TAB teaching at Impulstanz festival 2015.

The Body in Question.

The workshop I taught at Impulstanz from 27^th July 31 July originates in the work I have done in the project Archaeological Bodies which I conduct together with Nadja Voorham. Archaeological Bodies finds place in Novi Sad, Serbia and as part of Waiting in the Margins in Lviv, Ukraine. (www.archaeologicalbodies.org, www.waitinginthemargins.org)

In this project we work with movement, text and making video with smart phones. The 2 projects have a slightly different target but both focus on how the portrayal of conflict is manipulated by the way of inquiring into it. Belonging to a minority and the questioning of oneself and others about ones own responsibility in situations of conflict and war are subjects that come up in our workshop sessions.

Part of the workshop is that interviews are held: both with the participants themselves and other people outside of the workshop(for example in Novi Sad we have held interviews with youngsters from the Hungarian minority and from a Serbian background; in Ukraine we had interviews with Tatar refugees, people fleeing from the Donbass area as well as people who identify themselves as being Ukrainian.)

To develop movement skills or rather a sensitivity to movement and to start thinking about various questions we worked with automatic moving and automatic speaking. During the moving we let movement come from where it wants to come; go from one movement to another in any kind of connection. Sometimes also pondering on the question at hand on that particular day or use the session to remember what we did during the day before.

During the workshop at Impulstanz I started with questions about what constitutes your identity connected to group identity and belonging or not belonging to a group and we did speed dialogues about the question: ”When would you leave your home to never return and leave most of your possessions behind”. In previous workshops there were very different interpretations of this question. In Ukraine it clearly related to the situation in Crimea and Donbas but In Serbia people related it to leaving the parental home to study since that is not an easy thing to do on any level. This time the question of what 'home' is, was talked about since the participants were either travelling or did not have a ’real’ home established yet. There may also be a different concept of travelling in northern America then in Europe since in Europe we are much more likely to encounter borders between nations as well as different language areas.

Through the week we played with different ways to ask questions in various scores and used this skill in an interview, which was recorded on a smartphone. The question and the answers would be directed towards the phone which was held by the speakers themselves and handed over to whoever was speaking.The two speakers were not facing eachother.

The automatic speaking was recorded and randomly used as a spoken text with a film clip by another participant. The text was read aloud and recorded into the clip while listening to the recording of it through headphones. The film clip was of a ‘body’ not moving very much, and the situation set up by the one that filmed. There was no editing afterwards other then reading the text into it with the live editing method we'd been using. The clips that are shown here are working material and not a finished product.

The interviews were used in a similar way: while listening to the recording of an interview(each a different one) two participants would live edit by speaking along with questions or answers that they were listening to through the headphones and leaving out other text. A new dialogue and new meaning came into being in this way. On the last day we experimented with attaching this live editing it to 2 persons moving with a score that we had worked with previously.

 Throughout the workshop we had discussions about how scores and tasks related to various situations of the world today. The question of who gets to speak and who do we listen to came up, missing voices, home, identity to name a few.

On the attached images there is a list of questions that emerged.