MFA Thesis: Rope Design and Rigging Design as artistic practice

Rope Design & Rigging Design

as artistic practice

MA Thesis by Saar Rombout

Master in Contemporary Circus Practices 2018-2020 Stockholm University of the Arts

Supervisor: Ana Sanchez-Colberg Corrections by:

Marie Suzanne Fijen and Angélique Willkie

Table of contents

I’ll never really know you p.4 Glossary p.7 Introduction p.8

Getting to know the ropes p.10 Talking rope p.12 Philosophical movements involved in my work p.13 Practice p.22 Rope Design p.26 Rope wall p.28 Rope cube p.29 My mind jumps, runs, tumbles and falls p.30

Reclaiming playfulness p.32 Fantasies of mastery p.32

Circus onbject as broken tool p.33 Improvisation and play p.34 Glossary p.35 Making space p.36 The body & the building p.42 Artistic practice p.49 Craft p.49 Bauhaus p.53 Rigging p.55

Whisperings of the wind p.58 Glossary p.59 Forces p.60 Tensegrity p.60 Bubbles p.63 Layers and perspectives p.64 Nice to meet you object p.69 Play Space p.71 Play p.71

Rope wall & Rope cube p.74 Questions of participation p.76

Epilogue p.80 Bibliography and resources p.81 Appendix

Jonathan Burrows - Practice p.84

Benjamin Richter - TLO Checklist p.93

I’ll never really know you

- The ingraspability of the ropes

My research is about Rope Design. The design of, but more importantly, by and with the ropes. I have worked with ropes all my life, in many ways; sailing, circus, rigging, knots, etc. They have had a big impact on me and my life. In my research I am looking at what they can do and who or what they can be. On stage, in my practice and in my daily life. With me, as well as without me. I want to find an equal partnership with them, where I acknowledge that we both have agency and where both of us constantly keep changing and learning from each other. I am discovering how they can change my movement and the way I look at the world.

Sometimes I worry that I can never know all the different aspects of my ropes.

I know more than most, but less than others. I hope to get to know more sides of them, more qualities that I didn’t meet yet, and maybe never expected to. It is almost like starting a new relationship, wanting to know every little thing about someone, even the things that you might not like and you will learn to accept.

The ropes are hyperobjects1, they don’t come in one single shape or form and have massively affected the human race. If they wouldn’t have existed, our world would look very different.

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|“Imagine a world without ropes, lines, cables and knots. There would be no yarns to set as warp and weft for a loom, no fabric, no clothes to wear.

No electricity cables.

No telephone lines.

No woven wicker baskets to carry your picnics, and no gift wrapping; and sadder still no guitar playing, no violin concertos, no high-wire walkers!”|2

Hyperobjects will be explained in the chapter Philosophical movements on p.19 Petit, Philippe (2013). Why knot? New York, NY: Abrams Image Books. p.1

The ropes are objects that I constantly try to attune and relate to. I am not sure if I really manage to do that, we keep going back and forth. Even though we will never completely understand each other, there are always aspects where we connect, overlap or find links. Am I not just another object? I relate to and affect other humans and I will never be fully understood or known by other humans, nonhumans, objects or myself. In that way am I not the same as my ropes? Never fully graspable to anything or anyone.

The ropes have their own poetry to communicate. Since they cannot initiate the conversation, would it be possible for me to start the dialogue in a way that is understandable for an audience, without losing their non-humanness? But then I wonder, why do I want to know or understand my ropes. Should I maybe not try to find a human message or a narrative in my ropes?

Instead of understanding them I could look at our interobjectivity and intra-ac3 tion , realizing that without each other we would perform very differently. I would like to invite the ropes to dance or move with me, and take part in the conversation or dialogue we have with each other. A negotiation between human and nonhuman. One gives an impulse the other reacts and the first answers on that again. I feel at home with my ropes and want to explore new relationships with them. Because I will never completely know them there is always more to explore and discover. Maybe that ingraspability, inherent to the ropes, is a part of what attracts me.

Art is a place of not knowing everything.

What are the ropes?

Who am I? Is this “I” different with or without the ropes?

Can the ropes be included in the “I”, or maybe a “we”?

What do they do to me?

How do they change me? My movement, my way of looking at the world, my

patience to just sit and listen to them.

What do I do to them?

What are the ropes on their own and which (sometimes unexpected) qualities

and properties do they have?

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Interobjectivity and intra-action will be explained in the chapter Philosophical movements on p.16 and 20

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How do you know what an object is? Looking at its parts, functions, how it

moves or makes you move and think...?

Which ways are there to interact or communicate with an object?

What makes something art?

Is it possible to define art?

What can art do?

Between being and imagining I find the poetry inside the ropes.

A body entangled in ropes Limbs suspended in the air A weightlessness is created by pushing and pulling at the same time Reaching will pull you back, While letting go might move you forwards We move together, body and ropes One reaching to the other What will be the answer?

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Glossary

This is how I will use the following words in this thesis, it may not be the only or most common definition of them, but for the reading of this text I would like you to go with the temporary belief of these definitions, to ensure a clearer communication of what I want to say. I’ll be introducing different glossaries through different sections of the text.

Affect: to influence or to produce a change in something.

Agency: the ability to act and be acted upon, to affect and be affected, which is not limited to human beings.

Anthropocentric: considering human beings as the most significant entity of the universe.

Apparatus: circus equipment; e.g. trapeze, unicycle.

Practice: all the things you do that are directly or indirectly involved in carrying out your craft (in my case my art).

Trick: in circus we talk about tricks when you do a certain repeatable movement; e.g. a salto or specific handstand shape.

Vibrant matter: the lively power of material.

Vitality: the capacity of things to affect the world around them and to have trajectories and tendencies of their own.

Zuhanden/Vorhanden (ready to hand/present at hand): two words Heidegger introduced, which he used to describe various attitudes to things in the world. When you use a hammer it is withdrawn from the conscious perception of the user, it is zuhanden (ready to hand).

When the hammer breaks, and becomes a broken tool, it becomes part of the active perception. The hammer became vorhanden (present at hand).

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Introduction

|“We learn the ropes of life by untying its knots”|4

In this thesis I will reflect and discuss my research of the last two years at the Master in Contemporary Circus Practices at Stockholm University of the Arts. I will talk about where my research started and how it evolved. To explain my process I have written different essays, exposees, poems and letters that each show different aspects of my research, thoughts and artistic practice. Through these different texts and explorations of my research I would like to invite you into discussion with me.

My way of working with circus is looking at the relationship between a body and an object. I started with my own body and the objects I work with most, ropes. From there I tried to implement the way of working that I developed to other bodies and objects. I explored how there can be a collaboration with an object, without trying to master it. How new ways of working and thinking with them can be found, in which you don’t constantly fall back into your (circus) habits, but where you are open to listening to everything around you and letting that move you. I work with the meeting of the human and the other, but since both the ropes and I constantly change, everytime we meet, we meet as two changed entities and each time we meet we need to rediscover each other.

I work with ropes as my circus apparatus. I am interested in all the different forces at play when I interact with the ropes, both physical forces as well as forces of social and political power. Physical forces like gravity, the strength of the ropes and my body, will affect how different constructions make me move differently and give different possibilities for interaction. And on the forces of social power; how some roles in circus have a higher status than others; e.g. artists, technicians, directors or dramaturges get different recognition for their work. As well as how most humans deny the power of nonhumans and place themselves higher in the hierarchy of things. In the eyes of many people there is a strong dichotomy with a subject on 4

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Toomer, Jean

the one hand and objects on the other, where agency is located only in the human subject and no agency or power is associated with objects or things. I don’t agree with this division, in this thesis I will try to find different ways of dealing with objects and include humans in the category of objects. |”I said that the nature of an apparatus is essentially strategic, which means that we are speaking about a certain manipulation of relations of forces, of a rational and concrete intervention in the relations of forces, either so as to develop them in a particular direction, or to block them, to stabilize them, and utilize them. The apparatus is thus always inscribed into a play of power that arises from it and, to an equal degree, conditions it. The apparatus is precisely this: a set of strategies of the relations of forces supporting, and supported by, certain types of knowledge.”|5

I find it important for this research to have an equal partnership with the ropes. Which is not so complicated within the intimate space between the ropes and I, but once you open it up, letting the social space in and trying to explain it to other people, it can become quite a complex space to navigate. A space where you have to deal with judgements and ideas about what normal ways to interact with objects are.

I look at the ropes and other objects from the perspective of a human, and specifically this human, since I will never be able to really see things from something or someone else’s perspective, but I would like to have a less anthropocentric world view. Growing up in a society that is very anthropocentric, makes it hard to step out of that. I often feel like I have to correct myself when I slip into this ingrained perspective. I hope that one day it is normal to look at the world around us and see that there is so much more than just humans who decide how things will happen. I am looking for a coexistence of humans and nonhumans and ways to allow things that are not yourself, nor human to have an influence on you. Specifically I am looking Foucault, Michel (1980). Power/Knowledge: selected interviews and other writings 19721977. Brighton, UK: The Harvester Press. p194-96 5

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at how this will inform circus practice and performance.

Can you imagine a circus performance without humans?

Another common human habit is to anthropomorphize, which is a process where human traits and emotions appear in nonhumans, like objects and animals. I try to avoid that when I interact with objects, because a potential danger when you anthropomorphize, is that you value humans above all else. In some artforms that is not necessarily the case, in storytelling and puppetry power soul is given to an object by inscribing human traits to it. In some Humanistic-Paganisms anthropomorphic language is used to create a more personal relationship to nature and become more susceptible to the life-transforming religious experiences that flow from that relationship. To me, the properties that an object has on its own, without it being linked or compared to any human properties are interesting enough and good enough by themselves. Although consciously stepping in and out of anthropomorphising behaviour and thoughts can also be a tool; recognizing when you anthropomorphize, learning not to do that subconsciously and to see what it does to your perspective on the object, when you anthropomorphize or not.

Getting to know the ropes

I try to be open to what the ropes give me. Not to let my expectations and prior knowledge influence my interaction with them too much. With this openness, I found how they can dance, make music, be a sculpture or an installation. They are participating in many different art forms, which made me wonder if art can exist without human involvement? Where there are no humans involved in the creation or the observation of it. Art by, for and about nonhumans.

I would like to find a way to share the connection I have with ropes with an audience. Because a lot of that connection is linked to memories from the past and fantasies about the future, I don’t think that will be completely possible, but I am still going to try. Through poetry I try to give a voice to my thoughts about our connection 10

and maybe also to my ropes. I think an audience won’t be able to understand the Rope-Saar connection by just watching us, they will also need to experience it in different ways by for example touching them, moving with them and learning to trust them. To eventually build their own relationship to the ropes. It takes time to build that, but I would like to invite them to experience some first glimpses of that connection.

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Talking rope

The ropes are talking, with knots as their words.

They whisper and scream their secrets to the world.

But not many listen, to hear what they say.

They’re trying to tell you, but why don’t you listen?

They whisper and scream, but you don’t seem to care.

You see them, you feel them, but have no clue what they mean.

They want you to want to and be understood.

They won’t give up, but this is no good.

So many curves, some soft and some sharp

The crossings, the curves, the bends and the turns,

All together form knots

They’re hoping at some point you will learn to listen.

They whisper and scream do you know what they mean?

They want you to want to, so please just try.

To listen and see them take all of it in

They tell you their secrets and that’s just to begin.

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Philosophical movements involved in my work

Even when tied in a thousand knots a string is still but one

During my research I realized and accepted more and more how the ropes had agency, how they affected me in so many ways.

How they could create, perform or be art on their own. How they interact with other fields, for example architecture, playground, sculpture, music and kinetic art. To get a better understanding of my relationship with the ropes and their agency I have been looking at theories of Speculative Realism, New Materialism and Object Oriented Ontology. I have been developing physical ways to understand those theories and I am examining if these ways of looking at the world can change the way we look at circus and working with an apparatus.

I will explain what some different philosophical movements and terms mean to me and how they are used in this thesis. Although my thinking is not entirely in line with these thinkers, they all contain elements I do and don’t agree with and each have informed my thinking and the interactions I have with my ropes in their own way.

Talking a lot about objects, asks for defining what an object is. For this paper I will use the definition that is used in Object Oriented Ontology6 where an object is anything that cannot be entirely reduced either to the components of which it is made or to the effects that it has on other things. This is a very broad definition, but I will try to explain how I see it. I don’t limit the word object to lifeless material things. Humans and animals are objects, being lifeless or without consciousness (whatever that is exactly) is not a requirement to be an object. Thoughts, political movements and names are also objects, so objects are also not required to be physical, but can also be conceptual. Objects are limited to neither time nor size, a skin cell is just as much of an object as the solar system and objects can exist for nanoseconds or millenia. Groups of objects can together form another object. You don’t have to be able to name or understand Harman, Graham (2018). Object Oriented Ontology, a new theory of everything. UK: Pelican. p.51 6

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something for it to be an object, “they exist independently of human perception and are not ontologically exhausted by their relations to humans or other objects.”7

My research is about connections and relationships between different objects, human as well as nonhuman, and how nonhuman objects can be allowed to have more space in human-nonhuman relationships. Looking at almost everything as an object, I want to be more aware of how I engage in these relationships.

Every time you come in contact with an object, you come in contact with it now, it is not the same as the last time you came in contact with it and neither are you, because that was another now than this one. The rope used to be a cotton plant and it is on the move to becoming something else. I don’t know what that will become, just like I don’t know what I will become. Objects are constantly changing and adapting, so it is like you have to get to know them every time again. Don’t expect that you know or understand the object you are dealing with.

I want to work with the agency of objects, but what does that entail? Agency is the capacity to affect and be affected, this can be done consciously or unconsciously. Agency is not limited to humans, but all different kinds of objects have agency. I am interested in acknowledging the agency of objects and letting go of the anthropocentric point of view that objects are passive and stable things and in which humans are the active subjects in the world. I don’t think certain objects need to be ‘raised’ to the status of subject, I would like to find ways to let go of the object-subject dichotomy and acknowledge the agency of all objects, not just the ropes I work with.

The political scientist and writer Jane Bennett, who works in the field of New Materialism, wants to dissolve the binary between subject and object, she shows how all things can be ‘Actants’; “the ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle”8. In her opinion objects are alive in their capacity to make a Harman, Graham (2002). Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. Peru, IL: Open Court. p.16 8 Bennett, Jane (2010). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of things. Durham, NC: Duke 7

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difference in the world, to shape complex interrelationships, entanglements, and propensities for open- ended change. This is what she calls the ‘Thing-power’ of all the ‘Vibrant Matter’ around and among us. Everything is constantly undergoing transformation, creating interwoven webs of material all affecting each other and forming alliances, Bennett calls these ‘Assemblages’. |”Assemblages are ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts. Assemblages are living, throbbing confederations that are able to function despite the persistent presence of energies that confound them from within.”|9

Bennet is looking at what implications these insights have on politics, ecology and everyday life. She talks about the theory of ‘Distributive Agency’ “which does not posit a subject as the root cause of an effect. There are instead always a swarm of vitalities at play”10.

When applying these theories to my (circus) practice it calls for acknowledgement of and listening to all the other parts of the assemblages I am part of. I am also an actant, one point in a big network of actants with agency. When I work with my ropes there are many elements at play that are all affecting each other. I want to take the idea of distributive agency seriously, and see what that does to my circus practice. |”What it means to be a “mode”, then, is to form alliances and enter assemblages: it is to mod(e)ify and be modified by others.

The process of modification is not under the control of any one mode – no mode is an agent in the hierarchical sense. Neither is the process without tension, for each mode vies with and against the (changing) affections of a (changing set of) other modes, all the while being subject to the element of change or contingency intrinsic to any encounter.”|11

University Press. p.6 9 Ibid., p.23 10 Ibid., p.31 11

Ibid., p.22

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It is important to remember that even though ‘New Materialism’ has the word new in the name, the ideas of nonhuman centered ontology and ethics, and sentient environments have existed for a long time with, among others, First Nations and Indigenous peoples, but in Western thinking, with a fundamentally anthropocentric history these ideas are often new, since those cultures are not equally represented in history and philosophy. This is a problem that is closely connected to the ongoing colonial oppression of many people as Zoe Todd very accurately points out in her article “An Indigenous Feminist’s take on the Ontological Turn: ‘ontology’ is just another word for colonialism”. I hope to soon read more from Indigenous thinkers to broaden my view on this and to be able to think with and through their ideas without taking them out of context.

Feminist Materialist and physicist Karen Barad introduced the word ‘Intra-action’12 as the mutual constitution of entangled agencies. When two bodies interact, they each maintain a level of independence, but in the case of intra-action individuals materialize through the intra-actions and the ability to act emerges from within the relationship, not outside of it. This gives a new way of thinking about relationships with each other, with matter, with materials, with nature and with discourses. Interactions defer and deflect responsibility, but in intra-actions responsibility is distributed among the constitutive entities. This is where agency comes in, agency is about actions, reconfigu- rings, doing and being, it does not pre-exist separately, but emerges from the relationships in these intra-actions. Thinking with intra-actions means giving up cause and effect relationships, individual agency and subject-object dichotomy. We gain new understandings of ethics and justice not as being predetermined but always changing and unfolding. Intra-action calls into question steadfast boundaries and borders and linear time, in turn it helps us think in terms of simultaneity. It tears down the walls that contain disciplined thought and action to reveal the artificial boundaries that we forgot we invented.

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I would like to work with objects thinking through intra-action, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0SnstJoEec

and here I am still talking about objects of all kinds, e.g. ideas, phenomena, spaces and humans. Through the intra-actions between me and other objects new things emerged that I couldn’t have predicted. The idea of intra-actions also influenced the Bubble theory I will talk about in a later chapter.

The next philosophical movement that I want to talk about is ‘Speculative Realism’: which is an umbrella term for many different kinds of philosophy that, all for different reasons, were opposed to ‘Correalism’, which is Meillassoux’s term for the sort of philosophy that is based on the mutual interplay of humans and the world. One of the subspecies of Speculative Realism is OOO, or ‘Object Oriented Ontology’ of which I will give a very short summary next.

Graham Harman used the term ‘Object-Oriented Philosophy’ in his 1999 doctoral dissertation13 which he based on the ‘Zuhandenheit’ (ready-to-hand) from Heidegger, where objects are withdrawn from human perception until the moment that they don’t function like they normally would, they become ‘Vorhanden’ (present-athand) and then you suddenly notice them in a different way. Harman argued that objects withdraw from other objects as well, and not just from humans and that objects, whether real, fictional, natural, artificial, human or nonhuman, are mutually autonomous. Levi Bryant introduced the term ‘Object Oriented Ontology’ in 2009 as the movement that followed out of this theory.

In OOO Harman talks about two principal strategies for devaluing the philosophical importance of objects, undermining and overmining. He rejects both Undermining and ‘Overmining’ and calls this ‘Anti-mining’, in which an object is whatever cannot be reduced to what it is made of or what it does, it is not a sum total of its qualities nor its effects. |“One can undermine objects by claiming that they are an effect or manifestation of a deeper, underlying substance or force… One can Harman, Graham (2002). Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. Peru, IL: Open Court.

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‘overmine’ objects by either an idealism which holds that there is nothing beneath what appears in the mind or, as in social constructionism, by positing no independent reality outside of language, discourse or power.”|14 Basic principles of Object Oriented Ontology:15 • “All objects must be given equal attention, whether they be human, nonhuman, natural, cultural, real or fictional.

• Objects are not identical with their properties, but have a tense relationship with those properties, and this tension is responsible for all of the change that occurs in the world.

• Objects come in just two kinds; real objects exist whether or not they currently affect anything else, while sensual objects exist only in relation to some real object.

• Real objects cannot relate to one another directly, but only indirectly, by means of a sensual object.

• The properties of objects also come in just two kinds: again, real and sensual.

• These two kinds of objects and two kinds of qualities real to four basic permutations, which OOO treats as the root of time and space, as well as two closely related terms known as essence and eidos.

• Finally, OOO holds that philosophy generally has a closer relationship with aesthetics than with mathematics or natural science.”

OOO uses a ‘Flat Ontology’ as a starting point, which is a term introduced by Manuel DeLanda. A flat ontology is a model for reality that says that all objects, even those that are imagined, have the same degree of being-ness as any other object. No object is more a subject than any other. All subjects are simply objects. The key factor in determining ontology is the ability of an object to affect another object. Haman says that a flat ontology is a good start and a useful way of ensuring that we do not cave into our personal prejudices about what is or is not real, but that it is a disappointing finish to a philosophy, because if everything equally exists not much Harman, Graham (2011). The Quadruple Object. UK: Zero Books. p.8-12 Harman, Graham (2018). Object Oriented Ontology, a new theory of everything. UK: Pelican. p.9 14 15

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progress can be made.16 I don’t agree with Harman on this, I think you can strive towards a flat ontology and make progress by the difference in the relations between different objects, while each object also exists in itself.

I find it interesting to use some of Harman’s principles and to work with his definition of an object, but I have a problem with his idea that OOO is a ‘New theory of everything’. I don’t think it is possible to have one theory that fits everything in existence. I think it is important to always be open to different perspectives, you will never be able to see something from all sides. To think about from what perspective it is that you are talking, writing and thinking, what your situatedness is and to create an awareness of what we might be missing from this perspective.

OOO is committed to thinking through the non-relational autonomy of the object world, and ignores the problems of objectification, marginalization and instrumentalization of, for example, people of colour, women, and people with disabilities. It is easy to say that all objects must be given equal attention, it is harder to actually bring that into reality. What does it mean to be given equal attention, equal in regards to what? Who decides what is equal attention and what could be strategies to get there? I would like to propose a more feminist and inclusive way of thinking in my practice, for this OOF or ‘Object Oriented Feminism’ offers an alternative. A wide range of voices gets to speak about multiple and sometimes contradictory perspectives in the book “OOF”17 edited by Katherine Behar.

Another OOO philosopher, who also wrote one of the chapters in OOF, Timothy Morton, introduced the term ‘Hyperobjects’18 to describe objects that are so massively distributed in time and space that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place. Global warming is an example of a hyperobject; it is someIbid., p.55 Behar, Katherine (2016). Object-Oriented Feminism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

18 Morton, Timothy (2010). The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. p.130 16 17

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thing massive that you cannot see or touch but affects the human race immensely, you only experience pieces of it at any one time.

Morton described five characteristics of hyperobjects:19 • Viscous: hyperobjects ‘stick’ to beings/objects involved with them.

• Nonlocal: any ‘local manifestation’ of a hyperobject is not directly the hyperobject.

• Temporal Undulation: hyperobjects involve profoundly different temporalities than the human-scale ones we are used to.

• Phasing: hyperobjects occupy a higher dimensional phase that results in their being invisible to humans for stretches of time.

• Interobjective: hyperobjects consists of all kinds of entities but isn’t reducible to them and it is formed by relations between different objects.

In my eyes ropes are hyperobjects, they don’t come in one single shape or form and have massively affected the human race.

If they wouldn’t have existed, our world would look very different.

They have contacted me in many different ways, and I have only just started to listen. We are attached to each other in different ways, for example if someone who knows me sees something interesting with ropes somewhere, they see me, so our relationship is present even when we are not both present.

Morton also introduced the term ‘Attunement’, in his analogy where he draws both on Kantian philosophy and Star Wars, he observes that the idea of “mind melding with a non-human being” resembles the Force, an invisible field that permeates and binds everything. Sensing this “Force”, the underlying connectedness of all things, is an experience Morton describes as attunement20. I call this listening to an object with all your senses, but it comes from the same idea, so through this thesis I will use both interchangeably.

Morton, Timothy (2013). Hyperobjects; Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. p.1 20 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/20/being-ecological-timothy-morton-review 19

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|“Since a thing can’t be known directly or totally, one can only attune to it, with greater or lesser degrees of intimacy. Nor is this attunement a “merely” aesthetic approach to a basically blank extensional substance. Since appearance can’t be peeled decisively from the reality of a thing, attunement is a living, dynamic relation with another being.”| 21

I have developed a certain intimacy and sensitivity to the ropes by attuning to them and they attuning to me. Negotiating our relationship with a receptive open awareness and finding ways to develop the dialogue between us. Focquet suggests that this attunement could be an alternative to the relations of mastery that are often so present in circus, while asking important questions about agency.22 It could be a good way to develop new relationships with the objects and apparatuses we are working with in circus. More humble ways of circus as Focquet calls it where the objects get to be on the foreground and the human beings are decentralized.

All of these philosophical ideas come back in different ways in my research, in the way that I think about and intra-act with ropes and other objects and how I design and create different installations and performance settings.

Glotfelty, C., & Royle, N. (2017). Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking (Cohen J. & Duckert L., Eds.). Minneappolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

22 Focquet, Vincent (2019). MA thesis: To Withdraw to a Humble Circus, three dramaturgical tactics. Ghent, BE: Ghent University. p.10 21

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Practice

|“Practice is a doing which is not yet art”|23

Last year I attended a lecture by Jonathan Burrows,24 (the writer of “The Choreographer’s Handbook”) where he talked about practice. Not practice as in practicing, a learning method where you improve through a constant repetition of activities with the aim to master that activity, but a practice that builds towards the making of art. A practice is a collection of doings (in which thinking is a doing as well) which can come in all kinds of shapes and sizes, e.g. reading a rigging manual, attending a performance and climbing ropes are all part of my practice. I will mainly talk about an artistic practice, so different ways of doing all that inform your art, but you can also for example have a legal practice or a surgical practice, which are all doings that add to you performing your occupation, craft or a particular subject matter. I added the text of this lecture as an appendix to give the full picture of what he talked about.

Burrows talked about how someone told him she liked his expression ‘practice is a doing which is not yet art’ and that it reminded her of working on her allotment; |“It’s something about how the materials you practice with start to teach you. It’s not just you digging, it’s the soil getting dug. It’s the trowel or shovel talking back to your hand. Smell of the soil. Maybe the soil is urgent. You do the allotment every day because otherwise something will die, or not grow, or grow too much.”|25

During this master I have gone from working with several disciplines to having a practice, or at least being conscious of that practice. A practice that comes back in my whole life, it is not just when I am training in my equipment, but it also exists in the way I write, what I read, or how I fold and knot things together while talking to someone.

Burrows, Jonathan (2018). Talk on practice written for DOCH Stockholm; What would be another word for it? - see Appendix I. 24 Ibid.

25 Ibid., p.2 23

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My practice exists of reading, writing, moving, interacting, intra-acting, conversing, discovering, building, creating, sitting, waiting, cooperating, observing, listening, listing, accumulating, attuning, dwelling, crafting, knitting, knotting, not knowing, letter writing and many more doings.

In a practice it is not always clear how it will inform your art, you can’t completely imagine all that it will do. Practice is a process that will sometimes give you insights, but just as often the things that arrive through practice are places of not yet knowing or comprehending. Practice is a process, not a product.

|“When I dig on my own allotment I’m sometimes aware how far off the eating of the vegetables will be, in fact how impossible it feels to connect the two activities of eating and digging, and I wonder at this moment if I even care about the eating or if the digging is equally the point, on the road to some barely imaginable future. It’s easy to think how this teaches a certain patience, but it’s barely true. Practice is an urgent thing and right now my allotment overflows with weeds, I can’t even see the paths for what is growing.”|26

My practice is constantly changing and adapting, it is a ‘Becoming’ as Ana Sanchez-Colberg calls it. My practice is informed by, among other things, people with similar practices around me. We have a community of practices where the practices are in dialogue with each other. Lave and Wenger describe a ‘Community of Practices’ as “a set of relations among persons, activity, and world, over time and in relation with other tangential and overlapping communities of practice.”27 A practice is not just about how it informs your own art, but it also informs other practices, and more importantly is informed by other practices. Not just ones around you but also from other places in the world and other times. We are building on our history even if we don’t know all of it.

Ibid., p.4 Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation.

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. p.98 26 27

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Erin Manning works with a similar idea as the community of practices, which she calls an ‘Ecology of Practices’. In 2004 she founded SenseLab, which is a laboratory which explores intersections between art practice and philosophy through the matrix of the sensing body in movement, where they mainly work with ecologies of practices. In these ecologies, it is important that the differences in each of the disciplines must retain their singularity. It is not straining toward homogeneity, but toward a bringing-into-relation of difference. An ecology of practices activates the relational field at its point of inflection, creating new potential for a thinking-with and -across techniques of creative practice.28 Manning says that from the vantage point of an ecology of practices; “it is urgent to turn away from the notion that it is the human agent, the intentional, volitional subject, who determines what comes to be.”29 |“One never writes alone. As Deleuze and Guattari say, one writing alone is already a crowd. Our words in this book are never without the echoes of the voices of those whose difference we chose to write with. Not to mention the moves, gestures, colors, architectures, and events of the creative practices we encountered.

A veritable cacophony. Or better: an ecology.”|30 In SenseLab they work with ‘Research-Creation’31, which generates new forms of experience; it stages encounters for disparate practices, working through a collective expression. A writer could for example express their writing through tying knots, and a dancer expresses their dance through the knots. Each of their individual disciplines will translate differently into the practice of working with the material.

Their aim is to experiment with creative techniques for thought in the act, a ‘Making-Thinking’ as they call it. In which the process is not predetermined but evolves by the collective input and propositions from the participants.

Manning, Erin (2016). The minor gesture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. p.245 Ibid., p.3 30 Manning, E & Massumi, B. (2014). Thought in the act: Passages in the ecology of experience. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. p.viii 31 Research-creation is the term given, in Canada, to academic work that is evaluated both for a creative, usually artistic contribution, and a written, more theoretical or philosophical one.

28 29

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I think having a practice is something we miss in circus, we have our daily discipline training and sometimes we work on creation for a piece, but we don’t have our daily practice for our creative work, doings that don’t directly have to lead anywhere, but are always adding on to our broad creative vocabulary. The knowledge and custom of having a practice is lacking in circus schools as well as in the professional community. In dance and other artforms, having a practice is much more common, and I think an example can be taken from that. To let circus grow in more ways than the technical training I think we need more people who have a circus practice and create a broader community of circus practices.

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Rope Design

|“The simple act of tying a knot is an adventure in unlimited space… an excursion that is limited only by the scope of our own imagery and the length of the rope maker’s coil”|32

A method I have been using to learn more about the ropes is to create many different rope setups. Rigging the ropes in different ways to see how that affects my interaction with the ropes. I have been experimenting with how adding weight, changing length, thickness, shape and stretch influences the movement of the ropes and through them my movement.

To find these setups I have worked on different scales, from drawings and models to structures that I can climb in and move with.

I would like it to grow even bigger to building or bridge-like constructions. To be able to create more of these structures, I have done an internship at the architecture firm Urban Design. Where I learned to work with the 3D drawing programs Rhino and Grasshopper, with these you can also create 3D computer simulations and see all the forces in play. The forces on the ropes, but also what the effect will be of adding one or more people to it.

I want to make rope sculptures that never stop moving, whether that is the physical movement of the ropes or that they move something inside me. To me, the rope installations I build have the ability to move even when they are static. I also explored whether one rope setup could change or morph into the next without having to build a completely new construction. Influenced by different forces it could change shape, how it moves and how you can inta-act with it. The constant change encourages you to keep listening, to get to know this new side of the ropes and not to have expectations on how they will react.

Most of my structures are very organized and follow one principle through to the end, but what if I would make a chaotic rope structure that doesn’t follow any logic and is irregular. The idea of a 32

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Ashley, Clifford (1944). The Ashley book of knots. Naples, IT: Albatross.

chaotic structure scares me in a way, which is a great reason to make it and see how I can work with it. The movement I would create with it would probably not be repeatable, which is not something we are used to in circus. How can you learn a trick if you can’t do it over and over again and make it a little bit better every time? Do we really need to make tricks with everything?

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Rope wall

One of the installations I designed is the Rope Wall; 1500 meter of rope going up and down, up and down, and up and down between two steel pipes with weights on the bottom. Together it creates an 8 x 8 meter wall, in which I am just a tiny thing in this massive wall, but to every little movement I give them, all the ropes in the whole wall answer in vibrations. Their response echoes long after I gave the impulse and the memory of my movement is left behind in their strands. The ropes are connecting the floor to the ceiling.

Suspended between the two while getting more and more tangled in the ropes I discovered how I can let them take the lead, allowing them to push me around and guide me. Finding ways to let our dialogue evolve continuously. https://vimeo.com/358241044

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Rope cube

I designed the Rope Cube as an installation for the audience to play in. This truss cube of 4 x 4 x 4 meter can hold different rope landscapes, that are an invitation to the audience to change and affect. It is not a finished and fixed installation, but is in constant process and changed by everyone and everything that comes into contact with it. I wanted to find ways for the audience to understand the connection I have to the ropes, and I thought they wouldn’t be able to do that by just watching me perform, so I decided to build an installation where they can experience the ropes in different ways.

To play or move with them, to feel, smell and listen to them, and experience the intra-active entanglement. I tried to create a space of collaboration and engagement, giving the audience the freedom to change the structure and become part of the assemblage.

In building the Rope Cube I discovered the ropes’ ability to change my perception of time, while pulling, and pulling, and pulling to get meter after meter threaded through a knot. Time disappears and changes shape, it morphs into a nonlinear space that we human beings don’t recognise but that objects have no problem with. They will accept time as it comes to them, whether it wants to be a line or a multidimensional space where things change and adapt to whatever time wants to give them. They communicate with time as we do with each other – call and response – without a notion of hierarchy or one being in control over the other. They react and intra-act.

Each of my designs have their own particularities and possibilities and they inspire me to dig even deeper into the potential of working with rope. Each rope installation is a proposition and creates different futures.

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My mind jumps, runs, tumbles and falls, it goes criss-cross through a maze of thoughts and hops from one to another without pausing.

It loves doing five things at the same time, because then I distract it with doing things, instead of focussing on all the other thoughts.

Spoken words cannot keep up with all the images, worlds, conversations going on inside.

ideas

and

I’m afraid to let the chaos come out, because I think I wouldn’t be able to stop the waves from taking over and drowning me. I would get lost and would have no grasp on what is going on anymore.

It scares me to lose control,

To take off the handbrake, not knowing what will happen.

My mind is always going on and on faster than I can follow.

The only moment it slows down a bit is in my ropes.

There is just me and them.

We work together.

They keep me calm and make me feel at home.

They are my roots connecting me to fantasies of the past and my memories of the future.

With them I can always be myself, I don’t have to pretend or be better than I feel.

They let me express myself with and through them in a way that I cannot do in words.

I love them,

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because they let me be me.

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Reclaiming playfulness

Fantasies of mastery

Why do we get so stuck in being pretty, strong, virtuous, and masterful in the techniques of circus? Why do we always want to know, when we are going to perform a trick, act or sequence, that we will do it perfectly and get the timing of the applause exactly right? Would it be possible to let go of all of that and just improvise?

I am the first to admit that I love the feeling of being in control, to know what is going to happen and to be able to decide if that is what I want to do or not. Most circus artists I know are control freaks. Gravity-conquerors. In full control of our body, the apparatus and the audience.

Let’s hand over some control. Find new ways of moving and being on stage.

Share the responsibility of taking the stage with your apparatus, your object, your nonhuman partner. They will do their part, don’t worry. Be open to reacting to what the apparatus gives you and let them help you be on stage. Take a step back and let them take their space instead of disciplining them into the thing you want it to do. What happens if we step away from the anthropocentric worldview that we are so used to? Could we remove the human from the center of the circus?

We can form an alliance with our apparatus and enter into an assemblage with them. To modify and be modified. To create a relationship of mutual influence between a human and a nonhuman, which is often failed to be appreciated within the spectacular circus world. What is my part of my circus assemblage? What are different actants in the assemblage that my ropes and I are a part of? The parts are human and non- human, material and immaterial. The collection of words on the next page are all objects that affect my research and form the assemblage that I am part of.

The manipulation of forces that is involved with working with an apparatus works two ways, from you onto the apparatus, but also the apparatus to you. In other words the apparatus has agency, it is an actant; with the capacity to influence and be influenced. Actants can be material, but also immaterial; Jane Bennet takes ‘Fantasies of mastery’ as an immaterial example, mastering the actants in an assemblage is a fantasy that many circus artists strive for, even though that is futile.

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Circus object as a broken tool

What can we do to get to a more equal and non anthropocentric relationship between the human and the apparatus? Or as Vincent Focquet calls it: “to withdraw gracefully to a more humble circus”. One suggestion Focquet gives is to go look at the apparatus or object differently by going from ready-to-hand to present-at-hand (from zuhanden to vorhanden according to Heidegger). When you use an object, for example a hammer it is withdrawn from the conscious perception of the user, it is ready-to-hand.

When the hammer breaks, and becomes a broken tool, it becomes part of the active perception. The hammer became present-at-hand. If we deal with objects as broken tools in circus, we will be more open to seeing all different aspects of them instead of just seeing them the way we are used to using them. It will open the possibility to have a dialogue with your apparatus and really listen to their answer with all of your senses, instead of virtuously trying to dominate it.

Before we look at our own apparatus as a broken tool, maybe we could look at something we are not so used to, something that moves in strange ways to open up our 33

view. I build tensegrity models out of broomsticks and bungee elastics, which have a very particular and unpredictable way of moving. While interacting with it, I really have to listen to it and cannot control where it goes. I want to experiment with letting other circus artists interact with these tensegrity models to see if afterwards they can work with their own apparatus with the same openness. Through that I want to see if they can get out of the habit of repeating technique over and over again, without creating their own original movement material. To work with their apparatus as a nonhuman partner who keeps motivating them to move and to answer the impulses it is giving them, to push the disciplinary boundary. Out of working with not-knowing, trial and error they could get to know the object or material they are working with, in a more intimate way.

Improvisation and play

Another method to find this new way of being, is to improvise, react and intra-act. Not just to create new movements in the studio, but also while performing on stage. Improvisation is something that you can train, which is great because that’s what we circus artists love to do -train, train, and train some more! We know every detail of the trick before we put it on stage. Let’s try focussing on knowing every bit of our nonhuman partner instead and letting their actions add to our toolbox. Reclaiming the playfulness together. Experimenting with the relationship between you and the objects around you and seeing them in a new light. Looking for new possibilities to arise.

Improvise. Play.

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Glossary

A Building: a relatively permanent enclosed construction with walls and a roof, used for any of a wide variety of activities, as living, entertaining, or manufacturing.

Embodied knowledge: the knowledge that is ingrained in your body, where the body knows how to act without having to consciously think about it.

Force: there are many kinds of forces, of course there are the forces involved in physics, but when I write about forces I also include forces of emotion, theory, power, authority or influence.

Material: physical objects.

Materiality: the forces at play that shape that material.

Instrument: materials with a particular use become instruments.

Instrumentality: the forces at play that shape the instrument.

Phenomenology: a 20th century philosophical movement dedicated to describing and analysing the structures of experience as they present themselves to consciousness, without using theory, deduction or assumptions from other disciplines such as natural sciences.

Playfulness: the capacity to use play outside the context of play.

Tacit knowledge: learned unconsciousness Things in themselves: what things are themselves without any preconditions coming from another set of thinking.

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Making Space

In my research during this master I have encountered and worked with space in many different ways, but what is space? Or better what can space be and how is it important in my research? The ropes create spaces where I feel at home, sometimes this is a physical space where I am in between them, but it can also be a space of imagination. I feel like there is a space that is just ours, a bubble of Saar and Rope, where we intra-act, affect and attune to each other.

Inside this bubble our connection grows stronger and our relationship develops.

There are many different kinds of spaces; interior or exterior space, real and imagined space, virtual space, public, social, and ritual space, geographical space, outer space, dream space, empty space, a space of time and space for play, to name just a few.

Thinking of all these spaces made me wonder how a space actually becomes a space and what that entails.

Let’s examine two kinds of space, the ‘Extensive’ and ‘Intensive’ space.33 Extensive space is the measurable, quantifiable space.

The space between the table and the wall for example, concrete space. The intensive space is the affective and qualitative space, which may or may not bear reference to its physical or concrete dimension. The intensive sense of a space, can make you perceive a space differently from the quantifiable amount of space. You can never see the extensive space in a completely neutral way, there is always an interrelation between extensive and intensive space.

Henri Lefebvre, who is a philosopher, sociologist, and a political scientist writes in his book “The productions of space” mainly about ‘Social space’; the space that is fundamentally bound to the social reality and social interaction.

Rubidge, Sarah (2012). Dance spaces: Practices of movement. Odense, DK: Syddansk Universitetsforlag p.22 33

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|“(Social)space is not a thing among other things, nor a product among other products: rather, it subsumes things produced, and encompasses their interrelationships in their coexistence and simultaneity – their (relative) order and/or (relative) disorder. It is the outcome of a sequence and set of operations, and thus cannot be reduced to the rank of a simple object.”|34

I guess if Lefebvre knew Timothy Morton’s work he might call space a hyperobject. Since it fits into all the characteristics of hyperobjects; space is viscous, nonlocal, it has different temporalities and occupies a higher dimensional phase that results in it being invisible to humans for stretches of time. It is also interobjective since it emcompasses the interralationships of objects, and at the same time also has relationships with them.

Lefebvre explains that the ways that the mental and physical space affect each other are concealed within two illusions; the illusion of transparency and the realistic illusion. On the illusion of transparency; that a space could be ‘innocent’ or ‘free’, he argues that a space is never transparent, it is always acted upon. If you go out of your house to the exterior space, into the street, that space is not free; it has a time, a history, a design that imposes the way you use it or behave in that space. Then there is the realistic illusion of quantifiable space, which may seem concrete, but it is transmitted through language which explains the reality, and language is never neutral. These two illusions are manipulated, constructed, produced and designed upon in order to sustain a particular social system.

Space doesn’t exist in itself, it is always produced. Lefebvre proposes three dimensions from which social space is constructed and through which it can be analysed.

Spatial practice (the perceived space): is the place where society acts its productions and reproductions. You can look at the way a society creates, organizes and inhabits spaces as features of the identity of that society. A material spatial practice for example is how there can be a paved walkway, but another path is created by people 34

Lefebvre, Henri (1991). The production of space. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell. p.73

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cutting the corner and walking over the grass. The spatial planning is then different from the spatial practice.

Representations of space (the conceived space): are the signs and codes related to the spatial practices, conceptualized space. The discourse on space, the way we give meaning to, speak and think about space in order to understand the perceived space.

Lefebvre proposes this to be the dominant space of a capitalist society, a frame of reference for communication linked to verbal systems and signs.

Representational spaces (the lived space): determines a way of being for the inhabitants and users of the space, like social norms, values and experiences. This space is based on the relationship of the subject to their world and the embodied experience. The space that has been seized by the imagination and it cannot remain indifferent to it. It overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects and can be the precursor for change or disorder, for the creation of something new. This space comprised mental inventions, imaginary landscapes, and even material constructs such as symbolic spaces, or particular built environments that imagine new meanings or possibilities for social practice.

To understand these three dimensions of social space it may help to consider how the body travels through these coexisting dimensions. The body practices in the social space, it moves through the space, it engages with the language and understands and interprets the signs. It is also lived, through the practices and representations of space. The body moves through these different layers of space and can exist in several at the same time. |“A body conceived, as produced and as the production of space, is immediately subject to the determinants of that space: symmetries, interactions, and reciprocal actions, axes and planes, centres and peripheries and concrete (spatio-temporal) oppositions.

The materiality of this body is attributable neither to a consolidation of parts of space into an apparatus, nor to a nature unaffected 38

by space… rather, the spatial body’s material character derives from space, from the energy that is deployed and put to use there” |35

When Lefebvre talks about the body it is not just the human body, he talks about the architectural or spatial body, each body that occupies space is a body. He limits the ability to produce space to subjects, but in my eyes each object, whether real or imaginary, nonhuman or human is a spatial body and operates in, relates to and produces space, that is not something exclusively for human subjects. The interrelations between objects happening in space are informed by the space. The space that each individual object inhabits and the space that is shared between them. Sometimes different spaces can overlap and create a new space, I will explain more about this idea in the chapter about bubbles. The space will determine certain possibilities of the engagement with the object.

The representational space is where art takes place, sometimes it will interact with the other two dimensions to execute or implement its ideas, but it is at home in the representational space.

In performance we construct ephemeral spaces that are there just momentarily and then dissolve, as bubbles that pop. In my research I am trying to create a space of collaboration and engagement, a space which is created for an audience to experience, which they can reproduce themselves afterwards from the connections they made.

A space that leads to participation.

Michel de Certeau describes a difference between a place and a space, a place is a location, but a space exists when you take into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables.

It is composed of intersections of mobile elements, it is place, caught in the ambiguity of an actualization and modified by transformation.

In short, space is a practiced place.36 Practice invents spaces and it can manipulate spatial organizations. The practices that happen in a city, for example walking, can define and change that city.37 Ibid., p.195 De Certeau, Michel (1980). The practice of everyday life. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. p.117 37 Ibid., p.101 35 36

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|“These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen; their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each other’s arms.

The paths that correspond in this intertwining, unrecognized poems in which each body is an element signed by many others, elude legibility. It is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized by their blindness. The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other.”|38

When I create a space, where ropes and people can intra-act, explore and experience their relationships through play, the practitioners that participate in that space, like an audience and the ropes, won’t directly understand that space, but by intertwining into each other’s stories they will create their own understanding of it. Their practices will alter the space and hopefully they will start to inhabit it. |”Humans are beings that participate in spaces unknown to physics: the formulation of this axiom enabled the development of a modern psychological typology that scattered humans -without regard for their first self-localizations- among radically different places, conscious and unconscious, day-like and nightly, honorable and scandalous, places that belong to the ego and places where inner others have set up camp. .... With beings that are alive in a humanly ecstatic manner, the question of place is fundamentally different, as the primary productivity of human beings lies in working on their accommodation in wayward, surreal spatial conditions.”|39

I think that the cultural philosopher Peter Sloterdijk has a good point in this quote; in saying that you can never Ibid., p.93 Sloterdijk, Peter (2011). Bubbles. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e) LA. p.8384 38 39

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really say where someone is and that we can also be in several spaces at the same time, but I think that that is something that doesn’t just go for humans. My ropes join me in my imaginations and ideas, so they can also be in different spaces than the physical space, and I think they can do that on their own as well, each object has the capability to transport itself to other places. Other objects may not have the same language as humans to describe the spaces, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t create and inhabit other spaces than where we can observe them.

Sloterdijk allows me to reconsider the way I worked in my internship at the architectural firm Urban Design, where I was exploring how bodies participate in and navigate through spaces. What the mutual effect is that a body and a building can have on each other. As a designer you have to work with the extensive and intensive space at the same time, but while designing it on the computer you can only see the physical space. You have to imagine some of the other layers, but you will never completely know what a building will be like without inhabiting it and no two inhabitants will have the same experience of the building!

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The body and the building

Workshop for internship at Urban Design

How can a body in a space effect or change that space and conversely, how can they be influenced by the space? When I work with an apparatus or circus equipment, I change it while working with it. Its movement, shape, sound and other qualities are all manipulated by my interaction with it. While moving I also change the space and sometimes the view people have of a space. For example, when I perform in a public space and tie ropes between two buildings people will look at the space above them with new eyes, they notice that space, and see different possibilities that they could not imagine before.

After 5 weeks of internship at Urban Design, I taught a workshop to the architects, to see if I could give them a different perspective on a body in a space. Offering some new tools to look at a new creation and hopefully get people out of the habits they are so used to. Exploring how they can navigate, inhabit, create and transform space in unexpected ways.

In the workshop we looked at the possibilities for working with these ideas in the realm of architecture. Of course, you change a space when you build something somewhere and you change someone’s perspective when you design something, but would it be possible to design a space that keeps changing? Can it in fact be manipulated or adapted each time a new person comes in contact with it? Does a building have to be so static once it is built, just standing there; strong, tall and immovable, or could it be adaptive to the people inside and around it and be informed by their practices?

Architects look differently at a body in space than circus artists do. I think that most of the time architects don’t think about one individual person, but about a group of people, usually the group that represents the norm. If a building could be different for each single person, what would that look like?

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On the other hand, how does architecture change a body?

Changing the body’s behavior or their way of moving. In the architectural design you can direct which route people take, and through that what they see and buy, or how they commute. Or if the floor of a building would not be solid, but slightly bouncy it would change the way people walk on it.

Why would you want to come up with an adaptable building?

Looking at my experience at Urban Design for example, in one way it is a very creative place, by the things that are made and designed there, but in another way everybody sits in the same way at the same desk in the same place. When the inhabitants of a space have agency and allow for change to happen, it keeps them awake and their creative energy alive. Can a building fuel creativity by constantly adapting, causing you as an individual to have to keep changing the way you do things so that you don’t get in a rut?

What is the choreography implicit in the design? What are other situations in which you experience this? The architects gave examples of spatial design, like a football stadium where the roof can open or close, or the grass field can roll outside to let it get some natural sunlight and that you can use indoors for concerts. A theatre that has a different set up for each new performance, changing where the stage and the audience is and how the audience is seated or standing.

We all have certain ideas and expectations about the objects that we see around us every day.

I brought a box full of everyday objects, like a candle, matches, rope, a fork and a rubber ducky; (see picture) for the architects to examine. I asked them to observe at the objects in a phenomenological way, like they were aliens and had never seen or used it be43

fore. They had to explore the objects, emphasizing one of their senses at a time, keeping in mind what new possibilities they could discover and in which inappropriate or unusual ways they could use it.

• Look at it without touching, what color and shape does it have, what kind of shadow does it cast?

• How does it smell? Does that provoke a memory?

• If you would taste it, what do you imagine it would taste like?

• Close your eyes and touch it, feel the texture, weight and the way it moves.

• Does it make a sound by itself, or can you produce a sound with it?

• Does it have a natural movement, how can it move in unnatural ways?

• How do you move if you move with it? How can you involve your own body in the object’s movement?

The smelling and tasting provoked a lot of nervous laughter, this was clearly something they were not used to doing with an object. It brought up memories; “The wood reminded me of a museum for old boats and the metal of cutlery”. We discussed their views on possibilities of manipulating the space by changing the scale of the objects, thinking about how it would be to explore the same object if it was really big. |“It was interesting to take the time to explore the object, your first impression is mostly visual and you don’t notice much, but when you involve your other senses and interact with the object you see more specific things about this object.”|

Then we moved on to doing a similar exercise with the space around them; each of the architects had to pick a spot in the office where they spent time every day, and look at it with new eyes, thinking about how this space could be used if you had no idea of its normal purpose and where the hidden potential could be. In this, thinking about the effect of memory on a space and how a space can change your experience or an event.

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Several of them picked small spaces, under a desk or in the wardrobe which made them feel like a child; cozy, quiet and protected, not how they would usually feel in the office. Going under or climbing on top of something seems to be something adults don’t do very often and it directly reminded them of childhood. Most people (other than weird circus artists) don’t change levels or go upside down very often, standing or sitting is as far as it goes. Even sitting or laying on the floor is already out of the ordinary, which is a very easy way to change perspective. |“The view was funny, to see how people move their feet, like little dances.”|

The expectations of textures and smells, according to what they usually experienced didn’t always match, their ‘material library’ turned out to be smell-less, and a big mess of colors and textures, and the workbench in the middle of the room gave mixed messages; |“It gave a lot of visual input, the color and pattern, but it disappointed my other senses. It has no smell, no taste, looks like it has texture, but it is totally smooth. So the visual chaos promises a lot, but it doesn’t give anything to the other senses. Sound wise it was holding back, but when I provoked it, it overreacted.”| Subsequently I split them up into three groups. Each group had to design a building or public space that could adapt to people. They had to think about what the different needs of that specific space would be and how those could change and materials were adaptable and would be good to use for this space.

Group 1: School “In primary school, kids easily use space in different ways. Looking at having one space that can be used for different purposes.

Furniture that can create in-between spaces in one classroom, which the kids can move so they can decide what kind of space they want at that moment. Differentiation of space, space in different scales, spaces without a fixed function, so one moment 45

there can be small alcoves to sit with a small group and next it can be a big space for the whole class to work together. Creating the potential for things but not specifically program every space, so that there is a flexibility or an inventiveness in how you use them.”

Group 2: Transportation Expandable stations, that can grow depending on the amount of people in it. Subway station with moving platforms, so you don’t have to stop the train to let people get off. Maybe the whole station could move? Expandable spaces that move and can connect to each other. What happens if they connect? They would behave like bubbles, you would get a Voronoi-diagram.

Each station would have a kind of soap film around itself, so it creates an interior environment just by itself. The more people come in one station, the more the bubble grows. Because of this different bubbles will connect and create one big space together.

Central transportation hubs nowadays take so much space. What if everything we need would be in that bubble and around it is just landscape. It creates a very movable environment according to the number of people.

Group 3: Restaurant Can a restaurant go from “breakfast for kids” in the morning to “dinner for DINKies” (Double Income No Kids) in the evening? A space with a closed core in the middle, with space for staff and dishes (things that you don’t want to show) and the cooking around it. U-shaped furniture boxes that can change function around that core. They can be put together for a small group, in a big circle in more of a theatre setup. They can also 46

be put on their side and create different heights and so it can be a stage. Or they can be stacked, to get bunk bed dining. It will also make the sound a lot more muted, which is good with a lot of kids.

Looking at what the architects came up with, it was interesting to see that most of them mainly thought about how furniture could change a space. There was only one group who really attempted to change the building and that directly became a kind of science fiction. I do think it is good sometimes to think in a science fiction way, if you think about a concept or a building you want to design where there are no limitations of money, space or how the laws of physics will affect it, you can come up with amazing ideas, and afterwards you can always still tone it back and see how it could fit into the world we live in.

The suggestion of the Voronoi bubbles gave me a new perspective on the idea of the bubbles that I had been working on, which I will explain further in the chapter on Bubbles from page 63 on. Georgy Voronoy was a mathematician who came up with a formula to calculate how a space would be divided if a random collection of dots all grow into circles, where the circles meet each other it becomes a straight line. If you do this in 3D you have bubbles, that in a way still have the memory of the sphere, but you see all different kinds of geometric shapes.

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By coming into contact with each other the bubbles affect and change each other, which is what in my opinion also happens when objects come in contact with each other.40

It was good to work with people who have a different perspective than I do, working with circus and being surrounded by circus artists most of the time doesn’t give you the most ordinary world view. I think circus artists have a quite playful way of dealing with the space around them, and don’t always abide by the rules and expectations of society. It is good to be reminded that most people don’t react to the world around them in that way, because I want to make installations and performances for a broader audience than circus artists.

This exchange of knowledge opened up a space to see things through a different lens, we have different backgrounds and we allowed the different perspectives to be present. Collectively the architects and I discovered a more playful and open way of seeing objects and space. This process gave each of us the awareness and attention to allow more playfulness into the designs. It made me realize how important it is to me that the installations that I build are not static finished constructions, but that they have the ability to change and grow. That both the ropes and I affect each other and that we adapt to each other. I want to design a rope installation where the audience is allowed to transform it and be transformed by it. It is a process not a product.

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See page 37 in the chapter on Bubbles.

Artistic Practice

This project was a preliminary research into opening up a conversation and discussion about what creative rigging and rigging design can be in circus: which roles the rigger can have and how it can be not only a technical aspect, but an essential element to the artistic process. In circus, the way you move is very closely linked to the apparatus you use. By designing new apparatuses or rigging constructions for circus artists to intra-act with, I create new potential ways to move. The installation works partly as a score or a script for the performers to interpret and work together with, not just an instrument to serve a human to do tricks in. Working with ropes and knots is often seen as a craft, not an artform, but I think it can be both.

Craft

The way I am working with the ropes, the material sensibility I have with them is a kind of craftsmanship. The writer of “The Craftsman”41, Richard Sennett, describes craftsmanship as highly skilled work with a good relationship between head and hand; combining thinking and doing, with an appreciation for quality of work and doing a good work for its own sake. What does it mean to do good quality work and how do you achieve the quality in itself? Sennet suggests three ways of developing quality in skill; • Problem solving and problem finding.

• Filling a quiver, the assembling of skills which are more than a one to one match between challenge and response.

• Working with resistance rather than fighting against it.

With problem solving and problem finding Sennett means that there is not just one fixed solution for each problem, the single solution kind of problem solving he calls a cognitive death sentence.

Instead, every time you are engaged in solving a problem, the variability to solve it means that you find new things that need to be worked on. So each time you solve a problem you try to find new 41

Sennett, Richard (2009). The Craftsman. London, UK: Penguin UK.

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ones at the same time. There are no solutions that do not open up other problems, and every problem has multiple solutions. This is a kind of problem solving which allows you to develop technically on your own. Learning by experimenting not by a teacher telling you the perfect solution or a set formula.

The second one is the quiver, where an archer keeps their arrows. There is no one to one correspondence between means and end, there is not one single best practice. The more arrows you collect in that quiver, the more means you have to create an expression.

The more versatile you are in ways to do something, the more you can react to what is happening and play with it, instead of needing everything to go according to a fixed plan. This also builds confidence that you can meet the challenges that different circumstances will bring.

The way to work with resistance instead of fighting is to apply minimal force Sennett explains. A carpenter hammering into a piece of wood, who encounters a hidden knot will lighten their blows, in order to test and explore what is there. The use of minimal force is all about what Sennett calls the dialectics of resistance, how the artist or craftsman learns how to befriend the resistance, to explore it before dealing with it. One should investigate, perhaps there is a promising reason hidden in why something isn’t working smoothly. Using minimal force in response to resistance, allows curiosity to come into play. The moment that there is resistance and you explore it, is when you are most in touch with the material.

A practice which begins as explicit knowledge becomes tacit when a specific technique gets ingrained in your body.42 As your skill level gets higher you find out that the one technique you have learned doesn’t fit if you do something slightly different, at that point there is an explicit unpacking, because there is a resistance. Something has to go wrong to re-explore or reconsider a technique. From there you learn a variation of techniques and the creation of a new Sennett, Richard (2016). Lecture: Craftsmanship. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=nIq4w9brxTk 9:11 min 42

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practice, which then becomes tacit again. You develop a notion of experimentation from within without having to think about it. A technique is not getting better by doing the same thing over and over again, but by getting to know all the slight variations to perform the same kind of activity. You learn from difficulty and ambiguity.

Learning is an ‘education of attention’, you get the embodied knowledge or tacit knowledge that takes time to acquire, you can’t learn it from a book, but only through practice. Developing your own practice means discovering and identifying what the integral parts are for you. Some parts only you will know about, and of some parts you might not understand (yet) how they relate to the rest of your practice. It is not always important to know, the important thing is that you want to know, investigate and explore.

I think there is a lot of craftsmanship involved in circus. In a circus school you learn a lot of technical skills, you need this technique to get the familiarity with your body, the apparatus or material you work with and the space. You are learning to pay attention to details that you never knew existed, and find potential you never thought possible. Vincent Focquet suggests craft as a way to read material agencies better and look for ways to deal with them, to follow the material. Craft opens the possibility to skilfully make things in more than human worlds, which could be a leading tactic for doing circus.43 |“Starting to see circus as a craft, will require new conceptualizations of knowledge, in which knowledge is not confined to the timeframes before and after physical practice.

Rather, craft calls for a conceptualization of thinking that is happening in and through practice. In other words: a paradigm in which doing circus is thinking circus.”|44

As you hear about sculptors who chip away bits of stone to let the sculpture hidden inside reveal itself, I feel like that about the Focquet, Vincent (2019). MA thesis: To Withdraw to a Humble Circus, three dramaturgical tactics. Ghent, BE: Ghent University. p.46 44 Ibid., p.49 43

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ropes sometimes; I don’t necessarily decide what I’m going to make.

Often I have images in my mind, inspired by all the things I see and experience from other objects and people, but that is not the same as what comes out of the ropes. I work a lot from intuition, I build models and draw things that exist in my mind and I feel the need to bring them into another reality and dimension. When I start looking for material in the workshop to build a model, there are certain things that jump out and ‘call’ to be used. It is hard to explain this without putting any human traits on it. The space and time to let those things appear or come out without a fixed plan is a luxury that I have been able to enjoy the last two years during this master programme. I have been able to develop my craft, think through crafting and both exchange and share my practice with a group of likeminded people who challenge my thinking and doing.

Since the Renaissance there has been a divide between art and craft, the so-called high and low art. In medieval workshops that divide didn’t exist yet, but around 1400 A.D. a greater value started to be placed on individual creativity and uniqueness than on collective production. The fact that craft is more concerned with skill and utility and that there is less innovation and creation involved is for some people still a reason to see it as ‘not quite art’ and lower in the hierarchy. Sennett turns that around in a way that the focus on originality in art, brings a capitalist ethos with it and creates a relational market value. He claims that “the progression of skill is in that case only measured in terms of the ability to deal more and more shock, ... who is the more transgressive.”45 Instead, in craft the object in itself has value, according to Sennett and it has layers of value built into its practice.

Sennett, Richard (2018). Lecture: The good craftsman. https://vimeo.com/320539053 38:00 min 45

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I think that when you are working through craft, and building a skillful sensitivity to the material, you can be more innovative, because you know the detailed properties of the material with which you are working that most people are not as familiar with. Working together with agency and vibrancy of the material allows you to build a relationship with it, in which you can explore new possibilities that would not be able to exist without that connection. I don’t think all crafting is art, but every form of art requires some sort of craftsmanship. In my opinion they are intertwining disciplines. The distinction between art and craft as high art and low art has been challenged by movements such as Dadaism, Pop Art and Bauhaus. Out of these movements Bauhaus is closely aligned to my practice.

Bauhaus

In 1919 Walter Gropius started Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany as a school of invention and it became one of the most influential modernist art schools of the 20th century. They sought to level the distinction between crafts, fine and applied arts, and to reunite creativity and mass manufacturing. They aimed to create practical objects with the soul of artworks.

Even though initially they didn’t have an architecture department (which started in 1924), it became most famous and influential in its 46 architecture and design.

There are many elements in the Bauhaus approach that fit very closely to the way I work in my research. Like the way they leveled out the hierarchy between the practical crafts and the fine arts; architecture, typography, textile design, woodwork, sculpture and painting were all of the same value. How they combined different crafts and artforms with the idea to bring everything Picture of the Bauhaus curriculum, starting with the first year as the outer circle, moving more towards the inner circle the longer you study.

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together into the “Gesamtkunstwerk” (an interdisciplinary total work of art) is similar to how I combine my expertise in rigging with installations, intra-actions and movement.

Can all the input from different disciplines create a new way of looking at the possibilities of the ropes and space? Allowing different disciplines to weigh in creates a practice of innovation, because you look at the same things but from different perspectives. Creating art by the (un)organization of objects and perspective.

I really appreciate the focus on the material that exists in the Bauhaus movement; getting to know every aspect that you can about it and staying true to the materials - not hiding the construction of a building or object, but letting it be an integral part of the design. In the Bauhaus movement function and expression are intertwined and they assume that the conditions for the design are in the materials.

Over the years I have gotten to know the ropes better and better.

The profound familiarity and intimacy I have built with the material has taught me to see them in a different light. Learning about how they are constructed, when or why they stretch and break, all of the properties inherent to them and how they behave, show me a potential in them that most people don’t see because they don’t know them as well. I understand ropes and knots better than I understand most people or maybe even myself, but they still manage to surprise me time and time again and let me discover characteristics that I didn’t expect.

The Bauhaus idea that the alienation or defamiliarization of something will lead to the comprehension of it creates a way of experimenting, experiencing and problem solving that really speaks to me. It is hard to be dominating when you are curious. If you learn to trust in your senses of perception you can take those as a starting point for working with materials instead of just trusting on the facts that you know about that material.

In the Bauhaus school community was very important, switching between working individually and teamwork, learning from each 54

other and sharing ideas. This has been reflected in my experience with my classmates in my masters programme, where there has been cross-pollination between our practices and our research, which has influenced my research and my thinking a lot.

Rigging

I have been interested in knots and forces since a very young age, which grew more and more, the more I worked with ropes as my circus discipline. During my Bachelor Degree in Circus and Performance Art I also became interested in the rigging involved in circus.

I loved the math and physics involved, the problem solving mentality of it, and I also thought it was important as an aerialist to know what you are hanging off of, since it is literally your life on the line. For a long time I really enjoyed both working as a rigger and as a performer, but there seemed to be a big separation between them. I don’t know if that was because of my own expectations, or the value I felt that was put on it by the world around me, but they definitely didn’t feel on the same level.

After getting quite badly injured in 2017 in Costa Rica, by falling on my sacrum, I was hardly able to walk at first, let alone perform. I felt very strongly that I had to prove somehow that I was still a performer. It was hard to be in a place where everyone knew me from how I moved and performed, and then not to be able to move like I normally did. It felt like a big part of my identity got taken away from me. In the end it made me appreciate all the other facets involved in performances so much more and recognise how many other aspects of circus I enjoyed and was good at. I toured as a rigger and stage manager, designed and sewed costumes, taught and was involved in the creation of shows. These were all things that I had done before in some way, but were underappreciated by myself and others around me. They came easy to me so I never really noticed them, the challenge of performing on the other hand made me feel like I had to prove that I could do that as well. Now I can move again like I could before, but the importance I give to different parts of my practice has been changed by this experience. Performing is no longer the main, 55

central thing that everything else circles around. Rigging, designing and organising became a more intrinsic part of the way I create and carry out my artform.

One of the things I have always liked about circus is that for me it never felt so competitive, because everyone does something different, but there is still a strong drive for a lot of circus artists to be strong, virtuous and original. You do have to compete for work and there are circus festivals that are competitions, which encourages this competitiveness, but in the circus circles where I usually spend time I am happy that it doesn’t feel so competitive. Putting competitiveness on hold opens up space for collaboration between artists, but also between the performers and audience.

The hierarchy that exists within circus, but also in general in the performing art world is very fixed. When I started writing this piece I wanted to write about how creative rigging can be ‘more than just something technical’. Which made me realise that by saying it in such a way I maintain the hierarchical norms we abide to. A lot of circus artists probably think that they are not doing treat technicians differently than other performers, but it is amazing how big the difference is between how I am treated when I work as a performer or as a rigger by artists, venues and organizers. The fact that I am a female rigger is another point where I often notice the hierarchies. I feel like I first have to prove that I really know what I am doing before people will accept that I can do this job, while for most of my male colleagues it is accepted that they will be able to do their job without any doubt. There are many hierarchies or dualities that I would like to see change, artist/rigger, human/nonhuman, art/craft, performer/ audience, male/female.

Over the years and especially during this master programme, rigging came more and more on an equal footing with my movement practice and it developed into an essential part of my artistic practice. The way I designed the rigging would affect the way I moved and intra-acted with the ropes and the moving gave me new ideas for the design again. Each rope installation I design and build shows 56

many possibilities and potential roads to take, it creates different futures for myself or other artists to explore. |“Designers must know about materiality; they must be familiar with how materials can be bent and manipulated to a purpose. But a designer must also know people: how they interact with objects, how they relate to the future state of affairs encapsulated in a designed object, and how they feel... To design is to bring about new things in the world. These things that are not just occupying space; they are fulfilling a purpose, and they have meaning on their own. To design is to create meaningful things for meaningful uses, understanding different uses and different materials.“|47

In the following chapters I will explain how I worked with creative rigging as my artistic practice and how I try to create a more horizontal hierarchical structure between all parts of my practice through participatory installations, bubbles and play.

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Sicart, Miguel (2014). Play Matters. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. p.87-88

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Whisperings from the wind

|“When you grow up, you’ll never be sure if this happened or not. Never sure if it was just something your grief stitched together from the parts of him you remember and the questions still in your throat. Your doubt comes up against the image of him, flickering behind your eyelids.”|48

She loved sailing, how the wind would blow past her ears and pushing her around in different directions. It gave her freedom but at the same time a sense of guidance. It reminded her of her dad, Joan, always full of trust that she would make the right decision and that he would be behind her even if she didn’t. Everything was possible but nothing had to be, as long as you enjoyed it. How he used to sail and was the skipper of their ship the “Verwisseling” (the change).

Everything changed when he died, there were suddenly just three of them, her, her mom and her sister. Everything was different, but still the world was the same, the boat was the boat and the ropes were the ropes. They would tie things together and hold everything steady. Like the wind they were strong and flexible at the same time.

She turns and turns and thinks away. She notices everyone moving forward, but she is stuck. The bruises on her leg show where the ropes were holding her. They won’t let her slip..., well sometimes a bit, slowly, like pushing against the wind. Ropes hanging down like rain pouring down on her head. She’s dripping wet.

They understand her and take her back to half forgotten memories and musings of times to come. In her ropes time doesn’t exist. It is now and then and what will be. Nonlinear and no logic, but she still understands. She understands herself, the ropes and the world better without a linear timeline. She is here and now, which is always and everywhere. She can stay here forever and disappear in endless worlds of creations that move and morph, change and are misunderstood. They take her through a maze, to get lost in thoughts and imaginations. She doesn’t know where she is and where she is going, but she knows that she is enjoying it, that she is in the right place and that she is going the right way. Because she has his trust.

Joan is always with her, in her ropes, in her thoughts, her memories and her boat.

He is like the wind.

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Griffin, Sarah Maria (2018). Spare and found parts. London, UK: CPI Group. p.1

Glossary Complex activation: the activation of for example an audience, where they are physically activiated as well as mentally.

Dwelling: the creation and inhabiting of a space that you make into a home.

Kinesphere: a term coined by Rudolf von Laban with which he described the sphere around the body whose periphery can be reached by easily extended limbs without stepping away from the place where you stand.

Vector: a force with a magniture and direction.

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Forces

|“The world is a knot in motion”| 49

My interest in rope started with sailing, I was intrigued by how both ropes as well as the wind are so strong and flexible at the same time. How some knots would win the fight against the wind and others would just slip away. How the pressure of the water against the kiel on the bottom of the boat would keep it from falling over while the wind tried its hardest to push it down. And how a sail and some lines would transfer the sideways push from the wind into forward momentum, going faster and faster, hanging over the edge trying to give some extra counterweight with my tiny ten year old body. Feeling how I was on the edge of losing control, having to work together with the wind, water, sail and ropes to stay afloat. The excitement of skimming over the water and grazing the sky.

All the forces and vectors involved in sailing are the same ones I am working with in my ropes. I am interested in all the different forces at play when I interact with the ropes, both physical forces and forces of power, authority or influence. Physical forces like gravity, the strength of the ropes and my body, different constructions make me move differently and give different possibilities for interaction.

As well as the forces of power, most humans deny the power and agency of nonhumans and place themselves higher in the hierarchy of things. And hierarchies among people, one person or profession is often seen as more important, the technician has a different status than the artist

Tensegrity

I work a lot with Tensegrity structures, which originally come from architecture. The word Tensegrity comes from a combination of the words tension and integrity. This tensional integrity or floating compression is a structural principle based on the use of isolated components in compression inside a net of continuous tension, in Haraway, Donna (2003). The Companion Species Manifesto. Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press. p.3 49

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such a way that the compressed members (usually bars or struts) do not touch each other and the prestressed tensioned members (usually cables or tendons) delineate the system spatially. The term was coined by Buckminster Fuller in the 1960s. In addition to architectural structures, tensegrity is also how a human body works; our bones (compressed members) are not stacked on top of each other, but actually floating in our body being pulled together by muscles and tendons (tensioned members).

In my eyes Tensegrity is one of the places where the rope structures and I are the same, where we overlap, which makes it very interesting for me to work with. I build several tensegrity models on different scales, from little sticks and elastics to aluminium pipes and cables. The ones I built from broomsticks and bungee elastic are about 1,20 meter high so you can move with and inside them. They move in very unpredictable ways, and the whole thing sometimes jumps or trembles when you hardly touch them and don’t expect it.

Because of this you really have to listen to what they give you instead of virtuously trying to master them. This is what a big part of my research is about, how to listen to the objects or apparatus that you are working with and going in a dialogue with them instead of trying to control them. In Tensegrity there is a constant negotiation to find a balance between pushing and pulling, but in the structures I build, that balance is not fixed, there is always an adapting and shifting of the forces at play. When you touch the Tensegrity, the impulse moves through the whole body of the object and the effect comes out at the other side as well. If there is another human body on the other side, they can take that input from the Tensegrity and react to that.

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In discovering how the Tensegrity reacts, through vibration, resonance and constant movement, I realized that they seem to have memory, like the ropes and our body. They can lay flat for a while and then back up to their 3 dimensional shape. The intra-action between us is not only affected by my own memories but also the ones from the objects I’m working with. When you bundle a rope time and time again with a twist in it, it will ‘remember’ that when it hangs straight down and it will move differently, than if it would have been bundled without twists. The ropes I work with also activate memories of my dad that are intertwined with them and bring him back to the present time.

I found intra-acting with and listening to Tensegrity a very good way to learn to listen to other apparatuses. If you try to really listen and attune to an apparatus that you are very used to working with, it is very easy to fall back into habits of your daily technical training. When you first work with an object that you are less familiar with, you have more of an open mind of what it can give you, not as many prejudices of how it will act and react to you. You learn new ways of communicating with an apparatus and develop the ability to navigate in problem space. When you go back to your familiar apparatus after getting used to this kind listening, it is often easier to recognize it when you jump back into habits, and realize that you are not in the moment, not listening to your apparatus and your body, what they are asking right now, but instead you are several steps ahead already. Every time you realize that, you can try to return to your dialogue with the apparatus, and take away the expectations of what will happen. Let yourself be surprised.

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Bubbles

|”The child stands enraptured on the balcony, holding its new present and watching the soap bubbles float into the sky as it blows them out of the little loop in front of his mouth...

There is a solidarity between the soap bubble and its blower that excludes the rest of the world. And each time the shimmering entities drift into the distance, the little artist exits his body on the balcony to be entirely with the objects he has called into existence.

In the ecstasy of attentiveness, the child’s consciousness has virtually left its corporeal source. While exhaled air usually vanishes without a trace, the breath encased in these orbs is granted a momentary afterlife. While the bubbles move through space, their creator is truly outside himself -with them and in them.

In the orbs, his exhaled air has separated from him and is now preserved and carried further; at the same time, the child is transported away from itself by losing itself in the breathless co-flight of its attention through the animated space. For its creator, the soap bubble thus becomes the medium of a surprising soul expansion. The bubble and its blower coexist in a field spread out through attentive involvement.”|50

During my research I have started to develop a theory about bubbles. In this theory each object has a bubble around itself, as a sort of kinesphere. This came from the idea of life cycles, that each object, no matter if it is alive or not, has a life cycle, whether it is a computer, a sloth or an idea. Visualising a three dimensional version of this life cycle/circle creates a sphere or a bubble. Over the time of its existence an object and the bubble that surrounds it develop and are influenced by other objects outside itself and it changes in accordance to that.

I started to imagine how bubbles from different objects constantly come in contact with each other and sometimes they will penetrate each other and overlap. By overlapping they create a space that wouldn’t be possible to exist if there wasn’t that specific combi50

Sloterdijk, Peter (2011). Bubbles. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). p.18

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nation of objects, the spaces of coexistence. This overlapping space can be a physical space, but it can also be an idea or movement quality that comes out of the objects coming together. When bubbles overlap, the objects inside it are affected. This can be asymmetrical, one object doesn’t necessarily influence the other as much as the other way around. A new object could be created out of the overlapping space of the bubbles.

In my mind all the bubbles can change shape, size and consistency, sometimes they are very penetrable and other moments way more solid. They move around with changing speeds. They have a nonlinear timeline and it is a non hierarchical system. The bubbles are a way for me to deal with objects and their agency and for other objects to deal with my agency. Visualising the intra-action between us in different ways and thinking about what comes into existence when I come into contact with another object.

Peter Sloterdijk wrote a trilogy called “Spheres”51 which is an investigation of humanity’s engagement with space and a reaction on Heidegger’s “Being and Time”. Volume I ”Bubbles” is Sloterdijk’s phenomenology of intimacy and the discovery of self, volume II “Globes” is his phenomenology of globalization and exploration of the world and volume III “Foams” is about the poetics of spatial plurality: “how the bubbles that we form in our duality bind together to form what sociological tradition calls ‘society.’”52 He uses foam as non-round sphere formations that are metaphors for the globalization of society. |”What is known in tradition as spirit is thus originally, through sphere formation, spatially spread. In its basic form the sphere appears as a twin bubble, an ellipsoid space of spirit and experience with at least two inhabitants facing one another in polar kinship. Living in spheres thus means inhabiting a shared subtlety… for humans, being-in-spheres constitutes the basic relationship Sloterdijk, Peter (1998). Bubbles: Spheres Volume I: Microspherology; (1999). Globes: Spheres Volume II: Macrospherology; (2004). Foams: Spheres Volume III: Plural Spherology. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).

52 https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/foams 51

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-admittedly, one that is infringed upon from the start by the non-interior world, and must perpetually assert itself against the provocation of the outside, restore itself and increase.”|53

Sloterdijk also saw the bubbles as a space where a relationship could form and exist. From there it could produce something new, “it inevitably develops further into a general theory of autogenous vessels.”54 Sloterdijk explains that his theory of spheres means gaining access to something that is the most real, yet also the most elusive and least tangible of things. Even though he says gaining access is not really the right word, maybe attuning to the bubbles and the spheric circumstances we have overlooked.55

My practice also exists out of different bubbles, of moving, writing, reading, building, creating, designing and experimenting to name a few. All these different bubbles overlap at times and looking at their meeting points I can interrogate what is at the heart of my practice. All those different bubbles each give a different perspective on my practice and my research. Which is something I find very important; to try to see everything I do and think about from different perspectives, even though that is never completely possible.

Layers and perspectives

This relationship of overlapping bubbles was something I experimented with in the residency I did with three of my fellow students, Eduardo Cardozo, Francesca Hyde and Toubab Holmes. During this residency we created our own language, had discussions, movement and writing sessions and created new methods to explore our practices. Together we developed a method of layering different artforms to look at each of our practices. This way you could look at your own practice through the perspective of the other’s practices.

We developed physical ways to explore concepts and abstract things, which allowed us to communicate and move with objects that Sloterdijk, Peter (2011). Bubbles. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). p.45-46 Ibid., p.60 55 Ibid., p.78-79 53 54

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are not physical, in new ways. This gave a different perspective on them and a different understanding of what we were working with.

In one of the exercises in our residency I imagined my consciousness as bubbles; I let the bubbles move me through the space and wrote how they affected me.

My consciousness is like bubbles, bubbles that can change in size; grow or shrink. When they get in contact with each other, they adapt and change. They constantly change size, consistency and the speed at which they move. They can be really big and airy, or tiny and come together in a mush. They are solid, but can pop.

They push me around sometimes, at times to places where I cannot go, because of bodily restrictions or because I don’t understand how to go there yet. They can be inside my body and outside it. I can be inside one bubble to explore the often forgotten ephemeral space of the invisible.

In our writing sessions we would usually start with automatic writing about a certain idea, part of your practice or an exercise we just did. In automatic writing you don’t stop moving the pen, i.e. no pauses to think, no editing, no censorship for a set amount of time (we usually did 5 min). We would also write about objects that we don’t have names for, the in between things. From the automatic writing we would pick one thing, found during the writing, to write a letter to. One of the others would read it and answer from there.

Here are some of the letter exchanges that came out: Dear Transformation, You were caused by something, and neither that thing nor me could have gotten where we are now without your interference. The combination of the three of us at that place and time caused us to be the way we are right now. You were sudden and durational at the same time, with a rippling impact that was long lasting.

Sometimes I wonder in which shape you will come to me next.

Hopefully see you again soon, Saar 66

Dear Saar, I will stay with you forever, sometimes more present, at other times more in the background. At the same time that I am with you, I will also be with a lot of other objects. You all need me, but on the other hand, without all of you I wouldn’t exist. Without the clashes and interactions or encounters between you I wouldn’t be activated. Usually you only notice me afterwards, but I jump back and forth in time. Wherever bubbles overlap and intersect I will appear. I can’t really say if I like it or not, it’s just who or what I am.

Transformation Dear Saar, Now some time has gone since I wrote last. I’ve thought a bit about your question “what form will I take next?” At the time I had a hard time understanding the question as for me the answer is clear. The saying “a fish cannot see the ocean because they are surrounded by it” comes to mind.

I know you prefer me when I’m safe.

Transformation Dear Possibilities, not yet created space, You are changing my perspective. You make me look at all the things that could be, that might change or will never become. you make me want to try to find more and more of you. To distract myself with all that is not yet there. The more we work together, the more I like it and the more I see you everywhere.

With love, Saar Dear Possibilities, They use the ideas and images they get from you to go through me and get to the New, the Changed. Somehow we fit very well together, but often they don’t end up where they thought or imagined with you, once they have gone through me. Which creates new versions of you again… I like pushing them, together with you, to get to new places, unexpected spaces.

Love, Transformation 67

We found many ways of sitting with, listening and attuning to objects, to think through and move with those, internally and externally. Embracing problems and sitting with doubt were important tactics in these explorations and to follow the traces of our minds crossing over to the other spaces we would create.

This residency also gave me the opportunity to try out how to share my research and my practice with others. Working with other artists on their relationship with their apparatus through tensegrity and play.

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Nice to meet you object

In my research I don’t just want to develop my own relationship with objects and specifically the ropes, but I am also trying to find ways to share this way of working and looking at objects with other artists and an audience. As a first step for a collaboration I examined the possibilities for sharing with other circus artists, exploring how I can help other artists have a more open attitude towards listening to their object or apparatus. By reacting and improvising, avoiding to recreate the same tricks over and over again, but react to their nonhuman partner.

We started by working with the Tensegrity to step away from all the habits and prejudices they have about their own apparatus. As I explained in the chapter on Tensegrity, its unpredictable movement asks you to really engage in a dialogue with the Tensegrity instead of trying to control it. Allowing the intra-action to happen without expectations of what will come out of it or how virtuously you can move with it. Finding ways to make the qualities of the material visible and the materiality available. Exploring this through movement can be together with the Tensegrity, but it can also be movement on your own inspired by the observation of a detail in the Tensegrity.

After this we worked in duos with different disciplines, where they investigated, moved with and wrote to and about each other’s apparatus. In this they could see how someone else, with a different perspective, saw their apparatus and found unexpected possibilities of moving with it. Finally they would work on their own apparatus, where they feel at home, but come into contact with it in a new way.

Intra-acting instead of interacting, attuning instead of controlling and entering into a dialogue that embraces problems instead of virtuously mastering their apparatus. |“What is the process of moving our thinking of circus from the apparatus to the dwelling? As in the case of houses, what turns a house into a home is the memories, the smell, the personal freedom of expressing ourselves inside the home-place and the 69

desire of wanting to go back, as a returning to somewhere. More than anything else it is also the effort put to “bring” all this together. The four dimensions are involved as are our five senses.

Something like this happens with the apparatus, if instead of approaching just a rope that someone bought and sooner or later will replace, we put focus on this very delicate, spread in time, think of the co-existence of the being and the object”|56

One of the ways in which I worked with the circus artist to attune to their apparatus was inspired by “The Language of Objects” checklist of Benjamin Richter, which I added as appendix II, because it informed the way I intra-act with and explore objects a lot. This is a way to explore an object by focussing on the observations of one of your senses at a time. This allows you to listen to details that you would otherwise not notice and reduce association and metaphor to the level of background information.

I hope to let circus artists look differently at the connection to their apparatus and recognise that their apparatus has agency.

For them to take the impulses that the apparatus gives them more seriously and to listen to those impulses. To see the apparatus as a partner, that keeps motivating you to move and answer to the impulses it is giving you. Working this way helps developing tools to get out of habits of just repeating the technique and being able to create your own movement material. To react to what the apparatus is giving you instead of disciplining it into the thing you want it to do.

It allows artists to keep pushing a disciplinary boundary. The material familiarity comes with practice, not knowing and by finding new problems through solving others as Sennett says.57

Meli, Angeliki (2018). MA Thesis: The interpretation of space, the improvisation of play. p.38 57 Sennett, Richard (2009). The Craftsman. London, UK: Penguin UK. 56

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Play Space

|”Play transforms actions and objects into something new; it does not restore them to an original state.”|58

I want to share my practice with an audience, but not in the traditional circus conformation, where the audience watches an artist move virtuously and masterfully on stage, while they sit back in their chairs passively. I want to expose the relationships I am building with ropes. I think it is not possible to do that by just watching me. Besides that, I think it is not easy for people to accept the fact that objects have agency, and to be open to the possibility of thinking differently about this. I want to open up possibilities for them to experience it themselves, to build and explore their own relationships with objects. I want to use participatory installations and play as methods to create those possibilities. |“The realm of play, if participated in openly, offers obvious opportunities to explore alternative modes of awareness, to develop insights into knowledge of new modes of being, and to explore radically different possibilities perhaps not readily available elsewhere”|59

Play

To achieve this I wanted to create a space that is open for play. I designed and created a rope playground with different installations, where an audience could play in, interact with and change the installation. The Rope Cube and Rope Wall I described on page 16 are examples of those installations. The audience is co-producing the artwork, they are invited to be part of the artwork and part of creating it. They have a short term impact on it, by moving with and in it and by doing that they are part of creating a performance. The installation also invites them to have a longer lasting impact on it by Agamben, Giorgio (2014). Beyond the Threshold of Deconstruction. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. p.261 59 Meier, Klaus V. (1988). An affair of flutes: An Appreciation of play. In Philosophic Inquiry in Sport, edited by William J. Morgan and Klaus V. Meier. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. p.194 58

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allowing the audience to change or adapt it in a more permanent way, changing the setup of the ropes and adding to it. The idea is that by being allowed to do that, they will start to think about what it means to change a piece of art and what the artwork meant in the first place. How, what they changed, changes what it will mean to other people, who will interact with it after them. Thinking about the artwork and the intra-action they have with it, and to create complex activation.

By handing over the responsibility to experience the artwork to the audience and giving them the freedom to decide how they want to experience it, I hope to empower the spectator. By breaking the expected rules of engagement I want to invoke contemplation while they experience the ropes. |“Playful designs are by definition ambiguous, self-effacing, and in need of a user who will complete them. Playful design breaks away from designer-centric thinking and puts into focus an object as a conversation among user, designer, context and purpose. In fact, what playful design focuses on is the awareness of context as part of the design. Rather than imposing a context, playful designs open themselves to interpretation; they suggest their behaviors to their users, who are in charge of making them meaningful. Playful designs require a willing user, a comrade in play.”|60

Even though there is no permission needed in play, most adults still feel like they are not allowed or supposed to play. The first reaction to an explanation of my installation is often “oh, my kids would love to play with that”. Then I wonder if it is really their kids, or if it is actually they themselves who would want to play, and if it is more that they feel like it’s not their role. There are so many stigmas around it. To pull people in to engage, I want to invite children to take an adult to play, they are allowed to pick an adult and decide the rules. I am trying to find ways for people to accept that you don’t have to use everything the way it is normally used. That you can find your own way of dealing with the objects around you. No matter 60

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Sicart, Miguel (2014). Play Matters. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. p.31

if you work with circus or not, I think we all need more playfulness.

Through playfulness we can explore an object’s functionalities and meaning in often unexpected ways which can give new and different perspectives on it.

It is scary and exciting at the same time, to get the freedom and choice to deal things any way you want. People often want to know the rules, or at least what the game is, but this is no game, it is play. In play the rules constantly evolve, which is different than in game, where the rules are fixed and in the end you win or lose the desired goal. Key ingredients of playing are thinking, manipulating, changing and adapting rules, which cause play to be open-ended.61 If you are open to it, almost any space can become a playground.

A space for play, without the specific expectations of playgrounds, I would call a ‘Play Space’. |“The relationship between space and play is marked by the tension between appropriation and resistance: how a space offers itself to be appropriated by play, but how that space resists some forms of play, specifically those not allowed for political, legal, moral, or cultural reasons. Play relates to the space through the way of appropriation and the constant dance between resistance and surrender.”|62

When a play space is created it should be open, flexible, and malleable to allow players to appropriate, express, act and intra-act, make and become part of the form itself. A space for collaborative processes of engagement and intra-action among all agents in the network of play. Nobody dictates meaning, order, importance, or action; all actants, designers and players, negotiate play. The designer just sets the stage, inviting others to play through this form that has been created or found. The designer’s role is to open the gates for play in an object and with a purpose.63 A designer sets a frame for form to start its process, and then all other elements in the network Kaprow, Allan (2003). Essays on the blurring of art and life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

62 Sicart, Miguel (2014). Play Matters. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. p.52 63 Ibid., p.90 61

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take over, deploying an object into the world which encourages appropriation and lets it speak for itself and be spoken through. Play proposes a new way of seeing the world, which is also what I want to do with my rope installations. |“To play is to be in the world. Playing is a way of understanding what surrounds us and who we are, and a way of engaging with others.”|64

Rope wall & Rope cube

My final presentation for my Master Degree existed out of several parts, since most readers won’t have been there, I will try to be a mediator to create a variation of this presentation of my practice for you to experience.

Each part had a different layer of intimacy to the ropes, which was connected to the time and intensity the people involved had had to work with them; to build memories, make connections and develop dexterity. It was connected to how well they had gotten to know the ropes.

Before walking into the space I had told the audience to follow a rope and let it slide though their hands while it guided them to their seats. Once they arrived there they had to take the end of one of the pieces of rope that was waiting for them, another audience member would hold the other end and they had to keep tension on the rope and feel the connection to the rope and the other person while watching. While they found their seat I played three poems to them that I wrote and recorded.

“The ropes are talking” (see page 7) “A body entangled in ropes” (see page 3) “Mind mind jumps, runs, tumbles and falls” (see page 14)

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Ibid., p.1

During the third poem I started to come down from the top of the Rope Wall. This was the deepest layer of intimacy with the ropes, having worked with them for years in different ways gives me a great familiarity with the materiality of the ropes and I have a close relationship with them. While improvising I feel like the rope wall and I really work together, we listen and react to each other.

While swinging the whole structure side to side Tinka, Angelique and Sianna joined me, sliding down, letting the sideways movement decide their speed and movement. Our movement with and in between the ropes created negative spaces in the line pattern that started out so even and regular. The music that was playing was created with rope sounds. This was the second layer of intimacy because the three girls had been working on the Rope Wall with me for four weeks, so they had had some time to get to know them but not very intimately yet.

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After coming down off the Rope Wall, I explained how Tensegrity is the overlap between the installations, architecture and my own body and that I had been working with the first year Bachelor Circus students with the Tensegrity models the week before. Some of the students showed an improvisation in trios; two students and a Tensegrity, where the students moved inside the Tensegrity. Every time the Tensegrity or the other student touched them somewhere they had to push back with that body part and follow the movement with the rest of their body.

After this third layer of intimacy I invited the audience to come play as the least intimate layer. Most members of the audience knew ropes as objects that they come across in their daily life, but they often don’t pay much attention to them. They could climb in, lay on or under the Rope Cube, walk through the Rope Wall, to experience being surrounded by the ropes, explore the Tensegrity models and look at a little exhibition of models, drawings, books and small Tensegrities that I had created.

Some of the circus students seemed to expect to be able to show off their trained bodies in the Rope Cube, and to be able to move easily in it, but it humbled them when they couldn’t master it directly, because the ropes moved in very wobbly and unpredictable ways.

Most people without any circus background came in contact with the ropes with a much more open perspective. Some really took the time to explore and see how the ropes reacted, others were just walking around to see what the other people did with the ropes.

Questions of participation

Some questions arose for me from seeing the audience play in the Rope Wall and Rope Cube; how can I create the conditions where there are guidelines for the audience to experience the material and materiality of the ropes? Is there a way for them to immerse themselves in the installations without me having to explain in too 76

many words what the idea is? What is needed for an audience to experience the objects as something that has agency, as well as for the audience to experience their own agency in affecting the installation? How do I activate them into doing, and thinking while doing?

How can I give insight into the process and let them be part of it?

I think the Rope Wall and Rope Cube were interesting to work with, but they didn’t address these questions for everybody. Some people didn’t feel comfortable to play or didn’t know what to do with it. In a previous presentation I had more variation in rope setups for people to experience the connection with the ropes and then almost everyone found their own thing they were interested in to connect to the ropes. Maybe having those different options could help the audience experience the agency of the objects and of themselves.

When I had those other rope setups, I left a little card with a question or a suggestion of what you could do with it at each setup; as a way for the audience to get insight into the process of my research.

Twisting rope; Twist the rope until it starts to twitch, or let the record player twist the rope. When you let it go can you see the memory of the rope?

Trembling rope; Which vibrations can the rope make? How do you affect them and what do they do?

Singing rope; Which sounds can the ropes make? Can you combine different rope sounds to make music?

Break a rope; How much weight can you add before the rope breaks? Add one sandbag at the time. Do different knots have different strengths?

Marionette; Put loops around your limbs and chest. Move around while suspended or let someone else manipulate you.

Unravel a rope/rope dissection; Take a rope apart. Put a rope back together.

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Shadow play; How do the shadows and models interact with each other? Move the light or the model to change the shadow.

Making models; Cross two sticks and tie them together. Start a pattern with the string by tying it to the sticks and keep repeating the pattern. Create a in a ring.

Pile of rope; How do you move when you are surrounded by rope? Let someone cover you in rope, wrap it around yourself and be submerged in it.

Tensegrity; Build a small tensegrity model or move with the bigger one. There are three times two parallel sticks, can you figure out how to put them together? (You might need more than two hands).

Painting rope; Dip the ends of the ropes in the paint, pull on one rope to make the other ones dance and paint on the paper underneath it.

Cats cradle; As a child you may have played with ropes between your fingers, can you make the same sort of figures, but with two bodies instead of hands and limbs instead of fingers?

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The amount of time I spend with the ropes, building the structures, pulling rope, tying knots all change my perception of time and give my mind the possibility to make connections that I wouldn’t see otherwise. So maybe a durational piece could also give some of that to an audience, while also giving insight into the process. It could allow for the material to ‘speak’ and for the audience taking the time to listen. I would like to create a durational piece where I build a rope installation in an atelier or performance space and where the building, constructing and rigging is the performance, which could take several days. The audience can watch me build or join in with building the installation and tying the knots. The ropes are then connecting people to work together. Following is a timelapse of the building of the Rope Cube, as an example of what this could look like. https://vimeo.com/416296536

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Epilogue

I hope that this thesis can be a first proposal towards rigging as artistic practice and can open up the discussion on the role of creative rigging in circus. As well as innovate the thinking on the objects we work with and to value the role of objects in a different way than circus practices previously have done.

This is just the beginning, doing this two year master programme, learning about how to do artistic research and starting to look into all of these ideas and concepts made me hungry for more and I am looking forward to dig deeper into some of the things that I just started to scratch the surface of and discover how they can inform my practice. I would like to look into what the difference is between things and objects, learn more about explicit and tacit knowledge and explore practice, craft, play and interactive installations more in relation to Karen Barad’s spacetimemattering, feminist intersectionality and inclusivity, Sarah Ahmed’s “Queer phenomenology” and Ben Spatz’s “What the body can do” among many others that I would like to invite into my space of thinking, research and practice.

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Bibliography

Literature Behar, Katherine (2016). Object-Oriented Feminism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press Bennett, Jane (2010). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of things.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Burrows, Jonathan (2018). Talk on practice written for DOCH Stockholm What would be another word for it?

De Certeau, Michel (1980). The practice of everyday life. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.

Focquet, Vincent (2019). MA thesis: To Withdraw to a Humble Circus, three dramaturgical tactics. Ghent, BE: Ghent University.

Foucault, Michel (1980). Power/Knowledge: selected interviews and other writings. : Pantheon Books 1972-1977. Brighton, UK: The Harvester Press.

Glotfelty, C., & Royle, N. (2017). Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking (Cohen J. & Duckert L., Eds.). Minneappolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Griffin, Sarah Maria (2018). Spare and found parts. London, UK: CPI Group.

Harman, Graham (2002). Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. Peru, IL: Open Court.

Harman, Graham (2011). The Quadruple Object. UK: Zero Books.

Harman, Graham (2018). Object Oriented Ontology, a new theory of everything. UK: Pelican.

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Haraway, Donna (2003). The Companion Species Manifesto. Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Kaprow, Allan (2003). Essays on the blurring of art and life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Lefebvre, Henri (1991). The production of space. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell.

Manning, Erin (2016). The minor gesture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Meli, Angeliki (2018). MA Thesis: The interpretation of space, the improvisation of play.

Morton, Timothy (2010). The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Morton, Timothy (2013). Hyperobjects; Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Petit, Philippe (2013). Why knot? New York, NY: Abrams Image Books.

Rubidge, Sarah (2012). Dance spaces: Practices of movement.

Odense, DK: Syddansk Universitetsforlag Sennett, Richard (2009). The Craftsman. London, UK: Penguin UK. Sicart, Miguel (2014). Play Matters. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Sloterdijk, Peter (2011). Bubbles. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).

Sloterdijk, Peter (1999). Globes: Spheres Volume II: Macrospherolo82

gy. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).

Sloterdijk, Peter (2004). Foams: Spheres Volume III: Plural Spherology. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).

Internet sources On Intra-action, accessed April 3rd 2020 www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0SnstJoEec On Being ecological, Morton, accessed April 7th 2020 www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/20/being-ecological-timothy-morton-review Sennett, Richard (2016). Lecture: Craftsmanship. Accessed May 1st 2020 www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIq4w9brxTk Sennett, Richard (2018). Lecture: The good craftsman. Accessed May 1st 2020 vimeo.com/320539053 On Foams, Sloterdijk, accessed March 10th 2020 mitpress.mit.edu/books/foams

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— Appendix — I. Jonathan Burrows What would be another word for it? talk on practice written for DOCH Stockholm, 2018 This talk was repeated as the closing event of the C-DaRE Somatics Conference 2019, Coventry University, with a slow motion black and white film of Katye Coe dancing at Rosemary Butcher’s memorial, and harmonica and melodeon interludes How to begin is a good place to begin, because practice usually begins by asking how to begin, and because in practice it only matters that we begin and that we might allow the practice to continue.

This continuing is a daily activity which should resist as far as possible the wish for an ending at all, though an ending like a beginning is usually present in the mind of the person doing whatever they are doing. The person for instance who is practising and longs to get somewhere and stop and look back and see how far they’ve come, and to rest and be rewarded and understand again why they love to do this thing.

I showed this talk to Katye Coe and she said yes, this word practice reminds me of the word somatic, which sometimes stands in for everything and maybe gives emphasis to the wrong stuff, or puts people in camps or circuitous arguments that make money for the academy mostly. What might we mean by the word practice? What would be another word for it?

A short while back I heard Mette Edvardsen talk about practice and Bojana Cvejić said but oh this practice, this word practice is a way to be busy not doing, to avoid doing or something like that, I don’t recall exactly what she said but I remember she was picking up and troubling the habit of all this.

And by the way it doesn’t matter if you know these people or not, it only matters that we go on speaking each other’s names or else we’ll all disappear.

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Being busy not doing is one of the problems of the word practice, the habits of this word practice, so I find myself calling it ‘doing’. And I find myself feeling worryingly sensitive or prickly when somebody easily uses the word, talking about my practice this and my practice that.

Mette Edvardsen said in a talk that when she was preparing her library project Time Has Fallen Asleep In The Afternoon Sunshine she had the practice, the daily practice, of reading and remembering the book I Am A Cat by Natsume Sōseki, and Jan Ritsema asked her to speak it there and then and she spoke it, and he was astonished and said ‘Ha, but this is all you need’. And I worried he had made the mistake of maybe thinking that she’d thought this place that she’d arrived at as though it was a concept already flying, and that he’d forgotten the slow doing by which she had arrived.

The argument certainly made us think and someone said well alright what is this practice, and without too much preparation on the spur of the moment I said ‘practice is a doing which is not yet art’, but the exact meaning of what I intended to say only vaguely hovered, clouded with questions.

I repeated this thought afterwards at another talk in Birmingham and somebody came up and told me how much she’d liked the expression ‘practice is a doing which is not yet art’ and that it reminded her of working on her allotment. I had a train to catch so I didn’t stop to ask what she meant, and anyway I was slightly afraid as it didn’t really sound like what I meant, but walking away I thought she was describing how there on the allotment something happens, which by its slow and daily nature bleeds into her other doing, like her art doing. Or maybe she meant she wanted to call the vegetable doing itself a kind of ‘about to be art’, which I’m not against. But I thought again of Bojana Cvejić’s being busy not doing, and I caught a glimpse of where the word practice ties itself into a knot and us with it.

Thinking about this confusion between practice and doing and performance and visibility, Katye said yes I don’t think practice is a thing, but I think in its generosity it can include thingness. For instance, she said, me and Charlie do a movement practice together and we sometimes express it as a performed practice which makes it art, but it’s a practice nonetheless and that’s the point really. And I thought of her talk called ‘She Dancing’, where 85

she declares for a daily practice that holds equal validity between the not yet art and whatever arrives as art, sanctioned or not in some barely imaginable future. But which stays urgent.

Chrysa Parkinson read what I’d written and wrote in the margin that she agreed practice is not an art object, but that nevertheless you art when you practice. She said it just doesn’t become a noun yet. It’s something about how the materials you practice with start to teach you. It’s not just you digging, it’s the soil getting dug. It’s the trowel or shovel talking back to your hand. Smell of the soil. Maybe the soil is urgent. You do the allotment every day because otherwise something will die, or not grow, or grow too much.

And the philosopher Bojana Kunst added yes, practice is not yet art but it troubles the ways that art can be; so the moment when practice is becoming art, or slipping over into art, is exactly when it changes how art might be shared, or exchanged, or attended to.

I should say at this moment that it may sound confusing these voices overlapping, and you’re wondering who they are and who said what and where we’re going; but it’s important we listen to different voices so maybe for now we can let them flow, and follow the flow and flow also.

Jeroen Peeters, writing about Mette Edvardsen’s Time Has Fallen Asleep In The Afternoon Sunshine, quotes Jean-Jacques Rousseau wondering ‘what it is to pursue this passion without learning anything useful or making any progress?’ A familiar feeling. Each day before I make this daily practice of writing, I find myself reading a little of Jeroen Peeters’ text, and then I fall asleep and when I wake up I feel further away from wishing for an end. I digress more easily and these digressions point me in the direction of a better practice and I feel like I’m making progress, but only so long as I sleepwalk through it.

Walking now to my children’s school I write a note on my phone saying ‘practice is a ghost-like activity’, by which I think I mean that this doing which is not yet art, is inhabited always by the ghost of other work which points insistently towards what might slip over into art.

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When I dig on my own allotment I’m sometimes aware how far off the eating of the vegetables will be, in fact how impossible it feels to connect the two activities of eating and digging, and I wonder at this moment if I even care about the eating or if the digging is equally the point, on the road to some barely imaginable future. It’s easy to think how this teaches a certain patience, but it’s barely true. Practice is an urgent thing and right now my allotment overflows with weeds, I can’t even see the paths for what is growing.

The poet Michael Donaghy, writing about why poets follow certain formal practices, describes their process as an enjoyment of what he calls ‘that serendipity which comes from negotiation with a resistant medium’. By which he means that accident of art arrived at in a moment of almost mechanical fiddling about with a stubborn shape, which itself is not yet art.

The daily return to a place where things are potential. Where a certain democracy of possibilities sits alongside the ghosts of other work, untroubled by the dead hand of genius and all those well known conceptual leaps that became the story and stopped our breath.

If the real value of dance is that it has no value, what might that mean in this time which historically demands action? Simon Ellis said this and Efrosini Protopapa and I were there and we all three were troubled by the value thing, even though it had been a long road of discussion to get to it and we saw plenty of glimpses along the way of how dancing does evade capture and continues to declare itself free despite the evidence.

And Katye’s right, that if practice is labour by choice then that suggests privilege. But at the same time as Bojana Kunst pointed out, practice also challenges the usual modes of production, because of the way it somehow refuses to be quite measurable, or exchangeable in any economic sense.

I’ve always been drawn to the person who knits clothing and goes on knitting; sweaters, hats, gloves, scarves, even socks, in excess of the wherewithal of friends and relatives to absorb such furious output, which stands like a stern reprimand to easily bought shop clothes. How this slow accumulation of knitting stays blissfully distant from the finished garment, which may or 87

may not get worn in some barely imaginable future.

Standing at the back of a dance class, talking with friends to avoid that part of the class where everybody throws themselves across the room. Talking to pass the time, to avoid being drawn into the game, to put off the inevitable sense of never quite improving. Laughing. Watching the ones who take it seriously. The bond you feel with the others.

Jeroen Peeters writing about his experience of being part of Mette Edvardsen’s library piece, says ‘These technical matters quickly make way for what binds us, for the realisation that we are a small community of practice, whatever it is that we share through the doing.’

Practice has always had an awkward relationship to the promise of improvement. How we hold each other up despite the pressure to compete. How we help each other out from under the thumb of all that.

Practice is a doing which could never quite imagine its own success, because to imagine success would be to negate the accumulation of small almost inconsequential or close to unnecessary things that might be done to arrive somewhere, such that the quilter cannot imagine exactly the bed quilt from the scraps she hoards and sews one to the other over the slow months of her doing.

And what arrives through practice might more often than not anyway be put aside, or what Stefan Jovanovitch calls archived, and sit there in a place of not knowing or not yet knowing, like compost. Or as Stefan says, you have to put it aside as soon as something gets iterated, you have to trouble it, or contradict it, or lay it by for later. For some barely imaginable future.

My practice is under siege by the Arts Council of England, whose sensible policies ask me to make a promise on my own self-improvement, and even the lies I tell are ruinous to the health of all this slow accumulation.

Choreography is a tool for disturbing what happens as soon as it happens, which is a quality hard to quantify. It’s too wasteful for university assessment procedures, outputs and funding criteria. It splashes about messily and 88

the bits come together again too late, and too differently to justify the promises we might make.

Agh the tone of indignation you hear as I rifle through scraps of experience and try to build an argument, and it slips away because practice is a light thing, not much more than what it says. Not much more than a doing which disturbs another doing. Even talking about it feels wasteful.

I do my writing practice, my reading books practice, my speaking out loud practice, my dancing without a purpose practice, my practicing a new piece practice, my drumming practice, my harmonica practice. I make my folk music practice. I pick up the box with knobs held in a rubber band and two safety pins to replace missing springs. I’m working at the style of a man called Scan Tester through the playing of my friend Will, who plays Scan’s concertina. Will has sold me this box with the rubber band and safety pins.

The style is odd, counter-intuitive, and I swing between comfortable and uncomfortable.

Add four notes at the top, roll on the note before you’d normally roll then rise two notes higher at the end and roll back down in the usual place but entered at unfamiliar speed. Every day. Everything changed.

The feel of practice clothes worn down to the shape of your body. The way they sit for years afterwards in a drawer but never lose their familiarity, that sense of being about to be worn again.

Blindfold in a Bodymind Centering class, sniffing an old ballet shoe, like a gateway drug.

How that early luxury of daily dance class became at first a mild imposition and then had to be rejected, more or less entirely. Moving on to a healthier body image. Staying fit for a few years. Forgetting why you got into it in the first place. Being saved by the slow focus of somatics. Sitting longer and longer in front of a laptop.

Marcel Duchamps in his New York apartment, playing chess to fill the time he’d saved fifty years before with a conceptual leap.

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This practice of writing a little each day. Trying to avoid the subject. Trying to avoid capture but failing. Thinking about Seamus Heaney’s description of writing poetry as being the business of arriving somewhere he could not reasonably have expected to arrive, but which he recognised when he got there.

Practice is a doing that is not yet public image.

Up as usual to the top note then roll even higher, and a slur which sounds wrong but right wrong and back again to the start which is harder to play now than at the start. Daily practice. Not yet art. Everything changed.

The experience of dancing for Rosemary Butcher was a process whereby she slowly and persistently disturbed each moment and with it any possibility of ownership of gesture, even as you were busy embodying the gesture. Your body distanced by procedures, by practices, which diverted what you thought you were doing, splitting each impulse down other or multiple routes. Rosemary liked the movement that had been rendered archaeological, that had become an artefact altered by time and chemical, call them alchemical processes. Traces of resonant experience. Dug up, exposed again to the air but worn out, all surfaces unreliable. Everything changed.

Or Ralph Lemon’s twenty year documentation of his friend Walter Carter from Yazoo City Mississippi, like an accidental aside to his choreographic work, accumulating slow layers of grainy and imagined story until Walter, already showing signs of early dementia, takes flight in a spacecraft made of junk. All surfaces unreliable.

All surfaces impermeable to the usual validation. No likes, no retweets, a somewhat uncertain relation to the art historic hierarchy. Resistant to the dream of a fully automated future.

Or Lee Scratch Perry up at dawn remixing beyond and beyond, a slow erosion of everything as he reduced four tracks down to one and began again, over and over, approaching the border of legibility, spending one year mixing bass tracks, his records almost unplayable by the sound systems but mapping everything the sound systems played.

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Agh but the thinking of my practice is so much slower than the thinking of my emails, my texts, my calls, my calendar. The satisfied doing of all this self-administration erodes, confuses, washes out, stamps over, crushes, defeats, overwhelms, eclipses, is contradictory to, disguises itself as, replaces and stands in for the thinking of my practice, which brings no such sense of purpose or completion. I jealously guard it but the admin gets in. I try not to speak it but I spill it trying to prove I’m doing something at all. It does its work so weakly, like making stalagmites, or stalactites. Slow drip. Small particles. The accumulation of debris.

Chrysa Parkinson sent me a Gary Larson cartoon of sheep in a room and one of them asking ‘Where are all the sheep dogs’ or something like that.

Practice is like that.

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Practice is a doing which is not yet concept.

Practice tries not to think a future.

Practice keeps going in the full and foolish knowledge that these things might fail.

Practice looks best in articles about dead artists.

Practice resists white male genius leaps.

Practice unclenches your fingers from the idea that you will find some kind of performativity.

Practice laughs at authenticity.

Practice dies when you use it to tick a box.

Practice is like a corner of the attic filled with papers.

Practice is a field wishing for a map.

Practice makes dull marketing copy.

Practice is like scanning the universe for an alien life form.

Practice is like collaborating with everybody but in private.

Practice appropriates everything but doesn’t yet know what to do with it.

Practice has never finished editing itself enough to say anything to anybody.

Practice wants to go visiting but can’t stand the daylight.

Practice can’t be collected.

Practice subverts perfect.

Practice is career resistant.

Practice defies all opinions, even your own.

Practising is the bathwater not the baby.

Practising is a doing which is not yet art.

With additional thoughts, comments, conversation, help and writing from Katye Coe, Bojana Kunst and Chrysa Parkinson Thanks also to Hugo Glendinning for editing the film of Katye Coe, which was projected throughout the talk at C-DaRE Somatics Conference 2019 © Jonathan Burrows, 2018 92

II. Benjamin Richter TLO – The Language of Objects Checklist A tool for facilitating sensitivity to the agency of objects.

A pathway to an understanding of object oriented ontology in a creative context.

Before beginning with the checklist look for a state of simple “being” in the body and mind. A useful thought is that the body is the object in which the human lives. Many somatic techniques speak of “sensing”. A kind of synthesis of listening and feeling. Through sensing one can arrive at a very authentic mode of “doing.”

Whilst interacting with the objects, reduce association and metaphor to the level of background information.

Notice when association and metaphor arise and let them go.

Avoid anthropomorphizing.

See what is there.

You can explore an object using the following parameters and questions. For each step it’s useful to remember/write down words that occur to you on the associative and metaphorical level so they can be more easily let go of. Also, they may be useful to you later as memory triggers.

The checklist is an impulse-tool giving the user a framework to make their own discoveries.

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Checklist

1.

Sight • Forget what it is.

• Observe the object as you would an abstract sculpture • How does it catch light and shadow • Colour – is it warm, cold, light, dark?

• Shape – lines, curves, negative space • What have you never before noticed about it? Does something surprise you?

• Position yourself in space in relation to it in a way that compliments its visual properties.

• The floor as a canvas – where is your place in the picture? Understand your choice. e.g. extend the lines of the object into space and position yourself on a point on the imaginary line.

• Near and far – scale of partnership and focus. The object alone,human and object dialogue, the human dominates the object.

• Counterpoint – place yourself in space in contrast to the object.

Contrast also makes visible. Make the opposite physically of what you see.

• Play with scale of same and opposite 2.

Smell • How does it smell?

• Smell often provokes memory.

• Notice what you remember without expanding on it.

3.

Taste • Is it the kind of object you would like to taste?

• If not, how do you think it would taste?

• Taste it.

4.

Touch • How is the surface texture?

• What can you discover about it with your eyes closed? Warm, cold, rough smooth, round, edges, hard, soft.

• What images do you see when your eyes are closed and you 94

touch it?

• Touch with the whole body. How do different parts of the body touching change the focus/quality?

• How do you vocalise what you touch?

5.

Sound • Does it produce sound by itself?

• What sounds does it produce through your touch?

• Is there a particular rhythm or tempo that makes sense to you?

• How do you vocalise what you hear?

6.

Movement • If you were the object, how would you move?

• Natural directions – how does the shape tell you which way to move it? Extend the shape with imaginary lines in space. Follow the lines with the movement.

• Find patterns and variations of the patterns within the natural movements.

• Unnatural directions – how can you move it wrong?

• Are there “every day” ways to move the object? What’s it normally for? E.g. bringing a telephone up to your ear. Find variations.

• Is there a common way to hold it with my hands? What is the consensus?

• What is the opposite of the common way?

• How else can you hold it with your hands?

• How can you hold it wrong?

• How can you hold it with the rest of your body?

• How does moving the object make you move?

• If you throw it, how does it fly? What is the object’s relationship to air and gravity?

7.

Playtime • Now that you have gathered all of the information in a conscious way, take a break.

• Play with the object and your body with these questions in mind.

Find variations to the material you already found. Find new ones.

• Make.

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• What do you want to share?

8.

Contrast/Trio/More of the same one.

• Which other object would be in contrast to this one? e.g. something heavy vs.something light or something stiff vs. something floppy.

• How is it to explore these contrasting qualities together?

• How does your body react to this contrast?

• Think of this as a trio. Two objects, one body.

• If possible, take many examples of the same object and interact with them all. How does that change your relationship with them?

9. Your artistic practice • How do your answers to the questions in 1-10 affect your practice?

• What is relevant to you?

• Which objects seem to you to be related to/nourishing for, your artistic practice?

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