In We Just Stopped Pretending , an international dance and film project slated to premiere in Spring 2014, dancers, performers and everyday people in four different countries get real about what we pretend to care about in art, ecology and politics. As artists, inhabiters of earth and world citizens we engage deeply in unforeseen interactions. The project surprises and tricks us into circumventing the forces at work against us that have effectively kept us from acting on our values. Our collective objective for the project is to find ourselves beyond conceptual understanding, in real time, creatively, ethically, intellectually and aesthetically communing, as a practice in the public sphere.

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In this demanding piece, Eve Schulte dances “the in-between”, as Desire configures her single body into multiple bodies. Under forces she contorts, resists, floats, navigates, manages, and succumbs to beautifully functional bodies and not so functional dances of various genres.

As audience, we observe forces influencing the social body, the experiential body that powerfully asserts itself through the senses and the personal body of unique vernacular and propensity, in this case, for the ballet lexicon, offering  promise of the transcendent, perfection and arrival. 

Throughout the piece, the various bodies emerge, are displaced, converge or evaporate. In-between are the affects of pre-assemblage or becoming, communicated with a dance vernacular of hiccups, burps and attempts to find the way or to find one’s agency.

After using Eve as its vessel, Desire has desired so much that it eats its own heart like Ouroborous eating its own tale and poof it’s over or is it complete immanence? Hard to say because Eve chokes on the heart. She does not assimilate it! Yes, it’s a protest against what desire wants and against the myopia demanded in each assemblage. BTW, the planet heats up while desire desires. The stage lights burn brighter and brighter to simulate this reality.

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Textural threading is a technique I devised from decades of performing both improvisation and diverse styles of choreography. TTT enables dancers to thread unexpected actions together and adopt various body alignments in relationship to gravity and spatial planes.

When using TTT, threads of information are accessed in and around the body. Threads of varying texture, size and direction are sensed or realized at the hands (sometimes with assistance from the imagination). In turn, the body/field and physical forces simultaneously inform the hands about potentials. Threads are initiated, stabilized or released at anchor points around the body, in the ground and in space. This enables the dancer to work with both contained and expansive space parameters. The dancer can intend lines into a contained space parameter to work with articulate weight shifts and body texture changes, or out into the space for larger actions. While dancing, threads can supply information about changing energy lines and forces related to the skeleton, muscle tissue, the nervous system and the energy field.

This video shows 15 minutes of practice. It’s neither a rehearsal nor a performance.

Changing tensions of threads affect physical texture and the dynamic changes as body systems support each action. One can drop threads to pick up on emergent dance vocabularies, delineate changes in the space by mobilizing threads from anchor points or intend pathways through the body into space and vice versa. Threading can tap the nervous system resulting in charged, involuntary actions.

Along with physical forces (relating to the physics of the body moving through space), in practice, contact with other performers and the audience via threads of information in a shared performance field can activate social forces (behavioral, relational and conditioned response) while creative forces (inherent aesthetic, unconditioned expression and localized eruptions in the body) emerge, compete, or share time and space with social forces. Sometimes the interaction of forces results in splitting attention while other times aspects align in an imbued, singular action.

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Solo Performances in Minneapolis:

June 14, The Southern Theater

                                                                  Sept 20,  Minnesota Contemporary Dance Platform

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“Just as men are converted into commodities, so every aspect of nature is converted into a commodity, a resource to be manufactured and merchandised wantonly. … The plundering of the human spirit by the market place is paralleled by the plundering of the earth by capital.” ~ Murray Bookchin (Social Ecologist)

In Every Drone Wants to Live Leralee Whittle investigates one’s worth in contemporary society, being a consumer. Her physical performance is an embodiment of ethics, value and place within a-corporate-profit-driven-existence. She juxtaposes extreme, poignant performance states with videos possessing levity and visual imagery.

Every Drone Wants to Live Part 1 from Leralee Whittle on Vimeo.

In videos, Whittle takes over the 5th floor of an office tower to reckon with “the pre-apocalyptic zeitgeist”. She exorcises “states of mind” lingering in corners, cubicles and crevices of the abandoned office suite. As she shape shifts through the building her actions as a creative medium are captured on camera. She picks up on a degraded cultural milieu in traces of social meetings at corporate coffee houses, voyeuristic fetishes of being under watch (surveillance cameras and bosses) and drone status sublimated into obsession with celebrity. Movement vernaculars convey our impulsive nature and a lack of “big picture thinking” in this creative critique of how we live.

Along the way she personifies the ethos of a crumbling capitalist empire where one’s stuff is an extension of self. Disposable objects root one to a sense of place. Thoughts compete for attention without clear as spectacle distracts from important issues. 

Before the performance begins the audience will fill out a questionnaire regarding the neoliberal “free-market” which seizes a disproportionate share of the world’s natural resources and exploits poorer countries for their assets, an imbalance that’s having a dire impact on many groups of people and the environment. Questions about subordination of comparatively wealthy American consumers will be derived from social ecology, ecofeminism, ethical consumerism and the book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (Noam Chomsky). The questions will serve to draw out a conscious connection with one’s level of freedom and responsibility. Some of the audience’s answers and Whittle’s answers to the same questions will be integrated into the live performance as text, embodiment and interactive video.

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In PARTS the ethos of a crumbling decadent society is personified by an almost famous woman. Her attempts to play an “important role” in society are chronicled in dances that look something like starting down a highway that is suddenly reconfigured into multiple broken intersecting streets. She has to constantly reinvent, reorient and reconfigure herself.

Dances depict the ultra material world as a kind of empty calorie animism. Desires are unexpectedly expressed in the power of social objects like a coffee cup, a purse, and a wig. Habitat is what one possesses and what one is possessed by.

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Audience Participation 

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WorkArtOut is a contemporary performance featuring video, dance and live music. Videos feature the process of making time–based art in gyms and sports complexes across America.

WorkArtOut stimulates the audience to explore and investigate our national obsession with sports. When are our bodies free and when are they institutionalized? Have we been desensitized? How has our creativity been affected? How does sports culture instill narcissism and exploitation? How is jingoism tied into sports culture? What are the repercussions? What is health?

WAO shows rarely experienced creativity in sports spaces to jostle the audience out of our unexamined and excessive enthusiasm for sports and the imbalanced emphasis on competition that it encourages in every arena of our lives.

Made possible with the support of a Rocket Grant(Andy Warhol Visual Arts Foundation, Charlotte Street Foundation and Spencer Art Museum).

ROCKET GRANT BLOG

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