(Research on love and work and love for work and how does love work)
10.5.2016 Skopje, Macedonia
Welcome
Michel Foucault, in his book the History of Sexuality: An Introduction, presented the concept of ‘confession’ as a way in which the subject is established and how his singularity is articulated in western society. Foucault wrote: “western societies have established the confession as one of the main rituals we rely on for the production of truth” (Foucault, 1987, 56). In other words, we are confessing something all the time in all areas of our society, even those things that are the hardest to say. We have become accustomed to believe that only through the revelation of all that is inside of us, we finally become free (1987, 60). I decided to welcome you with the concept of confession because it occurred to me that I have been constantly confessing something to someone in the past two years; I made confessions about being a lover, a performer, a maker, a curator, a researcher, a worker, a wife… At first they were just intimate revelations, but soon they became a vital part of my research. They appeared several times in different stages. But the relations between them were distinctive. For example: in the first stage of the research I confessed that I am a performer: experienced in working in a dance company in the past, touring, performing regularly, feeling exhausted and empty due to not realizing my artistic articulation. But then, in the third stage of the research, I came to realize that being a performer in the independent performing art scene today means feeding the capitalist circuit of labour exploitation with more or less everything I do. It seems that this circulation is draining me out and leaving me empty, even though I finally have a chance to discover my artistic interests. A similar process happened with my understanding of love, which at first appeared as something worth fighting for, like moving to another country because of a partner, excepting a job in another city, or even risking the partnership and a job for an underpaid project. However, by assembling relevant theoretical discourses and reading authors like Bojana Kunst, Michael Foucault and Jan Verwoert, I again came to the conclusion that all those investments might have implications in the fact that I am a perfect worker in a capitalist system by sacrificing all my attributes for work. There is one more important confession I made at the very beginning of the research: ‘It is psychologically impossible for me to sit down’! It is borrowed from Slavoj Žižek1 and his method of writing. Like Žižek, I also had to ‘trick’ myself into writing. I was telling myself that all I was doing is just gathering information and editing and that the real writing will come later (it is the 10th of May, 2016, the submission of this thesis is due in one week and I am still telling myself I am not writing). So how did this process of gathering information and taking notes started? It began as an invitation from our Contextual Practices teacher to track down research progress in a Research archive as an assignment, which I took very seriously. And here I am. With more than 200 pages of documentation, notes, literature reviews, photos, undeveloped ideas and few artistic experiments.
1 You can go to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlojUvQdjMg and watch a part of documentary Zizek! from 2005, directed by Astra Taylor, on 1:00:07. 3 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
During the research I underwent 4 stages that are intertwining, complementing and explaining each other: 1. What makes me move? 2. Love makes me move. 3. I am a performer. 4. Defying the pressure to perform. As I already wrote, the thesis was conducted through writing a journal, where I was entering utmost detailed information about what I am doing and thinking. The second phase was selection of the texts, and the third phase was editing, transforming, and adding sense and different narrations. Thereby, the thesis consists of several temporalities, voices, and writing positions that complement but also contradict each other, since they are a bundle of my multiple returns to these texts in different periods. The challenge of this principle of writing (that started in the form of a journal , but then turned into platform of editing, meeting temporalities and thoughts) is in the fact that the omniscient present ‘Me’ often tried to interfere with less informed ‘Me’ from the past in adding to her writings and fast forwarding the developments of chronological events. Notes also vary depending on the location where they were written and resonate the result of my progress obtained by reading relevant literature. The mode of referencing repeated throughout the thesis enables the reader to follow past and present train of thought and progression of the research, not only chronologically, but also through associative connections and critical questions2. That is also why I need to ask you for patience, as some events and facts reveal themselves several times, but others need more time to develop. Some texts were written as actual reports of my work, as literature reviews and observations of the world around me. Others were formed as assignments and others again as practices in creative writing. All of them were originally written in English, except this last one, that is in fact the first one in this thesis, which resonated better in my mother tongue (which, sadly, as a language and Slovenia as a context are represented the least in my research). This journal/thesis/research archive/sometimes even a love letter is mostly about me and how I deal with belonging (perhaps in someone else’s opinion not fitting in) to the contemporary performing arts scene. Bojana Kunst in her book Artist at work quotes Peter Klepec and writes that if we are all the time trying to say the things that are the hardest to say, than it must be that the things that are said are no longer secret (Klepec in Kunst 2012, 33). I agree that confessions we make every day may have lost the value and they might not be true anymore. But they helped me stay on a track finding my position in the art world, in discursive practices, in the scene of contemporary art in brother European space, and in my current context in Skopje, Macedonia. Those confessions made me see where I don’t want to belong, where I could fit in and where the potential for my point of resistance is.
2 You can practice it furthermore by going to the Google images and search for ‘phenakistoscope’. 4 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
October 2014 ArtEZ, Arnhem, The Netherlands
First: stage
3 4
Look at them… so different but yet the same? It is incredible what years of training can do to the body and the consciousness. Cunningham, Limón, Graham, Release, Flying low, Contact improvisation, Mime, Stanislavsky method, Acrobatics, Yoga, Pilates, Feldenkreis, Alexander… all those techniques and many more have passed through my body. Sometimes I wish I could capture each of them and its effect on my body, but in fact they were stacking, enhancing and establishing themselves as one flow of movement that was in a way unique for me. Nevertheless, I felt numb artistically, as if I was just a tool for executing other people’s ideas. That beneath so many dance and theatre techniques lies only one story that I am communicating to the audience. Even though I was enjoying the working environment of Plesni forum Celje, a dance school and a production house, for 17 years (group dynamic, regular productions and continuity of work, which are basic conditions for a performer), the quality of the movement I was developing, the constant repetition of dramaturgical and esthetic approaches to staging didn’t allow me to develop further as a performer, nor a maker. Since I was involved with structured dance techniques for many years, and was later adding to that perspective by also understanding body and
3 Photo is a part of personal archive. It was taken on 10.9.2009 in Celje, Slovenia, during the performance Ionosphere by Plesni forum Celje. 4 Photo is a video still from Shots in the theatre, that was recorder on 28.5.2015, Arnhem, The Netherlands. 5 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
movement in an academic context, while studying Cultural studies at University of Ljubljana, I somehow lost my ability for curiosity for my own movement. Looking at a second picture, that will not happen until almost 2 years from now, I can recognize a different communication and another necessity to be on the stage. I came in touch with somatic practices and improvisation few years after I left the dance troupe in Celje. As I was starting to undress all those layers of learned dance and theatre techniques, there were all this questions emerging: Is there something like my own original movement? Where does it come from? What is my voice? I realized that while improvising my movement is often limited with pre-learned movement patterns. I started wondering whether emotions affect the quality of my movement. When reminiscing about the situations, people and emotions that have been the strongest in my life and that have moved me, I could not ignore one thing that has always been so influential - Love — emotionally or physically. I started believing that memories, images and emotions concerning romantic relationships, family or love for my work are affecting the way I move. But how to reach them and how to differentiate them from all the movement stimulated with other images and emotions? I think that Love is a state where I am truly me (unique, creative and honest). And as Georgette Schneer suggests in her book Improvisation: In the words of a teacher and Her Students: “When you follow the lead of your body — its movement, qualities and tempo - you get to know your deepest aspects. You relearn the nonverbal ‘remembrances’ your body has stored up’ (Schneer in De Spain 1997 25). When I started to ‘dig in those remembrances’ myself, mostly through improvisation, I started wondering if the presence of love in my mind and body can diversify my movement? If I compare those photos on another level, I can say that there is uneasiness in both of them and the question about the movement appears on another level. In the first picture there was this wonderful feeling of belonging to a group and a place, but there was a fear of getting to know my deeper aspects. In the other picture there is also fear, but this time is of not knowing what to do, for example when I enter an empty studio, because before I was functioning under the system of beforehand determined program of productions. It is for the first time that I am also dealing with several positions at a time: being a performer, maker, my own producer, technician and many others. ‘Where is my movement coming from?’ is thereby also a question out of the necessity to understand what inspires me and motivates me artistically. What is producing a motion in me to be able to produce, for example, a performance myself? Partly the fear also derives from encountering the independent scene, individual, nomadic even lonely working conditions and not knowing how to deal with it. Ironically something I ran away from, that is a group or collaboration, is now entering my research, almost like a quest. So I continue with posing questions like how do I get things moving and how do my actions affect others?
5 I continue writing about this topic on 10.9.2015 in a note “Movement of Love”. 6 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Written: 5.12.2014; Skopje, Macedonia. Edited: 27.1.2015; Arnhem, The Netherlands.
This crazy little thing called love makes me move move move!!!6
Why is there something rather than nothing? Do I have free will? How big is the Universe? Can I really experience anything objectively? All of these cliché philosophical questions that might never get an answer have been asked throughout history. And I asked myself another one. Where does my movement come from? To even make an attempt to answer that question I first need to say something about the movement. It is a primary condition of me as a human being. Through breathing, blinking and pulsing I feel like I am in constant motion. I also understand movement as an intentional or unintentional change of the position of my body because of its internal urge or external force. But it can also be a need of the soul to move the body and to create rhythmical patterns that are known as dance. So, all of this is movement. And I would like to propose here that movement never stops. But if I know that it never stops, how can I find out where it starts? The more often I repeat questions like What makes me move? and How do I create movement?, the closer I am to the naive or even romantic idea that Love is a motor which makes the world go round. This idea is constantly circulating in my head, coming closer and going away. Love being movement and movement being love. So easy to draw it on paper, but also fast to confuse it with something else. Always too illustrative for my critical eye or too vague and ambivalent for the eyes of others. To explain myself and to be precisely understood by others is a struggle. How to speak of the subject of love that has a meaning so different for all of us? In the introduction to his book A Lover’s Discourse, Roland Barthes says: “the lover's discourse is today of an extreme solitude. This discourse is spoken, perhaps, by thousands of subjects (who knows?), but warranted by no one (Barthes, 1990, 1). The only thing that a lover, such as myself can do with her words is to paint a “portrait - but not a psychological portrait; instead, a structural one which offers the reader a discursive site: the site of someone speaking within himself, amorously, confronting the other (the loved object), who does not speak” (1990, 3). For me love is to be whole in myself, fulfilled, and at the same time to be completely lost. To feel the pain. To feel abundance. To feel nothing. Even the laziness of the thought. To surrender to external control. To take control. To be vulnerable, sensitive and fragile. Strong, ferocious and without limits. To depend on someone. To give in to the wonderful attraction of love. “So it is a lover who speaks and who says: I am engulfed, I succumb”, wrote Barthes (1990, 9), and I couldn’t have said it better myself. To illustrate this attraction and to give the first example of how love creates a movement, I will refer to a part of Plato’s Symposium. One of the monologues in Symposium talks about two halves that have been separated centuries ago and their mission is to rejoin and feel as one again, because of a desire and pursuit
6 Instead of reading this note you can listen it online together with a video at: http://sabrinazeleznik.weebly.com/this-crazy-little-thing-called-love.html This note was primarily created as an assignment and it was transformed into a lecture performance that was presented in Utrecht at a Young what matters conference (February 2015) and at a festival Locomotion in Skopje (November 2015).
of the whole which is called love (Plato 2005). The idea of joining with one’s lost soul mate is dangerously romantic, but if we think about it through the laws of attraction that rule our Universe, it actually might make sense. Thereby, in my opinion, the idea of a loved person creates a movement of attraction that brings lovers back again, even when they have to depart. Almost as if there were some invisible forces connecting two bodies, like the two forces in the universe: the centrifugal force, that is pulling away from the source of love (romantic partner, family member, friend or colleague) and represents life circumstances pulling me away from the one I love, and, on the other hand, the centripetal force dragging me back to the source of my love, by the laws of stability and gravity. Therefore, movement comes from my desire to be united with the one I love. And that desire produces action. In the name of love for people I move. — With that I mean travel, touch, hug, walk, create... movement in all its forms and shapes. Giving and receiving (or gathering and sending as one would use in a Fly Low technique class). But never feeling empty, on the contrary, feeling richer and richer. So, movement as love and love as a movement: I can say where it starts and that it never stops, it perpetually circulates and transforms. However, I came across several events in my life where the obstacles were so enormous that even the strongest love couldn’t ignite the movement to overpass them. I realized that there are some limits and restrictions to the movement of love. Regardless of my desire to amorously introduce love as something pure and mystical, I have to acknowledge representations of love used in contemporary society. Love became a trade mark of the capitalist system, being used as an ambassador of freedom of choice and society under false pretense of openness. No matter how open-minded and liberated societies today might be, we constantly get judged by whom and how we love. Our relationships are constantly valued, measured, weighed and looked at. From expensive weddings to reality shows on finding a romantic partner and declaring love publicly in new and creative ways. As if we were living in a love obsessed world where love is but a fashion trend. Here, I need to return to Foucault’s confessions and be critical about how we, whether we want it or not, have to confess our love publicly, when it comes to status, regulations, and bureaucracy. Due to more and more nomadic lifestyles as a result of the ephemeral society, we started building long distance relationships, whether they are romantic, working, family related etc. Like many others, I, too, found myself in floating mode between Slovenia, Macedonia, Italy and the Netherlands, and by that simultaneously embedded in several administrative systems that are constantly trying to regulate my life. Sometimes, they are overseeing my working relations in Italy, as I travel there regularly to work and create with a dear friend of mine. Sometimes, they are counting my days of residency in Macedonia, as I am allowed to spend only 90 days in 6 months as a guest in a foreign country to be with my partner. I am also urged to spend the next 3 years working in the European Union, because of the contract I made with the Ministry of Culture in Slovenia regarding my scholarship for master studies in the Netherlands. I could continue talking in numbers and say that in the past year I have traveled 6000 kilometers to be with the one I love, or 8500 kilometers to be working on what I love. I can find a number of days I spent working on my research, because I love doing it. Here, I am trying to tickle the thought that a confession of love means almost nothing if it is not valued by an institution of our society, even though this year it has moved me so, physically, economically and politically.
Before there is a contract, a document or a revision, these numbers mean nothing to the authorities. They are just promises. They are, like love itself, a performative speech: ordering, apologizing, warning. So how do I move through my research freely, when I know that the movement which is ignited by love is all the time restricted and that by moving I am making a constant promise to someone or to something? By counting days of stay in Macedonia, because I promised to the country I will not stay more than 90 days, by counting days away from my lover, because I promised him that this time I will return sooner or counting days spent on my research, because I gave a promise to the faculty to do so. All these thoughts remind me of a text from Kunst’s article “A Project Horizon: On the Temporality of Making” where she speaks about promises we give as artists to producers or institutions about our future work (2012, 65 ). The same as the promise that I gave to the Ministry of Culture about my successful future work as a young maker, or as the one I give by getting a passport in a certain country. I thereby give a promise and get to have rights and duties. These promises also make me think whether to move or not to move for love... promise to move to be with someone or to stay. To make a promise to work on a project or to let it go. Some promises are, as Kunst says in the same text, still yet to come true. She talks about the nature of our work as contemporary artists, how we have to really love our work to be able to move constantly, change, and be able to adapt to the system. How we are in a constant debt of promises given to institutions like producers or networks about our work (2012, 65 ). And as long as we have love for our work, these promises will keep on rising. And so will those given to the people I love. And for me that tells a lot about the future continuous movement of my love… Always in motion, always restricted, and always indebted by a promise.
In my additional attempt to describe how love creates movement I reached over to Jan Verwoert’s book Tell me what you want, what you really really want. It made me start thinking about the ways I lever myself towards new projects or performances. In his book, Verwoert introduces several concepts of how we can look at working relations in the independent performing arts scene today, but it also gave me some insight on how to understand the motivation for artistic work. I am researching this topic because sometimes I really cannot explain why I do something in my life or performing practice, and it feels I do it out of love. But also, some other times, I cannot find sense in moving or doing the work at all. I am not claiming that love towards a person or a project might be the same, but rather questioning the mobilization that happens within us when we deal with something that is dear to us; as there would always be an external reason why we do something in life. In the article “Exhaustion & Exuberance” Verwoert writes about practicing the positions of ‘I can’, ‘I can’t’, ‘I could’ and ‘I care’ (Verwoert 2010). When I was reading it, I was not yet aware of the term ‘performance’ as acutely as I became later on in my research. Here, I took his use of ‘to perform’ merely as ‘to act for or towards something’. Until 2013, I was living more or less in Ljubljana, dealing with a partially closed but yet eclectic dance scene. To be a part of a scene like that, the motivation to be in as many projects as possible, meeting as many people as possible and presenting myself at different venues, was my main objective. I said ‘yes’ to everything and everyone, worked without payment, risking my time and income, failing etc. Verwoerth writes that the state ‘I can’ performs as something turned towards oneself in facing the reality of one’s desires and, on the other hand, as a “moment of existential indebtedness to others” (2010, 47). Similar to that, as I had already written in the note before, where I was referring to Bojana Kunst, when we give a promise we are in constant debt: as lovers to our partners and as artists to institutions or producers. When I moved my work to Italy in 2013, my private life to Macedonia, and my academic research to the Netherlands, I spent quite some time stuck with the feeling of ‘I can’t’. I can’t because there is no people that could work with me, I don’t have a space, I don’t know what to present etc. Thinking of love for my family and collaborators or even for what I do helped me develop different questions, such as: ’What can I do from this nomadic position I am in?’, ‘Who is my work interesting for?’, ‘How could I present and share my work if I travel all the time?’ Verwoerth suggests practicing the ‘I care’ position i It derives from the potential where the positions ‘I can’ and ‘I can’t’ co-exist and are “not forced under the yoke of a dominant imperative to perform in one way and one way alone” (Verwoerth 2010, 43). He explains that this care gives one the motivation to act and that not acting is out of question, because when one loves someone or something action is required. He states that “I care’ implies the potential of an unconditional” (2010, 51), which in my research resonates
as unconditional love, or unconditional sacrifice to be with someone7 I love or to be working on something I love. In other words I do things to please the significant others. It means that I try to put unconditional effort into being a good lover, a good wife, a good student, a good daughter, a good friend… Recently, with my collaborator and friend Gisela Fantacuzzi, I was artist-in-residency in Electa, in Teramo, Italy, where we were facilitated only with a space and accommodation. Food expenses, travel and production costs were, of course, not covered, which I am sure many of my colleges in the independent performing arts scene are experiencing on regular basis. Because that is a part of giving a ‘promise’, like I already wrote by quoting Bojana Kunst. What was more degrading is that in the one week that we spent there we weren’t just training and rehearsing. Every day, we held a workshop for dancers of the local company, and as if that wasn’t enough, we also helped paint the walls of the space, because otherwise the workers wouldn’t finish by the time we were supposed to perform, we were cleaning after the workers, we were promoting the performance by handing out flyers to the people in the city centre, pleasing every wish of the producer and, last but not least, we performed 3 times. While doing all of those things I never thought about any kind of exploitation. And even now, I am not making a statement in order to complain. I am just trying to point out that all of those people that we were in contact with, got paid to do their jobs. We, as performers, weren’t. Nor for doing anything else that week. That really makes me question why should I keep on working under such conditions, but also how much I have already sacrificed for something I love doing8.
7 I think my mother still doubts that my decision to move to Macedonia was prudent. I wrote a note about our conversation on 7.3.2016. 8 I will write more about the “Work out of Love” on 19.11.2015. 11 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Written: 16.5. 2015; Arnhem, The Netherlands. Edited: April 2016; Macedonia.
Love (with) Spinoza
Even though I already have many view points on how love creates movement, I decided to also steer my research towards Benedict de Spinoza, because I was primarily attracted to his idea of good. By good Spinoza understands every kind of joy, and whatever leads to it, and especially what satisfies any kind of longing, whatever that may be (Spinoza 1994, 156). I was then thinking that in the process of satisfying longing or in searching for something that would make me move, there already is movement happening. Particularly when someone cultivates a passion for someone or something. The first thing I learned from his writing is that the passions I have in life are truly not related to my mind itself, but they are rather something that depends on others, they are triggered by something of external nature. So, my assumptions in the previous writings were correct. Love does not simply appear in the body, but is rather triggered by an external cause. If we take joy and desire for example, which are in Spinoza’s words examples of passion, my motivation in life is to reach the satisfaction that passion has brought me in the past. The simple conclusion is that once I have felt the sensation of joy or happiness, I will always strive to preserve it, as it will bring comfort and satisfaction. Does, then, the idea of comfort and satisfaction produce action and motivate me to act? He explains that desire is something that is man’s very essence to do something (1994, 158), and continues that the same is also valid for joy and love, because: “Love is a joy, accompanied by the idea of an external cause” (1994, 158). External cause may be many things, that may differ from individual to individual, from one lover to another. For me, external causes are promises of satisfaction of my passions, like those that I nurture towards my partner, a new performance I work on, an exciting collaborator I have met recently, my mother or a childhood friend. These external causes are the reasons why I move (travel, take a new opportunity, make a new acquaintance). If I may now briefly return to the good; Spinoza wrote that “we neither strive for, nor will, neither want, nor desire anything because we judge it to be good; on the contrary; we judge something to be good because we strive for it, will it, want it, and desire it” (1994, 160). So, ironically, perhaps the motivation for people to move is not only love itself but to diminish the longing, the lack. Anyhow, no matter how many images of people and places one carries along, the longing is always present. In my case, which I will elaborate later on, it is present anywhere I go, because there will always be some element missing. No matter where in the world I am, there will always be someone who is somewhere else, something happening in another place. Beneath the other motivations that I already wrote about, movement of love is also happening when I am longing for those people or events, and setting actions towards being there and with them. In this moment of the research, I realized that people (collaborators, peers) are one of the basic conditions I need to provide for myself in order to ignite a creative process. People are like matches in the fireworks of love9.
9 I write more about the necessity of working with other people in the note “Working conditions” on 8.4.2016. 12 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
20.5.2015, Celje, Slovenija
Constant volition
I was already writing about looking for the substance that makes me move not only as a lover, traveling around Europe in order to meet friends and family, but also as a dancer, as a performer. I need this substance in order to be able to act, to perform. I discovered that this substance does not merely exist in my body, but is rather something that lights up when an object of love is on my mind. Here, I would like to have a look at Buddhist practices and the understanding of love in one of them. What I believe is crucial, is that love in some branch of Buddhism means understanding of joyful and melancholic moments that happen simultaneously. The deeper the joy or pain, the more we need to try to listen and understand (Hanh 2014, 13). It seems that this understanding, which is the base of love in Buddhism, is an ongoing process. It is striving for perfection, but never arriving there. I first realized that I am a lover myself, when I came across the philosophy of Buddhist love. Not only that I am loved and that there are people that I love, but also that I am a lover, which is a state that is changing, developing and opening. I am a lover in romantic relationships, but I am also an amorous performer, enchanted with the creative process and the audience. In the state of the lover there exist no self (2014, 85). The Lover is a giver, who cannot exist alone. In Buddhist philosophy, the self coexists with others in nature. Exactly like a trained dancer coexists with others in a group. Buddhism teaches how loving means striving towards constant volition — nursing deepest desires for the one we love, understanding and aiding each other. Buddhism teaches love that is physically spacious, that is vast, that can overcome distances (2014, 54), which I experience daily in all my relationships. As I change geographical locations almost every month, I find it crucial that when I return somewhere, a space that I left is still there and empty. That no one takes my place while I am gone. I need this in all the different relationships I am in, whether they are personal or working. It might sound selfish, but the notion that someone is saving a ‘seat ‘for you while you are gone is the main motivation to return. The second one is the promise that someone will do so. That brings me to human bondage and the necessity of humans to associate among each other. Buddhists teach that one needs to aim towards inter-being with others (2014, 85). Because the last is so important for my integration in general, but also in the artistic society in Skopje, I initiated regular trainings of contemporary dance that are public and free of charge. With other dancers in Skopje, willing to participate, we named them ‘KULtrening’ (which resonates with the Macedonian pronunciation of cool and Kultura, meaning culture10). They will be held at least once a week at Kino Kultura, a local venue for promoting contemporary performing arts. The initiative is important for mobilization of our bodies and minds, for aiding each other as peers and creating a base for local dancers and those who work abroad, as they will have somewhere to return to. It is also significant in the promotion of contemporary dance and for creating our future audiences. Some of the Buddhist teachings were very relevant for me when I was starting to develop the idea for this initiative. First of all, in a city like Skopje, where the scene of
contemporary performing arts still has big development potential, it is crucial that we start nurturing healthy peer relationships between the few dancers and choreographers who live in Skopje. We can achieve that by having consideration for one’s personal space, listening and trying to understand each other’s needs, healing and aiding each other… but, most importantly, by actually sharing the physical space, a dance studio or a theatre. Building a good base for understanding creates possibilities for further development of relationships and creative processes. I believe that by deep listening and loving speech we give each other sparks, and that by sharing love we can create a caring movement. Only that, before any kind of financing, programming or change of cultural policies, will create a true development of the still a bit sleepy dance scene in Skopje.
So far in my research, I was able to identify a few ways in which love works as a motivator for movement: laws of attraction drag us back to the object of love; lack of love (missing someone or something) runs the desire and mobilizes us to reach that state of love again; we care about people and get satisfaction from doing something for them; an image or a memory of an object of love recalls emotions and senses to the body; when we love we are motivated to understand the pain and heal the person that we love and that sets us in motion.
Composed: 10.9.2015; Research Intensive Week, ArtEZ, Arnhem, The Netherlands Edited: April 2016, Macedonia.
Movement of Love
Up until this point Movement of Love was not merely a quest to understand how love creates movement, but it has been growing into a community of people, ideas and events that have been happening to me during the research and have contributed to it or were moved by it. I collect it all in a research journal, containing reflections on readings, work processes, and trying to understand the conditions I need or are given to me and for my work. But over a year ago, Movement of Love seemed as something that I wasn’t in control of. As if there was some kind of external force dragging me to different places as I was moving around Europe for several projects and visiting people in different places. I could not identify what that force was and was trying to answer some questions by gathering statistics, sketches, photos, videos, methodologies; everything that captured the idea of love creating a movement. I started writing this note last year, but after I read a feedback from a bachelor student that was working with me during the Research Intensive at ArtEZ, I changed its direction. Davide, the student, wrote: “Several of the working methods Sabrina used to explore such a big concept as love were: improvisation, video tapes, use of images, discussions, writing, voice and words” (Calabrese 2015, 1). It was the first time I actually gave my multiple tryouts in what moves me artistically a name: methodologies. Reading his report on working with me was the first time during my research that I looked more concretely at which methods I use when I compose or create. Like with body training, I am also not aware of which techniques of making I am using. I decided to make a short chronological trip and visit them separately. As I already mentioned at the beginning, I started the research by reporting on almost everything I have experienced during my studies at ArtEZ; readings, lectures, workshops, discussions, performances. I approached writing about those experiences academically and also through creative writing. I tried another method of reporting when I did a series of interviews with people I look up to and who have in one way or another experienced movement of love. I was talking with Gisela Fantacuzzi, my choreographer and friend from Italy, with Monique van Hinte, my colleague and collaborator from Master of Theatre Practices and with Goga Stefanovič Erjavec, my mentor and pedagogue from the dance group in Celje. What they had in common is the fact that they moved to another country or city to be with their partners, but they also had to risk and move a lot in order to sustain their artistic practices. I somehow felt that making interviews is not my domain, but soon after that I started a collaborative project in Skopje based on interviews called Nnnaughty people11, whose mission is to expose rare contemporary artists and their practices in Macedonia. Besides practicing writing, I was also engaged in creating visual material throughout the research. Almost at the very beginning, I started working on zines12 as a part of my practice. Through a method of collaging, juxtaposing, comparing and adding mostly images from popular culture I was choreographing movement
11 www.nnnaughtypeople.com 12 A zine (/ˈziːn/ ZEEN; an abbreviation of fanzine or magazine) is most commonly a small circulation self-published work of original or appropriated texts and images usually reproduced via photocopier (Wikipedia). 15 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
within my more or less sitting practice. It is interesting how collaging later appeared also in my writing and now also resonates in this journal.13
Due to my nomadic lifestyle I was having troubles establishing a regular dance practice and thereby started to engage more in video. Filming was one of the responses to my post-internet phase of the research, where I was very interested in how my life is constantly being digitalized and virtualized, for example through Skype, Facebook, Youtube and other social media, which are essential for my communication with my loved ones, but are also a burden and a distorted reality. As I said before, in the beginning of the second year I had a chance to invite bachelor students to work with me during a Research Intensive week. I got a wonderful group of loving individuals who were not afraid to conquer the subject of Love. First, we discussed different perspectives on love; from its social and dramaturgical aspect to the meaning of love in terms of movement, where it comes from and how it reveals itself physically and emotionally. We talked about many theories of love, happiness and sexuality. And after a few days of discussing I asked the students to structure three individual chapters based on our conversations in order to create short scenarios upon which we could stage the movement. I asked them that first chapter relates to an image they have about love, the second one is based on a physical experience of love, and the third one derives from the desire of love. Having those short stories as our basis, we started working on improvisation. The movement research process was based on the question: How does love move you?. We tried several times to create movements through improvisation that would not recall love too easily, avoiding every kind of clichè or dramatic gestures. Davide wrote: “Love for me becomes certainly a tool to make a dancer move, inside and outside, physically and mentally, rationally or irrationally”, by which I was satisfied, even though the movement we created was triggered merely by strong images and memories
13 The image presents four layouts of zines that were later folded and distributed on different occasions (as flyers for a lecture, performance, Research presentation and introduction to a public interview I did with my pedagogue Goga). 16 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
the dancers had from their past regarding love and not straight out of bodily sensations that love has led to. However, the actual movement of love happened when, at the end of the piece we created, I asked students to start asking the same questions we were dealing with throughout the week to the audience. Shortly after initiating it, a wonderful debate on love happened and Love again created movement in the space. I started realizing how with my actions I am creating motion and that I, myself, might be the source of love that creates movement.14
14 Image is a video still from Research Intensive presentations titled We didn’t give it a name. 17 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
She was thinking how to choose another position in her own research whereas she had problems defining what it means to be a lover and act out of love for someone or something. It became clear that the love she has for the work she does comes from the fact that she was raised as a dancer with many relevant skills and potentials. Thereby, would be disrespectful to her past to say she is merely a dancer? But on the other hand, that would also be an overstatement, as she never gained a diploma from a dance academy. So let’s say she is a performer. Because that sounds more like a person working on something, rather than creating or inventing something. And this is how she feels. Like a worker, not like an artist15. So a performer she is. It is hazardous to state this as well, as it seems today that everyone is performing. Here included: performing and performance arts, visual artists, dancers, actors, movers, musicians, amateurs, cars and technology, and even domestic environment. So, like many others she is also a performer. Not a good one though. She was never properly trained in something even though she did a lot of training. She took leading roles in performances one week before the premiere, but yet people managed to convince her that her act is not compelling. She executed more than 30 roles and had more than 100 performances per season, but yet her practice might be recognized as amateur in some artistic circles. She performed in more than 10 countries and in more than 5 languages and yet the lack of academic background disables her from entering the scene of performing arts professionally. And yet, she feels she is a performer, with all that she is. Maybe the virtuosity of her as a performer does not lie in the performance itself, but in how she works as a performer. Thinking about that made her realize all the skills she has as performer. And she made a list. List of skills a performer has… or she is:
organized punctual concentrated works inside of a box works outside of the box precise virtuoso focused machine of ideas problem solver able to repeat
15 I write more about my distinctive position between a performer and an artist in the note on 13.5.2016. 16 I continue researching what performing implies in the text “I am a performer“ in the note on 20.4.2016. 18 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
hard working skilled in various techniques ada(o)ptable a fast learner mindful cognizant able to renew sensitive patient always ready to perform empty.
The question that she is trying to pose here is ‘what drives the performer to go on and on’ despite working situations, exhaustion, lack of awareness, emptiness. I believe the answer that she will try to give you lies in the fact that she knows no other way. She is like a doomed romantic lover enchanted by the significant other in a constant volition of returning and a debt that can never be paid off. But who is this lover, my dear performer, whom you cannot get out of debt with? Let me tell you. It is the audience, my dear performer. Audience is the one that creates one of the primary conditions of the performance. They are the reason that the performer can never stop. They produce the idea of belonging, recognition, fulfilling the expectation, they give an applause and pour self confirmation. They give the performer an external cause of her existence. By receiving all that, the performer acquires a lifelong debt as well as a dependence on the audience. A performer is not supposed to have desires, aspirations and ideas. She is supposed to be given a score or a scenario. A performer is not meant to have any specific awareness except the one from the role or the character she is playing. She is not even supposed to be aware of the fact that she is a performer. So who is she as a performer, when she is not playing a role? States of the performer are… or she feels:
blank concentrated energized a leader a planner uncertain faithful committed a star humble sensitive big hearted a giver empty. 19 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
She is feeling empty. She has already had so many attempts to discover what makes her move, but every time she ends up feeling empty. Maybe not completely empty. There is always something worth mobilizing herself for.
Claiming or even ‘owning17’ one’s position as an artist has always seemed an act of bravery to me. Even though I have been confessing many things throughout this research, announcing that I am an artist has been the most difficult. I have always believed there are two kinds of artists; those who go through the academic process and those who wake up, feel the inspiration and simply act upon it. Both ideas might be naive or even romantic. But I suppose my understanding of the position of the artist dates back before entrepreneurship, when the artist was understood as a ‘Kunstler’, a craftsman. Like William Deresiewicz writes in his article “The Death of the Artist and the Birth of the Creative Entrepreneur”, the image of the artist has changed radically over the centuries and history has created several models of artists such as “hard-working artisan, solitary genius, credentialed professional, but that today we might be facing the end of art as we have known it” (Deresiewicz, 2015). He continues writing that: Before we thought of artists as geniuses, we thought of them as artisans. The words, by no coincidence, are virtually the same. Art itself derives from a root that means to “join” or “fit together”—that is, to make or craft, a sense that survives in phrases like the art of cooking and words like artful, in the sense of “crafty.” We may think of Bach as a genius, but he thought of himself as an artisan, a maker. Shakespeare wasn’t an artist, he was a poet, a denotation that is rooted in another word for “make” (Deresiewicz, 2015). My understanding of what the position of ‘The Artist’ might imply was built on the fact that I was training regularly and performing even more excessively for many years. The easiest way to contextualize my position is to say I was working in a system that would most resemble working in a professional ballet company (due to the amount of training, production and traveling) or in a smaller amateur group (due to the artistic and discursive level of working and positioning of the work itself to the local environment). I was part of a group, where I was just a tool of direction and composition of the choreographer. My mission was to train my body, in order to model it, improve and shape it up until it was capable of transformation, fast adaptation and being multi tasking. My body was my instrument, with which I was executing work (distributing movement and drama). My view of the position of the artist might also have to deal with the fact that I was brought up in a post socialist society in which academic validation was bringing profession and a status of an
17 ‘Owning’ as Alana Jelinek said in an inspiring lecture she gave at ArtEZ in September 2015. I wish I could discuss it further, but I honestly never read her book, This is not art, completely. 20 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
artist. Personally, lacking academic background, I was thereby lacking the artistic status and references to enter other artistic institutions, such as theaters and dance studios. I somehow satisfied myself with the position of a performer, as being one would imply the disclosure of the mystic aura of ‘The Artist’ and would take away the great expectation of originality. Today, claiming I am a performer and not an artist might represent a degradation to my overall practice. But when I started working in a broader artistic field (besides performing, I started working also on administration and production), I realized that the term performer is truly overarching. Encountering new modes of production, dealing with cultural policies, temporary nomadic structures and finding spaces and financing, I feel this virtuosity of a performer even more. It has outgrown the capabilities of my body. Bojana Kunst writes in the Artist at work that ‘virtuoso’, today, is not in the virtuosity of the work itself, but rather in the way one does the work (Kunst 2012, 114). It might be that the position of the artist was not accessible to me in the past, due to several reasons, but I think that perhaps I never wanted to claim it, because I felt I do not belong in the broader discipline and to what the position might imply. I met many beautiful and interesting people within the art world, but I also encountered laziness, competition, corruption… I am sure it is like that in other disciplines as well. And I believe that for politicians might, too, be very difficult to pronounce themselves as such, as so many in their field are corrupt and faulty. But anyhow, one working in politics can make a difference to their profession. That is why I am a performer. It is something I do.
Today we were supposed to meet in order to discuss artistic research. We actually did meet, but me and my peers were more a decoration than an equal part of the discussion. More and more, I get surprised how and by whom some topics, mostly in academic circles, are discussed. To my simple logic - when one needs to discuss baking bread, one should talk with a baker or with the one eating it. My point is, I believe that we, as the representatives of the practice, should empower ourselves to defend our discipline, in order to find common language with other professionals in the performing arts field, and to have debates that are more grounded than abstract. Ironically, I was too tired to object to the debate or even to give my opinion, but I did write a story about the setting I experienced… We were like a beautiful set design, connected by colors, patterns, light movement, rhythms of the space, breathing and focusing on the same topic. We were sitting in a black box, where only the ceiling lights were giving shape to the room and our bodies. We were sitting in a circle, as if we were shaping a secret sorority of artistic research, connected by innocent touches of elbows, eyes and the squeaking of the chairs. We were all facing towards a guest lecturer with explicit body movements. He functioned as a gem stone, collecting and reflecting all the colors in the space. There were grays, greens, burgundy reds, blues and ochres. Some of us wore black. But we were all joint in a communal tonal relationship, translating ideas from one to another clockwise. Staring at the participants, I, myself, could dive into the beautiful palette of monochrome autumn colors, that were incredibly intertwined as if we had agreed on the dress code or even Wes Anderson himself had made us a costume design. The guest lecturer coming from Finland was representatively wearing a sailor white-blue striped T-shirt and mostly facing a landscape of grays on his right, sitting next to a green and brown vest. Not just his clothes, but also his hair and mustache were interacting with the dress of the woman sitting to the left of him. Her dress was hugged by a white cardigan that was flirting with the white stripes of the guest lecturer. The lady was also wearing burgundy tights which gave an idea in which tones this circle continues. Her shoes were light brown - that initiated a beautiful game played around the circle - including the bag of a woman sitting next to her, the shoes of the women sitting on chairs 5, 6, 8, 16 and 17, and there was also a wooden pen lying somewhere on the floor and a bunch of leather strips from a black backpack hiding behind a chair. The grays of the lady on 1 had dialogues with the jeans of the woman on 3, while her jumper was the same as the glossy shoes of her left neighbor. There was a harmony of turquoise blues and greens sitting on chair number 4, which in a way functioned as a drop of fresh Mediterranean water, but was still well aligned with a chequer shirt on a bearded man, sitting directly opposite of the guest lecturer, and with the shoe laces of a rather strange looking woman, full of opinions, sitted on the 5th chair counter clockwise. There were more greens present… an envy green on a small eyeglasses case, an army green on a sleeve of a burgundy lady and, shy but argumentative green leaves on a flowery dress somewhere in the middle of the circle. The combinations kept flowing. As there were also yellows… in the hair of a Dutch, obviously highly educated, woman, in the notebook that was meant to keep 22 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
the lecturers’ thoughts, on a perfectly combined twin set on chair number 5, on the soles of the Timberlands sat on the second last chair, but also on the pen and on the jumper of a fast-writing lady. Yes, there were mostly feminine colors. Some accents were present, but the discourses were coming from feminine palettes. For example, there were dark blues present, but they were dancing with the ochres, browns and burgundies in a wild, but yet collaborative dance. From time to time, some of the colors spoke louder than the others, but in the end it seemed as if they reached a common ground. They became coherent and so clear in their connectedness. It was as if we had an argument not just in colors, but also in combinations or selections. What an amazing event! If only I could revisit it to make it more vivid and strong. But it was just a moment, or few of them, that I took to describe interesting discussions captured in a studio 4, on a rainy Wednesday evening, during a debate about artistic research.
14.11.2015 Skopje, Macedonia
Performing bodies and bodies that perform
Today I was reading Susan Leigh Foster’s Body of Ideas as a reminiscence on what dancing bodies represented throughout the past century. Reading about the importance of having a trained body and being a part of a discipline, confirms my doubts about the independent and freelance dance scene today. While there still are many companies and dance institutions hiring dancers, there also are a number of individuals or small groups floating mostly in Central Europe, finding their ways to work and sustain themselves within dance and the performing arts scene in general. I, too, am one of the floaters, traveling through Europe, finding out how I could work, encountering different ways in which people invent their futures. As I get more and more grounded in Macedonia, I am getting to understand the importance of the question ’Where are you based?’. Base, as a more or less materialized space of belonging, recognition and expression. Base, as belonging to the technique, to the discipline, to the scene, to the city, to the country… and belonging to someone. Not belonging in the meaning of being owned, but in the meaning of having an emotional home or feeling at home in your own body. In the article, Foster starts by describing the concept of a body of ideas. She explains how all the bodies go through training several techniques every day, like walking, sitting and eating. She introduces Foucault’s explanation of every day practices: “such practices invest, mark, train and torture the body; they force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies and to emit signs” (Foucault in Foster, 1986, 236). She says that these are in fact daily practical participations in concrete disciplines that make the body a body of ideas. What I find really interesting in her writing is that she points out that being at one with this body, getting more and more aware of it through executing practices, creates momentums of ecstasy that motivate us to continue, to learn, to improve. And it is exactly that motivation I am interested in when I talk about how love creates movement. Like Foster says, having the feeling of being one with the body gives the drive to 23 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
continue the movement. I believe exactly that is the essence of the work of a dancer, an actor or a performer… the desire to go on, to develop, to reach this feeling or awareness. Through 5 different techniques or approaches in the past century, Foster introduces three ways that the body is perceived by the dancer herself and by others as well. She introduces a perceived, ideal, and a demonstrative body. The first two are constantly influencing each other and developing, while the »demonstrative is a bodily instantiation of desired or undesired values« (1986, 238). What I find interesting is that she states that dancers are not »expected to practice extensively on their own… Their training is communal and highly regimented, but also context specific« (1986, 238). She continues by stating that »a dancer’s body is in constant appropriation with other dancers’ bodies or even the one of the teacher« (1986, 239). This appropriation is deeply rooted in my inconspicuousness, which is why I had so many problems in the past years in the independent scene… how to train or practice alone, if I am not able to find collaborators or a group? And more importantly: why? Being trained as a dancer in a group (a company), and then later finding myself working on my own, might sound emancipating. But my experience is that is also very frustrating. Having all the liberty in the world to create pieces as one pleases, not being a part of a group and not having to share communal goals with others, makes the creative process possibly even more suffocating than in regular training. Like Foster says, in traditional technique training drilling is necessary and the goal or the aim is creating The Body, together with others in the group. Then she even says: »Dancers labour in order to meet the standards of the ideal body« (1986, 239). My question would be: what are we laboring towards today as dancers and performers in the independent performing arts scene, not knowing when our next production will be. My impression often is that being between projects makes it difficult or even senseless to train to any kind of standard. But also, the art world that praises ideas and concepts, but rarely bodies and its aesthetics, is creating a discipline of less and less trained bodies, and sometimes even untrained bodies. Naively speaking, there could be two objectives… the first, that dancers actually don’t have a space to train anymore, but the other is exactly lacking that commonality of the group and the common goal that Foster talks about. As individuals today we train our specific skills and needs, if we are training anything at all. It became almost taken for granted that our bodies are prepared to react and act in any given moment; an audition there, a residency here, a project in between. So even if one wants to stay fit and be prepared, it is hard to imagine what one should be prepared for. The art industry has become so unpredictable; opportunities need to be grabbed instantly and building one’s practice is left to coincidences. Of course, on the other hand, this ‘dancing body’ that Foster was writing about was, until the 90’s, training to be more or less just that, but within the demands of the neoliberal society and the art world, the same body needs to be able to act, stand naked, read Agamben, write applications, constantly change contexts, collaborators and colleagues, and, last but not least, work for free. And still have the motivation to go on. So maybe, in addition to Foster’s text, the last group of post-dancers that is missing in her book could be called ‘confused bodies’ or ‘bodies on the run’; bodies that depend on the unpredictable future. The last description that Foster makes in her article is of ‘hired bodies’… she places them in the early 90’s and writes that a »hired body does not display its skills as a collage of discrete styles, but rather homogenizes all styles and vocabularies beneath a sleek penetrable surface. Uncommitted to any specific aesthetic vision, it is a body for hire, it trains in order to make a living at dance« (1986, 255). 24 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What happened from that point onward on the European dance scene is that academically educated dancers who were successful enough to stay in companies continued training for that hired body, but a high number of dancers, who had become freelancers, makers, dramaturges, or had chosen any other profession, have probably stopped training for the goal of being in regular productions and of being able to perform. Instead, they would attend classes, workshops, get yoga certificates, become pilates instructors, learn how to do financial reports, become pedagogues… anything to sustain that momentum of ecstasy, which I mentioned at the beginning, that gives the motivation to go on and find opportunities to perform.
19.11.2015 Skopje, Macedonia
Work out of love
I started reading a book called Politics of Feelings/Economies of Love, written by a group of artists from Croatia called k.r.u.ž.o.k., which in Croatian means a small interest group. I bought this book while visiting Rotterdam. On the back of the book I read: »This publication is composed of visual and textual contributions which unfold different chapters on the entanglement of politics and collective sentiment, as well as love as a trigger for dedicated unpaid work« (Bodrožić 2014). Already in the past year I had been trying to explain love as something that motivates us to work, to go on and insist, but I didn’t know how to implement it in the economical structures of the art world. By reading Bojana Kunst and other authors dealing with the wage system in society, I became more focused on thinking how love is motivation for work for an artist that in contemporary society seems to be less and less valued and paid. However, what turned out to be even more problematic is that this might have been the case throughout the entire history of art, but that now, when contemporary art and its protagonists are becoming more clearly a part of capitalism and its production of values, the issue of the position of the artist’s work has developed in several theoretical discourses. When the creative industry outgrew the small craftsman’s workshops, virtuosity and technique focused more on mass production of ideas, and artistry turned into status, profession and even a lifestyle. Today, being an artist means much more than having an art degree, being artistic and doing your craft. It means also dealing with art policies, funding, administration… When I observe performing arts artists becoming more and more involved in bureaucracy and management, it seems that what might have been the artist’s inspiration in a non-capitalist society (intimate or social issues, working out of love and care), now turned into a well calculated process of applications, funding, planning, strategies etc. Or,to use words of Hito Styerl: “The scene today is produced on exhaustion and not on effort” (Styerl 2016). To conclude my musings on working out of love and not being accordingly paid for it, let me quote from the book mentioned at the beginning, from the Untitled chapter, written by Fokus grupa: 25 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“The financial compensation that the majority can expect for their artistic work is generally small, which may be an utterly distorted perception of Charles Fourier’s suggestion that compensation for work should be inversely proportional to the desire to do it. Consequently, for more demanding jobs, which provide less personal satisfaction, one should receive a higher compensation. Thus follows that art, an occupation many people are attracted to regardless of the financial compensation, is already a part of Fourier’s Harmony. The only thing is that, besides the so called unpaid or low-paid women’s work of nursing and caring for others (which is a much more extensive problem than the issue of compensation for artistic work!), not many domains cover this, in our opinion, stimulating concept. However, in art there is always the promise of a large and sudden compensation” (Grupa Fokus in Bodrožič 2014, 92). Of course, that doesn’t mean that she should not expect a compensation for her devoted work, but the question is what that compensation should be? I think the comparison between women’s domestic labour and artist’s work is beautiful, because the source and the aim of both collide in some way. In both cases, one cares for something, one doesn’t try to reason about this care and surely does not calculate the outcomes of this care. It is so at least in theory, of course. Perhaps, there are parents who rely on their child’s future profit, perhaps there are also artists who are counting on their work to bring them profit. Does this expediency still mean that they are responsible parents? Or that one is a responsible artist? "If I were rich, I'd be a better artist”, writes Igor Štromajer in one of his works, among the other statements18. But, provocation to the side, many artists struggle because of the poor working conditions and “the illusion on which high performance culture is founded, where each individual should be able to generate an inexhaustible potency to perform solely from his own resources” (Verwoert 2010, 47). I honestly believe that one’s motivation to work should primarily derive from their desire to create, but the reality of neoliberal society is pushing one’s potency to perform to extreme limits. My desire for further research and work is to find or refine potential points of resistance that would not only not feed the circuit of applications, residencies, and festivals anymore, but would allow a more sovereign but yet sustainable practice19.
18 I encourage you to go to: ttp://www.intima.org/artist/index.html for some fun provocation on what makes one a ‘better’ artist. 19 I make an attempt in suggesting one in the note ‘I am a performer on 20.4.2016. 26 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
10.12.2015 Skopje, Macedonia
The circuit
I use the term ‘circuit’ several times in my journal. It usually refers to the movement of cultural policies, or to the fast day-to-day lifestyle of contemporary society. Bojana Kunst gives an additional explanation by quoting Slavoj Žižek and his concept of the circuit. He says that today people do something all the time and that pseudo activity, as he names it, is the biggest threat of today’s society. The real challenge is to get out of it (Kunst 2012, 16). As a performer and a cultural worker, I found this concept is like a trap. Even if I am aware of my constant pseudo activity, I always seem to find alternative and creative ways of production on the way towards a point of resistance in this circuit. This means, I jump into first gear and speed up the circuit even more. That probably has to do with the fact that I am programmed towards efficiency, efficacy and productivity as a performer20.
20 If you care to revisit again the skills that a performer has or if you are willing to offer me a job based on my skills please go to the note Anatomy of a performer, written of 14.9.2015. 27 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
15.1.2016 ArtEZ, Arnhem, The Netherlands
Declaration of love (from a performer to the stage)
“I promise to be your lover, companion and friend, Your ally in conflict, Your greatest fan and your toughest adversary. Your comrade in adventure, Your student and your teacher, Your consolation in disappointment, Your accomplice in mischief. This is my sacred vow to you, my equal in all things. All things21.”
21 The image was used to communicate my artistic presentation, in June 2015 at ArtEZ, entitled Tea party. It is a bout a portrait of a girl completely devoted to performing, to the stage, to the audience, to her lover, to her family…. “In exuberance and exhaustion” (Verwoert, 2010). The text and the image that were used are both playing with representations of love used in wedding ceremonies. 28 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 7.3.2016 Celje, Slovenija
The fear of the unknown
Yesterday, my mother shared her dilemma with me. Her dilemma about raising a child that is not a child any more. That is me. She said that she doesn’t know how to guide me in this moment as a parent or a mentor concerning my career path. I said that is not in her domain anymore and that first, I am dealing with it myself, second, with my partner and that, maybe, she can come in third place with her opinions, which now makes me sound much more cruel than it really was in that moment. Because it wasn’t about opinions or suggestions, it was about her way of finding an entry point into my life and participating actively in how I plan to shape it. I took it as a generous gesture and not as an attack, especially concerning what the topic was. What she was actually concerned about is probably something that a lot of parents are dealing with; she knows that I have a lot of knowledge and experience and she also knows how much I have invested in those. However, with my recent move to Skopje, where I am yet to find my place not only in the art world, but in general - between people, structures and values - I might need a lot more than just experience and knowledge to really find my place. She expressed her doubt as a parent on how to guide me when it comes to being driven towards a job. As we live in an era of constant performance, efficiency, making an impact, changing or doing groundbreaking things, that puts a heavy weight on people, no matter which sector they work in. So, is her role as a parent to guide me towards a steady, well-paid job, somewhere in Europe, preferably in the public sector, with health and pension benefits, or is it better if she let go and support me in starting a new life in Skopje and developing my artistic practice? I said neither. No matter how our lifestyles have changed and how our personal views on life have reshaped, there is still a major social consensus about what life should be like. This is probably how most socialist countries planned the school and work system: finish school, get a job, get married, find an apartment and live happily ever after, preparing pickled vegetables for long winters to come. Also make sure to save money to leave something for future generations. Because they were afraid. They were generations after the war, like my grandparents, who were waiting for a life that is yet to come, even though they were doing quite well living the one they had. But the notion of the future was so present that it had become the most vital part of their everyday life. Today, we, too, are afraid of what is yet to come. But we invest in what is here today; in what we eat, the clothes we wear, in university education, experience, travels, our work. If few generations ago, working for investing was a value in life, today we are investing in working. Analysis of this mindset is important for me regarding the context where I want to live, where, on a daily basis, I still get questions like: Where do you plan to work after you finish school? I don’t know how many people can relate to this question, but it refers to the idea that life happens ‘before’ and ‘after’ something. Because the question derives from a fear that was fed to us in one value system, and is still invasive in the value system that I am creating for myself today. I don’t want to live in fear of what is yet to happen or not, but would rather care about today and make more 29 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
sustainable plans for the future. Obviously the perception of self has changed, and I might sound more selfish for doing so. But it is so, because I have to deal with this dilemmas every day. Should I apply for a residency? Ask for funds? Promise a project to a producer? So, the answer to my mom was: I want to take time with my artistic practice, see where it takes me, not to struggle with references and being present just for the sake of the presence at venues or festivals, and that I want to work because I care for theatre and arts in general. Maybe I will find a way to sustain myself in other ways. I have many past work experiences and it doesn’t have to mean that I will sustain myself by doing a totally different thing, but it also doesn’t mean that because I am an artist I have to earn money from it. I don’t want to be pressured by applications and deadlines, but I want to find other ways of developing my artistic practice. Which doesn’t need to happen tomorrow, it can happen in a long term plan, as long as I can make my practice visible to people. I think we mostly agreed on what I said, but she did send me a link to the Dancing Opportunities for Ballet BC Rehearsal Directors in Vancouver, Canada the very next day.
I was supposed to deliver text and visual material about my artistic work (that is yet to come to life) to a festival that has invited me to present at the end of March. I was trying to think of three sentences that would communicate my upcoming work and think of a visual appearance despite my headache. Something wasn’t right with that false promise. Sure, I could just think of few words that have been on my mind lately anyhow. I could also say something about my working process and plant the seeds for a spring showing. What for? I don’t know what will happen to this material. It is conceptually rooted in my head, flirting with discourses and placing itself into brother artistic field, but that is all. This material hasn’t been modeled yet, I haven’t sweated on it yet and definitely it wasn’t embodied yet. Is it work then? I don’t want to make division here between intellectual and physical work, but I am trying to be critical towards a work that was prepared, arranged, curated etc. and was then rehearsed maybe only at the time of the showing itself. Is that the temporality we are striving for? Or fighting against? Am I with making some sentences up giving my work a push or is it just a preparation for something that might never be? Am I giving the work an opportunity to be seen or am I abusing it? Am I abusing the care for the work? If I am trying to accomplish something with these writings it is the fact that I don’t seem to fit in this system of independent contemporary art. I would dare to say that Bojana Kunst’s concept of ‘promise’ is too mild. I am not just promising; I am potentially lying. To the festivals, to collaborators and to my mentors. This is what makes a true victim out of me. Not the working itself, but lying about working. Because the least would come out of conditions that I would be capable to present for myself; such as a space, peers and trust. In every working process a little positive push, like a deadline, can be motivational. But to push myself to write about the work that could be finished just in time to present at a local festival now really seems like a lie and betrayal to everything I have been writing about in the past year. Because that would mean that I deliver a text in time not to please my desire of showing the work, but because of the awareness that I can use the future potential showing of the work as a future potential reference to the future potential festivals… and then I am in the circuit again. I believe a lot of creative floaters out there could identify with this problem. Where is the potential for our resistance then? To be lazy? To emphasize on our critical discursive practices? To stop working? Or to stop with institutional critique, stop bluffing, get the work done and then rethink this monologue in some time? Good plan. 31 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Edited: 14.4.2016; Skopje, Macedonia
I did some rethinking in this time. I have also developed the work. I did ‘lie’ (a bit), before I was also procrastinating with delivering communication material, but at the end I was also able to present my work at a festival successfully22.
8.4.2016 Skopje, Macedonia
Working conditions
When I talk with artists or cultural workers, we often come across the subject of working conditions. Especially in Macedonia, we mostly complain about the lack of it. Usually, it comes down to the lack of working space, collaborators, professionals, audience and, of course, finances. Actually, the lack of finances always comes first. In the past year, I was trying hard to prove people wrong in discussions. I was also burdened by my own conditions that brought me up as a performer, like working in a group, working continuously, having a regular production, etc. Not being able to present myself with those, but yet willing to work, I had to start doing it differently. I needed to believe that there are ways to do projects without the financial support, or to say it better, to start projects without first having to think through the financial aspects. Not all would agree, but for artists that is a choice and a position we can make. Why are we doing the work? What are our artistic practices based on? Is it the demand for being productive and proving to society how much artists are worth or it is out of necessity for creating? Realistically, probably both, but I cannot wait for another application or a residency to be approved in order to start creating. Living in Skopje, Macedonia, where I might not yet have access to some more general conditions for work that I have mentioned at the beginning, I had to find my own ways of dealing with problems we are facing as workers in the independent dance and theatre scene. What are the conditions that are within my reach? What do I really need, what is truly essential for me to start a creative process? From reading Foster, to applying to ArtEZ, meeting artists in different projects; I found out that it is peer support and motivation — a spark or even magic that happens when I am with people in the creative process. If then I also invest some ideas, care and love (and obviously some time), conditions for work are set.
22 You can visit a face book page of the project Co-existinghttps://www.facebook.com/coexistance , where I had a double role of being a foreign artist in Skopje, but also a local resident facilitating other guest artists. In that double role I was like a mediator between mostly Swedish artists, busy in the field of contemporary arts, finishing master studies in performance or dance studies and on the other hand a less informed local audience. 32 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Written: 14.4.2016 Composed: 19.11.2015
Meeting point
When I was thinking optimistically about which conditions I do have when I am in Skopje, I came to the conclusion that there always were some creative people around for a talk and a nice cafe to sit in. We might not be able to show our performances, exhibitions or publications in the city, but we often developed interesting and relevant discussions about it. In one of these meetings I had with a local artist, I realized that it would be interesting if the two of us opened our discussion to whoever might be interested in listening to our artistic whining. That would enable the guest artists to present their practices to a broader audience and give me a chance to continuously nurture the most basic conditions for developing projects: meeting people and being motivated for further work. The Meeting point23 was born out of the idea to gather artists and audiences on a same level of sharing and participation. Meeting monthly at different locations in Skopje, reflecting on the independent performing arts scene with the mission to share, exchange and invite... It stands for 'meeting' as 'to meet' each other (again or for the first time) and 'meeting' as 'having a meeting' (presenting, listening, talking, discussing, and suggesting) ... overall actively participating. I started focusing on experimenting on 3 levels:
How to be resourceful by investing what we have (time, space and care),
How to share references (games, giving feedback) and
Continuity in production (happening every month, with a clear curatorial direction).
What soon turned out to be interesting is that even though I am the one setting the conditions for us to meet (time, place and inviting guests), by the end of the session the authorship becomes shared. Since we always start the meeting with a social game, enabling us to relax, the audience becomes really involved in what is being presented to them and the guest artist becomes involved in what the participants are hearing from the presentation. As we are seated in a circle, the gap between the audience and the one that is presenting almost disappears and this creates a mutual conversation about the suggested topic. Participants get empowered in their participation, but not over ruling or taking charge. We all become responsible for the meeting. For me, that responsibility, but also mutual motivation and dependence on each other, is slowly bringing in one more of the conditions: existing in a group. And also, having a regular production, doing something continuously, and slowly building my own audience in Skopje.
23 You can visit a Facebook page and take a look at some past events within the Meeting point: https://www.facebook.com/meetingpointskopje/ 33 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
20.4.2016 Skopje, Macedonia
I am a performer
Critically looking at my necessity to start creating something in Skopje would mean that the necessity came exactly from the ‘pseudo activity’ that I already mentioned before. The Meeting Point events partly started from the restlessness that the contemporary capitalist system is projecting on me and also because of the fact that I had to start doing something, for myself, to develop and sustain my artistic practice. In the same spirit, we could then understand every human activity as being manipulated by the constant movement of the neoliberal labour system; even love. I believe love and care are basic human conditions of existence, the foundation of a lover, and the work of an artist. But, we live in a world where exploitation of those human attributes, or as Bojana Kunst writes: “radical consumption of energy and human capabilities and actions is in the centre of the focus of the contemporary capitalism” (Kunst 2012, 29). She continues by writing that what is specific of the contemporary principle of work is the consumption of subjectivity, which is opening the possibilities that we can always produce more (2012, 29). The more I invest in relationships, projects, and performances, the more possibilities I will have to produce new subjectivities or creative ideas, that will then need to be consumed again. By admitting I am a performer, at the same time I reveal that I was trained to be prepared all the time, to be in the state of ‘I could’ or I can, that Verwoert writes about (Verwoert 2010), and that I am in the constant process of producing new subjectivities, re-inventing myself and creating. As workers of this neoliberal society, we labour with our most affective, intimate, communicational and human abilities, where, at the same time, their transformation and flexibility also always needs to produce an effect (Kunst 2012, 34). With all my skills as a performer, I am a perfect worker of the capitalist system. It is so not only because I am effective in specific techniques, but also because I have a capability of self performance or radical consumption of my own capabilities for processes of constant transformation of physical states and affects (2012, 34). Unfortunately, excess of transformation never happens, thereby the work that drives me constantly to draw from my deepest attributes produces nothing of value (2012, 34). My constant necessity to perform is thereby a trap. The circuit is inevitable and it engulfs all of the disciplines. I might be feeding it with all my attributes: training as a professional performer, scholar of cultural sciences and researcher of theatre studies, a contemporary worker… all that in the challenge of a good performance. I am trying to make a bridge here between a ‘performer’ as a profession and a ‘performer’ as in to perform in society, to be productive, efficient, to fulfill goals. Performativity is in everything that we do as artists or workers of the contemporary labour system. Realizing that, I reached over to Jon McKenzie’s book Perform or else, where he makes an overview of performance disciplines by questioning the idea that everybody’s performance is universal and that performance could be a universal expression of human significance. He introduces the book by stating that living and working today means constant reviewing of our performance (productivity, creativity, motivation, innovation, ability to fulfill goals) by authorities, where we are rewarded for getting a High performance review, ‘or else’, for Low performance review. It means that we live under the threat of ‘or else’ that might happen if we don’t perform well (McKenzie 2001, 5). 34 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
That threat hides in degrading examples that our society produces, such as ‘if you do not perform well as a wife you might get divorced, if you don’t perform well as a worker you might get fired, and if you don’t perform well as an artist, then… what? What can the biggest threat to an artist be? Not getting an exhibition? Not getting financing? Or not getting invited to the festival? Probably, we have all already experienced that. I think artists, anyhow, have the possibility to resist that threat by sustaining a caring practice, which does not exist merely on promises to institutions or authorities. Even though reading many articles on the discourse about the artist as a worker in the neoliberal labour system might make one depressed and forced to take the position of a victim24, I believe that just the awareness of such position could be the key to finding the point of resistance. At the end of her book, Bojana Kunst gives three proposals of disobedience to argumentations that need to prove today’s capabilities of affirmation of art and its ‘public’ in the society… in order to enable artists to resist exploitation of artistic resources and to open at the same time the potentiality of common (Kunst 2012, 144). I agree with her third proposal, and thereby I want to expose it. I have to say I think her proposal is not only to the point, but also it is practicable, without being unrealistically revolutionary about changing the art world, and, nevertheless, acting and deriving truly from one’s position. She suggests practicing the position of doing less and writes: “we should do less exactly in the moment when we find ourselves under the demand to do more” (2012, 154). I would call that position the position of the empowered ‘no’25. At moments I feel I am a part of some type of a movement in Skopje. Within the dance scene, we historically named it ‘the spring of dance’, in which it feels that the scene is awakening, based on the projects I was writing about in this thesis. I think it is so empowering how in the scene, that seems to be dependent exclusively on foreign policies and funds, we as an initiative, have the incredible opportunity to build it on values we will choose. But it all started from strong individual positions and aiding each other as peers and colleagues. Like I wrote at the beginning, ‘I am just one of the narrators of this time’, belonging to different contexts, deriving from different backgrounds, but I believe that each individual, depending on their preferences and desired practice, can make a decision about how to work. I also believe that within so many narrations of our time it is so hard to make generalizations and that is why individual voices have such a strong position. I know I still need to answer some questions: What is work? What kind of work do I want to do? Why I do the work I do? Should art be treated as work? Is love treated as work? What do you get in return when you love?
I don’t have those answers at the moment. But I have the power to decide who or what I will love.
24 Like, for example, that one needs to commit to art with the entire life (Kunst 2012, 116) or that ”exploitation of potentiality, communicational abilities of working subjects and their flexibility (constant availability of subjects), disappearance of the boundary between working and leisure time, enhancing of performing capabilities of the contemporary worker… all that is tangled with project orientated creation of new forms and contexts with a performing stance to every segment of work” (2012, 117). 25 I would do anything for love, but I won’t do that! No, I won’t do that! 35 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
11.5.2016 Skopje, Macedonia
Goodbye (for now)
And here we are, back at the beginning or right at the end, confessing our togetherness in this short journey that we took together. This does not necessarily mean it is the end. It is just a moment in time, when we have to depart. Thank you for taking this path through 3 stages of my research. I am now moving towards the 4th stage in which I am trying to embrace my inner performer and defy the pressure to perform. You are more than welcome to stay here with me where I am continuing the movement of love. There is still so much work to be done, concepts to crack, discourses to make… research is just like the movement of love itself a constant volition. It never stops….it grows, spreads and adapts.26
26 One last reference for the road: When in doubt what to do feeling trapped in a neoliberal system, just “make love not art”, like Igor Štromajer does: http://www.intima.org/makelovenotart/ . 36 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bibliography:
Austin, J.L.1955. How to do things with words? Oxford New York: Oxford University Press.
Baba, Meher. 1963. The everything and the nothing. Beacon Hill: Meher House Publications.
Barthes, Roland. 1990. A Lover’s Dicourse. London:Penguin Books.
Bodrožič, Nataša and Irena Borić. 2014. Politics of feelings / Economies of love. Zagreb: Loose associations.
Calabrese Davide, Andrea. 2015. Love and barriers. Report on Research Intensive. Arnhem, 20.9.2015.
Spain de, Kent S.1997. Solo movement improvisation: Constructing understanding through lived somatic experience. Michigan: Temple University.
Deresiewicz, William. 2015. The Death of the Artist—and the Birth of the Creative Entrepreneur. The Atlantic, January/February Issue. Available at: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/01/the-death-of-the-artist-and-the-birth-of-the-creative-entrepreneur/383497 (13.5.2016).
Foster, Leigh Susan. 1986. Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction. New York: Vintage Books.
Fromm, Erich. 1995. The art of loving. London: Thorsons.
Hanh, Thich Nhat. 2014. How to love. Berkley: Parallax Press.
Hardt, Michael. 2007. About love. European Graduate School, Media and Communication Studies Department Program Video Lectures. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6ZvsQ_hAt0 (May 2015).
Kunst, Bojana. 2012. The Project Horizon: On the Temporality of Making. Ljubljana: Maska, Performing Arts Journal, Maska Institute.
Kunst, Bojana. 2012. Umetnik na delu. Ljubljana: Maska.
Lepecki, André. 2009. Introduction: the political ontology of movement in Exhausting Dance: Performance and the politics of movement. Routledge: Routledge.
Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the virtual. London: Duke University Press.
Spinoza, Benedict de. 1994. The ethics and other works. Chichester: Princeton University Press.