Phỏng vấn

Maybe with the beginning or the origin of this project called E.X.T.E.N.S.I.ON.S. (...)

(...) I remember that at that time my major question was about the relationships between the production and the product of the creative process that brings forth a dance (or theatre) performance. At the same time I was questioning the interdependency between how a conception of the body is represented and how this representation was produced. (...)

(...) Could you be a bit more concrete, for example which conception of the body are you talking about?

I don’t know. But I often ask myself, why should our bodies end at the skin or include at best other beings, organisms or objects encapsulated by the skin?

I don’t know the answer to that question either, but you are no doubt also referring to the fact that the body image is extremely fluid and dynamic. That its borders, edges, or contours are “osmotic”(...)?

Yes. As you say, body images are able of accommodating and incorporating an extremely wide range of objects and discourses. Anything that comes into contact with surfaces of the body and remains there long enough will be incorporated into the body image. For example clothing, jewellery, other bodies, objects, texts, songs etc...

All this may mark the body, its gaits, its postures, its talks, its discourses, its positions, etc., more or less temporarily, or even permanently.

So in other words, what you are saying is that the body image is as much a function of the subjects psychology and socio-historical context as of anatomy, and that there are all kinds of non-human influences woven into us.

Exactly. Accordingly, there must be an alternative to the body image presented to us by anatomy.

For example?

For example: the body can be perceived as a space and time of exchange, traffic and circulation. THANK YOU TO ELISABETH GROSZ FOR THIS PROPOSAL

Could you explain what this way of perceiving the body means to you?

It would follow from this that each individual could be perceived as an infinite number of extensive, expanding parts. In other words, individuals would exist only as composite individuals. An individual would be a notion completely devoid of sense. (...) I constantly integrate parts into my relations, when I eat for example (...) I appropriate extensive parts. (...) To appropriate parts means to remove them from a previous relationship, so that they can enter a new relationship, whereby this new relationship is one of my relations. (…)

Ok let’s (...) go back to the beginning.

(...) [I sent] an invitation to about 20 persons to invite them to take part in E.X.T.E.N.S.I.O.N.S. (...) The proposals and general ideas were formulated [like this]:
“Experiments and investigations concerned with human and non-human bodies as extensions of one another, using “movement-based art”, their performances and representations.
Performance of the relationships between the “products” and modes of production of these experiments and investigations in the field (time and space) of their development.
Transformations and recycling of these investigations by “others” in a second period.
Later in another letter I proposed a kind of definition for E.X.T.E.N.S.I.O.N.S.:
We could think of E.X.T.E.N.S.I.O.N.S. as an organizing idea or concept, simultaneously working and contemplating questions of performance, body representation, forming, in itself, a performance.

Could you explain why you made these proposals?

During the realization of a dance piece there is usually a cut or a gap between the rehearsal period and the public representation. It’s a sort of blind pathway from private to public. It is a delicate question and at the same time it can’t be ignored. You can’t escape it.

I don’t accept this disconnect between the rehearsal and the performance; I think that you cannot separate the representation of the bodies from the set up you used to develop these representations. I would like to handle the question posed by this pathway during and within every moment of the production.

(...)

Maybe I was wrong but I refused to implement these widely known and often used methods. Not in order to impose another one, but to try to find new methods.

So could you tell more about the method of work you are referring to?

For example the selection of moments from an improvisation as answers to a certain question put by the choreographer. But more generally I refer to the usual ways of working through which we were all socialized in our education and environment. Because I think those methods have to be questioned deeply if we want to further develop the productions and even the products of artistic processes in the performing arts. (...)

(...) So let’s go back to the principle of the project. Why did you propose to use the notion of play?

When we play we choose a role or, a role is assigned to us to take part in the situation which is constructed with rules. This has a lot of similarity with how we act in our daily life within social and cultural constructions. These constructions assign roles to us but we can also choose them. So in other terms, in our daily life we also play or ’perform’ different roles like in games. (...)
The games are also activities within which it is possible to search and experiment and at the same time develop strategies to follow and use the rules. So it is a privileged field to explore the reciprocal effects of the constructions which traverse the body and vice versa.

(...)

One last question. Can you tell us why you talked about the project E.X.T.E.N.S.I.O.N.S as a utopia earlier?

I think that the utopian aspect of the project comes from this effort to replace some dominating models of behaviour and perception by other models. It is a utopia because it is an attempt to de-institutionalize the relationships between individuals, and to unmake the existence of power in the "spectacular" production chains (or lines). It is a utopian building site because its goal is to propose a different process, a different approach and a different perception of that global system.

(...) On another hand, I think that if utopia still makes sense, it is not as a wishful system or a socio-institutional model, but as the “singular modality or tonality” of a process and a perspective. That is to say, as the qualification of a perception, and as an action rather than as a meaningless, desirable object.

(...)

That’s why I think it is important to propose methods, organizations, systems or concepts, which can activate and question the perception within the production processes that we are involved in, in order to change the practices we use to survive. (…)

Thank you. I think we can stop with these words on Utopia.

Thank you.

tanzconnexions thanks Xavier Le Roy for his agreement to publish his text here in excerpts. The full-length text is published on his own website http://www.insituproductions.net/_eng/frameset.html