Fractal

Practitioners: Amina Avdić, Hannah Johnson, Lana Hosni, Omer Keinan, Romain Beltrão Teule

Tinker (see base form below): Expanding the relay system and integrating more practitioners. We found it difficult to math out, so we started with elongating the existing chain: A B C B C - a new C is dancing the description of a new B who speaks the actions of the base C. To go exponential, each practitioner secretly formed an additional relation; the end of the video includes us “confessing” these relations and speaking a bit about how it went.

Unempowerment Practices / Romain Beltrão Teule

Warm-up. We started from a warm-up for voice and body. Standing in a circle, Romain proposed three tasks:

1. Going around the circle, say your name as if it is a sound (playing with how it is said)

2. Say a sound as if it is word (as if it has semantic meaning and intention)

3. Working separately for several minutes, begin by repeating a word (of your choosing or the first that comes to mind); engage more movement with the word, finding a gesture that pairs with it and repeating both together; insist on the repetition and allow/invite the word-gesture to transform (the word loses its semantics and becomes sound, the movement shifts attention, space, effort, and so forth).

[We tried the third task twice, exchanging some reflections in between. To me, this warm-up articulates a relation between voice as sound and voice as speech, massaging the edge of phonetics in preparation for what comes next.]

Dispositive. Romain proposed a dispositive / performative mechanism for us to explore. It is formed through a relay-relationality between three interdependent yet distinct roles.

A - a mover, dancing what moves them

B - a speaker, describing what they see person A dancing

C - a mover, dancing what they hear person B describing

We alternated roles until all 5 practitioners embodied each roles at least once. The mechanism was performed frontally to the (two) witnesses. Each session was 6-minutes.

Between each session, we took a moment to share our experiences (from our respective roles/positions) and reflect on what happened. There was a sense of joy in unravelling the great potential for variability and nuance in the relationship of the three roles.

What does B attend to when they are describing A’s dance?

How does B’s relation to space and the other practitioners create relations of power?

How do A and C interact? Do they acknowledge one another? Do they collaborate?

How do we conceptualize the relation of movement and language?

Along the way, we made slight tunings to the dispositive, later making more significant ones in the Openings.