Of the Refrain
A child in the dark gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients himself with his little song as best he can. The song is like a rough sketch of a calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos. Perhaps the child skips as he sings, hastens or slows his pace. But the song itself is already a skip: it jumps from chaos to the beginning of order in chaos and is in danger of breaking apart at any moment.
A Thousand Plateaus Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.
The refrain is a rhythmic operation that connects with a moment of emergence out of chaos. The refrain helps the person to navigate that moment, creating certain stability, close to the source of chaos or helps to launch the person away from it. The refrain territorializes, it creates temporary configurations of heterogeneous materials; and deterritorializes again re configuring the relations of elements continuously.
In BSIDES project we gave form to the concept of the refrain under two types of configurations:
Configuration of the series singing-moving : the act of singing gives tendency to the
autonomic body organization of the performer. The rhythm of singing
a poem or a pop song, influences the time-space-energy coordinates
of the habits of the body. The dance is produced then, in the back
and forth movement between the memory habits of the performer and
the tendency added by the act of physically enunciating a song.
Configuration of the series feeling-moving : the act of feeling the awareness of the body and
its time-space-energetic organization gives tendency to the potential
passage for a new movement to be taken, for a new organization to
be delineated. As if the present body configuration would function as a
time/space imprint that opens new possibility to move away from.
In BSIDES we concentrated in two types of attention (at least)
the "exteroceptive" attention of the sensibility of the skin, and
the "interoceptive" sensibility of the visceral thoracic area.
The relation between the attention of at least two types of bodily perceptions (singing-moving and feeling-moving), is a transformative relation. The relation does not only connects with forces of emergence, but as well modifies the elements trespassed by it.
So just what is a refrain? Glass harmonica: the refrain is a prism, a crystal of space-time. It acts upon that which surrounds it, sounds it, sound or light, extracting from its various vibrations, or decompositions, projections, or transformations. The refrain also has a catalytic function: not only to increase the speed of the exchanges and reactions in that which surrounds it, but also to assure indirect interactions between elements devoid of so-called natural affinity, and thereby to form organized masses.
A Thousand Plateaus Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.
In the following video excerpt you can see the smooth transition between the two refrain series. First from "reciting" a poem towards "moving"; and second from "feeling" the body configuration towards more "moving".