Abstract: Dialogues with someone without ever meeting each other in person; exposing the process of an encounter with someone through a set of rules that explore exposure beyond a physical meeting; an invitation to get involved in a dialogue through texts and assemblages of various textures (images, notation, figures, maps, photos, illustrations…). This process will consist of various movements and exchanges with someone you (ideally) haven’t met and won’t meet during the whole period of the blind dating for activate.

It is a three step process, and participants choose individually in which order to move through them:
1) Collect gestures or experiences of exposure and translate the sensory, perceptual, and formal content onto the page in text(ure)s.
2) Address exposure exclusively through visual material (photos, drawings, graphics, comics, stills, video, etc.)
3) Exchange about blind spots (scotomata) in one’s personal and/or public performance through texts, sounds and images.

Below is a collection of responses to these three tasks. These (inter)textual movements exposed with “eyes wide shut”, complicating the relationship between what is revealed and hidden. All material was sent to activate, which acted as a link between the two so that they could remain anonymous to one another throughout their conversation. The weekly exchanges alternated between task and response, and in the end, an edited version was compiled by activate.

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Irene Liverani just began a PhD in the Drama, Theatre and Performance department of Roehampton University. Her BA and MA studies were communication and theatre direction, and she comes from a background in dance. Her research interest focuses on the emergence of a temporality of co-presence in the arts, and its impact on narration. She is active in the performing arts, notably as a member of laPeriferia – www.laperiferia.eu. She has focused her practice on interactive projects / experimental settings, where patterns of multiple choices unfold. She is active in the organization of a summer performing arts festival in Italy.

Victoria Gray is a performance artist and writer based in York and London. Her work has been presented nationally and internationally, including Siobhan Davies Dance Studios and Chisenhale Studios (London). Her academic writing has been published in the edited collection ‘Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices (Intellect)’, in the Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices (Intellect) and Total Art Journal (Canada). She is a PhD Candidate at Chelsea College of Art and Design (London), a Lecturer in Performance at York St John University and co-director of O U I Performance (York). For further information please see: www.victoriagray.co.uk.

Katerina Drakopoulou (co-author of seminar performance PUZZLE)
Maro Zacharogianni (co-author of seminar performance PUZZLE)

Abstract: PUZZLE – theatre of consciousness critical work is the 3rd circle of PUZZLE attempting to get into an encounter between the original seminar performance PUZZLE and this other dimension of contextualizing ‘theatre of consciousness’ and its method by choosing a radical example, on talking with other’s people’s tongue. PUZZLE series is part of the on-going research with the title ‘polyrhythmic realities’ which has its core of interest in the intermediary space of conscious and subconscious, triggered by the distortion of the notion of space. There is where the looping question reoccurs on the relation of spectator and spectator-ship, in the points of what is seen, who/how is looking and what is perceived, gives its constant feedback; but if there isn’t a spectator there is no spectator-ship and and there is no spectator-ship if there is no spectacle. In reference to the fact of one perceiving things that are not immediately evident… the viewer experiences an architectural representation of a brain scan, via the constant reconstruction of image and speech.

In the seminar, two performers are brought together in order to create a relation based on the view through a glass mirror cup object. The object becomes a lens of observation to their perception of reality. A surveillance camera captures their action, and a television streams the recorded action. Within the composition of PUZZLE – seminar performance, the performer is initially developing a relation to the self, further the relation to the mirrored object returning to self and in continuation to the other. In both practical and theoretical sense, the use of a mirrored object, the spatial arrangements, and the sequence of elements given are placing the performer and the audience in a direct research. Gilles Deleuze informs on one less manifesto ‘The true power of theatre is inseparable from the representation of the power of theatre, even if that is a critical representation.’ Yet while exposure of a performance act is delivered by a mediated viewing to the public, there is no concept as such of representation.

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Maria Lalou is an artist and independent researcher born in Athens in 1977, living in Amsterdam. Lalou works with the science of objects – containers, spatial installations, accumulated performances and film, developing context as of extensions of architecture. Lalou’s specialization at glass science has been evolving in contextualizing aspects of mass / surface / space/ time /duration in the sphere of cognition by challenging the bodily experience and questioning alignment of the vertical and horizontal, disposition and disorientation; as a performance within the politics of time. She graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and is currently a researcher at DasArts Amsterdam. Her works has been shown amongst others in De Oude Kerk Museum in Amsterdam, in the Contemporary Art Museum of Thessaloniki during the 2nd Biennale of Thessaloniki and in ‘Living Spaces’-2nd Contemporary Art Festival in Damascus. For more info visit http://reaction-lalou.com

Abstract: My research attempts to trace the process of evolution of the concept of the body in Butoh practice and performance as experienced by the dancers themselves and as viewed by the spectator. A process that is not only seen as taking place on the physical plane defined by the readily traceable, visible contours of the sensible but also as a subtler process of inner transformation that leads the dancer towards transcendence of the body’s materiality.

Analysing briefly Hijikata Tatsumi’s first butoh performance, it can be seen that butoh dancers initially problematised the body by stripping it from all artificiality – literally from clothes and metaphorically from the restrictions of social norms. That translated a vivid desire to return to a primitive, pre-reflexive state of being – evoking Japan’s mythical past – in which movement would urge spontaneously without any conscious dictates. Or, I will argue that this is not possible unless the classic dichotomy between a thinking mind and an acting body disappears and the dancer becomes, in phenomenological terms, conscious of the world through his body.

An exploration of Yoko Ashikawa’s experience on stage shows that the ‘full’ consciousness of existing ‘in’ the body is simultaneously experienced as a state of emptiness, of forgetfulness of the ‘I’ in which dancing is experienced as a movement from the body of matter to the nonmaterial larger body of a universalized self.

For the dancers of Sankai Juku, the preoccupation with the transcendence of the materiality of the body becomes systematic. Observing their itinerary from the 80’s till present, it is seen how with its materiality continuously challenged, the dancing body unveils its potentiality to carry the dancer towards the unknown and to unlock the secrets of the inner self.

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Eleni Lorandou has studied classical Manipuri dance (North-East India) with Guru Bipin Singh, Kalavati Devi and the Jhaveri sisters. Twice an ICCR (Indian Council for Cultural Relations) scholar, she has a Masters in Dance from Rabindra Bharati University, Calcutta and a PhD in Performing Arts from Pune University. She has performed mainly in India and assisted in many seminars and workshops. She has researched extensively on Indian, Indonesian and Japanese dance and theatre with focus on the subtleties of movement and gesture but also on the underlying philosophy. After an MA in Philosophy from Paris, in 2012 she began research towards a doctorate on Kashmir Shaivism with Lancaster University.

Abstract: This article explores notions of exposure in the work of Spanish artist La Ribot, more specifically looking at Another Bloody Mary. It addresses ideas of physical exposure, as well as exposure of ‘the traces of [a] false promise’, to use Rebecca Schneider’s terminology (1997, p. 52). Theatre’s false promise of pleasure is here examined through the use of the body, drawing on Sprinkle’s Post Porn Modernism. These two kinds of exposure are interrelated and discussed in terms of spectatorship.

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Eirini Kartsaki writes and performs. She has presented her work nationally and internationally (Hayward Gallery, V&A, Arnolfini, Soho Theatre, Cambridge Junction, Whitechapel Gallery, Camden People’s Theatre, The Place, Biennale d’Art Contemporain de Lyon). Eirini has completed her doctoral thesis entitled ‘Repeat Repeat: Returns of Performance’ at Queen Mary, University of London. Her performance work, which is about and from the body, explores desire, gender and language and discovers through the physicality of movement and the repetitive storytelling that, ultimately, what we want is to want. Lyon, etc.) and has published in journals Activate, PerformArt and Choreographic Practices. Eirini is a Senior Lecturer in Drama in Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge.

Abstract: As a burlesque performer, I’m well acquainted with the mechanics of exposure. Much of my life is lived naked in front of an audience, for pleasure. And pay.

Under my skin however, I write a narrative for myself that I am reticent to let anyone read. Soft squashed viscera with a story scrawled by my own hand across my innards. I’m forever oroborous-ing, eating back my words just to etch them on my bones.

To get at exposing, I have embarked on a creative intervention into internal nudity. I bare my body frequently, but rarely open my skull, my heart, my conscience for similar inspection. In fact, I tell lies to get around it. Dirty, mashed-up, squished-in lies. All in service of not sharing my skin-space with you. I’ve wrapped my insides in steel-wool to shred your hands if you grab. But it also chafes me raw.

Tiring of this superficial striptease, I will now dissect myself on the page. I want to crack my ribs open for you, and let myself out. This project is a performative score, equal parts burlesque theatre, operating room, and cannibalistic buffet. I want my words to unfold as tantalizingly as a strip, leaving me, the writer, peeled like a grape for your prying eyes. I want the page to sizzle, to titillate, to arouse, even though what I reveal for you is grotesque.

A piece of performative writing that hustles for tips.

I long to strip myself in writing. Peel my mental defenses like gloves, strip off my ego like stockings, snap away at my self-preservation like a front-closing bra. I’ll leave my clothes on, but I hope to show you something more titillating, with words as garments.

Disgustingly gorgeous voyeurism.
To counts of 8 in service of truthful ecdysiasm.

Let me entertain you.

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Molly Beth Seremet is a performance artist, burlesque performer, and writer based in New York City. She earned her M.Res with Distinction in Performance and Creative Research from Roehampton University in 2011. Her work is seated in explorations of body and identity, and oscillates around questions of autobiography, memory, and sexuality. She is the founder of Morse Code Theatre Company, and is currently creating a performance piece focused on Evelyn McHale, ‘The World’s Most Beautiful Suicide.’

Abstract: In this article, I seek to contextualise the work of Croatian collaborative performance collective BADco., specifically their performance Memories Are Made of This…Performance Notes (2006) which I witnessed at Chelsea Theatre (London) on 8 November 2008. By doing so I will perform an act of ‘double exposure’. Firstly, and perhaps on a meta-level, I will expose myself by describing a very personal experience of a performance that I felt intrigued, but also exposed by. Secondly, I will discuss the potentials of ‘inserting’ One to One encounters and their aftermaths into a formal theatrical framework by paying careful attention to the complex relationship between spectator and performer.

Writer and academic Rachel Zerihan has stated: ‘to feel an intimate interaction with ‘the performer’ can heighten the intensity of audience reception’ (2008: [my notes]). Within this proposed framework, I will consider concepts such as intimacy and exposure as possible effects that can develop from this relationship. Furthermore, I will explore the problematic dynamics and ethical implications that arise from an unusual performance situation. What happens when collective and singular spectatorship meet in one performance?

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Antje Hildebrandt is a London-based choreographer and performer who is currently undertaking a practice-led PhD project in the dance department at the University of Wolverhampton. She gained a MA (dist) in Dance Theatre: The Body in Performance from TrinityLaban (London) and a first honours degree in Dance and Arts Management from De Montfort University (Leicester).

Her work, which takes the form of conventional theatre pieces as well as site-specific works and installations, has been presented in various platforms and festivals in the UK, Germany, Italy and Sweden. As well as making solo work she often collaborates with other artists (for example performance writer Rachel Lois Clapham) and she has worked and performed with Serbian Artistic Collective Doplgenger, Willi Dorner, Lea Anderson, Ivana Müller, Franko B and Tino Sehgal. Antje is a member of Trio, a collective of four artists who are interested in collaborative performance practice.

Abstract: Still_Movil is a project that took place in 2010 and 2011 between the London-based photographer Manuel Vason and the South American organization Red Sudamericana de Danza. 50 South American artists, choreographers and dancers were commissioned to create a new dance piece which would take the form and duration of a single image created in collaboration with Manuel Vason. The result of their collaboration was 45 images as well as a process, more images, a site, workshops, texts, films, drawings, a book and a few exhibitions. This ‘re-view’ is an attempt to re-visit the project through Still_Movil site and ask how the dancing bodies are exposed to translation and therefore difference through the medium of photography.

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Elena Koukoli is a London based visual artist and choreographer. Her early practice embraced various mediums including drawing, video and photography. It took the form of large installations through which she explored notions of authorship and the gallery space setting as site of common exchange, and participation between artist and audience. She has exhibited work in various galleries and platforms throughout Greece, Italy, and the UK. Currently a PhD research student at Laban, she is mostly focusing on the medium of performance and more specifically on notions of reconstruction, appropriation, and performativity within theatre. Her works are usually multifaceted short events leaning across disciplines of experimental theatre, dance and visual arts. She works with pre-existent texts (the ballet of Giselle (1841), Site (1964) by R. Morris with C. Schneemann, Trio A by Y. Rainner (1966), Both Sitting Duet (2002) by J. Burrows and M. Fargion, Les Noces (1923) by B. Nijinska) trying to explore the histories they derive from and the histories they have become part of. Therefore, through her practice she interrogates certain post-production tactics as well as discusses alternative productions of archival knowledge. She questions the specifics of reconstruction, and re-enactment, across dance and visual arts practices proposing a cross-disciplinary intervention into the performance of the archive. Each scene, each small instantiation follows the conventional narrative and yet, it constitutes a slip from history which bears the potential for new contexts to emerge. Along those lines, she is interested in the potential opened by meeting other artists, and talking or sharing her individual art practice with a greater audience. Apart from individual projects, she is also working on international collaborations (she is a founding member of the performance collectives: Trio and KangarooCourt) and has worked as a performer for other practitioners (Nicola Conibere, Augusto Corrieri, Patricia Lennox- Boyd). http://elenakoukoli.blogspot.com/

Abstract: My research explores the process of movement creation within an oppositional improvisational practice in which I attempt to improvise using movements that do not belong to the established dance schools and genres that constituted my formal dance training. This places my body in a state of tension with itself, as it is forced to negotiate its way out of its (and my) embedded kinetic habits and to find and articulate an unknown path of kinetic exploration.

Following a brief contextualisation of my habitus-averse improvisation within a historical tradition of resistance in the visual and body-based artistic practices, I will endeavour to clarify the politics of artistic dissent and to identify ways to articulate its possibility of existence.

In particular, I will argue that the attempt to achieve self-determination through the improvisational body counts as an act of resistance for which possible theoretical frameworks are offered by Michel de Certeau’s notions of tactical and strategic actions and Jacques Rancière’s police, dissensus and politics.

While explaining the possible mechanics of collective resistance to normativity, de Certeau’s and Rancière’s analyses also imply the existence of individual bodies that are neither the passive product of cultural moulding, nor the unmitigated expression of biological imperatives, since neither would allow for acts of dissent.

Referring to Susan Leigh Foster’s analysis, I identify the condition for the possibility of individual dissent in the existence of agency: the body’s ability to act independently of, or to question, conformity. The agentic -or oppositional- body is defined through its sustained organic engagement with the world it is shaped by and which it shapes, rather than by prescribed and inescapable behavioural, cultural or structural modes. With specific reference to the practice of oppositional improvisation, I suggest that the constitutive element of agency could be identified in the selective use of kinaesthesia.

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Eun Hi Kim is a final year Ph.D. student at the University of Surrey School of Arts. After learning ballet at a very young age, Eun Hi embraced contemporary dance. She performed extensively and choreographed several productions. Before coming to the UK, in 2001, Eun Hi worked for six years as a lecturer in dance theory and practice at several South Korean universities and held a position as artistic director of the Dankook University dance company. Once in the UK, she completed an MA in dance studies -also at Surrey- and collaborated with British choreographer Rosemary Butcher for ad hoc projects and for the film-work The Return (2005). This offered her the opportunity to explore an approach to improvisational movement removed from the kinetic frameworks of dance genres that had constituted her formative training and previous practices. This experience inspired her current research into the theoretical feasibility and the mechanisms of oppositional improvisation. In particular, she engages with the notions of agency and kinaesthesia as a means of resisting the normativity of genres.

Abstract:
In the staircase the stairs are of wood and worn down. An older woman who lives a little down from Angelique has her toilet outside her apartment behind a door in the staircase and one day she didn´t make it because there was a piece of shit on the wooden stair outside the toilet.

Emanuelle has classes in the morning and after that she has to walk through the Luxembourg Garden to Raspail where the afternoon classes are held. She buys a baguette with eggs, and mayonnaise and tomato and eats on the way. After school they go to have coffee at a trendy place behind the Bastille. From there you could steal big rolls of toilet paper from the toilet and bring home. But Emanuelle doesn´t, only Angelique. When the orders are ready the waiters shout behind the counter. “Hot Chocolate!” Emanuelle thinks it´s disturbing when they are shouting. They are having a show there behind the counter.

Emanuelle buys a pair of platform boots in grey suede in the mall at Les Halles. Lucille is laughing at the sound when Emanuelle walks up the stairs to their apartment, how they galumph in the stairs,

Lucille and Emanuelle go grocery shopping, Lucille likes grocery shopping. Emanuelle thinks they buy too much food and Emanuelle always thinks she has spent more money than Lucille, but mostly it is Emanuelle who owes money to Lucille when they are calculating the balance.

They mostly eat natural yoghurt with no fat with liquid honey on it and macaronie and ketchup.

Emanuelle also thinks she washes the dishes most frequently. It strikes her that she always thinks she is at the minus account but actually isn´t. She interferes with Lucille throwing her coat on the armchair when she enters through the door.

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Anna Kinbom was born 1980 in Stockholm. She holds a BFA from Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm and is currently enrolled as a Master student at the same institute. In 2011 she was a guest student in Performance Art at Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna. She writes concrete poetry and make performances in her practice, she often includes painting and drawing in my work, as painted or drawn by staged characters. She creates characters, writes texts for Characters or about them. She stages herself as the characters in videos or live performances. She goes on journeys to find characters in her work. Recent performances and presentations of her work have been displayed at Paradox Conference in Cork (Ireland), Latest Music Bar (Brighton) and Högkvarteret in Stockholm. She most recently participated in Some Exercise in Complex Seeing is Needed at the Art Academy´s Rundgang in Vienna.

Abstract:
‘Aesthethics’ designates the simultaneous prominence of aesthetics and ethics in David Greig’s The American Pilot (2005) in the context of globalization and the frame of the ethical turn, which in recent reassessments emphasizes the centrality of form, notably in Nicholas Ridout’s Theatre & Ethics (2009). Taking Nicolas Bourriaud and Jacques Rancière’s notions of aesthetics and Judith Butler and Helena Grehan’s conceptualizations of ethics as theoretical framework, I will exemplify this two-fold paradigm with the above-mentioned play. The idea of intervention of the ‘sensible’ has been prompted by Greig’s statement in Rough Theatre that the global-media institutions colonize perception by posing a single narrative superstructure around which imagination grows. Drawing on Rancière and Butler, I argue that the ‘sensible’ implies mental and bodily dimensions in the globalized milieu exploring the ways in which the play’s characters are entrapped in a global-media inflicted picture of themselves resulting in the most disastrous consequences. By positing various radical alterities to the spectator, the play abounds in ’aesthethic’ micro-situations (Rancière), which in turn foreground the reversibility of proximity and distance (Butler) that, as examined, is the mechanism whereby the ‘aesthethico’-political resonances are generated. An intervention of the ‘sensible’ emerges as a result of the utilization of ‘aesthethic’ strategies I have identified as stage ‘ghostings’ and grotesque bodies. The article concludes that theatre’s emphasis on form is particularly relevant in terms of intervention of the ‘sensible’ in the media-saturated globalized society.

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Verónica Rodríguez is Ph.D. candidate at the University of Barcelona and research assistant for “The representation of politics and the politics of representation in post-1990 British drama and theatre”, a three-year research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (FFI 2009-075981FILO) currently under the Ministry of Economy and Competence. She graduated from the University of Murcia with a major in English Studies. In 2011, she completed an MA in Comparative Literature (University of Murcia). She is currently working on her Ph.D. thesis, which focuses on David Greig’s plays and globalization and is supervised by Mireia Aragay. She was awarded a Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst bursary in October 2011, which allowed her to have her work supervised by Martin Middeke, executive member of CDE. She has recently given papers at the colloquium “NOW, Legacies, Amnesia” (Goldsmiths College, February 19, 2011) and the symposium “Theatre and Alternative Value A TaPRA Posgraduate Symposium“ (Royal Holloway, January 28, 2012).