#networked performance

In 2020 we (Daniel Pinheiro, Muriel Piqué and Annie Abrahams) were interviewed by Alix De Morant (researcher at the University Paul Valéry in Montpellier) and Ivan Magrin-Chagnolleau (artist, researcher at the Chapman University, Orange, California) on the subject of Distant Movements.

Finally our exchange got published : Interview about Distant Movements (English version) Entretien au sujet de Distant Movements (version française) Abrahams A., Magrin-Chagnolleau I., de Morant A., Pinheiro D., Piqué M. p-e-r-f-o-r-m-a-n-c-e, Vol 6 2022 (Creation Research)

ENG Of course, since then, thoughts, relations and lives changed. However this exchange clearly highlights our different thoughts on what was/is important in this coming together of different universes through our blind online dance practice and research.

We talked about: origins – “being with” – guidance being an approach of movement by calling it out, not just naming it, but almost hailing it – a practice that allows people to move together at a distance, while trying to interrogate the relationships between what’s happening in their bodies – the process not only depending on what we want and what we think, but also on what we discover in the others and how we can go on with that – using protocols as a way to stability or as a process to change relations, to escape habits – the question of presence inside the rigid frame of videoconferencing – the role of an audience and the influence on dance from the webcam – the incongruity of the dancing body in the private space creating performativity in a place of life – the intermediary / intermedial space, constructed from all the environments in which the participants find themselves – how to experience a certain quality of movement, with the eyes closed, while trying to perceive the other bodies elsewhere moving – the common work is created in the conjunction of all the in situ dances – resonance, enaction, intra-action – ….

“virtual presence can be experienced as more intimate than a physical encounter” Martina Ruhsam interviewed by Beatrix Joyce in “A podcast on the future of dance and performance”, dis[ ]tanz, artconnect.com.

FR Cependant, cet échange met clairement en évidence nos pensées différentes sur ce qui était/est important dans cette rencontre de différents univers à travers notre pratique et notre recherche de la danse en ligne à l’aveugle.

Utterings is a sound-only networked performance experiment where six artists while blindfolded, commit to a 30 min long exchange across distance. They engage in utterings as communication, building on solo’s, duo’s, chorales and silence, creating an on the fly “new” language, that forwards attention, trust and affects above rationality. Six sound streams are interlaced and entangled in one single polyphonic composition. The protocol for this performance has been written collectively in the week before the performance. Utterings is a collaborative attempt to go beyond the borders and closures created by languages, opening up and transgressing these in a performance that probes meaning through pre-language communication and formerly un-inhabited expressions.

Utterings is a project by Annie Abrahams (FR) and Daniel Pinheiro (PT) with Constança Carvalho Homem (PT), Curt Cloninger (US), Nerina Cocchi (BE) and Derek Piotr (US) as invited artists and collaborators. Technical assistance by Jan de Weille.

After this first performance Utterings became a group with a website Utterings.

22/2 2020 16h30 Paris time, Audioblast #8, APO-33.

Protocol: No rehearsals, only a sound test and a mental preparation / an attunement. Just before connecting, we will all listen individually to Pauline Oliveros for 15 minutes. https://youtu.be/U__lpPDTUS4 * 16h Paris time connection via zoom. Sound testing. Disconnection 16h15.  (16h21 Annie starts zoom again and Jan starts BUTT connection.) * 16h25 Re-connection to zoom by all. Putting on blindfolds. * 16h30 Start. In Nantes and on the radio Julien will introduce us, but we won't hear it. * 30 min of Utterings. Anyone of us six can start - if we have in-between silences, another random person initiates the follow-up. When zoom stops we will know it ended.We disconnect. We will reconnect 5 min later again to say goodbye. we are not making music - it may be boring and that is ok - don't have ideas about what would be "good"

Distant Movements #10, #11 and #12.

Three sessions that aimed to open the process and the experience to people outside the project.  We invited people coming from different backgrounds (DM#10 and DM#11 - art/dance practitioners; DM#12 - researchers).

With Elsa Decaudin, Jean-Marc Matos, Isabel Costa, Martina Ruhsam, Johannes Birringer, Hélène Roussel and Déborah Nourrit. Un grand merci à tous!

Points we discussed afterwards : - The meditative aspect, the possibility of opening a space of active meditation where we connect to others by diving into an internal motion of our body (how can the space be shared while moving through it?). - Instruction based on what the experience is actively doing to us instead of producing a thought of where we want the movement to go. Actively engaging in the internal individual movement – not pursuing a formal synchronicity – and feed from that in order to materialize an instruction that is about sharing what’s happening and letting it travel through the connection, each person deciding if it’s integrated in their own [shared?] experience.

Before continuing our practice we need to clearly describe what we mean by dance and movement in this context. We continue researching a notion of what a shared danced movement online can be (or become) resorting to guidance - spoken and alternated between participants.

27th November 2018

In 2014, I was Executive Producer of the AMATA Public Programme when we were involved in a networked performance from Sir Elton John, which changed my perception of what is possible. Picture the scene; Elton performed 5 songs on a Yamaha Disklavier Grand Pianoto a very large invited audience in Los Angeles, as part of Yamaha Music’s 125thanniversary. The audio and visual performance was networked live to 11 other pianos around the world, providing audiences at remote venues, including Falmouth University, a tantalising glimpse of one potential future of live music where global audiences are linked by a moment in time whilst sharing a physical group experience in disparate venues around the world! If Elton can play 12 pianos at once I thought, then why not 112 or 1112? Suitably inspired, I went on to programme more networked performances and then (sometime later!) to write this post …

Lazzaro & Wawrzynek (2001, p. 157) define a Network Musical Performance as occurring when ‘a group of musicians, located at different physical locations, interact over a network to perform as they would if located in the same room.’The idea of networked performances itself is relatively old, with Gabrielli & Squartini (2015, p. 10) reporting an event in 1985 where musicians played simultaneously from two venues in NYC.More recently, the concept has spread to other art forms, so for instance; in April 2015 the AMATA Programme included Ultraorbism; a networked interactive performance theatre work conceived and developed by Marcel Li Antunes Roca incorporating Cheap Date Dance Company, actors, live painting and animation. The event created a live performance, with elements (and audiences) in Santa Monica Arts, Barcelona and Falmouth University, and was awarded an Excellence Award at the 19th Japan Media Arts Festival.

Being involved in the Elton John performance made me consider the possibilities of adding live musicians and a hologram of the star to networked performances and how this could potentially change the meaning of a world tour as well as artiste and audience expectations of live music venues! So, could networked performances be programmed in festivals of the future? Whilst the music industry interviewees for my chapter in The Routledge Handbook of Festivals demonstrated limited awareness of networked performances, Ian Biscoe perceived that ‘It is possible to do this, it’s having enough people who understand artistically and dramaturgically how to connect people in these contexts’

Undeniably, technicalchallenges remain if festivals are to program networked performances, and indeed; the issues of achieving tolerable levels of latency / time lag, etc, feel inherent in Biscoe’sdefinition of the artform as; ‘trying to get the same type of quality and immersion in a performance that involves performers in multiple places, and normally audiences in multiple places, that you would do in a single live venue’. However, given that he has been in the news recently, the prospect of an artist of Elton'sstature simultaneously headlining a number of major live festivals around the world, without actually leaving home, feels tantalisingly close!

Bibliography

Gabrielli, L & Squartini, S (2015). Wireless Networked Music Performance. Singapore: Springer.

Lazzaro, J. & Wawrzynek, J. (2001). A case for network musical performance - NOSSDAV ’01: Proceedings of the 11th international workshop on Network and operating systems support for digital audio and video (157–166). New York. ACM Press

Daniel was in Lisbon, Annie at home in Montpellier and Muriel with Ivana somewhere else also in Montpellier. Muriel guided the dance in French. Ivana translated Muriel’s internal dance voyage in Italian. We used the zoom.us application to connect with each other and the audience in Pisa. The people in Pisa had two possibilities: either to close their eyes and to “dance” with us, or to watch us in a projection on a screen, trying to see what translates of our moving on our faces.

Can we read this imaginary movement in people far away on the surface of a screen? not sure Can we share something as intimate as feeling a dance? not this time And does this sharing over time via machines connect us? maybe 

Reactions: Being together was difficult because we had to concentrate on following the guiding and we had to fight our inclination to actually start moving. Sometimes the pace was to quick and made it impossible to “execute” the movement, even in our imagination. Some movements were too complicated. For our body to exist, to dance without moving we had to translate too much which made immerging in the dance difficult. Including narration meant that our brain started to project itself into the future. This is contradictionary to being with the movement, to being fully attentive in the body.

Technics - always test bandwidth before at the time of the performance. - 19h is a high density time on the internet. - earplugs for the person talking are necessary - always! - the end is an interruption of the ongoing. We don't think of tension curves.

We want to continue. More tests 28th of July 19h. - moving allowed as long as we stay in the frame - no narration.

on:

OUR LINGAGES // Annie Abrahams (@e-stranger​ )

Performance in collaboration with Daniel Pinheiro, Isabel Costa,  Igor Štromajer, Outranspo (Lily Robert-Foley, Camille Bloomfield, Jonathan Baillehache), Jan de Weille, Helen Varley Jamieson and Rui Torres.

//

between the digital and emotion, a system of four present bodies within the limited space, expanded by writing of presences that flood the screen - characters in motion -. A translation process back and forth, in overlapping transformation. As #4 move in (dis)placement, role playing, agency on a mutable system of comprehension. Gathering, a communion, an electronic communion where (we) become together we intersect one another with words and gestures. a latent restlessness of syncopated movement. Dance, move leading to speech, to sound, to coded language.

-- "Fragmentation is a way of living in a border" --

Arterial language, undefined, glitched, "The internet is my mother tongue"

<...is a language that a person has been exposed to from birth or within the critical period (source: Wikipedia)>

Parsing the intricate network of an enclosed moment in time - the time we share(d) together.

"participatory, collectively made, refusing hierarchy, a knitting together of artists and performers in the moment of the event, an erasure of the artistic ego, a practice, changing rules, choices, connecting, accepting the unexpected, it's responsive, shared, collaboratively authored, open to all, working with temporal behavioural phenomena, a healing, an enactment, improvised, including environmental conditions, attentional strategies, instructions, protocols, an apparatus, a meeting, embracing the ordinary, rehearsing alternatives, re-hijacking therapy, exercising our relations to others, our social (in)capacities, exploring rituals, being together, concerns individuals and politics."

- excerpt from the script