CAFx SHMOG | Six Movement Variations
22nd June, 2018 SHMOG
Our movements re-interpret and explore thought processes set in motion by the artists and architects of the museum. Movement as an art form cannot but address the notion of ‘thingliness’. By extending objects and spaces into movements we reverse the dominant directionality whereby objects and spaces extend our capacities. Through this reversal, we and the museum raise fundamental questions about the commanding presence of objects and their ability to diminish our capacity to produce non-subjugated subjectivities.
‘Six Movement Variations’ is the first of a series that engages with this complex discussion. It emphasizes repetition, stillness, and synchronicity: modes of movement we are all familiar with and have internalized.
Each Movement Variation explores different choreographies of commonality:
First Movement
by Zhouzhou and Shu
‘What is the Nature of Time?’ The first movement begins with a game about time played (until recently) by children all over the world and proceeds to contrast clock time, the perpetual perishing present, and psychological time, that is interpenetrations between pasts, presents, and futures.
Second Movement
by Wu Jiayu with Yuan Yang, Spitsyna Mariya, Anna and Yueming
‘What Movements does a Glass Vessel elicit from its Maker?’ Objects choreograph gestures during the process of becoming. In this performance, we explore spinning. Spinning is one of the oldest human crafts. It first converted fiber into thread, that is it condensed mass into a linear order. In human movement, our arms begin to extend when we spin our bodies.
In glassblowing spinning too uses the centrifugal force. The glassblower rolls a hollow stick with a mass of hot glass at its end. The radial outward force creates symmetry. The craftsman rolls the stick with great sensitivity and watches as he guides the mass of glass into a form: he has only a short span of time during which the glass is malleable.
The human body too can only turn for a limited time. We become dizzy. Deprived of our vision, we rely solely on sound in order to (re)-orientate ourselves in space.
Aware of the positional disorder of atomic bonds in spin glass, the dancer in this piece also tentatively dialogues with the hexagonal floor on which she spins.
Third Movement
by Wang Jiaming
What can we learn from Glass? Microscopic Vision and Perceptual Intensification.
The terrain behind the movement is our sense of balance, the oldest one of all senses and without which movement cannot be.
Fragile Balance: a man balances on a pipe of glass, seeking stillness. Keeping still for 24 minutes at a time, the body performs multiple layers of intensity. To maintain balance the body moves in a thousand hidden directions: minuscule movements become visible once we move stillness to the foreground of perception.
Fourth Movement
by Steph D'Sibö
Becoming other
Becoming flame: wriggling upwards and merging pieces of solid into a mass of fluid.
Becoming heat: expanding in ripples and setting air free.
Becoming light: shooting along the straight lines of a refracting ray.
In this participatory work with the interactive multimedia installation Fusion, the dancer takes the public on an alchemical journey from a grain of sand to the flame that melts it to the light that refracts when it encounters glass.
Fifth Movement
by Lena Kilina
‘Where does the sound of a voice go?’
‘What happens to words when they are sung?’
Echoes, Ripples, and Repetition.
It has been argued that during the Renaissance ’glass literally opened people’s eyes and minds and turned western civilization from the aural to the visual mode of interpreting experience.’ Alan Macfarlane[1]
How did we interpret the world before the visual mode became dominant?
In Greek mythology, Echo embodies unrequited love. In one of the two stories about the nymph, her love is not returned by Narcissus, he who cannot tear himself away from his reflection in the water. In the other story, it is Echo who does not return the love of Pan, God of the Wild, also described as the God heard but not seen. In both myths, the experience sends her to the depth/caves of the earth.
It is in subterranean space where also the first labyrinths were built in Greek sanctuaries. Both space and voice were lifted above ground by the theatre. In Greek Theatre the chorus vocalizes the process of emergence that takes place on the stage and communicates it to the audience. Apart from their use of the human voice (vox humana), the chorus also mediates the physical space separating the audience and stage through ordered physical movement (dance). The chorus moved over the circular, sandy surface[2] between stage and audience according to a choreography that left labyrinthian traces. Movement for movement's sake rather than as an enforcement of words is the fourth dimension in theatre, a dimension that has not been retained in Western theatre, possibly because dance and theatre went their separate ways.[1] Draft of article published in the Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History, 2005. This suggests that the Greek and Hebrew/ early Christians explained the world through sound as their first point of reference, as did the Chinese and that sight only became dominant at the beginning of the Renaissance (in the period between 1350 and 1500) which not only coincides with glass being used for lenses and capturing celestial light into buildings but also with the development of perspective in painting/architecture.[2] This area could be as large as 80 feet in diameter.
Sixth Movement
by Olga Merekina
The journey of glass is circular and returns us to notions of time and gestures explored in the previous movement variations. As we have seen, sand, heat, and movement create an object. Objects break and/or lose their function. Glass objects turn into shards. Shards immersed in a movement that resembles that of ocean tides, become sand.
Finale
Movement in Full Shot Frame: Concealed Presences
Glass is an undervalued invention. As an essential element of the technological avant-garde, the glass component in optical fiber transmits dozens of gigabytes per second whilst the Hubble telescope told us the age of the universe. Glass has been changing perspectives not only in art but also in philosophy and science. If we would fully acknowledge its significance, modern history would be named the Glass Age.
CAFxSHMOG | Six Movement Variations
22nd June, 2018 SHMOG
Our movements re-interpret and explore thought processes set in motion by the artists and architects of the museum. Movement as an art form cannot but address the notion of ‘thingliness’. By extending objects and spaces into movements we reverse the dominant directionality whereby objects and spaces extend our capacities. Through this reversal, we and the museum raise fundamental questions about the commanding presence of objects and their ability to diminish our capacity to produce non-subjugated subjectivities.
‘Six Movement Variations’ is the first of a series that engages with this complex discussion. It emphasizes repetition, stillness, and synchronicity: modes of movement we are all familiar with and have internalized.
Each Movement Variation explores different choreographies of commonality:
First Movement
by Zhouzhou and Shu
‘What is the Nature of Time?’ The first movement begins with a game about time played (until recently) by children all over the world and proceeds to contrast clock time, the perpetual perishing present, and psychological time, that is interpenetrations between pasts, presents, and futures.
Second Movement
by Wu Jiayu with Yuan Yang, Spitsyna Mariya, Anna and Yueming
‘What Movements does a Glass Vessel elicit from its Maker?’ Objects choreograph gestures during the process of becoming. In this performance, we explore spinning. Spinning is one of the oldest human crafts. It first converted fiber into thread, that is it condensed mass into a linear order. In human movement, our arms begin to extend when we spin our bodies.
In glassblowing spinning too uses the centrifugal force. The glassblower rolls a hollow stick with a mass of hot glass at its end. The radial outward force creates symmetry. The craftsman rolls the stick with great sensitivity and watches as he guides the mass of glass into a form: he has only a short span of time during which the glass is malleable.
The human body too can only turn for a limited time. We become dizzy. Deprived of our vision, we rely solely on sound in order to (re)-orientate ourselves in space.
Aware of the positional disorder of atomic bonds in spin glass, the dancer in this piece also tentatively dialogues with the hexagonal floor on which she spins.
Third Movement
by Wang Jiaming
What can we learn from Glass? Microscopic Vision and Perceptual Intensification.
The terrain behind the movement is our sense of balance, the oldest one of all senses and without which movement cannot be.
Fragile Balance: a man balances on a pipe of glass, seeking stillness. Keeping still for 24 minutes at a time, the body performs multiple layers of intensity. To maintain balance the body moves in a thousand hidden directions: minuscule movements become visible once we move stillness to the foreground of perception.
Fourth Movement
by Steph D'Sibö
Becoming other
Becoming flame: wriggling upwards and merging pieces of solid into a mass of fluid.
Becoming heat: expanding in ripples and setting air free.
Becoming light: shooting along the straight lines of a refracting ray.
In this participatory work with the interactive multimedia installation Fusion, the dancer takes the public on an alchemical journey from a grain of sand to the flame that melts it to the light that refracts when it encounters glass.
Fifth Movement
by Lena Kilina
‘Where does the sound of a voice go?’
‘What happens to words when they are sung?’
Echoes, Ripples, and Repetition.
It has been argued that during the Renaissance ’glass literally opened people’s eyes and minds and turned western civilization from the aural to the visual mode of interpreting experience.’ Alan Macfarlane[1]
How did we interpret the world before the visual mode became dominant?
In Greek mythology, Echo embodies unrequited love. In one of the two stories about the nymph, her love is not returned by Narcissus, he who cannot tear himself away from his reflection in the water. In the other story, it is Echo who does not return the love of Pan, God of the Wild, also described as the God heard but not seen. In both myths, the experience sends her to the depth/caves of the earth.
It is in subterranean space where also the first labyrinths were built in Greek sanctuaries. Both space and voice were lifted above ground by the theatre. In Greek Theatre the chorus vocalizes the process of emergence that takes place on the stage and communicates it to the audience. Apart from their use of the human voice (vox humana), the chorus also mediates the physical space separating the audience and stage through ordered physical movement (dance). The chorus moved over the circular, sandy surface[2] between stage and audience according to a choreography that left labyrinthian traces. Movement for movement's sake rather than as an enforcement of words is the fourth dimension in theatre, a dimension that has not been retained in Western theatre, possibly because dance and theatre went their separate ways.
[1] Draft of article published in the Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History, 2005. This suggests that the Greek and Hebrew/ early Christians explained the world through sound as their first point of reference, as did the Chinese and that sight only became dominant at the beginning of the Renaissance (in the period between 1350 and 1500) which not only coincides with glass being used for lenses and capturing celestial light into buildings but also with the development of perspective in painting/architecture.
[2] This area could be as large as 80 feet in diameter.
Sixth Movement
by Olga Merekina
The journey of glass is circular and returns us to notions of time and gestures explored in the previous movement variations. As we have seen, sand, heat, and movement create an object. Objects break and/or lose their function. Glass objects turn into shards. Shards immersed in a movement that resembles that of ocean tides, become sand.
Finale
Movement in Full Shot Frame: Concealed Presences
Glass is an undervalued invention. As an essential element of the technological avant-garde, the glass component in optical fiber transmits dozens of gigabytes per second whilst the Hubble telescope told us the age of the universe. Glass has been changing perspectives not only in art but also in philosophy and science. If we would fully acknowledge its significance, modern history would be named the Glass Age.