links
Under Armour departs from dance as a crossroad. Inspired by the fearless dance of the Portia spider, ready to be devoured by its beloved, spectating other, the work embarks on a chaotic journey attempting to synthesise different perspectives and extensions of why we ( may still) dance, including interspecies performance, visions of bodies marked by dystopia, military drill, dancing overlapping with the art of healing and a hunger for being eaten alive where the urgency to dance insists on serving as a survival mechanism in the face of societal collapse.
Creating a half eroding, half emergent force field where information clash, collapse and attempt to make sense, Under Armour is an emotional and inquisitive performance that juggles in between movement, voice, lecturing and overthinking, all the while hunting for a bodily state that could perhaps embrace it all.
"Maybe we knew we would never come out of this “healthy”, or healed. Maybe we used it like some sort of cure, an intersection of openings and bendings, re arrangements of a world beyond sick and healthy. This thing I do, the thing I call dance, can somehow do the reprogramming. At least sometimes. Not a gesture to “bring the change” but a much more subtle and meta-substantial gesture needed for me, to make sense of that what I otherwise cannot bare to look at, bare to sit with, bare to stand upright facing, carry with me along, mute and merciless, against the ticking time framing my live. Back to the Orang Utan that can heal itself.. Researchers also say we have been given our emotions from our animal ancestors. Our emotions were there before we existed, and we are a consequence of them. How do you make sense of that you are coming from feeling?-This next scene is called European failure “
CREDITS
PERFORMANCE + DEVELOPMENT Toni Steffens
COSTUME + TEXT Toni Steffens
SOUND SOURCES zzomkaraoke.uk, How they got game projecy, Stanford University/theinternetarchive, Marc Ayres-Freude, Joe Cooker- with a little help from my friend, DJ Call me- Say goodbye
DOCUMENTATION Olivia D'Cruz, Paulina Prokop
Sandberg Institute, Framer Framed 4Bid Gallery, Spring Wounds/Kunstkapel Amsterdam
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.
.png)
.png)
.png)
