experiencing U.N.I. in the SideStep Festival (Helsinki) 2009
[NB following text tries not to promise anything but to give an illustration about the inner conversations I have had with the experiences during the festival; writing this down is meant to be a learning process in studying the knowledge and wisdom of the many professional talents in the field of dance I had the honour to meet;
Book of references: Framemakers: choreography as an aesthetics of change (2008). Daghdha Dance Company, Limerick. (Most of the writings referred to are published on choreographdotnet and linked to throughout the text, ED.)]
RAW THINKING CIRCLE – AN EXPERIMENT OF FIVE PEOPLE THINKING RAW IN FRONT OF THE AUDIENCE
Human beings have been and are born through artistic actions that keep happening all the time. The Art reflects our being as humans.
This is something I wrote on the blackboard in the raw thinking circle.
It was a mistake because it caused the circle to fall apart. It was not because of the statement itself: What I wrote is what I have been thinking at least 40 years and still keep on thinking. There was the fresh flow of my imagination on the very moment – I haven’t defined reality as “living together” never before that.
The mistake was my choreography as a teacher: standing at the blackboard telling how the things are… The bodily memories of school… The conflict could of course have turned into blessing if we had been able to develop a common choreography of the circle – which also happened but only partly. However, in the end there was a lot of energized information and especially the question about reality: not in a way we normally are asking about what is reality but more as a question of the relationship between artist and her/his reality; not asking what is actually real but how to be real in a way that is healthy, meaningful, shareable and opens new possibilities.
IN A FLOATING SPACE OF SOCIAL DREAMING
In Side Step festival there was this floating space, uncovered, disclosed state of being that was called U.N.I. and a dream (=uni) it was, a matrix of social dreaming.
This is a method to use when we want to turn the information of dreams into thinking by using associations, finding patterns and connections. To understand the choreography of our common infinite reality, our selves. A brilliant simplicity, almost anarchistic tuned democracy in the method that opens the infinitely varying horizons of togetherness. A choreography of thoughts and ideas, a choreography of dreamlike metaphorical thinking, a choreography of deeper unspoken wordless understanding, a choreography of feeling, sensing the very beginning of all movements, some colourful stream of patterns and shapes in multiple dimensions without any time, any history
just emerging connections between the moving entities, bodies starting to breath synchronized, colours coming out of the bodies, getting in, changing, mixing with other colours until after an hour there is the end of the matrix.
Social dreaming …is one such choreographic tool…this choreography of dreams, thought and communication is precisely a fine-tuning of intuition: allowing the new, the unknown, what W. Gordon Lawrence calls the unthought known, to grow. In a safe and unpersonal context, intelligence about ourselves and our system/s is cultivated from raw thinking material of our consciousness. (Jeffrey Gormly p98)
what is dreaming for? and dance?
or art as a whole, as a way of meeting the world, as a place to meet each other, as something that one cannot see, but which begins to vibrate when you touch it with the wing of an eagle; liquid air that you can breath and live in, floating clouds of dancing dreams, z-score travelling on floating ice and the Titanic did sinking in one of the early matrixes.
A dreamlike connection between days and people who worked or visited U.N.I. was a strange movement all the time: people came in, touched the air and left their energies that were seen and felt to the next one to step in. It was a long social matrix – and as Jeff wrote, the matrix has a memory:
this all ended with the powerful images, where the library of Alexandria was burning down with all the information lost, and the civilization was destroyed with burning books; the ball of glass was broken and snowflakes disappeared: the closed world with its small scale aesthetics was broken and the human bodies were to be opened… in the last matrix the strange powers were made visible, the social matrix and the dance revealed a normally unseen world.
BUILDING MEANINGFUL PUBLIC SPACES
U.N.I. was an experiment. Gordon Lawrence speaks about a Faraday cage that keeps the outside disturbances away. Jeff was wondering how this was possible. How the keep the visitors in the right mode of being.
we are connected with each other
the field of connections is information may it be in form of knowledge, wisdom, love, hatred, emotions
the field can be seen as a choreography
this field or fields of connections produce what we are as humans
no one separated brings anything
how these fields function is the key
how free
how much respect
how much air to breath
how much it dances
I see art in general
and dance in particular
as a solution
art has been the matrix of our birth
art is the liquid that fills the space and the cells
and art is the real connection between us
THE MODES OF BEING IN INFINITE AWARENESS
Gordon Lawrence speaks about conscious and unconscious. According to him the real source of our creative abilities is the latter. It is quite easy to agree with him – especially after spending a week in the realm of dance. At least some part of the so called creativity has its origin somewhere out of the reach of our rational thinking.
However, the division into conscious – unconscious is a misleading concept and gives a broken picture about human mind. A healthy mind can never be divided. A human being is one with one body, and one part of that body is the brain that again is one. In fact those tasks we have given to the consciousness are too difficult for it. Consciousness is loaded with a demand for rationality that only can be a shadow compared to those expectancies. Our conscious mind is far from being rational and realistic. In stead of that our consciousness works through feelings, emotions, intuitive understanding, desperate wishes, strategies of avoidance. And in fact many activities we believe to be under our conscious control are just happening in us without any conscious decision.
There is nothing wrong with the word consciousness. It could mean being present, being aware, reflecting our deeds and aims, being in contact with the possible, following that what is happening. But in stead of that we have learned to close our eyes from seeing, to shut down the perception, to avoid being present: that is what we call conscious reality and rational thinking.
The basic mistake is there where these two – conscious and un-conscious – are considered as opposites to each other. Originally they have been separated because of the structure of our economical production and the administration of our societies. These names – conscious and unconscious – were given a hundred years ago because they already existed: the picture of our mind drawn by Freud and the others is in fact the picture of the historical structure of our society and political economy.
The illusion of a conscious ability to make rational decision keeps us concentrating on working and producing. At the same time the concept of un-consciousness leads us to forget the most of our lives.
Unconscious means that the most of the importance of our lives is hidden, made unreachable, which means that in fact it has been taken away. We have learned to believe that our dreams, our intuition, our emotion, our creative abilities would be something outside of a systematic study and understanding. And that forgetting or not-remembering would make things be somehow un-dimensioned out of the normal personality.
In this sense the social dreaming matrix developed by Gordon Lawrence and his working hypothesis about the meaning of dreams are exceptionally interesting. And in stead of the terms conscious or not Gordon Lawrence speaks also about infinite & finite which he personally prefers to the pair of conscious – un-conscious.
Thus I would like to leave the idea of unconsciousness and claim that our understanding of ourselves is processed in two fields of communication: in conscious processing and in an infinite awareness.
Parallel to these two ways of processing information our existence expresses itself in two modes: in doing mode and in being mode. Doing is possible through conscious decisions and reflections, the products of doing mean something finite. Being opens up an infinite awareness, which still isn’t anything to be called un-conscious.
And still a basic thing to remember about these terms: they only are words to describe the angle of the approach to our body-mind existence. As much as they do represent something real, they do not close each other away. They are not alternatives and they do not mean that only one at a time would fill the reality. On the contrary, they support each other and in a way neither would be possible alone. These terms describe how someone is related to the world, not anything about the person her/himself.
MORNING DANCE – A SKILL OF INFINITE AWARENESS
The social dreaming matrix was started with a morning dance:
bq. and so, is there anything more beautiful than a “morning dance”!
Dance is a dream, a dream dances.
Then, the question here is, into what kind of mode a dance turns our relationship to the environment? What happens to me when I start to concentrate on the dance? Where does the dance call me to follow?
The morning dance takes me with it by awakening expectancies that start rising in the horizons as a promise for something. I’m probably waiting for something new, perhaps never seen before. In a way there is a paradox of opening expectancies for something unexpected. Anyway, what ever may it then come it has to be able to touch me, to keep me in motion with the dancer. I am following only if the dance keeps on interesting me, if there is a meaning for me.
meaning doesn’t have to be anything precisely defined, it can show itself in emotions, in activation of senses, in shadows or in the stream of colours;
meaning as something with an importance to be experienced ;
meaning is something that calls my name whether it has a name itself or not;
it can be a riddle or a solution, a question or an answer, and both at same time meaning as something that marks my connection to the environment, marks the relationship
What the dance does to me is simply to call me to experience the being in the world. To describe it with the term of meaning is a question of vocabulary, not any of strict definition.
There is also the question of the difference between an artistic performance of an unique nature and a performance built on something already known and rehearsed. Concerning the question about the meaning there is no difference that would make any difference. The point is that I want to be connected to the environment in a meaningful way. Meaningless means loosing this connection. Thus the question isn’t about between new and already known. Both can stay meaningless: the new may be too strange as well as the old and familiar may stay empty.
With this morning dance I won’t stay here to argue more about the meaning of meaning. More I want to point that what happens to me there where the dance has taken me, where my presence in the dance makes the whole of my presence in the world to change.
There are many things happening, simultaneously or one after another, suddenly or little by little – that is not important because the whole space of time is changing and what happens can in the end turn to be cause for something that happened before it.
One of the very first things to happen is the change in the mode of perception. When my senses are concentrating in catching the meaning, this calls them also to recognize my inner creative processing. This concentrates my mental energy more and more on both the dance and on the experiences it awakes in my body-mind system. In a way I’m leaving the environment behind me but not for stepping out of the world, not for closing but opening my presence in the world in another way.
I’m developing a presence of listening, of hearing, of feeling, of sensing. I’m moving towards a very specific state of communication synchronizing the movements, gestures, mimics, vocabulary, metaphoric expressions thus bringing bodies closer and closer, not in physical distance but into a shared togetherness.
And the more the presence is opened the less there is space for the linear time of communication. Information that the dancer, the other spectators or myself are bringing out is there at the same moment reflecting both one’s own reactions and the responses of the others. And so on and again: the information fills the air, the space, in emotions, in motions, in the way bodies are situated to each other, in rhythms, in colours of sounds, in things that happens or do not happen; and again: what happens is the immersion of everything, synchronization of body language, streams of shared experiencing. The billion bytes fill the space between the bodies, making whirls, taking shapes, creating patterns of relationships.
The dance changes the modes of being and perceiving in a way we cannot decide in advance. Not the dancer or I can make it happen according to a planned program. And still the dance isn’t something that happens accidentally. The dance is happening because it is danced. The dancer opens the motion to the dance. The moment of motion needs to be participate and shared. For all this to happen we need to know what to do, we need to have abilities, skills. Thus the different modes of being and perception can be understood as skills, as practised abilities, as something to be aware of. About something that concerns our existence as human beings.
TECHNE is grounded on the practice of bodily awareness…research of body’s functional intelligence…
TECHNE as bodily knowledge is also a research into how the movement possesses power for disclosing of the historical world…
…TECHNE [is] the practice of certain non-reacting and non-acting, which brings the dancer away from conventional body instrumentalism to functionally perceptive, unique here-moment and body-mind integrity. (Kirsi Monni p.42)
BEYOND THE ART: LEARNING AS A MEANING EXPERIENCE My studies with performing arts – for the most with Reality Research Centre – started in the year 2000 with a question about the similarities between performance and hypnosis.
The reason for my understanding in hypnosis again came from my background as a teacher. The key question had been, how to find the right words, words to make a young person to believe that there is a place, a role for her/him in this world, in the future. Words to reveal the possibilities, words to disclose reality. Words for being.
Our experiences about our relationship to the environment develop through two states of perception: the performing and the perceiving state of consciousness. These two can be compared with the modes of doing and being.
Thus the essence of our being is in perception. Through perception we are connected to the environment. In this way perception makes being possible to recognize and realize; being releases perception. Being happens in the world, related to the world.
In my experiences perception and hypnosis are almost like synonymous. I call hypnosis a state of perceiving consciousness, which may refer as well to the mode of being. Perceiving consciousness is the space we create meanings – like walking in the forest and listening to the stories of trees.
The other state of mind is performing consciousness, which is a state we are acting according to those meanings. Concentrating on the daily practices, working and producing, collecting things of interest, following ready patterns like walking in the forest and picking mushrooms. Performing state is aiming at something finite and it is alike the mode of doing.
Both are beautiful states of consciousness and neither is in any way “altered”. And the both have been kind of taken away from us, hidden in the supposed necessities of society. The performing state has been changed into an everlasting service of production. And the other one where we are supposed to create meanings is covered with the tapestry of the total media that gives us the meaning in ready packages. That is why a common every day hypnosis of dreaming, hallucinating, creating meaningful public spaces and social spheres is commercialized for the needs of the markets.
The art is the almost the only zone where there still are corners and holes of freedom, where we are allowed to study and create meanings. This is how far I have come until now studying the arts from the side of a spectator and finding new questions concerning the basic learning experience.
For the moment it has the name: a theory of infinite awareness in art as a meaning experience of the spectator.
DANCE AS A METAPHOR FOR INFINITE AWARENESS
The following conversation is extremely interesting in opening many similar perspectives as was discussed above. In the book it was under the title of dance as a metaphor for thought
MICHAEL: Conversational patterns are thoughts, they are not just up there (in head). Thoughts can be everywhere. Thoughts are between us. For things to come into being it is a matter of thoughts… We are not saying that thought is a dance but we are talking about a certain figure or vision of dance whereby the constellations are loose enough to actually reach a state of excitement or play without falling apart, without losing identity. A system such as society or a state can be dancing, unlike our present day situation, where the structures are too tightly constrained by … the dogmatic slumber of reductionist thinking… So the notion of dance has to be applied to all systems rather than applying it exclusively to the physical body. (p 84)
STEVE: This is the point…we reach a kind of event horizon, this place where things fall apart, when the gods arrive or when god walks through the room, etc. At this point, there emerges for me a deeper awareness of the certain vision of dance we have been talking about. Not of dance thought on its own terms, on the basis of its history and technique, but of dance as it is given welcome and shelter by the wider fields of human understanding… Dance is a metaphor for thought precisely inasmuch as it indicates, by means of the body, that a thought in the form of its eventual surge, is subtracted from every pre-existence of knowledge. How does dance point to this subtraction?…The dancer doesn’t dance means that what one sees is at no point the realization of a pre-existing knowledge, even though knowledge is, through and through, its matter or support. The dancer is the miraculous forgetting of her own knowledge of dance. (reading from Alain Badiou’s book The Handbook of Inaesthetics) (p 86)
MICHAEL: Dance allows the thought body to show itself, it is the showing of the body in thought, independent of what constitutes such a body, whether its boundaries are made of skin or by constitutions played out in laws. Dance is the forming of certain configurations of thought, expressed in manifold ways by the birth of ideas or shivering body. That is why evolution, animals and nation states are said to be dancing at times, because certain conditions are met allowing a system to be flexible and its emerging dancing body to be naked, anonymous and selfless. This is what constitutes dance. Hence dance is a matter of thought pointing towards the possibility of change as inscribed in the body. For the spectator to perceive dance, it is an exercise in trust… (p 87) Dance is always pointing towards the possibility of change…towards the unknown silently rewriting your vision. (p 89) This state between finite and infinite, place and non place, integration and disintegration seems to be an elemental, regenerative, i.e. healthy mode of being in the world. (p 90)
WHAT IS THEN DANCE AS ART
So, what is actually dance? in a dance festival it perhaps is allowed to ask a question like this?
Kirsi Monni answers this question: dance is a poetry of motion showing us the world and reality. The signifying of the world happens as bodily poetry, poetic motion. (p 43)
When making her research Kirsi Monni has been negotiating and discussing with the theories of Martin Heidegger. In Heidegger’s philosophy there is a silent country road (Holzweg / metsätie) that brings one right to origin of an artwork, to the point where one senses the historic tension between earth (nature, universe) and world (historical/ socio cultural reality).
Here are we born between earth and world, again and again, never really understanding how to be there, always trying to solve the challenges by doing, by hunting the answers, by measuring, explaining, by categorising, by seeing the possibilities as objects to rule, to govern.
Thus missing the possibilities of being it self! According to Heidegger we don’t see the being because it is hidden and so with the being is every one of us hidden her/himself. As a consequence we probably do not even know who we actually are. What every one of us needs to find her/himself, says Heidegger, is to be seen by the others. The existential possibilities hidden in our being as individual potentials are there to be recognized in the co-existence of the other beings. Those possibilities do not show themselves as long as we look at other living and existing beings only as object to be utilized.
By focusing on the situated existence of every creature one confronts the world in different ways than by confronting the world mainly as objects for knowledge, material and a reserve fund for humans to use… in the point of situated-bodily-existence one cannot eventually separate matter and spirit, body and intellect without executing the life.. (p 41)
So the theory of Heidegger shows that the origin of an artwork comes not from representing some classical ideas of how an ideal human life would look like but more it is to show us the possibilities hidden in our existence.
Heidegger attempts to bring forth a new way of thinking about art… Heidegger… does not approach art as a vehicle for representing the contents of the supra-sensible but considers it a prime opening up of a world or a disclosure of reality… An artwork does not imitate reality. (p 37, 38)
In Kirsi Monni’s
new paradigmatic orientation of dance …a dancer [is not] attempting to construct a performance that is about the world, dance does not utilize space, time, and form like some objectified material [and] dance does not get signified only as a representation of something previously revealed
[but dance is] the happening of being… An individual’s perceptive action and conscious movement in itself is a unique way of thinking and therefore possesses a power for disclosure of reality…she or he receives and reveals being…discloses being’s temporal and spatial happening, a kinetic logos, the bodily involvement in being, interpreted through a historically situated world. (pp 40, 41, 43)
How this is beautiful! How beautiful a theory of art can ever be!
perceptive action and conscious movement in itself
is a unique way of thinking and therefore
possesses a power for disclosure of reality.
she or he receives and reveals being.
discloses being’s temporal and spatial happening, a kinetic logos, the bodily involvement in being, interpreted through a historically situated world.
why is this so beautiful?
what if we would bring these words into action in our society?
what if we would think about a movement of a child as a power for disclosure of reality
what would the reality look like?
what if the teenager’s bodily involvement in being would be understood as a kinetic logos interpreted through a historically situated world instead of giving them a ready made history to fulfil
what if we would think about the movements of an elderly person as a unique way of thinking
what on earth does it mean, the -disclosure of reality_
look at the child how it moves
not hiding her/himself but openly, expressing, experiencing,
full of possibilities, promises
every gesture, every step ready for something new
a surprise
a spring of movements is there
being present on every movement
“it is the instant presence in our bodily existence, here and now.”
and again, what on earth does it mean to reveal the bodily involvement of being in the historically interpreted world
every history is made by ourselves, by people living on earth
we forget that and take the history as given
when we as individuals are thrown here in the middle of the history we kind of think that it is something that doesn’t concern us
however, the secret is revealed when a boy or a girl is stepping in the circle of an adult history
how does he or she move when entering these halls of the man made realities
at the moment understanding the choreography, the dramatic solutions,
questioning them for ever
… it means presence in here world, in the realm of sense and meaning: the historical (societal, political, economical, cultural) situation of the person, with factual existential boundaries and possibilities.
how much we lose when in stead of giving them some respect we tell them to behave
what if we would understand that all we regard as inability to move would be seen as thinking
as a representation of a mind
that reveals it through movement
where are perceptive actions possible and allowed
where do we see movements having a conscious
movement as a power for disclosure of reality
how much energy these words have!
what kind of a metaphorical sharpness to cut the tights
how is it that these words that could be used for any art feels so strongly applied in dance
this conscious movement of touching each other, reaching, giving, getting, carrying, caring, healing
to notice those little movements in the grass, round the corner, behind the curtains, shadowing through windows
this is so beautiful
how can a theory of art based on the existentialism – not to say anything about flexistentialism – be so beautiful!
It is about a change in understanding of reality… and therefore it has also laid a demand and possibility to develop new ways of understanding of dance, choreography and dancer’s skill… This critique has also brought about new deep-ecological ethics where the philosophical horizon is formed by the shared participation in being in the world… and begins a poetic living – a hearing and sharing the common being-in-the-world with the creatures of the world (p 46)
DISCUSSIONS ABOUT THE SOCIAL CHOREOGRAPHY
STEVE: Choreography has moved beyond the architecture of its stationary historical universe and has emerged as an embodied act of a human consciousness no longer separate from, but embedded within, the irreducible, unfathomably complex ordering system of biological world (p 25) Choreography as a pattern language … mode of being. (p 21)
MICHAEL: Choreography as an Aesthetics of Change … how individuals can imaginatively order and re-order aspects of their personal, social, cultural and political lives. (p 21) If the world is approached as a reality constructed of interactions, relationships, constellations and proportionalities, then choreography is seen as the aesthetic practice of setting those relations or setting the conditions for those relations to emerge. Choreographic knowledge gained in the field of dance or harvested from perceived patterns in nature should be transferable to other realms of life…(p 20)
[this gives an concrete example for the idea understanding art as a study of our birth as human beings, the art is about our being]
…choreography to describe the active inquiry into the non-concrete, or super-sensible reality of complex relations and connections within the natural world. (p 22) The stage becomes a laboratory for the governing and steering of existing mind-dynamics and processes. (p 21)
Choreography is not to constrain movement into a set pattern, it is to provide a cradle for movement to find its own patterns… over and over again…to prevent a body…whether bound by skin or habits…from stagnation and enable that lightness, primal energy and elemental possibility only to be found once relations start dancing. (p 22)
I heard about social choreography for about a year ago connected to a most beautiful and meaningful living experience in an artwork, in a dance made just for my self. No doubt “Social Choreography” are the words I had been looking for. In a way I already had been collecting the material, making experiments and developing theoretical models about that how art and audience were meeting and working together. Not in the way art is coming out of theatres and galleries and developing new methods for itself but in the way artist have started to ask not only the audience but as well people outside the normal audience what would it be that the artist could share with or give to people who are in need for something.
Actually there could be a lot to share with the artist and the people, the modern citizens. Art could be a real political power, not in the way politicians have used the art as a tool for their own aims or the artist have declared their visions about the better world. I don’t think art belongs to politics in itself, art is art and politics is something else. But, it is easy to see the possibilities of social choreography as an aesthetics of social and historical changes; the question is how are artistic understanding and practices going to be connected to structures of our every day life? Today the choreographies keep changing in every field of art and the artists have become more and more aware of their importance as artist, as professionals to be needed in a much wider field than just on the stage.
MICHAEL: social choreography … _could it have a real impact in the wider social sphere_… or will it remain on an abstract level as a terminology with a lot of potential but without physical effects? (p 150)
STEVE: The choreographic act is one of cultivation – as a shifting and changing and digging over of a situation in the social realm which allows for a new awareness to enter into a specific situation. It is participatory, creating conditions for things to happen… (p 147)
MICHAEL: Western art has unfortunately engaged in a devil’s bargain in which it received “ivory tower” status in return for staying away from the materialistic and functionalistic way the world is understood, organized and acted upon… Art and culture seem unable to respond affirmatively, courageously, to the demands, the complexities, to the richness of contemporary situation. I think we are in desperate need of new language, new understanding of a new “surface” on which to map the relationship between consciousness and aesthetic. (p 23)
STEVE: [We need] an already existing, yet still-to-be-created design, that you and I are somewhat part of: a new meaningful public space! What is lacking is an awareness, an expanded sensibility, which could inform, coordinate and bring about the conditions necessary to draw together and actualize capacities for profound, transformative innovation. This sensibility would need a locus, a point of orientation, a place where new domains of meaning can be cultivated. (p 149)
GORDON: Dreaming as a mental activity is nature’s way of experimenting with alternative versions of reality…The hypothesis is the bright idea of creativity, or choreography, comes from the dream. (p 58)
STEVE: In the current state of deep insecurity and uncertainty, it is essential for us as individuals and organizations to have a place to question our deeper assumptions – assumptions shared by virtually all modern societies – assumptions that are now taken for granted that it is almost impossible for any of us to realize their impact. What is missing is a place and an infrastructure for motivated citizens and institutions to engage with each other, to immerse themselves collectively in realities of the contemporary situation… an infrastructure must be created which would provide opportunities and incentives for city-dwellers and local institutions to suspend their habitual ways of seeing… where citizens can detach from their everyday functions and roles and cultivate a wider, panoramic sense of knowing. (p 149)
Yet the pressures created by these very phenomena tend to keep every one in a continual doing mode, with little or no time for reflection and real thinking… people are searching for ways to develop a new source of action, one that lies beyond preconceived plans or narrow interest, beyond past experiences. For this to be possible it is necessary to provide opportunities to experience acting in the world, not on the world, to explore places and possibilities, strategies and prototypes for shifting from the past, to opening up to what might be emerging from the future. A place to do what needs to be done, for action as a spontaneous product of the whole. (p 150)
STRAIGHT ON MEDICINE ART BY MARKUS RENVALL
I’ll take an example from a parallel reality, where we have managed to bring the artistic theory and professional skills into use of the ordinary educational practices.
Similarly as with social choreography there has been an art theory to be applied according to analyzed needs in society. This theory called straight on medicine art has been developed by a media artist Markus Renvall. His model is based on the healing influence that an artistic activity may have on the audience. In his artworks applying this theory Renvall has built open social spaces in a certain frame of meaning. One example is the discotheque for sorrow where people can come to experience sorrow through art, to work it by doing art or just to discuss.
The other theoretical bases comes from the media theory, where his analysis sees our world covered with a global total media that fills every corner of our consciousness, leaves no place for any dialogue but gives us a ready made image of a broken identity. Media and media oriented art is filling us without leaving us any chance to empty ourselves. However, according to Markus Renvall, the only place where we can be born as human beings is the nearest media, a space where people meet each other face to face, where one is born in the eyes of the other, in the mutual respect and care.
In stead of this the total media gives us a ready designed aesthetics. This polluted aesthetics gives us no real tools for creating our own realities but leaves us in a total emptiness with tragic consequences from silent withdrawal to the school shootings.
So, according to this analysis the action needed is to give people back their aesthetical sense. To be successful this has to be started in the early ages. The artistic solution is called mediaplay, which simply means giving cameras in the hands of children starting in kindergartens with children from the age of two. Giving children cameras and helping them to create their own media has a profound influence on many levels.
What happens in the mediaplay is that the children start to create the media world again. That what is ready given by the total media is put aside and the child her/himself becomes visible again. The child is born as a cultural being in the eyes of the other children, in the eyes of the teachers and in the eyes of the parents; the whole cultural environment will be created again. Also adults start to see the world with new eyes. – That is what I call aesthetics, the way of seeing, the instruction of perceiving. Now children have the tools for creating their own meanings and for strengthening the nearest media, the place where we as human beings are born in the eyes of others.
The eyes of a child have the sacred ability to dance, in the eyes of a child the world is dancing as well. It is the same magic of the conscious movement that touches the world and discloses its realities. Our perception is aesthetical, our action is ethical, a dancing child brings these two together.
And when changes take place they can really be described using the terminology of dance: when professional pedagogical practices are changing, it means that also the choreographic is changing.
When children and adults start working according to new pedagogical choreography, we can really see how they are situated in new position to each other, how they move and react to others in a new way, how all the movements tend to change their patterns. It is easy to see how the essential is happening through the changing of choreography.
Thus if we want to improve new kind of pedagogical understanding we have to create situations where there is a possibility for a new choreography to emerge. And a silent way to support those processes is to draw new choreographic lines and marks.
but there still is the question, whether it is enough?
what does choreographic thinking give us for practical tools?
CAN ART SAVE THE WORLD – not in the million years, says Michael.
the theatrical stage is a part of life as such and that the strategies developed there have a wider relevance, including the ordering of the social sphere (Michael, p 21)
ideas exist as possibilities; it is only by expanding the realm of the possible that the actual will take shape (Jeffrey p 19)
dreaming needs to have its cryptic messages transformed into thoughts, otherwise they would not be communicated; …thought is translated into action through the process of imagination resulting in dance, a poem, a painting or any work of literature or scientific discovery. Dreaming is an unconscious re-framing of the relations among objects and phenomena in the world. (Gordon, p 55)
social choreography has opened an arena of cultural interplay between artists and audience, a lived and interconnected world of relationships, patterns and dynamics, a region of new and subtle observational capacities in which a deeper level of interdependence, an implicate order of mind and nature, has emerged as a model for a new and regenerative social reality. (Steve, p 147)
when coming to this arena from the side of the audience I see many levels and fields where artistic professionalism can meet the needs of the audience, of every day people; where the very choreographic sense of the artists will be in basic help in creating meaningful public spaces so urgently needed in the modern society
social choreography means space (a process, a project, a common interest, a curriculum, an entertainment, an adventure, ordinary tasks in every day life, professional skills) where artistic professional understanding and skills (as choreographers, conductors, dancer, performer, painter etc.) meet the needs of everyone
there are many stories, old and new ones, where art has been or is applied for the audience, in working with the audience; *choreographic thinking may work as an unifying reflective model
to make the different applications of different art and cultural fields to discuss with each other*
I personally am kind of interested to see how choreographic ideas affect theoretical framing; how choreographic thinking may help in making the invisible visible and creating new kind of ways to intervene; what kind of influence choreography will have on the way new projects are planned and designed
when seeing life and world as a pedagogical process where the basic issue is whether we find a way to adapt our selves in the demands of our surroundings in a way that leaves enough space for our own identity to grow healthy, it is quite obvious that the questions, challenges of life are in no way material but the basic question of our health will always be our relations to other people; these are the most immaterial factors of life
our efforts would be directed towards maintaining certain ethical principles which enable life to be meaningful and healthful, …for with a collapse of ethical living, viability of human universe collapses also, into an entropy of solipsism (Jeffrey, p 96)
a choreography of ethics would seek to create conditions for healthy interplay of different private ethics. it would seek also to induce a state of dance, which is described by Michael Klien as that state of excitement in a system wherein change becomes possible. (Jeffrey, p 94)
IN FRONT OF THE BLACKBOARD
it was a unique honour to participate as a performer in Choreography for Blackboards, a master piece drawn by Michael Klien, a strange and magical study the social learning process of six people in the frames of evolution of humanity, digging the sediments of our earliest memories both as individuals and as a tribe, as a family and as a cultural specie; to study the emerging of a language out of the basis where everything is information, turning the overall information into exact meaning of a expressed language; understanding another human being as communication, through communication and to develop an ability of perception, a perceptive presence among the others
Jeffrey writes afterwards: “as a performer of ‘Choreography for Blackboards’ at Sidestep Festival, I noticed that that choreography too, despite not having been performed in two and a half years, has remembered… It was as if we started from where we had left off before, even though new people were involved… This leads me to assert that these kinds of ‘social choreographies’ – which are essentially processes that are driven by the personal experiential material of participant-performer-citizens – have certain qualities of memory and, perhaps even, intelligence. I refer to Rupert Sheldrake’s thinking about ‘morphogenetic fields’ as a useful analogy”
after experiencing blackboards Jeffrey’s observation sounds familiar
how did the audience experience this strange ritual where six people were standing in front of their blackboards, drawing and deleting drawings, again and again as if they would have desperately been searching for something that finally is not at all to be found out of the lines of the chalk on the black surface but in the space between and around, in the movements, in rhythms and patterns unseen for the individual…
FACING THE MONOLITH
in Arthur Clarke’s space story 2001 the cultural evolution of man begins when in the middle of an almost fallen tribe suddenly appears a mystical monolith, an object with an impact on the creativity of the people
that is a media poetical metaphor based on a true story told thousand times in the stone ages; these stories are still to be read in places like Stonehenge; the true story tells about an artistic experience of facing the choreography of the dancing stones so heavy that no muscle can get them to move;
to move a stone of several tons is no doubt an artistic challenge that reveals the world and opens the creativity to the possible
and here am I standing in front of a huge black monolith like standing in front of the opening of a dark cave. Alone.
Chalk between fingers moving on the blackboard as a seismograph.
What is it? Reminder from yesterday? Hand is moving, drawings emerging on the surface, coming from somewhere, out of my normal conscious reach.
Find sediments. Like pieces of gold.
how every drawn line changes the whole group
every found sediment reveals a history and creates a history
we are a group, an ancient family in an aquarium
a crazy task trying to draw out something
in front of those monoliths
the beginning of civilization
a group of monkeys
the very simple instructions make us to be in a laboratory of creating social meaning
creating social matrix
creating history of desperately trying to fulfil the task of finding and strengthening the possible connection within the group
as Michael Klien, the choreographer, said, it cannot go wrong
there is no ‘wrong’
because the work it self, the choreography doesn’t fail: it always reveals us as a group just like we are, the show can not fail
even when we as a group would fail in finding the common harmony
as in the world history
the history is never wrong, it is what it is
what may be seen as ‘wrong’ is a mankind that fails to build a fair world
that takes care of everyone and do not make people suffer
lost possibilities may be called ‘wrong’
the choreography in itself is never wrong
what could be our possibility is to see the choreographic patterns we are moving along
to understand that all the meaning I’m doing alone are originally given from the others
empty meaningless would there be where I was left alone, if there were no one to take care of me
How to get to the others through this black board!
being a society in communicating through signs and gestures
creating patterns for rituals out of patterns
learning from the others, learning the others, and turning the learned into the self
until mortality shows its faces on the board
in a world of actors, purpose – motivation is the driver. Dancer, however, may be moved by something other. Let’s say intuition, our internal navigation system for entering the unknown
a choreography of ethics must provide for our inner curiosity by elaborating models with which we can navigate unknown, and cultivate our ability to live in a world replete with unknown: a humble admission of ignorance, a reappraisal of our notion of primacy among creatures, and commitment to stop trying to penetrate mysteries of life, while also encouraging production of self-knowledge (jeff p 98)
relating means moving. communication implies a volunteering of self into new possibilities of configuration, a willingness to move into a new position in order to stay with a relationship (jeff p 100)
we are not obliged to make our commitments to one ideal or another, but rather to preserve a lightness in our thoughtful movement that allows us to negotiate with grace and gravity our paths through this morphogenetic field, our living with change in this morphogenetic field. (jeff p 101)
Leave a trace. sediments form a bed for growth. dig in. move on… (jeff p 101)
dance, an economics of flexibility, that is dance. And when the mind rests, dreams are made to dance. the city is your stage
…evolving conscious paths to cross, creating possibility, growing through growing pains. Here comes society. Society means everyone. Everyone an artist. (jeff p 102)