FIRST SESSION

References:
Donna Harraway "Staying with the Trouble", Jeanine Durning -Inging practice and 'unstopping' text from the book "Choreography: Strategies", Doris Uhlich
; Mierle Laderman Ukeles 'Manifesto for Maintanance Art'.

Quotes that stayed with me:
"Am I a human being or a human doing? Do be do be do" Jeaning Durning
"what happnes when we earn money by doing something that seems very close to our profession but is not at all what we want to do" Elmyra
"unending research as a way of not working towards a product" Viktorija
"I want to recognize what are my inerests as a freshly graduated artist" Sointu
"How to value ideas in their unendingness?" Kevin
"Unending research as a continuous curiosity" Elmyra













Library
THIRD SESSION with Doris


Before you make your first piece you already have a biography that shapes who you are and what you are interested in making
Why is dance only possible for slim athletic people?Why is it important how it looksfrom outside?
Not to perform fragility but work with people who are actually fragile

A GOOD QUESTION IS NEVER FULLY ANSWERED IN ONE PIECE. A GOOD QUESTION HAS NO END AND IT DOES NOT HAVE ONE ANSWER. WHEN THE PIECE IS DONE THE QUESTION MIGHT NOT BE DONE.

WHAT is needed in the dance scene is less questions about what is needed and more artistic freedom!

how dancing/ moving supports the life beyond the practice space

I will not make something perfect and then show it, but I will keep working on it when the audience comes in

I AM A DANCE WORKER!!!!
I see int he body where the pleasure wants to go!
How is it possible in the theater to reflect on the very process of the gaze?

We move in order to move something

Theater as a living room. Bodies live there together , they do not only perform

I want to share my research, my question and not my excellence!

The audience is also performing for me through their presence

To watch with---- eyes---skin-- flesh--bones

A question of what I really want to do- reflecting on this not really in my head but also IN MY BODY!






discovering Paul Celan, "Poet of the Impossible", "endlessly making an end to things” — Paul Celan

excerpt from https://bostonreview.net/articles/peter-e-gordon-tks-paul-celan/

"Celan knew that his poetry would not be easily absorbed; he once characterized his work as a “message in a bottle,” as if in the hope that at some point in the future it would meet with more comprehending readership. In the winter of 1968 he had written a clairvoyant poem that describes not only his work but the spirit of the times:

Unreadability of this
world. Everything doubles.
The strong clocks
agree with the fissure-hour,
hoarsely.
You, wedged into your deepest,
climb out of yourself
forever.

Celan composed this poem at the Spaltstunde or “fissure-hour,” when he feared that the world was growing as illegible as his own work. His fears were not misplaced. Modernism had once been a program, a demand that the reader (or auditor or spectator) rise to the challenges of the artwork instead of having the artwork descend to one’s needs: we were asked to climb out of ourselves to be equal to its claims. Rilke saw this injunction in the archaic image of Apollo: “You must change your life.” To be sure, this demand may not be especially modern at all. Plato thought of the experience of beauty as a metanoia, a wrenching-free of the everyday and a turning toward the purity of the Forms. With Celan this ideal is reversed and we are plunged back into worldly suffering, but he did not surrender the deeper promise of an experience that both shatters and transforms.

In this respect Celan may have been wrong. Today things have not grown illegible; they have grown too legible. They are laid out before us without the least hint that they could be otherwise than they are. In this regime of total transparency not only Celan but the entire canon of high modernism has begun to age; its greatest works have acquired the patina of tradition, as if they were no more our contemporaries than the paintings of the old masters. They gaze at us as if through cracked varnish and have grown nearly mute. But when on the rarest of occasions we succeed in hearing what they say, they still have the power to leave us shattered, and to rouse us to possibility:

Threadsuns
above the grayblack wastes.
A tree-
high thought
grasps the light-tone: there are
still songs to sing beyond
mankind.
LOVE THIS<3
Liza, 09/02
SESSION TWO

Task
Who are the people that influence your life and practice?
What could you extract from their doiing and make it into a tool?

Some quotes..
Trust the curiosity
How to stop in this crazy ongoingness of time
I want to talk FROM my experience and not ABOUT my experience

Her socio-political position is clear but not screaming


---> List of Names

TELEPATHIC DANCE 10/02/2022
FOURTH SESSION with Christine

Watching excerpts from 9x9
“When something is totally evident, you start wanting to look at how you look at it”
“Research is unending in its transformation and not in going back to the something over and over again”

WEEK 1: Writing practise overview:

I'm coming back to the body---> to body and mind---> neuroscience and body---> to body body body---> to theory which exists in the body of the body--->to bodybodybody.

DANCING/TEACHING/PERFORMING
.
.
.
But what is the difference from living?
-Am I separating stuff again?
-But why do you see separation as a problem?

What is the artistic value of 'getting to know yourself better"? I don't really need to explain stuff because sometimes to put something into logic or language also means to destroy magic and mystery of something who sparkles.

What is professional in dancing? Why sometimes dancing eliminates 'fun' part, or like why something professional could not be related with having fun as well? Is that a problem in education?
----------------------------->

------------------------------------------------------------->

...being in the practise with the full body, with the open heart, with the full lungs of the air.
Poetic I guess...
But ahhh... How can I be not poetic when it comes to the body...

What it means to be a freelance dance artist? Is it like having 2 full-time jobs always? One is for paying bills and your own ass and then the other is something that you're doing basically for your passion but mostly for free (?)

Some quotes from the meetings:

- Art field needs more people who are not thinking of 'what is needed' _Doris

-I'm interested in finding physical signature of the body_Doris

-To enjoy a minute as it would be an hour_Eglė

-To see something through the lens of 'researching'_Kevin
(it makes me questioning 'how do I see?' or 'how am I used to look at stuff?what are those lenses of mine?')

-The crowd can also be understood as being together in the same action (not necessary 'together' means being together physically, even tho it's still so physical)_Christine



13/02/2022

-V
Poem by Pavle Heidler
'In Praise of Studying, or The Importance of Studying as Political Action'
https://dancerswriting.wordpress.com/in-praise-of-studying-or-the-importance-of-studying-as-political-action/
DIAMONDS, little precious moments
sometimes you dream of them


too many in the same place just dim each other
down
and you have to kill your Darlings...
--Doris' ideas





Movement Does Not End

Where The Body Does

It Goes Beyond And

When I Move, I Shift The

Space's Energy

-- from Doris

SHAKING
- makes my joints warm
- releases stress
- helps my to let out emotions
- is fun
- makes me sweat
- is beautiful to look at
- when you do it in a group you
are alone and together at the
same time
- allows me to swim in the music

FAVOURITE TRACKS:
Jon Hopkins- Singularity
Jon Hopkins- Emerald Rush
Rival Consoles- Recovery
notes from our session with DD
*"How can I reveal this process without just showing it?"

*"Give the audience a chance to take the time."

*"Go for what you want even when it’s not obvious to you."

*"Use your guts. Use your body."

These words from the poet and mystic Rumi always inspire me to act:

Inside this new love, die.
Your way begins on the other side.
Become the sky.
Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.
Do it now.
UNENDING RESEARCH IS ALWAYS CONNECTED TO MY GUTS - DD DORVILLIER
Meeting with DD:
'To learn a movement in question'
'How much can you take away and still keep the identity of the movement?'

Meeting with Alex and Krööt:
'Procrastination --> what are we used to call as not-working? what are the methods of procrastination?'
'What would I do if it's not for the money?'

17/02/2022

'I'm feeling slow, not super motivated to do something today. Even tho, this anti-motivation is quite an interesting phenomenon. After meeting with Alex and Krööt this experience feels more normal, more common in general. And to be with that in creative process as well as in life in general is somehow weird but also interesting. It's hard to say that it's inspiring and the word 'interesting' also can't describe this situation well. Because probably to have an interest means to to be satisfied by something. But for now it's more about how to be in the process without any interests and still use the potential of that as a source'

//-//

'And sometimes it will be boring. And very exciting as well. It will never be just exciting. It will always be criticized in some contexts or ways'

//-//

18/02/2022

'I'm so looking forward to get to know you better, dear. I know that it will be amazing! And I'm just so proud of you - growing and becoming something that I'll never be able to fully understand. But I promise you to be a condition through which you will become alive. You will become experienced!'
17/2

Just yesterday we were meeting Alex and Krööt. Today their piece 'Codomestication' was staying with me, when I was baby sitting. The girl, is only 4 years old. She speaks mostly Italian, and repeats what I say in English. Many times I don't understand what she says so I just say 'Yes, yes' and act excited. Sometimes probably she doesn't understand me either. However, it doesn't matter. If I act excited, she gets excited too. If she starts a game, I join how I can. It's a kind of improvisation in which you always say yes to a proposition. With her, I loose my ego. I go all silly, because I want her to be amused. It's a funny thing that with children it feels so important to make them smile and laugh. At least for me, I also want them to like me, and when they do, I feel like I've succeeded in an important task.

<--- yess, had very similar notes after the session <3
- To listen to the environment and to see what impulses it brings to me
- Curious to improvise in non-stage spaces and watch how my body adapts to them, how the atmosphere of the environment and people in there affect me - my movement, my presence
- I want to feel the space, I want I want to feel the people in it, I want to watch my body reacting to it all...



Humor, strangeness, vulnerability and openness. That's the power.

When you are on the stage, the time is yours. Be brave to take that time.

Keep and use your weirdness.
8th February

I want to try rapping.
I am curious to embody something I didn’t try to embody yet.
I am also curious, how to create the right frames for myself. Because frames are needed too. There is a need for defined tasks. I am struggling with creating them.
Could organizational work be one of my curiosities? I don’t know. In the future, maybe.

9th February

Anyway, there’s such a thing that I like solo, but I often choose to do things with a group, prioritizing the group... Is it out of insecurity? But I love people, also.
Levels of presence of an artist. Types of presence of an artist. How the presence is influenced by the surroundings and by the people that are in the same space? How do I influence them?
Elina Pirinen's practice comes to mind.
Clowning comes to my mind.
Focusing on different body parts (exactly – eyes, nails, tongue) and moving from them.
Voice. I wanna use it. I wanna sing.
How to be within a group and remain individual?
I am observing way too less works of the other artists. I want to watch more. To feel more sense of the things.

You need to let the things that

would ordinarily bore you

suddenly thrill you- Andy

Warhol
Boredom happens when there is an unmet desire. For some reason any available option of entertainment doesn't seem tempting. Or you are stuck in a situation that is not entertaining the brain. In a boring situation there is no external entertainment that would be interesting enough, so you go for inner ones.
-->you let time pass and you wait

Joseph Gelmis: You've said, 'I like boring things.' How can entertainment be boring?

Andy Warhol: When you sit and look out of a window, that's enjoyable.

JG: Why, because you can't figure out what's going to happen, what's going to be passing in front of you?

AW: It takes up time.

JG: Are you serious?

AW: Yeah. Really. You see people looking out of their windows all the time. I do. (I'll Be Your Mirror, p. 168-9,2004)
“If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.” - John Cage
If they can take one painting of a soup can, why not to give them 100?





Adam Curtis- Century of the Self (2002)

“To many in politics and business, the triumph of the self is the ultimate expression of democracy, where power has finally moved to the people. Certainly, the people may feel they are in charge, but are they really? The Century of the Self tells the untold and sometimes controversial story of the growth of the mass-consumer society. How was the all-consuming self created, by whom, and in whose interests?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s → propose to watch it in your free time..

Roland Barthes- Death of The author (1967)

https://sites.tufts.edu/english292b/files/2012/01/Barthes-The-Death-of-the-Author.pdf → read

Foucault- Technologies of the Self (1982)

Self shaping of the self rather than being shepherd by the dominant social forces
Self as a an element always intertwined with border structures

https://monoskop.org/images/0/03/Technologies_of_the_Self_A_Seminar_with_Michel_Foucault.pdf


"Hard times require furious dancing" - Alice Walker


WHAT ARE YOU ALREADY DOING???
SPACE ----->
<----- PLACE
Trying to learn:
Ballet is not about fulfilling forms that come from outside, and don't have anything to do with me. Ballet is personal, and these forms are found unique in every body.
(Quoting Brit Rodemund, a visiting teacher at AFI)
-Soi
"Blood, bile, intracellular fl uid; a small ocean swallowed, a wild wetland in our
gut; rivulets forsaken making their way from our insides to out, from watery
womb to watery world:

we are bodies of water.

As such, we are not on the one hand embodied (with all of the cultural and
metaphysical investments of this concept) while on the other hand primarily
comprising water (with all of the attendant biological, chemical, and ecological
implications). We are both of these things, inextricably and at once – made
mostly of wet matter, but also aswim in the discursive fl occulations of
embodiment as an idea. We live at the site of exponential material meaning
where embodiment meets water. Given the various interconnected and
anthropogenically exacerbated water crises that our planet currently faces –
from drought and freshwater shortage to wild weather, fl oods, and chronic
contamination – this meaningful mattering of our bodies is also an urgent
question of worldly survival. In this book I reimagine embodiment from the
perspective of our bodies’ wet constitution, as inseparable from these pressing
ecological questions."

Astrida Neimanis, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology
"Undoubtedly much of embodied experience and affect has found itself edited and proliferated through artificial means and digitized technologies. From ocular virtual realities, high definition surround sound to synthetic olfactory landscapes, contemporary techniques of machine virtuality and spatial simultaneity propose to rupture confines between my corporeal self and domesticated notions of space. The velocities at which high definition technologies attempt to produce this total verisimilitude start to raise questions around my body’s relation to its immediate surroundings. Indeed, when all information can be found in systematically replicated components, the original starts to quiver, a type of uncanny discrepancy between the scripted and genuine bubbles to the surface.

As Baudrillard suggests “This is the end of the body as we would know it, of this singularity called the body, whose secret is precisely that it cannot be segmented into additional cells, that it is an invisible
configuration to which sexuation is witness.” When nature has become outsourced to its synthetic
surrogate my body slowly begins to believe and merge with its coded language. And the more I engage with it the harder it is to see spatial networks as independent from the digital. In fact it is hard to grasp spatial peripheries at all, as the habitual distracted mode of orientation has slipped into a foam of computerised code. And indeed this foam just keeps on spreading."

from Aaro Murphy, https://aaromurphy.com/about/
What limits us (or What is limited in us) when we don’t change how we’re connected to one another?
Sloppy jewels of crystallized feeling sparkle as they break our hearts:

Split asunder, open and awake,
they refract and distract,
explode and unfurl
- each one from the other -
close though we are
- in ways.

Concentrated thus, we hold power in us.

We harbor grandeur.

“It is always asking how to live.” KKS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU62x2PnSO4

Stupid risks are what makes life worth living
on MURIEL RUKEYSER: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/05/30/muriel-rukeyser-mother-of-everyone/

The fullness of this vision is achieved not by retreating from but rather tuning in to immediate experience, a lucidity she describes elsewhere as being “in the world / to change the world.”

We often lament our porosity to the world’s data as a uniquely contemporary curse. Rukeyser imagines it instead as a capacity we might cultivate, no easier for having been attempted before by others like her, from whom we are lucky to learn, and by many more who will not be preserved or restored. So often in her poems, Rukeyser is both student and teacher. “There is no out there,” she instructs in one of Speed’s many self-revisions. “All is open. / Open water. Open I.”

-------
"Käthe Kollwitz"
by Muriel Rukeyser

1
Held between wars
my lifetime
among wars, the big hands of the world of death
my lifetime
listens to yours.

The faces of the sufferers
in the street, in dailiness,
their lives showing
through their bodies
a look as of music
the revolutionary look
that says I am in the world
to change the world
my lifetime
is to love to endure to suffer the music
to set its portrait
up as a sheet of the world
the most moving the most alive
Easter and bone
and Faust walking among flowers of the world
and the child alive within the living woman, music of man,
and death holding my lifetime between great hands
the hands of enduring life
that suffers the gifts and madness of full life, on earth, in
our time,
and through my life, through my eyes, through my arms
and hands
may give the face of this music in portrait waiting for
the unknown person
held in the two hands, you.

2
Woman as gates, saying:
"The process is after all like music,
like the development of a piece of music.
The fugues come back and
again and again
interweave.
A theme may seem to have been put aside,
but it keeps returning—
the same thing modulated,
somewhat changed in form.
Usually richer.
And it is very good that this is so."

A woman pouring her opposites.
"After all there are happy things in life too.
Why do you show only the dark side?"
"I could not answer this. But I know—
in the beginning my impulse to know
the working life
had little to do with
pity or sympathy.
I simply felt
that the life of the workers was beautiful."

She said, "I am groping in the dark."

She said, "When the door opens, of sensuality,
then you will understand it too. The struggle begins.
Never again to be free of it,
often you will feel it to be your enemy.
Sometimes
you will almost suffocate,
such joy it brings."

Saying of her husband: "My wish
is to die after Karl.
I know no person who can love as he can,
with his whole soul.
But often too it has made me
so terribly happy."

She said: "We rowed over to Carrara at dawn,
climbed up to the marble quarries
and rowed back at night. The drops of water
fell like guttering stars
from our oars."

She said: "As a matter of fact,
I believe
that bisexuality
is almost a necessary factor
in artistic production; at any rate,
the tinge of masculinity within me
helped me
in my work."

She said: "The only technique I can still manage.
It's hardly a technique at all, lithography.
In it
only the essentials count."

A tight-lipped man in a restaurant last night saying to me:
"Kollwitz? She's too black-and-white."

3
Held among wars, watching
all of them
all these people
weavers,
Carmagnole

Looking at
all of them
death, the children
patients in waiting-rooms
famine
the street

A woman seeing
the violent, inexorable
movement of nakedness
and the confession of No
the confession of great weakness, war,
all streaming to one son killed, Peter;
even the son left living; repeated,
the father, the mother; the grandson
another Peter killed in another war; firestorm;
dark, light, as two hands,
this pole and that pole as the gates.

What would happen if one woman told the truth about
her life?
The world would split open

4 Song : The Calling-Up
Rumor, stir of ripeness
rising within this girl
sensual blossoming
of meaning, its light and form.

The birth-cry summoning
out of the male, the father
from the warm woman
a mother in response.

The word of death
calls up the fight with stone
wrestle with grief with time
from the material make
an art harder than bronze.

5 Self-Portrait
Mouth looking directly at you
eyes in their inwardness looking
directly at you
half light half darkness
woman, strong, German, young artist
flows into
wide sensual mouth meditating
looking right at you
eyes shadowed with brave hand
looking deep at you
flows into
wounded brave mouth
grieving and hooded eyes
alive, German, in her first War
flows into
strength of the worn face
a skein of lines
broods, flows into
mothers among the war graves
bent over death
facing the father
stubborn upon the field
flows into
the marks of her knowing—
Nie Wieder Krieg
repeated in the eyes
flows into
"Seedcorn must not be ground"
and the grooved cheek
lips drawn fine
the down-drawn grief
face of our age
flows into
Pieta, mother and
between her knees
life as her son in death
pouring from the sky of
one more war
flows into
face almost obliterated
hand over the mouth forever
hand over one eye now
the other great eye
closed
1. -What my body wants to do with information that it already has?
-What my body decides to do when it meets audience? Are those things the main ones that I want to work with?
2. -‘Collaging’, ‘mapping’ rather than ‘fixing choreography’ and ‘working with the scores’. How it can be done?

-What can be learned through deconstructing and trying to construct my knitted dress again?

-Can I freeze my excitement? How this impossible action of staying in one emotion that we used to experience in a very short period of time looks and feels like? How long can I stay with one emotion which reborns in every new second?
pdf
Information about The Commentator Dance and lots of other things is available in the PDF to the left.

<----

Let me know if you have trouble downloading it.