Dear Tanja,
Dear Giselda,
Dear Cristian,
Hope you are well enjoying the summer. First of all, Tanya, I’m happy that you can join us for the final phase of the “Fragile” project in Bucharest. The two weeks in Riga were intensive and unfortunately Natalia, the third performer who was selected following the workshop in Riga, was not strong enough to deal with artistic proposal. Therefore I decided to stop the collaboration with her after the two weeks research in Riga. It’s a very unfortunate situation but I’m very confident that Tanja will catch up very fast and will make a very nice team with Giselda and Cristian.
Please find bellow the short summary of the artistic process. I’m gonna try to make a selection of photo and videos and send it to everybody via wetransfer this week. Tanja, I would like to propose you a Skype meeting starting with Wednesday to talk you more in details ad the project and its needs. Please let me know what time you prefer, either during the day or night.
Here a short summary of the our first residence in Riga:
a) format of the final performance
– ideally in my mind the performance would start in a private secret location (basically in people’s apartments/houses or a gallery/ZonaD studio) develop a bit into the city and end up on the black box. in Riga we tried a version that included – performative actions in the private flat, a running & dancing section in the city followed by a final performance in the black box. the total duration of the whole experience in Riga was about 3 hours but from my side didn’t work well. We need more time in the flat to build up a relationship with the audience, so at least the duration of the performance in the secret location should be 2 hours, which will go finally to a -6 hours experience which is maybe too much :). on the first week in Bucharest in October we gonna try a version to split the performances in the two spaces in two as follows:
– 2 hours performance in the flat ending up with 30 minutes running & dancing in the city
– 30 – 45 minutes running & dancing in the city ending up with a 60-90 minute on the black box with audience on the stage
Depending in how it will work we gonna decide what would be the final version. In Bucharest we have the stage booked for November 8 and 9 and we will have a trial version of the performance in the flat scheduled for November 1.
b) sections & ideas to be tried & developed:
– Dance like you’ll never do again (individual solo and a trio group version)
– Smelling Cristian solo (with tenderness quality), Transparency Giselda (with male side) solo
– Tanya’ solo (poliical & sexual identity, maybe ???)
– Kiss & Heart Solos/Group
– Emotional trip (performed by you with/for the audience)
– Life percent (Cristian performed 60 % of Giselda’s quality of movement)
– GAME (spin the botle /spin the body, other social games that can be used)
– Change of identity & cloths (between the performers and the audience)
c) Re-visiting master piece and Re-Enactments
This is soo contemporary – by Tihno Segal’s work read more here http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/australia-culture-blog/2014/feb/06/tino-sehgal-this-is-so-contemporary-review -transformed in THIS IS MY MASTERPIECE
First Kiss (https://vimeo.com/88671403) > ?
Rythm O by Marina Abramovic (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwPTKmFcYAQ) or MANIFESTO (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsPx9sLcbeI) ?
d) Questions, yet to be answered:
– How to get into people’s fragility and how to show/share their/own fragility on stage
– What is the Wild Giselda/Cristian/Tanya
– How to hijack the audience (and the performance)
– What you can still from the audience (maybe a smile, a kiss, a private conversation, a personal touch etc)
– How to dare more and push the limits (ours/audience) –
– What are the strategies to approach and engage the audiene (eye looking gaze, smelling, hugging, whispering at the hear….
This is in short something we work on Riga, tried or just discussed.
Giselda and Cristian, in case I forgot something from my diary, please add them to the conversation.
Based on the very good experience of the workshop in Riga, I’m gonna lead a new workshop (longer) in Bucharest during our final phase. I’m thinking to involve also the participants in the workshop in the running & dancing sections and in the black box performance…Maybe they can also learn the emotional trip exercice and do it with the audience, so more groups will work in the same time.
Tanja, please find attached a document regarding the speach by Jaques Ranciere called “the Emancipated Spectator”, which I kindly ask you to read as a preparation for the project.
As a home work for everybody 🙂 until we meet again in October, I would like to ask everybody to re-read the Alice in the Wonderland by Carol Lewis and see the movie made by Tim Burton based on this book (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TfanDv5iRk). I would like to ask everyone to choose a character from this book, obviously Alice will be the audience.
As a task for everybody, please buy one piece of cloths (can be a dress, underwear, wig, socks, tshirt, material) for yourself and one for somebody else. Please keep the receipt and you will be reimbursed in Bucharest (maximum 100 Euro/person). Myself I will buy some staff from Japan, so please send me your size.
Finally, Tanya let’s chat more this week. And don’t forget to plan your arrival in Bucharest on October 12 and the departure on November 10. Please, let us know from where you will be travelling (Hammerfest, Oslo, Russia) so we can start to look on the plane ticket.
Thank you all.
Wish you all a lovely summer,
Cosmin
