{"id":222,"date":"2020-12-05T14:33:28","date_gmt":"2020-12-05T14:33:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/22\/?p=222"},"modified":"2023-03-15T11:27:15","modified_gmt":"2023-03-15T11:27:15","slug":"electric-dance-or-how-to-talk-with-birds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/22\/electric-dance-or-how-to-talk-with-birds\/","title":{"rendered":"Electric Dance, or How to Talk with Birds"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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

Abstract<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Reflecting on a series of ongoing outdoor performance experiments during the COVID-19 lockdown period, this dance essay is a composition that interweaves an outlook on the political and social fallout of the pandemic with more intimate, personal probings during the return to self-insulation in a generous countryside. The essay\u2019s title evokes a series of climbs (up electrical power masts) or reverse bird-eye views on an eco-philosophical imaginary that seeks to combine body weather techniques (derived from Japanese butoh dance), enacted in various organic nature and industrial locations, with digital processing. The site-specific performances are creative responses as well as social choreographies in an era of climate crisis and virological pandemics. The author proposes that experiential time-based performance is an art form for the twenty-first century, capable of capturing the pulse of anxiety but re-connecting human and not-human lives or organisms: reflecting on what is important in our environments, nurturing mind-body connection and somatic experience in a commons.
Keywords:<\/strong> social choreography, ritual, electricity, plague, resurrection, maraboutage<\/p>\n\n\n

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Summer valley with electric power lines, Schmelz, Saarland, July 2020. Photo: Johannes Birringer<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
Digital Ontologies<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

The year 2020 has not changed my understanding of theatre and performance; it perhaps only offered reprieve<\/em>. The term as I understand it means: a stay of punishment or, perhaps less drastically, a delay that keeps something bad from happening. Why not consider the theatre in crisis? Why not consider that something really bad has in fact happened? But many theatre makers always proclaim a crisis, and then continue to produce theatre. The theatre in crisis is a sustainable theatre and always has been, since it was always able to find or adopt new ways of communication and to reinvent communal rituals (even if immersive and participatory performances and installations did not always succeed in the much needed catharsis).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ontological crisis is unsurprising because it had always been known, anticipated, theorized and archived. The pandemic has happened, and many of us in the performing arts had to change gears, slightly but not drastically. We did not retrain to become plumbers or accountants. After all, we were experts in \u201cempty rituals\u201d (Eugenio Barba spoke of such when referring to secular, non-sacred theatre). Alan Read, in his new book (2020), anticipates our lives in a continuous inter-pandemic era.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rather than calling it a stop, or going into details of what the global lockdown meant to many in the performing arts or the \u201ccreative industries,\u201d one could imagine harvesting the many open seeds and spores that emerged, perhaps modestly first on a local level, the level where one was confined. And I would venture to argue that everyone, most practitioners I should think, continued their practices on that local or domestic level. Shifts to working on camera (and in Zoom<\/em> rooms, etc.) were not terribly complicated\u2014acting on camera or with multimedia set up can hardly be considered unusual in the twenty-first century. The ontological question of unrepeatable live performance was long decided in favor of mediation, loop, reproduction. Zoom<\/em> theatre is a theatre in the age of technical reproducibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thus, theatre was not in crisis, only the commercial and independent venues were closed for a while; concerts and film festivals moved online, theatres opened their archives and streamed some of their favorite productions. Everything became more accessible. Local to local communications (across national borders that had suddenly reappeared), across the seas and time zones, were moving along. The notion of a live stream gained new significance, as performers rediscovered telepresence and the joys of telematics that were once proclaimed to be initiating a new era of virtual art or cybertheatre. Digital performance, we knew for some time, is the current name for a multimedia theatre that is at ease with augmented realities, projection mapping and live feed cameras, electronic sound and 3D images. Some actors may prefer to send their avatar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many directors, from the ancients (Piscator, Svoboda, Wilson, LeCompte, Lepage, Castorf) to the late postmoderns who, like Marianne Weems or Katie Mitchell in their recent productions, create live webcam or \u201ccamera shows\u201d\u2014had realized the convergence between the medium specificities: theatre, cinema, sonic art, opera, circus and installation.[1]<\/sup><\/a> Nothing was left unexplored; VR or 3D glasses not far away from slowly becoming an infrequent regular device to be offered to audiences who, at times, were also encouraged to use their smart phones and copy\/paste what they experienced to their social media friends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Theatre to Zoom<\/em> was perhaps one avenue, and we probably will read about the theory of \u201czooming\u201d and its dark ecology in the current journals. In the remainder of this essay, I venture to the outside instead, reflecting on the less digital and virtually augmented, on the less good idea<\/em> (as William Kentridge calls it) yet the still entangled materiality of performance aware of \u201celemental mediation\u201d (Durham Peters 2015).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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