FALL BACK: ETERNAL RETURNS – Production Workshops

 

FALL BACK: ETERNAL RETURNS

Production Workshops

• October 21-22, Friday and Saturday, The Kunstkapel

The Transparent Enterprise as The Transpiring Conservatory performs KHORA (Instrumentalizing the Void)

 

 

The Transpiring Conservatory was introduced for the Spring program to establish a different ideal  for a conservatory in order to counter what was thought at the time to be the all but inevitable destruction and transformation of the Kunskapel into the highly institutionalized conservatory.

With the Khora project The Transpiring Conservatory makes a challenging advance toward developing the Kunstkapel itself as an actual instrument that can be both demanding and disarming to actually play. Like the Eternal Return, the term Khora is an idea descended from ancient greece. For Plato the Khora defined a formless interval that gives space but also has maternal overtones (the womb, the matrix). Heidigger refers to Khora as the space where being takes place while Kristeva felt that Khora could only be understood as thinking time and space together. It was Derrida who brought our contemporary attention to Khora while he suggested it defied all attempts at naming or either/or logic.  Armed with this legacy participants in The Transpiring Conservatory from the Spring are coming together to activate this concept within the very conserved space of the Kunstkapel and produce resonant performable examples which will be presented throughout the fall season. 

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• October 23-24, Sunday and Monday, The Kunstkapel

The Distraught Foundation performs Recovery Operations

 

This workshop is also in essence the flip side of the Listings in the Day Room project in the Spring… thus appropriately falling back after springing ahead. The Day Room was the characterization of the Kunstkapel space as the shared common space in an institution where inmates suffering from the disparate conditions seek ways of interaction or withdrawal. Recovery Operations suggests the return to the life stream but more frequently it suggests the mechanisms in place to confront crisis. Lo and behold, we establish the creative space of the Kunstkapel as a locus for catastrophe and perpetual recovery. Perhaps this is a not so inappropriate premise for a space based in experiment and resolve.

Recovery Operations are based on the training of different strategies for urgent care. Therefore the space has shifted from the removal of the institutional dayroom to its flip side: a rehearsal work space for the spirit of disaster that has become a dominant idea with regard to our conception of a world : “out there”… Thus participants from the Listings in the Day Room project now return into a reversed proposition: new heightened rehearsals for the disaster and trauma that might have established the retreat into the institution in the first place… and like its predecessor this project will cull together disparate contributions for participants that will, through their interposition, establish shifting contexts: through discussion, creation of scenarios and the creation of performative responses. This point should be stressed as it is the point of the workshop: recovery operations can only be conceived through recourse to the idea of performance in its widest and immersive sense. With this mind, the workshop is expected to produce a variety of recovery operations…

 

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FALL BACK: ETERNAL RETURNS  October 21—December 12, 2022

The Autumn program of Audio Visual Spatial performances

For the Autumn program The Warp provides the counter balance for the Spring Ahead: The Afterlife program presented earlier this year with Fall Back: Eternal Returns. Just as we are prompted to remember to set the clocks forward by the command to Spring Ahead in the Autumn we know we must always fall back and set the clocks accordingly. For the Warp however, Fall Back means an attempt to return to an apparent new normalcy after the demise of the plans to transform the Kunstkapel into the Conservatory of Amsterdam but also as a reflection of the attempt to readjust after the extended Covid period that began in Spring 2020. With Fall Back: Eternal Returns we explore the recurring aspects that have characterized the work made in the Kunstkapel over the last ten year period.

The concept of the Eternal Return has been with us since Greek Antiquity when the stoics postulated that history was doomed to repeat itself infinitely since the universe and its concomitant energy is recurring. Nietzsche later transforms this into a thought experiment which questions what we would do faced with the information that we could be doomed to repeat ourselves. Nietzsche later had Zarathustra proclaim:

All things are entangled, ensnared, enamored; if you ever wanted one thing twice, if you ever said, ‘You please me, happiness! Abide, moment!’ then you wanted all back … For all joy wants—eternity.

The actual physical reality of the Kunstkapel which we have treated alternately as an instrument, a vessel, a container, a space station, a space of contemplation, a place of madness and at last a place of recovery, is the site of eternal returns and its circular immersive quality provides the perfect object correlative for this proposition. The Autumn program will consist of the regular Audio Visual Spatial spectrum programs that usually combine three performances in a single evening, several ongoing workshops which will produce individual evenings for stand alone performances as well as club nights that create a different context to present a dynamic environment for more impromptu or informal performances.

 

FALL BACK: ETERNAL RETURNS I: Look here… Where did all of the time go?

 

FALL BACK: ETERNAL RETURNS I: Look here… Where did all of the time go?

Oct 29, 2022, Saturday, 8 pm, the Kunstkapel

 

 

The first program of the Fall Back season begins with a question that ponders the space between what was and what is and our new difficulties in coming to terms with the strange feeling that nothing can be as it was.

The Transpiring Conservatory performs The Seven Minutes

Performed by the Pitfall Ensemble: Pau Sola Masafrets, Gareth Davis, Alkistis Misouli and Jan Willem van der Ham

Connected with the Spring Transpiring Conservatory workshop performances of Aus Den Sieben Tagen by Karlheinz Stockhausen, the Autumn sees the compressed twitterizer version for the future in which seven days is compacted into seven minutes. In this case a series of seven minute solos which in turn take up the new challenge for the conservatory: to create duos with the Khora space of the room itself as an essential instrument.

 

Reinier van Houdt & Thomas Mohr: Dealing with Time

Through the months of the lockdowns video artist Thomas Mohr and composer/musician Reinier van Houdt explored the relation between moving image and music. Since then they have established different dynamics over three projects with the growing awareness that they were establishing different aspects of time. These multi-layered compositions can begin with the end describing the process from perception to experience, from specific situations to general characteristics, from rough to subtle. Three works now become three movements in an overall arc: Stripes 1988, Habitat 2 and Turning Point. The arc of this piece covers a period of 34 years.

 

The Pitfall Ensemble performs Writhing, Still 2.0

 

Performers include: Pau Sola Masafrets, Gareth Davis, Alkistis Misouli and Jan Willem van der Ham

Four performers interpret a score of writhings, connected to previous works performed in the Beatrixpark in connection with the Shadow Floriade. Writhings, Still are a series of scores that attempt to reflect life sentences made up of brain waves, breathing patterns, sleep motion studies… the return to bodily awareness seen against the line of the landscape. These scores mean to capture the return to another sense of time and space and our bodily restlessness within this equation.

 

 

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FALL BACK: ETERNAL RETURNS  October 21—December 12, 2022

The Autumn program of Audio Visual Spatial performances

For the Autumn program The Warp provides the counter balance for the Spring Ahead: The Afterlife program presented earlier this year with Fall Back: Eternal Returns. Just as we are prompted to remember to set the clocks forward by the command to Spring Ahead in the Autumn we know we must always fall back and set the clocks accordingly. For the Warp however, Fall Back means an attempt to return to an apparent new normalcy after the demise of the plans to transform the Kunstkapel into the Conservatory of Amsterdam but also as a reflection of the attempt to readjust after the extended Covid period that began in Spring 2020. With Fall Back: Eternal Returns we explore the recurring aspects that have characterized the work made in the Kunstkapel over the last ten year period.

The concept of the Eternal Return has been with us since Greek Antiquity when the stoics postulated that history was doomed to repeat itself infinitely since the universe and its concomitant energy is recurring. Nietzsche later transforms this into a thought experiment which questions what we would do faced with the information that we could be doomed to repeat ourselves. Nietzsche later had Zarathustra proclaim:

All things are entangled, ensnared, enamored; if you ever wanted one thing twice, if you ever said, ‘You please me, happiness! Abide, moment!’ then you wanted all back … For all joy wants—eternity.

The actual physical reality of the Kunstkapel which we have treated alternately as an instrument, a vessel, a container, a space station, a space of contemplation, a place of madness and at last a place of recovery, is the site of eternal returns and its circular immersive quality provides the perfect object correlative for this proposition. The Autumn program will consist of the regular Audio Visual Spatial spectrum programs that usually combine three performances in a single evening, several ongoing workshops which will produce individual evenings for stand alone performances as well as club nights that create a different context to present a dynamic environment for more impromptu or informal performances.

 

Shadow Floriade Finale: THE ERRANT CIRKLE – THRU A COMPASS ROSE II

 

Shadow Floriade Finale

October 22, 2022, Saturday, the Beatrixpark 

THE ERRANT CIRKLE performs RATIOCINATIONS & REORIENTATION THRU A COMPASS ROSE II

Here now is the concluding half of the project that began with the first day of the Shadow Floriade on April 22, 2022–International Earth Day. It now brings the Shadow Floriade and the piece itself to a kind of conclusion, precisely six months later. The Errant Cirkle, a collective of visual artists and performers, explores the rituals of park life that suggest parallel realities and a space for reimagination and freedom of thought. Thus the Errant Cirkle tries to envision contemporary rituals for the park setting while creating a path of unusual objects that may suggest thoughts.

For this project, two themes from an entwining dialogue: the pharmakon which is the greek term derived from Plato that refers to the indeterminacy of that which is both a poison and a cure as well the sense of reorientation of the world we find symbolized in the compass rose. For this reason a key location for this project is the Herbal Garden which is one of the sections of the Beatrixpark which was created for the 1972 Floriade. The Herbal Garden presents a unique enclosed world which is distinctly set apart from the rest of the park, allowing an idea for isolated interventionist and performative activity. These events will be composed of speech and movement that views the Herbal garden within the context of the pharmakon that we live with in our minds in this time of post pandemic while also providing a space for small visual interventions that will encourage spectators to wander attentively and thoughtfully in the garden to see what thoughts have grown there alongside the herbs. However this garden is also located alongside the wading pool at the kiosk which will provide the basis for variations on the compass rose as a visual motif for the park as well as a guide for a sequence of performative events that will relate themselves to the Compass Rose constructed from floral elements established in the wading pool at the central kiosk in the park.

The Errant Cirkle includes Olivier Keeler, John McGraw, Hiroshi Tatsumi, Keiko Wakamatsu, Heidi Mach, and Illio Kiryos.

 

FALL BACK: ETERNAL RETURNS

 

FALL BACK: ETERNAL RETURNS   October 21—December 12, 2022

The Autumn program of Audio Visual Spatial performances

 

For the Autumn program The Warp provides the counter balance for the Spring Ahead: The Afterlife program presented earlier this year with Fall Back: Eternal Returns. Just as we are prompted to remember to set the clocks forward by the command to Spring Ahead in the Autumn we know we must always fall back and set the clocks accordingly. For the Warp however, Fall Back means an attempt to return to an apparent new normalcy after the demise of the plans to transform the Kunstkapel into the Conservatory of Amsterdam but also as a reflection of the attempt to readjust after the extended Covid period that began in Spring 2020. With Fall Back: Eternal Returns we explore the recurring aspects that have characterized the work made in the Kunstkapel over the last ten year period.

The concept of the Eternal Return has been with us since Greek Antiquity when the stoics postulated that history was doomed to repeat itself infinitely since the universe and its concomitant energy is recurring. Nietzsche later transforms this into a thought experiment which questions what we would do faced with the information that we could be doomed to repeat ourselves. Nietzsche later had Zarathustra proclaim:

All things are entangled, ensnared, enamored; if you ever wanted one thing twice, if you ever said, ‘You please me, happiness! Abide, moment!’ then you wanted all back … For all joy wants—eternity.

The actual physical reality of the Kunstkapel which we have treated alternately as an instrument, a vessel, a container, a space station, a space of contemplation, a place of madness and at last a place of recovery, is the site of eternal returns and its circular immersive quality provides the perfect object correlative for this proposition. The Autumn program will consist of the regular Audio Visual Spatial spectrum programs that usually combine three performances in a single evening, several ongoing workshops which will produce individual evenings for stand alone performances as well as club nights that create a different context to present a dynamic environment for more impromptu or informal performances.