In the following I present LUFTIG, a choreographic enquiry and performance where the idea of air as primary moving agent is passed on to younger makers and performers. I examine how shifting the focus from movement language to a discrete expressive concept affects the choreographic process, and propose that involving young people as choreographers and choreographic material affects the aesthetic experience of the now for artists and audience.
From WIND to LUFTIG
‘LUFTIG’ is a performance iteration of a long term artistic research project - WIND - I have been working on with Austrian artist Lisa Hinterreithner. Taking one of our previous performance works ‘It might be windy, it will be dark’ (2016) as its starting point, an international group of post-graduate students from The Danish National School of Performing Arts (DASPA) worked alongside local pupils from Musische Gymnasium Salzburg (MGS) before performing together at tanz_house festival in Salzburg.
In ‘It might be windy, it will be dark’ masses of air are moved through space using only the mechanical means of the two performers’ bodies and pieces of cardboard in varying sizes. This means that the piece - which is sometimes performed in the dark - is primarily felt rather than seen by the audience. The spatial, choreographic composition thus consists of a sensorial experience exploring the effects of wind and its affects on humans.
Passing it on
In LUFTIG, the notion of wind as tactile conveyor of aesthetic experience is passed on to others. Children and adults collaborate to create choreography that is not concerned with movement language. Air replaces the body as the moving agent, requiring both performers and audience to sense rather than see the work. As much a pedagogical experiment as a performance idea passed on, our hope was that these new, younger performers would find novel ways of morphing, transforming and owning the work. We were interested in how the participants might critically embrace and diffract a haptic performance experience such as this, and curious to see what and how they would choose to share it with an audience.
Practically, LUFTIG consists of three phases. I consider the accumulated events of the two-tier handover and the performance situation as ‘the work’ and will address issues related to all of these:
- Lab I (3 days): Lisa and Laura worked with DASPA students introducing work principles and letting them plan Lab II
- Lab II (1,5 days): DASPA students worked with MGS pupils to create the performance
- Performance (1 day): Audience was invited into performance loop, DASPA students and MGS pupils performed together
The partaking dancers were new to the concept we introduced. However, they all had experience with dance, choreography and performing, some a little, some a lot. The DASPA students studied dance partnership at MFA level and were already artists in their own right before embarking on their studies. The young people from MGS were aged between 10 and 13. They had chosen dance as an elective subject in school, and had signed up for LUFTIG through their dance teacher. The project took place in their holiday, and was not connected to their curriculum. Parent consent was obtained for participation and use of image material. In line with the work’s intention to take the children seriously as contributors of meaning, they are credited for their work by name.
The premise
As well as being a teaching situation and a performance situation, LUFTIG serves as part-submission of the Art in Context PhD I am currently undertaking. Methodologically, this research defines itself as practice-driven (Black, 2021), and is perhaps most closely related to Practice-as-Research as described by Robin Nelson (2013) in its praxis centred understanding of dialogical modes of knowing. As such, working on LUFTIG alongside Lisa and the performers could be thought of as speculative practice (Arlander, 2017) and this article as a thinking along, with and against existing knowledge, drawn from sources chosen for their capacity to spur on or provoke said thinking.
The premise of the research is a belief that children and young people can contribute to the choreographic process in ways that push the work towards other possible futures than adult collaborators can, and that a key to unlocking the radical potential of the adult-child collaboration is a practice were expressive concepts (Cvejić, 2015) rather than expressive movement is central. By leaving behind kinaesthetic exploration and movement language as the central choreographic elements and instead working on discrete expressive concepts that are particular to each choreographic pursuit, I aim to create circumstances where ones ability to contribute to and perform in the work is not reliant on previous empirical experience with dance and choreography.
Choreographic principles
LUFTIG fulfils the criteria of functioning as an expressive choreographic concept, yet it still deals with the movement of material - only the moving body that is being choreographed is air rather than human bodies. This means that the practice offers the possibility of drawing on traditional choreographic and compositional tools, such as the use of time, space, energy. (Since air is perceived as see through, the fourth element of shape cannot be readily applied in this particular context). These compositional tools were not explicitly dealt with, but were present as a knowledge base and experience that the dancers brought into the work.
Rather than propose explorative choreographic tasks concerning air and wind as subject matter or verbally passing on a concept, the proposal to the students happened through the means of sensorial experience. Lisa and I were aware that in order to fully pass on the work and let the students do their own explorations, one of our challenges would be to gradually let go of the work, and we set a few rules for our sharing of the material approach:
- No vocabulary can be introduced (by vocabulary we are referring to already set choreographic elements)
- Didactically, do not give choreographic advise or restrictions (aside from what is inherent in the choreographic proposal and the limited materials)
- Materials of all sizes are available for all labs (here, materials refer to cardboard pieces)
In Lab I we encouraged the DASPA students to explore the material within very narrow limits directly borrowed from WIND; moving air using only the means of their bodies and pieces of cardboard of varying sizes. Very quickly they realised that a different kind of performativity was at play here; unable to think or predict their way to solutions, they had to experience them themselves in order to find out ‘what works’. Their previous experience as choreographers was not rendered useless, but they did have to stand on new ground, and making this shift was literally only possible in collaboration with others. You can only to a very limited degree produce and feel the movement of air at the same time; you need someone else to give you the experience. You have to experiment together, working in, not on the choreographic proposal.
With this realisation as a backbone, the students planned Lab II, for which they were both artistically and pedagogically responsible.
Changing relations
Irit Rogoff (2007) introduces criticality as a concept. Criticality, she argues, differs from being critical (to find faults) and critique (where a source or object is scrutinised in a particular context, using already established methods to unveil hidden meanings). Criticality can only be produced through inhabiting a problem, merely addressing it is not enough - and perhaps not even possible, as we are always living within the effects of the problem we are trying to work through. Rogoff argues that this shift away from critique towards criticality is indicated by changing relations between modes of researching/learning, of practicing and of being an audience member.
Such changing relations are very much part of the work process in LUFTIG. Take for example the performance situation. Here, the performance runs continuously whilst the audience members enter and exit at will. The performers - young and adult - work in loops of ten minutes and are divided into three groups, each group performing in two loops and blending with the audience members in the third loop. They never leave the space. The performance only happened once, and since the concept was new to the performers, they were constantly figuring out the what and the how of the choreographic proposal; constantly alternating between overlapping modes of practising, learning, researching and ‘audiencing.’
From Rogoff’s point of view, the aesthetic experience of engaging with art is no longer about getting it: “For it is failure —rather than the triumph of being able to see through something seemingly hidden — that produces the affectual aspect of art — that moment which knocks you out of your territory and on the quest for re-territorialisation.” (Rogoff 2007, p.9) In other words, the core of the work is not a hidden, already existing meaning waiting to be uncovered through critique or critical scrutiny, but the possible new futures it may open for someone willing to engage with or inhabit the work.
Transformative time
In the text 'Culture, quality, and human time' Frederik Tygstrup (2018) looks at the issue of temporality in relation to cultural quality, thus identifying the tension between the cultural products that “see the present as a place where the future begins” (p.103) and those that seek to instantly satisfy the cultural customer’s needs by projecting future wants based on the now. An example of the latter would be streaming networks such as Netflix, where evermore refined algorithms offer you new content based on your past choices, offering possible futures based not on what could be, but on was already is.
For Tygstrup, Rogoff’s notion of criticality feeds the idea of quality in cultural production as that which affords us time to temporarily leave the pressing immediacy of the market system. Time, which we can then instead spend imagining possible futures together; Tygstrup’s idea of ‘transformative time’ points to the cultural/artistic proces/experience as a space for shared wondering - not for (artefact) innovation or individual optimisation.
Taking into account the attention span and stamina of the younger pupils, in Lab II the DASPA students facilitated a playful but by no means childish workshop, starting by giving the pupils a sensorial experience of air. Although the students had planned more of the performance elements than I had initially hoped was necessary, they nonetheless left space for - and genuinely wanted - the young people’s input. Planning just enough elements and calibrating these with possibilities for shared decision making and discovery of choreographic potential turned out to be a responsible and caring act.
Since the work is not performed in darkness, the role of the performer in this haptic work is to assist the movement of air without attracting too much attention to themselves as subjects in the room. This was the instruction the performers were given in order to achieve the performance quality we as choreographers feel that the work requires; an almost utilitarian approach. (At this point, Lisa and I cannot help ourselves, we become directors of quality, if not content.)
I was impressed with how willingly the students and pupils left behind the idea of the moving body as expressive object - it almost seemed a relief - and of how well they embraced the performance quality the work required. Not least the young pupils surpassed my expectations. They performed on par with the adult performers, displaying confidence and ownership of the material.
However, it does not not matter that the performers are children.
Children and risk
Children on stage typically bring uncertainty to the stage, playing around with risk as a “metaphorical exploration of the residues produced by a fear-driven and security-obsessed society” (Orozco, 2010, p. 84). Lourdes Orozco describes how audience members are invited to observe risk from the comfort of their seat, creating an illusion of shared responsibility for the child on stage who might start crying, fall off the edge of the stage or at the very least ought to be in bed by now.
The situation in LUFTIG is quite different. Not only are the children old enough to conduct themselves in a way that keeps them out of harm, they also perform alongside adults, who one might expect would help them if needed. The spatial configuration does not place the audience as seated spectators in the auditorium. Instead, they are interspersed throughout the space, sitting, lying, standing as instructed. The children are clearly in control here. They direct the adults’ pathways. They perform exactly the same tasks as the adult dancers. They sit next to the adult audience members, giving them individualised ‘treatments’ of air moving close to their body. They are not wild, unpredictable elements. Nor do they seem to be in any kind of danger. They have ownership of the situation that the audience is invited into. Here, the child takes responsibility for the adult’s experience.
Emblems of the future
These children are not unpredictable hazards in the performance situation. Yet, a different kind of disruption occurs, a dormant concern; surely children should not be taking care of adults?
“(The Child) embodies the citizen as an ideal, entitled to claim full rights to its future share in the nation’s good, though always at the cost of limiting the rights “real” citizens are allowed.” (Edelman, 2004, p. 11) The child points to one of the most fundamental and largely unchallenged motivations of human behaviour; the struggle for future generations to survive and thrive. It is the role of the adult to create optimal surroundings and experiences for the child, not the other way around. Altering this relation reminds us of our presumptions of what role the child should play in an ‘ordinary’ adult-child-relation.
Although hugely challenged by pressing issues such as climate change and a worldwide pandemic, we still live in a society, which, above all, values progress and the idea of ‘a better future’. As adults we strive to lead fulfilling and happy lives, whatever that may mean, but never, ever at the cost of the (quality of) lives of children. The Child – likely as she is to outlive The Adult – is an unchallenged emblem of the future. Everything we do to or with the child, or the child does to us, is implicitly read in this context; the child by their very presence points to the future.
Interference
Allowing the participants to push the work in any direction they see fit is clearly an ideal in this work. Lisa and I wished to pass what we consider a fertile idea (air as choreographed material) along in order for it to appear in new and hopefully unforeseen guises. This desire resonates well with Tygstrup’s idea of transformative time and Rogoff’s point of the affectual engagement with art opening up for other understandings and possibilities to occur. How amazing, I thought, to give these young people a way of working and being together that is free of constraint from school curriculums and learning goals, where the end is in process, where the future is open.
However, a lecture by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (2018) during a symposium in Copenhagen shook my idea of the open future where anything could happen as an obvious ideal to strive for in participant facilitation. In his lecture Gumbrecht described how within the historical worldview the present is transient, the future contains multiple possibilities to choose from and the past consists of accumulated events. In the everyday life of our contemporary present - ‘our broad present’ in Gumbrecht’s words - we no longer live in the historical present. Now, our future is occupied by threats that are slowly getting closer and the past, rather than being something that recedes us, is a digitally accumulated invasive past. As a result our present is ever enlarging.
This makes for an existential now that the individual simply cannot deal with. Therefore, Gumbrecht argues, what an audience seeks in art and the aesthetic experience is no longer to be provoked or in Rogoff’s words ‘pushed of your territory’ but rather to momentarily reconnect to the universe in a longing for ‘a primordial place that is not a choice.’
Although Gumbrecht was addressing audience experience rather than that of the artistic collaborator or participant, I immediately felt a surge of bad conscience. My work, pedagogical and artistic, is all about not predefining the outcome, but to find a way through sometimes very challenging choreographic questions together with my collaborators, across age and experience. Am I - are we - at best robbing participants and audiences of the possibility of momentary escape, at worst following suit with pressures of the market economy, forcing them to imagine and deal with an overwhelming amount of possible futures?
The adult’s imagination of the child’s imagination
Michael Taussig (2002) invites us to imagine a continuous mirroring loop; a figure of eight that goes between child and adult, where the adult takes fascination in what she believes the child is fascinated with and the child in turn notices what catches the adult’s imagination and corresponds accordingly.
One of the qualms that led me to embark on my research into children and young people as choreographers and choreographic material stem from the observation that supposedly open proposals for choreographic exploration often are anything but that. This is true for my own work, but also within dominating discourses in the field of dance and children, such as creative dance practices. The adult dance practitioner suggests themes for choreographic exploration that they believe will inspire children and young people to engage in movement exploration and choreographic decision making, but only too often end up with predictable outcomes. Tygstrup’s image of streaming algorithms that simply recycle previous choices in order to suggest something ‘new’ (2018) provide a fitting parallel for the looping motion of supposedly open-ended artistic proposal which in either form or theme simply offer a slight variation of already existing material leading to repetitive work(s) that reproduce the adult’s idea of the child’s ideas.
In this mimetic gap that is the adult’s imagination of the child’s imagination, the child reigns somewhat outside of time, as a figure that points to prehistoric times, when “magic held sway, things could easily transform into other things, and women, children and sometimes animals, but not men, had the magic.” (Taussig, 2003, p. 461) We might believe the child to be interested in trolls, pirates and fairies, when, perhaps, the child is only interested in these figures because we take them to be. We preserve the child’s imagination in time, in primordial time, in a different, distant but near, realm.
What a fitting space for the adult to curl up inside, to relish, to escape.
Engage by retreating
LUFTIG bears no explicit or implicit reference to such a magical space. In fact, one of the main reasons that I insist on working in the expanded choreographic field is that it helps me negate thematic or narrative approaches, thus avoiding such pre-conceived ideas of the child’s interests. Still, the adult’s desire to connect or re-connect with their imagination of the child’s imagination is strong. It may be that the mere presence of the young performers allow the adult audience members to more readily surrender themselves to the work in their longing to connect with momentary stillness, escaping the ever mounting pressure from the future and the past.
During the performance, I noticed that many audience members closed their eyes. It is certainly possible that this was purely a sign of engagement in the premise of the haptic experience; that the individual audience member was gradually adjusting to the proposal, sharpening other senses by closing off the dominance of sight. However, many also lay down, allowing themselves behaviours that are not normal in public space. They seemed to give themselves to the experience, to engage by retreating into a shared experience. LUFTIG could have been an alienating encounter, a weird space filled with odd activities. Instead it felt decidedly communal.
As for the pupils in the work process, I saw no sign of them being unable to work open-ended. On the contrary, I was impressed with how both pupils and students were able to inhabit the idea, shedding themselves of the expressive movement paradigm embedded in their previous dance training. This is of course partially down to good planning on the students’ part; they had calibrated the challenges for the pupils just right and created a manageable and pedagogically sound situation for the pupils.
Children as performers and makers
However, I also wonder whether the different time perception of children and young people plays a role here. Because they haven’t lived as long as adults, neither past nor future has accumulated to a degree where pointing to new futures feels overwhelming. Assuming this is true would mean that children have a special propensity for entering open-ended artistic collaborations, simply because they are yet to be oppressed by the now.
In such an argument, the child is a particularly apt collaborator, both in performance making and in performance.
As makers, children and young people are less afflicted by ‘our broad present,’ more able to enter ‘transformative time’ and therefore better at pointing to new futures - crucial in artistic endeavours. Maybe it is the adults, rather than the children and young people who will potentially be overwhelmed in open ended artistic processes? This is probably not the case for adult professional collaborators. It certainly wasn’t evident in LUFTIG. After all, I would argue that speculating in practice, proposing and problematising future pathways is exactly what many artists are good at. A more plausible argument would be that the child is a particularly well aligned partner when it comes to collaborations between processionals and non-professionals, and that this is particularly true in collaborations that require engagement in open-ended explorations and would otherwise come at the cost of overwhelming participants with seemingly endless possibilities.
As performers, children and young people allow the adult audience members to better cope with any new futures evoked by the performance, because the child’s presence gives the adult easier access to primordial space, where the adult can retreat from the pressing now and feel connected to the universe. Simultaneously, the child’s presence makes the future extremely present - flesh and blood if you will - as their lifespan almost certainly exceeds that of the adult, and so, the retraction into primordial space is potentially disrupted. In performance work where children are both choreographers and choreographic material, the imagination of the child’s imagination and the actual actions of the physically present child are at the same time mutually dependent on and at odds with each other, leaving the adult teetering on the edge of contemporary reality and primordial retreat.
Unsettling the now
This pushes me to rethink my presumptions regarding the child-adult collaboration. Rather than simply rejecting the lull of the magical landscape dominating the adult’s imagination of the child’s imagination as suggested by Taussig (2003), perhaps it is possible to embrace the child’s potential to evoke primordial space non-thematically. To embrace atmosphere and the mush of the primordial soup without resorting to fairytale tendencies, to make the work/research/performance situation a space for both retreat and for shared work and practical wondering. After all, collaborating within the self-contained, singular logic of the choreographic question does perhaps require some kind of retreat from the our contemporary present.
Circumventing such tendencies of mutual projection of imagined imaginations and at the same time make use of the child’s special propensity for easing the work for all requires a singular and pedagogically sound work process, where we - children and adults alike - can inhabit questions together without relying wholly on our previous knowledge of and experience with known performance parameters. Only then, when both the social and the artistic suggestion pushes us slightly off course can we unsettle the now and suggest possible new futures together whilst maintaining a sense of connection to the universe.
Conclusion
I have looked at how replacing the expressive dancing human body with air as haptically experienced material affects a choreographic process where children and adults create and perform together, transforming principles from an existing choreographic approach into a new performance situation. The project succeeded in its aim to create circumstances that all performers - regardless of age - could work within, inhabiting the shared choreographic enquiry together. It did not seem taxing for children nor adults to shift their focus away from movement language and self expression as a dominating factors in the choreographic work. If anything it seemed like a relief.
A founding principle in my on-going research is provoked and remoulded. My idealisation of open-ended artistic processes, proposed in ways that encourage diverse and divergent ideas to appear, for many possible futures to present themselves, is momentarily shaken. Perhaps too many futures actually produce a now that is too overwhelming for the (adult) performer and/or audience, who are already living within the pressing vastness of the contemporary present? (Gumbrecht, 2018)
In terms of what actually happened in the performance, LUFTIG was different to its predecessor ‘It might be windy, it will be dark’, but not radically so. In the end, the new, younger performers did not alter the work beyond recognition. However, it felt radically different.
I propose that this is a consequence of an altered sense of the now in artistic spaces co-inhabited by children and adults. In a work process that operates within a logic that is new to all performers, the child, who simultaneously points to the future and the past, allows all collaborators to momentarily enter a time outside of time, without loosing connection to our contemporary reality. This makes the child a fitting collaborator in artistic work of a speculative nature.
In hindsight, my insistence on cultivating choreographic proposals where the task at hand, rather than difference between performers, is at the forefront, also somewhat functions by ignoring difference. In my attempt to avoid letting my imagination of the child’s imagination dictate the choreographic proposal, I may be overlooking the rich potential of the adult-child relation as artistic material and the presence of children as harbinger of ambiguity.
Collaborators, LUFTIG:
Devising choreographers; Laura Navndrup Black & Lisa Hinterreithner
Adult performers; Esther Wrobel, Tanya Rydell Montan, Sonia Ntova, Lucía Jaén, Helmi Järvensivu, all students at the MFA in dance and participation at The Danish National School of Performing Arts
Young performers; Hannah Gsteu, Lea Kreilinger, Ida Van Leerdam, Valentina Reitshammer, Anna Kramer-Schiller, Avalon Schweiger, Charlotte Steidl, all students at Salzburg Musisches Gymnasium
Scenography; Lisa Hinterreithner, Birgitta Schöllbauer
The creation and performance of LUFTIG was supported by Kultur Stadt Salzburg & Land Salzburg, and made possible in collaboration with Up.Lisa Hinterreithner, The Danish National School of Performing Arts, University of Agder, ARGEkultur & tanz_house studio
References:
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