PaKT

How can performance be understood as a research method? The multimodal and ephemeral nature of performance (with its sensory and physical nature) is difficult to capture in a discourse of knowledge and research. Yet that is the task facing many an artistic researcher. Which and what kind of knowledge is activated, transmitted, modified, deepened? Which aspects relating to content and practice, to know-that and know-how, to implicit and explicit knowledge, does artistic creation provide? Which multimodal knowledge aspects does the artistic creation want to offer and which of these are received (by the listener or participant)? In what way can this knowledge be (re)transmitted? In what way can this knowledge be explained (e.g. discursively, analytically, artistically, through performance...)?

 

To these questions, researcher Yasen Vasilev tries to respond through A Score for an Empty Swimming Pool: a movement research trajectory exploring the possibility to form a collective body from the bodies of ten or more individual performers of various backgrounds and abilities.

The practice is informed and inspired by the many-headed slime (also known as the slime mold, the blob, or physarum polycephalum), a complex unicellular organism which doesn’t have a brain or central nervous system but is able to take decisions, develop strategies and remember.

While in permanent physical touch, the performers try to feel their bodies as extensions of one another, to coordinate thoughts, actions, and movements, to find new approaches to touch, to negotiate collective decision-making and re-distribute agency.

A series of public workshops will be conducted for local participants in different locations with the questions at the core of the research explored from an embodied dramaturgical perspective. Balancing between physical practice and critical discourse, the material is not subjugated to the concept and rather the physical experience guides the direction of the research.