Any Body Dance Lab (2018)
Residency programme for independent performers
Participating artists: Adriana Jamisse, Elijah Ndoumbé, John Cartwright, Leilah Kirsten, Louise Westerhout, Luvuyo Nyawose, Matshidiso Skosana, Nico Athene, Qondiswa James, Tiisetso Mashifane, Amy Simons, Mia Labuschagne, Tania Vossgätter, Yonela Makoba, Jori Snell, Lucia Walker, Tetsuro Fukuhara, Tossie van Tonder, Julia de Rosenwerth, Kopano Maroga, Kristina Johnstone, Nicola van Straaten, Thalia Laric
16 March-22 April, Cape Town: Theatre Arts Admin Collective

Flower Secret
Tetsuro Fukuhara, a Tokyo-based Butoh-artist, and guest teacher at Any Body Dance Lab as a guest artist performed Flower Secret. His practice and performance draw attention to time-concepts. In one of his exercises called a ‘walking dance’, he asks dancers to remember their past lives as fish through the articulation of the foot on the floor as they walk across the space in extreme slow motion, opening the possibility for an evolutionary memory. In his work, Tetsuro also moves beyond our current evolutionary state by conceiving of humans as ultimately supreme technological beings. He works with futuristic contraptions like the ‘space tube’, which is a prototype for an anti-gravity machine designed to train the body for life in the space age. Through his use of time and technology, he opens the possibility for embodied research that may lead to the erasure of the human body in performance.





Caving
In the work Caving, Adriana Jamisse uses her breath and voice to access the farthest recesses of her memory as she allows her body to respond in movement, producing a whale-like sonic score and evoking a pre-human state of being. Most of her dance takes place in near-darkness, allowing spectators to enter an aural and visceral world of experience. Her performance produces something other than recognisable signs that can be grasped by a cognitive mind. The dance is not about anything but emerges from an embodied investigation. The sounds that are pushed out of her body begin to take on compositional power as each new sound produces change in the body, decentring her body’s image in the dance.

Extreme Subjectivities
In Extreme Subjectivities, movement originates from each dancer’s awareness of her body’s sensations. The dance allows the interweaving of the dancers’ subjectivities as their bodies enter a relational space with each other. The dancers’ heads and faces are covered in white clay that dries and cracks over the duration of the dance to produce a white powder that falls of their bodies and onto their clothes and the floor, acting as a measure of time. The movement progression is slow, drawing the spectator’s attention to the dancer’s act of perceiving change in the body. The work also makes use of a technique of extreme witnessing, whereby the dancer’s inner ‘eye’ is turned towards her co-performers as her body steps out, into a witnessing state. The act of this ‘stepping back’ and ‘re-entering’ as a witness in the dance, has the effect of altering one’s perception of time within the dance. Time becomes elastic. When I am ‘in the dance’, my perception of time is different than when I am witnessing my co-performers from ‘the outside’. The dance shifts between paying attention to the unfolding of cellular movement to witnessing archetypical forms emerging through the journeys and subtle interactions of the other performers. Extreme Subjectivities is not characterized by an absence of signs, but rather by the accumulation of innumerable, momentary signs and images. Despite the dance’s drastically slow movement progression, the images occur in quick successive flashes, challenging the degree to which recognition can take place on a cognitive level.



Beyond bodies of signification
How do we experience a new gravity (Flower Secret)? How do we witness affect (Extreme Subjectivities)? How do we view the dance of a barely visible but sounding body (Caving)? What are the embodied and performative results of witnessing these events?
By decentring the body as image and turning away from a body of signification, the dance becomes a research method. In an artistic environment where image and identity politics dominate, and where narratives are endlessly recycled through the recognised and the recognisable, such instances of embodied research have the potential to tear up the canvas and create new possibilities for what it means to make and perform dance and for what it means to call oneself a dancer. Moving beyond representational thinking for both the artist and the audience is a radical and political shift. Moving beyond signification is to move deeper into the body as a rigorous practice of thinking and doing. Thinking as doing and doing as thinking.