Figure 1. Scheme for the exploration of the participatory event
In this exercise of affect and being affected there is the relationship between the practitioner and the audience’s experience. What is the dramaturgy of the mise-en-corps? In dramaturgy as a living organism, what is the methodology that is constantly present in the exercises that I have proposed?
Description
There is a table located on one side of the space. On the other, there are some items such as paint bottles, crayons, brushes, and hand-made cardboard zines. The participants are situated around the practitioner, placing themselves at their own will. The aim is to create a relationship of embodied listening between the participants and the practitioner. To establish this moment, the participants will listen to an audio track and will react to what they are hearing. They can do it freely and voluntarily through diverse media: movement, intervening on the craft board zines, or having a relation of motion with the practitioner. Although the practitioner will not listen to the audio, they will be reacting with movements to the experience of others. There are three elements that I have decided to include so the experience can be multimodal, or at least that multiple layers of sensory activities can be developed.
Motion, mobility, movement: The practitioner moves around the space. These movements are not predetermined, they are based on impulses and feedback from the participant’s actions, movements, and the table. It is important that participants are able to move or follow their physical impulses. Also, they can interact with the performer but not necessarily focus their attention on what is being done.
Audio: This is a loop of sounds produced by a jaw harp, the sound of my breath while I was doing the training, and a narrative that refers to the table. This is a text comprised of some excerpts from Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology (2006) and some questions that I am posing to the participants so that they can relate what they are experiencing in sound with the problem of the table. What are the impulses that participants are following? Are these related to the musical loop or the experience of listening to the presented issues?
Hand-made cardboard zine: The cardboard space as a haptic experience, a place for intervention, an aural relationship with the ecology in which the piece is established.
This work wants two things. On one hand, it offers practitioner more time to improvise to unknown moments in relation to the people present in the room. As far as sound is concerned, I have decided not to listen to it because I am more interested in the somatic experience of authentic movement or mirroring motion. That is the reason why people listen to the track with their own headphones. However, one of the more complex questions to me in this work is what would happen if someone decides not to use the headphones? Why, if we are all together in the same room, the audio cannot be played to have an experience of communal listening?
On the other hand, it is essential that the participants’ experience will be a moment of being affected but at the same time, a space to have self-awareness and transit emotions. In order to avoid any kind of emotional harm, people are allowed to move or transmit their thoughts, emotions, feelings, corporeal responses to any of the multiple tools that have been announced at the beginning of the action.
To conclude, my intention is not to have an event focused on my abilities as a practitioner but that participants can move from their roles as audience, public, or spectator to a participant who has the agency to decide whether to stay, leave, move, stand or do whatever their bodies are asking to react in response to what is happening.
Fall 2021
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