Intuition

I do work with an impulse or a desire which does not have a clear subject matter. I don’t start from a point of self-reflection, or a clear consciousness. I let a process of activities to grow and to select themselves. I create techniques that preserves the production and the selection of certain activities. The activities produce kinetics impulses, cycles, curves, lines of perceptions and emotions. I try to shift the clear recognition of what the emotion or perception can be. I keep the kinetic impulse going. Something continues to be produced. At one point in the process I found symbols and signs that satisfy a representation, or a narrative of the kinetic process. This is done in order to activate some trust from the audience, to not push the spectator to follow a too abstract process.

In resume: all the performers of the project (choreographer, dramaturge, dancers, light and music designer) when we get too conscious and we start to interpret what is happening with the kinetic activities, we look for a technique to keep going without reflecting too much in that way. Nevertheless we are actualizing all the time our processes. This means that we are looking for an alternative way to be conscious about what we create. We read the concrete signs and narratives that we are doing in the making, and at the same time we feel the quality of the kinetic activity. We are working with a method of “intuition”. This is how our disciplines produce something in the affective level (certain vague emotionality, certain body irritability, commotion) and how they sum up to a collective affectivity or narrative. We train to distinguish when our individual activities produce something that sums into something collective, and when we are consciously intending to be collective. The answer is always to come back to the individual production putting an ear in what is collective production. In another words: how our individual timing gets momentum with other individual timing into a collective effect. (BERGSON concept of intuition: a method to pay attention to how the space and time differentiates, with an accent on time, which includes change.)

How to listen to the time of what you do: where you are, where are you going, what are you collectively creating, what types of consciousness you are developing and how you come back to the individual making.

What I like about the three texts of Agamben, Massumi and Maning is that they all have a sense of “time” and  the “collective”. They all work with paradoxical arguments that forces thought to not link linearly. To understand consciously what they are talking about, you need to move with them through the text, you need to produce something with the text, you need to engage affectively-sympathetically with the text to find your way. If you start with a critical position and you are not ready to move your thinking around, the effect of the text does not emerge. There is no sense of experimenting with consciousness and not call for intuition.