WORKBOOK_201
MAY_2021
BERNARDO DE ALMEIDA
UDK_HZT_SODA 1
STUDENT ID_372035
ISLE OF FLOWERS
(working title)
Coming from previous SODA episodes, quick catch up:
On content:
Concerns on Portuguese Decolonialism.
Still understanding why my urge on having such thematic as performance research.
Portuguese systemic denial of History, lack of collective awareness of contemporary (worldwide) colonial consequences.
Reckoning? Activism?
How to open from biographical episodes into broader questions? What is my place of speech, from where do I position myself?
How to introduce fiction and playfulness in this journey?
On Format:
Interest in storytelling.
The performance structure based on a sequence of scenes that I'm calling Islands. Each Island combines a set of elements or rules. The Islands are meant to be fully understood, relating with one another, in the whole of the performance composition.
Usage of voice Over.
Usage of video.
It is being important defining a differentiation between
NARRATIVE, STORY and STORYTELLING:
On STRUCTURE
at this work phase
about NARRATIVE
about REPETITION
I'm exploring REPETITION as accumulation of information.
Repetition as a composition strategy for the narrative.
As an instrument that shapes and organizes the whole of the performance, sustaining the unfolding of performatic experiences within each Island, that only after a certain number of rounds, accumulate a desired amount of information to compose their story.
The terms narrative and story are often used interchangeably and both are implied when we use the word storytelling.
No matter if the content is real, biographic, more scripted or less scripted, semi fictional or totally fictional, verbal, physical or both - this is how I'm understanding Narrative, Story and Storytelling in my working environment:
A Story includes all the events described and elements used, that make up a Narrative. Many stories can be articulated to form a Narrative.
The Stories are then the material used to erect the structure. The stories tell "who" and "what".
The Narrative is the "architect’s design" or how I intend others to interpret the whole structure. The Narrative also suggests how stories relate with one another on their content relationship, and how the events link and formally connect.
The Narrative tells "why" and "how".
The Storytelling is how the narrative and its stories are communicated to an audience. Not only referring to verbal communication, but all formats used. Being the storyteller the main agent responsible for activating all the actions/ events /elements within the narrative. In this case the performer in presence, me, as the storyteller of the narrative, although other bodies, voices and speeches, take part in different stories.
The Stories are here the Islands.
The Narrative is the Isle of Flowers performance.
The Storytelling and its storyteller as the main connecter agent.
some references with different approaches over repetition, as a strategy to compose a narrative,
that are helping me on organizing thoughts, ideas and practice :
the classic American blockbuster from the 90's, GROUNDHOG DAY, starring Bill Murray playing Phil, a man who suddenly wakes up repeatedly in the same day.
What is interesting about repetition here is the cumulative learning of the character over the experience of repetition. Although his world became extremely narrow, fixed on a single unchangeable day, the character doesn't stop learning, and transforming, guiding us through details he wouldn't have been aware of, if the repetition hadn't take place.
The polish video artist Zbigniew Rybczinsky.
in is work TANGO (1981), different characters get in and out a common room, repeating their same action in a loop, giving the sensation of an endless sequence. Although each action work when seen independently, the overlapping of the characters creates inescapable relations between them, offering the viewer the potencial and responsibility of building up several stories.
ROADMETAL, SWEET BREAD, a performance written and directed by Julian Maynard Smith and Susannah Hart.
The relation between the live performance and the video performance, where the overlapping of the twin actions and situations, contribute to the construction of the same narrative. Competing with one another in a complementary way, never just being shown to be compared.
HAMLET by TheWoosterGroup.
The relation between the live performance and the film version of Richard Burton's 1964 Broadway production, directed by John Gielgud.
The plot of Hamlet becoming a stage exercise on repetition. The narrative here is constructed over reversing the film version of 64 again into a live stage performance. While the performers engage on a real time reenactement of the film performance.
The audience gets mainly busy with this layering, more than with the plot itself, consequently getting emotionally detached from the story.
WESTERN SOCIETY by GOBSQUAD.
The reenactement in loop of a youtube video as a starting point, a video that shows a western family party where there are several figures in the same space, but all are tremendously alone, whether eating a slice of cake , dancing in a corner, singing on a karaoke machine, sitting motionless on a sofa... some audience members are instructed to do, together with the performers, a
reenactment of that video in a loop basis, overlapped with dystopian dialogues about the contemporary condition of being Western, capitalist, consumerist, in normative failed family systems, very
technological and extremely lonely.
OMER FAST, video artist.
Tank Translated (2002)
Spielberg’s List (2003)
Five Thousand Feet is the Best (2011)
The Narrative structure I've been working on for the 201 is composed by two Islands, in a sequence of 3 cycles. The repetition of the sequence allows each of the Islands to gradually accumulate information.
ISLAND BRUNO
I'm in dialogue with Bruno Huca, Mozambican-Portuguese artist and intimate friend.
He was the first Black person I got to know, at the age 18; the first Mozambican and also my first boyfriend.
How to use my biography to travel from empathic subjective memories into a manifest?I don't consider myself an activist.
I don't frame my work in artivism.
But I'm interested that my stories can potentially have some activist power.
When I invited Bruno to collaborate with me, I told him that my intention was to talk about the terrorism happening in Cabo Delgado in northern Mozambique, and the international invisibility of such human tragedy.
To frame such invisibility we could departure from our own biography. The fact that when I met him at the age 18, I knew nothing about Mozambique despite some historical facts about being a Portuguese ex-colony.
How meeting Bruno and his subjective life, was my journey to break with the "Single Story" (ref. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) I applied till then to all Mozambican population.
Remembering when Isabel Lewis told us about her project where she explores the Angolan dance style Kizomba. She said that she didn't mean to be at all an actor on Blackness with that project. But when she presented it in Dia Beacon NY, a local Black man came to her, thankful for her project representing the Black community, poorly represented in local institutions.
I'm wondering about what real control can one have about the "activist power" someone can address to a work, despite the artist's premeditated intentions about it.
Having in mind that activism is today more urgent in the micropolitics than in the macropolitics.
PLACE OF SPEECH
How to speak about a Mozambican reality, from my place of being a Portuguese educated, middle class, white male artist,
with access to institutions of culture and knowledge production,
that never stepped in Mozambique ?
From me to Bruno, From Bruno to Cabo Delgado.
Inviting Bruno to speak about it in the first person, baring in mind our intimate relationship as a way to openly negotiate my proposal with him.
A Game of non-scripted conversations
By always starting with the same question:
Can we revisit some of the first memories we have from each other?
We combined before each round where we wanted to reach, but we never knew how the conversation would unfold
ref. GobSquad Reader book
I spoke a lot with Bruno about how activism and social movements are intrinsically dependent on capitalism and mass consumption. How the murder of George Floyd and the statement I can't breathe, became a symbol of such an inmensurable importance worldwide. How its consequences can still be seen and analyzed in Lisbon society today.
But a question remains in the air, why genocides are invisible or irrelevant in some parts of the world ?
Brazilian academic and activist Carla Akotirene refers the need to an emancipation from the USA on many levels, including the perception of concepts as Blackness and Whiteness. Because concepts and terms are dependent on contextualization.
Situatedness is mandatory.
p.ex: The North American Jim Crow laws avoided miscegenation, while the opposite happened in Brazil with the Lusotropicalism ideology.
My friend and colleague Renan Martins, Brazilian artist based in Portugal, recently on Facebook was straight to the point of racial identity being dependent on situatedness.
ref. Santiago Sierra, Kunsthalle Wien 2002
beginning
end
ISLAND KITCHEN
How the subjectivity of different bodies and their voices, can contribute to the construction of a narrative?
What information a body carries and transmits, before we get to know the person?
Using repetition to explore different performative conditions and proposals over bodies' subjectivity:
Daily actions.
Movement sentences.
Description.
Scores.
Voice over.
Choreography.
Storytelling.
Kitchen as a generalized common space on everyones lives.
kitchens in the houses I've been living as a place of experiment
IN DIALOGUE WITH
the studios as a place of experiment.
How does a body behave when is not being observed ?
Everyday behaviour.
Strangeness / Weirdness / Otherness.
Premeditated dance / movements.
Some references
Somewhere in Between (2006)
by Meg Stuart and Pierre Coulibeuf
On the relation between everyday gestures and unexpected attitudes.
On the kitchen.
Dogville (2003)
by Lars von Trier
On the playfulness between having and not having the object, having and not having the space, to perform the actions/ movements.
Palindromes (2004)
by Todd Solondz
A narrative where the main character is played by 8 different actors.
The Digital Face (2012)
by Liz Magic Laser
On the movement study of hand and arm gestures of two politicians when giving a speech.