DOING THINGS
(IN FRONT OF OTHERS)
// ROBIENIE RZECZY PRZED INNYMI
(2019)
People that I don’t know well are staying at my place. When they are
around I am tensed. I am repeating things, like standing up and looking
at the oven, realizing that my action has no cause I’m coming back to have my tea and when its paper label is squashed in all directions I’m standing up
again...
It is a multimedial performance based on fragility of improvisation and (impersonal)
affect that becomes a common ground for everyone engaged in the
situation. Stretching time, navigating the gaze, generating coincidental encounters
for unexpected feelings to emerge. Performers and visitors together form a collective body that carries out the work of fabulating - primarily by
the fact of being enmeshed (physically and semantically) here and now.
“How to acknowledge the obscure but ubiquitous intensity of impersonal affect?”
Concept: Dorota Michalak, Borys Slowikowski
Choreography & facilitation:
Dorota Michalak
Co-creation, performance & set-up: Dorota Michalak, Borys Slowikowski, Lena Czerniawska & guests (Tio’tia:ke /Montreal: Miri Chekhanovich, Haley Jenkins-Crumb)
PARTNERS
SUPPORTED BY
PERFORMED AT
White Wall Studio - Tio’tia:ke / Montreal (CA), 20.08.2019
NOTES:
WORKING WITH THE OBVIOUS - LEARNING FROM “DOING THINGS”
"Doing things" has its origins in an attempt to attentively inhabit performance as a certain material-semantic situation. We direct our attention towards the very act of communication, rooted in materiality and dynamic networks of impersonal affect. It offers potential for playful reorganization of the structures in which we function as social beings and allows to follow material, affective, sensual rationality.
It is primarily a meeting. During the process of creation, people from different (artistic) fields, operating within different cultures and infrastructures of (artistic) work meet. We build a common ground through the very engagement in the collaboration, commitment to the work, spending time together, sharing space, building understanding.
We anchor ourselves in the sense of our physicality as the primal experience of every living being. We lean on the fragility of improvisation which exposes us to the unknown and to the forces of impersonal affect.
Within the performance we expose ourselves and we expose one another in continuous flux. Every activity potentially prepares a space for the other to thrive. It is about being generous, it is about being baroque and mundane, it is about acceptance.
The material that we work with is the material we consist of. It is getting distorted, obscured, and augmented. We learn from dismantling the techniques that we mastered, our crafts, disciplines, our abilities, routines, and behaviours. We learn from repeating and pausing, attending to the details and gut feelings. We withdraw from the endless database of our bodies.
It is a part of the practice to acknowledge various strata and matters constituting our tangible-selves. Microbiome, chemicals, bioplastic, an inflexional system of the native language, hours spent sitting on the chair, several ways of bending over, the impulse to look immediately at the source of the noise,….
It is the labor of moving between different scales embedded within us, trying to embrace the whole complexity of the body. Using imagination and bodily empathy, we can tune into the planetary level and feel the continuous expansion of matter, or the cellular level and feel the oxygen particle penetrate the cell membrane. How does tuning into these processes affect the pace and quality of unbuttoning the shirt, singing the national anthem at a school assembly, explaining the complicated visa application procedure,…?
This work is based on a deep bodily conviction that thoughts, meanings, and rationalities emerge in a material world and can be transformed by engaging with the matter.
Performers and visitors together form a collective body that carries out the work of fabulating - primarly by the fact of being enmeshed (physically and semantically) together.
It is a poetry created by an attentive and sensual co-inhabitance of the exhibition space. Within the performance, we consciously navigate the unruly gaze. Seeing with the flash, not looking at one another or looking back in the eyes, watching the watchers, observing carefully. It allows us to expose the material-semantic tensions, rifts, frictions between the various strata and components of the situation. It is a poetry of reverberating coincidence.
It is primarily a meeting. During the process of creation, people from different (artistic) fields, operating within different cultures and infrastructures of (artistic) work meet. We build a common ground through the very engagement in the collaboration, commitment to the work, spending time together, sharing space, building understanding.
We anchor ourselves in the sense of our physicality as the primal experience of every living being. We lean on the fragility of improvisation which exposes us to the unknown and to the forces of impersonal affect.
Within the performance we expose ourselves and we expose one another in continuous flux. Every activity potentially prepares a space for the other to thrive. It is about being generous, it is about being baroque and mundane, it is about acceptance.
The material that we work with is the material we consist of. It is getting distorted, obscured, and augmented. We learn from dismantling the techniques that we mastered, our crafts, disciplines, our abilities, routines, and behaviours. We learn from repeating and pausing, attending to the details and gut feelings. We withdraw from the endless database of our bodies.
It is a part of the practice to acknowledge various strata and matters constituting our tangible-selves. Microbiome, chemicals, bioplastic, an inflexional system of the native language, hours spent sitting on the chair, several ways of bending over, the impulse to look immediately at the source of the noise,….
It is the labor of moving between different scales embedded within us, trying to embrace the whole complexity of the body. Using imagination and bodily empathy, we can tune into the planetary level and feel the continuous expansion of matter, or the cellular level and feel the oxygen particle penetrate the cell membrane. How does tuning into these processes affect the pace and quality of unbuttoning the shirt, singing the national anthem at a school assembly, explaining the complicated visa application procedure,…?
This work is based on a deep bodily conviction that thoughts, meanings, and rationalities emerge in a material world and can be transformed by engaging with the matter.
Performers and visitors together form a collective body that carries out the work of fabulating - primarly by the fact of being enmeshed (physically and semantically) together.
It is a poetry created by an attentive and sensual co-inhabitance of the exhibition space. Within the performance, we consciously navigate the unruly gaze. Seeing with the flash, not looking at one another or looking back in the eyes, watching the watchers, observing carefully. It allows us to expose the material-semantic tensions, rifts, frictions between the various strata and components of the situation. It is a poetry of reverberating coincidence.