Performance Studies: On Abundance 

This will be a first experiment towards a practice of performance that is a practice of collective study too. The invitation is to gather in study around some of the notions and practices of abundance that appear in the film by Filipa Cesar and Diana McCarty “There Is Always Dance in Abundance”, which is currently showing at GfZK Leipzig.

You are invited to join a study group that takes the form of a public performance as it attempts to use the performance setting and its specific modes of gathering attention to collectively sense and make sense of abundance.  The study group will gather for 4 sessions over 2 days, on January 27th and 28th, the last of these sessions will be open to the public.

During the sessions we will devise the score for the performance, which will be participatory, improvised and shifting transversally across different registers and forms of engagement. I am interested in performance as the plotting of attention: whether you are performing or watching someone else perform, what is literally moved and shaped, is attention. Be it gazes, gestures, scores, intentions or mistakes, everything channels attention towards, or away from that which comes to be sensible, or not. Performances – understood both as discursive practices and as performative acts – rehearse and plot attention in specific ways that make some “bodies” come to matter, while others not. They are an ongoing rehearsal of our gendered bodies, of our identities, of our relationships, of our institutions and beliefs. I want to experiment with and experience what other modes of coming together an artistic performance may offer, and how the usual arrangements of attention can be un-plotted.

This experiment is part of an ongoing research which I call Studio Practice which experiments with ways of knowing, ways of sensing and making sense, that are collective and transversal, as they take in consideration and move through different levels of existence (emotional, intellectual, physical and spiritual). This research directly experiments with methodologies and tools that produce new knowledge and produce knowledge differently, or as I would rather say, with tools that gather us in study. I consider the studio not only as the place wherein to study, but as the place that makes study possible through its very specific conditions. In this new experiment “performance” will be our studio, and you are invited to join.