interactive performance

About Animacies

With Animacies, HYENAZ stage their 10 years of Foreign Bodies research and musical compositions, giving them form through interactive performance scores developed during their 2023 residency at Hamburg’s Kampnagel theatre. These scores are interactive games in which audience members take the stage with HYENAZ and are invited to explore relationality and the micro-politics of inter-action; concepts HYENAZ explore in-depth throughout Foreign Bodies.

These scores operate as live co-creations: through which those gathered are challenged, for example, to think about proximit(ies) and how proximity affects our ability to take action towards care. Or, to experience the aliveness of the objects that populate psychic life–for instance, the phones breathing in our pockets, the scarves coiled around our neck–as well as the invisible relationships to other humans that condense within these objects – the many hands that follow an object from its origins as raw materials into the seemingly “finished” entity that we “own”. HYENAZ also invite their audience to sit with the (discomfort) of the micro-interactions we perform with each other in shared spaces as rehearsals of power.

The work refuses the tyranny of distancing, through which the aliveness of other entities vanishes beyond the horizon because we cannot physically experience them in our immediate environment. In what ways does proximity and distance make it possible for wars to continue without end, and for the satanic mills of capitalism to grind on into a cascade of mass extinction events.

These choreographies of care and complicity refuse the notion of presence and absence, action and passivity: we are always choosing to tune in or to tune out, to act or avoid. Tuning into the aliveness of objects–and of each other–is one way of returning a sense of radical responsibility to humans in a world that seems out of their control.

Introduction to the Animacy scores

An Animate Theatre PRactice

These texts for stage can be interpreted at will. They are not to be performed in any particular order or in any particular place. They are not all to be performed every time. The texts can be changed, they are dynamic, they are alive to us. We want to invite you to allow them to be alive to you. They are, and we are with them, a process; a flowing entity to which we enter. They are living texts, we hope. This is the hope that we have blown into them.

We know that no one can make something alive to another person. Perhaps the question of how to cultivate, facilitate and care for aliveness–a mutual commitment to and honoring of the life in each other–is at the heart of what might be called a “non-extractive creative process”. These texts contribute broadly to a dialogue about how to create such processes and the difficulties paramount in doing so. How do we work together across our unique intersectionalities, creating and maintaining relationships which resist extraction (of time, of money, of care, of commitment, of emotional labour, of joy, of ideas, of consent itself)? These texts intend to speak to, with, and about these questions without providing answers; these texts do not feel that they need to provide answers.

Extraction and its adjacent term extractivism is a wide concept, which could (perhaps) encompass many different kinds of actions and relationships. We are researching and relating to “extraction” as metasignifier—we include the extraction of (creative) labour from (precarious) bodies; minerals, gas and water from the ground; sounds, words and images from sentient beings; the consensual extraction of digital content, and the “mining of the special” from our very identities.

You might ask how is this any different from any other script. For one thing it is not directed by anyone except the participants. We will create and recreate it together. It is not the vision of the director, but the decision of those involved how it is shaped. This is also a critical pedagogy. It is also a process as soon as it is accepted by a production house / space / basement / backyard / public square. It is already a process, but when a house steps into the flow, the relationship begins to develop about how the players will be collected and who will play the audience and who will play the players and everything inbetween–interlocuters, active players, passive players. A sense of how a collaboration will be initiated is part of the ongoing conversation into which the house will step.

We have learned from previous performance work that performing the same ritual over and over can endanger one’s inner magic, especially when it is tied to performance sites where art and capitalism intersect–which is most sites of performance that have the priveldge of being so. That is why we have chosen to make this a hypertextual ritual with a modular structure, where pathways can be followed or left for nature to reclaim, so new paths can be discovered. It is, as you can see, also open to the public to witness and read.

We have a few hopes for our engagement in the process:

    In this performance, we stay in touch with pleasure.
    In this performance, we stay in touch with fears that cause resistance.

These texts are categorized in the following parts, which are by no means fixed or rigid: resources, scores, scenes, prose. It is entirely possible that a text changes its form and becomes another category, or be published twice, in two slightly different forms, under two different categories. It is also possible that new categories arise and are created, or that the system of categories is eliminated altogether. Our reasoning begind the categorizing system was to make some order for ourselves in terms of how we imagine staging this for the first time, and how bodies would orient to a given text based upon their category.

The idea of a score is a set of directions to be followed, as though the text is speaking to the participants. Participants attempt to interpret and follow the directions of the score, but essentially what they create will be a set of movements and speech acts that are not pre-recorded and will be entirely created in the moment by the unique set of people following the score. The speech can then be written down and recorded as text if the participants desire, and recorded, for example, as a scene.

A scene is a set of movement directions and speech acts which the participants, for the most part, repeat. The act of repetition of speech through the bodies who take the text across the dimension of time create the difference. Even if the scene were performd by the “same people” twice or three times, the difference would still be creation by the dimentiion of time and the fact of people changing through time. (We might, by that logic, ask if it really is the same people performing the text). The script of the scene, of course, can be changed, modified, but essentially the playing of the same scene more than one time is the act of repitiion and what we might think of as a vertical deepening of meaning, a way of finding new meaning in the same thing.

A bit of prose is similar to a scene, however the intention is that it is read by one body, and that body takes on the speech act for them/him/her self, meaning that they attempt to speak the text from the perspective of authorship, not as a representation of another’s text. They also dont engage directly with other bodies onstage; their relation is solely with the text. The text again acquires meeaning thorugh the act of repititiion, but the emphasis is on how one body relates to a text rather than how a field of bodies relate to a text. The challenge also arises in the way in which the mouth takes a text which “is not theirs” and speaks it, and owns it, or claims it from the perspective of “I”.

Resources are not necessarily meant to be (re)presented onstage, though they can be. They are meant to be informative to the structure of the text itself, like this document. They are also meant to act in concert with the texts.

Finally, these texts for stage desire to be much more than what they can be, and this is a painful desire. This desire is a kind of dysphoria, a dysphoria that one feels or is interpreted as weak but is actually powerful, of being able to effect change, to be able to make the change happen together. The dysphoria is that the texts have to not be works of art but rather to be political acts, to be legislation, to be unions. They also call to act bodies who desire to be much more than what they are, and to be understood to be more more than how they are visualized by each other. They would like to be asked what they imagine to be and use the stage as a place experiment as something(s) they imagine themeslves to be. And i—script—- i living script—i desire to be something larger than what i can be, to affect more change than what i can affect. Perhaps not to be script, but to be a union of artists, of workers. To be a union of persons who do not have to claim art as a distinctive category. What a beautiful idea.