Sony UWP Dual Wireless Lavalier Microphone system (470.025-542.000MHz): 1 x URX-P03D two channel receiver; 2 x UTX-B40 body pack transmitters; 2 x Sony ECM-V1BMP Lavalier Microphones
Selected Documentation from Fonds Darstellende Künste #TakeHeart Residency, Kampnagel 2022
WORKSHOP – TECHNIQUES FOR AUDITORY RESISTANCE
In this periodic performance workshop, we invite any and all musicians and non musicians to take part in a conceptual mapping of a chosen area. On the 30th of June, using the garden at Kampnagel as our epicenter, we mapped our surroundings conceptually and “affectively”. We then invited participants to join us on a sound gathering walk, where we recorded 1. atmospheres 2. texts 3. “found instruments”. Ahead of the recording, we discussed how as a group we will consider consent, animacy and longevity, migration and authorship in relationship to the subjects of recording, and how our decisions will effect the way in which we undertake the recording process.
Some of the questions we considered were: Is it wrong to include humans in works of art without their consent? Why? Is it wrong to include non-human animals in works of art without their consent? Why? Is it wrong to include non-animal entities (i.e. rocks and stones) in works of art without their consent? Why? Is consent important in field recording ? Why? How will we gain consent from humans and nonhuman animals ? Can we do something performative to “ask” consent when there is no shared language? Is there something else we can do ? What actions will we take before recording a sound? How will be know when one person decides to begin recording sound? Is there violence in individuation when we have to decide who is the author of each sound and ask consent of that author?
DAILY SCORE – THE LIVING TEXT
The living text is the skeleton of what we would like a theatre piece to look, a theatre piece which attempts to refuse extraction from each other or itself. It is a text which we acknowledge as having a life of its own; therefore, it resists even our authorship. We acknowledge that we set it into motion and attempt to give breath to it, but eventually even the text will float away.
The Living Text writing practice score looks like this:
write for two hours every day, for 40 days of the residency
let the processes of research on extraction that you have already done inform what you understand performance to be or to be able to be
as you write, allow the processes to be performances and the performance to be a process.
as your write, remember that the writing is part of the process, so it, too, is a performance
try to write one of the following: 1. score 2. scene 3. prose 4. resource
writing in the language “markdown”, begin to compile a git repository, one which we hope will eventually become opensource. This will allow the text to be constantly written and rewritten. Through forking it will be possible for other manifestations or collectives to branch off from early iterations of this performance concept and to reformulate the texts at will
PERIODIC SCORE – TALK TO SOMEONE WHO KNOWS
make a list of people who we are interested in talking to about “art and extractivism”, including those whose work we find affinity, new and old collaborators, strangers whom we have read or heard or like their work
compose a thoughtful and person email inviting them to a recorded conversation, reminding potential interviewees of our compendium of tactics when recording
arrange a date and time with those who respond positively
arrange a translator where necessary
research platforms for properly recording two sides of the conversation separately
send a reminder
make a list of possible questions
record a one hour conversation with the person
aftercare: send the recording and transcript to the person we spoke to and thank them
DAILY SCORE – FULL TRANSPARENCY
Research one thing that’s on, in, or facilitates your body, each day, for 40 days
take a photograph of yourself. Try to include your full body
let the photograph help you visualize all the things you see on your body
list them
looking at all the things on your body, start to think about all the things you don’t see but that are also on or in your body
list them
thinking about all those things that you don’t see, think about things which are not “things” but perhaps processes and energies that facilitate those things
list them
choose one of the things on your list to investigate and one of them
Stop and address any and all misunderstandings of any word or concept
In this ongoing iterative performance, we show up in hybrid virtual and real spaces which are something chancing between Matka in Bucharest, Kampnagel Hamburg, Leftist Festival Lithuania, Synth Library Prague, Hopscotch Reading room Berlin, and the virtual space called “DISCORD” where we are joined by an AI called Craig. Craig is dressed like a bear, and/or his avatar looks like a bear but he sounds like a white man whose native language is English. Perhaps we should also dress like bears but instead we normally dress our absolute worst—we normally do not put on makeup or what someone would call “costumes”, but rather the most regular of our regular day wear because we have either biked very far and are sweaty or not biked far at all and have barely left our beds. These states of being have been reiterated over the past years of the global pandemic, practiced and well worn in, hard to let go of.
The reading group takes on the power dynamics of a space, of any space, of the theater space, which is also the sidewalk. The reading group is a stage and it is attached to the same problems of the theater. Why is it hard to get people to join a free event? Who should the target audience be—friends, close friends who already enjoy spending time together, but who may not be genuinely drawn to the topic? Or strangers—who are intellectually drawn to the topic but may not really enjoy spending time with each other? What pulls people together and keeps them independently connected? When an event is free, what makes people decide not to come? Is it because they have not made a monetary contract? Or because they have something else to do—something that is related to work and to economy and to earning money? Or something else which is more “fun”? What makes an intellectual pursuit “fun”, and is it a problem when it’s not? Does it feel like work, and therefore, do people desire to get paid for it? Does it feel like it feeds them intellectually which therefore makes them more viable in their fields, which then connects them to their careers and to work and therefore—they should be getting paid for it? Or is it, for some other reason, a very unattractive place to be?
Who has decided that we should read this text, and who is the author. Why have we given them the space to spend time with their words? Of course, we have reasons. Good reasons. Mel Y Chen has written a text called “Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect”, within which they discuss, among many other things, animacy heirarchies. Such heirarchies, which could be described using terms like: “alive, very alive and less alive” or “human, less human, less than human, nonhuman”, are inbuilt to our languages and to our social fabric, and index how we regard other things with respect and value. The text seems relevant to our work because we are thinking about field recording other humans and nonhumans, and a sense of respect (or lack of respect) must be inbuilt into the way in which we approach another human whom we record. Field recording is a relation in the moment. It is also a long term work of art, which will theoretically live—in some form. Understanding the animacy of the subject … Rather —interrogating the animacy of the subject—seems to be integral to understanding the relationship of the recording.
PERIODIC SCORE – OBSESSIVE FIELDTRIP
Using the Daily Score “Full Transparency” described above, choose one object or process to obsessively follow.
extend the minimal research from the index card and spend time finding out everything you can about the manufacturing process
find out where the object or resource is manufactured
visit the location
come as close to the location as you possibly can and document yourself there
if you can’t get inside the location, walk around the perimeter and document what is there
stop and journal about your experience, what you see, hear, and experience
For this periodic score, we visited the Tesla Gigafactory in Grünheide Berlin-Brandenburg, opened by CEO Elon Musk in March 2022. The factory aims to produce around 500,000 electric vehicles annually.
China / Credit: Alice Yuan TingChina / Credit: Alice Yuan TingPlatoon Berlin / Credit: Claudia BrijbagPlatoon Berlin / Credit: Claudia BrijbagCircolo Ribalta Vignola / Credit: Francesco Ballestrazi
We leave the residency space and drive across the highways to Naples Airport, returning the car. There is always something strange to endings, especially in contemporary capitalism. You leave behind the connections, pay the tollway, buy a cheap sandwich, return the rental car, board a plane and one world dissolves and another materialises.
This accelerated life, defined by commodities, distances and a profound lack of time, contrasts so violently with the cool timelessness that dripped from every stone we cradled inside.
We remember back to where this journey began back in 2015 in our slow movement journey about migration; perhaps it was on this day, in a stone quarry, although it would be hard to place it there, exactly there as a beginning. In the stone quarry I couldn’t help but think of the labor of the men down in the mines. It would be hard to say where precisely this journey began. But we know that this place, this Murgia region always brought us back.
We came back because what we had found was something we were not looking for. We found something that could be considered the opposite of migration—we found stone. Everywhere, stone. We found and felt the geological magic of the the murgia—The Altopiano delle Murge—a karst topographic plateau. Ancient rocks have pushed up from under the sea, joining a once island sliver of land to the rest of the mainland. And yet in this land there is a movement, there is motion. In stone that seems the only thing one can say is dead, is, rather, life.
In this land there is a road of pilgrimage, an ancient road of migration from the Rome to Jerusalem where travelers would traverse, stopping every 40 kilometers or so at another resting point, “estacion del poste”.
These songs and sounds found in stone – suoni pietra – colors our entire journey and we carry it through, and back to Berlin, and will carry it when we return.
From the murgia in Puglia to the erupting Etna mountain above Catania; from the marble quarry in Apricena to the natural caves and eco-instruments in Ariana Urpina; from the powder released from a broken stone that the artist Vito Maiullari cracked and had us taste with our tongues (“this is the way to Touch Time” he said); to the stone streets paving every city. The stone is that which cannot move but manages to. It moves with horrific lethargy, terrifying slow-motion drama. Moves despite everything. And as Vito showed us—produces sound despite its density. We broke stones in two, and the two halves formed the half of eternity, and they formed the magic of time, of all time, tasting time. We began throughout all time bound, bound in stone and bound in the geology of the earth. And yet despite this, we MOVE. We must MOVE.
Yes this time our theme was something else, something that perhaps I did not intend, that I could not have embarked upon with intention.
It was Maria Teresa the translator we met years ago, in 2015, who may have first uttered the word recuperare (recovery) when speaking about the vision of Ferula Ferita, the arts organization in the Old Station on the Antique Road. Recuperare–recover, recuperate, regain. In relation to architecture, it means to take ruins, old run down spaces, unoccupied buildings, and make them functional again, even if just for a temporary amount of time. In relation to things it means to find old furniture, discarded bits of trash, and to refurbish them. In the way of land it means to pull away the weeds from nut trees and give them the chance to breathe again. It means both to scavenge and to reuse. It resists consumerism, resists the tendency to discard and build or buy anew. It resists the idea of supporting an economy where jobs are generated in order to make new things and we toil at making new things to buy new things to make new things.
“The reality we dream is the connection between dreams and memories. It is a reality. Ferula Ferita is a dream and preserves the memories. It is a sense of recuperare (recovery).”
When I ask her about how this fits in with the stories of migrants who come to a new place she tells me, How do we preserve memory of place and tradition and welcome new people?
“It’s a collective work … Maybe the people who come from the sea, have a connection between our dreams and our memory. Maybe they are the dream and we are the memory! And just with this connection, we could have a real revolution, a real exchange in society … It doesn’t matter if you are Tunisian or from Milan or Alta Mura, you will have that memory because you live in that memory, it will become a part of you. I think that memory can be transmitted … if you now live in that place, in that place there is memory, people preserve it, you will learn it, it will become part of your reality.”
In relation to migrants it means, to hold on to the old stories, to pass down stories and to keep them and share them with people who enter the community. It means a collective memory, a collective preservation of stories.
I suppose in relation to music, it means to remember the songs that we learned as children, to remember and revive the songs that live within. In relation to dance, it means remembering first impulses. First instincts. Teaching and sharing those with others.
Maria Teresa’s words reminded me of the connection between the scavenger and the migrant, though they are often separated along race and class lines, separated by nation. They are separated by the complex social lines that keep us divided in the circles that we tend to swim in. And yet so many of us in fact are living with the idea of recuperare running in our daily lives. So many people who I see as moving and intersecting in parallel with alternative communities, not always directly in alliance, but certainly with a common goal of recupare.
Some have found success with money, but most have next to none. They live with little, they make sacrifices to live softly and simply do their art and find ways to survive. Vito and Domenico and Donato and Maria Teresa and ourselves included, even the gallery inside the Conad Shopping Center, where we encounter the opportunity to juxtapose our show with the theater of consumerism, all of these people are making it work, somehow. And I had to say to myself, and I wish I could say this more clearly to others: lets stop having the conversation where we judge everywhere else as so closed—lets stop having negative expectations and malprophetic analysis of our own communities. Instead lets have positive expectations, higher goals, expectations to reach towards.
Even the idea, so often put forth by well meaning souls – “they just need you, need art, to be brought to them, to open them up” – it makes me feel deeply uncomfortable. Its not true—I’m not a savior, I’m not a sage. I’m essentially just living my life as I feel that I must. The project of performing for and with other people is about an exploration in social interaction and social integration, but it is not essentially a self-less thing—if there is such a thing.
Perhaps people are shy, but so also are performers. Performers are discontent, shy, socially awkward, sensitive creatures. Often afraid, often insecure. Perhaps people are essentially OPEN or WANT TO BE OPEN but don’t know always where to go to, whom to ask. We look for art on the Internet, for music videos, we look for it on TV.
And what is fed to us constantly in the music industry, in the film industry, in the startup world? Generate Content. Generate Content. Generate Content, without regards to what the content is. Fill up the space—resist dead air! (Which reminds me of the way that we think about work in the capitalist economy. Simply WORK, simply DO SOMETHING. It doesn’t matter what it is. If you don’t like it, it doesn’t matter, you “have to” do something, in order to survive. This is just “the downside” of capitalism, so they say. This is simply what we must do … we must survive, so if you have to do something you don’t like or doesn’t interest you or you don’t love, just do it. Content content content. Make something, an image, fill the social media world with content. Stupid promotional videos encouraged by Kickstarter or Snapchat. “Show us the real you—all of it!” Show as much as possible, regardless of its value, regardless if you really mean or want to say anything.)
To resist the resisting. This is, essentially, the acceptance of dead air. The acceptance of our socially awkward tendency towards shyness. The acceptance of silence. The acceptance of lack of content. The active welcoming of different silence(s). The resistance to simply WORK without regard to its implication for the greater world. The resistance to simply take a job, any job, for the sake of generating an income, an income of survival, an income of leisure, wherein we begin to lose sight of what we need and what we really need.
When I looked deeper at the word recuperare, I began to see the links forming all around me. I see where and why we traveled as and where we did. We were finding those who want to think differently about labor. We found also about labor, as we always do, there is labor all around us and how we make a living, in the fields, moving about brush from the trees, people who have decided to decentralize instead of centralize around cities.
The impossible imperative of coming together and combining forces. Now moment now of “taste time “ in stone. Breaking of rock, Murgia pushing together stone shall capture, encapsulate all, all time, all people ,still impossibly it moves. Now and every now caught in this timelessness, lack of time.
Now place now, or here place here. We are all here, neither native nor migrant but both. If we can “see” this juxtaposition, this paradoxical truth, we might think about the imperative of us “sticking together” or “moving together”, tasting the timelessness of time.
This marks our final day in Italy, and we set off towards Ariano Irpino, a midway point en route to Naples from where we shall return to Berlin.
Our first stop is Mefite, a sulphurous lake valley located near Rocca San Felice, Villamaina, and Torella dei Lombardi. Mefite is named for the ancient Italic goddess Mefitis who is venerated by the Hirpini people, an ancient tribe who existed as a discrete group at least until the Roman era.
We are joined by Barbara, who we had come to know years earlier through her sound garden the Giardino di Sensible, Annibale, who takes thrilling photographs, Raffaele, a painter and sculptor who appears fully cloaked in animal skins, and Vito, a musician, and curator of a art and nature residency he runs in the area with artists and musicians.
Raffaele leads the ritual and acts as our interlocutor to the myths of Mefite. We make a procession down a hill to the edge of the sulfurous waters. Raffaele and Vito explain that if you spend too long by the bubbling waters, you can die, especially on days when the wind is still. Likewise, to bring yourself close to the ground is especially dangerous because the concentration of sulfur is higher.
This is shown by the multitude of animal corpses scattered around the lake: a fox, a boar, a dog, a wolf. They see the remains of other animals, and approach in search of food, whereupon they collapse and become part, themselves, of this frozen, macabre spectacle.
Not even insects or microbes can survive the sulfur, so their corpses lay mummified and preserved, their perfectly preserved pelts slowly sliding off bones.
We make recordings of the procession, of the drumming, and singing, and then in silence, the bubbling of the sulfurous waters.
Gurgling sulphur
Vito tells us a story about a man who had died there. He had gone there specifically to commit suicide because the man believed “he had the devil inside him”. Later in the village, Adrienne raises this story with him again and Vito recalls nothing of the story and says that instead that the man had been collecting artifacts and had spent too long with his face close to the ground. She insists a little bit, and Vito asks, “Did you read about the Mefite ahead of your visit here?” Seemingly as perplexed as we were about where we had heard this story. And we say no.
It is probably just a lost in translation moment, but it is amusing to think that it is the vapors that have possessed Vito to tell the story, or that we have even hallucinated it.
Kate recalls the story a little differently: it is not that the man had gone to the place to commit suicide, but rather that when he was there, the vapors caused him to believe that the devil was inside him, and once he felt that way, he no longer had the power to leave, the toxic fumes took him to his death.
Afterwards, we walk like a gang of boys around a town called Rocca San Felice. Donato parades through the town dressed as Noah, attached to a sail to the delight (and irritation) of the residents. We are taken to the museum there and also to the studio of Raffaele, where he shares some of his artworks. Particularly striking are some paintings he made in collaboration with the sulfur, leaving the canvas by the lakeside for a few days so that it corrodes into the material, as well as paints that he has extracted by processing the sulfur.
Donato Laborante as Noah in Rocca San Felice
Later, we regret not asking more direct questions about the animal skins he wore, and also about the aliveness of the sulfur, but it is hard without a dedicated translator to approach subtler questions of the aliveness of so-called dead matter.
The trip to the lake seems to encapsulate so many of the themes that arise throughout our journey – life and death woven into one another, the way that time and materiality overlap – in particular in the grisly silent forms of the mummified animals, and the potential aliveness of things we do not normally consider to be alive.
Returning our attention to our surroundings, we perform a geographical, political, social and spiritual mapping of the Dimora Cagnazzi. This exercise is a cornerstone of our practice, one we have returned to again and again since we began our experiments in ritual with the Critical Magic performance and album. It is a way of centering ourselves and opening up our attention to what is around us, the political fault lines, the unseen architectures, the elusive details that elude easy capture.
We drive out of Altamura and through and beyond the town of Matera to another network of caves. We meet GianFranco Lionetti, who has spent his life since a teenager exploring the Murgia’s caves. Joining us is Michele Garofalo, a local guide who acts as our translator. He speaks a beautiful, literary English that he picked up, to our surprise, living in Bulgaria, where English is of course a lingua franca among non-Bulgarian speakers. Domenico Profido, a self-taught biologist, accompanies us as well.
Spontaneous Cave Melodies
GianFranco imparts on us what he knows ancient rituals that were performed using the water bestowed drip by drip from the stalactites above. The water emerges white like sperm or milk, and was said to give the women who rubbed this brew on their bellies and breasts the nutrients they need to be fertile or to breastfeed. Women seeking to become pregnant would rub their breasts with this cave brew.
Knowing that we are there to make recordings, we sit in silence together for a full five minutes to try to capture the sound of one drip of water falling from the tip of a stalactite. We take all the lights off and in the dim light Kate turns off the camera and Adrienne captures the sound of the drip-drip-drip. It is, unspoken, a holy moment for all of us to experience.
The cave becomes narrower, and narrower, and narrower as we press in to the chambers said to be inhabited by bats, but, alas, they had all migrated for the winter months, and so we rested a moment in an empty crevice whose ribbed walls evoke an abdominal cavity. GianFranco tells us the caves were used by cults for rituals and was even for some time consecrated as a church.
As we approach the growing light of day at the mouth of cave we ask GianFranco if he has ever slept in a cave.
Adrienne capturing the cave’s silences
“Once,” he replies, “when I was a teenager, because the storm outside was so strong.”
What was it like?
“Like being in a womb.”
As we make our way back to the car, Domenico picks herbs and native asparagus for us to eat. They taste different, he explains, because of their proximity to the life-giving minerals that shelter in the caves. The aliveness of these caves overflows, and saturates everything around them.
He also seems to know about plants that grow where the land has been finely trampled, and these are signs of where the dead have been buried. We know that the signs of life and death are everywhere for them if we begin to understand what they are.
We wake up and make a sound expedition through the house, moving from room to room, taking the objects we found, and exploring the affordances they give. We take video and pictures as well, with the vague idea of making an integrated audiovisual work.
Some powerful moments are discovering an unused daily planner from the 1880s, sounding on an old copper cooking pot, and a poignant melody that plays itself through Adrienne’s hands when we commune with the old baby grand piano in the salon. The piano is a degree out of tune and the melody seems to quiver in the air around us.
Piano melody
We take the afternoon to drive to the coast, to Trani, and we have deep, hard conversations about the way we work together and the way we relate to one another. We walk along the docks and jetties and in the cold bright sun of early spring, time seems to quiver, like a stone breaking in two.
Today we hold our ritual-performance-workshop “Stillicidum: Die Tränen des Steines” in the so-called “Cemetery of Stone Blocks”. Our general goals are to produce a composition of sound and movement where synchronicity emerges rather than being imposed, that we find a way to move and sound together.
We ask all those gathered to dress in the colours of rocks, so that we may more closely that the rocks are our kin.
We are interested in the group reflecting on questions like “Are the rocks alive?” and “How do we ask stone for consent?”
Below is the score we performed together.
Quarry Score Altamura 2023
Introduction
– Hello. Introduce HYENAZ. – People are going to be recorded, obtain consent, release forms – We are going to move together, play together. Once we descend into the quarry, we will treat it as a sacred space. – Phones on silent.
Enter the space
– Clap on 3 – Enter space in silence
Grounding Choreography
– Walk through the space – Sense the place that is right for you. It will be a feeling that says “this is where I belong”. When you feel this, stop moving. – Plant your feet firmly – Stand with your legs hip width apart, arms open, face to the sun – Imagine a circle of light encircling you. – If you feel the need to sit or lie down, feel free to do so. – Count backwards from ten and with each number imagine yourself being pulled into the earth. As each number passes, you are getting deeper and deeper until you are in the centre of the earth. – Now count from one to ten and find yourself back where you began, but still connected with the centre of the earth.
Deep listening
– Remember to breathe, and let yourself be fully present in the moment. Allow the sounds to guide you to a deeper connection with your soul and the universe around you. – When I stop talking, listen. Open yourself up to all the sounds, the vibrations, the energies of this space. – Allow the sounds to vibrate through your being. When you hear a sound, point towards the source of the sound with any part of your body. You can point with your arm, or your nose, or your foot, or your belly. – Let your intuition guide you to search for a sound that calls to you from farther away. Connect with its energy, and point towards it with a different part of your body. – Keep listening for sounds further and further away, and each time you hear the sound point with your body.
Mirroring forms
– Find an object nearby that speaks to you. – Study the object’s shape, texture, and overall essence. Visualize the object in your mind and prepare to transform your body to resemble it. – Using your entire body, mimic the object’s shape and form. Hold this pose for one minute, allowing your body to fully embody the object. – Take a moment to observe how you feel as you become one with the object. Pay attention to any sensations or emotions that arise. – Now, find a partner and make eye contact with them. Rotate your body if necessary to face them directly. – Observe their current shape and form for 30 seconds, taking note of any unique characteristics or movements. – Over the next two minutes, slowly transform your body to resemble theirs. Take your time and allow your body to flow and adapt to their form. – Repeat this process with different objects and partners as desired, – Repeat?
Consent & Animacy
– Feel the energy between each other as a circle – Walk around the space and feel yourself drawn to a particular stone within the space. – Take it to the stone of your choice and see if you can feel energy there – Can you get in touch with the aliveness of the stone – Is it saying something to you, is it consenting – If you hear a message, whisper it to yourself – Repeat the whisper, make it louder, and bring it to a song
Play the space
a. Different kinds of sounds – atmospheric sounds – singing / speech – found instruments: – long sounds – percussive sounds – resonant sounds – dull sounds
b. Play and find instruments – take some time to simply explore and play
c. Make a group composition – come together and use the tool box to create something together – remember that there needs to be space for silence – remember that we are composing together and we don’t need to make sound all the time
As we trailed behind the departing cars heading to a group dinner at the residency space, we absorbed the day’s experience. We both feel elated. To be outside, to be with others, to move together is a profound, joyful experience. We were joined by about 12 people, and there was the sense that, some at least, felt profoundly as moved as we did.
We felt truly blessed by the presence of Vittoria Elena Simone, a photographer and videographer who captured beautiful images and helped us to translate key moments in the ritual.
There were limitations as well as disappointments. Some of those gathered did not seem able to fully take part, to let themselves go, to move freely, to sound freely. There are lots of explanations we could give. The cold weather, sandwiched between two formidable rainstorms, could have hindered those gathered from fully enter their bodies as temples of movement and sonic exploration. There were also differences in mobility in the group, some were older and more frail and perhaps did not feel safe or even able to move across the unstable ground with its precipitous and potentially deadly drops.
We had asked everyone to spread out, but the group was too small and the space too vast, causing the energy to dissipate rather than intensify. We wanted a flow between each of us, such that we learned from, gained from, built on the gifts of sound and movement that others were providing. Instead we often felt quite alone in our movement.
In these moments, insecurities crept in. We wanted to lead but not stand out, to not be “performers” with an “audience”. Yet with an inexperienced group the confidence of a leader can inspire othersand light the flame so to speak.
In general, we learned yet again, that not having a dedicated translator nor time for introductions and after care left some of the depth and intimacy missing
Between us as performers, we crave that in future there is more attention to creating and sustaining the magic of the ritual, rather than concerning ourselves over small technical details. If we had an assistant, letting go of such concerns might be easier. We would feel more empowered if we were not carrying bulky equipment at at the same time as we try to lead.
In moving forward, we will take these lessons and experiences with us, seeking to cultivate a space that encourages presence and awareness, power and vulnerability.
A final thought: we couldn’t help but notice the sight of cement in the quarry, lobbed beside the ancient stone. The omnipresence of this substance came up yesterday as well in Gravina and it reminded us to think more deeply about the relation between stone and cement, between deep time and modernity, the dichotomy between these two forms.
