Neforma #75, Maribor 18.10.2019
On how to make mistakes
“It will be most
interesting if we make mistakes”, Katja Legin says at the beginning of the
already 75. edition of Neforma, Slovenians dance and music
improvisation series, taking place in the context of the international Shifting-Baselines project
in Maribor. Together with fellow-dancer Yuri Konjar and musician Zlatko Kaučič
they await the audience in a small studio in the attic of the Maribor puppet
theatre. Standing in front of the blackboard, Kaučič at their feet manipulating
a plethora of analogue and digital instruments and small children toys, they
start their dance. Having her initial words in mind, I watch and think: What
can be a mistake in movement? What can go wrong in improvisation? Besides: If
there is no fixed structure, who is to decide what is right or wrong in the
first place?
Legin and Konjar use
carefully placed steps and gestures to explore the small space between Kaučič,
the diagonal ceiling of the attic and the audience. Cautious movements with
their hands, slow tilts of the torso giving guidance to the limbs that follow
as they fall, a couple of relaxed steps, a pause: Legin and Konjar listen
attentively to Kaučič and then – go on. Kaučič, on the other hand, begins to
match sounds with movements: Starting from scratches on the wooden case of
his hammered dulcimer he goes to playing its strings, then to
the sanding noise of two small stones held in his hand. The sounds both support
and contrast Legin and Konjars movements, intensifying their rhythms or opening
other ways of movement. They respond to Kaučičs sound, to the sound and the
movements of each other, but above all to the blueprint of their own body – the
functional yet extremely flexible design of their bones, joints, muscles and tissues
working with and against gravity and the tensional forces in and around them.
If their body is full of potentiality, so is the space around them: They shift
and shuffle across the empty stage; changing its structure, changing its
geography, changing its density by movements that seem to be the effects of
stumbling rather than of deliberately made decisions. They walk, run and play –
increasing dynamics, falling to the ground, exploring all dimensions of the
compact, empty space as if to fill it with narratives.
Then and now, Legin
and Konjar come to a rest. As if opening up, they face the audience,
acknowledge their own being acknowledged, watch how they are being watched, and
finally – as in a freeze-frame – recognize in what positions their bodies came
to rest: Konjar leaning against the tilted ceiling, Legin next to him. But
Konjar is somehow a bit too tall for the place he chose, Legin is standing
neither close enough to Konjar to convey intimacy nor far enough to be at ease.
Their positioning conveys awkwardness, weirdness, a feeling of being ‘out of
place and out of phase’; as if both were trying to subvert our preconceptions
of how bodies relate to each proxemically; as if both wanted to show how
they do not fit. But is it really them intentionally creating
this moment or is it something somehow provoking it, something somehow getting
in their way? Maybe it is rather the latter: Legin and Konjar having been set
by their bodies into an arrangement that just weirdly seemed to happen to them.
Along those lines of movement, their bodies turned from solely being the means
of improvisation to the source of its resistance. Here Legin and Konjar came to
a halt. Or rather: here they were made to halt. Reflecting, involuntarily, on
what their bodies have done to them; reflecting on their position, on their
relation, on their form. “I do not know how to go on”, Legin says to Konjar,
using English instead of her native Slovenian and thus clearly also directing
herself to the international audience. Does she interrupt the dance? Does she
detach from the illusion of the performative space as being different from the
space of the audience? Does she detach from the flow of movement that was
underlying her and Konjars improvisation? Does she fall out of form? Or does she
fall into form, as the stop in movement and the use of language as a symbolic
means that can be clearly identified and pinned down would suggest? A
form Neforma meant to subvert in the first place?
‘A hiccup in
movement’, as dance scholar André Lepecki recalls, though, produces “critical
anxiety”. If so, then the ‘stop and go’ of movement, the use of language and
the acknowledgement of “not to know, how to go on”, is so much more than
setting an end to dance-improvisation as the spontaneous expression of constant
movement and uninterrupted flow. Instead, it portrays a problematic but highly
productive experience, where language as well as stillness are not opposed to
one’s body but are its prolonging. Not knowing how to go on, how to set the
next step, how to keep on walking and moving can create deep anxiety. But it
also allows for the acclamation of body and language as both systems
that have their own ways and own rights independent of the ‘self’. Systems that
create both possibilities as well as resistances for the ‘self’ trying to go
on. Systems that create finally other ways of (not-)moving and
(not-)speaking.
Making use of one’s
mistakes means to acknowledge that productive force of resistance. Of something
that always is outside of the dancer-self, even if it is the own body; of
something that produces aesthetic tension because it is
awkward, full of friction, out of phase and neither-going-nor-stopping from its
beginning. The dancers’ bodies become as weird as Zlatko Kaučičs plastic
toy-dinosaur moving on the strings of his hammered dulcimer that
creates not noise, but a universe of sound. Maybe then to improvise means to
move, slide, stop, slither and limp along the lines, surfaces and planes of
this strange universe that resides within our bodies and the material world
around; confronting us with experiences that are as awkward as they are poetic.
