Score Breg for Lili


Find my score below! As a next step in this conversation. :) Maybe it's better to read it after you finished your score for me. I didn't explicitly take the idea of 'memory' in account although my imagination during the process of making it, is taking me very much into a 'space of memory'. There is some questions in relation to Snelting's text as a warming up, before you get to the actual score.
 
This trainride is very helpful in thinking about geometrical infrastructures. It feels like my personal space is expanding at a speed of 300km/h after more then two months within a 1km-perimeter. I'm suddenly very aware of any trainride as a 'hyperdirectional infrastructure'. I'm also very aware of the 'negative space' around my linear trajectory, extracted from my experience. A voice in the back of my mind says 'you should enjoy the view'. But I don't because I'm absorbed in my laptopscreen. I'm riding backwards. There is no-one in front of me nor next to me.
 
I'm looking at the pionirska-illustration of the boy and the girl. Their heads are turned towards each other, but their eyes are looking at the viewer. Their interaction is in a sense bended and suspended, connected through the eyes of the viewer. The red layout-frame could suggest a train window. Maybe they are going from point A to point B.
 
I'm wondering to what extent the last weeks apass-conversations were directional interactions. A network of Point A's and point B's. How do we - you and me - operate within the layout-frame of this exercise? Are our interactions directional? Do we tend to ‘instrumentalize’ our interactions, working within an economy of 'giving and taking'? I'm curious if we can allow ourselves to give and take in a undirectional way, through a bended interaction. How could we find togetherness in that?
 
This score is an invitation to explore the negative space along the line of our connection.
 
Go to a natural place where you can make a walk, in a loop. Make sure it's a place where the beginning and the ending coincide.
Start walking. Follow your path.
On one - just one - particular moment, you consciously go offtrack. Tangentially.
Slow down your pace to zero and find a place to sit down comfortably.
Sit as long as you want.
(EXTRA) If you feel like it, experiment in bending your body in several directions.
When you're ready, stand up and start walking again.
Rejoin the path consciously. Tangentially.

You finish where you started.

 

Score Lili for Breg


I had a very different score prepared, but then I thought I'd rather share this as my main questions revolve around the following text, issues it thematizes. Some of the things we wrote down last time I find are relevant for this following topic too - visibility, readability, and especially what you mention in the last email - un-directional interaction 

I would like to hear more about this - is it a conversation with a topic but through another person - so I converse with space but through you as a node?
do space communicate undirectionally - is mirroring as a principle undirectional?
the last two questions need more explaining from my side I imagine, but still, for now I just drop them
Here - the score, which is the text itself

score

Inhabit the part of the home that is the in-between space - it's not a thing, 
it's not very purposeful, maybe from the outside, yes, but you might even see it as a blind spot, somewhere "awkward"
Could you make your office here for 20min to think about the following text and questions attached to it and perhaps make notes, draw a diagram?

 

 

 

How did the idea of the centre of the body change through out the history, evolve through dance history? How did the centre of the body “travel” around the dancer’s body, more precisely up and down the vertical axis,”… and how are these travels inflected by a spectrum of political agendas…”1 How does the body centre relate to the centrality and periphery notion as a social position, index, that of political participation? It is a very stubborn concept in dance practices because it is a stubborn condition for moving.

 

The centre of gravity of the human body is a hypothetical point around which the force of gravity appears to act. It is the point at which the combined mass of the body appears to be concentrated.

 

Although the centre of gravity does not coincide with the centre of the body in dance-techniques, we have adopted the idea of body-centre and moreover, that it coincides with the centre of a self, of a subject, that we need to manage it, referring to it with contemporary terms as a power-house, an inner core, positioned somewhere between the pubic bone and the belly button, the belly button and the solar plexus, the projecting sternum, or is it the axis that aligns with one’s spine through the centre of the body and should be thought of as a silk thread one is suspended on in their optimum elastic state - a spine that can recover fast.

 

 

We want to think choreography and dramaturgy differently, non-humanly,  landscape like…yet all through heavily centre-periphery trained bodies. Maybe that’s not our dance to dance.

One could speculate that the lower the body centre, the more basic movement patterns are revered, just like the opposite, a highly held centre exposes affinity to (over-)geometricalised bodily relations and composition in space. The dancer more aware of its own image, less relying on a feeling, first takes care of the form, tending to how it seems.
Yvonne Rainer addressed that succinctly in her trio A ; the gap between how the dance feels and how it seems, apparent and actual.
Idea of centre when investigating political participation can be considered through three factors: community identification, feeling of closeness to the centre and a sense of participation. If the analysis of dance schools, techniques and movements are considered against this criteria, one could loosely conclude that the more vital art felt to the society, the more entrenched the idea of the centre was in bodily training. As perhaps agency and participation of the dance field become questionable, doubted in,  increasing interest in “other” techniques, other knowledge appears that prioritise periphery, horizontality, off-balance.

 

But one needs to have a sense of self, a coherent unity that then seeks and maintains its centre. So I go back to the supposed appearance of the self. Following several writers in their hypothesis, but especially Anne Carson, a self appears with the advent of new technology - namely writing. Due to a change of attention regime, focusing upon a page, limiting our focus, we conceive of edges, edges of our being, our productive awareness and therefore develop a sense that our body is a vessel of our concentration, of our being, of self.

 

First, we need to stand, be “stand-ed” 2 if we are to dance - we need to be erect, we need to be straight.

Seemingly we have a relation to nothing, but ourselves; contained, unlike within the release and floor-work techniques, where not only we are not erect, we are either horizontal, at best inclined. There we heavily recognise our dependence on the ground at least, gravity to be more refined, so we can start conceptualising not only up/down, left/right, front/back, at best, but we add “away from” and “towards”. Not as a display for the viewer where performers play with the distance, but away from and towards the floor as constant reaffirming of our inclinations, dependencies and therefore creative vulnerabilities.

 

This text has been written as a result of continuous thinking about possible alliances between ideological attitudes and physical postures. My specific interest in the aspect of body centre has found resonance in the work of Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero’s concept of postural ontology. Through that she critiques “rectitude” and “verticality” as a value information of a subject and is looking for an alternative in reconstructing subject ontology and shifting it from individualistic to a relational one.

Although a lot has been written on new geometry of relations, as a feminist notion emphasising inclination that engenders more fundamental existential conditions such as love, care and indebtedness, I find it a useful exercise precisely in these times, where physical confinement is challenging the mental one. 

 

1Ruprecht, L. (2017). In our hands: ethics of gestural response-ability, Rebecca Schneider in conversation with Lucia Ruprecht, Vol 3, No.1, 108-125

2 yes, I make words up, as a non-native speaker I love to bend English like a hot iron rod with the fervour of my linguistic urgencies, stood, be put into standing



Alright, ...so...

I am very curious how we will address "space" on Tuesday, I can imagine one beginning to be to distinguish between metaphorical spaces and types of it and then a physical space and continue into the spaces that are in the intersection of both - physical and metaphorical - like an encounter with a person - where the space of the two is not a mental object, a metaphor under control of the two involved, but has its own mind and its own regimes of tensions that we feel as real as a physical architectural restriction.

Because I cannot imagine where our group discussion will take us on that matter, the only place I could move my thought further was to think space-translations - here are some questions I was busy with lately, msotly to find a way in my own research.

How do you inhabit different spaces, what is your status in them?

Do you feel central in some of them?

Where are you in your research space? Where are you in the map(ping)s of your research? 

Are there spaces you feel they run through you, as a node they intersect?

What spaces deserve that name? Do they need to enable some propositional-relationality to the person who imagines them or visits them, mentions them, thinks them, can spaces worthy of such a name be impenetratable with thought?

Which spaces are rather remote?

I started writing your score on the train last friday. 20 minutes ago I executed the score you made for me. Now I’m back on the train, back into the A-to-B-modus.  

I inhabited an in-between space. Outside. Blocking a passage, a connection between two environments. One covered with a translucent roof, the other not. The moment I sat down, a small insect, landed on my screen, moved up and sat on the edge for a mili-second. Then it flew off. It didn’t have a clew of where it was or what I was doing in my artistic meta-bubble. I tried connecting to the insect’s un-consciousness. Not knowing there was something like a ‘centre’ where it has to relate to. Not even wondering what kind of weird slippery retina-screen it’s on, but just stepping towards the highest point possible, following its instinct to fly.

When I started the score, I was a bit off-centre. Later I adjusted myself, making myself more at ease. I noticed that I was looking for some kind of alignment just before the repositioning. I’m wondering if I made that decision with my head or my core. What is the added value of ‘being aligned’? And with what? Simultaniously I made a drawing of the insect and it’s core. I drew a line from it’s axis, and wrote down some quotes on what you said. My path is lineair, but pluriform.

I’m acknowledging my intersubjective position (in space) and in my research. I recognize a need to un-knowledge any ‘formal position’ and make space for a positionlessness.

From the talk: constellations; then Lili came with the text 'Other Geometries’ by Femke Snelting, exploring human relationships based on concepts as

negative space, spaces that are off a kind of network-grid -> score Breg
spaces that facilitate un-directional interaction
in-between space -> score Lili

Medium that challenges you: do we need a shared medium, to share a space? Can we propose an un-directional interaction? Resulted in two heterogeneous scores, that we did on the same day. So there is a sense of a shared time. The space we shared was a ‘negative space’, where we had a unidirectional interaction.