performing economies

Economies of space underlie every choreography. Bodies serve as currency and token in economies of representation. And finally, art is a market in which I am a freelancer.

During the «sand residency» in July ‘18, Pauline, Dorota and me explored the mutualities that emerge within an improvised dance. Several workshops throughout June have produced a comprehensive codex of practices.

The collective research project «allegory of economy» (December ‘17, ongoing) aims to leverage allegory as a tool to understand and reassemble economies in relation to bodies, transactions and customs

«future witchcraft» (feb-dec ‘17) comprised of a residency with an open lab, several performances and rituals, workshops and a theatre play, all approaching the political struggles of early modern women in Europe that ended, as we all know, in mass gynocides. Can we, in our situation, join these witches’ emancipatory stategies of magic practice, ritual, and direct action, and eventually undo the historic establishment of female gender as economic marker?

Through the «framing ritual» (Jun 9, ‘17), I related the apparatus’ frame (such as central perspective) through spontaneous gestures and inscriptions (lines painted on skin) to inner foci, in an attempt to exclude conventional interprlay between these three layers. The awareness of five foci in the body which mold the appreciation of surroundings proved a useful ingredient for all successive practices.

Can dance crack codes of deprivation?

“This is the first discovery: that patriarchy is not a construction, an order or a structure, but an economy, for which women are the first and founding commodities”, Sadie Plant writes in her essay «On the matrix: cyberfeminist simulations». And then she quotes Luce Irigaray: In this economy, “Women, signs, commodities, and currency always pass from one man to another”; their existance being reduced to what it signifies: “the possibility of mediation. transaction, transition, transference”. And adds: “Women have served as his media and interfaces, muses and messengers, currenties and screens, interactions, operators, decoders, secretaries… they have been man’s go-betweens, the in-betweens, taking his message, bearing his children, and passing his genetic code.”

In retrospect, allegories and emblems of the early modern age are blatantly sexist, and nescessarily so as they were to depict interfaces of circulation as female-marked bodies. The project of gendering the symbolic realm, a foundational effort of modern patriarchy, has, despite resistance from women, been successful, and continues to inform image production in the contemporary fields. And, in a not-⁠so-⁠ironic reappropriation, “Twentieth-century scientists call on this earlier visual technology for insisting on a specific kind of reality, which readily makes today’s observers forget the conditions, apparatuses and histories of its production. Especially in computer an information sciences and in biotechnology and biomedicine, representations of late twentieth century technosciences make liberal use of iconic exemplars of early modern European art/humanism/technology. Current images of technoscience quote, point to, and otherwise evoke a small, conventional, potent stock of Renaissance visual analogues, which provide a legitimate lineage and origin story for technical revolutions at the end of the Second Christian Millenium”, as Donna J. Haraway describes in her «Virtual Speculum». Deeper motivations may have stayed the same for 500 years as the extended-shelf-life visual apparatus canonized in the Renaissance still, in distinct ways, serves the production and reproduction of gender.

The visible spill of early modern emblems into cyber-⁠science throughout the 90s has inspired me to revisit contemporary body representation through the lens of Allegory. I discovered this word in many critical texts on 20th century feminist performance art as well as on early modern construction of gender, and despite its demise in the 19th century, Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay on Allegory seems to have spurred a slow but lasting reassessment of this concept throughout late modernity right into post modernism. Allegory, with its ternary structure and its figure’s superfluity, helps uncover myths that contemporary symbols would keep implied.

Economy is the other side of the model I work with, and it appears in three guises. First, as the circulation mediated by the figure-as-sign. Rebecca Schneider, in «The Explicit body», asserts that female-marked bodies in capitalism serve as “allegory for commodity circulation”, and to form the ternary structure of allegory, the text in this case is the ‘dreamscapes’ of ‘insatiable desire’, an economy itself, in which touch is impossible and gaze is infinite. Second, economy is instrinsic to my process of working, where resources, transactions and symbolic evaluation determine what I can produce. And third, the volatile space I summon through performance/dance is itself structured by an economy of bodies-⁠as-⁠material, even before any score is noted.

Allegory is a model to scutinize and construct approaches to alterity, i.e. what T. W. Adorno called ‘mimesis’. The explication of code/myth as requisite allows for normative assessment. It allows me to create images without conceding my judgement to the seductive affirmativity of the symbol, and it potentially gives the Other a language.

machine pleasures

In «tableaux vivants», ‘living images’, actors represent a concept through staging a scenic figure taken from a known text. It fell out of use amidst the onset of industrialization due to a somewhat ribald excess: a body is always more than what it supposedly marks. In particular, excessive pleasures may transcend narrative frames and bear yet-unwritten myths from the cyborg worlds. My graduation work «solo for my body» (July 17, ‘18) assaied the concept.

«machine skills» was a workshop performance I gave in several frames. Tackling D.A. Haraway’s enigmatic assurance that “intense pleasures” were to arise from “machine skills”, I created a garden for cyborgs, and invited the participants to embark on counterpoint singing, affirming they have the according skills.

The «cyborgism» practice was the result of my first interpretation of Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto as a choreographic score. In several workshops and jams, the guests explored the pleasurable implications of being a cyborg in a shared space.

How would a cyborg perceive and engage the material world? Sensations of touch and gravity guided the «moss residency» with dancer/artist Pauline Payen that comprised of somatic practice as well as felting interfaces, and talking about our economic situations.

An aspect of cyborgs’ spacial economy is how we perceive limits. In recurring «limit jams», the invitees explored resistance and presence through malleable, contracting and expanding boundaries with tools from meditation, contact improvisation and martial arts.

The touch of material became very visceral when rain was pouring during the participative installation of «river species», part of the «future witchcraft» series of events.

«my stillness with the garden», a technique for grounding and preceiving everything as material began to develop in early ‘16 within ritual retreats I organized on the basis of Starhawk’s emancipatory witchcraft writings.

Throughout summer ‘14, I met with three fellow artists to move like animals. We called ourselves the «crawling group». What started as a development process towards the production of a butoh-inspired performance, eventually became a deep dive into an alternative way of encounter, with both the environment and each other.

myth container

What I call myth container («Fabelcontainer», ‘12-⁠13) is a site-⁠as-⁠figure. Armed with the hieroglyphic fragments of an abandoned, or counterfeit discourse (they are always latent), we can enter this site-⁠as-⁠figure and practice the dislocation of our dance into a parallel world. Historical discourses depend on models of societies, and, in retrospect, evoke fascinating myths, stories within ideal societies. I stumble upon heterostopies, sites that are both what they are, i.e. material, and ideal, as if they were hosting imaginary parties of societies in a parallel world. This nourishing relation is mutual; the choice of a site juxtaposed with an abandoned discourse produces an ideal society, and in many ways this production covertly mirrors allegorese (allegorical interpretation), where a vessel that is more than its function, the figure of the body as marked by gender and other attributes, invokes meaning through a conventional myth. Conclusively, just as we commonly dance to produce a volatile space, through latent narratives, the volatility of a space arouses a dance in return.

The expression ‘double in a parallel world’, liberally borrowed from Alice Chauchat, may grasp a grounding concept in several of my works. Those include the theatre script «K-⁠Gruppen» set in a looping 1972 election night shifting between ‘limits to growth’, radical agit-⁠prop, and cyberneticized popular front politics (‘13), as well as the «Luftschiff» and «Architecten» narratives (with related works since ‘13) which are both set in a never-⁠ending WWI in Europe in the years 1917 resp. 1999, and inspired by the heterotopicity I experiences in the film-⁠sets I had been working in. In the context of my Fine Arts studies occured the ‘democratic pleasury’ («ein demokratischer Lustgarten»; ‘16-⁠17) and the precursury 19th-⁠century «Akademie» world (‘12-⁠13), both inspired by Prussian garden architecture, which would later inform my practical approaches to an aesthetic of Tableau Vivant. The «Sociétés in the city without environs», finally, took the epinymous space not as figure but as rhetorical means to the end of informing a volatile space in which we’d find our ‘Other’, in Lacanian terms. Finding one’s double in these parallel societies nescessarily incurs a surrender towards fragments of a theory ethic-⁠esthetic, orphaned discourse looking for its debaters. Joy lies in connecting these pieces, mending the fissures, still failing a nod towards history’s actual tale, to create an iridescent mosaic. The latter’s mimetic like(li)ness and spatial fidelity to the architectural sediment (as in ‘take the hyroglyph for text’) carries a promise, a gesture of deference to normative reality effects, and this gesture is what I am trying to cultivate in all my projects.

«Luftschiff» and «Architecten», as well as the «Akademie» and «Lustgarten» take place in a fictional socialist Europe that has never embraced the steam engine. While the latter two are situated in a stratified but affluent late (and long) 19th century, the airship in «Luftschiff» crosses the Baltic sea in 1917, and hosts the author of a fiction, «Architecten», that projects WWI up int the year ‘99, including a slimy communications network based on biotech. The paradigmatic topos from which discourses evolve is that of neoclassical sculpture. The European discourses of rationality, humanism and misogyny find a lasting expression in gardens with statues, especially of the ‘pleasury’ variety. A 21st century European may find it hard to reconcile masculinist Enlightenment rhetoric with the tactile qualities of Baroque and Classicist sculpture, in which the human figure poses as some mythical emanation. The unease is caused by the ‘too-⁠much’ that Walter Benjamin ascribes to (Baroque) allegorical figure. Classical and neoclassical aesthetics petrify allegory to an unbearable extent during the ‘Sattelzeit’ (early 19th century). This conflict warrants a nonfactual scenario, in which the early modern forms around allegory would have been rescued into modernity. How would the first modern world war be staged through this hypothetical setup? Which art corresponds to a society that perpetually reperforms long-⁠forgotten antique myths? Very likely, we may develop a sensibility for the history of that world in our’s—after all, has the early modern age in Europe ever ended?

In «Sociétés in the city without environs» (‘14-15), the myth begins with the endlessness of a periphery (the site), and the self-⁠sufficiency of local secret societies (the hypothetical discourse), and then asks the site for fragments of a text. Which is the practice, or ritual, that a ‘city without environs’ lends itself to? The paradigmatic sprawl speaks of urban-⁠social indifference. How would the Sociétés ‘other’ each other? Through a compartmentalization: a history of labyrinthine entrenchment through an infinite, malleable concrete fabric, etc. Our performative explorations into the «Sociétés in the city without environs» started with bygone spaces rhetorically appropriated in order to summon the double of our troupe in another world, such as the (re)constructed labyrinth as synecdoche, or the abandoned Iraqui embassy building taken as metonym for the «bureaucracie».

The site-⁠as-⁠figure in an allegorical equation is a device I find myself using all the time. But similarly, the solutions to the equations are developing their own lives as inquiry devices: they illuminate the contingency of today’s specific patriarchy. As they intergrow, their shared world, a ‘parallel’, raises issues of our’s. This is the cradle in which my inquiries in ‘18—«allegory of economy», «my stillness with the garden», and the performances around «cyborgism» and «machine pleasures»—would form: they are all questions that other world poses us.