Experiments Along the Brink of I
Performing the City (2012) is an artists’ bookwork that brings together material from Movement and the City, an ongoing research project-workshop led by Bianca Scliar Mancini and Sara Wookey, and Experiments Along the Brink of I, a prose response by myself [Emma Cocker] to witnessing and participating in Movement and the City workshops in Zagreg (2009) and Toronto (2010)"
Experiments Along the Brink of I is an example of ‘contiguous writing’ whose content evolved and emerged from a position of proximity, from being-with another’s practice, from working alongside and experiencing from within.
PART 1, 2009
The first phase of ‘contiguous’ research took place within the frame of the fifteenth annual Performance Studies international conference in Zagreb, Croatia, June 24-28 2009. The theme of PSi # 15 was MISPERFORMANCE: Misfiring, Misfitting, Misreading. More information about the conference can be found at http://www.psi15.com/
In addition to presenting a paper as part of this conference, I participated in (UN)Folding Zagreb, a three-day collaborative workshop or ‘shift’ led by Sara Wookey, Bianca Scliar Mancini and Christopher Brunner.
“In a format that resembles a workshop but that aims at a collective research-creation process participants will use movement and rhythm as techniques to explore how to know Zagreb through affects. Participants will share a short reading pack, which includes philosophical texts, as well as other relevant writings and images that will set a common ground of knowledge about the city.
With three molecules of actions, each one with a specific focus on either movement, visual or sound elements, this method of approaching the city is strongly based on improvisation techniques, both from dance and music, which priories flow and process; it is anti-flaneur as it proposes participation and movement of the body as a tool for engagement with the others in the space of the city, exploring the notion of gestural contamination.
(Un)Folding Zagreb consists of intense work during the three blocks of three hours of activities in the studio (physical propositions), outdoors (tasks of collecting) and on mapping techniques ( collective composition).”
PART 2, 2010
The second phase of ‘contiguous’ research took place within the frame of the sixteenth Performance Studies international conference, Performing Publics, 9–13 June 2010, Toronto, Canada. The conference will investigate the power of performance to intervene in, reshape, and reinvigorate the public sphere at the beginning of the twenty-first century. How are we hailed by various publics, and how does this shape our behaviors and social interactions? How are publics spatially and temporally constituted? In what ways do publics participate in forms of activism, civic engagement, and “poetic world-making” (Warner)? What affects and effects are produced by such utopian interventions? In parallel to presenting a paper at this conference, I was invited to observe a workshop led by artists Sara Wookey and Bianca Sclair Mancini which explored the city through various forms of choreographic intervention.
"The challenge then, is to figure out a way beyond and through the impossibility of community. This is not to invoke a transcendent plateau from which one will find a new synthetic resolution free of contradictions. Quite the contrary, it is meant to suggest the impossibility of total consolidation, wholeness and unity [...] and perhaps more importantly, to suggest that such an impossibility is a welcome premise upon which a collective artistic praxis, as opposed to a 'community based art' might be theorised', Miwon Kwon, p.154.
"Research should no longer be done off to one side, in a school, a library, a laboratory. Where one lives needs to become a laboratory for researching, for mapping directly, the living body itself, oneself as world-forming inhabitant ... there needs to be a communal devising, selecting and combining of techniques that will strengthen organisms-persons and help them to regenerate themselves; results need to be pooled and compared" Architectural Body, Madeline Gins + Arakawa, pxx
