Silent Masters: The Sets of The School of the End of Time
I. The Dancefloor
The Dancefloor is one of the three sets of the School of the End of Time. Triggered by the idea that art produces knowledge and that this knowledge might be experienced in other ways than the sole intellectual faculty, we can think of the dancefloor as a classroom, a format, an event, the production of a new body. The dancefloor is about producing a collective body, shaping a different experience of time, embodying ideas, dreams, fantasies, visions. The dancefloor is also about intensity and wastefulness, as Diedrich Diederichsen points out, and very soon it turned into a model of productivity of late capitalism, or into a model of social and political control as shown by the peculiar history of the Soviet discotheques. But unlike the opposition between intensity and attention, the Dancefloor of the End of Time would like to betray and overcome these dichotomies thinking of it as a place for an affective and magical way to learn. Here, the complexity of human performativity unfolds, articulating new games for the social body. A dancefloor of sleepwalkers, broken hearts, cosmonauts, animals, robots and all sort of lives, on the dancefloor we become clouds and vampires and viruses.
Jump to: Activities on the dancefloor
II. The Postural Landscape
The Postural Landscape features a series of postural and performative devices that composes the "silent faculty" of The School of the End of Time. These objects are teachers of the school just like any other teacher. Each master has a specific form and is conceived as a silent and welcoming tutor. They are designed to invite to take a specific posture that implies a generous attention toward the physical relation between one's body and the master itself. The silent masters are not to be intended in the gymnastic or rehabilitative sense, in order to achieve a neutrality of the spine, but rather as points of listening for the information that some bodily tissues, such as the fascial one, as well as the complex articulation of the vertebral column, can bring us. The masters were designed according to methodologies developed by physiotherapy and somatic disciplines, while postures and shapes were inspired by an inconographic and literary research within reminiscences belonging to the collective unconscious of terrestrial people (human and not). Every single master opens the way to subtle lessons nourishing the invisible sphere of the existence in which what is produced is emotional, erotic, sensible, melancholic and psychic in the widest sense.
Jump to: Activities in the Postural Landscape
III. The Active Substances Bar
The Active Substances Bar is an installation thought as a collective space, blurring the boundaries between the exhibition space, the living space and social places. Active Substances Bar is a counter around which people gather to listen to a talk, look at performances or to talk to each other, sharing social moments. But what seems at first glance to be an ordinary counter, turns out to be a critical scenographic setting, raising questions about our contemporary lifestyles, our collective habits, our beliefs. Active Substance Bar delivers only few natural substances with specific effects on human physiology; St. John's wart – a natural anti-depressant, ginseng extracts – an energizing roots, glasses of red wine – popular disinhibitor. All substances help one's body to respond the demands of capitalism (efficiency, rapidity, sociability). Active Substances Bar provides substances to temporary transform one's physiology, and experience how economy affects our bodies.
There is something in the air.
We all breathe it without care
The Active Substances Bar is a project by Lou Masduraud and Antoine Bellini
Oxana Timofeeva, The Time of Catastrophy / Lecture
The lecture suggests to discuss the structure of time that is different from the one that moves from the past to the future, from the beginning to the end. One may call this time the time of the end, or the time of apocalypse, but also the time of desire, or dialectical time. It runs counterclockwise. Its main characteristics are retroaction and repetition that, like in the theatre, precedes a première.
Oxana Timofeeva's lecture is an evolution and expansion on the research expressed in The End of the World: From Apocalypse to the End of History and Back, originally published on e-flux #56, June 2014.
Robert Steijn, Asses Wide Open / Workshop
A workshop to collectively experience another way of thinking, breaking patriarchal ways of controlling the image of ourselves and our environment. It is a celebration of the sensual and sensorial body by reconnecting the awareness with the reptile brain, by shapeshifting into the energy of the snake. this workshop is part of the school of tender thinking.
SCHOOL OF TENDER THINKING # 1: Imagine a snake of white light floating above your head. Invite this snake to enter your body. So your skin becomes the skin of the snake. Outside you still have the shape of a human being, eyebrows, fingers, knees, inside you feel as a snake, perceive the world as a snake, think as a snake. Welcome to the school of tender thinking.
SCHOOL OF TENDER THINKING # 2: Project onto an item of clothing a behaviour pattern you want to get rid of, or a way of thinking that wears you out. Then get rid of this item of clothing by dancing, rubbing up against a wall, or just by taking it off. And know with losing this piece of cloth, you shed your old skin. A new skin appears, a new way of behaving, a new way of thinking. You can do this exercise several times till you are bare naked. P. S. Do you want to wear these old pieces of cloth again. Shake them out fiercely before you put them on again.
SCHOOL OF TENDER THINKING # 3: Go to the ears of a minority or to the ears of people who are treated as a minority. Whisper in their ears that they must no longer adapt themselves to the rules of the so called majority. Seduce them with your snake tongue. Say: “Be no longer a mistake in the eyes of others, become a mystic”.
Paul-Flavien Enriquez-Sarano, The Automatic Secretary / Workshop-performance
"Let possess and be possessed!", says the hedonistic spirit to the crowd of the living. Why not abandon ourselves to the ludicrous luxury of not being in the driver's seat of the thinking, of the creation, by sharing the subjectivity with another "other"? Why not become the other in turn? What a relief! And what a tool, a perspective, a practice for both art research and creation… to be unintentionally intentioned.
If automatism is well known from the experiments of the 18th and early 19th centuries, the dimension of the automatic creation goes far beyond the sole spiritualist entertainment. It talks about grace, furor, animality, the ontological exuberance of the creator, about language and, surely, about dance.
Stefanie Koebel, Weaving bodies - a breathing technology fiction / Workshop
The workshop connects discursive inputs of Stefanie Knobel's recent research on cotton to a deeply physical breathing practice. Weaving, breathing and cotton find a common ground in the coal-fueled Industrial Revolution. The workshop takes up the myth of the loom in the body and translates it into a choreography of five breathing techniques: As in the 19th century, Ada Lovelace invented the computing technique and set the basics for the contemporary cyberspace – and thus for a technology that subsequently became widely militarized, Ada took the abstract work of the loom as orientation. At the same time, weavers protested against the mechanization of weaving and set newly built factories on fire. Alongside selected historical incidences of weaver protests all over the world, the workshop examines the virtual potential of breathing.
Alice Chauchat, Togethering, a group solo / Performance
Togethering, a group solo embraces dance as an expression, a social activity and a collective process. Presenting us with a series of proposals in which dance is both a means and an end to togetherness, it includes a lecture on speech and agreement within groups, a telepathic dance and a poetry reading. Alice Chauchat shares some aspects of the collective imagination she practiced over the past 15 years in the field of dance and choreography. These are stories about co-existing and about sharing. While remaining in their formal territories (spectators watching, dancer dancing), performer and audience share roles: assistant, companion, collaborator or host, as protagonists of the theatrical event. Considering our shared time/space both as a reality and as a projection space for other occasions of coming-together, it is an invitation to address those occasions as experiments that are each time re-formulated and that we invent together.
Inger Wold Lund, The easiest way to exit a body is through sweat / Cocktail-Performance
Inger Wold Lund will serve the classic drink «Pink Lady» while whispering secrets in the ear of the person ordering the drink through the voices of Teresa Noronha Feio, Ambra Pittoni, Paul-Flavien Enriquez-Sarano, Amos Cappuccio.
