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What Do We Mean When We Say that We Are Transforming Performance Practice into a Production of Space?*
Bojana Cvejic

It may seem that “education” is yet another conceptual framework by which the performing arts in Europe have sought a new emancipatory avenue recently. However, the proliferation of projects on education in dance, theatre and performance − academies, conferences, research labs, exhibitions, and texts issued on education, knowledge-production, learning, etc. in the last three years or so − has spurred another movement of thought as its by-product.[1] Having little to do with aesthetic formation or political mobilization, movement is more an expression of dynamic forces, too weak in goals and aims to be represented. A number of initiatives and projects forking out of the debate on education created another dynamic in the field: the one of articulating and reorganizing work as a practice that implicates but does not center on education, with respect to the exhausted curatorial concept of research. I will elaborate this movement further as a distinction of practice that can be related to the notion of spatial practice in terms of reconfiguring work into a production of space. Before clarifying the use of the terms “practice” and “space” with respect to performance, I will sketch out the conditions that enabled them.

In the wake of immaterial production, performance artists realize that their project-based work in all its plurality does not necessarily share a thematic, ideological or procedural basis.[2] Ontological inquiry into expansive definitions of performance or choreography does not affect the mode of production in performance, its political economy and its impact on a larger scale of culture.[3] Realizing that what they have in common is expending an amount of labor which cannot be transacted as or along with a product of performance, performing artists are re-evaluating knowledge production in their practice. With its express short-lividness in freelance production, performance reinforces the awareness of the type of worker the performance artist represents: constantly producing outside of the (paid and recognized) labor-time, in a non-calculated productivity which is always larger than the access, space and effectiveness given to it in the existing institutional structures. This inspires a change of attitude towards considering “making” as “learning”. As opposed to the self-marginalization that ensues from the preciousness of performance, research in working methodology, set-ups and conditions of working are recognized as the capital to invest in.

Folding theory into what can be produced by and through the experimentation with methods, conditions, formats of work reorients theory from a critical and conceptual to an inventive and experiential approach. The desire for such reorientation is motivated with a couple of discontents as well. One concerns how freelance work and lifestyle have turned the project-basis of performance from a mode of production to a mode of reaction, cynicism and opportunism in the question: what is always-already there that I need to deterritorialize? What is always-already there is the dispositif of theatre − the deconstruction of which in the last 10 years has consolidated spectatorship without exploring it further than the joyful recognition of the role of being a spectator. Another dissatisfaction with the dispositif concerns what discourse it can produce. The performance in its distribution is unavailable for discussion from the very simple reason that there can be no live comment made about what is seen. The discussion time in theatre is put off until after the show, when it happens in the bar. Artists talks before or after the show are − at best − promotions upgraded to the authors self-explanation under the tyranny of democratic dialogue with the audience. The knowledge instigated by a performance amounts to an individual opinion, a review in the daily paper or, at best, an essay in a quarterly magazine.

All in all, performance artists and theorists who operate within performance practice are in need of platforms that can capitalize on the freelance service-based economy and work and lifestyle to reinforce and intensify that which they are already doing in a precarious, not acknowledged and unstructured climate.

I will now describe the projects and initiatives whereby the attribution of “spatial practice” will echo an obvious reason at first.

PAF (Performing Arts Forum) is an organization built upon an offering of space without a pre-existing normative or representative structure. Theatre director and performer, Jan Ritsema, bought a former convent with a large capacity and issued an open invitation to anyone in the performing arts who would be interested in using it.[4] Unlike the residency system that nowadays represents a cheap form of co-production by providing the artist with a room of his/her own and almost no production budget, PAF depends exclusively on artist involvement: on their financing and self-organization that ranges from moving house walls to organizing one’s research process. Being thus an emergent self regulating structure run by users that are at the same time its developers and consumers, it offers only space and time so that inventing working conditions for oneself in non-supervised and non-representative ways is not only possible but necessary in order for anything to happen. In the context of the West European institutional market, PAF surfaces the need of performing artists to reclaim and take charge of the part of their work that has been parented by various institutional co-optations of critical, “experimental” and research-based formats. It also attests to the capacity of performing artists to surpass the culture of complaint and to structure proactively the desire for expanding possibilities, interests and the exchange of one’s own working practice. Amidst a saturated infrastructure for performance production, the quest for another “forum for producing knowledge in critical exchange,” “a tool-machine” in researching methodology, “a place for temporary autonomy” is specific insofar as it motorizes artists to take responsibility and cooperate in producing a space in as much for themselves as for others.[5] Work thus expands to the production of space in activity and knowledge that its users invest, exchange and bring forth while not accumulating it to a representative function of a public institution like theatre museum, or cultural centre.

If PAF develops from realizing an opportunity to produce space out of a vacancy (the empty space of the former convent), “Six Months in One Location” (6M1L) is a project that seeks to temporarily situate work in a particular organization of space and time. This initiative, originally proposed by a choreographer and a theorist to a number of performing artists, is conceived of a set up of special conditions in order to examine what these conditions produce in terms of working methods and procedures, presentation formats and circulation, conceptual and discursive apparatuses, and ways of working and being together.[6] The conditions are that the work take place: 1) in one location, 2) in the duration of six months without interruption, and 3) involve a number of people who each apply with a project of their own in whatever phase of development. Applying with their own individual projects, participants also become involved in one or two more projects by taking on a different role and changing function. What 6M1L reinforces is not a collaboration of a collective on one overarching project, but ways in which artists and other practitioners act as individual intercessors of each other. The objective of 6M1L is to produce a platform where work localizes in situ so as to regain time that is lost in traveling in pursuit of new opportunities for jobs and projects. Therefore, this project aims to produce a counter-site, a heterotopia in Michel Foucault’s terms, in which the supposed nomadism of the freelance project-based work is simultaneously represented, contested and inverted.[7] Displacement is replaced by continuity in immobility that is needed for exploring one’s own and one another’s “foreign territories”, countries of work. Such a platform is heterotopic in so far as it is outside of the other places whose reality it indicates. Situating work as a space for several projects whose regime, practice and site may be incompatible, 6M1L examines if the constraints of time and space are conditions that enable a juxtaposition of several spaces in a single real place, a slice of incommensurable durations of processes that open onto heterochronies.[8]

Transforming performance into a spatial practice and making this shift graphic is how a project combining architecture and performance, called The Theatre, could be characterized by.[9] It consists of constructing an in situ building of theatre, financed and developed in a process common to theater performance. The Theatre orchestrates itself as well in an ongoing forum for speakers from different, even unrelated disciplines. It is conceived as a transportable structure made available to artists, curators and other performance practitioners to program whatever activities they determine in their localization of the project. Such a mobile template invites and enables a re-articulation of the original function of theater as a public forum sensitive to the particular meanings and forms it may take in different contexts.

While PAF produces space by invigorating the responsibility of the self in motorizing and organizing work in a structural cooperative endeavor, 6M1L experiments with work determined in temporal and spatial constraints. The Theatre acts as a template to prompt a representation of space (planning and construction) and a representational space (activities that will be programmed there). There is another form of spatial practice that has emerged in current performance practice without localizing itself in a site. Here I mean the emergence of working groups gathering practitioners for an investigation, exchange and circulation of concepts, methods, and techniques. One such group assembled to discuss and elaborate knowledge on methodology in performance (traditionally attributed to a study of poetics and dramaturgy).[10] Another one formed around Open Source for an inquiry into the implications OS as a particular model of social organization, based on horizontal organization, free distribution, and participation, may have on the working process and practice in performance.[11] OS thus empowered a copy left outsourcing of methods and tools for producing performance as an expanding distribution and exchange of knowledge from artistic practice. June 2006. Another group established itself out of the need to revitalize body practice in a manner of non-hierarchical non-authoritarian transmission of technique, which is uncommon to dance.[12] None of them contained themselves in an internal use of information: they deliberately strived to formalize a mental space into a platform available for any users. Thus a physical site is substituted by a virtual one − a website − that begins with a repository of texts and continues in responses, discussions, modifications, the stimulation of more articulation and expressions, and declines the divide between producers and consumers, makers and the audience.

After introducing the situation, i.e. the conditions in which I described these projects ensue from and set forth, I might be closer to defining terms in which I use “space” and “practice” here.

I have adapted the notion of “practice” here from Isabelle Stengers, who considers it an activity that is not free from rules and norms, yet is not normative, in the sense of conforming to a common good.[13] The practice of training a technique at a dance school or a dance company or the practice of applying for a subsidy is a normative or rule-following activity for it conforms to instrumental reason: the practical achievement it will have on the formation of a dancer or company member or a candidate for the status of performing artist. What differentiates the concept of practice that I employ here from a normative one is that it is driven not by the measurement of validity (whether it conforms to standards of the good, the functional or the objective/real), but by the success of empowerment. This is positing practice on a speculative ground of the possible rather than the plausible. Such a practice operates with discursive expressions that cannot have a definitive authoritative value, but are to be transformed in abduction. C. S. Peirce characterized abduction as the logic of creating new thoughts, where a new observation generates a new rule as a possible explanation. Stengers would call Peirce’s dealing with potentiality a culture of hesitation, where a practice depends on contributing to a situation that causes one to think, feel, and wonder. Rather than a norm, this notion of practice entails obligations because obligations can be betrayed when the situation has not given the power to have one thinking, feeling or wondering. A normative practice is not sensitive to situations in which the potential of operative reason is questioned, for there are habits, convictions, conventions, customs that perpetuate and petrify it.

The question is whether a situation with respect to the empowerment a practice contributes to it should be replaced by the term “space”. “Space” has had a long diverging trajectory in social and cultural theory, often marked as “spatial turn” where “space” appears alongside with other geographical metaphors in order to reshuffle and modify a consolidated set of terms and concepts.[14] Perhaps in the same vein it can operate for theorizing the current performance practice, exactly because performance is conventionally classified as a temporal and not a spatial art discipline. So, with the history the concept “space” has had in Gaston Bachelard’s “Poetics of Space”, in Situationism’s “detournement”, in Henri Lefebvre’s “Production of space” and in leftist community practices of squatting and gentrification, it may still help us to sharpen the distinctions,[15] it may still help us to sharpen the distinctions from community, territory and networking. Following Lefebvre’s triad of representations of space, representational spaces and spatial practices (which is equivalent to: 1. the conceived, mental representations such as plans, 2. the lived, symbolic procedures and protocols enacted in a space, and 3. the perceived, spatial patterns in everyday life), community belongs to representational spaces. Insisting on the aspect of community in a practice is to homogenize a group whose very virtue lies in a heteronomy of interests, origins, logics and existential stakes. When a practice is connected with territory, then its purpose and horizon is concerned with the power structure to take over, the boundary to cross, and the inscription to map. Connecting a practice with the concept of territory is stressing the scene in which a practice supposedly takes place, or the concept it is broaching ground for, or the economy it seeks to develop. All this has to do with assigning it a certain mission or aspiration, or claiming it to be a product of a context, while I am interested in defining it in terms of the effects it has and the ways in which it operates. Another term in line with community and territory is networking. Even if every practice involves networking as a fact of late capitalism, practice cannot be reduced to or confused with connectability and establishing a connection, sharing information that includes or excludes. Networking produces interstitial spaces and space in spatial practice is not in the interstice of contact, as in connection, space is something to inhabit. Thus the pragmatic motivation behind introducing the term “space” is to underline “inhabitation”, as opposed to “observation”, “intervention” or “deterritorialization” that operate at a critical distance. Inhabiting excludes the positioning of inside/outside, and all the binary oppositions in which the theater stage confirms its sacredness, or as Foucault put it, our habits of distinguishing between private space and public space, between family space and social space, between cultural space and useful space, between the space of leisure and that of work. A practice propels one to inhabit a space that is external and heterogeneous, connecting and untying many spatial registers at once. It primarily places one in the duration of a process that does not progress linearly from point to point on a map, but at different speeds and trajectories reviewed only in retroaction. A process is knowable if it has a terminus, the condition or constraint that puts forward the moment in which a percept substitutes for a concept.[16] This is a pragmatist speculation that explains the creation of concepts as inventions or events equally stemming from a world seen as a reservoir of activity and from experiencing not just things, but relations that are not secondary or inherent in things, but are external and experienced as real. The emergence of concepts or any other forms of knowledge is thus the crystallization of a process in which one participates before one recognizes it. “Participation precedes recognition” is the rule Brian Massumi derives from Gilles Deleuze and William James.[17] It serves here to construct an experiential approach to performance practice that rests on the belief that experience is not only received, but is composable and that situations need to be built as artificial environments for one to experiment beyond constituted ways. Experimentation in a practice is characterized as a deviation from the procedures that produce known effects. To participate before recognizing what the situation is and what outcome it may have can be described in two ways. The current discourse in visual culture and architecture would define it as a tactic of complicit curiosity scaled to the situation one is currently in, but being more intensely there (read: being affectable and more open to seemingly unrelated heterogeneous input).[18] The Deleuzian discourse would not miss the opportunity to explain it through the Spinosian, cross-bred with pragmatist, lens of “affect”. Massumi deploys it in the place of hope, as a way of talking about that margin of maneuverability, the “where we might be able to go and what we might be able to do’ in every present situation.[19] Affect in the process of a practice is a perception of a changing intensity, intensity that disconnects from significance, and thus changes one’s capacity to act, feel or think. It becomes the conceptual tool to help one discern and focus on a next step as a potentially experimental one, rather than to refrain from any action being overwhelmed by a big utopian picture.

Why would one be doing or considering performance practice in the ways I have described a few exemplary projects and proposed the attribution of spatial practice? A part of the reasons “why” I have already elaborated as the discontents about the sharing, impact and knowledge performance practice has in contemporary society. The other part remains to be seen − as to what performers and makers aim for when they experiment with abilities, capacities, methodology and conceptual tools before or aside from making performances destined for theatre as we know it. Are they aiming for performance to implicate the spectators as users and developers of the same experimentation with abilities, capacities, and the ways of making and representing performance? This is where I satisfy my argument with speculation and not realism, with a venture into possible, but perhaps not plausible concepts and metaphors. They are ways of seeing and naming things that now may not be more than a symptom of a proactive developing tendency or a reactive sideline. But still...

The future is uncertain because it will be what we make it.
Immanuel Wallerstein

And if it’s waiting, it will be self-organized.
Raqs Media Collective

notes:

* This article is published as Frakcija’s contribution to documenta 12 magazines. . Frakcija has been invited to participate in documenta 12 magazines,a collective editorial project linking worldwide over 70 print and on-line periodicals, as well as other media (www.documenta.de)

1. To mention but a few: Tanzplan Deutschland, Kulturstiftungs des Bundes, Berlin, http://www.tanzplandeutschland.de/, Mode05 Towards a new educational model in dance and choreography http://mode05.org/blog/, Festival Context #3 “Learning by Doing”, Hebbelam-Ufer, Berlin, February 2006, artistic laboratory Education Acts! Tanzquartier Wien, May-June 2006.

2. Andrea Fraser, “How to Provide an Artistic Service: An Introduction”, http://www.adaweb.com/~dn/a/ enfra/afraser1.html.

3. Cf. Bojana Cvejic, “Learning by making and making by learning how to learn” in I. Rogoff (ed. a. o.), A.C.A.D.E.M.Y., Revolver, Frankfurt, 2006.

4. PAF was initiated by Dutch theater director and performer Jan Ritsema, and launched in October 2006 in St. Erme, a village 130 km northeast from Paris.

5. From the mission statement on www.pa-f.net

6. “Six months in one location” is a project proposed by Xavier Le Roy and Bojana Cvejic. The history of the project dates from a working group which emerged during MODE05, a conference on education in dance and performance held in Potsdam in March 2005.

7. I am referring here to Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces” (1967) from a handed-down electronic and unpublished translation of a text “Des Espace Autres,” published by the French journal Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité in October, 1984 on the basis of a lecture given by Michel Foucault in March 1967. Although not reviewed for publication by the author and thus not part of the official corpus of his work, the manuscript was released into the public domain for an exhibition in Berlin shortly before Michel Foucault’s death. Translated from the French by Jay Miskowiec.

8. More on 6M1L in Bojana Cvejic, “Continuatie. Zes maanden in één locatie,” Etcetera 104, December 2006, 51-53.

9. The Theatre is a project by International Festival (Mårten Spångberg and Tor Lindstrand).

10. The working group on methodology in performance was initiated and set up by Mette Ingvartsen and Bojana Cvejic as part of Mette Ingvartsen’s research project realized in Nadine, Brussels from March till June 2006.

11. The Open Source Working group consisted of a varying number of choreographers, dancers and performance practitioners since 2006, among who were active Alice Chauchat, Mette Ingvartsen, Petra Sabisch, Króót Juuarak et al.

12. Practicable is a project by Alice Chauchat, Frédéric de Carlo, Frédéric Gies, Isabelle Schad and Odile Seitz, centered on “body practices”, the physical activities based on a conception of the moving body and on a definition of a set of exercises whose aim is to concretely realize this conception.

13. Isabelle Stengers, “Including nonhumans into political theory: Opening the Pandora Box?”,manuscript handed out during the seminar Prof Stengers held at CRMEP at Middlesex University in November, 2006.

14. Cf. Mike Crang, Nigel Thrift (ed.), Thinking Space, Routledge, London-New York, 2000 and Phil Hubbard, Rob Kitchin and Gill Valentine (ed.) Key Thinkers on Space and Place, Sage, London, 2004.

15. Gaston Bachelard, (tr. by John Stilgoe) The Poetics of Space; Beacon Press, London, 1994; Henri Lefebvre (tr. by Donald Nicholson-Smith) The Production of Space, Blackwell, Oxford, 1991; Nicolas Siepen, “Thereby Against”, Frakcija No.39/40, 2006, 8-27.

16. I borrow the concepts of process and terminus from William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, Dover Publications, Dover, 2003.

17. Brian Massumi, Movement, Affect, Sensation: Parables for the Virtual, Duke University, Durham NC, 2002, 230-31.

18. Markus Miessen and Shumon Basar (ed.), Did Someone Say Participate?: An Atlas of Spatial Practice, MIT, Boston, Massachusetts, 2006.

19. Brian Massumi, Navigating Movements, interview with Marie Zournazi.