BACKYARD DANCES

WANTED 30sec – 3 MINUTE HOME VIDEOS FOR ‘BACKYARD DANCES’

- THE ELECTROSMOG FESTIVAL. 19 – 21 March (NZ time) SUPPORTED BY THE AOTEAROA DIGITAL ARTISTS NETWORK

BACKYARD DANCES is an on-line community dance that brings the ordinary and the local to global networks.

Help create a global community, an online neighbourhood of backyard ‘dancers’.  Transform your backyard into a screen dance to be used in an online community dance project that responds to the question can remote connections become a truly rewarding experience in and of themselves?

WANTED  – 30 sec – 3 minute videos transcribing the terrain of your backyard, the micro and the macro, the gritty and the serene, the discarded and the sculptured through the lens of a camera.  Take us on a journey, offer a new perspective, strap your camera to your foot, your knee, your elbow or your head and make a recording of the path made by your dance in your own backyard.

Send us your recordings (no more than 3 minute qtvr/mp4) and these will be transcribed into a choreographic score for a performed series of solo dances from divergent places. This global ensemble facilitates a new community of backyard dancers who will perform live at the Electrosmog Festival. The ‘BACKYARD DANCES’ performance will occur on Sunday morning, the 21 March at aprox. 10am (NZ time) more details to follow.

Send your images or enquiries to:

backyardvideo@beccawood.co.nz

MP4’s and Quicktime movies accepted between 30 seconds and 3 min duration

Up until the 12th March 2010

MORE ABOUT THE PROJECT AND THE ELECTROSMOG FESTIVAL

ElectroSmog is a new festival that revolves around the concept, Sustainable Immobility. By Sustainable Immobility the festival refers to ‘a critique of current systems of hyper mobility of people and products in travel and transport, and their ecological unsustainability.’

The Electrosmog festival sets out to critically re-examine these possibilities and seriously start to turn them into viable choices.  More can be found out about the Festival at http://www.electrosmogfestival.net/

TEST SITE 04

‘PORTE COUCHERE’ EXHIBITION OPENING WW BLOCK, AUT, MOUNT ST, AUCKLAND

4PM FRIDAY, 28.08.09

After working with performers other than myself in a live improvisation and response situation in Test Site 03 I gave myself a brief with altered parameters for my 4^th test site which was to be part of the Porte-cochère exhibition.  In Test Site 03 the performer worked blind folded, using only the live response sound score translated to her through headphones and based on the imagery she was creating with her body via the little wireless camera attached to her.  There became a dialogue between the two performers and the separate spaces folded in on one another.

For Test Site 04 the first condition was to work solo -  and put my own body at the centre of the work.

This created new sets of conditions or rules as I figured ways to negotiate the live event  with a ‘single body’.

The second condition was to do away with the blindfold allowing the performer (myself) to see.

The third to create a residual artefact an integral part of the work.

The first condition created the biggest shift.  In order to generate a sound score to work from, I had to do some preparatory work that could be incorporated into the ‘live’ performance.  This gave the work an added dimension of alternate time and place.  Devising this in an alternative space from the ‘presentation’ I worked with the wireless camera, improvisational structures and the characteristics of the space.  Making a 20 minute improvisation with my body and the camera I recorded the cameras perspective for the duration.  Playing this footage back I made a transcription of the recorded footage.  Contained by the frame I interpreted the scape through describing the tones, shapes, lines, angles – observing the environment without naming the structures themselves. e.g. the door was a oversized blue rectangle  This resulted in a detailed word-scape  that was converted to real-time speech for the ‘live’ event.  The sound output was audible only to myself, transmitted using Apple’s text to speech function and played through wireless headphones.  The limitations of software offered no option for making ‘space’ in the monologue.  I tried dashes, dots, multiple comma’s and still ‘Vicki’ my chosen orator wouldn’t perform a pause.  To overcome this I had to write ‘pause’.  Not wanting to hear ‘pause’ repeated tirelessly as an aspect of the performance I decided to create a more useful device – I incorporated somatic ‘pauses’ that in performance I would always attempt to maintain as a ‘subtextual’ layer to the body.  So at points in the text where there was stillness, the voice read words like – ‘pause and breathe, soften’ – ‘breathe, focus on your connection with the feet’.   This created a ‘virtual’ mix of body and space, and a compositing of the ‘past’ space and the ‘live’ space.  For the opening performance I ventured forth into the foyer of the Dadley Building in Mount St and working with my body and my imagination ‘performed’ the score I was listening to through the headphones.

This test brought the notion of another space to the fore and a folding of two spaces occurred.  It also raised questions such as should the audience hear the sound?  The choice to keep this secret was primarily driven by preference for disengaging with the cognitive or the symbolism and associations that are caught up with language.  To locate the reading of the body through the somatic as opposed to semantics, accessing a language as distanced from cognitive processing as possible.

In Test Site 03 the performer was blind folded.  This gave the audience members freedom to indulge in a voyeuristic viewing of the performer. In Test Site 04 without the blindfold the audience were unable to escape the close proximity of the performing body without becoming part of the spectacle themselves.  Anticipating that this intimate setting would be challenging and also wanting to maintain a sense of ‘screen’ between the audience and the performer I worked a gaze that was focused on the space in between the audience and myself, allowing the audience to see me, without me ‘seeing’ the audience.  This was admittedly difficult to maintain at such close quarters and needs some rehearsal.

This took the work to another level, and in the context of an art opening it was an acute reminder of how the coding of space informs our physical behaviour. Placing the primordial language of the moving body in this small and transitional space can make the body appear alien and strange.  This initiated some reflection around spatial coding and the screen/body.

This ‘performing’ screen/body performed the space not only in the corporeal, but in the ‘live dancing screen performance’ projected in the alternative space.  This performance was recorded and is currently being exhibited in the same space it was recorded in.  Thus it becomes a recording of the screen/bodies dance.

TEST SITE 03

In Test Site 02 and Test Site 03, the technology of ‘seeing’ is brought into question. Modes of negotiating space and testing proprioception are bought into play through a process of subtraction and substitution, by forging physical limits and extensions.

The development of the performative and choreographic language has become paramount in this inquisition of reframing or destabilizing the body through the negotiation between the real and the signified. Drawing from the provenance of my own movement training, and through examining the avante-garde of dance and performance arts, fundamental concepts of Butoh dance have emerged in this practice.

This introduction of a methodology through my dance ‘discipline’ or training is influenced by a key text ‘Bursting Bodies of Thought’, by ex pat performance artist Michael Hornblow who ingeniously uses Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts around the body without organs and the virtual and actual body as a mechanism for examining Hijikata Tatsumi ‘s practice of butoh dance. The intersections that occur in Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of the body and Hijikata’s methods for experimentation for the body offer a wealth of theoretical models for approaching notions of a butoh body as both a conceptual and physical practice. Hijikata’s intensive explorations of the butoh body Hornblow proposes, ‘creates a sense of virtual presence through an experiential interplay of matter and movement, apprehended prior to the external physical expression.’ (Hornblow 2006: 27) Here, I am employing transformative practice ‘through the use of internal imagery’ in conjunction with the prosthetic camera and screen.

Drawing from ideas from Hijikata Tatsumi’s  practice which has passed on to me, mutated by time and evolution through a lineage of practitioners such as (in a chronological order) Lynne Pringle, Joan Laage, Charles Koroneho, Frank van de Ven, Tadashi Endo, Atsushi Takenoushi , Kinya Tsuruyama and Yuko Kaseki. Methods for ‘writing’ the body are devised in a manifestation of the space, through representation via the digital screen image.

The spaces in these tests are conflated through wireless networks that use radio frequency in a transmittal of image, text and motion – mediated by the performers bodies. The body is augmented through the screen image and the space enters the body through a kind of metaphrastic process from image to text. The scripting is transfigured into sound through the digital and is internalized and modulated through proprioceptive responses into the somatic expression of a virtual body. Vision is transmuted through distancing the body from the screen image and senses are transposed and reorganized.

Performers create a network of body by accessing the interstitial through limitation, space, screen image, sensing, and language represented. The reconfiguration of the body’s proprioceptive system due to prosthetic extensions and a process of substitution is harnessed in these tests to explore the potential of destabilization. Interrogation of the space, the body and representation (the screen) through dismantling and reconfiguring our sensing systems borrows notions from the established methods of Butoh which organizes itself around the virtual body.

In Test Site 03 the body, the screen and the space fold into one another in a multiple, fragmented and networked whole. The performers body is disorganized and destabilized through a very obvious shift in the sensing system and the audience experience a sense of this destabilization in the sensation of the screen image, augmented by the body, which has a live-ness, a ceaseless motility as it’s every movement,  caught within a frame is amplified by the bodies ‘kinaesthetic restlessness’.

TEST SITE 02 INTERPRETER

TEST SITE 02 WHERE TO?

TEST SITE 02

FRIDAY 17TH JULY 2009 5pm, WW101, AUT, MOUNT ST, AUCKLAND

TEST SITE 02 was configured with the aim of shifting action from visual mimicry to a more interpretive response.  This time, the wireless camera worn on the body was concealed and the monitor on the body removed.  The sight of the ‘screen body’ performer was removed (she wore a blind fold) – so that she could sense the space via all her senses with the exception of her vision, yet her body was ‘seeing’ the space via the wireless camera and sending a video stream to another room where the second performer ‘interpreted’ the screen image into text.  Reading the video image the ‘interpreter’ sent a visual reading via text, received in real time on a large projection in the space of the ‘blind’performer. Of course she cannot possibly read the text, although the audience can, and so the onus is on the audience to offer her the visual information.  They don’t really get this.  Perhaps this could be more instructive. I also think they are too distracted trying to ‘work things out’.   This is famliar, as with TEST SITE 01 there seems to be a desire to ‘get it’. An impatience to understand the whole, and paradoxically a passive inertia to go and discover this for themselves, wanting to know what it’s about before they have explored the entire space for themselves.  Is this the inertia that is a result of redefining space and place in the digital realm?  The two TEST SITES have made obvious the innate coding of space that we are accustomed to behaving by. What happens when these codes of behavior are broken and reconfigured?  The participants don’t quite know how to respond – they don’t know how to respond in an environment of the unknown. This response has revealed the importance of considering the boundaries we are breaking, or the codes we are using in a space, if any.

The instant gratification of TEST SITE 01 was clearly both satisfying and stimulating for the participants.  Yet it’s not my aim to satisfy, gratify or entertain.  I want to stimulate, but on a more complex level than merely devising a scenario where mimicry becomes the ultimate goal.

The motivation behind TEST SITE 02 was to raise the stakes, to give the audience a greater sense of consequence or responsibility. Anja, wearing the wireless camera inhabited the space with them.  Amazingly, she very quickly became objectified by her inability to share the space through mutual vision.  Participants weren’t interested in assisting her, she was ignored and excluded a lot of the time.  The video imagery, observed by the interpreter in the adjoining space was seemingly seductive and was witnessed voyeuristically. It took some of the participant’s considerable time before they understood that Anja, our blind performer was in fact observing them through the lens of a concealed wireless camera, and that their images were being sent real-time to the ‘interpreter’.

TEST SITE 02 could be active independent of participation, however,  potential for the audience to become effective in the process was a key aspect of the work.   In response to the lack of interaction there are few directions to question. Firstly the direction of the performers actions requires more concise direction and intention.  Secondly, the space and the codes of behavior that accompany it, or the lack of code need to be challenged.   Thirdly, we could consider another obstruction. I don’t want to ‘direct’ the participants through instruction, the work needs to be prescriptive in it’s own right for the audience to make their own discoveries.

TEST SITE 01

MONDAY 13TH JULY 2009 5.30PM WW101, AUT, MOUNT ST, AUCKLAND
DOES THE SCREEN BECOME AN EXTENSION OF THE BODY – THE SKIN? A CAMERA AN EXTENSION OF OUR EYES? – DOES THE BODY BECOME THE SITE? READING THEN DRAWING THE PARTICIPANTS IN THE SPACE WHO THEN BECOME THE PERFORMERS – INADVERTENTLY, REFLECTED BACK AT THEMSELVES? HOW DOES THE BODY NEGOTIATE BOTH SCREEN AND PHYSICAL SPACE SIMULTANEOUSLY?

TEST SITE 01  w a s   a performative interactive  installation involving two performers, one wearing a 15” monitor  o n   t h e  front of the  b o d y   with   a   tiny wireless c a m e r a   d i r e c t e d   at   p a r t i c i p a n t s. This  t r a n s p o r ted   the participants  i m a g e s   b a c k   t o  an adjoining, but separate  space   t o   a n o t h e r   p e r f o r m e r   w h o   r e s p o n d s   b a c k   t o   t h e  the participants ,   t h e y   s e e   t h i s   p e r f o r m e r   o n   t h e   monitor   m o u n t e d   t o   t h e   b o d y   o f   t h e   p e r f o r m e r   i n   t h e   r o o m   with  t h e m .   I t   t o o k   a   w h i l e   f o r   t h e   p a r t i c i p a n t s   t o   w o r k   o u t   w h e t h e r   t h i s   w a s   l i v e   o r   n o t   a n d   w h e t h e r   t h e   p e r f o r m e r   c o u l d   s e e   t h e m   o r   n o t   a n d   w h e r e   t h e   p e r f o r m e r   w a s   l o c a t e d .  These questions were verbalized. The atmosphere was relaxed enough for the participants to ask be forthright with questions, interact, play and then attempt to interact at greater levels.
T h e   T E S T   S I T E   s e e m e d   t o   n a t u r a l l y   c o n f i g u r e   i t s e l f   i n t o   a b o u t   f o u r   p h a s e s .   I n   t h e   f i r s t   i n s t a n c e ,   t h e r e   was   a n   u r g e n c y   f o r   t h e   p a r t i c i p a n t s   t o   u n c o v e r   t h e   t r u t h ,   t h e   h o w   a n d   t h e   w h e r e .   T h e   s e c o n d   p h a s e   w a s   t o   i n t e r a c t     w i t h   t h e   i m a g e   o n   t h e   s c r e e n   ( a n d   t h e   r e m o t e   p e r s o n )    t h e n   t o   b e c o m e   d i s i n t e r e s t e d   i n   t h e   s c r e e n   a n d   m o r e   i n t e r e s t e d   i n   s o c i a l i z i n g   w i t h   t h e    r e a l    b o d i e s   i n   t h e   s p a c e   a n d   f i n a l l y   t o   r e c o n f i g u r e   a n d   f i n d   n e w   w a y s   o f   u s i n g   t h e   s c r e e n   a n d   t h e   c a m e r a .   F e e d b a c k   l o o p s   b e c a m e   i r r e s i s t i b l e   a n d   t h e r e   w a s   a   l o n g   s e s s i o n   o f   p l a y i n g   w i t h   t h e   f e e d b a c k   f r o m   t h e   c a m e r a .   What is   t h i s    d e s i r e   t h a t   w e   h a v e   f o r   f e e d b a c k ?   O r   a   d e s i r e   t o   p u t   o u r s e l v e s   i n   t h e   c e n t r e   o f   t h e   i m a g e ?
F u r t h e r   d e c e p t i o n ,   i l l u s i o n ,   c o n f u s i o n ,   d i s o r i e n t a t i o n   a n d   d e s t a b i l i z a t i o n   o f   o u r   s e n s i n g   s y s t e m s   a r e   p o s s i b l e   a v e n u e s   f o r   f u r t h e r   t e s t   s i t e s .
M a k i n g   a n   e n v i r o n m e n t   t h a t   i s   c o n d u c i v e   t o   i n t e r a c t i o n   r e q u i r e s   s o m e   f i n e – t u n i n g   i n   t e r r i t o r y   w h e r e   t h e   b o r d e r s   b e t w e e n   p e r f o r m a t i v e ,   o b j e c t ,   p a r t i c i p a n t ,   v i e w e r / v i e w e d   a n d   p e r f o r m e r   a r e   u n c l e a r .