Ecosystems...
Ecosystems: contextualizing process and production (Extract)
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Body, language and process.
Throughout the last few years, my work had been mostly comprised of interventions that can be identified by the creation of scenic devices inside which the body is introduced to be observed, analysed and consumed at several levels and through several operations. The elaboration of each process is a continuous apprenticeship all in itself.
To walk down the dividing line between the several genres of performance, disciplines and artistic languages, to constantly put to use references to prefabricated exposition structures, but always questioning its specific contents: those are the strategies one may use to come up with configurations that are capable of grating the spectator with a more critical and less patronizing view, as he or she relates to what is being observed. Whenever I’m about to start the building process of a new choreographic piece, I ask myself, what is choreography? How can one produce it? And what is the notion of body that underlies or legitimates choreography? The very conditions of production, the context of the new creation, will lie out an aprioristic set of elements, to which the work to come must relate. This fact demands, where creativity is concerned, an immediate answer, and it opens up the possibility of using the very context of creation as the theme or the matter of the said creation. Whatever the resulting device may be, it will always be a foundation for the body’s exposure. Here, issues such as the body’s materiality, appearance, behaviour and interaction modes are also raised.
Essentially, I am interested in regarding the artist as a collector of events, a sort of curator who singles out, lines up and shows off events. A contract is agreed with the spectator, the clauses of which are scattered all over the given event’s time and space extension.
The archaeology of the creative process.
In contemporary creation, production modes and matters have been especially singled out for restructuring. All the variations one can think of on the anachronic, the asynchronous, the replaceable, the beautiful, the irregular, the serial, the horrid, the kitsch, the instantaneous, for example, are but some of the topics of an incredibly long, unquenchable list of possibilities.
More often than not, even the sheer adjustment of new mechanisms to old ideas or of new ideas to old mechanisms is quite revelatory that such an adjustment is simply not enough, if there is no corresponding and subsequent questioning of the course these ideas followed and of the modes through which all the network of relationships that underlies each and every work came into being.
Perhaps one is looking for a body stripped of constraints as one constructs his or her own creative grammar. One is looking for a simple unfeasibility encased in more complex unfeasibilities. One is looking for both bodies of the extremes and bodies of the spaces in-between. One is looking for strategies of intervention on the process, which allow the emergence of a tension between what is the most current practice and the alternative practices, thus leading towards an expansion movement of the possible meanings contained within any given work.
A being between brackets, as it were: in a state of permanent fugacity, to inhabit the process is the same as inhabiting the route, that is to say, is the same as opting for nomadism as the operative scheme. It’s notions such as navigation between forms, appropriation, dérive and the contingencies that become the most stable compositional parameters.
Excavations
A swinging movement between the opacity and the transparency of the image of the Other: the body of the Other, the observing Other, the double of each body, an Other in itself. Within such process, a plurality of views on artistic creation and its realization modes is encouraged. Each body, to which its own organization of forms or the very possibility of being architecturally reconstructed draws attention, questions every single new gaze that is honoured with and multiplies itself in versions of its own specificity.
Within a wider artistic context, the goal of the creative process is not only the production of an object, but to rather become a process of process production. As it vents its inclination to alter how things are done – its form – it strides towards the unpredictable, and a repositioning relative to the creative act and its functions ensues.
Archaeological process: to pinpoint appealing areas, to dig, to find, to clean up, to classify, to exhibit… To move towards not only the finality of things, but towards its origin as well.
The compartmentalization principle: to examine as detailedly as possible the constitutive elements and reclassify them. What is the pulse of a creative process? How can one effectively manage the produced matter? How can one devise an index that allows its central issues and motivations to be accessed? How can one establish intersections between artistic creation and other human activities? How can one enhance the precision of one’s tools?
Derivations, topographies, registers: to put words side by side, to promote vocabulary research, to promote intertextuality, to file every indication, trace, every circumstance that underlies the events, to challenge expectations, to collect facts…. How can one find the specific tonality of each unwritten score?
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Joclécio Azevedo
(OPEN ESSAY - Nucleus for Choreographic Experimentation: Some approaches to Artistic Production, Edition: objecto cardíaco,2005)