Editor’s note: In 2006 R.I.C.E. was invited to take part in discussions about possible strategies for developing inter-disciplinary art projects that intersect with the public in vital and intimate ways. Steve Valk works in part by developing ‘thought tapestries’ that manifest physically as small handmade books. They work on an associative level, like a dream, to open the reader’s perceptions to a new understanding of reality. At the time, R.I.C.E. was preoccupied with the relationship between perception, imagination, and the observer participation in the construction of reality.

The book is addressed to Declan McGonagle, then Director of INTERFACE at University of Ulster in Belfast. The specific references to Oudad refer to a founational myth of Ulster that involves the warrior Oudad casting his own severed hand onto the shore of the province in order to make first claim on the territory. This bloody hand is still represented today on the province’s flag.

Steve Valk: What was the context for creating the book?

CREATIVE ABANDON
on the dance-floor
OF THE HERE AND NOW

In retrospect, I realize that the recursive, epistemological understanding which was informing our work and which we were hoping to imbue the Interface project with, could only have been communicated “inter-subjectively”. The book Dear Declan was an attempt to make that happen. It was an attempt to establish a discursive territory rooted in and emanating from personal, i.e. “existential”, subjectivity.

Social Choreography, a concept we were trying to introduce to the project, is contingent upon a kind of creative abandon on the part of the persons / performers / institutions involved. This heightened subjective state has the subsequent effect of actuating the immediate social environment. These conditions then foster/ manifest a situations and states of social creativity, by transforming the regulated world of human affairs into a dynamic “possibility space”, a kind of “dance floor” of the here and now.

R.I.C.E. “flew” out of that project because there was no intersubjective surface or interface to engage with. The discursive framework or organizing principle at work in that project was rooted in the codes of institutional academia and the world visual art production…
Innocent abandon and spontaneous creativity undermine the very criteria that bring these institutions and identities into being…

ideas in the world, changing the world

R.I.C.E. is a dramaturgical consultancy and a civic-life-oriented cultural agency located in Frankfurt, Germany, Limerick, Ireland and Helsinki, Finland. Its mandate is the exploration of a new and growing consciousness about how human activity transforms and is transformed by the world: not only how our actions physically mould our environment, but how the very frames we think by, organize our perceptions and give form to the particular way we see the world.

the social body as dancing body
developed in Frankfurt from 1999 to 2004 at the TAT Theater and with the support and artistic collaboration of William Forsythe and the Frankfurt Ballett and then further developed in Ireland with Choreographer Michael Klien and the Daghdha Dance Company, R.I.C.E. has emerged as an organization which seeks to explore more fully the broader implications and applications of the notion of choreography as an aesthetics of change

how do we get out of the gravitational pull of the places, habits and structures our lives exert on our souls?

R.I.C.E. thinks, dreams, and choreographs unique future-oriented social situations that allow deeper surfaces of awareness to become apparent, enabling citizens to sense the encompassing systems within which we all perform our public and private lives.

that mysterious attraction linked perhaps in one way or another to the knowledge of all our differences

R.I.C.E. connects and colludes with public and private, knowledge, worship, commercial and culture-based organizations, to investigate working paradigms in their fields of activity, realigning motivations, goals, actions and systemic organization, going deeper to investigate unspoken assumptions that ground these paradigms, in order to release creative energy, empower agency and affirm deeper understanding.

emptying the present of its absolute authority

R.I.C.E. specializes in deep dramaturgical research, the creation of innovative communicational formats and the practice of social choreography as methods of discovering and manifesting alternative patterns in the ecology of our collective experience.