Curatorial Performance Program
At the Donau Festival, Krems, Austria, between April 25th and May 3rd, 2014
description
The Great Big Togetherness shares different positions of collectivity through the lens of choreography, sculpture, sex magic, group experience, shamanism, activism and queer theory.
As a performance maker and curator I have been invested in ecstatic, neo expressive, hypersensitive, actionist bodies. I want to facilitate participatory group experiences that process play, mass dance, tantra, ritual, unconscious improvised choruses, and future machinic assemblages. For me,performance and experience making evolves from the desire for the transcendent union of the collective. Yet this ecstasy thing is tricky—creating a paradox of heightened perception through the loss of self.
All that has intense complex political implications; one creating subordination, and the other liberation. How do we tell which moment is which?
Participatory practices begin to have an overwhelming presence in the art and performance world. Similar to the conflict of the ecstatic this work can either heighten the attention to the power dynamics of leadership or create further subordination with the pretense that the work is at best using the audience. This discourse motivates me to further question the creation of participatory performances because I still believe and fight to maintain that this togetherness is really necessary and totally possible.
Potential solutions include: emergence, mediation, world making, activation, seduction, suggestion, fiction, friction, risk, not knowing together, spontaneous mass dance, care giving, and service. These performances are not about “transforming relational codes into something nicer” (Bishop).
As a performance maker and curator I have been invested in ecstatic, neo expressive, hypersensitive, actionist bodies. I want to facilitate participatory group experiences that process play, mass dance, tantra, ritual, unconscious improvised choruses, and future machinic assemblages. For me,performance and experience making evolves from the desire for the transcendent union of the collective. Yet this ecstasy thing is tricky—creating a paradox of heightened perception through the loss of self.
All that has intense complex political implications; one creating subordination, and the other liberation. How do we tell which moment is which?
Participatory practices begin to have an overwhelming presence in the art and performance world. Similar to the conflict of the ecstatic this work can either heighten the attention to the power dynamics of leadership or create further subordination with the pretense that the work is at best using the audience. This discourse motivates me to further question the creation of participatory performances because I still believe and fight to maintain that this togetherness is really necessary and totally possible.
Potential solutions include: emergence, mediation, world making, activation, seduction, suggestion, fiction, friction, risk, not knowing together, spontaneous mass dance, care giving, and service. These performances are not about “transforming relational codes into something nicer” (Bishop).
“Nice” is ok. But we want something deep that’s going to challenge what we become when we are together, whather it feels “nice”, or not. Usually, I prefer “nasty” to “nice” (it’s just a preference!) But if it feels nice, fuck it! As Liz Rosefeld put it: “Lets all cum at the same time” ! The Great Big Togetherness concerns my fascination with the highly charged, and fragile politics of togetherness.
It’s really big because possibly, it’s impossible.
Liz Rosenfeld and Carlos Maria Romero question how we see and how the charged presence of a stranged erotic body create ties that bring the audience and performer closer to one another.
Together Forever with Jeremy Wade, Liz Rosenfeld and Igor Koruga is a practice in futurizing notions of a collective body through the construct of marriage.
AA Bronson creates a canopy of the hypersensitive, where intimacy and magic can be reciprocally transmitted. Meg Stuart offers the uber score of laughing for one hour as a threshold to a massive social ornament. Keith Hennessy preaches and teaches us into action queering ritual and collective ancestry.
Finally, we are graced by the liminal presence of Protektorama, Johannes Paul Raether’s smart phone shamanic priestess, who will weave us together through the mythic and technological.
It’s really big because possibly, it’s impossible.
Liz Rosenfeld and Carlos Maria Romero question how we see and how the charged presence of a stranged erotic body create ties that bring the audience and performer closer to one another.
Together Forever with Jeremy Wade, Liz Rosenfeld and Igor Koruga is a practice in futurizing notions of a collective body through the construct of marriage.
AA Bronson creates a canopy of the hypersensitive, where intimacy and magic can be reciprocally transmitted. Meg Stuart offers the uber score of laughing for one hour as a threshold to a massive social ornament. Keith Hennessy preaches and teaches us into action queering ritual and collective ancestry.
Finally, we are graced by the liminal presence of Protektorama, Johannes Paul Raether’s smart phone shamanic priestess, who will weave us together through the mythic and technological.
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