PARAMETERS

Location: A public space (a theater, a university, a hall in train station...etc).

Basic General Condition: This action should not be announced a priori but involve people's participation through an announcement similar to the participatory activity that the public space usually involves.

Basic Ideas: To cancel, in-operate, undo. For instance, in the case of theatre, it could be to cancel the stage, spectator, piece, performer/author, time-frame...etc. Making a collective-useless construction that gives something to think to others. Holding the question of: what? for whom? with whom? what for?. To re-signify the use-value of collective-common space, content and relations involved in such a public space.

Basic metaphors: Moving. Moving, where?. To cover the entire physical space with materials for a move. Camouflaging the entire dominant representation of such public space. A strike with no address and no claim specific of anything or of anyone. A blurred perception of the situation. A blank page over which to rehearse with others "being together" in a public space. A space out of use, vacant.

Duration: (2 hours minimum). It can only be finished when an authority (security guard or similar) that takes care of the public space announces that the space's doors are to be closed.

Number of participants: everybody who is in the space is a potential participant.

Necessary materials (quantity must be calculated in relation to the size of the space and the number of possible participants): bobbins/rolls of bubble plastic 1,30 x 100m; bobbins/rolls of kraft paper or similar 1,20 x 250m; tapes for packing (crepe); boxes, cardboards (different sizes); garbage bags; scissors Sprays (different colors); nose masks; color pens (permanent markers to write over paper, bubble plastic).

TASKS

• Get busy with wrapping walls, floor, objects...etc.

• As if the space would be about to move somewhere, at the same time that is wrapped, you “name” what each thing is. This means that you simply indicate the things or object's name that you are wrapping.

• Involve others in things you do.

• Help others with the activities they are doing.

• Ask the help of others if you need it.

• When at least 70% of the space is wrapped, you start to relate the materiality of the space that has been named before. You do this, mapping out relationships over any surface in the space (walls, objects, floor, boxes) and using the material available (pens, sprays, tapes).

• Relate, cross and use your mapping traces with the map-traces of others.

CONDITIONS

• Everybody involved in the experiment is acting and treated as an “assistant”. That means that you are supporting peoples actions and, at the same time, you are supported by the ones of the others.

• You are not allowed to talk or explain anything about what you are doing to others.

• You are not allowed to do anything addressed to anyone (there is no front, nothing to show).

• Everybody that is in the space is potentially playing the same game, which means that the audience is there to do the same activity as we do, but no one is obliged to join in.

• You are perceptively in contact with the space around you and what you are doing.

• Be simultaneously busy with what you do and how your thinking process is communicated in the space through naming objects, relating-mapping them out.

STRATEGIES

• When you put your mapping process in relation to others, you may take care that it doesn't cancel the proposals of others, but that you give “life” to them.

• You may want to start mapping the space by “naming” what that space or object is –could be or is doing– to the space, to you, to others...etc. In that sense you can relate the name of the material in relation to. You can rename the covered surface, object for something that is not. You can adjetivized the material. You can put it in a circumstance: where, how...etc. You can humanized the material. You can put it in situation of.

• During your mapping, you may want also to problematize the general thinking process and experience of what’s going on. That means that you may want to treat the materiality and its mapping with actions such as crossing, subtracting, cutting, add on, recombine, displace, dividing, kidnap, transforming, piercing, breaking, covering, decomposing, re-composing...etc.

• You may feel that you want to relate with what is written and what is being done in the space. Not only the actions you may do, but also the way the words are inscribed on the surfaces, the way they look like, the process-action of their writing...etc

• If there is a technical problem, you communicate it to the others with normality, that is part of the situation we are creating, so you are invited to ask for cooperation, help...etc.

• At some point, you may feel that you need a break, in that case you can play the radio, music or have a snack.

Staging expresses both the questioning of the world and its abyss as a scene (Jean Louis Comolli).

Each night, a single continuous sequence that publishes live the current scene, building a piece/work at work, where what enters and happens (to us) is the ways of perceiving, feeling, thinking, looking, listening, and also, ways of representing without representing, of associating by decoupling. Ways to be on stage and simultaneously get out of it.

WHAT OPERATES?

In purely theatrical terms there will be no scene/stage. There will be no time to refer to a closed result because it is happening. There is no premeditated rhythm, no leading actors and / or predetermined viewers. There is no scenic action because there is no simulated progression of elements that push time towards an end.

HOW TO DO?

There are 3 ways to facilitate yourself in the game: 1. Prior agreements with those involved with whom you will be connected in the sequence plain each night. 2. Assistant figure that will bring together those involved each night to coordinate a plan. 3. Sharing tools that help us play the sequence plane from the shared vocabulary and experience.

GENERAL CONDITIONS OF THE SEQUENCE PLAIN

- Since there is no scene to present or represent, everything is susceptible of "being a scene".

- There is no "scenario" or territory of privileged visibility, nor specific frontality.

- We speak of the "scene", nor as something given and / or something to fill, but as what is happening susceptible of being perceived in a plural way by the bodies, voices, looks and actions of what is already implied.

- As an ongoing scene, that is to say, “at work and ongoing”, it knows that it does not depend on personal and / or individual actions since everything around it is susceptible of "entering or being part of the scene".

- Accordingly, "we are in situation". That is, in a situation that is likely to happen with others, fragile and vulnerable, since it happens through what is happening, and therefore it is exposed and continually built.

- In this way, it would be interesting to think that everything is a "secondary", so to speak, susceptible of "entering the foreground" by will, error or coincidence, or some other event beyond our control (contrary to the idea that there are "protagonists" which go to the background).

- To think that the "secondary" does not count for the visible one, from there it can do something without anyone taking it into account, until he/she/they mess it up ... (reference movie The Party).

- Other figures that we can relate to the secondary are the support figure and the assistant. In other words, we are all support and assistants in the sustained question of what, how, when, for what, who?

- Thus perhaps the basic premise is to start from the fact that we are also spectators, that is: we do not start from the place where one is doing, but from the place one is listening to. Strategy that we can think of as a “reception device”.

- Listening is a practice, it is to be perceiving: perceiving is action.

- Keep in mind that you are in a work/piece/scene at work, that is to say, your actions are inter-dependent on the current situation and as such, they must be carried out according to that pluri-situational plot that is perceived plurally and at the same time.

- The work and –at work– are inter-related concepts that involve the collective and the singular.

- In this way, think that your work (actions, interventions) is continued by the actions that are executed next and vice versa, and that that belongs of someone else is continued by your actions.

- Nothing is to be stated a priori. In sequence, there is no interlocution or mediation.

- It doesn't explain what's coming next. It does not explain what will happen. There is no explanation because it is happening while it is being done.

- "Doing while doing it" is the main command.

- Do not expect the "community and / or group" to follow you, since there is no such thing as "a group". Anyway, do not worry, you will not be alone. Although that is the condition, trust that there will be someone putting the body together with you.

- Remember that in the sequence plane there is parentheses: to take (the) time to be able to think, do and perceive together and imply that what enters the scene are the ways of living the visible as a sustained problem and as a potentiality.

COMMON TOOLS / STRATEGIES TO SUSTAIN THE PLAIN SEQUENCE

We can propitiate the listening of the sequence plane through the following tools:

1. Interference (bursts and disappears).

2. Overlay (add or incorporate an element or plane over another (the one that is happening).

3. Continuity/ongoingness (which happens without interruption and continues) in two modalities: as a "continuous bass" (perceived but not invasive, does not break in) and "operatic" (supports a particular moment from the soundtrack dramatizing it...etc).

4. Simultaneity (coincidence over time of two or more actions, elements or planes).

- Remember that the "peripheral devices and facilities" trigger a lot in order to sustain, to tense, to continue, to disperse the sequence plane.

- If there is no front or a place of privileged visibility, the actions begin and end anywhere.

- Your body (operator) proposes the point of view, whatever you do.

- If we understand that in the plain sequence there is no mediation, we can understand that we are an "operating body".

- Trust that "the operating body" is perceiving, doing and that this is what is happening.

- You can give yourself and take the time you need to set up your place / action.

- You can consider continuing your action, attending what comes next.

- If your action "has an end" is fantastic there will be some body else who will continue anyway.

- In this way we can think that "to continue" does not mean "agreeing on the tone, form, rhythm".

- You can disassemble everything you've assembled.

- If you need help, ask the one next to you normally.

The selected experiments shared a number of conditions: they included professional dancers and non-dancers; they were made within a laboratory situation, and were prepared within a time-frame of a minimum of 3 to a maximum of 10 sessions of 4-5 hours each. For each experiment most of participants were self-called, or were invited due to project affinity or friendship bond. No authorship was attributed in any of its public presentations, they involved a minimum of 10 people performing within a score organised through various principles. Some of these presentations were presented for a small community or for peers close to a specific context or within the context where the laboratory took place. At other times these experiments were presented in venues or were invited by festivals or other contexts. These experiments shared the film source reference Gerry, Gus Van Sant (2002). In the framework of this research, Gerry became a concept-question translated as a performance practice, fiction and as an audio-visual reference which at times was broadcast as a soundtrack and video.

DANCISM is a reflection on choreography and potentiality made from the body, but materialised in images and words. It shows a movement that goes from the body of politicians represented as a group of politicians dancing in parliament, to the political body being the anonymous body represented in the beginning through the corps du ballet and that later on takes on the form of the figure of the extra in cinema. This video-essay questions choreography inasmuch as it performs movement within a device that works for the neoliberal gaze and globalised power.

These solos involve a live-dance whose principles are the genesis of the practices I have developed during all these years. An audio-text which is played simultaneous to the dance (but whose content is autonomous from it) and still video images curated for each occasion (taken from Youtube or internet images respectively). In the solo Whatever moving like this there is an slide-show of internet images projected on a wall or screen to the rhythm of La Traviata while in the solo entitled Parliament there is a computer that sits on a museum stand from which is broadcast a video of politicians in an ordinary parliament session which runs throughout the whole performance.