the history project (working title)

see menu/contents in the top left corner for more pages

my trip to outokumpu was supported by Konstnärsnämnden, The Swedish Arts Grants Committee

research diary

Embodying the practice of feminist speculative fabulation in the scholarly mode, Strathern taught me–taught us–a simple but game-changing thing: "It matters what ideas we use to think other ideas." I compost my soul in this hot pile. [...] It matters what thoughts think thoughts. It matters what knowledges know knowledges. It matters what relations relate relations. It matters what worlds world worlds. It matters what stories tell stories.


–– Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble5

dream diary

outokumpu, january 2022

2022-03-13

 

stories

 

0. the one about why it matters what stories tell stories

0. the one about dance history being a historically inaccurate work of fiction

 

1. the one about Descartes and King Christina

2. the one about Descartes and Louis XIV

3. the one about Louis XIV and the formation of the Academy of Dance

 

4. the one about affect theory

2022-01-25

 

 

four days into my residency i came down with a fever. i took the antigen test off the shelf, unboxed the elements and spat into the container. the 15 minutes one has to sit through, waiting for that five minute slot during which the reading of the result can be considered valid, bore the weight of the two years i spent anticipating the moment i was finally going to see that bottom line revealed.

 

i tested positive for Covid-19 on January 15th, a Saturday. i was sober enough to understand that i’ve, indeed, seen the second line and to comprehend its meaning. i wrote messages informing the residency folk of the fact, my sister and my mum, too, before falling back asleep. i remember feeling ashamed of spreading the virus, of exposing innocent people to its influence. i remember feeling grateful for the exhaustion, the pressure of which left me with no choice but to surrender.

 

i slept for three days, waking only to make tea, pee, and experience extreme discomfort. my back muscles hurt as if my nervous system existed in a suspended state of disintegration. i couldn’t even sense the headache i knew i was experiencing due to the noise that came from between my scapulas.

 

and then i woke up, hungry and bored. i spent the next five days confused in bed. reading. sleeping. breathing. messaging with friends, checking in with mum. cooking, taking a nap, then eating. watching TV. and sleeping, again. and again. and again.

 

i am so grateful for the support i’ve received from the residency folk, whose messages of cool composture, whose readiness to deliver food, and encouraging compiments meant the world.

2022-03-18

 

To date, I have found that there exist 125 ballet companies of which 3 were established in 1600s, 10 in 1700s, 4 in 1800s, 113 in 1900s, and 5 in 2000s.

on practice

 

on the morning of the 27th, i logged into facebook and found my friend sasha kleinplatz's status staring at me, teasingly. it said, "is a practice choreography? is a practice something you use to get to the choreography?"

 

i responded over breakfast, porridge with banana and honey.

 

 

i sometimes think of "practice" as something that would have arisen in the context of a "master-apprentice" relationship way back when (i'm thinking pre-enlightenment village healer in a period drama type scenario) where choreography or healing would have emerged from a repetitive action or activity, which the choreographer or healer engaged in as a matter of principle, i.e. because they had a conviction. what justified their conviction? let's say that between the master and the apprentice, the activities that they engaged in sometimes lead to fruition. let's say that in the 13th century occasional medical success was more than anyone could have bargained for. let's also say that literal success wasn't necessarily what was at stake (think alchemy, love potions, superstitions, etc.).

 

a practice, in this case, must have been repetitive and it must have been speculative.

 

hundreds of years later, a doctor can practice medicine (to a degree) without having to speculate. a choreographer can practice choreography without having to speculate. whilst, and this is true for both, maintaining a higher success rate than that 13th century master could ever have dreamed of. it is also interesting that both a 21st century choreographer and a 21st century medical professional can literally have a practice. the difference being, the medical professional's practice names a place, doesn't it? whilst a choreographer's practice names ... what exactly? (this is not a trick question. it's mostly that i think the word practice in the european context is used... liberally, to say the least. the same goes for the word choreography.)

 

in conclusion, i think of "speculation" as what makes the difference between an emergent practice (adrienne maree brown, emergent strategy) and a practice that isn't necessarily, or a practice that isn't specifically emergent. more specifically, i think of "speculation" as a qualifying factor that justifies an activity's being named a practice in the first place; radical :).

 

in response to your question, then (you always come up with the best exercises-games, sasha) what if practice can be a way to choreography, albeit a *** one, since practice-as long as it remains defined as a speculative, i.e. an emergent activity-does not guarantee the emergence of any particular structure or form? practicing could lead one to choreography, but it could lead one to dancing, too. or writing. or dreaming. or singing...

 

ps and then there's the unresolved question of choreography. not that any of this resolves the question of practice.

dances

2022-01-13, before covid

(originally published on instagram, follow link below to video)

 

dear diary,

 

I am in Outokumpu, in North Karelia, a region in/of Eastern Finland. I was invited here this January to begin my work on "the history project (working title)" at the Old Mine Residency. 

With "the history project (working title)" I aim to develop a trans-disciplinary critical reading of the standard narrative timeline of the history of colonial European theatrical stage dancing.

During my first working period here in Finland I will primarily engage in analytical historical research with the aim to further develop my working hypothesis. Namely, that the standard narrative timeline is a work of fiction which–it being historically inaccurate–requires effort to maintain. If I find that I can corroborate my hypothesis, I will continue my efforts by working on the question: what resources are required for the maintenance of a fictional historical narrative and what justifies the expenditure?

I have other questions, concerned with liberation and dance practice and embodied knowledge creation and research and somatisation, but we'll get to those in a minute.

I danced today listening to a recording I made in 2018 in Edinburgh at a residency Skye Reynolds and I had at DanceBase. In the recording (available on vimeo under sappho's conversations Edinburgh day 2) Skye and I talk about orientation. At the beginning of this historical research, it was helpful to be reminded of the thoughts we've once had...

thanks Skye!

p

 

https://www.instagram.com/p/CYrW3R0BLV3/

2022-01-26, after covid

(originaly published on instagram, follow link below to video)

 

dear diary, 

the question goes something like, "how do i treat everything that we are doing as a somatic experience of the thing itself," which is simultaneously a philosophical (analytic) and a physical (experiential) question. i'm thinking of angela davis1 who once said something along the lines of, i am fighting for the kind of feminism that works at the heart of contradiction. i am thinking of karen barad2 who wrote, "Thinking has never been a disembodied or uniquely human activity. Stepping into the void, opening to possibilities, straying, going out of bounds, off the beaten path–diverging and touching down again, swerving and returning, not as consecutive moves but as experiments in in/determinacy. Spinning off in any old direction is neither theorizing nor viable; it loses the thread, the touch of entangled beings (be)coming together-apart. All life forms (including inanimate forms of liveliness) do theory. The idea is to do collaborative research, to be in touch, in ways that enable reponse-ability."

(i will document the references in the research catalogue, see link in bio for link)

https://www.instagram.com/tv/CZMJdm1BoW6/ 

 

 

 

unholding language

chalk on blackboard, old mine residency

2022

2022-01-26

 

in the first or the second episode of the third season of true detective, which i saw last night, the english teacher reads a segment from robert penn warren’s poem tell me a story. i never heard of robert penn warren before. when i looked the poem up this morning, i discovered that warren died in 1989: the year i was born.

 

the detective–who will later marry the english teacher–overhears the teacher’s reading of the segment, as luck would have it, by total and utter coincidence, and is mesmerised; by the verses, the teacher, her reading. in a later scene or episode, before asking the teacher out to dinner, the teacher and the detective talk about the poem whislt looking for a presumably dead child. this may be the third of several times our attention is drawn to the poem. the verses in question? "The name of the story will be Time, But you must not pronounce its name.” the teacher thinks the verses are telling us we cannot know what we’re experiencing by name, without distance we are doomed. the detective thinks the verses are telling us we mustn’t speak the name of God.

Tell Me a Story

Robert Penn Warren - 1905-1989

 

[ A ]

 

Long ago, in Kentucky, I, a boy, stood

By a dirt road, in first dark, and heard

The great geese hoot northward.

 

I could not see them, there being no moon

And the stars sparse. I heard them.

 

I did not know what was happening in my heart.

 

It was the season before the elderberry blooms,

Therefore they were going north.

 

The sound was passing northward.

 

 

[ B ]

 

Tell me a story.

 

In this century, and moment, of mania,

Tell me a story.

 

Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.

 

The name of the story will be Time,

But you must not pronounce its name.

 

Tell me a story of deep delight.

origin story, part one


in October of 2019 the infamously entitled conference post-dance-ing was held at MDT [1] in Stockholm, Sweden. the conference was organised by the hosting theatre in collaboration with Cullberg, Danscentrum, and SKH (previously known as DOCH). [2] the organisers anticipated the conference with the words, “We long for a conference with an unconventional format that emphasizes conversation, as well as supports the potentially different languages available to this conversing.” [3]

 

i do not remember that the format of this conference was specifically unconventional, nor do i remember that the conference or its organisers and moderators specifically supported conversing in different languages. what i do remember is that it was at this conference that i first realised that we–the members of this international community of professional dance artists, researchers, and students–do, indeed, seem to be speaking different languages whilst collectively maintaining the belief, and this is the enlightening aspect of the realisation, that we do not, in fact, do anything of the sorts.

 

three years later, i am still of the opinion that exposing the fact the members of this international community are for the most part unable to successfully and continually send and receive meaning across these unnameable, unexamined, shapeshifting, place-changing, incomprehensible, emotionally and spiritually charged membranes-instead-of-barriers whilst actualy speaking the same language–namely, the international variation on any of the english langauges–was the remarkable albeit unanticipated achievement of this conference.

Clearly, if we take quantum mechanics seriously as making a statement about the real world, then the demands it places on our conventional thinking are enormous. Hidden behind the discrete and independent objects of the sense world is an entangled realm, in which the simple notions of identity and locality no longer apply. We may not notice the intimate relationships common to that level of existence, but, regardless of our blindness to them, they persist. Events that appear to us as random may, in fact, be correlated with other events occurring elsewhere. Behind the indifference of the macroscopic world, “passion at a distance” knits everything together.


—Greenstein and Zajonc, The Quantum Challenge: Modern Research on the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics4

...the power of the now the now that keeps on fleeting away and accepting the thing that she just said that she didn't want to say am and speaking of now you can't be in the now and actually talk about it at the same time a becuase you can talk about a a kind of representation of the now or the concept of the now but you can't be in it and and and talk about it at the same time but that's obvious i mean i am the master of the obvious the jack of all trades the master of none at least that's what i've been told in catholic school...

 

– Jeanine Durning, inging3

origin story, part two

 

my process started the afternoon reggie wilson, of the Fist and Heel Performance Group, introduced the conference to the three sisters of dance. the three sisters were presented as metaphors for the three qualifying values that would have been used to assess and categorise the characteristics of a particular dance.

 

the sisters, their names, the values they stood for were so obvious that, thinking back, i cannot remember what they were. i thought one of them must have been rhythm. i asked a friend who attended the conference whether she remembered who the sisters were. my friend agreed the values the sisters represented were obvious; logic would insist on rhythm, time, and space. another friend, however, insisted–to my surprise–that one of the sisters was in fact pleasure. but if pleasure was one of the sisters, i thought out loud, which of the three other ones is not?

 

when reggie first introduced the conference to the three sisters, i was quick to assume that his was a historical approach; that he wanted to remind us of the way we used to think about dancing. i realised my assumption was incorrect the moment reggie–having asked the conference to name the three sisters in the example of tina turner dancing in an old music video he’d just pull up on the big screen–responded with a firm, confident “no” to any suggestion he disagreed with without offering an explanation.

 

this is reggie saying no to a fellow adult professional who just shared an observant if intuitive response to a leading question out loud in a public forum, whilst being given very little by way of information and no time to think. this was a classic teacher-fishing-for-an-answer scenario, which most people in the room wouldn’t have had a chance to experience (i.e. practice) in decades.

 

it was not until some 30 minutes later, when jeanine durning was performing learned (!) excerpts of inging [4] within a lecture-performance type scenario, that i first thought about this situation i was continually finding myself in as theoretically impossible. how was it that dance history (the reggie wilson approach) and dance futurity (the jeanine durning approach) existed simultaneously within the confines of a shared spacetime that whas the conference panel in question, in the city in which 369 years prior Descartes either died of pneumonia or murder? [5]

origin story, part three


langauge, as i’m beginning to think of it, isn’t a matter of language or only a matter of language.

 

when jeanine durning commits to memory excerpts of what was previously–and now i’m tempted to say, allegedly–exactly not a performance of thinking feeling speaking moving out loud in public, i.e. under pressure, then devotes herself to speaking what was previously–allegedly–not memorised as if it still isn’t, i am forced to doubt my own expert ability to differentiate between two different types of affect that most frequently affect professional performers during work hours.

 

affect, 1. manifests under pressure, under the condition of opportunity.

 

under the condition of opportunity, the person affected is permitted and/or can afford to maintain a (felt) overview of (a) what kind of attention and (b) how much of what kind of attention they (c) choose to place where (d) at any given moment (e) for whatever reason. note: this scenario assumes the person affected has the skill necessary to proprioceptively negotiate, i.e. intentionally and successfully manage, several types of attention simultaneously over an extended period of time. when placed intentionally, attention is calibrated, i.e. sensitised to a specific type and/or amount of incoming stimuli. to “place attention,” in other words, is to “temporarily choose with what kind of capacity what to be sensitive–and what to be insensitive–to.” as long as the person affected remains in control of the kind of stimuli they continue to be sensitive to–no matter how many of these they choose to be managing at any given time–the person affected under the condition of opportunity remains relatively underwhelmed.

 

affect, 2. manifests under pressure, when the condition of opportunity does not apply.

 

when the condition of opportunity does not apply, the person affected will not be permitted to and/or will not be able to afford to maintain an overview over their attentive capacities, as a result of which they will be exposed to the risk of unanticipated disorienting overwhelm.

 

if overwhelm occurs in the situation in which the condition of opportunity does not apply, the person affected is likely to be surprised by it, since they didn’t maintain overview over their capacities. when surprised by overwhelm, the person affected’s capacities will likely be drawn to overwhelm, in the attempt to assess the situation and minimise damage. whilst assessing the situation, the person affected will be momentarily distracted from whatever it was that they were doing right before the overwhelm occurred. whilst assessing the situation, the person affected will be disoriented, i.e. momentarily and effectively unconscious of anything except the assessment. in that moment of effective unconscious that occurs right after an overwhelm, the person affected runs the risk of being unable to maintain their professional composure, the consequence of which might be that the person affected momentarily misinterprets the stress they are being exposed to as a private matter, which transforms any emotional, spiritual, intellectual reaction into an existential one.

experienced performers, skilled performers will be able to recover from the most existential of overwhelms. no doubt about that, overwhelm beyond recovery isn’t what’s at stake here. what’s at stake is that not even the most experienced of performers can recover from awakening to the existential in public without revealing something of that experience to those who are in the know, if not everyone who was paying attention.

 

when jeanine durning successfully blurs the line between the two types of affect by putting herself in a situation in which she is affected in one way when i’d expect her to be affected in another and vice versa, jeanine durning is making a point. she is speaking.

 

when reggie wilson screams no at a person who took a risk and made an attempt at guessing what it was that reggie imagined, reggie is making a point. he is speaking.

 

 

 

 

 

the question that remains is: when they speak, what are they saying?

 

taking stock of the room i found myself in guided by this question–when they speak, what are they saying?–i came to realise that “dance history,” that story of continual progress, was factually inaccurate. because here we were, the classicist, the modernist, the postmodernist, the experimentalist, the researcher, the dancer, the choreographer; were were all there, in the present moment. in the same place. sharing this space.

 

and here i was, realising that because we were behaving as if our differences were only a matter of personal preference or conviction, we–this community of international professionals–were missing out on the opportunity to study how to speak to each other across those imperceptible barriers that were not, in fact, our own or only our own.

 

this, of course, isn’t only a matter of someone being a closeted classicist. this is a matter of someone being a closeted class-icist, a closeted white person, a closeted person in power, a closeted heterosexual, a closeted polyamorist, a closeted neuronormative person, etc. who, as long as they stay closeted, will continue to avoid being faced with the fact of their condition. that fact being that closeted whiteness doesn’t hurt white people, in much the same way that closeted modernism doesn’t hurt modernists.

2022-01-28/29

 

notes on affect

 

 

“Affects are difficult to grasp and conceptualise because, as Spiloza says, ‘an affect or passion of the mind [animi pathema] is a confused ideawhich is only perceived by the increase or decrease it causes in the body’s vital force.” [italics are mine]6

 

 

From what I can remember, I was first introduced to affect by Chrysa Parkinson and/or Bojana Cvejić, in the early 2010s. I am specifically not saying affect theory, because I cannot remember for a fact that I was, indeed, introduced to affect theory at precisely the same time I was introduced to affect, a (new-old) concept that was making itself comfortable in the shared consciousness of the Bruxelles dance scene. [To my impressionable young mind, it seemed like affect was suddenly all any of the adults ever wanted to talk about. What was it about affect that was so important? Relevant? Cool? I’m also wondering, was affect really well known, which is why so many felt comfortable talking about it? Was it really functional? Was it doing a lot for people?]

 

I would be surprised if the introduction to affect authored by Bojana Cvejić bypassed affect theory, especially since I remember Bojana occasionally discussing Massumi, Deleuze and Guattari, and Spinoza–who is, with his “Ethics,” credited as the originator of affect theory, according to the article on affect (philosophy) on wikipedia.com. Where Bojana’s introduction would have been technical, Chrysa’s introduction to affect would have been poetic, linguistic, experiential or practice based, speculative, as well as philosophical. By which I do not mean to imply that Chrysa’s would have been any less specific of an introduction than Bojana’s. Please. The other thing that comes to mind is that Chrysa’s introduction would have taken place in the dance studio, where Bojana’s would taken place in the classroom, in front of a projection.

 

note: perhaps go through your notebooks from the period when you’re back home? maybe there’s something there to evidence any of the fantasy you are committed to publishing.



According to the New Oxford American Dictionary (online edition), only the word effect is “commonly used as a noun, usually meaning ‘a result, consequence, impression.’ The noun affect is restricted almost entirely to psychology.” [italics are mine] Dictionary.com defines affect in its own right only as a verb. All the meanings of affect, noun on dictionary.com are specifically associated with an operative context (psychology, psychiatry, obsolete). The Merriam-Webster defines affect, noun extensively, but places the definition of noun last–something I’ve noticed all dictionaries that define affect, noun are in habit of doing. This possibly in lieu of the fact that “the noun affect is [contextually?] restricted”?

 

Affect as a philosophical concept–according to wikipedia–was originally defined by Spinoza as that which places emphasis on bodily or embodied experience.6 Affect, or–as Spinoza puts it–”affections of the body”7 increased or diminished the body’s power of acting whilst interacting with another... critter, perhaps–to borrow from Donna Haraway’s collection. For Bergson, being affected–following wikipedia’s lead–had to do with self-knowing established from within, as opposed to self-knowing being established from without only.

 

note: is this how i understand proprioception in the context of body-mind centering®?



Reading Massumi’s translation of the excerpt from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus8, I am reminded of the projected frame, of the countless times Deleuze and Guattari’s names were called to our attention. The sentence, “Neither word [affect/affection] denotes a personal feeling,” stands out as the sentence that could correctly capture the sign of the times, the obsession with... objectivity, perhaps? that rampaged through the community around the year 2010.


It’s not objectivity. We were not obsessed with objectivity, not objectivity per se. We were obsessed with not being personal, it wasn’t personal. We were trained not to take it personally and we were trained not to mean it personally. Passion was looked down upon, feelings were a historical fact, affect, sure, but contextualised, anticipated, explained. And always, always independent.




In an interview with Owen Jones I saw on youtube today9, Judith Butler said it was from trans folk who read Gender Trouble and complained–am I’m paraphrasing here–that she learned of the myriad of ways in which a constructivist approach can either be misunderstood or else taken to mean what it was not intended to mean. That a constructivist theory of gender can function in a critical and an operational capacity, that a constructivist theory of gender can provide an opportunity to think gender agentially, that is a good thing. That must be a good thing, right?

 

Not if it is taken to mean that as long as it’s constructed, it doesn’t matter. Which opens the space for biological extremism? Is that how the story goes? Is that the logic?

 

 

The mistake I made in my first reading of Gender Trouble–which I did exactly under the influence of affect theory–is that I thought that acknowledging gender for the construct that it was was about to resolve all my problems, insecurities, and confusions. Because gender, yes, affected me but even if I had an inclination or affection towards it, neither word denotes a personal feeling. And so gender became a construct at the same time as it never could have even affected me... in a personal way. The relief inspired by this realisation was so great, I didn’t stand a chance.

origin story, notes


[1] MDT stands for Moderna Dansteatern, which literally translates to Modern Dancetheatre.

 

[2] SKH stands for Stockholms Konstnärliga Högskola, i.e. the Stockholm University of the Arts. DOCH stood for Dans och Cirkushögskola, i.e. the University of Dance and Circus.

 

[3] Mdtsthlm.se. 2022. POST-DANCE-ING – MDT. [online] Available at: https://mdtsthlm.se/archive/6671/ [Accessed 27 January 2022].

 

[4] see bibliography.

 

[5] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/feb/14/rene-descartes-poisoned-catholic-priest

the presentation

 

on saturday, January 29, i gave an hour long presentation to fellow residents in which i described my experience of the residency and outlined my hypotnesis. the recording was interrupted by the alarm at the 60 minute mark. i didin't realise the alarm was going to interrupt the recording. the conclusion of my presentation and the 20 minute long conversation the five of us enjoyed afterwards was not recorded.

 

i took this opportunity to ask, if i want storytelling to be one of the formats with which to report on my research, where does the story start? how does the story go? what does it include? what does it exclude? and how do i find out?

 

in the true sense of non-anticipatory aesthetics–i am realising as i write this–i've discovered that there is no other way to find out what to include and what to exclude but by starting to tell the story. and there is no place to begin at than at the beginning.

 

my name is pavle. i also go by pav. my pronouns are they/them. i was born yugoslavia, a country that doesn't exist.

bibliography:

 

1 Davis, A. and Butler, J., 2017. On Inequality Angela Davis and Judith Butler in Conversation. [online] Youtube.com. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MzmifPGk94&t=25s [Accessed 26 January 2022]. 

 

2 Barad, K., 2012. On Touching—the Inhuman That Therefore I Am (v1.1). update from Differences, A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, [online] 23(3), pp.206–223. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/7375696/On_Touching_The_Inhuman_That_Therefore_I_Am_v1_1_ [Accessed 26 January 2022].

 

3 Durning, J., 2015. inging. [online] Vimeo.com. Available at: https://vimeo.com/150299224 [Accessed 27 January 2022].

 

4 Greenstein, G. and Zajonc, A., 2006. The quantum challenge. Sudbury, Mass.: Jones and Bartlett.

 

5 Haraway, D., 2016. Staying with the Trouble. Durham: Duke University Press, p.43.

 

[6] En.wikipedia.org. 2020. Affect (philosophy) - Wikipedia. [online] Available at: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affect_(philosophy)> [Accessed 29 January 2022].

 

[7] Spinoza, Benedictus de (1994). A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works. Trans. by Edwin M. Curley. Princeton and Chichester: Princeton University Press. p. 154ISBN 978-0-691-00067-1. Retrieved 27 November2011.

 

[8] Deleuze, GillesGuattari, Félix (1987) [1980]. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Vol. 2. Trans. and foreword by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. p. xvi. ISBN 978-0-8166-1401-1OCLC 16472336.

 

[9] Jones, O., Butler, J., 2021. Feminist icon Judith Butler on JK Rowling, trans rights, feminism and intersectionality. [video] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXJb2eLNJZE> [Accessed 29 January 2022].

 

alys' request


alys asked me to send her a photo of a plastic detail from the airplane. new zealand's response to covid-19 has been severe. alys is longing to travel again. here is a selection of photographs i took for her on January 30.

the second telling


on Feburary 27, 2022, at an event organised in Stockholm by Dages Juvelier Keates and Alexis Steeves, i told the story for the second time. preparing for this event, i reflected on my experience working with Eleanor Campbell and Corrine Harragin on the story of Odin's Eye. i remembered admiring Corrine's methodological approach to storytelling:

 

1. read;

2. write;

3. speak.

 

i remembered how much joy i drew from this methodology. i remembered how much sense that methodology made for me. did i ever ask why, though? why did this methodology make so much sense to me?

 

i am thinking this as i'm writing this.

 

reading, writing, and speaking are the three activities i find the most engaging. in life in general as well as at work. my process has always consisted of a combination of the three. what i've never done before was to intentionally engage the activities one after another, in a thought-provoking order.

 

sticking to this order, what made the strongest impression on me was that it, the order, lends itself to repetition, to looping. and so

 

1. read;

2. write;

3. speak;

 

becomes

 

1. read;

2. write;

3. speak;

4. read;

5. write;

6. speak;

7. read;

8. etc.

 

reading and writing are the solitary components in this methodology. speaking is the social component. i like that of the three components, two are solitary. the two solitary components do not make sense, as activities they do not have a purpose, without the social component. it is in the social environment, in the interpersonal landscape, that meaning is discovered.

 

meaning is not not relational, it is intra-active. meaning, and this contrary to the popular opinion, cannot be made. not ethically, at least. making meaning requires hierarchy. discovering meaning requires relationship.

reactions


one person, the greek neighbour, said, wait. so. we have chaos, and then we have earth. and here’s me (in the middle, pinching her two fingers together) trying to figure the smallest detail out? is that what you said? ... yes? thank you. thank you! thank you.

 

a person with mickey mouse patches on the lapel of their white shirt and a flower blazer said, at first i thought this is random, and then i was like aaaaaaaah.

2022-04-22

 

the video above was created to serve as worksample for a Konstnärsnämnden travel grant that is support my visit to Milano in May, 2022. as it happens, what was meant to serve a single purpose proved interesting enough to serve multiple.

 

 

from VIMEO:

 

This experiment concerns the history project (working title), with which i am developing a transdisciplinary critical reading of the history of European theatrical dancing and dance making. the aim of this reading is to challenge the way in which we (average citizens, for the most part, uninformed and/or well educated, i.e., indoctrinated dancers) not just read, but think of (imagine!) history. 

 

"history, his story, is often assumed to be non-negotiable, definite, finite, even after evidence is procured to the contrary. this is why i start the project with the following question: what will i learn about dance history if i don't treat the written as the only viable historical record? i want to know what of history is still remembered. i want to know who remembers it. and i want to know the many ways in which the remembered doesn't correspond with the recorded."

 

For more on the history project (working title) please follow the link below.

https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1504990/1504991

 

The video material used in this experiment was recorded at the Old Mine Residency, in Outokumpu, North Karelia (Finland) in January, 2022. My visit to the Old Mine Residency was supported by the Swedish Arts Grants Committee aka Konstnärsnämnden.

 

The audio recording used in this experiment is an excerpt of "sappho's conversations STHLM day 2", recorded with Skye Renolds at Konsntärsnämnden in 2019. The link to the full recording is available below.

https://vimeo.com/313419964