A summary: Mette, I. (2016) EXPANDED CHOREOGRAPHY: Shifting the agency of movement in The Artificial Nature Project and 69 positions.
p. 3
Nonhuman choreography: a poetic principle that attributes to nonhumans the capacities to act, express and affect those who are paying attention; where human bodies move with and through the nonhuman world in order to start practicing movement as a relation to external environments and nonhuman actors. In this case anthropomorphizing things is not connected to wanting nonhumans to look or behave like human beings. Rather, the principle has to transform the understanding of our own bodies by entering into composition with nonhumans in ways that also challenge our sense of self.
p. 4
How can theater propose a space for listening to things that don’t speak in a human language? What is the relationship between the animate and the inanimate world? What does it mean to make a choreography for materials, where human movement is no longer the center of attention?
The use of space
How to make a performance that literally would take place inside the body of the spectator and by that, make the spectator into the location of the performative event
By removing stage frontality – vision as the primary sense through which we receive choreography and dance is put into question. By creating emersive environments and placing the spectators inside the perormane area a sensorial experience is facilitated not mearly a visual one.
The rationale behind visual and auditive erasures of space, was to give the visitors an even stronger feeling of being immersed in the performative space and to prompt them to focus on their sensorial experience.
p. 6
Sensorially active ways of receiving performance. By reducing the information flow that emanates from the “stage”, the audience is invited to focus on the minute changes happening in the evaporating materials, or in the immaterial movements of colors, lights and sounds
Alva Noé: perception is not something that happens to us, or in us, but is something that we do.
a difference between what is represented on stage and how the sensorial quality that the pieces propose can also be considered a content in itself. This approach opens up a non-representational way of understanding these works.
p. 7
Use of time.The knowing, or becoming aware, of how perception is faster than recognition, gives rise to a very specific kind of experience. I call this mode of receiving performance sensorial participation to signal that perceiving is an action that the spectator is part of creating and not something that is simply happening to her.
The over-stimulating and easily manipulative economy of images that results from this could perhaps be counteracted – not by abandoning affective stimulation – but by offering a slower temporality with its altered sensorial effects?
What is affect? First you run, then you fear the bear. The mismatched temporalities that exist between affect and the understanding of affect render the body very fragile.
Brian Massumi: he makes the fragilization of the body directly political, explaining how affective fragility renders bodies susceptible to governmental control.
p. 8
What is the relation between subconscious affective experience and sensory manipulation, and how is this expressed in theater?
The performance was divided in two parts; a very strong, almost manipulative sensorial experience, followed by an invitation for the audience to talk about their experience for the same amount of time as the immersive environment had lasted. The aim was to link the experience of sensory deprivation to a verbal articulation of it, including potential questions regarding sensorial manipulation.
Imagination as a poetic principle was not a dreamlike utopic mode of floating in the sensations provided by these pieces, rather it was a strategy for how to pass from bodily sensation into language articulation.
The material processes of evaporation, dissolution and dispersion were closely connected to immaterial processes of discussion, articulation and communication.
p. 10
Artificial nature: In the Anthropocene epoch, the concept of unspoiled nature has ceased to exist. If we take this fact seriously, then consequently neither does the natural body. And this radically challenges and changes how we can think about the body in dance.
This unquestioned relationship between choreography, dance, nature and self-expression, which for so long and still today defines a widespread conception of dance, is very different from what the works in The Artificial Nature Series try to show; that dance or choreography does not necessarily come from within the body, but can also be entirely decorporalized or created in the intersection between humans and larger nonhuman environments. The body in these performances is either external to the nature represented, or operating in conjunction with the “nonhuman forces of nature” that in The Artificial Nature Project are staged as independent, autonomous, threatening and even overwhelming to the human body moving within it. —> placing the human in a decentralized position
p. 19 – 21 (reread for slow performance)
GIANT CITY: relational movement
Immateriality: immaterial labor, immaterial flows, immaterial movements such as sensations and affects
- the relationship between bodies as a form of immaterial architecture that would be transformable, flexible and mobile.
- the architectural distinction that can be made between hard conventional construction work and the immaterial flows that circulate inside and around such stable structures, streams of people passing through buildings, flows of information running through cables, exchanges of money permanently taking place in digital and immaterial spaces. I questioned how all these immaterial movements were part of what governs bodies and conditions patterns of behavior within the network society.
Questions: How inter-relational space is constructed? How bodies interact or respond to each other on the level of bodily communication? How bodies are being moved and how these flows of movement take part in constructing space and the possibilities of exchange within space? How to become aware and perceptive of that which is normally immaterial, invisible and non-graspable but nevertheless fundamental to understanding contemporary movement? How to render space tactile?
Theatre performances are perfect examples of products within the experience economy and it became a focus to try to create a rupture in the logic of how these “products” would operate on the bodies of the spectators. Instead of producing an already valorized and recognizable experience, what I attempted to do was to create indeterminate and indefinite expressions, giving rise to sensations that would be hard to place and therefore to questioning the efficiency of the experience.
I considered producing slow performances as a way of resisting the permanent overstimulation of the senses that I saw in many different ‘experience’ products like 3D cinema, interactive videogames, mainstream entertainment, etc. But I also considered slowness as a personal way of resisting the over-mobility that resulted from the precarious work conditions that I was subjected to.
The performances were attempts to use the theater as a place for potentially slowing down the speed of overstimulation, to tune in with a slower time of perception and reflection, as a temporary antidote against the demands for speed, flexibility, mobility and transformation.
p. 52 – 53
Proactive documentation is a strategy for how to document work as a productive activity that produces new forms of artistic expression, rather then as a secondary practice done as a side activity to the actual work of art. + +
p. 56 – 57
Applying movement strategies to speech: see the rules in p. 56 – 57
While exercising these speech practices, I discovered that they linked my work to oral traditions of storytelling.
p. 65 – 67
Interview
- temporalities: using the present tense to create space for a double perormance
- movement in the roader sense, not just the movement of bodies
- the works don’t represent the ideas. The works materialize the ideas ina different way, because the stage reality doesn’t just illustrate what can be said in words.
p. 69 – 81
Emails: (development of ideas)
p. 86
To achieve making a performance where the balance between human and nonhuman performers is reconfigured, we need to reduce our human performance presence by removing traits of our personality and faciality. This proposes a shift in how to understand performativity, by thinking about all components of a stage performance as equally important; thus leading to a non-anthropocentric perspective of theater production. While performing, we focus on our relation to the material in each moment, rather than (only) on the image it produces.
p. 87
We depart from the idea that the materials have endless capacities and abilities to transform and that we are the facilitators of their unfolding.
p. 93
It is interesting to think about what this procedure – of shifting one’s attention from human to nonhuman actors – could lead to when thinking about theater, where the human actor/performer/dancer is so unquestionably the center of attention.
p. 94 – 95
In the triple image, there is always three elements temporarily coexisting; the bodies, the materials and the movement connections in between them. It produces a doubt, by creating a third entity; a human/nonhuman connection where the collaborative totality can no longer be separated. A doubt arises as to the particular form of agency that is active within the image. What makes the nonhuman move versus what the nonhuman sets in motion? At times, this merging connection can appear as a body in itself – as an organization of human and nonhuman forces working together to create another logic of motion and rest.
p.97 – 98
The agricultural work continues as the performers throw the materials high up into the air, letting the particles fall down over most of the space. This specific part of the performance is conceived as a landscape. It is not representing a landscape, but it functions like one, in the sense that it lets your eyes drift […].
Our general approach was to avoid representing nature directly, but rather to deal with forces or processes of nature like gravity, magnetism, turbulence, equilibrium or chaos. Instead of thinking of a river we think of liquidness, or instead of thinking of the sea we think about surface reflection
p. 98 – 99
The performative eco-system that we developed is based on the following principles:
- Any element can be connected to any other element in the system.
- Any action has a consequence on the entire environment, direct or fictional. The sequences are built as chains of causes and effects, where the effects are sometimes suspended in time.
- Every connection between elements changes and transforms both or all elements in the connection. When the performers touch another element, like for instance the lamps, their way of moving changes, the lamp is at the same time changing its position and the light that it casts transforms the entire stage situation.
- Energy is always transformed into expression.
p. 105
The relation between fact and fiction is something crucial in The Artificial Nature Project. The fiction is not in the mundane actions you see if you only focus on the actions of the performers; Rather, it’s happening in the combination of the particles flying all over the space and in the link between the machines, the objects, the bodies and the imaginations of the spectators.
A third type of triple image is constructed as a tool to compose spatial relations. The third triple image is composed by staging a minimum of three simultaneous actions across the stage area, making it impossible for the spectator to see all the events occurring at once. This suggest a chaotic, wandering or traveling gaze. In order to see all elements of the image, the audience’s gaze has to move and “edit” the situation live.
p. 109
Choreography beyond the movement of human performers and dancers on stage. It’s a way of thinking choreography in the intersection between elements, rather than in the things themselves. To think choreography in between material and immaterial actors, who collaborate in ways that cannot be predicted but only tested, tried, rehearsed and elaborated. Or, a way to allow for difficult and complex encounters to take place between humans and nonhumans, when their different forces meet in a stage environment.
p. 131 – 138
Permeability: the ability of a porous material, for instance sandstone or rock, to allow fluids to pass through it. A concept signifying a movement or a passageway of one form of matter through another. Permeability could perhaps also signify an understanding of the stage being surrounded by a porous membrane allowing for a flux of movements to happen between what is inside and outside of its territory.
Permeability #1: Making nonhuman choreography for…humans
An integral part of the performances was in fact to rethink human spectatorship. The goal became to create sensorial participation by calling for active sensorial perceptions and sensorimotor awareness in the spectator. The aim was that their bodily movements would take part in determining the outcome of their experience (by asking the spectators to move around freely in order to receive the performances, by slowing down the time of perception and by working with microscopic expressions of light, sound, color and material movements.
Permeability #2: Implementing non-anthropocentrism
Donna Haraway’s notion of species companionship and a talk entitled Staying with the trouble.
“fossil-making-man”: The fact that the effects of fossil fuels are driving the earth into total destruction at the same time as their extraction guides and determines economic processes worldwide, is only one of the reasons why Haraway proposes the Capitalocene as the word that could define our current epoch. Her concept of the Chthulucene is connected to understanding and learning from the intelligence and the complex cellularity that exists within the natural world of microbiology.
Permeability #3: Nonhuman time
The experiences I proposed were thought of as alternatives to other much faster distributions of time and demands for attention, as they can be found in mainstream cinema, theater, dance, video gaming and screen-interfaces and not in relation to notions of time that can be derived from nature, which is rather on the scale of days, years, decades and centuries.
Permeability #4: A micro history of nonhuman agency in dance
Permeability #5: Questioning non-subjective performativity
How to combine a materialist, non-anthropocentric, perhaps post-human understanding of the body with complex articulations of human subjectivity?
In her book entitled The Posthuman, Rosi Braidotti argues that there is a need today to reconfigure our understanding of subjectivity so that it is articulated in relation to the forces of the post-human condition we are living in.
Permeability # 6: The autonomous life of performance
performance practices_divergent temporalities 