A Performance Practice Interface
Welcome
This interface is a site for developing practice-based methods of analysis and collaboration, and for getting very nerdy about forms-of-practice (exercises, activities, scores, tasks, games, and so on) as particularly potent conveyers of experience and knowledge. It is also an exposition of my degree project as a Master's student in the New Performative Practices program at the Stockholm University of the Arts. The study is enacted along several modes:
A conversation format where we speak about
a form you're busy with and document it.
Articulations of the overarching methodology and figurations of the underlying concepts.
A studio encounter where we play with forms - unfold, reactivate, compare, refine, and more.
References to other, relevant work,
of others and myself.
Shop Talk
I’d like us to have a conversation with and about a form you’re practicing,
attending to the technical and poetic details which give it thickness and vitality.
We’ll discuss the bodies and worlds it manifests and investigates,
and place it in relation to other forms, ideas, currents, events, and people.
Together, we’ll attempt to formulate a written document which can be handed on and reused –
as tantalizing, slippery, and fragile a process as that may be.
If this tickles your fancy, get in touch and let’s schedule a meeting - I’ll be overjoyed.
We can meet in and out of the studio, with and without alcohol or company.
Feel free to ask any questions, and I’m looking forward to our date(s).
The documents, or Provisional Guides, are intended as a companion for our discussions, facilitating processes of explication. Along with that, they are an archival intake format and potential interactive output; an opportunity to explore documentation tactics of saturation and interference, angled towards further reactivation, proliferation, and circulation. You can view these documents below.
Provisional Guides (9)
Practice Therapy
Let’s start from a form you’re practicing, which you can facilitate for us.
Or a content you’d like to explore, for which I can facilitate a form from the archive.
What did that (re)activation do?
Which bodies and worlds did the form manifest?
Which other experiences and forms did it remind us of?
Let’s try embodying one of those.
How do these two activations interact?
What are the objects – the concepts, the matter – that they share?
Let’s return to the first form, which has already changed.
When we (re-re)activate it, we’ll (re)ask:
What can this form do? What are its affordances, landscapes, potentials?
What do I want it to do? How can it reliably do that for me and others?
Unfolding, we can continue spiraling through (contiguous) experiences and forms.
Folding, we can attempt iteratively refining the formal and discursive aspects of "one" form.
You can join me in developing this method.
Try picking-up one of the Provisional Guides
as a stating point for the activity above.
You'll most probably have to make a
few adaptation to the form, which is exciting.
How about trying to activate two
"disaggregated" forms and synthesizing them?
Let me know how that went!
This format is still very raw. Hypothetically, it invites us to experiment with mapping the territories of a form; explicating the technique and poetry which it enforces/affords here-today, and perhaps elsewhere-yesterday. Utilizing an experiential-comparative approach, it makes the “stuff” of a particular practice more palpable, stabilized through iteration, accumulation, and translation. This experimentation (hopefully) allows us to think and do practice-based research and refine our own practicing in collaboration with that of others. It also field-tests the potential of the archiving methodology, of written-forms to be reactivated and create doorways into technique, generate relations of care, across space-time.
Conspiracies
This study cares for embodied-practice as a privileged site for grappling with bodies and the world. Rooted in the question of technique, it explores the “relatively reliable pathways through reality” (Spatz) which structure and emerge through moments of practice. Alongside performance laboratories and creation processes - methods of embodied and artistic research - the study is articulated through an archiving methodology, documenting the forms-of-practice (experimental-systems) which are enacted in the field today. These forms become a unit of analysis, allowing the mapping of research currents, method design, and loci of interest. As the documents are mobilized and reused, they become a mode of community and circulation, an opportunity for collaborating with the practicing of others.
The ongoing figuration of the study is traced in the Blog,
tracing the research narratives, phenomena in its iteration,
for which I am formulating models for further investigation.
This pursuit is imagined as a gnostic quest for grimoires,
of being a caretaker and arborist in the fields technique,
of a connoisseurship, alchemy, and kinship of practices.
It celebrate the craft, labor, and relations that go into making practices. The archive as such is envisioned to eventually take the form or an open-source community platform, where practitioners can support and be supported by each other’s research.
Bundles (1)
Resources
This study draws on a broader archive of forms and experiences, through my work as practitioner, facilitator, and choreographer, and further literature of performance practice. An ever growing reservoir of websites, podcasts, books, and more relating to performance practice can be found here:
From its entries, I've recently spent a lot of time with everybody's performance scores, Nobody's Business, and Blue Sky Body: Thresholds for Embodied Research (Spatz, 2019).
Below are logs from previous and ongoing performance laboratory processes of mine, accompanying this project in their experimentation with practice-based research.
Catalogues
Beat 2
Rehearsals 8-13, 10-19.02.2022
Returning to rehearsing after a brief, needed break – where we continue accumulating reference material as mythology – we start thinking more specifically about Azathoth as a performance. This beat distills the experiments of the previous and angles them towards a performative setting. And, as a function of the distillery, a retuning of Azathoth as a concept and practice.
Title (neutral box)
Beat 3
Rehearsals 14-20, 21-27.02.2022
The festival is coming up, and things are getting very much real. We set off on a final, week-long intensive with the full cast, Roi joining as a musician. This beat is a process of adapting to the presence of the soundscape, prioritizing the opportunities and challenges it poses. And with that, a constant recalibration of the concept, aesthetics, and mechanisms of Azathoth.
Dat
Dat
Dat
A Final Intensive with the Full Cast (Rehearsals 14-17, 21-24.02.2022)
A Shift: Retuning the Retuning
Open Runs (Rehearsals 18-20, 25-27.02.2022)
Beat 4
Rehearsals 21-22 and Performances, 03-12.03.2022
The rehearsals leading up to a performance and the performances themselves are inherently charged. Marking the end of this phase, this beat reflects on that charge – excitement and stress – as a performance is, in some ways, just another rehearsal, just another experiment. And, fortunately, this beat also marks the thread towards Phase 2.
Dat
Dat
Dat
The Final Stretch (Rehearsals 21-22, 03-05.03.2022)
Performance Week (Rehearsals 23-25, 07-12.03.2022)
Things Unresolved, the Future Holds