Ric Allsopp: “Notes on Poetics and Choreography“
21.10.2013 I 11 am-1:00 pm keynote and discussion
For the third Erasmus Intensive on Composition: Poetics and Procedures this initial keynote asks what might be at stake for individual solo work, signature and authorship, and provides a background to what might constitute a poetics of radical coherence for individual practice. It aligns a poetics of writing with a poetics of movement and draws on work in both mid-twentieth century projective and contemporary poetics (Olson, Bruns, Fisher, Nichols) and a poetics of contemporary dance (Louppe) that suggests that both poetry and dance are 'languages' that operate in excess of the functions of language, and open the possibilities of radical approaches to coherence and affection.
By: Ric Allsopp
Read the full paper online (click here)
By: Ric Allsopp
Read the full paper online (click here)
Video documentation of the lecture (in three parts):
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Video references included in the presentation:
Cocteau, Jean (1949) dir. Orpheé - Radio Transmissions
Clarinda Mac Low (2012) The Pronouns (Experiment #1)
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Bob Cobbing (1968) Marvo Movie Natter
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Reports&reflections
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Notes on
Descriptive Exercise
22nd of October
Poetics
Following Ric Allsopp's lecture: Notes on Poetics and Choreography it was debated whether there could be such a discussion on the existence of apoeticity within performance.
This questioning produced a creative response in the form of Descriptive Exercise where it was decided that a solo performer would attempt to perform a series of actions in relation to a bottle, using the space. The performer talks us through her activities as she is doing them.
The group posed two questions to be answered both by the viewer and the spectator:
1) What is your interpretation of poetic?
2) Was this performance poetic or apoetic for you and why?
Response from spectator (Gareth Chambers)
Poetics?
Poetics what do I care? I don’t care for them.
Or do I?
What is the feeling I acquire when I think of poetics? But is it in the first place?
From what I gathered it is how text produces certain effects to the reader/spectator/viewer/voyeur ( List is endless).
I wrestle with the poetic and it’s meanings. It is a snake covered in grease.
There is a struggle going on here, a battle. It’s mine not yours. You have your own reading.
Poetics can free you, give you wings to fly over the dirt, however it can be the dirt that weighs you down, it covers your boots. Weighs heavy.
It infiltrates, seeps in through the cracks, the crack that appear in the early morning sun, it is the language your tongue finds hard to physicalize.
How can I roll that R? Say that T sound?
But once it is mastered you are fluent. And it can take you anywhere. You can speak to many.
But what is a green bottle?
Response from spectator (Soili Huhtakallio)
1. At the moment I understand term poetic through how I observe things and phenomenon in relation to each other. For instance yesterday morning I saw poetry between the morning suns light and buildings and the people on the street, observed from the balcony during the breakfast. Of course this is quite a cliché. I feel that the poetry is connected to the rhythm and duration of things. Sometimes there is no space for things to become poetic...
2.... Like in this performance and/or exercise that Helena shared with us things were done more or less just by executing the task. She positioned herself into space with the bottle and stayed in those positions so short time that there wasn't really a lot of time to start to sense that much than just to observe what was happening. In the performance there is also this interesting twist between things being done and still being somehow affected be the space -> things happening or emerging more than someone creating them. It's interesting how she makes her choices how to set herself to stage. When I watched the exercise again from the video the performance being poetic was different each time. But when the poetic emerged, it was in spatial positioning of Helena and bottle. When they were lying parallel to each other I felt certain resemblance between them that was enjoyable in its simplicity. Also after all this executing tasks the one to be as close to the bottle as possible gought my attention in a slightly poetic way. Maybe this happened because of the change of the rhythm in performance emerging from the necessity not by choice of the performer - not created but happening still.
Response from spectator (Tamsyn Butt)
- The definition of poetic is problematic purely because it covers a wide range of contexts including, perhaps most essentially, the position of the performer and that of the spectator. In an online dictionary definition it states poetics is “having a quality or style” (thefreedictionary.com) but what is this quality? In Ric Allsopp's lecture he drew parallels between the poetics of writing and the poetics of movement and the endless possibilities that occur within these transformations into meanings. Based on this comparison I would suggest that if language is something that performs to us because it generates meaning than surely movement is to be read in the same way? I would like to offer the idea of poetics as a sensory experience which perhaps goes back to the idea of quality.
- Watching the first 30 seconds of Descriptive Exercise it seems to me that as spectators we are guided into the performance by the performer's instructions to herself. For example, the performer says “I will relate between the space and the bottle”. As a spectator I feel safely assured that as I know what her actions will be. The performance feels slightly pedestrian and as a result I estimate there will be reduced meanings, feelings, emotions. However I am already judging her economic status when she describes the clothes she is wearing. Maybe my initial feeling of non-expectation opens up even more possibilities of experiencing the “Otherness” that Allsopp talks about. Once this seal is broken the performance becomes, for me the spectator, a shifting of relations in time and space which at some point even make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. For example, the moment the performer gets as close to the bottle as possible without touching it. I know she is going to do this but I am not prepared for the pleasure I encounter in this demonstration of minimal proximity, from slow motion to stillness. I equally eagerly anticipate the dynamic she will hold or break when she is standing still on a horizontal plane staring down at the bottle. There is most definitely a relationship in both examples and the relationship is limitless. Surely this is poetic? It is then a case, as Allsopp suggests, that poetics is not what I experience but how I experience it.
Performer’s Response (Helena Botto)
- Poetics is perhaps something that may bring a multiplicity of possibilities of readings and/or experiences. It may be something that breaks a linear action, may be silence... It seems also to exist more often in a relation between parts (elements). Can it exist in a single act that does not relate parts? Perhaps it can, because the perception of it by the viewer is already establishing a relation.
Apoetics, something that has only one meaning or possibility. “I'm doing what I'm saying that I'm doing”. I'm illustrating the sense can actually
become more reduced, more narrow. It doesn't widen, it is only what it is. It doesn't provoke or estimulate anything in the viewer, it is a kind of
“neutral” existence and it has a kind of “neutral” presence.
2. The Performer's Experience:
I tried to experience an apoetic state in a performative act. Trying to execute exactly what I was describing. Trying not to achieve an extra-daily state of performing or presence. Trying to define what it is simply as what it is. A green bottle is a green bottle because someone did it like that an
that is all. This is my body, in this space at this time. I'm wearing my daily clothes and all is as it is presented and described. The movement that
occurs through the relation of my body with the green bottle in that space is what it is, a product resulting from the execution of precise tasks that are given and described previously or at the same time. This was an improvised exercise and wants to be exactly what it is. Perhaps one element of failure on it was the fact that in the afternoon when we decided to document it, we started immediately settling the camera, setting the angle and defining the space of “performance”. This careful preparation already gave it an extra-daily side, which perhaps made conditionate some moments where conditions for the apoecity to be broken. Nonetheless I would say 95% of it was apoetic.