The social power of bodies in urban spaces. Choreographic method as apparatus of socio-‐cultural empowerment. Bucharest fieldwork: Choreographic Terrain Beatrice Jarvis
Personal geographies
Intricate maps Maps of the un imagination Willingness to go beyond the boundaries of traditional cartography, then fall down lost in new revealed forms Maps that guide the wanderer to new parts of old place, the familiar lost and reformed Maps that guide the traveller past the terminus of success, to places that reek of uncertainty and lays in tatters as they fall and riser again and again Mapless the weary hiker signs in for a new journey There can be a home here on the most silent of nights There can be rest There can be stillness An endless trail of physical geography, cultural attractions, buildings, institutes, individuals and ones own memories I watched them take a map and struggle with contradictions The best map will be blank Awaiting soft imprint No dank melancholy
One of the charms of a map is that it can never anything near correct It takes many points of view to see the truth The spaces people occupy The silent theatres of human interaction Road maps to untold destinations Creeping slowly, the modern approaches its destination. The space in-between spaces and the places that promote a tranquilly that goes beyond chaos. “Find my way to lose your own” the map asks us to begin to mark.
As we consume such endless asphalt, searching in vain for new possession, fabrics to cover our flesh, food to generate energy to take on the next concrete stretch, we become the city. Endless scenes merge to colossal symphony, in their wake; we can determine what might be a civilisation. The body in the city becomes a site; of history, identity and construction which we will eventually tire. The body becomes biological cultural event and signal, Choreography becomes a frame, a means to explore the social response mechanisms as to how we see the body in space; the body becomes a symbolic social carrier which articulates certain codes of behavioural patterning.
The social power of bodies in urban spaces. Choreographic method as apparatus of socio-cultural empowerment. City: Bucharest. March to June 2012 How far does the current economic and cultural instability and restructuring limit cultural development within suburban urban communities? Participants; local city dwellers: residents of Bucharest, which I encounter and are happy to take part in the workshop process. Method: • • • • •
The dance of Bucharest. This study takes inspiration from the social position of dance within Romanian society as vehicle for social expression as to the political and cultural realities of daily life. Working with specific social groups to explore the social realities of their daily life. Exploring the position of dance and movement in Romanian cultural life as central form of expression. Enabling group of participants with limited political voice within existing political infrastructure a space of creative expression through movement Exploring how far key social issues can be reflected through choreographic practice.
Main emphasis; Production of performance, which can be toured, exploration of the potential of choreography to develop cultural platform for raising social awareness. The emphasis of this project is both internal and external. As there already exists harmony and collective ethos between participants, the significance is centred on their ability to communicate to a wider audience outside of their existing social network, and exploring how far choreographic practice can enable this to occur. *Performance idea; collective ensemble in the form of a more theatre based play; references to method acting selected from daily life; some solo work, reference to folk and social dance, collaboration with local musicians and dialog work in the form of songs made from the deconstruction of political symbols. Method acting as performers actively play themselves, evaluating their daily life through the performance process. The body as archive. Choreographic method as tool of cultural and political reflection. • •
Generating space for sensitive reflection Mode of personal embodiment
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Individualised process, no directed towards wider social focus immediately Mode of dialog towards sensitises awareness of shifting political states
Main emphasis; The individual explorations and narrative encounter with the city, the body as archive of the history of the city. As the participants may not have any existing movement experience; the main emphasis here is to effectively explore how far choreographic practice can generate a social system in which the body and its movements become an archive. How this process is documented and further reflected upon to a wider public becomes of seminal significance in this project. *Performance Idea: The living set, the participants will not be present; rather there will be a performance installation of videos of the participants walks and commentaries of their geographies, installations of reconstructions of their homes and videos and stills of solo based choreographic exploration of embodiment through minimal gestural vocabulary.
The choreographic terrain Photo essay Beatrice Jarvis
Blocks: small compartments for living out the process of life. The city between the lines; the lines which are contained in boxes for such process of living. The mode of encounter: the choreographer arrives; loose concept. The dance of the city in small boxes: watching the street lived out on the concrete grids from a history; lines of a history, which fought to be forgotten; removed in slight form. A grid system to keep the city in an order; planned out to be a structure into which all dwellers are expected to fall in line some how or another.
The numbers do not have names and yet somehow when the post arrives each number takes a name. An identity to each number slowly crafted. Some have stickers, some are blank. Some are never filled; some are bursting at the seems; some are filled with red envelopes with balloons; some have hand delivered card from the bailiffs. When the city begins to become human; these things begin to become subject; how does number 53 use the city? Does number 68 have a favourite route around the city? Does number 45 use the trams and buses? Does 31 feel the city to be home? The city in its giant form can engulf people; creating anonymous pathways for its dwellers to fall into step with; the city has no time for feedback; it must function; it must progress; marching towards a future of neon signs and neat pavements; aims of orderly transport and efficient health care; all aims yet to be filled; the city has no time to listen; it must progress.
The duet between presence and absence; when Coca-Cola takes a solo around the facades; silhouetting the terrain in shining red glory reforming symbols from eras past. The wide terrains take no pedestrian for celebrated passage; rather small dots shuffle quickly across lanes of racing automobiles; the car functions as container, as stage and as safety from the vast planes. In presence; plastic and concrete share a duet of strength and endurance; in absence is soft turf and subtle details. The minute and articulate are ushered to the back streets; where in shade and dappled light they are at once allowed appreciation for their beauty.
The individual and the spectacle of the city: how does the individual; the city is shaped by the routines of daily life, a vessel for its population, a projection of their intentions. Such projections shape the city. The notion that the city can exist as a separate entity apart from the social projections paves the way for a view of the urban landscape as mechanical and devoid of humanity, the human as part of a machine .The city becomes a vessel for narrative; to narrate the city; one has to have an active relationship with it; to theories the urban from a disengaged distance allows for no intimacy to nuances of urban life. The lady sits; shadowing another; the white of her shirt in harmony with glistening facades. She take a solo; only briefly; sedate; solid and in place.
The city as living emblem: The architectural language of a city reveals the past of spaces which even the dialects and interactions of those who live there may not. How the city is comprised and represented; visioned and realized can be seen through the residual traces of spatial practice; space becomes a container for a social realization; it manifests social trends which may attempt to actively conceal themselves in common strands of social discourse. The built environment becomes apparatus for the political body to exert power through spatial intervention, preservation and destruction. Collecting the old ruble from sites awaiting destruction and the new ruble from sites which will never quite be completed; an odd resting place between arrival and departure; we wait; in pause.
The past is an all consuming organism; which left uncontrolled; unmediated and unremembered, will manifest; even in hushed voices behind closed doors. The city becomes a larger vessel for the past simply because of the sheer weight of overlapping significant and anecdotal pasts which overlap in a symphony in the various enclaves for encounter which fashion themselves as the city. Memory can become a cultural vessel or lumbering weight towards the notion of urban progress; how the past is enabled or forcibly wills itself to manifest metamorphoses the sentiments of collective and personal emotions and sensitivities towards the past.
The city can be articulate from socio-historical framework as vessel for a thousand layered narratives, either spatial, oral, archival or object based; how such narratives layer a notion of a past to the experience of the city develop an ethos towards the reimagining of urban cartography, in which the past functions as an analytical tool for navigation. In this context, the city functions as the construct of a museum; a container for the pasts which are enacted as theatrical interludes; scripted by notions of the precedent.
The past lingers; the past repeats, the past emits messages, signs and symbols. The past is inescapable, yet it can be formed, presented, reconstructed, a malleable entity which is selectively interpreted to a plethora of cultural diasporas. The city contains an imprint of its past, selective and curated by all those who inhabit it. Forming a pliable collage to the nostalgias and grievances of those who inhabit the city flux. The transitions and impressions of the city notate a cultural identity and detain a nuance, which impresses individuality contained and framed in time and space and in the minds of the citizens who inhabit.
Architecture as performance; the history set; yet somehow uncertain; smooth surfaces that appear somehow timeless in the age less history. This is a city which somehow cannot become timeless; ‘architecture has changed the world. Yet the question remains as to what architecture might best suit a world that has changed itself.’ (Leech. N (ed) (1999) Architecture and Revolution. Contemporary Perspectives on Central and Eastern Europe. Routledge. London. P 3. How can the past begin to represent the future and how far does the architecture of the past affect the dialect of the future within the present? The past is a monster, a beautiful monster which in fear; we cannot help but cling to; for further fear that if we were to ever loosen such grip it would become then something even further from the vision of our control. The past can be seen as memorial; some hallow ground where we fear to tread for sense then that by allowing it to become archive we afford it a space which we can somehow monitor in an orderly form.
History in sight lines cannot be removed; momentarily it can become something else; it can take the form of and attraction’ the past as a means to make money; for forge an agenda for the future of the city in some new guise. At points there is an absence of the human form; on days when it seems the sky might burst under its own weight and rain the city into some foreign shape. The grey lines of the concrete form take a harsh tone to soft folds of human flesh, which might try to relax in some strange bypass. The looming towers of a past era as fine beauty visible from every point of the heaving mass of central fume and agitation. The streets give a wide birth to an array of functional and leisure pursuits; forming in their labyrinths fusions of order and chaos. To see a lone figure wash their clothes in the fountains is not an extraordinary sight; using the water; nearly clean to wash the fumes and dust blocking the pores from breath and to see some cleanliness which the city might offer for a moment before the summer sun reaches its aim to be high in the sky, or the snow wins the city for days of knee high ice games. Spring then offers some reprise; suddenly the flowers blossom; the Dâmbovița glistens in dappled light; the central parks are playful in the encounter; the park benches seem to invite and welcome pause and to amble becomes a mode of pleasure.
As breath; the city rises and falls; making crevasses and craters which each motion. The present seems a strange land; foreign ideas of humans tightly packed into close surrounding but at least one can see departure; somehow this becomes progression. Public and private in casual discourse littering the street; beer cans lie next to a discarded love letter, an old shoe lies next to a journal half full of scrawled imagination. As forager; such site becomes archive to each passage through this wasteland; each stone fallen becomes mode of understanding; or at least forming what one might personally allow to be understanding.
Such beauty of construction lingers as trauma; the glistening white walls; eagerly appropriated still hold some element of their former meaning; the tidy well kept ‘peoples’ edge seems still to resemble barbed wire. A triumph to construction; yet atrocity to kind nature; a word which seems to drown in a stormy sea of bureaucratic paper manoeuvres. Such a place lingers; dormant yet to some still tumorous in its presence. How can this be owned as the street? How can this become normalised? Towering embers still burn.
In my room I have these flowers. Now they are nearly three years old. I pressed them in a book about the nature of the human condition; perhaps important; perhaps not. My father gave these flowers to me. We were sat in the arcades; my first night in the city; sat watching, amazed, uncertain; this place; this city; a torrent of colour and imagination. The flowers were bought from a lady who came to our table; I remember my father speaking quickly to her in Romanian; she seemed pleased to give the flowers and pleased to walk away with some notes in her pocket. They were fresh then with the bottom wrapped in tin foil; now they are dried; but still hold their colour. When I think of Bucharest; now from a far; soon to be again; there is a heat; a warmth; a intensity; a collision of ideals; the smell of the flower market; the golden colour of the sand of the wasteland; a danger; a softness. I am trying to read all my books in Romanian, which I got from a girl on a street corner; a blue carrier bag filled with books for around 20 lei. They smell of the city between brown pages and when I sit here now imagining once again all the landscapes that will soon be the texture under my feet; I cannot help but feel warm.
Arrivals | Departures Exercises for arriving to a city
The body accepts | the body resists The body as research; a physical and experimental means to navigate the social code of the city; the rise of the city flow and ebb, the body resists, allows, admits occasionally defeated; Walking slowly with the expectation of space; holding in grace the demands, which the body presumes it to allow. The body in this context is a silent witness to mass command, a mocking of its own potential. The body falls silently in line with the spatial flux, holding in caution to its demands. The body does not move in a way other than the fashion in which it sees and perceives; formed so closely to the demands and expectations, which the space emits. But does space emit such message? Do we not project on to space a construction of reality, which we have allowed to form as our own reality? Performance score. Arrive to location; What does the space necessitate you to do? Allow such motion to happen Let it pass. Return to the emotion of arrival; remember your preconceptions; trace the stances, which they have left on your body. Trace the acceptance you fabricated to the space. Simplify Allow your body to repeat the motions you chose to represent. Notice if anything feels uncomfortable Closing your eyes allow yourself to dismiss the response to the patterns which you performed.
Dismiss. In softness, find comfort and stability in newness; in your own innovation to dismiss the constructs you first constructed. Take such movement and reapply allowing yourself allowing yourself to emerge to a new point of arrival. <As we walk> A A A A A
walk walk walk walk walk
of of of of of
emotion architecture the past the present the future
Lines and form, interaction and encounter. Decision and plan. Meander and loss The lines and behind the spaces The negative space With intent, in wonderment, awe, disbelief. Foreign turf becomes home for the duration of each step The fleeting present becomes infuriating; a battle to avoid decay; yet construction yields progress?
The city and I are in duet; it holds me; lets me fall; hard to the ground; only then to whisk me a to another sensation of being; here. The city and I are in duet. I feel the weaker; concerned as to whether I can ever hold its weight as it lumbers. I will persist and hope it allows us to continue, at times insensitive and clumsy in our encounter; at times in grace and purity; we begin to form elegance in our communication. At times; closed and protected; guarded and insecure; holding so many secrets; at times, raw and open; entangled and vulnerable; both seeking understanding in our quests; though neither of us can define what form such understanding has yet to take.