A Performance Practice Interface
A study of performance practice, in its disciplinary, aesthetic, and extended senses.
Introduction
Welcome, nice to see you. This interface is part of my degree project as a Master's student in the New Performative Practices program at the Stockholm University of the Arts.
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, 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.
Right below is an invitation to an artistic-research activity I am currently working, and a bit further down I detail the underlying/overarching methodology. Have a look around.
Shop Talk / Practice Therapy
A conversation format and documentation method, interested in the analysis and exchange of forms-of-practice (exercises, activities, scores, tasks, games) as particularly potent containers/conveyers of knowledge and experience.
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 –
a provisional prescription if you will.
The document is intended as an anchor/site for our discussion, facilitating processes of explication. Along with that, the Provisional Prescription is also an archival intake format and potential interactive output; an opportunity to explore tactics of saturation and interference a document, and for imbuing it with performative force angled towards reactivation and iteration.
Provisional Prescriptions (9)
Mapping and Modelling
Through the conversations and documentation, I am interested in the mapping of performance practice in terms of technique, utilizing methodologies related to
archiving, embodied-research, and artistic research.
The act of mapping is informed by several “narratives”,
phenomena in its iteration for which I am formulating models for
further investigation (see "Conspiracy Blog"). The mapping
draws on a broader archive of forms and experiences,
through my work as practitioner, facilitator, and choreographer,
and further literature of performance practice (“Resources”).
This pursuit is imagined as a gnostic quest for grimoires,
of being a caretaker and arborist in the fields technique, of a connoisseurship 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.
Conspiracy Blog
Resources
Bundles (1)
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