“The actors can play among the spectators, directly contacting the audience and giving it a passive role in the drama…
Or the actors may build structures among the spectators and thus include them in the architecture of action, subjecting them to a sense of the pressure and congestion and limitation of space…
Or the actors may play among the spectators and ignore them, looking through them. The spectators may be separated from the actors.”
- Towards a Poor Theatre
Our cohort at the Architectural Association Interprofessional Studio (AAIS) was collaborating with a motley crew of contemporary dance students from the London Contemporary Dance School (LCDS) or simply called ‘The Place’. We as a collective were being mentored by Joe Walkling and Patricia Okenwa of the New Movement Collective as part of a fortnight long workshop on Movement and Choreography.
I am young.
Abstract.
A sceptic.
And consequently cruel.
Her lower lip
Would tremble indignantly
In response to my impertinence.
For both of us though;
It was a resigning
From not doing.
I am not a movement practitioner. My inquiries into choreography hence, resort to a teleological discourse that I have with my Self as a person, and with the artists I collaborate with, as a Director and Dramaturg.
“A sign is the elementary integer of expression for us.”
- Jerzy Grotowski
As a Modus Operandi, I examine the purpose that the movements serve rather than the cause by which they arise.
I consider choreography as a language through which multiple agents can communicate the agency of situating the syntax of body language. I direct Performed Movement to extrapolate the ergonomic graphs of gestures that communicate signs.
‘Brain Surgery for an Old Person’ stemmed from the collective minds of Charon Hu and I. We were collaborating as co-directors for the improvisation but also as Dramaturgs for the performative event ‘Torque’ at the AAIS.
We opted for an ‘A posteriori’ approach wherein we expected the educated and artistic decisions that the dancers would make to inform our own processes and methodologies of approaching the task of directing the improvisations.
Charon Hu and I sought to create a set of tasks and guidelines for the dancers. We wished to create a framework engine that could succinctly establish a working scope within which the dancers could along with us extract a vocabulary or lexicon of performative textures.
‘Brain Surgery for an Old Person’ negotiates a pair of dialectics not mutually exclusive to each other. The 5 minute long Directed Improvisation re-examines the lascivious contract that an actor and the audience agree upon. On a particularly interstitial consideration, the piece comments on the fractured, and unstable subject/object nature of a movement artist’s Self that post modernism has brought with itself.
Movement Art has successfully reorganised the culture of ‘disinterested’ viewing, in which a subject is invited to ‘leisurely’ observe an art object, without any challenge from the artwork. I however had different intentions regarding this specific contract. Through the directed improvisation I wished to transgress the aforementioned ‘leisure’. I was keen on luring the audience into a psychic shock and contest the arbitrary fealty of the contract, albeit in a subtle, understated fashion.
Charon and I devised an experiment for the dancers. We presented the dancers with a set of rules and guidelines. The stage was set in such a manner that the dancers would face 5 people seated on chairs, acting as the audience. The dancers were then supposed to pick a member of their choice and make the individual feel uncomfortable rather than trying to captivate them.
I wished for the actors to simply be, with a passive readiness to realize an active role, a state in which one does not “want to do that” but rather “resigns from not doing it.” The dancer’s conscious presence was both a provocative anchoring point and strangely irrelevant, if not completely expendable. As a dramaturgy, the four dancers were considered to be beings simply existing within their abode, only to step out for nothing but meagre curiosity.
My rationale for the experiment was to extract a glossary of extroversive and introversive reactions from the audience including them in the architecture of the action, subjecting them to a sense of pressure and the urgency to act.
I was able to emphasize not only the embodied but also the phenomenological state of subjecthood.
OOPS.
The essential concern whilst formulating a performance is to find the proper spectator-actor relationship for each type of performance and embodying the decision in physical arrangements.
We hence choreographed the audience into sitting around the performative stage, that made them visible to the other members of the audience.
Each member of the audience became part of a carefully curated tableau. They became quasi statically active members of the scenography. Each fidget of an audience member became a spectacle for the other members.
I directed the movements to be pedestrian. I did not allow the dancers to touch an audience member, but they were allowed to come as close as physically possible to members of the audience. The intent was to make members of the audience spectacles and objects of observation themselves. The improvisation acts like a case study into the social behaviours that humans might employ and deploy in such peculiar situations. One of the guidelines dictated for the dancers was that they needed to remain agile, and cover as much ground as possible to make the improvisation seem engaging, visually so. We also heeded the dancers to at times focus their collective attention and antics onto a singular person in the audience to craft a heightened sense of suggestibility.
The improvisation was received with a sense of bemusement and bewilderment. It disrupts, questions and posits our smuggled degrees of consent in today’s hyperconnected realm where we are unwittingly compelled to leak into each other’s social existences and exigencies.