Earth Boxes

When I was a child, my family took many many road trips in the summer.  To entertain myself during those long, seemingly endless treks, I built myself a play world inside a cardboard box (long before the virtual realms so prevalent now had become a reality). The possibilities for long, winding, and never-ending stories as well as the stories that flashed up in the sun and then dissolved as we drove through the heat grew and multiplied. 

These childhood experiences trained me for what was to come: to see stories as framed in space, as though on stage.

These continually unfolding stories also taught me that storytelling is a matter of perspective. Where I sat as a crouched in the back of the car and peered into that magical cardboard box allowed me range and variation to my stories. These characters were my partners in an unspoken crime: the reality behind which I was hiding was not the only one. There are other worlds to be seen and heard and for now, I had the power to make them as I saw fit.

I have watched these stories from afar, or at times dreamed them before they have taken form on a moving stage.

Our first position provides us the initial window onto all these tales as they unfold.

But even from that point of stillness, as we take up a relationship to these stories that give, we find ourselves changing just as the stories themselves transform…taking up new and surprising twists and turns of the stories that bend with the flow of the road.

Boxes as the containers of the past, present, and future appear repeatedly in artworks.

In Sounding Bodies: Light, Image, and Empty Spaces (May 7-9, 2021, Jao Tsung-I Academy, Kowloon, Hong Kong), Earth Boxes came to hold as many secrets as they reveal.

Hearing and Water

For me, “hearing” has been linked with water for a very long time.

Although I was born hearing, I lost a good bit of my hearing at six. Soon after I was outfitted with a box hearing aid that hung in a pouch clipped to my shirt, with a long cord that would up the side of my neck, to the earmold that stuck out from my right ear.

Suddenly, sound became mysterious: an experience that appeared and disappeared unevenly, a perpetual series of sonic mirages. I am almost always “at sea” in the sound field.

 A scene in The Miracle Worker, a movie about Helen Keller (blind and Deaf) and her life, reveals how Helen, as a child, finally understood that, as the water spewed from the pump over her hands, that Anne Sullivan was spelling “w-a-t-e-r” across her palm.

In this one moment, “hearing” becomes “transmuted:” it is translated through touch.

And then through the power of water, it acts an instantiation of the connective tissue of our livingness, how we communicate, how we know. Water is crucial to how we touch—see—hear the world.

 Art moves us like water. It acts as an assistive technology in the re-fabrication of the world, allowing us to hear what we cannot necessarily hear, but can touch, feel, and sense.

Sound Bodies I. October 2019-March 2020. 

Credits: Image from Dance Film, Leo Leung

Sound Bodies I. October 2019-March 2020. 

Credits: Drawing: Kevin Lin. Concept: Kanta Kochhar.

Sound Bodies I. October 2019-March 2020. 

Credits: Bamboo Sculpture Artist: To Wun. Concept: Kanta Kochhar, Kevin Lin.

Sounding Bodies: Light, Image, and Empty Spaces (May 7-9, 2021)

Jao Tsung-I Academy, Kowloon, Hong Kong

(Credit: Image from Dance Film, Leo Leung; Video Projection; Tiffany Yu; Courtesy: Folded Paper Dance and Theatre Limited)

Artistic Research: Towards "An Enthusiasm of Practice"

The “artistic researcher”—at times used interchangeably with “practice-based researcher”—tracks their research inquiries along continuum that spans a range of artistic, design, scholarly and scientific research. The transdisciplinary blending together of art and research, or practice and theory in another lexicon, fosters a type of continuously folding and unfolding of the creative and critical, the conceptual and the material. This hybrid approach, as it emphasizes the co-production of knowledge, often highlights emergent ways of understanding each other and how we make meaning in the world.

In the “Manifesto of Performance Research,” Brad Haseman notes: “[M]any practice-led researchers do not commence a research project with a sense of ‘a problem’. Indeed they may be led by what is best described as ‘an enthusiasm of practice’: something which is exciting, something which may be unruly, or indeed something which may be just becoming possible as new technology or networks allow (but of which they cannot be certain). Practice-led researchers construct experiential starting points from which practice follows. They tend to ‘dive in’, to commence practising to see what emerges.”

This “enthusiasm of practice”—as we build our capacities to be responsive to, in, and with the material matters of artistic world-making—helps us forge pathways needed for thinking about and practicing dynamic forms of engagement with each other. We can then connect across the fractured spaces in our local, global, and mostly importantly, translocal contexts—that is in ways that highlight the connective business of us working across both the local and global at the same time.

Folded Paper Dance and Theatre  aims to build a network with artists, scholars, and museum and heritage producers within respective communities and across Hong Kong as well as in both a trans-Asia and international context, with a vested interest in new approaches to forums for generating new forums for cross-arts, cross-abilities, and cross-cultural arts and research production.

Dance Poetics

Image Description: Two dancers twirling their jackets, from opposite ends. A long ribbon of pink, red, green, orange splashes across the image. In the lower right corner are the words “Dance Poetics.”

“When the image is new, the world is new.”
                 ― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Dance poetics acts as the movement from there to here. The world touches us just as we touch it. Such a poetics appears under the sky, breathes stillness into what has been and what we will become. Under this sky, we will lean into the spaces where we live, dream, and touch everything, even as the wind thrashes the mountain, the sea, the city streets.

An orange streak of light in this late afternoon might take us back to ourselves, to the distant call of those ancestral feet that sound out history, mete out all the ways that we can find ourselves. Mete, Measure, Cut. Metre, rhythm. The light moves.

In the heat of the evening as the clouds slide behind the island’s hills, there may be only one way to call this world back into us even while we hover here: to dance air, next to possibility. Such breath is still and, then, more still.

 Yet, as our breaths are taken, from a demi-pointe to the lunge, our arms flutter, casting about secrets like flowers that light up in the dark night. We are wrapped in silk jackets fleshed with our histories in shadowed greens, whites.

The braille patterns projected through that history fall over our faces—the dancer arcs in the empty space between the audience and the screen. The hand, an image, touches.

Image Description: On stage. Across the backdrop, a large projection of a hand reading Braille. Three dancers to the right are slowly moving forward. Downstage is a large surreal-like bamboo and paper sculpture hearing trumpet flower, approximately 8 feet long and at one point 5 feet high.

How did we arrive next to the windows, next to the doors, next to the walkway that circles around the flats where we live.  The shadows flutter.

While we wait—inside this poetics of dance—all those ghost clothes drift across the clothesline, across the line of night, of the flush of first light over the hill.

Credits: Sculpture-To Wun. Dancers-Yuen Hiu Shan; Hong Pak Lau; Men Tin Lam.

Choreographic Ecologies: Naming Dance

Yesterday, I found that the tree had just about withered—yellow lines lifting into the days of heat.

Today, the gray rain thrashes over the silent harbor while wind from that faraway island lilts near the open windows of my studio.

Naming dance calls forth revelatory turbulence: remaking worlds, inventing worlds.  

As dance—a method of touching space and corporeal world-making—calls on us to encounter the unpredictable, it will require new performative archaeologies, methods of co-creation, and more nuanced networks of exchange across live and digital platforms. Before we can consider distinct types of dance, their names, vocabularies, and specific methods, finding a way to recognize dance in its most elemental form—as it lives in the space between here and there—we can begin to articulate how dance makes the world vibrate. 

Dance the Sense-Body

The activation of the sense-body establishes and mobilizes our activity in the world. My approach to the sense-body is informed by four points of orientation: deaf and disability studies theorist Mairian Corker on ‘Sensing Disability’; my own work on hearing, deafness and the third ear (a listening body that works at the interstices of the senses, often through synaesthesia); Gilles Deleuze on microperceptions; and the work of Arakawa and Gins, poet-architects who write about the architectural body.

Though we must move towards an understanding of diverse sensory frames that cross disability, gender, culture, and race, it often becomes apparent that, while we may want to claim the translatability of sensory frames, they are often incommensurable. The effort to bring about an agreement through language is all too often an effort to universalize sensory experience and ends up circumventing, even erasing, the bodies it claims to be including.

 In order to amplify the sense-body, we need to listen to: [t]iny perceptions [that] are as much the passage from one perception to another as they are the components of each perception. They constitute the animal or animated state par excellence: disquiet. These are ‘pricklings,’ or little foldings that are no less present in pleasure than in pain (Deleuze, 1993: 87).”

 This articulation of the sense-body provides a way of orientating ourselves towards diverse phenomenologies and events of experience.

 Dance Space- Architectures

 As we navigate bodies, spaces and multiply unfolding orientations, there is ‘something more’, however, than simply a diversity of experience. This is what Arakawa and Gins term the ‘architectural body’ in which architecture operates like a skin in relation to the moving body. We can think of this phenomenology as a sequence of passages through ‘landing sites’. They write: ‘similarly to the way a person flexes her muscles, she also flexes her surroundings’ (Arakawa and Gins 2002: 41). ‘The body is sited. As that which initiates pointing, selecting, electing, determining, and considering, it may be said to originate (read co-originate) all sites’ (5). Arakawa and Gins name the types of landing sites as ‘perceptual, imaging, and dimensionalizing’.

Architecture forms the skins we dance, and dance forms an architecture we become.

 Transformation, translation and turbulence are the mutually constitutive registers that promulgate the sense-body – that is, the stitching together of bodies, materials and architectures as ‘events’. This perpetual dynamic leads to new forms of visual tactility and tactile visuality, expanded spaces of revelatory turbulence. With both the stage and the city as laboratories, we can find ways, as a part of the collective endeavour required by revelatory turbulence, to do work that, as it were, thinks itself.

Dance leads us into places where we can experience the immanent intersections of colliding spheres of bodies, relations, histories, sciences, industries, and cultures.

Dance generates movement scores that activate as that mystical see-er/do-er between what is and what can be.

NB:  The above includes partial excerpts from: Kochhar-Lindgren, Kanta. (2014). “The Turbulence Project: Touching Cities, Visual Tactility, and Windows.” Performance Research Journal. Paul Carter (Ed.). Vol. 19.5: 13-22.

References

Arakawa, Shusaku, and Madeline Gins (2002) The Architectural Body, Birmingham: University of Alabama Press.

Corker, Mairian. (2001). “Sensing Disability,” Hypatia. Volume 16, No.4, 34-52.

Deleuze, Gilles. (1993). The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Kochhar-Lindgren, Kanta. (2006a). Hearing difference: The third ear in experimental, deaf, and multicultural theatre, Washington DC: Gallaudet University Press.

Kochhar-Lindgren, Kanta. (2006b). ‘Hearing difference across theatres: Experimental, Disability, and deaf performance’, The Theatre Journal, 417–36.

Kochhar-Lindgren, Kanta. (2009). ‘Uneasy alliances: Art as observation, site, and social innovation’, in Working Papers in Art and Design, Vol. 5, University of Hertfordshire, http://www.herts.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_ le/0013/12424/ WPIAAD_vol5_lindgren.pdf (Accessed 9 October, 2014).

Kochhar-Lindgren, Kanta, Davis Schneiderman and Ton Denlinger, eds. (2009). The Exquisite Corpse: Chance and Collaboration in Surrealism’s Parlor Game. Omaha: University of Nebraska Press.

Choreographic Ecologies: Half Spaces

Choreographic: Having to do with the arts of making of dances, activities, and spaces (from Greek khoreia "dance" + graphein "to write)."

Ecologies: The systems of living things in their environment (from oikos "house, dwelling place, habitation" + -logia "study of").

Choreographic Ecologies: dance-making within and across the complex systems of human and non-human relationships that activates varieties of worldmaking.

 Why Dance the City Now?

We have now, unexpectedly, arrived in this new place of “dividing moments”—fractures still forming—as regions across the world grapple with the short-term impact and long-term implications of the Corona Virus. Everything is haloed, rippling.

 These fissures had already been being conjured into existence through the persistent habits deeply embedded in the histories of today’s urban contexts. Cityspaces have been built up, torn down or altered with great speed; histories have been covered over, and, at times, obliterated; the glittering architectural monumentality of steel and glass skyscrapers and polished shopping malls has too often come to stand in for the ‘new’ face of the cities. In this mirage, the people disappear.

 Climate change in all of its manifestations has put in motion a dramaturgy of natural disasters pushing us further and further into collective scenarios of precarity. As a result, these patterns have already been profoundly disrupting people’s lives, rendering their material histories obsolete, and inundating further many dimensions of the histories of cities.

 Corona and climate-change are creating enormous loss and trauma as well as evanescent half-spaces for reconfigurations. There are fleeting encounters with ghosts on a pier in Victoria Harbor or in the windows of a high-rise in Sha Tin. The half-spaces appear in memories that become artefacts in need of memory, stories hidden in the dusty attics of old antique shops, and incommensurate apparitional histories that continue to swarm below the city’s visible horizon.

 Dance—as a method of touching space and corporeal world-making—calls to us to meet these unpredictable encounters through the enactment of new performative archaeologies, methods of co-creation, and more nuanced networks of exchange across live and digital platforms. As we move in partnership across communities, we create new modes of storytelling, new forms of being together.

Choreographic Ecologies seeks to explore more sophisticated varieties of concepts for dance across communities and institutions—as-is, as-if, and to-come—as metaphor and method for activating transversal affiliations in the context of sharing, learning and imagining new forms of our urban futures. We must dance the city with different movements and movements of difference, with a new twist and turn.