ATTENTION REHEARSAL
How does the language which describes the dance arts and the visual arts translate into each other? How does the culture of those very different methods of expression fold into each other? Is it the actual morphology of those expressions, what they look like that holds a key to an understanding, or is it something deeper at the level of method and process that we can explore there relation to each other? If so then does that give us a key into a much more metaphysical concept, a meta language, into the essence of what constitutes an? Furthermore, when does a rehearsal become a work of art and what if instead we never allow a rehearsal to make that change over to the completed work and instead suspend it as a never ending condition of becoming? In our Global Attention Economy that produces our experience of reality today what if we engaged our senses and cognitive apparatus instead in an emancipatory condition of never ending exploration by making works of art that never became full fledged works but instead remain suspended in a quais mode. Does this not then give a potential political essence to the work of art thus constituted as the never ending rehearsal that never reaches a specific reference point or point of exchange? How could one sell a product that never rested or was arrested. These are some of the questions that this work Attention Rehearsal attempts to answer.
How does the language which describes the dance arts and the visual arts translate into each other? How does the culture of those very different methods of expression fold into each other? Is it the actual morphology of those expressions, what they look like that holds a key to an understanding, or is it something deeper at the level of method and process that we can explore there relation to each other? If so then does that give us a key into a much more metaphysical concept, a meta language, into the essence of what constitutes an? Furthermore, when does a rehearsal become a work of art and what if instead we never allow a rehearsal to make that change over to the completed work and instead suspend it as a never ending condition of becoming? In our Global Attention Economy that produces our experience of reality today what if we engaged our senses and cognitive apparatus instead in an emancipatory condition of never ending exploration by making works of art that never became full fledged works but instead remain suspended in a quais mode. Does this not then give a potential political essence to the work of art thus constituted as the never ending rehearsal that never reaches a specific reference point or point of exchange? How could one sell a product that never rested or was arrested. These are some of the questions that this work Attention Rehearsal attempts to answer.
Through a series of discussions a number of rules have been designed through which an elaborate schema of intellectual and body movements can be produced and registered. The dance artist Canan Erek, born Turkey, will visit the studio of the visual artist, Warren Neidich, born USA, and vice versa. Each will discover and utilize props and objects found in the others studio to produce gestures of dance works or art works which will be recorded . These recordings serve two functions. First they constitute a kind of memory of transdisciplinary and transcultural encounters which will be later projected in another dance performance as rehearsal or never ending work to be enacted at the end of our residency and performed in front of a live audience. The videos will be interlaced in a real time work taking place in the space of the residency in which an improvisational work will be made using real objects found in and around that space and watched by a real audience. As such the rehearsal reaches even beyond dance and visual art to encounter video and media.
In an attempt to interface this dance work with the Knowledge Economy and in an effort to understand artistic expression in the context of the production of intelligible facts we will add another layer to this work by inviting a dance critic and art critic to join us on stage during the performance. Not as critics on the outside but as actors who comment on the dance and artistic elements of the peice from the inside. We call this method „open ended symposium“. The main idea of this performance then is to tear down the wall that usually seperates the critic and the performer and also bringing into the action an outside voice. While they are commenting and contextualizing the actions, they also become part of the performance. At the end of the performance, as the audience leaves, they too will be able to voice their opinions by having the opportunity to write their comments in a book lying on a table by the exit.
Our first collaboration in that sense took place in the Residency of Duende Artist studios in Rotterdam. We would like to further investigate the ideas of this work and have the opportunity to engage with other contexts, platforms and audiences.
