Androniki Marathaki
After one weekend it still remains difficult for me to spot out-to, separate the influences of the two choreographers that visited us during these two last weeks. It is not because they are not comprehensible to me, neither because they are not distinguishabe, but because they were experienced and I just cannot totally separate them from the “I”. John Paul Zaccarini’ s propositions keep interweaving with Michael Klein’s through my experiential lens and through afterward thoughts. This is the reason that I am writing for a two-week period of the lab. I am sure that I have translated their propositions according to my expectations, personally. To not I think is inevitable. Their tools are of great importance. Thank you both for sharing them with us.
1. Meaning making, Meaning in motion, Meaning in being, Meaning in...
Does the desire of “having meaning” prevent you from performance’s meaning? Does “meaning making” prevent us from expressing our dance? Does “meaning making” offer validity in our dance? Is this the third eye of dance’s reality today, under which I have the presumption that I dance? Meaning making, as John-Paul Zaccarini discussed, prevents us from being authentic. “How little” he said, “we are in control of our meaning”? Meaning in motion, translation and codification,... yes I refuse to obey this artificial “nature” . What I questioned though during these weeks is if I have to disobey the meaning in the performance making, the meaning that a performance communicates. There must be a meaning especially in the simple invitation to be a spectator. A performance is an invitation to my dance. It has a purpose of being and a mode. The meaning does not refer only to what it represents, i.e. a theme such as love, death, relationships, family, etc.. Michael Klein’s performance’s meaning is on the mode that takes place and its political implications against patterns that are invisibly inhabited. The asylum of the stage and the emphasis on the experiential element for audience members in “biograms” (my work based on “modulated choreographies”) offer a meaning because of the mode of this performance. But for sure I was trapped trying afterwards to give a kind of representative meaning in the performance (“the vanity of the mind”). WHY? Is this the social layer that prevents me from really expressing my dance, of really dance? (Paul and also Michael questioned that)
TO REMEMBER: The meaning that a performance communicates is not only what it represents as a theme. It refers also to the mode that is communicated and it can be just that, or better to say it can be ALL that.
2 a. Paul and Michael both asked how to provide a formula or a system that allows the existence of what one is. Moreover, Michael questioned how to find one system that is able to give space to the performers to create their own rules, the ones that they need in order to be fulfilled. Does my method allow performers to create their own strategies within a way that they feel fulfilled? “All of us create our own strategies in order to fulfill our needs”, Michael Klein said. Is “modulated choreographies” such a system?
b. I am interested in choreographies that keep going as a “living organism” (Michael). That refer more to the “who we are”, rather than to the “what we are” as John-Paul said, because simply in the first question it emphasizes “the process,... it never pins one meaning down” (John-Paul).
c. The rules/exercises/ directives of the score immediately reflect on motion. They do not refer to a theme that can be represented by motion.
d. It is in human nature to actually fight the inevitable (death by church, bipolar of loneliness and company by Sartre, guilt by Kafka, language by Derrida, representation by Deleuze, meaning in motion by Michael Klein and others, etc.). Impossibility brings tension and tension generates possible failure, John-Paul argued. To win it requires strategy.
All the above influence the variety and the quality of the score, the multiple dimensions of the task/stimulus and their qualities. My first need is the research of a stimulus that reflects automatically on motion (breathing, walking, self-protecting: stimulus that have already been used in my work), and that is in proximity with the “where am I” that Ana proposed.
3. Images, sounds keep visiting me in my day, in my dreams. But when a realization of them tries to appear, I dislike the result strongly.
“Obey to reach the point of disobedience”(John-Paul). Rules are needed to be disobeyed,... in order for a non-system world to exist there must be a system, Deleuze argued. And as we discussed in the lab, the main reason that is worth a system to be disobeyed is the risk that can keep moving you in unknown worlds.
Choice: Disobey my imaginary images. Obey the movement. They will never be as I dreamed them. Idea comes out of motion and not the opposite. Imaginary Images kind of follow the same directive with language. And as Michael said we must try to trust other ways/ modes of thinking/communicating. Phenomenology, I think, questions the perfect image, the optimal place, and reassures that it will never be fulfilled. As Tony Fisher explained, “phenomenal to be” means to always try to find the best position and the different aspects to grasp the world. There is always the place/aspect that we know it is perfect, we don’t have it, and will never find it, because simply the best place/aspect was chosen without us in that position.
4. The “Really dance” sense linguistically codified by Badiou (Michael):
- the body becomes its own forgetting,
- opposition to the spirit of gravity, multiple centres and opposition to one directive,
- need of space, no boundaries
...the closest to my experience of “really dance”!!!!
