The video installation relates to a performance by Tuija Kokkonen/ Maus&Orlovski from 2008. This was a pair of outdoor performances where the basis of the presentation was weather, time, potentiality and non-human co-actors. They were performed in two in-between spaces and times. A Performance with an Ocean View (and a Dog) was performed on the ancient shore of the post-ice-age Yoldia Sea in the northern suburbs of Helsinki, at the highest point of the city area. Its pair, A Performance with an Ocean View (for a Dog) took place on a potential future seashore on the roof of a city centre department store, and it was created and performed for a dog as its main spectator, although human spectators were present part of the time. The performance moves between live art, environmental art and conceptual art.

Installation: Tuija Kokkonen
Visual assistant: Pekka Sassi
Videos: Sini Haapalinna and Tuija Kokkonen
Shooting: Ilmari Arnkill, Leena Kela, Lulu Salmi, Pekka Sassi, Leo Torvalds
Photography: Kaisa Illukka

Maus&Orlovski performance collective 2005-2008/ the performers of the performance:
Eka (a dog), Sini Haapalinna, Jukka Hytti, Kaisa Illukka, Tuija Kokkonen (concept, text, direction), Tomi Suovankoski, Robin Svartström, Tuire Tuomisto, non-human co-actors

_______________________________________________________________________

WOW – Wir arbeiten hier is an initiative of artists from Berlin, a working title and an agenda, all in one. The project was born out of a need to understand work as a mode of continuous interaction. It locates itself at the interface between the art market – which defines work as a product – and a gift economy – which understands artistic practice as sharing and communicating to create a community of work.

During the festival, the participating artists will formulate their own standpoints, research, comments about the festival programme and appeals to the audience through a form of writing that is autonomous and interdependent at the same time. The process of a discourse formation contingent on chance and of a rampant contextualisation can be followed in a newspaper hanging on the wall that can also be picked up daily as a published collection of loose leaves. _______________________________________________________________________

Aria shows the artist’s companion dogs, Sugi and Tom, exploring the natural world; a journey through an archetypal Canadian landscape culminating with Tom’s emotional vocalizations as an “aria.” The recognition of animals’ own agency of being is the key in Aria which seeks to represent the dogs’ emotional connection to the natural world. Aria, the operatic form, is defined as a long accompanied song by a solo voice, with origins in 18th century Italian music. The form of the aria and the imagery and harmonic structure in Aria recall historical romanticism in art which emphasized personal inspiration and subjectivity. Aria uses the musical structure of “call and response” to depict an emotional dialogue between Tom and the landscape. All harmonics and ambient landscape sounds in Aria – birds, insects, wind – are constructed from recordings of Tom’s voice.

Aria was supported by: a co-production residency at Banff New Media Institute, The Banff Centre, Banff, Canada; Intersections Digital Studios, Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

_______________________________________________________________________

Adopting the movements of various animals Forti begins the performance by walking hypnotically in circles. She falls to the floor and begins a cycle of walking and crawling that becomes an open metaphor for evolution and aging. Through the course of the performance, the camera follows Forti’s circling motion at increasingly close range, creating an interactive dance between camera and performer. While “rustic” in respect to the quality of the video image and sound, Solo No. 1 serves as an engaging document of Forti’s dedicated study of natural movement. (source: Video Data Bank)

Courtesy: Video Data Bank

_______________________________________________________________________

A string quartet is playing live for the three dogs while they are recorded on camera. Domestic dogs as a product of both nature and culture span the modern divide between those two domains. Their attention to sound and their animal reasoning with it shift along the lines of perception and obedience. Their reactions point to the unresolved and unresolvable questions of what is form and what is noise, what is a product of culture and how does it mark its margins that distinguish it from its background?

With participation of Quartet Plus 1
_______________________________________________________________________

During the performance platform, Kira O’Reilly will continue her ongoing performative research on different ways and modes of relating to materials, tissues, objects and an/organic bodies. Creating a domestic laboratory setting – entailing fertilised chicken eggs, an incubator, a microscope and various glass objects, which have been produced specifically to relate to her body – she invites audiences for an hour each day to simply observe, or to engage in conversations with her. On the last day, when the chicken embryos have developed, a final collective performative manifestation will take place. ______________________________________________________________________

“In my childhood, on sunny days I would often stare at my own shadow and then suddenly look up at the sky. There I could see a ‘white silhouette’ – an afterimage of the shadow I had just seen on the ground. It was a game that fascinated me, because I knew that it was an illusion created by my eyes, not by the sky.”

In the second part of her shadow trilogy, Naoko Tanaka takes this experience of light as a point of departure for examining the tensions between optical evidence and the subjective power of sight. A single point of light is put into motion in an empty study, lending it an unfathomable dynamic and transforming it into an endless universe. Not only is the logocentric regime of the gaze that dominates our beholding and perceiving challenged, the space surrounding the viewers also loses its architectural stability and opens up new possibilities of orientation.

In astronomy, one finds the concept “absolute magnitude” (or “absolute Helligkeit” in German, meaning “absolute brightness”), with which we can precisely determine the material dimensions of the universe and the constellations of stars. In contrast, the performance explores this mathematical reference in relation to the connotation of sensory experience that it acquires in the German language. Absolute brightness is a very concrete concept in our abstract system of thought; as such, it provides an opportunity to stage visual expressions that do not correspond to anything in our world of experience.

In Absolute Helligkeit, light becomes the true agent. It takes on the form of an autonomous eye, whose gaze challenges viewers to explore new strategies of seeing.

Text: Adam Czirak

Concept, visual and sound design, performance: Naoko Tanaka
Dramaturgical collaboration: Adam Czirak
Technical collaboration (stage): Walter Freitag
Technical collaboration (light): Jo Grys
Production assistance: Alise Michon

Production: Naoko Tanaka, Christine Peterges
Co-production: SOPHIENSÆLE. Funded by: Regierender Bürgermeister von Berlin – Senatskanzlei – Kulturelle Angelegenheiten, Kunststiftung NRW, PACT Zollverein Essen _______________________________________________________________________

The Manifesto of Urban Cannibalism is an enactment of the organic and inorganic voices of the city, of the liquid flows of minerals and invisible ecologies of microorganisms that constitutes the bodies of buildings and beings. The Manifesto will be proclaimed by the historical larynxes and the deep memories of the Sophiensaele building itself. Audience is invited to partake and feast on a chemical and political convivium.

In collaboration with the sound artist Trevor Mathison. ______________________________________________________________________

One of them is quick, the other slow, one gulps down his food, the other one savours it, one of them is at the beginning of his life, the other one started her last quarter, one knows her ancestors of at least six generations, the other one is unaware until his grandparents, and both have metal ends in their bodies.

Tocki von Arnim and Bettina von Arnim live together in the same house. They do not speak the same language, they are hardly alike and yet, they have assembled.

In My Dog is My Piano, Antonia Baehr sketches a subjective acoustic portrait of the affinity between her mother and her dog: can the house they share be read as the music score of the stories of canine-human living together? What kind of language emerges from this long duet of everyday comings and goings, of these choreographies of affinities?

Concept, development, performance: Antonia Baehr
Dramaturgical support: Valérie Castan
Sound: Fred Bigot, Angela Anderson
Light design: Sylvie Garot, Georgia Ben-Brahim
Sound mastering: Angela Anderson
Organiser: Alexandra Wellensiek
Production: make up productions, www.make-up-productions.net

Supported by : FAR° festival des arts vivants (Nyon)

Thanks to: Bettina von Arnim, Tocki von Arnim, Donna J. Haraway, François Noudelmann, Avital Ronell, Gertrude Stein, Villa Gillet/ Walls and Bridges NYC. Infinite Affinities – Chords and Discords _______________________________________________________________________

The lecture addresses the current discourses critically engaged with digital techologies, affect and objects and the way in which these discourses are intersecting with one another to stimulate a turn to the vibrancy of matter, the liveliness of objects, and the affectivity of media. I will raise questions about performativity, tightly linking aesthetics and causality and thereby shifting weight to the allure of the sensual, the force of the affective and the rhythmicities of dynamic matter. Re-conceiving the relationship of life and matter, digital and analog, affect and cognition, these discourses are putting epistemology and ontology out of sync with each other, requiring a bridge through a deeper interrelationship between the social sciences, the humanities, the sciences and the arts.

The discussions of affect currently occurring across a number of disciplines will be extended to consider the relationship of affect to all scales of matter and to the singularity of each and every object. _______________________________________________________________________

Any philosophical attempt to think the body must be based neither on fascination with immanent substantial organics nor on post-organic fetishism. In order to come closer to a critical ontological horizon by approaching the body, I have introduced the concepts of disorganisation and aisthetic power.

The concept of disorganisation allows us to step out of the bad dialectics of the organic and the inorganic and thus demonstrates the originary condition of transformability of body-subjects. The body-subject becomes a subject through the complex operation of the transformative (dis)organisation of its tekhnai. I suggest that resistance is the term most suitable for this tekhnai force of metamorphosis. Resistance is inherent to the transformability of the body: it is the acting out of its own power.

Joined discussion, moderated by Franz Anton Cramer, Inter-university Centre for Dance Berlin (HZT)

_______________________________________________________________________

One of them is quick, the other slow, one gulps down his food, the other one savours it, one of them is at the beginning of his life, the other one started her last quarter, one knows her ancestors of at least six generations, the other one is unaware until his grandparents, and both have metal ends in their bodies.

Tocki von Arnim and Bettina von Arnim live together in the same house. They do not speak the same language, they are hardly alike and yet, they have assembled.

In My Dog is My Piano, Antonia Baehr sketches a subjective acoustic portrait of the affinity between her mother and her dog: can the house they share be read as the music score of the stories of canine-human living together? What kind of language emerges from this long duet of everyday comings and goings, of these choreographies of affinities?

Concept, development, performance: Antonia Baehr
Dramaturgical support: Valérie Castan
Sound: Fred Bigot, Angela Anderson
Light design: Sylvie Garot, Georgia Ben-Brahim
Sound mastering: Angela Anderson
Organiser: Alexandra Wellensiek
Production: make up productions, www.make-up-productions.net

Supported by : FAR° festival des arts vivants (Nyon)

Thanks to: Bettina von Arnim, Tocki von Arnim, Donna J. Haraway, François Noudelmann, Avital Ronell, Gertrude Stein, Villa Gillet/ Walls and Bridges NYC. Infinite Affinities – Chords and Discords _______________________________________________________________________

“In my childhood, on sunny days I would often stare at my own shadow and then suddenly look up at the sky. There I could see a ‘white silhouette’ – an afterimage of the shadow I had just seen on the ground. It was a game that fascinated me, because I knew that it was an illusion created by my eyes, not by the sky.”

In the second part of her shadow trilogy, Naoko Tanaka takes this experience of light as a point of departure for examining the tensions between optical evidence and the subjective power of sight. A single point of light is put into motion in an empty study, lending it an unfathomable dynamic and transforming it into an endless universe. Not only is the logocentric regime of the gaze that dominates our beholding and perceiving challenged, the space surrounding the viewers also loses its architectural stability and opens up new possibilities of orientation.

In astronomy, one finds the concept “absolute magnitude” (or “absolute Helligkeit” in German, meaning “absolute brightness”), with which we can precisely determine the material dimensions of the universe and the constellations of stars. In contrast, the performance explores this mathematical reference in relation to the connotation of sensory experience that it acquires in the German language. Absolute brightness is a very concrete concept in our abstract system of thought; as such, it provides an opportunity to stage visual expressions that do not correspond to anything in our world of experience.

In Absolute Helligkeit, light becomes the true agent. It takes on the form of an autonomous eye, whose gaze challenges viewers to explore new strategies of seeing.

Text: Adam Czirak

Concept, visual and sound design, performance: Naoko Tanaka
Dramaturgical collaboration: Adam Czirak
Technical collaboration (stage): Walter Freitag
Technical collaboration (light): Jo Grys
Production assistance: Alise Michon

Production: Naoko Tanaka, Christine Peterges
Co-production: SOPHIENSÆLE. Funded by: Regierender Bürgermeister von Berlin – Senatskanzlei – Kulturelle Angelegenheiten, Kunststiftung NRW, PACT Zollverein Essen _______________________________________________________________________

During the performance platform, Kira O’Reilly will continue her ongoing performative research on different ways and modes of relating to materials, tissues, objects and an/organic bodies. Creating a domestic laboratory setting – entailing fertilised chicken eggs, an incubator, a microscope and various glass objects, which have been produced specifically to relate to her body – she invites audiences for an hour each day to simply observe, or to engage in conversations with her. On the last day, when the chicken embryos have developed, a final collective manifestation will take place. ______________________________________________________________________

Corinna Schnitt: Once upon a time

Video, 2006, 25:07 min, colour, sound

In her video Once upon a time, Corinna Schnitt shows a normal, middle-class living room with Persian rug and a tasteful lounge suite. In the camera’s field of view, several animals appear one-by-one, doing their own thing – completely without the presence of humans. While at first a cat and a parrot may seem like nothing out of the ordinary, things take a turn toward the bizarre when they are joined by a goat, a calf and a llama, who together ravage the indoor plants. In her videos, Schnitt uses the suggestive power of monotonous straight-line and circling tracking shots.

Courtesy: Video-Forum des Neuen Berliner Kunstvereins n.b.k.

Julie Andreyev/Animal Lover: Rockstar

Video, 2010, 6:10 min, colour, sound

It has been found that the canine sense of smell is hundreds of times more sensitive to that of human beings. It can be argued that this uniquely detailed perceptual experience points to an empirical intelligence that humans can only imagine. Some canine experts speculate that the pleasure the dog experiences from traveling in a car with his head out the window is like a psychedelic experience – fantastic rush of the senses. In Rockstar, the artist’s dog Tom is portrayed in close-up as he travels in this way. The soundtrack is constructed solely from studio recordings of Tom’s voice and from car engine recordings. The soundtrack references rhythm and harmonic modes associated with rock music and car travel.

Rockstar was supported by Intersections Digital Studios, Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

Carolee Schneemann: Infinity Kisses – The Movie

Video, 2008, 9 min, colour, sound

Infinity Kisses – The Movie completes Schneemann’s exploration of human and feline sensual communication. It incorporates extracts of the original 124 self-shot 35mm color slide photo sequence, Infinity Kisses, in which the expressive self-determination of the ardent cat was recorded over an eight-year period. Infinity Kisses – The Movie recomposes these images into a video, in which each dissolving frame is split between its full image and a hugely enlarged detail.

Cluny 1980 – 1988. Vesper 1990 – 1998. Incorporating Infinity Kisses, Self-shot 35mm Photo Grid. Edited: Carolee Schneemann, Trevor Shimizu, Rick Silva. Sound: Rick Silva, Carolee Schneemann. With thanks: Alex Sweetman. To the memory of Diane Buckler 1956 – 2008.

Courtesy: Electronic Arts Intermix, Carolee Schneemann
Courtesy: Electronic Arts Intermix, Carolee Schneemann ______________________________________________________________________

Lygia Clark (BR): Mémoria do Corpo

Film, 1984, 30 min, b&w, sound

Lygia Clark’s (1920-1988, Brazil) artistic trajectory began with an emphasis on visuality. From 1947 to the mid-1960s, she successively produced drawings, paintings and sculptures. Since the 1960’s, however, Clark’s work gradually shifted towards the investigation of corporeality and always involved the creation of interactive objects. This shift in artistic themes, materials and modes of operation happened simultaneously on four levels: through the progressive destabilisation of the art object, the systematic transformation of the spectator into an active creator, the dissipation of the traditional notion of author, and the gradual abandonment of the artistic milieu and its modes of production and consumption. Clark’s last proposal — a psychophysical therapy entitled The structuring of the self (1976-88) — was the culmination of a poetic and ethic move aimed at dismantling rigid separations between object and body, spectatorship and authorship, aesthetics and healing, art and non-art.

Mémoria do Corpo (Memory of the Body) is a documentary film about Lygia Clark’s The structuring of the self therapy. Clark presents the Relational Objects and applies them to the body of Paulo Sérgio Duarte, a Brazilian art critic. (source: www.re.act.feminism.org/ author: Eleanora Fabiao)

Director: Mário Carneiro
Courtesy: The Associação Cultural “O Mundo de Lygia Clark”

Amanda Baggs (US): In My Native Language

Video, 2007, 8:37 min, colour, sound (English)

The YouTube video In My Native Language (2007) by the autism activist Amanda Baggs leads any kind of “look-at-the-autie gawking freakshow” ad absurdum and critiques “what gets considered thought, intelligence, personhood, language, and communication, and what does not.” In her two part video, Baggs depicts and translates her ‘native language’, which “… is about being in a constant conversation with every aspect of my environment”, about “(r)eacting physically to all parts of my surroundings”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnylM1hI2jc

Nao Bustamante (US): Sans Gravity

Video, 2000, 10 min, colour, sound

Transparent water balloons are stuck onto the performer’s body. In this way the body appears and simultaneously disappears under more and more balloons, which also alter its shape. An assistant gives the audience needles and knives on a tray, surgical instruments in a way. The performer exposes herself to the audience members, who are asked to prick or slice the balloon-body, causing water to flow out and the water balloon body to become increasingly smaller. The pricking and slicing of the other becomes a possible threat/injury, but also a kind of relief, since the burdensome weight on the body is reduced. (Source: www.sfb-performativ.de/freaky/films.html)

S a t u r d a y  7 t h  J u l y  2 0 1 2

5.00 pm Vinciane Despret (BE): When “showing” matters: humans/animals choreographies

Saturday, 7th July 2012, 5.00 pm, Foyer Festsaal (ca. 60 min)

Lecture (in English)
free entry

[dropdown_box expand_text="" show_more="Information" show_less="Information" start="Hide"] ______________________________________________________________________

Considered an indicator of self-awareness, mirror self-recognition has long seemed limited to humans and apes. Though other animals – elephants, dolphins, magpies, … – are considered today as being talented “recognizers”, we may suspect that these devices rest upon an anthropocentric (or even ethnocentric) definition of “self-awareness”. I would suggest that being able to consciously hide one self would as well rest upon the same feature. And if it is the case, some animals could be credited still more convincingly of self-awareness if they may purposively display themselves in order to be seen. Some of these animals, according to their trainer, their breeder, or their observer, seem to be fond of displaying, be it on stage, in contests, or in the wild. Self-awareness would therefore be a relational achievement, and displaying a cooperative embodied communicative process. If the story goes that way, we might therefore talk, like Donna Haraway suggested, about a choreography that bonds animals, and animals and human beings (be it trainer, breeder or simple observer).  ______________________________________________________________________

Interkingdoms, tinkering kingdoms and tinkering with kingdoms, the contemporary ‘new’ media of live and living materials within biological arts practice both explore and scrutinise through the matter of ‘matter’ the emergence of materials and knowledge systems from the life sciences and their attendant technologies.

These tanglings and entanglings of techné and biomedia across, betwixt and between contexts of biological laboratories, domestic spaces, art spaces and outdoor spaces inform much of my current art practice and research.

These will be presented as modest provocations that unmoor living materials and biological practices from their defining disciplinary frameworks and render them mobile, articulating and performing. Citing key works from visual arts history, biotechnology history and current art practices, I will discuss my practice of developing and participating in co-emerging contingent and partial bodies within and without the laboratory. These will include pigs and tails, raucous spiders, deeply unstable skeletal muscle cell cultures, filigree fungi, silken architectures, getting into the sterile hood and loitering at bus stops; gazing and peering, walking and falling and getting egg on my face.

Joined discussion, moderated by Boyan Manchev, Inter-university Centre for Dance Berlin (HZT)

______________________________________________________________________

The performance Monstrous Nature is motivated by the desire of a disjunctive coexistence. A coexistence that emerges from the friction of different intensities and not from parity. Three people affected one by each other, as well as by the environment. A skin environment, that embraces and drowns. They are three figures that pulsate, and this pulsation functions as motor to a gear that provokes accidents, it means, encounters, collisions, falls: affections. And these affections may produce f(r)ictions.

Artistic direction: Marcela Levi
Co-direction: Lucía Russo
Performance and co-creation: Clarissa Rêgo, João Lima and Laura Samy
Dramaturgic collaboration: Laura Erber
Light design: Andrea Capella and Tabatta Martins
Music: Marcela Levi
Foley: the whole group
Sound engineering: Fernando Capão
Visual installation and costume design: Marcela Levi and Lucía Russo
Technical designer: Custodio Vieira
Production direction: Marta Vieira
Executive production: Refinaria Produções LTDA
Artistic residencies: Centro Coreográfico da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro and MANIFESTA! (occupation Cacilda Becker Theatre)
Supported by: Espaço SESC – RJ and Iberescena Fund
This project was awarded by the Fund for Dance Development (FADA), Rio de Janeiro’s  Municipal Secretary of Culture. ______________________________________________________________________

During the performance platform, Kira O’Reilly will continue her ongoing performative research on different ways and modes of relating to materials, tissues, objects and an/organic bodies. Creating a domestic laboratory setting – entailing fertilised chicken eggs, an incubator, a microscope and various glass objects, which have been produced specifically to relate to her body – she invites audiences for an hour each day to simply observe, or to engage in conversations with her. On the last day, when the chicken embryos have developed, a final collective manifestation will take place. ______________________________________________________________________

Antonia Baehr is beginning with a new series of solos about interspecies relations, critiquing anthropocentrism and the straightness of nature/culture binarism. She will work with threesomes of affinity, conjoining an animal with a friend or parent and with herself as the host and solo-interpreter, as she will also in My Dog is My Piano, presented the night before in the festival.

At this point in time, we meet Antonia Baehr during the first stage of her project,  ABeCedarium Bestiarium, a performed “ABC of animality” in animal and temporal drag. Here she invites artist friends to uncover an affinity that they have with one extinct animal of their choice. Each animal stands for one letter of the ABC. She commissions each of these artists to write a short solo performance score, related to the animal that they have selected, which she can perform on stage alone. In the frame of the festival Antonia Baehr will perform two scores, the letters: S and T.

S is for Steller’s Sea Cow: concept, composition, choreography and setting: Sabine Ercklentz
T is for Tasmanian Tiger: text, voice, composition, costume and choreography: Steffi Weismann

Overall concept, production and performance: Antonia Baehr
Technical direction: Angela Anderson
Administration: Alexandra Wellensiek
Thank you: Ausland, William Wheeler, Stefan Pente, Conrad Noack, Ida Wilde, Bettina von Arnim, Andrea Neumann, Antonina Panfilowitsch, Kathrin Ercklentz, Rudolf Mast, Dieter Rehwinkel, Lindy Annis, Alain Roux, Rudyard Kipling, Friedrich Kittler, François Noudelman, Wolfgang Müller, Valérie Castan, Gertrude Stein, Walton Ford, Elisabeth Freeman

Funded by: Hauptstadtkulturfonds _______________________________________________________________________

“In my childhood, on sunny days I would often stare at my own shadow and then suddenly look up at the sky. There I could see a ‘white silhouette’ – an afterimage of the shadow I had just seen on the ground. It was a game that fascinated me, because I knew that it was an illusion created by my eyes, not by the sky.”

In the second part of her shadow trilogy, Naoko Tanaka takes this experience of light as a point of departure for examining the tensions between optical evidence and the subjective power of sight. A single point of light is put into motion in an empty study, lending it an unfathomable dynamic and transforming it into an endless universe. Not only is the logocentric regime of the gaze that dominates our beholding and perceiving challenged, the space surrounding the viewers also loses its architectural stability and opens up new possibilities of orientation.

In astronomy, one finds the concept “absolute magnitude” (or “absolute Helligkeit” in German, meaning “absolute brightness”), with which we can precisely determine the material dimensions of the universe and the constellations of stars. In contrast, the performance explores this mathematical reference in relation to the connotation of sensory experience that it acquires in the German language. Absolute brightness is a very concrete concept in our abstract system of thought; as such, it provides an opportunity to stage visual expressions that do not correspond to anything in our world of experience.

In Absolute Helligkeit, light becomes the true agent. It takes on the form of an autonomous eye, whose gaze challenges viewers to explore new strategies of seeing.

Text: Adam Czirak

Concept, visual and sound design, performance: Naoko Tanaka
Dramaturgical collaboration: Adam Czirak
Technical collaboration (stage): Walter Freitag
Technical collaboration (light): Jo Grys
Production assistance: Alise Michon

Production: Naoko Tanaka, Christine Peterges
Co-production: SOPHIENSÆLE. Funded by: Regierender Bürgermeister von Berlin – Senatskanzlei – Kulturelle Angelegenheiten, Kunststiftung NRW, PACT Zollverein Essen _______________________________________________________________________

Performance Saga (Andrea Saemann, Katrin Grögel): Interview with Carolee Schneemann

Video, 2008, 50 min, color, sound, Engl. (excerpt)

The artist Carolee Schneemann decided that the canvas was too restrictive in the early 1960s. She began to expand painting into space and to use her body. In the Judson Church in New York, she organized groundbreaking happenings and performances with actors and objects, calling these “kinetic theatre”. In the 1970s, she created seminal feminist performances. In this interview, which was recorded in her house in New Paltz, New York, Carolee Schneemann talks about her cat’s creativity, about becoming an animal and about the loss of self in her performance practice.

Interview: Andrea Saemann und Chris Regn
Courtesy: Performance Saga / Fink Verlag

Hélène Cixous with Adrian Heathfield: Writing Not Yet Thought

Video, 2011, 57 min, color, sound (Engl.)

In this exchange the acclaimed and prolific author Hélène Cixous discusses the practice of writing – considering fiction, theatre, the essay and poetry – alongside its relation to painting, music and philosophy. As the dialogue with Adrian Heathfield evolves, writing emerges as a site and instrument for encounters with other voices and otherness, mortality and mystery, the infinite and the “not yet thought”.
Recorded in Cixous’ home in Paris, the conversation is punctuated by various interruptions and affinities (animal and familial) that are taken into the movement of her thought. Cixous’ discourse flies between subjects as diverse as the song of the poetic, the temporality of invention, the re-thinking of the tragic, and the word becoming flesh and air in theatre. (Source: Unbound)

Production: Performance Matters
Direction, Camera, Editing: Hugo Glendinning
Design: David Caines ______________________________________________________________________

Isabelle Stengers has written a comment (2005) to Brian Massumi’s proposition that “a political ecology would be a social technology of belonging, assuming coexistence and co-becoming as the habitat of practices”. By social technologies of belonging Stengers refers to what we may become able to do, think and feel because we belong; an obligation to characterize what it is to know that you belong.

This presentation takes its points of departure in the following aspects: the yet unpredictable significance of the relationship between organism and place/ environment to our understanding of performance and life, and Bruno Latour’s redefinition of the notions of society and social, in which “society” and “social” are not understood as a human sphere but as diverse collectives of human and non-human actors. For me the relations between the human and the non-human are a space in which the performance takes place. I explore this space and potential technologies of belonging in the context of two performances: A Performance with an Ocean View (and a Dog/for a Dog) – II Memo of Time (2008) and Chronopolitics – III Memo of Time (an endless performance since 2010).

 Discussion, moderated by Bettina Knaup ______________________________________________________________________

The Manifesto of Urban Cannibalism is an enactment of the organic and inorganic voices of the city, of the liquid flows of minerals and invisible ecologies of microorganisms that constitutes the bodies of buildings and beings. The Manifesto will be proclaimed by the historical larynxes and the deep memories of the Sophiensaele building itself. Audience is invited to partake and feast on a chemical and political convivium.

In collaboration with the sound artist Trevor Mathison. ______________________________________________________________________

During the performance platform, Kira O’Reilly will continue her ongoing performative research on different ways and modes of relating to materials, tissues, objects and an/organic bodies. Creating a domestic laboratory setting – entailing fertilised chicken eggs, an incubator, a microscope and various glass objects, which have been produced specifically to relate to her body – she invites audiences for an hour each day to simply observe, or to engage in conversations with her. On the last day, when the chicken embryos have developed, a final collective manifestation will take place. ______________________________________________________________________

The performance Monstrous Nature is motivated by the desire of a disjunctive coexistence. A coexistence that emerges from the friction of different intensities and not from parity. Three people affected one by each other, as well as by the environment. A skin environment, that embraces and drowns. They are three figures that pulsate, and this pulsation functions as motor to a gear that provokes accidents, it means, encounters, collisions, falls: affections. And these affections may produce f(r)ictions.

Artistic direction: Marcela Levi
Co-direction: Lucía Russo
Performance and co-creation: Clarissa Rêgo, João Lima and Laura Samy
Dramaturgic collaboration: Laura Erber
Light design: Andrea Capella and Tabatta Martins
Music: Marcela Levi
Foley: the whole group
Sound engineering: Fernando Capão
Visual installation and costume design: Marcela Levi and Lucía Russo
Technical designer: Custodio Vieira
Production direction: Marta Vieira
Executive production: Refinaria Produções LTDA
Artistic residencies: Centro Coreográfico da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro and MANIFESTA! (occupation Cacilda Becker Theatre)
Supported by: Espaço SESC – RJ and Iberescena Fund
This project was awarded by the Fund for Dance Development (FADA), Rio de Janeiro’s  Municipal Secretary of Culture. ______________________________________________________________________

Materials perform. Stuff is constantly getting up to things. Matter is doing all of the time, at varying scales of time and space, in order to exist and generate the world of objects. This is your chance to encounter some of the most wondrous matter on earth; from shape-memory paperclips to magnetic liquids and non-Newtonian fluids, not to mention the lightest solid in the world. ______________________________________________________________________

“In my childhood, on sunny days I would often stare at my own shadow and then suddenly look up at the sky. There I could see a ‘white silhouette’ – an afterimage of the shadow I had just seen on the ground. It was a game that fascinated me, because I knew that it was an illusion created by my eyes, not by the sky.”

In the second part of her shadow trilogy, Naoko Tanaka takes this experience of light as a point of departure for examining the tensions between optical evidence and the subjective power of sight. A single point of light is put into motion in an empty study, lending it an unfathomable dynamic and transforming it into an endless universe. Not only is the logocentric regime of the gaze that dominates our beholding and perceiving challenged, the space surrounding the viewers also loses its architectural stability and opens up new possibilities of orientation.

In astronomy, one finds the concept “absolute magnitude” (or “absolute Helligkeit” in German, meaning “absolute brightness”), with which we can precisely determine the material dimensions of the universe and the constellations of stars. In contrast, the performance explores this mathematical reference in relation to the connotation of sensory experience that it acquires in the German language. Absolute brightness is a very concrete concept in our abstract system of thought; as such, it provides an opportunity to stage visual expressions that do not correspond to anything in our world of experience.

In Absolute Helligkeit, light becomes the true agent. It takes on the form of an autonomous eye, whose gaze challenges viewers to explore new strategies of seeing.

Text: Adam Czirak

Concept, visual and sound design, performance: Naoko Tanaka
Dramaturgical collaboration: Adam Czirak
Technical collaboration (stage): Walter Freitag
Technical collaboration (light): Jo Grys
Production assistance: Alise Michon

Production: Naoko Tanaka, Christine Peterges
Co-production: SOPHIENSÆLE. Funded by: Regierender Bürgermeister von Berlin – Senatskanzlei – Kulturelle Angelegenheiten, Kunststiftung NRW, PACT Zollverein Essen _______________________________________________________________________