Annabel van Baren

Research and Projects

Archive for April, 2008

The Making of Doubt – Colette Sadler

Posted by bellanna on April 23, 2008

Colette Sadler

Photo: Anna van Kooij

Colette Sadler’s piece The Making of Doubt is a highly visual performance dealing with the gap between fiction and non-fiction. In this performance, Colette maps the rules that govern the creation of representation and how movement vocabulary is made, as well as questioning the gap between the real and the fictional aspects of theatre.

Through the use of highly advanced movement techniques and intelligently constructed puppets, the audience is confronted with the question of what constitutes the distinction between a real body (read: of flesh and bone) and a Styrofoam body (read: puppet). The answer: very little.

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one.one – Florin Flueraş

Posted by bellanna on April 22, 2008

florin flueras

Photo: Anna van Kooij

As the description reads: “One.one is beautifully balanced between serenity, abstraction and excitement.”

For young Romanian choreographer, the body is a constant source for research, and in his solo One.One he plays with the dynamics of football and with the image and rules of perception. Florin juggles with the viewer’s concentration and manipulates expectations through his powerful bodily control. Comparing this performance to that of Hooman Sharifi, the importance of understanding movements becomes all the more apparent: Florin moves without moving, scores a goal whilst standing motionless, and shows the audience what he wants to show. Not at any point does he give away his next step before executing it.

Witty, painfully controlled, mathematically devised, and powerfully performed, Florin Flueraş’ One.One scores.

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God exists, the Mother is present, but they no longer care – Hooman Sharifi

Posted by bellanna on April 22, 2008

God exists, the Mother is present, but they no longer care

Photo: Anna van Kooij

As the description of God exists, the Mother is present, but they no longer care by Hooman Sharifi reads: “What are the relationships between love, violence, and language? Various texts from Friedrich Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt, Roland Barthes and Peter Handke feed into this distinctly physical performance. These texts have been absorbed into the movement, but are also projected so the audience can read them. They deal with love and violence, captured in a physical language.”

One of my first thoughts after seeing this performance is that it should have been an installation piece instead of choreography. Sharifi managed to create texts with powerful and sometimes confusing messages, focusing on the relationship between power and violence, group dynamics, individuality, and codes of conduct. These texts were simple prints, placed on the floor by a performer and subsequently projected on a screen at the back of the stage through the use of a static video camera positioned at the front of the stage. Multiple pauses in the performance allowed the texts, with various lengths, to be read and re-read; re-read as the pauses and stillness were sometimes too long and distracting. Through the use of poignant soundscapes the piece received an added layer of meaning. Moreover, the costumes were simply distracting, although not purposefully so. Sharifi chose black trousers and shirts – a seemingly safe choice – which neither showed nor hid the dancers’ bodies. Rather than supporting the overall frame of the performance, the costumes drew unnecessary attention by being out of tune.

However, the performance just did not work for me. The dancers’ movements were based on literal interpretations of the terms ‘violence’, ‘despair’, ‘anger’, in the sense that a virtually mimic quality was displayed. Had this been done with a healthy dose of wit or self-reflexivity, the predictability of the movements in general and the performance as a whole could have been broken. The crucial moment of my disappointment was Sharaifi’s complete denial of multiple interpretations by spelling out the meaning of the title of the performance. Not just once, but at least twelve times. In a back-tracking manner, the performance as a whole became a site of univocal meaning.

More crucially, I failed to notice and feel where the dancers’ movements originated from. They moved instead of dancing by executing the movements without expressing them in any way other than through the bare necessary muscle flows. Please note that I am in no way intending to suggest the dancers’ were incapable of executing more intention-based or ‘flow-based’ movements: they had simply not been directed to do so. This further strengthens my idea that God exists, the Mother is present, but they no longer care would work powerfully as an installation piece, combining word-projections, soundscapes, and occasional performances by a maximum of two dancers. In this way, I feel that Hooman Sharifi could blend his knack for creating intelligent theoretical and philosophical reflections on power and violence with vivid sensory input to create a coherent whole.

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Laughing Hole – La Ribot

Posted by bellanna on April 20, 2008

Laughing Hole

Photo: Anna van Kooij

“I am interested in speaking about presentation, more than representation”. These words of La Ribot (Maria Ribot) summarise her own way of understanding the cutting edge which modern dance has come to be. La Ribot mixes performance, dance and theatre; as a result, she can be said to “think with her body”. As Castro Flórez wrote: “all her choreographic pieces have a mixture of presence and, at the same time, an expression of a process that undermines them”.

Set in the chapel of the Central Museum of Utrecht, the Netherlands, Laughing Hole is an overwhelming experience. I was immediately drawn into the performance by the cacophony of laughter swirling from the three performers’ bodies, through microphones, fed into a computer, and expelled in a loop through three amplifiers. The floor of the space (approximately 60 m2) was strewn with cardboard signs, all face down, hiding their message temporarily. The performers moved through the space, bodies twisting and gliding with continuous laughter. It’s difficult to say how long I stayed sitting on the floor with my back against the wall. I thought I could have stayed their for hours and hours on end, watching more and more words and phrases being stuck on the wall with broad bands of brown tape.

A woman with a baby on her lap was noting the performance intently; the child was oblivious to the shouts and shrieks of laughter, and was more interested in the floor. Some visitors were smiling, laughing out loud even; some remained motionless, whereas others moved around in the space, following the tracks of the performers. The phrases on the cardboard signs already attached to the wall of the chapel read “over 40s mum”, “Guantanamo beach”, “death in detention”, “die laughing”, “impotent words”. The statements, personal and political, grotesque and abstract, lost their meaning through the cloud of other letters and laughter that surrounded them. Or rather, they achieved a new meaning through the other, multiple inputs that framed them. The laughter sometimes transformed into crying, at least that is what my auditory system made of it, after having been exposed to similar sounds for many minutes on end. Only when the cacophony of laughter was doubly looped did I stand up and walk away. Suddenly, it was too much to handle. Outside the museum the bells of the church rang, though sounded like laughter.

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SpringDance 2008: Symposium

Posted by bellanna on April 19, 2008

Springdance 2008 Promo video

Double Skin/Double Mind

Photo: Anna van Kooij

The first experience of Springdance 2008 was the symposium Questions of Meaning and Movement on Friday the 18th of April. As its main focal point was the interactive installation Double Skin/Double Mind, said to offer the opportunity to experience the dancer’s experience. Taking this installation as the starting point, the symposium asked how to hold on to dance, as its ephemeral nature slips through our fingers as we watch it: “Words, images, drawings, film material and digital technology can help capture its outward form. But can we also capture the intentions of dance? How can we catch the intangible creative process?” These are questions that the creators of the Interactive Installation Double Skin/Double Mind asked as part of their wider Notation Research Project. The installation allows the visitor, as a “sole participant in a virtual workshop” to follow the example of a digital dancer in the shape of Emio Greco within the installation. Adding to this virtual image on screen were music and sound, supposedly added to allow the participant to get “closer and closer to the intended movement until feel[ing] the inner sensation of the dance. This installation offers the opportunity to experience the dancer’s experience from within.”

The symposium held a total of three paper presentations. Some directly addressed the ins- and outs of the installation, whereas other presentations took the implications of the installation as a starting point. Combining insights from cognitive behavioural science, notation research, theatre and film studies, and media design, the symposium aimed at tackling issues of representation and intention from a diverse range of views.

Nevertheless, the question of what was meant by “intention” still escapes me. More crucially, I wonder what this installation aims to be. If it is positioned as a therapeutic device to allow patients with anorexia nervosa to reflect on their own embodiment and movements by seeing themselves pictured as rectangular shaped blobs, I imagine its strength: rather than being confronted with their weight and shape, patients can view their body in a less implicational and judgemental manner. However, as I am far from being a cognitive behavioural therapist, I cannot say this with certainty. If, on the other hand, this work is placed within a context of art, I feel that its execution could have been more advanced. Namely, had the definition of the images on screen been more high, it would have allowed for a more interactive experience of the work. If the position of the installation is within a dance training setting, I similarly have my questions as to how beneficial this may be. Seeing one’s moving image as a almost random collection of rectangular shapes does not benefit the comparison with the instructor’s movements. Importantly, the absence of any kind of correction undermines it possible status as a training device. One of the core components of any class is the comparison with the intentions (ah, so here it is!) of the author / choreographer / teacher. If, again, the technicality of the work had been more advanced as to include a sensitive tracking device and comparative programming, the participant could track her/his progress. Even so, I could imagine a videotaped or audio taped workshop combined with a mirror to have a similar effect.

It should be noted, however, that the DVD included in the publication Capturing Intention is notably more interactive and compelling. It features close-ups of parts of the body (feet and torso) that are of key importance to the correct execution of the movements, sounds which promote the kind of mental state necessary to ‘enter’ the intended movements, and detailed descriptions of several forms of dance notation, past and present.

Even though I failed to understand the way in which the installation captures intention, the symposium certainly made me reflect on how I position my own research on dance performances. Certainly, I will not venture into the direction of cognitive brain science or notation studies, but stick to positioning dance performance in a wider, cultural studies context.

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What it means to do PhD research in 2008

Posted by bellanna on April 19, 2008

Or, more precisely: how it differs from PhD research undertaken in, for instance, the 1990s.

One of the key differences, in my view, is the current abundance of materials, conferences, symposia, blogs, groups, e-journals, mailing lists, and so many other spaces in which critical (and less critical) debates are formed, aired, revisited and critiqued. What should my relation to these materials be? To what extent am I supposed to be aware of the trillions of bites of information flickering past nodes on a daily basis? Does the PhD research contract have a (hidden) section on the time allotted to these quests?

I am not only concerned about the time investment of making sense of this information, of categorising this input into workable chunks with a hierarchical structure. Rather, I am more pensive about being reassured. Assured that I am aware of the key concepts, debates, problems, arguments, and developments in my field of research. That if I fail to include any of these pivotal discussions, I do so out of choice, not out of ignorance.

Rest assured this is only a thought-in-passing; in no way do I suffer from feelings of incapability or self-doubt. At least not to any inhibiting degree. Moreover, I have not even officially started my research. Thus, these thoughts may be swiftly undermined, surpassed and dissolved within a very short time-span. If not, I’ll be sure to address them.

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Technophobia in Academia?

Posted by bellanna on April 19, 2008

It happens more and more often that I encounter a deep reluctance to virtually any type of technologically mediated, computer-based communication- or teaching structure in academia. Let me just state that I am not speaking about academia as a monstrously generalised heavy-weight; I actually do have a certain department in mind. The details as to which one is quite irrelevant, as I have the impression this reluctance can be found across the board.

While this state of technophobia may seem harmless, or even quaintly old-fashioned, I actually find the implications somewhat worrying. I believe that certain departments or sections could hugely benefit from the use of, for instance, e-learning environments, personal websites (up-to-date ones, I mean), group spaces, and others. Generally, these suggestions are met with a disinterested glance, to be soon followed by “sure it’s a good idea, but I have no idea how to use that stuff. It’s different for you ’cause you’re a bit of a nerd, anyway”. Regardless of the question of whether I tick the ‘nerd box’ or not, I find it striking that some people find it acceptable and justifiable that they failed to check their email for more than two weeks, simply because they didn’t know they could access their inbox via the web, without even wondering if a solution to retrieve and read their email could be found. They don’t even take the time or the effort to ask. Actually, when they do ask they don’t want to hear the answer if it appears even vaguely technological. If it entails more than two mouse-clicks it’s too tricky.

I believe that the introduction of certain computer-mediated features may greatly aid the functioning of some departments. Just think of how many processes could be infinitely sped up if people were to actually update their personal websites: no more emailing back and forth about lists of publications, research proposals, telephone numbers, etcetera. But maybe people actually enjoy this slowness. Why make things easy when they can be hard?

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