Final Presentation V2

Motion in Space: “constructed situations” (three hypothesis)

Since we’re no longer restricted to the prescribed classical methods of connection, we’re open to an extraordinary leap in connection, which is just a matter of defining connective space. - William Forsythe.

"Phenomenological Vector", also about the nature of connection, "the body as the pre-objective ground for all experience of the relatedness of objects is the first "world" explored" by Phemenology of Perception - Merleau Ponty

The art object times and it spaces. This is one of the consequences of the object-oriented approach. As Tim Morton puts it, “If there is no top object [overmining] and no bottom object [undermining], neither is there a middle object. That is, there is no such thing as a space, or time, “in” which objects float. There is no environment distinct from objects. [….] Objects don’t sit in a box of space or time. It’s the other way around: space and time emanate from objects.” Because object-oriented philosophy holds that any relation between any two objects automatically produces distortion all objects relating are generative entities. Relationships create differences. My distorting of the original is to be expected, according to the object-oriented thinking all translations are “lossy” and this loss or distortion in the translation from one object relating to another is at the core of performance art. Object-Oriented Philosophy and Performance Art, by Paul Boshears

ONE

Merce Cunningham - UNTITLED SOLO 1953

PREMIERE DATE August 22, 1953 PREMIERE VENUE Black Mountain College LOCATION Black Mountain, NC MUSIC Christian Wolff, For Piano I DURATION solos, 5-10 minutes

"John Cage and I became interested in the use of chance in the 50's. I think one of the very primary things that happened then was the publication of the "I Ching," the Chinese book of changes, from which you can cast your fortune: the hexagrams.

Cage took it to work in his way of making compositions then; and he used the idea of 64—the number of the hexagrams —to say that you had 64, for example, sounds; then you could cast, by chance, to find which sound first appeared, cast again, to say which sound came second, cast again, so that it's done by, in that sense, chance operations. Instead of finding out what you think should follow—say a particular sound—what did the I Ching suggest? Well, I took this also for dance.

I was working on a title called, “Untitled Solo,” and I had made—using the chance operations—a series of movements written on scraps of paper for the legs and the arms, the head, all different. And it was done not to the music but with the music of Christian Wolff." —Merce Cunningham, Merce Cunningham: A Lifetime of Dance, 2000

TWO

Bruce Nauman

Wall-Floor Positions, 1968, 60 min, b&w, sound

In this videotape Nauman assumes a set of positions in relation to a wall and floor similar to those he had executed for an untitled 1965 performance, which he described as "standing with my back to the wall for about forty-five seconds or a minute, leaning out from the wall, then bending at the waist, squatting, sitting, and finally lying down. There were seven different positions in relation to the wall and floor. Then I did the whole sequence again standing away from the wall, facing the wall, then facing left and right. There were twenty-eight positions and the whole presentation lasted an hour."

THREE

Trisha Brown

Length: 3-10 minutes Original cast: Trisha Brown, Elizabeth Garren, Terry O'Reilly, Steve Paxton, Wendy Perron, Judith Ragir, Mona Sulzman

A 10-foot-long, ¾” x ¾” stick is placed with one end against the base of the wall and the other end on the dancer’s head. The dancer facing the wall moves forward maintaining the original angle of the stick until the head is wedged in between the stick and the floor. Performed by four dancers placed at equal distances along one wall or in partners – stick against stick – in the center of the gallery.

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draft text for exhibit:

Cross-disciplinary media objects that share time and space, with subjects, in relational encounters.

The encyclopaedia of movement in space proposes a series of constructed situations, a new stage for a lived experience of corporeality, in which the viewer, now the performer, acquires a different consciousness of the space we are in.

“Since we’re no longer restricted to the prescribed classical methods of connection, we’re open to an extraordinary leap in connection, which is just a matter of defining connective space." - William Forsythe.

or

"Dancing it specifies its contact with the ground, which remains the fragile of its stay in world. There is no ground beneath the ground, because every reality is a kind of floating architecture stretched above the abyss of botyomlessness. Dance articulates this knowledge about this uncertainty bu recognizing the reality of the subject as unfolded reality. It implies and re.actualises the ontological vagueness of human existence. This is what its ease is based on: on the affirmation of the indifinite, which marks the absence of origin of the subjectc and the certainty that nothing is certain in relation to its future, which remains contingent and vague..." Marcus Steinweg on Dance.

or

"Whether they are islands of re-connection, experiments on mind-body stimulation or a spiritual search for essential motion, contemporary dance works express the concerns of our time: they question the value we give to existing in real space and time, and make us face or realize our desire to challenge the physical, social and psychological laws that govern us, and to actively enter the “dynamic reverie” (Bachelard, 1943, p.8) as dreamers of our perception."

Body, the physical self. “That knowledge-acquiring apparatus." - Merleau Ponty (at Phemenology of Perception)

Choreographic Objects, a collection of three different choreographic approaches from three performance artists.

ONE

Merce Cunningham - Chance Operations.

(game piece structure + scores/ navigational instruments/short instructions: sequence of actions and re-orientation / trajectory)

TWO

Bruce Nauman - Wall-Floor Positions

(individual/solo improvisation)

THREE

Trisha Brown - Sticks

timetable : every hour.

(collective improvisation + conducting)

Opening: Friday, 26 19:00 - 21:00 continuing Saturday, 27 June 11:00 - 17:00