Saturday October 12 2015
01:30pm–02:30pm
The two hour action Setting the Scene (2014) came about from an invitation by curators Rebecca Brooks, Daria Faïn, and Shelley Senter to engage broadly with questions of somatics, while they were asking the question “how are we mattering?”
As a response to this invitation and stemming from a desire for a collective intimacy, I invited fourteen friends and colleagues to come together as a working team, to improvise and help each other with different tasks using a variety of materials (six pieces of 20’ x 50’ clear plastic sheeting; nine pieces of 4’ x 8’ foam insulation; eight large transparent balloons; fifty blue chairs; audience). We engaged in a ritual of uncertainty and trust in which we were both doing and not doing, watching and being watched, touching materials and each other, being touched and moved by objects and each other. Our breathing and the air between us became part of the soundscape made by KOEFF / Johanna Rosenqvist, together with the reading of fragments of texts by Karen Barad.
I have invited Vanessa Anspaugh and Magdalena Górska to Stockholm for three days to consider this work together. Vanessa was part of the action at Danspace. Magdalena later encountered the action during a presentation in Göteborg. For this seminar we will engage with the materials and memories of these encounters as we move through them, as a process of documentation.
Vanessa Anspaugh is a choreographer, director, performer, and teacher based in Brooklyn, New York. Many of the questions that surround her work address the myriad relationships that exist in collections of groups and individuals, touching on tropes such as directorship, authorship, collaboration, collectivity, domination, and love. By looking at ways to subvert the dynamics and / or reverse the structures around the act of choreographing, her work stands as a metaphor for power dynamics in the world at large.
Magdalena Górska is a PhD candidate, graduate student at TEMA Department of Thematic Studies - Tema Genus, Linköping University. In her dissertation she engages with breathing as a diverse, transformative, and processual phenomenon that challenges anthropocentric understanding of human politics and ethics while asking anthropo-situated questions in a posthumanist manner.
Setting the Scene (2014) was performed during the Movement Research Festival Fall 2014: M A T T E R I N G at Danspace Project in New York City, with Malin Arnell, Vanessa Anspaugh, Fia Backström, A.K. Burns (Camera), Anna Craycroft, Nicole Eisenman, devynn emory, Rachel Higgins, Alhena Katsof, KOEFF / Johanna Rosenqvist (Sound), Katherine Hubbard, Zoe Leonard, Clara López Menéndez, Lydia Adler Okrent, and Guadalupe Rosales among other materialities.
The video documentation from this 2 hour action is edit by A.K. Burns to a 30:24 minutes video.
Presentation of ‘Setting the Scene’ (2014), part 1, real time documentation as part of the choreographic process, Sugar Rush Productions.
Presentation of ‘Setting the Scene’ (2014), part 2, real time documentation as part of the choreographic process, Sugar Rush Productions.
Presentation of ‘Setting the Scene’ (2014), part 3, real time documentation as part of the choreographic process, Sugar Rush Productions.
Presentation of ‘Setting the Scene’ (2014), part 4, real time documentation as part of the choreographic process, Sugar Rush Productions.