture in space?
A former interest of mine: perform the action of chopping wood together with a dance.
Movements of work, movements of dance, dance as work, work as dance. Actions of work that rupture the material.
Experiment 1: A performs hammering nails into wood, creating a sculpture out of a broken drawer; B performs movement tasks (from the blog).
Experiment 2: B performs the task of sawing a chair into pieces; A performs movement tasks (from the blog).
Sounds. Rhythms, speeds, durational planes, sensations. Shifting through modes of becoming, playing out polyrhythmic in-betweens.
We are performing a coexistence of difference through movements of work, task oriented actions of dance and non-dance actions. What do we call the dance?
THE WOOD IS THE BONES.
THUNDER AND LIGHTNING HIT THE DEER.
My interest in analyzing the condition, to then uncondition, recondition.
Construction, deconstruction, reconstruction.
Lately an interest in bone structure, relational movement of the skeleton. This is Steve Paxton’s influence on my thinking. The bones are like pieces of wood that can be recombined in endless ways, always creating the new.
As I saw a chair structure into pieces, I think the bone structure into pieces, I put it all together again, differently, repeatedly, and always differently.
I rupture the chair by sawing it into pieces. Now take pieces of wood, close your eyes, throw them into the room and call it “thunder and lightning hit the deer”. That reminds me very much of a certain artist who I like a lot.
Take broken pieces of furniture, deconstructed pieces of a conditioned structure, nail them together differently into a sculpture. Our ridiculous obsessions with objects. That reminds me very much of another artist who I also like very much.
movements of work 10.1.07
January 14, 2007
RPTRNSPC experiment 2: saw
Nora saws a chair into pieces. Aimar constructs a dance out of movement tasks.
movements of work 6.1.07
January 7, 2007
RPTRNSPC experiment 1: hammer and nails
Aimar constructs a sculpture out of broken furniture. Nora constructs a dance out of movement tasks.
