questions
Real-time composition, João Fiadeiro
1 – What are the "speculative gestures" that motivate the "fabulous techniques"?
The bets :what if?
The practices that interest us are often motivated by a speculative bet: What if...? /What if…1 ?
If we call these betsspeculative, it is because they are often based on paradoxes or counter-intuitive statements, so that they propose attemptsa priori impossible, by linking them to reasons for acting or thinking that go beyond ordinary rationality:
What if we could dance a unison with our eyes closed?
This is what the American dancer Lisa Nelson proposes to do in theBlind Unison Trio, one of hisTuning scores, or tuning scores.
What if we could feel or see from a distance?
This is the bet of Myriam Lefkowitz, whose practices consist in experiencing a “potential body” beyond the physical body, in an “ether” of extra-individual sensations and intuitions.2 .
And if we could be danced...
... by "the skin of space" (Yasmine Hugonnet), ... by "the mobility of the environment that dances in us? (Erin Manning), ... by "movements in us that are not ours" (Emma Bigé)?
What if the movements of attention already formed “social choreographies”?
This is what fifteen inhabitants of the same city can observe when Mickael Kliën offers them to spend four hours together in silence (Parliament).
What if the signs thought for themselves?
Under this hypothesis, the hermeneutical devices of Julien Bruneau, Alice Chauchat, Valentina Desideri & Denise Ferreira da Silva, or Teresa Silva & Sara Anjo, promote the encounter between a personal problematic (the one that motivates the "consultation" of the practice) and dance (or drawing, speech...), so that the signs formulate impersonal responses to subjective questions 3 .
What if we could separate the body and the dance? What if we could remember what we haven't experienced? What if we did a dance telepathically?
These are some of the questions with which Loïc Touzé intrigues in perception and in cooperation.
What if a composition without an author were possible?
This is what Real-Time Composition offers (Real Time Composition) by Portuguese performer João Fiadeiro, who develops tools to exercise the reaction and decision-making processes involved in collective improvisation.
Most of these practices provide specific means to provide experience. We call these means intrigues because they are heuristic tricks to thwart habits.
This involves, for example, offering paradoxical or counter-intuitive instructions, so as to trigger the disengagement of sensory-motor or cognitive habits.
It is also about sensory experiences based on the chiasms of the active and passive, of the felt and the feeling, so as to favor a lived experience “in the middle way 4 ".
It is still about impossible tasks, which consequently oblige to shift the search for means, and which thus favor discoveries by serendipity.
These intrigues thus operate as traps to see, traps to dance, motives to act, motives to think, so many possible pitfalls.
ways of knowing
If these practices are saidspeculative, it is firstly because they “bet” on the heuristic effects of their bets, and secondly because their working hypotheses are conceived and practiced as true modes of knowledge. Among these modes of knowledge, there are some that venture into the troubled regions of the "savage fact".5 », on the fringes of the phenomenal. At the crossroads of "magic" and intuition, certain divinatory or telepathic games interest us here for their specific pragmatics, and for the way in which they establish modes of veridiction which are not dependent on scientific rationalism (and its principles of verification), but which are nonetheless ways of knowing.
We will therefore study each of these practices with regard to the situated knowledge they produce on perceptual ecology, on the radical imaginary (that of the lived body), on the performativity of ritual, play and spectacle, on distributed cognition.[Hitchins, 19956 ] and participation in art…? We will analyze the ways in which they relate to the singular (and often minor) epistemologies of eco-feminism, ecopsychology[Roszak, 1995; Taleb, 2014], neo-paganism, divinatory arts, alchemical tradition, institutional psychotherapy, decolonial, queer, minority studies…
In doing so, we will seek to understand in what ways they contribute to complex approaches to reality, by "connecting without reducing"[Morin, 2014].
Intrigue
Extensions, Yasmine Hugonnet. Photo Anne-Laure Lechat
2. What ecologies of attention do fabulous techniques put to work?
attentionography
The artists who are interested in this research project give themselves creative means that are no longer only choreographic or dramaturgical, but also, and above all, attentionographic 7. We borrow the term attentionography from the American dancer Lisa Nelson, who for fifty years has been designing improvement practices for attention, and collective games to share the exercise, theTuning Scores(or tuning scores). Like Nelson (and sometimes in his wake), many artists make the writing of attention an important issue in the scores they develop: Myriam Lefkowitz speaks of "attention devices", Erin Manning of attention dance...
perceptual clairvoyance
In these practices, the reconquest of attention involves a micro-phenomenological work on perception, by means of what we call aperceptual clairvoyance. This clairvoyance designates the coenesthetic integration of different somatic and attentional practices capable of producing "sensation images": sensory-motor ideation (visualization and sensory incorporation), states of increased consciousness (hypnosis, meditation), chiasmatic games between agent polarities and patient with sensation, movement, thought.
We will therefore question the attentionographic means used by these artists, in relation to the know-how they borrow from somatic practices, spiritual or martial arts, clinical knowledge of neurosciences or psychology. We will study their respective approaches to oral guidance, their inductive uses of language, spatiality, atmosphere. We will question the ameliorative virtues of these techniques on sensitivity, and how they meet issues of emancipation.
Real-time composition, João Fiadeiro
3. What are the issues for participation in art?
games
“Fabulous techniques” are games, in the double sense of the term that the English language allows us to distinguish: theplayand thegame, or spontaneous play and regulated play.
In the artistic practices that interest us, spontaneous play (most often improvised) is the first mode of exercise of the expressive gesture, that is to say the gesture which puts the feeling or the thought at work of their figurability. To this end, artists invent heuristic tricks or emulator fictions to astonish the sensibility.
Elegantly, the American philosopher Bernard Suits defines regulated gambling (game) as a “voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles”[Suits, 1978, 41]. In the games we study here, these unnecessary obstacles take a speculative turn: they may be paradoxical tasks, counter-intuitive rules, problems to solve, bets on the impossible, or murky attitudes about to perceptual faith (telepathic hypothesis, divination, prayer, etc.).Thus, Lisa Nelson invites three dancers to dance in unison while keeping their eyes closed (Blind Unison Trio). Loïc Touzé asks us to redo a dance that has just taken place in a room where we were not (Imprint a dance).
In these games, the players do not solve these intrigues by themselves, but with the help of different impersonal forces: it is the rules of conduct that ensure the composition of looks, it is the transitivity of actions that promotes emulation. from the desire to see. In the final analysis, the only “success” of these games is in their aesthetic challenge: to experience an original creation without an author, a trans-individual experience of art made possible by the collective contribution.
contributed experience of art: the author is the relationship
As such, these artistic practices give a radical impetus to L'aesthetics of encounter that the philosophers Baptiste Morizot and Estelle Zhong Mengual call for : they realize an experience of art that sometimes goes so far as to do without a work, to work on the very encounter.
In this, the "fabulous techniques" take literally the promise of art as experience formulated in the 1930s by the philosopher John Dewey. For Dewey, the experience of art is not only a contemplation, it is an act, an act which proceeds from a rhythmic and relational harmonization with the vitality of forms, and which opens to the overcoming of all dualism: the aesthetic act being fundamentally relational, it leads to the blurring of any sharp division between production, work and reception, between creator and spectator.
Some of the artists who develop “fabulous techniques” further radicalize this proposal, beyond the current forms of participatory art 8. They do not offer spectators anyparticipate in something that would have been programmed upstream of the situation, and which would be called “work” once accomplished and documented. These artists design situations or games, and proposeparticipate in something, an event which will be produced by the very performance of the game, and which will not give rise to any work.
These games are certainly art, but the experience of art is not therelavished by work, she iscontributed through the performance of the relationships that develop in the game. The mode of artistic advent of this experience is therefore not that of representation, but that of encounter. The artistic forms that emerge from these games are the very fact of the relationships that are experienced there.
This is one of the radical aesthetic issues of these “fabulous techniques”: the author is always more than one (Manning). In other words, the author is the relationship. Artists only create and sign scores (to feel it, to act it, to play it…). These partitions allow perceptions, actions and cognition to be distributed among various agents, human and non-human, and for the creation of a form or a gesture to emerge from the game. groups-subjects to dosocial with the sensations and relations by which they individuate 9 .
Workshop Loïc Touzé and Mathieu Bouvier, with students from the Strasbourg National Theater School, 2021
Research topics
In the light of these observations, we will examine the various approaches toplayfulness from which these practices originate. What compositions of relationships do they create between spontaneous play (play) and regulated play (game)?
When some scores are developed, what are its modes, properties and effects? What artistic traditions do they borrow from, and how do they innovate in relation to existing partition categories? [Sermon, Chapuis, 2019] ?
What means do they bring to the work of feeling and acting, to the experience of collective bargaining, at the interpretation signs, forms and events?
We will also ask the new terms of participation engaged by these artistic practices and their specifications in relation to the existing categories of participatory art, open work, art in common[Zhong Mengual, 2017]. What historical and cultural genealogies can we draw from it? How do these practices radicalize the concepts ofArt as experience [Dewey, 1934] and D'Aesthetics of encounter [Morizot, Zhong Mengual, 2018] ? What sociological and philosophical issues for this relational paradigm in living art and in the social clinic?
From a perspective of cultural anthropology, we will also question the pragmatic relationships that artists weave between their practices and forms ritual action, when both are viewed as “serious fiction10» [Bateson, 1977; Houseman and Severi, 1994].
Finally, under a more philosophical approach, we will ask ourselves in what way “fabulous techniques” are fertile devices for the experience of collective individuation. How do these experiences allow us to think afresh about this notion of collective individuation, under the crossed perspectives of phenomenology, cultural anthropology and biology?
footnotes
1.It is a question that the American dancer Deborah Hay bequeaths to the artistic community. In the 1980s and 90s, she had the habit of making groups of amateur dancers work for several months on one and the same question, an "astonishing statement" [Bouvier, 2021] made up of emulating paradoxes, and initiated by a "what if? » "What if every cell in my body could simultaneously invite to be seen in the choice to let go of the habit of facing only one direction, using my perception of space and time as tools to observe my practice inside the egg theory”. See Hay Deborah,My body, this Buddhist, trans. from English (American) by L.Pichaud, and L. Perineau, Lausanne, Dijon: coll. New Stages / Manufacture, Les presses du réel, 2017