– Irina Baldini · Aug 2021
The work emerging from this month of residency at LAKE is rooted in a fluid methodology for choreographic improvisation (namely ATE, acronym for Accountable Temporary Expedients), developed first on myself and later with a core group of performers. The practice revolves around an embodiment of tasks leading up to psycho-physical states of Doubt and Confusion.
During the residency I focused mainly on realising the following:
a performance installation that includes image, sound and movement/drawing interventions.
a sound composition derived from elements informing of the installation
a book of photographic images emerging from the practice
a class-structure to disseminate my practice outside of a performance context, guiding dancers and non to familiarise with basic principles of ATE.
I worked mostly solo, with the contribution of production assistant Simona Piras, using the ATE methodology as a generative set of instruments that prepare the body for a process of composition and real-time composition.
On this particular project, the choreographic process keeps the body as a subject of events, but does not focus on movement as the sole output:
Movement in this case is the source which provokes side effects. These are manifested as drawing, text, sound, photography, and the use of voice.
In the emergence of these, I am looking for the urge to install a relationship of feedback between witness or participant to the performance, when movement is principally an essential initiation for other forms of expression to take shape. A feedback-loop provoked by movement, instigating responses, generating other traces, reshaping space and presence.
The daily practice involves movement, writing, drawing, photography, speech or vocalising. What may result from my exploration of multiple mediums are an opportunity for me to engage in a dialogue with the elements constituting a work (the materials and the ephemerals, the paper, the body, the imagination, the fleetingness of sound) in real time, around an audience.
The outcome is a composition of these elements, made and being made by the circumstance and the relation to one another / who may interact with them.
The work – presented as a performance installation – is composed and rearranged in real time, through its various elements. Visitors are invited to interfere with these, provoking changes in space and relations.
Alongside the application of ATE for movement and the generation of side effects, I invited guest dancers to enter in contact with this way of engaging with the body of work, as an opportunity to research into communicating the practice to those who may not be familiar with its lenguage yet.
To introduce them to the practice, I used a set of cards designed based on the ATE methodology, and invited them to play with suggested tasks, notions, triggers and distortions (more on the ATE deck HERE)
The residency has been made possible with the support of 4bid gallery and of production assistant Simona Piras.