Description of the process of creating the first performance.

 Inspired by friendship and a desire to create art together, I started to work together with Bas. We applied for a subsidy which was granted and we could generously make use of the new art-space 'De Nachtzuster'. We were very ambitious as we were planning to create performances each week as well as create an open community house for people in the neighbourhood, to connect to and draw inspiration from. Soon we figuered out we were too ambitious. We decided to skip the community house and focus on the performance-creation. 

We worked very intuitively. I remember entering the space and seeing the potential to work with thin sheet of plastic. The quality of this material is nice, because it is very delicate and wavy. And the sound is nice because it can crisp like gentle cracking ice. The idea to work with this material resonated with Bas and we started to hang the sheets. The room was divided and we came to some basic narrative idea of going through this wall of plastic, as to move into a different, deeper layer of the subconsciousness. Our approach to finding vertical resonance (resonance with the totality of the world) was through working with the form of a ritual to open up and immerse the audience in the totality of a dreamlike world, through the notion of 'incantation'.

We worked with individual proposals from me, Bas and our third collaborator: Maria. Everyone was to design their own performance, that we would compose together in a theatrical composition. 

I proposed a performance in an intuitively chosen costume that combines aeshetic elements from queer culture, roman war culture, the circus and scuba divin. I used a smartphone to express a feeling of alienation, through a text that was 'spoken' by the computer-voice of the telephone, leading towards the key-sentence: "All he wants, is a home away from home". 

Bas proposed a performance where he would grain ashes in a copper pot with a spiral-shaped, wooden staff that he sculpted himself. The ashes were left-overs from papers upon which we wrote our deepest wounds, that were then burnt into ashes. The idea of burning our wounds would lead to a sense of healing and nourish the idea of creating an experience of totality and wholesomeness. The sound of the graining was amplified by a contact microphone and mixed with the minimalist, mesmerizing tune 'Deep blue day' by Brian Eno. 

Maria proposed a contemporary dance in which she was dancing with the plastic sheet; the border between the physical world and the world of infinite potential. 

Through different forms and approaches to finding vertical resonance, we aimed to open up a ritualistic space to immerse the spectator into a dreamlike, magic world that may have been experienced - if only for a tenth of a second - as a totality.

Context: Alienation & Resonance

The sociologist-philosopher Hartmut Rosa has written a wonderful analysis of the acceleration of modern times and the alienation that arises from it. On the other hand, Rosa introduces the concept of RESONANCE. Rosa carefully develops the concept, but we are particularly interested in his idea of 'vertical resonance'.

VERTICAL RESONANCES are relationships between man and the world, existence or life as a whole. In such a relationship, one experiences a totality that is greater than the individual. In such experiences, the world itself speaks with its own voice, as it were. We see contemporary art as one of the last means in our late modern culture to create and experience vertical resonance. It is our ambition to create a performative installation in which spectators are invited to transcend their individuality and come into contact with something else that touches and potentially transforms them – to feel the right place of your 'self' in the the entirety of all chaos.

Abstract:
During a three weeks residency at the Nachtzuster, I worked together with a visual artist (Bas Kaufman) and a dancer (Maria Moschou) around the question of how to create vertical resonance in art. The question was inspired by theory of Harmut Rosa on resonance. We performed each Friday - 3 times in total - re-assembling and re-composing the main material of our spatial poem in dialogue with feedback from each performance-session. The performance had a strong visual aesthetics and attempted to play with dream logic.

Inspiration

It is our intention to develop a visual language from our own imagination and experience with which we can convey a contemporary form of vertical resonance to the audience. Sources of inspiration are: the work of Jan Fabre, Albert Camus and United-C. Character traits of this type of work are: raw, monumental, visual, tragic and physical. This makes our plan seem very serious. However, we cannot work with this theme without being able to laugh about it. We are aware that experiences of self-transcendence are always short-lived. One moment you experience the totality of life and the next moment you have to shit. That's how it is. For this relativising, comic side of the story, we are inspired by the tradition of absurdism, through the work of Alex van Warmerdam, Gumbah and Monty Python.

In this way, we want to attempt to create an absurdist ritual in which the spectator is invited to rise above himself. For a moment in infinity - but still, for a while.

Vertical Resonance & Metamodernism

I like to think of the idea of vertical resonance (experiencing the totality of the world) through the lense of metamodernism, as coined by Timotheus Vermeulen & Robin van den Akker in their seminal article "Notes on metamodernism" in 2010. 

The metamodernist view basically combines the main attitudes of both modernism and postmodernism. The main characteristic that is attributed to modernism is a certain enthousiasm, confidence and belief in the capacity of our human species to make the world a better place through progress. A more truthful, more ethical and more beautiful world is achievable through the great capacities of the human hands and minds. On the other end of the spectrum, as the main characteristic of postmodernism, there is scepsis, cynicism, relativism, deconstructivism, nihilism. There is no such thing as truth. There is no fundamental reason on which we can ground our existence. There are no essences, no grand narratives or systems that can ligitemately grasp the entire world, let alone be the right way to stimulate progress in that world. 

Metamodernism combines the modernist enthousiasm and the postmodernist scepticism into an attitude that allows to think in huge concepts like truth, totality and essences. Yet, with a sensitivity that these are never absolute nor final ideas and there will always be other ways to approach and understand and give form to such concepts. Yet, the metamodernist view allows for us to go after such great concepts like totality or vertical resonance, because it believes in the real impact and meaning that such experiences can have in a human's life, even though they are always temporary, ephemeral and transitory. It's worthwile and meaningful to pursue big idea's even though we know they can never be entirely be grasped.