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 sound and drawing as methods 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.
In her article “Landscapes as a Provocation: A Reflection on Moving Mountains” (2006), feminist political geographer Doreen Massey re-imagines landscape and place as events, thus contradicting preconceptions of the materiality of space versus the immateriality of time. Massey asserts that “both space and landscape could be imagined as provisionally intertwined simultaneities of ongoing, unfinished, stories“ (a statement that resonates with the three propositions for space from her homonymous monograph 2005). According to these propositions, space is (first) the production of interrelations, (second) is created by multiplicities—in turn, multiplicity and heterogeneity are intrinsic to space, and (third) space is unfinished and always in process since also relations are not closed systems.
The original quotation, which Massey borrows from anthropologist Barbara Bender, reads as follows: “Landscapes refuse to be disciplined. They make a mockery of the oppositions that we create between time (History) and space (Geography), or between nature (Science) and culture (Social Anthropology).” Landscapes, thus escaping disciplinary categorization and representational codex, form by gathering heterogeneous materials and, therefore, moving in a very slow motion over millions of years. Landscapes are open; they are still forming. They are telling stories. Landscapes are stories. Stories that could be invisible, too.
How can landscapes as events be staged? Is staging an adequate practice in the context of places and landscapes as events? Is there a balance or productive friction between staging and spacing? If staging presents a dramaturgical intensity – a spatial concentration – is spacing perhaps a dissemination of a performative spatial experience, embedding it within the agency and materialities of its surroundings?
We approach these questions through spatial scores – invitations for action across and along specific environments, balancing the dynamic porosity of inside and outside places.