A Performance Practice Interface

Conspiracy Blog

For an examination presentation of this here “research catalogue”, some of the current, core references for this project with a brief commentary.

How can we figure the reuse of a (document of a) form-of-practice? Where lies its force? What do the operations of documentation and reuse do to it? What does the form “provide access to” through reuse?

An intake form for the Shop Talks and Provisional Guides.

It seems like there are certain (historical) values which appear in many performance and embodied practices. Themes and operations such as flow, impulse, and attention – or as Chrysa sometimes says, dancers have specialized knowledge in memory, listening, and touch. Imagination is another big one. These can be thought of as territories of technique in/through which agency congeals, towards which a fair dedication of investment accumulated, or as significant affordances of embodiment (as material-discursive). I am interested in mapping forms in relation to these principles, and in developing models to trace their iteration with greater specificity.

What are the tactics and techniques of making forms-of-practice and practices into forms?

The difference between giving a cue as: a clap, a timer ring, a vocal prompt, inviting the practitioners to “in their own time”. Much like ending with: “beginning of end”, “find a terrible ending”, or just “end”.

When you say “honesty”/character/world, what does it do? (As opposed to “what does it/you mean?”)

Language serves as thresholds to experimentation (shaping the conceptualization of the practice, body, and so on). It is performative, it does something to the ontology of the practicing and the materiality of bodies, generating and changing the value and power system of the practice and its field. This has further implications, as a practice is performative of a practitioner’s ethical and ontological intra-action with the world. In other (more dramatic) words: Practices are mini belief systems, mini religions. The studio is a church, where you go to practice with likeminded people.

From conversation with Laressa Dickey: Poetic impulse, an intrigue for interrogating what a word is and does. What is the felt sense of honesty – how does it feel to do honesty in this practice? What does it do to newcomers? What is the language of honesty, what other words relate to it (semantic field)? Giving the language other anchors, making things technically and poetically vital.

Ex. For Hannah (PP7), let’s spend some time with the word “character”. What does it do for you? What does it do in this practice? How does something become a character? How is the concept of character in interplay with the relational-system of the practice in terms of technique and poetry?

Laressa suggested checking out the method of Micro-phenomenology. Ex. Imagine the word ORANGE. What happened there, step by step?

A unwieldy thought amidst a Wednesday Research Seminar:

How do practitioners approach, adapt, and tailor a form-of-practice in the instant moment?

There are methods/tactics which occur in the tension of form and instance. I am interested in the practitioner’s approach to the activation and proposition, their agencies within the container/form. For example, the tactic of modulating the challenge of a form in terms of the uncertainty, responsibility, and attention it demands. In turn, the tactics of facilitation and form-design in shaping a relatively reliable experiential-experimental landscape and affect.

Agencies as tactics in their strategic space (accepting the role) - tactics which practitioners employ in an instance-of-practice to modulate the strategic space of a form-of-practice – ways of making do within challenge, personal interests, social drama, and so on. 

Where do we place the cut between un/knowable, sub/conscious, un/controllable? Where does the mystery remain?

Poetry, gossip, the scandal of flesh – all those things irreducible to “simple” marks. With the desire of research to define and translate, there seems to be a need for certain aspects of the work to remain hidden, tacit – to mark the limit of profanity into the sacred. Balancing the crucial mystical elements/components/contingencies of a practice – those things which it vivid, uncertain, wobbly, thrilling – and their demystification through documentation, analysis, and method.

There's certainly a kind of dissociation/disengagement that can come from explication, from understanding an action as an iteration determined by technique. Like suddenly forgetting how to brush your teeth or sensing the repeated pathways/procedures of flirtation (come closer, hand on inner thigh, lean in for a kiss). A certain mechanization of life and the body, of technique inadvertently becoming technology – of fossilization rather than sedimentation.

How can a document summon the ghosts of the mystery?

How to tune in? Tactics: What do I need? Commit to moving.
How do deal with immanent or faux disallowance when working with others in a new situation/form? Tactics: Call and respond - try making sound and let another affirm before going further.
How to decenter the authority of the facilitator? Invite the practitioners to share their experiences, the scores they are giving themselves, things they might need.

(After listening to the podcast PETER, dance with Luusi Kateme)

The taste of other forms within a practice moment – “I’ve been here”.

Embodied-technique is knowledge entangled in matters of experience, sensation, memory, and so on. Over time, territories of embodied-technique seem to assume a quality of sense memory, a familiar space to inhabit. Training the skill of “locating” this felt sense in relation to the question of technique could be useful for my project. It could provide a quality of clarity to the practicing, developing the flow-state contingent for a certain attention to experimentation. It could also make the process of placing a form in relation to other forms – of matrixing – emanate from within the doing, more or less intuitively.

It is a very real possibility to use mostly any practice to think about/through all the things that got involved without being strictly called upon. As with pure scores, the whatness of your aesthetic bias, for example, suddenly manifests. Some forms are more prone to this than others, with pure scores making it their pride and joy.

Experimenting with the momentum of opening and closing, folding and unfolding as described in Blue Sky Body (Spatz, 2019). Starting from a form and a motion of opening, attending to the field, the objects and thresholds appearing through iteration. Passing from haze to rigor, working as a group to define these objects and the potential investigations which they attract/afford. Then, making alterations, tinkering-tuning-tracking the form until a derivation has emerged, one which allows relatively reliable access to a more specific, or simply different territory.

Somebody performs a practice and the people watching try to guess how it works. This probably needs a few more variables and scoring elements, aiming for a genuine attempt to read a technique and reverse engineer it. Perhaps the game of picking up a simple score, activating it to and spectator, and the spectator attempts to rewrite it.

Engaging with technique as a mode of spectatorship and an almost gnostic drive. In conversation with Roi, he suggested looking to the discipline of electronic music, where artists develop specific technique-technology to create their particular sound. These are often kept secret, maintaining the artist’s allure and profitability, with the rest of the industry laboring to “catch up” and “crack the code”. Examples include Arca’s early music and Ulla’s current music.

Watching Manuel dance a couple weeks ago (25.01.2024), working with a particular mechanism of vocalizing, a sort of reverse sounding. I asked him how he did it, and he said he simply thinks of one sound but vocalizes another. I am quite certain there’s more in/to play there.

Metaphor of taste-testing on master chef: Can you name the ingredients? What would onto-epistemically constitute ingredients here? This goes into the question of a practice’s components and contingencies, particularly on the level on instancing (this is what I perceive Dejan to be working on, at least in part).

Technique is a double edged sword.
People report that psychosomatic pain, that emotions are
in the chest, or stomach, sometimes throat.
It is the relative reliability of technique that becomes common, and
It is the common sense which dictates the exploration of everyday technique,
even the capacity of sensation and experience.
There’s mythology at play
There’s lineage of research at play
Is it “really” that these three loci (chest, stomach, throat)
are where emotional distress congregates?
How much is it the materiality of embodiment?
How much is it the discursivity of it?

It's about an expectation to feel something a certain way. Love feels like that. Inversely, being inspired and informed by how others feel love to remember and expand how love is felt.

(Waiting for the bus in Tel Aviv)

Language can index thresholds to embodiment through their mutual performative force. Metaphors, treated as of the world rather than about the world, are gateways/invocations to concepts and fantasy.

For example, the image of being childlike tunes the body in a specific way, thus unfolding a new territory of experimentation. It is also evident that many such images have been refined as experimental-tools/systems. Similarly, chakra/energy as an epistemic object / territory of technique and research. Tracing these images-as-thresholds as they appear in different practices could be a way to gage their efficacy, (re)use, and so on.

Further, we can examine how different practices approach working with language and images.
In Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing, an embodied something manifests a felt sensewhich can be given an imagery (linguistic) handle. The image is used to resonate with the vague, somatic thing – the image/word becoming (an index) of the felt sense. In Sapphire Dream Work, we see a very different relationship to imagination and language – closer to hypnotic suggestion (see also Scientology or PTA’s The Master).

If I am to go on a limb, enumerating tools and investigations of technique, I would say you can:

Embed the image in movement rather concretely, ie. become a butterfly, be in the field of daisies, touch the sunlight.
Invite the image to resonate hazily and inform a way of being / feeling.
Take the image and externalize/extract it into a something, project it onto an object or “hold” its imaginary-stuff like in Meg’s exercise.

Focusing – sensorial imagination
Emotional Sensitivity?
Gestalt – externalization imagination
Sapphire – visual imagination

Developing the language of the Provisional Prescriptions, or more generally of writing (of/about) practices. The phenomeno-technical mode (Spatz, 2019). This goes into a broader discussion of rendering a text of performative through saturation and interference. That's for another thought. For now, I mark the thought of poetic efficiency and the power of poetry to dilate language.

I am interested in developing an artistic research methodology dealing with embodied practice as a privileged site for thinking through and grappling with bodies and the world. In this short text, I attempt to give an overview of the approach through its topology, and potential applications and implications through a dialectic of practice exchange and analysis.

(A written reflection for a course named Methods in Artistic Research, guided by Martin Sonderkamp and Mamdooh Afdile. This text was sent to two fellow students, along with the "Provisional Prescriptions" #1 and #5.)

Is it useful to imagine a taxonomy/typology of forms?

What would inform the cut? Perhaps the relationship between their structural elements and foreground experiential-experimental landscape. For example, “scores”, in their NYC circa mid-20th century sense, are structurally simple, often instructional. And, it seems to me, foreground the practitioners aesthetic biases in an experience that is both open and frustrating. Otherwise, “activities”, in their SKH circa 2024 sense, are structurally more complex, often requiring a script to be read aloud. They foreground an experience of tinkering and tuning with a common material through one’s pre-existing practice – my practice. An experience that, again, is often both open and frustrating.

In terms of cake. We start with a recipe for cake (midwife form!!!, provisional prescription). Or, some specific cake, with the person reporting their process as best they can. (A recipe is a good metaphor because it is stabilized through iteration – trial and error.)

I go to a page for a certain kind of cake – chocolate velvet. I see lots of times people have made this cake. It shows permutations – oo, this time it turned a bit too sweet, this time it was dry, this time something amazing happened. There’s also information on what category of cake is it, perhaps if one is looking for sweetness or chocolate or a texture. Information on how it was made using a certain oven (that you can find other recipes which use that oven), which was developed by a certain person (that you can read more info on).

The lusciousness of the cake isn't in any of those. But, can more people make cake, enjoying the processes of making and eating, developing their cooking technique, their cooking practice so they may enjoy even more cakes. 

(Speaking with Roi after reading some of Everybody’s Self Interviews)

For a whole realm of things which I encounter, which feel wrong to me, which feel to me as if we are avoiding the real matter at hand, I’d like to propose the term: The Beast

This text was written for a course at SKH with Áron Birtalan. It marks an important moment in of negotiating the role mysticism can play in my academic study, foregrounding questions of belief and acknowledging the unknowable as crucial and (differently) reliable.

This text is a written reflection about and through a performance event. The particular event included nine short pieces by the students at the Tanzfabrik Dance Intense program, as well as one longer piece by an external choreographer. The quality of the text is akin to a rant, in that I recklessly perceive the event through my own current interests and express my thoughts haphazardly.

(This text was written just before the beginning of the creation process of Mythologies)