Backstage self-interview: looking for reasons to digital | |
File Size: | 7081 kb |
File Type: | mov |
Let this start from a claim: It is not what it is
Here we are, in the digital realm.
Premising that I understand what I do through friction, I set out on a task: to place my practice in tension with the notion of digital performance, and to consider what the latter IS NOT, in order to open doors to what it CAN be.
As with most of what I engage with (personally and professionally), my relation to digital technology has been one of doubt and duality. Yes, it has led me to enquire what it CAN be and do for the practice, but it has also provoked in me and my collaborators frustrations and frictions against the seductive convenience brought by the current accessibility of many devices. These make their use fascinating as much as becoming a trick attracting artists and audiences, but in my opinion are a bright light often blinding the content of works to favour an easier consumable surface-.
Digital technology has, and certainly does play a role in my work. From documentation of practice sessions (AV recordings to archive or look back and re-work on material), to being an integral part of the delivery of a performative piece (by the use of audio -live and recorded sound and voice with multiple in and outputs-, or video elements -live video feedback projected back into the performance space-), including the currently much-in-use tele/video-phonic communication enabling online rehearsal and conversation processes, digital technology covers many functions.
The dance I practice and write about is based on the materiality of the human body and the ephemerality of a person’s movement of their body-mind: the materiality of the body -concerned with its factual presence and physicality- is attached and inextricable from its ephemerality -the undeniable state of temporariness and of perpetual change-. In a choreographic improvisation practice such as that of the ATE-methodology, informed by a dialogue between moving and thinking, these two aspects are complementary.
I started biting the corners (it has a quality of squared-ness) of what the notion of digital performance could mean, aside of the technologies it implies, and shaped it into something that could speak of the world of my practice,
For clarity: I see what emerges through the use of digital medium as a TRANSLITERATION of the work into different forms which may support its dissemination and expand its signification. Through the digital medium I look for the work's relations to the materiality and the ephemerality of the body-mind, addressing it as a generative tool and a vehicle of TRANSMISSION through the technologies of its delivery.
In this blog, digital is an analogy to one of many shadows of the performance practice. An alter-ego, an other, the whispered reminder of a multifaceted nature of the work.