No Move

an account from Omer with a voice note from Dejan  

  I invited the group to sit in a circle, and introduced myself and the structure of today’s gathering: We’ll start with a practice sharing from Dejan, take a short break, after which I’ll guide us to experiment with Dejan’s practice. I then passed the torch to Dejan, who briefly presented himself. He then asked for people to say their name and briefly speak on their current relation to dance.

Fake Unisono / Dejan Srhoj

Dejan guided us through the practice. He invited us to lie down with heads towards each other. (He then facilitated a sequence of breathing exercises, to tune and warm up.) Notice your breathing; as it enters the head, chest, stomach… Imagine how fresh air fills the whole body at once, each of the thirty trillions cells at once… Feel where the body touches the ground; notice how the weight is releasing into the ground… Imagine breathing through the whole skin in and through the whole skin out; we reach and release into the space in all directions at once, and space enters our body through all directions at once. (And probably a few others.)

Softly open your eyes. Bring movement into the edges of your body: the fingers, the toes, the head. Begin travelling on the floor with the head always touching the ground; explore the dynamics, the ways of how one can travel through the space like that. (An exercise Dejan encountered from Ray Chung in Warsaw, maybe 10 years ago at a contact improvisation festival – the floor is your partner, you engage in a duet.) Gradually allow your head to leave the floor and return to it, to lift it from and drop it into the floor. Play with different ways of travelling, which would continue to passing through sitting positions, semi-standing positions, all the way to standing positions. The game is always to push away from the floor and to release or yield back into the ground, exploring ways of travelling up and down. (Basic movement principles in which each practitioner can find their own way, without relying on only certain experiences or trainings of dance.)

(Once everyone arrived at passing from laying-down all the way to standing, Dejan invited us to gather on one side of the studio.) Go in couples, travelling from one side of the studio to the other side. One practitioner will be the leader and the other would follow, trying to copy exactly the same movement the leader does. The leader travels from standing to laying in whichever way they want. Do this again, switching roles. In the third travel, you can both be leaders and followers simultaneously.

To continue, we’ll use fake unisono. (A name Dejan learned from Sonja Pregrad, a Croatian choreographer and dancer – this is his approach to or translation of that title). We’ll fake being together, exploring ways of feeling and thinking being together in the very moment; you can play with following / copying only the dynamics, or the movement of one part of the body, or the image you have watching the other person. It can be anything, but with the conviction that this is a unisono, even though everyone in the room knows it’s “fake”. We’ll travel a few times, where one would be leader and the other follower. Then switching roles, then leading and following simultaneously. After duets we’ll have trios and quartets. Finally, the whole group will travel through the space (not just from one side of the studio to another, more open composition) for 20 minutes, all being leaders and followers of the fake unisono (score).

Triangulations / Omer Keinan

After the break, I again invited into a circle and introduce the experimentation process: This practice we’ve all just practiced did, and is probably still doing, something. One way of thinking about that is that it generated a shared material, a body/world we’ve tuned to together, participated in, experienced. I invite us to experiment in and on this practice, articulating this shared material. To do so, I’d like us to take some time to think through writing about the question “What did this practice do?” I’ve brough some loose pieces of paper and writing utensils, let’s write for three minutes.

Now, I’d like you to read through your texts and mark dimensions of this practice/material that spark your curiosity, that you would like to explore further. In a moment, we’ll structure a series of experiments to unfold what this practice can do. For each experiment, one of us will be the director. I’d like you to think of ways to activate your curiosities about this practice. I suggest making up another form of practice or reusing ones you are already familiar with. So, take a moment to think of ways to activate those things you marked in your notes.

Would anyone like to be our first director. Great! How many practitioners would you like to work with? About how long will this experiment take? (Will you need someone to keep time?) One last thing: For each experiment, one of us will embody the role of videographer, using this humble phone-camera to trace the event. Who can be the videographer? Alright, let’s begin.

Experiment #1

Director: Malina Suliman Practitioners: Adela Jordakova, Dejan Srhoj, Gergő Modi, Israel Aloni, Malina Suliman Videographer: Omer Keinan

Before beginning the practice, Malina explains the following directive: We stand in a circle and try not to move at all. But if there’s a movement I see then I must follow it. Even if it’s just the twitch of a finger, I see it so I must follow it. I see you so you see me so we follow. We’ll end when movement has become the biggest, when we’ve all arrived to full movement. So we aren’t allowed to leap into big gestures, we start with small movements that happen naturally. (Before giving the directive, Malina decided the experiment would last a maximum of six minutes. As after six minutes the additional end condition wasn’t met – arriving to full movement – I called for an end preemptively. In the future, I’d like to be more aware of and responsive to the experiment conditions as they are being negotiated.)

Experiment #2

Director: Gergő Modi

Practitioners: Adela Jordakova, Dejan Srhoj, Gergő Modi, Israel Aloni, Omer Keinan

Videographer: Malina Suliman

Gergő shared an image he experienced while doing and witnessing Dejan’s Fake Unisono: a brainless meat of living flesh. He gave as reference the Zerg, an alien species which does not feel pain and functions through a hive mind, from the videogame series StarCraft. Together we set up a loose score: the practitioners commit to maintaining physical connection with at least two other practitioners and commit to the imagination Gergő proposed.

To finish, we spoke about what these three experiences (fake unisono, experiment #1, and experiment #2) did, as well as how they relate to one another.