The Open Body (monster)
Working towards the exhibition to take place at Savvy Contemporary Berlin in November. My proposed work revolves around the question of listening as a transformative act, and what I’m tending to think of as a mutational experience: how listening moves us, affects something of us; thinking of this on a bodily level, a cellular level, a passionate level. The consequences of listening, of what we listen to and what demands to be heard, come to shape something of the body, orienting habits, defining rhythms, shaping views, vibrating the heart. A trembling, a sensitivity, what Clément talks through by way of “syncope” – the eclipse of individuality, and that I would highlight as: interruption. And for Clément, also, a return: syncope is a fainting, and a waking up; a delay, suspension, and recovery (to recover the tempo). Never back to oneself entirely, but rather, altered. To be a stranger in one’s home requires a reordering by way of the outside.
Following these perspectives of listening and transformation, I’m thinking around the notion of “the monster”, or the open body: an opening to that which impinges, and in doing so, also supports – can we take this as a scene or condition of collaboration? With that which interrupts, enables syncope: a rhythm of engagement with what is outside oneself, and from which I gain support:
Things
Objects
Elements
Birds
You
Or
Food
Air
All these forms and forces that make the body, and that make of the body a partner, an enemy, a substance, a host.
Exploring these ideas with a group of four wonderful dancers based in Berlin, exploring the notion of the open body, of the monster and the mutational: Finding affiliation with other things; how we bring things into our bodily habits, becoming partnerships, tensions, joy. How we are also made up of other things: alien things, nonhuman things, planetary things, a type of chemistry. How to express this condition, what kind of movement vocabulary might this monstering principle inspire, generate, germinate; to embody the open body, as a state, an imaginary: of disequilibrium, equilibrium again, a spiral (a community of creatures).
With Catalina Tello, Kailin Badal Thomas, Rodrigo Opazo, and Hugo Peña Lagos.
