On Enclosed Spaces and the Great Outdoors - 4. Grounding

First intended as a performative conference, On Enclosed Spaces and the Great Outdoors - 4. Grounding has been reworked into a series of radio contributions that will be streamed in three parts from Kaaitheater.

We live in an age in which human activity has a profound impact on our physical and ecological surroundings. How can we create stories, aesthetics, and spaces of experience to deal with this situation reflexively and critically? What role can the performing arts play in the debate on climate crisis?

What remains of the theatre as we know it when its walls crumble and the outside world creeps in? When formulating this question over a year ago, little did we know it would be overtaken by reality in unexpected ways. The covid pandemic has made some uncanny aspects of the climate crisis into an acutely felt reality. Events, lifeforms and entanglements beyond our control have entered not only the theatre, but our familiar environments of life and work. Confusion, constraint, vulnerability and grief have mingled with emergent ecosystems and the prospects of organizing the world differently. Where can we – artists, researchers, citizens – find a ground to land given this situation?

CHECK EACH DAY’S PROGRAMME BELOW.

–Fri 5/02 20:00 (1h30)–

David Weber-Krebs – The Actual Event

Let’s imagine people waiting in the foyer of a theatre. They are waiting for the door to open. It opens and they enter the theatre. When everybody is inside, the door is closed behind them. There is no tribune. No stage. It is an enclosed space and what people share is air. The air that was there before they entered, air that now mingles with the air that all of them have carried inside. A fragile balance comes into being. Something seems to be at stake here. In this lecture, David Weber-Krebs analyses what happens when strangers gather in spaces. How does their mere presence change the place? What happens before, after, or during the actual event they are due to participate in?

Ingrid Vranken, Gosie Vervloessem, Mathieu Charles, Rodrigo Batista, Nahuel Cano, Mihaela Brebenel, Rasa Alksnyte and Mayfield Brooks – Unsinging linear time

‘Unsinging linear time’ is a collective reflection on the violence of the linear understanding and experience of time that defines Western societies. Time understood as an unstoppable train, driving from the past into the future. Many cultures and thinkers however describe time as thick and layered, circular or branching off into parallel timelines. We propose to think of linear time as a colonial psychological violence. Is a decolonisation of the mind possible by unsinging ourselves from linear time? In Unsinging linear time, Ingrid Vranken, Gosie Vervloessem, Mathieu Charles, Rodrigo Batista, Nahuel Cano, Mihaela Brebenel, Rasa Alksnyte and Mayfield Brooks present an open glossary of reflections on time, and how a different experience of time could responsibilize us towards the human and more-than-human world.

–Sat 6/02 20:00 (2h)–

Daisy Hildyard – Negative Love

How can a person experience absence? This talk uses death, grief and extinction to think about presence and desire as it tells – or listens to – several stories that extend beyond the human. The covid pandemic has drawn our attention toward the space between things. These ‘negative spaces’ reveal relationships that normally lie beyond our perception. The intertwinement of our lives – human, plant, animal – has become more apparent: our lives trace through other beings, and their lives trace through our own. This contribution was first realized and is included here by courtesy of Emergence Magazine.

Siegmar Zacharias – ANIMAterialities

Let’s acknowledge the grief present in this time. Grief for the dead, grief for the climate, grief for social injustices, grief for a certain idea of future, individual, collective, worldly and planetary grief. Grief for the lack of touch.

Going to the theatre is stepping out of our daily routines into a special shared place and time with others. As we cannot share that physically with each other, I invite you to set that frame for yourself. Choose a place where you want to sit that is not the place where you normally work. It can be anywhere even your bed. Change the light if you want. Switch off your phone if you want. What do you need to feel that you are ready to step out and enter our collective space? Who or what do you bring and who or what do you let go? Let’s listen together with our bodies. Bring something heavy that you can place on your body or hold in your hand. Bring a hot water bottle and a blanket. Listen with headphones. Listen with eyes closed, or listen in the dark. 

This binaural listening session explores intimacy and alienation as two dynamic forces of grief work and the possibility of touch by sound waves and the presence of those absent. It is followed by a conversation with several participants who reflect on their experience.

–Sun 7/02 20:00 (1h30)–

Julien Bruneau – A door opened onto a garden, delineating the cusp of where inside meets out

How are we inhabited by the places we inhabit? Places affect us, they direct and colour our thoughts and behaviours. Far from being an inert stage, space is itself expressive, active, potent. How to make ourselves available to this preeminent, yet neglected, dimension of experience? This question is at the heart of Genius Loci, a performance addressing domestic places through a simple practice of presence that invites the home of people to unfold as a dynamic web of interactions. While the podcast discusses this approach, it also enacts principles of it. How then to convene with a shared sense of ‘being there’ in a format where deferred time and multiplicity of locations is the rule? What kind of dwelling opens up between the speaker and the listeners, between the moment of recording and that of listening?

Thanks to Maya Dalinsky, Anouk Llaurens and Sonia Si Ahmed for their long-term collaboration.

Anne Lise Le Gac & Loto Retina – La Caresse du Coma ft. YOLO

I have been staying in a four star spa in Croatia for about 40 days now, at a gathering of people who are in search of Happiness, convinced that they live in a world FOREVER ALIVE. Within the group, they each have a transitional status: as I am new, I am automatically a DOG, ‘a loving machine’, and my number is 23. In this featuring, DOG (23) meets LIQUID VIRGIN, the spectral figure of the movement. Her presence is manifested by a breath called YOLO, a kind of primordial atmosphere, a contact like a ‘big passing shot’ that DOG (23) will have no choice but to inhale and spit out. YOLO is the fourth featuring of La Caresse du Coma, a pirate conversation by Anne Lise Le Gac in collaboration with the musician Loto Retina.