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Posted by Didelidi 2008 July 08 01:10 AM
   
VARIATIONS
directed and written by Alessandro Rolandi
3+1 performance artists / 3 +1 performance movements / 3 +1 music variations / 3 +1 plastic installation interventions / 3 +1 different spaces
Performers will work alone in 3 different spaces and together in the 4th one. They are receiving a training to develop a specific type of sensitivity and a particular body language. Each of them will work alone in the 3 different spaces, creating her own movements with the director , but won’t be aware of the quality, choices and details of the others’ work. The director will also define the environment for the 4th movement (where the performers will be all together) without giving out any information to the performers, who will find themselves confronted to few unexpected visual elements. These, together with the development of their 3rd movement, will give birth to the final, collective one, following an organic logic, never experimented in rehearsal before.
Musicians have been given Bach’s Goldbergh Variations 1-7 in the Glenn Gould version of 1952. They have listened to them and studied them, both formally and intuitively, then they have re-invented them according to their inspiration, using chinese traditional instruments, vocal research and electronic devices. The new 1-7 variations have been then “variated” 3 more times, fulfilling the conceptual direction of the whole project.
The aim of the project is: to allow every part of the ensemble to working in a creative way without hierarchic differences .to establish evocative and flexible guidelines in order that the final form will be defined only by the dynamic balance of all the different elements involved: human, musical, plastic, spatial. All elements have, at the same time, a structural and creative role, which changes according to the inner development of the rising collective expression.
Thoughts on Variations
Marcel Douchamp, one of the most important and contradictory figures in art history, said once “Art is constantly at war with itself”. At the beginning of the 21st century, when a limitless flexibility is bypassing most cultural and behavioural boundaries, this Frenchman’s sentence might acquire a new dimension. Douchamp specified “at war”, which means literally, in a state of tension and conflict. If it’s true that nowadays “everything can be art”, it is also true that, by accepting this statement, every conflict is authomatically dismissed. Money and a standardized consumerist culture are leading and art is following, that’s a fact. In a time when quotes are more important than sentences and being clever is more interesting that, for instance, just “being”, endless words are spent to craft the theories which will present, justify and support the next series of goods “on sale”. It seems like different media have been mixed and several disciplines crossed-over, but, in reality, these actions have been taken for granted, with the result that their effectiveness has been reduced to simple intellectual commentaries. The taste for the shocking and the highly spectacular, together with an increasing morbid and voyeristic approach are putting art at risk of becoming a self-indulgent pantomime, empty, sclerotic and sterile. Criticism itself, merely reduced to pointing out an evidence which everybody knows, but nobody seems really interested to change, is to become a formal exercise of dialectic. How i sit possible then to set up again art “at war with itself” ? How to raise a confrontation not only dependent on market established values? Where then, can the new proposal be seeked after? How can they appear in such a foggy stillness..? Well, to me, this questions share the same nature of a pure guess…..what if, instead of commentaries or statements, rigid concepts, or theories, what if we ‘d try and start from simple questions? Not premeditated structures of thoughts, but authentic curiosity about what we don’t know and desire to confront what we cannot explain…Which are the plastic and intellectual limits of today’s artworks? When and how the art work as a specific object, has a power on the viewer, and which kind of power? Where does the meaning we invest an art work with, comes from ? As it’s no more uniqueness, not necessarily craftmanship’s quality, or longlasting aesthetic or intellectual value, what is it then? Frozen fears? Fetish narcissism? Status quo?...provocation?or what else..? Does the contemporary viewer exercise an active power on the art work or is he/she in a completely passive position? How can we avoid to “produce” artworks and be able to “create” them instead? Which form or media would be able to challenge the authority of a planetary economic model avoiding to be swallowed, made harmless by means of integration, or simply dismissed as utopian or unlogic? Which quality of energy an expressive form must develop to establish a more intimate and stronger connection with a public, whose senses are made dull by constant overstimulation, pressure and ultimate life-speed? It is difficult to see how art could escape a fate which will push it toward a tighter and tighter technological competition and a corporate-like type of structure. Those who could find the sponsors to afford the cutting edge scientific innovations will be, to their elite patrons, the contemporary Charles Lebrun, and the others will be recycled into a lucrative design-like production of mass-goods. If it still exists, a possible alternative to this scenario, it can be found in a certain kind of possible development of Performance Art. With theatre dying out because of the laziness and lack of magic in people’s life, performance art is lately coming back and could play a more important role than simply the one of a nostalgic revisitation. The “live event” taking place in the intimacy of an art gallery with a limited public and limited technological intervention, still posses a unique characteristic. It is the impossibility to capture the energy and the quality of the experience the public shares during this limited time-window. It’s possible to record it, of course, with photos or shootings, but this won’t be equivalent of going through the real happening, and the document itself will be only an historical relic, in no way a substitute of the action. Yet performance art, the way it is and has been, shows limits and weaknesses. Occupying a borderline position among the expressive forms and relying mostly onto the individual force of few enlightnned and gifted but almost autistic human beings, performance art often speaks a misunderstood language with a confused voice. It creates the conditions to bring the public on another level of perception, but either in a cryptic or in a dyonisian way, which end up both being perceived as a predictable message of rebellion and refusal of the status quo. This puts the public in a complete exterior perspective, from where it can judge, being amused and observe “some strange animal doing some strange thing”. Whenever the public is provocatively involved, by means of “happening” or interaction, it is to make it feel guilty, or ashamed, or to prove its dumbness; shortly in a position of diversity from the performer. The precious power of the living act goes then lost in somekind of postmodern marthyrdoom ritual where the “different individual” only proves to be the exception that confirms the rule. The small window opened in the public’s perception closes up quickly and the whole thing is consumed with a sense of loss, but not an entropic loss, the loss instead, of a precious chance just born and suddenly consumed in a useless cry of inadeguacy. But what if this chance, instead of being employed to, make an obvious statement, would instead be used to “empathize” with the audience…..to try and establish a different sort of communication using more subtle channels and hidden currents….what if this initial “moment of openness” could be hold and expanded and shared…what if the public, instead of being accused or discriminated, was instead to go through the much more astonishing experience of having something in common with the borderline individual, with the strange animal, with the borderline artist ?….what consequences this might have? Is it possible to break through all languages and codes and finally, reach through life.? Would the experience of an authentic human act shared be possibly more provocative, powerfull and liberating than any other.? To honestly ask a question can bear both answers. Performance artists often act out of their natural physicality, lacking awareness of the strength of their own presence and of the quality of the message they convey with their body and actions. The so-called Third Theatre has in the last 30-40 years, developed a very deep and sophisticated work to awake the hidden creative sources of the body, but due to the nature of the research itself, still remains a sort of discipline for initiates. To establish a dialogue between performance art and the training of this kind of theatre could be a way to give birth to a new generation of performance artists aware of their physical possibilities and capable to improve them and push them beyond the boundaries using more focused, powerfull and effective type of energies rather than those implied so far in Happenings and similar forms. Variations is a project conceived around these inquiries. It explores the possibility to create a “total art work” in which all parts have the same creative importance and both intellectual and physical hierarchic divisions disappear. Performance artists, space, plastic interventions, and music feed each other in a constant dynamic balance, in which they all play a multidirectional creative role to establish a connection with something alive and continuosly changing. Something surprising and dangerous that brings artists and viewers in an unknown territory of communication and perception, more complex, articulated and challenging than the one of everyday life and the one normally used in this discipline. Variations is not a solution, neither a formula, not an achieved work. It does not want to prove anything. It wants to be a proposal, a possibility. It’s like as if, among a thick mist, a blurred light appears faraway, breaking the eveness and stillness of the surroundings. We don’t know what lies ahead, we cannot know what we will find, but at least we can try to go somewhere.
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NO.6 Middle School Polo Tees at Spoon House Shop Beijing and GoodFella shop Shanghai . 
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