The Turbulence Project

Abstract

Over the past five years, as a modern dance choreographer and Laban Movement analyst, I have been investigating various approaches to touching cities–in Hong Kong and Cochin–as a set of choreographic practices with implications for both daily and staged performances. In order to navigate multiple and at times vertiginous forms of border-crossing, I have begun to devise four constitutive modes of framing my current choreography in ways that emphasize tactility: passing through, touch patterns, shadows, and the use of windows. Such forms of touching cities are a type of mobile architectonics, an art of constructing systems, in which we come to know not who we are but where we are through making and finding ourselves in the spaces of the city, through the galvanic responses that pass from city to body and from body to city and toward and across the multitude of bodies. These touch experiments engender new practices of embodiment—that is the multiplying of sense-bodies, new geographies, and preliminary mappings of what I have called "revelatory turbulence." The strange dynamic persistence of those pressing, frustrating questions on how to think through new forms of revelatory turbulence through materials, bodies, and architectures across cultural and geographical locations and disciplines will generate new understandings and maps for touching cities, new cross disciplinary practices, and new pedagogical forums.

Notes

¹ For more on the dérive, see Guy Debord's ‘Theory of the Dérive’ at http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theory.html. Date Accessed 10 June, 2014. For recent scholarship on the Situationists, see, for example, Tom McDonough's The Situationists and the City: A Reader.

² Online Etymology Dictionary: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=turbulent&allowed_in_frame=0, accessed 28 June 2014.

³ The etymology of ‘revelatory’ is from Anglo-Norman and Middle French reveler, Middle French reveller (French révéler) to disclose or communicate (something) by divine or supernatural means (first half of the 12th cent. in Anglo-Norman), to disclose or make known (something previously unknown or kept secret) in speech or writing (second half of the 12th cent.), to show oneself, make oneself visible or apparent (second half of the 12th cent. in Anglo-Norman) and its etymon classical Latin revēlāre to remove the covering from, unveil, to raise the lid of, open, to unmask, to divulge, in post-classical Latin also to explain, to manifest (with reference to divine revelation) (late 2nd or early 3rd cent. in Tertullian). (Oxford English Dictionary. http://www.etymonline.com. 15 June, 2014.)

⁴ For more on Artaud and turbulence, see, for example, Gorelick 2011, Ridout 2008 or Weiss 1992.

⁵ In ‘Between Two Worlds: The Emerging Aesthetic of the National Theatre of the Deaf’, Hearing Difference (2006a) and ‘Hearing Difference Across Theatres’ (2006b) I expand the model of what I call the ‘third ear’ as an interpretative activity for a cross-sensory listening across domains of sound, silence and the moving body in performance along the categories of race, ethnicity, deafness and disability. As we attempt to hear across soundscapes, the third ear acts as a hybrid ear that ferrets out bits and pieces of meaning in a mixed landscape of sonic and imagistic fragments, sites of partial and hidden meaning. There is a history to the theatres of the third ear, the performative sites of a sound/image economy that also includes perspectives of deafness – as not only a condition but also a medical, social and aesthetic construct – beginning in the late 1700s.

For more on the Exquisite Corpse and the relationship to fragmented bodies and sense-fields, see: Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren on Augusto Boal and the Exquisite Corpse, in Kochhar-Lindgren, Schneiderman and Denlinger 2009, and Elza Adamowitz's Surrealist Collage in Text and Image: Dissecting the Exquisite Corpse

⁶ Online Etymology Dictionary: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=infect&searchmode=none, accessed 15 June 2014.

⁷ Email Interview, 2 July 2014.

⁸ Email Interview, 2 July 2014.