{"id":258,"date":"2016-11-15T17:40:43","date_gmt":"2016-11-15T17:40:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/14\/?p=258"},"modified":"2023-06-03T08:09:38","modified_gmt":"2023-06-03T08:09:38","slug":"atmospheres-of-dividual-performance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/14\/atmospheres-of-dividual-performance\/","title":{"rendered":"Atmospheres of Dividual Performance"},"content":{"rendered":"

Johannes Birringer<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n

The view is blocked. Imagine not necessarily seeing or having seen the goings-on. Thus the following essay should not be considered a review of performances, or a theory of the difficulty of hearing\/understanding, but mostly a series of echoes, rumors in my ear\u2019s labyrinth, more of a reflection on the difficulty, say, of seeing the wind. As I write this down, I hear an inner wind, a rustling inside, and, of course, I shall balance this out for you to create some continuum for these evocations, and how its temperaments can be inhabited.<\/p>\n

Imagine the space cramped, a small chapel-like venue constructed out of white wooden planks. We sit huddled together. The ceilings are high, giving us breathing room; a Victorian arm chair mysteriously rests up there on one of the cross timbers, a seat for angels to look down upon the crowd of fifty or sixty that have gathered for this evening of improvised dance and music. The venue, I\u2019Klectik Art-Lab, lies hidden under trees to one side of Archbishop\u2019s Park, on the south bank of the Thames across from Westminster Parliament.<\/p>\n

In the courtyard, we notice that artists-in-residence at this Art-Lab also tend to vegetables and flowers that grow in the garden. When the dance and music begin, we have been beckoned inside and for the next three hours become enveloped in this green social ecology\u2014an environment of very diverse practitioners, and visitors from near and afar, drawn to experimental contemporary art ranging across all genres and taking place in a working enclave, where members can rent space to develop projects. During intermissions, we are asked to go outside and linger in the garden.<\/p>\n

\"Fig.
Macarena Ortuzar dancing Stuck with the Bones<\/em>, with\u00a0 cellist Bruno Guastalla [right] at Really Actually Windy\u00a0<\/em>\/ R.A.W. Vol 1.<\/em>,\u00a0 I\u2019Klectik Art-Lab, Old Paradise Yard, London. May 7, 2016. Photo: Courtesy of Anita Konaska<\/figcaption><\/figure>What is a genre today? And how does renting connect to growing vegetables? Could we think of techn\u00e9 <\/em>in a different way altogether again, as a crafting and hearkening, a being in tune<\/em> with a ground? Attunement, then, would be one of our themes. Are we not listening to other forces of things now\u2014climates, atmospheres and heterotopias (safe spaces)? Do we hear too much about terror and violence, causing dizziness, vestibular disorders, tinnitus and hyperacusis? Does the accelerated political \u201csensationism\u201d (not quite anticipated in this way by the poet Fernando Pessoa) make us sick? And what is it about listening (the aural) that has preoccupied me lately, becoming concerned with different somatic places of investment in acoustic embodiment, other site-contingencies, away from that recent paradigm of immersive theatre and participatory social-works?<\/p>\n

The combination of herbs, planting and performing is a hint at new hybrid materialities and interrelations. The title of this evening of eclectic work, \u201cReally Actually Windy,\u201d points outside the common parameters of theatre to other assemblages or \u201cconfederations\u201d as Jane Bennett calls them in her book on Vibrant Matter? <\/em>For example, at one point Bennett mentions the strange concatenation of stuff she discovers in a storm drain\u2014a glove, a bottle cap, a dead rat, a smooth stick of wood. . . .[1]<\/sup><\/a> I want to tune into such confederations here.<\/p>\n

The works I hear at I\u2019Klectik are introduced by (two of the ten) performers themselves, Anita Konarska and Mirei Yazawa. Performers are curators\u2014a familiar trend in many alternative venues. When Macarena Ortuzar enters to the finest, almost inaudible sounds of Bruno Guastalla\u2019s cello bow and strings, we are instantly mesmerized by a quality of strength and fragility that she conveys through her slow moving, contorted postures. We inhale them as sensations, and Pessoa was surely right in imagining movement as a sensation, and as poetry. The tones of fragility also come from the strings\u2014the sinewy mezzo, low frequency overtones, unleashed by bowing at the bridge. Ortuzar is encumbered, two wooden sticks help her to stand upright, they are her natural crutches and yet they become so many other things\u2014branches of the wind, bones, walking sticks, lightning rods, spines, arrows. They are thin and smooth, one of them later seems attached to her chin, her face resting on it.<\/p>\n

A Chilean dancer who had worked on Min Tanaka\u2019s farm during her butoh and body weather training, Ortuzar here wears black blouse and leggings, a white apron wrapped around her hips (is she a maid?), her dark hair framing a face that is intensely focused, serious and sorrowful. We see her movement reflected in every inch of her strongly muscled body, the way she can bend, twist her balance and shift her center of gravity, lean without falling, falling without breaking, hovering in horizontal floating a few inches off the floor, as if weightless. Ortuzar\u2019s dance, performed to the highly sensitive improvised music of Guastallo, who touches the wooden body of the cello with hands more than he plays the strings, falls into place with the later solo by Anita Konarska, begun in the garden leaning and weighing against a pine tree with her head and chest, slowly slowly sliding down against the trunk of the tree, then sinking her arms into a flower bed, then performing in the chapel invisible to us. We are blindfolded upon entering; and so I listen to what I cannot see, imagining the inaudible, the silent now, growing what I collected from the outside, the nearly dark, unlit permutations of modes of contingency which are also relations to the surrounding architecture, that night, in that urban context.<\/p>\n

Eventually Konarska is revealed\u2014someone invites us to unfold the folds\u2014standing en pointe<\/em>, balancing a huge tree branch on her head that stretches almost across the entire width of the space. Tree woman, agent of near-silent sounds that we imagine hearing while blind, her performing conducts sensory power, a strangely shamanic vibe\u2014I\u2019m not sure what to call it.<\/p>\n

\n\n\n\n\n
\"picture2\"<\/td>\n\"picture3\"<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Anita Konarska [left], Raw Pieces,<\/em> and Macarena Ortuzar, Stuck with the Bones,<\/em> at Really Actually Windy\u00a0<\/em>\/ R.A.W. Vol 1<\/em>.,\u00a0 I\u2019Klectik Art-Lab, Old Paradise Yard, London. May 7, 2016. Photo: Courtesy of Anita Konaska<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n

Later, I remembered a peculiar announcement released by composer Richard Povall out West in Cornwall, in early 2016,<\/p>\n

Are you an artist, writer or performer looking to take your practice in a new direction? . . . We will explore the shift in perception that comes from tying yourself to a tree . . . the discombobulation of acoustically penetrating a tree’s internal workings (Tree Listening), and the mind-opening excitement of embodying tree-being (Other Spaces), among other innovative tree-led strategies designed to remake your sense of human-tree relations. Branching Out<\/em> fosters a radical reconception of the ways we inhabit the world in relation to other organisms.[2]<\/sup><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This relationality guides my thoughts here: why not shift attention to art and performance that makes visible what is, by nature or by design, often unseen or undervalued when working in a range of performance media, physical theatre processes, animated materialities, such as the ones, for instance, that Min Tanaka\u2019s students learn when they train in body-weather techniques (in the landscape) and work on the farm planting rice? Tanaka\u2019s farm flows into us: bending your body when planting is also a form of attunement to material surroundings. Why not branch out into shamanism and pataphysics, into discombobulated soundings and, what Konarska calls, the \u201craw pieces\u201d that can be felt, heard, touched, but not necessarily seen? How do these other organisms enter us?<\/p>\n

The notion of the atmosphere, in performance, no longer engages with the distinction between subject\/object. It exceeds. In a shamanic sense, Ortuzar and Konarska connect us to spirits. I feel the rods, the bones, the spines, the air. Both use their body weight and somatic sensations to develop, as sustained improvisations, a certain technology of movement-design. I can interpret such design in an immanent, material sense, looking at the architectures of spatial labor, the social spatiality created (the way they uses space), but also in a psychogeographical sense, through the imaginary narrative they intimate and make me listen to.<\/p>\n

This is an interest of mine, partly embedded in my own choreographic practice, that you find me exploring here across a range of other manifestations: the \u201ctechnologies\u201d in question are not necessarily technical\/digital, but methodical, and owed to techniques able to conjoin human and non-human, organic and non-organic matter. The choreographic is a vibrational and tactile occurrence\u2014reminding us historically of significant endeavors to connect movement and architecture as practiced, for example, in Anna and Lawrence Halprin\u2019s \u201cExperiments in Environment\u201d (the workshops they directed in California, 1966-1971). There is a rekindled interest in the 1960s, and the kind of PASTForward<\/em> reworkings that Ramsay Burt traces in Judson Dance Theatre<\/em>;[3]<\/sup><\/a> yet, I sense that today\u2019s postdramatic and immersive performances want to reconceptualize kinetic environments and happenings. They delve into atmospherics\u2014the elemental movements in the weather world.[4]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

The Halprins had examined such atmospheres to heighten perceptual experience through the intersection of component media. The exhibitions \u201cExperiments in Environment\u201d (Graham Foundation, Chicago, 2014) and \u201cMapping Dance: The Scores of Anna Halprin\u201d (Museum of Performance + Design, San Francisco, 2016) revealed that Anna was aware of Kaprow\u2019s Happenings but sought a more rigorous, interdisciplinary engagement with media and materials (lights, slide projections, transparencies, found objects, driftwood) incorporated into what she and her architectural partner called \u201ccollective creativity.\u201d The psychogeographical and political resonances are significant, and \u201cReally Actually Windy\u201d also points to meteorological and atmospheric occurrences, to concatenations of moving, haptic, aromatic, acoustic aspects. These concatenations also have architectural resonances. They can be observed, for example, in the stunning environmental installations by Olafur Elliasson or Tom\u00e1s Saraceno\u2019s Biospheres<\/em>, whilst architectural theories of atmosphere have been advanced by Gernot B\u00f6hme and Peter Zumthor.[5]<\/sup><\/a> B\u00f6hme speaks of architectural experiences as active, emotionally felt spaces that affect peoples\u2019 breathing through processes of entrainment. In this bodily-affective sense, persons in an atmosphere are also not individual selves contained by their skin\u2014the affective transmissions (as in the case of sound waves and smell) are sensorial phenomena that traverse space relationally, promiscuously, socially.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Tom\u00e1s Saraceno, Biospheres<\/em>. Installation, inspired by careful scientific studies of the formation of clouds, soap bubbles and the geometric principles behind spider webs. Several of the spheres contain plant-based ecosystems, while the largest of them invites spectators to step inside. Statens Museum for Kunst Copenhagen, 2009. Photo: Studio Tom\u00e1s Saraceno.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"\"
Tom\u00e1s Saraceno, Galaxies forming along filaments, like droplets along the strands of a spiders web<\/em>. Installation views, 53rd Biennale di Venezia, Venice, 2009. Photo: Studio Tom\u00e1s Saraceno.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Halprin\u2019s choreographic scores are visual and instructional mappings of the temporal, spatial and participatory dimensions of the performances she imagined and created, for instance, the \u201csensory tours\u201d across the city. From her records of the workshop activities we learn of the contact-experience exercises with the environment, blindfolded walks or \u201cdeparture rituals,\u201d instructing participants to isolate and then reassemble different parts of the their bodies\u2014an exercise I enacted at the \u201cE\/motion frequency deceleration Choreolab\u201d in Krems (Austria), a few years ago (2011). At the lab, I experienced deceleration<\/em> during a blindfolded walk across a hillside helped by a partner on whose shoulder my outstretched arm rested. The partner led me, or I led him trusting him blindly. This was a departure ritual, stipulated by choreographer Gill Clarke, which brought greater attunement to breath, hearing, smelling, the careful touch of my feet on the ground\u2014proprioceptions of being-together with the other person, of being dividual.[6]<\/sup><\/a> Now, I turn to performances I want to visualize for you, even though you may not have heard of them. What shoulder can I offer your hand?<\/p>\n

Consider Catherine D\u2019Ignazio and Andi Sutton’s Coastline: Future Past<\/em> project in Boston Harbor: thirty participants, in June 2015, walked through the core of Boston tracing a route from the Climate Change prediction of the city\u2019s future coastline to its history, as a way of physically understanding the future and past of urban change at scales that are difficult to see and comprehend.<\/p>\n

VIDEO<\/h6>\n