performance brainstorm: dark water, moss, stones, my body

Tags

emerge, enschede, experimental art, experimental theatre, fabric, live art, modern dance, organic art, PAE, performance art, pools, stones, submerge, twente biennale, water

For the past few days, I have been spending time at my chosen location for a performance titled Embody/Embrace during the Twente Biennale in Enschede, the Netherlands. The platform is titled (NON)-LOCATIONS, put on by Performance Art Event (PAE), a Netherlands-based live art collective. Each of the artists chose a space along the main museum corridor; I chose a beautiful strip of shallow marble pools with stepping stones in them, strategically arranged.

Considering the title of the event (NON-)LOCATIONS, we have had several conversations about our relationships to our locations/spaces/places. We decided it is important to discuss the process and development of these relationships.

I have spent several hours sitting by, wading in, the water, running my hands through the moss (I did not expect snails!), skipping across the stones…and taking notes with my feet in the pool. A list of key words that came to mind:

I chose a very long piece of charcoal gray stretchy fabric to work with. I imagine covering my body and wrapping myself in it to become one of the stones, camoflouged, to merge with the bottom of the pool and the dark water itself.

 

 

A word-brainstorm for the words I chose as the title: Embody/Embrace…

I also thought of the stones as a Pangea; a broken continent, a scattered puzzle of fragments. How do I move through them? How do I connect them again? How do I embrace them? How do I become part of these stoic structures? Can I move like the water? Can I not move (un-move) like the stone? What do I want to be in the water?

A few extra thoughts…

Contact Session with Rocking Chair

Tags

balance, dance, domestic, experimental art, experimental dance, feminine, form, live art, living sculpture, modern dance, performance art, rocking chair, sculpture, white dress

Photos from a Contact Session with a Rocking Chair…

How many ways can we merge in stillness? We (my rocking chair and I) had to consider balance and the different ways our bodies could and could not move to find positions that felt natural, in which we held each other’s weight. The process of finding these moments created an improvisational dance.  We performed a sort of partner yoga (the partner being my chair) dependent on responsivity. A give and take, a back and forth…

When we find those perfect positions, in which stillness sets in, a perfect balance, our bodies merge. It is in this moment that we become one sculpture held together by gravity and muscle tension.

Our bodies become different forms. The rocking chair became a cage, a cave, a resting cove, a womb, a carriage, a throne, a tree. I become the captive, the hideaway, the sleeper, the infant, the animal. On a purely physical level, we are counterweights, a yin and yang.

Now how to do this with my hammock and kitchen sink…