aesthetics becoming [ALWAYS ELSEWHERE] emotion everywhere [HERE WE ARE]
These are some things that can only exist elsewhere and here and now, are localized in order to participate in a co-emergence of language regarding a time of action whose sensations were largely extra-linguistic – 8 Days IV.
⏂⎿‾ ⏊‾│‾┤ ⏊‾│‾┤ ⏀┼⏈⏀ ⏋⏀⏂⎿├⏅ ┤⎿⎿
Pink City [2014] was released on September 4th 2014, the album is 32 minutes in length and seems to bare no relationship to Jaipur, India aka… the pink city.
⏁⏁ foreword
A documentation of 8 DAYS III is happening here in front of you now. It was happening before the occasion itself as part of the consideration for participating and here, now, we could speculate that it was shimmering somewhere in the thinking-field from which 8 DAYS initially emerged and here, now, it should be said that THIS emergence half-seeks to prolong it’s own act of emerging — 8 DAYS in this sense, to me, is an activity in and of itself – an activity of emerging knowledge, from and towards, the agents of the activity itself.
A rhetoric of ‘continuous inclusion’ with ‘self-maintenance’ [a sustainable-continuous-inclusion or sustainability-until-death with a laissez-faire attitude towards death] [which, by the way, has been subject to [slightly unfair] criticism as a rhetoric of elitism] intact in the mechanism of the activity itself ensures that the content of this activity is not barred entirely into the insularity of group-thought and the imagination — growth as a means of uncovering a new rather than growth which expands through the covering of a new.
Only as broken up does the image appear says Judith Butler of the paintings of Bracha Ettinger – and I say this now of 8 DAYS and any further iterative or implicit action, in this case, documentation. Only as broken up does the image appear — does the activity undergo its own becomings of knowledge, of language, and of worth [VALUE] – and so, this is one way to see that the worthless makes so the capacity for worth.
⏉⏇ it -is trauma
inclusion is an action that may induce trauma – inclusion can be used as a means of rehearsing tauma.
⏅⏅ doing-it
what could be said of an aesthetics of doing? This space now has a semblance of form yet not constructed though desire or decoration. It could even be said that it is not constructed whatsoever. Any perception of ‘construction’ within it negates the definition of ‘construction’ altogether – an agreement on assembly, through it’s own emergence is not currently possible. This is not solely an issue of spectatorship. This is an issue of it itself and the doing-of-it.
“bee, do you feel we are going too fast?” – Sandra Henderson.
⏈⏊‾ everywhere-always
The room is quite large and dark. It has been raining and very well still could be. The skylights, high above, show no distinction of texture or movement they are but portals of illumination, now closed and this darkness is very exciting. Walking through slow impenetrable sculptures, white thick bodies, a-glow under moonlight – emotion is everywhere. These gallery spaces cascade around the fortresses-of-emotion cut together by proximity [togetherness].This is where it is. Not in the people nor in their movement — it is both and neither.
⏄⏄ black-blurry
There is a fade between work and life through art. Art is an activity that blurs — Visible through blur and making blurs visible through fading and co-fading. It is a machine invested-in by other larger machines — telephones, chargers for telephones, chargers for chargers for telephones, etc… This blur is an horror, it allows the largest of machines to take us. More so, it implores us into the submission of our bodies and lives into work which if done so un-checked may obligate ourselves to everything that is unwanted.
“to not use qualifiers to describe that which we are doing” – Evan Webber.
⎿‾⏉ re-move-all
These days have become a shedding; slowly my cold is now leaving, still maintains the dredges of a stubborn cough. My guard is down — I am very much allowing myself to feel things, even yesterday — leading the group through practices alongside Bee and Laurie was a process of shedding. This sort of… look… this is what I am interested in… look and talk about it with me, or in-front of me. and this looking was also my uncovering. Now that this has been done and gone through I feel exposed or perhaps even the potential for “Real” exposure or “Actual” exposure has been made.
⏃⏄ N’SYNC
“Participation through synchronization does not involve me as a whole, as an entity that can be an integral part of a larger entity. It implicates me as a ‘divisible individual’, to borrow Bertolt Brecht’s wording: as someone whose very mode of existence, of attention for the world and for myself, is that of distraction. Because my attention will always be devided, no matter how hard I try to concentrate, what I do will always have to do with multiple collectivities at a time. Modifying a phrase by Heinrich von Kleist, one might say: it is not I who participates with a part of my attention, but rather a certain partition of my attention that performs participation. If to participate means to participate in something, the allocation of power in processes of participation concerns the definition of this “in”. Divided attention in a state of polychronicity, of synchronization with several collectivities, performatively claims access to (co-)defining the network of relations the “in” encompasses. The answer to the obnoxious question ‘And you, what are you doing here?’ is : What I am doing is part of what constitutes this here.”
(Kai van Eikels, ‘From ‘Archein’ to ‘Prattein’: Suggestions for an Un-creative Collectivity’ in Rehearsing Collectivity, Choreography Beyond Dance, argobooks 2012. page 13)
⏉⎶ REPORT — it
In brief, what activities did you plan to undertake?
8 DAYS is becoming an activity in of itself. We stand on the precedent set through previous iterations of the project [8 DAYS I (2012) and 8 DAYS II (2013)], however we do not attempt to repeat the specific actions articulated in previous years. We know that we will do, and we know that this doing will be completely in relationship to dance because the structure of the project is so purely crafted of a material that is dance through an architecture that is choreographic.
I remember in the first iteration of the project, we planned to do things over email before the project began. These desires for a time quickly melted into the actions of living the time itself. 8DAYS is an activity made of dance.
Pre-work is spent organizing the mechanics of the time; where will people sleep? how will they get here? What will they eat? and how?. In fact the central prescribed activity of the group is the preparation and consumption of food. Lunch and supper and spent together. Teams are organized for meal prep and clean-up. This timetable of eating is our primary mediator of time and everything revolves around these essential and corporeal choreographies.
Leading up to the project participants were asked to think in regards to themselves: we were asked to articulate our practices, we were asked to think about DOCUMENTATION. On the train in from Montreal, MC Forte and Claudia Fancello organized the kitchen schedule, I purchased boat tickets and Coke ZERO, Laurie Young sat and waited for people at the ferry docks while Christopher House and Ame Henderson swept the floors of our studios.
We knew that we were going to invite a public into our spaces and the work at one point through out the week.
⏇⏆ AND VOYAGER? *
There are the direct-benefits of 8 DAYS which increase within the soul of the individual participant. The knowledges and languages experienced by the individual throughout the activity of 8DAYS will deepen in richness and understanding, now entering the multi- other resonance-field that is the Canadian dance ecology but also life itself.
The immediate-potential-benefits of 8 DAYS emerge from the other-sides of the aforementioned conversation [the multi-other resonance-field that is the Canadian dance ecology]. In that, we who participate in 8 DAYS un-cover these expansions and emergences in knowledge and bring them, as resource, to the field we work in. Everyone now whom we touch in a professional context [but also life itself] will also take from the time itself of 8 DAYS. The most blessed property of the economy of dance-making is that [almost] every artistic endeavour in dance requires togetherness and communication. 8 DAYS is an activity emergent from this special potential.
The potential-future-benefits of 8 DAYS III is that a precedent has been set now being the third iteration. Through it’s repetition of three, 8 DAYS has developed a political economy defined through continuous-inclusion [a term I first heard articulated by Ame Henderson during the time she was making Voyager]. Dance, alongside many other fields and modes of life, suffers to processes of survivalist economies and projective temporalities; desires for making work live always in the actuality of affordance and capacity, and individual artistic practices are compromised towards the temporality of any specific project necessitating the continuous accumulation of project after project. An activity suchlike 8DAYS which now risks the proposal of continuing, but continuing through both the maintenance of itself and integrity while still envisaging it’s expansion proposes a politic and economy outside of survivalism and non-projective. This problem that an 8 DAYS IIII [that is my first time writing that] offers is quite rare and beautiful.