STAGING AFTERNOON LANDSCAPES

Eva-Maria Schaller, Nimrod Poles, Elena Peytchinska

The practice of spatial scores merges contemporary performance score practices with a reframing of Ilse and Pierre Garnier's Spatialism. Within performance score practice, Elena's approach builds upon artists and researchers like Salomé Voegelin, who advocates shifting attention from visual to auditory experience to reveal hidden dimensions of space (Uncurating Sound 2023), and Emma Cocker and Danica Maier, who emphasize process over product, resisting closure in favour of ongoing exploration (No Telos! 2019). Expanding upon Visual Poetry, Garniers' Spatialism explores the material potential of language—particularly words—not just visually but acoustically, spatially, and processually (Poésie spatiale 2012).

With the project Staging Afternoon Landscapes, we propose a collaborative practice of simultaneously approaching performatively embodied dynamics of kinship and sibling-hood (Eva Schaller & Nimrod Poles), staging/spacing of dramaturgical fields beyond the margins of the performance space by adopting drawing as a method for spatial practice (Elena Peytchinska), and the relational potential between performers and the performance site, merging the agencies of bodies, materials and places (Eva Schaller, Nimrod Poles, Elena Peytchinska).

 

Activating a multisensorial exploratory apparatus, we engage with practices of reading (a body, a line), listening (to a site, a texture), writing (a place, a relation), seeing (an intention, a sound), drawing (a text, a movement)…

 

What if we focus on the processes of transmission and exchange as generative tasks and let them become the material? What emerges from such a feeding-forward-looping, from the attempts of physical understanding, getting close and joining each other? What happens in the attempt to share and embody information, pass on patterns, phrases, movement – and make them available to the other? This care and curiosity of sharing and transmitting information between two dancers inform our entanglements with meanings and materials: Caring for each other and carrying each other amalgamate throughout our practice. 

 

By experimenting with different spatial scores, we explore the elasticity of a landscape as an undisciplined event of spatial multiplicity. Drawing on Doreen Massey’s discussion of undisciplined landscapes (a term she borrows from anthropologist Barbara Bender), we engage both semantically and materially with words, sounds, lines, tactile and non-tactile agencies, transgressing the geometry of body and space. In this context, the medium drawing becomes a method for experiencing, tracing, transposing and analysing spatial events and formations, activating various layers of interaction between performers and sites.

EMS: Finding a good position

MERGE

EMS: Chirch bells

Drawings

SOUNDS

WORDS

DRAWINGS

COLOURS

Words are malleable materialities. They are not only mediators of meaning but also have visual, material, spatial, and sonic qualities. Words weave texts. They activate textures of matter and meaning; they are not only embedded in but also generate spaces/places/sites: text*ures.

Text*ures are living organisms that change, expand, metabolize, fade, disappear, emerge again… 

Derek Jarman: "Blue" (1993)

Listening to a landscape or feeling it through our skin is a spatial experience that happens not only in front of our eyes. It is 360 degrees of spatial perception, as performer and sound artist Salome Voegelin suggests. In her book “Sonic Possible Worlds” (2021), she observes the landscape as one such possible world—a time-space place—in which the soundscape commingles with the terrain’s visible characteristics. For Salome Voegelin (and in resonance with Doreen Massey's approach to a landscape as an event) by listening to a landscape, we are granted “access to the mobility of its production.”

Paul Klee: "Taking a line for a walk"