– fragments from a theoretical text to appear in the ARTA magazine, within the issue on Hybrids-
Viena, 2015 – One shape of the ‘immanent duet’ by Alina Popa and myself, a spectacular singular centipede inscribing ourselves, predicting me hurting my leg the following week or both our solos inside the BHB the following year etc.etc. Foto: Rodrigo Andreolli.
Performance remains a notion alien to Romanian. One cannot but approach performance in one of two ways, just as one can hardly approach religion – either from a distance or from within. There is no real chance for a relaxed interested discussion. The gap between the ones inside, that cannot not accelerate things, and the ones outside, unwilling and unable to let it evolve and gain a ‘common sense’, is, of course, not a typically local thing. Maybe there should never be any relaxed text connected to performance. This text will try and get busy with the (hybrid) nature of its object, going from intensely satisfying two different extreme desires, failing twice, to losing the dichotomic thinking and trusting more the virtual forces of the discourse while entering an a-perspectival (whose voice, no voice), trans-dimensional logic of the mind-curving space where it is both and neither inside and outside, anything is haunted by something different and through their co-existence and movements of displacement and lingering, old voices get silent but meetings do occur.
In 1916, Egon Schiele wanted desperately for his time, the worst time in history, to end.
Indifferent to which nation he might belong, if any, he would prefer “the other”. There is a note in Leopold Museum in Vienna. I read it last summer in an exhibition room different from the one in which a Tino Sehgal performance was taking place. Amongst Schiele’s landscapes, that were all “visions of landscapes out of observing bodily movement of mountains and trees” and amongst the portraits that were all paintings of displacement and “wistfulness” (like “the feeling of an autumnal tree inside your body” while in Vienna, in summer), there were also the notes and fragments exhibited. The durational performance proposing 2-3 sitting performers looping in slow-motion and chanting (really chanting, very little beatboxing) was not produced especially for Schiele, nor was it presented in a museum for the first time.
In proximity, the performance was arresting, it had black box implicit event temporality and elaboration diffused in whatever the experience of ‘visiting’ could be. From the other rooms, it was not so clear what it did, but it was an alien body prolonged in all the corners and it messed with attention and temporality.
(…) This text follows and focuses on the performance coming from the black box of theatre (distinct from the performance in the visual arts/white cube logic, but that became what it is exactly due to the theatre-visual arts intersecting in black box or white cube) and from the perspective of contemporary dance history (in a complicated dialogue with the history of modern/post-modern theatre, especially its “postdramatic” stage). Speculating, especially when migrating towards other horizons, performance keeps the black box inside. And then integrates ‘other horizons’, too, turning the work into a “spaceship”, part alien, part gathering familiar phantom limbs, perfect for generating singularities. (Choreographer Forin Flueraș thought of the Black Hyperbox constellation to be a „spaceship” in relation to the old world of theatre and, later, in the discursive BHB formation, he wrote that the „black box moved inside the work”).
The premise of this text is the inherent hybridity of performance (that aims at scripting/choreographing experience and, implicitly, perception – you tell me what I experience, I tell myself what I experience) and that can generate spirals of hybridity, redistributing the possibility of understanding and experience in counterintuitive strange places of mingled perception and reception (I understand where my understanding stops and I sense nobody is telling anything, not even inviting for contradictory or alienating experiences but we all leave each other alone in proximity in the same environment for our immanent forces to transform us continuously and in some unstable moments we might even meet a.s.o.) –thus destabilizing the safe formulations of ourselves.
In his most recent book Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance, the dance critic theorizing performance extensively, André Lepecki, introduces the term ‘singularity’ in connection to dance and performance (in Bucharest he had so fittingly thrown the concept ahead two years ago when invited by Ștefania Ferchedău to give a lecture and a workshop inside the E-Motional program). In the spirit of Deleuze and Guattari, Lepecki uses the term ‘singularity’ as a reappropriation of Deleuze’s ‘concept’ done by art philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman: singularity as bearer and generator of “strangeness”. Could we, instead of meeting as individualities, meet in the coreless core of singularities? (paraphrasing Lepecki’s quoting of philosopher John Rajchman’s idea of “a society of singularities”).
(…)The second time she just ignored us, trapped in consuming her parallel trip from before the performance started and long after it was over. And kept on asking us to join her Prayer for the Abstract. No seduction, not like the first time, when the invitation was to “become flat” and “virtual” and “real” by scanning own existence (and their awkward Deleuze/Lacan shadows of significance) – language resignifying fictionalization and the interactive performativity of the Open Game. This time only grave disappointed insistence that all of us “reach the non-image” while covered in highly charged burkas, holding hands or looping Isadora Duncan style. Maybe just a bit of her viral complicity laughter haunting her trip and the performance. Still no one followed. And it was perfect. Lilach Livne’s performances happened in apartments in Bucharest (thanks to Lorgean) and this added to the alienation effect.
If you do not trust me, only check her Facebook account. She is using the same resignifying – or naming it like it really is – strategies (eating away enormous distances between most delicate things) in the official virtual space and she gets away with invoking the confiscated language of love and prayer accompanied by grave, intensely sad selfies. And the same failure reaches us somehow (still I wonder where/when is the laughter here?). She is not so far from Aurel Ilie (see video above) or from the counterintuitive forces of religious texts (stay away if not already inside) inviting us to the opposite of what our intuition and construction tell us it is acceptable, stretching for meetings with different fabric, ‘real’, while caressing each other’s brains. Test yourself. Check how close or how far you are to receiving this. ❤
Performativity means the capacity of language (convention-given, in art and in life) to act building/changing reality, while performance is the ‘live art’ endlessly inventing new languages for its elusive medium. One could also argue that this is the ‘performative turn’ and that there is no non-performative (non reality-producing) artwork (art historian Dorothea von Hantelmann, who also preferred the term “experiential turn” for contemporary art’s “concern with an artwork’s effects on the viewer and with the situation in which it takes place”).
The conventional-effective ‘hyperstitional’ attitude associated with performing turns performance into a very interesting hybrid already acting as such and surpassing dualist thinking (thought/language and its compounds on one side and reality/experience on the other). Once binary schematism irrelevant, hybridity spirals and complicates each side and their relation to the context. This way a notion like symbolic order enters opposition with both material and immaterial dimension. Also the physical plane can be ordered by the very logic of material, visible or invisible or could mix nonrepresentational language with kinetic sympathy, while verbal language can affect.
Black Hyperbox (BHB or just HyperBox, anyways “a productive lie”, thrown ahead of us like Florin Flueraș’s dice, to work on us retrospectively), had different utility, consistency, temporality and language for any of the performers involved. Concepts are similar to violent things or acts that we make, break and remake alongside a moving horizon, paraphrasing Gilles Deleuze but also artist Alina Popa’s passionate take on abstractions in her ongoing conceptual tension between perspective and horizon (the point pet, holding two perspectives in one vertical horizon slicing the body and the self or the possibility of a second horizon cutting the perspective in the middle etc.). In both writing and performing, she applies science-fictional strategies of dealing with abstractions literally or figuratively (with poetic or speculative effect). In the written extension of BHB labyrinth (Bezna BHB book published by PUNCH), some of the performative practices or theoretical interests will find a way to transform or just spread in the new medium. If I am not mistaken, paraphrasing, Alina Popa’s thought climbs the vines of liana and theatre jumps to the narrator’s throat.
(…) Choreographer Krõõt Juurak’s (self) performing practice (crafting the dosing of performativity pretty close to Artificial Intelligence), on stage and outside it, traversing contexts and following a score of explicit or implicit tasks of moods (bad, trying to have fun, normal, nice etc.), produces terrible uncanny-ness and uneasiness. Her black box skills mix unhealthily with life shaping existential experiments. (She does perform/behave as if she could anytime unplug herself and maybe this is also dance and choreography).
It shall never seize to amaze me the influence of Deleuze and Guattari (especially their work A Thousand Plateaus) on contemporary speculative thinking and performance and dance discourse, on the rethinking of thinking and the introduction of practice as another way to organize and share artistic knowledge, and how good a medium performance is for the ‘philosophy of immanence’.
Darkness or continuous evening as an invitation for the virtual to literally unfold its potentiality, conceptually and poetically hiding the dancers’ individualities and denying the scene’s promise of visibility, while opening the possibility for the actualization of a landscape kind of knowledge out of the fabric of public daydreaming, where it is not clear which is un-safer – lights off or on. One could inhabit for a while a Spångberg dance performance. Dawn, a more indifferent and dubious variant of Natten ‘the horror dance’, joined me in my falling asleep as an intuition of it being somehow choreographed. And the nice strategy of mingling whisperingly cheering performers in the audience felt like inner voices debating on what is improper, unsafe, nice and k.
Paraphrasing Lepecki, let us succeed in doing modest, improbable, un-heroic things and desire not so much, for them and for us, to be recognized. Singularities escape representation, they can only be alluded to. They are said to populate things and people and concepts. This way dance alienates itself from the urgency to be new and also from its subjective authorship.
Some good years ago, in a coffee shop in the Old Center of Bucharest, there was a Masquerade, organized by poet Valentina Chiriță and proposed by HitGirl, a virtual literary avatar, that invited performer Maria Mora to read, first hand and in a careless improper manner, a pseudo scientific text on telekinesis and, also, Aurel Ilie, specializing in telekinesis to do the deed. Aurel Ilie never faced the public, asked for indigo light and tried to move several glass bottles, while explaining his technique in a hallucinatory speech (“I can move objects regardless to their mass, the only condition is that the mass divided by distance is constant, since the moment is the force or the force’s arm. That is, if I see the moon, I could move it just as easily as moving an object, the only difference is that the angle of rotation for the moon is very small, while the angle of rotation for the closer object is larger”). The audience made fun of him, got anxious, got bored, doubted, got struck, vibrated, cried, got bored again, started conversations and took drinks from the bar or left home. After two hours of religious waiting, Aurel Ilie moved the first bottle in an almost unperceivable manner. Towards the end, when there was almost nobody watching, he was moving the bottles on the floor at an implausible speed.
Singularities, distinct from individualities, are points of tension and potentiality inside matter, or inside a thing when the thing enters a particular field of forces. They are a play between immanent forces and circumstantial encounters, absolutely unique for that thing that gets to take part into its transformation, and can be deduced only by commitment (to action) towards the material. Observation only is not sufficient.
The Masquerade succeeded in its strategies to activate surprising choreographic and hybrid-non-choreographic forces (a bit like Spångberg does), the ‘spectacle’ got literally dispersed in the body of the public and in their subjective temporality. What was choreographed were several planes of intensity: bugged discursive frame denouncing itself diluting an already improbable experience followed by ‘the miracle’ in the end, misplaced regime of attention (non co-occurrence of climax and anti-climax between sides, continuously missing the point or maybe a way to connect to one’s own singularity exhausting subjectivity’s preconditioned reactions) and last, but not least, strategies for ongoing alienation of the mediums and of spectators providing for new, literal, take on the object-oriented ontology or philosophy.
A Benoît Lachambre performance, especially as of lately, offers literally the experience of a choreography of energetic matter in movement, bearer of singularities in an ongoing process of transformation and transfer. Dancers and spectators, they all become un-thought of, unrecognizable spirited matter. What the Canadian artist choreographs is energies and air, very close to the “society of singularities” above. Lachambre accompanies his performances with short correct texts promising the breakdown of all social, individual, conceptual constructs as when an ideal stranger comes to you and knows to fulfill the very secret unnamable thing that you miss the most. It sounds so lame and it even delivers entirely. There is much talk about a shamanic approach to choreography but he really puts in motion something enormous. Another way to talk about it is that it is not much to look at, it smells badly, it feels cruel and awkward to watch, it requires for something not everybody is willing to give (up) and, maybe, this perspective does not stay long.
(…) Also an inter/(even) trans-dimensional shift but a different one – the new species of hybrids that come out of mixing hybridity and singularity are the ones feeding from the technologies of interiority and exteriority and engaging in interdependency but also trying to surpass the binarism of a problem not small such as the body/mind gap (and not only in object-oriented ontology style) but by still formulating the possibility for a new consciousness. One that allows for contingent encounters between people, things, fields, concepts, institutions, situations etc. and works at the energetic field level reverberating in how thinking is thought, affecting perception, action and language and trusts the ‘spatiotemporality’ of ‘singularity’. (And it is the reiteration of the very experience one could have receiving a performance).
The only possibility for language in this paradigm is speculative, another kind of performativity, losing the capacity to fix but, by irreverently devouring enormous distances in significance while mirroring conceptual abysses, also diagonally making possible a kind of statement/existence lacking certainty/subject.
Lilach Livne: “I look sad but this is my deep happiness. I wanna touch the real again. This body is so small so full of sings. Transcending, for peace. (test yourself, see how far or how close you are to receiving this <3)” Photo: Sveta Sheleg & Robert Zlotnick, Tel Aviv, 2016.
Any action in the world that inscribes our subjectivity hides a shadow, an area of intense indetermination corrosive for language and thinking. A gathering of these kinds of shadows carrying the subjectivities along might have been from time to time the work&life platform for performative research called Black Hyperbox, that artists Alina Popa and Florin Flueraș initiated and that went on for the last couple of years in Bucharest.
A multitude of undisciplined hybrid entities coming from different backgrounds each surrounded by an abstract/affective space busy with alienating themselves from interior/exterior perspectives, often reaching paroxysm and silence, or in which the subject exercised its ability to withdraw allowing for something else to appear. A very political gesture – this fluid open system traversing symbolic and physical mediums (…).
The consistencies and inconsistencies of the highly intense and also contingent BHB resonated with my own research for strategies to hold together (and coexist with) inner contradictions and to make possible meetings between the immanent areas of strange sensitivity, or between the singularities that traverse fields and planes.
(…) The voice (third person, but not only) and the perspective (moving) are fairly important for you to access an uncanny space within the very language, as a line of flight between inside and outside (indirect libre style and multiple projections), where words, haunted, in Schiele’s continuous oblique gesture of wistfulness, do not belong to persons, but feed and breed a new entity, “a child loved too much, an object of such intimacy that it dare not be allowed to live” (J.M. Coetzee). You talk about your research in the second person, you project on what came out of your solo performance inside the BHB book, you ask questions and answer by association with other’s research sharing the same spirit with yours. Why?
– Lepecki invokes “the ongoing lives even if in another formation of matter” of the close ones dedicating the book to them and to the living ones. “All of you, help me find the sense in that powerful, strange, fiercely joyful and crucial word singularity“, he writes.
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