SPILL Festival of Performance: On AgencyEdited by Robert Pacitti and Shelia Ghelani.Published by Pacitti Company.available here.

as part of Marina Abramovic Presents . . .

falling down the stairs backwards over four hours, repeated daily for 17 days
one descent per day

From the top, your flights of stairs go:
7 short
1 long step
9 short
1 turning long step
5 short
1 turning long step
9 short
1 long step
9 short
(FLOOR)

as written by Mary Griffiths, contemporary art curator, Whitworth Gallery

riser: 16 cms        6 1/2 inches
tread: 31.75 cm    12 1/2 inches

Stone steps
flights
wooden banisters with iron spindles
The stone stairs are smooth and slippery, no real purchase
if I really fall down, I’ll break my neck, there is a fabulous set of banister rails that I think I’ll use to grasp as I make my descent.

The movement needs to be so very slow, allowing for gradual progression, but there needs to be rest points, still points, especially for the hands which will get tired with the grasp.
So I need to find ways to come down, to be upside down alot in a kind of legs over head, to do that on a descent, and to sustain.

I’m concerned to find
• ways of moving that protect my neck – as well as everything else
• Ways of organising skeletal frame on the stairs to create balances that can be moved between like lots of svangasana (shoulder stand) to halasana (legs over head)
• Ways to prepare from now until the piece begins
• Ways to warm up before each daily session
• Ways to warm down and address aches and pains that allow for the next day

At the moment I’m imagining making the work naked
The skin slipping on stone is an issue but I think fabric is more hazardous and skin leaves slight marks, the stone/skin pressure will presumably redden the skin
I would like there to be a cumulative effect, so that someone coming in on day 11 will have a sense of build up, of a deposit of effort, or of travel.

Artists I’ve had or am about to have conversations with into and around this developing this work are:

Fiona Wright

Amanda Brown

Doran George

Yann Marussich

Empress Stah

 sKu-mNyé

Iyengar Yoga, asana and pranayama practices

 Here are a couple of pages on the history of the gallery and about it’s unique and special position in the history of Manchester.

It’s founding vision emrged out of the Arts and Crafts movement to  ‘Secure a source of perpetual gratification to the people of Manchester & and cultivate taste and knowledge of the Fine Arts of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture.’

One story I like to tell students is one that artist Susan Hiller told when I was a first year art student about Maya Deren. Like Hiller,  Deren was also both an anthropologist and artist who’s practices strayed willfully across disciplines and utilised paradigms other to those dominant in regard to discourse and knowledge making. ( - loose cannons in canonical disciplines).

Deren went to Haiti as an anthropologist to study voodoun practices, making ethnographic films and studies, resulting in a book first published in 1953 called The Divine Horseman (my copy is called The Voodoo Gods, it’s on my bookshelf in between Esoteric Buddhism and The yellow Wallpaper - I need IP addresses in my books to find them - which might not be so long now - two of the aforementioned are online. My books are arranged for the most part thematically but not necessarily obviously, the proximities of these 3 in a cluster is a typical accidental shuffling that enables a whole load of marvellous intertextual connections)

The very last chapter of The Divine Horseman, titled The White Darkness, is an account of her participation in a Voodoun practice, transgression out of the ‘observer’ position and that scopic binary structuring stuff) etc. into the mix and fray or a Voodoo practice, allowing herself to enter into ‘possession’. She writes,

‘I have left possession until the end, for it is the centre towards which all the roads of Voudoun converge. It is the point toward which one travels by the most visible, the most physical mean, yet, for the traveller, it is itself invisible. One might speak of it as the area of a circle whose circumference can be accurately described; yet this circumference is not, itself, the circle which it defines. To know this area, one must, finally, enter.’  

In Thinking About Art: conversations with Susan Hiller, Hiller quotes Deren’s querying of a Western thinking’s ‘reverence for detactment whether scientific or scholarly’ and suggestion that the artist in Western culture does not necessarily accept that postion. (Hiller quoting Deren, page 31.)

It’s one of my favourite stories as it spoke so wonderfully and comprehensively of a radical departure from the privileged mechanisms of observation, the hierachies of the senses in knowledge production, and also  because I’d already encountered Deren via an interest in the occult and the post punk alternative cultures in which her movies and life story figured. At that of listening to Hiller, (a first year art undergrad albeit a late 20’s mature student),  I’d not yet joined the dots to ‘Art History’ and the Art Cannon etc. Her practises across dance, film, anthropology and Voodoun Priestess made an expansive and intuitive kind of sense to me.

I love anthropologists, like geographers they crop up everywhere as willing transdisciplinary adventurers, the Cardiff University (Post) Human reading group  gave me a  chapter of Partial Connections, by Marilyn Strathern - here’s the Amazon Blurb on it.

. . . Marilyn Strathern’s seminal book challenges the routine ways in which anthropologists have thought about the complexity and quantity of their materials, focusing on a problem normally thought of as commonplace; that of scale and proportion. Revealing unexpected replications in modes of thought and in the presentation of ambiguous images, Strathern has fashioned a unique contribution to the anthropological corpus.

In her blog Mikala Hansbol writes: Strathern argues that we always only have access to making partial connections. There is (according to Strathern) no such thing as parts and wholes. When enacting the living world, we also enact holes. She argues that the world is always both one and multiply enacted - it is always both a container and what is contained. We cannot see it all at once. 

or as mathematician Ralph H. Abraham writes,“the fractal concept of self-similarity across scales is extensively applied to the complexity and quantity of anthropological materials: cultural data, ethnographic recordings, etc.”, Human Fractals: The Arabesque In Our Mind. Inspired by the Cardiff (Post) Human posse, I’ve suggested it to Janet Smith, my bioscience collaborator as a text we might both read, to consider our research activities from. It also to brought to mind the research of Complex systems scientist Sylvia Nagl and her thoughts on how we organise information to  structure knowledges and architect meanings:

An enormous wealth of data and knowledge about cancer has been created through research efforts around the globe. This has led to very substantial advances, but we have now reached a fundamental barrier to deriving maximum benefit from this data - the ‘complexity limit’.

Complex systems science addresses open questions that are fundamental to complex systems in general, cutting across particular disciplines, and searches for methods to deal with them. Principles, concepts and methods can then be applied to a particular type of complex system such as cancer cells and tumours.

I seem to be doing a big revisit to reacquaint myself with artists like Deren. Lois Fuller is another thanks to Catherine Hindson at University of Bristol’s Drama Department, who highlighted Fullers widely regarded activities in science, her relationship to the Curies, Edison and other scientists and technologists of the time.

Interestingly both Deren and Fuller were dance practitioners; that possession and hypnosis featured on occasion in both Deren and Fuller’s work respectively is not necessarily a linkage I was initially thinking of but it’s certainly a compelling one and perhaps to do with a series of questions and thoughts I’m trying to form on embodiment, knowledge and bodies, and language and body. This current in both my lab based activities as well as my presence in the larger science domain - and of course the explicit performance works I make.  That Fuller was a keen scientist herself and good friends with the Curies is similar to how I feel about Deren’s body of works across disciplines.

In her paper The “Symptomatic Act” Circa 1900: Hysteria, Hypnosis, Electricity, Dance,  Felicia McCurran discusses Fuller’s then highly experimental innovations with emerging technologies of electric lighting along side Charcot’s studies and experiments with hysterics in Salpetriere, emergent practices of dance, medicine, science and technologies knotting and constructing altogether other kinds of bodies, representations of bodies and cultural meanings of bodies. Erin Brannigan in “La Loie” as Pre-Cinematic Performance - Descriptive Continuity of Movement writes about

“the interchange between art and science and the centrality of the female dancer, finding in Fuller’s mobility an electrically charged evolution of form that offered an antidote to the popular theme of degeneracy. [Jane] Goodall describes Fuller as perfectly in step with her age; “scientist and inventor, a woman of the future, charged with the energies of an age about to dawn”

from Jane Goodall’s Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin: out of the natural order, p.217. In Women in Motion: Loie Fuller and the “Interpenetratio” of Art and Science, Elizabeth Coffman writes:

Fuller’s dancing embodies the intersection, or, to use the historically specific term, the interpenetration of the arts and sciences, and, by connotative extension, the interpenetration of both feminine and masculine codes of performance. As Jonathan Crary argues, “rather than stressing the separation between art and science in the nineteenth century, it is important to see how they were both part of a single interlocking field of knowledge and practice.”

Perhaps it is the interlocking or interpenetration that I’m curious about for myself and my activities across my own practice, and in dialogue with both defined and undefined science practitioners and art practitioners. The discreet disciplines both push and pull into complex engagements materially, metaphorically and conceptually. Ultimately what I am pursuing are critical and cultural questions, of how bodies and knowledge are constructed; bodies of knowledge and knowing bodies, and what are the unconscious underpinnings with their attendant cascades of power within the matter of bodies and the bodies that matter. As an arts practitioner within the science institution, bringing research strategies from my field and personal practice is difficult and fraught, sometimes seemingly invisible, perhaps because I do not participate in canonising, concretising structures, and also because I am maintain a non academic position. Being able to be within and without the institution is a rare and wonderful privilege and a tricky and tough one to navigate. So I’m curious about Deren and Fuller and others like them.

 I’m currently reworking  Untitled (syncope) for this showcase

 here is the text from the Bristish Council

The British Council and El Teatro de la Laboral present S.P.A.C.E. UK, a showcase programmed to explore the possibilities of performance spaces. S.P.A.C.E. UK takes full advantage of the multiple spaces which make La Laboral a unique place to programme site specific projects and generate work linked to the building and its history.

The idea behind the showcase is to create links and promote networks amongst artists from different disciplines and countries. S.P.A.C.E. UK  is a showcase of the latest generation of contemporary British artists working in the area of performance. These are artists whose work is meant to be seen in a variety of spaces and not just on a conventional stage.

The pieces on show to audiences and programmers over two intense days at Teatro La Laboral cover a range of forms of expression. Live art, action art, intervention and manoeuvres will be presented by artists of the calibre of Kira O’Reilly, Rajni Shah, Peter Reder and Marc Rees, amongst others.

In addition, S.P.A.C.E. UK will be a place for professionals to meet and debate the uses of public spaces for the performing arts, as well as serving as a catalyst and meeting point for local artists.

You can find more information in this document and the detailed programme

www.teatrodelalaboral.com

The run up to a version of inthewrongplaceness always echos with thoughts of the non human body that will join me in the work, my future piggy partner in our slow crushing dance - and the individuals of audience who will become part of the piece, points of contact, and each a vital and entirely other moment of our configuration.

I’m reading Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet and her working of knotty subjects and nodes between lineages of life, figurations of biocultural and social networks. The knottiness reminds me of my own preocupation with knots, originally borrowed from an Elizabeth Bronfen book, The Knotted Subject, Hysteria and It’s Discontents, and the dynamism of threads that knot into subjectivities, recalled as interior and bodily. Haraway’s knottedness speaks of arching and shifting junctures between and across individuals, kin, alliances, techno-somatic, temporal, spatial.

I thrive on textile and textual metaphors, tissue and techné threads and gaps, juntures and torchons, relational - all being experienced and lived as my very own often troubling essays of  uncomings with fleshy messes and messy fleshes, living, non-living, often troublingly consumed. Arm arcs into pipette gun connected to 10 ml pipette that aspirates and expunges DMEM and C2C12s into single cell solution, baby cow blood without the red bits stymying the enzyme decolonisation of the trypsin. My (my?) own knottyself -  contingent - deferred.

There is a hefty see saw, too violent to get to grips with the deorientation between the scale up and the scale down between species (non human animal model and human) and the very similar slides of cells, all very sick with illnesses of the muscle bits of body. Gestation parallels and checks made, in the knowledge building between the clinic and the place of research. Acute anguish of sickness, untimely losses creating another topple in the see saw of a lab meeting.

I am reminded of the girly piggy I’ll meet on Friday as I watch George Franju’s 1949 Le Sang des Bêtes, abbatoir scenes, brutal and stunning, cacophonies of twitches and flayings - butcher and surgeon techné of flaying. The blows delivering death also build cycst like swellings on the wrist that issues of the stike. The unrelenting repetition of carcassed bodies in the abbatoir call a stark visual memory I have of many pigs bodies on gurneys after a surgeons workshop, guts spilling, an ambiance of farm yard shit in the smooth clinical setting.

The film’s final text quotes:

I shall strike you without anger
And without hate, like a butcher.

The Man Who Tortures Himself, Les Fleur du Mal Baudelaire.

And finally, for this moment, the large and amplified pig carcass,  used as percussive instrument during Scott Walker’s Drifting and Tilting at the Barbican on Saturday night.

Well not for me this time anyway, unfortunately scheduling and the organisers needing to juggle several peoples diaries means that the intended performance is now not happening on the 5th. However there is a superb consolation which is that Joshua Sofaer is presenting at Performer Stammtisch on 2nd June.

Hopefully I’ll get back to Berlin to do a little something another time. Last time I was there was in 1991, staying in a huge and rather glorious squat in Kreutzberg staying with the always fabulous Lisa Verdekal. I don’t recall much of it, reading Venus In Furs, and hitting the tequilla.

****Watch this space to see if this is now going ahead!

I was lucky enough to be invited to show a small work in progress at Performer Stammtisch.

We are having some scheduling issues so it won’t be on 5th June as previously advertised.

Also see here for further details and information as to what is happening when and where.

It will draw on material developed during this years Chisenhale space bursary, London titled Research Notes (for You Beloved) and further developed as Untitled (for You Beloved) for Endurance at VIVID, Birmingham last month.

Here are some images from the work at VIVID.

7.30

Friday 23rd May 2008

Dance City,

Temple St., Newcastle upon Tyne.

www.dancecity.co.uk

Fiona Wright is one of the key practitioners I’ve been dialoguing with for a decade now; this has occurred through seeing oneanothers work, discussing work, sometimes feeding into or being in these works, sharing our practices, research and passions at length and the subsequent friendship that has evolved. Her work is key on both a UK and international scene as it traverse performative strategies from dance to writing to live art. She presents me with delicate and muscular challenges and moments of pause and uncertain rest both as a maker and an audience member.

Some of her writings are published in: 20 Short Performance Papers.

published 2004 by amino
format 64pp hardback book | 142mm x 124mm
isbn 0 9549073 0 2

Also see her collaborative work with Caroline Bowditch, Girl Jonah.

Research Notes (for you beloved)

is the public outcome from a period of research and development I undertook at Chisenhale Dance Space between November last year and early March this year. The r & d’s working title was Syncopal Actions and falling states and picked up from last years material developed for SPILL Festival 07. It was supported by a space bursary from Chisenhale which gave me 50 hours in the studio, and and Arts Council of England Grants for the Arts award which paid for travel, more studio time and inviting Doran George into the space to converse and input with me about my process. Doran and I have been dialoguing for years now about one anothers work, along with Fiona Wright, he was crucial in the development of my more movement based (dare I say dance) work last year for SPILL and whilst undergoing his own work at Chisenhale has been a wonderful intervening and supportive presence during the space bursary.

Here’s a short biog:

Doran’s experimental dance/ live art practice focuses on the physical, emotional, interpersonal, and cultural body in recovery. His performance work has been funded, commissioned and presented internationally.

and here is a link to his current project, The Mourner’s Dance.

During one of the studio days that Doran came in for, he made a dance.

In the initial proposal the activities in the studio were defined as:

• Construction of action based tasks that are currently impossible to master, cultivating emergent dances at the point of break down,
• Dances on the edge of my ability to balance.
• Working with movement material that does not follow a compositional, dramatic or kinetic logic, but the upsetting of the harmonious mechanics of my body.
• Body and action appeared as an object. Actions as places alongside each other, movement offered for consideration
• Formalism as a vehicle through which a nascent emotional nature is found in the functional imperatives of the/my body.

Which is pretty much what happened.

Here are my final notes that I gave to the audience who came to the public showing of material Chisenhale Research Notes (for you beloved) and references, they include some of Doran’s input. The material was approximately 17 minutes and in four sections. Silence and a piece from John Duncan’s sound work Palace of Mind were used.

Here are some images grabbed from video, not great quality but still give some impression.

Several audience members sent me remarkable texts in response to the work in reply to what did you see me do? Here, with typos, is Note to self, what I think I did.

The intention is now to keep working and extending the material and to develop it into a full work with the support of commissioning venues.

Some of the material will be introduced into Untitled (for you Beloved) at endurance, VIVID, Birmingham, 26th April.

ENDURANCE
24 – 26 April 2008
Endurance is a three-day programme of screenings, performances and exhibition exploring the physical and mental limits of human endurance. Spanning four decades this international programme looks at the co-development of moving image and live art and the integral role the lens has played in the development of live art practice as both mirror and collaborator.

See full details here: Endurance, VIVID press release
and the schedule here: Endurance, VIVID schedule

In Untitled (for you Beloved) Kira O’Reilly explores the collision between the hard surface of the physical space with the softness and vulnerability of her body. Concrete against skin, cold against warmth, falling against not falling.

There is a play with the notion of endurance as she makes these investigations, and wonders what is endured, if anything?

The audience bears witness to these forays; attempts, failures, clumsy, ungainly, embarrassed and assured and the ever changing sounds and colours that interrupt her body. The work is explicit, sometimes uncomfortable, and seeks to question rather than provide easy answers.