Stefan jovanovic

RADICAL TOGETHERNESS

by Stefan Jovanović

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RADICAL TOGETHERNESS

by Stefan Jovanović

AA School of Architecture History & Critical Thinking Fifth Year Thesis

2016-2017 LONDON

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...it has all started rather formally, has it not?

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Table of Contents

006 Abstract

008 Part One It always starts with theory...

018 Part Two Performative encounters from the stage 022 Performative encounters from the museum 030 Part Three Spells from Vienna 054 Part Four Radical Togetherness 101 Appendix

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Abstract The ambition of this thesis will be to demystify the use of the word ritual, as used by contemporary choreographers and visual artists who employ movement practices within institutionally coded spaces. The blurring line between the generosity and violence of live performative work will be the starting point of analyzing the work of Tino Sehgal & Meg Stuart as case studies. The deconstruction of the notion of a contemporary ritual will lead to my own spell-casting of how to create rituals for closed singular spaces, multiple liminal spaces, and radical togetherness. The ingredients for these spells will be taken from field research completed in the just-past ImpulsTanz festival, in Vienna, Austria. The writing will conclude with a series of socially choreographed situations and interventions that I have led in London during the beginning of November, 2016.

These spells will attempt to address the tension between choreography and the built environment, and the value of intuition and emotion as invisible scores for archetypal society-making performance-work.

Please read the following page very carefully.

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For the reader,

0.00.00 Begin.

One. Start to play the .MP3 soundtrack found within.

Baroque Dub-Step Untitled No.1 by Liam Byrne Two. Part 1.

It always starts with theory‌

...to be read.

Part 2.

Performative Encounters Three.

Part 3.

Spells from Vienna

0.38.15 1.03.04 End.

Four. a silence in the soundtrack begin to play .MP4 film found within, Radical Togetherness London.

...to be watched.

Five.

Part 4.

A Spell from London Six. Have you given the doodles a home in your space?

...to be peeled off and stuck.

Seven Find a way to continue gracefully after the soundtrack has ended.

* To consider, someone else may engage with this ritual after you, thus please arrange the material accordingly for the next reader.

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...start of soundtrack 0.00.00

PART 1

It always starts with theory‌ A Preface to Ritual:

Generosity, Violence, Orientation, Mis-recognition, Communitas, and Sacrifice.

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...images fall out of an envelope.

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What you are about to encounter is the score of a storyteller who will attempt to bridge your experience in this very moment, the social situation you currently find yourself in, to another, social situation, and experience, that you will find yourself in after sixty pages of time, an hour and three minutes of sound. You may consider how best to use this time.

Where do you sit?

You sit within...

“To think of architecture as an apparatus means to think of not simply material but rather a complex system of apparatuses made also of discourses, technologies, norms and protocols of freely regulated behavior of free subjects, embedded into a wider mechanism of government of, what can be called, subjects without body (agents/dividuals).”1 You may find yourself within your body.

That body may be orientated towards an object.

Perhaps, that object is a table.

“The ‘here’ of the body does not simply refer to the body, but [also] to ‘where’ the body dwells.”2

Whilst one understanding of the body resides in its flesh, another lies in its “embodied experience, including pain and its representation... a mix of biological facts and cultural consciousness.”3

Often there is a level of violence associated with this pain, but also a cruelty inflicted upon oneself to express that violence, dissect it, transform it, and give it a life outside of the flesh. The body then acts as a vessel for this consciousness, which begins as a process from within the body. However there is also a consciousness outside of the body, or the so-called out-of-body state/s. When the latter invades the former, when the threshold disappears, a form of violence is born once again. This violence, which is understood in relation to the self, associated at times with insanity, is first sent into exile, to later be placed within the prison.4 Further on, the same condition is transferred from the prison to the asylum until the birth of psychiatry. The madman is subjected to a disciplinary power, which fears and thus refuses to allow for the magic that he possesses. The subject’s body is forced into alienation from the self, and one loses any possibility to legally express the madness through the body. The masks on the puppets continuously change, but the puppeteer remains the same.

Shame has become guilt, fear has become anxiety, and madness keeps psychiatry in business. Hence, where exactly can the madman have any opportunity to exercise honest immanent power of the self, of that other consciousness, outside of any legal system, outside of any clinic? Where can the violence of that madness be both justified and safe?

We introduce violence.

We introduce madness.

“Once upon a time a temple and an altar on which the victim was sacrificed was substituted for the original act of collective violence; now there is an amphitheater and a stage on which the fate of the katharma, played out by an actor, will purge the spectators of their passions and provoke a new katharsis, both individual and collective. This katharsis will restore the health and well-being of the community.”5

Could one possibly turn to the modern-day theatre, as a model that could bypass both the prison and the asylum, or the benevolent clinic? The stage, the theatrical stage, is a site where space becomes an apparatus for exercising behavior that is at once free and also regulated.

Agamben writes that the (ancient) feast is one that “reveals itself to be above all a deactivation of existing values and powers.”6 His notion of feast involves dance as the “liberation of the body from its utilitarian movements” and masks as the “neutralization of the face.”7 This feast of anonymous dancing bodies with masks is a scenario one may very well expect to encounter within the theatre. In this instance, the threshold remains unaltered, for all bodies freely express themselves within the convention and norm already understood. The threshold between regulated and un-regulated violence, however, occurs when the feast is composed of broken expectations, where dancers do not dance, and their faces are not masks but subjective formalized ruptures. It is when the bodies deliver “a break-through which smashes the continuity of a personality and takes it on a kind of trip through ‘more reality’ at once intense and terrifying.”8

This is the moment, where the awareness of the body seated roughly twenty meters away from the body on the stage, is confronted with a sense of risk. The risk being, that there is the potential for that moment to become a “mass theatre, merged with the society”.9 The risk of a merger of consciousness, where the stage, as an apparatus for the bodies physically located on it, extends its agency into the auditorium. Suddenly the entire room becomes a dispositif for exercising immanence, to this point very likely dormant.

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Ahmed states, “When bodies are orientated toward objects, those objects may cease to be apprehended as objects, and instead become extensions of bodily skin.”10 If then bodies are orientated towards other bodies, do those other bodies cease to be perceived as other bodies, and instead become extensions of the subject’s bodily skin?

Notice the time it has taken to move away from my presumption that you are sitting at a desk facing a table, to visualizing yourself sitting in a theatre, orientated towards another body? Has it been three pages? Has it been six and a half minutes of a sound-track that is beginning to intensify?

That is the pace, and it may be fast.

What we move towards is the notion of togetherness.

What we move towards is multiple bodies coming into contact within an imagined space.

What we construct are strategies of orientation, of proximity, lines of connection, and... and... well..

“I can’t define it, but I know it when I see one.”11 Something occurs when there is a coming together of several of these bodies.

When there is a social situation that is generated.

When there is the possibility of violence.

When there is the potentiality of desire.

Something occurs, and we know it when we see it.

It, assumes many meanings, and some describe it as such:

It “implies formality, regularity, stereotyping, special uses of language and communicative gestures and sanc tions concerning its correct performance.”12 It “refer[s] to hidden, occult, forces that are hypothesized by the performers, [...] this idea seems negated by the frequent finding that people call [it] work’.”13 It can also be plural, so they. They “are accompanied by verbal specifications which depend on a belief in power of words themselves, enhanced by stereotypical forms of utterance and style.”14 They “can become the sites of cultural transformation and creativity in difficult historical changes.”15 They sometimes become singular, it. It “is a process, and a dynamic one at that, and it takes both linear and circular forms, integrating various domains of relationship.”16

The storyteller has purposefully omitted the subject of this paragraph, entirely constructed by a multitude of individuals’ definitions of one and the same idea.

That idea begins with one of ritual.

There seems to be an implication of spaces, of language, of bodies, of context, of shapes and forms, of practice and of a measurable function. Whilst the terminology and theory of Strathern, Rappaport, Bell and previously Girard; in relation to violence, depict a certain frame through which to understand the word ritual, we will conclude the beginning of this story with a text by Victor Turner.

“Liminal, or threshold, phases in rites of passage are ones in which the actors are suspended in a transitional phase and are thrown together also in an unstructured communitas or sense of shared experience prior to the re-establishment of a structured set of roles in a new configuration. Turner sees the place of ritual as a combination of work and play, developed in societies in which distinctions between work and leisure time are not marked. Thus ritual can be both work and play and play can be serious.”17

The notion of ritual can oftentimes be associated with that of sacrifice, reenacted over and over again, from ancient religion to the desire of modern-day thinker s. “All religious rituals spring from the surrogate victim, and all the great institutions of mankind, both secular and religious, spring from ritual. Such is the case, as we have seen, with political power, legal institutions, medicine, the theatre, philosophy and anthropology itself.”18 That surrogate victim is usually an animal.

The animal usually has to die. “...the animal takes away the possibility of violence (‘murder’) within that community, and it becomes in effect a scapegoat, carrying away putative evil and defusing violent actions between humans.”19 We witness sacrifice.

We speak of animals.

We imagine social situations in which animals die for some greater good.

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We pretend that all this will keep bad violence at bay.

Before we forget the beginning of this score, we should mention that there is an already a just-past emerging contemporary practice within contemporary arts, and that is the naming of work within the expanded visual arts and choreographic fields: ritual.

Is this ritual?

Is this the representation of ritual?

Why call it ritual?

What power does one claim when the museums or theatres become ritualized?

Could we perhaps travel to a different social situation, a different experience, and examine what makes a situation definable as a ritual? Could we claim that the museum has assumed the role of the religious institution in the twenty-first century? Where does indoctrination sit nowadays? How is my experience of dance as mass labor within the museum altered by the belief that I am engaging in a ritual?

The architecture remains as the apparatus, but now we need to turn our attention towards the strategies of power relationships within social constructs that test our imagination.

These thoughts and threads will gradually disseminate in the pages and minutes of sound to follow.

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Notes 1 Zartaloudis, Thanos. “Commanding Architecture.”

Control & Dispositif: Extra Lecture. Online, London.

1 Jan. 2015. Lecture.

2 Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke UP, 2006. Print. 8 3 Fuller, Robert C. Spirituality in the Flesh Bodily Sources of Religious Experience. (New York: Oxford UP, 2008) 163 4 Foucault, Michel, and Jean Khalfa. History of Madness. (London: Routledge, 2006) 10-11 5 Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, an Imprint of Bloomsbury Plc, 2013. Print. 331 6 Agamben, Giorgio. “What Is a Destituent Power?”

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (Vol 32, 2014) 70 7 Ibid. 70.

8 Deleuze, Gilles, and David Lapoujade. Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews, 1975-1995. (New York: Semiotext(E) ; 2007) 27 9 Kantor, Tadeusz. “My Idea of the Theatre.” The Rhinoceros by E. Ionesco Cracow (1961): 17-22.

10 Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke UP, 2006. Print.

132 11 Stewart, Pamela J. Ritual: Key Concepts in Religion.

London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Print. 1 12 Ibid.

13 Ibid. 3 14 Ibid 15 Ibid. 46 16 Ibid. 85 17 Ibid. 56 18 Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, an Imprint of Bloomsbury Plc, 2013. Print. 347 19 Stewart, Pamela J. Ritual: Key Concepts in Religion.

London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Print. 72

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PART 2

Performative encounters from the stage...

Meg Stuart/ Damaged Goods:

Sketches/Notebook, Kaaitheater, Brussels, 2016 Until Our Hearts Stop, Kaaitheater, Brussels, 2016

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There are three men entangled with one another on a sofa on a stage in Brussels, all with their shirts off, teasing one another with gentle slaps across the chest, belly, back, bottom. They giggle like little boys do, as they take turns being submissive to each other’s acts of benevolent violence. The slaps continue and the audience laugh, yet something begins to stir in the felt-sense of those who watch. The slaps become a bit harder as the sound of a palm across the abdomen resonates throughout the auditorium. A giggle turns into a short yelp, as pleasure turns into pain. Suddenly a very intimate setting is exposed to a public blind of its making.

What is now questioned as rehearsed, is a product of months of intensive labor where pain gets subverted into pleasure, ensuring that both the studio and the stage are places of trust for its users. This moment “transports us to a region where ‘nothing’ and ‘something’, ‘life’ and ‘death’, ‘creation’ and ‘negation’ reveal themselves as inextricably bound, bringing us to the very limits of language’s possibilities.1

Image 0 Goods, Damaged.

Until Our Hearts Stop. Digital image.

Tour. Meg Stuart/ Damaged Goods, n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2016.

Every act of trauma becomes associated with an act of magic. Layers of Wilhelm Reich’s and Aleister Crowley’s rituals are embedded in the contact that takes place on the stage. The stage becomes the only place where these highly intimate exchanges may take a public form, fuelling the body and the cast.

The “self is something to be invented, worked upon, transformed, performed, rather than recognized or found.”2 I n this moment the apparatus of the threshold enables the marriage of the myth and the rite, where the “myth tells the story and the rite reproduces and stages it.”3 What occurs is the creation of a new myth through the staging of the rite, the minute the same body that was slapped, leaves the stage and climbs into the audience. The lights come on and all the performers bring a little something to share with someone seated; a piece of clay, a book to read or a bottle of whiskey. This transgression of the proscenium threshold becomes an act of potential violence, but a violence that does not need to justify itself. This form of violence can be called generosity, ultimately depending on framework.

When the entire auditorium can fit within the (Berlin) wall, then the temperature of the ground begins to change. This haptic madness can only exist “between-times, between-moments” and between deaths.4

We turn once again to Victor Turner in this occasion, and his therapeutic model of drama, which “consists of a process of discovering the cause of misfortune or sickness through a struggle, and the resolution of the struggle through the recreation of order.”5

Artaud defines this moment as “this emotion, which communicates to the mind the shattering sound of matter”.6 This is the moment of ritual, which essentially is also magic. The magic consists in all the bodies’ arousal of “attention association processes” whilst “being deprived of information normally used to define the boundaries of the self ”. In turn this constructs “novel images of the self ’s relationship to the surrounding world.”7 The theatre, very quickly begins to assume a new dimension, a new iteration of itself as a test-site of a material. It is utter insanity, which suddenly becomes acceptable, for it cunningly operates within the implied norms and protocols of the invisible system that merely engenders the physical space one sits in. Nonetheless, there is the condition that the operation begins on stage, or from the stage.

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The explosion of newly embedded sociometrics causes the implosion of the user’s immanent power within the theatre. Both performer and audience are users. The stage in turn becomes an extension of the apparatus via which the users are able to experience an imagined role-play generated from trust and companionship, explorations and madness generated in a studio, elsewhere. The forms which begin to appear in this new space are entirely “bottomless, in the double sense that they only stand out against the most monotonous of nights, and that nothing can assign them their origin, their term and their nature.”8

To recapitulate, what is a subject with a body? It is a subject, which enters the theatre and becomes a body very aware of its constituency as either a spectator or a performer. Once that threshold is abolished, as it is in both Pina Baush’s and Meg Stuart’s repertoire, the theatrical space becomes the apparatus via which the immanent power of the users can implode. Once this implosion happens, via rituals of repetition, magic and madness, the subjects or users begin to redefine the complex system of relations within a hetero-normative architectural body. Their behavior becomes queer. So what must we do to the built environment, in order to move away from its hetero-normativity?

This thesis will set out to propose a series of spells, architectural incantations for the brave-hearted.

Within the theatrical space we encounter allegorical references and representations of past rituals, historically imagined moments, displaced to the ‘now’ that we may find ourselves in, in that given moment.

What we see in this work is embodiment of ritualistic and magical structure. In the Trobriander tribe, “magic was in the hands of a specialist, the towosi, linked by kinship to a ranked chief in the community.”9 This garden witch is the authority who exercises this entity called magic. Thus it becomes difficult to discern whether we encounter the modern towosi on stage, or whether he is summoned through our closed eyes. The objects on stage do not belong to a witch or shaman, but they generate a mimetic desire for that past, for a monstrous double hidden between lines of text in some non-descript archive. The storyteller does not find herself in a ritual in this moment, but rather in an attempt to ritualize a conventional space, a theatre built in 1932. There is thus a “relationship between ‘nows’ - the now of everyday life and the now of ritual place; the simultaneity but not the coexistence of ‘here’ and ‘there [...] constructed through special framing, which may involve music, song and the cognitive preparation of people via ‘somatic modes of attention.’”10 It would thus be more opportune to extend the experience as one that is queered, and that what has happened is the queering of a normative context through music, song, movement and somatic attention. The effect of this is visible in the displacement of spectating bodies from one situation to another, where after a scripted amount of time, they are no longer all seated facing the same direction, they are no longer vertical. There is a rupture in the “repetition of bodily and social actions over time.”11

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Goods, Damaged. Sketches/Notebook. Digital image. Tour. Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods, n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2016.

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We remain within the stage of the Kaaitheater, and we conclude with another piece by Meg Stuart, Sketches/Notebook, of which a four-hour version was performed last spring for Belgium’s Day of the Dance.

What we witness in this occasion is an even greater rupture to the presupposed verticality of bodies within a theatrical space. Sketches pervade the scene as bodies find themselves entangled, stories are told by the actors, and audience members invited to try costumes on, take photographs with the cast, roll marbles across the floor and enter into play-time. It is important to note that the stage is centralized, there is seating on all four sides, with a large ramp coming down from one of the sides. Everyone present in the room is on the stage.

The frontal situation has been broken. We are still within the building of the theatre, but essentially every body has equal peripheral vision now. Everything in fact is visible, and every one is in some manner complicit. Three hours of sketches, of moving around, of audience being asked to change seats, mobility becomes a norm, and what occurs with most durational work, the audience member can drop in and dropout. You can get yourself a glass of wine that you cannot bring back with you but you are allowed to leave, or you can commit to stay. There is a central cast with a certain amount of knowledge, and then there is the outer tier where the audience falls, with potentially less knowledge to begin with, but an ever-increasing one, which builds throughout the four hours.

Collective action becomes something rewarding for whoever participates, the output of which becomes hard to measure. We can begin to understand what occurs through Roy A. Rappaport’s view, that “what ritual communicates is not power over things but information about the performers’ own physical states, or previously encoded information that is regarded as canonical and unchanging, as a form of truth presented as ‘sacred’.”12 Again we encounter the ritualization of activity, or the representation of ritualistic structure, but the wooden floor is still wooden, and the physicality of the space has very much remained the same. Any level of misrecognition can be understood, “as Bourdieu employs it, appears to be intentional self-deception.”13

Eventually the cast begins to create gestural movements with their hands and arms, putting an outward facing palm to a forehead, or two hands at the side of each ear. They begin to speak to one another with these gestures, and gradually they move away from one another and begin to cast their gestures at a randomly selected audience member. Somehow, and potentially this is where the wonder of mimesis comes into play, the audience member begins to imitate the gesture which is shown to them, and casts it back at the performer. Like when one lures an animal into an open-field, or the tribesman lures the goat for its sacrifice, the audience member is beckoned to stand up and follow the performer, onto the stage, maintaining the gestural posture. There is a pervading soundscape throughout this ending. Once the audience member has understood the non-verbalized instructions, and begins to interact with everyone else on stage via gestural postures, the performer goes to fetch another member of the audience. Repetition becomes routine. The intention, which succeeds, brings most of the audience on to the stage, performance becomes rave, sociometric hierarchies become blurred yet still evident, but do we reach a formation of communitas? A rave can still operate within a socially structured framework, where “language and cognition go together, but cognition can occur without linguistic vocalization.”14

In this last instance, the theatrical stage is mis-recognized to be something else, a platform for gathering, facilitated by three hours of spectatorship. The sociometric deconstruction and reconstruction is only possible if one’s attention and staggered participation has lasted for the whole duration of the aesthetic feast.

The audience however does not quite enter into full role-play, they move from being spectators to performing spectatorship whilst dancing. What remain are the remnants of a rave, where one leaves when one has decided the experience has subjectively ended for them, or when the theatre closes its doors.

Is it the institutional presence that blocks one from achieving the fullest potentiality of a magical rite?

Yet, it is so often because of the institution that the practice we experience can be called a ritual to begin with.

We must find a way to end, just like we had decided to enter. What happened in between was a form of invariance, which “Bell says, is the most important aspect of ritual actions.”15

The storyteller would argue that invariance leaves the occasion within the realm of representation, and only an altered state in the communitas, would be a measure of success. This alteration would have to operate both on a structural-architectural level, as well as on an embodied-somatic plane. Due to this, the conventional theatre, as a site, will not do. What some choreographers and theatre-directors have done in this instance is the displacement of the performed dance, song, and word into a different institution, the museum.

One remains within the ambit of institutions, where they become “orientation devices, which take the shape of ‘what’ resides within them. After all institutions provide collective or public spaces.”16

With this very contemporary model, spaces that can house enough bodies that a church can withhold have the potential to become temples. These temples, however, require a large stretch of conscious imagination, when operating solely with human bodies as material…

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PART 2 (continued)

Performative encounters from the museum...

Tino Sehgal:

Carte Blanche Ă Tino Sehgal, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (October - December 2016)

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From the ritualized stage the storyteller will endeavor to take you to the ritualized museum, and so…

We turn to Carte blanche à Tino Sehgal, the largest showing to-date of Tino Sehgal’s work in the Palais de Tokyo, in Paris; and the second artist in the museum’s history to have been given a carte blanche to make-do with the entirety of its space.

It is October, 2016.

Three hundred performers, on rotation, two months of continuous labor, a dozen different pieces... and if the spectator was to focus on figures alone he or she may ask, is this a temple, or is it a factory?

You find yourself sitting in a sloped auditorium-like room, on a blue carpet, and there are two children standing in front of you, orientated towards the audience, meet AnnLee and Maurice.

A female child-actor stares blankly into the audience and begins to ask series of conversations, partly invoking for a response, partly just getting on with the job, constructing a binary monologue: “Have you ever been outside?”

[Silence.]

“Is it better to be too busy or not busy enough?”

[Silence.]

Image 2 Parreno, Philippe. Tino Sehgal’s Annlee. 2013. Palais De Tokyo, Paris, France. drawn at Palais de Tokyo

“They freed me from the world of image comics I was destined for.”

[Silence.]

“This place…

It’s a place for exhibitions to take place.

I’m working for an artist called Tino.

Instead of objects, there’s someone always doing something.”

There is another male child-actor sitting in the audience, his name is Maurice. He waits for his scripted queue before he begins to speak to her.

Annlee: “It’s nice to talk to you, but I need to continue with my work now.”

Maurice asks if he can join her, and she beckons him to come stand next to her. She whispers to him, showing him the way she moves her arms slowly, one up and the other down, mimicking some form of inversed t’ai chi type of movement.

Maurice turns back to the audience and asks a woman: “Is it worse to be too busy or not busy enough?”

The woman replies, “not busy enough...”

The child-actors eventually leave the space, and Philippe Parreno’s movie of Annlee begins to play on a screen in the background. The movie finishes, and the lights come back on, and once more the living Annlee is standing in front of you, and Maurice is seated in the audience once again. The loop resumes.

Image 3 Tino Sehgal’s Annlee. 2016.

Palais De Tokyo, Paris, France.

Photograph taken by Stefan Jovanovic.

“[Philippe] Parreno and [Pierre] Huyghe bought this cipher, named her Annlee (aka AnnLee, or Ann Lee), gave her a cosmetic makeover, and, with Anna-Lena Vaney, set up a state-of-the-art video animation facility for her in Paris. They started filling her in, so to speak, and — expanding the French Surrealist tradition of the “exquisite corpse” — they lent her free of charge to other artists they commissioned to do likewise.”17

This Subjective is a thus a new piece by Tino Sehgal, where Annlee has not only left the digital realm and embodied a real human body but now has a new companion, Maurice, both live embodiments/representations of the exquisite state-of-the-art animation acquired by Sehgal’s contemporaries in 1999.

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This Subjective is a thus a new piece by Tino Sehgal, where Annlee has not only left the digital realm and embodied a real human body but now has a new companion, Maurice, both live embodiments/representations of the exquisite state-of-the-art animation acquired by Sehgal’s contemporaries in 1999.

If you descend two levels below ground, you encounter This Objective, where five individuals face the wall, equidistant from each other, and withhold a variety of conversations stemming from the chorus line, “The objective of this work is to become the object of a discussion.” They tackle words such as nationalism and love.

In These Variations, we encounter a dozen dancers in a blacked-out room, singing, improvising beatbox and conversing in alternation.

In These Associations, we find ourselves dispersed in the basement of the building, watching over thirty bodies loop through different sketches of choreographed movement, singing, poses and gestures envisioned for a cinematic audience, culminating in the singing of a re-appropriated phrase by Martin Heidegger, “Thus we ask now even if the old rootedness is lost, in this age may not a new ground be created out of which human nature and all its works can flourish even in the technological age”.

The original phrase goes, “Thus we ask now : even if the old rootedness is being lost in this age, may not a new ground and foundation be granted again to man, a foundation and ground out of which man’s nature and all his works can flourish in a new way even in the atomic age?”18

Another singing moment draws us back to the texts of Hannah Arendt, as we listen to the performers singing, “Today we have begun to create natural processes of our own and instead surrounding the world natures forces we channel the elementary forces into the world itself.”

The original goes,

“In the present stage humanity has come to ‘create’ nature by beginning “to unchain natural processes of our own which would never have happened without us, and instead of carefully surrounding the human artifice with defenses against nature’s elements, keeping them as far as possible outside the man-made world, we have channeled these forces, along with their elementary power, into the world itself.”19

One is quickly reminded of the power of music, song, and movement in the creation of ritualized spectacle, but in our journey from the stage to the museum, we have left behind those somatic modes of engagement we found in the Kaaitheater.

Image 4 Parreno, Philippe. Anywhere Out of The World (2000). Digital image. No Ghost Just a Shell. Stretcher, n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2016.

In the very first piece upon entering the building, This Progress, an eight-year-old runs up to you and asks you about the word progress. You walk and talk through a series of rooms until eventually you are handed over to a teenager, a mother, and eventually an elderly. Before you realize the time that has past, you find yourself in the basement, having spoken to the spectrum of human age withheld in four bodies.

Whist the pieces mostly respect invisible lines demarcating their designated performance space, and thus respecting the white-wall partitions of a museum, one cannot help but feel a form of boundary-making in action. These boundaries are not “marked socially by setting up posts, upright rocks, or gateways” but instead involve invisible socio-metric understandings of protocols that involve being or not being spoken to.20 024

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In orientating themselves towards the performers, where these performers replace the notion of art objects towards which the audience’s entry ticket’s value has been allocated, they “participate in a longer history in which certain ‘directions’ are ‘given to’ certain places [or people], they become the East, the West, and so on.21 We thus subscribe to the orientations that the museum, as an institution, allows for. The concrete very much stays as concrete, and the human performing for eight hours a day, remains the human body performing for eight hours a day. Invariance is inescapably achieved, yet one woman says, she feels as if she had spent those eight hours in a temple.

Indeed, we do find ourselves in a temple, but one that escapes ritualization and ultimately engages with performativity, as the conscious behavior of the self in a public or collective space. The echoes of song summon something, where references are too blurred or altered to give the process of ritualization a context, and where the factory is too busy producing loops, which maintain a very steady, repeatable form of socio-metric inhabitation. One finds the human exchanges stuck in between enmity and amity, moving from a confessional to a sermon. What is most evident is the impressive labor provided for three hundred odd performers in the building, an embodied capital (est. at €1.5m), which we encounter in the form of practical action, the provision of a job. In this instance, the practical action witnessed can be viewed similarly to “the goal of religious thinking [which] is exactly the same as that of technological research.”22 Furthermore one might mistake the actions witnessed, as actions of pertaining to a ritual, if one follows Strathern’s line of thinking, that “productive work and ritual [are] indissolubly bound together.”23 The question that arises is: can this this form of dance making that we witness within the museum also be productive work? It is certainly a production, and it is factually work, but if the work is productive, then to what end and at whose interest?

We begin to lose madness.

We forget violence or that threshold we began with when we moved from our table to the theatre.

We surely do feel good when we listen to the Good Vibrations.

Perhaps we may agree with Sehgal, that “exhibitions are ritual-spaces of gathering for modern liberal democ racies”24, but we could also say, that what we encounter in Palais de Tokyo, is less of a ritual-space and more of a twenty-first century generous labor-driven temple, “a production which fills the void it itself has created.”25

To equal the ritualized-cum-temple-cum-factory, “one must imagine a humanitarian who was long ago persuaded of the grievous shortage of hospital facilities in the town. He continues to importune the passersby for money for more beds and refuses to notice that the town doctor is deftly knocking over pedestrians with his car to keep up the occupancy.”26

You may have approached the thirty-eight minute mark, or about to, but silence is soon approaching, and that silence will necessitate a return to the initial score…

...gap in soundtrack 0.38.10

[The rest of this page has been left intentionally blank.]

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[Interlude] Questions for the storyteller.

Questions for the reader.

Why do we want rituals?

To summon something that binds us to others.

So let’s simply call it that from now on.

We want togetherness.

So we will use our art forms to achieve it.

It will be polythetic.

We will market it as radical togetherness.

“The temple structure lends itself to the kind of sociological analysis known in the past as structural-functionalist {...} it is through such structures that the major lines of social identification, integration, hierarchy, wealth and gender relations are affirmed and strengthened.�27

The storyteller thus claims:

Retain madness as a strategy.

Do not dismiss labor as a device.

Introduce queer phenomenology.

Move away from the gallery room and the theatrical stage.

Welcome polysemy as an entry point.

Begin spell-casting to engage and seduce others into radical togetherness with tenderness.

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Notes 1 Agamben, Giorgio. “On the Limits of Violence.”

Project MUSE: (Diacritics 39.4 ;2009) 109 2 Gratton, Johnnie, and Michael Sheringham, eds.

The Art of the Project: Projects and Experiments in Modern French Culture. (New York: Berghahn, 2005) 213 3 Agamben, Giorgio. Profanations. (New York: Zone, 2007) 75 4 Deleuze, Gilles, and David Lapoujade. Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews, 1975-1995.

(New York: Semiotext(E) ;, 2007) 391 5 Stewart, Pamela J. Ritual: Key Concepts in Religion. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Print. 27 6 Artaud, Antonin, and Susan Sontag. Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings. (Berkeley: U of California, 1988) The Nerve Meter 7 Fuller, Robert C. Spirituality in the Flesh Bodily Sources of Religious Experience. (New York: Oxford UP, 2008) 78 8 Foucault, Michel, and Jean Khalfa. History of Madness. (London: Routledge, 2006) 531 [?]

9 Stewart, Pamela J. Ritual: Key Concepts in Religion. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Print. 37 10 Ibid. 126 11 Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke UP, 2006.

Print. 66 12 Stewart, Pamela J. Ritual: Key Concepts in Religion. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Print. 3

16 Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke UP, 2006.

Print. 132 17 “Stretcher.” Stretcher | Features | No Ghost Just a Shell. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 Dec. 2016.

18 Heidegger, Martin. Discourse on Thinking. New York: Harper & Row, 1966. Print. 53 19 Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1958. Print. 148-9.

20 Stewart, Pamela J. Ritual: Key Concepts in Religion. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Print. 30 21 Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke UP, 2006.

Print. 113 22 Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, an Imprint of Bloomsbury Plc, 2013. Print. 35 23 Stewart, Pamela J. Ritual: Key Concepts in Religion. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Print. 38 24 Sehgal, Tino. “Introdoction to DanceWEB 2016.”

DanceWEB ImpulsTanz Festival. Vienna. 15 July 2016. Address.

25 Galbraith, John Kenneth. The Affluent Society.

Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969. Print. 125 26 Ibid. 129 27 Stewart, Pamela J. Ritual: Key Concepts in Religion. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Print. 133

13 Ibid. 98 14 Ibid. 120 15 Ibid. 7

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PART 3

Spells from Vienna A Spell to Bind Oneself to a Singular Space: Everything Fits in the Room

Facilitated by choreographers & artists Jen Rosenblit, Simone Aughterlony & Miguel Gutierrez in participation with Roni Katz, Katharina Hรถlzl, Maciej Sado, Oswaldo Gomez, Jessyca Hauser, Lilly Pfalzer, Emily Gastineau, Ruth Childs, Sonja Joniniemi & Damian Malvacio

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Image 5 Everything Fits in a Room, Photograph by Stefan Jovanovic.

Vienna, July, 2016

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Some prompts to consider before you enter into the room:

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WHERE: A dirty enclosed room, with direct sunlight and access to running water.

WHEN: All day, or night-time, but consecutive duration (1-2 hr sequences).

MODALITY: Work ethic. The laundry needs to get done.

MATERIAL: Brick wall, wigs, ropes, chains, ladder, cloths, fabrics, water, sound, electric lights, SOUND: digital, noise, vocals, REPETITION: Consecutive days, minimum five days.

WORDS: dwelling, the machinic, faceting, the witch The storyteller now invites you to the first spell-casting module, in which:

Everything in Italics is to be read as an on-going narrative, to be imagined as read out-loud, a voice from behind the corner of the room you sit in, and the echo of a distant yet very familiar memory.

There is a Russian Feminist manifesto by Marxist writer and activist Alexandra Kollontai and there are preconceptions as to what fits in a room, the mandates of a space, accumulation, collection, and finally there is the beginning, which involves dwelling. What does it mean to dwell in the room?

I would now invite you to focus on the meditation of proximity.

Then Gravitating towards things.

The productivity in dwelling.

There is a “thing” going on in the room that everyone can join in on, participate in.

Is it possible to become busy with someone else’s business? There is stasis and then there is forever. So I ask you, what is the difference? What is ordinary? Repetition is ordinary. But then it’s ordinary until it becomes an aesthetic formalised language that is precise enough to reproduce on any stage. How does the experiential rub up with desires? I guess that would be the uncanny. When the familiar rubs up against the unfamiliar.

The starting premise in the room is that everything is ordinary, and that everything can be repeated. Can everything be repeated? What were we left with after the kissing? In order for sensuality to enter the space, what did we need to lose? Our individuality? We decided to support Wacho and Lilly when they were kissing and that made the environment sensual. How complicit were we in the manifestation of that intimacy? Were they kissing for us?

The room, the stage, the space, the set were centralised around a wall.

We arrive to the first space, where you must imagine, for the time being, that you will spend the following five days within. It is a ( ) space.1 It is preferable that you take the most comfortable length of a room you can find, square it, and then extend it if you prefer rectangles. There must be a focal point within the space, something that every eye will gravitate towards upon entering. It is something ordinary, made out of the materiality already found within the space, the most likely being a brick. In fact, that thing in the middle of the room is a brick wall, about two meters fifty centimetres tall, and it has an array of objects attached to it. Please refer to the objects list and see image attached. Even if you have never seen this wall before, you may enter with a notion of familiarity, because you recognise that a wall is a wall, and “familiarity is what is, as it were, given, and which in being given “gives” the body the capacity to be orientated in this way or in that. [...] Familiarity is shaped by the ‘feel’ of space or by how spaces ‘impress’ upon bodies.”2

The wall was there and we had a responsibility towards it. There was a need to confront the wall. Agreements were both silent and spoken. A peephole. Then there is dwelling again (with a focus on adjusting, that being the continuous arrangement of things. Faceting they call it. How do you facet a face? Can I facet her face to the wall whilst I rub dirty water on it? Merriam Webster says that a facet is a part or element of something, otherwise a small, flat surface on a jewel. What were the facets in the room?

What dwelling isn’t? Let me rephrase that in a mannerism that might make more sense. Is there something that is not dwelling? Let me try again. Is everything we do a form of dwelling? Perhaps we need to turn to sensorial awareness. This involves the exploration of the senses, which can be happening whilst dwelling. It somehow implicates the measuring of the body as architecture.

Experiencing this doesn’t mean you can’t experience that, or me.

Would you like to experience me?

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Image 6 Everything Fits in a Room, Drawing by Stefan Jovanovic.

Vienna, July, 2016

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And what to do in this room with a brick wall in the middle of it? Decide on the moment in time when you say, I have arrived. When do you arrive into a space? When do you know that you have entered?

How long is the temporal gap between having entered the space and having arrived? If there is a door, you might have entered the space through that gap in the wall, and if there is a free-standing wall in the room, then perhaps when you will have touched it you will have arrived at the wall. This is for each one to negotiate on their own. We first begin to define these ritualised actions based on how we enter the situation where it takes place. Judith Butler says that we perform everything, so we can say that you are performing entering the space where the wall is. This is the beginning of what we call sequence. Every ritual must withhold a sequence that can be followed, repeated, translated. “It [inhabitance] is a process of becoming intimate with where on is: an intimacy that feels like inhabiting a secret room that is concealed from the view of others.”3

Transfer of vibrations. From the macro to the micro. The body becomes a material for the space and for someone else. Switching from subjectivity to objectivity leads us to a place for sneezing, farting, and other human conditions. The body as a test-site of a material. What if the body is the material? Then, the room becomes the test-site of the material. What if the material is the room, or everything that fits in the room? Then our time there is the test-site of a material. If there was a fire, I would grab you, not the wig. Was there a fire burning all the time? So, there was a list of priorities in a fictionalised setting, in terms of how you entered the space, and the ability to exit it in case of imminent danger - to that extent it was a stage. Keep the fire burning. Was that the agreement? Could we say that there was fire constantly burning in the room, like a proper camping fire that we ignited upon entering that room the first time, and we kept it alive for the duration. And the silent pressure that burnt in the air like incense was the responsibility towards the fire. The wall was the fire. The room was the fire.

Don’t let the fire burn out.

Once you have arrived, you engage with a word, which is prompted by what you will read now: DWELLING.

The intent of the first spell is to see what behavioural conditions arise from the durational dwelling in a singular space over a continuous period of time.

I can be a chair for you, but in a second I can demand something else. Submission? Fetishised materials require the consistent search for submission. Synaesthesia. Is there an empty chair in the room? Is there an empty chair in the conversation? We should always allow for an empty chair in the conversation. Of course, that chair doesn’t need to be physical, you can imagine the chair there, and so that everytime someone joins the discourse we make space for the next to come in. The circle is never closed.

Image 7 McNatt, Eric. Miguel Gutierrez. Digital image. Past DiP Artists. Gibney Dance, n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2016.

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Miguel said that he was very conscious of the moments when he would make a change to the music, as he could feel the way in which it affected the rest of us. The music was material just as everything else in the room. Is non-participation a rejection? Is there a shame in mimicking? Mimesis. Is there shame in mimesis? Why should we be ashamed? There is no place for that. Perhaps that doesn’t fit in the room. But perhaps the room can help you get over your shame.

Non-participation is also material.

Pleasure. Does arrival have to do with when you arrive to pleasure, when you recognise that you have experienced it. We base our values on our desires. And what about centrifuge? The music projects on the space.

There is the pleasurable and then there is the self-indulgent. And when we engage with either, that is if we are able to differentiate between the two, we arrive to the question of accessibility? Are our actions accessible? Does it matter if what we do is accessible or not, and if not then can we mask our intentions? How clearly do our intentions read through our actions? Are we rigorous in how we go about committing to the room? Are we able to focus on the specificity of our intent, and the rigour and discipline required to maintain that focus?

As you begin to focus on the notion of dwelling, a third party begins to play music, digital or instrumental, it is another material within the room, like the wig that hangs off of the brick wall. As long as there is a melody or beat other than silence, the sequence is still going on, you can pre-determine with the musician how long you would like it to last before you enter the room, so feel free to prompt an hour of dwelling.

There was a constant re-negotiation of language, of definitions. The constructed space offers for its cognitive re-definition, for its cognitive re-association. It, being the wall, or the room. The wall is the room, and vice-versa, that is the room or “the room”. It is clear what the wall is. There is a physicality to it that is more ambivalent when we arrive to the room. What is that figure of speech that references a part but intends a whole?

Synecdoche. Were we all embodying a form of synecdochic beingness? And then we arrive to dwelling with the machinic. The Mechanised.

Your eye will inevitably go to all the elements/objects in the room, anything that you have brought with you on your journey here, that you would like to engage with. It can be something familiar, or it can be something found, or both. You can spend time faceting and thinking of how to create a machinic quality to the way your body touches or uses the objects in the room. Your focus will stay on these objects for a limited period of time, before you get bored and need to think on what to do next. Notice that “simultaneous arrivals are not necessarily a matter of chance; arrivals are determined, at least in a certain way, as a determination that might determine what gets near, even if it does not decide what happens once we are near.”4

Image 8 Suziki, Maria Barnova. Jen Rosenblit.

Digital image. ImpulsTanz Archive.

ImpulsTanz Festival, n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2016.

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There comes a point where Jen decides to guide the warm-up, which is until the music starts and an uninvited guest arrives to watch. We focus on entanglement, ruptures and breakages as part of the dwelling. Moving towards the possibility of pleasure. There’s always an empty choice in the conversation, as you become somebody else’s cave. You are my cave. The disruptive female body is a site of abundance and fertility. A construction site and a cooking show at the same time. Imagine that! But now... it is time to work. Brewing a potion. Spell-casting.

Deviance. “Becoming”. I have become a witch. You will cast your spell on me whilst I wash the wall with my own sweat. I will reveal the naked skin of my buttocks for your eager eyes, and that happens for just a split second before I wrap my head in a loincloth and don those black heels on. When does magic become ritual? If we channel the absurdity, we allow for an expansive environment, which can then amplify the absurdity already present in the room. We always have the choice to amplify what is at hand, to boost the intensity, or kill it all together.

You will want to bring other human beings into the room, so that when you get bored with your focused attention on the object, you will be able to engage with another body, and treat it as an expanded object. You might also consider using the “dead” objects in relation to the “living” forms, such as rubbing a bone against someone’s skin. What you mustn’t forget is that you are working. This is work. Hence, your work ethic needs to comprise the sensibility you have when you remember... the laundry still needs to get done! It is that feeling, that you have a pending list of things to do, that you might invent as you progress through your use of the room, but whatever it is, it needs to get done. We arrive to the underlying directive of intuition as another element within our spell, and within the space.

Opening of infinity. How many times do we give in to bridging the sentences, and how often do we let them just breathe on their own?

Everyone has a responsibility towards something. I have a responsibility towards the wall.

What do you do when you witness that deviance, that marginalisation?

Laughter to deal with things. Your laughter is deviant. You are a deviant. Go and practice deviance, why don’t you?

When you’re outside, can you get involved? Is watching a completely different action? Who is not watching?

What is the name of that bloody song that kept playing in the studio next door?

Outside might be further than we think. Inside might be more complex than we think. Then there is Responsibility versus Authority. Dosages. Trust. Trusting each other. Consent? Fantasy always interrupts and sometimes intervenes, and thus, it needs to be taken care of. This is a state. This is labour. This is entanglement.

Two human bodies and one other body involve commitment and cooperative energy.

Turn down the volume.

Intensities of your working method will rise and fall, excitement and boredom will interchange, as you either seek or forget the passing of time. Enmity and amity. Your durational attitude will flatten out the value of everything in the room, the music will become material will become body. Allow for those moments, as desire does not bloom at a constant rate, and so you will have to regenerate in the troughs of your working modality.

Reveal in the gaze. To have a task is to engage with specificity. A strange blind commitment. It feels like marriage

and this... and it’s not enough.

Give me more. Is that all there is? We can still do this, but over there.

Can I be promiscuous? Supporting each other through physical embodiment. Can I define what I mean

by promiscuity please?

Did you want to let go?

Would you come back if I let go?

When do you want to let go?

Can I let go?

Over-stimulus. Clear political gestures. If you are over-stimulated are you even able to make a clear political gesture?

Domestic scores involve blueprints for living, an architectural map that is. Necessity and needs. Bathing, eating, resting, recycling.

There are things to be done. I can linger and dwell but the laundry still needs to get fucking done!

Washing clothes of the room is logic. What? That can be washed? Well, then it needs to be washed. Don’t ask the question, just do it. Crack inside the machinic. Are you asking me to crack inside the machinic or is there a crack inside the machinic? Inside of this entanglement. Functional but not in a recognisable way. The emotional is not to be avoided, these things are always located. I can locate the emotion in the room.

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We built architectures so that we can dwell in them.

We dress to get warm.

We prepare food to gather and eat.

The structure needs to be built to be dwelled in. The dwelling needs to happen for… [ ]

You might question yourself at this stage; you might question your purpose, the aim, the ambition, why you are here and why you are assuming an attitude of labour towards something potentially dysfunctional? Why is it important to dwell? Your dwelling is soon to come to an end.

The wall doesn’t need us to perform Wallness, perhaps it needs us to perform Tiredness. The wall is going to travel with you. Access the options every time. The wall and materials can be accommodated every time.

Invitation to the guests and how much can they be mobile? Do you mean that the guests can be invited to move the wall? Well they can bloody try to move the wall.

Experience with a time-frame. Be there before the audience arrives! Don’t let them walk into the empty chair; the empty chair needs to be facilitated for them as they enter into the room.

We arrive to this thing called Closure - the sense of show without making an ending.

Kinship.

How does the body propose a value? Not a positive space, nor a negative one, just value.

You’re world-building, your bodies are world-building.

So can I transgress space?

Movement that needs other movement to move forward. Does movement ever stop? Does it stop when I stay stop?

Living is not flourishing, it is survival.

And this is the worst ending ever.

The laundry still needs to get done.

End.

The music will probably have ended by now, but not the music you are listening to, and perhaps something really awkward is orchestrated, or the musician says - we’re finished, or done! That’s the worst ending ever, when it’s announced. However, you need an ending so that you can recognise the sequence has finished, and can now be repeated. You will come back to the room tomorrow, and you will re-engage with the score, and this time you will think of ( )5 This is the point at which we consider the role of the word frame.

Through what frame are you entering into the room? Through what frame do you orientate yourself? Is the purpose of this whole spell to create a frame that did not exist once you entered? If that is so, remember, “Framing therefore crucially influences a ritual performance and its performativity in creating either enmity or amity.”6

This is the conclusion of the first spell, which will be recapitulated on the next page in simpler form.

You can consider it a prompt, a free score, a rigid instruction or an invisible plan. It invites you to use a singular space repetitively, shifting your imaginative intent, and lasting the duration of the sequence you prescribe yourself. It takes commitment; it takes effort, and especially discipline. Of course, if you’re bored, leave, but recognise that there is a value to be gained from the durational exercising of a task. Gradually a certain form of meditation will emerge, which brings forth the role of intuition in our moments of procrastination, of boredom, of mis-functionality and mis-recognition. We must use the power of imagination at the beginning of these spells, prior to the formation of more serious material culture, for “the world of ritual practice in fact encompasses the broad potentialities of the imagination and the reflexive ethics that people can create.”7

This process can oftentimes be very inaccessible when taken out of the closed studio, and placed for an audience on a frontal stage where physical engagement or interaction is limited. Hence, the museum-space or gallery-space, which allows for non-continuous attention spans, becomes more suited to place durational work in, as the premise already encompasses an audience, which has the possibility to leave. The ability to leave is more readily imagined than the confidence of having arrived. What we do eventually arrive to is the question of desire? What do we want with this spell that we’ve cast upon a space to do? Why have we re-created a ritual, to summon something... but to summon what... and once we have half-heartedly reassured ourselves that we have succeeded in creating a ritual, we may realise that what we want is to be together with others? We summon the space so that we can be with another being. We begin to differentiate between body and object, even though we have spent countless hours treating the inanimate as animate and vice-versa.

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Is any of this truth?

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This is a spell which assumes the working ethic of endless laundry that needs to get done, in a singular space that is continuously used by a fixed number of variables: the same people, the same objects, the same musician, the same duration. The only variable which changes is the intent with which you approach the space, that being: dwelling, the machinic, faceting, the witch, and so forth. What changes, is your imagined entry point of orientation. “It is by understanding how we become orientated in moments of disorientation that we might learn what it means to be orientated in the first place.”8

The italics you have read up until now are the transcribed prose from the first attempt of practicing a spell for binding oneself to a singular space. We can turn to Deleuze and consider what he says about singular events: “individuation leads to the creation of a singular ‘event’, a singularity. This is a life.”9

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One. Find a closed room with windows letting in natural light, and a source of water.

Two. Construct a primary architectural structure in the center of the room, a wall, column, arch or beam.

Three.

Introduce a fixed quantity of (mis)usable materials into the room.

Four.

Find a live musician/vocalist/instrumental who will play music for the duration of your usage.

Five.

Decide on how long you want your engagement and entanglement to last. Agree with the musician.

Six. Enter the room with a modality/mentality in mind.

Dwelling can be the starting point.

Seven.

Enter the room twice a day, for at least an hour’s duration, maybe two.

Eight.

Perform entering into the modality of dwelling for five continuous days.

Nine.

Find a way to end.

*To consider.

A The musician needs to be paid for his labour.

B The other bodies you might want to invite need a schedule.

C The room may need to be hired, and materials bought and brought.

D Health & Safety...

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PART 3 (continued) Spells from Vienna

A Spell to Locate Liminal Space: Love is the Agreement

Facilitated by choreographer Meg Stuart, musician Klaus Janek & artists Pawel Althamer and Arthur Zmijewski in participation with Roni Katz, Katharina HÜlzl, Shannon Stewart, Rocio Marano, Margherita d’Adamo, Florian Lenz, Thomas Proksch, Justin Cabrillos, Reza Mirabi, Pedro Henrique Risse, Elena Risteska, Corinne Jola, Alice Tatge & Laura Burns.

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Image 9 Drawing by Pawel Althamer. 043 Berlin, March 2016

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Some prompts to consider before entering the liminal.

All italics will be assumed by a multitude of other voices, read aloud, it is no longer one storyteller’s voice, but several…

WHERE: Different large capacity, public and/or cultural servicing locations with invisible scores, such as the hospital, museum, prison, swimming pool, library, bank.

WHEN: During opening hours of the institution.

MODALITY: Work ethic: Love is the agreement.

MATERIAL: Moving bodies and drawing utensils.

SOUND: Mobile instrument.

REPETITION: Consecutive days, minimum five days, minimum 2 hours in each space, unless kicked out.

WORDS: drawing, resuscitating, performing spectatorship, performing dead artwork, activating, releasing, making portraits.

“She never asked questions about whether she could do it or not, she questioned things within the group, and pondered dynamics, but in the end always just went for it and then dealt with the consequences - and looking back at all of it, whilst I can definitely remember all the tensions - no consequences, no one got hurt, we did our thing and we got away with it. The musical accompaniment was fantastic and so necessary. Music and rhythm just do something, and I don’t think it’s bad for them to influence actions, they are part of the scenario, and we feed from each other, visually and acoustically. “ - Anonymous Participant No.0

The premise for this spell is that whatever happens, happens in a collective of people. The reason for this is to understand the limits of agreements, based on love and non-verbal communication, to share responsibility for collective action, and question the boundaries of pedestrian behaviour. If you find yourself alone, then scavenge and find others to join you in casting this spell. Fifteen tends to be a good number for a small group that plans to move collectively throughout the city. Like in the previous spell, music is a vital material in the spaces you will enter. Find a musician that has a mobile instrument, such as a double bass or cello. He can be either standing or sitting. Consider yourself a moving kit, and also in possession of tools that can be applied to various spaces. The way you enter a space will be consistent, in that you will simply walk in. If it’s an institutional building, with several spaces, then pick a space that makes most sense, is the most interesting, or exciting, try and be specific... like the waiting room of a hospital. Try and pick spaces where there are already bodies occupying it. You have had practice up until now with intent, what happens when we begin to geo-socially displace it now?

“The graveyard scene was relatively ambiguous or rather just an awkward introduction with the Polish artists. It meant nothing to me to draw on people’s tombs - I don’t believe in that format - it was an interesting site, it was a set for me; a great theatre set that created an ambivalent mood - and perhaps because there was no risk in what we were doing, there was no fear that we would get told off, it was a somewhat non-coded space; because there is no real prescription as to what you are meant to do in a graveyard - which is why they have become more tourist attraction sites that places where rituals are practiced. Actually, there are rituals practiced in graveyards, if we think back to the mock-vampire stories in Highgate Cemetery, and clans of fanatics gathering and trying to create fictional murders to attract the media’s attention - the haunting. Is something a ritual if no one sees it? Does a ritual need to be witnessed in order to be a ritual? A ritual needs to mean something for someone or be recognised as something out of the ordinary. A ritual needs to fuck with hierarchy, and it needs to fuck with structure. The significance of any ritual in the graveyard seems ambiguous to me, maybe because there were no living spectators.” - Anonymous Participant No.1

The ritual needs to be performed where there is a potential spectatorship, as those will be subjects of your intentions. Once you enter into the space, analyse the behaviour that you find before you. Observe the postures that bodies are assuming, the angles they are bent at, whether they are sitting or standing, how weight is distributed, the proximity of walls and objects to bodies. Once you have taken into account the forms, start to pay attention to behaviour, to facial expressions, to proximities, to distribution of activity and the mood palette of the space. Remember that “intuition is neither sensible nor intellectual; it is the analogy between the becoming of the known being and the becoming of the subject.”10

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“The church was an interesting experience in that we did not encounter resistance there. I feel that our presence scared off the priest away and they just let us do our thing - because what we did was our own form of prayer. Someone died at a church in Normandy whilst we were doing this. I don’t believe in coincidences. There is such a need for closure, with relationships, with friendships, with workshops, to then like draw something meaningful out of it - its kind of bullshit. I’m not sure how smoothly things developed at the church- I know we started drawing with the Polish guys and then we eventually got bored of it and moved into movement. The space has such a fixed geometry though - there’s a clear front, and a clear axis, and we didn’t know which angle to approach it from. I had the impulse to take Roni on my back - and just walk from left to right and from right to left - so that those watching could scan the space as I went from one altar to another, with Margharita in the middle slowly moving and making gestures. It felt like we were quite evenly distributed in the space but it also felt like we were engaging very individualistically in the space - like how it felt when we were all making noise in the studio and banging things - before we re-united on the first day. “ - Anonymous Participant No.2

Begin to perform what you see. At the beginning you can verbally communicate with your peers as you’ve entered the space. As someone thinks of a prompt to perform, they can disseminate the word amongst the group via a whisper or a spoken word; there is no need to announce it at high volume. There is also no need to make explicit who is part of the group, and who is not. This is the first line that your spell will need to blur.

“What we were doing immediately appeared “other” to the nature of the church - but not outside the realm of spirituality, just a different form of spirituality, which looked like some pagan ritual. Circles, masks, collective movement. Playgrounds. We were in agreement to resuscitate the dead within, so I guess the mere presence of activity that manifested as alternative or heightened prayer did that. Could we call our action a heightened form of prayer? Could we say that whatever space we walked into, we amplified the codes of conduct by subverting them? We amplified the notion of prayer, until it resonated through the body, through the contrabass, through the paint. We discussed this thing of disassociating meaning from content, disassociating signified from signifier. So that when we entered into our collective state of togetherness, we could stare at the space and see a wall out of stone, we could stare at a painting and see colour, we could drop to the floor and feel the rough texture of a carpet, we could remove context and just engage empirically with what was there.” Anonymous Participant No.3

After the second situation, you should be familiar with everyone in your group, and have developed a certain sequence as to how you enter into the space and what the first thing you do is. You can begin by inviting everyone in the group to draw with pencil, charcoal or watercolours onto manageable-sized sheets of paper. Everyone can distribute himself or herself within the space. See how long the drawing lasts. You can draw each other, or you can draw the space, or you can even go into abstraction. You need an excuse to enter the space, and sketching tends to be a good one. So always start with the action of sketching, upon entering the space through its prescribed entrance.

“The museum is so guarded, so precious, so much money within, so much value allocated to culture, e.g. the artefacts of the visual arts that are protected and meant to be appreciated from afar. It’s not dissimilar from the church, in the attitude that is expected of one, but there is no security in the church. Why does the museum calculate for more potential threat? Someone might steal a painting. The heritage within the museum seems to be of greater value than what is found in the church. The fact that there was time pressure when we entered into the museum did not help at all - because there was an unspoken expectation that we are meant to “do” something, that we are meant to activate the space in some form and make it of value (to us) and potentially to whoever was there. Meg prompted us by saying that we should think about what it means to perform spectatorship. Of course sitting still in the chairs and sofas was not enough to perform spectatorship, what else would we have to do to acknowledge that we were performing it and not just spectating by looking at what was happening in the room? Perhaps we had to have a different intent within our bodies whilst spectating, which would make it a performance. Time was clearly a factor that marked the experience, in that we couldn’t wait to build the intensity but immediately went to interpret one of the paintings with our bodies. What we were doing no one could understand. In fact nothing we did in the whole week could be understood or recognised by anyone from the outside - so is there an invitation or not? We would have to make the invitation very clear for anyone to join - to dance to them, to make portraits for them, to send symbolic gestures in their direction with generosity and not hostility.”

Anonymous Participant No.4

After about fifteen minutes of sketching, and potentially sketching on someone’s paper that is not your own, try and observe the space whilst drawing. Remember that first task upon entering the space and observing, well try to do it at the same time as sketching. Once you have come to terms with the mood, ambience, intent of the occupiers, abandon the drawing utensil and paper and begin to walk around.

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[A small acknowledgement needs to be made at this moment towards the drawing utensil, the pencil, which is like Husserl’s table, which through your action you may queer. In doing so, we can recall that “...the table is just such a supporting device for queer gatherings, which is what makes the table itself a rather queer device.”11 Your usage of the pencil, makes it queer, and with that in mind, pay attention to how you will use the room.]

Walk normally, and perform spectatorship or perform the doing-ness that the space is designed for.

Enter into mimesis, and teach your body to hold a posture that you recognise in another body in the space.

Everyone in the group can gradually enter into this phase, it should not happen all at once.

“What happened in the museum was a collective action towards a painting, which then disseminated an energy that we could draw from as a group, but made it extremely problematic for anyone else that was not part of it. Pawel and Arthur were always complicit to what we were doing, but were very rigorous in remaining with their medium - drawing - whilst we were less rigorous with our approach, with how we decided to go about the use of time. Masses other than guided tourist groups in museums are a problem. Of course there is the situation of ten people gathered in front of a painting, all huddling to see it, but then there’s what we were doing - which is embodying the painting and using the room as the set, rather than the meter squared in front of the oil canvas with body postures resembling spectatorship. The physical deviation from the pedestrian norm is what offset the head of security. He completely acted on behalf of the institution in regards to what he deemed to be protocol and did not listen to Meg or Pawel or Arthur in regards to what we were doing. In fact what we were doing physically was a danger to the other visitors, as was walking out of the museum on all four or dancing. You are not allowed to dance in the museum until word comes from above that you are allowed. You are not allowed to draw with charcoal. You are not allowed make art where art is already being made. What comes to light in these moments is the social contract of the space, which sometimes is dormant or less active. Every contract has clauses, and in enriching the forms of behaviour, amplifying or subverting them, you come to understand the nuanced clauses that respond to what you have done. Which clause addresses unrecognisable art forms and ways of being togetherness as a threat?” Anonymous Participant No.5

You need to be very aware of the speed at which you engage with the space and with your peers.

Imagine that you are constantly being watched, and try to develop collective energy in a stealthy manner that does not attract too much attention. If you go from performing spectatorship to performing insanity, you will be deemed insane, and you will be kicked out. This spell will automatically come to a conclusion if you are thrown out of the space you have entered for violating any protocol that is embedded in the invisible script of the institution.

Remember, they operate with magical clauses invisible to the intuitive eye. Durkheim says that “... magical acts were individual, whereas religion was collective and constituted by ‘churches’. Magical acts, however, may also be conducted on a collective ritual plane.”12

“The energy was a bit dissipative, as we didn’t really know how to approach the hospital - and so it was easier to go inside in pairs and explore the grounds in that way. Of course as we roamed the hallways, the question of “are we allowed to be here” came up for me - and in general when I am somewhere where I have no real intent to be in, in relation to what that space is designed for. Why would I sit in a waiting room unless I need to be seen by a doctor? It kind of also felt disrespectful to make anything collective happen within the hospital. I guess we also wouldn’t know where to start. At the same time I felt like there was not much of intent to go there together, that is inside. What did make a lot of sense was what we did afterwards outside - release of sexual/ sacral energy (that we borrowed from Mark Tompkins) - vibrating one another and then letting the beast out. It felt like something so associative with the nature of the hospital, a space where a lot of bad energy can get clogged up or congested because so many people come in with problems to resolve, to diagnose, and why would we add to that inside? Rather we should do it outside, where the energy can be released into open air without being constrained within walls, and show human bodies that can support one another. There’s something very powerful in watching multiple bodies support one body that is releasing tension and energy. If we were to isolate the body of the person who was releasing, and look at them without the support system around them, it would be like watching the madman, the schizophrenic, the insane individual who should be placed in an asylum, or the hospital.

However the fact that “sane” acting bodies surround that person, encourage the behaviour and essentially amplify it makes the situation conflicting for someone watching. The exercise in a public space identifies the support of madness as something all right, something that we can deal with and not focus on its containment. However, there is the threat of its contamination. It’s a nice exercise for the legalisation of madness - or how to make it a very public event that is supported, observed, and uncensored.” Anonymous Participant No.6

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Once you have been at it for over a half-hour, and the energy has been generating, brewing, cooking; consider how you can make your actions, your movements accessible to those who at this point might be watching you. How can you create something that is transference? Can you show someone how to create a gesture, invite them to do it, to copy you? Everything can be re-appropriated, so don’t hesitate, just act. How do we know to wave back at someone, or to shake someone’s hand? How do we know to return a wink? Think of these embedded codes in relationship to whatever action you might send someone’s way. Start with simple gestures, and try to identify in your memory palace where all this is happening in the space. Try and think of directionality, of what you are facing, and try to position yourself side by side to the person you are interacting with. If there are no foreign bodies within the space, then engage with one of your peers. Remember the work of orientation. Recognition in order for misrecognition, disorientation, for new orientation. Where is intent?

“These prompts were very vital in how we approached spaces, in how we approached the public pool and the culture associated there, this culture of poses and portraiture and how people present themselves to a public when they are almost naked. It was great when we were roaming through the wooden docks and people were unsure as to what was going on. We were dressed like everyone else but we were collectively doing the same things in pairs - making portraits for each other or making portraits together, framed in whatever part of the grass or platforms we would find ourselves in. Something about repetitive actions and poses, or stopping movement from time to time, assuming positions that we would pick up in those around us, mimicking the behaviour and then continuing in our awkward ways. We moved to the pool and were all making caricatures of ourselves and of the idea of portraiture or posture, creating relationships amongst ourselves and really just frolicking. We were frolicking by the pool-side and being this weird polyamorous family that was touching each other and acting a bit childish. It was hilarious when the superintendent was clapping at the group in the pool, telling them to be quiet.. as if loud noise won’t be tolerated but I guess we’ll have to tolerate your disturbing behaviour. I remember seeing the faces of all the mothers as they were dressing their children, eyeing us and trying to make sense of what was going on or the old couple sitting and watching Elena and me. They seemed to be enjoying themselves, or enjoying watching us enjoying ourselves. The poolside is a fun palace - we can act like this, yet still we strayed from the norm, because obviously there is an inscribed idea as to how we must hold our bodies, position ourselves in relationship to others and how to behave in a container of water over a period of time.” Anonymous Participant No.7 The musician will play with you, feed you inspiration and also prompt you with tempo, rhythm, melody. Take cues and create cues where you feel you need them. Remember that you are in constant conversation with everyone in the space, even though you may not be verbally engaging with them. Take your situation outside, into a space that does not have walls to confine it. At this stage what binds you is the relationship with everyone else in the room. Notice when you feel you have reached a climax, when you have hit boredom, when you think you have exhausted your recently invented purpose in that space.

“There was definitely a consistent theme throughout the five days; people, spectators, the passer-by not knowing how to frame us, how to contextualise, questioning where we have come from, what we were doing, why we were doing it, what it was doing to the environment. We were definitely queering the environment, making it other, taking familiar places and making their functionality questionable by superimposing our own social dynamic and logic, based on energy and trust that was developed in the studio. How important is it that we had time in the studio beforehand? As opposed to just meeting in all these places and immediately staging work. Klaus was super important to have, he almost became a form of guardian, the music protecting us, or at the same time justifying our presence. How much did he soften the discrepancy between our intent and that of our surroundings? When one sees a collective-body of movement, several bodies in unison, or anything that could be placed on a stage, accompanied or in conversation with music, it is somewhat validated, and because we have separated music from the social context, it has become a form of entertainment that you experience on your mp3 player, at the club, or the concert hall. He was also a distraction to some extent, buying us time to do what we were doing, before the one realised that the music is inextricably linked to what is going on, and is also an accomplice to the breaking of the social contract. René Girard says that ritual is nothing more than the regular exercise of “good violence”. Good violence is superficial violence; it keeps the bad violence at bay. Were we making good violence or bad violence?” Anonymous Participant No. 8

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Once you have established a sequence that can be repeated, do it in various spaces over the span of five-days. Don’t worry too much about the meaning of what you are doing. Focus on where bodies aggregate, and focus on how to create moments of togetherness or of communitas, a gathering that does not abide by any social convention or hierarchy. You are attempting to create a liminal space, the way this text is pieced together from accounts and memories of different locations. The narrative you construct retrospectively is one that is situated neither here nor there, because the hospital blurs with the church, and the museum blurs with the swimming pool. You must become very consistent with your approach to how you cast the spell each time, you must be wary of how you enter and how you exit. Even though you are not in a theatre, there is still a stage, and even though you are performing yourself, you are still attracting attention. This is the spell that allows a travelling group to create the notion of liminal space and non-pedestrian togetherness. One of the features you employ is undoubtedly performance, “which implies self-conscious actions in public spaces”.13 What is also important to acknowledge in this last instance, is “not that rituals express social values but rather that they are instrumental in making them, bringing them about.”14 Has this spell had any effect to being this instrumental? How do you measure it? Is it measurable? Is the ability to measure the outcome of spell-casting an indicator of your instrumentality’s affectivity or success?

[This page was left unintentionally blank.]

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One. Find a group of people to enter into spaces with together, ideally fifteen.

Two. Find a musician with a mobile instrument, who will join the group.

Three.

Enter into a room within an institutional space that caters for large groups, serving a public or cultural service to the general populace.

Four.

Observe postures and behaviors of who is already in the space, begin to perform them.

Five.

Begin to deviate from performing what is already existing in the room, to performing relationships amongst yourselves, introduce gestures and portraiture.

Six. Upon developing a fictionalized socio-metrics of the space, try and transfer your behaviour onto the individuals you were first mimicking.

Start simple.

Seven.

Negotiate when and where you have reached a climax, after which find a way to wind down the energy, in unison with the musician.

Eight.

If you haven’t been kicked out of the place by now, find a graceful and pedestrian manner to leave.

Nine.

Repeat this in various locations, never the same one.

Target institutional spaces.

Corrupt social contracts and invisible scores.

*To consider.

A The musician needs to be paid for his labour.

B The other bodies you might want to invite need a schedule.

C You may be kicked out of your selected places, and drawing utensils gathered.

D Health & Safety...

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Notes 1Suggestions to be placed in the blank space: dilapidated, worn out, abandoned, secluded.

2 Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke UP, 2006.

Print. 7 3 Ibid. 11 4 Ibid. 39 5 Another iteration of dwelling to be placed in blank space: eg. dwelling with faceting, the machinic, the witch, the body.

6 Stewart, Pamela J. Ritual: Key Concepts in Religion. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Print. 124 7 Ibid. 105 8 Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke UP, 2006.

Print. 6 9 Scott, David. Gilbert Simondon’s Psychic and Collective Individuation: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2014. Print. 17 10 Scott, David. Gilbert Simondon’s Psychic and Collective Individuation: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2014. Print.

37 11 Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke UP, 2006.

Print. 179 12 Stewart, Pamela J. Ritual: Key Concepts in Religion. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Print. 29 13 Ibid. 9 14 Ibid. 126

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PART 4

Radical Togetherness A Spell for...

Facilitated by Stefan Jovanović, in participating collaboration with the Architectural Association, Jen Rosenblit, Alice Heyward, Roni Katz, Liam Byrne, Pete Dong, Patricia de Souza Leão Müller, Andreas Stylianou, Joyce Chen, Cécile Tonizzo, Lynda Rahal, Katharina Hölzl, Nassia Fourtouni, AA L.a.W.u.N. team, Darcy Wallace, Emma Zangs, Eva Recacha, Sadler’s Wells Theatre (Eva Martinez, Richard Cross & Sarah Lacombe), Jonathan Burrows, Tamara Rasoul, Ziyad Mourad, Chuck Wang, Marion Delaporte, Leticia Dadalto, Daria Moussavi, Jack Hardy, & Oliver Savorani.

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One. Start the day with a written phrase, and a drawing of those words, done by another artist.

You will work this.

Two. Minimum 90-minute physical warm-up in a studio of your choice, with minimum 10 human participants.

Three.

Enter into a different nonspace with entire group, considering tenderness as a strategy for beginnings.

Four.

Collaborate with live-musician, preferably amplified string instrument connected to digital soundscape.

Five.

Facilitate the situation through story-telling, use voice to narrate situations that involve role-play, begin to generate (aesthetic) situations.

Six. Second strategy involves considering misrecognition.

Seven.

Allow for swapping and development of costume, painting & body/face-paint simultaneously, engaging other craftsmen and craftswomen.

Eight.

There may be a climax, followed by boredom.

Decide whether considered chaos/wreckage can be attained.

Collective work and collision of collective creativity.

The laundry needs to get done but make space for the madman.

Nine.

Decide whether the ending involves a resolution, ie ordering of the chaos generated, or needs to be cleaned, re-ordered.

Focus on leaving the space re-orientated.

Ten. End and discuss radical togetherness and the making of mini-societies.

*To consider.

A Participants need to be paid for their labour.

B The other bodies you might want to invite into the space may need to pay a ticketed fee.

C You may be kicked out of your selected places, and drawing utensils, instruments gathered.

D Liaise with necessary institutions to gain access to space, PA system, AV equipment, and publicity.

E Health & Safety...

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A note to the reader.

The music may have ended by now.

Was it an abrupt ending?

Will you play it again?

Will you allow for the memory of it to echo as you engage in this last spell?

There are decisions to be made.

The journey through these socially constructed situations indeed lasts longer than an hour and three minutes.

I would like to transition from the two Viennese case-study spells into a spell of my own, the fruit of five-days of labour and research, in collaboration with dancers, architecture students, painters, a musician, and institutional support.

This is called a Spell for Radical Togetherness, and it focuses on archetypal-society-making performances in nonspaces, or liminal spaces, intermission spaces, in-between sandwiched floors, or the striated space.1 As one may notice, as we approach the end of this spell-casting journey, we become less interested in the use of the word ritual, as we move into description and synthesis of what has occurred. This spell functions on the basis of process-orientated collective creation.

Our ethos remains that the laundry needs to get done, but also acknowledges that, the witch needs to get fed.

We can maintain eighty percent of our energy as a pragmatic labour-driven one, but at least twenty percent needs to be safeguarded for the expression of madness. Once we have recognised this, we can move towards mis-recognising it, and play with the borderlines of what is happening.

Hence we can sanely move into a scenario where madness may predominate the score and structure may become highly questionable.

You have already read the provisional spell, in the preceding page, and in the pages to follow; you will come across the application of these words in day-to-day scenarios. What will be asked of you is the application of some of these pages in your immediate surrounding, the table you sit orientated towards for example.

The black text will serve as the voice recounting the experiences, post-factum. The italic text will serve as the narrator or storyteller, the facilitator who attempts to make sense of a past experience. What remains is a material culture; drawings, paintings, film, photographs and a sound-track, that may have begun to play for a second time now. Or perhaps you may begin to play it backwards. You may call these the products, if you will, but please understand that the crux of the spell’s power lies in the live-action that cannot be reproduced.

What this practice-led-half of the thesis concludes with, is the conditions necessary to create these situations, and a proposal for the types of spaces where they can happen.

This is a spell for generating modes of radical togetherness, constructed and deconstructed archetypical sociability and performance, aestheticized role-playing and mis-recognition of the built environment as a means to formulate new socio-metric relations.

Please do take this literally, The storyteller.

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This sticker peels off.

Will you be my cave?

Doodle 1

Is there a space within your reach that is a cave?

Get up and find it.

Let the doodle dwell there for a while.

Monday, October 31st, 2016

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Application No.1

Monday, October 31st, 2016

Participants: Eva Recacha, Darcy Wallace, Liam Byrne, Alice Heyward, Katharina Hölzl, Marion Delaporte, Leticia Dadalto, Daria Moussavi, Chuck Wang, and Jack Hardy. We were joined in the afternoon by Cécile Tonizzo and Oliver Savorani (on camera).

“Ritual’s role in all human cultures is to relieve and resolve anxiety, by turning people outward in shared, symbolic acts; modern society has weakened those ritual ties. Secular rituals, particularly rituals whose point is cooperation itself, have proved too feeble to provide that support.”2

We spent the morning at the Architectural Association (from here on abbreviated as AA), as everyone gradually arrived, and with the nature of infamous AA-timekeeping, we started half an hour late. We began with the following score: projected on to a white wall.

NON-VERBAL MORNING NON-SPOKEN MORNING

It was alternating with a drawing that Patricia de Souza Leão Müller made, a naked body hiding inside a shell-cum-cave (shown on previous page).

The prompt for today was: Can you be my cave?

The group has already assembled by now, the find themselves in a studio-space, a safe environment where they can begin to get to know one another. A phrase has already been set for them; imagination is active from the beginning, and “imagination is required to make sense of potent tools, or all-purpose tools, full of untapped and perhaps dangerous possibilities.”3

Introductions can therefore be skipped, and they enter straight into a movement score. They use the space without verbally coming to terms with what they are doing, why or how. Language is important to be present at the beginning, not spoken, but visualised. The text on the screen acts as a prompt. Consider this the warm-up section of the spell.

We began with a nonverbal open-score, arranging the Rear Second Presentation Room and the objects we found within; chairs, lecterns, microphone stands, microphones, left-over party blue party balloons, a block of timber, and clothes.

Once everyone saw the nonverbal and non-spoken words, black bold Arial text on a white cold, silence slowly spread. Soon to follow was the passing of a sheet of paper that read, “You can be my cave”, with an arrow pointing to the right perhaps it was meant to be passed to the person sitting to your right?

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Image 10 You can be my cave.

Written by Stefan Jovanovic.

October, 31st 2016 London

This “durational” score lasted for about an hour. Liam Byrne played in different moments, mixing sound from the Viol a Gamba with digital recordings.

There were canisters of acrylic paint sitting by one of the walls, eventually opened, and the architecture students began playing with the paint, with their hands, on each other’s faces, immediately marking one another and being playful.

Irony. The architecture students had paint on their faces by the end of the session. All others/dancers did not.

(Instruction) Turn to someone sitting next to you and discuss what arose.

Mimicry. Free-reigning re-appropriation. Mimesis. Adopted behaviour. How do you create behaviour?

Durational work.

Coffee break and extended conversation plus initial introductions.

We begin a second score, introductions through gestures involving only hands, arms and head. We move into mobile gestures, eventually incorporating spine, legs, verticality, rotation and displacement. Gestures as scores for one another, as method of communication. Gestures as nonverbal communication. Gestures outside of the room, but not leaving the room. We move towards making oneself invisible. We move towards proximity. We arrive to a central node in the room, by connecting with gaze and fixed gesture. We enter into tender moments of caressing and focusing on the micro. We find a way to end.

The group begins exploring moments of simultaneity of creative processes occurring, music playing, paint on fingers, sculpture building, beginning to access that notion of boredom that arises from durational mis-purposing and questioning.... why are we doing this?

Lunch-break.

We then embarked towards the first site of intervention, the Infinite Mix exhibition. Cécile, who had just arrived from Paris had got there before us, informing that it was closed. Of course, it’s Monday. As we walk and talk, we decide where to go. A faint memory of Alice asking “Have you seen the Bedwyr Williams exhibition?” That’s where we end up. Oliver joins us to film the situation. Liam has had to leave for the afternoon.

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The exhibition has a printed text at the beginning:

“Navigate a succession of surreal and theatrically staged scenes as you embark on a journey conjured by one of the contemporary art world’s most exciting and innovative artists. From a pair of singing running shoes to a depressed hypnotist and a talking goat, Bedwyr’s curious and often subversive internal dialogue plays out along the Curve’s space in this fantastical installation. Physical and metaphorical twists and turns will guide you through the gallery and ultimately inspire you to give your own performance, one that will fill the cavernous gorge of the gulch for those following in your footsteps.”4

The usher at the entrance tells us that we are allowed to photograph and film (but no longer than 15 seconds), and there is a newly installed contactless payment device in case we wanted to leave a contribution, given that the exhibition is free of charge.

We slowly progress through the rooms; there are drums to be played, a sandy dune with a song emanating from a lonely sneaker, an office-room with an instructional video from a depressed hypnotist guiding the audience into imagining themselves as dough expanding in an oven. We try to follow some of the instructions, as we melt from the seats down onto the floor. We gradually progress into the last-room, the racecourse, white lines on a red floor, a goat on a ledge, Maneki-nekos waving from large suspended Billy shelves. There is also a microphone that can be used.

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Image 11 Katharina Hölzl & Stefan Jovanovic.

Film-still taken by Oliver Savorani.

Curve Gallery, Barbican, London October 31st, 2016

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We decide to try out Marten Spangberg’s symmetry dance on the race-tracks - creating a composition to break the prescribed linearity of how one is meant to walk on the tracks. The usher in the room watches us, smiling every now and again, and letting us carry on. After about fifteen minutes, a couple walks into the room and stops to watch us. At this point the usher rushes forth and says, “I’m sorry but you can’t be doing that, it’s fine up until now, but if there are people watching and mistaking what you are doing as part of the artist’s work, then it’s not alright.”

Censorship. We stop. We discuss and reflect.

We approach the usher, Simon, and ask him...

“Has the artist left you some protocol guidelines or instructions as to what kind of audience “performativity” to allow/censor/interrupt…?”

“No. The artists usually don’t think that far.”

“How then, did you decide to stop us?

On what basis do you make your judgements?”

“Common sense! I mean, it’s complicated, it’s politics...

You were clearly performing a piece, which is not by the artist

of the exhibition, and for other audience members to think that it is... well, it’s wrong.”

“Have you had any professional drummers coming in to play the drums?”

“No.” “And any professional singers using the microphone?

“No.” “...but when Eddie Peake had his performance on in the Curve, it was with real professional performers, and they came to this space to perform!”

“So does anybody actually perform in this exhibition?”

“Not really…

and the performance envisioned is in fact quite prescribed.”

Cécile says that the microphone is quite low when she tried to speak, and that when Stefan spoke, it was audible, and why is that? Are there some technical issues or does Stefan just have a louder voice?

The usher misunderstood that Stefan was able to perform and that Cécile hadn’t because she was a woman. He replies:

“Misogyny...you’re not the first one to bring this up,

we have had seven consecutive male artists displaying work here, I will report this to the curator!”.

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Beginnings can be awkward, and it can take time for a sense of group to form. In order to progress beyond point no.3 in the spell, trust needs to be created between group members, between the artists, between the facilitator and everyone else. In order to move into any form of togetherness, the group needs shared time under their belt. Experiencing some form of resistance, censorship or rejection at the beginning of casting the spell, can have an affirmative effect in the long-run, and can generate a sense of purpose for the coming together of these individuals. Intervention and disruption are not of interest, unless they are an active strategy that will allow for trust building to occur amongst the participants.

Image 12 Jack Hardy & Stefan Jovanovic.

Film-still taken by Oliver Savorani.

Curve Gallery, Barbican, London October 31st, 2016

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This sticker peels off.

[This is the drawing, by another artist, in response to this day’s phrase.]

Doodle 2

The witch is dwelling.

[This is the phrase that is worked on/with this day.]

Where would you place the witch to dwell?

Tuesday, November 1st, 2016

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Application No.2

Tuesday, November 1st, 2016

Participants: Eva Recacha, Liam Byrne, Emma Zangs, Alice Heyward, Katharina Hölzl, Leticia Dadalto, Daria Moussavi, Jack Hardy, Nassia Fourtouni, Pete Dong (on painting), Jen Rosenblit, Cécile Tonizzo, Lynda Rahal, and Andreas Stylianou (on camera)

Image 13 The witch is dwelling.

Written by Stefan Jovanovic.

November 1st, 2016 London

It took an hour for everyone to arrive, and with a few individuals feeling ill we decided to commence with a very slow morning and warm-up. For the hour to follow, we warmed each other’s spines up, ghosting through the touch of two fingers, a palm, an echo of a breath and release of any sound withheld within the spine.

The space dark, the blinds down. One table-lamp on, and a flickering projector.

Warm-ups are crucial to the building of the trust we identified as a key ingredient on Day 1. Physical contact and promotion of tenderness as a strategy is effective in beginning collective labour. Before the musician begins to play, the storyteller narrates, and the dancers move, tender scores can be used as entry-points into the situation.

Coffee break.

We slowly enter into an authentic movement score, but we try not to use the word authentic. Stefan describes it as moving from impulse with your eyes closed whilst maintaining a relationship with another person in the room. After one round, the pair swaps clothes. Liam begins to play music, mixing a continuous digital rhythm with the Viol da Gamba. Multiple layers colliding into a situation that begins to escape didactic definition.

After another iteration, more clothes are swapped, along with roles. One person moves with their eyes closed. The other takes care that they don’t bump into things left and right. Ten minutes. They swap roles, and they swap another article of clothing.

Pete runs from one wall to another, painting attentively as he observes the situation. He has A3 sheets of paper stuck all around the room on the walls, and a large ten-meter wide roll of paper spread across the carpet of the room. His fingers coloured with acrylic as he dabs paint in one corner, rushing to another corner to catch a moment happening elsewhere.

Eventually costume enters into the scene, the clothing that has been lying around: heels, kimonos, lace gloves, a corset, a hat, and robes. The task of spectator/holder and mover continues to swap, until the patterns between the pairs begin to de-synchronise and the overall atmosphere assumes a direction of its own with multiple timings and orientations. Augmented role-playing through costume begins. “Indeed, we can begin here to rethink how groups are formed out of shared direction. To put this in simple terms, a “we” emerges as an effect of a shared direction towards an object.”5 The we that emerges from the situation resides in the concept of the figure of the witch, who is dwelling somewhere in the room. Whilst some individuals maintain their eyes closed, they are all orientated towards this one concept, allowing it to enter their bodies, whilst the bodies themselves, assume to face multiple directions within the space.

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Andreas follows the entire situation with the camera, from the large perspectival picture to the small detail. There is urgency in his and Pete’s presence, in their practice, in their contribution of video and paint. There are four practices aesthetically happening in the space, and maybe more. Intents are running parallel but we are all at work, and the phrase of the day needs to be worked. We use the idea of the ‘witch is dwelling’ as a premise for encountering the room we find ourselves within. Katharina believes to have swallowed her tampon whilst doing the authentic movement.

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The group has moved towards instruction point no.5 - following story telling as a method to engage with collective creativity. It is necessary to role-play through costumes, as these props offer a different sense of inhabitation of space to the individual and the pairs. Each person begins to imagine him or herself as a character wearing something, within a soundscape and a lecture hall, which is no longer, a lecture hall, but a space harbouring a phrase, which that day was: the witch is dwelling. They begin to scratch the surface of the next score, which is mis-recognition.

-Lunch Break...and perhaps for you as well ?

We assemble to prepare for Jen’s lecture at 5pm. Guests begin to arrive.

Jen has stripped down to her trousers and bra, with a microphone clipped to the side and her shirt entangled in her hair. She sits on a pink chair on a red table at the front of the lecture hall, facing the left side of the room. There are about 40 chairs now arranged in the space, facing the front. The witch is projected onto the screen; clothes are hanging again, where they had been in the morning. How did they get back there? It feels that the room reset itself, but did it? It seems that things had been furnished, where “the word ‘furnish’ is related to the word ‘perform’ and thus relates to the very question of how things appear.”6

Jen begins to speak, and by the time we reach the 4th ingredient of her lecture, a level of action disseminates in the room, chairs begin to be moved, a microphone and camera are passed around, relationships are struck, and structures begin shifting. By the time Jen concludes reading her written piece, Liam has already introduced a couple of layers of sound into the space.

Jen begins to transition into a more instructional mode of locating “her”. We need to collectively locate “her” and we can begin by mis-recognising the objects around us and changing our relationship/approach to them. The chair is not a chair, and the coat is not a coat. We move into three focal points of attention, we move into group attention. The sound has multiplied in layers, and we begin to access that plural vocality and orientation that the space gained in the afternoon session. We focus on building one thing collectively. We construct, and the minute we recognise the structure, we deconstruct. We clean the room and tidy. “No! Lynda does not like tidiness.” We put everything back, we make a mess again. There is short period where there is a questioning of production or productivity of the practice in the space, and how that productivity is linked to deviance, “where what deviates does not take us off line but creates instead ‘small differences’ that approximate the qualities that are assumed to pass along the line.”7

Eventually the energy subsides and the L.a.W.u.N. members walk in with outfits painted by Pete, setting up a curved dining table for a feast beginning in the morning, boiled eggs to be served at 10am.

Why do we intervene? For who? At what cost? What is at stake?

Any form of disruption is to some extent associated with activism.

Can you locate the witch?

Is the witch inhabiting the architecture around us, which inhabits us?

What the group arrives to at this point, is a sense of togetherness after two days of practicing scores of tenderness, and now mis-recognition. Jen joins as a facilitator in the space, and introduces the notion of instruction through narration. Costume, paint and props become more active agents within the room. There was no displacement of studio to non-space on Day 2, but rather there was a mis-recognising of studio into nonspace. The preparation, the performance, and the aftermath all happen in the same space. They leave a trace of blue paint on the carpet.

Questions prompt for actions, and what emerges is both intuition and emotion as driving forces for collectivity, or rather what we begin to encounter is “society creating itself through communication in a charged emotional context of collectivity.”8 067

Image 13 Photograph by Pete Dong.

Architectural Association Lecture Hall, London November 1st, 2016

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Image 14 Jack Hardy and Emma Zangs. Photograph by Pete Dong.

Architectural Association Lecture Hall, London November 1st, 2016

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Image 15 Daria Moussavi, Jack Hardy, Eva Recacha, Andreas Stylianou, Lynda Rahal, Katharina Hรถlzl and Alice Heyward. Photograph by Pete Dong.

Architectural Association Lecture Hall, London November 1st, 2016

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Image 16 Stefan Jovanovic.

Photograph by Pete Dong.

Architectural Association Lecture Hall, London November 1st, 2016

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Image 17 Photograph by Pete Dong.

Architectural Association Lecture Hall, London November 1st, 2016

This sticker peels off.

Doodle 3

Our medium is tenderness.

Can the nose and ear climb your ladder?

Wednesday, November 2nd, 2016

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Application No.3

Wednesday, November 2nd, 2016

Participants: Eva Recacha, Alice Heyward, Katharina Hölzl, Leticia Dadalto, Daria Moussavi, Roni Katz, Ziyad Mourad, Tamara Rasoul, Chuck Wang, Siobhán Ní Dhuinnín, Jack Hardy, Nassia Fourtouni, Pete Dong (on painting), Cécile Tonizzo, Lynda Rahal, and Joyce Chen (on camera)

Today, our medium is tenderness.

We start with the sun’s rays at Somerset house, four newcomers to the group. There is a need to discuss what’s happened in the previous two days. We did say that first we would act and then we would enter into discourse, but that discourse has been delayed, and now it is urgent.

Siobhán, who has joined us just for the day, shares some of her scores that she does in her hometown in Wales, walking across an urban trajectory no matter what is in the way, a wall, a chair, another human being.

We needed a break from the lecture hall in the AA. The witch had been mis-recognised, constructed and deconstructed, summoned into deviance and put to bed. She needed time for herself, and we needed to let her be. There was a subtle need to see the Infinite Mix exhibition at The Store at 180 Strand. We missed it on the first day, and the group felt a gallery space would be appropriate to go back to, at the cost of missing the Boiled and Fried Egg sessions of the Fiefdom Fandango Feast at the school.

A couple of hours spent roaming around from one video installation to another. Massage the History by Cameron Jamie and Nightlife by Cyprien Gaillard left an impression, but we ended up locating ourselves in Ugo Rondinone’s video installation, THANX 4 NOTHING, featuring a monologue by John Giorno, synchronised on multiple screens. One of the large screens was not working.

There were about twenty bodies in the room.

We enter with a fixed score: find a space, and enter with a phrase. Our medium is tenderness. We will continue to mis-recognise others in the space. Make yourself comfortable, and sleep for twelve minutes. (Lynda has set an alarm). Once the alarm goes off, gravitate towards another member of the group and begin to offer tenderness to one another, massaging, touching, Reiki, attention to bodily detail, or caressing of any pain.

The pairs engage in subtle gestures of care and stroking. The pairs draw very little attention from other audience members.

Image 18 Ugo Rondinone, THANX 4 NOTHING, 2015 © Ugo Rondinone. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Eva Presenhuber and Gladstone Gallery, New York/Brussels

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Another way to understand these different applications is that the full score of the spell is not practiced in its entirety every day. Rather, the group selects which parts of the score to test in different places.

What one begins to see is that perhaps the spaces chosen cannot quite accommodate the full spectrum of the spell. Tender gestures seem to be the least invasive and potentially mis-leading for the gallery space.

Eventually a massage train begins to form on the carpet, and we all gravitate towards it. There are six people sitting cross-legged behind one another, all facing one of the many John Giornos in the room, offering a massage, and hoping to receive one. We are so gentle and react to the topic of the voice we listen to- he is thankful for nothing, yet we are thankful for these small gestures. A new word has entered the score.

Thankfulness.

I llness and absence slowly creep into our score on this day. Alice is in bed. Liam must be with us in spirit as he prepares for his solo tomorrow evening. Laura is also not well. Do things collapse on the third day? Yet, it is not everyone’s third day.

We find a way to end and begin to walk to the Architectural Association.

What becomes evident at this point, is the problematic that can arise in group-work when the group members are not consistent day-to-day. New people join the group on a daily basis, others leave, and there is a drop-in and dropout approach. We do embrace the empty chair score; that is that every time someone joins the conversation, a chair is added for the next potential person to join. Likewise, anyone can leave the conversation at any moment. However this also has the effect to curtail the build-up of trust amongst group members, as it takes time for everyone to acquaint themselves with the bodies that are present. Participants may lose trust in their facilitator if he or she continues to accept newcomers into a group-building dynamic that involves vulnerability and exposure. This day informs that consistency in presence cannot be enforced but is nonetheless vital for the evolution of collective creativity and inclination towards collaboration.

We enter the AA in time for the session of Fried eggs. A very tense discussion is on going - the word computer has been forbidden, the witch has been suffocated, or she has escaped, perhaps she is hiding, but she is nowhere to be found. There is sadness and disinterest to engage with what is happening, what some members of the group begin to describe as an inevitable generational gap and students being encouraged about their own empowerment in the least empowering of modalities: a preaching lecture.

Food is of the essence.

“Either I’m going to jump on the table, and change this oppressive air, or I will let it dissolve and come back for the last session.”

Liza Fior arrives with her falsified AA diplomas. Everyone takes a seat at the table. She speaks briefly about the notion of permission and how thankful she is to David Greene for having let her teach and practice architecture.

We had created a plan for the afternoon, and it had dissolved quickly. Diagonal authentic movement across the dining table was not going to seem like something worthy of our time, and Stefan questioned for who would the group be doing it?

“If you see people moving in weird ways around the room, don’t worry, it’s just the dancers.”

Hearing that put us off from encouraging any form of movement that would have transformed our otherness into a form of entertainment for guests at a dinner party. The group is not interested in that.

Realising that there is a need for a continuous readiness for adaptation, change and accommodation.

Alice and Nassia crawl under the table - unplugging different cables as they go.

Don’t blame them, they were just doing authentic movement, so they didn’t see what they were treading across!

They get told off, they were naughty.

“Why can’t you just stick to the plan?!”

What plan? There is no plan in this scenario. The plan does not justify the behaviour. Learn to adapt.

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Liza prompts us to speak to the person sitting in front and ask what they would like architecture to be?

As she leaves, Stefan begins to instruct a staring score.

Look at the person sitting in front of you, straight into their eyes, in silence, for two timed minutes.

Giggles and laughs, a few meaningful stares. We repeat once more.

This time ask the person across the table the question, “Who am I?” Your partner has two minutes to respond and tell you who you are. Now get up, shift one seat to your left, and do it again. Giving and receiving, who am I, who am I?!

The spell can be interrupted from time to time by events such as this one, when the group expands into a wider audience, now comprising roughly forty to fifty people. Again we turn to vulnerability as a score in a safe environment, a lecture hall. The room has been re-purposed again to accommodate a dining feast and a different activity. We gravitate towards the table to eat, but we also gravitate towards the table to speak and to stare. The ethos of today’s application is that there is more than one thing at a time. It is good for the group to experience a wider interactivity on the third day, expand the social framework in order to absorb new thoughts and catharsis, to then bring back to the studio on the following day. The table becomes the object of orientation, and it very much becomes that towards which everyone is orientated, very quickly constructing a notion of we in relation to the table. Illocutionary strategies invoke the guests to shuffle and move around the table, but “what happens when the table dances?”9

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The scrambled eggs have disappeared and the Meringue is arriving.

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I have no idea what situation we walked into, I can only gauge that it was an uncomfortable one, and that the discussion was centralised, the corners of the room were not being used, and tension was leading to no windows or no doors, and all cables were intact. Ours was perhaps an intervention, or perhaps it what was direly needed, but it allowed for twenty multiple conversations to be happening at once, strangers meeting, and telling one another a piece of information, words and stares to learn from, a form of togethering with a dining table in-between and not forgetting that we can offer something with the smallest gesture, we can be silly and we can, in that way, be present.

Multiple groups overlap, like the layers of Liam’s tracks. Each conversation is a score. We create a more complex score in unison. Intents run parallel once again, and twenty conversations can fit in the room. The air has changed. Otherness is not so other anymore. There is laughter and the taste of wine has been mis-recognised to be recognised once again.

I think the witch has heard us.

She is returning, and she’s bringing some tender buttons back with her.

What becomes very evident on day three is the reliance on music and rhythm. Liam’s contribution up until this moment was pivotal in creating a certain type of ambience, of mood, that could allow for different behaviours to develop. As was seen in the spells in Vienna, like with the music of Klaus and Miguel, sound is another material for the spell casting, and without it, we enter into situations without a metre. The challenge for the musician is to strike a balance between how much s/he instructs the other bodies in the space into action, and how much s/he is affected by what s/he sees. This is the same challenge for the other bodies and practices in the room. Without an instrument, which is another character in our score, the group needs to create it’s own rhythm, it’s own repetitions, so two-minute timed conversations and swapping of chairs in between begins to generate this quite fast. In order to begin misrecognising the situation we must recognise the space through repetition of movement, repetition of gestures and of sounds.

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Images 19 & 20 Film Stills by Joyce Chen.

November 2nd, 2016.

Architectural Association, London.

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The museum only collects dead artists [or imagine a rave inside your head.]

Show me the torso and the snake behind the glass in your kitchen.

Thursday, November 3rd, 2016

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Doodle 4

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Application No.4

Thursday, November 3rd, 2016

Participants: Alice Heyward, Katharina Hölzl, Leticia Dadalto, Roni Katz, Ziyad Mourad, Tamara Rasoul, Chuck Wang, Jack Hardy, Nassia Fourtouni, Cécile Tonizzo, Lynda Rahal, and Roni Katz.

We decided to take the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern as our studio for the day. Returning to the score of the second day, that the same space is used for the warm-up, the climax, and the aftermath. We began with observations of everything our eyes witnessed in Philippe Parreno’s installation (a Hyundai commission), called ANYWHEN. The dramaturgy was done by Tino Sehgal and Isabel Lewis.

Screens, lights, speakers, objects, whose movement was controlled by a scientific lab in the corner, helium fish travelling nonsensically around the space, children activating any potentiality, whilst the rest of the audience sinks into the carpets, sleeping, chatting, lazying around or checking their phones. The predominant bodily score for the public seems to be a horizontal one.

We begin again with our twelve-minute sleeping score.

Oh, by the way, our phrase for the day was that the museum only collects dead artists.

We also decided to add a postscript today, which is, to imagine a rave inside your head.

The group begins with the score of mimicry, adopting postures and gestures that they observe in the bodies already in the space. What follows is the score of tenderness, and then eventually a move into mis-recognising one another through the tender touch. Little pockets of odd behaviours begin to appear, but too subtle to attract considerate attention.

Everyone made themselves comfortable on a spot on the carpet, set an alarm clock, relaxed, or went to sleep and then awoke. From solitude we moved into groups of two or three and started scores of intimacy, touch, caresses and tenderness. From there we moved into a long durational massage train, lasting about forty minutes.

We were perpendicular to the main screen, onto which a movie was projected. A little girl joins us, and begins to massage Jack.

The train begins to move; we snake towards the back and begin to move towards the end of the carpet, on our bums. We indulge in the silliness, we indulge in the playfulness, and we simply indulge in the situation we have created.

The security guard is too busy making sure that the helium fish stays up in the air.

A space that at the moment is not massively Instagram-friendly suddenly becomes so, as people take phones out to take selfies with the “massage-train in the background”. Our train gradually dissolves as an octopus appears on the screen behind us.

The act of giving a massage is a recognisable code for the body, and hence presents no imminent threat or danger. When this type of score is done with duration, the space and those in the space become accustomed to what is “allowed” to co-exist in the space. This score is not necessarily executed to create audience participation, despite it being very welcome, it is designed to introduce the notion of multiple vocalities in a coded room, which has a commissioned artwork on display. The design of how the bodies move and engage in the space becomes the first step towards mis-recognising orientation within the space, creating new directionalities, subversively blurring the “towards” of one’s attention. If done non-violently, the group creates a framework from which to involve their energy, in order to move towards less evident and more experimental rituals of engagement with the space.

The lunch table is always a great space for discussion. The group did not feel the installation did anything in relation to sociality, encouraging or structuring it, it only promulgated a passiveness which was associated with a very tranquil ambience and yet again, encouraging a prescribed behaviour, laying on the carpet when the screens are up or sitting and watching the main screen with your torso facing the front.

Exit.

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The installation made Katharina feel even more human, she felt that all the technology simply reminded her that she was merely a human-being in a big space, and that this technological superstructure was above her, all you could do, is look up towards it. We decide that what is needed is trance, and to enter into it. We develop a score that would involve us going back into the Turbine Hall, spending an hour inside, on and off of the main carpet, using headphones or internal rhythms to enter into trance. We would be distributed throughout the space and would use one another as an energetic support system to activate the space for the helium fish and for ourselves.

We begin to define our ritual practice as something to “first be separated analytically from its sociocultural surrounding context, and then should be reinserted back into its context.�10 Roni stood for a good while, with her arms out, entering and exiting rhythm. She was a madwoman, but not mad enough to be thrown out nor helped by anyone around her.

CĂŠcile committed to embroidery today, through her own moving trance.

Katharina decided to film.

The screen is down again and playing the movie.

Lynda and Stefan dance behind the screen, all you can see is their feet moving across the length of the carpet.

We come to an end.

In creating their own rhythms, they could begin to understand the rhythm of the installation, and whilst they did not create relations to the other humans in the space, at least not directly, they created a relation to the artwork. This session was neither about disruption nor about interruption, but coexistence and understanding. They were raving, but they were also at work, and their practices fit in the room. The witch smiles, and has made friends with the octopus and the floating fish.

There was an exchange of security guards, and the helium fish has been abandoned in a dark corner now.

You must now become the fish.

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Image 21 Alice Hewyard, Jack Hardy and Stefan Jovanovic.

Photograph by Barry Dillon.

Tate Modern Turbine Hall, London November 3rd, 2016

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Image 22 CĂŠcile Tonizzo.

Photograph by Barry Dillon.

Tate Modern Turbine Hall, London November 3rd, 2016

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Image 23 Barry Dillon, drawn by CĂŠcile Tonizzo.

Photograph by Barry Dillon.

Tate Modern Turbine Hall, London November 3rd, 2016

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Image 24 Photograph by Alice Heyward.

Tate Modern Turbine Hall, London November 3rd, 2016

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Image 25 Film Still by Katharina Hรถlzl.

Tate Modern Turbine Hall, London November 3rd, 2016

Image 26 Roni Katz.

Film Still by Katharina Hรถlzl.

Tate Modern Turbine Hall, London November 3rd, 2016

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This sticker peels off.

Let the little fool inside free.

Take me to where the little fool can play...

Friday, November 4th, 2016

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Doodle 5

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Application No.5

Friday, November 4th, 2016

Participants: Liam Byrne, Alice Heyward, Katharina Hölzl, Leticia Dadalto, Roni Katz, Jack Hardy, Nassia Fourtouni, Cécile Tonizzo, Lynda Rahal, Darcy Wallace and Roni Katz.

A moment of suspension in the morning as we await confirmation of where the group would meet for a last session with Liam.

We found ourselves in this in-between space, the first and second circle bar areas at the Front of House of Sadler’s Wells Theatre.

We were between floors. It was not a room, it was not this, nor that, a space made for intermissions, and there were no corners.

We began with a warm up in pairs. This is custom by now. Transferring weight lead to laughter, propping the body you care for to a standing position. There were limitations in strength, as not everyone was able to lift their partner from horizontal to standing.

Push and pull, a little bit of tension, and then release. Hold your partner by their waist. They will try to escape from you, but you hold them back as much as you can. Without giving them any anticipation, release them. Let them feel the tension escape as they flung themselves into the space before them. Careful that they do not hit anything.

We move into our final score. The Witch and the Idiot.

Crawling around the space, what is your favourite four-legged animal? Crawling, and rolling, mis-recognising the material, mis-recognising the textures and the floor.

Image 27 Roni Katz & Jack Hardy.

Film Still by Stefan Jovanovic.

FOH, Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London.

November 4th, 2016

The last day and the last iteration of the spell with Liam’s presence allows for intimacy to reach a new level. Whilst costume and paint were not agents brought into the space, once more as it was a borrowed space, the rest of spell was activated in the formation of an archetypal-society. The group enters into the thick of role-playing, as they explore their personal aestheticized understandings of the figure of the witch, and the figure of the idiot. They mis-recognise one another’s bodies to create new socio-metrics that allow for a fictional world to be created, following an illocutionary story telling voice. The layers of encounters begin to layer onto one another, like the forty layers of sound building in the space. Archetypal role-play becomes a strategy to seduce one another into more complex realities, where each individual exposes their understandings, even if clichéd or contrived, of these quasi-mythic personae. The recognition of them through the storyteller’s psychomagical approach, allows for a new series of relations to emerge, a different type of togetherness, familiar yet unfamiliar, uncanny and novel.

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“In Psychomagic, [...] we need the individual’s understanding instead of his superstitious beliefs. THe patient should know the reason for each of his actions. The psychomagician makes the transition from witch doctor to adviser. Using psychomagic prescriptions, the patient becomes his own healer.”11

Eventually you find another person, and the relationship between the Idiot and the Witch is formed.

The Witch demands abundance, the Witch demands swapping of clothes.

The Idiot allows himself permission to go somewhere, and the Witch controls the way.

It was easier to have your eyes closed in order to find your own notion of abundance, but we did not have enough time to find the idiot.

“Can we both be the Witch?”

If you are both the Witch, then you have to locate the Idiot. Make space for the Idiot.

The Witch becomes the Idiotic Witch. Leticia preferred this role.

The Witch requires a throne, and the Idiot needs to make a headdress for her.

It takes time to practice this, to kill the patterns, the education, the quotes, the modes of behaviour of these characters, and the preconceptions we have of them. Abundant garlands. Abundant headdresses.

Jack and Lynda introduce dark red lipstick into the score.

“I was pretending to be the idiot, but not really the idiot because I care about my t-shirt. He got lipstick on my shirt.”

We then meet the priest, who has become a slave to the witch.

This is a strange space, this international theatre.

Locate the flashing light.

Liam is constructing a complex soundscape of Baroque Dub-step, but not instructing the movement as much as he felt he did last time.

We need to negotiate this balance between informing/feeding information and receiving. There are still loops and rhythms.

There is still space for the inner rave.

Everyone is prompted with the idea that only one body in the space harbours the witch in her body.

“Locate that body.

Locate that person.”

Leticia is identified as the body that houses the witch.

Give her abundance. All the bodies in the space begin to surround Leticia, as they begin to give her abundance.

Everyone begins to touch Leticia.

Decision-making. How did we know it was her?

We gradually return to the power of non-verbal agreements. How did the group know which body in the space was harbouring the witch without having decided beforehand on it? The group must be able to interact outside of their “performative” states; and so meals tend to be good places for these social exchanges to take place. Each and every one gradually begins to create some kind of understanding or idea of who everyone else in the group is, which characters are present, what role each person might have within the construction of a an archetypal performance. All of these unspoken observations, judgements and reflections informed their decision on locating the witch within one of their colleague’s bodies. The scope of this score is to reveal these subconscious decisions, but first they need to pass through inevitable stereotypes of embodying idiosyncratic roles in tender playtime.

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The witch sacrifices herself, her wholeness, and enters each and every body.

At this stage, everyone has their eyes closed, and is touching Leticia. They gradually listen to the words being spoken, and they absorb within themselves this energy that they felt within Leticia’s body. The imagined or adopted presence of the witch in Leticia’s body is the surrogate victim in the sacrifice of the “imagined” violence within the space. We killed the idea of the witch as a whole entity in one body, and accepted it as a plural entity in every body. Thus we all share what it means to be a witch, but by now we have absolved the role-playing of the stereotype of the Witch.

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“It was a relief to stop being the witch.

I was happy when it was over.

The witch was gone, and I could go back to being the idiotic Witch.”

The witch gradually subsides and the little idiot is not mentioned again.

The room is put back to normal, with traces of what had happened.

The chairs and tables are put back to how we had found them, but all slightly orientated differently. The orientation of the tables and chairs has been queered for the next visitor.

Something had happened here.

Someone was here.

Image 28 Jack Hardy, Lynda Rahal and Liam Byrne.

Film Still by Stefan Jovanovic.

FOH, Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London.

November 4th, 2016

There was a magic that was happening, but you don’t see magic, when it happens.

There is something so invisible about the witch, an undercurrent that is present in the space.

We must bring these archetypes together in the same room as, for “what seems even stranger is the extent to which we maintain this separation even now. Despite being stock literary characters for hundreds of years, and the subject of extensive (separate) historical and antropological research, witch and fool only very rarely appear together, as it were, on the same page: let alone in the same book.”12 Roni asks this question of what does one subscribe to in situations like these?

Lynda asks if we could re-invoke what happened today in another space now, a bigger space, like if we were to go back to the Turbine Hall, and do it there, what would happen?

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An ending approaches as rain dominates the skyline.

Part of the group goes to sleep and other modes of processing, and five go to the Queen Elizabeth Aquatic Centre.

So many codes in a swimming pool.

You must swim counter-clockwise in the lane. Very easy to upset another swimmer.

Five little ducklings swimming in a row. Can the fool fit in the pool?

Every tenth stroke, give a graceful counter-clockwise twirl.

Five little ducklings seek warmth.

Five little ducklings question what is deviant in this space? Is there any space for deviance in a prescribed water tank?

The Witch and the Idiot make for a great pair.

This long spell comes to an end.

We would like to end this spell with recalling a phrase by Gertrude Stein. “All the time that there was a question there was a decision. Replacing a casual acquaintance with an ordinary daughter does not make a son.�13

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Image 29 Darcy Wallace, Katharina Hölzl, Nassia Fortouni, Jack Hardy, Leticia Dadalto, Daria Moussavi, Cécile Ronizzo, Alice Heyward, Roni Katz and Lynda Rahal.

Film Still by Stefan Jovanovic.

FOH, Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London.

November 4th, 2016

This is not a dance-piece nor a stage-specific one, it is an architectural piece about behaviour, it is about work, and making rough spaces for collective labour, it is a space for storytelling, and a space for Baroque Dub-step, it is a space that does not exist in its current form, but that needs to be designed, both from the walls and from the body. It is a space where characters like the Witch and the Idiot can meet, and where ritual is no longer definable. It provides the possibility for artistic labour outside of socially-scripted space and thus begins to engage ritualization that can be other than the secular.

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In his book, Sociometry, Experimental Method and the Science of Society (1934), Jacob Moreno writes that “Sociometric explorations reveal the hidden structures that give a group its form: the alliances, the subgroups, the hidden beliefs, the forbidden agendas, the ideological agreements, the ‘stars’ of the show.”14

The sociometric explorations in both the Viennese Spells and the Spell for Radical Togetherness are embedded in the descriptions, stories, quotes, reflections and annotations in the previous pages leading to this one. I would like to come back to the instructional score of the last spell, and expand upon each stage, and in this way conclude this written research.

There is always a facilitator, be it the director, or the choreographer, who instructs for the dissolution of the linear threshold, and the enabling of possession, the modern puppeteer, the shaman doctor, the schizophrenic judge. It is in this moment that the theatre becomes the secret clinic, where the caretaker, as the artist, becomes both the psychiatrist and the judge. The artist assumes the commanding power of the space, and of any infra-ordinary behavior housed. As the bicameral mind begins to break down, the social script gets re-written. But who then commands the artist? “Volition came as a voice that was in the nature of a neurological command, in which the command and the action were not separated, in which to hear was to obey.”15 Of course one can simply walk out of the nonspace, blissful of anything that has gone on, but if there is volition to endure through the apex of the insanity, perhaps a cognitive re-organization will not seem as far away. We thus identify illocutionary story-telling as one key strategy, and the first of many crafts which is present within the space. What we witness through all the spells, is a return to the artisans who labor within a space, durationally constructing a society, where “the performative is very much also the operative.”16

What remains is but a trace of that area where language inverts on itself, and where culture, as we know it begins to shake. We enter into a “secret theatre of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an infinite mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries.”17 The language of the storyteller, who is the principal deviant is crucial, and “It is a question not only of the spoken accent, Simondon suggests, but also the vocabulary, the grammar, and the syntax spoken and written; the general expressive manner operational in a language is what filters within the group’s interior (determining who is the stranger, the deviant, the leader) and which relationship must be maintained between groups (cultural stereotype relative to communication).”18 Once we have allowed for these stereotypes to be exposed, deconstructed, rebuilt, we can begin to address the space that we find ourselves within.

This spell does not prescribe the specificity of a space that can foster or promote the behaviors described up until now. What it offers is the devices, the qualities, and the agents necessary. It is up to the reader to find or to design this space. What we have uncovered through the various applications, is that we can stop calling the willingness and humane tendencies of being together with others, a ritual, for it is merely adding allegorical meaning to what already happens socio-metrically. Dance in the museum, is a displacement of framework from the theatre. It is still a space with codes, which does not discredit it as a potential site for radical togetherness. However, it does require additional effort to turn it into a nonspace, a spatial intermission. Orientation is very important, so we should avoid the orientation that spaces like the Christian church encourage, which is a multitude of bodies facing one object or person. There is no one priest, and there is no one principal direction. Orientation in these instances is but the construct of our language and the subjective context we find ourselves in. The aim of these spells is, to return to Victor Turner, the creation of communitas. In this social gathering, minus conventional structure, roles need to be identified, role-play needs to be accessed, material such as costumes and paint should be allowed to enter into excessive abundance, music becomes material as much as the concrete floor may be, words find their way into the space via narration, and indoctrination is avoided by assuming responsibility for your own actions. Each and every individual begins to locate the craftsman, who “represents in each of us the desire to do something well, concretely, for its own sake.”19

There are optimal requirements for the space, such as an acoustic system that can amplify sound.

There should be at least twenty squared meters of open space for a circular/collective gathering. The space need not be precious, for it may be dirtied, and it may be wrecked, within reason. Lighting, including natural daylight, is another material to be regulated by the users; hence blinds or curtains are preferred. A minimum of five meter high ceilings can allow for otherness, the higher the better, the more amplified the sound can get. The option to leave the space should be easy. In fact, there should be openings into the metaphorical central prism, without doors. It should not be an amphitheater. It should not be a frontal stage, or if it is, the action should not only take place on the stage. One must be wary of re-appropriating the church as performative, the same way a pagan shrine may have been buried and re-appropriated by a Christian holy place.

Perhaps we cannot escape locations that already have embedded a historical mix breeding of spirituality. In either instance, what is vital is the dynamics of framing. Our commitment may not be grounded in deviation, but it does involve “a certain way of inhabiting the world”, which Sara Ahmed calls a queer politics.20

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All of these ideas should be able to fit in this room, where they may be ritual, or they may be something more than ritual. Or perhaps all the situations witnessed until now are acts of poetry, “beautiful, aesthetic, and without any justification.”21 If they are the latter, it is important to note that they are not a “’thing’, but a term for processes and events that have a particular place in social life.”22 These processes and events involve an orientation towards queer phenomenology and inhabiting a world that can appear “oblique, strange, and out of place”, and offer it support.23

In order to turn people outward, as Sennett beckons, one must allow time for the craftsman to reemerge in these spaces of spell-casting, and the term ritual may soon become nothing more than the “rhythm of skill-development, practiced again and again”, the practicing of what our group has come to call radical togetherness.24

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RADICAL TOGETHERNESS One. Start the day with an idea for a written phrase, and a drawing of those words, done by another artist.

You will work this, which means you will execute the words into physicalized action.

Find an artist who will translate the phrase into a drawing on the walls, floor or free-standing partitions of the nonspace.

Two. There should be a minimum ninety minute physical warm-up in a studio the nonspace of your choice, with a minimum ten human participants. There is a storyteller, his medium is illocutionary psychomagic.

Three.

Enter into a different nonspace with entire group, Consider tenderness as a strategy for beginnings.

This would involve touch, caresses, body-work, and operating with the principle of pleasure.

Four.

Collaborate with a live-musician, preferably one who has an amplified string instrument connected to a digital soundscape.

All participants should be consistently present throughout.

Five.

Facilitate the situation through story telling, use voice to narrate situations that involve role-play, and begin to generate aestheticized situations.

Six. The second strategy involves considering misrecognition.

Once the nonspace and its qualities have been recognized, and the bodies within have been recognized, begin to mis-recognize them via role-playing story-telling.

Seven.

Allow for swapping and development of costume, painting & body/face-paint simultaneously, engaging other craftsmen and women.

The laundry needs to get done, so consider yourselves at labour.

Eight.

There may be a climax, followed by boredom.

Decide whether considered chaos/wreckage can be attained.

The rough space should allow for some violence, this means that the wall could be chipped, or a chair broken.

Collective work and collision of collective creativity.

The Witch needs to get fed. So allow for madness.

Nine.

Decide whether the ending involves a resolution, eg ordering of the chaos generated, or whether the nonspace needs to be cleaned, re-ordered.

Focus on leaving the space re-orientated.

If the spell has been cast properly, then traces should be inevitable, and an archetypal performance will have been socio-metrically generated.

Ten. End and discuss radical togetherness and the making of your society. The discussion should come at the end, just as any references used for role-playing, or reasoning for decisions made throughout the score.

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* ALWAYS ACCOUNT FOR HEALTH & SAFETY, PAID LABOUR, AND INSTITUTIONAL SUPPORT.

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Notes 1 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1987. Print.

14 Stein, Gertrude. Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1997.

Print. 44

2 Sennett, Richard. Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Co-operation. London: Penguin, 2013. Print. 280

15 Moreno, J. L. Sociometry, Experimental Method and the Science of Society; an Approach to a New Political Orientation. Beacon, NY: Beacon House, 1951. Print. 29

3 Sennett, Richard. The Craftsman. London: Penguin, 2009. Print. 238 4 Williams, Bedwyr. “The Gulch.” The Curve. Barbican Gallery, n.d. Web. 7 Dec. 2016.

5 Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke UP, 2006.

Print. 117

17 Scott, David. Gilbert Simondon’s Psychic and Collective Individuation: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2014. Print.

21

6 Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke UP, 2006.

Print. 167

18 Jaynes, Julian. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990) Introduction

7 Ibid. 123 8 Stewart, Pamela J. Ritual: Key Concepts in Religion. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Print. 17

19 Scott, David. Gilbert Simondon’s Psychic and Collective Individuation: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2014. Print.

154

9 “Ugo Rondinone.” Ugo Rondinone | Southbank Centre. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 Dec. 2016.

20 Sennett, Richard. The Craftsman. London: Penguin, 2009. Print. 144

10 Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke UP, 2006.

Print. 164

21 Jodorowsky, Alejandro, and Rachael LeValley.

Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotheraphy. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2010. Print. 22

11 Stewart, Pamela J. Ritual: Key Concepts in Religion. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Print. 82 12 Jodorowsky, Alejandro, and Rachael LeValley.

Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotheraphy. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2010. Print. ix 13 Colin, Anna. Sorcières - Pourchassées Assumées Puissantes Queer = Witches - Hunted Appropriated Empowered Queered: Redfern Barrett, AA Bronson, Angus Cameron, Silvia Federici, Richard John Jones, Latifa Laâbissi, Olivier Marboeuf, Vincent Simon, LW, Marina Warner. Paris: Ed. B42, 2012. Print. 109

100

16 Jaynes, Julian. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990) 99

22 Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke UP, 2006.

Print. 117 23 Stewart, Pamela J. Ritual: Key Concepts in Religion. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Print. 1 24 Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke UP, 2006.

Print. 179 25 Sennett, Richard. Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Co-operation. London: Penguin, 2013. Print. 202

APPENDIX

101

Radical Togetherness Notes by Alice Heyward

November 9th, 2016

What is it to intervene?

How do we intervene, but not become the intervention?

How can we be invisible interventionists?

Or indeed, not even become the interventionists, but experience the situation removed from its cause?

I envy the people at the Tate who see Roni slow walking, eyes shut, very gradually circling her own path, and asking themselves questions in relation to the entire situation, the entire work of art.

How can we remain subjects unto our own actions?

I want to know less, to behold each moment as its own story. Entangled independence.

I wonder now how it could be to return to our sites of work/play, for a second entrance into this laboratory. I would like to return for a second life, another beginning in places we became familiar with in this iteration of events.

Does a public space imply always beginning at square one?

Does our trace linger in these sites?

Who is our community beyond each other?

Let’s meet our space-sharers, gently interact for us all to generously invade together.

As the title of Lawrence Weschler’s book denotes, chronicling decades of conversation between Weschler and master painter Robert Irwin, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, this is about entering into a zone of not knowing. It transcends its matter by opening up the experiential core of the occasion. It is its ends, by virtue of its means, which we behold.

To enter a space compounded by its means and ends. We don’t need to search for anything more within it, as everything we need is right there: space, people, movement and variance.

How revelatory it is to practise in a space that isn’t necessarily constructed for that function (our practice)...

What does conscious misrecognition allow for?

To misrecognise something, we must first recognise it...

Knowledge, recognition, giving names - language creating reality. Can we tangle, knot, tear, dissolve our semantic web? And why?

There is no need to discover or find more than what we are presented with at the time.

Let’s place less emphasis on the importance of searching ~ I want to be alive to the abundance of what already is, what we have, and use our energy to work on this level. This invokes the ability to enhance what is already happening…

Does our trace linger in the sites?

The memory of the site, of the action, traced in us, in our bodies.

Architecture - Body relationship. Could the trace be the architecture, inside us, inside architecture, inside its trace, inside our trace, inside its body?

I want to ask Pati to draw a human centipede-esque sketch of this image ^

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(2014): 65-74. Print.

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McKenna, Terence K. The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Vir

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Moreno, J. L. Sociometry, Experimental Method and the Science of Society; an Approach to a New Politi

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Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1958. Print. 148-9.

Sehgal, Tino. “Introdoction to DanceWEB 2016.” DanceWEB ImpulsTanz Festival. Vienna. 15 July 2016.

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Sennett, Richard. The Craftsman. London: Penguin, 2009. Print.

Barclay, William. The Gospel of Matthew. Rev. ed. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1975. Print.

Sennett, Richard. Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Co-operation. London: Penguin, 2013.

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Galbraith, John Kenneth. The Affluent Society. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969. Print. 125

Scott, David. Gilbert Simondon’s Psychic and Collective Individuation: A Critical Introduction and

Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2014. Print.

Colin, Anna. Sorcières - Pourchassées Assumées Puissantes Queer = Witches - Hunted Appropriated Em

powered Queered: Redfern Barrett, AA Bronson, Angus Cameron, Silvia Federici, Richard

John Jones, Latifa Laâbissi, Olivier Marboeuf, Vincent Simon, LW, Marina Warner. Paris: Ed.

B42, 2012. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles, and David Lapoujade. Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews, 1975-1995. New

York: Semiotext(E) ;, 2007. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: U

of Minnesota, 1987. Print.

Fernandes, Ciane. Pina Bausch and the Wuppertal Dance Theater: The Aesthetics of Repetition and

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Steele, Brett. First Works: Emerging Architectural Experimentation of the 1960s & 1970s. London: Ar

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Stein, Gertrude. Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1997. Print.

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Modern French Culture. New York: Berghahn, 2005. Print.

Heidegger, Martin. Discourse on Thinking. New York: Harper & Row, 1966. Print. 53 Huxley, Aldous. The Doors of Perception: And, Heaven and Hell. London: Vintage, 2004. Print.

Williams, Bedwyr. “The Gulch.” The Curve. Barbican Gallery, n.d. Web. 7 Dec. 2016.

Zartaloudis, Thanos. “Commanding Architecture.” Control & Dispositif: Extra Lecture. Online, London.

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don. 1 Jan. 2015. Lecture.

Jaynes, Julian. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Boston: Houghton

Mifflin, 1990. Print.

Jodorowsky, Alejandro, and Rachael LeValley. Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic

Psychotheraphy. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2010. Print.

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Images Cited 0 Goods, Damaged. Until Our Hearts Stop. Digital image. Tour. Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods, n.d. Web.

8 Dec. 2016.

12 Savorani, Oliver. Untitled 01. Digital image. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2016.

1 Goods, Damaged. Sketches/Notebook. Digital image. Tour. Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods, n.d. Web. 8

Dec. 2016.

14 Jong, Pete Qiadong. Untitled 01. Digital image. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2016.

13 Jovanovic, Stefan. The Witch is Dwelling. Digital image. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2016.

2 Parreno, Philippe. Tino Sehgal’s Annlee. 2013. Palais De Tokyo, Paris, France. drawn at Palais de Tokyo

15 Jong, Pete Qiadong. Untitled 02. Digital image. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2016.

3 Jovanovic, Stefan. Tino Sehgal’s Annlee. Digital image. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2016.

16 Jong, Pete Qiadong. Untitled 03. Digital image. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2016.

4 Parreno, Philippe. Anywhere Out of The World (2000). Digital image. No Ghost Just a Shell. Stretcher,

n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2016.

17 Jong, Pete Qiadong. Untitled 04. Digital image. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2016.

5 Jovanovic, Stefan. Everything fits in a room. Digital image. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2016.

18 Eva Presenhuber and Gladstone Gallery, Galerie. Ugo Rondinone, THANX 4 NOTHING. Digital im

age. The Infinite Mix. Southbank Centre, n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2016.

6 Jovanovic, Stefan. Everything Fits in a Room. 2016. N/a, N/a, Vienna, Austria.

19 Chen, Joyce. Untitled 01. Digital image. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2016.

7 McNatt, Eric. Miguel Gutierrez. Digital image. Past DiP Artists. Gibney Dance, n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2016.

20 Chen, Joyce. Untitled 02. Digital image. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2016.

8 Suziki, Maria Barnova. Jen Rosenblit. Digital image. ImpulsTanz Archive. ImpulsTanz Festival, n.d.

Web. 8 Dec. 2016.

9 Althamer, Pawel. Love Is the Agreement. Digital image. ImpulsTanz Archive. ImpulsTanz Festival, n.d.

Web. 8 Dec. 2016.

21 Dillon, Barry. Untitled 01. Digital image. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2016.

10 Jovanovic, Stefan. The Witch is Dwelling. Digital image. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2016.

24 Heyward, Alice. Untitled. Digital image. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2016.

11 Savorani, Oliver. Untitled. Digital image. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2016.

25 Hölzl, Katharina. Untitled. Digital image. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2016.

22 Dillon, Barry. Untitled 02. Digital image. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2016.

23 Dillon, Barry. Untitled 03. Digital image. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2016.

26 Hölzl, Katharina. Untitled 01. Digital image. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2016.

27 Jovanovic, Stefan. Untitled 01. Digital image. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2016.

28 Jovanovic, Stefan. Untitled 02. Digital image. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2016.

29 Jovanovic, Stefan. Untitled 03. Digital image. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2016.

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Doodles Drawn 1 De Souza Leão Müller, Patricia. Will You Be My Cave? 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. 2 De Souza Leão Müller, Patricia. The Witch is Dwelling. 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. 3 De Souza Leão Müller, Patricia. Their Medium is Tenderness. 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. 4 De Souza Leão Müller, Patricia. Like a Rave Inside Your Head. N/a, N/a, London, UK. 5 De Souza Leão Müller, Patricia. Let the Little Fool Inside Free. 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK.

105

Paintings Featured 1 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled Roll 01. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

26 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 21. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

2 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled Roll 02. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

27 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 22. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

3 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 01. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

28 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 23. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

4 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 02. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

29 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 24. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

5 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 03. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

30 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 25. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

6 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 04. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

31 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 26. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

7 Althamer, Pawel & Zmijewski, Arthur. Inorganic Urban Choreography No.1. July, 2016. Vienna, Aus tria. This painting was made simultaneously by the two Polish artists during Meg Stuart’s field project in ImpulsTanz that I took part in. My task was to meet them for a coffee at CafÊ Sperl, present some form of symptoms to them, and they would then act as my therapists and prescribe a task to complete in the afternoon. They asked me what an architect was doing in a dance festival? I explained to them how I dance for street furniture like the red post box in London. They asked me to demonstrate. I demonstrated.

They said that it is very organic, like the bronze map (talisman) that I wear around my neck. The challenge for me, is to go out into the city, and in the span of three hours, construct three inorganic urban choreographies. They would draw three paintings for me with water colors, saying that what they were drawing was extremely precise, and to follow their instructions closely. These three paintings are now featured, here, within this thesis.

32 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 27. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

8 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 05. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

9 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 06. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

10 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 07. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

11 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 08. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

12 Althamer, Pawel & Zmijewski, Arthur. Inorganic Urban Choreography No.1. July, 2016. Vienna, Aus

tria. Watercolor on paper.

13 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 09. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

34 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 29. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

35 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 30. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

36 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 31. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

37 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled Rolls 3, 4, 5, & 6. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on

paper table cloth.

38 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled Roll 7. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

39 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled Roll 8. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

40 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 32. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

41 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 33. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

42 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 34. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

43 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 35. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

14 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 10. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

44 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 36. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

15 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 11. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

45 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 37. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

16 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 12. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

46 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 38. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

17 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 13. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

47 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 39. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

18 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 14. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

48 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 40. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

19 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 15. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

49 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 41. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

20 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 16. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

50 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 42. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

21 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 17. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

51 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 43. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

22 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 18. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

23 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 19. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

24 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 20. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

25 Althamer, Pawel & Zmijewski, Arthur. Inorganic Urban Choreography No.1. July, 2016. Vienna, Aus

tria. Watercolor on paper.

106

33 Jong, Pete Qiadang. Untitled 28. November, 2016. N/a, N/a, London, UK. Acrylic on paper.

107