context
The encounters in Copenhagen, Cologne, Bucharest and Heraklion play a central methodological role within our artistic enquiry, providing a research context for exploring artistic material in music and dance. They provide a frame within which to generate, encounter and reflect upon the unfolding of transformational processes, forms of thinking-in-action and the emergence of artistic material produced in collaborative exchange.
The encounters facilitate different intensities and durations of collaboration: collaboration between researchers in workspaces in Copenhagen, Cologne, Bucharest and Heraklion alongside an overarching collaborative encounter spanning over the project duration for provoking, questioning and deepening our understanding of the research process.
The encounters include: opening - an impulse (Cologne - February, 2022), content/form (Copenhagen - May, 2022), sound+movement materialities (Bucharest - August 2022), form/content (Cologne - April 2023), being (in) a fortress (Heraklion - August 2023)
(In) between - investigations on transformational practices
We explored sound and movement-material as well as compositional and choreographic structures focusing on transferability, intertwining, reversibility and principles of handing over in creative procedure. From the experimental handling of material, the students developed multi-dimensional ideas.
It was particularly important to play with the characteristics and behavior of the material to find out how the material can be processed and which techniques might suit it.
Does the material dictate the way it is joined?
What are ways of acting with the material that provoke that material and process relate to each other and result from each other?
What’s special about the material and how can it be used
What levels of meaning does the respective material contain that inform the artistic work?
What levels of content resonate?
What formal language is triggered?
Which transformations are conceivable?
Does an artistic idea emerge from this?
... were questions that marked the transition to an active approach to the material.
The students were given methods for understanding that the material they worked on is not a passive substrate that is provided with content and filled with form. Rather, they discovered that it has a potential effect that needs to be explored and activated. Students explored how artistic action is stimulated by dealing with specific materiality, and dealt with concrete forms of action and approaches to artistic processing.
When we started the RELAY project we wanted to contribute to the existing knowledge in the field. We formed a project that both created a context for generating artistic materials and expressions and at the same time investigated the relationship between immaterial and material aspects of choreography/dance and composition/music. It potentially strengthens the position of choreography and composition in particular, and art in general, as a source of innovation. The material action tested in the RELAY served reflecting existing hierarchy relations through formal and content-related resistance. Strategies of rupture, disruption and error, of the accidental, provisional, unstable and temporary generate the being of material from the 'in-between'. In this section you will find examples of transformational approaches tested in the RELAY project.
thoughts on movement
by George-Ioan Păiș, composer and participant of the RELAY project
Movement is fundamental to all art - this is, summarised in one single sentence, the biggest takeaway from my experience in the RELAY project. Being a musician implies some relationships to moving and movement (it's often the case that composers or conductors talk about musical gestures, a very intuitive concept that is rather tricky to define), but it never seems to be something that is at the forefront of our thought process when creating. This is not the case for dancers and choreographers.
My time in the Relay project and all my interactions with the people I have come to meet have shown me that there is something profound underneath the surface of all things, and with the suitable frame you can derive an aesthetic experience out of seemingly simple situations, mundane objects, trivial sounds. I was amazed how ordinary, seemingly insignificant movement became a means of artistic expression for the dancers partaking in the improvisation sessions of the project. It was the classic case of something ordinary becoming extra-ordinary because of a frame – the otherwise normal gestures somehow became dance because of the framing of the work/improvisation session. A similar thing happens in contemporary classical music, where sounds that would be perceived in a day-to-day situation as unimportant, trivial, or as outright noise can become the main working materials or art-objects of a piece, with the right framing of a show or stage. The scratch of a violinists' bow, an accidental sound that he would otherwise try to avoid, could become the intended effect of a piece. The breathing noise of a singer, an otherwise residual sound that should be minimized, could become the main element of a show.
The background noises of a silent concert hall could be framed as the music itself, as with John Cage's famous work 4'33''. This was my main bridge in understanding and enjoying the projects' sessions, as the scene of the workshops could come across as strange to someone who is not accustomed to contemporary dance.
If sound is the raw material of music, movement is the raw material of dance. But there is no sound without movement, so it is in fact movement that is also the raw material of music as well – be it the actual movements of playing an instrument (I always thought that the best drummers don't play, but somehow dance at the drumkit), the movement of sound through the medium to our ears, the vibrations of a speaker cone or our eardrums.This also ties into one of the projects' themes, that of the question of what is material and immaterial in each of our artistic practices. This new perspective somehow makes me think of art in much more material terms, although probably a more suitable term would be physical. One could argue that movement is, in fact, immaterial, that the object itself is the material, and its movement is rather something else, but I believe making such fine philosophical distinctions is just missing the forest for the trees. Music has this tendency to present itself as something transcendent and ethereal, but these thoughts that I have arrived at after the Relay project somehow seem to anchor it in a much more palpable way. Music is indeed ethereal, as all performance arts are, it is tied to its manifestation in time and space, its happening, but it is also very physically present, no matter how charged with intellectual add-ons, it is movement.
TOOLS
on transformational practices / material from the in-between
WALKING
Start walking. Slowly shift your weight from left foot to right foot. Observe the mechanics of balance and shifting weight. How does your foot unfold itself from the floor? How does it reach and touch the floor? Do you feel gravity? Stay aware of your back, your front, your left side, right side, the space above you, space under you, your flesh, observe where your awareness travels to, what path you take, be aware of what affects your walk. You can change to walking sideways or walking backwards.
TOUCHING
Start with touching your own body. Be aware that touch is always doing
(touching) and receiving (getting touched) at the same time. Give in to the needs/ desires of your body: which body part wants to be touched and in which way? Which materiality or quality of touch triggers which kind of sensation, and eventually response? When does touch become movement?
Now, use touch in order to
A. connect your body to the floor
B. connect your body to the air around (first your own kinesphere, then from there into the 'larger world', which could be including other human beings and objects)
C. (in case human beings are present and available for touch) transpose your self-practice to touching and receiving touch with a partner. How do two bodies behave with each other? What triggers mentally, physically?
STILLNESS
Be quiet, close your eyes, find a comfortable, yet attentive position. You can be still or move at any time. Ask yourself: what is silence? Is it the lack of sound? Is it a state? Does it develop? Are there different kinds of silences and if so, in which way?
SMUGGLING
A trade through 'unauthorised routes'… A purposeful movement of objects, substances and information between people in contravention to the relevant frameworks.
PLAYING
Playing is a negotiation of agreeing to, following or making up rules and often also challenging or bending these rules, or even cheating. Playing is practicing rules within a usually chosen and safe frame. This is obvious when observing young animals’ play-fights as a preparation for the real fight, they will be confronted with as fully-grown animals. A playful attitude fosters learning capacities, aliveness, enthusiasm and certainly social skill building. In their pure form, both play and arts are free from product orientation in the economic sense of the term - and thus provide examples of social structures and dynamics other than neoliberal growth - oriented frames.
We practice playfulness by surprise: playing games. It could be any kind of game, directly related or seemingly unrelated to the project’s context. We observe if - and if yes, how - a playful mind influences the course of our day(s).
We can sometimes also take each other's roles and keep working on our agenda, from the perspective of the playful alter ego and witnessing the others taking on other characters.
Maybe these interventions will only lead to having some fun, or gaining some energy ( e.g. in the middle or end of the day) - reason enough to play! Or maybe relevant findings turn out as unexpected results of a game.
MEANDERING
This practice presents the idea of 'relaying'/'meandering'— wandering casually without urgent destination—as a way of framing a conversational creation process that can help loosen control without being out of control. Through this method we implement a creation and learning process that is not only pleasant and rewarding but also leads to a concrete action plan.
This approach advocates letting go of control to allow insight to emerge through free-flowing conversation. It contradicts expectations about learning amongst teachers and students and raises fears of discussion degenerating into pointlessness.
WEAVING
A relay setting invented by one of the three student groups in the encounter in Copenhagen resulted in a rendering of a weaving process that addressed the presence and absence of representation and the intersection of technology and analogy. The arrangement chosen in Copenhagen combined the process of weaving with the technology of video. It showed passages of a 'weaver' whose sounds or movements had produced the translated designs of the earlier 'weaver', which in turn were translated by the current weaver into newly transformed patterns. The video and audio recordings created an acoustic/visual relay that highlighted sound and movement as catalysing creative material. It addressed the transformative nature of material - a video by musicians created through the translational designs of performers, in which they transformed the visual and aural codes applied to the material and translated them into sound and image, creating a feedback loop and the possibilities of communication.
In the frame of a seminar in Cologne (which served as an in-between event between the encounters in Copenhagen and Bukarest to filter the knowledge of the RELAY project into the curriculum in Cologne`s university) the setting was slightly adapted. While in Copenhagen video material formed the starting point for the transformation process. In this process analogue materials from students in Cologne served as the starting point for the transformational process. Students from Bucharest transformed the given analog materials into digital compositions and re-layed them to the Cologne group at the end of the seminar. The process invited to invest into the following questions: What potentials and scopes arise when we understand the materials as a starting point for scores? What dynamics and materialities unfold in the work? And how do composers deal with them in this function?
