These few pages are meant to help those of you who might be more curious, to get an overview of 2 years of research at ArtEZ Master of Theatre Practices, as well as to aid those who might be a bit lazier, to skip reading the 30-something pages of the whole research. Anyhow, the footnotes in this overview will guide you to the relevant texts in the thesis as well as to the references (that can be found mostly on the internet1). With this overview, I would like to take you through my research Movement of Love, which was not merely a quest to understand how love creates movement, but it has also been growing into a community of people, ideas and events that have been happening during the research and have contributed to it or were moved by it. I collected 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 work2. During the research I underwent 4 stages that are intertwining, complementing and explaining each other. Three of them are represented in the Master thesis: 1. What makes me move? 2. Love makes me move. 3. I am a performer. The fourth stage is resonating in the artistic project: 4. Defying the pressure to perform.
Stage 1: What makes me move? My artistic research didn’t start with the idea of refining and contextualizing my artistic practice, but rather looking for it and defining it. I entered the research as a performer, not yet as a maker, with the initial question ‘what makes me move’? My first idea was to strip down movement learned in dance and theatre training in order to find my ‘original’ movement. I soon realized that I am looking for the source of my artistic expression. As I was always in a role of a performer, executing other people’s ideas, I was worried that I might not have my own artistic voice, which would give a narration to the practice of a maker3. I spent a lot of time in my research focusing on and analyzing my past experiences and contexts. I thought that there I might find the key to understanding what my artistic voice is and what I would like to present with my artistic work. I was having some difficulties in work and private relationships, but, nevertheless, I still had the urge to further my artistic practice and make personal decisions, which were life changing.
Stage 2: What makes me move? Some decisions I made seemed so irrational. That is why I kept on looking for what motivates me to create, to take on new challenges, to make new encounters and to take risks in life. During my research, I was looking for the emotion or drive that makes me, for example, decide I want to be a maker, change working contexts, study abroad and take unpaid projects. I found out that Loveis my primary motivation that gives me strength to take risks at work and in my private life. I started using love as a method for movement research, with the idea that the awareness of love in the body affects its movement. I was also trying to use the words of Brian Massumi, Benedict de Spinoza and Plato to explain love as a movement itself, because the force of it seemed so unimaginable to me. I was able to identify 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 1. You can practice by taking a look at “Bibliography” at the end of the thesis, on the page 37. 2. I explain more about my motivation and approaches to writing in the text “Welcome”, written on 10.5.2016. 3. I invite you to go to the note “First: stage”, that was written in October 2014.
1 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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, which sets up the motion4.
Stage 3: I am a performer Unconditional Love mentioned above is not a coincidence. It is so because I was trained in dance and acting techniques in an amateur dance theatre school and production for 17 years, I was raised as a member of a dance group, a group with a common ground and goals, where all individuals contribute equally to the process of making, cherishing devotion, sacrifice and belonging. With that awareness I came across a very important contribution to my research, the book of Susan Leigh Foster Body of Ideas. What I found interesting in her book, and seemed a frustration in my past years, is that dancers are not “expected to practice extensively on their own… their training is communal and highly regimented, but also context specific” (Foster 1986, 238 ). “Being at one with the body, becoming more and more aware of it through executing practices, creates momentums of ecstasy that motivates us to continue, to learn, to improve” (1986, 238). It was exactly that motivation I was interested in when I was thinking about how love makes me move. Like Foster says, having the feeling of being one with the body gives you the drive to continue. I believe that is exactly what the essence of the work of a dancer is, or of an actor or a performer… the desire to go on, to develop, to reach this feeling or awareness. In this point of the research I was engaged with several ways of artistic expression and I was experimenting with different media and methodologies5. I was seeing that my research question is transforming from ‘what makes me move’ to ‘how I put things in motion’? Being busy with different projects and including other people created a movement around my artistic practice. I realized that my actions of love also affect others and that by investing love I start the movement and receive motivation back from people I work with. Recognition of the last was the first indicator in my research that the part of creating I enjoy the most is the dynamic that happens in collaborations (exchange of ideas, complementing each other, group dynamic).That a lifestyle of a solo maker in the independent scene of the performing arts doesn’t seem to suit me and that I need others not just to work, but also to find a sense of doing the work at all. I realized that because I was trained as a performer, I developed specific skills — physical and emotional. The most essential characteristic of the training was, that I was always part of a group, thereby I still depend on group dynamic and group motivation. Since I encounter the work conditions of artists in the independent contemporary dance and theatre scene on daily basis, I also encounter the lack of group work and motivation, which are set by the conditions of the neoliberal labour circuit6. In the past year I changed my living context from central European to the Balkan region, as I moved to Skopje, Macedonia. I can say that the reality of the work conditions for artists there depend even more on the temporality of project-based international financial funding, as the cultural policies do not invest in the development of contemporary artistic practices, and that if one wants to sustain an artistic practice, one needs to invest even more intimate attributes (such as love, passion, patience and energy).
4. I dispute more on this subject in the notes “I care, thereby I act”, “Love (with) Spinoza” and “Constant volition”. 5. I present several methodologies and projects in the note “Movement of love” from the 10.9.2015. 6. I took the term ‘circuit’ from Slavoj Žižek and his explanation of pseudo active society. You can read more about it on 10.12.2015.
Stage 4: Ways to defy the pressure to perform In that point of the research I returned to the position of the performer, who constantly searches for external motivation for work, and ironically realized that I might be a perfect worker in the capitalist labour system: drawing strength from my deepest resources, constantly performing for something or someone and all the time being focused on efficiency7. Thereby, the basic conditions I need in order to set the artistic process in motion (motivation, people and continuity) might actually be as well the conditions that are helping me feed the neoliberal circuit. That is how resourcefully handling the work conditions given to me (time, space and energy), and at the same time trying to create a point of resistance to the neoliberal labour circuit in which we constantly tend to do something, became a challenge for the research and development of my artistic practice. In the spirit of this awareness, I started developing a meditative workshopI am a performer, in which I am trying to make the audience aware how much they do every day and help them experience a transformation from embracing their ‘inner performer’ to defying the pressure to perform. I believe the workshop won’t be my only attempt to find the point of resistance, and that it is a very intriguing point in the research. You never know what is yet to come, or how past work will change, evolve and upgrade.
Therefore dear readers, I invite you to move into the thesis (whether you access it in hard-copy or digital format8) with the awareness that is, like love itself, in constant movement…
7. I make an overview of Bojana Kunst’s book Artist at work, in which she writes about contemporary labour of the artists, in the text ‘I am a performer’. 8. http://sabrinazeleznik.weebly.com/research.html 3