Developing a somatic Sci-Fi inspired practice. The world of COI.

“In the effort to expand and challenge how the human body is thought of and perceived and its relation to an outer reality, I have been practicing different ways of interrupting this preconception by playing with ideas of ownership / directorship / responsibility in relation to movement itself. I have done this by looking closer at and developing the physical practice from 20214. Enter Pain, briefly, although it is ever-present. As I grow older the body is less capable of moving in the ways most exciting and familiar to me, provoking long-lasting pain. Enter Giorgos. 

Because I wish to practice transmitting my physical practice to others and exploring it with them (and in pert due to back-pain issues), I have had a few meetings with my colleague Giorgos. Giorgos has taken time off from Skånes Dansteater (where we worked several years together) and expressed a desire to help me out while also exploring something new to him. I was nervous for not being able to offer money in exchange but we mutually needed this for our own reasons, so it felt like a fair exchange. These encounters, few but very meaningful, have greatly contributed to developing the practice, based on somatic principles of generating movement. With Octavia Butler’s help it has taken a turn toward science fiction, inspired by the “Patternmaster” series (1976 onward) in which a group of mutated humans called Clayarks appears. Clayarks are mutated because they are hosts to an alien organism. Pause. Enter Spinoff and Imagination. What remains is the idea of a microorganism living within the envelope of the skin. It’s a community of individuals: each organism is capable of acting individually but is dependent on the community. These communities of individuals (from now on “coi”) can concentrate or stray toward different areas of the human body, inhabiting and moving within the boundaries of the skin. This is an experiment to see if it’s possible to get away from naming the body as bones and muscle, while also offering the opportunity to challenge the constraint of the bones themselves. The individuals in the coi can interact with each other or act as a group, as well as able to connect to other cois in other bodies. They react to outer stimuli and are linked almost telepathically. The cois can have a wide radius of sensitivity, depending on where their attention is focused. Some individuals might react to other stimuli than the collective, creating tensions, interruptions, or sudden changes. There’s a clearly virtuosistic aspect to this practice, as it pushes the body’s limits and requires a constant effort of attention to one’s own desires/reactions and the ones of the cois. Furthermore, coi practice attempts to assign the origin of movement to something else than the perceived self. Of course this is but an illusion, a trick to tap into some hidden recess of our consciousness.” - From my presentation of artistic practice assignment, January 2023.

Find sound recordings (transcription is still in the makings, due to the poor quality of the recordings) of two practice sessions, one with Giorgos Pelagias and the other with both Giorgos and Kristian Refslund (another SKånes Dansteater colleague now freelancing) here.

Find the full pdf of the 2023 presentation of artistic practice assignment here.

Logbooking

In a followup of tracking and tracing various work situations and in the effort to shed more light on to this intriguing blurriness between domestic and professional (pre)occupations, I started a practice of logging. It is not a diary since it tries to avoid too much inwardly reflection. It was rather an attempt to keep track of time and remember what had happened each day. Often I would not quite be able to do that because of dealing with an often-changing schedule and the aftermaths of covid and a relatively mild burnout. 

Some of the entries have been lost, as the notebook disappeared after the summer of 2022. A few of these first entries remain as scans. Other entries are from a newer notebook started in fall 2022. 

The score for these texts consists in logging the hours in which various activities of the day take place, so as to see what is professional work and what is domestic work. As it progresses the lines get blurrier: more diary-like entries want to make their appearance. The busier the day, the less likely I am to take the time to sit down and log the day’s events, which means I often need to backtrack and eventually stopped logging altogether. 

For a more or less indiscriminate selection of entries go here.

Putting it all into practice on stage

Abstract from the DiVa catalogue.

"// F - E- G // is the title of my independent degree project created for the Master program New Performative Practices at Stockholm University of the Arts.

The project was a mere 1/4 of the semester’s total points, but served as a means for  presenting and understanding my artistic practice and its various aspects.

The project was presented publicly in three separate instances between the 26th and the 28th of April 2023 in the university’s theatre hall at Brinellvägen 58. The format chosen was a 50 minute performance with a 10 minute participatory section at the beginning of the show. I was the performer, as well as dealing with the music editing, texts, recordings, and coordination. That the project took on a neatly packaged performance format was a slight surprise but did not happen entirely by chance. It has to do with my passion for the theatre, the stage-space, and with a curiosity for figuring out how all these seemingly disparate aspects of my practice could fit together. It felt like an impossibility and that challenge was both terrifying and compelling at the same time.

My aims were multiple in this project. On the one hand it was a challenge to myself in moving forward from a repertoire dance company life to a solo performer and creator life. This was psychologically and physically meaningful, as well as acutely painful on several occasions, as I wrestled with the doubt and uncertainties of not knowing myself in this kind of situation. Parallel to this personal inner challenge I also wanted to try fitting together the various interests that I had been exploring during these two years of the course: a somatic sci-fi based practice, clown technique, the use of voice, the relationship of the performer to the audience, finding honesty and repeatability in performance, the use of chance and randomness in creation and performing, the use of language in guiding others toward physical and personal insights and experiences, what kind of social impact performance art can have, Nonviolent Communication (NVC) as a choice of life and reconnecting to an ageing dancing body. I call the method chosen to explore these various interests and curiosities a personal experiential one, for lack of a better term, inasmuch as I endeavoured to explore these ideas throughout by trying them out, physically and concretely, over a span of time.

The performance was meant largely as a metaphor for my artistic practice and history.

The external dramaturgic basis of the piece is that an alien entity (they/them) is endeavouring to explain to humans (the audience) their life-story of how they came to visit this planet and interact with humans. The alien explains in the way they can, with the means familiar to them (dance, theatre, performance), how it never really found its way, nor necessarily adapted to humaneness. They go through an array of very humanely recognisable emotions, and in an attempt to connect to the audience try to speak and explain, unaware that their language (a gibberish composition of, among others: italian, french, english, swedish, portuguese, and spanish sounds and cadences) is largely unintelligible to the listeners. The internal dramaturgic basis of the performance is autobiographic, dealing  mainly with my personal and professional trajectory within dance, as well as with how I feel at some moments in my life.

The title // F - E- G // is a play on words, as it mimics the phonetics of the english word effigy (something to be burnt in protest, or an image to commemorate and honour) while spelling the swedish word feg (meaning cowardly). Here again a reference to an external phenomenon or action (the effigy) together with an internal psychological state (fear and stuckness), both of which are relevant to my artistic process and practice.

The outcome of the project was rich in personal learnings and challenges, as well as a personal milestone in my small life. I hope it served as a moment of poetry and enjoyment to those who participated, that they might recognise themselves in similar situations and feelings and that they might be either relieved or comforted or somehow get the chance to stand along their experience through my own (or rather the character’s, through the dramaturgy of the performance and the participatory moment)."

You can find the video of the presentation itself here. Behind the camera and editing process: our classmate Maja Wilhite Hannisdal, who so generously and throughly documented many of our NPP presentations.

For documentation of the process, as on overlay of video materials to show the progressions and iterations please go to this page instead

Rehearsal director /choreographer's assistant: an apprenticeship. 

Archive Of The Body with Gwyn Emberton.

A new chapter and opportunity opened in this project, in terms of reflecting on the process of documentation as well as in the quest to situate myself within my field of work. In January / February of 2023 I had the opportunity to apprentice as rehearsal director/ choreographer’s assistant/ dramaturg for a Research and Developement project initiated by Gwyn Emberton in Malmö. The project’s working title was The Archive of the Body (AOTB). Largely it took information from the book “The body keeps the score” by Bessel Van der Kolk as a baser devising methods of generating movement and dramaturgic expression. I am ever grateful to Gwyn for giving me this opportunity and for so calmly and generously accepting me in my beginner’s attempts to service the process for him and his wonderful group of collaborators. To Giorgos, Kim, Bella, Amancio and Jennifer, the dancers, I owe immense gratitude for the weeks spent together, as they dove deeper and deeper into the recesses of their bodies’ memories and sensations, in service of the score developed in the course of the project. A lot of intimate moments were also shared as a result of the process and collaboration with the composer Sion, all of which contributed to a very meaningful and humane experience of togetherness, through both laughter and tears, as each person’s individuality was brought to light and their past and how it lives within their particular body was honoured and put forth in the service of creation. 

In documenting this process, I was aiming toward a few things. First of all, I wanted to make sure that the feeling, the atmosphere of the time spent together had a place in the documentation. I also wanted to be able to look back and find concrete verbal traces of the methods and forms used during the process, while following its development and change. At the same time, as I was in the process of learning myself, I also wanted to keep track of my own feelings, impressions and thoughts as I participated, witnessed and recorded the project. I chose to experiment writing with pen and paper on a notebook which had a layout designed to enable quick scanning with a phone (from a company called Whitelines), in order to easily convert the writings to a digital format. I imagined that later on this material would have to be presented in digitally and that maybe Gwyn might want to use some of it for future funding applications as well as to pick up the work later on.

In writing, I recorded a lot of conversations verbatim, as well as Gwyn’s words guiding warm ups and instructions to audience. The conversations were recorded to give an immersive feeling to the eventual reader as well as for us who had been part of the project to potentially  be able to follow our own path of development along the way later on if we wished to. The guided warm ups were recorded in order for me or any of the dancers to be able to rehearse these in case of a workshop or audience participation session. Over the course of these two years with NPP I have been taking a lot of notes and devised a way to distinguish between note-taking as fact recording as opposed to noting impressions, thoughts, inspirations and reflections which are my own private musings on what is going on in the room/ space around. I use the symbol “//“ to signify the beginning and end of such notes of personal character. You will see these “//“ recurring in the notes presented. Sometimes they mark the beginning and end of a poem, sometimes it’s self-empathy, other times it might be a series of open questions, or ideas for a future project. I chose to record these in the same place as the more observational notes, in the awareness that they add a potential confusion for the reader. What I wanted was to leave a visible trace of the process of interpretation and constant exchange between the observer and the observed: while I try to be as objective as possible in recording and documenting the process, we are dealing with art-making which is tender and tenuous, blurry and intimate even while in the attempt to devise and carry on methods of a more scientific and methodical nature. 

In addition to the notes taken in the studio, Gwyn and I would meet most mornings and discuss thoughts arisen from the previous day’s work as well as plans for the upcoming rehearsals. Some notes were taken in these moments too, but not to the same extent, because of it being more difficult to write while participating actively in the one on one conversation. 

Many audio recordings complemented the written notes, as well as videos and photos. These are not included here, as per request by Gwyn, who wished for the videos to be kept private for the moment.

All the raw documentation was then collected on Gwyn’s google drive. 

You can find all the notes scanned here