The following text is part of the half year report of the Amsterdam Master of Choreography (AMCh).
The texts follows what could be the trace trespassing the projects I was and I am still busy with.
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REFRAIN - GESTURE - SIGNATURE
Today a thought came to me. What links together BSIDES project, the PROCESSUAL WRITING and ABSTRACT ATRACTIONS project is the concept of the “refrain” as mentioned in A thousand Plateaus of Deleuze and Guattari.
The refrain is a song that creates certain stability out of chaos. The chapter 1837: OF THE REFRAIN starts telling the story of a child singing a song to feel at home in the midst of the darkness he fears. 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 chaos.
Not only single persons (or animals) but also milieus are in contact with chaos. From chaos, Milieus and Rhythms are born. Each Milieu relation to chaos is coded by repetition and the transcoding or transduction of the code is what allows one milieu to overlap with another. Therefore there is rhythm whenever there is a transcoded passage from one milieu to another, a communication of milieus, coordination between heterogeneous space-times. And whenever there is transcoding, we can be sure that there is not a simple addition, but the constitution of a new plane, as of a surplus value.
Territories are created through transcoding-making- rhythm out and in of chaos. And territories don’t belong to a single milieu but borrow from all the milieus bites and pieces. Territories of rhythm becomes as such when the regulatory objective function of a milieu becomes expressive. Take the example of color in birds or fish: color is the membrane state associated with interior hormonal states, but it remains functional and transitory as longs as it is tied up to a type of action (sexuality, aggressiveness, flight). It becomes expressive, on the other hand, when it acquires a temporal constancy and a spatial range that makes it territorial, or rather territorializing, mark: a signature.
In BSIDES Rob List sings his self-made poem/tune, the young students sing their appropriated songs from the Tube. Both are singing and transforming the activity of singing in a process of territorialization. Territorialization happens when the act of singing propels a movement of awareness, embodied in the body of the performer, that transduces the event into an improvisational dance out of chaos…into rhythm.
Singing is a movement of attention that unleash the motor functions of the anatomic body into an activity that produces felt atmospheres in the milieu around the body. Dance does not communicate the song, instead expresses a movement sensed “in” and “outside” the body, fragmenting the usual time space and energetic coordinates. The relation between “song” and “dance” and “light” and “music”, among other elements/milieus, produces a refrain: an expressive way to perceive the dance performance, an expressive movement of the elements assembling the dance performance.
Dancing and singing for nothing than for the pleasure to put the hand in the flame of chaos… coming out with a rhythmical movement separating and connecting the pull of gravity, the body, the sound from the space and the light with the signs.
The relation between chaos, territorialization and deterrritorialization has as a node the use of a common gesture of communication: to sing.
According to Igor Dobricic what we are doing, one more time with the project BSIDES after THE HALF is to investigate the dynamics of gesture. The becoming gesture of a body (of a performer, of light of music and so on) in the cusp of its force of emergence and in the cusp of its force of signification. The capture of a double parabolic movement of emergence and recognition.
In the case of Rob List we are working with a movement from territorialization to deterritorialization: from “common singing” to “abstract movement” produced through the transduction of the singing into embodied dance.
With the students we are going back to territorialization when they “commonly” sings/twitters among themselves via the lip-sync code.
In both cases we approach the normal function of communication, offered by the action of singing, and we break it open to a play of virtual forces. When a rhythmic territory forms, gesture appears.
With the PROCESSUAL WRITING we have two men bringing process to the most common activity of signification: writing. If we look to the activity of writing in the frame of the theatre milieu we could say that we are representing the act of representation but emptying it from content and therefore injecting it with the potential for ambiguous/ambulatory meanings. Or in the best case, making feel to the audience what it feels to signify…nothing.
Gesture could be equalized to what Deleuze and Guattari called signature. The signature is not the indication of a person; it is the chancy formation of a domain. The moment of delimitation of a domain of energies in order to re shuffle its coordinates, whether by modulating and excess of chaos or by adding a bit of it to the excessive regulation of signs. Signature is the dynamic gesture of the hand; des-personalizing the meaning that gives the image of two people writing, and re energizing the relation of movement between the serie hand-pen-paper-table-room. Signature is signing. The hand is not really writing, is signing a document, coding a paper with abstracts. Signing the rhythm of tracing that makes abstract the activity of writing. Singing the signing.
ABSTRACT ATTRACTIONS is a project dealing with the issue of attraction, erotism and sex appeal in the performance art. Producing attractive bodies applying a methodology of work that deals with "abstractions". To deal with abstractions means to subtract the body from the pool of audiovisual information in the media that constructs the image, idea and feeling of what is attractive, in order to gain an excess of -abstract- attractiveness.
The excessiveness of attraction is the surplus of expressiveness released by the avoidance of the functional end goal oriented of any functioning organism. Philosopher Elizabeth Grosz continues the thoughts of Deleuze and Guattari on when she explains that courtship and sex appeal in animal species are not qualities developed for natural selection only; attractiveness in animals does not have as a final goal sexual reproduction for the survival of the specie, but its aim is to intensify the pleasure of living bodies.
In affirming the radical distinction between natural and sexual selection – that is, between skills and qualities that enable survival, and those that enable courtship and pleasure, which sometimes overlap but commonly do not – Darwin introduced an excessiveness into the development and transformation of species. Species are no longer natural collections or kinds developed to survive and compete, they are also the a posteriori and ultimately incalculable consequences of sexual taste, appeal or attraction. Perhaps sexuality itself is not so much to be explained in terms of its ends or goals … as in terms of its forces, its effects (which can less contentiously be understood as pleasure in indeterminable forms), which are forms of bodily intensification
Elizabeth Grosz “Chaos, Territory, Art” pag.33.
The aim of the performance is to mix dance with fashion and create a purely abstract dance/fashion event that transmits pleasurable sensations and remains unrecognizable.
We will look for possibilities to dance unusual physical movement, further away from our habitual movement patterns. To do so we will look for different body anatomies than humans, for example: insects, birds and fishes; and we will overlap the nonhuman body plan with our human body plan. Creating finally an abstract plan of movement for the concrete human body.
Here the refrain sings the chaos of the nonhuman body territorializing it into an abstract/hybrid half animal and half human composition. The rhythm of the expressive qualities will follow the tendency of seduction through resonance. The movement of concrete and abstract body parts to elicit vibratory feelings of pleasure and seduction from one body to the other (from the body of one performer to the other and to the audience, but also from the body of light with the body of music, and so on). Signing the bodies in a multiplied line of seductive relations that makes the audience feels the heat of the moment…in an unusual (transcoded) manner.
People singing, people writing and people dancing and cat walking their way out from stabilized codes falling into another kind of stability. Which stability? The stability out of common codes, out of chaos into a new flag pinching the land, the land of art, in its most multi versed ways. When the flag pinches a land that is not chaos and not common sense is when movement becomes music, when rhythm takes movement and when territorialization is art.
Let’s finish with another beautiful quote.
Proust was among the first to underscore this life of the Wagnerian motif. Instead of the motif being tied to a character who appears, the appearance of the motif itself constitutes a rhythm character in “the plenitude of a music that is indeed filled with so many strains, each of which is a being”. …. The discovery of the properly melodic landscape and the properly rhythmic character marks the moment of art when it ceases to be a silent painting on a signboard. This may not be art’s last word, but art went that route, as did the bird: motifs and counterpoints that form an autodevelopment, in other words, a style.
Deleuze and Guattari A thousend plateaus, p.352.