team
concept: Luis Garay Music: Luciano Azzigotti
program
Speechless in the deepest and most untranslatable meaning of the expression. Powerful discomfort. Bravely confronting language and its breakdown. A condition of language that is awkward, uncanny and Cuir (awkward, strange, deviant). Not necessarily to arrive at a resignification or destruction of the senses. Nor is it a black box or something hermetic. It is the opposite. It is a naked mind. Any emptying, not only of speech and graphocentric logic, is also an emptying of dance and performance itself as languages. In other words, thinking the body as language, but without reinforcing the old dichotomy between culture and biology, but rather betting on an attempt to work with language in another way, embracing paradoxes, contradictions and binomials. A politics of doubt. Listening practices that generate spaces of uncertainty. Willingness to place oneself in states of attention. Not trying to “read” or “talk about” in an imperative way. It is subtle, intimate and open.
Bruno Mendonça
Imagine a rhythm without rhythm where dancers and musicians intertwine sound and kinetic skills governed by rules of interaction. A multimodal language far from representation and anchored in materiality. From it, fiction. Not as fantasy but as the capacity to open ourselves to the opaque.Imagine space not as architecture but as a process of intentions.
Luis Garay
We can think of human history as a communicative process, from isolated tribes to the global village. From isolated tribes to the global village, from the modularization of phonemes into alphabets to infinitesimal dictionaries. The emergence of a single principle: information compression. An inverted big-bang made of data. DNA strings, semantic labeling of emotions and concepts. Subverting languages by decentering their functioning towards the most primitive functionalization, that of making fictional patterns. Humans and non-humans become ultra-social because they become exo-bodies, recognizing collective patterns as their own. They are cooperative processes, but also competitive, not between agents but in pursuit of the moment where the predilection, the apprehended, the culturalized yields to the concentrated-synchronized emergence of the unique element. The marvelous object: the Kykeon, where the ecstasy and the transfiguration of the anthropogenetic balance to the epiphylogenetic memory, of the tangent gesture to the transcendent vibration take place. Naked Mind is the failure for this object to occur.
Luciano Azzigotti
GENERAL INTERESTS
MENTE DESNUDA is an operatic environment (3 to 4 hours) that exercises impossible behaviours. Forms of agency that investigate listening, fragility, passivity and co-dependence: this our my understanding of the posthuman, the cyber and the queer. We propose “performance” as always relational, never individual.
CONTEXT
MENTE DESNUDA is part of my encounter with the Colombian choreographer Luis Garay. With him, we have developed a liminal language between performance and experience of invented environments. We are deeply interested in the specificity of each participant. We are captivated by each encounter with the audience. We have always worked with performers with amphibious practices or self-described as Queers. We are Queers because we share what Professor Chela Sandoval calls “consciousness of the oppressed”. Both I, as a descendant of migrants and a migrant myself, and Luis as a gay immigrant have always found allies in these bodies. At the same time we emphasise never to be defined by our place of origin, sexuality or what we would call “identity”. How from specific and material conditions to connect with the cosmic-foreign? Here we will continue with these interests and the ensemble of 16 performers will follow these ethical and aesthetic lines. Luís and I have collaborated in my work mental-activity (2004) and in the project “La Tierra tendrá dos soles” (2015). We share the conviction in the importance of the idea of “system” over choreography and the emergent-contingent.
METHOD
The ensemble of 16 performers operates within 5 exercises for the body-voice, without ever leaving the floor. We invoke pre-human states. The idea of waiting as activity gives way to a non-linear perception of time
- EXERCISE 1: ORAL RECOLLECTION Groups of 2 or 3. Recover real stories, happened in the last 24 hours. Now they are sung with specific rules of intonation and estrangement. The vocal technique alludes to the stridulation-gesang, (singing insect). One at a time (the other two listen). The body is neutral with a focus on orality.
- EXERCISE 2: TOUCH 3 or more performers. One person “receives”, the other(s) touch. The touchers perform a haptic exploration on the receiver. They compose an exo-voice, modulated by other bodies, generating vibratos with body touches and obfuscations. At the end, the body that received performs the “recollection” exercise, the other 2 observe.
- EXERCISE 3: RECOLLECTION 1 performer. After being touched or when alone in the space. Collect the memory of the perceived touch with a bodily-phantasmal journey of what happened. Gestures and sounds are understood as ruins. Here opera becomes telepathic and non-clockwork, drama and exo-corporal singing made of accumulations of brain waves. Can a transcranial magnetism so intense that it radiates music directly into the neurons be generated from synchronous recollection?
- EXERCISE 4: HANDS 2 performers, arms and voices. One in front of the other, what we try to generate is a magnetic field of tension between the bodies. “Sound as a situation”, sound as a resonant string that replaces a limb of the body. Communication without understanding. A spatial granulation of synchronous emergences as waves. The greatest instrumental action.
- EXERCISE 5: UNISON Pre-choreographed nodes, for the body as well as for the voice, can be used if the participants who meet wish to do so. The musical material of the motifs is organised by a chromatic distribution of the Missa Naray je jamais (Anonymous) filtering original dissonances in diatonic groups assigned to the nodes and sung in unisons by 4 performers.
- ON THE IDEA OF LABORATORY AND NOT PERFORMER. The landscape seeks to constantly move participants in and out of the exercises, this seeks to map the performer and their forms when they are not “performing”. What we are interested in is how an individual arrives at the decisions they arrive at (this is what the title NAKED MIND refers to). This methodology will produce a pre-scenic, laboratory texture. A public intimacy. About the idea of landscape and micro-exchanges between performers and between performers and audience you can refer to my latest work “Future Technology” (2021) indicated in the links.
ABOUT THE INSTRUMENTAL FUNCTION
6 performers make up the ensemble of musical skills. Three little instruments of a homogeneous organic, in principle three trombones disassembled on the floor, their parts connected with pvc tubes. The exo-organological rule: each instrument must be activated by more than one performer.
Three other performers are trained singers, the vocal style integrates the lyrical and operatic function with the vocal tract extensions that underpin the other voices. All of the performers coming from corporeal training will have some form of vocal experience and ability. Another instrumental group may consist of percussive objects of increased scale (to be investigated) such as giant euler discs (ultra-fast chirps-glissandos), 5-metre magic springs (in the manner of multi bordonas), 10-centimetre wide elastics (ultra-low frequencies) and 2 giants-vibraslaps.