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Through a subtle and precarious approach,“An attendee” tries to guide the audience perspective into the details of space, along the edge of (un)spectacular events, towards the frictions of different encounters. Small stimulation open up to bigger questions, emotionally and energetically charged, as a single performer finds themself in the company of a set of things, fragments and sounds. Upon encounter they transform into subjects, into micro narratives and locations, sketching out a place of memory, loss and hope, where leftover voices give their account.
As the performer moves along and with them, a precise, soft and concentrated body emerges that tries to attend to these accounts, encapsulated in the environment. In the attempt of overcoming a present state of affair towards another state of “future”, the performer encounters internalised projections, obsessions, lingering violence and wounds.
The practice that this work brings to the foreground tries to investigate the utility of being in a broken place, that a priori to fixing or saving, asks to be embraced with delicacy and care, with trouble, yet attention. The viewer is invited to join and rest in this space too, without pushing for answers, judgement and absolution, and to give in to the disquiet.
By looking at ecological philosophies and environmental precarity, effectively supported by an isolating pandemic, Toni Steffens is investigating anew what the notions of “environment” can mean within the theatrical and artificial realm of the black box. In her practice she refers to the context of visual arts and balancing on the line between two different traditions of mediation, in between spectacle and installation, theatre and still life/exhibition. Being sensitive to western arts traditions, she imitates the “gallery space” to foreground the power of things, objects and more than human reality. Here is where she uses performance and theatre with a notable emphasis on movement to let those things open up, create mystery and discourse, take the lead of the story and question the human body in their arrangement and encounter.
Booking info:
length: 48 mins
I am travelling together with my light designer Paulina Prokop. The set deisgn and lights fit into two trollis and two odd sized luggages.
Credits
Choreography and Performance: Toni Steffens
Set design: Nikola Knezevic and Toni Steffens
Costume: Ginta Tinte
Lights: Paulina Prokop
Sound: Toni Steffens, Teresa Winter
Advise: Keerthi Basavarajaiah
Notable Attendees influencing the work: Alina Popa, Ana Mendieta, Camille Claudel, Jeanne Dielman
Production: Veem House for Performance, NBprojects, 2020
Reviews:
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When a tadpole is growing into a frog, its electromagnetic field already holds the information of its legs and body shape. In the essay ‘TransMaterialities’ , Karen Barad refers to a (cruel) experiment,where the electromagnetic field of tadpoles were changed by scientists, which resulted in them growing additional limbs, eyes in different places and other bodily mutations. Following this experiment, scientists concluded that tadpole bodies do not have fixed or defined borders. They carry their suggested futures, just as our DNA, bones and cells carry our inherited pasts, eventually manifesting anew in future times to come. The space in the air, for tadpoles at least, is sensible, intelligent, loaded with information and very much subject to intervention, interaction, and, as the experiment shows, open, porous, vulnerable and corruptible. Space is a part of the process of being, likewise it is part or the extension of beings. Space is oftentimes thought as filled with unlimited potential and possibilities. Yet the tadpoles are connected to space, as space is connected to them, from material (the body of the tadpole) to immaterial (the electromagnetic field of the tadpole) and across timelines. Space is specific enough to carry planted seeds for futures, while those are not necessarily fixed. For it to become a frog in the future, space needs be strong enough to carry information and at the same time remember how a frog is created. What is a future vision is also a memory. Such operation of space could be seen as a form of a creative, spatial training. When training starts in the brain, and something new (or old) is learned, neurones craft new pathways. The brain changes. Being enters the space, and the space enters being.
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