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.

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…

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.