FUSE#4

FUSE #4
which angered Athena since she was the goddess, the source, of craft. So
Athena disguises herself as an old lady, meets Arachne, and tells her that
she needs to acknowledge the goddess Athena as her teacher. Arachne then
challenges Athena to a competition, after which latter reveals herself and
agrees. So Athena weaves a carpet where the gods are in the centre and
creation are at the sides, while Arachne weaves a carpet which depicted the
god Zeus and all his violations against women; she weaves a rape scene. And
the competition was public, so people could vote for the best carpet and they
voted for Arachne, as it looked so realistic, which infuriates Athena and she
destroys the carpet.
So we have here in the story images of public viewership, weaving, a
workshop situation, a competition, the autodidact, and realism. Arachne unveils
power structures that are present in her artwork, and it gets destroyed.
And Arachne is so involved with her artwork that she decides that she cannot
live and tries to hang herself with her rope - so her material is rope, and she
is ending her life by cutting the rope that connects the head to the body. But
just before she dies, Athena sprinkles a poison on her and transforms her into
a spider. And culturally, this transformation is a big thing because the head of
the woman shrinks, and the abdomen swells.
This figure, for us, is the beginning of art. It captures the messy places
that we want, realistic places, not presentational nor controlled spaces that
have single purposes, and we really wanted to push the idea of knitting,
weaving together, and the space of workshops that addresses the idea of
texts, texture, textiles.
So why is myth still relevant today? When it comes to myth there is
something problematic because they are, no matter which culture, from mostly
patriarchal cultures. But nevertheless we like to work with myth because
it is tied to oral culture. Myths were always told, and it could happen everywhere.
And what interests us about myths is not so much that they contain
truth or non-truth, but more that they have recognisable attributes, like I can
recognise myself in this myth. Mythology is also intercultural; there are lots
of studies that show repeating motifs in myths across cultures like the spider,
gender roles, power gaps. And if you remember we have two big European
myths here - Orpheus being the one of beauty, of gentleness, and Arachne
being the one of harsh reality, and not just of her life but that she depicted
rape scenes. And for us it was important that when we started Emergence
Room, we set up public spaces for people to knit and stitch things and not
be censored. So some of these - a lot of these - were really tough. But remembering
that Arachne’s carpets are like carpets of reality, that was always
our task.
So why is Arachne important to artists today? Arachne is the young
woman, and the young woman is a figure in society that is very fragile, in
terms of who gets the education, who gets aborted. And there is also the
ELEMENT #5 Social Choreography
young woman as the object of desire, the object of hope. Another thing
about Arachne is that she was an autodidact, that she believed she could
learn things for herself and be very good in it. She is also the contemporary
artist, the body artist - she does her work in public, as opposed to the traditional
image of the artist hiding behind their canvas, in their workshops.
Just in Time
We’re now going to talk about our Just in Time project which we have been
invited here with. The only topic in this project is dance, dance in all its various
forms and variations, and it is also our first work where dance on the stage
becomes pure social choreography; there is no difference between a performer
and audience, the audience is as much as performer, which makes the theatre
become very much a social situation, everyone sits in the same boat. So the
pictures of Just in Time in different cities are all similar in the outcome, you
always see happy people dancing together. But each city also has a special
characteristic which makes for very rich encounters.
There are two things that make the project, one is the letter to dance,
and the other is the movement that we collect. The letter is an important form
because you address it to somebody. We only collect handwritten letters, and
the act of giving it away, out of one’s hands, that is a very artistic gesture, because
you do something and give it, like a dance, to make your body a subject
on stage, you are also giving something out of your hands; you lose control.
And the way Emergence Room and Just in Time fit together is also
through the notion of heritage. Just in Time started when we were asked to
hand in an application for a dance heritage performance. We came to realise
that this dance heritage thing, and focus on technique and the past - it all fits
this idea of control, that there are guards dictating right technique and history.
So with Arachne/Emergence Room, we were thinking about messing up
of the space, messing up of images, and here in Just in Time, we’re thinking
about giving up control, of handing over, the idea that you can do your own
movement, and you can dance the favourite movements of others, and it can
be a fun space, and pleasure can come in.
This project also looks with suspicion at the western fundamentals of
dance, and why are they so important. The ballroom is all about dance and
tradition, dance and sexual orientation, dance and language at political levels.
And if you joined the ball you would realise that dance always deals with all
of this - nationalities, tradition, body, language.
How did the different communities get invited to the project?
It differs from each city. In LA, one person from the theatre coordinated
everything, and each workshop had a mix of people from different com-
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