My Champ D'action Labo experience so far (August, 2017)
Dear steemers,
Champ d'Action
this week I have been participating in a workshop called Champ d'Action Labo at deSingel in Antwerp, Belgium. Champdactionlabo is an annual multidisciplinary arts project on new music, sound art and multidisciplinary projects. It selects 25 musicians, artists, composers, performers and dancers (mostly people who are early in their career and students) and invites them to partake in workshops and encourages them to colaborate together on self initiated projects.
I have been selected through my atelier teacher Ellen Augustynen and Sint Lucas' curator Kurt van Belleghem to partake in this 5 day workshop. Fortunately, it is free for selected students, others have to pay a 150eu fee (which I think is super worth it, although I guess it depends on the0 person's experience and needs)
This year, the Labo is closely connected / related to the dance company Eastman by choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui in terms of theme (apparantly it is "voice and body percussion"). One of our 4 teachers - Johnny Lloyd (US) - dances with the company. My 4 teachers (Marko Ciciliani, audiovisual artist from Austria, Douglas Irving Repetto, artist from the US and Guy Cools, dramaturg from Belgium) are SO WONDERFUL - they are very kind, helpful, knowledgble, patient and really really talented at what they do... Just so great!
How my experience is so far
It's easier perhaps to break it into a few concepts, instead of trying to recall the events.
My love for the performative art has finally found peace
I said today to Kurt on "the radio" that it is so refreshing to meet and work with musicians, composers, theatre makers and performers. I feel like having a performative element in Fine Arts is rather an exception than a rule and the same goes for incorporating or basing work on sound, text or movement. I have felt very limited in expressing and developing my interest in sound, dance and performance before and to be able to be among people who are so far in their development of these disciplines is very insightful and it broadens my horizons.
I have always been attracted by music, sound and dance naturally. Dancing when I was 10-12 with my friends (we even entered a competition once), making a soundscape in my first year (with bloody Virtual DJ!), DJ-ing and my obsession around musicians discographies and the music/pop industry (which was explored in my study at the Erasmus university in Rotterdam) on both indie, popular and 'experimental' music, and also philosophising about listening, creating and playing music/singing/rapping. Despite all this I could never place this deep interest and love for music in my artistic practice properly.
Improvisation
The workshops were also thematically linked to games/structures (which reminds me of another workshop I was able to partake in earlier the year by Femke Gyselinck, assistant to artistic director Anna Theresa de Kaersmaker, which focussed on dance structures/rule based dancing) and so most of the workshops included improvisation. I am attracted to improvisation because it involves an element of chance (which in Cagian terms would be considered quite Zen Buddhist as it forces one to be "in the moment"). It involves quick analysis of the context and situation and direct response, something which is always a gamble - I have always been fascinated with it! It also involves a certain way of subconcious thinking, a particular level of mastery of skill and conciousness of the moment. The problems I stumbled onto in dance / movement improvisation is similar to speech, it is so remarkable. Only when I am truly focused I can deliver great quality of work. I know that and it became really apparent during improv dance.
Text
It was also nice to work with and see my two former Sint Lucas colleagues Puck and Pim discuss their ideas about texts. It made me realise how much text is also part of my practice, even though I have only made one poster with text so far. I remember an instant in a group discussion about a performance where the performer wanted to use a text from a cultural book and another person insisted on revising such a decision, pointing out that it is quite a horrible artistic decision to choose a heavy culturally layered piece of text - text should not be disregarded. A few exercises from our workshops were textbased and in the same sense it was great to see how people take text as a practice and work seriously, from musicians to dancers.
Artistic decisions
They seem to be cross disciplined (which I had always thought, but never saw it in 'real life'). What looks good, sounds good, sounds bad, looks bad, the discussions are the same, the vision is similar - bad stuff is bad stuff, good stuff is good stuff! It was really nice to see other people discuss their artistic decisions and I also felt confident to voice my opinion no matter the discipline. I also felt the same thirst for experimentation as other musicians and dancers and that had a VERY big impact on me - it really felt like homecoming, working in a musical/performative way that is experimental and going for the same goals. Just really great.
Artists who use themselves as part of their work
I am often surrounded by painters, sculpturers, photo and visual artists who are able to leave a work at an exhibition and pick it up a week or two later. Their work is captured in a physical object. They have 'left' their mark on the object and can abonden it. Musicians, performers, composers and dancers who have invested time in a 'live' performance can't - their body and mind are a piece of the work. A guitar cannot play itself - except for Lin Gerritse's. It's refreshing to meet other artists who deal with the same restrictions. We have all rocked up with some stuff (that's mobile) - instruments, makeshift instruments, cameras, recorders, notebooks - but no canvasses, large spatial structures to built with, etc.
Artists who also have to deal with duration in their work
All of them. Everyone. The saxophone player, the composer, the dancer, the make shift instrumentalist, the poet. It is great to finally think about time on a proper level with people who have dealt with it intensively. And dealing with it doesn't mean that time passed while it's being made as being the only element in the work, but that the work unfolds as time passes and that is frankly the only way.
And so forth and so on!
My projects
The podcast
Pim Steinmann (storyteller, NL), Nicoletta Favari (pianist, IT) have been focusing on producing a podcast, which involves a conversation Pim and myself and contains an interview with dancer Johnny Lloyd, a poem written and read by Pim and a text by guitarist Thomas van Walle. We were able to record in the fancy smancy recording studio of deSingel, which is underneath Radio2 studio and also thanks to my friend and singer Amina Osmanu I was able to use her zoom h4n for the field interviews.
This is the podcast, btw: https://soundcloud.com/user-178530290/disfluency-podcast-1
Elena's dance
Elena Tzanavalou (dancer from Greece) wanted to create performance around movement, sound, text and how they could inform eachother. Composer Davide Gagliardi (IT) created a spatial installation for the dancers and the musicians to perform in: by involving microphones and 4(?) speakers he created a spatial delay of everything that would happen in the room. I think there are almost 9-10 people involved in the production and I am doing improvised gestural dance based on text!
Finally
For the last 4 days, our days have looked like this: 9.30-12.30 we have a physical warm up which involves, dance, improvisation, breathing exercises, writing. We have lunch until two and from 14:00-16:00 we commit to a workshop. We have a short discussion about the day and continue with building on our own projects until 19:00 and then we have dinner. Some people continue after dinner, like I did on Tuesday where I stopped working at 23:45.
We are tired. I havent felt so hungry at so many moments of the day, and have not gone for a wee so many times a day. I feel energised, but worn out, I feel stressed but also relaxed. Everyone is so kind and nice, but also critical and honest at the same time. It's paradise, packed in 5 days. I will surely miss it when it ends.
But, I am going to London in a month and school starts again... Which means it's kind of Labo but for 6 months straight. See if I still 'like' that intensity! Ha!