PRACTICE

On the 28th of September Peter wrote an email to Ligia saying that he just had „someone [resigning] at very short notice”, and that he had “a studio for [her] research in the context of PRACTICE from Oct 6 until 18. On reading this, Ligia called Peter to ask what this PRACTICE project was exactly about and said that she wanted to work with Thierry – with whom she had worked on most of her late solo project. After coming to an agreement, they hung up and Ligia, who was in Lisbon, Portugal, at her sister’s, immediatly called Thierry who was in Berlin, Germany, at home.

In the following couple of days, the idea to work on Ligia’s last piece “Birds and Wind” in the context of this program made its way and it became clear that it was a good one. PRACTICE was not offering rehearsal space; ideas that came in should not be too advanced, the vaguer the better, as what was offered was the possibility to research for two weeks in UferHallen.

The “Birds and Wind” idea for PRACTICE was first to take, on one side, the text of the piece which constitutes 85 percent of the piece itself, the performer being seated still for most of the time, and on the other side the perfomatic side of the piece, which is contained in 5 mn out of one hour, and to open them in order to rethink the whole thing. On the morning before Ligia’s arrival, Thierry sat down and wrote three pages about the concept that are now in the trash. But the discussion was open and its aim was clear. When Ligia arrived in Berlin late the same day, they discussed what could be the possibilities of rewriting and re-chreographing over diner, with much confusion (and a little bit of a delicious portuguese wine bought in Berlin).

The following day, they went to UferHallen and met Peter. The three of them sat down and Peter explained to them what his project, that he shared with Amy and Jacob, was about. It was something about Lolita written by someone else than Nabokov and a technic called Family Consternation or Constellation, which remained at the time quite unclear for Ligia and Thierry. For what they got that day, it was something about a pedophile, group therapy and theatrical tools. It had nothing to do whatsoever with “Birds and Wind” (BAW) retitled for the occasion “birds and Wind revisited”.

“Birds and Wind” is a piece about failure, the failure of the performative act in its confrontation with the spectators’ expectation. In this piece the theater becomes a sort of a tabula rasa, based on the perception of a theatrical reality from the zero point – without context, without past, without any other premise beyond the confrontation of the performer with an empy space, a length and the public.

Was the piece itself a failure? That question accompagnied them on the first day. But what was wrong in the piece that could have made it a failure? The text? The text was carefully read. The performatic elements? The performatic elements were carefully looked at. At the end of this first day, on the way home after leaving UferHallen, they came to realise that if a detail here and there in the text and in the performance could be reviewed, the whole thing didn’t really need a thourough rewriting. PRACTICE, they thought, was a place for research, not for corrections.

On the second day, they thought they could open “BAW” and push each of its elements as far as possible in its own direction – the piece was there, and could remain untouched. There was no risk in exploring it. What would come out could then maybe be included back into the piece. It is only after that that they decided to isolate the elements contained in BAW and to use them for other purposes.

The main element that they wanted to explore is the confrontation between a performer on a stage and a spectator looking and building interpretations. On one side, movements, actions, that don’t necessarily express anything – and on the other side the head of the spectator laid open. If it can be said that everything that is perceived on stage by the spectator is fiction, then every move is suggestive. In a theatrical or performatic space, even the most concrete action or presence of a body can be a target or a container for poetic projections from the public. After the experience develloped in BAW, they decided to revisit its premises by setting a series of execises where the speech can extrapolate significations over the action, trying to enact the perception of an imaginary spectator.

After Barthe’s “Death of the author”, they decided to look into the Art of the Spectator. The Art of the spectator is always an attempt. The interpretation is somewhat floaty, vague. A story never gets to be built. There are associations, one after the others, subjective. Pushing the coherence further would bring one back to an art of the author. Although the “interpretation” will be composed, the fact that the performance is always slipping away from grasp doesn’t allow a sense to come to completion.

On the third day, Peter, Amy and Jacob showed them a video of the familly constellation. What they saw was a semi-fictitious theater representation with therapeutical purposes guided by a gourou called Hellinger who seemed to all of them extremely ideological and somewhat unethical. This brought them to a discussion about the enlightning or manipulative powers of representation used in a therapeutic context.

And a few days later Ali and Krisana, family constellation practitioners, came and set up with them a constellation. This is how it goes : A and K set the participants on the field, the space of the constellation, giving them roles. A particular issue is going to be enacted. In this case, they wanted to explore the family background of a fictional character : Humbert Humbert of Lolita. Peter was the nympholept. Amy, Jacob, Ligia and Thierry were other characters. The participants know nothing of who they are the “representatives” of, nor what is the situation exactly. A and K stay on the side and watch. They have all the details, the who’s who doing what to whom. From watching the way the representatives behave in relation to one another, they are able to draw an interpretation. At the end of this session, they explained what the situation was, who was who etc. And the participants were able to see how they created characters, and a background story for a fiction, thus deepening the psychology of the actual characters of Lolita. This is a technic that Ali uses in his theater work.

After giving up on a sequel to BAW, Thierry and Ligia had constructed a method, taken from the element of BAW mentioned above, to produce interpretation. On the stage, Ligia would improvise, and Thierry, seated in front of her, was taking notes for a text, the “interpretation”, that would be composed later. And it came to them that, all traces of the family constellation system removed, what would be left to see on the “field” was what Ligia and Thierry were looking for. People on stage that are not performing, not trying to express anything. Only relating to one another in an intuitive way. The lack of expressed intention in the performatic act is replaced by the interpretative skills of the observer.

During a conversation where L and T explained the link they found between their work and Peter’s team work, Ali told them, after they had said that they were only starting with this method of working, that sooner or later they would find (or fall into) a system : and this is exactly where the similarity between their common works stops : in order to create the art of the spectator, it appeared to them that it was an imperative to be anti-systematic. Thus the subjectivity of the spectator would be kept.

Another thing that came up while trying to draw distinctions between the two works was the question of psychology. Thierry said, quite affirmatively, that he was not interested in psychology. Amy asked then how could one get rid of it in looking at anything – it was everywhere. Peter’s team had observed the constellation that Ligia and Thierry formed while working – one seated writing looking at the other improvising – and made funny analogies to man/woman and 19^th century artist/muse relations, maybe in an attempt of guessing Lígia’s and Thierry’s personnal involvement in this process. Ligia and Thierry are people. And their relation is personnal. But here, they defended themselves, what they were trying to do is to produce images. Not an image of a joyous or suffering person, but of a presence suggesting a set of transformations and half narratives. One could find psychology everywhere, but one could also decide to turn away from it – thus leaving space for other things to come up.

To the question : what kind of images? Thierry answered : images that touch me. With this unfortunate answer, Thierry triggered an unfortunate question : What images touch you then? What did she mean? The value of an images lies in its capacity to convey meaning. It can be a pieta as well as a toilet bowl. It might be that the personal Thierry, for reasons that can be found in psychoanalityc textbooks, would pick the toilet bowl over the Pieta. But one can also choose to leave this question unanswered.

In spite of Thierry and Lígia’s resistence to any prior logics or systems to interpret movement, they found themselves caught by a tricky belief: the conviction that representation will be there, behind movement or behind words, to come up and show itself.

Putting themselves in the positions spectator/ performer, they were sujected to a wide range of expectations. Lígia expecting Thierry to give sense to her improvised movements, and thierry expecting ligia to create images that would support a nice metaphorical language.

Lígia even got to express something as inapropriate as her wish that her presence on stage without even moving a finger would be already enough to produce a whole range of thoughts and significations if they could be seen by a very gifted spectator – Again the Art of the Spectator.

They were in great confusion.

Lígia talked about the urge, the need, the motivation, and other romantic premises of the artistic work. She said that the mere use of tools could never be suficient for a creation, and that it is rather a conflict and not the ability that gives the first push to it. “we’ve got to get to a problem to offer a frame in which the tools can act”.

This dialetic relation between speech and presence brought them to a possibility of dramaturgy.

They talked about how speech can swallow reality, but how at the same time reality can be sustained by words.

About how the speech can concentrate on the object at one moment and drive its attention away from it at another.

How to oppose the potential of representation of the speech on one side, and the movements on the other, as if they were in a constant war.

How to question the awareness of the performer about its representative potential

How to observe the language’s dependency of reality

All those questions would allow them to set the dramaturgical line of the spectator mind, or art.

Three years ago, Ligia and Thierry were in Portugal. One night, in the kitchen, Ligia was peeling an orange. And Thierry started describing the peeling of the orange by Ligia. From this, they imagined that they could present not only a spectator mind in front a perfomer, but also the ascendancy that this voice would have on the perfomer if this perfomer would hear it. Language, with its adjectives, its different times, is always able to contain what is presented to it. If one says : she is peeling an orange – and she stops peeling the orange, one can still say : she WAS peeling an orange. The perfomer is going to be bothered by this voice that chases him. Even when, obviously, what the voice will say is only a subjective interpretation, it is still a problem for the performer. No one feels well being categorised, explained, as arbritrary as the category or explaination might seem. From this stems a conflict of power between the performer and the voice.

Nietzsche said that truth were old metaphores that came, with usage and time, to be solidified. Bathes links this to the etymotlogy of the word ‘stereotype’ : in greek, stereos means “solid”. A tree is not the same from one moment to the other. A river neither. This is the limit of language : its inadmissible limit. It cannot gasp the stream. Language brings us to make of living things statues : dead things.

If in choosing the art of the spectator over the one of the author they apply for a subjective, therefore questionable, ephemerous and non-dogmatic interpretation, one still finds, because of the limits of language mentioned above, an agression. Things named tend to be dead things. This is what they wanted to add to the piece that was slowly being build. A denounciation, and the impossibility of escaping language.

By ways of conclusion, they would like to say that they have no idea yet where all this is going to take them. It is not excluded that the train on which they’ve boarded might never pull away. If you have any questions, they will answer to the easy ones. Or we could play football instead?