Remembering Kalenderpanden
“The Grand Prix Installation”/ (dance) performance”
I walk up some rusty iron steps into a delinquent industrial warehouse, an autonomous social space squatted by a community of fee thinkers.Kalenderpanden
Inside, this large room, a number of doors leading to other places. There are activist and punk band billposters and propoganda on the walls of events past and present and a huge quote spray-painted on a wall:
we are not in the least afraid of ruins
we are going to inherit the earth
the bourgeoisie may blast and ruin
their world before they leave the stage of history
but we carry a new world in our hearts
Durrutti
There is a background murmur of people playing pool. I look over to a corner; I make my way up a small staircase, which opens out to what is titled, “ (dance) performance”. I read this on the piece of paper as I reach the landing.
A girl dressed in white cotton, white gloves and a painted blue face, enters the open space. She is standing still although it seems as if she is hovering, a type of stillness in motion. This action draws many of the spectators, including myself over to what transforms into a performance area. There is a horizontal line of white paper bags and she starts to walk along them as though they could be a tight rope. I have assumed this symbolic relation of tight rope, because when she places her feet on the bags, the surfaces of her feet are not firmly grounded into the floor as in common every day walking, from heel to toe. The emphasis is upon using the full potential of the four arches of the feet, mediating between the medial and lateral longitudinal arches and the two transverse arches. Her entire body yields and floats with gravity but with subtle clarity and precision. It is clear she is using her feet differently to the usual one associated with gravity in this life world. She seems to be embodying another place, she could also be walking on another planet, her face is painted blue (symbolic of - among other things - suffocation, to lack of gravity). Furthermore, as she is walking, she picks up the paper bags separately every few steps and uses them in two different ways: first, as though they are gloves, or a second skin for her hands and second as containers for oxygen, as she breaths into these bags she leaves them full of air in a trail behind her.
In front of the bags is an amoebic blue reef formation; this is encapsulated in a glass jar, not unlike the resemblance of the cerebellum. Perhaps this landscape is trapped; a symbol to connote how the natural environment that the body is mostly disconnected from is now a package, a part of the global commodity culture. By seeing this object, I then had the impression that she was dancing from the Cerebral Spinal Fluid, which flows through this part of the brain, and the central nervous system. This particular cerebellum hemisphere plays a large part in coordinating voluntary movements, thus permitting her calculated and graceful motion. To the side of this ecology there is pile of white paper bags filled with air. Eventually, she hovers over to this pile of entrapped air, whilst accelerating her breath inside one of the paper bags she still holds. It seems that there is no more air left in her world, she then picks up all of the paper bags in the pile. They seem to lift her arm into the air as if they are defying gravity.
All of this suspended movement completely transfixes me. Phenomenology is an acknowledging, mediation and articulation of perceptual and sensory influences. I am reminded that Philipa Rothfield speaks of inter-subjective and intra-subjective moments which constitute these 'connective possibilit[ies].' The former 'is based upon the existence of at least two bodies, and arises through a corporeal connection between the performing body and the body of the audience'. The later, 'is a pleasure which circulates the body of the individual...movement that is exciting, a corporeal excitement that my body feels in connection with another's (1994: 61/2)'. The mutual inscription of her in my experience and of myself in her experiences, effects the inter-weaving of our individual phenomenal fields into a shifting fabric, a single phenomenal world. By this process my sensing body gradually attunes itself to the style of her presence, to the way of this performer, as the she seems to adjust itself to that which is other than her, the reciprocal mood of the audience at the live performance, the style and sensitivity in the space, the objects in her performance. I am absent in her presence, I feel myself in her, and herself in me. In this manner, the simplest thing has become a world for me, as the cerebellum in the encapsulated jar comes to take its place more deeply in my world.
The prop, a contained ecology of sorts, I took to be an indexical relation for a cerebellum, because it seemed that the dancer was accessing the cerebral spinal fluid in the quality of her movements. But perhaps this was also because in my movement class that day we specifically focused upon accessing and exploring this interior landscape of the body and its innate states of movement and mind. To turn our dancing inside out and to render the felt body visible. Perhaps, this was, in the light of C.S. Peirce, the 'mass of cognition' I had already brought with me to the performance.
Concerning Kalenderpanden's socio-political circumstances let me speak of this hetro-glossic, site of marvelous diversity. One, the particular characteristics that contributed to the grounding of all the performance occurrences, is its general rebellion against the current dominant cultures' ways of being. Kalenderpanden as a sight is a symbol for the abject and indeed remainders of every sort, a textual centre piece between a slum neighborhood, which contains ethnic minorities, a few white artists; generally consisting of poor, imperiled, terrified or the dangerous. It is here, in this nonetheless marginalised territory (not unlike the territory of desire), that it was not to be a matter of choosing to struggle, to resist constructs that invite me complicity not of choice, but simply to locate myself along and outside the peripheries of mainstream performance culture.
This place of fugitives and this chosen gesture of exclusion are acts to mediate and undermine what Lewis describes to be, "the paradoxical ground upon which theories of embodiment (and representation) must rest, in my view a ground that is not completely solid, to be sure, but one that is also not entirely illusory, imaginary or "unreal" (1995: 236)." This space actively investigates the possibility of a new sensory order which experiments with other ways of sensing the world whilst acknowledging the difficulty of the undertaking. In this community of investigators, where audience and performers slip into bodies in space, experiencing beings penetrate and resonate through the realm, which I occupy, from which I am inseparable. I am overcome with a sensation of enchantment; happiness, lightness, willingness to absorb. An excited and reeling internal dialogue banters away within, observing, questioning; grasping hold of
the new circumstances as sustenance for further consideration.
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Lewis, Lowell. 1995. 'Genre and Embodiment: From Brazilian Capoeira to the Ethnology of Human Movement', in Cultural Anthropology 10 (2). p. 221-243.
Rothfield, Phillipa. 1994. 'Points of contact: philosophies of movement', in Writings on Dance, Issue 11/12. p. 76-86.
Weber, Samuel. 2000. 'The Greatest Thing of All', in 100 Years of Cruelty. Editor, Ed Scheer. Power/Artspace Publications. p. 7-32.
