We are going to start with a rather simple question, which might open the discussion
to more complex matters. Why or how did you and Jefta van Dinther
come up with the idea of working with trampolines?
It started as a very simple physical desire, a nearly childlike passion arising
through the remembrance of how the body can feel almost supernatural by the
very fact of extending its capacity to jump. The extension in this case being the
trampoline, understood as an analogue machine that enables the body beyond
its natural ability. When we went to try it out the first time, we became increasingly
more convinced that this activity of jumping could also have a potential as
performance. The ecstatic smile that planted itself on the face of the person watching,
without fading for the next 15 minutes, together with the sensation of movement
that we felt not from jumping but simply from watching, made us think
of the possibilities of kinesthetic transfer. A transfer of movement from body to
body that we had not yet been able to imagine in relation to dance and performance.
So you became fascinated with how the spectator’s body absorbs or reproduces
the movement of the body that it watches?
Yes. We had already been talking a lot about how a contemporary body can be
understood in relation to dance and movement. We were looking for a way to
deal with an abstract rather than a signifying/semiotic approach to movement,
and at the same time we were doubtful about returning to a body practice based
on technical dance skills as we know them. In these discussions we came to
the notion of kinesthetic transfer and how sensations can be communicated on
the level of bodily engagement, on the level of experimenting with what a body
can do and what a body is capable of. What occurred to us was the intriguing
perspective of how to work on the body as body and to be busy with the how in
front of (but not in place of) the why.
What exactly do you consider the difference between the “how” and the “why”
of what a body is capable of?
The how has to do with the experience of actually seeing a body moving in front
of your eyes, of seeing an unfolding of the body which you did not expect or
that seems to stretch the limits of what you consider the body to be capable of.
It works through your sensory system. Through experience, it is that which you
cannot know before you have actually seen it. It is content produced through
perception.
The why is rather a cognitive thought process that appeals to reflection. It would
be possible to conceive of the jumping without actually doing it, which most
probably would be a rather spectacular and powerful conception, but it would
remain unrealized and, more importantly, based on past experiences rather than
creating new ones.
We go from the notion that the body needs the body to know what it is capable
of doing and that it is only through experimenting with the force of the body itself
that its powers can be uncovered.
It sounds a bit like you are talking about a body/mind split, which I have to say
surprises me.
We don’t think that these two approaches can ever be entirely distinguished,
but we need to separate them in order to work, to define the specificities of our
method, which for this work starts from the body and its movements working
outward towards structure and composition rather than the other way around.
We go from intensive and qualitative movement experiments, from the how high,
how long, how detailed, how differentiated, how silly, or how precise we can
perform.
Okay, I understand this emphasis on the how, but still it’s a very particular set-up
for a performance that I assume you have been thinking about as well?
Well the trampoline enables the body to do things it cannot do without this
machine-like connection to the extension tool. In a way this is an interesting aspect
to consider, as we live in a world where technological/mechanical extensions of
the body are part of our everyday activity, at least in our part of the world. With the
Internet and the free flow of information, a lot of things have changed in terms of
how bodies interact. How we consider identity, belonging, privacy, social spheres,
borders, and nations. The defying of gravity, the hyper-mobility, the flexibility and
buoyancy of these jumping bodies, in a way, reflect exactly these moves away
from stability, fixation and rooted-ness, not as an ideal or utopian state of being
free, but rather as a response to certain developments in how contemporary
bodies function.
I don’t know, maybe I misled you with my last question. It can be
that it’s a bit
far-fetched that two people on two trampolines, jumping up and down,
should
represent anything in relation to the world and for instance the bigger,
better, faster of capitalist expansion … except maybe if you would
actually represent
the competitive sports bodies of synchronized jumping, where discipline,
precision,
perfection, and synchronicity are the only things that matter, and where
it is
exactly only the fittest who win. But as far as I understand you are not
going to
actually represent that; however, it is one of your influences?
That’s correct. We decided to extract certain principles from the sports discipline,
but we are exactly not interested in working on the clearly coded body
that a sports body would be. The piece is built on vague indications of reference
within a very strict set up of the binary motion of the bounce. Even though some
of the shapes, intensities, and rhythms that our bodies pass through might point
to specific connotations, the basic principle remains the qualitative, intensive,
affective, kinesthetic, and proprioceptive.
Wait … all these principles are not exactly known to me; would you mind trying
to specify them?
I guess quality has to be seen in opposition to quantity—it implies change, or
maybe rather one can only really define a quality when it has changed or when
it is put in relation to other qualities. If not, you are simply watching a growing
number of jumps. We think of every jump as a qualitative transformation—which
might only manifest once a series of jumps has been completed. It’s like looking
at a landscape while traveling through it—then snoozing for a little and realizing
when you wake back up that you are no longer surrounded by endless fields
but by a mountain range. The quality of the landscape has changed; you are no
longer counting sunflower fields but rather mountaintops.
Excuse me, but where does this nature reference come from all of a sudden?
In fact we have been thinking a lot about what aspects of the body can be considered
biological functions or at least as following natural laws. Like gravity: I throw
a thing into the air and it will come down—that much is certain. Perhaps there
is also something about the kinesthetic mechanisms of movement perception
that in this case connects to the physical laws of the body and the behavior of
material/matter. I mean this in relation to, for instance, the sensation of one’s
own body moving when in fact it is not, just by watching a body jumping. Of
course we are aware that the fully natural body is a long gone concept, which
is also why we, in spite of our interest in physics, gravitational pulls, and natural
perceptions, are still working with digital strategies of manipulations, trying to
understand each jump as an organic/mechanic loop, which participates in a
constructed system of generated movements.
Maybe this is an irrelevant question, but are you trying to produce a synthesis
between nature and culture?
We are not really concerned with that question; we are rather trying to figure out
something in relation to perception. I don’t know if you have heard about the
famous half a second that it takes for the brain to actually become conscious of
its own activities. Experiments show that if the body is affected with a stimulus
it can be measured as brain activity 0.5 seconds before it actually becomes a
conscious perception. What Brian Massumi adds to the understanding of this
experiment is that every perception is already smudged by all the other perceptions
that take place within this half second of delay and explains the clarity of
perception as a kind of hallucination. The brain tricking itself into thinking that
the stimulus and its conscious reception coincide in time, when in fact it always
runs half a second late.
This is extremely interesting to think about in relation to what we discussed
before, when saying that qualitative changes happen unnoticed. If it takes half a
second for the brain to register a change, it should be possible to work with the
micro perceptions that lie in between, and these changes in fact could happen
unnoticed, like microscopic hallucinations.
In fact what we are working on is the differentiation of perception: imagine you
are listening to the rain, a sound that you have heard a million times before, but
that you have no detailed perception of. You don’t have 20 different names for
snow like the Eskimos, at best you have four: rain, snow, hail, and fog (which by
the way is no longer rain). Now imagine that you start to be able to distinguish
one drop of rain from another, the kind of surface on which it falls, its speed and
texture. All of a sudden rain is no longer one whole but a conglomerate of millions
and millions of different/-ciated drops. In a way it is this kind of microscopic
perceptive activity we try to achieve when working on looping the materials we
address.
Something is becoming clear to me. As I understand you are no longer busy
with the politics of representation, but rather with the politics of perception and
sensation, from the perspective of creation. Does that sound right to you?
What do you mean exactly with creation?
I mean that you use natural or common perceptions and manipulate them in a
way where the expression it produces is no longer expressing something natural,
but something entirely cultured or, let’s say, created..
Uhmmmmm, maybe you are right. Somehow we question the notion of natural
perception in the first place, as there is always a level of mediation involved in
any constructed expression. But for sure with this work we are trying to get
beyond dealing with the politics of representation as our topic.
Now that you bring up the word topic, how would you then define the topics that
you are working on?
There is not one single topic but rather many different topics processed through
the same machinery which is the gravitational constraint of moving up and down
in relation to the surface of the trampoline.
Maybe what you said before is not bad as a topic. The politics of perception,
sensation, and possibly, affect: this is for sure within our domain of interest. Secondly,
I think the notion of experimenting with how the body becomes visible as
what a body can do deals with the idea of modulation, transformation, evolution,
creativity, and change. This connects to the idea of the subject, what it is
that determines it, and how these forces of individuation, or becoming, function.
Thirdly, there might be an interest in figuring out how to develop a new form of
spectatorship that works through the principle of kinesthetic transfer. As a fourth
topic, I would address the set up of the performance and the radical constraint
of the movement production that the trampolines produce as an experiment.
This all sounds very justifiable, but do you also have a more personal interest in
these things?
In a way it’s very simple. Jumping equals desire, whether personal or impersonal.
Desire equals a motivation to work and a reason to invest in thinking about why
this is important to do now in dance and performance. Work always relates to
at least two fields of production: one’s personal development, and the general
state of the field within which one works. This parallel axis is what makes it
important to work both on the personal desire and in a more social or political
context. Whether that is applicable to this particular work, I don’t know.
IT’S IN THE AIR is concerned with the body, its capacity to move, to change,
to act, to jump, to experience, sense, situate, hallucinate, fabulate, and to think
and formulate how one’s own body is affected by watching these bodies jumping.
What conditions the body to move? How much is it the machine that moves
the body and how much is it the body that moves the machine? It’s about the
in/visible forces that condition the movements of the body and about the effort
or effortlessness with which these forces are performed. The body is always
changing/evolving in relation to something, be it other bodies, systems of organization,
maps of spatial navigation or an inner sense of orientation.
This notion of navigation and orientation, could you elaborate on that a bit?
Let’s maybe return to the principles that you asked us to define more in depth
earlier on because we think two of them are very relevant in relation to the question
of navigation and orientation. One could try to define the more conventional
understandings of orientation, such as following city maps versus one’s sense of
place, or walking in accordance with habit and memory versus walking without
any sense of direction, but what we are dealing with while jumping is a very
precise and specific notion of orientation which has to do with the previously
mentioned proprioceptive and kinesthetic mechanisms of the body.
Proprioception is defined as the body’s interior ability to know the position of its
own limbs in relation to each other and to adapt the acquired effort it takes to
carry out a physical action. It is, in opposition to the five exterior senses (taste,
smell, touch, hearing and sight), an interior sense, which often is forgotten or
functions completely unnoticed. Kinesthesia is a similar phenomenon, a sense
guided by receptors in the muscles, tendons, and joints.
When we are jumping, we are dealing with these bodily mechanisms of orientation,
of letting or getting the body to know where the ground/surface is, even
when we are totally upside down without any measure from our other senses or
when sight has become too slow a sense to navigate with. We are working with
the instabilities of directionality and position of the body as expression.
What we are interested in are the kinesthetic hallucinations that can occur when
the body senses that it is moving, yet nothing is going on. It’s exactly these hallucinations
that the body of the spectator might be confronted with and hope-fully
a lot more.