For the past year, the If I Can’t Dance COOP for the Dutch Art Institute entitled ‘The Word and Wound: And Now We Are Ready to Sing’ has been developing a practice of what artist and tutor Snejanka Mihaylova calls thinking in assembly: a method that connects listening with thinking, personal experiences and collective voice. The COOP builds on lines of inquiry Snejanka set in motion with artist and former tutor Rory Pilgrim in their three-year DAI COOP entitled On Tradition – Future Ancestors. This is the second year that the study group focuses on the thematic Word and the Wound and the practice of thinking in assembly. Together with Snejanka, director of If I Can’t Dance Frédérique Bergholtz, and musical composer Lisa Montan, this year’s students have taken a next step, reflecting on and exploring in practice what it means to be ready to sing; what it means to sing with others; what the relation is between the individual voice and the voice of the group; how the voice connects to the body and to (bodily) memory, and finally, how to harness the potential of acts of listening and singing to reparational ends in times of grief, violence, and harm.
If I Can’t Dance has been sharing its performance-based methodologies and opening-up its programme of artists and researchers with DAI students for the past twenty years, an engagement that is very special to us as the sharing is never one-directional, but reciprocal. Teaching is very much about listening, thinking, and working through, together. There is a dynamic porousness between teaching and learning. This has certainly been acutely felt with this year’s COOP. Over the past many months, If I Can’t Dance has been both looking back at its twenty-five years of existence, whilst grappling with its meaning, purpose and structural fragility moving forward. As a performance institution now settled into our new home within the WG-Terrein and finally with our own presentation space, we find ourselves embedded in, and dedicated to, our local context and deeply affected by the present social-political moment saturated with violence, injustice and polarizations. How best to use our platform within this context? We very much experience this moment, as what Hannah Arendt identifies in a key text for the ‘Word and the Wound’ as a gap; a non-time-space nestled between past and future whereby a meaningful connection to the world is registered as in need of being re-created. For Arendt, the gap is not inherited like the world and the culture into which we are born. Each generation, and each individual, has to discover and work through it anew by exercising a practice in thinking. For an institution dedicated to performance and feminist histories, what thinking entails and how it is exercised necessarily involves the body, and as we are learning alongside the Word and the Wound COOP, the voice.
Artist and former IICD COOP tutor Jimmy Roberts, identified the body as the site par excellence where the gap in time is registered. He asked his students to sit with choreographer Andre Lepecki’s question ‘And what is that being that constantly performs this weaving of contemporaneity into pastness and back from the future if not the body – moving its presence not in a spatial grid, but in the multifolded dimensionality of its unstable, slanted, oblique thrownness into time?’ The philosopher Adriana Cavarero, whose writing has also been key to both Snejanka’s practice and the Word and the Wound study group, reminds us that for many ancient cultures, thinking was believed to be performed by the lungs, not the brain. If we ascribe to this logic, one could propose that singing appears, in a first place, as a sounding of the practice of thinking, a cry-out and attempt to mend one’s embodied thrownness into the gap between past and future.
Also during the past months, and together with former If I Can’t Dance curator Tanja Baudoin, we have been busy looking back through our history of teaching, gathering archival material to create the education page of our website. Sifting through twenty years of If I Can’t Dance COOPs at the DAI, ongoing conversations emerge around performance-based methodologies in thinking and making. In a letter to his IICD Practice -Theater COOP students, former tutor and artist, the late Ian White, once spoke of the desire of building an ‘Insistent Collection’ out of tools and methods that were emerging in the class. Such a collection would in his words constitute ‘something urgent, something that is perhaps ephemeral, that challenges what a collection usually might be, something that is responsive to its specific context or a wider currency, a collection that is about a way of working rather than a bringing together of objects.’
The archive of If I Can’t Dance’s DAI COOPs already provides the stage for such an insistent collection, a cartography of thinking in assembly, where questions, practices and artistic materializations respond to and build on each other across time. Can thinking in assembly occur in such an expanded field? Does the history of thinking and acts of creation not always involve forms of call and response across bodies and contexts over time? The voice, as theorized by Cavarero, is inherently both unique and relational, as it emerges from the organic tissues of the individual body, is pushed outward, only to enter and reverberate deep within the corporeal tissue of other bodies. Akin to any act of writing or creation, once the voice leaves the body it becomes sonorous material in the world, whose frequencies travel in uncontrollable ways to the extent that they will encounter, resonate with, be transformed, dismissed or carried further, by others.
During his three-years of teaching IICD COOPS at the DAI with curator Susan Gibb, artist Jon Mikel Euba invited students to probe such acts of transfer from one body to the next through exercises in what he calls ‘writing out loud’. His lectures were given in Spanish, translated live into English and then, through the students active listening, were individually translated by them into other media. Speaking of the relation between reception and creation, Euba claimed that ‘culture is received, art is what one does’. On a similar note, during a working session with students, guest teacher Myriam van Imschoot, introduced exercises in modes of delivering voice, such as the ‘silly song’, which she explains ‘takes thinking and talking straight into action of singing, and as silly as it is, we sing what comes to our minds.’ Then students Mercedes Azpilicueta and Witta Tjan recount in the DAI’s student chronicle how this lead to the cohort standing in a circle and throwing each other ‘lasso sounds and movements’, and eventually, lying on the floor in a circle, heads together to form a voice fountain. These exercises were a way to prepare the follow-up exercise of sharing ‘seeds’ from each student’s practice; artistic propositions that the other students would then analyze and react on using tools like translation, addition, extraction, combination, and remediating them into performative action.
This ongoing process of reception and creation, troubles the very distinction between listening and speaking, and for this year’s Word and the Wound COOP, between listening and singing. The Word and the Wound proposes to think of singing, not only as an emanation of sound, but as an embodied practice of listening, asking us to attend to how language, and by extension, enunciations, and yes singing, register and carry forth a plurality of others voices. This proposition is beautifully articulated and extended into human and non-human relations in the following citation of ecologist and philosopher David Abram; a quote that was shared by current student Agnese Krivade to the rest of the Word and the Wound cohort:
Such processes of emitting, receiving and transformation that are arguably at the core of the transmission of culture, and certainly acts of creation, were also met with caution in other instances. During the If I Can’t Dance’s exploration of Appropriation and Dedication, under the tutelage of artist and choreographer Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, students were asked to think about the politics of what it means to take on the voice of another, what becomes of that voice and of our modes of ‘participating in the realization of minoritarian positions’. IICD COOP tutor and artist Emma Hedditch, while critical of the fetishization of the individual author, claiming that it is ‘social history and not the individual that breaks into present’, also stresses the need to address the broader implications of performance itself while revisiting the artistic strategy of appropriation through the lens of dedication. This revisiting, she proposes, might require producing an ‘architecture of recognition in transmission.’ On a similar note, in her motivation letter for joining the IICD COOP Affectionately Yours, artist and then student Barbara Wagner states that affect was for her a challenging way to approach the idea of otherness in contemporary social relations, ‘in tune with a broader range of disciplines to which the main aim is not only understanding the various forms of registering otherness but specially the ethics of recognition of the other and his/her desires.’
Due to its inherent relationality, there is an intimate connection between the voice and affect. In the IICD COOP Sotto Voce, taught by curators Sara Giannini, Arnisa Zeqo, and artist Geo Wyeth, the voice, and specifically the lowered voice used off-stage in daily life, such as the lover’s discourse, whispers, gossip, and dirty talk, invited students in the course description to ‘shift the space of performance from the retinal/spectacular realm to a sensorial, frequency driven, infiltrating, impalpable agency.’ In this register, they continue, the voice operates ‘like desire lines, cutting through the official routes of communication, to initiate new kindships, unlicensed ways of speaking, secretive passages of words, a language of touch and intimacy.’ For artist and IICD tutor Phil Collins this is precisely where the power of affect lies, in the spaces one can open-up within existing structures. In an email to his students of the IICD Affect/Production COOP, he cites Brian Massumi’s articulation of affect as ‘a way of talking about that margin of manoeuvrability, the “where we might be able to go and what we might be able to do” in every present situation.’
But is it, and how is it, possible to bring this agency of affect, the sonorous, and the sensorial into the power dynamics of the gaze embodied in the architecture of the stage? In a short text outlining points of focus for the students of the the Practice-Theater COOP, Hedditch writes of how the stage is reconfigured in nightclubs and self-organised spaces such as the feminist and queer punk music scene she was involved in. These spaces were all about constructing a place that could afford ‘starting to perform without previous experience, of figuring out how to address the dynamics of social space and the power of relations that had always been typical in a concert setting, and about how to work together as a collective force.’ Lutz-Kinoy, echoes this thought when he referred to a performance setting as a location that ‘is at best, one that we could call a state of becoming through influence, acknowledging that the power of that particular room has to do with all those bodies in it.” Indeed, Ian white asked his students to think about the stage as a very physical or psychological thing that is first and foremost ‘a site of attention, power and unity and in this way we could take this meeting as an experience of stage that we step in and out of and onto.’
This is perhaps a prompt for this situation we find ourselves in here, at this very moment, the question then is: who is the ‘we’ in this context. In ‘Human Personality’ another key source of inspiration for this year’s Word and the Wound, Simone Weil articulates what for her is sacred in every human being: what she identifies as the childish and inescapable expectation that good and not evil will be done to us. This is an impersonal belief shared by all. Injustice, according to Weil, is registered every time a cry emerges from the depths of the human heart and asks ‘why am I being hurt?’. This cry, however, is mostly lost to the world. And yet for Weil, apart from the faculty of intelligence, this impersonal ‘point in the heart which cries out against evil’ is the only human faculty which has an interest in public freedom of expression. What is needed according to Weil, is ‘a regime in which the public freedom of expression is characterized not so much by freedom as by an attentive silence in which this faint and inept cry can make itself heard.’Just as, ‘the hills and trees no longer [speak] to the literate gaze’ to cite once again the words of Abram, and just like Arendt’s belief that a practice in thinking must be developed in order to work through and mend the gap between past and future, it seems we are always confronted with having to re-learning how to attend to, register, and respond to the cries of injustice in the world around us.
In the past years, we have witnessed the power of assembled bodies in and around a stage in which an artistic practice and proposition is shared. During If I Can’t Dance’s programme of Open Rehearsals an audience gathers to feedback an artist’s try-out of an artwork in progress, in order to collectively respond and contribute to the further development of the work. This has been experienced by us as one of the more meaningful and important ways this space becomes activated as a site of collective thinking; a palpable silent attention where listening, responding and care occur across bodies. The rehearsal is felt as enriching not only for the individual work’s further development, but for the ongoing emergence of a collective response, vocabulary and thinking around performance within the characteristics and singularity of the present moment. For theorist Sara Ahmed, there is a significant difference between listening and listening with what she calls, feminist ears. The latter involves not just hearing but responding and amplifying. We are stronger, she writes ‘not only when we are heard but when we hear together.’ The power in the room lies in the relation between the unique baggage everyone brings to the table and the relation between all those present, a dynamic that reaches full force in the silent attention that is given to this inbetween space-time, here and now. This is the point at which the important work of individual and collective act of creation, and by extension repair, begins.