SoDA WORKS 2015

The Practicalities of a Poetic Engine.
Do something and then talk about it. When someone else
talks about what they did, translate that into instructions
and follow them. Do something and then wait for someone
else to do something. Don’t talk about your opinion, talk
about how it feels. Wait till you feel the effect of what you
just did before you do something else. Think of how the
fog might behave, describe it, try it out, and then report
back. Talk about what you just did by simply naming it.
Make sure the big inflatable is moved regularly. Don’t make
violent movements in the first 15 minutes. Let things go
wrong. Don’t let me off the hook so easily. Work to always
be physically involved with someone, but let yourself be
affected by forces transmitted through the structure. Make
clear proposals. Stay with it. Don’t do it for too long. You
don’t need to be interesting. Speak clearly, our accents are
a bit hard to understand. Only talk about what’s happening
in the room. Don’t mention theories or political issues. Don’t
knock the lights over, but if you do, pretend that it’s ok. Let
things soak in. Just, figure it out. Mess up the space. Don’t
use the fog machine too much, because some audience
members might not like it. Don’t breathe so loudly.
Patterned Interference, my fourth semester presentation
for the SoDA program was conceived as a milieu of
nested situations, where action and discourse mediate
changes of spatial arrangement and atmosphere. It
grew out of an interest in training practices and improvised
ascetics. We engaged in a long period of searching
our bodies and environments for activities that were
“interesting”, in that they held a fascination and a
desire to investigate further. It could be something
as simple as rolling your head around while focusing
on the sensations in your feet, or repeatedly trying to
touch the same point on a wall with your eyes closed.
We called these activities “choreographic situations”,
and set about describing them in words to each other,
or diagramming them. Then we noticed that the act of
describing what you just did has a certain effect and
could be worth investigating further. What started as a
way of keeping track of activity became a kind of instant
research output, a way of mediating our relationships in
the abstract space of performance, and an unexpected
method of training a certain kind of self-awareness.
We then wanted to apply a similar process to the search
for choreographic situations in the arrangement of the
space we occupied, to observably relate our outside to
our inside. The large inflatables were thought of as a
way to quickly change the spatial characteristics of the
room, as well as providing more insides and outsides.
Their bodies were pliable and unpredictable. They could
be entered, they enveloped and prodded . They were
both compliant and stubborn. They were, in fact, more
than we bargained for and exerted substantial force on
the process. Lights and fog, indispensable atmospheric
effects for the stage, were called upon to soften and
smooth our transitions, to usher us across thresholds
and seduce us into action.
In a sense it was an exercise in building and being built.
There was an excess of framing and a commitment
to organising everything around questions. This was
partly a response to working within the artistic research
environment that contextualises the SoDA program, and
the attendant demands to demonstrate one’s activities
as such. As research. I made a real-time research environment
on stage consisting of 3 human performers, 3
large black plastic inflatables, 4 LED panels on stands, a
fog machine, and the search for things worth doing.
SoDA. Solo. Dance. Authorship. So how can I justify
working with 2 other people? Well, what I can do is
contextualise or signpost it as a necessary risk, a
side-effect of the conditions I desired to work in and
with. The conditions I speak of are those of a system, of
something that behaves of its own accord, with a repertoire
of states and a tendency to react to conditions
and inputs. If you give a coherent system information, it
will return a result in some form. In our case, the moods,
thoughts, expressions and actions that traversed us
were all part of the interest of the work, and contributed
to the navigation of the creative process and the
performative outcomes that emerged. And why 3 of us?
In keeping with the theme of systems, I gesture towards
Edward Lorenz’s discovery that a chaotic system
requires a minimum of 3 interdependent elements
(Gleick, J. 1987). And chaos? Chaos, from Chaos Theory,
which is also called Dynamic Systems Theory, in which
simple rules lead to unpredictable and never repeating
behaviours. Simple rules are something we worked with
a lot. The working method in the studio was a repetitive
sequence of propose, enact, evaluate and refine.
The performance piece itself was a network of simple
interconnected rules.
For me, the stage is a space for simulation, like the
ones they do on computers nowadays. A space for the
colliding of materials into one another, for interrogating
structural tendencies, for subjecting fragments of culture
to one another; for testing. A space for experimentation.
Performance science. Research, results, findings. What
happens if I… What happens to me? What happens to
the things around me? How are we together? Cause and
effect. Terms and interactions. Endless recombination.
Moments of coherence. Spatters and smears of meaning.
Why put something other than a living organism on
stage? The coilings and thrashings of a mutating system
make for a good spectacle. Live memetic engineering.
We made the inflatables ourselves, from black rubbish
bags and tape. DIY. This aesthetic permeates much of my
work. I suspect part of its value for me is the ever-present
possibility of changing the arrangement of physical materials,
of revising the design, of trying something out. The
barrier to action is low and enables one to simply think
through doing, to find one’s way in a cognitive-material
narrative. The revising of material bodies plays out in
contrast to the seeming impossibility of revising my own
body in any immediate physical sense, short of cutting off
an arm, which I am not prepared to voluntarily undertake.
Revising or redesigning my own body takes place in the
form of searching for trainable activities, for choreographic
situations that evoke new experiences, that change
perception and the organisation of the mind/body.
These training practices are a way to create new modes
of feeling and perceiving. Rejigging the psychosomatic
connections. Hacking. The development of new organs
of sensing, alternative ways of thinking and doing. If my
mind emerges from my body, then in rearranging the
way my mind is involved with my body, the habitual connections
and conventions of interpretation, I may add
dimensions to my world. Practices can alter the body in
order to influence the mind in order to enter new ways
of experiencing, which in turn alter the nature of one’s
presence or behaviour on stage.
The body is key. Messy, full of openings and prone to
mis-haps. An unreliable replicator, unable to consistently
discipline potentials, to restrain latencies. Infectious and
infected, subject to movement, rhythm, word, image and
mood. Polyrhythmic and out of sync. Oscillating wildly
through recursive situations. How do we find purchase?
Get a grip? Increase the squeeze and feel the burn? What
is the threshold between experience and technique?