SoDA WORKS 2015

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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?
Some limits are easy to find. Limits like aerobic fitness, strength, balance, attention. Others are obscured. Hiding in corners, folds and depths. Hidden in clouds of thought and feeling. Taken for granted or assumed to be fundamental. How might I confront the limits of my imagination? How real are they? Have my expectations of the world been formed by inaccurate impressions? Is there a way to test that? Frames help. If you can frame a situation so that it orients itself towards a question, directs the force of its unfolding into an enigma, a fresh ream of experience might be revealed. This is what I have learnt. Categories help. Naming helps. Questioning your constructions help. Precision helps, effort helps. And when these frames, these activities are organised around a sufficiently wild problem, the risk of reduction and flattening is reduced. The risk of discovery is heightened. Patterned Interference existed in a field of tension between three realms: the realm of spatial arrangement, the realm of subjective experience, and the realm of language. All three choreographed and modulated one another in a chaotic, interdependent fashion. Perhaps what we were really training was the ability to facilitate this particular interaction, the confluence of three realms through ourselves. The outcome of this encounter was, for me, an enigma. Although I knew what we were doing, and more or less how we got there, each night we performed the work I encountered a hard limit in my ability to encompass or understand the situation as a whole. I didn’t have an adequate frame through which to organise my impressions. The system simply exceeded me. The complexity of its quiverings and thrashings left me dizzy and saturated. But also awake and curious. It was not cathartic. Mostly I was left with a sense of work. Endless work. Beautiful work.
Page 1 and 2: ODA WORKS 2015
Page 3 and 4: ANDREW KERTON
Page 6 and 7: THE RIFF On encountering integratio
Page 8 and 9: Orbital Studies Something out there
Page 10 and 11: An orbit commonly refers to the pat
Page 14 and 15: P DANCE I am a Man! Perhaps almost
Page 18 and 19: foto © Marion Borriss
Page 20: The Agency of Touch “The Agency o
Page 24: Publisher: HZT Hochschulübergreife

SoDA WORKS 2015

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