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Dear friends, perhaps our own state of permanent exception would work for now
This is a work in progress by the artistic collective _ et al.
(Eirini Melianou, Nanna Bruun, Natasha Joubert, Polena Kolia Petersen).
In this work Polena invited 3 of her close friends to collaborate and co-exist in a co-created virtual space (Research Catalogue), where they exchanged letters and together formed practices / acts (sensuous, embodied and/or visual) that addressed matters of affective relations, sensuous connections to the world and collective creation of more desirable and more sustainable futures.
In May 2021 our collective distant process was amalgamated into a solo performance by Polena Kolia Petersen and presented in the theatre of The Danish National School of Performing Arts in Copenhagen. For me, Polena, the process of transforming a sensuous collective process into a solo performance confronted me with several ethical questions of responsibility and representation as well as my ego and insecurities to prove my worth as a dancer with the responsibility to "represent" our collective work. However, this work -collective and solo- stands very dear to me and I would love to revisit the performative manifestation with the wisdom of this experience.
Dear friend, you can travel through the pages of the book -one of the manifestations of the project:
OUR MANIFESTO
We feel an urge to do things collectively, even though we are
very much on our own. We are in Greece and in different parts
of Denmark, we are in jobs, in schools, in isolation, on islands.
But once a week we are on common ground, in the same
present, though not in the same space. We meet through zoom
and it is what it is and we try to overcome that. So what does it
mean to be a collective and how much will it demand from each
of us? We wonder if it is possible to take care of each other
through distance, we wonder how to create intimacy through
distance and we wonder how far conversation will take us. Can
we share a space through the screen without communicating
with words? We want to initiate conversation and imagination
around what it feels like to have a body in this world. We want
to try to share our experiences of being alive and to do that we
feel the need to experiment with communication. We want to
urge each other to pay attention and listen, to the small, the
rare, the unfamiliar, the daily. We want to become
hypersensitive, hyperaware, hyper feeling beings who care a lot.
We want to reach that very concrete task and meaning, that lies
behind all the abstract and fluffy, we want to aim for the better
future that is an illusion, in order to build new roads, leading us
somewhere new, or maybe nowhere new, only elsewhere but
enjoying the journey together. We want to feel engaged with the
world again after a year of isolation, of not touching, of not
sharing space, of not talking much. We are trying to resocialize
and prepare ourselves for what comes next. But we are also
trying to invest ourselves in what is already there, next to us, in
front of us, around us. We put our bodies through experiments
that we don't understand, because we still hope and still believe.
In senses over intellectual. In surprises. In the irrational.
We surrender to the cliches and to pluralities.
Photos from the performance:
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